The Case of the Missing Boyfriend (2 page)

‘And you’re
missing
this?’ I ask incredulously.

Mark wrinkles his nose and nods sadly. ‘Yeah. Dead in-laws in Glasgow take precedence,’ he says.

‘She’s from Glasgow?’ I say.

‘Yeah,’ Mark says. ‘Though I think you’ll find that
was
from Glasgow is the correct tense. Anyway, call Darren. He split up with Peter again, so I’m sure he would love you to go.’

‘I take it Ricardo Thingamajig is gay,’ I say, ‘. . . the photographer?’

Mark nods and wrinkles his nose. ‘Probably,’ he says, pushing his lips out. ‘Bisexual at worst, I would think. Or from your point of view, I suppose, bisexual at best.’

I grimace.

‘I’m sure there will be some straight arty types there though,’ Mark says raising one shoulder. ‘And it has to be better than sitting here feeling sorry for yourself in the dinge all weekend,’ he adds, nodding out of the kitchen window at the mass of green shadow beyond.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I say.

Once Mark has drunk his tea and swooped off with his flowers, I sit and stare out of the window at the base of the Leylandii and think about the invitation. A year ago I would have jumped at it. But that was before I started worrying about The Missing Boyfriend.

Of course, in a way, I have always worried about The Missing Boyfriend – I have worried about him, or his absence, so frequently that I have had to shorten it to TMB just to save brain energy. Even when I was dating someone, even when I was married to Ronan, or living with Brian, I still worried about TMB, for the person sitting opposite never quite fulfilled the image I had in my mind’s eye about how TMB would/should/ could be.

It’s not that I am particularly demanding, honestly it isn’t. It’s just that the men I have ended up with have been so spectacularly lacklustre. And ever since Brian . . .

A gloomy image of my life with Brian appears at the periphery of my mind’s eye, like a storm on the horizon threatening devastation. I pause and sigh before swallowing hard and pushing it away.

God it’s still there! Three years on, and Brian is still lurking around the edges of my brain ready to pop up at any moment. Break-ups are survivable. It’s the aftershocks that get you.

Suffice to say that ever since that bastard Brian, finding a man, finding the
right man
, has started to feel urgent, because of my age. Well, my age and the baby thing.

So Darren and Mark and their boyfriends
du jour
may be fabulous fun, but I am increasingly aware that they are not the correct route through the maze that is my life – they will not lead me to the TMB.

And so I make a compromise with myself: I will go to the dreaded speed-dating thing again and as a reward I will let myself go to Ricardo Whatsit’s bondage exhibition. And you don’t need to be Mystic Meg to predict which is going to be the most fun.

I reach for my mobile and dial Darren’s number.

Carpenter Pants

Fridays! They’re always the worst. Days stuffed with itsy-bitsy multicoloured tasks that fill every second of the day, but like M&Ms fail to nourish in any way.

I make a phone call here, send a couple of emails there, courier a DVD to the printer.

These days – and in advertising there are many of them – drive me insane. Because though I run around barely pausing for breath, schmoozing here, smoothing ruffled feathers over there, chivvying along and calming down as required, no single task is ever consequential enough to give any kind of character to the day. These
days
, and they fall often, though not exclusively, on Fridays, leave little or no sense of achievement. They are the kind of day that, when Ronan or Brian would ask me what I had done that day, (usually in response to my state of evident exhaustion) I was hard pressed to think of a single thing I had achieved.

Nowadays no one asks of course – perhaps the only advantage I can think of in being single.

Though painfully vacuous, these days are, however, essential. For without schmoozing, clients look elsewhere, and without smoothing, ruffled feathers fly away. And without chivvying, neither Media nor Creative do anything at all.

It’s four p.m. I put down the phone and sigh. It’s the first time since eight this morning I have had time to think about the ADD nature of the day.

I look over towards the coffee room to see if the dreaded Victoria Barclay is lurking, waiting to assail me with one of her complex look/sigh combinations – a raised eyebrow here, a pouty mouth there. Though the meaning is never explicit, I am always left feeling guilty. Just as with my mother, any look other than a smile leaves me feeling as though I am somehow a disappointment, if not to the partners (of which she is one), then to womanhood, or perhaps even to the entire human race.

