Unlike a Virgin (2 page)

The reason I shower quickly is because I like to have time
to talk to myself in the morning. I don’t know what I’d do without my morning pep talks. I got them from my dad. My mum likes to start the day with fifteen minutes of yoga, and when I was little I would get in her way and interrupt her karma, so Dad used to lock me in the bathroom with him and entertain me. He would set me down carefully on the toilet lid and I’d look up at him and listen as he shaved and talked to himself.

‘Good morning, Camille, looking very fine, may I say,’ he would start, smiling at his reflection. I would giggle. ‘Now then, you handsome devil, what have we got in store today? Oh, the Clydesdale Cup. And are we going to win it? Oh, we are. Good, good. We’re going to keep the control in the cha cha cha, aren’t we? Not like the last time when we nearly catapulted Rosemary into the judge’s lap. Although he would probably have enjoyed that, wouldn’t he, the filthy toad?’ Then he’d wiggle a few cha cha cha steps. ‘Camille, don’t dance and shave, I have warned you. It can get bloody. So, winning the Clydesdale Cup, what else? Oh I know! I’m going to sing a song with my beautiful birthday daughter, Gracie. What shall we sing?’

Now, as the bulk of these mornings happened when I was between the ages of three and eight, one might expect us to be singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ or ‘Old MacDonald Had A Farm’ together. But no, by the age of four I knew all the words to ‘Wichita Lineman’ by Glen Campbell. At five my favourite song was ‘No Woman No Cry’ by Bob Marley. My sixth year was quite prolific because we covered a lot of Bob Dylan and the Beatles; and I was singing most of the major Motown hits by the time I was eight.

‘Up tight. Everything’s all right!’ I shouted. It was the morning of my eighth birthday and I was in a massive Stevie Wonder phase.

‘Gracie,’ my dad said, clocking my enthusiasm with a smile, ‘the time has come. Today is a very important day because I’m going to introduce you to someone very special. Someone very special indeed. A woman with a huge talent. A beautiful, deep, rich voice like you, Amazing Grace.’ He called me that a lot. ‘A woman with the courage of her convictions. A woman who worked tirelessly for the rights of black people. A Goddess. Gracie Flowers, may I introduce you to … the one, the only … Nina Simone.’ And he walked over to the cassette recorder on the bathroom windowsill and pressed play. That was the first time I heard the song ‘Feeling Good’. ‘It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day. It’s a new life for me and I’m feeling good.’

I was eight and watching my dad who loved me mouth the words to this wonderful song. He mimed being a fish and a butterfly and I laughed in delight – quietly though, as I didn’t want to miss a word – and I remember feeling good.

That Nina Simone day was exactly eighteen years ago. And I’m feeling pretty good this morning, too, despite the semen situation.

‘Happy birthday, Gracie Flowers, how you doing?’ I say to my reflection. ‘Whoa, not pretty. That’ll be last night’s tequilas. Concealer, where are you?’ I say, delving into the cosmetic detritus by the sink. I do completely love my flat, however, its standard of cleanliness may not always attest to this fact. It’s generally a complete tip on Saturday because, if I tidy at all, it will only ever be a rushed, haphazard attempt on a Sunday.

‘So, Gracie Flowers, let’s get down to business,’ I say after
I’ve smudged away my tequila shadows. ‘You’ve got a lot to get through today. You could get giddy after the announcement, and there may be champagne, so practise what you want to say.’

I stand back from the sink slightly and take a deep breath. I imagine Ken Bradbury saying, ‘It is with great pleasure that I give the job to Gracie Flowers.’ Then I start to perform.

‘Oh my goodness,’ I gasp, putting my hands over my mouth in mock surprise.

I have to giggle. I’m so rubbish at acting.

‘Oh. My. God,’ I try in a higher register. It’s better, but not much.

‘Argh! No way!’ I screech, which is dreadful.

