Work had seemed so far away when I was in Corfu.
It had been utterly forgotten and I was not due back at my desk until the coming Monday. I had the weekend to adjust back to reality.
Elaine had been working in the City as a recruitment consultant at an agency and she was suddenly changing career, although she did not specify precisely what she was doing, I had a fair idea.
She did not need her office clothes any more and she turned up with a large bin liner full of barely worn clothing that was full on City girl by design.
"You can make good use of all this!" She announced and I was delighted to see that there were many ideal outfits that were perfect for my new job as a PA.
I set about being as super efficient as I knew how to be.
I was given more responsibilities and when I asked for an assistant, I got one, no questions asked.
Alison was straight out of secretarial college and very unsure of herself. She was actually really clever but took a lot of encouragement and confidence building before she believed me.
I had the use of a company car so that I could pick up clients, suppliers or visitors from the airport or deliver print film to local printers.
I maintained a tremendous relationship with the staff on the assembly lines and fed information back to my boss about things that he was unable to keep an eye on.
The girls on the factory floor had a crush on the managing director so, one day after he had fielded several irritating phone calls and had flopped back into his swing chair with a huge sigh, I made a suggestion.
"Why don't you take of your jacket and tie, roll up your sleeves and go down onto the shop floor to see exactly how the boxes are made up and filled? The staff would absolutely love it. It would be useful for you and they will be really impressed. Great for morale!"
He thought this was a terrific idea and went straight into action. All afternoon I worked like a thing possessed to cover for him and when he returned at 5pm he was full of ideas.
"We have to get a painter and decorator in to do up the loos!" He announced as I scribbled notes. "Oh and that whole shrink wrap area needs to be redesigned!" he was grabbing his jacket as he went out of the door "Get us another forklift driver, will you?" "OK!" I said and waved him goodbye.
That evening instead of going home I popped to see a great friend and it just happened that a friend of his from Colchester was visiting. They were cracking up, giggling their heads off when I arrived and I finally managed to get some sense out of them.
They had been to a solicitor and had both changed their names. They were now to be known as Bob Sherunkle and Sausage Hendrix.
Sausage was asking me about the factory where I was working and I explained the business to him. "I need a job" he said hopefully. I was looking at a tattooed long haired hippy guy with no shoes and thinking, no way can I get this guy a job, but I casually mentioned the fork lift. "Oh yeah, no bother!" retorted Sausage.
"Can you be outside the gates by 8am on Monday?" I asked. "Sure, I will be there!" came the confirmation. "With steel toe capped boots?" I ventured and Sausage said that he had all the kit he needed and promised me that he would be very smart.
On the Monday morning I arrived at work at 8am to find Sausage waiting in the foyer outside my office. He looked amazing. His hair was neatly tied at the nape of his neck and he was wearing a nice shirt and clean work trousers. He had even polished the boots.
I went up to the personnel department and collected an application form and we filled it in together. When my boss arrived at 9am we were having a coffee, waiting for him.
"This is Mr. Hendrix" I introduced Sausage. "He has come for the new fork lift job"
My boss looked a little taken aback and took the application form from me. He shook Sausage's hand and they went into the directors office together.
They came out together and I noticed that my boss had his tie off and was rolling up his sleeves.
"We will be in the warehouse" he said as they went out onto the factory floor.
He came back alone and Sausage had started work.
We met for lunch at a bench around the back of the factory and shared my sandwiches and a joint. Sausage was very grateful. He was amazed that he had got the job so easily.
So was I.
Astonishingly, Sausage became a very popular member of staff, was always on time and almost workaholic. He discovered some boxes had a white residue in them and upon examination had come into the office to tell me that the boxes that the plastic parts had arrived inm had previously held a chemical substance, which he could not pronounce but had written down for me. He was very itchy and I noticed that where he had been touching the stuff he was coming up in a fierce rash.
One thing led to another and the whole factory was closed while a professional clean was conducted at great expense. Everyone was very grateful to Sausage for his observation and good sense in reporting the matter. That could have been disastrous for Trivial Pursuit in the infancy of it's development.
One afternoon I was supposed to be collecting some German print representatives but their flight was delayed because of fog. I went to find my friend Lynn who had recently moved to a part of Colchester that I was not familiar with, just to kill a couple of hours.
She had somehow become homeless and had been rehoused in temporary accommodation by Colchester Borough Council. It was a shoddy little house and, when I arrived, Lynn was in her bedroom trying to arrange a lot of stuff into a very small space.
"Can you have that car over the weekends?" she asked me and I said that I could if I wanted to.
"Great!" she said "Let's go to the Pink Toothbrush in Rayleigh!" I had no idea what the place was but Lynn was enthusing about a band she was hooked on called the Fields of the Nephilim, who would be playing at this alternative venue the coming Saturday night.
It was an intensely heavy experience with the first vestiges of gothic fashion beginning to develop. Lynn was dressed up all in black lace and was right at the front of the crowd totally entranced by the singer. Well, she called him a singer but I heard groaning, husky squealing and some unintelligible sounds that I guessed were lyrics.
