Not Working

by Lisa Owens

‘Marketing wasn’t your calling, then.’ ‘Creative communications,’ I correct him. ‘Won’t lie: I never really knew what that meant.’ ‘It . . .’ I prepare to launch into an explanation, then realize I may never need to again, ‘doesn’t matter anymore.’

When I’ve read the same paragraph five or six times, I look up, desperate for some relief from the words.

‘If she was really as clever as she thinks she is, she wouldn’t be so desperate to prove it all the time,’

Sleep and wakefulness bicker all night and I think, Why can’t you two just get along?

Free time When I had a job, I used to fantasize about what I’d do if I didn’t have to work anymore. Go to the gym every day, get really fit, train for a marathon perhaps. Finish Ulysses, read Moby Dick and one of the big Russian guys. Get to grips with the economy, also modern art.

My computer’s laboured whimpering has given way to a grinding gurgle, which means it’s ready to use, so I slap the book shut and slot it back on the shelf.

‘I know what’s going on: terrorist threats, terrorist attacks, shootings, food shortages, drought, floods, women being raped and killed. No, thank you.’ I shake my head.

‘I know it sounds strange,’ I say, ‘but the more time you have, the less time you have. Every moment becomes so precious.’

‘not everyone can be a hero, or live the dream – we just need to contribute what we can. Pull our weight, earn a living. There’s no shame in that.’

I wonder if this commitment to the dregs is something that should be celebrated, or if it means I have trouble moving on, letting go.

‘Well, not specific jobs. More like a general lifestyle idea. Glass corner office, sushi and coffees delivered to my desk, great clothes, poring over something – photographs? – spread out on a table.’ ‘OK. I think I see where you went wrong. All those vague, title-less jobs have already been taken by characters in New York-based romcoms.’

Best life lesson.

Some nights our bed feels much too small: hot and hard with elbows and knees, and the cloying stickiness of flesh against flesh, not just Luke’s skin on mine, but my own on me, inner thigh cleaving to inner thigh, arm to armpit, breast against breast, and I long to be alone and stretch out asterisk-like;

her client-facing laugh: tremulous, musical and woefully affected.

I’m trying to decide exactly what this woman, dressed from suede-platform-booted toe to fedora-feather tip in a single, arresting shade of green, might have lost. Her inhibitions? Her mind? A bet?

A bell tinkles when I open the door and I’m hit by the smell – a powdery, fudgy, floral nostalgia-blast, encoded in my brain at some long-ago point to signify ‘femininity’, and I realize with a vague sense of disenchantment that this phenomenon – femininity – has not manifested itself at all as I expected, in the form of vanity table, crystal perfume atomizer, kimono suspended from silk-padded hanger, et cetera, but instead as a tangle of greyish underwear, old sports T-shirts for nighties and an unruly Boots-special-offer-dictated assortment of half-finished moisturizers, packets of face wipes and bunches of tampons.

‘there isn’t going to be a magic job that will solve all your problems. There’s a whole world between any old thing and the thing.

‘Too much,’ I say to the universe.