another lazy Sunday

Uninspired and dozy today. All I've done creatively is my homework for this week's class: a character study based on a short briefing...

Maria

Maria is forty-six. If anybody asks her about her age, she says "early forties".

When people meet her, they sense energy, busyness, and - for some - brittleness. She is rarely still. When she's sitting down, her feet are always on the move, her eyes flicker on your face and over your shoulders, and she keeps pushing her hair back behind her left ear.

She's a sales rep in the photocopier rental industry.

She has long fingernails, and they're strikingly convex in cross section. They're strong: she taps them in rhythmic arpeggios on table tops, desks, filing drawers, and photocopiers when she's talking to people. She does this unconsciously.

Sometimes, for no apparent reason, she'll feel suddenly nervous, and she'll get sweaty under her arms: she'll worry about her sweat showing, and that will make her sweat more. When this happens, she has to go and sit outside, or open a window and feel the cool air on her neck.

When she sits in her company car after a client meeting, she'll make notes in her notebook, with the radio turned up very loud and tuned to a station playing music that's much too young for her. As she writes, she chews relentlessly through the caps of the cheap biros her company supplies. There's something comforting about the shredded plastic against her tongue, and something satisfying about that moment when the cap cracks and collapses into shards and dribble: it reminds her of spring evenings thirty years ago, when she studying for her school exams, when she was in love, and happy. But the chewing sometimes gives her headaches.

Business hasn't been great the last couple of years, but she still buys the best department store clothes she can: she chooses conservative colours, shortish skirts, and jackets that accentuate her bust. She always buys stuff that she can mix and match with her existing wardrobe - she's had the same basic look for years. The younger male reps find her attractive, but they're wary of the way that she vibrates with energy, and they can't read her. A lot of people find that talking to her makes them unaccountably anxious. Younger women think she's a bit odd, a bit bogus - "all shell, with nothing inside", as one of them had said bitchily at the Christmas party.

In her professional life, she thinks she should always look her best - especially as everyone else in this job is so much younger and - she thinks - more confident than her. She seems to spend a lot of time leaning over washbasins in motorway service station toilets, repairing her makeup - powder, lipstick, eyelashes - in bad lighting conditions. Her hair is beautiful: a deep chestnut colour, thick but pliable, and with the healthy sheen beloved of shampoo advertisers. Sometimes, before a meeting, she'll give it a good brush, and imagine herself as one of those hair-tossing, white-toothed bimbos who witter on about 'polyceramides' and 'hypoallergenic root proteins'.

New clients sometimes find her a bit odd, over the top, especially when she marches into their office with her face and lips shining glossily, her eyes bright, her hair 'volumised', her breath smelling of freshly-crushed peppermint, and trailing behind her an intense wake of strong perfume.

Her address book has 247 names in it. 212 of these are work contacts. She's probably in regular touch with 30% of the rest of them - mum, sister Anne, and the rest of the family for Christmas and birthdays. Her two best friends are Jill and Sandra, both of whom she knows from her first job. They meet up every two months and get throwing-up drunk together at a nightclub. They are usually twice the age of the rest of the clientele.

She's not 'with' anyone. In fact, she hasn't been out with a man since that bastard Derek. That was three years ago.

Sometimes, strangers - supermarket checkout women, petrol station attendants, dry cleaning shop staff - find her arrogant and impersonal. At other times, she has a softer, troubled, on-the-brink-of-tears look in her eyes, which makes people want to pat her shoulder and tell her that 'everything's OK, relax'