‘Curriculum Vitae’ by Mary Morrissy

1.

The shutter slaps open.

The hatch is on the return of a dim stairwell and George leans towards you filling the frame. You hand over your tickets. They’re cloakroom tickets in two colours, bedroom pink and primrose yellow. George scoops them up and sets them down on his side of the hatch and begins to count them as if he’s shuffling cards. He has a fat moist lower lip and long heavy blonde hair tied back in a louche ponytail.

‘Twenty-three,’ he shouts and the other ‘chef’ lifts the ladle and dips it into the huge cauldron that’s farting on the two-ring stove.

It’s your last table of the night. You set the tray down on the lip of the counter. George lays out the paper plates on his side. His assistant slops out a ladle of stew on each plate – it could be chicken or beef, no matter it always looks the same, a runny brown sludge with only the carrots identifiable. When seven plates have been filled George lifts them on to your tray, tosses down a bunch of plastic cutlery, and you totter down the stairs.

You walk into a cauldron of noise. On the stage a crooner does Elvis, late Elvis with the black sideburns, white suit and the hip rolls of fat. This one looks the part. A live band crashes behind him and he rubs his lips up against the microphone. It’s cabaret night at the Char-a-Bang, popular with gangs of women. It’s a huge barn of a pub with rows of trestle tables, covered with butchers’ paper. It’s midweek so only a third full but still boomingly noisy. There are three girls on tonight, like careful drivers at the bumpers, steering their large trays of slop between the tables in the dark.

You deliver your first tranche of plates and return to the hatch for a second trip. And then a third.

For the final time, you head for your table, the group of twenty-three ‘ladies’ who’re well oiled, swaying from side to side and clapping their hands. You set the tray down, lifting the plates, bowed out of shape by the liquid dinner, onto the table trying to avoid the lethal flash of the women’s charm bracelets and their false nails. In your adolescent heart you despise them. The loud lipstick, the permed hair, the brassy jewellery, the screeching that proves they’re having a good time but rings false to you. Their awful taste in music.

Thank God, soon you’ll be out of here. You turn away when someone tugs you on the sleeve.

‘Miss, Miss, you’ve left us short – Marie and Joanie didn’t get their dinners,’ a woman with blonde corkscrew ringlets shouts.

‘I only got twenty-three tickets,’ you shout back.

Twenty-three tickets, three tray runs.

You try counting heads again. The number at the table seems to have grown. Where did these extra people come from? Did they sneak in during the show without paying their admission?

You head back to the kitchen.

‘We’re two short on table twelve,’ you shout into the hatch. George appears.

‘You know the rule,’ he says, ‘no tickets, no dinner.’

‘Come on, George, it’s the end of the night.’

‘No tickets, no dinner,’ he repeats with his fat lip and glum eyes.

‘Please, George, what difference does it make? You’ll only throw it out, anyway.’

You think of going back to the table and how those women will turn on you, they’ll point their fingers and shove their powdered faces into yours. They’ll vent their rage because they’ve seen your disdain.

You turn away from the hatch and trail back down to the floor. But you can’t face it. You turn left by the toilets and take the back way out.

You quit your first job.

2.

Charlie Relihan looks like a grocer’s assistant in a mustard coat. But underneath he’s nattily dressed, white shirt speared at the collar, primly knotted tie, a three-piece suit – that’s for when he goes out to visit the reps. He’s beaky-looking, small watchful eyes, a sharp nose, thin hair dragged over his pate. Your job is to sit in the storeroom at a desk, filling requisition orders. Charlie’s mantra is – always look busy. You’re surrounded by shelves of stationery and supplies – order books, receipt jotters, typing paper and ribbons, pens, pencils, erasers, staples, paper clips, desk calendars. From time to time the door will open and someone – often a messenger boy or a secretary from the upper floors of City Hall – will enter and hand you a chit. You fill out their order, putting the stuff in a cardboard box, then you stamp the order and file it away in the book which Charlie checks when he comes back. Sometimes days can go by and no one comes. You learn how slowly time can pass. But on the bright side, you get to read – a lot. You’re three-quarters of the way through David Copperfield when Charlie ambushes you, coming back early one afternoon when you’re not expecting him.

‘What are you doing?’ he asks.

You can see he’s worked up. It’s the first time you’ve seen him like this. ‘I’m reading,’ you say.

‘Oh no,’ he says tragically, ‘oh no, my dear, you’re not here to read. No, no, no. We can’t have that at all. What would happen if the City Manager walked in and caught you. . . reading.’

You can just see it – the City Manager coming down to your basement hidey-hole for a pencil sharpener.

