‘That’s not the way I’D do it personally, but I don’t know how you work.’
Joanne the administrator sits just close enough so that I catch a waft of her perfume. It smells expensive enough to let people know she earns a decent living from her admin work. She sighs and looks at my computer screen.
‘Still no luck?’
I shake my head. I arrived for my temporary placement early, and my computer isn’t set up with a password yet. The password could be sent today, or it could be tomorrow.
I contemplated not going to my placement today. I woke up at 8am exactly for my 9:15am start and sat on my laptop for fifteen minutes, flicking between Facebook and Youtube, listening to club music to motivate me.
A Whatsapp lights up my phone at 8:15am, slicing a selfie with: ‘Good luck today!!! You’ll be great!!!’ It’s from my mum. I feel queasy and I stand up to put my tights on, traipsing half awake to the toilet where I sit for five minutes, praying for something to happen, for my body to wake up so that I don’t need to pee when I am at an office I won’t know. If I start to bleed uncontrollably and my guts fall out of my vagina, I can call in sick.
No such luck. I sit down again on my bed and Google ‘What is temping actually like?’ All of the top articles are highlighted blue, because I read them all last night. I put my head in my hands and rub my eyes, and then stop because my mascara is coming off and I don’t want to waste the little I have left in the tube. I pick up my phone and reply to my mum: ‘Thanks (kiss emoji), I’ll let you know how it goes’.
On the bus I pretend I’m going on holiday. I watch the other people sitting around me and standing, clutching the bars to steady themselves on their morning commute, leaning against any hard structure that is as far away from other people as possible. I wonder where they all work and what they’ll be doing today. I wonder if any of them are temps or if they ever have been. Most women on the bus are at least ten years older than me, dressed in black fitted trousers and shirts or polo necks with expensive handbags and that strong sweet perfume that haunts the cloak rooms of offices and kitchens.
I shift around from foot to foot so that my skirt crumples into the crease of my thighs. Sometimes I feel the women’s eyes on me, looking at my short checked skirt and cheap tights, solidifying their notions that they are not like me. The bus stops every few seconds, letting a fresh batch of workers on. More than it can take.
People fall back onto one another at the mere sight of the new additions, piling against the seats and bars as the coins slide into the mouth of the machine next to the driver. Clink clink…
I’m now against a horizontal bar and I’m glad it’s there to steady me. I feel more in control standing against the bar, less likely to fall against the wall opposite me and ruin my composure when the bus lurches forward. I take my phone out of my bag: ‘0845am. Mum: ‘3 kiss emojis’.
I pass all the familiar shops on the high street. I wish I was going shopping. I keep pretending I’m going on holiday. Maybe back to where I used to work. It gets to 0847 and I realise I haven’t eaten anything. I open my bag and find a crumpled orange; a hardened, dented skin with a black hue to it. I feel one of the women’s eyes on me and my orange, but when I look up she’s pretending to look ahead, back to her own private world.
I start to panic about what I will eat. The bus passes Greg’s and Pret, and I think about pressing the red button to get off, but it feels too early. Instead I move furtively towards the door, pushing a gaggle of commuters out of my way, pretending I have somewhere important to be, that I start at 9 and not the luxurious 9:15.
The driver is stopping anyway and suddenly I am on the pavement next to a stationary shop I have passed many times before. I have never understood how on days when you are about to walk into an unfamiliar environment, places you have been to hundreds of times before morph, taking on frightening new meaning just through their mere proximity to the unknown.
I buy a croissant from Pret, eating it half heartedly on a bench near the office in the rain that has started. I look at my phone again. 08:51am. I’m still very early. I look at the street that I’m sat on, at the polo-necked women who have all travelled on buses to get to work and the suited men who look straight ahead, walking with purpose. I feel more comfortable when I sit down; my skirt doesn’t ride up my thighs and I can keep pretending I just happen to be here on a Monday morning, that after a while I’ll go back to my flat and apply for more jobs. I wonder if any of these people walking are going to the same office as me, and if they’ll realise that the new office temp is the girl they saw sitting on a bench near the office in the rain an hour or so before.
For this reason I stand up and rake around my bag again to find my phone. I try to cover the screen with one hand, the rain sloshing the plastic and making it hard to type. 09:00am. Still fifteen minutes to go. I open Google maps and type in the office address, even though I know where it is, hitting the paper plane to seal my fate. I am only 3 minutes away, but I start walking.
I pass the train station and contemplate going inside, looking at the departure boards and taking my pick of destinations, buying a meal deal from M&S and going to Glasgow for the day. It would be a fun story I could tell. I walk away quickly, ignoring my impulses. I am entering unknown territory; new cafes sit to the left of me, and I can see some worker men chatting at the corner of where I’m going, looking merry and comfortable, ready for their long shifts ahead.
The blue dot follows my movements. I cross the street to kill time, taking in the names of the cafes I will spend the next month going to every day. Across the street sits a square, modern building called The Apex. I open my pictures on my phone and look at the screenshot of the email: ‘The Apex, Floor 4, Temporary Assignment, Receptionist, 09:15am start, smart dress’.
The female perspective 