Читать книгу What Rhymes with Bastard? - Linda Robertson - Страница 9

3: Work

‘You’ve got to have enough money. That’s the most important thing.’

Mum

If I’d held on to my career, it would have been easier to hold on to Jack. But who was I to make the rules when he made all the money?

As much as he despised his new job, he liked his new workmates: ‘They’re such a great bunch, Lins!’ Their interests ranged from drinking and smoking to talking in funny accents. They bonded through cigarettes, which had been Jack’s comfort since he was ten years old. After gargantuan efforts, I’d had him off them for a few months, but his new colleagues thought that true friends die together, and invited him for a smoke five or six times a day. Eventually, his resolve cracked and they initiated him into the gang with a flaming lighter. To his delight, he was then automatically included in the after-lunch pot-smoking sessions. He kept on telling me how cool they were, once you got to know them.

‘Mmm,’ I said.

‘They’re so social and loyal – it’s amazing.’

‘Mmm. Do they ever see anybody from outside of work?’

‘Well, they spend every Friday or Saturday night together, at any rate. I guess it’s pretty incestuous, though. Like, there’s this tarty account-handler whom everyone fancies, called Gayle – she’s really sweet, she’s got an amazing arse, you have to see it, she’s kind of pudgy but really cute-looking – and I thought it was just kind of light-hearted, but some of them are deadly serious about it. They’re fighting over her!’

‘Really? Who’s going to win?’

‘No one. She’s really smart. Dressing like that and acting flirty gets her what she wants, but I don’t think she’ll do it with any of them. They’re dying of frustration, but no one will actually ask her out.’

‘Do you fancy her?’

‘No, not really. Well, to be honest, I just want to fuck her up the arse.’

While Jack’s anal-sex fixation grew ever more intense and while – unbeknown to me – our relationship was careening towards the rocks, I remained jobless and increasingly desperate to get out of the house. I’d gaze at the towers downtown, speckled with a million windows, a million ways in, thinking that somewhere, in all of that, there had to be a little space for me. I longed to find a job, but I’d never had much luck in that department. After all, back in London, I’d worked in recruitment advertising.

What the fuck is ‘recruitment advertising’?

In London, you’re never more than eight feet away from a rat or a recruitment advertisement. This clandestine industry operates under the radar of normal human awareness, like the Masons without the handshakes and the (alleged) sex parties. Here’s what’s going on: some crap companies struggle to find good staff, others to find any staff at all. Instead of increasing salaries or improving working conditions, they prefer to spend their money on tailor-made propaganda with which to ensnare unsuspecting candidates. And that’s where the recruitment ad agency comes in. It’s not a field that anyone aims to get into, and this was how it happened to me:

In 1995, I graduated with no useful skills. I guarded books in the library of a stately home (where my parents discovered me asleep on the job, sitting upright in a chair), cleaned toilets and made coffee. I then worked on the till in Boots, tended a bar and worked in a cake shop – a nightmare for anyone with a potentially fatal allergy to eggs. In the new year, I went to Liverpool to volunteer in an arts centre for poor kids, where I learned that poor kids were scary. The centre was an unheated church, which was so viciously cold that I chose to run a bake-your-name-in-a-biscuit class, the lure of the oven outweighing the stress of working with eggs. Fifty hours a week I was embroiled in some farcical activity or other, entitling me to a mattress in an unheated, dusty attic. This was winter in the north of England. There was snow on the ground. I washed my jumper, hung it to dry in the basement and returned three weeks later to find it wetter than ever. No one ever took off their clothes except to have a bath. Three months of this was enough to give me some kind of lung disease, so Mum and Dad drove up to rescue me.

Next, I went to France with Jack, where I contracted chicken-pox, and ended up back with my parents, covered with pink spots. When I was up and about again, I got a job as a pizza waitress, and discovered too late that the uniform had short sleeves. I tried to cover up my arm scabs with concealer, but lasted only a day. Then I decided to go abroad, but an intensive Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) course took me no further than south London. Teaching English to Italians in Tooting (TEIT) was a three-hours-a-day gig that involved six trains, and I was fired before the summer ended.