I have a problem. It’s fairly obvious to everyone that I’m going to get the job of Head of London Sales. I’ve been the company’s top negotiator ever since I became a negotiator, and Ken Bradbury himself pretty much told me the job was mine. ‘My decision works very well in your favour, Gracie,’ he said and then he winked. It couldn’t have been clearer. So this is all really just a formality because Ken likes to have a big Saturday-morning announcement whenever there’s a new appointment at Make A Move. He thinks it encourages a healthy rivalry amongst the team. I’ve been to loads of them and it’s very important to act surprised. I saw one bloke simply nod and go up and shake Ken’s hand. No gasp, no tears, no witty but not vulgar expletive. We had one word for him: smug.

At Make A Move there is only myself and my good friend Friendly Wendy in the entire company who are of the fair and delicate sex. The rest of the employees belong to the sex that
read the
Daily Star
and like to throw office equipment at each other’s heads. ‘Men’ is the technical term for them, although Friendly Wendy and I prefer to lump them under the more appropriate term, ‘dickheads’.

The bloke who nodded when he got his promotion eventually became known as Smeg. It started out with the odd quip: ‘Is this ssssmug yours?’ And, ‘Would you like a ssssmug of tea?’ But substituting the word mug with smug offered limited comic value, so in the end he became known simply as Smug which in turn became Smeg – and Smeg stuck. Ken Bradbury’s nickname originated in a similarly organic manner. At first he was known by his initials KB, then these got changed to KY, and now he’s simply known as Lube.

I mustn’t look smug when they announce me. Smeg’s left now and it’s his job I’ll be taking over. I really don’t want to be called Smeg 2. Or Lady Smeg. Or Little Lube. If I’m given a nickname at all I want it to be Lady Boss.

I clear my throat and try again. This time I opt for soft and gracious.

‘Oh my goodness, Ken, thank you,’ I say, in a way I hope will sound quietly overawed. ‘I won’t let you down, I promise. I love Make A Move. I started here over five years ago, answering the phones on Saturday mornings. And here I am now being given this amazing opportunity. What an honour! I owe so much to you, Ken, for your support and guidance. I’m going to ensure that Make A Move is the only estate agent in London that people want to use.’ Ken will love that bit. ‘And I’m going to whip your arses, boys,’ I add, with a scowl at all the blokes.

When I finish my little speech, my heart is pounding. I stop and look at my reflection in the mirror. I look like the same Gracie Flowers: a five-foot short arse with long blonde hair that never stays in its ponytail. I’m still chubbier than I want to be, but I feel amazing.

I’ve worked so hard for this day, and now it’s here. I did it. I walk, as though on air, over to my five year plan, which is laminated and framed on my bathroom wall. I kiss it and walk to the windowsill, pausing for a moment to wince at my cactus. I’m sure someone once told me that cactuses were unkillable. They got that wrong. I press play on the CD player and listen to ‘Feeling Good’ by Nina Simone.

I didn’t always want to be an estate agent. Like most little girls I wanted to be a singer. But then, like most little girls, I grew up.

I remember the moment when I was first drawn to the job, though. I was twenty and I was at home with Mum when the doorbell rang.

‘Grace, I haven’t got my face on, will you go!’ my mum shouted from upstairs. Those were her words exactly, I know because I recall thinking how even when she had her face on she made an excuse not to answer the door. My mother hated answering the front door. She wasn’t lazy, but she’d started to hate seeing people – or people seeing her, I wasn’t sure which.

I opened the door and a tall young man in a suit stood on the doorstep before me. I don’t remember the details of his face, but I know that it was handsome and that I regretted answering the door in my leggings and Dad’s old Ramones T-shirt. I was going out with Danny at the time, but I was still
twenty with plenty of hormones, and the man before me had put those hormones in a Magimix and whacked it up to full speed.

‘Hello. So sorry to trouble you.’ He sounded posh, like Conservative party posh. ‘I couldn’t help knocking on the door. It’s just that this house is so beautiful.’

