Had this been a bad choice?

Jenny had asked herself essentially the same question on the way home every evening of the past two weeks, and sometimes several times through the day.  As she waited for the bus to take her back to town from the industrial estate, she reflected on how – and really why – she found herself here.

She wasn’t sure which was worse: that she was now working at Shackleton or still lived at home with her mother.  Neither was part of any plan she had a year ago – or ever really.  Yes, she was born in Deadend, went to school there, then college.  All fine so far, but then should have been time to fly the nest.  Her family were good, working stock and could never quite see the point of ‘education and degrees and whatnot’, particularly ‘for a girl’.  They certainly saw no need for her to move away.  Over time, however, she had successfully convinced them beyond argument that she was going to university and had already hatched a crafty plan.  She applied to, and was provisionally accepted for, several degree programmes in remote cities.  She also applied more locally to Mugsborough, but the A level grades they asked were impossibly high – well above those predicted for her – so, as a smokescreen for her family, who as a compromise, wanted her to stay at home for her studies, she announced that to be her preferred option.  Instead, she had her heart set on a Scottish university about as far away as she could manage and with far kinder entry requirements, which she would ‘reluctantly’ have to accept.

Fate, however, conspired against her that summer.  Her father, although only in his early fifties, after a lifetime of hard toil and even harder relaxation, had a stroke and was returned from hospital in a wheelchair, and needing round-the-clock care, for his remaining few years.  The week of his homecoming, Jenny got her A level results and was devastated to find herself with multiple top grades and accepted by Mugsborough.  She knew that she could turn down the offer and vanish to the Highlands but, having played such a risky gambit against her family, who now needed her support, she ultimately found that she just couldn’t.  Instead, she suffered a two-and-a-half-hour round trip on the train each day between home and the county capital.

Her father lived just long enough to see her graduate.  His death buggered up another summer so, convinced as she now was that she wanted a full-blown academic career, the easiest option for the time being was to continue with a master’s degree at Mugsborough.  But then the subject of her final dissertation blossomed into something unforeseen – and very topical – and her supervisor, armed with a small amount of bursary funding, persuaded her to stay on and expand it into a PhD.  Then finally the world would be her oyster.

But it wasn’t.  It never made winkle.  A doctorate from a red-brick university – even the local one – should have put pretty much anywhere in the world in reach, but there was a final problem … money.

Her mother’s personality had changed considerably after her husband’s death.  She quickly became morose, then unpleasant, confrontational and, finally, mean – a particular facet of the last character being financially grasping.  Jenny’s father left little by way of pension or insurance and, although she suspected her mother to be better off than she claimed, it fell to Jenny to pick up the pieces – and specifically the bills.  Whilst her mother charged her rent, she spent the rest of her remaining loans and grants on keeping the roof over their heads.  They fell out frequently, and bitterly, with Jenny threatening to leave on several occasions but, while she doubted her mother’s exact levels of poverty, she felt her pleas of emotional instability to be genuine.  Now, five years on, with absolutely no credit history and huge debts, not a mortgage lender – and barely a landlord – in the land would look at her.

She applied for jobs at good universities and was offered interviews but was often unable to afford the train fare to get there.  There were no post-doc openings at Mugsborough.  When she was actually offered lecturing positions, she quickly realised she stood no chance of ever affording accommodation in those areas so had to turn them down, literally with tears in her eyes.  Her father would have found the money somehow to help with a deposit but there was no way her mother was going to, even if she could afford it.

Eventually, in desperation, she answered an advert for a temporary lectureship at Nathaniel Shackleton, was given an interview, caught the bus there and realised she’d got the job before the interview was half-way through.  The signs weren’t good even then: in the ‘meet the department’ session for all interviewees, when the head of department had asked, ‘Any questions, anything you’re not sure about?’ three existing members of staff had raised their hands!  That was a mere month ago.  With no other commitments and The Shack’s engineering department desperate for timetable cover, she started two weeks later.  There was no job security: she’d have to survive two years for anything even vaguely close to that, but it would bring in a monthly pay packet.  So there she was … and here she was … on the bus back home to her mother’s.  Fuck it!

