My Idea of Fun (24 page)

All of them, all of the marketeers, had compensated for the painful nullity of their emotional lives by infusing their work, introjecting it into their psyches. These were Ian Wharton's ideal confrères. For, like him, their cerebella had been fashioned into frozen gondolas, crammed full of frosted thought-items. Theirs was a mental
mise-en-scène
within which aspirations, yearnings, dreams, ethical confusions, had all become just so many product placements, each jostling for its paid-for moment in the viewfinder of consciousness.

They subjected themselves to marketing methodologies relentlessly and avariciously. They divided themselves internally into socio-economically classifiable sub-sets of assertive homunculi, which were compelled to complete notional surveys, attend focus groupings where phenomena were assessed, and then witness hamfisted demonstrations of the next Little Idea. The marketingspeak had invaded their very ordinary language. Thus, they had adapted the folksy homily to their own usage, proclaiming, ‘There are no such things as strangers, only prospects that we haven't converted, yet.’

These were Ian's colleagues and in his perverse way, the only people he really felt comfortable with.

‘Morning, Hal, Pat, Si, Geoff – ‘

‘Morning, Ian,’ they chorused.

‘Ian, I'm glad you're here. I've had the most extraordinarily good news.’ Gainsby gestured at the surface of the conference table where, Ian now noticed, there lay in front of each of the marketeers a D.F.& L. Associates pitching document. ‘We've won the Bank of Karmarathon account!’ His peculiar Bostonian accent warbled over the exclamation, and at long last he felt able to free himself from the air-conditioner. He took a seat at the head of the table. Ian sat as well.

‘Hal, that's amazing news, congratulations, you deserve every credit.’

‘Nonsense, Ian, this wouldn't have been possible without all of us. We worked well as a team, now I think we're going to be rewarded – handsomely. They've agreed to the budget we proposed for the product launch without any reservations. I don't need to tell any of you that our fee as a percentage of that budget will be very considerable.’

‘What a relief!’ Ian sank heavily into his allotted chair, then instantly regretted it. The chairs were another of the fruits of D.F.& L.’s labour and Hal Gainsby's unfortunate loyalty to the products he marketed. The aluminium S-bend design was ubiquitous, but this particular version had a major fault. The tensility of the aluminium used had been too great; anyone who forgot this fact found themselves bouncing to a standstill as if on a trampoline.

When he had finally settled Ian went on, ‘So what now? How quickly do they want us to proceed?’

‘Well, that's just the thing. I had a call at 4 a.m. this morning from Nat Hilvens in NY. Karmarathon want to push the launch forward to January of next year, which gives us only six months to do all the softening up.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Geoff Cryer muttered. ‘That's going to present huge logistical problems. There's the financial press to be dealt with, for a start. I'd thought that we'd have time to organise quite a number of informal seminars, in order to introduce them to the idea.’

‘Y-yes.’ Arkell was squirming in his seat, thin fingers holding each opposing wrist.’ What about these standing booths we were going to erect? I've only just put the whole thing out to tender, I've no idea how we'll manage to organise the permissions and get them actually built before January.’

For no good reason silence fell around the conference-room table. Ian idly scanned the juncture of the cream skirting board and the beige carpet, noting the druff-falls of paint and plaster fragments, another failure by the staff to keep their itchy fingers away from the Painstyler decoration. Under his own broad palm he could feel the slick folders, the phallic pilots’ pens, the plastic-encapsulated microchip butties, that bulked out his soft, calfskin portfolio. Ian's attention first wavered, then wandered, away even from the silence itself. Outside in the other world of the street, vehicles oozed through the soupy air, a jack hammer drummed on the cakey crust of the earth.

This wouldn't do. He normally felt bound-in here at D. F.& L., secure in his trade persona. In his work he intuited the universe of products as a primary construct, a space-time configuration upon which consciousness-at-large had engrafted itself, like wisteria choking a trellis. That is why – he believed – one's own mind fitted so well into those of others. Every dove of consumer cogitation could marry a tail of vendor awareness. The communality of products was stronger than that of language, of television, of religion, of party, of family, of primogeniture, of
Heimat,
of Medellin, of retribution, of clout, of face, of
latah,
of the Four of Anything, of off Broadway, of any of the consistencies that had been used to establish the increasingly arbitrary character of the cottages that made up the global village.

