Reluctantly Charmed (9 page)

“Morning.”

“Hi. Mad about Drake Chandler, isn’t it?” he said.

“I know, really sad.”

“He finally did what he was singing about.”

“Looks like it.”

“Did you hear about the note?”

I looked over at him and saw him unwrap another Starshoot. “No. There was a suicide note?”

“Yep. Looks like you’re not the only one going on about the fairies.”

“What? You’re joking.” I cradled the phone to my neck and started typing frantically: “Drake Chandler suicide note.” I clicked onto cnn.com, and there it was. “Have you read this?” I said into the phone.

“Not all of it.”

“‘Too much, too fast, the impossible is now. I took this world and lived with it, but it wouldn’t let me. They wouldn’t let me. I’ve been in a dark place for too long, and now I need to see the light. The fairies are finally letting me dance with them.
To the woods and waters wild, with a fairy hand in hand/For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand
.’”

“Drugs?” Matthew looked over at me, nodding.

“Looks like it.”

“You don’t think there’s anything . . .” He paused. “Your fairies? His fairies? That stuff in the first Step, that line about ‘our
anger you will know, a cradle burned, a soul extinguished, in the music it shall show’? Ah, it’s probably nothing . . .” He trailed off.

How was I supposed to answer that? “I don’t know. It’s unlikely, when you think about it. He’s a rock god superstar, and he’s in America. Surely it’s a different caliber of fairy. How could he have anything to do with the Seven Steps?
And
he was on drugs.”

“Yeah,” Mathew said quietly. “He had Irish ancestry, though. I remember reading about it before. He used to talk about it in interviews.”

“I don’t know. What am I supposed to think?”

He paused. “They say fairies play tricks. What if your aunt foresaw this? What if enough people, enough Celtic souls, didn’t do the first Step, and that’s why he died? The music was extinguished.”

“He committed suicide. How could the fairies have done this? He left a note.” My heart was thumping loudly in my chest. “Fairies? Come on, Matthew.”

“You’re right. It’s drugs.”

“Drugs.”

I didn’t know until a while later that Drake Chandler’s suicide note quoted the Nobel Prize–winning poet W. B. Yeats, who had spent years in the west of Ireland immersed in fairy culture, exploring and absorbing Irish folklore. It wasn’t the first time I wished I’d listened more in school. And I should have listened to Matthew then. Because it was the first sign that there was something more to the Steps. But I suppose I didn’t want to hear it, I didn’t want to know, and I didn’t think. I didn’t think. It seemed impossible. I never thought there could be a connection. Why would I ever think there could be a connection between me and Drake Chandler? Him, a world-famous rock star, and me, a junior copywriter in a Dublin ad agency? I couldn’t make sense of it, not then, anyway. That came later.

7

“H
ow’s the Starshoot working out for you?” I said down the phone. I looked across at Matthew, raised my eyebrows, and smiled. It was Tuesday morning and I was due to post the second Step that afternoon.

“Delicious. I think I’m addicted. We have to do something, though. The Little Prince wants a work-in-progress meeting soon.”

The theme tune to
Jaws
exploded in my mind. My promotion, my future pay raise, my career, all depended on Günter Lindz. A client with so much attitude, the office had nicknamed him “the Little Prince.”

I nodded, hung up, and tried to think about chocolate, nothing but yummy chocolate. But it was tricky. Starshoot is a really nice chocolate bar, packed with nuts, caramel, some crispy bits, and crumbly chocolate. It’s been around since the seventies. It’s the kind of chocolate bar your granddad would shove into your pocket as you said your good-byes, and you’d find it later, warm and melted, and lick the insides of the wrapper. It’s a fuddy-duddy chocolate bar, old-fashioned and outdated. Old people dunk it into their tea. No one under fifty eats it. Ever. But now, the Little Prince wanted young people to suck on it with lattes,
he wanted to see it fall out of the pockets of supermodels and hear it name-dropped by IT people. Unfortunately, there were already seven other bars in the market that had the exact same ingredients and were seen as cool and hip. So there was nothing to say about Starshoot other than it was a very nice chocolate bar and your granddad loved it. “Starshoot—a nice chocolate bar for pensioners.” We had a problem, and we knew it.

