by Danny King
I think about Andrew and all his constant complaints then I think about Carol at school. Carol is such a wonderful woman, just turned sixty and still as energetic as a humming bird.
She’s really upset she has to retire at the end of the year and almost cried when the children presented her with all the birthday cards they’d made for her in Art. I think she’s incredible. She’s been at that school since she was in her early twenties, almost forty years, and has taught children of some of the children she taught years ago, which is amazing, and in two or three instances, their grand-children.
But does she have any regrets?
Not a single one. She says she’s loved every second of her life and, given the chance, she wouldn’t do a thing differently if she had to live her life all over again.
I told this to Andrew and you know what he said?
“Jesus, what a saddo!”
Typical.
But what I wouldn’t give to live a life as sad as Carol’s.
Chapter 2. Sex Lives of the Poorly Paid and Anonymous
Time is an amazing thing.
Just trying to get your head around it is all but impossible. Believe me I’ve tried.
About the only way you can do it is by putting it into some sort of context. The popular way is by condensing the whole of time into a normal 24 hour day. Actually forget that, the whole of time is too big a deal. Let’s just condense the lifetime of the Earth into a normal 24 hour day.
Four and a half billion years.
Right, here’s what happened.
Earth was formed out of a swirling mass of dust and space particles and at midnight was one big molten horrible place to live. Slowly it started cooling down but it wasn’t until about quarter past five in the morning that you could finally take your flip-flops off and run into the sea. If you had’ve done that, you would’ve probably found a horrible green film covering just about every rock and pebble. This was the local tenant and an abundant bloke he was too. He had pretty much the whole planet to himself until about six o’clock in the evening when the seas suddenly filled up with hundreds of little monsters that started to eat the green film. Unfortunately for these little monsters bigger and even more horribler monsters came along to start eating them up, so that before you knew it you couldn’t turn around without seeing a great big set of teeth chasing you around in circles.
A few of the smaller monsters decided they’d had enough so at ten o’clock that night they crawled out onto the land to escape the carnage. Once there, they found their old green friend again – plant life – enjoying a nice, safe peaceful existence and instantly started eating him again.
By half ten, all the big monsters were now up on the land and the whole feeding frenzy was repeating itself all over again…
Actually, you know what, this is simply too massive a time scale too, so let’s forget about when the world formed and concentrate on condensing life’s time scale into a 24 hour clock.
Okay, it’s midnight again and the seas are just starting to turn green… Actually no, that’s still too big a time scale, so let’s go back and start it when actual proper, walking about life began.
Six hundred million years ago.
Hmm, you know what, I’m not even going to worry about dinosaurs. The dinosaurs are too huge a lump of history to deal with so let’s just talk about man.
Scientists would have us believe that man’s been around for a million years (that’s about two minutes to midnight on the 24 hour clock) but to be honest if you saw one of these ‘men’ walking down the street, you’d phone your local zoo to tell them they’d left the gates open again.
No man as recognisable as man, has only actually been around for about a hundred thousand years.
Okay, so, it’s midnight again, we’re all dressed in animal furs and Rachel Welsh is back at the cave getting passed around until someone invents the telly. On this time scale, Jesus only showed up at quarter to midnight and the war finished less than fifty seconds ago.
Incredible isn’t it, when you think about it? The war, for me, was like another lifetime ago, but in real actual species terms it’s not even a minute old. Now that really was amazing.
Time was amazing. Time was precious. And time was always slipping away.
Each of us got such a tiny little fragment of it for ourselves, a razor thin slither of light between two great immensities of blackness and what did we do with it? What did we achieve?
Personally speaking, I’d used rather of lot of mine up trying to work out what time it would’ve been when the dinosaurs disappeared if the world’s history was a 24 hour clock (about half nine I think) when I should’ve been getting on with Norman’s report. It was four o’clock in the afternoon (the real four o’clock) and my desk was buried underneath dozens of Post-it notes, each covered in drawings of clock faces, calculations, cigarettes and Brontosauruses. Or should that be Bronosauri? I spent another ten minutes looking it up on the internet and found to my surprise that it was actually Brontosaurs, which made sense, before turning back to the question of my report.
