Please Describe a Time

Please describe a time you helped someone take part in a creative activity.

Leila read the question again. It seemed designed for people who had already had the job they were applying for. She had helped Toby with a cardboard house. She had drawn a cat for Anushka, who said it was not purple enough. At fourteen she had painted a friend's face for a charity fair and got blue paint on the friend's mother, who had been wearing a coat that did not forgive it.

None of these seemed worth putting in a box with a limit of three hundred words.

She wrote: I am passionate about helping others express themselves.

Then she looked at it with such dislike that she shut the laptop.

“Done?” Toby asked.

“No.”

He was on the floor wearing one football sock and trying to remember where he had put the other.

“Then why'd you close it?”

“To stop it looking at me.”

The laptop belonged to college. Miriam had arranged a short loan after Leila explained that completing a form on her phone made every answer seem longer and less manageable. Leila had signed a sheet promising to return it with the charger. She had immediately put a label on the charger in case it tried to become one of theirs.

Toby found his sock under Mum's bag.

“You helped with my house,” he said.

“I know.”

“Write that.”

“It isn't exactly a workshop.”

“You made me do the roof myself.”

“Because you could.”

“Well.”

He put on the sock as though he had dealt adequately with both their problems.

Leila opened the laptop. She deleted passionate. She described the corner of the house that would not stay upright. How Toby had wanted her to do the whole thing and she had held the wall while he put on the tape. How the roof did not fit because he had measured the outside of the walls and forgotten the overhang he wanted. They had made another roof from the back of a cereal box.

I learned that it is not always helpful to fix something as quickly as possible, she wrote. Sometimes the person making it needs to find out what went wrong, and you can help them do that without taking it away.

She read the paragraph to Toby.

“You've made me sound quite difficult.”

“You were.”

“I was learning.”

“So was I.”

He considered this and allowed it to remain.

The next question asked why she wanted to work at the Mercer. That should have been easy. She wanted the smell of paper and paint, the white walls, the strange relief of being allowed to look closely at things. She wanted a reason to be in a place she liked. She wanted money she had earned herself.

She began with the exhibition of illustrated book covers. She explained that she had gone back after the school visit because one picture had looked different depending on how far away she stood. She wanted to help make that sort of experience less intimidating for people who thought a gallery was somewhere they needed special information to enter.

Then she added a sentence about being willing to learn the ordinary parts of the job: clearing materials, answering simple questions, arriving when expected. It was not as impressive as the first paragraph. It sounded more like work.

Mum came back before nine, earlier than usual because someone had swapped a visit with her. She read the answers while Leila stood by the window pretending not to watch.

“Do you want suggestions?” Mum asked.

“Only if they're good.”

“That's limiting.”

Leila sat on the edge of the bed. Mum pointed to a sentence in which Leila had used the word engagement twice.

“What does that mean here?”

“That children would be interested.”

“Then say interested.”

They went through the rest without turning it into a performance review. Mum found one place where Leila had accidentally made it sound as though the book-cover exhibition was still open. Leila corrected it. They checked the dates of the summer placement against the school calendar.

“There's an interview session if they shortlist me,” Leila said. “A group activity and some questions.”

“We can practise questions.”

“Please don't do an interview voice.”

“I have several voices you've never appreciated.”

Toby came out of the bathroom with wet hair and asked which one Mum used to get them to clear the floor. Mum told him that one was fully in service and could be demonstrated immediately.

At the address, she stopped reading.

“You put the hotel.”

“It's where we are.”

“Yes.”

“You don't have to make a face about it.”

“What face?”

“The one where you're pleased but trying not to make it a thing.”

Mum looked down at the laptop. “All right.”

There was a box offering an opportunity to mention access requirements for the interview. Leila wrote that she would be travelling by public transport and would appreciate the session's expected finish time. She did not explain the entire bus route. She had begun to understand that accurate and complete were not always the same demand.

She pressed Submit before bed. A confirmation message appeared, polite and impersonal. She took a screenshot in case the internet changed its mind.

For a few minutes she felt lighter. Then all the answers she should have written arrived at once.

“I should have mentioned the display boards,” she said.

Mum was putting the laptop back in its case. “Which display boards?”

“The ones I helped Mr Olson with.”

“You can mention them if they ask you to an interview.”

“What if that's the reason they don't?”

“Then they had unusually specific needs involving display boards.”

Leila laughed, though she still wanted to reopen the form.

The following day, the confirmation was the only message in her inbox that mattered. Everything else was a discount, a reminder or a notice from a website she did not remember joining. She checked at breakfast, between lessons and on the bus. By four she had decided that serious applicants probably did not check so often, which did nothing to stop her.

At the hotel, Nina was trying to repair a paper crown with a strip of clear tape. Anushka had been invited to a nursery party and wanted to wear the crown instead of the special dress Nina had washed the night before.

“Would you hold this?” Nina asked.

Leila took the crown. One of its points was bent almost flat. Anushka stood beside them with her hands behind her back, watching as if they were performing an operation.

“Do you want it straight?” Leila asked her.

“No. It has to bend. That's how you know which bit is the front.”

Leila moved the tape away from the bent point.

They repaired the split along the band. Anushka put it on and went to look at herself in the dark window.

Nina stretched her shoulders. “Thank you. She was beginning to lose faith in my engineering.”

Leila looked at the pieces of spare tape stuck to her fingers. Yesterday she would have considered the crown too small a thing to put in an application. Now she knew it was exactly the kind of thing her answer had been about.

She took out her phone, opened the confirmation one more time and then put it away. There was nothing new to read. There was a small girl waiting to be told whether her crown looked better sideways.

“It depends how royal you want to be,” Leila said.

“Very.”

“Sideways, then.”