Joanna Kavenna - Inglorious

Wanted, she read. European Sales and Marketing manager. London-based Design and Product Distribution company seeks an experienced Sales and Marketing manager for Europe.

Can you focus on the detail while keeping sight of the big picture? No, thought Rosa. No, she wasn’t sure she could.

Leading London-based media measurement agency seeks go-getting grads with excellent writing and analytical skills.

She shook her head. Communications Coordinator, she read. Excellent opportunity! Depending on how you look at it. Marketing office administrator. This could be the job for you! Do you want to be part of the fastest growing Communications agency in the UK?

No, thought Rosa. No, she didn’t. Wanted, a secretary for a busy London company. She or he will be stylish and efficient, ready for the thrust and parry of office life, and great at dealing with people. Starting salary of — but Rosa had flicked over the page. Do you long for opportunities to travel? If so, this job is for you! Personal assistant to head of company, always on the move, needs efficient person to manage his meetings and schedules. Degree preferred. Apply to …

Do you long for the peace that passes understanding. Apply to … — but she couldn’t find an advert that said that. Instead, she began scribbling words. Wanted Customer Manager for bright bubbly company in Vauxhall. Wanted Director of communications for a small dynamic company in Angel. Wanted spawn of Satan for a saucy company in Stockwell. Wanted brethren of Beelzebub for a blazing bubbling cauldron in Bow.

Her lists were creative acts in themselves. Initially she had written with the bold idea that she would actually achieve the things set out on them, but after a few days she realised that wasn’t going to happen. They represented what was required of her, with a few extras thrown in that were plain unlikely. But she couldn’t get through the entries, unlikely or otherwise. It was pure catharsis, writing them out.

Now you are home, it’s definitely time to:

Get a job.

Wash your clothes

Clean the kitchen.

Phone Liam and ask about the furniture.

Phone Kersti

Find a place to stay

Buy some tuna and spaghetti

Go to the bank and beg them for an extension — more money, more time to pay back the rest of your debt.

Read the comedies of Shakespeare, the works of Proust, the plays of Racine and Corneille and The Man Without Qualities.

Read The Golden Bough, The Nag-Hammadi Gospels, The Upanishads, The Koran, The Bible, The Tao, the complete works of E. A. Wallis Budge

Read Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the rest

Hoover the living room

Clean the toilet

Unearth the TEMP

She drank her tea. She took a slice of bread and put it in the toaster. ‘But come now,’ she said to herself, standing with the lemon walls around her staring at the kettle and thinking she might pilfer some more tea. Really, she was reminding herself, things weren’t that bad! If she could just get the furniture sold then she would feel much better. If Liam would only sell it, she would have money for a month or two. But he was clinging onto it, the hankering hand-me-down swine. Why he wanted to guard the shiny black sofa and the stained dining table, she didn’t know. A month or two seemed like a long time, the way things were. It would tide her over. Though to what? And where would it wash her up? She wasn’t taking any chances. At 4 p.m., she would go and see Mrs Brazier about the job. A few weeks ago, she had written a little advert and walked around putting it up in shops. Intelligent — in theory — and qualified. Can teach English and History to children up to the age of twelve. Also the piano up to grade five. Flexible hours. Good references on request. No one had answered for weeks, and the advert started to droop and fade and generally look like a symbol of her inner blah, until Mrs Brazier rang her the other day.

She set down her pen. She folded up the list and put it in her pocket. Then she turned to the room. Jess’s flat was at the junction of several fields of noise; always you heard cars skimming past the front and trains hammering along at the back. Jess lived in denial of hostile elements. She didn’t care that a gas tower squatted at the windows and a nearby billboard said Abandon Hope. She had furnished the place with care. First she had bought up a stock of self-assembly furniture. She had fitted in a long beige sofa and some shelves. The chairs were fold-away, because the living room was so small. Jess had built-in cupboards like stowage on a boat, with novelty portholes. On the wall she had put up framed posters from exhibitions she had seen at the Tate. She had painted everything pale pink. The furniture — such as it was — had been angled carefully round the TV. The kitchen Jess had painted yellow. Everything in the kitchen was yellow: the crockery, the kettle, the washing-up bowl, the cupboards and even the fridge stood behind a yellow door. It was moving, how colour-coordinated Jess had made her flat. A Roman blind obscured the graffitiladen tracks behind, the names of taggers and the word TEMP . Rosa, who slept in a room at the back, woke with the early trains. She liked that, though now it was nearly winter it meant she opened her eyes before the sun rose, and lay in the darkness wondering what time it was and if she should sleep some more. No need to complain now, she thought, when you are leaving anyway. So, the cheap accommodation hasn’t suited you! Well, now you can find some more!

*

TEMP , she thought. Temper. Temperature. The tempo of the times. Time’s grasping temper. The temperature of the city. Was that what it meant? She couldn’t be sure. Temptation. The temptation to do nothing. It was heavy upon her. A few months ago she had still been industrious. She went out seeking advice from anointed experts. She had been to see Dr Kamen in September because she was concerned her mood had dipped. She wasn’t ill, she explained. She just needed something to steady her, calm her nerves. I have undertaken a labour. If she was honest, she was sometimes disturbed by the intensity of her thoughts, the way they held her. She couldn’t control her obsessions. Months after leaving her job, she was still undisciplined, still quite out of sorts. I feel myself driven towards an end that I do not know. I have been panicked. I am seized by the play of opposites, she had suggested to Dr Kamen, as they sat in the small room where he worked, a room like a throat lozenge — purple walls, tapered sides. ‘You know, the usual ones, being and not being, life and death, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, the rest.’ It was nothing serious, she said, smiling in embarrassment. ‘It just stops me using my time properly. Getting on with things. Work, that sort of thing. I just walk around and read and run my overdraft closer to the limit. I make long lists of things I have to do. It’s hardly the way to use a life. Time is so short, and there I am drifting quietly, lagging out the days.’ Perhaps it wasn’t her thoughts that were the main problem. A few thoughts never harmed anyone, she added. The thing was she would try to get back to earning money and there she would be, dropped back, inert, prone, quite incapable of action. To earn was not to think, she explained. Work — the sort of work she was fitted for — and thought were, though ideally allied, not necessarily — when thought was excessive — best friends, not strictly speaking teeming with mutual amity. ‘Do you understand?’ she said to Dr Kamen. Dr Kamen said, ‘Not quite yet, but we’ll soon get to the bottom of it.’ Dr Kamen was a good doctor; Rosa had always liked him. He took her temperature, peered in her ears, made her stick out her tongue. He asked her if she had any aches or pains. He did some blood tests and said he would send them away to a lab. Then he wrote something in his notes.