Hi everyone!
So this morning I’m going to do a business make-up look. I know, it’s not the most exciting thing ever, is it? But then, job-hunting isn’t either, as you’ll know if you’ve been watching this channel over the past few months. And if you’re here because you’ve got a job interview coming up too, I hope it goes really, really well for you.
The whole corporate thing – well, it’s not that corporate really, because that’s just not me, but it’s kind of low-key. Polished. Professional! That’s it, professional. It’s a look I’ve had to master over the past few months, because I’ve been going to a lot of interviews. A lot. I think today will be, like, the twentieth one. But it’s all good experience, right?
And one thing I’ve learned along the way is that when you’re attending interviews – or any business meeting, really – you need to look the part. What do they say? Dress for the job you want, not the job you’ve got. Or, to put it another way, fake it till you make it. And the same goes for make-up. I suppose if you were interviewing to be, I don’t know, a receptionist at a modelling agency or something, you could be a bit more out there with your whole look, but for most jobs, you just want to look like someone they want to employ, and that means keeping things a bit subtle. You want them to go, “That’s the girl with the amazing CV”, not “That’s the girl with the amazing blending skills”. But at the same time, you want your make-up to last. Turning up for an interview with your nose all shiny and your mascara smudged is not a good look. Trust me, I know, because I’ve done it!
But that’s enough waffling from me. I’m literally just going to show you what I do. Hopefully this look is going to work for me – I’m using my lucky Charlotte Tilbury lipstick that Jack bought me for Christmas – so keep your fingers crossed for me. And speaking of fingers, don’t forget to give this video a thumbs up if you like it, and if you work this look for a job interview or an important meeting, let me know how you get on.
So, I’m going to start by applying my foundation…
“I’d like a bottle of Prosecco please,” I said, when I eventually managed to fight my way through the throng around the bar and catch the barman’s eye. “And two glasses.”
It was all I could do not to say, “We’re celebrating! I’ve got a job!” But I managed to stop myself, just like I’d managed to resist telling the guy in Pret when I bought a chicken sandwich, and the carriage full of people jammed in like sardines on the train, and the Big Issue seller when I bought my magazine, like I did every Friday. Although, come to think of it, it was just as well I hadn’t told him. Crowing about my new gainful employment to someone who didn’t even have a home would have been a massive dick move.
I’d told everyone else, though – well, everyone there was. I’d texted Mum. I’d texted Katie, Shivvy, Nancy and Olivia. I would have texted Stanley, only he’s not great with technology, being a teddy bear.
And now it was time to tell Jack.
It was a Friday evening and the bar was packed with groups of office workers pouring pints of beer and glasses of wine down their necks as fast as they could, celebrating the end of the working week. It was the end of the month, too – payday, I guessed, because lots of the women had glossy carrier bags from Oasis and Whistles slung over the backs of their chairs. Soon that would be me, I thought, resisting the urge to skip with excitement.
Where the hell was Jack? I craned my neck, searching for him, glad for once of my height and the additional three inches lent to me by my smartest shoes. Finally, I spotted him at a table in the corner, his back to me, a pint of Guinness in front of him.
I just hurried over, clutching the sweating ice bucket to my chest.
“I got it! I got the job!”
“No way! That’s brilliant, Gem, you must be really proud.”
Jack stood up and hugged me, even though my top was damp from the ice bucket. I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him. He tasted of beer and a bit of cheese and onion crisps – the empty packet was on the table next to his glass.
“Have you been waiting ages? My train was cancelled so I had to wait for the next one and then there were no seats. It was grim.”
“Not that long,” Jack said. “So – tell me about the interview. Was this the advertising agency one?”
“No, doofus, that was yesterday.” To be fair to Jack, I’d been for so many job interviews in the past eighteen months I’d almost lost track of them myself. Endless tweaking of my CV and my LinkedIn profile. Endless train journeys to London, expensive and fruitless. Endless emails starting, We regret that on this occasion… But it had all been worth it, because now, finally, I’d been given a chance.
