Do You Want to Know a Secret? (11 page)

‘Just write the way you talk, and we’re home and dry. Trust me on this.’

‘Well, then, I suppose this is the final rung in my descent from noted young barrister to dancing bear,’ she
sighs
. ‘Right then. If only for reasons of catharsis, I’ll write out something and send it to you from my new email address: “Laura at bottom of the barrel dot net”.’

There’s a tiny pause and I just know she’s doing her lop-sided smile thing. This is a big improvement, this is great progress from the state she was in at the start of the call. She sounds cooler, calmer, more like herself. My God, she even went for a gag.

I make all the soothing, supportive, clucking noises I can, and just as we’re saying our goodbyes and I’m heading in for my meeting, it flashes through my mind . . . is there anything in my dog-eared law of attraction book that might offer her a granule of comfort right now?

No. If I was to tell her that somehow, she
attracted
all this into her life, she’d probably never speak to me again, and I don’t think I’d even blame her. Although I am pretty certain there’s a reason for everything she’s going through right now.

I just haven’t a clue what it is.

At least, not yet.

Chapter Seven

NOW, I’VE ACTUALLY
done some work with Best Advertising before and I
love
visiting their office. It’s just the coolest place you could imagine; I honestly think if I worked here, I’d never throw a sickie, ever. It’s an old malt house, completely refurbished but with a lot of the old, original features still intact. Exposed brick on the inside, frosted-glass brick staircases, you know, the sort of building architects must lie awake at night salivating over.

Anyway, two things you should know about Best’s: a) I often think they must have a policy in their HR department that to work here you must be under thirty, hot and with a smokin’ body, guys included, and b) the company motto seems to be ‘at all costs, have a good time’. They often have these mad theme days going on, like champagne Thursday (I remember nearly falling out of here after one late meeting, but then two drinks
on
an empty tummy does that to me) and Fridays where everyone comes in wearing Hawaiian shirts and keeps saying ‘aloha’ to you down the phone, that kind of thing.

I’m half-afraid to ever bring Paris and Nicole here with me; they might start getting ideas.

‘Vicky Harper here to see Amanda Smith, brand consultant,’ I say to the very smiley, very blonde, cute-looking guy behind the desk.

‘Take a seat and I’ll let her know you’re here,’ he beams. I’m just about to plonk down on a very luxurious-looking leather sofa when he says, ‘Hey, would you like a mocha kiss?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘It’s just that today is Choca-Mocha Monday and I can highly recommend their kisses. They’re a new account and they keep giving us freebies by the truck-load. Here, you HAVE to try them. Utterly divine.’ With that, he tosses me over a bright red, heart-shaped bag stuffed full with lovely, shiny, individually wrapped kisses.

Free chocolate handed to you first thing on a Monday morning? Bloody hell, I might apply for a job here myself.

A few minutes later, Amanda comes click-clacking down the glass brick staircase, waving a giant-sized, lipstick-shaped pack of mocha kisses at me. You’d love
Amanda
, she’s bubbly and she’s a howl and she’s always full of hilarious stories about rubbish dates she’s been on, and no kidding, every time I see her, the hair is a different colour. Today it’s bright blonde, but with jet black streaks going through it, from front to back.

‘Hey, gorgeous, I bring the best PMS treatment in the whole world,’ she squeals at me as we air-kiss at reception.

‘Freebies, loving it,’ I say, gratefully taking the bag of kisses from her. ‘And loving the hair too, by the way. Miles nicer than the time you had it purple.’

‘You don’t think it makes me look like a badger on
NatureWatch
, do you? The girls upstairs are giving me a rotten time. They say I look like an endangered species.’

‘No, totally fab.’

I’m not just being nice; it’s the God’s honest truth. Plus she’s got a stunning black-and-white Marni dress on, which I know cost a fortune because I looked at it in Harvey Nicks and nearly had to have a lie-down when I saw the price tag. She looks like a goddess in it, far better than I would have, but then Amanda’s one of those people who, if they wore a bin liner, would make Kate Moss want to rip it off their back in a fit of jealousy.

