Free Year of Being Single by Fiona Collins Page B

loved going to London to work, despite the fact she hated her current job. Thank
God
it was Friday.
    She had become an actors’ agent at twenty-two, after being an assistant agent for three years and an intern for one. She had been one of eight agents in a big company. It was a busy, glamorous job – sending actors for castings, negotiating contracts, dealing with actor’s egos, schmoozing casting directors and producers at lunches and dinners. She loved it.
    Her glory days, she called those early years. She went to places like the Met Bar and the Titanic. She got drunk and went home to Putney in mini-cabs. She knew a lot of TV blondes and once snogged one of Supergrass’s roadies, in the VIP area of a festival. She drank red wine in fancy restaurants until her teeth were black, and she’d grin at herself in posh Philippe Starck-type toilets that had no locks on the door, and think she not only had it all, but she had it all before her. They were the good old days – apart from one small blip. Her days in the sun.
    She smiled as she remembered them, as she fed her ticket through the barrier and climbed the steps to Platform One. Her glory days had lasted for a long time. Even after she’d had to move back to Essex, she’d tried to keep them going. She was still out every night, watching plays and productions with up-and-coming actors in, attending networking dinners in trendy restaurants and, before the Man Ban, dating the most eligible and unsatisfactory men in the capital.
    The last train back to Chelmsford had been a good way of separating the wheat from the chaff. After ten past midnight bad decisions about men were all too easy to make. The only time she’d missed it and had to get a cab all the way home was after a fantastic night salsa dancing with an investment manager from Deloittes. Their revelry had ended drunkenly at 2a.m., the cab cost her £140 and there had been no return on her investment. Deloittes Man turned out to have a wife, five children and a house in Mayfair that he got a £15 taxi home to.
    The last train to Chelmsford had also stopped her from bringing any men back to the boxy new build she was slightly ashamed of. That’s what hotels were for.
    Imogen got on the train. She frowned, as the only remaining seat was next to a woman eating a very smelly ‘breakfast bagel’ that looked like it had a full B&B fry-up stuffed into it. She squeezed as close as she could to the window, got out her Kindle and wondered exactly how, last November, she had suddenly got fed up with it all. Being an agent. At the time her thought processes seemed quite clear: she was forty, she fancied a career break, a change. She’d been an agent for twenty-two years. She couldn’t climb any higher with it. She’d done it all. It was getting boring.
    She thought she’d see what was out there. Sniff around a bit. Maybe get a job in a different field, like television. Television production, maybe. She had a lot of skills. She could temp. She’d met someone who’d told her it was brilliant. You could get a foothold in the door of a new industry but at the same time enjoy a sense of freedom. You could walk out that door whenever you liked. And there was no pressure. Imogen was sold.
    She left her agency, Potters, in a triumphant cloud, with a loud and boozy champagne send-off, then, within days of joining a temp agency, got a job at Yes! Productions, covering someone’s maternity leave.
    She pushed open the door there now. The trendy reception area always met her with a pepper and ginger biscuit-infused room spray that made her sneeze. She’d suffered it all week and had just about had enough of it.
    ‘Morning, Imogen.’
    ‘Ach-oo! Sorry. Morning, Fred.’
    She always had to show her pass, everyone did, no matter how long they’d worked there. Fred once refused to let Marge the cleaner in, because she’d forgotten hers, and she’d worked there for ten years. It was an independent production company. They made