Penny sniffed. “We’ll just see, shall we?”
“See what?”
“Who gets a job the fastest.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have a little competition, shall we?”
“No,” said Lizzie. “We don’t need a competition. You’ll get a job the fastest. You’ve got blond hair and perky tits and you smile nicely and look like you might conceivably be up for it. I wear elasticated trousers. Can we not have a competition, please?”
“You know, all you have to do is just drop a few pounds and you’d be really attractive, Elizabeth,” said Penny, looking serious.
“Oh, and could we definitely not have the ‘all you have to do is drop a few pounds’ conversation,” said Lizzie. “It’s not as much fun for me as you seem to think, given how often you bring it up.”
Penny stuck out her bottom lip. “Well. We’re in a borough with no unemployment whatsoever and a definite need for what us Essex girls do best.”
“Drink Bacardi Breezers?” said Lizzie.
“No.”
“Go to Lakeside?”
“No.”
“Do the shitty jobs nobody else wants to do?”
“No . . . uh, yes. Yup, that’s us.”
Chelsea looked shinier in the morning. Lizzie wondered if the people here just spat out their chewing gum less than people in Brandford. But then she saw the massive street-cleaning machine purring up and down. So everyone who lived here just got more good things even though they had more to start with. That didn’t seem fair.
But it was so lovely. It was early and clear and bright and the pavements were being polished. What was it Penny had said? “Remember: we’re looking for posh jobs in nice places where we meet nice men and you don’t have to get salad-bar bits in your hair.”
She crossed the King’s Road, shivering slightly at the sight of the smart clothes shops. She certainly wasn’t going to start in there; if she was too scared to shop in them, she certainly wasn’t going to put herself through the humiliation of asking for a job there. Plus she feared that, for example, part of the interview might be having to get herself into an outfit they stocked, then all the other staff would come out and have a good laugh at her and she’d break the zip and be unable to get out of it and she’d end up three hundred quid down.
No, not the clothes shops.
Pondering whether to spend her last few pounds on a coffee so she had something to cling to as she pounded the streets, she wandered up past the rows of perfect, huge, white-stuccoed buildings—just like hers, she thought happily—interspersed with red mansion blocks. She wondered who lived in these, how there were so many rich people all living so close to one another. What did they all do? They couldn’t all be rock stars and bankers, could they? Maybe they could.
Out of a large building with pillars on either side of the huge front door came a young family with a baby in a pushchair. The baby was snortling contentedly, and the couple, her with a lovely figure and long blond hair, him looking successful and well dressed, were laughing together at some little joke. Lizzie looked at them and found her teeth grinding slightly. She told herself they must be really unhappy underneath, or really nasty and were laughing horribly because they’d just ritually disembowled the underpaid foreign help. The idea that you could be rich, attractive, live here, and be happy . . . Well, Lizzie thought, she lived here now. She could be like that too. She was broke, chubby, squatting, jobless, and single, but apart from that they shared a postcode so they were the same really.
The little family got into a beautiful shiny black car just as it started to rain. Probably on their way to the divorce lawyers, thought Lizzie, as she trudged on, getting wet.
The Fulham Road was next up. It was full of rare book shops; incredibly expensive florists with about three carefully selected perfect blossoms on display; furniture showrooms that looked like they’d just been flown over from Versailles, and old-fashioned pubs quietly being scrubbed down, with beer being brought in and the doors and windows thrown open to get some fresh air. Lizzie wondered about a bar job. She could be the friendly, busty heart-of-gold barmaid cheerily serving foaming pints of frothy ale to the local squire’s son . . .
Hmm. One of the bar staff threw a bowlful of soapy water out across the pavement, just missing her legs. She skipped out the way, and shot him a dirty look before she could help herself. Whoops. Maybe not apply there, then.
Right, no clothes shop, no street cleaning, no bar work . . . this was getting ridiculous. Either they were going to starve to death or she was going to have to go in and ask someone about a job. The next shop she saw . . .
The next shop was a smart-looking antiques shop. Nothing in the window had a price on it. She pushed on the door, before noticing there was a little bell she had to press before she could get in. Quickly she pressed it before she could change her mind.
After an age, an old man wearing a bow tie came to the door.
“How can I help you?” he said, looking at her somewhat distrustfully.
“I was going to buy your entire shop but now I see your unpleasant face I’ve decided against it,” Lizzie wanted to say, but restrained herself.
“Uh, hello there.” She took out her CV nervously. “My name’s Elizabeth Berry and I’m particularly interested in working in the field of antiques. So if you have a vacancy . . .”
The man squinted at her.
“Vacancy? What do you mean, if I die or something?”
“No,” said Lizzie slowly, “I mean, if you need an assistant or something.”
The man looked behind him into the empty shop.
“Well, I suppose we could do with someone to manage the enormous queues in the mornings.”
“There you go, then,” said Lizzie. “And I’m sure you’d need someone at lunchtime?”
The man sighed. “OK. What’s your opinion of that piece there?”
He pointed to an old earthenware vase. It looked like the kind of thing you could pick up at a furniture shop for about a tenner, and was entirely featureless.
“It’s a vase,” said Lizzie. “Uh, and . . . very suitable for all sorts of places in the home. Indoors, outdoors . . .”
“Well, well, well, it’s a classical historian,” said the old man. “Sorry, could you get off my step? I need to dust it for the hordes that come down here straight after queuing all night at Ikea. Oh, and it’s Abyssinian and worth thirty thousand pounds.”
“That’s exactly what I was going to say next,” said Lizzie, but it was too late. She trudged across the road to the pub. The man who’d sent the water along the pavement was still out there, looking at her.
“So, you’re really an antiques dealer but you want to work in a pub?” he said when she approached him, CV in hand.
“No, I just want to work generally.”
“Sorry, love,” he said. “We’re looking for people who really love pubs, you know, love the customers and all that.”
Lizzie tried to think of a pub she’d been in where the bar staff had really loved her, but failed. She tried to smile, realizing as she did so that a) she seemed to be taking quite a lot of shit she didn’t really deserve, and b) she would never be able to go in that pub, or possibly any pub in the street ever again as long as she lived, and headed farther up the road.