‘But there’s nothing to do.’

‘There’s never nothing to do,’ Charlie says. He points to the metal shelves that line the rooms, everything stacked neatly and labelled. You eke out twenty minutes every day stocking them.

You want to ask how many times can you tidy the shelves but you realize you’re on shaky ground. Charlie has already said you have a future in Stores. You’re not quite sure what that means. You’re pleasant to the customers, if that’s what he means. Hell, you’re glad of them, a new face, an idle conversation to parse the day. It’s a temporary job, but still you want to keep it till the summer ends. So you say nothing. But even so you can sense Charlie’s immense disappointment in you, even though you think he’s pathetic, all dressed up in his Sunday best, when he’s just a glorified shopkeeper. He’s seen through your fake compliance to your youthful cynicism.

You learn a new skill. Reading in a drawer.

3.

The department store’s electrical counter is an obsessive’s dream. It is divided into gradated compartments like a tradesman’s toolbox, containing fuses, bulbs, fairy lights, batteries, coils of flex, light switch plates and plugs. Mr Nolan is your supervisor. He dresses in a suit and calls all the staff by their surnames. So you become this new creature, a lady who has strayed from prim Victorian literature, Miss Beale. When he’s training you he’s very keen to tell you that in the trade, plugs are considered male and sockets – ‘the receivers,’ he says coyly – are female. He fingers the prongs of a three-pin plug. ‘See, Miss Beale, a threesome.’

4.

You see the limitations of being a shop girl. You save. You go to college late. You learn to write for a living.

5.

Just say yes. That is the freelance life. You write about bars, catering equipment, drug addicts, traditional musicians, rare medical conditions, job training schemes for the young. You cover court hearings about TV licences and parking fines, waiting for someone prominent to fuck up. You say yes because you’re afraid to say no. It’s a bit like love that way. You meet a schoolfriend, Sylvia, in the detergent aisle of the supermarket and she asks what you’re doing. When you describe the above she says pityingly, ‘Could you not get into journalism?’

6.

Your first commissioning editor, older than you by a decade, has policeman’s feet – large and flat. Not that they’re out of place. He’s a mountainy man, tall, with big hands and a scored face that registers a narrow range of emotion. From mild surprise to mild disdain. His physique suggests he should be out stalking the fields, threshing hay, manhandling beasts. Instead he’s crouched over a typewriter that looks like a toy in his hammy hands. Others tell you he’s capable of calculation and cunning but you can’t see it. He is the only boss who ever paid you a direct, open-faced compliment. ‘You have more talent than anyone I’ve seen come into this profession.’ You remember that in years to come; it gives you solace even though it was probably a chat-up line.

7.

Your flatmate’s boyfriend, Vinny, gets a job dishwashing in the Sultan’s Cave, a small basement restaurant that serves Indonesian food – little bowls of rice and fish and peanut sauce which goes with everything. Vinny puts his back out after three days and not wanting to lose the job, he asks you to deputize for him. Your freelancing work is drying up, so you say yes, as you always do, to ready money. You stand in the corner of the kitchen on a duckboard in front of the deep aluminium sink with the hose-like tap and you spray and scrub. You wear a white plastic apron and a pair of white wellingtons. You learn to develop tunnel vision; otherwise you’d be overwhelmed by the volume of work beyond your peripheral vision. You look only to the left where the in-tray is, leaning towers of smeared plates and bowls. Spray, rinse, drain; spray, rinse, drain. You hear the tantrums and the merriment of the chefs at your back but you don’t turn around from your dank little position. It is the wettest job you’ve ever done. You go home damp on the inside as if you’d been standing in an eight-hour rain shower.

8.

One day on a payphone in the hallway of your flat, you’re holding for an interview for a piece that’s right up against deadline when an emergency operator intercepts the call asking you to get off the line. Your panic boils over into rage. Does she not understand, you’re about to do a vital interview, the piece is due in three hours, you won’t be able to pay the rent if you don’t get this. . . The operator says, ‘Madam, this is an emergency’, and the line goes dead.

9.

You slide electoral notifications into brown envelopes, sealing the pre-addressed envelopes with your tongue. You remember the gummy taste, which is impossible to shift, and the sawdusty feel of your mouth. Kissing democracy is short-lived.

10.

You start dating your discerning commissioning editor once he has left his wife. He is scrupulous about not playing favourites so your work drought worsens. You decide to downsize and become a proofreader.

11.

