The Evil Inside (10 page)

Anthony flew over to San Fran with the storyboard on the Friday red-eye and the coolcams kids lapped it up.

‘That's great, bro,' Bill smiled when I relayed the news to him. ‘Here, I got you a little something to cheer you up.'

It was a video:
The Powerpuff Girls
Season 2
–
featuring the famous ‘Puffpower' episode.

*

While the coolcams TV storyboard approval was great news, the huge amount of work that came with it over the next week wasn't so great.

Not only did we need to start meeting with directors and production companies to see who'd be right to produce the spot, we also needed to review, and adjust where necessary, all the other print and online material we'd already presented in order to make sure all the disparate campaign elements still, as Anthony liked to say, ‘sang from the same song sheet'.

On top of coolcams, Anthony also wanted a couple of ‘quick' spec campaigns churned out for a microchip manufacturer and the Silicon Valley Bank.

‘So you mean “quick and shit”?' I asked him testily one night at midnight.

Bill gave a tired snicker behind me.

Anthony was swaying in the doorway: he was exhausted, too.

‘Oh don't give me that “woe is me” creative prima donna routine, Guy. I know you're fucked – we all are – but just do your best. I've gotta show these guys something next week.'

Secretly though, I was kind of happy to be stuck at work: it meant that I wasn't spending much time at the Olcott or, more to the point, near Callum.

All the weird Callum-related stuff that had gone down at North Fuck had sent my head spinning.

I still didn't know what to make of it all. I needed some space and time to gather my thoughts and shake off the sense of dread I'd brought home with me like a bad flu.

In the meantime, work was an effective if debilitating diversion.

But, smack dab in the middle of this week from hell, some genius decided it was the perfect time to hold the Brave Face Family Day.

At the point when it became too busy and noisy to do any work, with all the extra civilians milling around our office, I resorted to checking my emails. There was a surprise message from my Australian friends, Jim and Nadine, who were threatening to come to New York in a few weeks to spend a ‘wild weekend with good old Guysville' on their way back from Ibiza. If they were relying on me to provide their NYC entertainment in my current stuporous condition, they were going to be sorely disappointed.

Meanwhile, Callum was pulling the tops off markers at Bill's desk and sticking Post-it notes to his face. But Bill didn't notice because he was showing his new girlfriend, a Japanese photographer's assistant, his favourite Jasper Johns book.

Mia was leaning against my desk while Lucy lingered dangerously in the doorway. I felt like Michael Douglas in
Fatal Attraction
.

‘So this is the seat of power,' Mia said, surveying my well-ordered workstation.

‘Power sometimes,' Lucy said quietly. ‘Pain more often. Especially if he can't crack my briefs. I'm Lucy,' she said without a fraction of her usual confidence. She walked forward extending her hand.

‘Mia.'

There was a long, unpleasant pause. Bill and his girlfriend looked up at the silence but then quickly buried their heads back in the Johns.

‘So you work with Guy on coolcams?'

‘Coolcams, other new business prospects – you name it, we're a team!'

Mia frowned. Lucy bit her lip and soldiered on. ‘I get to do all the boring grunt stuff: background research, client liaising, writing the brief. Then these boys here get to play.'

‘I see,' Mia said coldly. After living with me for years, Mia already had a pretty good idea what account service did. Plus from what Susanna had no doubt told her, this woman seemed to be overly friendly with her husband.

And the antipathy appeared mutual. ‘And what do you do, Mia?' From me, Lucy already knew full well that the only thing Mia had been doing lately was keeping the vineyards of California in rude financial health.

Mia answered without looking at her. ‘Um. I was an art broker back in Australia but—'

Susanna Johnson suddenly appeared in the doorway in a crisp Donna Karan charcoal suit with a bottle of Krug in one hand, making a drinking motion to Mia with the other. Susanna looked straight through Lucy, too: the snippy solidarity of the First Wives' Club.

Mia dutifully followed the boss's wife out with a not-at-all convincing ‘Nice to meet you.'

Safe at last, Lucy rolled her eyes, wiped metaphoric sweat from her brow and trudged back to her office.

Bill finally looked down at his desk, to notice that Callum had added big pink, purple and black flowers to the detailed Yo digital layout he had been working on all morning.

