Every time you make a move

Was It All Worth It-Pt 3

The Watering Hole, around 7:30pm

"You can stop polishing and take them back out now, Peter," Mr Harold Steinherr's round, pink face peered into the scullery from the swinging door that lead into his bar, shouting over the music to his new employee that was polishing an entire array of drinking glasses and arranging them on a drying crate in the back, "Any shinier and one would think that you were trying to blind us all!"

"Sorry sir, old habits die hard!" Mr Peter "Phoebe" Freestone casually defended, stepping away from the crate and tossing the dishrag into the sink.

"Who did you last work for anyway, a Magpie?" Mr Steinherr sarcastically joked as he held the door open for him, the thick alight cuban cigar wiggling between his yellowing teeth as he spoke.

Phoebe gave an awkward chuckle in return, lifting the crate full of glasses off of the shelf and carrying them towards the door back into the bar.

When Mr Steinherr said things such as that, it didn't help Phoebe move past the previous eight years he spent working for Freddie Mercury, simply because he became very good at polishing the amount of brass, silver and crystal his boss had acquired inside Garden Lodge.

"Maybe being a personal assistant is all that I know" he thought doubtfully yet again, setting the crate down behind the bar counter.

But this was a new job to prove himself wrong, and prove that he was more than just a doormat to Freddie. The bar man thing would only be temporary, then he'd climb back up to where he was as a wardrobe assistant before Freddie came into his life...

"And then, who knows?" Phoebe thought, beginning to arrange the wine glasses onto the hanging rack above his head.

Mr Steinherr, who was watching him from the other side of the bar counter through clouds of cigar smoke, asked him a question, "You want to know why I hired you, Peter?"

"Why?" Phoebe spoke loudly over the music.

"Soon enough the Watering Hole will be London's finest new haunt of 1987, and it'll be teaming with anyone who is anyone!" Mr Steinherr proudly bragged, "It needs workers like you who are efficient, polite, and above all dependable."

Phoebe blushed slightly, "You think so, sir? Thanks..."

"I know so. And best thing about you Peter is that you're trustworthy. Anybody would immediately take to you, and for that I have a special request for you to carry out."

The last part of that statement had caught Phoebe off-guard. He'd had one or two shifts so far and thought that he was trained in all that there was to know about working at the Watering Hole. What more could there have been?

"What kind of 'special' request, sir?"

"You see that gentleman sitting at that table over there, Peter?"

Phoebe followed where Mr Steinherr's signet-ringed finger was pointing, to someone whom was sitting alone and slouched at the table in the corner of the space.

"Yes sir, what about him?"

Mr Steinherr explained, "I've had my eye on him, and he's been here for some time since before your shift started."

"You want me to ask him to leave?" Phoebe was about to make his way out from behind the counter.

"God, no!" Mr Steinherr grabbed Phoebe's forearm to stop him, "I want you to take his order for me. And when you serve him you must then casually, and I mean casually, invite him back to my private booth upstairs later on to have a meeting with me personally."