She got off the bus on Deadend high street and trudged up a terraced side road to her mother’s house – the only home she had ever known.  The rain was harder now; she wasn’t dressed for it: she was soaked by the time she reached her door.

‘You’re late,’ was the only greeting that assailed her as she walked in.

‘Yes, thanks Mum. I know.’

‘You look tired.’

‘Yes, I am, Mum.’

‘I always said you’d regret choosing one of those fancy college careers. Not all it’s cracked up to be, is it my girl? You’re working longer hours than your Dad did – and he had a proper job!’

‘Yes, Mum, I know.’  She didn’t even have the energy for an argument tonight.

Jenny made herself a sandwich: her mother rarely even cooked for her these days.  She ate it standing in the kitchen with a bottle of diet cola.  She wasn’t that hungry: she’d taken to eating a midday meal in the university refectory, as overpriced as it was.  Afterwards, she washed and dried her dishes, and her mother’s that had been left there, and took a long bath.  Later, she came back downstairs, took a bottle of wine from the fridge, and sat down in an armchair with it, and a large glass, on the table next to her.  Knowing that her mother disapproved of such behaviour added a little to the small pleasure she took from it.

‘There’s a stopper in the drawer so you can put what’s left in the fridge again when you’ve finished,’ her mother growled.

Jenny’s lowered eyebrows growled right back at her.

Later, after her mother had retired to bed and she was finishing the last glass, having carefully left the empty bottle on the kitchen unit where her mother couldn’t miss it in the morning, Jenny found herself thinking about the future, the alcohol shuttling her to-and-fro on the optimism/pessimism spectrum.

She still had plans.  The long progression through the arse-licking, downward-kicking Bill Wiggins to Vince Plumb’s world-weary resignation wasn’t inevitable.  Although she was on something only marginally better than a zero-hours contract, for the first time in her life, she had good money coming in (well, she would next on next month’s payday).  By the standards of her family, and almost everyone she knew, a lecturer’s salary was huge; and, in a few years – if she worked hard, she could apply for senior lecturer.  Helping her mother out financially was no longer a problem but she could also put some away.  By the time she was 30, she might be able to set her mother up properly, get some outside care for her if she really needed it, and finally, finally, finally open her wings and fly!  Maybe her future wasn’t quite so bleak after all.

But the present was, the dark side of her brain reminded her.  The present was shit.  She was 26.  She was sitting in her mother’s lounge with a bottle of wine inside her, with a film on the TV she wasn’t even following.  Travelling from home to work and back each day simply replaced one God-awful situation with another.  She’d taken a job she didn’t want; she was being taken advantage of everywhere, overworked on all fronts, out of her depth, and generally didn’t have much idea of what she was doing – or why.

Oh, and now she’d probably have a student complaint made against her by Monday morning!

*

Jenny usually slept with her bedroom window open and woke Saturday morning to the sound of a bottle landing angrily on glass in the recycling box in the back yard.  She turned to her bedside clock: it wasn’t even 6:30, but she had a lot to do so she was up quickly.

After a hasty breakfast, she was logged on to NSU’s e-learning portal shortly after seven.  Someone from the web team needed a brief biography from her by midnight so they could upload it on Sunday, and it would be live on Monday – but that wouldn’t take long and could wait until later.  She also had two lots of marking to do, aside from the electronics module she’d inherited.  She downloaded the first folder and started on each student.  The first was a superb piece of work: she marked it at 75% (first class honours stuff) and wrote copious feedback on small issues that could be addressed next time to make it even better.  She breathed a relieved sigh.  Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad, after all.

The second piece of work was so dreadful it took Jenny ten minutes to convince herself it had been submitted to the right assignment – even the right subject.  The third was clearly the right assignment because it had the headings she was expecting; other than that, it was unintelligible.  The fourth was OK.  The fifth was a corrupted file and wouldn’t open.  The sixth made her laugh, then cry …  It went on and on, each seeming to take longer than the last … Terrible.  Awful.  OK.  Just moderately bad.  Jesus fucking wept! … She broke for a coffee and biscuit at 10:30 and a short lunch at one but, by 2:30, she was only half-way through and had a bad headache.  She’d have to stop.

