The Personal Assistant

Saturday 2nd June 2012

11.45pm

Dressing room of ‘Pure Sophistication’ Gentlemen’s Club

“Babe, have you got a pair of scissors? I need to cut this tampon string.” The girl holds aloft a tampon applicator, white thread hanging loose like a mouses’ tail.

“Oh, yeah, sure,” I say, rifling in my duffle bag and pulling out a pink-handled pair. I’m the stripper who comes equipped; born Virgo, endlessly organised.

“Thanks,” she says, snapping a chewing gum bubble. She disappears into the toilet cubicle attached to the performers’ dressing room.

I turn back to the mirror, touch up my powder a little, reapply my lipliner. With my natural blonde hair, bronzed skin and apple-green eyes, I’m a good earner for the club. Strip club attendees are pretty classist on the whole, and inevitably tow-headed British-born girls do better than most. It doesn’t hurt that my figure is naturally good; I’m 5’7, but with the stature of a more statuesque woman. I have a flat brown stomach and long legs. My boobs are a little on the small side, but I rarely get complaints.

“Thank you, hon,” my fellow dancer says, reentering the room and chucking my scissors back in my duffel bag. She looks at me in the mirror; her eyes are ringed with eyelash extensions, her lips plumped full of filler, but somehow behind all the cosmetic tweaks there’s a naked vulnerability to her.

“My other tampon almost didn’t come out,” she says to me. “I was fishing around for fucking ages!”

I laugh sympathetically. I love strippers. The strip club is always filled with a ragtag bunch of artsy, middle-class students, drug-fuelled party girls, old-school glamazons, and those of us who come from what society would term a ‘disadvantaged background’ (as though those two words could accurately convey the chaos we were brought up in).

“I hate when that happens,” I reply, and then I close my clutch bag with a snap. “Right, I’m going back down.”

“Have fun,” the girl says, applying plumping lip gloss to her already full lips and pouting in the mirror.

“Thanks,” I reply over my shoulder, and I descend the dressing room stairs down to the main floor of the club. With every step the music gets louder, until the door spits me out and the noise engulfs me.

The bar is heaving. Customers clamour for the attention of the strippers who walk around in scanty clothing. Girls lead men by the hand to the back, where the VIP Rooms are. Men look up as I pass, do a double take, scan the length of my lithe body clad in red lingerie and stockings.

“Where the fuck did that come from?” I hear a man say approvingly as I walk past. I can’t help but smile.

“Babe, will you do a stage show?” I hear a man’s voice say from behind me. I turn around and see it’s the DJ. I sigh.

“It’s not my turn,” I say to him. This is the exact reason that we have a show rota.

“I know, but Bunny’s in an hours’ VIP right now,” he says, his tone just the tiniest bit pleading.

I roll my eyes and walk to the pole stage. The DJs always do this to me, because they know I’m popular with punters and I put on a good show. As the first strains of Alex Clare’s ‘Too Close’ plays over the sound system, I climb to the top of the pole and tip backwards. Customers turn in their seats, eager to watch me.

I’m an acrobatic performer; I like tricks. I hear the crowd holler and wolf whistle as I throw myself around the pole. As the song builds to a tumult, I perform my piece de resistance; dropping from the top of the pole into the splits. The crowd is wild with cheers. It’s hard not to get a rush from this. As I jump up from the floor and give a cutesy little half-curtsey to the applause, though, I catch sight of one curious face in the crowd. It belongs to a man named Jason Welby, one of the most lucrative clients of Bichard Building Supplies, the company I work for by day. Shit.

I peer at him to see if he recognises me, and he gives me a knowing nod and a wink. My insides turn cold.

For the rest of the night, I go through the motions of making money, but I’m agitated, on edge. Jason left soon after my pole show, so I didn’t get to talk to him. I fret all night that he will talk to my boss, Piers, about the fact that I work here. I’m woefully under qualified for the role of Personal Assistant to the CEO as it is. Thanks to my chaotic upbringing, I only have a handful of GCSEs, but Piers must have seen some sort of potential in me at my interview a few months ago. If Jason talks to him about the fact I’m a stripper, Piers’ perception of me will be dashed. I can’t afford to lose my job.

