Unlike a Virgin (3 page)

And today, on the very last day of the five years, I have achieved this. ‘And I’m feeling good,’ I sing along with Nina. Then I hear my phone ringing and suddenly I don’t feel quite so good. It’s my mum. I know this because the ring tone I have chosen for her is ‘Flight of The Valkyries’. The de de der ders perfectly prefix whatever ominous announcement she’s about to impart.

‘Morning,’ I say into my mobile.

‘Grace. Oh good God, Grace, turn that off, please.’

I pause the stereo. My mum used to love Nina. My mother loved Nina right up until the point that I started to love Nina, then she drastically went off her. She maintains that my Nina Simone period was one of her most challenging as a mother. I knew my mother was vexed when she was called away from rehearsing the cha cha cha to meet my primary school teacher. The school was worried about me.

‘So, Grace, what do you want to be when you grow up?’ my teacher had asked me, just as she had asked all the other boys and girls.

‘A big black lady,’ I immediately replied. My teacher didn’t know how to respond, so she told the headmistress, who called my mother. Seems entirely unnecessary, if you ask me, she could have just broken the news to me herself.

My Nina Simone period came straight after the Stevie Wonder and Motown phase, so it’s no surprise, when you think about it, that at eight years of age I wanted to be black. I would cling to black ladies when we went shopping and ask them to sing to me. I even wrote to
Jim’ll Fix It
asking him to make me black, though I never heard back. I’ve stopped all that now, but Mum still has a thing against Nina.

‘Grace, happy birthday.’

‘Thanks, Mum.’

‘Now, your father doesn’t want you to wear purple today, Grace. He has a very bad feeling about you wearing purple.’

‘Oh, God,’ I sigh. Purple is my favourite colour. Half my wardrobe is purple and my purple flowered baby doll dress is the only thing that’s clean at the moment. I think about ignoring the request, but I’ll be seeing my dad later so I can’t.

‘OK, fair enough,’ I relent. ‘He’s starting to get a thing about purple, though, Mum, and it’s weird.’

‘Don’t blame me.’

‘No, right, well I’d better go. I’ve got the announcement at nine thirty.’

‘Well. Let me know how it goes.’

‘Will do. Love you, Mum.’

‘Yes, yes. Bye.’

‘A mother’s love.’ I sigh after I’ve ended the call. That reminds me. I cannot forget the morning-after pill today, I think, as I leave the bathroom to find something not purple to wear.

‘Isn’t that what you wore to my hookers and pimps party?’ Friendly Wendy asks as soon as she sees me. I can tell she’s surprised because bits of the bacon sandwich she’s eating have just easyjetted out of her mouth and landed on my exposed cleavage.

‘Oh, give us a bit of that,’ I pant, looking at her sandwich. She hands it over and I bite into it. Delicious. I love bacon sarnies. I’ll never be thin.

‘So is this the sexy Lady Boss look?’

‘Hardly. I was wearing my little flowery purple dress, but my dad had a bad feeling about purple.’

‘Again?’

‘Yep.’

‘But your dad used to love purple.’

‘Aren’t they the clothes you were wearing last night?’ I ask, clocking Wendy’s walk of shame. I’m sure she was wearing that outfit in the pub last night. Wendy makes a bad attempt at looking coy, but I’m having none of it.

‘Yeah, you’ve still got nacho goo down the top. That’ll be a nightmare to get off,’ I mutter, scratching at the crusty stain.

‘Oh, er, Grace, I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’

‘Urgh! Wend!’ I say, jumping back immediately. ‘So who was he then?’

‘Freddie’s friend Martin.’

‘As in Freddie, the man you fancy above all others? You slept with his mate?’

‘Do you think I won’t be in with a chance with Freddie now?’

‘I can’t say for sure, but I think it would be a wise move to stop sleeping with his friends.’

‘Hmm, but I feel it’s getting me closer to him.’

Wendy finds it very difficult not to shag people, hence the nickname, Friendly Wendy.

‘I feel a bit sick,’ I tell her, looking around our office, which is currently crammed with all the men from Make A Move’s five branches – the men I’ll shortly be whipping into shape in my role as Lady Boss.

