gamine: part 1

No one has asked Gamine what she wanted to be for at least three days, if not 4. This strikes her as bizarre as it was almost all she thought about: a funny symmetry between your early childhood and your early 20s. Funny peculiar not funny haha. Generally, Gamine wants it all: a boyfriend and a job, or even better, a girlfriend and a career. Specifically, this week, she wants to work in telly. 

There is a man who works in telly (specifically the BBC) that comes into the pub a lot. Afflicted with the painfully transparent aspiration to become a regular, Gamine found him uniquely unappealing- preferring regulars who were there because they were alcoholics, and knew you were there because you are paid to be. Gamine was careful not to romanticise transaction. Last night ‘BBC’ had ‘liked’ her on Hinge- her presence on the app betraying her painfully transparent aspiration to have sex. Having met The Student on Hinge Gamine endowed it with a rare optimism, she hoped meeting someone else in the same ‘place’ would bring things ‘full circle’. It seemed to Gamine relationships, now, seemed to sort of spiral, like a DNA strand, never neatly starting nor ending. She was nostalgic for nice, complete circles. His proposition was neither surprising nor flattering to Gamine and so she decided it would at least be useful, he could be her in. 

BBC’s profile was as superficial as she suspected he was. It confirmed he was of a tolerable age, worked in TV and liked a drink. One could have gathered from Hinge, for example, that he smoked, but not that he did so unconvincingly, pacing the moat of the pub with his arm stretched behind him, as if trying to run away from his own fag. He oozed a repulsive but promising, strictly professionally, level of privilege, not helped by maleness, but then very little is. Were they meant to meet? They had, double, matched. She wondered if algorithms were simply a modern extension of fate, for if a higher power (the teletubbies sun?) is controlling our future, surely it would have to intervene in the landscape these things now play out. Or were they doing the very opposite, presenting us only with what we are predicted to want. Are we self prophesying and then self fulfilling, voiding any of the subversion so integral to real romance. Was Hinge the higher power, or did the higher powers use Hinge? Something was going very badly wrong because Gamine certainly didn’t want a man that was emasculated by his own fag. She hovered over the X. Only to be polite really.

Gamine knew people fucked their way to the top but she could barely stand to hold eye contact with this particular man, and while she acknowledged those things (fucking and eye contact) were not mutually exclusive, the logistics would prove difficult. Saltire, her best friend, always said you could tell if you fancied someone if you didn’t mind the idea of their genitals in your mouth. Saltire was a very levelling influence on Gamine. She definitely would mind. She also suspected she would, in fact, be fucking her way to the bottom, in which case she’d just end up working with someone you’d slept with, which from experience, is more of a bore, than anything more sinister. Gamine wondered what Claudia Winklemn would do, and then for balance, Gabby Logan.

People are forever saying you shouldn’t mix work with pleasure. Or was it leisure? This was necessary in the 1990s, as pleasure was undergoing a BOOM, along with babies and wars. Places as inherently unsexy as leisure centres or city beaches were Pleasure Parks and Pleasure Beaches. It was a different time when plastic was synonymous with fun. If you weren’t careful you might start enjoying your job. Recently, the whole concept of pleasure seemed to be undergoing a lapse in popularity, and bizarrely work was more popular than ever. Gamine wondered if it was some sort of post-ironic thing. In any case Pleasure, now, seems to have rescinded into its traditional sleazy- or worse, serious- dwelling. We had appropriated it from the Americans and now it was back in their lubed up hands. Now women have to ‘choose pleasure’. It all sounded like such hard work. There were whispers (taking the form of infographics) that the answer, to everything, was the 4 day working week. Yet Gamine’s first thought was the problems it would cause in terms of date night, as Thursday wouldn’t really be Thursday anymore, or Friday Friday, would it. 

After exploring a quick fantasy, in which BBC ran around doing all of her photocopying (her fantasies were indulgently paper-occupied), she was returned to reality by the inevitable realities of working with someone you’d slept with. Such as eating a packed lunch in front of them. This was such a deeply unbearable concept her finger did what could only be described as a small fit over the X, triple clicking, and forgot about the whole thing. Anyway, she was pretty sure she’d be excellent at working in telly, and there was nothing funny about being good at something. 

It was Freud that said all you need is Work and Love, but he also used to wank in taxis on the way to parties so as to achieve a ‘twinkle’ in his eyes. Gamine preferred Maybelline Lash Sensational for the same effect, although if she was to wank in a taxi it would be in a Fleabag-esque, and probably positively feminist. It was another thing she would get around to, first she would download Feeld and start writing her sitcom.