Truly Madly Guilty by Liane Moriarty Read Free Book Online Page B

trousers, his pinstriped shirt. The kid probably hated the idea of an office job. He’d say, ‘No way, I’d feel like a trapped rat.’
    A rat pushing a lever to get cheese. Like those old experiments. Yesterday Sam had sat at his desk like a rat using his little finger to push the letter p on his keyboard and his thumb to push the spacebar, over and over, with a space in between each p , until his screen was filled with nothing but p p p p p p p p . He did that for maybe twenty minutes. Maybe even half an hour. He wasn’t sure. That had been his biggest achievement at work yesterday. A screen filled with the letter p .
    He watched the group of passengers streaming onto the ferry shaking their umbrellas, their faces grumpy and over it before the day had even begun. The kid probably didn’t realise that a white-collar worker could spend a whole day in his office doing nothing, literally sweet fuck-all, and still get paid for it. Sam felt himself break out in a cold sweat at the thought of how little he was achieving at work. He had to get something done today. This couldn’t go on much longer. He was going to lose his job if he didn’t find a way to focus his mind. He was still in his trial period. They could sack him without too much paperwork or stress. At the moment he was getting away with it because of his team. He had four tech-savvy, everything-savvy twenty-somethings reporting directly to him. They were all smarter than him. He wasn’t managing them, they were managing themselves, but that couldn’t go on forever.
    If Sam had had a blue-collar job, he would have lost it weeks ago. He thought of his dad. Stan the Man couldn’t go out to a plumbing job and just sit there staring into space, could he? He couldn’t mindlessly bang a spanner against a pipe for twenty minutes. If Sam had been a plumber then he would have been forced to focus and his mind wouldn’t be slowly unravelling, or whatever the hell was happening to him. Wasn’t there a great-aunt somebody or other on his dad’s side who’d had a (hushed voice) ‘nervous breakdown’? Maybe he was having one of those. His nerves were disintegrating, crumbling to dust like porous sandstone.
    The ferry lurched off, back across the harbour to deliver everyone to their jobs, and as Sam looked at his fellow passengers it occurred to him that he’d never really belonged. He wasn’t one of these corporate people. He’d always liked his work well enough, it was a relatively stimulating way to pay the bills, but there had been those times, as he stood at the front of the room with his PowerPoint presentation, for example, when he’d feel, just for a moment, like it was all an act, an elaborate act, like he was just pretending he was the ‘businessman’ his mother had always dreamed he would be. Not a doctor or a lawyer, a businessman . Joy had no idea what a businessman actually did all day, except that he wore a tie, not overalls, and his fingernails were clean, and that if Sam got good marks at school, which he had, then the glamorous life of business would be his reward. He could have insisted he do a trade like his father and brothers – his mother wasn’t domineering, just enthusiastic – but instead his teenage self had dopily, sleepily gone along with it, without ever really considering what he actually wanted, what would give him satisfaction, and now here he was, stuck in the wrong life, a middlingly good middle manager, pretending to be passionate about marketing energy drinks.
    So what? Suck it up. What percentage of people on this ferry felt passionate about their jobs? It wasn’t a God-given right that you would love your job. People said to Clementine all the time: ‘You’re so lucky to do what you love.’ She wasn’t grateful enough for that privilege. Sometimes she’d answer, ‘Yes, but I’ve always got the fear of wondering if I’m good enough.’ Her neuroticism about her music had always baffled and bugged him, just play the