“It’s Clickfrenzy,” I said. “You know – ‘Winning the internet since 2010’? Their stories come up on Facebook all the time. I’m officially a junior writer. I start on the fifteenth. Just wait until you see their office – it’s so incredibly cool. There’s a popcorn machine and a coffee machine and a games room and it’s right off Oxford Street.”
“It sounds amazing,” Jack said, easing the cork out of the bottle of Prosecco and carefully filling a glass for me.
“It is amazing!” I said. “Aren’t you having any?”
“Maybe in a bit,” Jack said, taking another sip of stout. “I’ve still got this. Anyway, cheers. Congratulations.”
“I actually still can’t believe it. My boss – how weird does it feel saying that? – Sarah, she’s the MD, interviewed me, and I thought she’d do the usual thing of being like, ‘We’ll be in touch (not).’ But she offered me the job straight away. She said they’re growing so fast the challenge is getting talented people on board. She thinks I’m talented! I told her about my YouTube channel and made out like I was some social content guru, and I guess she must have believed me. She’s super scary, though. Scary Sarah.”
Jack didn’t laugh. He was looking kind of thoughtful, staring down into his glass.
I said, “Look, I know this is huge. And it’s kind of sudden – I was beginning to think it was never going to happen, and I’d have to carry on living with Mum and working in the bloody pub forever. But now it has – and it changes things for you, too, I guess.”
“Does it?” Jack said.
I said, “Of course! It means I can finally move out of Mum’s, and we can… you know. We can get on with life.”
I didn’t say it, but I knew he knew what I meant. We can move in together. I can stop living out of a bag when I stay over at your flat. We can have a place of our own. We can move our relationship on to the next level, the way it’s supposed to happen.
I said, “I was looking at flats online, on the train home. We couldn’t afford a place of our own, I don’t think. But we could get a room somewhere together, easily. Somewhere with cool bars and shops and stuff. Somewhere like…”
I paused, thinking of the vastness of London. I didn’t really know where. But I could picture it in my head: a sunny bedroom, maybe somewhere high up, with a view of the Thames. Or maybe not – I knew next to nothing about London but I was pretty sure that views over the Thames didn’t fall within our budget. With a balcony, then, where we could have coffee and croissants on weekend mornings, before strolling hand-in-hand through cobbled streets, stopping at market stalls to buy bunches of tulips and cool vintage things, like people did in vlogs on YouTube. And I could film myself doing those things for my own vlog, which might mean I’d get some more viewers, because, as I had discovered, me putting on make-up for unsuccessful job interviews, serving pints in the Mason’s Arms and trying not to have too many rows with my mother didn’t exactly make for compelling content.
And Jack – Jack was surely ready to move on with life, too. To be honest, I’d found it – not frustrating exactly, but almost mystifying that Jack, to whom everything seemed to come so easily, didn’t do more to make things happen. He’d gone straight from university to living in a flat his parents had bought as an investment and working for the software development company his dad owned, where he spent his days doing things to do with C++ and SQL and other stuff that made me glaze over a bit whenever he talked about it. If it was that boring to hear about, I sometimes thought, how boring must it be to actually do? But whenever he complained about it and I suggested that he could make a change, do something he was passionate about, he just said, “Yeah, maybe,” and changed the subject. And because, after all, I wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire career-wise myself, I hadn’t pushed the issue.
Jack said, “Gemma. I handed in my notice at work today.”
“You did? That’s great. And how incredible that you did it on the same day I got this job! It’s almost like you knew, or fate knew, or something. Now we can really…”
Then I stopped. I knew, right then, that I wasn’t going to like what he was going to say. I wanted him to stop, but I knew I had to hear it.
I took a big gulp of my drink. It had gone a bit warm and flat while we were talking, and it tasted sour and not like a celebration at all.
I said, “Have you found something else, then? Or are you just going to take a break for a bit?”
Jack said, “I guess I’m going to take a break for a bit. If you want to put it like that.”
I said, “A break to do what, exactly?”
Jack said, “I want to go travelling. I want to see a bit of the world, before I settle down.”
Before I settle down, I noticed. Not before we settle down.
“Travelling where?” I said.
“Everywhere,” he said. “I want to go to Dubai and see the tallest building in the world. I want to go to Thailand – I might try and find work in a diving school there. Then maybe India, Australia, Peru – I want to hike the Inca trail. And New Orleans, obviously. And New York.”