People like Matthew and me, who come up with ideas in an advertising agency, are known as “creatives.” I don’t think even van Gogh had a title so grand in his lifetime. It’s a misnomer. There’s very little real creative work involved in our jobs. Instead, it’s about selling. We’re supposed to package a product in such a way that the consumer feels that they need it, that they have to have it, that it
completes
them. We try to start that itch for a new pair of shoes, that longing for a perfume that conjures up images of the south of France and Marilyn Monroe, that desire for the mascara that will make you a better person. The product should feel like completion, if only for a nanosecond.

At least, that’s what we’re supposed to do. Matthew and I work as a team. Officially, I write the words and he draws the pictures, but our roles often blur into one. Like with Starshoot—we were trying to come up with a
big idea
like “Just do it,” “Because I’m worth it,” “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.” We needed a concept, a slogan or a thought that would create a need in every chocolate-craving hipster. And we were struggling, so much so that a little niggling voice in my head was telling me we might be out of our depth and not up to the task.

We’d landed the Starshoot account by accident. We’d been working late one night, slaving, whipped and loin-clothed, over a particular telco leaflet. The office was a ghost town: the foosball tables had stopped clicking a few hours before and the
Nigerian security guard had done one patrol, drunk a coffee with us, and gone on to his other moonlight job at the bank next door. We had a nine a.m. meeting with Colin to “whip and skip out the good stuff.” But there was no good stuff: there were more pictures of phone cords, electrical plugs, wires, speakers, a maze of telecommunications. Then there was a
bang, wallop
in reception, followed by the familiar clopping sound of our short-legged boss.

Wobbly, Colin saw us at our desk and ran over, panting. “Thank God you two are here! I need a creative team. Now.” He ran his hands through his shoulder-length hair. “Günter Lindz from Chocolatez has just called. He has an emergency briefing on Starshoot. He’s on his way in. You two are going to have to take it.” As the words fell out of his mouth the smell of desperation filled the air. His eyes started to crack, fizzle, and pop with panic as he realized just who he was asking to take this briefing—a junior copywriter and a junior art director. Colin quickly scanned the office, hoping that a janitor, Chinese phone guy, Nigerian security man, anyone other than Matthew and I could step in.

“There’s no one else here, Colin. And we’d love to take the briefing. We love chocolate.” Matthew had spoken in the manner of an eight-year-old girl twirling her dress.

Colin had looked defeated. “Okay, okay,” he’d whispered, dry-mouthed.

That was weeks ago and we’d made no progress.

I pulled out my notebook, wrote “Starshoot” at the top in neat capitals, and carefully drew a large question mark underneath. Now I was getting somewhere.

My phone buzzed. Marjorie.

“Kate, can you spare five minutes?”

“Have you more on Drake Chandler?” Although I suspected not—her voice was slightly elevated, more business than gossip.

“No. Could you pop into meeting room four, please?”

“Meeting room? Oh no, do you have a client there? Can you not ask someone else to do it? I’m just about to dive into some very important work.”

“It has to be you. Colin wants you here.” She sounded very annoyed. “It’ll only take five minutes.”

As I tapped on the door of meeting room four, I decided to only feign objection if they sent me out for eclairs. Really, Dudley should have done those kind of jobs, but I supposed I would go if I got an eclair, too.

Marjorie nervously swung the door open. I peered past her. Hugging the red Formica meeting table were two guys from the online department whom I half recognized, as well as Colin, who was nervously twirling his mustache, and the porn client, dressed in a baby blue T-shirt, his arms outstretched and resting on the backs of the chairs beside him, as if he was too large for just one seat.

The porn client’s gray eyes fell on me, piercing, studying. The giant shaggy dog plodded over to me and stuck his wet nose into my hand, nudging me into the room. Maybe the guy doesn’t recognize me from my outburst in the lift, I thought, deliberately avoiding looking at him.

I turned to Marjorie, every inch of my freckled skin blushing. “Yeah?” I whispered meekly, conscious of my breathing and the porn client’s eyes.

Marjorie swung her arms toward me, presenting me like a shiny car on a game show. She turned to the room. “This is Kate.”

“Hi,” I said, studying the tiled floor, refusing to look up at him.

He pushed back from his seat and crossed to me in a heartbeat, extending his hand. “I’m Hugh. Nice to meet you . . .”

