The Spring of Second Chances : An absolutely perfect and uplifting romantic comedy Read online

  ‘You are,’ Phoebe laughed, ‘that’s why I like you so much.’

  ‘I wonder if you’ll still like me when you land this new job in promotions. I’m counting on you to get me another elf stint at Christmas.’

  ‘You want to do that again?’ Phoebe said with a faint look of disbelief. Apart from the fact that she had met Jack and Maria whilst working as an elf, which was undoubtedly the best thing that had ever happened to her, Phoebe shuddered at the memory of the days she’d had to endure in the claustrophobic and pungent room that served as Santa’s grotto. She was much happier working out on the shop floor sans rosy cheeks and green tights.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ Midnight raised her eyebrows. ‘That was the most fun I’ve had in ages. Do you remember reading all the kids’ letters? They were hilarious! And Janitor Jeff as Santa… that choice of personnel was so mental it was genius!’

  ‘You wouldn’t get me in those curly-toed shoes again for anything.’

  ‘Well, my little friend, if you get this job next week you get to hand out the curly-toed shoes instead of wearing them.’ Midnight swung herself up to sit on the sales counter and grinned. ‘What does Mr Stalker think about you going for this new job?’

  ‘Jack?’ Phoebe asked. She’d never been able to convince Midnight that it was Maria who had instigated most of the stalking. And then Phoebe herself. If anyone was actually innocent of that moniker it was Jack. ‘He’s all for it; thinks it’s a good move for me.’

  ‘It’s funny…’ Midnight swung her legs as she sat atop the counter, ‘you say that I don’t talk to anyone at Hendry’s but you’re not exactly Mrs Sociable yourself, are you?’

  ‘I don’t need to be.’

  ‘Surely in promotions you have to be a bit jolly and friendly?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s all that important,’ Phoebe replied amiably. ‘I think the job is more about organising silly costumes and events for the rest of you minions. As promotions coordinator I have to dream up new and excruciating ways for you all to humiliate yourselves.’

  ‘See… you haven’t even got the job yet and all that power has gone to your head.’

  ‘I’ll go easy on my friends though. So you make sure you stay in my good books.’

  ‘Roger that!’ Midnight gave a neat salute. ‘Bagel and coffee for lunch, ma’am?’

  ‘Followed by a nice foot massage… maybe you can do something about my bunions while you’re at it.’

  ‘Don’t push it, blondie!’

  Phoebe chuckled. From the corner of her eye she could see the car that Midnight had sent racing across the shop floor peeking out from beneath a shelving unit. She bent to pick it up and handed it over. ‘You’d better hide the evidence before Hitler comes back.’

  Midnight leapt down from the counter and pocketed the car. On the way past a giant pink Barbie display she stopped and looked at the dolls thoughtfully. After doing an elaborate impersonation of an artist measuring up his subject, she began to rearrange two of them.

  As she walked away from the stand, Phoebe looked over to see that Barbie and Ken were top-to-tail, lying on top of each other across the bonnet of a beach buggy.

  ‘You know Steve will kill you if he sees that,’ she laughed.

  ‘He won’t have any idea what they’re doing,’ Midnight replied carelessly. ‘Only people who’ve actually had sex would know, so that clearly exempts him.’

  Phoebe shook her head with a smile as she watched her friend head to the stand where the toy cars belonged.

  Scratching her head through a mop of bed-tousled hair, Phoebe yawned widely. Although… the word tousled implied something sexy, a little bit of effortless glamour. As she caught sight of herself in the mirror, she decided that this was more like the coconut matting she had out by the door of her flat. The inside of her mouth felt similar too. Inwardly, she cursed herself for getting so worked up about her impending interview. No matter how many times she had told herself that it didn’t matter whether she got this promotion or not, as she’d tossed and turned the previous night, running over every possible interview scenario in her head, she’d realised that it did. The fact was, she had the overwhelming feeling that it was somehow a tipping point in her life. It felt huge, like the break she had been waiting for, the final end to the run of depressing, dead-end jobs she’d had since school. This was the chance to get a proper career off the ground.