And then I think about the chivvying thing again, and realise that Creative haven’t given me anything whatsoever for my Monday morning pitch to Grunge! Street-Wear, so I grab the phone. When the boys fail to pick up their extension I literally jog across the room and throw myself through the closing doors into the lift.

Gotcha! Victoria Barclay, lying in wait, spider-like, gives me the once over, raises an eyebrow and then screws the end of her nose as if I am perhaps smeared in dog shit. ‘Running
late
for a change?’ she asks.

I smile at her. ‘Not at all,’ I say.

I turn to face the doors and wait for my chance to escape.

Of course, not getting anything from Creative –
The Gay Team
as I call them – is pretty par for the course really. As far as I can see they just sit around all day talking about their sexual conquests and smoking until half an hour before the deadline, whereupon they somehow miraculously defy gravity or time or something by slinging together some irritatingly fabulous idea.

Whether this ability to do nothing and then come up with the goods at the last possible moment is a sign of their brilliance, or a severe failing on their part, I can never really decide. I often wonder how good the campaign would be if they spent, say, a whole
afternoon
on one. But with Mark away, and with Jude famously refusing to work weekends (nothing must get in the way of his cycling) this is cutting things even finer than usual.

Sure enough I catch Jude and Darren leaning out of the window smoking. They drop their cigarettes into an old Marmite jar on the window-sill and spin to face me. ‘Oh it’s only you,’ Jude says. ‘Damn! Waste of a good ciggy.’

‘Thank God you’re still here!’ I reply. ‘Where are the visuals for the Grunge! pitch? I just realised, I haven’t had anything.’ I note a slightly hysterical tremor in my voice and decide to get a handle on that.

‘What? For the pervy jeans?’ Darren asks, frowning.

‘
German carpenter pants
, I think you’ll find,’ I say calmly.

Carpenter pants are in fact black jeans, only with two zips for the fly, one to the right and one to the left of the normal opening. Quite why German carpenters, or anyone else for that matter, should need two zips for peeing is beyond me, but the Grunge! designers are convinced that it’s the next big thing. It is up to us at
Spot On
to make it so.

Thinking that it’s a bit late in the day for me still not to know this stuff, I ask, ‘Anyway, why
do
German carpenters need a double fly? Are they, like, really big or something?’

Darren giggles. ‘Maybe. Or just into general perviness.’

I sigh. ‘Come on then,’ I say, ‘spit it out.’

Jude shrugs cutely, and blushes slightly. ‘Well, that’s the real point, isn’t it?’

I frown. I think I’m being naive, one of my specialities – though when you’re surrounded by gay men, it’s often hard to appear anything else. ‘OK,’ I say. ‘I have to sell the damn things. Explain.’

‘It’s so boys can get their tackle out,’ Jude, now seated at his Mac says, matter-of-factly. ‘For you know . . .
shagging
. Quickly.’

‘Is it?’ I ask, grimacing at the overload of mental imagery this concept is producing. ‘And they can’t do that with a normal fly?’

‘Well no, dear. Not without considerable risk of rubbing it up and down the zip,’ Jude laughs.

‘Not to mention the risk of getting it caught in the zip,’ Darren adds.

I grimace. ‘Is that
really
the point?’ I say. ‘Or are you winding me up? Surely button flies . . .’

‘No one can get in or out of a button fly in a rush, hon, even
you
know that,’ Jude says.

Darren nods sadly. ‘That’s why leather-men have had double zips on their gear for years.’

‘But how does having two zips help?’ I ask, picking up a sample pair of the jeans and unfastening one zip and then the other. The rectangle of tissue between the two zips flaps downwards. ‘Ahh!’ I laugh. ‘You undo both zips
at once.’

Jude rolls his eyes at my apparent slowness.

‘So I take it you do have an idea to sell this to the general public,’ I say, ‘because dungeon masters are
sooo
not our target market here.’

Jude beckons me over and Darren squeezes in beside me. ‘I just did this mock-up,’ he says. ‘There are two campaigns – we run the gay one first, in
Gay Times
,
Têtu
in France . . . what-have-you.’

