Lisa Owens - Not Working

“Whoa,” says my cousin Faye. “ What ? Gum used to show you his…?”

“Oh — no, no. ‘Show’ makes it sound…It wasn’t…I don’t think it was really on purpose or anything,” I say. Everyone is looking at me. No one is talking. “Honestly, it definitely wasn’t a big deal. At all. I always thought it was — Did no one else have this? How it used to just kind of slip out?”

Faye is shaking her head. Her ears, poking through her thin blond hair, have turned red. I glance around at all the other cousins’ faces; most are gazing into their coffee. I dump a packet of sugar into mine and stir it with the knife I saved from dessert.

At night driving on the motorway, my lights won’t turn on, but each passing car has theirs on full beam, dazzling between fretful stretches of darkness.

“The buddleia (or buddleja bush),” according to one website, “can either be a beautiful flowering garden bush attractive to butterflies or a vile, destructive, invasive weed.”

I take the bus to the gym I can’t really afford anymore. I choose a seat by the window and try to make progress with my book. (I have been reading Ulysses for nearly nine months.) When I’ve read the same paragraph five or six times, I look up, desperate for some relief from the words. An old guy in a powder-blue jacket with long, sparse hair is coming slowly down the aisle. He looks around for a seat, but they’re all taken and no one gets up, so like a stoic he sets his mouth and grips the handrail next to him. I think about offering mine, but I’d have to ask the woman next to me to move. She looks important, smartly dressed as if she’s going to a meeting. She’s reading through some notes and I don’t want to disturb her, or make her feel bad that she didn’t offer up her seat. I go back to Ulysses and, burning with the effort of pretending I haven’t noticed the old guy, I finally make it onto the next page. When the woman next to me gets off, the old man stays where he is. I watch him sway and shuffle with the movement of the bus, dancing in his orthopedic shoes.

At the gym, I try to get out of my membership contract.

“You’ll need to wait until the thirtieth of the month to hand in your notice, and then your contract will end two months after that,” the woman whose name badge says FRANKIE tells me. It’s Halloween and she is dressed as a witch, with a hat, a cape and her nails painted black. Underneath the cape, she’s in a shiny black unitard.

“But the thirtieth is a full month away,” I say. “Can’t we just pretend it’s yesterday?”

“If only!” she says, rustling a tin of retro sweets at me sympathetically. I take a pack of butterscotches and crunch them two at a time.

She looks at her records. “I see you still haven’t had your Full-body Analysis. Shall we do that now, as you’re here?” I had been putting it off until I got fitter because I wanted to get a better score than Luke, but it’s been two years and if I’m leaving, I might as well get it done. She comes around the reception desk and ushers me to a table, taking her plastic broom with her.

In response to the questionnaire, I tell Frankie that I don’t drink any alcohol or coffee, and that I sleep for nine hours every night. My blood pressure is good and so are my resting levels, but when she tests my aerobic fitness on the treadmill, I’m so eager to impress that I nearly slide off, and my vision goes dark while I gasp for breath.

“How often did you say you come here?” Frankie asks, looking at her clipboard. “Have you thought about a personal trainer?” By the time I leave, I’ve signed up to three one-on-one sessions with a personal trainer named Gavin, at a specially reduced introductory rate of £99.99.

I’m not sure if my mother has been storing up material for our conversations, or if it’s part of the process of grieving for her father, but these days when she phones, she seems to have an awful lot of awful news to relate.

“Pippa from church, in the choir — you know her. The husband, an atheist — you wouldn’t have met him. Slipped and fell in the shower: it’s touch-and-go whether he’ll walk again. I’ve sent Dad out to buy one of those rubber mats. You can’t be too careful.”

And: “Gordon two doors up from us, well, his son-in-law, the policeman — I told you, remember? Depressed. Several attempts, over the years, but they thought he was over all that. Anyway,” she says with a sigh, “it would seem this time he did succeed.”

I go to a cafe to get out of the house and bring my laptop so I can do some career research. There is a table of about eight women, all with babies, and a couple of them are breastfeeding. They’re talking about how hands-on their husbands are, and while their one-upmanship makes me slightly suspicious, I can’t deny that the women look great. Their skin is fantastic, and the babies are all so sweet — tiny, quiet and content.

I’m surfing websites for jobs, but don’t know what I’m looking for and all my searches keep returning sales or executive positions way above my earning bracket. A woman comes in who looks about my age, balancing a toddler on her hip, a little girl. The two of them are in matching Breton-striped tops and jeans, and when she orders a coffee, she actually has a French accent. She sits at the table next to me and the child is off: behind the counter, under the table, climbing up the stairs marked NO ENTRY. She is delightful; the baristas don’t mind at all.

I click on a description for a heritage job, which involves writing the blue plaques on buildings where notable figures used to live. I could definitely do that, I think, sum someone up in a couple of words. I consider how I would blue-plaque people I know: Luke = “eminent physician”; Paul = “pioneering artist”; Sarah = “educational innovator.” I have a harder time with the ones who work in PR and management consultancy, and decide that’s because they probably wouldn’t deserve a blue plaque anyway.

The toddler is at my table, holding out her arms and waving both hands from the wrists, beaming. I do the same and she laughs, runs away, buries her face in her mother’s lap saying, “Maman, Maman!” and the mother, who might in fact be younger than me, bends over to murmur a stream of French into her daughter’s bright bobbed hair.

—

“Maybe I should have a baby.” I’m loading the dishwasher after dinner, and Luke laughs.

“With who?”

“Right, I meant we should. But I’ll be the one having it, won’t I? I could be a stay-at-home mum.”

“I thought you were finding your purpose,” says Luke. “I thought that’s what this was all about.” He makes an expansive gesture at “this,” as though the kitchen is somehow part of my plan, as though “this” is where I spend all my time now.

“Maybe my purpose is to be a mother?”

Luke nods, wide-eyed, pushing out his bottom lip, thoughtful but ultimately unconvinced. He beckons me over and I sit on his knee, loop my arms around his neck, rest my chin on his shoulder.

“I think I’m going to take French classes,” I say. “Build on what I learned at school. It’s a shame to let all that knowledge go to waste.”

“Mais oui,” says Luke, shrugging my face around to his. He French-kisses me, which means we’ll end up having sex.

Six p.m. on Thursday, and while I may not have applied for any jobs, I have made myself eligible to win a Mini Cooper, two nights in Paris and seven in Miami, £500 of vouchers for a Scandinavian clothing brand, an enormous TV (which I plan to sell), an espresso machine (which I’ll definitely keep), tickets to three exhibitions, a case of Prosecco, a juicer, a designer handbag, a designer coat, a meal for two at a corporate-looking restaurant in the city including a cocktail on arrival but no wine, membership to an independent cinema franchise and a VIP package for two at a female-only spa, so no one could argue it’s been a completely wasted day.