to get to the hard stuff (Death Wish Coffee, treble strength).
Ella, who was watching our antics with the faulty blind in mild disbelief, points a square, French-polished fingernail under my desk and says, ‘Isn’t that arrangement a little dangerous?’
Since Ella arrived two weeks ago, we are even more pushed for space. I am crammed into a corner with no electrical sockets, so I get by with a complicated series of extension cables that stretch out across the floor like sleeping snakes.
Our junior casts a censorious glance at The Boss’s door. ‘I mean, doesn’t she care about Health & Safety?’
Shona and I exchange a look.
Ella is right, of course. But Shona is probably thinking exactly the same as me: since when did teenage girls become so confident? And so obnoxiously superior. It almost makes me want to defend The Boss!
Ella stands up. ‘I’ll volunteer to sort it out.’ She straightens the skirt of her cute pink dress.
‘No, no,’ chorus Shona and I in alarm, all but leaping out of our chairs to restrain her.
Ella gives us the kind of bewildered and slightly pitying look my twelve-year-old brother gives my mum when she gets flushed and animated recalling her brush with Beatles mania. (She saw them perform live, back in the day, and loves to tell how she had to revive her friend Marjorie who overheated in her vinyl mini dress and fell down in a swoon.)
I smile cheerily at Ella. ‘Best leave it up to The Boss, eh?’
‘If you want to keep your job,’ I murmur, sitting down at my computer and clicking on the following week’s cleaning rota.
Thankfully, Ella – who comes direct from the New York catwalk each morning – sits back down again. Today she is wearing a tangerine fake fur over the pink dress and skyscraper ‘nude’ shoes which, she informed us helpfully yesterday, can make women with fat legs look an awful lot slimmer. She was looking at Shona’s rear end, snugly encased in brown cord trousers, when she said this. Luckily, Shona had her head in the filing cabinet and didn’t notice.
To be fair, Ella does look amazing. I mean, I am twenty-nine, but standing next to her, I resemble a middle-aged nun. Actually, no, make that a middle-aged nun’s mother. (And let’s be honest here, I might just as well take Holy Orders. At least then Mum might stop fretting about me not having a ‘chap’ in my life.)
As far as fashion goes, I have always been drawn to black, ever since my fat teenage days. Black is so generous and forgiving, skimming over lumps and bumps and giving the satisfying illusion of a sleek outline. Of course, I don’t just wear black. I also like white and all colours in between – namely, many shades of grey. Icy grey, pastel grey, blue-grey, charcoal grey. My colour palette of choice means I can dive into my wardrobe in the morning, pull out any combination of garments and know, without doubt, that I will co-ordinate nicely.
I had a brief flirtation with eye-catching, peacock colours in my mid-twenties when I was at my slimmest, working in London and partying practically every night. I had the world at my feet; a dazzling future ahead of me. I was going to take the art world by storm with my quirky glass sculptures.
It was an optimism that lasted for about five minutes. The evidence of my youthful naïvety is now folded up and packed away in a trunk in Mum’s garage.
I don’t bother with make-up now, except for a touch of mascara and blusher, which I only wear because otherwise, with my pale complexion and dark hair, I look like I might have died during the night. I no longer waste money on hairdressers so my locks just keep getting longer and I twist them in a ‘messy up-do’ as it’s now called. Actually, I had this ‘style’ before it became fashionable. It takes me about twenty seconds to wind my hair up and skewer it with a big wooden pin, although admittedly by three o’clock it is usually falling down enough to genuinely warrant the term ‘messy’.
I glance at Ella, who’s been tasked with reorganising the office, a job Shona never has time to tackle. Sorting out paper clips and tidying filing cabinets is not exactly glamorous work. Ella is seventeen and earns pennies but she behaves and talks as if Alan Sugar is in the room and might, at any moment, spot her potential, point that knobbly finger of his and say, ‘Ella. You’re hired.’
Actually, I have a sneaky respect for her. In any other organisation, her youthful enthusiasm and fluent use of corporate jargon might combine to take her places.
But her prospects here are, regrettably, zilch.
A good boss educates and encourages her employees, finds each person’s unique talent and makes sure her staff feel valued and respected.
The Boss subscribes to none of the above.
Making money is all she cares about these days – and the thing is, she’s very, very good at it. As she keeps on telling us. Of course, she has her exhaustingly successful family to thank for setting her up in business in the first place.
The McGinleys are all high-achievers. Mr McGinley’s electronics company floated on the Stock Exchange last year and his wife is an extremely successful barrister. Brother Max has followed in his mother’s footsteps and Carol’s sister, a dentist, lives in Los Angeles and crafts perfect smiles for B-list celebrities. Carol, the youngest of the three, is following in their workaholic footsteps with her cleaning gold mine.
She started up the company three years ago and we are now the premier domestic cleaning company in the area. Everyone I talk to has heard of Spit and Polish. And to be fair, The Boss has worked her butt off to make it happen, grafting late into the night and most weekends, and making shameless use of her parents’ business contacts to bring in work.
She employs an odious little man called Gerry Flack to do her accounting. He’s overly moist, believes he’s everyone’s intellectual superior and is a master at slithering his way through tax loopholes while staying just this side of prosecution. The Boss regards Gerry as second only to God and she guards the financial records jealously, locking them away in a desk drawer. Even Shona has never clapped eyes on the lucrative results of our hard work. We joke that The Boss thinks she’d have a staff rebellion on her hands if we found out the true scale of her wealth.
My dad died when I was sixteen, leaving Mum with me and my unborn baby brother. Cash was always tight – most of our clothes came from charity shops – and I was aware from a very young age that life wasn’t always fair and that it was the people with money who wielded the power.
We have living proof of that here every day, sitting in the adjoining office.
Poor Ella has no idea what she’s let herself in for.
The Boss has grown even narkier of late. She has developed a way of ‘putting wood in t’hole’ (as they used to say in this part of the North) that borders on legendary. Her door slams shake the building, reverberate through your abdomen and encourage flakes of peeling paint to hurl themselves off the walls in surrender. Most days, Shona and I tiptoe around on eggshells with our shoulders up to our ears.
My friend, Fez, says I should just tell her to stuff her job. He keeps banging on about how pointless it is being creative if I’m not planning to actually create. But glass-blowing or painting watercolours isn’t exactly going to pay the rent, now, is it? It would take years to get established and how would I exist until then?
No, far better to concentrate on keeping The Boss sweet so that I can hang
