Hi. My name's Faith and I'm living the London dream! I work in a fabulous PR company, have loads of thin, glamorous friends but most of all, I have a perfect, handsome boyfriend. He never wants to watch the football and he always thinks I am the most beautiful girl in the world. The only problem is that he doesn't exist. I made him up, just like I made up my perfect life and my perfect job. It's what I do. I'm a single, lonely, low-paid, make-up girl and it's far too late to tell my family the depressing truth. Except that my sister's just got engaged, which means I've finally run out of reasons why my family can't meet my man... Hi. My name's Faith and I have less than two months to turn my perfect fictional boyfriend into reality. Wish me luck?
Release date:
February 6, 2014
Publisher:
Piatkus
Print pages:
335
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
I’m running and I’m late. This is the interview I have waited three years for – three years – and I should have been there five minutes ago. I mean, how did that happen?
I certainly left the flat on time. Well, the first time I left the flat it was on time.
Then I realised I had laddered my tights. So I went back.
Then I realised I looked like a vampire. So I slapped on some tan.
Then I realised I should change my tampon. Just in case.
Then I realised I had missed my bus.
Then I realised I had to get some money out for a taxi.
Then I realised the hole-in-the-wall was unable to complete my request, suggesting I should contact my card issuer.
Then I realised that I had gone over my overdraft limit to buy these shoes.
Then I realised that I had to get there on foot.
Then I realised the shoes which broke the bank seem equally capable of breaking my feet. Especially as I am currently engaged in a breathless attempt to break the land-speed record in order not to blow my chances completely.
There it is.
As I clip-clop down the pavement at hyper speed, I can see it.
The headquarters of Coleridge Communications, the biggest PR agency outside of London. There it is, six storeys of gleaming
hope.
I decide to slow down to a fast walk. In fact, it’s less of a decision and more of a physical necessity. I’m hyperventilating,
my heart is about to burst out of my shirt, and my squished feet are now two sizes smaller than when I started running.
I come to a complete stop just beyond view of the foyer, and clutch onto some black railings.
OK, deep breaths.
Calm thoughts. I close my eyes and I’m on a beach, waves gently rolling, palm trees gently swaying …
‘Spare some change, love?’ I open my eyes and see a very skinny and ill-looking boy – no older than sixteen – holding out a
polystyrene cup half-full of brown coins.
‘Um, yes,’ I say, as I fumble in my handbag for whatever loose coins happen to be lying about. I haven’t really got time,
but I need all the karma-points I can get. And he does look pretty desperate. ‘Here.’
‘Nice one,’ he says, in appreciation of the miniscule amount I have just clunked in his cup.
I glance at the boy as he slouches off, in his faded clothes, and I try to gain some perspective. This is only a job interview,
I tell myself. It’s not life or death.
With that thought, I fill my chest with air and climb the stone steps towards the revolving door. On the other side of the
glass I can see the foyer – within which there is a very tall and intimidating desk with an immaculate-looking woman perched behind it, talking importantly on the phone.
A sea of people are leaving the building – for lunch, I assume – and I wait timidly before attempting to jump into the flight
path of the revolving doors.
This is it, I tell myself.
This is my one chance to make everything all right.
Once inside the foyer, I start to heat up. And I mean, really heat up. After a two-mile run in high heels and a suit, that’s
just what I need. A pre-interview sauna. The immaculate-looking woman behind the desk must be a complete psycho. Either that,
or she’s not a human being at all and needs this kind of temperature to heat up her blood.
I arrive in front of her desk and wait for her to finish her phone call and acknowledge my presence. In the meantime, I check
out her make-up. Mist foundation, sprayed on for even coverage. Perfect shading on the cheekbones. No bags or grey under the
eyes. And then I start to worry. I must look a right mess. I mean, make-up is normally what I’m good at. But this morning
I was all over the place. And I bet I overdid it on the tan. And the two-mile run won’t have helped.
The immaculate woman finishes her phone call and looks up. She gives me a brief, but forensic assessment. I could just be
paranoid, but she seems to be looking slightly amused at my appearance. Oh no. What’s the matter? Have I got bird poo on my
shoulder or something?
‘Um, I’ve got an interview.’
‘Sorry?’ she asks, as amusement turns to confusion.
‘I’ve got an interview,’ I say again, only this time trying not to let my nerves make me incoherent.
‘Which company?’
What does she mean which company? Don’t they own the whole building? ‘Er, Coleridge Communications. It’s with Sam Johnson.’
‘You mean John Sampson?’
Shit. What an idiot.
‘Yes, sorry. It’s Faith Wishart.’ Well, at least I got that bit right.
Immaculate woman picks up the phone and presses one number. Two seconds later she says: ‘John, Faith Wishart.’
My God, I think. This is how important John Sampson is. He doesn’t even have time for proper sentences.
‘He’ll be two minutes,’ the immaculate woman says, before raising her perfectly plucked eyebrows and smiling smugly to herself.
OK, now I’m really paranoid.