All this time, I’d been applying for bottom-of-the-rung jobs in anything connected with words. Dozens of applications had resulted in just two interviews, both of which I’d mucked up by speaking with unrelenting sarcasm in a tremulous whisper. Eventually I realized I’d have to work for nothing, and condescended to contact the editorial departments of various magazines. To my surprise, they had all filled their slave-labour quotas, so I targeted the picture desks instead, hoping to get a toe in the door. My first ‘yes’ was from Tatler, so that was where I started. I didn’t know that it was a society-’n’-shopping rag for the landed gentry. Too late, I found myself knee deep in cashmere pashminas with matching handbags. For full-time grunt work, I got travel expenses, plus three pounds a day for lunch, which nicely plumped out my thirty-nine-pounds-a-week dole money. (Mum was taking care of my rent – twenty pounds a week for a mattress on the floor in a vicarage.) On my first day at the swanky office I wore a red wool dress I’d picked up in Portobello market. ‘I don’t believe it!’ neighed the editor. ‘A work-experience girl who knows how to dress!’

The magazine operated like a feudal society, in which the ideas came from half a dozen posh people, with unnervingly white teeth, who passed on the labour to an army of unemployed graduates. While we toiled away, the skeleton staff (no joke, they were all anorexic or dying to look it) spent their days blabbing on the phone, chewing salad leaves or getting their teeth polished. A typical day involved traipsing to New Bond Street to pick up a £5000 Loewe suitcase for a photo-shoot, then spending three hours on the phone fact-checking an insultingly vague, scrawled wish-list of dream luggage for winter skiing holidays.

But as those three excruciating months drew to a close, I was filled with dread. Worse was to come: I was scheduled for six weeks on the picture desk at Vogue. I’d been up there on various errands, and everyone had matching belts and nails, and pointy shoes that cost at least thirty pounds per toe. Every night I prayed to the media gods: ‘Please, let me get a job before I have to go to Vogue.’ In between, I had a placement at i-D magazine, the po-faced style bible for urban hipsters. Everyone was fashionable and cool. Because they weren’t fake, they weren’t friendly. The art director was indifferent, unshaven, and seemed surprised to see me. ‘I suppose you could do some photocopying,’ he mumbled. In desperation, I went to the loo, but I couldn’t get back into the office as I didn’t know the door code. Trapped in a cold, echoing corridor, I lost it. I ran from the building in a flood of tears. Hysterical, I phoned Mum, who listened sympathetically and advised me to catch the first train home.

And then the unthinkable happened – I got an interview. The job title was ‘journalist’. With glam mags on my CV, I felt it was within my grasp. This feeling was waning a week after the interview, when Jack decided to take action. He sat me on his lap and said firmly, ‘Now, Bun, call that bitch and tell her why you’re the best person for the job.’

‘I can’t. I’ll look desperate.’

‘Lins, you are desperate. Do it.’

‘What if I’m not the best person for the job?’

‘You are. Course you are. Now do it. Call her now. I’m right behind you.’

He held me tight, and I made myself do it, earning a big kiss and – after my trial period – eleven grand a year.

Eleven grand! It seemed a lot of money until I tried to live on it.

My new boss was a bitch. A smiley bitch with a fake laugh and bad suits. This tousle-haired Medusa barked orders in threes, and sneered when I asked her to repeat, so I’d go round asking people to guess what she wanted. ‘OK, here are the clues: umbrellas, under the window and Prince Albert.’ I’d walk round the block waiting for the tears to stop, hide in the loo or take refuge in the storage cupboard (where, contrary to office lore, I was discovered asleep only once). My job title was misleading: the place sold pictures, and I wrote the accompanying text, which helped sell the snaps, but rarely got published alongside them. I would whiz through my daily atch of fashion and celebrity snaps, then get to work on old stock – pictures of homing pigeons or the Queen Mother’s ready-to-run obituary. To break the tedium, I took down my trousers and modelled a fart-filter (my rear later appeared in a Swedish magazine), and interviewed a corporate shaman, who sat in the office burning sage while we danced to her drumbeat, snickering. I was sent out to interview a man who had been sexy in 1962.

I soon jumped ship and landed in the West End, next to the BBC HQ and the flagship branch of Top Shop, in the dark heart of recruitment advertising. My colleagues were all male, witty and self-deprecating. It was the first place where I felt I belonged to the gang, and our day-long banter detracted marvellously from the demoralizing work. Together we filled our days with useful activities: one tapped away at a screenplay laid out on his monitor to look like ad copy; others stood by the window, spotting stars going in and out of the BBC building, before joining the head of copy at the Dog and Pickle around noon. Later in the day we’d make paper costumes or throw things at each other, running up ads whenever there was a lull in activity.

