Alone with it.

She was a large girl, a girl with girth. Agile, busy, lightly bounding round the bar, table to table. A colourful elephant butterfly visiting, wearing a very short skirt which looked like a large lampshade surrounding at a good distance her white prong low-energy-bulb legs.

Sexy, she filled the bar, but she didn’t stay long. Flitting off as a butterfly will to a nightclub down the road. She took with her a small group of humming birds presumably in search of nectar to suck on.

That was my first sighting of Obescious, I called her Obescious, full sobriquet Obescious Bounty. She threw herself into life with vigour and devour. A power-block. Sometimes lesbian sometimes cock. On the ball. Political correctness perfect. Polished.

We had one girl who was so thin they called her the town bike, and you can’t get much thinner than a bicycle. She was well-known and much loved. She liked music too, popular music and she played. The horn I think it was. I used to hear she’d done a blow job at the weekend. I don’t think she was professional, just an amateur.

Relations with some of the staff were strange, maybe it was just an employer/employee interface that I couldn’t recognise, seeing myself as just another worker. In hindsight some of them seemed more like observers than people who identified properly with the business, peculiar really. We did everything we could to empower them, sent them on courses, handed out responsibilities, left them to run the place any time we went away. The watching was weird behaviour on their part. It has to be said they were not all dim-wits. Some of them had degrees. They circled round us like an unseen kind of warping force. There was no static, no tension. They were somehow together without us. Absurdly we didn’t recognise their connections one to another. From time to time, over a period “I’ll send her a text” was said but we thought nothing of it.

She was doing a few hours more than her family was comfortable with.

“So, instead of giving me the extras” she asked, “Will you save it for me so I can take my family on holiday later on. Christmas maybe.”

We agreed to that. Thought we were helping. Feeling a bit proud to be trusted. We were all friends together.

Christmas neared. ‘I’ve booked a holiday to the West Indies” she said. “We’ll be away for the whole school Christmas break. 3 weeks.” And she gave us a bill for £3500.

Very nice.

A shock.

Come to think of it I was never offered proof of any sort that this sum was actually due. No detailed account. No how, when, why and no warning. No prior notice, never along the line a suggestion and no hope you realise and no periodic updates. Just “£3500 now or my boyfriend won’t like it.” Insinuations, veiled threats.

Incidentally the boyfriend, who was going on the holiday, was some sort of psycho, a vulgar brute, a regular disturbance in the bar.

Only now do I fully realise the enormity of the demand. £3500 at the minimum wage of about £7 an hour equals 500 hours which to aid understanding just assume a 40hour week is twelve and a half weeks or over three-months work. No way, not possible within the time frame though in truth she was occasionally doing, when we were stuck, a few extra hours at short notice.

We were embarrassed. We didn’t have that much cash. Didn’t know what to do. Didn’t want a bad name for not paying an employee. Didn’t want to let her down. And after much nail-biting decided to sell some art works. We sold our cherished best pieces. Sold in a desperate hurry, at a fraction of their real value, to a gallery in Hampstead, and that money with some out of cash-flow paid her.

Shortly after the squander and 10 years-service she left saying the atmosphere had changed.