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He works in equities at a small Swiss firm near London Wall. He’s not being arrogant or anything but he’s bloody good at his job – it’s just a fact.
He lives in Putney, drives a BM, doesn’t much like films or books unless they’re about real life crime.
He listens to XFM, thinks Katy Perry’s got nice tits but Adele should lay off the doughnuts.
He goes down the gym – David Lloyd, Fulham – three to four times a week and does forty minutes on the treadmill at fourteen kilometres an hour ’cos he likes to look good. It’s where he met his last girlfriend, Megan, twenty-five, who was super hot, beautiful blow job lips, ri-di-culous body (the greatest arse in London), but after two years she was pressuring him to commit and he just wasn’t sure she was enough for him and he doesn’t miss her ’cos London’s full of fit birds. Mind you, you don’t want to be dating a woman who’s over thirty. There’s a reason why they’re single.
I am yet to find Jason’s redeeming features.
He thinks my name is Ella, and I haven’t bothered to correct him. Partly because he’s done nothing other than talk about himself for an hour. And partly because I’m now severely drunk. My burger hasn’t turned up and all I can think about is how hungover my Wednesday morning is going to be. I’m a little dizzy and I really should have a glass of water but Jason is now desperately chatting up the tattooed, red-lipsticked waitress and I don’t want to interrupt. She’s humouring him, playing along, because the cocktails here aren’t cheap, and if Jason orders a few more then her tip might reach double digits.
‘Oy, Danny,’ he says, pulling at his friend’s sleeve as the waitress heads back to the bar. ‘Did you clock that waitress’s mouth?’
‘Saw her tramp stamp,’ says Danny. ‘You dirty dog, Jase.’
‘I think she’s up for it,’ says Jason.
‘I think she’s a good waitress,’ I say, thinking that I couldn’t flirt with this tosser just for the sake of a bigger tip.
‘Those bright red lips! I bet she’s filthy …’ he says, nudging Danny.
‘For God’s sake, just because a woman wears red lipstick doesn’t mean she’s filthy,’ I say. ‘Where’s my burger?’
Jason takes a swig of his drink. ‘Yeah well in my experience red lipstick’s a good indication that a girl knows what she’s doing down there.’ He grins. ‘The more lipstick, the dirtier!’ He winks at Rebecca.
Good grief. ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Are you actually suggesting that red lipstick indicates a girl is good in bed?’ Rebecca gives me a warning look: you’re drunk.
He shrugs and looks at his mate with a raised eyebrow, as if he’s said the most intelligent thing short of E = mc
.
‘Because, Ja-son, if that’s true, then why don’t you run off and join the circus?’
‘What?’
‘Go join the circus, Jason. Date a clown. They wear loads of red lipstick – it’s all over their face. By your logic that makes them at least twice as filthy as that poor waitress. Yeah, Jase, go and date a nice dirty clown with a squeezy plastic flower and those funny stripy trousers.’
There is an embarrassed silence, filled eventually by Rebecca. ‘Sorry guys, maybe those Jäger Bombs weren’t such a good idea …’ she says. Jason is staring at me like I’ve said something … I don’t know, what is that word now … weird?
‘You know what, Jase?’ I say. ‘Maybe you don’t have to wait until the circus comes to town. You might get lucky. Maybe there are some clowns hanging out down the David Lloyd, running on the treadmill with their long slutty clown shoes.’
I see Rebecca shaking her head more violently in my direction.
‘Gosh, clown shoes must make running a real challenge. Bet they can’t do “fourteen kilometres an hour” like you can … Oh! And step class must be a nightmare! So embarrassing, always tripping over their own feet. Poor, sexy, slightly scary clut-slowns.’
‘Clut-slowns?’ he says.
‘Clut-slowns. Clut-slowns, slut-clowns, you know what I mean!’
‘Are you a lezza or what?’ he says.
‘What?!’ I haven’t been accused of being a lesbian since I refused to snog Elliot Johnson at the school Christ-mas disco when I was fourteen. ‘Jason … You know Maggie?’
‘Maggie who?’
‘Hello? Your ex-girlfriend Maggie? Wow, fickle! Two years together and you can’t even remember her name!’
‘That’s because her name’s Megan.’
‘Oh. Was it? I thought you said Maggie? No?’
He shakes his head.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Pretty sure …’
‘Anyway, “the greatest arse in London” –that one – well, Jason, I’ve got news for you, my friend: you are the greatest arse in London!’
‘Suze …’ says Rebecca, putting her hand on my arm. ‘Let’s get you some food …’
‘I think you should take your mental rug-munching friend home – get her back on her meds,’ says Jason, heading to the bar in pursuit of the waitress.
‘Yeah, send my love to …’ I rack my brain for the name of a famous clown … er … how come I don’t know any famous clown names? Now that really is embarrassing. ‘Send my love to … to Coco!’ I shout after him. Yeah. Coco. That’ll do. He was a boy clown. I think.
