Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [115]
Clodagh nearly laughed. The very thought! That’s why you leave school, isn’t it? So that you never have to sit another exam?
Yvonne twiddled her fingers in the air, before bringing each one down separately, to deliberately, hypnotically stroke the page flat again. ‘What software did you use there?’
‘Ah…’ Clodagh couldn’t remember.
‘Have you typing and shorthand?’
‘Yes.’
‘How many words a minute?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I just type with my first two fingers,’ Clodagh elaborated, ‘but I’m very fast. As fast as some people who’ve done a course.’
Yvonne’s child-like eyes narrowed. She was annoyed, although not to the extent that she would have you believe. She was just playing, having fun with the power she had. ‘So can I take it that you don’t actually have any shorthand?’
‘Well, I suppose, but I could always… No,’ Clodagh admitted, having run out of energy.
‘Have you any basic word-processing skills?’
‘Ah, no.’
And even though Yvonne knew the answer, she asked, ‘And you’re not a graduate?’
‘No,’ Clodagh admitted, fixing Yvonne with one normal eye and one red-veined one.
‘OK.’ Yvonne exhaled long-sufferingly, licked a finger and used it to smooth down a ragged corner of the CV. ‘Tell me what you read.’
‘How do you mean?’
There was a pause, so tiny it barely existed, but Yvonne had created it to convey what a hopeless idiot she thought Clodagh was.
‘FT? Time?’ Yvonne prompted. She didn’t exactly sigh, but she might as well have. Then she added cruelly, ‘Bella? Hello!?’
All Clodagh read were interiors magazines. And Cat in the Hat books. And occasional blockbusters about women who set up their own businesses and who didn’t have to sit through humiliating interviews such as this one when they wanted a job.
‘And I see you count tennis among your interests. Where do you play?’
‘Oh, I don’t play.’ Clodagh gave a near-teenage giggle. ‘I mean I like watching it.’
Wimbledon was about to start, there had been lots of pre-transmission publicity on telly.
‘And you go to the gym?’ Yvonne read. ‘Or do you just like watching that too?’
‘No, I really go,’ Clodagh said, on much more solid ground.
‘Although that hardly counts as a hobby, does it?’ Yvonne asked. ‘That’s like saying sleeping is a hobby. Or eating.’
This caught Clodagh on the raw.
‘And you’re a regular theatre-goer?’
Clodagh wavered, then admitted, ‘I’m not really. But you’ve to put down something, don’t you?’ (When Clodagh and Ashling had finally stopped inventing joke hobbies such as rally driving and devil worship, and had tried to assemble a list of real ones, pickings had been slim.)
‘So what are your interests?’ Yvonne challenged.
‘Ah…’ What were her interests?
‘Hobbies, passions, that kind of thing,’ Yvonne said impatiently.
Clodagh’s mind had frozen. The only thing she could think of was that she liked playing with her split ends, peeling the broken bit along the shaft of the hair, seeing how far up it would go. She could spend hours amusing herself thus. But something stopped her from sharing this with Yvonne. ‘You see, I have two children,’ she said feebly. ‘They take up all my time.’
Yvonne flashed her an if-you-say-so glance. ‘How ambitious are you?’
Clodagh recoiled. She wasn’t at all ambitious. Ambitious people were weird.
‘When working at the travel agent’s, what gave you the most job satisfaction?’
Making it through the day, as far as Clodagh remembered. The idea was – and it was the same for all of the girls she worked with – they went in, suspended their real lives for eight hours and poured their energies into enduring the wait.
‘Dealing with people?’ Yvonne prompted. ‘Ironing out glitches? Closing a sale?’
‘Getting paid,’ Clodagh said, then realized she shouldn’t have. The thing was, it had been a very long time since she’d done any kind of interview. She’d forgotten the correct platitudes. And, as far as she remembered, she’d always been interviewed by men before, and they’d been a damn sight nicer than this little cow.
‘I’m not really interested in working in a travel agent’s again,’ Clodagh said. ‘I wouldn’t mind