Maid to Order Read Free Page B

boring, tedious job that means being bossed around by a lot of stuck-up people and doing all the really crap work they can’t be bothered with, and work a full week, and they only pay me one hundred and sixty-nine pounds and forty-four pence before deductions, which was what I was going to be getting at the Friston Executive, and I’m supposed to be proud of myself. Alternatively, I can work one evening a month, getting my bottom smacked in front of a load of dirty old men, and, OK, maybe tossing one or two of them off, for a cool five hundred pounds plus tips and no deductions, and I’m supposed to be ashamed of myself. Why?
    The argument that always gets trotted out is that providing sexual services is degrading, but that’s just bullshit. Seriously, what’s more degrading; having to clean the toilets in a big hotel, or dancing about in my knickers while a load of men try to get me drunk on champagne? Mopping up after a party of drunken chavs or being put over another woman’s knee, given a slow sexy spanking and being brought to orgasm under her fingers? You prefer mopping up? You can keep it, and if that makes you proud I feel sorry for you.
    I certainly didn’t feel proud of myself as we drove down to the south coast, and I did feel very sorry for myself. Danielle had wanted me to go by train and bus, on my own, but the very difficulty of getting to the place had meant that for once she didn’t get her way. Then she’d suggested driving me herself, but Dad and Summer had both wanted to come and wouldn’t be put off. For some reason that was making her nervous and snappy, and when we stopped for petrol and Dad got out of the car she told me to grow up and stop sulking. I felt I had every right to sulk, and told her so. She had completely ruined the end of my year off, and was obviously getting a kick out of making my life miserable, because if she just wanted me out of the way it would have been better to let me go to Europe.
    She and I hardly spoke all the rest of the way, but it was only as we got close that I realised how completely she’d spoiled things. I’d looked up the Friston Executive on the net and it had seemed quite nice: a big, spacious three-star hotel in its own grounds and right on the beach. What I hadn’t realised was that it didn’t just have its own grounds, it had its own valley, in a dip between two huge, bare hills without another house in a mile and five miles to the nearest town. It was a quarter of a mile just from the road to the actual hotel, with gates to close off the drive and the entrance to the car park.
    We parked by the beach, which turned out to be a strand of enormous flints at the bottom of a twenty-foot chalk cliff. Dad seemed to be impressed, stretching his arms out and taking a deep breath of air.
    ‘Ah ... smell that! I love the sea. You are a lucky girl, Jem. Just think, all summer at the beach.
    I peered over the edge. There was a stair, of sorts, but just looking at it gave me vertigo, while as far as I could tell the smell Dad seemed to be enjoying was a mixture of rotting seaweed and very dead fish. Summer was equally unimpressed, wrinkling her nose and throwing me a knowing look as Dad admired the scenery. Along the beach in both directions, the dirty white cliffs rose higher, with the same drab grey shingle stretching to the limit of vision, where headlands jutted out to East and West. It was all very sunny and calm, but the trees planted to shelter fields in the valley bottom were bent away from the wind, showing that it could be as bleak and miserable as I felt inside.
    The only building I could see was the hotel: a central whitewashed block three stories tall between a sprawl of single-storey wooden terraces, joined together by walkways, which continued to a line of chalets half hidden among the trees by a field. There had to be fifty or sixty rooms, and I could see that cleaning them was going to be a nightmare, never mind what else I might be expected to