New Beginings

         As Jenny stood waiting by the side of the wide road she smiled in anticipation. She thought of the job she had just said goodbye to. Well, it was the job she had just ran from, charged from, escaped from maybe. Jenny didn’t smile when she remembered her old boss and the equally old supervisor, she shivered. Although she had never really had much of liking for women, over the twelve months she had clawed through at the corner shop it had sunk into distaste. As Jenny pondered the depths some women will sink to in hope of maintaining the delusions they had when they too were twenty eight, she watched another two learner driver cars stutter past.

                Garth had said she would get picked up at 10.15 it was now 10.45 and she was worried. Selling double glazing was perhaps not the ideal profession. The taxi driver had hinted as much, the child minders over enthusiasm confirmed it and her Dads blank ignorance of the Sunday phone call this week made her stomach feel as if she had swallowed a large ball of elastic bands. But, she reminded herself she did have a career aim, double-glazing it was not, but she couldn’t follow any aims working in that blasted shop. In fact you weren’t allowed anything in the blasted shop, not an aim, a hope or a dream, not an ounce of flair, style or individuality, heaven forbid it outshone the delusional witches.

      Teamwork required your soul to be chained to a pair of stepladders in the stockroom, and when you weren’t there by god you’d best be thinking how lucky you were not to be. It was 10.50 and Jenny was noticing a male learner driver that had stepped out of the car to have a fag. From the other side of the street she pretended to look into the distance for the next approaching car while straightening her back slightly just incase he was watching her, she knew she looked her best in a suit.

      Jenny’s phone made her jump and she quickly checked to see who had sent her a message, oddly she didn’t hope it was Garth explaining he’d be there any time shortly, and she had definitely not hoped it was that old bloke from the dating website. She had rather prayed, for a whole week now, that it was Craig who wanted her attention every time her phone made its daft ding-dong doorbell sound. Of course it wasn’t Craig, Craig wasn’t playing hard to get, Craig was playing some kind of friendship card and he drove Jenny crazy, still this was Jenny, it isn’t much of an achievement. Jenny felt like writing, “Thanks but I just wish you were someone else,” to the old bloke from the dating website, but instead she managed to send him a few sentences of rubbish that she hoped would stop him texting eventually.

        By 10.55 Jenny was gratefully in the child minders car heading home to find the office number. The child minder’s car smelled of sick but the child minder soon informed Jenny that it was a bottle of milk that had curdled under the car seat for a month. Reassured, Jenny tried to say yes in the correct pauses while inwardly wondering why anyone would offer someone a job and then not turn up. It just didn’t make sense and even if it did make sense she didn’t want it to make sense. She wanted to see if she could sell this stuff, in a credit crunch, in great loads, she wanted to succeed and piss off all the idiots at the corner shop and have a great bloody time while doing so.

      Jenny was stressed and the childminder was demonstrating her usual heart stopping driving skills that didn’t so much stop Jenny’s heart as the poor old folks that were trying to cross at zebra crossing. As the childminder finished her story about how she had cleaned the car four hundred times without finding the milk Jenny smiled wondering what the actual truth to the story actually was, perhaps the child minder had been doing foreigners for the mob. 

          Inside her house she found the office phone didn’t work and Garths mobile didn’t work either. The ball of elastic bands in her stomach melted away into a thick heavy lump that could perhaps of resembled whatever milk is like after being kept under a car seat for a month. The child minder was a star, it didn’t say in her contract she had to be at all star shaped and it must of killed her that she couldn’t charge by the minute for her extra sparkly services. There was an unspoken bond between her and those she fleeced for a fortune on a weekly basis that if she was needed she would walk to the ends of the earth to be the kind of person Jenny wished her mother was, that she liked to believe she was, but had no time or chance recently to show any hope of ever being again.

          They drove back to the child minders and Jenny told her confused children that the new job she had been telling them about wasn’t actually a new job at all. Jenny asked the child minder if she thought that there was much money in fortune telling since it was her only skill in life she considered in slightest bit special and obviously the child minder thought that was a marvelous idea, conscientiously ensuring she spent three minutes in an over enthusiastic bubble over the idea.
     
        Jenny imagined her receiving her Oscar. Just as Jenny was turning round to walk towards her new life of moons, stars and usually very difficult moments when you have to tell some poor woman her husbands a right rotten sod, Garth seemed to be looking at her through a car window on the front of the drive. Elated Jenny happily forgot the pitiful world of a struggling psychic and skipped off to hear about the drunken antics of an ageing salesman let loose the day before at the races, how he won and lost hundred and fifty pounds, spent aimlessly on hydrating ladies in very posh hats.