I sit down next to a head-high pot plant which, on closer inspection, turns out to be a fake. There are some magazines on
the table in front of me. I resist the latest issue of Gloss and pick up a copy of PR Week, pretending to look interested.
Shit, my hands are shaking. And my palms are damp with sweat.
Come on, Faith. Concentrate.
I try and remember everything I wrote on the application form. All the true bits, the nearly-true bits and the completely
false bits. But I can’t even think straight.
Why am I a good team player?
Did I say I had a 2:1 or a First?
What relevant experience did I have again?
It’s no good. The steady drum of my heart has now accelerated into a mad bongo rhythm. My legs are numb and my tongue is sticking
to the roof of my mouth.
The lift pings and slides open to reveal a tall, smartly dressed man staring straight at me.
‘Faith?’ he asks in a voice so deep his vocal chords must be located in his testicles. He holds out an enormous hand. ‘John
Sampson.’
Oh blinking bollocks, he’s gorgeous.
And look at that suit. It must be Gucci or something. Purple shirt, no tie, open at the neck, dark curly hair, confident smile,
and one of those faces that actually suit being old. And when I say old I don’t mean Hugh Hefner old I just mean George Clooney
old.
OK, so the purple shirt does nothing for him. I mean, this is a man clearly in touch with his inner-prune. But other than
that he’s just like the men you read about in all those novels.
Tall, check.
Dark, check.
Handsome, double check.
If this was the nineteenth century I’d be swooning right now. I’d be swooning for England and he’d pick me up and ride me
away on his black steed (whatever a black steed is) and he’d take me to his castle and ravish me and write me a love sonnet
and we’d go off and poison ourselves or drown in a lake or start a revolution or something …
Shit, I’m delirious.
I really shouldn’t have missed breakfast this morning.
Anyway, it’s not the nineteenth century, and I’ve got a job to get.
I somehow manage to stand.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ I tremble.
He is looking at me straight on, and then I remember: eye contact. If you want to make the right impression, you have to fix
the interviewer’s gaze.
‘After you,’ he says, nodding towards the open lift door.
I hesitate.
There is a strange-looking woman standing in the lift, staring right at me. The woman is bright orange and looks absolutely
petrified.
Oh shit.
It’s a mirror.
Petrified orange woman is me.
Bollocks, how much of the flaming stuff did I slap on? The bottle had promised a deep, natural, radiant tan. Radioactive,
more like. Mind you, what kind of tan is going to look natural in April? In bloody Leeds?
And what’s more, it’s started to streak, near my ear. All because mum says I look anaemic.
No wonder immaculate receptionist lady was smirking. I walk into the lift, and try and remember what exactly I put on the
form. And then I get a feeling. A premonitiony feeling. As if something is about to go horribly wrong.
By the time the lift door closes, the mad bongo player caged inside my chest is pounding away like it’s the first day of the
Rio carnival. On top of interview nerves I’ve now got handsome man nerves as well.
If I wasn’t bright orange I’d be bright red. In fact, now I look again I realise I’m actually a combination.
A blood orange.
With added streaks.
Come on, I tell myself. It’s probably not that bad. After all, I have got a bit of a critical eye for that sort of thing.
Handsome-interviewer-potential-boss-man-whose-name-I’ve-forgotten smiles at me. It’s a nice smile, designed to put me at ease,
but it doesn’t.
It doesn’t even come close.
‘It’s a nice day,’ I say, although as soon as I say it I realise that I am lying. It isn’t a nice day. Before I started running
it was freezing. ‘For April, I mean.’
He nods, not in agreement, but in another attempt to make me relax. Oh God, this is terrible. The way he combines sexy and
powerful in one look, is making me feel so weak. It’s like sharing a lift with Colin Farrell and Bill Gates at the same time.
‘OK,’ he says. ‘Here we are.’
‘What?’ But then the lift pings open and I realise he means here we are on the right floor. ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Yes.’
I follow him out onto the floor and for a second I think I’m dreaming. The reason why is because this is my dream. I mean, when I close my eyes and imagine my perfect working environment this is pretty much it.
Open plan. Colourful seating areas. Trendy glass partitions. iMacs on every desk. The gentle hum of creativity. People wearing
what they want and chatting at their desks. All generating that confident, moneyfied glow which only seems to belong to career
people, not job people.
For a second, I am so impressed with the scene that I almost forget to be nervous.
‘OK, this way,’ says John (that is his name isn’t it?), walking me through the room to his office.
He asks an occasional, incomprehensible query to members of his staff and he gets answered in tones which confirm that he
is the boss. This is a man, I feel, who is not only respected but genuinely liked by his staff.
As I walk I can sense that I am being silently assessed. Everybody is trying to work out if I am a Coleridge Communications
kind of person. Oh God, I hope no one recognises me. I hope no one …
Oh no.
That girl at the photocopier. The skinny one with the heavy fringe and Diesel T-shirt. With the small pointy nose and bright
crimson lips. She is staring at me more obviously than most. I try and counter her gaze with a polite microsmile, but it doesn’t
work.
She just keeps on staring.