It was now ten past four and the thought of going through the files had become even less appealing. I’d arrived at work this morning with the intention of having it done by the end of the day but then I’d got sidetracked with all this 24 hour time line business right up until mid-afternoon before realising all I was doing was putting off going through my files.
Miserable defeat sank through my soul as I turned my chair to look at the jumbled bank of filing cabinets and I wondered if there was anything else I could do before I got started.
“Godfrey?” I called across the partition to the opposite cubicle.
[Silence bar the clicking of a mouse]
“Godfrey?”
“What?” Godfrey replied without looking up.
“Want to do me a favour?”
“No.”
“What do you mean no? You don’t even know what I’m going to ask yet.”
“Well I don’t know specifics but I know it’s going to be something shit otherwise you wouldn’t be asking me, you’d be doing it yourself,” he reasoned.
This was classic Godfrey. Besides me there were three other people who worked on Caravan Enthusiast. Godfrey, my assistant, Elenor, my secretary, and Adam, my designer. Elenor and Adam worked on a couple of other motoring titles too but Godfrey was all mine, although if you were to see us in action you could be forgiven for not knowing which of us was the dog and which of us was the tail.
“I’m busy,” I told him.
“Doing what?” Godfrey asked.
“Doing… doing… what does it matter what I’m doing. I am your editor, you know.”
“You’re not my editor. You’re the editor of the magazine. I don’t have an editor. I am unedited.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” he mumbled, before returning to his mouse clicking.
“Godfrey, can you just do me this favour, pleeeeease?”
“Do it yourself.”
“Okay fine, if you want to be like that then this is how it is; this is not a favour, this is a direct order. I want you to go through the files and pull out the remittances for every contributor, photographer and freelancer for last year,” I told him in no uncertain terms.
“Fuck that!”
“Godfrey, I’m not asking you, I’m telling you,” I repeated, in case he’d missed that key detail.
“You can tell me all you want but I ain’t doing it. That’s a secretary’s job. Why don’t you get Elenor to do it?” Elenor shot us both a steely look, so I stepped out of the firing line and told Godfrey I didn’t want Elenor to do it, I wanted him to do it.
“Why?”
“Why? Why not? Because I do. Because I’m your boss. Because that’s my prerogative. Now get on with it.”
“What is this, fucking Russia or something? Do this! Do that! Look sharp! Jawohl!” he saluted.
“That’s German, you moron,” Elenor snee
red, picking at her split ends.
Godfrey ignored her dig, as he always did, and focussed the full glare of his sulk on me.
“I ain’t doing it and you can’t make me. I’m in the union and I’ll phone them up if you try to force me to do that shit,” he warned me in no uncertain terms.
“The NUJ aren’t going to be interested in your piffling little complaint,” I told him. “And besides you told me your membership had lapsed because you hadn’t paid your subs.”
“I’m still a member. I’m still part of the union. I’ve still got the card.”
“Why does everything have to be a fight with you? Why can’t you, just for once, do as I ask?”
“Oh what, so you’re asking me again are you? Two seconds ago you were ordering me. One threat of industrial action and suddenly you’re only asking me. Just goes to show, doesn’t it,” he said, giving me his best knowing look over the top of the partition before sinking out of sight again.
“I give up,” I resigned, slumping back into my chair. I started rubbing my face out of sheer frustration but before I was all done Godfrey was asking if he could go early.
“You are joking aren’t you?” I double-checked.
“No, I’ve got to go – dentist’s appointment. I did tell you about it this morning,” he insisted.
“No you didn’t,” I replied, scouring my memory for any mention of dentists.
“Yes I did. I fucking did. As soon as I got in,” Godfrey maintained, already on his feet and in his jacket.