For the first time you have a woman boss. Mrs Wolfe is a small, nervily energetic woman with a smoker’s cough. Everything about her seems congested, as if she can’t breathe or work fast enough to meet some urgent demand out there. Her bald husband is a cruel-faced man with thick glasses. He could be an ex-con – the lines on his face are deep as scars yet he has kind eyes. He sticks to the background, tending the machines, and smelling of oil. A silent partner. With Mrs Wolfe there’s no other way to be. Her exasperation reverberates. On the phone, in frequent dressings-down on the floor. Even when she’s alone, there’s a constant muttered monologue of incredulity.

You’re employed as a proofreader. It’s a small printing company and to get to the office upstairs you have to pass by the assembly line, where Hayley and Donna and a middle-aged matron, Mrs Burley, collate brochures for aluminium windows and pack flyers for jobbing plumbers. Hayley and Donna are your age. Cheerful, good-time girls, who have hairdresser’s conversations about boyfriends and holidays and their plans for the weekend.

Mrs Wolfe likes you which is frightening. Particularly when you make your first mistake. You miss three literals in a boiler instruction manual and the whole job has to be done again. You’re called into the office. Mr Wolfe looks at you with lamb’s eyes as you go in and you know you’re for the chop.

It would be a relief to be let go, to tell the truth. Mrs W’s histrionics are predictable only in that you know they’re coming, but you never know exactly when. But she has other plans. Against her better judgement, she decides to be merciful. She sees something in you, she says My god, what is it? You’re demoted to the assembly line where you discover Donna is exactly as you thought but Hayley is a painful introvert trying, like you, to pass. You go out with them and get mildly drunk in a rowdy bar. They invite you to go dancing and try to fix you up. You don’t mention the commissioning editor. You believe in keeping work and personal life separate. (Where did you learn that?) The assembly line is pleasant, mindless. For the first time at Mrs Wolfe’s, you exhale.

She mistakes your placid contentment for a plucky response to reversal, and after a few months, rewards you with your proofing job back. The old order is restored. Hayley and Donna drop you. Before you make another mistake, you leave.

12.

Questions you’re asked at the next interview:

Do you have a steady boyfriend?

Do you plan on getting married?

If so, will you have a baby?

What about your social life with the night work?

How do you feel about men swearing?

Paradoxically, this was your happiest workplace where men swore and you learned how to drink in a hurry.

13.

Proofing is teamwork. You work in twos – one to hold the copy, the other to taste it – i.e. to read it aloud. Reading outside the drawer, in other words. You work with Terry happily for several years until he’s promoted to supervisor and suddenly it’s all change. What was cheery slapdashery in an equal translates into casual contempt when he’s in charge. He’s always late. He arrives in on the run, throwing his jacket off, rolling up his sleeves, all business, as if you and others who have been covering for his absence are malingerers who need to be barked into shape. He is the circus master and this is a performance. You fixate on the spittle that gathers in the corners of his mouth, something you never noticed before. It’s not like he’s frothing at the mouth but you will him, silently, to wipe it away. You fear some day you’ll fish out a paper hanky and do it yourself. Wiping his eye, Dr Freud would call it. You’re amazed at how quickly you come to resent someone you thought of before as a mate. It’s because he imposes his chaos on you. You have enough of your own to be dealing with. You have a life outside that is going off the rails. You have moved on from the commissioning editor and now have a marriage shifting on its foundations, two failed pregnancies, a blameless husband who feels blamed.

Luckily, Terry moves on, up. In seven years, there are four other Terrys doing that job. Never you.

14.

You saw it once before – obsolescence – when printers were subsumed by technology. Next they come for the proofreaders. You’ve been replaced by a little key with your function – SPELL CHECK.

15.

You adapt, use your old skills to new purpose. Rebrand. You’re a copy editor now and Shirley’s your boss. She’s rake thin, with vivid lipstick, big teeth, and an exactitude about pronouncing her final dentals. Gushing is her default mode, but very soon she’s hauling you into her office to berate you over your attitude. She suspects you don’t ‘believe’ in the publication, a glossy women’s magazine peddling fashion, cookery and dissatisfaction to the housebound mother. She doesn’t say that, directly, of course. Instead she talks about you being too much of a stickler.

‘Wait till you have children, then you won’t be such a perfectionist,’ she says.

As if pregnancy were the ultimate corrective for whatever is perceived to be wrong with you. You’ve had your third miscarriage, but Shirley is blithely unaware of this and would probably still feel entitled to say what she does, even if she knew. You gulp and tell her this is what an editor should be – a perfectionist. It’s a job she’s never done and it shows in what she writes. But, unlike you, she’s acquired the skills necessary for the habitat – chief among them a coat of plumed camouflage. Her areas of willed incompetence are legion. She leaves huge, windy gaps and stands back, waiting for the conscientious to rush in. You’ve despised other bosses, but this one releases a kind of toxic gas slowly like a faulty appliance. You’ll choke so gradually that no one will notice you’re turning blue.

