Time of My Life - Sharon Griffiths

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while George went off on another job, Marje and I walked back to the office and I remembered about my Oxo tin. I opened it carefully. Inside was a brown paper bag. It smelt of candles and polish and a musty under-the-stairs sort of smell. Inside that was a sandwich made with doorsteps of good white bread, filled with something that smelled a bit odd. I took a tentative bite and tried to work out what it was. It had a sort of fishy taste. Sort of. A bit like cat food.

      Then I remembered my gran’s kitchen cupboard, those funny little jars. Fish paste. I was eating a fish paste sandwich. I suppose it made a change from M & S’s poached Scottish salmon with dill mayonnaise and watercress on oatmeal bread. And the bread was nice.

      Then Marje had to show me how to type up a story.

      What a chew! There was this mucky black paper, carbon paper, that made a smudgy sort of copy. You had to put three pieces of paper together, with two bits of carbon between them, and roll them into a typewriter. The typewriter took for ever. It was so heavy. You really had to bash the keys. And I kept forgetting to push the thing that made it go to the next line, so I kept typing on the roller instead of the paper. And you couldn’t delete mistakes!

      ‘Bet you wish computers were invented,’ I said to Marje.

      ‘Computers? Why?’ She looked at me blankly. She was very good at pretending to belong to the 1950s. I think she must have been one of the testers rather than a competitor.

      ‘Well, you know, quick and easy to type, correct your mistakes, spell check.’

      ‘Spell check?’

      ‘Yes, it corrects your spelling for you.’

      ‘That’s handy if you can’t spell. How does it do it?’

      ‘Um, I don’t know really. But that’s before you start on the internet.’

      ‘The which?’

      ‘Internet. You can find anything you want to know in seconds. About anything. Facts, figures, famous people, shopping. You can go on the internet, find things and buy them.’

      ‘How does it do it?’

      ‘I don’t know, but it’s wonderful. And—’

      ‘You don’t know much, really, do you?’ said Marje, lighting another cigarette. ‘Especially about spelling.’ She turned back to my chaotic-looking copy and carried on swiftly marking up my mistakes. Most of them weren’t actually spelling mistakes you understand, just typing mistakes from using the heavy typewriter.

      ‘That computer thing must have rotted your brain. Here,’ she handed my piece back to me, ‘you’d better type it again or the subs will go mad. See you in the morning.’ She picked up her string bag of shopping and went home to cook supper for her husband.

      I typed up the golden weddings again and, because there were no messengers around, and because I was curious, took it along myself to the subs’ room. The subs, all men, were smoking pipes or cigarettes and sitting around a long table, marking up the copy ready for the printers. As soon as I walked into the room I had that feeling you get in some offices – as though you’d walked into a private club and you’re an outsider. Horrid.

      One of the men looked up from the piece of paper he was writing on and whistled at me. Another sat back in his chair. Soon all the men, six of them, were sitting staring at me. The first said, ‘Well, well, what have we got here? Hello girlie, who are you?’

      ‘Rosie Harford. I’m here for a while as a reporter and features writer.’

      ‘Features writer eh? We used to have one of those, but the legs fell off,’ said one young man. They all laughed uproariously as if he had made the wittiest remark ever.

      Another older man leant across the desk. ‘Well Rosie, you’ve certainly got rosie cheeks. Rosie by name, rosie by nature. If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?’

      More sniggers.

      ‘Watch yourself,’ I said. ‘That’s sexist language.’

      They looked shocked for a moment and then the laughter started again. Slowly at first and building up as each man joined in more noisily than the one before.

      ‘Sex, is it?’ said one, looking around with a broad grin at the others. ‘Well, if you’re offering.’

      ‘No I am not,’ I said and banged the copy down on their desk, ‘and certainly not with you.’ I turned to walk out.

      ‘Will you just look at that,’ one of the men said to my retreating view. ‘A backside like two eggs in a hanky.’

      I slammed the door but could still hear their laughter through it. My face was bright red. Pigs. Idiots. Stupid ignorant men. Bugger! I realised it was probably a test, to see how I’d cope. Well, I’d really blown that, hadn’t I?

      Flustered and feeling stupid, I went back into the newsroom. At least it was nearly going home time. Gordon was there, talking to another man. A tall man with sleek blond hair, standing with his back to me under the yellowing light at the far end of the newsroom.

      I recognised him instantly even in the shabby unfamiliar clothes. I would have recognised him any time, anywhere. The set of his shoulders, the angle of his head, the gesture with his hands as he explained something to Gordon. Oh, I knew them all. I didn’t need a second glance. I knew that body almost as well as I knew my own.

      Will!

      I was so happy I nearly let out a yelp of excitement and only just stopped myself running up and flinging my arms around him. I thought my heart would leap right out of my body with joy and relief. Here, in the middle of whatever strangeness was going on, and those stupid sniggering subs, I knew how much I needed him. With Will here, everything would be all right. He would turn the nightmare into an adventure. It would be a game, a laugh, a great story. Us two against the world. Suddenly it stopped being something strange and slightly sinister. Already, in that split second, it had started being fun.

      It was all so wonderfully familiar, so reassuring. If Will was here, then I could cope with anything, from sexist subs to fish paste sandwiches, scratchy underwear and no showers.

      ‘Will!’ I said, going towards him. ‘Will! Thank God you’re here!’

      Will looked around. He looked surprised. He looked straight at me. And he absolutely blanked me.

      Will looked at me as though he’d never seen me before in his life.

      The silence seemed to go on for ever, to hang heavy in the air above the heaps of newspapers, the jumbled files and scuffed desks. It swirled with the dust from the overflowing ashtrays, and time slowed down as I gazed desperately at Will. I had stopped breathing, was just waiting for him to respond, to laugh, to step forward and hug me. But he didn’t.

      Sure, for a moment there was a flicker in his eyes – but it was that flicker you get in the eyes of any strange man when he sees you for the first time, the quick measuring, appraising look. And then – nothing. Not a hint, not a glint of recognition.

      This was worse, much worse than any row. This was nothing to do with anger. Will was looking at me as though he had never seen me before. As though I were a stranger, as if we had no life, no past together. Nothing. And when I saw that blankness in his eyes my whole world shifted, as though the very earth I was standing on had been hollowed out from under my feet and I was in free fall. Without him, there was nothing to cling to. Nothing.

      I wanted to run up to him, fling my arms around him. OK, we’d had a row. That was in another world, another lifetime. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he was here. But not when he looked at me like that.

      ‘Will?’ I asked, tentatively, hesitating, terrified that he wouldn’t even acknowledge me. I stood

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