“Oh just go,” I told him, too tired for a confrontation. “But I’m going to remember this, I am.”
“What, that you let me go to the dentist’s? I look forward to reading about it in your memoirs.”
I stared at Godfrey as he headed towards the door and savoured several fantasies in which he begged me for his job and I threaten to tear up his P45. Then, seeing as this was a fantasy, I swapped the P45 for a PPK and Godfrey started to bawl.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” Elenor asked, distracting me just as I was about to put two rounds into Godfrey’s imaginary kneecaps.
“What?”
“Coffee? Would you like one?” she repeated. I blinked several times to let this soak in and noticed Godfrey was doing much the same, only with one hand on the door.
“Erm, yes, that would be lovely,” I cautiously accepted, watching Elenor watch Godfrey through the back of her head. Godfrey refound his purpose and hurried on to his fictional dentist’s appointment, leaving only a swinging door and a bewildered Editor in his wake.
“I’ll just be a moment then,” Elenor smiled, sauntering off in the direction of the kettle.
I blinked several more times then sank back into my chair with an amused smirk. If you’re wondering what was so unusual about Elenor asking if I wanted a cup of coffee, it’s because Elenor never made coffee. Never. Never never never. She was a fiery little Fembrandt who bowed to, and made hot drinks for, no man. She’d made this abundantly clear on her first day when I’d accidentally tried to hand her my cup and even the conciliatory offer of several hobnobs wouldn’t warm her glare for a couple of days.
Elenor didn’t make coffee.
Not for anyone.
Full stop.
“Just because I’m a secretary, it doesn’t mean I’m your skivvy, to sit on your knee, flutter my eyelashes and make you coffee,” she’d told me several days later when we were finally back on speaking terms. “I’m employed to do a professional job of work, to see over the day to day running of the magazine, organise the admin side and blah blah blah…”
Other stuff came after that but I couldn’t tell you what because I’d shut it out in favour of picturing her beautiful curvy little peach resting squarely on my knee.
“I fully understand,” I pretended because this seemed like the easiest thing to do.
“I’m glad, because this is the 21st century you know, not the Dark Ages,” she’d pointed out, before holstering her glare and dropping her hands away from her hips.
Let me tell you a bit about Elenor. Elenor was a very sexy girl. Some girls needed make-up, clothes, hairspray and bubblegum to look sexy. Elenor just needed Elenor. She wasn’t a classically beautiful girl. She didn’t have bleached blonde hair, 38DD knockers and legs from here to heaven. It was more her attitude. Elenor knew what Elenor wanted and Elenor usually got it.
She was strong and stern, and as hard as a tank full of tungsten frying pans. I would’ve hated to ever get on the wrong side of her though the right side must’ve been a very nice place indeed.
That was often the way with strong women (or girls even); those fires that burned within would erupt to the surface with equal measures of passion, regardless of whether you were rolling around in the hay with them or trying to pass them your coat. Not that I’d known either scenario. My relationship with Elenor was very much like my relationship with Godfrey – cold, frosty, minimalistic and full of resentment and sick days. I was their editor, their boss, the bloke who occasionally asked them to come off the internet to do some work, therefore I was the enemy.
When she’d first started on Caravan Enthusiast, she and Godfrey had forged a bond in the face of the common enemy (ie. me). In those days the office had been alive with circumspect whispers, secret jokes and stolen glances, and every word spoken had been flavoured with hidden gibes.
“Oh Godfrey, thank God you’re here to keep me sane! If it weren’t for you I think I’d go out of my mind with boredom,” Elenor would announce, a few feet away from me. “It’s soooo boring here. You’re not boring though Godfrey, you’re a good laugh.”
As childish as these little digs were they still used to make me feel self-conscious and I’d end up moping over my own shortcomings before returning to the business of circling my night’s telly in the TV guide.