I smiled at the strange, handsome, posh man. I agreed with him. My childhood home was beautiful, although people didn’t usually knock on the door to tell us.

We were just off the busy Chamberlayne Road, but our house felt like a sleepy idyll away from the mayhem. That’s because it doesn’t sit next to the other houses on the road, it’s perched behind them, hidden by trees. There’s a tiny driveway, which most people miss, which leads you to our house. It doesn’t look like the other houses nearby, either, which are all three-storey red-brick Victorian monsters. Our house is made of grey stone, similar to the stone you find in Bath, and it’s square with two floors and a porch with a little Gothic turret.

The posh man stood in the porch and looked up at the carved stone arches above him.

‘Beautiful,’ he said again.

I pointed at the floor beneath his feet.

‘What’s this?’ He said, stepping aside.

‘It’s a gravestone,’ I told him. ‘The man who built the house buried his wife there so that every time he walked into the house she would be with him.’

‘A love story,’ the man murmured as he stared at the stone.

‘Hmm. Although, according to the Christians her soul would have burned in hell because she’s not buried in consecrated ground.’

He looked up suddenly. ‘Is the house haunted?’

I paused for a moment, unsure of what to say. If you asked my mother she would say the house is undoubtedly haunted, but in my honest opinion I’ve never noticed any otherworldly activity. And believe me, I was definitely on the lookout for it.

‘Not really,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Is there a garden?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Is it gorgeous?’

‘Yeah, there’s a fig tree and a pear tree and a silver birch, and the birds really love it. It gets sun in the afternoon and evening, so you can sit out all day. We’ve got a swing seat under …’ I stopped myself. I was sounding like a plonker talking about trees.

‘Gosh. Sounds lovely. Listen, I’m an estate agent. Don’t get out the garlic,’ he said, which I thought must be some strange posh-person expression. ‘If you ever wanted to sell this house—’

I stopped him then.

‘We’ll never sell it. Sorry. It belonged to my dad’s parents and they gave it to him. It’s always going to be in the family.’

‘Oh, right, good,’ he said, and he turned and walked away.

It was that strange posh man’s visit that put the idea in my head. I wasn’t doing much with my life at the time – you might say I hadn’t started living at all – but all that was about to change, because shortly afterwards I walked into all the estate agents on the Chamberlayne Road to see if they had any vacancies. Everyone I spoke to was completely unimpressed by my lack of qualifications, except for Lube, who said, ‘I need an office dogsbody on a Saturday. Key duties are answering
phones, making the tea and getting bacon sandwiches. I’ll give you a month’s trial.’

I was still on trial and living at home when I wrote my five year plan. As you might expect, people have taken the mickey out of my plan over the years. They say I’m obsessive, but I prefer ‘driven’.

I wrote my plan on my twenty-first birthday, exactly five years ago to the day, in fact. It was a glorious day and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, not even a wispy one. I sat on the swing seat in the corner of our beloved garden with my favourite book,
The Five Year Plan: Making the Most of Your Life,
and a notebook. I listened to the silver birch sway and rustle and I thought and wrote carefully for two and a half hours. Oh, and I hummed and sang ‘Mr Bojangles’. I only remember that because at one point I got carried away and my mum shouted out of the window for me to ‘Please stop singing that damn song’.

The words I wrote that day are now on the bathroom wall of my maisonette. This is what they say:

Gracie Flowers – My Five Year Plan

Thinking big, aiming high

One year from today I will have:

A full-time job at Make A Move doing anything


Saved £2,500

Two years from today I will have:

Been promoted to sales negotiator


Saved £5,000

Three years from today I will have:

Become the best-performing sales negotiator in the branch


Saved £10,000

Four years from today I will have:

Become the best-performing sales negotiator out of
all
the Make A Move branches


Have bought my own place (even if it is a shoebox without a lid)

Five years from today I will have:

Been promoted to Head of London Sales


Be living in my own place