Free Love Me by Gemma Weekes Page A

it in for her, don’t you?’
    â€˜I don’t!’
    â€˜Yes you do!’
    He makes a fed-up noise and goes back to his food. ‘Just get a job, Eden,’ he says. ‘Then maybe you can think about travelling the world.’

stick it.
    â€˜ WHAT KIND OF work would you like to get involved in?’ says a chirpy little woman in a pink shirt. Her name badge reads ‘Margaret’. She’s obviously not been here for long enough to fully absorb the profound sense of futility that’s sunk into the bones of her colleagues. ‘Something else in market research, perhaps?’
    â€˜Not sure.’
I’d rather shave my head and stick it in a hot chip fryer.
    â€˜. . . Office admin . . .?’
    â€˜Um . . .’
Are there any lottery winner positions left open? International superstar? Heiress?
    â€˜. . . and there are quite a few retail positions available if that interests you.’
Spy? Assassin? Prime minister? Astronaut?
‘What do you think?’
    â€˜I dunno.’
    â€˜What skills do you have?’
    â€˜Not many.’
I can hold my breath for thirty seconds. I can levitate. I build bombs. I can burp the Old Testament in Latin.
    â€˜You must have some! It looks like you’ve done a few different kinds of jobs.’
    â€˜I know how to use computers.’
    â€˜Great! What programs?’
    â€˜Mahjong Tiles,’ I say. She gives me a confused smile. ‘Quite good at that,’ I add.
    â€˜Mahjong Tiles?’ she repeats slowly, drawing out the words in the hope they’ll make more sense that way. I look around at all the other unemployed people sitting in chairs, listingthe reasons they may be of practical use. To someone. Anyone. Everybody looks bored, including the ones asking the questions. All of them look like they’ve been asked to play a game in which the winner’s already been picked out and it’s none of them.
    â€˜Yeah, and Pacman.’
    â€˜I’m not really sure I understand . . .’
    â€˜Minesweeper. Inkball. Solitaire occasionally.’
    â€˜Solitaire?’ Margaret pushes the fringe out of her face and then, ‘Ohhh!’ she laughs. ‘Funny!’
    I don’t laugh. ‘How much am I gonna get a week?’ I ask.

hang up.
    THERE’S A WOMAN who guards my dresser from inside her £1.99 clip frame. She’s a photo I took once, a few years ago. I call her ‘The Woman Who Got Away’. Right now she’s hanging out between a calendar and a couple of flyers that I’ve failed to get rid of from a show Zed did. A lot of the time I don’t even notice The Woman, but when I do she speaks to me.
    You notice her eyes first, a pale, vacant blue. She’s looking up into the air as if the 253 bus – this was taken at the bus stop – may descend from above like a bolt of lightning. But she waits without excitement or dread. She just waits. Soon after the transparent blue eyes, you’ll notice the precise, bobbed haircut. You’ll notice the fitted denim jacket, buttoned to the neck, her slim jeans and bright flip-flops. You may even notice her painted toenails. Then you’ll wonder what’s wrong with the photo; why does it have that crazy finish?
    But it’s not a trick of the light. It will become clear that the woman is, in fact, blasted with dirt from her flip-flops to the precisely cut bob; so dirty that it’s very hard to determine the actual shade of anything but the wet blue of those eyes. She’s dressed for summer, but if you look into the background of the shot, you’ll see several people bundled up in puffa jackets wielding umbrellas against the drizzle. She doesn’t belong there, dressed as she is for the summer on a cold, miserable winter day.
    I’ve invented dozens of histories, but the one that sticksis that she was a perfectly normal girl, doing all those things you do to be normal. And then one day she thought