Back in January, I registered with an employment agency, and the charming consultant who interviewed me asked me what my ideal job was.

I described the job that I have now been doing for the last seven months, and she didn’t just find it for me, she created it, by telling her Director about me and my unusual penchant for ISO 9001.

By mid-August, the company was fully accredited, but there were still lots of things for me to do, so my contract was extended to the end of October, and now it’s finally up and I have to leave.

Frankly, they’ll have to drag me out of here kicking and screaming, this afternoon, because I’ve had the most fantastic time. There have been frustrating moments and some of it has been hard work, but I have really, really enjoyed both the work and the company. I realise how lucky I am to have been doing my ideal job with such fun, friendly and intelligent people, for these last few months. I am gutted to be leaving.

1. Service – Friendliness, communication skills, waiting time.
2. User interface – can you work out how to order/find your way around the restaurant or the menu.
3. Accuracy of order – did you get what you asked for?
4. Niceness of food
5. Toilets
6. Value for money
7. Drinks – quality, variety, price.
8. Décor and ambience
9. Miscellaneous – hot flannels, mints with the bill, and other unexpected niceness
10. Gout [absence of] – the mood of the persons involved in the meal experience, and other influencing factors. This to be referred to as giving them the benefit of the gout.
11. Choice – diversity and interestingness of menu.
12. Location – i.e. not in Slough.

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Sometimes, the “I” that I write with doesn’t feel very much like me. Writing has become a performance, and is no longer either fluid or truthful. It’s not that what I write is a lie, but that it doesn’t get very close to the bone. Writing is now a large-scale social interaction, and doesn’t feel like a one-to-one conversation anymore.

If I was still writing for an unknown audience, I would be telling you that the two biggest topics on my mind at the moment are birth and death. I sat through the funeral service of someone I didn’t know on Monday, and felt that it wasn’t being done thoroughly enough. No-one should be reduced to a cobbled-together eulogy and a single meaningless hymn. But let’s not pretend we are celebrating someone’s life, whilst comforting ourselves with the assumption that that person wanted to die.

And why would anyone want to die? Reunion with one’s loved ones is a vain hope, a fairytale. After death, what can there be? I see it as like powder dissolving in water: becoming part of the solution. Yet I still have firm ideas about my ashes being buried or scattered in a particular place, as though that will make a difference to me by then. I still want certain songs to be played, and certain words to be said. My only deviation from my nihilist view of death is this: if you say a prayer over my body, I will haunt you.

In the office today, someone became a grandmother for the first time. We bought pink champagne and baby clothes, and our voices softened, and everyone stood around with their heads tilted to one side, and big soft smiles on their faces. We’re all expected to join in with this burst of emotion about a stranger’s child. If you don’t join in, it’s assumed that you’re one of those hard-headed baby-hating women, with no feminine emotions.

The older generation slowly disappears, and the middle generations look to the youngest with expectant raised eyebrows, knowing perfectly well that if any of us was actually to announce that we were pregnant, the grown-ups would find reasons to shake their heads about it. It wouldn’t be the right time. We don’t have enough money, stability, security. And really, what possible rational reason is there for having a child? I can only see it as a purely sentimental decision, or a non-decision: nothing but an inability to act against our basest instincts.

With my head, I see that.

I got married when I was 20, to my brother’s best friend. His name (the husband’s, that is; not the brother’s) is Kurt, and he’s a policeman. That is, I suppose you’d still refer to him generally as a policeman, although after 20 years on the force, he’s a bit more than that. I’m proud of him, and I think I’ve supported him well since we got married. It was a long time ago, now, but I can remember fancying him from the moment I met him, and I still do now.

We always knew that he would have a career and I would not, although we didn’t rush straight into having a family. Our daughter, Gail, is ten years old, so I worked for a good few years before taking a maternity break. Most of our friends had families much earlier than us, but we weren’t ready to be tied down by having children. As a result of that, and the fact that Kurt has been really successful in the police force, we have a much nicer house than most of our friends, and we’ve been on more interesting holidays. We’re also in a position to spoil Gail a little bit, and she won’t ever have any brothers or sisters, so she doesn’t have to compete, either for our attention or our resources. I’d describe myself as utterly contented with my life so far; at least, as far as last Saturday night.

