Half Plus Seven (29 page)

She looked like she'd seen her first cock; a face of joy and confusion. She pushed an open envelope across the desk. I picked it up and read.

‘Pay SoupMobile Station the sum of 100 thousand pounds only. Signed F. Hatcher.' Carol looked at me for some form of verification. ‘Well, well, well…' was all I offered.

‘I don't know what to say,' she said, kind of contradicting herself.

‘Well I did have a quiet word with Mr Hatcher. I explained how important the SoupMobile Kitchen was to him when we lunched recently, and it would have been remiss of me not to mention the parlous state of the finances.'

‘You did?'

‘I did.'

‘Oh, Bill.' Carol sprung up from her booster chair and put her short, cardiganed arms around me. She sniffled. I pushed her away.

‘Wait, what's this?' A Post-it note fell out of the envelope. Carol read it. ‘It says there is one proviso. That Derek must be released from his duties. That is all. “I wish you a bright future. Yours, Frank Hatcher.”'

‘Well, well, well…' I said.

Carol just stared at me. Cock number two.

Carol.

Tick.

Chapter 29

Many men have gone before us with names other than the ones their parents plucked from the air at birth. How different would the lives of Richard Starkey, Reg Dwight and Farrokh Bulsara have been had they not played them out as Ringo, Elton and Freddie?

The crux of the matter is that these showmen were destined for greatness; their made-up monikers simply added a sprinkle of stardust.

In the PR industry we were concerned daily with the illusion of image. The rub was, however hard he tried, my not-so-illustrious colleague was destined to be a mid-ranking executive whether he signed off as Kevin or Trent.

Trent needed me to help him and, in turn, help others. A coming out, if you will. His public acceptance of the Kevin brand could be a lifebuoy to all the other little boys and girls in the suburbs thinking of changing from Colin to Chas or Larry to Lake. Because every one of us was a brand. A personal brand. What, you? Yes, you. Well, that's the line we sold clients anyhow. Everything you did, thought or shat said something about Brand You, and while you couldn't control whether you were a brand or not, you could grease the Morgan & Schwarz palm to help you manage it.

I was about to take Trent on as a personal client. No one said this redemption stuff was going to be easy.

The orgasm of agency life was victory in a beauty parade. And, like the strength of a relationship, they were faster and more frequent dependent on how hot you were. At the present time, Morgan & Schwarz was not hot. We hadn't come for a good couple of months now. Every shop went through it. Sometimes you were so smoking you were spunking new clients all over the walls, other times things were dry as a bone.

We needed some lube. And quick.

Our sights were set on a waste management company. Someone control my boner. As with shagging, you couldn't always catch the belle of the ball. But like the chub left in the club corner, the clients always had some redeeming features. Whilst the fat girl might cook, clean and gobble gratefully, the waste management company – the biggest in six territories worldwide – would pay, well and regularly.

Morgan & Schwarz had put together a crack team for the assignment, such was the importance of the financial bounty promised by our potential lay.

It started with the brief, sent to a selection of starlets sexy enough to be invited to the backstage area. On this occasion our skirt was short enough due to some previous with the second biggest player in the sector. They liked this; the chance to flirt with a rival's ex and hopefully get us wasted or desperate enough for some juicy pillow talk.

Once you'd made the first cut, a pitch required the same amount of perspiration and inspiration needed to turn a pig into a prom queen. Campaign idea after campaign idea crumpled up and thrown against the wall, long drawn drags on cigarettes through window gaps twelve floors up, name-calling, nail-biting, in-fighting, blue-skying, settling for what we've got an hour before deadline. And Domino's Pizza. Always Domino's Pizza.

The art of the pitch, as with the Pygmalion sketch, was to find some inner beauty in the client. Sure, they were a waste management company, but maybe they had a GSOH, were kind to children and animals, or carried out good deeds in the developing world.

‘I've got it,' said Trent, looking up across the boardroom huddle from amongst the piles of research papers and cafetières. We looked up, as if gazing upon Moses giving the Sermon on the Mount. Yes, it was only Trent and not a bearded seer but the clock read 22.57 and the brainstorm clouds had just cleared.

‘Well, come on, don't leave us fucking hanging,' said Miles. Police sirens whirred outside the window.

‘What do we do for our clients?' asked Trent. Yawns were stifled. Was this rhetoric?

Carol stepped in, ‘Solve problems?'

‘Exactly,' said Trent. ‘And what's the world's biggest problem?'

‘Whether Trent is getting any pussy Friday night?' Unhelpful, yes, but sarcasm was all I had left at this hour.

‘Ha-de-fucking-ha, Bill. No, while important, it's not that.'

‘What is it then?' asked Jill.

‘Climate change.'

He rocked back and forth on his chair with a smile of self-satisfaction.

‘Go on…' said Miles.

‘Well, my uncle Terry used to work on the bins…'

‘Where is this going?' I nudged. When in the sand-selling zone, Trent was unflappable. You could see how his chat charmed the chicks. That and the barbiturates.

‘…and they'd work in all conditions; rain, wind, snow, sleet. And do you know how they'd keep warm on those days? They'd burn the rubbish, the trash. Trash… can…'

‘Trash can?' asked Jill.

‘Trash can save the world,' said Trent. He leant back on his chair, post-coital without the cigarette.

‘That's how we manage the waste. By burning it, producing energy and in turn, solving the world's energy crisis at the same time.'

‘People, we've got our angle,' said Miles, his tone ambivalent. He hated it when other people had the big idea.

And just like that, the waste management pig had it: fuckability.

We worked like Trojans around the idea now, producing Prezis, infographics, slogans, strategies and online media campaigns with shareability to put puff in the plastic doll.

