My Boss
Keywords: My, Boss,
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"My best friend asked me to write a story about her dirtiest fantasy. A., this is for you – I've changed a couple of details (and the names) to spare your blushes. XXX."
Listen, I don't have any illusions about this: of the two of us, Clara is quite definitely the cool one.
We first met aged six, in primary school. We didn't get on, to begin with. She was hanging out with girls who I found a bit intimidating. It came to a head when she accused me of stealing something and I stabbed her in the hand with a pencil. After the ensuing public enquiry, she became much more friendly. By the time we left school we were inseparable. Natalie and Clara.
She has the benefit of an Italian mother, whose genes have blessed her with luscious olive skin and black hair and a way of working off her bad moods by starting huge shouting matches that leave everyone round her exhausted and ratty, while she is pink-cheeked, happy and gloriously forgiving. "I'm a cliché," she says, "learn to live with it." I, meanwhile, am boringly Irish and diffident and undramatic and repressed. Oh, I know how to have fun. But Clara goes through life like it's a buffet meal and she's the guest of honour. I am pretty. Clara is gorgeous.
She's always been able to get people to do whatever she wanted. She sweet-talked me out of my Barbie playhouse when we were ten, on the grounds that she had more Barbies anyway and she'd make better use of it, and anyway I would have full visiting rights and would always be able to use it whenever I was round at her house, which was often. When we were seventeen and doing Leaving Cert Art, she persuaded me to pose nude for her so that she could get better at life drawing. Me posing nude! I was a fat teenager who changed for PE inside a towel. But Clara got me to strip to the buff and sit on a chair in her bedroom, pink and embarrassed while she squinted at me from behind a pad of cartridge paper and posed me in various positions. She was able to make it seem like it was the obvious solution to the problem. Never for a second would I have considered asking her to return the favour. Not because she was unkind, or ungenerous – it would have been ridiculous, like asking a queen to help you unblock a toilet.
I don't really know why Clara hung around with me all the way through school. She says it's because I'm the intelligent one. I rather doubt this, although it's true that I am better at Maths than her. Still, she got an A in Art and I got a C plus. You work it out.
"When we get to college, Nat," she would say, "you wait, they won't know what hit them." We were both doing Marketing. I had a vague idea that I wanted to be a writer, and Clara encouraged me, although she insisted that it was best to get a proper job so that I wouldn't have to live off my pen. She was right, in that I still don't live off it. But it was in college that we had our only serious rift.
I won't bore you with the details because it's as banal as everything else about me. To cut a long story short, she fucked my boyfriend.
By changing my diet and swimming a lot I had finally managed to stop being a fat teenager. I metamorphosed into...a pleasant-looking young woman. I am average height, if anything slightly taller than Clara, and I wear my brown hair long and tied at the back. Martin was a nice enough guy, in many ways a male version of me, which is how we managed after much circling and sniffing to get off with each other in the student union bar one night. I lost my virginity to him a week later. Needless to say, Clara had already lost hers, in circumstances that I'd better not repeat here as neither party was exactly of the age of consent at the time. But she was properly jubilant that I was now a woman, and she and her then-boyfriend invited Martin and I on a double date that left me hungover for three days.
Clara's student relationships didn't last very long, mainly because she was chiefly concerned to do as many things as possible with as many people as possible, and most people didn't have her broad appetite. For a couple of months she decided that she was a lesbian, but I teased her so much that she left the girl (a stunning, heavily pierced, intense and humourless blonde philosophy student on an exchange from Chicago) for a hulking swimmer whose father was a well-known member of parliament. She left him too, a fortnight later. He was too boring, she said, plus his parents had a distinctly twinkly look when she met them, which led her to suspect that they had less than honourable intentions towards her. Marriage was not something she was thinking about.