Occasionally, I go out with the girls from work. It’s usually a nice meal in town, or sometimes a trip to a show, up in London. We hire a minibus and get all dressed up, and have such a scream. Last Saturday, for a change, we went out in the next town. The temp who was working with us suggested a nightclub, that she said we would enjoy, because it has a great 80s disco, and we’re all getting on a bit, you know. There were six of us: Joanne, tall and blonde, in her jeans and cowboy boots; Emily and Ashleigh, petite and blonde, in their designer stuff; Caroline and Liz, both ever-so-slightly goth; and me. I reckon I’m the plainest of the bunch.

The club was great, it had comfortable booths, and the floor wasn’t sticky; I remember discos as being far more tacky than that. There was waitress service to the tables, which was pretty cool. Before the disco started, there was a sort of cabaret act, so we had a good laugh at that. Then the tables were cleared away, and the disco started. We were pretty drunk by then, so the empty dancefloor held no fear: we launched ourselves into the open space, shaking our booty to the sounds of Kylie and Madonna, laughing our heads off and feeling like teenagers again.

We weren’t alone up there for long; the floor was packed, all ages, all bright and beautiful, bouncing to the music. We reckoned we were probably among the oldest in there, and possibly the drunkest too, which would explain the buzzing cloud of blokes, attracted, perhaps, by our sophistication and evident maturity. Caro said afterwards that it was only because we were so pissed, but I could tell she was secretly flattered by all the attention from little shaven-headed scrotes.

Joanne was pulling them off her arms, and they were springing back like Velcro spiders. Ashleigh and Liz put their arms around each other and pretended to be lesbians; pretty short-sighted, as a measure for getting rid of horny blokes, don’t you think? I haven’t been in the midst of such a heaving, sweating mass of hormones and alcohol for years and years and years. It was ace.

We all pulled. Even me. I wasn’t trying, or anything, just jigging around, having a laugh with Joanne; and then the next minute, this guy has his arms round me, and I’m dancing with him, and he’s looking into my eyes, and smiling at me, and then we’re kissing, tongues and everything, kissing like teenagers who are in love. I mean, you just don’t kiss like that after eighteen years of marriage, I’m telling you.

I caught Joanne’s eye, and she shook her head at me – disbelief, I think. Or disapproval. I didn’t care. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be kissed like that, to have a man press his warm body against me, his hands digging into me a little bit, not quite enough to hurt, but plenty to make me feel wanted. I closed my eyes and let him kiss me, and then I opened my eyes, to check that it was really happening. Inside me, it felt like I was melting, dissolving; the way I felt was like blue ink dispersing in a cloud in a glass of water: stars and dreaminess and novelty.

Caro says I was kissing him for hours, and Liz barely spoke to me in the taxi home. We were all coming down from the energy of dancing and drinking that had given us such a high for a little while. I was so pleased with myself, to have hooked that big handsome bloke; and only slightly miffed that they had dragged me away from him.

I dropped my clothes on the floor and crawled into bed with my makeup still on. At lunchtime on Sunday, Kurt woke me up with a kiss on the forehead and a cup of tea. My eyes were heavy and sticky, difficult to open. As the hot tea flushed out the smoke and dirt from the night before, I realised what I had done, and I choked on my drink.

I put the tea down and pulled the covers back over my head. Go away, I said to Kurt, and it wasn’t his fault that I was unkind to him, but I couldn’t bear to talk to him. My head was aching heavily, and my memory was waking up faster than I wanted it to. I was seeing, or feeling, images of the night before. I was remembering how I had been kissed, and kissed back, and let that man touch me. He had told me his name, and I couldn’t even remember it. I could only remember his mouth.

You have to believe me, I’ve never done anything like that. I’ve been married for eighteen years, and all the time we’ve been together, we’ve been the most normal, sensible couple. We’ve done everything in the most conventional way, and it’s made us happy. What have I done, what have I done? Sobbing like a baby, dirty eyeliner-dyed tears, hoping Kurt and Gail had gone out somewhere, so they wouldn’t hear me, and I wouldn’t have to explain.