He clicks and the screen fills with an image. A guy (beautiful, skinny, photoshopped to perfection) is standing in a pub surrounded by white-toothed, earnest-looking colleagues in business suits. He’s wearing carpenter pants and a sweatshirt, and around his neck is a sketched-in dog collar with a vast long lead which runs out of the door, up into the night sky, and across town before dropping into the hand of a guy who strikes me as a very Village People leather-man in breeches, boots, and one of those peaked military hats. He is heading into the door of another, much dingier looking bar with a neon sign. Across the top of the ad the copy reads, ‘For guys who like to get ^ out.’ Above the ^ is a hand-written ‘
it.
’

‘Jesus!’ I say. ‘That’s a bit full-on isn’t it?’

Jude shrugs. ‘
I’d
buy a pair,’ he says.

‘Me too,’ Darren says. ‘That’s brilliant.’

I shoot him a look and turn back to Jude. ‘When you say you have just done this, you really mean,
just
, don’t you?’

He shrugs.

‘So what’s the pitch?’ I ask.

Jude grins disarmingly. ‘Gay culture is all about invisible signs that only those in the know can spot,’ he explains. ‘Leather wristbands, handkerchiefs in pockets, key chains . . . So here we see a gay guy, by day, in a work environment, and all those suits he’s with have no idea that by night he’s a dirty little bugger.’

‘Truly brilliant,’ Darren says.

‘Whereas, of course, any other gay man will have seen “carpenter pants” (he raises his fingers to make the speech marks) or at the very least this advert and will know exactly what’s going on.’

‘But the target market isn’t only gay men,’ I point out.

‘No,’ he says, clicking on the mouse. ‘It’s not quite finished yet, but . . .’

The screen fills with a soviet-propaganda-style image of a couple. The guy has cheekbones you could hang washing on and biceps the size of my thighs, whilst his girl has an Angelica Wayne nano-waist and a tied-back, blond bob. They are standing with their backs to a scene of urban desolation – London, kind- of after the earthquake – whilst before them is a vast, open vista of green fields, cows and daisies. Along the top is a similar tag line. ‘For men who like to get out of the Grunge!’ The guy is, of course, wearing carpenter pants.

‘So here,’ Jude explains, ‘we’re showing a Germanic alpha- male who lives the hard life in the city, but spends his free time enjoying nature. He is the touchy-feely nature-lover/muscle-man women want.’

‘Is he?’ I ask, briefly trying to imagine myself with the touchy- feely, Germanic, alpha-male.

‘Yes,’ Jude says, ‘and he’s leading his girl away from the grunge of the city for a lovely day out.’

My focus has shifted to the bulge behind the alpha-male’s double-zip combination, and I decide that Jude is indeed right. He is exactly what women want.

‘But what is the double zip gonna do for
this
guy?’ Darren asks.

I frown at him. ‘Have you worked on this project
at all
?’ I ask.

Jude shrugs. ‘He hasn’t. But he’s finishing off the visuals this weekend, aren’t you? And the answer is that double-zips aren’t going to do anything for him. It’s fashion, sweetie. But once the trendy straight boys see us gay boys running around in carpenter pants they will want them too. This second ad creates a parallel message about it being to do with the great outdoors – it’s an enabler – it creates a second narrative to let them buy something that they would otherwise identify as gay.’

I nod. ‘OK,’ I say, doubtfully. ‘But heterosexuals do actually have sex, you know.’ I wait for one of them to say, ‘
Do you?’
But no one does, which is a relief. Because if I were being truthful, I would have to admit that not
all
of us do.

‘Yeah, but not in an impromptu whip-it-out kind of way,’ Darren says.

I shrug. ‘It has been known,’ I say, affecting my best wise- woman-of-the-world expression. ‘There are certainly plenty of couples who like to shag in the great outdoors.’

‘Well, then the image is perfect,’ Jude says. ‘You can read it either way.’

‘If he buys a pair for his girlfriend too then that would certainly speed things up, wouldn’t it?’ Darren says.

‘As long as the zips don’t get stuck together . . .’ Jude giggles.

‘So that’s it?’ I ask, forcing a serious tone to interrupt the chatter. ‘This is what I’m pitching on Monday to Clarissa Bowles and company?’

Jude shrugs. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think it’s awesome,’ Darren says. ‘I wish I had made more input, I would have been really proud of that one.’

I shake my head. ‘Jesus, Mary,’ I say. If my childhood priest knew the things I have to sell these days he’d . . . Truth be told, I do remember a bit of a fuss. He would probably want a pair. He probably
has
a pair. In leather.

Jude rubs my arm. ‘You’ll breeze through,’ he says. ‘You always do. ’