The Case of the Missing Boyfriend (7 page)

And then I somehow stumbled through the crowd and out into the rain and fell into a taxi. And here I am. The gaps have been filled. Phew!

I sip my tea and snort sadly. The thing about a
gay night out
really
is
knowing when to stop – when to stop and go home. And I’m afraid I never seem to get that right. There is always a terrible moment of drunken solitude when I realise that whoever I was with has gone off, or is kissing someone . . . There is always a moment when I realise that I have become surplus to requirements, and that ultimately I’m an intruder in someone else’s space, a voyeur whose alibi has vanished.

I sip my tea and think, not for the first time, that though I love my nights out with Mark and Darren, this isn’t healthy – really it isn’t.

It’s a bit like watching TV – a useful distraction but ultimately unproductive. I need to reorganise my life. I need to spend more time with straight friends. I need a boyfriend of my own.

And then I remember Brown Eyes and wonder if he has phoned.

I stand and cross the room for the handset. For a second I think I might throw up again. I have to steady myself by holding on to the mantelpiece as I dial voicemail.

There is an instant of hope when the computerised woman – she of the erratic intonation – announces that I have
one . . . new, message . . . yesterday . . . at . . . ten, oh, five . . . p.m.

I hold my breath for a moment, but then groan as Cynthia’s nasal twang says, ‘Hi pumpkin. Cyn here. As I’m
sure
you remembered it’s Carl’s birthday on Thursday, so of course we’re having the traditional “do” on Friday. Hope you can come. The usual crowd. Let me know if you’re bringing anyone. Oh, and no need to worry about food. Just bring lashings of Champagne. It’s the big four-oh!’

Oh God! The
traditional
‘do’! The
usual
crowd!
Lashings
of Champagne!

I slump back onto the sofa, feeling not only sicker but thoroughly, irrecoverably depressed.

After the break-up, when all the possessions and friends got divided up, I somehow ended up with Cynthia and Carl. That doesn’t sound very appreciative, and I guess that it isn’t really fair – it’s just my hangover doing my thinking for me.

Fact is, that Cynthia and Carl couldn’t forgive Brian for what he had done to Yours Truly, so when everyone had to choose sides, they chose mine. Which is lovely, really, seeing as they had previously been Brian’s friends rather than mine.

So I’m not ungrateful . . . it’s just that the
traditional ‘do’
means a sit-down dinner at their house, and the
usual crowd
means Cyn and Carl, Pete and Betina and Martin and Cheryl. Don’t get me wrong . . . they’re all perfectly nice couples. But the truth is that now I’m a single girl, I fit into happy-couple-hell (New! With added children!) about as well as I fit into single-homo-hell . . .

In fact, I probably fit in slightly better with the gay crowd, for at least they understand that lives and loves are tenuous at best. We at least have that shared knowledge to bitch about.

The happily-marrieds really seem to have no idea. They don’t understand yet just how fragile their relationships are. They don’t realise how reliant they are on their partners remaining sane, and stable, and truthful, and, long-term, how improbable that is.

We: the single, the dumped, the lied-to, have learnt that relationships are a house of cards, and that with the slightest jog of the table everything comes tumbling down.

And it occurs to me that far from the loss of the relationship itself, the most profound thing Brian did to me was to give me that knowledge: that you can be the happiest, luckiest girl around. You can be in love, confident in your future and overjoyed to be pregnant. And then someone (Brian) nudges the table, and
wham!
you’re a single, childless spare, casting desperately around to try to find someone,
anyone
to fit in with.

It can happen anytime. And it can happen to anyone. And it happened to me.

And now I think I need to throw up. And then I need to go back to bed.

An Arse-Slapping Success

By the time Monday morning arrives, the worst of my hangover is past and I am feeling almost human again. And yet, as is always the case with these things, a shadow of my self-inflicted abuse remains, specifically a vague blurring of my thought processes, an inability to concentrate on a single thought for long enough to get anywhere with it.