The day of the pitch came, with its air of inevitability and eau de parfum, freshly pressed pants and picture book hair. We were on last. This was cited as an omen.

‘First or last, they're the best slots,' Miles would say, although on these days pretty much anything was seen as a message from the gods. The F5 key was pushed in and out and in again over rival PRs' social media feeds, the tea leaves of 140 characters acknowledged and analysed.

‘Zara Weissman from Randalls has just tweeted about a black cat,' someone would shout across the office, while the rest of us tried to remember if that was lucky or unlucky. In the end, none of that mattered. Not with what I had planned.

We arrived pitch side at a nondescript glass office building a good hour's drive from the city and were ushered into a plush waiting area not unlike the one at the Wellness Centre.

‘Did you read the register?' Miles asked Jill.

‘Well, I, erm, signed us all in,' she replied. Trent and I both knew what was coming.

‘And?'

‘And what?' said Jill. Her trouser-suit clashed with the butterscotch wallpaper.

‘What's pitch rule number one?' said Miles.

‘Don't get your—'

‘It's not the time for jokes, Bill.'

He turned back to Jill.

‘What's. Rule. Number. One?'

She looked at him blankly, chewing gum.

‘Always, always, check the name of the agencies who've signed in first. Particularly if you're on last. It's one of the benefits. ALWAYS.'

Jill's eyes, as they often did, said ‘fuck you'. Her mouth said ‘sorry'. Miles had been parking up when we'd announced ourselves at reception. Ever since he'd been made to quit smoking by Kira, he got antsy in these situations. He'd linger by the ‘designated dying' area as he now reluctantly called them, inhaling what he could off a post room kid on his break.

When you've got the biggest dick, if your balls are on the line you've got the most to lose. That probably explained his tetchiness.

The oak double doors opened and the sound of pleasantries being exchanged echoed down to us.

‘Who's this crowd?' asked Trent.

‘Well, we'd have fucking known if rule number one had been followed, wouldn't we?' snarled Miles. Jill kept schtum. A bullshit of rival PRs, as was the collective noun, strode towards us. Of course they did, the hard part of their day was over. They could look forward to an evening of Rioja Joven and fucking their girlfriends. Ah, the post-pitch highs.

‘Giles.'

‘Miles,' said the natural leader of each quartet, all false and surprised, as if they'd bumped into each other on an August morning at the Acropolis.

‘How are you?'

‘Oh, you know…'

‘How did it go?'

‘Oh, you know…'

Giles was the CEO of Wiseman Worsley, a rival agency. Wiseman Worsley was the Pepsi to our Coca-Cola, the Shelbyville to our Springfield. Everyone needed an opponent to mock and vilify. It gave us a focus for insecurities to manifest as anger. Even Carol called them ‘Wiseman Worsely', before tittering and feeling sinful.

They had a HQ in a loft development, all bean bags and yucca plants. They did exactly the same things we did for not quite the same clients. They had the same conversations with the same journalists. They used slightly different hashtags. We could have slipped into a day in their lives and only noticed the difference thanks to our email signatures. But we hated them. That was the game.

‘So, feeling good about this one?' asked Miles.

‘I've always got a good feeling,' said Giles. One of his flunkies snorted. (Question: were we flunkies?).

‘Anyhow, stay lucky.'

And in a puff of smoke, they were gone.

‘Cunt,' said Miles.

‘Worse than Hitler,' I said.

‘Yeah,' Trent and Jill chorused.

(Answer: we were flunkies).

The oak double doors opened for the second time and a short woman with a severe fringe beckoned us in. The catwalk – for that's what we called Pitch Zero – was dominated by a long boardroom table (oak), around which sat the severe fringe and two accompanying nondescript suits; in pitch parlance, ‘the money'. There was nothing to say about them. I'd pitched to a thousand of these dull fucks and the only time there was something to say about them was when you'd created it. They were blank canvases for your campaigns. The walls hung with certificates celebrating success in industry awards. A snatch of modernity was added through an LCD screen hung at the head of the table.

Miles did the intros. Smile/smile/shake/shake.

‘Does it have Bluetooth?' I asked, motioning towards the TV.

Silence.

I guess not.

I left the iPad in the bag and synced up the iBook. Trent owned the big idea so it fell to him and Miles to be our swimwear models. Jill's role was to nod, flash her teeth and elaborate through supportive comments. I'd been reduced to slide monkey.

Driving the PowerPoint (or Prezi, if you were really pushing the boat out) might seem like purely an administrative task. And maybe it was. But it was one that came with great power. Essentially, you had your finger on the throttle. Intuition was important. If your swimwear was waffling, a shift up the deck could move them on to safer ground. If they were really struggling, pinging to a video could give them a breather and blind the money with smoke and mirrors. And with great power came great responsibility. It's just that today I was choosing to ignore the second part of Peter Parker's mantra.

I fidgeted. A wool suit was not a good idea. The pressure cooker of pitches heightened the emotions. The adrenal gland went into overdrive. Add to that the skinful I'd generally had the night before – and the stabiliser in the Morgan & Schwarz men's room – and my default beauty parade smell was pure brewery. Today it was just sweat, the omnipotent bead.

Trent, on the other hand, was more fire than sweat. He was looking credible in his sector knowledge; making eye contact, a well-timed industry joke (‘now don't rubbish our creative!'). Hell, he was likeable. Like a politician in a televised debate, he was referring to each of his audience by name (in this case, Imelda, Stuart and Paul). Thanks to the trusty reciprocation rule, they came back with ‘Trent this,' ‘Trent that', ‘Three bags full, Trent.'

It was time for the next slide.