Productivity by K D Grace

Author:K D Grace
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Xcite Books
Published: 2011-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Gothic Supplement

by Emma Lydia Bates

Our office is more subdued than most. The young trainees and work experience students put up their bubblegum-coloured calendars of breasts and not much else, thinking it’ll make them blend in – in the rest of the building, it would – but here it just makes them stand out. The decidedly non-heterosexual make-up team and some of the photographers have pink or blue laptops, which add a spot of colour. Everyone else in the building has standard Apple-Mac beige – except us.

Our office is – not a celebration, more of a wake – of black and crimson. Our laptop cases are uniformly dark leather and even the deputy sub-editor, the campest man in a world of camp, only dares venture to deep purple.

The purpose of it all is to get us more in the mood for our individual job, to take our thoughts away from the polished white smiles and silicone breast implants and blonde hair and giggling of the rest of the office.

Yes, where everyone else has cotton wool or rubber, we have leather. Where they have bounce, we have darkness. When they spring up, we are tied down. I’m sorry, but this is true: when their nipples are tassled, ours are clamped.

Even our receptionist is suitably dark – a Russian on an exchange who decided to stay. His rich, deep tones make even the telephone greeting sound black.

‘HOTgirls magazine, Gothic Supplement. Please state your desire.’

Considering it is called HOTgirls – making the content pretty clear – it perpetually astonishes me how many gay men work here. I hate to revert to stereotypes, but they are wonderful designers and photographers – they know how to lay out a picture so that it almost turns me on. And I, like them, am cursed to be eternally second-guessing what our heterosexual male readers will like.

So the proliferation of gay men is doubtless a good thing for the magazine and so a good thing for my job, but it’s definitely not a good thing for my love life or hopes for a little office romance. Exchanging love letters by the water cooler, that sort of thing. Romantic maturity is hard when you’re writing for something with a customer base of 42.7% teenage boys. Although at the Gothic Supplement, we do pride ourselves on having a little more maturity, as our beauties are slender, corseted and raven-haired, unlike the blonde, busty bimbos that grace the rest of HOTgirls’ pages.

‘Adeline, would you just nip this across to Accounts for me?’ George asks as I lose my train of thought. He’s the only person who calls me by my full name, but he’s sexy enough to get away with it. And gay, of course.

I attempt to stand up, but am pulled back down on to my chair. One of the stylists had wanted to test the suitability of a particular type of bungee cord for bondage, and I’d volunteered. I would have to say “unsuccessful”. After all, what’s the point

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