“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,
tantrums 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.
Of course that was just during office hours. Once we’d all
gone home they could’ve been doing it anywhere. Now this I really found
unsettling and it wrinkled my nose every time I arrived in the morning to find
my keyboard and stationery all over the place. Again, I couldn’t be certain, it
might’ve just been the cleaners (having sex on my desk) but it all added to the
whole crapness of my job.
And this is the way it looked like continuing, possibly for
the rest of my life, until one glorious morning I came to work to find Godfrey and
Elenor weren’t talking. They sat there in ear-splitting silence until lunchtime
came along and Elenor rushed off to leave Godfrey confused and indecisive. He
looked at me and then out of the window then he got his coat and sat back down.
He waited like a dog, staring at the door for Elenor to
return, but she didn’t, not until two o’clock, and when she did she was
laughing and joking gaily with Clive, our cor-blimey full-on Cockney Group Ad
Manager.
This stumped Godfrey good and proper and he spent the rest
of the afternoon chewing his lip before finally attempting to talk to Elenor
last thing. But Elenor wasn’t interested: she was “… going out with friends
tonight. We’re going on the pull. We’re right sluts when we get going we are”.
I could well believe it and by the look on Godfrey’s face so
could he. This was no idle bluff either but a genuine open-handed smack right
across the chops to knock him for six and Godfrey felt the full force.
He stumbled about almost punch-drunk for a full thirty
seconds before collecting his coat, his bag and his wits and heading for the
door.
He was late the next day and his eyes were bloodshot and
full of booze. Elenor frothed and bubbled with excitement in the seat between
us and while she didn’t tell us anything directly, we got to hear the whole
story as she burned up the company phone bill.
It went something like this:
“Oh no, I can’t say anything at the moment. (pause) No I
can’t. (pause) Oh stop it, behave. Ha ha ha, what are you like! (pause) Now
that would be telling. (pause) Hahaha, you dirty bitch, no, I can’t. I can’t!
(pause) Steve. (pause) A kick boxing instructor. (pause) You can say that
again, hahahah. (pause) I’ll tell you later. (pause) No, I said later. (pause)
Because I can’t, I’m at work. (pause) Oh, no one special. (pause) Because I…
(pause) Ha ha Stacey, you utter tramp, what are you like! (pause) Yeah. (pause)
Yeah. (pause with some additional sniggering and a whiney little squeal that
built into a screeching crescendo). You know I did, ha ha ha! (pause) His
place. (pause) You know what I mean! (pause) Three times. (pause) Ha ha ha, you
dirty bitch, of course I did. (pause) Up the arse and in the gob.”
Maybe my memory had added that last snippet of detail but
either way it was horrible to watch and I had to watch it six times as that’s
how many girlfriends Elenor chose to phone up in order not to say anything.
Godfrey looked absolutely devastated and used up so much energy simply trying
to hold it together that by the afternoon his shadow was calling the shots.
“Godfrey, do you want to do me a favour? Can you get some
money for a Travelcard from accounts and go around all the WHSmiths in central
London to see who’s stocking our magazine?” I asked, inventing a job just to
rescue him from an afternoon of hell.
Godfrey gratefully accepted and drew a tenner from accounts
before heading for the nearest pub. Naturally, this also called time on all of
Elenor’s phone calls and I was able to enjoy a few hours of peace and
productivity – a rare treat for me.
Godfrey called in sick the next day and went AWOL the day
after that so that it wasn’t until Monday when we saw him again, by which time
he’d been exposed to a whole weekend of pub advice.