So, when Martin told me that he didn't think it was really working out because he fancied somebody else, and that it was Clara, I felt worse than betrayed. I felt winded. I stopped hanging around with her and I didn't answer her phone calls. I couldn't believe she would do that to me. It was bad enough that my best friend was wickedly funny, intelligent, drop-dead sexy and wildly more charismatic than I. She had no call to go stealing my men, as well. It wasn't fair. What made it really hurt was that I knew Clara wasn't even all that interested in Martin. It was just that she'd never had a guy like him; quiet, respectable, well-mannered, studious, all that stuff. She was ticking off a box when she stole Martin from me. I didn't rule out the possibility that she'd wanted to find out what it was like to cheat with your best friend's man – tasting all the possibilities of life, or some such shit like that. I was in no mood to indulge her, and I cut off all relations with her.
What can I say? It didn't last forever. Maybe a year, which was eleven months longer than her stupid little fling with bloody Martin. I answered the phone in my mum's house one day and Clara was on the other end, sounding contrite and sober. I grudgingly agreed to meet her for a coffee. She was there in the café when I arrived, carrying a big bunch of flowers, and the first thing she said when I sat down was "I've been a stupid, greedy, fucking little cunt, and I am "so", "so" sorry, Nat, and I know you don't believe me and you're right and if you want to slap me in the face I think you should do it "right now", in fact "do" it, I "want" you to do it, because I've hurt you and I never ever want to hurt you again." By the time she got to the end of this sentence she was starting to well up. I was slightly embarrassed by this, especially as the café was full of startled housewives taking a break from the afternoon shopping, but I sat stiffly and listened to what she had to say. We had three cups of coffee each and then we went to the pub. Four hours and six G&Ts later I was a.) pissed as a coot, and b.) prepared to forgive her. Firstly, though, I asked her to step outside for a moment, as I wanted to show her something. She was so relieved that I was still talking to her that she agreed. We stepped out into the alleyway outside the bar and when she turned to face me I whacked her as hard as I could in the face with my open hand.
I'll never forget the look she had. She went crimson with anger, then she blinked, and then she took a deep breath, shook her head, burst into tears and opened her arms. We hugged and I felt immediately like a cow for hitting her. "I'm sorry," I whispered into her ear. "Don't be," she sobbed into my shoulder. "Thank you. I'll never do it again, I swear."
We went back into the pub and drank some more, and the left side of Clara's face slowly turned purplish and swelled a little. I thought this was the funniest thing in the world. We went for chips and then went to another pub, and we ended up crashing in her flat – her architect dad had given her an extremely bijou little pad in a new block he'd designed in the city centre. (That's the other thing about her. Her parents have money. And I mean, money. Your hair would curl to learn how much money a good architect could make during the still ongoing Irish property boom. My own father has a job with the post office. He's a lovely guy. But I do wish he'd worked a bit harder at his exams.)
After that, our friendship changed. It went deeper, and the balance of – I don't want to say "power", but you know what I mean – shifted. Clara had Done Me Wrong, and she started looking to me more often for approval. She stopped treating me as Little Nat, her junior sidekick, and started treating me more like her wiser and steadier better half. I stopped regarding her as a goddess above normal human weaknesses, and more like an irresponsible child who occasionally had to be reminded that she was no better than the rest of us. When we graduated, it didn't take us long to find jobs in the only area where two essentially useless people can do really well: P.R.
Clara's charm, her unstoppable energy, her ability to make people want to do what she wanted them to, was of course the best possible asset for someone trying to make a career in public relations. I am quiet, friendly, ultra-reliable; I take no bullshit from anyone, and I pride myself on knowing the job backwards and inside-out. I am, in short, the perfect secretary. That's why, as we moved at our respective paces up the career ladder, it was no coincidence that we should end up working for the same firm, and that I should end up being Clara's personal assistant.
We laugh about it, when the girls have a night out. We are the same age (we were born in the same week, she is five days older than me and never lets me forget it), we went to the same schools and the same college, but the natural order of the universe has asserted itself and Clara has become, of course, my boss. We are generally recognised as A Team. We have worked for a few firms over the last seven years and now and again, some senior management type has called me into his or her office and spoken to me about my Prospects and Did I Not Think It Was Time To Move Up and the importance of Keeping A Career Moving. I have always politely declined.
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Keywords: My, Boss,