Julia did not give me a uniform, but took me to meet Mrs Miller who was ruddy-faced and somewhat harried, but had a gentle manner under the stressed aura she exuded.

“Chris is short for Christine, is it?” she asked as she led me into the working part of the hotel.
“Christopher, actually,” I said.

She looked at me sharply, frowned slightly and then cracked into a wide smile, and gave me a nudge as we walked along the first floor corridor.

“We’ll get on well, you and I,” she beamed.

My confusion as to what exactly she thought of me and how she had taken that first exchange was dissipated with the array of things on view when she showed me the store room. Her arm swept in several arcs: “cleaning materials; cloths and scrubbers; brushes; hoover attachments, but be sure to let me know if a machine is missing anything; through that door linens and curtains and here…” she leaned into the linen room, “a tape measure.”

She quickly ran it around my waist as I leaned slightly back from her encroaching torso.

“I don’t know why they can’t make things the size they say on the label, but it’s always best to measure, ‘cause I know what these uniforms will really fit.”

She also measured my chest and my hips.

“How old are you?” she frowned.
“Sixteen.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Perhaps you’ll get fed a bit better than you’re used to, now you’ve a job here.”

I didn’t know what to make of this, but she was gone in a second into the linen cupboard and pulled out three items.

“Could you lift your trouser leg for me?” she said.
“Eh?” I said, but caught her eye and complied by flashing an ankle.
“Thought so. Here, have these too”, and she took a long thin rectangular packet and plopped it on top then handed me the folded and cellophane wrapped bundles. “This way!” And she rushed out.

I looked at the dark blue rectangular package, which sat beside something white and cellophane wrapped, on top of something larger and white and cellophane wrapped, on top of something pale green and also wrapped. The top package had a matrix printed in the back with small letters and numbers that I couldn’t read as I walked, but I had a bad feeling about it.

“In here, this should be private enough,” and she swept a door open.
“I’ll be back in five minutes, Chris. Put the uniform on, all you’ve got there, and wait outside for me.”

“Um Mrs Miller, I’m not sure…” I stated, looking at the pile I was holding.
“Chris, everyone doing the rooms wears the same uniform. If you don’t like it you know where the door is.” Yet she somehow managed to add a conciliatory smile on the end of saying this. “Don’t worry about it, it’s just part of the job. I can assure you, you’ll forget what you’re wearing half way through the first room; it’s hard work and you’ll be glad you’re not wearing your own clothes.
I looked at her, and with a big smile she turned and was gone.

I looked around. Mirrors lined one wall, with a table-like shelf part the way along it, and then three sinks. Reflected in the mirror behind me were some cubicles. I put the things on the shelf, picked up the packet that had worried me, and as I read the front I felt the blood rush to my face, and my heart beat in my ears. “Ladies’ tights, medium, taupe,” it said.

I looked towards the door, took a step after Mrs Miller, and then froze. She had not sounded like she would accept an argument. If I gave her an argument then surely Mrs Jennings would hear about it. Mrs Jennings had definitely called me “Miss”. “O Hell!” I thought, maybe Julie had too, they all thought I was a girl. So Mrs Miller must have thought I was joking when I’d said my name was Christopher, which was a conclusion I had been trying not to come to.

I turned to the mirror, frowning. I did look androgynous I knew there had been something odd about the look I’d seen in the chemist shop’s mirror. It was so long since I’d tried to look smart, so long since I’d had a haircut I would have felt strange seeing myself under any circumstance. Even so, I didn’t see a girl, just a boy, a young man, well nearly… in soft cut slacks, a girls blouse and hair tied back. A sudden feeling of rage came over me, and I was almost about to rip the clothes off, when I was swamped by just as sudden a feeling of ennui as I realised that if I did that then the dreaded uniform would be all I had left to wear home.

I looked at it again.
“But I need this job,” some part of my mind said through clenched teeth. I felt my eyes fill with tears. “When they find out they’ll laugh me out of here, and all the hotels in town will know me.” The cogs in my mind turned for what must have been seconds but felt much longer. I realised that they had got my name from Kelly, and it dawned on me that Kelly might have thought I was a girl too… must have, if she had passed my name on and they had me down as Miss. My head slumped. I realised if they all thought I was a girl anyway, it made no difference if I wore the uniform.

And then, coming like a cool breeze, I remembered I didn’t even know what the uniform was! It was probably a tabard and slacks like it was working for Kelly. I shook my head and laughed at myself and quickly undid the white package.

Not a tabard. A white knee-length full apron in starched polycotton. I opened the green package and my heart sank; really, I felt it splash as it hit my stomach. It was a green dress with white piping, collar and cuffs on short sleeves. I felt the tears return, but shook my head and thought: “If they’re making fun of me then let them have their laugh.”