“But you never said anything,” I said. My voice sounded a bit wobbly, and even more squeaky than usual. “You must have been thinking about this for ages.”
“I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “Obviously. Yeah, I guess I’ve been planning it. But I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t want to tell you until I was.”
Then I heard my voice say the obvious thing – the stupid, inevitable thing. “But what about us?”
Jack said, “I love you, Gemma, you know I do. But I’m not ready for all the settling-down shit. I can’t go and work every day in some fucking boring job I hate and save for a deposit and then save for a wedding and then have kids. I can’t. I’m twenty-four. I’ve done fuck all with my life and now you want me to do all that and it just feels like more of fuck all.”
I said, “I never asked you to do any of that stuff! I didn’t!”
“Maybe you didn’t,” Jack said. “But I know it’s what you want. Come on, Gemma, I’ve seen your Pinterest boards.”
“What about my Pinterest boards?” I said. “So? I post recipes on them – it’s not like I’m ever going to cook any of them. And pictures of what I’d like my living room to look like if I had a house that cost a million pounds, which is never going to happen, obviously. And I post… What were you doing looking at my Pinterest, anyway?”
“Wedding dresses,” Jack said. “You had it open on your iPad, I couldn’t help seeing them.”
I said, “Look, all girls look at wedding dresses. It’s theoretical. It doesn’t mean anything. Not like buying a flight to the other side of the flipping world means something!”
I glared at him and he glared back. I could feel the row waiting to happen – if it hadn’t already started – and our evening, which had got off to a pretty awful start, being irretrievably ruined. But then, I thought, if it was all over between us, what did it matter anyway?
I said, “How long were you – are you – going to go for, anyway?”
Jack said, “Six months, probably. Maybe a year. I’m not sure. But I’ll come back, Gemma. I want to be with you. I really, really do. I’m just not ready for that kind of commitment just yet.”
It was the straw I needed to clutch at – the promise that, even if he was on the other side of the planet, he’d still be my boyfriend. Call me a mug, but I grasped it.
“Do you really mean that?” I said. “What, like we’ll still be together, even though you aren’t here?”
Jack said, “Of course we will. I’ll FaceTime you every day. It’ll be almost like you’re there. I want you to feel like you’re having this adventure with me. I just wish you could be there in real life.”
For a second, I thought, Maybe I actually could. Maybe I could email Sarah and tell her I couldn’t accept the job after all, or ask her if I could apply again in six months. But then I remembered the long, depressing months of unpaid internships that were meant to teach me valuable skills and actually taught me how to make tea and call endless lists of telephone numbers to check that they were correct. I remembered the triumph and relief I’d felt when Sarah said, “We’d like you to start as soon as possible.” And I remembered that I could barely afford a train ticket to London; I certainly couldn’t afford a round-the-world flight, and Mum couldn’t afford to treat me to one and then pay for places for me to sleep and food for me to eat and everything else I’d need for six whole self-indulgent months. Or maybe a year.
I felt the familiar sense of injustice, of resentment, of there being something horribly unfair about a world where everything was so easy for some people and so difficult for me. Then I remembered the Big Issue seller, and sternly reminded myself, as I did so often (and Mum did even more often), that in the grand scheme of things, I had absolutely nothing to moan about. But still, I couldn’t help thinking how nice it would be to have rich parents like Jack did. Like Olivia did.
Then a horrible idea occurred to me, and as soon as it did, I knew that it was right.
I said, “Won’t it be a bit… a bit shit, travelling on your own? Lonely?”
Jack said, “I’m not going on my own, Gemma. I’m going with Olivia.”
“Of course you are,” I said. I sounded angry, for the first time since he’d dropped his bombshell, and bitter, but I didn’t care.
From the first day I met Jack, Olivia had been a constant presence. She was even there when I met him, having dinner with him in Lucio’s, where I was working as a waitress during the summer holidays after my second year of uni (I was ignominiously sacked shortly after for throwing a bowl of minestrone soup over the chef when he pinched my bottom one time too many, which was totally worth it).