‘Family Days,' he snapped his big photo book shut. ‘God love 'em!'

‘Do you still love advertising, Guy?' Mia looked at me that night with pity.

As if she was asking whether I was still doing crack.

I looked up from the
New York Times
. ‘It's a living.'

‘Seriously, Guy.'

I wasn't sure where this was going. ‘It's my job,' I said. ‘It's what I'm good at. It pays the bills. Why do you ask?'

‘Do you think advertising's good for society; for the world, I mean? For people? For us?' She looked positively nun-like now, asking for my confession.

Saint fucking Mia.

‘What's this all about?' I was annoyed. Surely there were so many other more important things we could be talking about. Things we hadn't even broached.

‘It's this fucking No Hopers book, isn't it? Filling your head with a lot of nasty, negative No Ideas.' I picked
No Logo
up from the coffee table and turned it over. ‘Naomi Klein? She should be called No No Klein!'

‘Why do you hate strong women, Guy?'

‘I don't!'

She remained irritatingly serene. ‘Why are you so angry? I was just asking a question.' She snatched the book back out of my hands. ‘I just wondered whether you ever thought about the repercussions of what you do every day.'

‘Look, Mia, I know you've had a rough time lately. But so have I. And I'm sorry I've been so busy since we got back from Anthony's place. But advertising – my job – pays for our life. Where we live, where we go, what we eat, what we buy, what we do. Especially since you're not working.'

‘But it doesn't have to be our life,' she countered. ‘In fact, I'm not even sure I want it to be our life any more.' She looked lost and empty. ‘I think we should go home.'

There, she'd finally said it.

I'd already thought about my answer to this inevitable proposal many times over the last few weeks. ‘Look, sometimes I feel like going home, too. But I've made a commitment to Anthony. We've really only just arrived. I can't just turn around now and say, “Sorry, mate – didn't work out, so we're off home.” Plus it'd be like giving up.'

‘But what about your commitment to
us
, to me and Callum? To your family, Guy? If we're not
all
happy here, then what's the point of being here? Are you telling me we're staying here for advertising's fucking sake?'

She still didn't get it. ‘It's not for advertising's sake, Mia. I just don't want to feel as though I've been beaten by New York. I can't go back to Melbourne with my tail between my legs. I've gotta give it a go.'

‘I think this is really all about your ego, Guy.'

‘Maybe it is. But at the moment, it's my ego that allows us to eat.'

‘You could do something else,' she persisted. ‘We could go back and you could become … an English teacher or something! I could get back into my buying—'

‘An English teacher?' I was incredulous. ‘A fucking
English
teacher!' She may as well have said street sweeper. ‘Do you honestly believe that we could survive on an English teacher's wage? For a start, I'm not trained as a teacher – so there's three years' study before I could even start. Then, when I do finally graduate and get a job in some dead-end school, my wage would cover exactly four-fifths of fuck all of the mortgage. Let alone little extras like private school fees or …' I wavered.

‘Or what?' she shouted.

‘Psychiatric treatment.'

‘For who? I'm not mad, Guy. I'm just very sad. It's normal after you've lost a baby, you know.'

‘Not for you. For
Callum
. He's not normal, Mia!'

‘Maybe he hasn't been himself lately because his mother's been very depressed and his father's been acting like—' She fluttered her hand.

My problem was that even though we'd only been back a few days, the whole week up in Long Island had by now assumed a muddy, inchoate quality in my mind. Now we were back in the relative sanity of New York, it was difficult for me to articulate all the bizarre and disturbing things that were seeming to happen whenever Callum was around without sounding like a complete maniac. And if I knew that if I tried to, Mia would simply laugh in my face.

So I attacked instead. ‘You just haven't noticed it because you've been so fucked up yourself!'

‘Maybe you're the one who's a bit unhinged lately, Guy. By booze. Or coke? Please tell me you're not snorting that shit again. It turns you into a monster – I couldn't bear it!'

I'd had a bit of a coke relapse the year we lived in Sydney. Mia hated Sydney.

‘Maybe you're the one who's fucked up, Guy. Maybe you're the one who needs to see a fucking shrink!'

I rolled my eyes. ‘Can you honestly say you haven't noticed anything strange at all about our son lately?'