My favourite client was Sun Valley, a chicken-processing plant in Yorkshire. Sun Valley was a great place to work for three reasons:

1 You got paid.

2 You got a free pair of rubber gloves and a hat.

3 You might not have to deal with giblets.

It was my job to convince unemployed locals that this was a marvellous career opportunity. I churned out dozens of variations on a feathered theme: Your beak break! Give us a wing! Our boss, the creative director, would descend unpredictably from his penthouse, and pace about, making us all nervous. One day, after I’d been there a couple of months, he leaned over my shoulder and said gently, ‘Could we have a word?’ I followed him into a small, cold room with no windows, where we sat down. ‘Linda,’ he said, ‘it’s been noticed that you leave work at five p.m. almost every day.’

‘Yes,’ I acknowledged. ‘That’s what’s on my contract.’

‘Ye-e-s,’ he said, ‘but it’s supposed to be a minimum.’

‘But I’ve always got my work done when I leave.’

‘Ye-e-s, but is it done to the best of your abilities? It’s about giving one hundred and ten per cent here. So, this weekend, I want you to ask yourself if you really want to work here at Jobfab.’

I was stunned. Nobody did a stroke of work after five. It was all right for the boys, but could I really stand another eight hours a week of indoor cricket, Tomb Raider and free beer?

On Monday afternoon, I met up again with my boss. I’d spent the morning in the loo with stress-induced diarrhoea, and I had nothing left to lose. ‘So, Linda,’ he began, ‘did you think about what we said?’

I nodded. ‘I guess I’m not as committed as the rest of the creative department.’ He made a ‘yes, indeed’ face. ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘you can tell that straight off from my Tomb Raider rating.’

‘Tomb Raider?’

‘Face it, my score’s way below the others. I’m no good at cricket, and I can’t drink half as much beer.’

‘So … ?’

‘So what I’m saying is, I think it would be best for everyone if I left, and tripled my income by freelancing at other agencies.’7

‘Now, hold on, Linda, let’s not—’

And thus began the next stage of my career:

Linda Robertson Nomadic Copywriter

nomadcopy@bullshit.co.uk

Exorbitant rates * No job too risible

This led to the same old rubbish, but at three times the pay. I’d sit in gloomy offices with sagging ceiling tiles, waiting for an account-handler to brief me on how to promote pest-control jobs with Hackney Council. I photocopied novels so they looked work-related, and read my way through the long, grey days, taking grotesquely extended lonely lunch breaks.

That was the past, and Tina was taking care of the future, right here in San Francisco. She got me an interview at her marketing agency, Think! ‘They’re all Mormons,’ she explained, ‘but they’re OK. Except David … He’s – well, you’ll see.’

David Aarse was her boss, and two weeks after my arrival in the city I found myself perched next to him on the San Francisco waterfront, blinking in the dazzling white light. The bay shimmered blue and white, and a fresh breeze tickled my arms. It was like having an interview in heaven – if this kept up, I’d get a tan. I took a deep, refreshing breath and turned to face my interrogator. The sun glowed like a halo through the bleached remnants of his hair, and black shades masked his eyes. As he flicked through my embarrassing portfolio, he muttered: ‘Crap … crap … crap … Art direction’s terrible … Now, that one’s OK …’ I tried to begin my spiel, but each time, he held up a silencing palm and flicked on through the book. Then, suddenly, he snapped it shut. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you can’t write, but I like your accent. Linda, are you funny?’

‘I think—’

‘Don’t think, do. That’s the Think! motto. Listen, Linda, we’re putting together an Internet movie, and we need an interviewer. Can you do it?’

‘Um, yes,’ I said, and cleared my throat. ‘I was told fifty to seventy dollars an hour is the going rate.’

David turned his face to the sky. ‘Well, Linda … I can only do twenty-five – an intern rate, I know, but it’s going to be worth it. You see, we’re in … what you might call an interesting situation.’

I asked him what he meant and he took a deep breath. ‘Linda, we have no clients. That means we don’t make any money. However, it offers huge creative freedom. Think! is a very exciting place to work right now. It’s a true challenge.’

I accepted the challenge and the 75 per cent pay cut and returned home with a spring in my step – David Aarse wanted me Think! ing ASAP!

The very next morning I travelled purposefully downtown, gazing up at skyscrapers that jutted into flawless blue.

‘I like your pants!’ said a passer-by.

I reeled, and then I remembered: Americans talk to strangers; pants = trousers.

