it's bad enough being forced at money-point to drag myself back into work on a monday, without these insensitive swine insisting on it being someone's birthday, too. so, as of four o'clock, we started trooping across to the pub as fast as flexi-time would allow.
i put it off as long as i could, watching the office empty, particle by particle.
soon, i was alone. well, pretty much. a couple of desks were dotted with others who'd come to the same conclusions i had: (1) peace and quiet meant getting more work done and (2) a pub visit featuring this lot sounded far too much like hard work, anyway.
i'd heard occasional tales of young women who'd once worked there; drinkers, fighters and fornicators, their exploits lived on in song and legend.
but that was the past; the glory days of the millenium and these tiger-women, if they ever existed in the first place, were long gone now. i gave up on what i was doing and headed over to the tedium.
as i'd predicted, the party, such as it was, was in full swing. about as lively as it would ever get. all the freudean return-of-the-repressed games - and all being played under-the-counter. with subtitles.
the courtship games where only one party was intetested. displays of power and demonstrations of weakness. alliances formed and severed by those with one eye fixed on the throne.
as a temp, i wasn't eligible to play any of it, although temps can, i believe, be used as pawns, coerced into the firing-line and sacrificed in pursuance of some greater good.
by eight-thirty, the kissing had begun in earnest. by tomorrow, the hangovers would be battling it out with the guilt for control. and by nine, i was almost at the door. well on my way to escaping unscathed.
suddenly my concentration was smashed 'n' grabbed by a commotion by the toilets. something had kicked off. it was one of those - every rational atom of my consciousness told me to get out of the door while everybody was distracted elsewhere; that perverse and prurient part of my skull barked at me to go over, to see, to get involved.
guess which won?
that's right.
on closer inspection, two of my male colleagues had been caught in a spot of face-sucking. big deal, you're probably thinking. it's 2010, we live in a world of graham norton and same-sex civil ceremonies. nobody actually believes that "gay" or even "bi" equates with hiv or paedophilia any more... the world has moved on, right?
not this shower, though. pointed remarks, jostling, guilt 'n' mortification. it was embarrassing to watch, like bumfights or the circus maximus. you know where a situation's too horrible to contemplate - and you can't even bring yourself to look away? a rabbit in headlights, that's what i was like.
certain men are so hell-bent on being considered heterosexual that any deviation from this sends them into a rage, a panic, or both.
and so it came to pass that there was much beating of breasts and gnashing of teeth. also wailing.
like a crowd scene from leviticus, the populace roared and bayed for blood.
at the bus stop, i remembered that the term faggots came from the medieval tendency to burn homosexuals at the stake.
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