I didn’t want a solution. I JUST WANTED HIM TO LISTEN. And sympathise. Like a friend would.
‘You can’t have conversations with your partner like you do with your mates,’ Kath said.
But this left me wondering what you could do with your partner if conversations and sex were often off the agenda.
What did that leave?
And so I stopped telling him these work stories. I stopped telling him the old stories (he’d heard them all). I stopped telling him. It made me sad but I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do about it. It didn’t feel like something that dinner in a nice restaurant would fix.
On top of this we’d been through three miscarriages after Bella. Miscarriages can bring you closer together but they’d seemed to push us further apart instead. We wanted to stay together.
But life was tiring and we didn’t have energy to put into it anymore.
After lunch, I went back to the silent, air-conditioned tomb. The air con had been turned up so high that several of my colleagues were wearing thick blankets wrapped around their shoulders. It made the whole place feel a bit desperate – like we were in some sort of disaster zone, just trying to hold our shit together until somebody rescued us. I shoved my headphones on, and spent twenty minutes trying to construct a Spotify playlist that would encourage me to run more often.
Phoebe came back into my field of vision. She mouthed the words, WHERE’S THAT BRIEF? at me and I made a sort of shrugged shoulder, not sure where, gesture and she was off again. It was obvious that there was a need for more briefs today. We were very busy but not busy enough.
I whacked some KRS-One on. An old P. Diddy track. The minute those beats started I felt more energetic. Hip-hop made me feel like I could conquer the world. Hip-hop artists never struggled with their careers or worried that they’d spent too much on a bobble hat and would need to return it. I love hip-hop (classics from the 90s). This stemmed back to my childhood growing up in Beckenham – basically you either liked hip-hop or dance music and I tended to be more of a hip-hop gal. It seemed as if those lyrics were written for a white, middle-class girl dealing with boys who thought I was too tall and boyish for them and friendship dynamics which changed every two minutes. Now if you clocked me in my Boden skirt, grey roots just starting to show through, you’d think I was listening to Coldplay or some such dross but I retained my tiny sliver of youthful abandon through listening to LL Cool J, DMX, Dr Dre and Wu-Tang Clan.
There was something about hip-hop that was remarkably confidence boosting.
Like many females, I didn’t over-index on confidence and was drawn to people who did. LL Cool J never woke in the morning with imposter syndrome. He didn’t have to read positive affirmations to know what he stood for or what he wanted to accomplish that day. It’s was awe-inspiring. One day I would launch a magazine and it would give advice from rappers to middle aged women. It would be called Dope Housewives, and would blow Good Housekeeping out of the water. Who wanted to look at Judith Chalmers in a floral jumpsuit or read articles about body brushing when you could read ‘Snoop Dog’s 10 Tips for a Hot Damn Sex Life?’. It was accepted that your tastes became more conservative, the older you became but why did this have to be so?
Eventually, I came back to the slides I needed to finish off. Some of the presentation seemed to be rather repetitive, but I could always hide those slides, or delete them once I’d finished.
I couldn’t help myself and checked Instagram first, scrolling through another fifty images of women who were apparently ‘killing it’, ‘nailing it’, ‘embracing the day,’ and the like. I wrote another slide. Then went back on social media. I kept this not-very-virtuous-circle going for the rest of the afternoon.
‘The synergy between cleaning and sleeping doesn’t feel optimum for a bum product offering.’
‘Today’s the first day of the rest of your life.’
‘A core barrier is the fear of toxicity next to baby’s private parts.’
‘The only thing to fear is fear itself.’
‘The optimized proposition needs to reassure on naturalness as some respondents feared rashes and reactions due to strong offensive odour of product.’
I was increasingly feeling like I was just arranging words in different configurations, and they made very little sense. I took a few screengrabs from various baby websites and stuck smiling faces all over the deck. That jollied it up somewhat and made it feel a bit more accessible. At around three p.m. it was time for a team meeting. Darren was my team leader – I’d hired him just before going on maternity leave and he was now my line manager. It wasn’t uncommon of course. Having a baby was not a good idea and your career rarely survived – unless when you came back you worked ten times as hard and denied the baby’s existence. It was a thorny issue and one that showed no signs of going away.
‘So, are we all SMASHING it today?’ Darren said as the four of us settled around the table.
There was something about him that gave me a visceral response – a queasy feeling. He was a strange hybrid of ‘macho surfer’ and ‘steely banker’. It was a horrid combination.
‘We are smashing it today,’ I said under my breath but this was far from the truth.
I’d only had one brief in two weeks, and had been finishing up this debrief for three days now (when usually I should have moved onto a new project already). On the table there was a young female intern who seemed about fourteen, then a lovely girl called Sam who had joined Mango-Lab after her gap year in Belize rescuing turtles, and the guy with the TWAT cap who I’d seen around the office, but who had only just been put on Darren’s team. Then me – the Grandma of hip-hop.
‘Let’s each take a turn and say the one thing we’re proud of achieving today.’ Darren said.
Darren had whitened his teeth, and smiled a lot to make sure to get his money’s worth. In my last appraisal, he’d told me to study the book How to Win Friends and Influence People. He’d learnt all his ‘tricks and strategies’ from it, he said. I needed to be more like him if I wanted to win in business. The thing was, I wasn’t sure Mango-Lab wanted a forty-two-year-old surfer chick who slapped people on the back without warning … but he was right that I needed to be more enthusiastic – my enthusiasm levels were not great. He also told me that my business-winning target had tripled. He delivered this news with a grin, and then slapped the table to signal our one-on-one had finished.
‘Great dude! Do you want to high five?’
I just glared at him. I clearly didn’t want to do that at all. It had taken me forty minutes to fill in one line on the review form which was all in Excel – I found it impossible to use at the best of times. I had the sense that Darren was trying to catch me out and make my life as difficult as possible. I didn’t like the cut of his jib. Even by Mango-Lab’s standards he was a viper. If I’d been Phoebe, I would have taken his advice on the chin and manned up. Instead I went into the toilet and cried, and then went to Pret and bought myself a cheese and ham croissant. I rang Mum and vowed to escape this terrible job as soon as possible. I understood we needed to bring business in but they needed to be practical about just how much a part-time mum could bring in on her own with little support.
‘You’ll never achieve this huge figure Rebecca,’ Darren had said in one of our more recent catch-ups. ‘You won’t even come close but let’s set the bar REAL high? Let’s see where that tide takes you.’
He’d grinned, flashing those ghastly gnashers. He delivered bad news whilst smiling like Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining. This might have come from his self-help book but it didn’t work for me. Many were terrified of him.
‘I worked until three a.m. on a debrief last night.’