Ian thought for the first time in years of the concept of retroscendence. How it might be possible to enter into the very history of a product, any product, the Porsche or the crisp packet, and flow down its evolutionary folkways, zoom back to the point where it was as yet undifferentiated, unpositioned, unintentional, and therefore not about anything. In the flat land of the Delta the babies cry themselves to sleep in the airless shade, while everyone else labours in the scintillating sun. When the dun evening comes the kids go down to the irrigation channels for some bilharzia bathing. They have little to look forward to. . . Gainsby was saying something ‘. . . feels that he was crucially involved in, so to speak, factoring this to us. It isn't something I've spoken of to you before – ‘

‘No, you haven't, Hal, you haven't seen fit to.’ Patricia Wieiss's voice was snappy, more than piqued.

‘I don't know the guy.’ Hal was unhappy, his voice teetered up a half-octave. ‘I've got no idea of how he could possibly even know about us, but he does. Or at any rate he says he does. He's got some interest in Karmarathon, of course – ‘

‘That's right, of course he bloody does. Isn't that bloody brilliant. This agency limps along, constantly in danger of going out of business altogether. Then finally, at long last, we land something that looks as if it might be a decent account, something that will really underwrite us, not just some fucking wing nut or minority-interest hair cream. And immediately we start to get yanked around, like a toy poodle on a leash. And who's doing the yanking? Some funny-money man, some wheeler-dealer, an asset-stripper, a fat cat, Mister bloody Samuel North –’ Ian didn't hear the last syllable, but he knew what it was. It was the cliff he came from, the one chopped off and adumbrated by the heaving green of the sea.

Before he could register how he had got there he was in the tiny toilet on the half-landing. He did know this much, that he hadn't actually bolted out of the room, he had made some kind of an excuse. But for all that, the need to get out had been overwhelming.

He was back. Ian didn't believe in coincidence, only shit-smelling serendipity. The big man was all around now. It was he who hummed through the Vent-Axia, he who wheedled shut the composite door on its oily pneumatic arm. Glancing around the smallest room Ian was seized with his tormentor's ubiquity. For, while it was certain that he was with Smallbone in Devizes, at one and the same time, possessing full simultaneity, he was a fly on the wall, scampering between the plaster fronds. His city shoes held him level, as securely as any insect's suckers or gooey-glue secretions.

Such arrogance! Such disregard for the Painstyler effect. He was swinging from one frond-tree to the next, open-handed, like some throwback. And as he swung each one broke in turn, leaving in his wake a trail of dusty puffs.

Truly, as he might well have said of himself, he was the Dharma Body of the Dull. He was in the lino, he was in the soap, he was in the Toilet Duck. He stared out from the windows of the branded monads. He was exactly where Ian didn't want him to be. The world of products was not the encompassing quiddity Ian had so resolutely built it up to be. Above it and beneath it, swirling, involuting, forming screwed-up eyes of howling force, there was another determinant, another
primum mobile.
And Ian was reaching an understanding of what it was. If Samuel Northcliffe was involved, money couldn't be far behind.

Back in the conference room things were picking up. Papers had been spread out on the table, biros scratched and circled. Ian reentered the room casually and sat himself down again.

‘OK?’ asked Gainsby.

‘Fine, fine.’

‘Good. Look, Ian, I think that first and foremost we're going to have to deal with this naming problem. We've already fallen into the habit of calling this thing “Yum-Yum” amongst ourselves, and it just won't do.’

‘Even the client calls it “Yum-Yum” – ’

‘Be that as it may, what they're paying us for is to come up with an entire image, a personality, for this product. No one is going to sell a financial product called “Yum-Yum” to anybody. So I want a new name for it, and I want it fast.’

‘I'll do that. I'll set up a naming group for next week.’

‘Excellent. Geoff is going to organise the press end of things, starting off with a series of advertorial pieces in the relevant publications. Si is working flat out rejigging every single schedule to fall in line with the new launch date. Once he's got that in hand we'll have a better idea of how we're going to manage it.