Soon I was gliding in a gold-plated lift to the Think! reception area, where a young woman sat reading a magazine in the shade of a gigantic, asymmetric blaze of tropical flowers. She looked up and smiled, gesturing for me to proceed. I found myself in a space the size of a football pitch, in which enough people to make up two teams swivelled listlessly in thousand-dollar ergonomic chairs. The place was heaving with the latest technology and the fridge was stocked with organic smoothies. I wondered vaguely who was funding all this, but then Tina came up and showed me round and I got distracted by all the activity. I was working on a website that would have been for Comedy Central TV if they’d commissioned it, but as they hadn’t we had to keep it a secret in case they sued us for using their logo. The website spoofed the X Games8 – taking place a few blocks down the road – using tiny skateboards and bicycles from cereal packets, and served to demonstrate the Think! flair. By the end of the day I had the Think! system pretty much worked out:

A week later, I was standing on the pier in San Francisco, surrounded by X-treme sports fans with grey hoodies and outsize jeans melting over their sneakers. In my red polka-dot blouse, I felt like a cross between a clown and a traffic cone.

David Aarse interrupted my thoughts. He was preaching to his acolytes. ‘A great creative solution isn’t just about pretty pictures or witty strap lines. Never overlook the importance of the financial aspect. Because no business can operate on gloss alone.’ He reached up to smooth his gleaming hair-nimbus. It was true: to demonstrate their business savvy to their non-existent clients, the Think! team would do anything – hang the expense! He turned to me. ‘Now, see, Linda, this is what we’re looking at …’

As far as I could tell, he wanted me to conduct hilarious interviews with skate-kids that would surreptitiously convey valuable data on the consumer habits of the target market sector. Under ideal conditions, I’d have struggled to build a rapport with them, and these conditions were far from ideal. For a start, David had decided that I wouldn’t appear on camera: instead the on-screen interviewer would be a doll-head on a stick. I would crouch out of shot, addressing my questions to a knee.

‘OK, Linda,’ called David, ‘we’re rolling!’ I cleared my throat and unfurled the question list, which kept flapping in the wind. Now, was there a question that wasn’t too dreadful … ?

‘Rolling!’ said David, again.

‘Um,’ I said, to a flapping trouser-leg, ‘why do you smell of tuna?’

‘Whaaaah?’

David bent down. ‘Linda, he can’t hear you.’

I tried again. ‘Why Do You Smell Of Tuna?’

‘Whaaaah?’

Our cameraman turned to the kid: ‘Sorry, man, she has an accent. The question is, why do you smell of tuna?’

‘Whaddaya mean?’

I tried another tack. ‘What Is Cool?’ I shouted into the wind.

‘What’s cool? Oh, I dunno, like, skaters and stuff, you know? Like, the X Games! That’s cool!’

Bingo! Time to slip in a marketing question. No one would ever notice. ‘What was the last consumer durable you purchased?’

‘Whaaaah?’

‘What was the last thing you bought with a plug on it?’

My TV career proved short-lived, but as lay-offs weren’t yet in vogue, David quietly demoted me to tagger-alonger. In my stead, he hired a dreadful little man who dressed up like a ladybird and went round hitting people with a balloon, all his own idea. I trudged around after them, slowly accruing my twenty-five dollars an hour. When the X Games drew to a close, I approached the Create! employment agency. ‘Nothing today,’ they chirped, ‘but soon! Check in every day!’

Three weeks later, they dredged up something, and I went downtown to a swanky ad agency. There, a man with curly red hair sat me down and spoke as though we were planning an air raid. ‘Thanks for coming in at the last moment, Linda.’

I tried to look as though I had something better to do. ‘That’s all right.’

‘Excellent. So, here’s the deal. Our client wants two options for this campaign, and we’ve already come up with the ideal solution.’ He held up a drawing-pad with a blue scribble on it. I inspected it and raised my eyebrows appreciatively. ‘Nice …’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘However, we need to offer them something else, something that’s not so hot, so they get the impression they’re choosing the ideal solution. And that’s where you come in.’

I was confident that I could create something truly second-rate.

Next, Create! got me an interview for a permanent job with the brand-new interactive wing of a global ad agency. The creative director hired me on the spot. ‘Great portfolio,’ he said. ‘Sharp. Edgy. I like it.’ His judgement was awry, but I ran off a-sparkle, rushing into Jack’s arms with the good news.

‘Fifty bucks an hour?’ He beamed. ‘Full time? That’s great!’ He lifted me off my feet for an extra big hug. ‘I’m so proud of you!’

‘I’m so proud of me too!’

We went out to dinner to celebrate. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I really didn’t want to come over here to San Francisco. And things have been pretty difficult so far. It was the worst time of my life, being here without you. But now I’m thinking that maybe we did the right thing after all.’ He polished off his third whisky.

‘I’m sorry I made you do it, Chief. I’m sorry I uprooted you from everything. I know you had a terrible time.’

‘That’s all right, Bun. We’re together now and it’s working out. Shall we get salmon-skin rolls? With little bits of lettuce for you?’