I assumed they were a couple – of course I did, the handsome, stocky man and the willowy blonde girl chatting and laughing together. So, when Jack lingered after he’d paid the bill and asked for my number, I said, “Fuck off, you’ve got a girlfriend.”
And Jack had said, “That’s not my girlfriend! That’s Olivia.”
And it was true – she wasn’t his girlfriend and never had been. In some ways, it would have been better if she was. Because Jack wasn’t just Jack; he was half of Jack and Olivia, bound to another girl by the ties of a friendship that had lasted since they were – well, basically forever.
Their birthdays were three days apart. Olivia’s parents and Jack’s parents lived next door to each other. They’d gone to the same baby music classes and the same riding school and been babysat together while their parents went out for dinner together. They’d even been on holiday together, for God’s sake. And instead of hating each other, like most kids would surely have done with such close proximity imposed on them, they’d stayed best friends throughout their childhood, and when Jack and I started going out, they were best friends still.
Of course, when the closeness of their friendship became clear to me, I’d felt threatened. But Jack had laughed when I asked him if he and Olivia had ever… you know… had they? He’d said kissing Olivia would be like kissing his sister, if he had one. He’d said he couldn’t imagine anything weirder or more wrong – and besides, he said, they didn’t fancy each other. Not in the slightest, not even a tiny bit.
So I put my fears to one side. This wasn’t as hard to do as it sounds, especially as Olivia made a huge effort to be nice to me. And it wasn’t hard to like Olivia – everyone likes her. She’s got more friends on Facebook than anyone I know, and she actually stays in touch with them all, meets up with them and keeps up with what’s going on in their lives. She kind of adopted me – inviting me on nights out with her mates, until Shivvy and Nancy and the rest of them became my friends too, giving me a ready-made circle of friends at home in Norwich that made up for the fact that I’d been a shy, uncool no-mates at school. She sent me flowers on my birthday. Recently, she’d listened to me complain about the misery of job-hunting and reassured me that I was brilliant, that something would come along eventually, that it was all meant to be and part of the Universe’s grand plan for me (Olivia’s a yoga teacher. She often comes out with zen shit like that).
But in spite of Olivia being my friend, I always knew she’d been Jack’s friend first. Even though I’d been Jack’s girlfriend for four years, I didn’t know whether his first loyalty would be to me or to her. It had never really mattered – it had never been tested. Not until now.
I said, “So the two of you have been planning this together, and not said anything to me. You’ve done it all behind my back.”
“Gemma, babe, please don’t be like this,” he said.
“Be like what? Be like your girlfriend, who was planning a life with you, who’s found out you’ve had other plans all along?”
“There isn’t an ‘all along’,” Jack said. “Please, Gemma, you have to understand. This has all been really recent. We only booked our tickets today. Liv only had the idea, like, last week. I mean, obviously I’ve been thinking for a while about stuff, about what I want to do, where I’m going…”
“Who you’re going with,” I said.
“Come on, Gemma,” Jack said. “You know, if I could choose anyone in the world to go travelling with, to have this adventure with, it would be you. But…”
I said, “I could save up. They’re not paying me much at Clickfrenzy – it’s a starting salary – but if I stayed at home for a year and saved like mad, I could maybe take some time off, like a career break. I could go with you then.”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I regretted them. I knew what I’d said wasn’t true. Not that I didn’t want to travel, and see the world, and do it with Jack – but not like that. My idea of exploring wasn’t remotely the same as his. He’d be quite happy sleeping in tents and in grotty youth hostels with filthy showers and maybe even bedbugs – evidently so would Olivia. But I wouldn’t. There’d be nowhere to have a hot bath. The food would be weird. I wouldn’t be able to make people who didn’t speak English understand me. I remembered going to Glastonbury with Jack a couple of years before, and how much I’d hated it, even though I hadn’t admitted as much to him and never would. This would be like Glastonbury, only with added foreign languages and probably even grimmer toilets, and it would go on for months and months.
Jack reached across the table for my hand, but I moved it away.
“I don’t want to wait,” he said. “We – I want to go now. It just feels right.”