Deciding to leave the rest until Sunday, Jenny walked slowly into town in the hope of clearing her head.  As she turned the corner into the high street, she saw John in his customary place in the part-covered shared entrance between Boots and Starbucks.  Beside him, his sleeping bag still looked damp from the downpour of the previous night.  She stopped for a chat and gave him her usual fiver but he looked particularly bad today, so she went in to get him a coffee and something hot to eat.  There was just one guy in front of her in the queue.

He was not much older than Jenny and carried a clipboard labelled ‘Virgin Mobile’, and wore a fleece marked the same.  She’d seen these people before in town touting for business of some kind.  The woman behind the counter wasn’t much younger than her but she was getting it in the neck from the Virgin guy, who clearly thought he had a right to speak to her as if she was dirt.  Apparently, they’d run out of something-or-other and Virgin guy wasn’t happy.  It obviously wasn’t her fault but there was no-one else there to take the blame, so she weathered the brunt of it with commendable composure and restraint.  Jenny waited patiently, bought a coffee and hot roll, came out and gave it to John, then walked on towards the centre of town: ‘Dead Square’ as it was locally known. 

Naturally, having lived there all her life (a recurring realisation that never failed to drop her into an emotional pit no matter what spiritual peak she may have temporarily scaled), Jenny knew many people in Deadend.  Romance had been sparse – a few short relationships with both women and men – but she’d been to school and college there with many people of similar age and was on nodding terms with others across all generations.  As she approached the centre of Dead Square (two benches beneath a raised circular advertising hoarding), she saw a small group and at least one person she recognised.

It was the local Labour Party handing out leaflets and protesting about the ongoing NHS and education cuts.  The Tories’ pledges made to the frontline heroes that had got the country through the Covid crisis hadn’t lasted long of course: empty promises and twisted statistics as usual.  Jenny had joined Labour enthusiastically during the Corbyn years, when the world had seemed like it could be a better place, and always intended to get active; but, weighed down by research work and a slight aversion to social engagement – particularly confrontation, had never managed it.  Now, with Starmer as leader, any remaining motivation had evaporated some time ago, although she still paid her monthly membership.

Her old classmate, Ivan, shouted a hello as she approached but she was distracted for a moment by a second group in the square.  Virgin guy had returned, with his cardboard tray of drinks, to his sales team and was now getting lambasted by a woman with jacket and badge, which appeared to outrank his clipboard and fleece.  Whether his misdemeanour was in taking too long, the missing whatever-it-was or something else entirely, she couldn’t tell, but she smiled inwardly at the poetic justice.

‘So, are you finally going to be joining us now that you’ve got time on your hands?’ Ivan asked innocently.  He knew what she was doing these days, but she nearly snorted at the assumption that she had nothing better to do.  Even so, she was packed and ready for the familiar guilt trip.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she muttered evasively.  ‘When’s the next meeting?’

‘Thursday at the club,’ Ivan answered brightly then, looking over her shoulder, ‘Oh, hi Alex; good to see you. Grab some leaflets.’

‘Our newest activist,’ he motioned, by way of introduction.  Jenny turned: it was the student she’d told to steal cars less than 24 hours before!

*

She couldn’t quite run away there and then, much as she wanted to, but she didn’t linger a minute longer than she could politely get away with.  In the time she did stay, however, she gathered a few things about Alex.  He was only a year or so younger than her.  (This must be a return to education for him, she realised: a ‘mature student’.)  His heart was in the right place, even if he was never going to be another Brunel.  He disliked authority with a passion and was desperately nervous in its presence.  (He was on a waiting list for some therapy for that: she cringed.)  On more of his own ground, although still anxious, he was better – and politically quite sound.  All in all, he was a fairly decent bloke and Jenny felt like the worst person in the world.  They were civil but reserved towards each other and Ivan could clearly tell something wasn’t quite right.  He would obviously find out after she left.

A Virgin trilogy was completed on her way home. She saw Virgin woman, alone this time, ahead of her as she neared her street corner.  She was talking on her mobile and swept past John without even appearing to see him but then stopped suddenly, scowling hard and giving a very clear indication that the conversation had taken a grim turn.  As Jenny passed her, smiled at John, and continued on, she overheard part of it.