Sunday 3rd June 2012

7.36pm

The Stables (Bichard/Bell residence)

It had been a beautifully hot and languorous day… not that Aoife had enjoyed it, Piers thought resentfully. He’d asked her to accompany him to the beach, but she’d insisted that she had too much work to do, so he’d gone alone. Whilst down there, he’d noted how women’s eyes still followed him, travelling the length of his tanned torso, the muscles still as defined as they had been twenty years ago. He’d turned 42 in March, but he knew he was still attractive to women. Every woman except his wife, that is.

He was in his office upstairs now, steadily making his way through emails. Having his own business was more work than he ever could have imagined.

“Well, I could have told you that,” he pictured Aoife saying. His wife had co-founded a fashion PR firm, Johansen Bell Communications, over a decade ago. It still stung slightly that she had started a business before him.

Piers’ phone began to ring, and he could see that it was Jason Welby, one of his top clients. Why was he ringing on a Sunday? Piers answered with some trepidation.

“Hello, Jason,” he said, attempting to keep his tone light and professional. “What can I do for you?”

“Alright, mate?” Jason said, and even that set Piers on edge. Piers wasn’t a ‘mate’ kind of man; other men didn’t generally strike a chummy tone with him. “Bit awkward… need to talk to you about that little secretary you’ve got, what’s-her-name…”

“Emilia?” Piers answered in confusion. What did his PA have to do with anything? “Has she done something wrong? I did remind her to send through your last invoice…”

“No, that came through fine,” Jason said. “It’s just… well, I was at a strip club last night, and she was working there.”

Piers hesitated for a moment.

“As a bartender?” he said eventually.

“No fella… as a stripper,” Jason replied, and Piers suddenly realised that Jason was actually enjoying telling him this. There was ill-disguised glee in his voice. What a prick.

“Right… well, thanks for alerting me to this,” Piers said, with as much dignity and self restraint as he could muster.

“No worries, I’d want to know if it was my sec…”

“Yep, thanks again,” Piers said shortly, closing the call down. Probably not the best way to end a call with a client, but he’d have to deal with the consequences later. In that moment, he was so furious that he couldn’t speak.

Emilia was the face of his company, the first person people saw when they walked into his office. He thought he’d chosen well. At her interview, he’d noted that she was composed and capable, even if she did lack formal qualifications. It had helped that she was very good-looking, of course; in a male-dominated industry like his own it was useful to have a pretty young thing to keep the customers coming back in. But he’d thought she was unaware of her own attractiveness, that the shy smiles she reserved for him were indicative of her own obliviousness. Now he realised that she had just been using her good looks to get what she wanted all along… and sullying the image of his newly-established business as she did so.

He brought up her smiling image on his company site and looked angrily at it. Emilia Hart, Personal Assistant. He felt the faint stirrings of his dick getting hard.

Monday 4th June 2012

7.08am

Flat B, Dean Court (home of Emilia Hart)

Early on Monday morning, I lay in bed after a restless night’s sleep. My stomach had been churning with anxiety all weekend, wondering if Jason Welby would have said anything to Piers. Something about the scheming glint in his eyes that night told me he would have. Biting my lip to qualm my nerves, I reach for my phone on the bedside table, and scroll through to my favourite Horoscope app. I click on the day’s reading for Virgo, and a cool, clear woman’s voice with an American accent began to read;

‘Today is a day to expect the unexpected. While events may transpire that feel uncomfortable in the moment, in the long run the consequences of those events may come to surprise you.’

“What a crock of shit,” I say aloud, talking to no one in particular. I need actual guidance, not this crap. I throw my phone back on my pillow in disgust.

Reluctantly, I get out of bed and into the shower. If I’m going to face the firing squad today, I might as well look good doing it. I dress in a virtuous-looking white blouse and a grey form-fitting pencil skirt. I blow-dry my hair into gentle curves and put on just a touch of light makeup. I almost go to leave, then I double back. My crystal rune stones sit in a grapefruit-pink glass bowel on my dresser. I select the stone carved with the Algiz symbol, that of defence and protection, and slip it in my coat pocket. I have a premonition I’ll need it today.

When I get to work, I don’t see Piers initially, but I can hear him in his inner office. It’s always just the two of us in the office; our travelling salesmen come in to see him every so often, but other than that it’s a very quiet place to work. No water cooler chatter, no sociable tea breaks. Normally I don’t mind that, but today I wish I just had one other colleague to natter with, to soothe my anxiety.

I listen to the voicemails on the office phone, take down the messages. I’m just replying to emails when Piers emerges from the inner office. His jaw is tense, set.

“I’ll need to speak with you later,” he says, not making eye contact. “Come to my office at five.”