My Boss

My best friend asked me to write a story about her dirtiest fantasy. A., this is for you – I've changed a couple of details (and the names) to spare your blushes. XXX.

Listen, I don't have any illusions about this: of the two of us, Clara is quite definitely the cool one.

We first met aged six, in primary school. We didn't get on, to begin with. She was hanging out with girls who I found a bit intimidating. It came to a head when she accused me of stealing something and I stabbed her in the hand with a pencil. After the ensuing public enquiry, she became much more friendly. By the time we left school we were inseparable. Natalie and Clara.

She has the benefit of an Italian mother, whose genes have blessed her with luscious olive skin and black hair and a way of working off her bad moods by starting huge shouting matches that leave everyone round her exhausted and ratty, while she is pink-cheeked, happy and gloriously forgiving. "I'm a cliché," she says, "learn to live with it." I, meanwhile, am boringly Irish and diffident and undramatic and repressed. Oh, I know how to have fun. But Clara goes through life like it's a buffet meal and she's the guest of honour. I am pretty. Clara is gorgeous.

She's always been able to get people to do whatever she wanted. She sweet-talked me out of my Barbie playhouse when we were ten, on the grounds that she had more Barbies anyway and she'd make better use of it, and anyway I would have full visiting rights and would always be able to use it whenever I was round at her house, which was often. When we were seventeen and doing Leaving Cert Art, she persuaded me to pose nude for her so that she could get better at life drawing. Me posing nude! I was a fat teenager who changed for PE inside a towel. But Clara got me to strip to the buff and sit on a chair in her bedroom, pink and embarrassed while she squinted at me from behind a pad of cartridge paper and posed me in various positions. She was able to make it seem like it was the obvious solution to the problem. Never for a second would I have considered asking her to return the favour. Not because she was unkind, or ungenerous – it would have been ridiculous, like asking a queen to help you unblock a toilet.

I don't really know why Clara hung around with me all the way through school. She says it's because I'm the intelligent one. I rather doubt this, although it's true that I am better at Maths than her. Still, she got an A in Art and I got a C plus. You work it out.

"When we get to college, Nat," she would say, "you wait, they won't know what hit them." We were both doing Marketing. I had a vague idea that I wanted to be a writer, and Clara encouraged me, although she insisted that it was best to get a proper job so that I wouldn't have to live off my pen. She was right, in that I still don't live off it. But it was in college that we had our only serious rift.

I won't bore you with the details because it's as banal as everything else about me. To cut a long story short, she fucked my boyfriend.

By changing my diet and swimming a lot I had finally managed to stop being a fat teenager. I metamorphosed into...a pleasant-looking young woman. I am average height, if anything slightly taller than Clara, and I wear my brown hair long and tied at the back. Martin was a nice enough guy, in many ways a male version of me, which is how we managed after much circling and sniffing to get off with each other in the student union bar one night. I lost my virginity to him a week later. Needless to say, Clara had already lost hers, in circumstances that I'd better not repeat here as neither party was exactly of the age of consent at the time. But she was properly jubilant that I was now a woman, and she and her then-boyfriend invited Martin and I on a double date that left me hungover for three days.

Clara's student relationships didn't last very long, mainly because she was chiefly concerned to do as many things as possible with as many people as possible, and most people didn't have her broad appetite. For a couple of months she decided that she was a lesbian, but I teased her so much that she left the girl (a stunning, heavily pierced, intense and humourless blonde philosophy student on an exchange from Chicago) for a hulking swimmer whose father was a well-known member of parliament. She left him too, a fortnight later. He was too boring, she said, plus his parents had a distinctly twinkly look when she met them, which led her to suspect that they had less than honourable intentions towards her. Marriage was not something she was thinking about.

So, when Martin told me that he didn't think it was really working out because he fancied somebody else, and that it was Clara, I felt worse than betrayed. I felt winded. I stopped hanging around with her and I didn't answer her phone calls. I couldn't believe she would do that to me. It was bad enough that my best friend was wickedly funny, intelligent, drop-dead sexy and wildly more charismatic than I. She had no call to go stealing my men, as well. It wasn't fair. What made it really hurt was that I knew Clara wasn't even all that interested in Martin. It was just that she'd never had a guy like him; quiet, respectable, well-mannered, studious, all that stuff. She was ticking off a box when she stole Martin from me. I didn't rule out the possibility that she'd wanted to find out what it was like to cheat with your best friend's man – tasting all the possibilities of life, or some such shit like that. I was in no mood to indulge her, and I cut off all relations with her.