I could feel a huge surge of anger building up inside me. It wasn’t fair – he was selfishly, casually doing exactly what he wanted to do, with no thought for me, my dreams and ambitions, the future we’d talked about having together. I wanted to accuse him of that, to demand to know why he thought that diving in Thailand was more important than me. But the words wouldn’t come.
Instead, I heard my voice say again, even more pathetically, “But what about us?”
Jack said, “This isn’t about us, Gemma. This doesn’t mean anything about us. I love you. I’ll always love you. When I come back, we can move in together, like you wanted. I just need to do this now, for myself. And you could come out to New York for Christmas – we think that’s where we’ll be then, anyway. And in the meantime, you can really focus on your new job. You’re going to be so awesome at it.”
As he spoke, he topped up our glasses with fizzy wine, then held his out towards me.
“Come on, Gemma,” he said. “Let’s drink to the future. To us.”
And I clinked my glass against his and echoed, “To us.”
When I woke up, for a few seconds things felt just the same as usual. I opened my eyes and saw Stanley, lying next to me on the pillow where he always was. Beyond his battered furry body, I could see the dent where Jack’s head had been, and I remembered that it was Saturday, and he always got up early on Saturdays to go to the gym. I saw greyish light making familiar patterns through the leaves of the lime tree outside my window. I could hear some eighties pop song blasting from the radio and Mum singing tunelessly along to it.
Then reality hit me like a brick. Jack was going away. Jack and Olivia. I remembered all the promises he’d made to me the previous night as we finished the bottle of Prosecco and then over the dinner he bought us to celebrate my new job, and later when we lay together in my bed. I’d found it so easy to believe that they were true when he was there, but now that he wasn’t, doubt came rushing in to fill the space he’d left.
Long-distance relationships could work – I knew that. Katie and her boyfriend Matt had stayed together all through university, with Katie in Newcastle and Matt in Exeter, snatching weekends together and seeing each other in the holidays (admittedly, it all went horribly wrong shortly after we graduated, when we went on a girls’ holiday to Ibiza and Katie shagged a barman. But still). Other people made it work too – of course they did, even though I couldn’t actually think of any right this second. Jack and I would make it work. He’d promised.
But this was different. Jack and I wouldn’t be seeing each other regularly. We wouldn’t be able to have a routine of talking before we went to sleep every night, the way Katie and Matt had. I wouldn’t know where he was or what he was doing, or feel connected to his life because I knew first-hand what it was like. He’d be seeing new things, meeting new people all the time. He’d be exploring the world, and he’d forget about me.
I remembered how I’d felt the previous morning, when my alarm clock had gone off and I’d known instantly that today was the day I was going for the interview at Clickfrenzy – full of excitement and apprehension and hope. I’d got what I wanted, but it didn’t feel that way. It didn’t feel like the beginning of my life as a grown-up – or if it did, I wanted nothing more than to be able to turn back the clock.
I picked up my phone and plugged in the earbuds to drown out the sound of Mum’s singing, and went online to drown out my thoughts. I flicked through my Instagram feed, but I didn’t post anything. I checked my YouTube channel and saw that some of my two thousand followers had commented on my video, saying I looked great and wishing me luck for the job interview. I knew I should reply, letting them know how well it had gone and how excited I was about it all, but I just wasn’t feeling it.
I pulled the duvet back up to my chin, cuddled Stanley to my chest and closed my eyes. All I wanted to do was go back to sleep, and stay asleep until it was time to get ready for my shift in the pub, but I couldn’t. There was a horrible taste in my mouth; the light was too bright. I needed to wee and I was hungry.
So, reluctantly, I got up. I had a long shower and washed my hair, but I couldn’t be bothered to get dressed or put on any make-up (Some kind of beauty vlogger you are, Gemma Grey, I scolded myself). Instead, I put on fluffy slippers and my dressing gown and went into the kitchen.
Mum was on the sofa with her feet up on the coffee table, reading Vogue. She was wearing grey suede leggings and a drapey purple top, and she’d changed her hair. It had been a sort of ashy blonde yesterday; now it was chestnut.