  She had never been much for studying, although all her teachers had told her she was bright enough to go onto higher education, but there were days, as she had stood behind a crowded bar, or shoved a toilet brush down yet another urine streaked bowl, that she seriously regretted her decision not to. And then, after a few years, it had all felt too difficult to unpick. When Vik came along, she’d been so happy that it really didn’t matter what job she did as long as she came home to him at night. It was just another way in which Vik’s death had undone her life completely that first year. She’d been left without the man, without the education, without the career… without anything that made life worth living.

  But Jack had ignited her spark again and now she wanted to get back on track. She was tired of feeling like a failure, of the pitying looks from people she bumped into from school, friends she had lost touch with who had gone on to bigger and better things. Even her own parents had that look when they asked her how work was going, on visits that were becoming increasingly rare: that ever-so-slightly disappointed smile when she replied. They told her they loved her and didn’t care if she worked in a sewer as long as she was happy. But Phoebe heard only their bitter disappointment in her life choices. They loved her, of course, but that was biological conditioning. It didn’t mean that they approved.

  This year, she had resolved to change all that. Baby steps, she had told herself back in January and she had begun slowly. She had moved from the damp flat she had endured for three winters, where the walls crawled with mould that set off her asthma during every cold snap, and had taken a better one, closer to work. It was smaller than her old one, but that had kept the rent within her budget and what it lacked in space it more than made up for in cosiness. She had taken the opportunity to part with trinkets that meant too much: reminders of days gone by. It had been hard, but she began to see that if she held onto Vik’s CDs, his books, even his things in the bathroom cabinet, she would never be able to move on. She owed that much to Jack at least. It seemed strange to her at first that she never saw anything in his house that looked as though it had once belonged to Rebecca, Maria’s mother, but perhaps, she reasoned after a few visits, he had come to the same realisation much sooner than her. After all, Rebecca had been dead for five years. Phoebe wondered what her own thoughts and feelings about Vik would be after five years.

  Despite her resolutions to stay focused, however, there were times, like now, when she wavered. She was beginning to wish she had accepted Jack’s offer the night before to stay over with him, but she’d known that if she did she would drink too much and stay up too late and wouldn’t have felt ready for the interview. As it turned out, the same thing had happened at her place, only she’d spent the evening alone when she could have been with Jack having a lot more fun being unable to sleep.

  With a deep sigh, she wandered into the kitchen to retrieve her coffee and took a swig. She grimaced; she’d let it go cold while she’d stared into space feeling sorry for herself. At least she’d had the foresight to pack a decent outfit the night before to take with her today. Replies to her enquiries about the dress code for an internal interview had been vague at best, but somehow she felt that her usual Hendry’s uniform – a red polo shirt and black skinny jeans – weren’t going to give the right impression.

  ‘Morning, gorgeous! You’re just in time and I think it’s my turn to buy.’ Midnight handed Phoebe a coffee she had just lifted from the vending machine. Phoebe tried not to make her distaste too obvious as she peered into the cup. Midnight insisted on subjecting them to this ritual at least once a week, despite the
fact that they had a kitchen equipped with a kettle and perfectly acceptable instant coffee from the corner shop.

  ‘It was either coffee or death by cyanide,’ Midnight said as she turned and punched in the code for her own drink. ‘I thought coffee would be kindest.’

  ‘I think I prefer the cyanide. Hand it over and stop hogging it all for yourself.’

  Midnight laughed. ‘Are you nervous about today?’

  ‘About the interview? Of course not,’ Phoebe lied. ‘How hard can it be?’

  ‘What’s your presentation on?’ The machine whirred into life as it prepared Midnight’s drink, and she was distracted for a moment as she watched the milk squirt in with a hiss.

  ‘Presentation?’ Phoebe asked in a dazed voice, suddenly feeling as if her legs had been replaced by jelly replicas.

  ‘You did know they’d want one, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, of course…’

  Midnight turned to Phoebe and raised her eyebrows. Phoebe’s lie crumbled instantly.