I was feeling almost as low as I ever had. Everything had been going wrong for me. Why this seemed to be so bad, in the scheme of things, I was not sure any more. If I’d had more confidence, if less of the stuffing had been knocked out of me in the previous months I would probably have explained or walked out. But it was some sort of act of psychological self-harm, a kind of self-esteem suicide that made me decide to put on the damned uniform, let them have their laugh, and then sack me.

I went into a cubicle, unclipped the bumbag; undid the top button and unzipped the trousers, slipped them off; unbuttoned the blouse, hung them both on the hook on the door, and then held the dress up. It zipped at the back, to the waist, so I unzipped it and then stepped in, I got the zip part the way up the back but couldn’t be bothered to fight it further. I grabbed the trousers and shirt, took them out of the cubicle to the shelf and folded them.

Suddenly, making me jump, Mrs Miller burst back in.

“How are we doing then? Good grief, what took so long? Here, let me zip you up. You’ll need the apron on next.”
She grabbed it and quickly pulled the neck loop over my head, I had turned towards her, but she pulled my shoulder to turn me so that I had my back to her again. She finished zipping me up, then she tied the belt of the apron. She turned me again, picked up the small white packet that I hadn’t looked at and peeled it out. She then opened a small pack of hair grips which had been inside it, took my pony tail, twisted it up into a bun, pinned it, and then unfolded the white thing out to reveal what looked like a nurse’s cap, made from some sort of plasticized paper. A couple more hairpins and it was in place.

“Are you alright?” she said, shook her head with a slight frown, and then took a step back.
“Lose the socks. Put those tights on and meet me outside in two minutes,” she said sternly, but still with a twinkle in her eye. She swirled off towards the door with her usual haste and as the door slowly closed I heard her speak in the corridor.
“Alison, Christine is almost ready. Will you show her the ropes this afternoon…” and the door clunked shut.

I picked up the pack of tights. “She really thinks I’m a girl,” I thought. “How did this happen?”

The socks came off easily, but the tights were strange things. I realised from the things I’d heard my mom and sis say about ladders that they were fragile, so with care I managed to avoid snagging them while stepping into them, although my left hand middle finger had a slight burr on the nail, which I found I had to be careful about. Once they were up my calves it was easy enough to pull them up. I slipped my shoes back on, which felt different through the nylon. I stood up holding my socks, and felt so exposed. Did girls feel exposed like this in a dress? I didn’t like it.

I was walking across to deposit my socks on top of my folded clothes when once again with a thunk, Mrs Miller burst in.

“Better, Chrissie, but let’s be quicker about it in the future. Quick, get your things. Alison is going to get you going, show you how things are done, and then will watch you have a go. This is Christine, Alison, she’s the new chambermaid and we’ve heard great things about her from Kel; you know Kel, don’t you?”

Alison nodded and smiled, “Oh yes, I used to work over at Bat Towers with Kel,” and she giggled.

I managed to smile at “Bat Towers”, which was a fair description of the gothic Victorian pile that Kelly’s hotel was.

“Okay, Chrissie, let’s quickly put your street clothes in the storage room, I’ll have a locker key for you later, but they will be safe until then, I assure you. It’s only you and Alison on this floor.”

So I deposited my mom’s and sister’s clothes, how could I have been so stupid as to wear them...? And yet would I have been offered the job otherwise? Kelly seemed to have made assumptions all along that I hadn’t been aware of. I turned to follow Alison, who was dressed identically to me apart from her shoes, which where black court shoes with a one-inch block heel and her yellow badge saying “Alison” and in small letters “room attendant”.

Two hours later I was exhausted. Alison had been quick and thorough showing me the first two rooms, then had left me alone in the third. She came back when I was half finished, wearing a wry smile.

“You’ll need to speed up, but you’re doing well,” she said as she surveyed the room and went in to inspect the bathroom. “Good, you’ve done in there nicely.”
“I wanted to get it over with,” I said, more for the sake of conversation than information.
“Yes, I tend to do that too. And then it feels better handling the sheets after washing your hands.”

The fourth room I managed to do more quickly without missing anything, and seemed to be passing muster. I realised when I finished it that Alison had done four in the time I had done two. She told me that was the main corridor and that there were eight more rooms in the west wing on this floor. We would do one side of the corridor each and I should try to keep pace with her as much as I could. But first we were to have a break.

So after two hours of work I realised that while I had been very conscious of what I was wearing for the first room or two when being shown the ropes, when I started my first room alone I had lost myself to concentration and this had helped me forget. It’s not that anything was complicated about the job, but there were details and nothing was to be forgotten. There were protocols as to how and where fresh towels should be left, as to how the bed sheets should be folded, as to how much scourer should be used so as to not damage surfaces or leave streaks. Lots of small things. And it was quite physical carrying and moving bedding.

So it was that we headed back towards the ground floor for our break, I became conscious again that I was wearing ladies’ tights and a green dress and a maid’s cap. I felt my cheeks flush, embarrassed to be seen this way, though the only person who seemed to realise there was any reason to look askance was myself.