In truth, I quite like this sick, nervous feeling, when you have to hold your breath and clench your bottom because your whole body is gurgling in anticipation. Does that make me weird? Probably.

I used to experience it much more frequently than I do now. When I was young I sang in competitions. Not because I had pushy parents – far from it – the singing competitions were all my idea. Well, my idea via a girl called Ruth Roberts, who I went to primary school with. Now she
did
have
pushy parents. Her parents were so pushy she’d done a demo of ‘Walking On Air’ and sent it to record labels by the time she was nine.

Ruth Roberts was my sometime best friend from the age of five to eight. I say ‘sometime’ because she was the sort of girl who would be arm in arm with you and calling you her best friend one day, then the next she’d ignore you and tell your classmates you had nits. Ruth Roberts sang in competitions and I liked singing, so I begged Mum and Dad to let me have a go, too. I did my first one at the age of eight and I loved it. Dad drove me to Milton Keynes and we sang along to Nina Simone in the car and had toasted teacakes dripping with butter in a Little Chef en route. I can’t tell you how exciting it was – my mother doesn’t allow butter or yeast-based products in the house.

I sang ‘Castle On A Cloud’ on stage in front of four judges, numerous parents and hyperactive siblings – and I won. I didn’t expect to win. It was only when Ruth Roberts eyeballed me on the way to pick up her second-place rosette that I started to feel this gurgly sensation in my tummy for the first time. I beat thirty-two other girls, four of whom also sang ‘Castle On A Cloud’. We had a celebratory Burger King on the way home. Dad and I swore not to tell my mother and discussed what song I’d sing next time. It was one of my best days. Not
the
best day, but it’s absolutely up there. The only problem with the day was beating Ruth Roberts as she never spoke to me again.

‘There’s Lube.’ Wendy nudges me and I hide the bacon sandwich in my desk drawer and stand up straight. ‘Oh my goodness, KEN. Oh my goodness, KEN,’ I repeat to myself. I must, must,
must not
call him Lube after the announcement.

Ken Bradbury walks buoyantly into the office. He’s a short man with a wide, cheeky-chappy face and a close crop to hide
his receding hairline. He dresses a bit like Jonathan Ross: expensive suits that always look a fraction too tight, teemed with a garish tie. Today it’s purple. Good call, Ken. He’s followed in by another man who looks familiar. He must be a new recruit from another branch. He’s tall and very handsome. Wendy has obviously clocked him, too, because her elbow is poking my rib in excitement. For once I agree with her fit-man-o-meter. He is very gorgeous. Tall, tick. Dark, tick. Handsome, tick. Full marks. And that, as any lady knows, is rare.

‘I think he might need some special Lady Boss attention,’ Wendy hisses. I smile.

‘Here you all are. My team. My men. My empire,’ begins Ken. I love Ken, but he does think he’s Julius Caesar.

‘I can smell your hunger and it smells magnificent,’ he says, taking a deep breath. Strange, I thought we smelled like rank, hungover people myself.

‘Now then, a big day. Head of London Sales, as we all know, is the big cheese. You get a bit of commission from every sale made in the company. You do the hiring and firing and whipping into shape. You motivate, you lead, you inspire.’

My knees start to shake.

‘Now, today’s appointment is exciting. This person is one of, if not
the,
best in the business.’

Whoa. My stomach is doing cartwheels.

‘I would like to introduce you to John St John Smythe, your new Head of London Sales,’ he announces proudly, and the tall, dark handsome bloke steps forward.

Oh my goodness, I’m going to faint. My breath catches in my throat and suddenly it feels as if all the air in my body is
leaving me. I’ve come over all woozy, like a woman in a corset drama. I reach out for Wendy, but she’s staring open-mouthed and doesn’t expect me to lurch at her. I fall into her with a yelp and she stumbles into the man to her right, who drops his Starbucks. We both land in a coffee wet patch at his feet. Everyone turns and watches as the man pulls us both up.

‘Sorry, Ken,’ shouts Wendy. ‘It was me. I went arse over tit.’ She puts her hand firmly around me to stop me going again.