Danny whispers something to Rebecca and follows his mate to the bar. Rebecca just stares at me.
‘What?’ I say, twiddling my umbrella and checking whether the up-down mechanism on it works. Cool, it does! I love the fact that these umbrellas could actually function as mini parasols, for ladybirds or something …
‘Bloody hell, Suze,’ she says. ‘You need to stop doing that.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Being insane and aggressive when hot men are chatting us up.’
‘He wasn’t that hot. Anyway you fancy the barman more than you fancied him.’
‘Not the point.’
‘Come off it, he was booooring. And his nob-head friend was rude about Adele. I’m standing up for womankind. And he made that moronic comment about lipstick and I was merely trying to explain to him that … you know … you shouldn’t objectify women, and lipstick doesn’t make a girl sexy …’
‘Shall I tell you what else doesn’t make a girl sexy, Suze?’
‘What?’
‘Verbally attacking random men.’
‘Random dipshits more like …’
‘Whatever. Either way, you come across as angry.’
‘Becka, I’m only angry when I’m provoked.’
‘Look, I know you’ve had a drink …’
‘That’s your fault! You’re a bad friend! You made me have five drinks on a Tuesday night and you know I don’t get along with Jägermeister at the best of times, hideous Alpine medicine …’
‘Hang on a minute …’ she says.
‘What?’
‘The lipstick thing …’
‘No, it’s not what you’re thinking!’ I hold up my hand to stop what she’s about to say.
‘Isn’t Jake’s girlfriend a …’
‘Rebecca, it has nothing whatsoever to do with that.’
‘You’re not still looking at her stupid blog, are you?’
‘No.’
She looks at me.
‘Not really,’ I say.
‘You are. Oh Suze, why are you doing this to yourself?’
‘I’m not. There was some stupid piece in ES Magazine last week about Spring’s New Make-Up Looks. I saw her name, and then there was a little photo of her with her bloody Birkin bag like some wannabe Victoria Beckham, doing some model’s lip gloss at a show … I wasn’t Googling her, I really wasn’t.’
‘Oh Suze, she is so irrelevant.’
‘They’re still together, Rebecca. She’s posted some new pics on Facebook. God, I need some carbohydrate, I feel dreadful.’
She shakes her head and puts her arm round me. ‘Come on, you drunken, crazy fool. Let’s get you home for your meds.’
‘Only if by meds you mean two McDonald’s cheeseburgers for the road? Please, can we?’
She nods, resignedly.
She’s a very good friend.
Wednesday
I will never, ever let Rebecca order me a Jäger Bomb, ever again.
I wake up in my clothes with half a pink umbrella in my hair, a splitting headache in my left eye and the taste of McDonald’s dill pickle in my mouth. It’s fine. I’m not late for work or anything. But as I lie here in bed, talking myself out of chucking a sickie, I can’t help but think ‘Why, oh why am I still working at NMN?’
I’ve been there for six years. I moved there from BVD, an even crappier agency, where I worked on a yellow fats account. (Yellow fats = butter, anything that behaves like butter, or that you’d say was butter-y-ish if you had no taste buds/someone put a gun in your mouth. In fact a gun in your mouth would taste more like butter.) I moved agencies because I thought the problem was BVD and yellow fats. But I’ve come to realise that the problem wasn’t my old agency. It wasn’t the spreadable butter-replacement solutions. It’s this business full stop.
Oh I know what you’re thinking: daft cow, of course advertising is full of tossers! Since the 1980s, ad ‘folk’ have been second only to estate agents as figures of hate. But in recent years two things changed all that. First, bankers and politicians (never high on your Christmas card list), made a running sprint, like at the end of the Grand National, for Public Enemy spots number one and two. The guys from Foxtons slipped down to third place, and ad folk – well, we fell off the podium.
And second: Mad Men came on TV. The men were chauvinists but sexy chauvinists. The women looked like actual women. Everyone smoked and drank and had sex with everyone else in the office. The industry suddenly looked glamorous and grown up and intellectually stimulating. And suddenly people seemed to forget that Mad Men is a made-up TV show rather than a documentary, and started thinking maybe advertising wasn’t so bad after all.
Friends began asking if it was anything like Mad Men at NMN. To which the answer is surprisingly twofold: a bit, and not at all. A bit: the men are still chauvinists. Everyone drinks. Some still smoke. Everyone still has sex with everyone else in the office (apart from Sam and me). But glamorous? Grown up? Intellectually stimulating? See ‘not at all’ for details. And as for women who look like actual women? I’m one of only four females in the building who’s bigger than a size eight, and two of the others are pregnant.