Honestly, it’s almost a relief when I arrive in John’s office and he shuts the door. I say almost. I mean, this is an interview after all.
The interview.
‘Take a seat,’ he says, in the same testicular tone.
I take a seat.
John Sampson sits opposite, on the other side of his desk. A Guccified vision of power and fuckability.
‘Faith … Wishart,’ he muses, as he scans my application form.
‘Yes,’ I say, confident that at least my name is correct.
He scans the form further, and as he does so he smiles. It’s a different smile to the one he exhibited in the lift. A slightly
smug smile, involving a simultaneous raising of his right eyebrow.
‘I must say, right at the outset, that I was very impressed with your application. Your qualifications and your experience
and your references are all absolutely superb.’
These are good words. These are the words you dream of hearing as you walk into an interview. So why are they making me feel
nervous?
‘Oh,’ I say transferring my weight between buttocks. ‘Thanks.’
‘Yes,’ he continues. ‘On paper at least, you certainly seem made for this job.’
He places the form back down on the desk, leans back in his chair, hands cradling the back of his head, elbows wide. Then
something starts to happen with his eyes.
They narrow, and sharpen. If this wasn’t an interview situation, the look would qualify as sexy. But this is an interview
situation. And the look is qualifying as scary.
A quick confession.
It’s about my job. My actual job, not the one I am being interviewed for. I am a make-up girl. I work part-time on a cosmetics
counter at Blake’s department store on a wage roughly equivalent to three peanuts an hour.
It might be enough to pay the rent for the cheapest flat in north Leeds, but it’s a shit job.
So shit, in fact, that as far as my mum is concerned, it’s not my job at all.
My mum thinks I work for a top PR company which is based, like Blake’s, in the centre of Leeds. The job is full-time, pays
enough peanuts to keep the entire monkey population stocked up for over a year, and is bulging with exciting career prospects.
She thinks I have worked as an account executive for the last three years. To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t meant this to
be a lie. When I was at uni I worked for a PR company in Leeds for my work placement and they’d offered me a job for when
I finished. Only thing was, when they found out I got a third the offer was cancelled. Trouble is, I never told my mum this
– in fact, I never even told her about the third.
So, every phone call I have to invent some new story about what happened in the office or what some made-up colleague said
to me by the made-up water cooler.
And every time it gets harder to tell the truth. Gets harder to say that I am a make-up girl. That I work part-time on a cosmetics
counter at a department store.
Because my mum wanted me to be successful, to have a career, to be proud of me like she could be proud of my brother, Mark.
Because we are all she’s got, all she thinks about, since dad died and my sister went to Australia.
And three years ago I was prepared to do or say anything to make her happy. Hell, who am I kidding? I’d do the same thing
now. Even though she can now sit down for five minutes without crying about dad.
So if she wants me to have a career and a 2 : 1 and everything else, then that is what I’ll tell her I’ve got. Why should
I let the facts get in the way of her happiness?
And if I can never come clean, then I’ll just have to turn the lies into the truth.
‘I’d like to ask you something …’ says John Sampson.
Well, of course he would. I mean, this is an interview and the whole thing about interviews is that they generally involve
asking things, so I’m ready. In fact, he could ask me anything right now and I’d do it.
Hop on one foot.
Sing a lullaby.
Give him a lap-dance.
‘Why us? Why CC?’
Oh good, an easy one. ‘Well, you’re the best agency. From what I’ve, um, seen. And heard. And you’re the biggest outside of
London …’
He stays leaning back in his chair, wanting more.
‘… and I really like the stuff you do. The campaign you did for Keats Cosmetics was really brilliant, you know, with the cages
and everything …’
I’m on shaky ground here.
I mean, I work for Keats Cosmetics. Well, at the lowest rung. I’m one of their make-up girls but I hadn’t tried out their new tan till this
morning.
And I am good at my job. Of course I am. I mean, think about it. What is make-up all about? It’s about manipulating the real
you. It’s about covering up. Concealing. Glossing over.
But the thing is, I didn’t mention my job on the application form. Because working part-time on a make-up counter for a department
store is not exactly what qualifies as relevant experience for a career in PR.
But I had to say something and the Keats campaign was obviously the first that came to mind. And anyway, it was a brilliant campaign. You can probably remember it. You know, it was when Keats came out with the slogan ‘Human Tested,’
and they were going on about how none of their products were tested on animals. Well anyway, Coleridge did all the PR for
it and arranged a big photo-shoot where they got a load of models to pose naked in cages in the middle of Leicester Square,
while lots of pretend scientists tested on them. Apparently the pictures made all the papers and it was included right at
the end of the Ten O’Clock News after all the serious bits about wars. You know, when they try and finish on a funny bit so
we don’t all have nightmares about the end of the world and stuff.
John Sampson doesn’t say anything. He just keeps on looking at me, assessing me, as if every flicker of my mouth holds the
key to my true personality. And in my head all the time there is this voice going: ‘You are in an interview, ooh, isn’t it
scary, you are in an interview and. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