This is not good news for the Grunge! pitch and I am only too aware of it.

When I get to the impressive offices within the far bigger, but less sexy sounding, Bowles, Richards and Parkinson Group, or BRP as they are known in the trade (Darren calls them Burp most of the time), I am well known enough to be able to make my own way to the boardroom where the presentation is to be held. I am half an hour early – half an hour which I hope is going to enable me to organise my thoughts.

In the otherwise empty boardroom I find Darren spreading glossy posters out on the giant oval table.

‘Hey,’ he says, as I close the door. ‘Have a look at
this
and tell me what you think.’

He sounds sharp and confident, and stunningly awake, and I wonder for a moment why dealing with hangovers gets so much harder as you get older. Then again, I never remember having felt like that after a weekend on the razzle at any age.

Darren reveals his secret, though, before I can ask. ‘Shit, you look rough,’ he says. ‘You look like me when I got up. Do you want a line? Because I’ve got a bit left.’

I roll my eyes.

‘I know you don’t and everything,’ Darren says, ‘but it is sort of exceptional circumstances. Anyway, the offer’s there.’

But a single glance at the posters on the table provides the jolt of adrenalin required to get my brain on the move. No drugs required. ‘What the
fuck
is that?’ I say, rotating one of the glossy sheets towards me.

The image is a total reworking of the concept I was presented with on Friday. In fact, the image, a man on a sledge in carpenter pants holding a three man-dog husky team looks more like a poster for Ricardo Escobar’s exhibition than an ad for jeans.

‘You don’t like it?’ Darren asks incredulously.

‘I . . .’ I say, momentary speechless.

It’s a beautiful poster but it’s not what we agreed. And it’s not what Grunge! will want to see. I leaf through the other posters on the table. They are all slight variations on the same theme.

A voice behind us says, ‘Like what?’

We both swivel to see Jude enter the room, lean his bag against the glass partition, and circle the table to join us.

I shake my head and swallow and put my now trembling hands into the pockets of my D&G trousers. The three cups of espresso plus the quickly mounting stress have pushed me from comatose to panic attack in a single leap.

Jude rounds the table. ‘Huh!’ he laughs. ‘Cool. Were these taken at that exhibition you two went to?’

‘The next day,’ Darren says. ‘You see,
Jude
likes it.’

‘Yes,’ Jude laughs again. ‘Excellent. Anyway . . . Show me the visuals for today. We haven’t got long.’

Darren frowns at him.

‘The storyboard,’ Jude says. ‘Show me the finished storyboard.’

‘I thought this . . .’ Darren says, his voice tailing off.

‘You did
do
the storyboard?’ Jude says. ‘The original one. The one we
agreed.
’

Darren coughs. ‘I thought this was . . . better,’ he murmurs.

Jude wrinkles his brow and looks from Darren to me.

I say nothing, but combine a raised-eyebrow look which expresses,
You see what I’m dealing with here . . .
with a,
Your problem not mine, you fix it
, shrug.

Jude turns back to Darren, then grabs his arm and bustles him into a corner.

As head of Creative, Jude has never let me down, but even so . . . this is cutting it fine, even for them.

In an attempt at remaining calm I stare out of the window at the London skyline and repeatedly sing ten little Indians in my head. In Italian.
Uno, due, tre indiani, quattro, cinque, sei indiani . . .
Ridiculous, I know . . . but it has always worked for me.

I try not to listen to their discussion, but occasional phrases slip through my filter:
Where the fuck . . . don’t care if the fucking Queen took the fucking photos
. . . so you
do
have them . . . Go! Now!’

Darren grabs his laptop bag and turns to leave.

‘And take this shit with you!’ Jude bellows.

Darren swivels back, gathers the posters, rolls them, and then, red as a beetroot from his dressing-down, runs for the door.

Jude turns to me, smiles, and slides into a seat.

‘And?’ I say.

‘Don’t worry,’ Jude replies calmly. ‘He’ll be back.’

