Free Finger Food by Helen Lederer

Chapter 1
    Bella knew the signs of stress. The tight feeling across her chest, her pulse racing so fast she could feel it in her neck. And this morning there was something new. A tic by her eye.
    On the other end of the phone, Sharon at Flair 4 Living TV seemed to take too much pleasure in saying, ‘I’m afraid Yvonne’s in a meeting at the moment, Bella. But I’ll just go and check.’
    Then came the added insult of having to listen to a mix of James Bond themes for five long minutes before the receptionist returned. This time her voice was full of fake regret.
    â€˜Shame! You’ve just missed her, Bella! Try again tomorrow perhaps?’
    â€˜I certainly will, Sharon.’ Bella forced a smile into her voice but had to keep the phone under her ear. She had no spare hands to end the call – what with holding her umbrella, the phone, her newspaper and her small handbag. She thought she could hear Sharon chuckling as she fumbled to disconnect. Cow.
    Bella shook the rain off her umbrella. She had been phoning her old boss Yvonne daily for the last six months. If she couldn’t get her old job back she might at least be annoying.
    Bella preferred to tell people she had been ‘let go’ rather than sacked from her job as researcher at Flair 4 Living daytime TV channel because it sounded better. She had spent years working at the channel, chopping vegetables, wiping surfaces and coming up with some great ideas. One had been called ‘When Vicars Attack!’ which was turned down, as was the one called ‘How Clean is your Nostril Hair?’ as well as ‘Ready Steady Cheese’. In fact they’d all been rejected almost immediately. But Bella was not put off. At the back of her mind was the dream that one day she would be invited to present her own show. She just needed to come up with the right idea. One that was more food-focussed.
    Unfortunately, Flair 4 Living’s controller Yvonne did not agree. On the day of her sacking Bella had presented her brilliant proposal of a new pilot idea. ‘Finger Food’ was to be a low-brow digital-TV food and chat programme. After an hour of pitching the idea, Bella had gone home with the quiet confidence that this show would be taken up. And she would be cast as the presenter she had always dreamed of being.
    Instead, Yvonne had personally dropped a letter through her letter box only hours later, saying that ‘due to various changes at the channel’ Bella would have to be ‘sacrificed’. While they ‘valued her ability to develop ideas and respected her talent as a “stand-in presenter”, with a particular skill for table displays, they’d have to let her go’. Yvonne added she was ‘so sorry to say goodbye to Bella, especially as they “went back”’. (They’d been at Guides together a long time ago.) Bella knew that of course Yvonne wasn’t sorry at all. In fact she sounded pleased to have finally got rid of her.
    Ever since then Bella had been trying to make sense of her life as an unemployed person and had even bought a self-help book called Making Sense of Being Sacked . This gave instructions on how to get out of bed in the morning to avoid ‘moping’ (jumping was one idea), how to talk to at least one person a day (this could include a policeman) and how to have a vision of something nice in one’s mind (pretending to be on a date with George Clooney was offered as a helpful example). So Bella had created a new routine. She would leave the house at 8.30 a.m., walk to the newsagent to buy a newspaper and then walk to the local cake shop. The cake-shop visit she did every day except Sundays because that was the owner’s late start. She didn’t buy women’s magazines to read because the recipes made her upset and irritable. They weren’t up to her high standards. Bella loved food. She loved arranging it, talking about it, eating it