You should know I felt no remorse about lying to my employers. I know hardly anyone does, but I felt perhaps less remorse than the average person.

In my mid-twenties, in fact, the lying seemed essential. At that point, my primary income came from working for a small PR company three days a week for a slim salary, my secondary income was from running monthly poetry workshops for the elderly, and I mostly found myself lying to these two employers to make time for myself or for my third and final strand of employment, which was unpredictable, complicated and difficult to define but came the closest to being creatively and intellectually satisfying.

I started working for the PR company because I’d been obsessed with the idea of gaining control over my time. Thanks to my notion of myself as a writer I believed any job I did was, ultimately, a waste of time, and after a series of physically and emotionally demanding jobs where I’d felt watched every second of the day, I was convinced that something had to change. Not only were these jobs a waste of time, but they destroyed whatever time surrounded them by leaving me mentally paralysed at the end of each day. So I needed a job that was less tiring and where, crucially, I had agency. I was convinced that if I wasn’t being supervised constantly and if I had this agency, then I’d be able to loosen my synapses a bit and allow space for more productive enquiries to play through my mind in tandem with whatever useless work I did to pay my rent. In other words, I needed an office job.

This posed a serious challenge because I seemed incapable of getting myself an interview anywhere, no matter how much I embellished facts in my cover letters and CV. When I got an interview for this PR company I was ecstatic but then I realised that although the contents of the email weren’t technically unusual, it was sent by the company’s CEO and not some assistant running recruitment, and the final sentence of the email was “It will be lovely meeting you…” before the CEO’s signature, which hyperlinked to a misspelled version of the company website. This obviously set off some alarm bells, the ellipsis above all, but by that point in my job search I felt it made sense that the only place that would consider hiring me would be somewhere that seemed like a scam. I confessed this thought to a friend who told me that what I was experiencing was called impostor syndrome, but then I had my interview and it was confirmed that what I had been experiencing was common sense.

The CEO was a woman in her early fifties named after a Shakespearean heroine, so I will be calling her Desdemona. My interview with Desdemona took place in the restaurant of a posh hotel that immediately made my best clothes look cheap. There is no way that Desdemona didn’t think my clothes looked cheap, but she didn’t mention it. Instead she told me about the company, which still sounded fake, why she’d founded it and what I would be doing for it, as if I had the job already. She barely asked me about any of my professional experience because the only questions she seemed interested in asking me were about my upbringing, and she was especially interested in hearing about why I spoke the languages I do, how I felt about the cultural interplay of my upbringing, and what my parents had done for work. This last question was Desdemona’s attempt to confirm my class status and although I knew it would benefit me to lie, there really was no way to—rich people knew how to identify these markers faster and better than anyone else and I knew that my answer wouldn’t actually reveal anything, it would just confirm her suspicions. So I told her the truth, that they were translators, and she said “I see. Not very lucrative… It must have given you character.” We only ordered coffees and she ordered hers black with the milk on the side. When the coffees arrived she instantly said “now there is a real problem here…” and the real problem was that her coffee cup was so full there was no space for her to pour in her milk. I said “oh no, you’ll have to take a sip to make some room” and she looked at me like I had said a slur. She beckoned the waiter back and had them make her a new, smaller coffee. As we waited for her new coffee to arrive I didn’t drink mine out of respect and she said, apropos of nothing, “Your parents must have loved you very much” and I said, “Of course, as much as they were able to, yes” and she said, “They must have done, to have given you so many languages…” and then she told me about growing up between France and London and how she thought boarding school was tantamount to child abuse. “A child must be cuddled…” ¹ she said, and I nodded and said my childhood had not been lacking in cuddles, it was true. I asked her sympathetic questions about her upbringing and then said celebratory things about multicultural-ism, although her being from two Northern European countries didn’t seem all that impressive, least of all being French and English, a combination that indicated to me that her ancestors’ ambition was limited to crossing a narrow body of water. At one point she asked me where my grandparents were from, which is the precursor to a certain type of middle-aged European engaging in amateur eugenics, and I briefly wondered if grandparents should become a protected characteristic. That my grandparents were white South Africans and Albanians complicated things, given the fact that I couldn’t exclude the possibility that she could be racist and xenophobic and therefore likely torn between liking and disliking me as a result, so I told her they were Dutch and Greek, which is abstractly true depending on your philosophies around nationhood and immigration and, in the European’s eye, cancel out to an inoffensive average.² “Hm…” she said, “different temperaments,” and smiled approvingly. By the end of the conversation it was clear that Desdemona believed we were kindred spirits, even if divided by a deep class line. She was wealthy enough that I suspected she was very familiar with feeling this distance from people, and that the wealth was a distantly aristocratic inheritance suggested to me that she was irreversibly inclined towards coldness as a result of inbreeding and epigenetics. I also suspected that in some way she enjoyed the pity she felt for me and that exercising warmth and sympathy qualified as a sort of emotional calisthenics for her. I was a more-than-willing receptacle for this emotional expression. She gave me the job and I accepted, although what it entailed remained unclear.