‘With the boards?’

Jude nods. ‘I think he just got carried away. A case of less is more, I’m afraid.’

I shake my head. ‘Incredible!’ I say.

‘I’ll sack him if you want . . .’ Jude says. ‘He would have asked for it.’

‘Shit!’ I say. I shake my head and sigh. ‘Well . . . we can talk about that afterwards. If any of us are still alive.’

At precisely ten I take my place beside the empty whiteboard and begin my pitch.

I smile confidently at the assembled people: Clarissa Bowles, Peter Bowles (her father), four people from the Grunge! marketing department, the Grunge! marketing director Simon Savage, and Peter Stanford, our own grey-haired, impeccably suited, sixty-something, Romeo/Director of Marketing.

Three words are bouncing around my head:
How the fuck?

I take a deep breath and try to shout myself down. ‘Hello everyone!’ I boom. ‘We’re here today, as you know, to present our campaign for the new Grunge! Street-Wear range of unisex carpenter pants.’

I cough and clear my throat and Jude winks at me, egging me on.

‘It’s a well-known fact that gay fashion typically precedes the mainstream by anything between six months and two years, and for this product, because our market research has revealed instant appeal within the trend-setting gay market, our strategy evolves . . . sorry,
re-volves
around exploiting this fact for maximum advantage.

‘We intend, in a nutshell, to specifically target the gay market a full six months to a year early with a stunning tailored campaign to . . .’

I manage to keep this up for a full twenty-two minutes, whilst silently praying for Darren’s return. And, even if I do say so myself, I sound bloody convincing.

But at ten-twenty-two, Peter Bowles interrupts me in typically blunt fashion with, ‘OK, OK . . . Enough of the blah, blah, my lovely. Show me the bloody visuals . . .’

No further stalling possible.

I cough. I glance at Jude. He shrugs discreetly.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘but . . .’

And at that second, I see Darren press his nose against the glass partition.

I force a smile, and beckon for him to come in.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say again, ‘but . . . I didn’t want to show you the visuals until I had explained about the specific market targeting we have planned. The first ad . . .’

Without looking at Darren, I put a hand out to take the sheet from him. If he doesn’t have them, or if these are still the wrong ones, then this pitch will now crash, and I want to make sure that everyone realises that this is not my fault.

To my great relief, like a marathon runner passing the baton, Darren places something, still rolled, into my hand.

I unroll the poster-sized sheet, turn it right way up, clip it to the whiteboard, and then for an instant words fail me. Just for a few seconds, I am so stunned that I could burst into tears there and then.

Because the photo before us – Darren’s reworking of the original concept Jude showed me on Friday, a man in a bar with a sketched-in dog collar, is so – and there’s really only one word for it –
beautiful
, it takes my breath away.

The original pub location has been replaced by a glitzy London bar with multicoloured neon strip lights behind the bar, and everything about the photo is so lush, so rich, so gorgeously vibrant . . . every expression on every person in the shot, every suit, every drink . . . everything . . . everything about this shot is
perfect
.

I suddenly remember that this is the moment which makes advertising worthwhile; this is the moment when, sometimes, just occasionally, what we produce is more than advertising. Sometimes advertising meets art. And I’m overwhelmed with pride to be the one presenting it.

‘We . . .’ I stammer, turning back to the group.

I see Jude consciously close his own mouth.

‘We used an incredibly famous gay photographer for the location shots,’ Darren says, nervously filling in. ‘His name is Ricardo Escobar and he’s terribly well known in the gay community and I think it shows: you can really see that this is a photographer at the peak of his creativity.’

‘So . . .’ I say, catching my breath. ‘As you can see, the image shows a fashionable man wearing carpenter pants surrounded by work colleagues . . .’ An hour later, as we spill onto the pavement outside, Peter Stanton, says, ‘Brilliant show, guys. Spot On, as they say!’ He guffaws at this regularly repeated joke.