What can I say? It didn't last forever. Maybe a year, which was eleven months longer than her stupid little fling with bloody Martin. I answered the phone in my mum's house one day and Clara was on the other end, sounding contrite and sober. I grudgingly agreed to meet her for a coffee. She was there in the café when I arrived, carrying a big bunch of flowers, and the first thing she said when I sat down was "I've been a stupid, greedy, fucking little cunt, and I am so, so sorry, Nat, and I know you don't believe me and you're right and if you want to slap me in the face I think you should do it right now, in fact do it, I want you to do it, because I've hurt you and I never ever want to hurt you again." By the time she got to the end of this sentence she was starting to well up. I was slightly embarrassed by this, especially as the café was full of startled housewives taking a break from the afternoon shopping, but I sat stiffly and listened to what she had to say. We had three cups of coffee each and then we went to the pub. Four hours and six G&Ts later I was a.) pissed as a coot, and b.) prepared to forgive her. Firstly, though, I asked her to step outside for a moment, as I wanted to show her something. She was so relieved that I was still talking to her that she agreed. We stepped out into the alleyway outside the bar and when she turned to face me I whacked her as hard as I could in the face with my open hand.

I'll never forget the look she had. She went crimson with anger, then she blinked, and then she took a deep breath, shook her head, burst into tears and opened her arms. We hugged and I felt immediately like a cow for hitting her. "I'm sorry," I whispered into her ear. "Don't be," she sobbed into my shoulder. "Thank you. I'll never do it again, I swear."

We went back into the pub and drank some more, and the left side of Clara's face slowly turned purplish and swelled a little. I thought this was the funniest thing in the world. We went for chips and then went to another pub, and we ended up crashing in her flat – her architect dad had given her an extremely bijou little pad in a new block he'd designed in the city centre. (That's the other thing about her. Her parents have money. And I mean, money. Your hair would curl to learn how much money a good architect could make during the still ongoing Irish property boom. My own father has a job with the post office. He's a lovely guy. But I do wish he'd worked a bit harder at his exams.)

After that, our friendship changed. It went deeper, and the balance of – I don't want to say "power", but you know what I mean – shifted. Clara had Done Me Wrong, and she started looking to me more often for approval. She stopped treating me as Little Nat, her junior sidekick, and started treating me more like her wiser and steadier better half. I stopped regarding her as a goddess above normal human weaknesses, and more like an irresponsible child who occasionally had to be reminded that she was no better than the rest of us. When we graduated, it didn't take us long to find jobs in the only area where two essentially useless people can do really well: P.R.

Clara's charm, her unstoppable energy, her ability to make people want to do what she wanted them to, was of course the best possible asset for someone trying to make a career in public relations. I am quiet, friendly, ultra-reliable; I take no bullshit from anyone, and I pride myself on knowing the job backwards and inside-out. I am, in short, the perfect secretary. That's why, as we moved at our respective paces up the career ladder, it was no coincidence that we should end up working for the same firm, and that I should end up being Clara's personal assistant.

We laugh about it, when the girls have a night out. We are the same age (we were born in the same week, she is five days older than me and never lets me forget it), we went to the same schools and the same college, but the natural order of the universe has asserted itself and Clara has become, of course, my boss. We are generally recognised as A Team. We have worked for a few firms over the last seven years and now and again, some senior management type has called me into his or her office and spoken to me about my Prospects and Did I Not Think It Was Time To Move Up and the importance of Keeping A Career Moving. I have always politely declined. I like being a personal assistant, and I could never be as good as Clara, so what would be the point? If they've pushed it, I've had a quiet word with Clara and the two of us have simply walked away from the job and found a place somewhere else. She needs me to know exactly where she has to be and whom she has to meet, and I need her because she is a good boss. She works me like hell, and yells and screams and rolls on the floor when she can't get what she wants, and I clean up around her and remind her who to apologise to, and together we get results. Nobody else but me would take the shit she gives out, and nobody else but her can work her special kind of magic.