I feel as though I’ve betrayed everything, I’ve broken our perfectly good, functional, happy marriage, for no reason at all. I was drunk and stupid, I let a stranger touch me and kiss me, and I enjoyed it so much that I didn’t want to stop. When I think about it, my body gets flooded with pleasure, but I feel so guilty that it makes me sick.

I can hardly speak to Kurt, because I’m so frightened I’ll give myself away. And every time I look at Gail, I’m terrified I’ve done something that will ruin her life. I don’t know if I should confess to my husband or not. I don’t know how he will react, but I don’t know how I can possibly go on with this terrible secret inside me.

All my friends are talking about having babies; it must be the age we’re at, and also the fact that Geraldine got pregnant within about a week of getting married, last spring. She was the first of our group to do either, although I suspect that Mel might have been pregnant once; she’s always very secretive about her love life. But that’s a digression, another story.

When Gerry got knocked up, we were all thrilled. She’s been with her boyfriend for nine years already, and she was convinced he would never marry her. Then, all of a sudden, she’s obsessed with folic acid and baby names, and we all realised that we had grown up, without noticing it.

Personally, I’ve always said I didn’t want to get married or have children; I liked to think of myself as an independent type of girl, although I have actually been living with Charlie for a few years, and my stepmum tells me that motherhood is a defining experience that I shouldn’t miss out on. I don’t think he wants children, particularly; and I’m not sure he would be a very good dad. This is a horrid thing to think, and please don’t despise me for saying it, but he was abused as a child and I just don’t know how he would be around his own children. I guess I don’t entirely trust him. I don’t mean that I think he would be an abusive parent, but just that his own experience of family life wasn’t exactly normal. I don’t know how he would manage to create a stable and loving environment, when he never had one himself.

Ten days ago, Gerry was rushed into hospital. Actually, that’s gratuitous use of a cliché, and there’s no excuse for it. She wasn’t rushed, she got decorously into Mel’s car, and Mel drove her to the maternity unit in the nearest big town for her pre-booked appointment for a caesarean delivery. Gerry’s husband, Jack, was unavoidably out of the country, but he said there wasn’t much he could do anyway; Mel was there to hold her hand, and it wasn’t like there would be much of the pushing and breathing business going on. Apparently he turned up shortly after the baby was all cleaned up and put to sleep, kissed Gerry, and went off to the pub with Charlie.

Gerry was kept in for a few days; apparently the op takes it out of you a bit, and she was a bit distressed. I didn’t go to see her in hospital, but as soon as she and the baby came home, I called in to her house after work. I was shocked by how awful she looked. She was still in bed, because her stitches were not healing very quickly, and it looked like she hadn’t washed her hair since she went to the hospital. The baby cried the whole time I was there, and Gerry looked like she wanted to cry as well. She put a brave face on, but she must have known how untidy and disorganised everything was. I offered to tidy up a bit, and Gerry looked even more upset than she had when I asked her where Jack was.

Apparently, Jack had hardly been home since the baby was born, and he was sleeping in the spare room. Gerry told me, trying to sound like she was justifying and defending him, that he needed his sleep, and the baby disturbed him. She admitted that it was difficult for her to wash and care for herself, never mind the baby, because of the painful wound across her stomach. The baby kept crying, a thin little wail, all the time. Gerry tried to jiggle him a bit, but I think every movement hurt her. I can get out of bed, she said, but I’m so tired.

While I was there, Jack came home. He called hello up the stairs, but he didn’t bother to come up.

I didn’t really want to leave her or the baby in that dirty, hungry state. She said that her mum lived too far away to come and help, and Mel was doing a lot but she had a job too. We don’t have room in our house for the two of them; I felt so helpless.

And still, the girls are talking about having babies. They’re assuming that, in this day and age, it’s just a matter of blooming for nine months, squirting the thing out under the protection of Modern Science, and reclining on a couch for a few weeks while their significant others run around after them. Their equation doesn’t include sedation or caesareans, wrinkled little walnuts of children who cry all the time, or partners with no interest in child-rearing. I realise now that I shall never have a child, because Charlie’s idea of the role of the father goes no further than wetting the baby’s head; the chores just don’t get done around here if I don’t do them, so it’s not really feasible, is it?