‘You all right?’ she whispers in my ear, but I can’t answer. I simply stare at the bastard who’s got my job and ruined my plan, ruined everything. And he looks at me. And then he smiles, and I recognise him. It’s the man who came round to my childhood home years ago and said it was beautiful.

I could cry, and I never, never cry.

I failed. I failed. I failed. I failed. That’s all I can think. Gracie Flowers failed. Gracie Flowers failed. Again.

It’s been so long since I last failed that I’d almost forgotten what it felt like. Isn’t it lovely how humiliation hunts you down, even when you’ve tried so hard to build a new identity? The only other time I’ve felt like this was the last singing competition I did nearly ten years ago. The whole day felt wrong from the beginning. Mum drove me there for a start. We didn’t sing Nina Simone for obvious reasons. In fact, we didn’t sing at all. We didn’t even speak. And we definitely didn’t stop for high-fat snacks. There was a bag of peeled carrots in the car. It was miles away – Manchester – and it was the biggest competition I’d ever been in: British Under Sixteen Singer of the Year. The winner got to work with Sony on an album, so it was massive. Singing competitions had always been fun, surreal and ridiculous, and the only way I got through them was by not taking them too seriously. Just sing the song as best you
can was my motto. Dad’s motto. But this one felt monumental, life-changing, too huge to get my head round. It meant I could leave school and become a singer, and I cracked under the pressure. Exploded is probably a better word.

We all had to sing a hymn or gospel song in the first round and I was due to sing my first song after Ruth Roberts. Ruth took to the stage and started to sing ‘Amazing Grace’. I’d heard her sing it over a hundred times before. I used to enjoy listening to it, but that day I just couldn’t bear it. It’s hard to explain, but it’s as though my whole being rejected the song and the competition, so I screamed to block it out. I stood in the wings while a fellow contestant sang and I screamed uncontrollably until she stopped and I was carried out.

In many ways that’s more dramatic than not getting the Head of London Sales job, but it felt the same. I’d spent years working towards something only to fail.

‘We should probably step out of the bogs,’ Wendy says. She has a point: we’ve been in here for twenty minutes. Wendy’s been looking in the mirror, fiddling with her dark bob and adding more black eye make-up. She looks a bit like a bug. A beautiful bug, but a bug nevertheless. She knows it and she’s not ashamed. Every time we get invited to a fancy dress party she wears her home-made bee costume. It’s an all-in-one black catsuit with a big spongy bee-shaped middle and deely boppers. She always pulls. Wendy can work the bee look like no one else.

I’ve been sitting on the loo, not saying a word since the announcement. Five years of work and it may as well have gone down the loo I’m sitting on. I failed the five year plan. The book doesn’t tell you what happens when you don’t
achieve what you want. It doesn’t tell you what to do when some strange man appears out of nowhere and stands where you should be standing. I’m supposed to be writing my new five year plan this weekend. What’s the point? For the past five years I’ve known what I was aiming for. Now I feel lost. I can’t carry on working under this posh bloke. I was supposed to get his job. I had it all planned. What now? Will somebody please tell me, what now?

‘Gracie, I need you to speak to me. I mean, I know you’re in shock, but you need to speak. How can you sell houses if you can’t speak? How will you sing to your dad? I mean, I suppose you could mime …’ she trails off for a moment. ‘GRACIE!’ Uh oh, it’s her cross voice. The one she uses when the boys steal her printer ink cartridges and take them home. Wendy always gets panicky when I don’t speak. ‘SAY SOMETHING. SAY ANYTHING.’

‘I hate him,’ I growl.

‘Excellent,’ she seems genuinely pleased with my progress. She waits for me to add to it, but I don’t oblige.

‘On the bright side, at least he’s good looking.’

I stare at her and shake my head.

‘I need him to leave this job quickly, then I’ll get promoted and it won’t be all bad. Otherwise he might stay for years. Then what would I do?’

‘Grace, come on. It’s not that bad.’

‘Wend, it is. I’m giving it three months. And if he hasn’t gone by then, I will.’

‘Where?’

‘No idea. Some other company that will have me.’

‘But what about Lube? He loves you!’