I enjoyed the seediness of the venue and the crowd were certainly very alternative. There was a lot of cannabis resin in the air and the prices at the bar were not as stupidly high as you might expect in a place that was as popular as the Brush, as they called it.
Lynn met up with a few friends and we all went out to the car park to get some fresh air.
It was there that I was privy to the first plans that were being made for an important upcoming event.
This germ of an idea introduced me to a movement called Stop the City and it was deeply political, even dangerous.
They wanted to literally stop the City of London, the one square mile where all the banks and newspapers, insurance giants and movers and shakers conducted their mysterious control over the entire British economy.
It was a bold plan and the buzz had gone all around London like a wildfire in dry ferns.
In 1983 and 1984 they had taken the streets with surprise blockades and mounting of banners against the arms trade, the bank's supremacy and many other issues. Ringleaders had been rounded up and Lynn had escaped to the quiet life on the Essex coast until the whole idea had appeared to have been disbanded and forgotten.
Lynn explained to me the way that the movement had changed it's modus operandi.
Now the work was all about infiltrating the grossest of the City businesses and doing what they could to disrupt from within or to leak information out if at all possible.
I was very intrigued.
Lynn spent a lot of her time reading high brow newspapers and was cluing me up on which companies were the hardest to get into, I was very curious to know how successful they had been but she said that divulging more detail could risk people being exposed so I let it drop.
It was coming to the end of 1988 when out of the blue and completely unexpectedly Tony decided to break into my house via the back entrance very late one Sunday night.
He was drunk, he was unstoppable and he was filled with a rage that seemed to relate to his new wife Lorraine in some way, but he was so incoherent I never did fully understand what had happened.
He set about a very brutal rape which lasted until dawn, when I managed to persuade him to stop.
I don't know how I finally got him to leave but he went out by the back door and walked across a huge car park that was accessible from the alleyway at the back of my house.
I went back to bed but was woken up again at about 8am by frantic knocking at the front door. It was Tony's brother, Pete who gestured to Tony's dark red Mitsubishi pick up, parked facing the wrong way round in the one way street. It was half on the pavement and right outside my house.
Tony, in his drunken stupor, had obviously forgotten that he had been in it the night before and had gone home without it.
"Lorraine is freaking out!" said Pete "She drove past looking for Tony and has seen his pick up! Is he still here?"
I shook my head and said that he had left at least an hour previously but had gone out the back way.
I don't know how he covered himself for this madness but he must have, because I never heard another word from any of them for months after that.
However, I was emotionally shot to bits.
There was no way that I could possibly go to work that Monday morning.
At 9am I phoned the office to make my excuses and the person who answered the phone was the head of the purchasing department. "What is the matter with you?" he asked abruptly and I hardly knew what to say. I stumbled over trying to think of a feasible reason for not going to work but finished up saying "Look, erm. Can I explain when I get there tomorrow, please? It is a bit personal"
The following day I covered up the bruises with make up and went to work like a zombie.
My boss called me into his room and the purchasing manager was also in there.
I took my notepad as usual and he asked me to sit down.
He was frosty and remote in his way of speaking to me.
"Can you explain why you were absent from work yesterday?" he asked.
I was not about to explain in front of anyone else and certainly not to two men who were glaring at me with their arms folded. I flashed with rage and stated that I had deeply personal reasons for my absence that I was not prepared to discuss. The hint was not enough. Rape didn't happen in their lives, not ever. They were smart, university educated young men. They had no idea what my life had been like and I was not going to be telling them either.
I was summarily dismissed and I picked up my handbag.
I went straight home without saying another word to anyone.
I phoned Top Shop and explained what had happened to the owner of the agency.
She was horrified that I had been sacked, but sympathised that I had been unable to tell them the truth about what had happened.
She said, "When you are ready, call me. I will find you a great job. Don't worry!"
Later, almost at the end of business on that same day, she phoned me back and asked if I could manage to start a new job the following day.
"Wow!" I was surprised that she had found something so quickly "What is it?"
She said I was to be working for a major insurance company as a secretary/PA at board level.
"Highly prestigious, Fran! You would be doing me a really big favour if you could manage it?" The pleading in her voice was not a sound I had ever heard from her.
"If you do well, I will get all their temporary work, Fran. It is a huge contract!"
And so it was that, battered and bruised, I turned up at the poshest suite of offices I had ever been in at 9am sharp the following day.
I wore my black lace shirt under a black pin stripe suit.
Black patent leather stilettos, black tights and I carried, hidden from view, a stone cold black heart.
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Here are Chapters 1, 2 & 3 if you missed them:
https://steemit.com/life/@francesleader/pinstripe-spy-chapter-1
https://steemit.com/life/@francesleader/pinstripe-spy-chapter-2
https://steemit.com/story/@francesleader/pinstripe-spy-chapter-3