Chapter 5: Managerial Attention

A confrontation was taking place in an office overlooking the platforms at Euston Station.

“Do you have the slightest idea how much trouble you have caused, Lewis?” Bernard Lewis stood in his supervisor’s office, looking sheepish as she harangued him. She was sitting behind her desk, waving a wad of papers at him. “Confusion over the Sunrise demonstrations, unauthorized absence, broken curfew, two police officers to bring you back, absence from your lodgings. Do you want me to go on?”

“No, Ma’am,” Bernard responded as respectfully as he could. She had evidently had a stressful day. It was clear that she would need little excuse to take out her frustrations on Bernard.

His supervisor was a bulky woman. The weather had been hot and Bernard couldn’t avoid noticing the sweat stains spreading out under the armpits of her blouse. A half-eaten pork pie sat on a plate on her desk. Knowing her enthusiasm for food, Bernard guessed that its unfinished state was the most eloquent evidence possible of a day disturbed by events and activities not of her choosing. The way that her ankles seemed to swell over the edge of her shoes, as if only the strength of her stockings prevented the ankles bursting out to twice their size, told of a day in which she had failed to even sit down for long. She hadn’t even managed to find time to take advantage of one of the station staff to take on the role of her footstool.

The stifling atmosphere in the room was hardly alleviated by the sulky creaking of a fan, moving slowly, over-head. Across his supervisor’s shoulder, Bernard could look down at the station with the first of the evening’s commuter trains starting to leave. The women would be all right in their air-conditioned carriages, Bernard thought, but the men having to travel in coaches that were little more than cattle trucks would be finding the conditions oppressive. Bernard was starting to wonder if he would end up having to look for a job that meant he would be travelling like that.

“Good. Well, it seems that in spite of all the problems, we are not going to sack you.”

Bernard’s relief was immediate. Losing his job right now would be a disaster, he thought. There were few sponsorships available for someone of his age and the life of an un-sponsored male was an even more depressing prospect than being in service as he was.

“No, we’re not going to sack you, but we are going to transfer you. It seems you made some sort of impression on Madame Chao. She’s asked for you to be assigned to one of the Sunrise projects. Quite frankly, I can’t see any reason to keep you here, can you?”

In spite of the fact that he was very disturbed by the idea, Bernard could not think of any reasons that his supervisor was likely to think relevant.

There was a knock at the door. Ordered to enter, another male came in carrying a tray with a single mug of tea and a plate piled high with biscuits. The newcomer gave Bernard a sympathetic look as he put the tray down but said nothing. He obviously knew what was going on. Bernard’s supervisor waved him away and then fell on the plate of biscuits with the enthusiasm of a vulture on a newly dead corpse.

Bernard stood, waiting to be dismissed.

“The only trouble is,” Bernard’s supervisor got to her feet, biscuit crumbs spilling from her lips. She closed in on him., “I had high hopes for you. I thought we might get on so well. That you might move up from working on the platform to being more helpful around the office.” As she spoke, she gripped Bernard by the scruff of his neck and dragged him forward, pulling his face into the strained cotton stretched across her gorge-like cleavage.

Bernard struggled to breathe as his head was clamped between his supervisor’s substantial breasts. The woman, appreciating the sensation of his head clamped against her, grunted pleasurably, spraying biscuit crumbs across the back of his neck.

“But we can still have a little fun before you go, I think.” Bernard was surprised by the way in which in spite of her bulk she seemed able to move so easily, swinging him from his cleavage suffocation to being clamped under her arm, the smell of her sweat-drenched armpit full in his nostrils, as she wrestled him down to the floor. “Or, don’t you want to play?”

He had no opportunity to object. With Bernard forced down on his back, his supervisor slid her ample buttocks, barely contained by her seat-polished, seam-stretched skirt, down on his face. She gave a contented sigh. Whether this was because of the pleasurable sensation of a man’s face pressed beneath her, or because of the satisfaction derived from another male conquest, or simply from the relief of taking the weight from her swollen ankles, Bernard couldn’t have said, even if his mouth hadn’t been clamped shut by the woman’s weight on his face.

Bernard had almost asphyxiated by the time he heard words that he would never have imagined would represent deliverance. “You have round-eye ready? Madame Chao insist that he come now!”

Oxygen rushed into his lungs as his face was freed; his supervisor’s arse moved off him with the inevitable slowness of the end of an eclipse. He gasped to recover his breath and then looked around to see Tsai Linn, smart in her Sunrise uniform, smiling down at him.

“Pink-face round-eye, you close your mouth and come with me,” she ordered.

Bernard certainly didn’t feel able to object. Quite the reverse, he was grateful to escape from the attentions of his supervisor.

Parked at the front of the station was an ornately decorated rickshaw. They weren’t common in London but the Chinese Trade Delegation used them as a matter of course. Tsai Linn pointed to it as she and Bernard emerged from the booking hall. “Madam Chao’s!”

Another male stood holding the shafts of the rickshaw. The man was clad in a leather suit that strapped his arms to his sides, was wearing a leather hood with blinkers that meant he could only see directly ahead of himself, and was silenced by a thick rubber bar locked across his mouth as a bit; clearly, he had been left waiting.

“You get in!” Tsai Linn ordered Bernard, pulling open the door of the rickshaw. Inside, Madam Chao was dressed exactly as she had been when Bernard had first encountered her: pencil skirt, v- necked sweater, and broad, studded leather belt. Her black leather skirt contrasted with the bright red leather of the rickshaw’s seat, her leather jacket stark against the stuffed satin of the seat back.