16.

This time it’s the copy editors they’ve come for.

17.

You go back to retail. Home of the middle-aged woman who’s reared her children, or looks as if she has. The supermarket chain is looking for personable females of a certain age – comforting, maternal presences with dexterous fingers and a passing acquaintance with a keyboard. You’re put on checkout. The symphony of bips and bleeps enters your brain. You hear it constantly like an annoying tinnitus; you wake out of dreams to it, it marks your time for you. Like life support. As is inevitable you meet people you know, most of whom are too polite to remark on what they consider your comedown to a lowly position. (Though apart from the noises, the job itself is pleasant, undemanding of your emotions, solitary yet social.) Your schoolfriend from the detergent aisle, Sylvia, appears again. She married a doctor and has gone platinum. You’re still dyeing your hair because Corporate says the customer doesn’t want to be served by someone who could be mistaken for a pensioner. Makes them look like exploiters. Sylvia leans in and asks a version of the question from thirty years previously. Piteously.

‘Did you have to give up on the journalism?’

You sat beside Sylvia at school. The nun who taught you had a club foot and a rolling walk like a listing ship. She looked as if she was about to drop into a curtsey, perhaps before an all-knowing god. Sister Doubting Thomas smiled all the time but there was steel in it. (Or was it to cover the pain of her short leg.) When she was about to skewer you, she smiled hardest. She notes that you don’t put your hand up in class, even while Sylvia beside you, is bobbing up and down and hissing ‘Sister, Sister’ at her, gagging to answer every question, though nine times out of ten she’s wrong. ‘Yet,’ says Sister Doubting Thomas, putting her hand in the wound, ‘you know the answer and won’t volunteer, you won’t share your knowledge.’ And that she says is a sin, the sin of intellectual pride.

You remember the film, The Nun’s Story, when Audrey Hepburn, the brightest student doctor in the class, is asked to fail her exam because her intellect threatens her less intelligent colleague. That, she is told, is her Christian duty. Does she fail the exam. Hell no!

Sylvia stands cradling her king prawns and bottle of dry white waiting for an answer. A doctor’s wife, she’s owed one.

‘I’m undercover here,’ you hiss, ‘doing an exposé on the sordid life of minimum wage workers in a multi-million Euro global franchise.’

Sylvia nods sagely.

‘Your secret is safe with me,’ she says and taps her nose. She was always a bit of a fool.

18.

Your ex-husband shows up at the checkout as if for some kind of reckoning. You haven’t met in over twenty years. He lives in another part of the country so you’re not expecting him to be in your world. It’s a shock. But what’s really shocking is not the strangeness, but the terrifying familiarity of him. Martin is thinner, grey where once he was russet, more melancholy – in comparison, you’ve cheered up.

‘What happened?’ he asks and fixes you with a brown gaze.

‘A global recession,’ you say lightly trying to neutralize the charged intimacy that comes with his question.

The intimacy of failure, or is it the failure of intimacy?

He treats you like you’re still his wife and a worry to him. Did I do this to you, is what he’s asking.

Your marriage was a see-saw like this. Who’s to blame, as if there could only be one. The three babies you didn’t have filled up all the recriminatory space between you. He broke the cycle, and your heart in the process, but someone had to. You don’t blame him. Not now. He replaced delivery with deliverance, gave you permission not to try again. Or not to fail again. He wept when he said he was leaving you; you had to comfort him. To make it less final, you promised one another that if you were both still free, you’d get back together again when you were old. By which you meant the age you are now.

‘How’s Angela?’ The woman you think of as his new wife.

‘Angela died,’ he says.

‘Oh, Martin,’ you begin but he shakes his head and you know not to continue.

A queue is forming behind him. Your supervisor, a sharp young woman with a navy suit, and a cash pouch under her arm, pauses by the till.

‘Is there a problem here?’

Not unless you call a fifty-seven-year-old bereaved man with a sliced pan, three apples, a pack of cheese singles and two beef burgers who’s about to weep, a problem.

19.

You come around to the customer side of the checkout. You steer Martin to a chair that’s left out for the elderly to take breathers. You remember your ancient youthful promise.

20.

Is this where it ends?

From issue #13: spring/summer 2022

About the Author
Mary Morrissy is the author of three novels, Mother of Pearl, The Pretender and The Rising of Bella Casey and two collections of stories, A Lazy Eye and Prosperity Drive. ‘Curriculum Vitae’ is from a third collection of short fiction.