I wanted to be a bunny as soon as I saw the
advertisement. Why wouldn’t I? There
was no question that it was the most interesting job prospect I’d seen so far.
I thought: casinos, glamour, fast cars and millionaires. But most of all I thought it would be better
than working for a living. So I told
Carol and she said we would go to London together. Easy. After all, we
didn’t have anything else planned for the rest of our lives. We had both put in just enough effort to get
our degrees and, having got this far, didn’t have a clue what to do with
them. Some of our friends were going to
be doctors, solicitors or even teachers.
They knew what they wanted. I
hated them all.
We met up at King’s Cross, eventually. Carol had managed to get herself almost
arrested for slipping past the toilet attendant but, in a stroke of genius, had
invented a relative who worked as a toilet attendant in Exeter station and who
had been given an award for the cleanest toilets in the South West of
England. Mary, the London loo keeper,
thought that she had heard of auntie Georgina and asked Carol to make sure to
pass on her regards, before pressing a free token into her hand and wiping a
metaphorical tear from her eye, saying that it had been a great pleasure to
make her acquaintance and that, when you got up in the morning, you never knew
what was going to happen.
‘Why do you do
it?’ I yawned.
‘What?’ Carol replied, as though I may have
inadvertently changed the subject.
‘Make things so
bloody complicated.’ I saw from her
expression that she thought I was a dullard.
‘What would you
have done, then?’ she turned on me.
‘Paid the
woman! I mean how much can it cost to
have a pee?’
‘Ten pence.’
‘Really?’ It seemed implausible. ‘Whatever happened to the spending a penny
idea?’
Carol gave me
one of her blank stares before suddenly noticing the effort I had made with my
appearance. ‘What the hell have you got on?’
She looked me up and down in what can only be described as a less than
complimentary manner.
I was wearing
figure-hugging jeans and a tight tee shirt with ‘Why Don’t You Ask Me? I Might Say Yes!’ written across the
front. I could understand her taking
exception to the incorrect use of capital letters, but I knew that maths
graduates were more or less unaware of punctuation. My carefully selected attire kind of set the mood, I thought, the
mood being, as far as I was concerned, one of extreme levity and foolish
indulgence. To add to the effect, I had
on a pair of disarmingly conservative calf-length beige zip-up boots, cunningly
worn over my jeans, as was the fashion for young women of a certain type, that
type being acutely bimboesque. I thought
I looked brilliant.
Carol, in my opinion, hadn’t got
a leg to stand on as far as dress code was concerned. She was wearing a tatty kaftan coat and gypsy earrings in an
effort, apparently, to be as inappropriately dressed as possible and thus give
an uncomfortable edge to the proceedings: she didn’t agree with the concept of
an interview. There were a lot of
things that Carol didn’t agree with so, to save time, I said that I thought she
looked brilliant too.
In short, we
were confident, provocative and loud, we were backward birdbrains about to
learn the hard way that there was ‘no such thing as a free lunch’. We had no notion of what it was like to have
a job, apart from serving curry in the Students’ Union bar to salivating youths
hoping for a post biryani snog and a grope; we were young, hopeful and out to
impress with our individual ideas of what was inspiring in a world brimful of
desperately dull people leading desperately dull lives. How could we be
wrong? How could the people at Playboy
not love us?
‘Shall we get on
with it?’ said Carol, looking at the over-sized watch on her wrist.
‘Whose is that?’
‘Dave’s. I haven’t got one. Didn’t want to be late.’
‘Is that a cow
on the face?’
‘Yeah.’ She held it up for me to see. ‘He likes
cows.’
London was a huge and shapeless
odorous maze and we cursed, laughed and stumbled our way towards Edgware Road
via the ubiquitous London underground, which seemed like something out of a
Victorian history book. Or do I mean a book on Victorian history? Anyway, I discovered, interestingly, that I
was in fact claustrophobic, and taunted myself with the thought of being trapped
in the dark, shiny tunnels, never being able to get up to the surface
again. My reflection looked so serious
in the dark, glossy windows of the carriage while I entertained these thoughts
that Carol found it necessary to practise her favourite grimaces until,
catching my eye, we both started laughing.
The other passengers were not
amused, as it turned out, although this only served to bring out more of our
loutish behaviour. We finally left them
in peace as we burst out of the sliding doors and exploded up the stone steps
on to the street, quite exhausted and gasping for air, believing ourselves to
be hilarious.
The tube station
was not far from the casino and when it came into sight I thought it looked
more like an enormous, ungainly office block.
It was on pillars, but not the classical kind, and it looked so, so
wrong. The windows were high up and
masked by long curtains which, presumably, hid the bright, luxurious
interior. I suppose I thought the
building would be grander, more ornate, dripping with wealth and
sophistication.
‘What a dump!’
said Carol.
She wasn’t
wrong.
Then, we saw all
the people. There were hundreds of
them. Girls and some boys too, just
standing there, in the longest queue I had ever seen. It went along the side of the building, round the corner and on
for at least a hundred yards. On closer inspection I noticed how the young
trendies were dressed. Never had I seen so many fashion mistakes in one
place. I pushed back my dyed blonde
hair and eased up my skin-tight jeans.
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