job number 78

It’s Christmas party time, but I haven’t been invited. I’m nothing more than a temp. A legal secretary, they call it. The job involves sitting in a basement in the Gloucester Road and trying to stay awake. I work with an obnoxious man who will be rich one day, and enjoys playing the drums. He is a fervent follower of the band Rush. Also a friendly Irish woman. I hardly ever see any of the lawyers. They work upstairs and occasionally request photocopying. In the afternoons the papers have all been read. We lie our heads on the long wooden bench and try to ignore the drumming.

Someone fixes for me to go to the Christmas party, held in a hotel on Queens Gate. In a party everyone’s neutral. I make friends with a pretty seventeen year old and we request James Brown from the DJ. He plays Sex Machine, like they all do. Later it’s learnt that following the party one of the hotshot young lawyers in their fancy ties does something which constitutes extreme sexual harassment, for which he will be sacked.

There’s no way of getting home to Rayner’s Lane. I share a cab with the Irish girl and her flatmate to their place in Golders Green. Her flatmate’s a pretty, shaven-haired Dane called Maybrit.

Back at Golders Green, Maybrit takes me to her bed. We kiss and crash out together. I keep my long johns on. (Long johns are George’s idea for keeping the Winter at bay.) In the morning, Maybrit extracts me from my long johns. She heads for her bookshelf where she keeps condoms. By the time she gets back, maybe two seconds, the insulation is back in place. Maybrit is peeved. She asks me what’s wrong with me. Am I gay? Do I have some kind of problem with her?

Maybrit and I keep in touch. She tells me she gets suicidal from time to time. Too beautiful not to. There’s a poem about it in the back of a Tolstoy Penguin Classic in Winchester somewhere. At one point she’s severely ill. I visit her in the Royal Free, bringing grapes. We lose touch. I get a call from her. She’s going back to Copenhagen. Land of jazz bars and proper pubs. We meet up before she goes over an afternoon beer in an eightees bar on a Covent Garden corner.