You are probably wondering why you're reading all this. I'll get to the point.

Our current firm seems to be happy with us. Saturday night is recognised as the Girls' Night Out, and Clara is always the one who organises it. We go to the place that she has identified as being the Place To Be, we drink, we eat tapas (or meze, or antipasto, depending on what part of the Mediterranean Clara has decided is coolest that week), we go dancing if we have the energy (and the closer we get to thirty, the less energy we have, frankly), and anyone who has the audacity to be on the pull has to endure the slagging of everyone else until the boy in question has been inspected and passed by the group. If this makes Clara sound like an office tyrant, she's not. She doesn't sit and play Queen Bee, because for a start I wouldn't let her. It's just that she's the most fun person to be around, so we naturally congregate around her. She will have the best story about the guy she pulled the other night who turned out to be a hopeless wanker, and she will happily relate how she made a complete dickhead of herself in the pursuit of some divine guy – or occasionally girl, as she hasn't quite abandoned the fond delusion that she is daringly bisexual. And she has learned, with difficulty, to restrain herself from making a move on the cute boyfriend of the newest girl in the office.

So last Saturday was a night much like the rest. We had pulled off a spectacular corporate shindig in a marquee, which had kept us frantic for a fortnight, and we had secured a big table in a city centre wine bar and moved on from Sauvignon Blanc to cocktails. Clara was in flying form, looking stunning in a sleeveless red top and tight black jeans, her black hair cut short and spiky, tired like the rest of us but rippling with hilarious contempt for the idiot clients. By midnight the club crowd was starting to appear and we didn't fancy dancing. We were all ready to move on.

The tram stop was just outside the bar and most of the girls were talking about going to a late bar. Clara tugged my sleeve.

"Listen, I don't think I'm on for going anywhere else," she said.

"Me too," I said. My legs were killing me and I was looking forward to a long Sunday afternoon in bed with the papers.

"Wanna come back?" she said. "We could do a sleepover. It's been ages."

"Oh yeah," I sighed, sagging. There'd been a time when Clara and I had often shared a bed. We'd even fooled around a little, when I'd been especially drunk or daring, back in college, but we'd never gone very far, either out of tiredness or a sense of the ridiculous. It was just a way we had of being close. We still used it as a technique to scare off assholes in bars; she'd slip an arm round my waist and nuzzle me and I would stare at the offender, giving it my best bad-assed dyke glare. But that was as far as it went; I was working so hard these days that I was almost sexless, and I didn't have Clara's energy. She could put in a twelve-hour day and still have enough voltage left to chat some guy up.

Right now a sleepover sounded like a very good idea. Clara, I remembered, had a great bed – king size, a firm mattress, a crisp white duvet. It was an offer I couldn't refuse.

We said goodbye to the others and took the tram a few stops out to her flat on the Southside – another of daddy's little gifts. My own Northside flat was poky and hot and badly wired.

Inside the flat, Clara kicked her shoes off and flopped onto the sofa. "Want a drink?" she said. I did. She waved a hand in the direction of the kitchen. I knew my cue, and I made us a stiff G&T each. We sat up, watching telly and sipping, feeling exhausted and virtuous.

Then she turned to me and smiled sleepily. "I'm for my leaba," she said. "You know which is my toothbrush. See you in a bit. There are t-shirts in the bottom drawer." She hugged me, got off the sofa and went out.

I lingered over my drink and finally stubbed out my last cigarette. I washed my face, moisturised, and then brushed my teeth before walking into the bedroom.

Clara was lying on her back beneath the duvet, wearing an oversized White Stripes t-shirt that some artist had given her. Her bedside light was on but her eyes were closed. I took off my top and my skirt, then my bra and tights, and rummaged in the drawer. I found a plain blue t-shirt and put it on, then climbed into bed beside her.

I lay there, feeling my blood pounding from all the drink I'd poured into myself, and happily bathing in the warmth of Clara's body next to mine. I found myself thinking of the times I'd seen her naked. In the changing rooms at the pool, more times than I could remember; skinny-dipping on holiday one time in Crete, late at night after too much retsina; once in a sauna at a health club. I found, to my surprise, that I was feeling tingly and excited thinking about these things. I decided that it was probably to do with the fact that I hadn't had a man in four months.