‘… but we tried: we were there most of the day. No, it was quiet. No, we had a bit of interest early on, but no-one signed up. Yes, I know that’s what I’m paid for but the damn team …’

‘Ha, your turn!’ Jenny muttered, as she climbed the hill out of earshot.

Later she sat, eating fish and chips from the paper on her lap, thinking about it all.  She was pissed-off: angry with herself and fed up with the way the world worked.  John slept in the Starbucks doorway; Starbucks avoided millions in tax – but still wouldn’t fork out a few quid for enough staff in their café.  So Virgin guy takes it out on a trainee barista; Virgin woman has a go at Virgin man; Someone else bollocks Virgin woman; Richard Branson sues the NHS to make himself a bit richer, so Alex has to wait for counselling.  She humiliates Alex.  Shit.  It was bloody ridiculous the way everyone had to fight each other just to get by.  We all did it, and only the people right at the top seemed to be able to distance themselves from it.

She was an engineer – not over-fond of lengthy prose – but she could write well enough when the mood took her, and she had a peculiar urge to do that now.  She’d liked English at school just as much as maths.  She threw the remainder of her chips to the dog, went out to the off-licence, bought a bottle of wine, came back, poured herself a large, inspirational glass and, on not much more than a whim, started typing – probably the first poem she’d written since she was in junior school.  She surprised herself with the flow, and the rage within it; it took little over an hour.  She read over it a couple of times and tweaked the odd bit but then it was done.

I’m swearing at the shop girl, because the price is wrong;
The shelf it sang ‘on offer’, but the till a different song.
Just a tin of beans; full price – an extra 20p;
Might not be much to you but it’s a fucking deal to me!

I take a breath, hold my tongue; ‘cause really I can tell
that 20p to her would mean a lot as well.
Crap job; minimum wage; treated like shit;
Not her fault; she’s checkout; she didn’t do it.

I’m swearing at the shop girl because the price is wrong;
But the guy doing signage had been on shift too long.
The figures he was working with, the number one offender;
Database contract awarded on the lowest fucking tender.

Accountants chose the software: no tech. skills to judge it;
But it was cheap; the salesman neat; it all came in on budget.
Manager likes the system, and she convinced the board;
Now she’s back in contention for the end of year awards.

And up and up and up it goes: a pyramid of rats;
Directors and executives: sycophantic twats.
Covering their arses: thinking of the dough;
Cock-sucking those above; crapping on those below.

Until you get to ‘number one’: fuck all for him to fear;
And a seat in the Lords at the end of his career.
The tensions beneath him are just part of the plot;
And all those 20ps add up to a brand-new yacht!

I’m swearing at the shop girl, because the price is wrong;
But the path through all the scoundrels meanders, and it’s long.
A rancid command chain; meritocracy back-to-front;
I’m swearing at the shop girl because the CEO’s a cunt!

She sat back, warmed and strangely contented: she was pleased with that.  Although, having written it, she now had no idea why, or what to do with it.  However, there was a nice, repeated line in there so she titled it ‘Swearing at the Shop Girl’ saved the file and considered what to do next.  Finishing the wine seemed reasonable.

She remembered she had to write her biography before she went to bed.  She typed out a couple of paragraphs about her background, interests and qualifications but, bloody hell, it looked boring.  That was her life right there!  She would come back to it after a bath.  She thought of a couple of improvements while lying in the hot water and updated the file when she sat down again.  She also looked once more at ‘Swearing at the Shop Girl’ and, laughing at how silly it was, added ‘Jenny Weatherill, aged 26 and three-quarters’ to the bottom.

She still intended to give her biography one last look before she sent it off but, just before eleven, the web guy (Christ, he obviously didn’t have a life either) emailed her to remind her so she sent it by reply.  As she picked from her recent files to attach, clicked ‘Send’ and watched the message window close, the name of the vanishing attachment burnt itself like acid into her vision.

She’d sent him the poem!

(End of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 will be available on 1^st May!)

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