I think it must be yet another Best company policy – at all times, staff are required to dress like they just stepped off a catwalk in Milan – which makes me:
a)
doubly delighted I’m wearing my really good white linen trouser suit from Zara today, and b) overwhelmingly grateful for the minor miracle that I actually remembered to pick it up from the dry cleaners. Actually, come to think of it, it’s maybe the only disadvantage of working for a company like this: the sheer number of man-hours I’d lose worrying over what to wear the next day. It would probably kill me.

‘Ooooh, Vicky, I love, love,
love
that you’re pitching for this,’ Amanda says, squeezing my arm as we both troop up the glass staircase.

‘Well, I love, love,
love
hearing that.’

‘No really, everyone here still raves about the fashionista launch you did for us. Most amazing night
ever
. Well, except the guy I ended up with at the after-show party turned out to be bisexual, but that was hardly your fault, and apart from that, it was just totally, like,
out there
.’

This was the last time we worked together, about a year ago, when Best’s hired me to launch the new Peter O’Brien ready-to-wear collection for a big high street chain. Their suggestion was that we hold it in a trendy down-town champagne bar, but I had the strongest instinct that that would be just a bit too . . . obvious. So I rang the designer, the mighty Mr O’Brien himself, and asked him what his inspiration for the collection had been. Well, it was like striking gold: it turned out he’d
based
the overall concept for the entire collection on the portraits by Sir John Lavery hanging in the National Art Gallery. It was just the eureka moment I needed; I pitched that we host the launch there, had murder trying to win Best’s around, but eventually wore them down, and the rest is history.

Honestly, if I say so myself, it was a glittering night. I’d arranged for models wearing exact copies of the Edwardian dresses in the portraits to pose in gilt-edged picture-frames, then step out and circulate. It was a gamble, but it worked a treat: the launch practically generated more column inches than the President’s last state tour, and the stores that stocked Peter O’Brien’s clothes sold out, literally in hours, leaving nothing but empty shelves and queues outside the doors, a bit like Stalinist Russia on Christmas Eve.

A few hardier shoppers even vowed that for his next collection, they’d camp in sleeping bags on the pavement outside the store the night before, like people do when U2 tickets go on sale, just to be on the safe side. And the icing on the cake: the whole story even ended up getting a novelty item feature on the
Six O’Clock News
, which in PR terms is kind of like the Holy Grail.

Which is kind of why I feel confident about coming back here this morning, with the new pitch I’ve worked so hard on for them.

Which is kind of why I feel, OK so it’s not
technically
in
the bag, but I think I might just be sending Paris and Nicole out to buy a lovely big bottle of pink champagne for us to celebrate with before the day is out.

Which is kind of why my heart sinks a bit when, just as we’re about to go into the boardroom, Amanda turns to me and says, ‘Oh, yeah, by the way, the boss is sitting in on this one. It’s just that it’s such a huge contract and this client is so important to us. You don’t mind, do you?’

Shit
.

Funny, this is normally the way the law of attraction works on my love life. Every time I feel confident about a bloke, I’m rewarded with a sharp smack in the gob from the universe.

I will seriously have to re-read that book when I get home.

Anyway, as you might expect from a company like Best’s, the boardroom is more like somewhere you’d throw a party in; in fact I bet they use it for their staff Christmas party.

Note to self: do level best to get invited to their next Christmas do. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they make it a condition of your Christmas bonus that you have to kiss the face off as many people as possible, therefore am bound to score. Yes, even me.

The room is huge and white and bright and fab, with
a
giant Louise Kennedy crystal chandelier, bright-blue swan chairs, and so many bowls of sweets dotted around that I almost feel like emptying one into my handbag for later. Don’t worry, I don’t, but when Amanda plonks down beside me and tosses me a mocha kiss I can’t help myself. I’d no breakfast this morning due to having no kitchen, I just grabbed a Starbucks which I gulped back in the car, and am now half-afraid that the pitch I’ve put my heart and soul into will be drowned out by my tummy, which is now rumbling louder than a 747 cleared for landing at JFK. We’re the first people here, there’s no one to see, so within two seconds, I’ve stuffed two of them into my face in one go.

‘Oh, God, Amanda, the only thing you got wrong with these is the name. Should have called them chocolate orgasms.’

