Leftovers Read Online Free Page B

thinking!’ I hold up my hand to stop what she’s about to say.
    ‘Isn’t Jake’s girlfriend a …’
    ‘Rebecca, it has nothing whatsoever to do with that.’
    ‘You’re not
still
looking at her stupid blog, are you?’
    ‘No.’
    She looks at me.
    ‘Not really,’ I say.
    ‘You are. Oh Suze, why are you doing this to yourself?’
    ‘I’m not. There was some stupid piece in
ES Magazine
last week about Spring’s New Make-Up Looks. I saw her name, and then there was a little photo of her with her bloody Birkin bag like some wannabe Victoria Beckham, doing some model’s lip gloss at a show … I wasn’t Googling her, I really wasn’t.’
    ‘Oh Suze, she is so irrelevant.’
    ‘They’re still together, Rebecca. She’s posted some new pics on Facebook. God, I need some carbohydrate, I feel dreadful.’
    She shakes her head and puts her arm round me. ‘Come on, you drunken, crazy fool. Let’s get you home for your meds.’
    ‘Only if by meds you mean two McDonald’s cheeseburgers for the road? Please, can we?’
    She nods, resignedly.
    She’s a very good friend.

Wednesday
    I will never, ever let Rebecca order me a Jäger Bomb, ever again.
    I wake up in my clothes with half a pink umbrella in my hair, a splitting headache in my left eye and the taste of McDonald’s dill pickle in my mouth. It’s fine. I’m not late for work or anything. But as I lie here in bed, talking myself out of chucking a sickie, I can’t help but think ‘Why, oh why am I still working at NMN?’
    I’ve been there for six years. I moved there from BVD, an even crappier agency, where I worked on a yellow fats account. (Yellow fats = butter, anything that behaves like butter, or that you’d say was butter-y-ish if you had no taste buds/someone put a gun in your mouth. In fact a gun in your mouth would taste more like butter.) I moved agencies because I thought the problem was BVD and yellow fats. But I’ve come to realise that the problem wasn’t my old agency. It wasn’t the spreadable butter-replacement solutions. It’s this business full stop.
    Oh I know what you’re thinking: daft cow, of course advertising is full of tossers! Since the 1980s, ad ‘folk’ have been second only to estate agents as figures of hate. But in recent years two things changed all that. First, bankers and politicians (never high on your Christmas card list), made a running sprint, like at the end of the Grand National, for Public Enemy spots number one and two. The guys from Foxtons slipped down to third place, and ad folk – well, we fell off the podium.
    And second:
Mad Men
came on TV. The men were chauvinists but sexy chauvinists. The women looked like actual women. Everyone smoked and drank and had sex with everyone else in the office. The industry suddenly looked glamorous and grown up and intellectually stimulating. And suddenly people seemed to forget that
Mad Men
is a made-up TV show rather than a documentary, and started thinking maybe advertising wasn’t so bad after all.
    Friends began asking if it was anything like
Mad Men
at NMN. To which the answer is surprisingly twofold:
a bit
, and
not at all
.
A bit
: the men are still chauvinists. Everyone drinks. Some still smoke. Everyone still has sex with everyone else in the office (apart from Sam and me). But glamorous? Grown up? Intellectually stimulating? See ‘
not at all
’ for details. And as for women who look like actual women? I’m one of only four females in the building who’s bigger than a size eight, and two of the others are pregnant.
    Anyway – I think, as I force myself to crawl out of bed – it’s all going to be fine because I have THE plan: execute this new brief perfectly, stay out of trouble with Berenice, get my bonus and promotion at Christmas, then go and find something fun and fulfilling to do in the world of food instead. And no, I will not be serving fries with that.
    It could be a lot worse, I figure as I head to the tube. At least I don’t