  ‘Well of course I bloody didn’t!’ she said. ‘What am I going to do?’

  Midnight shrugged carelessly. ‘You’ll have to write one.’

  ‘This morning?’ Phoebe squeaked. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t think to tell me about this until now!’

  ‘Hang on a minute, how is this my fault? I thought you’d checked the application pack about a million times. At least, every time I’ve seen you this week you’ve had your nose buried in it.’

  Phoebe took a scalding gulp of her coffee and winced. ‘I’m sorry… you’re right, of course. So why don’t I know?’ She mentally went through the interview paperwork now sitting on her dresser at home. She was as certain as she could be that there was no mention of a presentation. Had she somehow, despite her best efforts, managed to miss that bit? Had there had been a page missing? Whatever the answer, nothing was going to help her now.

  ‘Deep breath… Okay… So I have to write one this morning.’ She looked up at Midnight, who nodded acknowledgment to a male colleague who was hanging his coat on a peg. ‘What can I write about?’

  ‘Write about toys.’

  ‘Brilliant! Write about toys…’ Phoebe tried to rally her muddled thoughts into some sort of order. Toys was a rather vague and obvious subject area. What could she write about toys that would really fire them up? She supposed, anyway, that they would more likely want something incorporating promotions and PR and toys. She had no visual aids, no notes, no plan of any kind and her interview was straight after lunch. She would have to work for the whole morning too, down on the main shop floor at ground level, Steve’s favourite hunting ground, so no opportunity to sneak off and write something.

  ‘What if I do something about enthusiasm and how that’s like fifty… no, seventy-five percent of the battle when it comes to promotions?’ Phoebe said, brightening as the thought occurred to her. ‘Hearts and minds, you know?’

  ‘Sounds amazing. What are you going to do? A little song and dance number for them?’

  Phoebe opened her mouth and then closed it again. Midnight took a sip of her coffee and continued to eyeball Phoebe as she waited for a reply.

  ‘I’ll do a rap!’

  Midnight grinned. ‘Oh. My. God! I so wish I was in on that interview panel! Please, please, do the rap for me now!’

  Phoebe gave her a sheepish smile. ‘You’re going to have to help me write it first.’

  Throughout the morning, Phoebe and Midnight threw lines across the shop floor at each other and Phoebe wrote down the most promising ones, trying to get them into some form of rhythm and rhyme. What had started out as a stupid and desperate idea began to look less so. It was even becoming fun. Phoebe wondered whether the humiliation she had envisaged might actually give way to triumph. Nobody else’s presentation would be quite as original as hers, she was sure, and even though the thought of the performance had her running for the toilet every time it popped into her head, perhaps thinking outside the box (oh, yeah, she watched The Apprentice, she knew the buzzwords of success) could win her that job after all.

  At lunch, Phoebe watched with some regret as Midnight finished off her chicken and sweet chilli wrap from the Bounty. Usually, the days when she got to fetch one of Stav’s legendary lunches from the local deli instead of her own paltry attempts at making sandwiches were a highlight of her week. Today, she had hoped that it would encourage at least some appetite in her, but she had picked at the edges and given up after two mouthfuls. She was often plagued by migraines if she skipped meals. Today, there was no way she could eat and she just hoped the adrenaline she was running on would be enough to see her through the next hour or so.

  ‘I think it’s more or less finished,’ Phoebe said, turning her attention back to her notepad as she chewed on the end of a pen.

  ‘I think you’ve got bigger balls than Steve going in with that,’ Midnight mumbled through a mouthful of chicken and rocket.

  ‘I don’t have much choice, do I? I really need to know how you knew about the presentation, and I didn’t.’

  ‘You have to wonder if someone in HR did it on purpose.’

  Phoebe threw her a questioning look.

  ‘You know, maybe one of the other candidates is a mate or something, so they sabotaged everyone else’s pack…’

  ‘Great. I feel so much more confident now you’ve planted that little seed of doubt.’

  ‘Could happen.’ Midnight shrugged.

