This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

We looked at the clothes the people wore in the offices in which we temped. How did they do it? We wondered and studied. The trouser suits and spike heels, the shirts with crisp fronts and high collars, the handbags with tooled flaps and brass fastenings, coats of tweed that buttoned down the front. And the hair: straight and flat as paper, cut so that it swung cleanly around the cheeks. How to achieve these things when we had no iron, no fixed abode, no regular salary, nothing in our suitcases but creased clothes that weren’t right for our new life?

I am consumed with a sharp longing to be that woman. I want her life, her dress, her dog. I want to be thirty and have a bike with a basket—what is the word for that kind of basket, there is one, I know—and be pedaling home to an apartment with long white curtains and bowls of flowers and a husband who loves me. I want to be over all this, to be past it, to be safe and unreachable in adulthood.