Sushi for Beginners - Marian Keyes [6]
As a sop to her long years of faithful service, Ashling was allowed to hold on to her job until she got another one. Which, hopefully, would be soon.
‘Well?’ Ashling smoothed out the front of her jacket and turned to Ted.
‘Fine.’ Ted’s shoulder bones rose and fell.
‘Or is this one better?’ Ashling pulled on a jacket that seemed to Ted to be identical to the first one.
‘Fine,’ he repeated.
‘Which one?’
‘Either.’
‘Which one makes me look more like I’ve got a waist?’
Ted squirmed. ‘Not this again. You’re obsessed with your waist.’
‘I haven’t got one to be obsessed with.’
‘Why can’t you go on about the size of your bum, like normal women do?’
Ashling had very little in the way of waist but, as always with bad news pertaining to oneself, she’d been the last to find out. It wasn’t until she was fifteen and her best friend Clodagh had sighed, ‘You’re so lucky, having no waist. Mine is tiny and it just makes my bottom look bigger,’ that she’d made the shocking discovery.
While every other girl on her road had spent their teenage years standing in front of a mirror agonizing over whether one breast was bigger than the other, Ashling’s focus was lower. Eventually she got herself a hula hoop and set to it with gusto in her back garden. For a couple of months she rotated and whittled, day and night, her tongue stuck earnestly out of the corner of her mouth. All the mammies from the neighbouring families looked over their garden walls, their arms folded, nodding knowingly at each other, ‘She’ll have herself hula-hooped into an early grave, that one.’
Not that the non-stop, obsessive whirling had made any difference. Even now, sixteen years later, there was still an undeniable straight-up-and-down quality to Ashling’s silhouette.
‘Having no waist isn’t the worst thing that could happen to someone,’ Ted encouraged from the sidelines.
‘Indeed it isn’t,’ Ashling agreed with unsettling joviality. ‘You could have horrible legs too. And as luck would have it, I do.’
‘You don’t.’
‘I do. I inherited them from my mother… But so long as that’s all I inherited from her,’ Ashling added, cheerfully, ‘I figure I’m not doing so badly.’
‘I was in bed with my girlfriend last night…’ Ted was keen to change the conversation. ‘I told her the earth was flat.’
‘What girlfriend? And what’s this about the earth?’
‘No, that’s wrong,’ Ted muttered to himself. ‘I was lying in bed with my girlfriend last night… I told her the earth was flat. Boom boom!’
‘Ha ha, very good,’ Ashling said weakly. The worst thing about being Ted’s favourite person was having to be the guinea-pig for his new material. ‘But can I make a suggestion? How about, I was lying in bed with my girlfriend last night. I told her I’d always love her and never leave her… Boom boom,’ she added wryly.
‘I’m late,’ Ted said. ‘D’you want a backer?’
Often he gave her a lift to work on the back of his bike, en route to his own job at the Department of Agriculture.
‘No thanks, I’m going in a different direction.’
‘Good luck with the interview. I’ll pop in to see you this evening.’
‘I don’t doubt it for a minute,’ Ashling agreed, under her breath.
‘Hey! How’s your ear infection?’
‘Better, nearly. I can wash my hair myself again.’
3
Ashling eventually decided on jacket number one. She could have sworn she detected a slight indentation roughly halfway between her breasts and her hips and that was good enough for her.
After agonizing over her make-up, she plumped for muted in case she came across as flighty. But in case she looked too drab she brought her beloved black-and-white pony-skin handbag. Then she rubbed her lucky Buddha, popped her lucky pebble in her pocket and looked regretfully at her lucky red hat. But just how lucky would a red bobble hat be, if worn to a job interview? Anyway, she