I threw my hand out and slowly raised my eyes to him. And he smiled. It was one of those rare smiles that seemed to face the whole world for an instant and then concentrated on me, seeming to understand me—only the best me, or the best impression of me. It was as if he knew me. His face was creased and the smile lines around his eyes made him look rugged. “. . . for the first time.” His hand was rough and mine felt weak and lost in it.

“And you.”

He smiled at me again, and my heart fluttered a little too fast.

“Soooo . . . ?” With her swinging arms, Marjorie created shapes and shadows around me.

“What are you doing?” I asked out of the corner of my mouth.

She tightened her lips. “Just wondering if you could be a fit? For Hugh’s site?” She swung her ponytail and absentmindedly checked her pink nail polish. “I mean, you’ve got that real Irish look. I mean, it wouldn’t be you—you’re not a model, obviously.” She stared me up and down judgmentally, causing me to pull on my navy V-necked sweater and hitch up my jeans in one clumsy movement. “But I wanted Hugh to see the look that Colin and I have been talking about—the freckles, the red hair—to see if it could work for the face of the site.”

“The site? The p—” My mouth hung open in shock.

Marjorie stepped in front of me. “I . . . I . . . don’t think this was a good idea, Colin,” she said a little too loudly.

“No. This is a bit too strange.” I looked over to Colin for support.

He quickly jumped to my aid, me the self-conscious show pony. “Marjorie, that’s fine. Kate, you can go, thanks for coming
in. Sorry for disturbing your morning. This wasn’t a good idea. Thanks, Kate.”

Stunned and confused, I headed out the door.

“I think I’ve just been auditioned for a porn site,” I hissed at Matthew as I passed.

Back at my desk, I opened a bar of Starshoot to help calm myself down. “I don’t know who’s worse: Marjorie or Colin?”

“What happened?” Matthew shouted, only half interested.

“You don’t want to know.”

But
I
did, and an hour or so later I quizzed Marjorie. “Seriously. What was that about?”

“Like I said, the Irish thing. They’re based in the west. I thought it could be a fit—the red hair, your look?”

“You should have warned me.” I was sounding really very cross with her.

“Oh, come on. It was just a moment of inspiration, a creative blast. He’s a difficult client. I had to think on the spot. Don’t get up on your high horse about it, Kate. You should be flattered.”

“Flattered?” High-pitched and slightly hysterical, but definitely not flattered.

“Well,
I
would have been. It’s not happening, anyway.”

That’s a relief
, I thought,
whatever “it” was
.

“Hugh thought you weren’t right. Said you were too ‘natural-looking,’ which basically means you’re not model material, but we knew that.”

Too “natural-looking”? What was that? Too fat? Too red-faced? Too frizzy-haired? “Natural-looking” was never a compliment. That man was infuriating.

“Don’t do that to me again. I’m just glad I don’t have to work with him. He’s an arsehole.”

“Arsehole,” she said in agreement.

Which was how I was feeling about Marjorie at that moment.

My angry thoughts were interrupted by Dudley, who, oblivious to all nerve endings, whistled to the tune of his creaking cart. He idly wheeled through the office to the sound of nails running up and down a blackboard.

Colin stopped him by placing his two hands on the front basket and eyeballed him. “For the love of God, stop, for the sake of the children.”

“I just have to deliver this to Kate.”

“Take it by hand, for all our sakes.”

Dudley tutted loudly and reached into his cart, almost toppling over with the weight of a giant purple orchid. He swayed, continuing to whistle until he got to my desk and plonked the plant down.

“There you go now. Very nice. Who’s it from?”

I couldn’t hide my excitement or my smile, even though Dudley’s presence always guaranteed extreme irritation. My eyes widened and I felt a surge of giddiness as I bit my bottom lip apprehensively. Could it be Jim?

“That’s my business, Dudley.” I tried to sound cool and collected. Other than from the sucker-handed Italian, I’d never received flowers at work before.

“Is it Matthew? You two are always chatting, all lovey-dovey.” Dudley’s eyes were tiny slits, and his underbite looked even more pronounced, if that was possible.

“No.” I reached for the card and ripped it open.

Kate,

So lovely to meet you last week. I’m working on a follow-up piece for
The Times
. I’ve started looking into the life of your aunt. You might be surprised at what I’ve found. I’d love to talk to you about it.