‘Can't blame him if he is a bit out of sorts. No wonder. For the past few weeks, his parents have been on another planet.'

She was right on that score at least: together, we'd boarded a starship to a hostile, uninhabitable world where all the usual laws of reality seemed to have been completely reversed.

After a couple more energetic debates with Mia, Susanna pulled a few strings and we managed to get an appointment for Callum on the Tuesday of the following week.

According to Susanna, Claude Lavelle was one of the finest child psychiatrists in the city. He'd cured Courtney of her bed-wetting a couple of years back and had helped relieve another little girl the Johnsons knew of her pre-school anxiety.

But he didn't come cheap: Upper East Side, upper price bracket.

His waiting room was more like the library in a magnificent French chateau. There was a De Kooning lithograph; a dozen fresh white roses in a very expensive-looking Chinese porcelain vase; a tank filled with a kaleidoscope of tropical fish; and a vast mahogany reception desk with a glossy secretary pouting behind it – totting up Dr Lavelle's invoices on a sleek new Dell. Mia was right: I was definitely in the wrong profession.

We sat on a pale-mauve leather couch while Callum, despite our quiet admonishments, ignored the children's playpen and pressed his face up against the glass of the fish tank.

Mia was there under sufferance. Callum thought he was going to see a man to talk about his drawings. The
Sports Illustrated
secretary brought us freshly roasted coffee in bright new Terence Conran cups.

We didn't have too long to wait. ‘Callum?' Dr Lavelle marched out, bent down and shook Callum's hand. ‘Oh good, I see you brought your drawings with you. Would you like to come in and show them to me?'

Callum looked uneasily at Mia. ‘It's OK, darling,' she said. ‘Mr Lavelle looks at lots of drawings from boys and girls. He knows all about them. Mummy and Daddy will stay right out here and wait for you.'

‘Can I bring my Buzz, too?' Callum asked, showing Lavelle the doll in his other hand.

‘Of course you can. I've had Buzz in my office once or twice before, you know.'

‘Woody too?' Callum asked as Lavelle led him away.

‘Oh yes, Woody the cowboy often visits me, too.'

Fifty minutes later, Mia and I were sitting opposite Dr Lavelle's desk ourselves, waiting for the debrief. That's what we called it in advertising anyway. I wasn't sure what the technical psychiatric term for it was: Diagnosis? Hokum? Bunkum? Meanwhile, Callum was back outside with the secretary and Doctor Seuss.

‘Callum is a very bright and slightly sensitive little boy,' Lavelle began. I waited for the ‘But', but there was none forthcoming. ‘Aside from that, he seems completely normal. And he seems to have adjusted very well to life in a strange new country.'

Mia leaned forward. ‘I lost a baby last year. What sort of effect would that have had upon him?' She didn't mention her suicide attempt: we thought we'd managed to hide that horror from Callum.

‘Ah yes, he mentioned the baby. He said that Mummy was very sad that “Bubby” was gone. And that Daddy was too. At this early age, he was probably very jealous at the thought of a sibling he'd have to compete with. So he's probably actually secretly happy and relieved about the loss at some level. Children are selfish and often perverse that way. They take self-preservation to extremes. As long as Mummy eventually recovers from being
sad
and Daddy stops being
upset
, it probably won't cause him too much trauma down the track – even if you have another child at some stage. Because he'll be older then and better able to cope with the competition.'

Mia nodded. I shook my head. Another child certainly wasn't on my agenda at this stage.

‘And his drawings?' I asked.

‘His drawings are fairly typical of boys his age: filled with adventure scenarios from TV or videos or books, interspersed with people from his own real-life experience. It's a way of making normal life seem more exciting. Or the opposite: making a fantasy world seem more real.'

‘But what about this one?' I persisted. I held up the DeD alien picture.

‘He told me it was you and he having a sword fight. Except that you had assumed characters from the
Toy Story
movie that he likes.'

Undeterred, I then told Lavelle about Callum's dream about the electric skeleton.

He volleyed back again with the bleeding obvious. ‘Yes, all children have bad dreams from time to time, just as we do as adults.'

Mia butted in. ‘So is there anything to really worry about?'