Anyway – I think, as I force myself to crawl out of bed – it’s all going to be fine because I have THE plan: execute this new brief perfectly, stay out of trouble with Berenice, get my bonus and promotion at Christmas, then go and find something fun and fulfilling to do in the world of food instead. And no, I will not be serving fries with that.
It could be a lot worse, I figure as I head to the tube. At least I don’t work at Fletchers.
Fletchers is a rubbish supermarket. They’re the seventh biggest in the UK. They used to be fourth, but they’ve steadily cut the quality of their food and staff. If you go into a Fletchers after 2 p.m. on a weekday, chances are they’ll have run out of milk and bread and you’ll be lucky to find a chicken in sell by date. They’re plagued by bad PR stories: the guy on the meat counter filmed by an undercover Sun reporter picking his nose and then touching the pork belly; donkey meat in the burgers; the relabelling of mutton as lamb; the job-lot of tomatoes from China that were genetically modified in an old nuclear plant.
They’re still pretty popular with shoppers though. Why? Here’s why: firstly, you can feed a family of four for two pounds at Fletchers. Secondly, a large proportion of the British public love the Fletchers ‘brand’. Devron, Fletchers’ Head of Foods and Marketing, is on record as saying ‘If you crossed James Corden with a can of Tango and a Geordie hen night, that’s what our brand stands for: down-to-earth, honest, cheeky fun.’ And all that cheeky fun is down to the advertising we’ve done for them over the last six years. Advertising that I have, in some small way, been involved in. Good job I don’t believe in re-incarnation or I’d be coming back in the next life as a vajazzle.
Fletchers hired NMN as their agency because we are the diametric opposite of Fletchers. We look classy (from the outside at least). We are big. Shiny. Expensive. We do ads for famous beers and jeans; for deodorant that is in every bathroom cabinet in the nation.
Our offices are plush and tasteful. They reek of sobriety.
We’re not wacky, soothe the white walls in reception.
We are solid, reassure the marble tiles in the first-floor client loos. We won’t take your overpriced t-shirt brand and ‘sex it up’ so that next year the only people wearing it will be gypsies on a reality TV show. Gosh no – not our style at all.
Take a closer look, whisper the spot-free windows in the second-floor boardroom. Here, borrow this ruler so you can measure how thick the chocolate on our client biscuits is. See? Isn’t that wonderful? Everything’s going to be just fine.
(It’s a good job clients never take the lift above the second floor. Up on fourth, the creatives inhabit their own little Sodom. Management up on fifth is Gomorrah. The smell of fire and brimstone is masked by copious amounts of Jo Malone Red Roses air freshener but that doesn’t fool me.)
And then we come to my desk, here on the third floor – home of the account directors. It’s a metaphorical floor plan. Below us are the clients, when they come in for a meeting. Above us, the creatives. We are stuck in the middle of two warring factions, the filling in a sandwich that you would be well advised not to eat.
I dump my bag on my chair and take a deep breath. Right: I’ve made a decision. Today is going to be a good day. Yes, I’m hungover, which isn’t ideal. But I have a large white coffee in one hand, and a brown paper bag with buttered white toast and Marmite in the other. Caffeine. Salt. Fat. Carb. Chair. Those five nouns: what more could a girl ask for?
Even better! Jonty’s not here. He’s off on a course all week learning how to manage his workload. Bless, I don’t think he needs any help on that front, he’s given it all to me.
And in other good news Rebecca is out too, on a shoot, so she won’t be able to nab me over lunch break and try to make me talk about last night. Rebecca is one of those friends who thinks it’s important always to confront the truth. Doesn’t she realise no one ever thanks you for telling them the truth? Denial is a healthy psychological state, designed to protect us from ourselves, and should be respected accordingly.
So no lunchtime shaming. In fact, today’s lunch is going to be the start of the rest of my life: Devron’s finally briefing me on Project F and I’ll be on the road to promotion. He’ll phone me in a bit to tell me where he wants to be wined and dined. My mother is always telling me how lucky I am that I get to go to the occasional posh restaurant and not have to pay. Maybe it does sound glamorous. Except it’s not like going somewhere fab with your friends. No. It is going somewhere fab with a compulsive freeloading rude buffoon who is a stranger to the concept of shame.
Sure enough, my phone rings at 10.57.
‘S-R,’ he says. Berenice calls me Susannah. Devron calls me by my initials, S-R. He doesn’t think women other than secretaries should be allowed in the workplace and I figure it’s his subconscious mind trying to pretend I’m not a girl.
‘So Devron, where do you fancy today?’
‘Hawksmoor,’ he says, ‘in Covent Garden. Hello? Are you still there, S-R?’
‘Uh-huh …’ I say, trying to replay exactly what interaction I had with the bar staff last night … Did that waitress overhear any of the clown stuff?
‘I want steak,’ says Devron. ‘Hawksmoor. It’s a beef place.’