Things were looking up – we’d got ourselves a sun-drenched, overpriced pad with a palm-tree in the garden, and Jack was already bringing in enough to support us both. Viewing life as a ladder we couldn’t fall off, we threw away our savings on designer sunglasses, roller-blades and CDs.

Sadly, life at the cutting edge of interactive advertising proved to be a lot like freelancing in London, except I couldn’t get a single word approved. After two weeks I’d been given nothing to work on except the subject line for a single spam email.

 See the potential. Reflect on your growth.

 A moment’s reflection.

 A lifetime’s growth.

 See your reflection; reach your potential.

 Your potential is reflected right here.

 Extraordinary potential. Time to reflect?.

 Time to reflect on extraordinary potential.

I passed my latest sheet to Slim, the head of copy. ‘Yeah!’ he said, nodding. ‘Nice work! There are some really strong lines in here.’

‘That’s good,’ I said, breaking a smile. ‘I was beginning to think —’

‘Yeah, you’ve nearly got it.’

‘Nearly?’

‘Yeah.’

My buttocks clenched inside my nice pants. ‘So, um, how do I actually Get It?’

‘Hmm.’ He tapped his chin. ‘I’d say … focus on the concept of “Extraordinary”.’

I trudged back to my borrowed desk. Slumping in my ergonomic chair, I began to type yet again.

 Reflect on extraordinary growth potential.

 Reflect on potential extraordinary growth!

 Reflecting extraordinary potential growth?

 Extraordinary potential: growth-reflecting.

 Extraordinary potential for reflecting growth.

 Potential growth reflecting the extraordinary.

 Growth potential reflecting the extraordinary.

 Extraordinary reflecting potential = growth!

 Grow extraordinary reflecting potential.

 Extraordinary! Reflect your growth potential.

 Potential: reflect your growth. Extraordinary!

 Reflect potential for growth: Extraordinary!

 Reflecting truth growing potenti …

Why didn’t they get a computer to generate this stuff? It wouldn’t need its own ergonomic chair. I stood up and went to lunch.

As I ate my rice pudding, I calculated that if Slim ever accepted one of my sentences, it would have cost the company five hundred dollars a word. Considering this, I felt bad about downloading so many knitting patterns. It was time for some straight talk, so back at the office I collared the creative director.

‘You’re doing fine,’ he purred, stroking his plastic hair. ‘There’s plenty of work. Just a bit sporadic. Start-ups.’ Then he ducked into the loo.

The veneer began to disintegrate before my eyes, and I realized quickly that nobody else was doing any work either. Though the CEO kept making references to the future, he wouldn’t give an exact date. We were ‘temporarily’ housed in a low-slung attic above a Chinese restaurant, with threadbare carpets and exposed wiring. Of course, we’d move into a marble palace ASAP, and I’d have my own ergonomic desk, chair and computer, but in the meantime would I mind squatting in the lobby over that big, dark stain? I stared out into the limitless azure beyond the murky windows, then followed my instincts and walked out.

As soon as I got home, I called Jack. ‘I couldn’t bear it any more, Chief. I told them where to stick it – under G for Goodbye. Actually, I said I had another job, which isn’t really lying – it’s referring optimistically to a future state. You don’t mind, do you?’

‘No, Bunny, I don’t want you to suffer. No point us both having a stupid job that we hate. You’ll get something much better.’

In fact, I didn’t. There was no word from Create! and I began to give up hope. I started making elaborate food, reading French and lounging around the house a lot; things got so desperate that I started reading the paper. Not the news part, of course – just the column with the sex tips. ‘A gentleman props himself up on his elbows,’ it said. That was an option? I liked being squashed, but Jack was really heavy, and I couldn’t breathe properly, and after a while the sweat made those farty sounds … But hang on, wasn’t I supposed to be moaning, or something, sort of spontaneously? I just didn’t have it in me, especially now that Prozac had me numb from the waist down. Oh, well, I suppose the occasional orgasm was a fair trade for the soft padding inside my skull. I put down the paper and got to work on a song, and by the time I’d finished, Jack came home with a bunch of irises. ‘Hi, Bun!’ he said. ‘Writing a ditty?’

‘Yup.’

‘Great. What’s it about?’

‘That girl at work you want to fuck up the arse.’

‘What – Gayle?’

‘Yeah, it’s about Gayle.’

‘But you haven’t met her.’

‘I’ve seen her from a distance.’

‘Let’s hear it, then.’

‘You might not like it.’

‘I’m sure I’ll like it. Go on.’

I cleared my throat.