‘Not that I can see,' the good doctor decreed. ‘Just keep monitoring him and look out for any changes in behaviour.'

I rolled my eyes.

‘I told you!' Mia spat. ‘This has been a complete waste of time. Sorry, Dr Lavelle, my husband works in advertising – he has an overactive imagination.'

‘Oh, no problem, I assure you. Better to be safe than sorry.'

Yeah, right, especially at $325 an hour.

On our way out, I screwed up Callum's drawings and tossed them into the secretary's shiny gold wastepaper basket.

*

‘I want to put your big, hard cock in my mouth until I've sucked it dry.'

Lucy hadn't said anything remotely like that. All she'd said was, ‘So how you feeling?' But her eyes were so bright and bewitching that they made me feel that any fantasy was a possibility.

Ever since we had entered March, work for once was slow. There were lots of irons in the fire, lots of submissions under consideration, lots of results we were waiting to hear back on. But it was one of those strange limbo times when the hours plodded past in slow motion and nothing much seemed to be happening.

Anthony was out on the west coast again, trawling the conferences, flicking out business cards and looking under rocks for new clients. But unlike the liquid excitement that had flowed fast and furious when I'd first arrived in town, I now sensed the pale ghost of recession hovering in the wings. Everybody seemed to be waiting for something to appear or change, but no one was exactly sure what it was. Had we finally reached the limit of greed and ‘gimme more'? Were the tech stocks, with their ludicrous names like why.com, yo.com, zi.com and whatthehell.com – and the faceless companies they propped up – really going to change the way we lived our lives and make the world a better place? Or were they really just opaque and ultimately unworkable sophomoric scams?

Yet the market kept climbing, the nebulous never-ending ticker kept unspooling its digital hopes and dreams and lies and the NASDAQ continued to
boing! boing! boing!
like an overworked pinball machine on its last legs. Yes, the dotcom bubble was still floating high above us like a beautiful crystal ball. But how long before it lost its lustre and burst into the ‘now you see me, now you don't' nothingness that it really was.

‘So?' Lucy repeated.

It was dusk. The side bar was dark but warm, not gloomy. Not with Lucy's dancing eyes to brighten it up.

Work may have slowed up, but I still didn't really feel like rushing home to the Olcott at the end of the day.

‘I've been a little bit down lately. Lousy, actually.'

‘I could tell. Want to talk about it?' She uncrossed her legs, then recrossed them the other way.

I didn't really want to talk about it. I really just wanted to go to Lucy's apartment and fuck her brains out. I was sure that would be a lot more therapeutic than just talking.

‘It's just … Mia. Not just Mia – me and Mia …'

I didn't want to mention my feelings and concerns about Callum. I wanted Lucy to think I was vulnerable and sexy. Not insane.

‘What about you and Mia? Have things been bad between you since … ?' I wasn't sure whether she meant the lost baby or the suicide attempt – but both were relevant. She put her soft, silky hand on my knee.

‘Yeah, we're not really communicating. I'm not sure that she loves me any more. I think she even blames me in a way for what happened.'

‘Oh that's ridiculous, Guy. She's probably just still depressed and all fucked-up like you are. You've been through an awful lot, you two.'

I sipped my Red Star, thirsting for sympathy. ‘Perhaps we
hadn't
been getting on even before this. Different priorities. Moving in different directions. Maybe it was really just Callum – and maybe the new baby – that was holding us together.' I trotted out the old
my wife doesn't understand me
shtick, yadda-yadda-yadda.

‘So how's he doing, the little guy?'

It seemed I'd have to talk about Callum after all. ‘He's … doing OK. Fine. He's got a great nanny, which is lucky because Mia and I obviously haven't been looking after him as well as we normally do. We've been a little emotionally … distracted.'

Cue the violins. Cut to her other hand on my other knee and a delicious red open mouth whispering into my ear.

‘I'd like to distract you, Guy.'

At least that's what I imagined she said.

*

Saturday April 1: April Fool's Day.

There was a fat little oblong packet on the table.

‘What are these?'

‘They're the photos from our first weekend,' Mia sighed. ‘Back when we were happy to be here.'