  ‘So how did you find out it was part of the interview if no-one else knew?’

  ‘I’m not saying no-one else knew. It’s just a hypothesis, you know? Anyway I heard Valerie Cox mention it to Steve the other day.’

  ‘Valerie Cox is going for it? She never said… bloody hell, she’s good and Steve actually likes her.’

  ‘Luckily for you, the decision isn’t Steve’s to make. You’ll be okay.’

  Phoebe chewed her pen and read over the page again. ‘Perhaps it’s a blessing in disguise,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘My mum always says things happen for a reason.’

  ‘So long as the reason isn’t someone else getting the job…’ Midnight crammed the last of the wrap into her mouth and chewed with a thoroughly contented look that reminded Phoebe of an alpaca she had once seen at the zoo as a kid. ‘Anyway,’ Midnight continued as she swallowed the last of it, ‘you’d better get your interview kit on, hadn’t you?’

  Phoebe glanced up at the clock. ‘Yep. I’ll be back in a tick.’

  She reached for the carrier bag stowed under her seat and left Midnight to stand guard over her magnum opus while she went off to get ready. She had finally decided to go with a suit regardless of what anyone else was doing and then at least she would look the part, even if she didn’t exactly feel it. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been so nervous… hang on, yes she could. It was her first date with Jack at Christmas. She had been like a puppy on bonfire night and that had turned out alright in the end, hadn’t it? More than alright. She was happier now than she’d been in a long time. Besides, she told herself, nerves were good, they would make her alert, focused, hungry for success…

  By this point, she found herself standing in front of the large mirrors that lined the walls of the ladies toilets, having no recollection of arriving there. She was obviously more nervous than she thought, and that was bad enough. She stared at herself and let out a deep breath. Another one in… another one out… Just like the stress counsellor had taught her. Get it together, Clements.

  She focused her mind on positive thoughts: how pleased and proud Jack would be. She tried to picture his face if she could take home the news that she had got this promotion. The key he had given her last week had meant a lot more than he was letting on. He played it cool for her sake; they had discussed her moving in before and she had insisted that it was too soon. But, in truth, that was only part of it. She wanted it almost as much as he did. She felt so comfortable in his world that she had no doubt their bond would only strengthen.

&nbs
p; The truth was that Phoebe was financially embarrassed. Her debts were so big and her pay-cheque so small that she felt she would be a burden to him. He already had a five-year-old daughter to support; she wasn’t about to add to his worries. If she ever moved in she would pay her way and, right now, she wasn’t in a position to do that.

  Reaching into her bag, she pulled out a bundle of clothes. But as she unfolded them, she went cold. Her gym kit? What the hell?

  She threw the leggings and t-shirt to one side and dug deeper into the bag. All that came out were her manky old trainers. In a ridiculous and futile gesture she tipped the bag upside-down and shook it. A forlorn flake of mud floated out into the sink below. Surely she hadn’t been so half-asleep this morning that she’d grabbed the wrong bag on the way out? If only she’d invested in a proper suit cover, with a zip and hanger and everything, as her mum had suggested, this would never have happened. What had she been thinking, packing a suit in a carrier bag? She needed a slap.

  The irony was that although her gym kit often came into work with her in this bag, it wasn’t often that she actually made it there in the end, usually succumbing to offers of food or alcohol (usually both) from Jack instead. Her mother had commented only the previous week that she thought Phoebe was ‘filling out a little’, which was her not-so-subtle way of telling Phoebe she was getting fat. She had replied, in a rather outraged tone, that she weighed barely more than one of Stav’s meat and potato pies and that her mother really ought to keep her damaging opinions to herself. Did she want her only daughter to develop an eating disorder? Her mum had looked suitably horrified and spent the rest of her visit mumbling about how she was only trying to be helpful and had Phoebe’s best interests at heart. On a different day, Phoebe might have agreed. There had been a flurry of gym activity in January, part of her decision to shake up her life, which had gradually dwindled in frequency; a combination, she supposed, of settling down, of contentment, of lack of time and sheer laziness.