Mandy reached up to the motor-home door and tried to insert the key. The lock was rusted and the key didn’t fit. Tears pricking at Mandy’s eyes. Her school motto so long ago had been:
‘Ravenscrag girls keep trying until they succeed’ and Mandy had been Head Girl.
She tried again. It was difficult to see where the key should go. Sandwiched between two bushy trees, the motor home would have been in the shade even if it hadn’t been getting dark.
It had definitely been a bad key day, if there was such a thing. Handing the keys of her home back to the local building society had been the single worst moment in her life. As soon as she’d parked her car outside the building society premises, Mandy had felt that all their eyes had been on her. The walk from the car to the cashier’s desk had been the longest walk of her life.
“I’ve been told by the court that I must hand in the keys to my house,” she said simply.
The lady behind a desk, middle-aged, comfortable and understanding had smiled sympathetically, knowing Mandy wanted to get away as soon as possible.
“They’ll change the locks anyway the woman said, but thank-you.”
Dropping the keys on the counter, Mandy had retreated as fast as possible back to her car. She was determined not to shed tears of anger and frustration in front of the clerks in the building society. Tears were a luxury that could come later.
The keys to her car were next but the salesman who accepted them hardly gave Mandy a glance. She left him gazing dolefully at his sales figures for the month on his computer. By the look on his face, his job was likely to be on the line soon too. Mandy, whose fashion business had gone past six months previously, felt no sympathy, not because he didn’t deserve it but because she now felt all emotion had been wrung out of her body.
The final set of keys on this bad key day were handed to her by her new employer Rick and were those she was now trying to use to open the old and rusty motor home that came with her new job in motor-home sales.
There had been a long queue of applicants for the job. Mandy reckon she’d got the motor-home sales job because she was willing to accept a wage way below anybody else. Probably, her wages would be illegal, if her accommodation hadn’t been part of the package.
As soon as Mandy had explained she was homeless, Ruarc, the scruffy owner of Ruarc O’Novelty Motorhome Sales to the West Country, England had looked up with interest, sucked on his cigar, picked up his internal phone and told Gladys, his secretary, to send the rest of the applicants home. Mandy could see Gladys passing on the news to the other applicants, smoothing down her far too short and tight skirt and chewing nonchalantly on her gum.
“Jobs gone!” Mandy heard her say.
Gladys didn’t care about the applicants, she didn’t care about the job and she didn’t care to make any sort of effort. She knew her job was secure as long as her skirts were short and she didn’t object when Ruarc brushed against her as they passed in the narrow corridor of the motorhome that served as his office. Times have been good and times had been bad. Ruarc, always somehow seemed to survive.
Perhaps his business was shady. Perhaps it was not. The most important thing to Gladys in these credit crunch days was that Ruarc paid her wages at the end of the week so she could fund the lifestyle of her out-of-work husband Fred whose main occupation and aim in life was persuading the Social Security that he was incapable of work.
With a scrape, the motorhome key slipped into the lock, the door swung open and the stale air smelling of damp curtains and furnishings wrapped itself around Mandy like probably Ruarc wanted to.
But that was tomorrow’s problem and Mandy, exhausted, climbed up into the motorhome, pulled her backpack in behind her and surveyed her new home in the gloom.