"Here," she said sleepily, "I never told you. You know that Burmese girl who was temping with us in March?"

"Yeah," I said. Clara chuckled.

"I had a bit of a thing with her," she said. From the sound of her voice I knew she was smiling.

"Oh yeah?" I said. I wasn't that surprised – if anything, a little envious. I'd never been especially attracted to women, but the Burmese girl had been stunning. Work had ground to a standstill around her. Grown men had lost the power of speech in her presence.

"Yeah," Clara murmured. "After that book launch. To be fair now, she did make the first move."

"You mad cow," I said. "What happened?"

"She came up to me in the Ladies' and asked me if I liked her," said Clara. I glanced at her. Her eyes were still closed, but she was smiling. "I said yes. She took me back to her flat and, um..."

"You dirty bitch," I said, grinning. "She was absolutely gorgeous, though."

"She was. I know, I'm dreadful. She was a mad thing, but lovely really. They must be really repressed out there in Burma, is all I can say."

"Why? Did she do...weird stuff? Actually if it's pornographic, please, don't tell me."

Clara rolled over and opened her eyes wide, staring into mine. She was grinning madly.

"She licked out my arsehole," she whispered, and burst into a peal of laughter.

"Oh no!" I cried, laughing, half-revolted, half-impressed. "Jesus! What did you do?"



"What d'you think I did?" she said. "I lay on my tummy and thought of Ireland. No, actually, it was amazing. It took me a while to get into it, but it was fabulous."

"You're fucking unbelievable," I told her. "You know the closest I've come to getting laid in the last four months? Tipping the pizza guy."

"That's awful," she said softly, rolling on her back and closing her eyes again. "Seriously, Nat. That's terrible. You're fucking gorgeous, you should be fighting them off."

We were silent for a while. It came to me that I had never before heard Clara tell me without being prompted that she thought I was attractive.

"Do you really think I'm gorgeous?" I asked. Clara turned on her side and looked at me again.

"Of course I do," she said quietly. "I've always thought you were."

"Oh," I said. "It's just I can't remember you saying so before. Not without me asking anyway."

"See, I'm a fucking cow," Clara said. "I should tell you every day."

I thought about this for a while. I was just about to say something wry and ironic in reply when she spoke again.

"Remember when we were in school?" she said. "And I made you pose for me? When we were doing Art?"

"Yeah," I said. "God, I was such a big lump in those days. I still can't believe I did that."

"You weren't a big lump," Clara said to the ceiling. "You were just as beautiful then as you are now."

"I hope I'm more now," I said, managing to do the wry and ironic thing this time.

"You were a bit bigger then, yeah," Clara said. "But I still fancied the arse off you. Why do you think I wanted you to pose?"

I didn't know what to say. It had literally never occurred to me that Clara had felt like that about me.

"Wow," I said, demonstrating how on top of the conversation I was.

"Are you shocked?" she said.

"No," I said, although I was, a bit. My beautiful, sexual, sensual best friend had fancied me. I'd posed nude for her under false pretences. This would take a bit of thinking about.

"I still do, you know," Clara said casually.

"What?"

"Fancy you," she said, looking at me sidelong.

This was too much. I turned on my side and raised myself up on one elbow.

"Are you taking the piss?" I demanded. Clara looked me in the eye and smiled.

"No," she said simply.

"You fancy me."

"Yeah."

I stared at her. She was looking back at me, apparently wide awake, a cool gaze, searching my face, looking to see what my response would be.

My response was that I knew, right then, that I wanted Clara, that I wanted to worship at the temple of her tight, olive-skinned, narrow-waisted, firm-breasted body, to kiss her on her red lips and all over her face with its dark, narrow eyes and pointed nose and sharp cheekbones. I wanted to fuck her, my oldest and dearest friend. And I hadn't the faintest idea how to go about it. I guessed that fucking Clara would be very like riding a whirlwind – hang on and try not to get thrown off. The difficult bit would be coming close enough to get caught up in it.