‘Mmmm, I mwah, merw mmmmmmmmm,’ is what she comes out with, but I’m pretty sure she’s agreeing with me.

Pretty soon, the room fills up and it’s showtime. Amanda introduces me to about eight different people; more staff from Best’s marketing department who I haven’t met before, more design consultants, more brand consultants and then of course . . . drum roll for dramatic effect . . . the client herself, one Sophie Boyd. She’s older than anyone else here, maybe fifties, and is dressed to kill in a stunning pale-blue pastel suit with a
matching
Hermès scarf. The hair is cut into the most perfectly executed blonde bob and I know just by looking it must take at least half an hour every morning with a GHD to get it sitting that poker-straight. She has a distant, bored look and kind of reminds me of Meryl Streep in that movie,
The Devil Wears Prada
. In fact, I’d safely say she’s one of those frowningly important women who come with their icy stares all pre-graded, from class A to class C (the one that reduces her staff to whimpering wrecks), entirely depending on how narky a mood she’s in.

Apart from her, there’s two guys, the rest are all women, and needless to say, everyone’s outrageously good-looking, fully in keeping with the company ethos. Amanda doesn’t give me their actual job-titles though, and I’m frantically trying to put faces to names and names to titles, and even more critically, gulp, figure out who is this boss I’ll have to try and impress the most, when suddenly a size-zero Posh Spice look-alike, wearing a suit just like mine only in black (thank you, universe), steers me away from everyone else and introduces herself as Best’s senior creative adviser.

Oh, bugger. We shake hands coolly, and I swear I can practically see this one taking an instant dislike to me, which I probably should explain.

The relationship between creatives and PR people can pretty much be summarized thus: they hate the
sight
of me and I hate the sight of them. They tend to look on people in my game as jumped-up nobodies, outsourced and now trying to muscle in on their territory; whereas we look on them as behind the times for not accepting that launching any new product is a huge deal, and that PR people need to be involved in product development from day one, whether they like it or not. And, on a personal/slightly bitchy note, I have yet to hear any ‘creative’ come up with a concept that isn’t a rehash of what’s already out there, instead of being ahead of the game. Just like the fashion world: the real players there have already decided now what we’ll all be wearing in about two years’ time.

I don’t have to pretend to be nice to her for too long. After a light bit of chit-chat, everyone just plonks down on the swan chairs and Amanda asks Posh Spice look-alike to kick-off. Which she does, giving me a sneaky few minutes to glance around the room, trying to figure out which one is the Don Corleone, so to speak.

‘OK, well, in keeping with the Hollywood theme you envisage for Original Sin,’ Posh Spice is saying, in her ‘It’ girl voice, holding up a storyboard, ‘I’d like to suggest we go for a young, hip concept that will appeal to the broadest section of our target market. So, I’ve created Isabella to represent our ideal consumer. OK, so let me introduce you. Isabella is aged between twenty and thirty-five years old, OK? She lives in Malibu,
California
, she spends all her weekends at the beach, and she drives a Mercedes convertible, OK? She eats out at least three times a week, works out four times a week and is more likely to agree with the lifestyle statement: “It’s more important to look good than to work hard.”’

She keeps droning on and on about Isabella’s favourite colours and movie stars and TV shows, and will probably be telling us what colour her knickers are in a minute, but I’m not fully concentrating, I’m too busy scanning the room for who could possibly be the head honcho around here . . . and having absolutely no joy whatsoever. I’m just wondering if maybe whoever it is couldn’t show up at the last minute, for some multi-millionaire type reason such as the private jet ran out of Moët & Chandon or something, when the tag-line of Posh Spice’s pitch suddenly pulls me back into the room.

‘. . . so to conclude,’ she’s twittering, ‘I would say our overall image could be summarized in a single phrase, Bel Air.’

What?
Bel Air freshener, is what I’m thinking, as the rest of the room give her a small round of applause and, hypocritically, I have to join in. Oh my God, that is so NOT what I had envisaged for this product, I’m thinking, glancing down at my notes for the launch which so don’t fit in with any of Posh Spice’s pitch, not a bit of it . . .