‘For the moment, since there isn't much client liaison involved in this one, Patricia will be on hand for
ad hoc
support. OK? Oh, and one last thing, I think it would be a good idea if we all put in a showing at Grindley's tonight for the S.K.K.F. Lilex launch. I realise it's not our product but we do other things for them and I know that Brian Burkett feels attendance at these dos kind of shows agency loyalty.’

There was a scattering of groans and ‘Oh no's from around the lozenge. Gainsby ignored them, scooped up his share of the wasted paper, and puckering up his already puckered seersucker suit still further, headed for the door.

Jane Carter and Richard Whittle had got on like a recently doused chip-pan fire. Such was the drenched and oleaginous quality of their meeting.

On the Friday afternoon, Jane left the Lurie Foundation Hospital for Dipsomaniacs clutching her heavy handbag, and feeling her heavier heart burn in her chest. Whittle's address had been difficult to decipher from the notes Gyggle gave her. He seemed almost peripatetic. In the space allowed, address after address had been written in and then deleted with firm strokes. She finally managed to get it down, thinking all the while: What's the point?

A double-decker bus picked Jane up and like Sinbad's roc carried her up the hill through Camden Town, towards Gospel Oak and the mansion-house block of apartments on the edge of the Heath, where Whittle lived. Winging up the High Road, slumped back into the bench seat, Jane had once again sensed the presence near by. The sweat-dampened fabric of her skirt, stretched between her unhosed legs, offered up – or so she felt – an opening, a lobster-pot ingress to the interior of her body. She pulled the skirt down tight and stared out the window, thrusting the presence off and away from her.

Out in the street, under the reddening afternoon sun, a spectacle of ineluctable commerce greeted her. Everywhere Jane looked someone was selling something to someone else. It was as if exchange had replaced language as a primary form of communication, and people were selling to one another in order get a hold of some words. A braiding of gestures: one hand proffering money bill-like to another repeated itself, hither and thither, stitching up the ragged braid of the shopfronts. And the shops themselves, departmental, electrical, grocery, clothing, fast food, DIY, furniture. All had spilled out on to the pavement; the goods inside were falling over one another in their desperation to find a potential purchaser. Once in the open air, they mingled with the street traders, costermongers, fly pitchers and hawkers who plied this grungy souk. On whatever point Jane's eyes rested, through whichever line her gaze ran, she saw cheques being signed, credit-card counterfoils being scrawled across, standing orders being arranged, and cash – wholesome dosh, ponies, monkeys, oncers, coins of the realm – flowing around like mercury, like some element.

Whittle had swum towards her, his form undulating through the wrinkled hide of toughened glass, as she stood on the cool stone stairs. In the hidden crevices of the apartment block she heard children's voices, the whirring industry of domestic cleaning, large dogs barking in small places.

‘Yes?’ Richard was pulling Ian's two days of sleepy dust from the corner of his eye – it even felt that way to him, the solidifying gunk of another's oblivion. The doorbell had hooked Richard, then reeled him in from riverine sleep. It had landed him here, back on the mud bank of his own life.

‘Oh – hello,’ said Jane, taken aback, struggling to compose herself. No matter that she had prepared herself for this, the Whittle face was still an awful sight, a collection of weeping infections, hot-pus springs boiling in slow motion. ‘I'm from the DDU. I'm not a social worker, or a psychiatrist, I'm a volunteer. Dr Gyggle sent me to see if I can help you in some way, but I can come back another time if now isn't convenient, or not at all if that's what you'd prefer – ’ The words had spilled out of her, precipitate, stupidly revealing.

Richard was disarmed – and laughed. ‘. . . I see. You'd better come in and have some . . . have some – tea!’

Improbability had piled upon improbability, as Jane's skinny junky host came up first with tea, then with milk, and finally ever-so refined sugar. Given his circumstances this was as preposterous as if he had produced a willow patterned plate piled with neatly decrusted cucumber sandwiches.

Seated in the resolutely unfitted kitchen, they had eyed one another over mismatched cups. Whittle was brown-haired, with close-set green eyes, a snub nose, low brow and an undistinguished little pointy chin. He surprised Jane by making conversation, asking her about her work, her flat, whether she had a boyfriend. He seemed pathetically unaware of the awful impression he made, with his spotty face, his greasy unkempt hair, and his outfit of dirty striped pyjamas and an American collegian's sleeveless kapok anorak.