We stopped by a coffee machine. I realised that we were in an open area at the bottom of the corridor where Mrs Jenkins’ office was. Alison sat on a seedy old settee, and I put my coffee on the coffee table and perched on the edge of an equally decrepit armchair. I was nervous about sitting in it, because Alison had sat very decorously and now I was conscious again I was wearing this awful dress I realised I would have to try to at least not look indecorous. If Alison were to see up the skirt of the dress it could potentially reveal far too much information, apart from being embarrassingly gauche. I hadn’t meant to think this way, but somehow when I realised that Mrs Miller really thought I was a girl, I had fallen into trying to keep the job, into playing along as if I were a girl.

I felt myself begin to get tense again. I had actually enjoyed the nitty gritty of working hard, forgetting everything except the task at hand, and I had been getting on well with Alison. The tension increased suddenly with the next question.

“So tell me about yourself,” she said, smiling.

I stared at her before realising I must have had a terrified look and quickly
looked away.

“There’s nothing to tell, really,” I said evasively, and looked up to catch her looking concerned. “I lost my mom earlier in the year, so I left school and have been doing cleaning work.”
“Oh, that’s awful,” she said. “Do you have any other family?”
“Yes. Well, yes, but I’ve lost touch with my sister. I had to move suddenly.”
“Oh, no! How did that happen?”
“Just that we were in a council house, and with my sis away at uni, the council said I had to move.”
“But surely your sister knew?”
“Um… well, I, I was just not very well organised. It all happened so fast. I lost her number.”

She was silent. I looked up, fearing that she was scorning such carelessness, but all I saw was concern. Care. And no-one had really cared, no-one had really shared my grief – certainly not the council – and I almost started crying.
“Don’t worry, I’ll find her number again,” I forced a smile.
She shook her head. “That must be all so awful for you. But you’re here now, and you’ve got friends – alright?”
I had to look her in the eye: she seemed to mean it. I blinked back the tears that were forming and nodded, and tried to smile.

In the next hour and a half we did the remaining eight rooms. We hoovered the corridors, then we bundled all the dirty laundry into a sort of four-wheeled barrow and took it via the lift down to the basement. There we loaded large washing machines and then began to iron and fold sheets that had already been laundered. When we had a pile, we loaded these back into the barrow and took the lift back up, and with Alison pulling and me pushing, we returned to the linen cupboard.
Inside, on top of my sister’s and mom’s clothes, was an envelope, and in a big curly hand it said: Christine Tertullian. I looked at Alison who glanced at me and smiled as she started to unload the barrow. I helped her until we had everything on the shelves, and then she urged me to open it.
Inside was a plastic key fob numbered “5” with a locker key attached, a plastic rectangular badge with a safety pin connected. On the other side from the pin the badge said “Christine, Room Attendant”. I gulped inwardly staring the badge, but Alison stepped in.

“Here, let me.” And she pinned it onto the apron to the left side of my chest, just below the neck straps. “There, now you’re official – oh, almost,” she said eyeing the last item in the envelope which I now held in my hand.

On thin paper, which was a similar pale green to the dress I wore, was a form with lots of boxes and columns and some lines of script. It had “Christine Tertullian” filled in after the printed “name” and underneath the address was left blank. I saw that “Mr and Mrs” had been crossed off before my name, and “Miss” was left as the title. There were two boxes for male or female and I heard my blood coursing in my ears as I saw the tick in the box that said “female”.
I had expected to be laughed at, or sacked. I had resigned myself to ridicule, but now I felt deeply mired in a situation I couldn’t easily extricate myself from.

“Actually, I’m male,” I imagined myself saying, and although I didn’t say it, I glanced down past the bottom of the form in my hands at my nylon covered ankle, poking out from under the green dress and white apron. What would Alison possibly think, if I did say it? Or her superiors in the hotel – our superiors. Perhaps they would just laugh as Mrs Miller had when I said my name was Christopher.

“All you have to do is pop your address and phone number in and sign it,” said Alison, cutting through my confusion.

I looked at the form. It was a contract, a job here in my hand; a steady, if paltry, income. I looked at Alison uncertainly. She clearly had no idea why I was hesitating, but I didn’t know what to do. Yet I had to sign it. I had no choice: it was an income, my survival at stake. But it was like signing my manhood away, and so early, before I had really understood anything about it.

I shook my head, and inwardly scolded myself for such melodramatic catastrophising. My manhood was a fact, so was my poverty. This contract had no effect on the former in any real sense except that of bureacracy, but it seriously affected the latter.

“I don’t know my NI number, I said, suddenly worried it would all come out in the wash and I would be horridly and publicly embarrassed.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Alison said dismissively, “I never know mine either.”

So I emasculated myself in bureaucratic terms with a Bic Cristal, signing to confirm all that the form said. And then I filled in my address. And she took the form from me, folded it and said: “Come on – bring your things.”