I greet Zoe who works on our brochures and Frederica who assists the online team, then clear up while my computer loads.
I work as a PA for Katherine Fellingham, director of marketing and publicity at the CGT, and my day mainly consists of rearranging her diary to avoid all the clashes she’s added in overnight, managing her expenses, making her cups of Earl Grey tea, then cleaning her mugs in the bathroom sink. Yes, it is the job I signed up for, but that’s always been my problem. I struggle to remain in office jobs for more than nine months at a time because there’s no joy in it and you cannot convince me otherwise. I can’t comprehend living to work, but then I’m afraid of working just to live.
I’m paid twenty-four thousand pounds per annum before tax, don’t unnecessarily spend, and have a savings account with a little over four thousand pounds in it that I barely touch because I never know when Mum will need it. I scroll through job websites on a daily basis hoping the perfect position will announce itself, but I’m not even sure what field it would be in and whether my experience at this point would stretch much beyond menial office work.
“Good morning, Maddie.”
I turn in my seat as Katherine approaches her desk, which is situated behind its own door. She’s wearing her circular glasses today and recently cut her brown hair into a bob. Teamed with her five-foot-two height and wind-painted cheeks, she looks younger than her forty-seven years.
“Morning, Katherine. How was your weekend?”
“Lovely, thanks. David and I caught the penultimate performance of Closer Still at the Lyceum—have you seen it?”
“No, not yet.” I never will; remaining tickets, last time I checked, cost somewhere in the three-figure bracket. “Would you recommend it?”
“Oh, definitely.” She unbuttons her blazer and crosses her legs at the ankles. “It was brilliant—you really have to try to catch the final show on Thursday.”
Claire, the general manager, walks in and asks, “Is this Closer Still?” Her dark ponytail swings like a pendulum even when she stops and she has her work shoes in her hands, ready to swap out her trainers. “Incredible, wasn’t it?”
I leave them to their conversation and return to my emails—mostly people asking for Katherine’s time. The simple answer is she doesn’t have any and they know this, but they also know that Katherine suffers famously from FOMO （fear of missing out）。 On a senior level where she is one of only two women, she feels she can’t turn any meeting down, so she instructs me to find the time, even if it’s during her lunch hour.
A couple of weeks ago, she was diagnosed with depression. She told those working directly under her, then told me herself after she’d accidentally copied me into an email to HR explaining why she’d need time off. Despite a month’s leave being granted, she returned to work the following week and took to smiling in front of us and crying in the toilets, returning with red eyes and puffy cheeks.
No one did anything about it. Claire even pulled me aside and told me not to mention it to anyone because if even one of the eleven （out of thirteen） male directors found out that “Katherine couldn’t cope,” they’d think her too weak for her position.
“Does that really matter?” I asked. “I mean, what they’ll think of her? Katherine’s not well.”
“Of course it matters,” Claire said. She barely reined in an eye roll before replacing it with folded arms. “Even though she does more and works harder than any of them, they’ll replace her with yet another man if they find out she’s depressed. She and I have seen it happen twice already. Why don’t you make her a cup of tea?” she suggested. “Katherine will be fine in an hour.”
Claire was wrong.
“Morning, Maddie.” Ellie’s next to arrive. She too rushes in, but likely because she woke up late; her blond hair is scraped back, she’s missed a button on her corduroy dungarees and her Converse lace has come undone. She sits and lets out a breath of air.
“Morning, Ellie.”
Ellie’s my line manager, even though she started after me and is only a year older. We were friendlier at first, joked around a bit more, but that dried up like the arse of a prune on a date and time I still can’t stick a definitive pin in. Sometimes I lie in bed at night and briefly wonder what it was I did to her, even though it doesn’t bother me enough during the day. For some reason, at night, when you’re meant to be sleeping, your brain wants answers to everything.
I think Ellie just prefers the other members of the team because she knows they’re staying, whereas I walk the corridors with an invisible sign around my neck announcing I’m soon to hand in my notice. I must reek of unfulfillment at work, which is funny, because I started with bright eyes and worn trainers and now the two have reversed.
I came upon this job through Access All Areas, a social enterprise dedicated to getting more underrepresented young people into London’s creative industries. They informed me the director of marketing at the Covent Garden Theatre was looking for a PA and admin assistant. I’d never considered working for a theater because I never went to the theater. You were either a cinema or theater person, and that depended largely on your budget and upbringing. However, I needed a job and met seventy percent of the experience required. I did as much research as I could and was excited to read they’d had a few changes in senior management in order to focus on “reflecting diversity” in both their shows and staff.
I’d gone for an interview and whilst the panel were all white, at least they were all women, and on my way in and out, I saw people like me. We were still the minority, but compared to my previous jobs, it was a sizable difference. Weeks in, I realized they were mainly front of house, serving staff. The departments I interacted with were stiflingly white, to the point where in every meeting I took minutes for, I was the only Black person in the room.
You have no idea （or maybe you do?） how this can make you feel. It’s mentally exhausting trying to figure out if I’m taking that comment on my hair or lunch too seriously. It’s isolating when no one I know here is reading the Black authors I am or watching the same TV shows. （You should have seen their blank faces when we were talking nineties/noughties TV, specifically Friends and Frasier, and I happened to mention My Wife & Kids.）
When you’re in a job you don’t love but need, it must help to have someone close by to share light moments with. I do have Avi （you’ll meet her later on … prepare yourself） who works on the floor below me, but honestly, we don’t have that much in common and I only see her for about thirty minutes every week. So for the remaining thirty-seven hours my silence is punctuated only by work requests and conversations I’m not invited to.
I’d wanted to leave the CGT before my probation period was up seven months ago, which spat in the face of my parents’ and grandparents’ work ethic. My mum said it was a privilege I had the opportunity to jump from job to, albeit low-paying, job. I knew I had my degree in English literature to thank for that, but it’s the least being forty thousand pounds in debt could do.
“Why are you never happy, Maddie?” Mum said. “I wanted you to be a lawyer, doctor, or a vet, any of which would be more exciting, but you chose this. And all you have to do is sit in front of a computer all day, no? You’re hardly on your feet. Your generation just don’t know.”