I was used to seeing these overnight – or daytime, I suppose, strictly speaking, because they didn’t actually happen while she was asleep – transformations. Mum used to be a model – not a supermodel or anything like that. I’m not going do a thing like, “You know Naomi Campbell? So, I’m her daughter.” I mean, I don’t think Naomi even has a daughter. But if she did, I’m not her. Anyway, Mum was an actual model, until she met my father and got pregnant with me, and then after Dad left she trained as a hairdresser, and now she manages her own salon. She’s won prizes and everything. The only thing she likes better than experimenting with new colours and styles on her own hair is experimenting with them on mine. It means that, however down I might feel about my appearance generally, my hair is always fabulous.
I said, “Aren’t those my leggings?”
Mum looked up. “Are they?” she said, ever so casually. “I must have put them in my wardrobe by mistake after I washed them. I could have sworn they were mine.”
“Well, they aren’t,” I said. “They’re mine, and they’re dry clean only, so there’s no way they would have been in the wash. I bought them last week at TK Maxx, they were, like, the bargain of the century and I haven’t even worn them yet. So give them back.”
“Oh, please, Gemma?” Mum said. “Can’t I borrow them just this once? I’ve got a date and literally nothing else to wear. We’re not even going for lunch, just a walk by the river and maybe a drink, so I won’t spill anything on them.”
“You’re going for a walk by the river in those shoes?” I said, eyeing up her charcoal platform shoe-boots and making a mental note to borrow them at the earliest possible opportunity.
“It won’t be far,” she said. “And he said he’s six foot two, so if he’s lying he deserves to have me tower over him.”
“Is this another Guardian Soulmate?” I asked.
“Match.com, this time,” Mum said. “They’re all a bit worthy on Guardian Soulmates. The last one I met was a vegan, as he told me within about five seconds of us meeting. So I was too embarrassed to order any food at the pub we went to, even though I was starving, and we just sat there crunching away on peanuts like Mr and Mrs Squirrel. He got one stuck in his teeth and the spark died, right then.”
Reluctantly, I laughed. Mum’s online dating stories are always entertaining, although I suspect they’re often embellished for comic effect. She’s been single for as long as I can remember, apart from when Cameron moved in with us for a couple of years when I was a teenager. I’m pretty sure it was my epic strops that scared him off, but Mum didn’t seem too bothered when he left. It’s like she doesn’t mind being alone, but she does like meeting new people all the time. Weird as, right?
I said, “Want a coffee?”
Mum said, “No, I’m all… actually, yes, I’d love one. Thanks, angel.”
I pushed the sleeves of my dressing gown back off my hands to fill the kettle. Even though it was a gorgeous, sunny day, I didn’t feel warm. I wanted to go back to bed.
I made the coffee and took two mugs over to the sofa.
Mum said, “Did you and Jack have a nice evening? I heard you come in, but I was already half asleep.”
“It was all right,” I said. Then I sat down next to her and picked up my drink, clasping my hands around the mug with my dressing gown sleeves as insulation.
“He must be pleased about your new job,” Mum said.
I said, “Yes, I suppose he is. Because I suppose he thinks it’ll distract me from the fact that he’s fucking off overseas for a fucking year with fucking Olivia.”
I heard Mum give a little gasp. I looked sideways at her and watched while she composed her face from surprise to careful neutrality.
“That came a bit out of the blue, didn’t it?” she said.
“I know, right?” I said dismally. “He told me last night. I was like, yay, new job, go me, and he was like, never mind that, see where I’m going.”
Mum said, “Oh, Gemma. Does that mean the two of you are…”
“No!” I said. “He’s going to come back, and then we’re going to find a place to live together and… I don’t know, settle down and stuff. That’s what he says, anyway. He means it, right?”
I heard Mum take a deep breath and slowly let it out again, blowing on her coffee to cool it. I looked sideways at her again, but her face was still and unreadable.
“I’m sure he does,” she said. “He loves you, Gemma. Anyone can see that. He’s a decent guy, and he treats you well, and I’ve always liked him very much. But…”
“But what?”
“A year is a long time when you’re twenty-four, Gemma. No, don’t look at me like that. I know you think I’m patronising you, but I don’t mean to. All I’m saying is, don’t put your life on hold for him, because you never know what’s waiting around the corner, for you or for him.”
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