“I saw some firemen on my way home last night. God, Firemen are soooo sexy. Godfrey, you should be a fireman, you’d look great as a fireman. Girls really like men in uniforms, they’re soooo sexy. Unlike suits. Urgh, what a turn-off! There’s nothing unsexier than a man in a suit. Yuck!” – That was the last time I bought some thing in Burtons on my lunch break.
This all quickly became tedious on a monumental scale and turned an already crappy job into an all singing, all dancing, daily face-slapping dose of misery.
I hated it. I hated them. But most of all, I just hated. Full stop.
Godfrey in particular seemed to thrive on the whole antagonistic atmosphere and yinged to every one of Elenor’s yangs. He became like a wilful teenage boy who back-chatted me at every opportunity and deliberately ate salt and vinegar-soaked fish & chips while I was trying to force down my salad two desks away, though I got the impression he was only being difficult in an effort to impress Elenor. Of course this all pointed to one thing – that he was banging her. But surprisingly few people believed this simply because Elenor was so foxy and Godfrey was so utterly not. It didn’t make sense. But then sex often doesn’t. Sometimes sex is more about power than attraction and different people often have sex for different reasons. At least, that’s what Sally’s glossy periodicals reckoned. Watching Elenor and Godfrey at play, if nothing else, confirmed all this coffee break mumbo-jumbo.
Admittedly, I wasn’t certain they were having it off, but they sure looked like a couple who were having a clandestine office affair. They went everywhere together and couldn’t have a conversation with anyone else without rushing back to report their findings. They bought each other little presents (chocolate bars and sweeties and such like) and wrote each other secret notes. They twittered and tweaked and giggled at things that didn’t need twittering, tweaking or giggling at and Elenor even started making Godfrey the occasional cup of coffee. Most of all though, they talked incessantly, on and on and on and on, about everything and nothing – mostly nothing actually – and they almost always agreed with everything the other said. On the rare occasion they didn’t see eye to eye, there’d be heated words and heel digging, ta
ntrums and tears and then half a day of heaven-sent silence. This would last until Godfrey worked up the courage to grovel for forgiveness when he thought no one could hear him and before you knew it they’d be super-best friends again.
It was nauseating in the extreme.
I remember thinking at the time that I bloody-well hoped Godfrey was having sex with Elenor because I couldn’t see anyone behaving the way he was behaving out of just friendship, so he must’ve been getting something. Or at least, hoping to get something.
I say this not as a sexist, or a lumbering old fashioned chauvinist or anything, I say this simply as someone who knew Elenor.
She wasn’t the nicest person in the world.
Okay, so she was strong and stern and hard and all the rest of it, but you can be strong and stern and hard without being a fucking bitch. Elenor obviously disagreed.
Elenor had, what I believe the Spice Girls used to call, “attitude”.
“Nah, she’s just a little cunt,” my friend Tom, who worked on our sister publication, Camper Van Magazine, dismissed. “Take away her tits and the ability to dish out blow-jobs and she wouldn’t have a friend in the world.” I wasn’t sure I agreed with that but I could see his point. She used what God had given her to get what she wanted. And what she had wanted when she’d first started was an office full of soap-opera squabbling to spice up what was effectively a rather hum-drum job.
Me and Godfrey had happily tolerated each other for two years before Elenor walked through the door but the moment she did that all changed. He suddenly became animated in all the wrong departments and I became the hated figurehead of the establishment.
Like I said, it took me a while to come to the conclusion that they were having sex but when I did I started to wonder where they were doing it. They couldn’t have been doing it at Elenor’s as she still lived with her parents and I doubted Elenor would’ve travelled all the way back to Godfrey’s dingy little bedsit in Balham so that really only left the office.
A rather unsettling thought.
I found myself wondering where specifically they were doing it and finally narrowed it down to the second floor toilets or the back issues stock room, though the key for this door had been lost some time ago so there was no way of doing it in there without the risk of somebody walking in halfway through. I didn’t know this from experience, I’d just worked it out one afternoon instead of filling out one of Norman’s monthly editor feedback forms.