After the One by Cass Lester (e book reader free .TXT) 📕

She showered and changed, then drove into town to get the car repaired, very much against the advice of the garage of course, and then she bought a new phone. All told, she shelled out the best part of three hundred quid.

Bloody hell, she winced, the redundancy money isn’t going to last five minutes at this rate.

Back home she made herself a strong, fortifying coffee, and then took a forensic look at her monthly bills and outgoings, to work out precisely how long she could live on what she’d got left in the bank. Apparently, not very long. Mentally rolling up her sleeves, she opened her laptop and started to look for a job, a task that would have been a lot simpler if she’d known what she actually wanted to do. There were, literally, hundreds of jobs advertised, some of which she’d never even heard of. But whilst the vast array of opportunities seemed initially exciting, it rapidly became overwhelming, and, after getting bogged down in a maze of recruitment websites, Charley soon realised she needed to be ruthlessly methodical in her approach.

She drew up a spreadsheet headed Jobs I Want to Apply For, with columns logging: the name of company; the location; job title; experience and qualifications and so on. Optimistically, she added columns for: date of interview; salary; and starting date.

Rather too optimistically, as it turned out.

It seemed she either needed qualifications she didn’t have – like a degree, or a BTEC diploma – or experience in a bewildering list of things she hadn’t even heard of.

What even is ‘operations resource co-ordination’ or ‘people services administration’ for crying out loud? And what the hell are ‘procurement systems management’ and ‘supply chain operations’? She frowned. I swear they’re making these up.

There was only one person she knew who could interpret this impenetrable gobbledegook – her friend Nisha. But she hesitated to pick up the phone. Nisha was the most successful of Charley’s friendship group and she’d always found her slightly intimidating – actually, more than slightly. Cool, elegant and a little older than the rest of her mates, the woman worked twenty-four-seven, running her own marketing company. So, where Charley had decided not to tell Pam about being made redundant until she’d got another job, she didn’t want to admit it to Nisha at all – she’d feel such a failure in comparison to her. She sighed, told herself to bite the bullet and picked up the phone.

‘Hi Nishe, is it an okay time to call?’ she asked, deploying her usual opening line with Nisha.

‘Yes, of course. In fact, I was going to call you.’

‘Oh?’ said Charley warily, immediately assuming Tara had let the cat out of the bag about her redundancy, since she couldn’t imagine why else Nisha would be calling her.

‘I need cheering up,’ announced Nisha, flooring Charley completely. Nisha was intensely private, an emotionally closed book who rarely confided in anyone.

‘What’s up?’

Charley could sense, rather than hear, Nisha taking a deep breath before announcing, ‘La Bimbo is pregnant.’

‘Oh, Nishe,’ said Charley, her heart going out to her mate.

‘Can I come round?’ asked Nisha hesitantly.

‘Yes! Come now!’

Officially, Nisha’s status was ‘Happily Divorced’, but Charley wondered if her friend’s status was possibly better described as ‘Stoically Divorced’.

Twenty minutes later Nisha arrived, the height of elegance in a pair of blue-and-white striped culottes, a navy shirt and heels, which made Charley feel like a grunge-queen in her old joggers and even older T-shirt.

Charley found herself apologising for the coffee. ‘It’s only instant, I’m afraid.’

‘I much prefer instant,’ Nisha assured her politely, and Charley didn’t know if she was being truthful or diplomatic. Either way, Nisha sat opposite her at the kitchen table, nursing her coffee and venting spleen.

‘He spent ten years telling me he didn’t want bloody kids. Utterly refused to have any. So I kept taking the pill, and now… and now La Fucking Bimbo is up the duff, and I’m knocking forty and—’ She didn’t even bother to finish her sentence.

…and it’s probably too late, finished Charley silently.

‘I’m sorry, Nishe,’ she said gently. With her other friends she’d have pulled them into a hug, but instinctively she felt Nisha wouldn’t be comfortable with that.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ said Nisha. ‘Sorry, to dump on you like this, but I can’t talk to the others – they’ve got kids. They won’t understand.’

‘You’re not dumping on me,’ Charley assured her. ‘I’m glad you shared it with me. It’s huge. Devastating news.’

Nisha gave a faint nod and then said, ‘Maybe I should have just stopped taking the pill and got pregnant, like La Bimbo. Huh! Maybe she’s not such a bimbo after all,’ she finished bitterly.

Desperately wanting to find something, anything, that might make Nisha feel better, Charley said, ‘If you’d had kids do you think you and Jay would still be married?’

‘Probably,’ replied Nisha. Then, after processing that notion, she visibly cheered up and added, ‘Ghastly thought! Imagine being lumbered with him for rest of my life!’ and Charley adjusted her friend’s status back to ‘Happily Divorced’.

Then, since she still needed Nisha’s help with her job-hunting, Charley reluctantly fessed up about her redundancy. To her relief, her mate didn’t seem to think it reflected badly on Charley at all, and after commiserating with her and assuring her she would be bound to get another job soon, Nisha turned her attention to the list of the job titles and duties Charley had found so confusing. She dealt with them easily, contemptuously even.

‘Don’t be put off by job titles. They’re all just admin jobs, which you’re eminently capable of doing. The job spec will tell you what the job really is. It’s just title inflation. People bigging jobs up.’

‘To attract more applicants?’ asked Charley, thinking that if this was the case, it wasn’t a tactic that was working for her.

‘No, because the pay’s crap. It’s cheaper to give a job a fancy title than a decent wage. If I were you, I’d look at the salary