Read Online Original Cyn by Sue Margolis - Free Book Online Page B

you’re good I’ll bring you some apple later on.” God, she was treating him like a person, as if he really understood. The table was in a major thoroughfare, which meant Morris would get lots of attention from people passing by. It was only when he got bored or frightened that he started his mad chatter. Of course everybody at PCW knew about Keith’s mynah bird and nobody would have found Morris’s perfect imitation of Keith moaning on about needing a shag anything other than hysterically funny. It was the fact that Morris tended to do his impersonations at the shout that eventually drove people mad.
    Cyn was thirty when she joined PCW, so, like Chelsea, she was a fair bit older than the other junior copywriters. After university she did an internship at the
Daily Mail,
but quickly came to the conclusion that spending days stalking adulterous game show hosts wasn’t for her.
    When the
Mail
offered her a full-time job, she turned it down and spent four years nannying in Europe and Australia. Finally she got the nightmare job in Hong Kong.
    By the time the two youngest Clydesdale children had started school, Mimi was quite happy for Cyn to work part time for other families, as long as she was there to pick the children up from school.
    It was around this time that Cyn’s interest in advertising began. She had found some extra nanny work during school hours, but not enough to keep her occupied. With time on her hands she started reading. When she got fed up with books, she would flick through magazines. She realized that when she read magazines she always stopped to study the advertisements. It was the same when she watched TV. Instead of going out to make a cup of tea when they came on, she stayed to watch. She found herself analyzing bland soap powder or toothpaste commercials, trying to work out precisely why they were so successful. She found herself staring up at billboards, criticizing the slogans and thinking up ways they could be improved.
    Eventually Cyn decided she wanted to come home and find a job in advertising. But she refused to leave the Clydesdales’ children until she had found a replacement nanny. It wasn’t hard. Marcia, an old friend of Barbara’s whose husband had just left her, was desperate for “a fresh start” and was looking for a nanny-housekeeper job abroad. Marcia, who was in her late fifties, had raised four children of her own and was endlessly patient, loving and maternal. She flew out for an interview. Within five minutes the children were jumping all over her. The Clydesdales hired her on the spot. Cyn stayed on an extra month to help with the changeover, and the last she heard Marcia was still there and had no plans to come home.
    Cyn’s interview at Price Chandler Witty hadn’t gotten off to a good start. It was a scorching hot day and she had decided to wear her new Monsoon flip-flops, which matched her pink skirt. Before she left, she had painted her nails and moisturized her legs and feet, which were tanned from having spent a week sunbathing in her parents’ back garden. She’d bought the cream in Selfridges. A woman at one of the cosmetics counters had seen her looking at it and had then spent a solid ten minutes rubbing it into various bits of Cyn’s person in order to demonstrate how richly nourishing and rehydrating it was. Of course by then, after all the trouble the woman had gone to, Cyn had felt compelled to buy it—even though she thought it had a rather tacky feel to it.
    It was only on the long walk from the tube to the office that she realized that all the pavement dirt was sticking to her feet. When she arrived they were nearly black. There wasn’t time to clean herself off in the ladies’ room, so she spent the entire interview trying to hide her feet under the chair.
    If that wasn’t enough, Messrs. Price, Chandler and Witty—who were playing on one of the pinball machines when she arrived and greeted her with “we are so totally chilled out”