I felt entitled to go in to the pub to use the ladies’ yesterday, because I had given them three months of my life, albeit six years ago. I got a job there because it was on my way home from college and because there was a ‘help wanted’ sign in the window and because they served food, which meant tips, which you don’t otherwise get doing bar work in London (unless you flirt hard, for maybe a quid). I don’t know why I didn’t think that I could do better.
We were supposed to look out for the toilet customers: our branch of this particularly terrible chain pub was next to the Clapham Junction train station and it was therefore very convenient for people who needed the loo. I ignored the directive to apprehend them: it was too embarrassing. (Also embarrassing: the time when I, the only female staff member in the place, was sent to retrieve a woman from said loo who was passed on on the floor, her pants around her ankles.)
I served pints and glasses of wine and reheated food with a motley crew of people - students, immigrants (we were all immigrants, actually), artists, ‘artists’. One really sad man who became my friend, and then we went for lunch and he stared deep in my eyes and took my hand and told me that he was gay but he was also certain that ‘it is God’s plan for me to one day marry a woman’.
Saturday nights were the worst: male staff stayed behind the bar while women were sent to do table service, even though movement was near-impossible. The place was always cheek-to-jowl packed with lairy drinkers who would prod and pull us mercilessly as we attempted to get past without sloshing too much Foster’s. On Sunday mornings I was always purple and bruised.
One beer-stenched man simply grasped me with both hands and I pushed him aside and went to look for the bouncer, but then thought better of it. The final punter left in the pub on Friday and Saturday nights always got beaten up by the guy at the door for completely arbitrary reasons, so I was certain that given a nonarbitrary reason - ‘that man just felt me up’ - the bouncer would cheerfully commit murder. I didn’t want that to happen.
It was a Sunday morning, after I’d been there for a few months, when we were summoned for a meeting by the managers, who stared at us accusingly and reported that the till was down £25,000 pounds over a few months and it was our fault for pulling too-generous pints. ‘This is our real life,’ the managers said. ‘These are our careers on the line,’ and I looked at them and decided that working for crooks - character building though it was - was not the way forward.