I started to flick through them. There we were – lording it round Central Park in the carriage, Callum exultant on Balto's back, dodging the crowds in Times Square, hamming it up in the Warner Brothers Store, chowing down in the Muffins Cafe, terrorizing the Olcott lobby. Smiles, laughter, joy and excitement. Mia was right: it looked like another family.

The following Tuesday morning, I was sitting in Lucy's office staring at the crossed soles of her bare feet up on the desk, wondering where her legs ended. The night before, over a drink, she'd been telling me about her childhood down south. Now she was telling me some more.

‘ … and before the ranch, we were in Dallas.'

I told her Bill's Lee Harvey Oswald joke and she chuckled with recognition. ‘Yeah, I remember hearing that one when I was back in grade school.' She recrossed her feet and I tried to look away from the split second revelation of her inner thighs. ‘My Daddy was there that day, you know.'

‘What? At the Kennedy assassination?'

‘Yeah, he used to be in commercial real estate and he had a meeting with the building supervisor of the Dal-Tex Building the afternoon that Kennedy was killed.'

I shook my head. ‘Sorry, I'm not an assassination buff – does Dal-Tex mean something?'

‘Well, the Dal-Tex building was just across the street from the Texas School Book Depository – adjacent to it, in fact. Daddy was early for his meeting that day so he decided to stand on the corner right opposite the Depository and check out the motorcade.'

She suddenly reached for her pad and scribbled a note. ‘They have an earthcam up on the sixth floor there now, did you know? Maybe coolcams should put one over the Triple Overpass so you can see it all from the reverse angle?'

‘Good idea!' Lucy never stopped thinking.

‘Anyway, Daddy was standing on the little wall of the long water fountain that's there, the ‘reflecting pool' I think they call it, so he could watch the cars go by.'

‘On the corner where the car turns and starts to head down to where the shots are fired?'

‘Exactly.'

‘Wow! What a place to be: your old man's part of history!'

‘I guess so.'

I looked over her toes. ‘Did he see anything?'

‘Well, first up, this young black guy had an epileptic fit right near where he was standing.'

‘Really? Is that well documented?'

‘Yeah, all the conspiracy nuts say he was an actor just pretending to have a fit to divert attention from all the open windows around the Plaza. But my father said he saw this guy hit his head pretty damn hard on the low concrete wall of the pool.'

‘Maybe he was an early De Niro method actor type?'

‘Maybe. Anyway, a cop called an ambulance and they put a stick in the man's mouth to stop him choking and then they took him away just a couple of minutes before the motorcade was due to arrive.'

‘So did your Dad see anything else? Anything interesting? Like rifles sticking out of windows or anything?'

Lucy looked thoughtful for a moment. She suddenly seemed a little reluctant revisiting the family lore. ‘Well, he was wearing his big, wide-brimmed Stetson – just like Governor Connally was that day. In fact, Daddy's sometimes referred to as “Reflecting Stetson Man” or “Connally 2” in those lunatic conspiracy books. Anyway “Reflecting Stetson Man” had his hat on as usual and he didn't have any reason to look up in the air at that point because he was probably really just trying to see through the crowd, smoking his cigar and turning around to see if the motorcade was coming.'

‘Oh.' Disappointing.

‘Then the cars went by and I imagine Daddy would have tipped his hat to the president and then, right after that, all the shooting started.'

‘Did he say where the shots came from?'

Lucy shook her head. ‘He said the sounds were ricocheting all round the Plaza – like firecrackers he said. Dealey Plaza is actually quite small, like a box canyon, so the sound bounces from building to building, apparently. And people were looking around wildly in all different directions. And everyone was screaming at the tops of their lungs like it was a horror film at the drive-in.' She pulled her feet off the desk and sat forward.

‘Daddy finally did look up and he saw a huge flock of pigeons fly off from the roof of the Depository. Then he jogged a few yards down towards the grassy knoll because that's where most of the crowd seemed to be running and … It was just chaos all over.'

‘I can imagine – I've seen some of the film clips.'

‘But then Daddy turned around and looked
back
towards the Depository Building and he saw something that he still doesn't really like talking about.' She seemed uncomfortable with the detail herself, dragging deeply on her Dunhill as a delaying tactic. ‘Because he's not really given to “fanciful notions”, as he calls them.'