At first there was the agency I’d craved. The staff was international so the work was entirely remote and had been since before the pandemic. This, combined with their erratic schedules and the fact that no one worked for the company full-time—other than Desdemona, allegedly— meant that everyone had bypassed the camaraderie other remote office workers had developed throughout the pandemic, so no one in the company was necessarily friendly nor inclined to talk more than the requisite amount. The lack of clear structures also meant that no one person was truly aware of what was happening across the entire company, which suited me very well, since my job was to assist across all departments. Everyone thought I was busy working on a project for someone else so would only hesitatingly ask me to help them with anything and would also give me generous deadlines. I’d been told the job would be very creative and would “suit a writer”, but it turned out the only writing I had to do was drafting copy for clients’ newsletters and press releases—a type of text that is closer to arithmetic than it is to writing. I found its vacuity practically meditative.

For the first month of the job I would stand in my kitchen at ten in the morning in total silence eating sumptuously buttered slices of toast, staring at a wall, just thinking. It felt like everything I’d hoped for and more.

Then Desdemona returned to London after a stint in Paris and wrote to me saying it might be nice if I joined her the next day in her flat near Sloane Square. I wasn’t sure what this entailed and it certainly hadn’t been mentioned as a possibility in the interview or in the month since and, more importantly, I resented the impact this would have on my toast and cogitation schedule. But I simply replied saying that sounded delightful and signed off with “À demain”, which I thought she might enjoy.

Her flat was near mine so I cycled the short journey over the river the next morning. When I arrived at her front door with my bike helmet dangling from the crook of my elbow she found it truly hysterical and, once she’d composed herself, said I really was an “interesting creature”.

I was surprised by the décor of the flat, which didn’t consist of what I’d expected (framed pencil drawings by major twentieth century artists) but Man Ray-like photography and various reflective pieces of furniture. It was, I was astonished to think, nouveau riche. I wondered briefly if the PR company wasn’t a vanity project after all; perhaps Desdemona actually needed to work.³

It transpired that I’d been invited over because she wanted me to run a series of errands for her, including doing her groceries. I was a little surprised because this seemed outside my developing understanding of my strange job, but I wanted to show myself as capable and enthusiastic, so I said of course, I’d be happy to do that, but I needed to send a draft of a press release to the person running the luxury car account first, if she didn’t mind. Desdemona waved her hand and said that could wait, but her food couldn’t. So I did her errands and when I arrived with the groceries I automatically started unpacking them into her fridge and cupboards. I noticed her observing me doing this and instantly realised I’d made a serious mistake. What I had thought was me displaying capability and enthusiasm was me actually showing Desdemona that I would tolerate demeaning tasks amiably. I’d inadvertently given her permission to treat me like a personal assistant. I hated the idea of becoming so closely entangled with one other person—the thought of coming to know her routines, her dry cleaning, her breakfast choices, revolted me. So I placed the rye bread on the kitchen counter in front of the bread bin and left the rest of the groceries in their shopping bags to join her at the dining table with my laptop, and start drafting the stupid press release.

She tutted to herself as she worked and mumbled in English, then sometimes snatched her phone and had an intense phone call with a client in French. At one point she told me I must help myself to any food or drinks I wanted and gestured to the kitchen and said “you know where everything is…”

After some time she seemed to reach a lull and lowered her laptop screen, leaned back and looked at me. She asked what I was working on and I reminded her about the press release, which seemed to perk her up. She asked to see it and before I could answer she rose from her seat and leant over me, closer than I like anyone to be, and looked at my screen. She began to read the text in a whisper and after the first line she went “no, no, this won’t work” and began dictating to me. I hesitatingly typed her correction and then eventually she took the laptop herself and retyped the whole text, while narrating why my version was wrong. I thought her version sounded much worse and less coherent, but she presented me with it and told me this was exactly how I should write all future press releases. I said “okay”, although I knew the only way to achieve this would be to reach her level of intellect, which seemed an unlikely course of events unless I took up running into walls as a hobby. She returned to her laptop and began tutting again, then looked up at me, as if she’d just had an idea, and said, “I am surprised…” she gestured to my laptop. “I thought you were a writer.” It was so deliberately cruel and personal that I had nothing to say. That I had nothing to say surprised even me, but it revealed to me that despite my little grocery rebellion, I knew my place entirely and I did not think I deserved better.

Eventually I shrugged lightly, but she wasn’t looking at me anymore.

I finished my minor remaining tasks quietly and when I had nothing left to do I began to ask Desdemona if there was anything I could help her with, but she said “one moment, I must focus” before I could finish my question. So I sat in silence, my humiliation raging so loudly I felt like I couldn’t think. .