by Geoff Palmer
A waiter marched up and snapped menus at us with a kind of military precision, tinged with a hint of obsequiousness. ('Merci,' said Pid. 'Ta,' said moi.) He then stepped back a pace, stood bolt upright, surveyed the restaurant like an alert bird, spotted a slightly raised eyebrow and goose-stepped off towards it.
I underlined the mental note about the kebabs and opened the huge, heavy, hand-tooled, leather-bound menu which, ironically, contained just two sheets of paper.
'They can't even afford a printer,' I whispered. 'Mine's hand written.'
The handwriting, combined with the lingo, mixed with the thumbnail sketches of quaint rural scenes showing peasant farmers and bunches of grapes, added to an excess of cedillas, circumflexes and accents both grave and acute made the damn thing almost unintelligible.
'I'm not eating anything with French letters in,' I muttered.
Pid ordered from the wine list, then made polite conversation. He seemed to be on his best behaviour. He chuckled politely at my crack about the shonky menus (mine had no prices in it), made no comment about me bringing my battered duffel bag (which Jean-Paul had carried to the coat-rack with considerable distaste and then disappeared, probably to sterilise his arm), and completely ignored the fact that I was wearing the wonderful tie I'd found dangling from a clothing bin at the recycling centre (a huge, wide, pale blue Crimplene thing bearing a badly crocheted horseshoe enclosing the head of a boss-eyed horse). His good humour was most unsettling.
The waiter returned for our orders and Pid let fly with a babble of French. I was still dredging up my schoolboy smattering to try and translate the menu. It was the sort of place where you could end up ordering the vegetarian special served with greens and a side order of salad.
'I'll have a soupçon of soup, a bucket of baguettes and a trawler full off fruits de mer, s'il vous plaît,' I finally ventured.
We were polishing off the hors d'oeuvres when Pid hit bro' mode. 'Look bro',' he said, 'I've been meaning to talk with you about that little soirée we had at Valhalla.'
'Pardon?'
'That party at our place.'
'Oh, yes?' If he was going to admonish me for my behaviour, this was a damned expensive way of going about it.
'Look, one or two of the things you said didn't go unnoticed ... They were ... duly noted in ... certain quarters.'
'You mean Barry Kennedy? Not just duly noted but deftly nicked ...'
He motioned me to silence. 'Before I go on, I have to say that everything I'm about to tell you is secret and you must promise not to reveal any of it, at least not yet. Swear?'
'Fuckshitbugger.'
'Good. Look, there's a bit of a shake-up coming in the Kennedy camp: pruning some of the dead wood, rationalising, reallocating and redeploying current resources ...'
'You mean sacking people?'
'Um ... yes.'
'Well, it's either now or in six months' time, I s'pose.'
'... Er, maybe not...'
'I thought he'd resigned and was giving up his seat at the next election?'
'Not quite ...'
'But it said on the news ...'
'You don't want to believe everything you see in the news.' (There, from the horse's mouth!) 'No, Barry's made what we might call a tactical withdrawal. He's been doing some great work lately and his resignation's made him even more popular.'
'I can believe that!'
'Now that he's announced he's quitting people have suddenly realised what a good bloke they're about to lose and he's been besieged with offers if he'll stay on. It was a gamble, but it looks like we've pulled it off.'
'We?'
'Well, I mean "he". With my guidance.'
'You mean you planned it?'
'Of course. We're not talking Acting Minister and a marginal electorate forever. Barry's got his sights on the stars. And he's prepared to gamble to get there.'
I shook my head. I knew there'd been something going on.
'Look,' he continued, 'there's basically three ways you can get to the top in a political party. You can beaver away for years and hope to get noticed — which you almost certainly won't because every party needs some poor bastard to do the work. You can backstab your way up the ladder, but at the price of eternal vigilance — and besides, Barry's not like that ...'
'He is sacking all his staff.'
'… Or you can get swept along by a tide of admiration and popular acclaim. And naturally, we've chosen the latter ...'
'But you can't choose. You can't just switch on a tide of popular acclaim ...'
'Says who?'
'Sorry. I forgot I was talking to an advertising man.'
''And that's just what we have done, bro'. The polls say it looks like being a spring tide. It might even go tsunami.'
'But ... you planned it? All of it ... ?'
'To be honest we didn't think it would get this much publicity. A full seat in caucus perhaps, a nudge in party rankings, that's all we were after. A change in profile, a little bit of attention in the build-up to the election. But it's gone ballistic. The attention it's got has rather caught us on the hop.
'But to answer your question, yes, it was planned. Pretty much down to the last detail. We'd worked out the direction months ago but we'd been searching for the context, the trigger, and that's what you gave us.'
'l did?'
'The disenchantment, the idealist lost in the wilderness, the man of power who's suddenly seen how it's corrupted him. Wonderful stuff. A universal theme. He's said what the man in the street has been saying about politicians for years, only he's said it about himself? It's a brilliant touch. And so simple — a real Bumsucka! It's got a twist, too; humanity, feeling, warm fuzzies.'
He spoke as if he hadn't realised such things existed before.
'On top of that it's unopposable because it's not an attack on policies or personalities but a cry from the heart. An anguished man at odds with what he's become. A politician who's so honest he criticises himself. You know there was hardly a dry eye at that show after Barry had finished? A man like that must be beyond reproach. And it was all your idea!'
'Well, that wasn't quite my idea ...'
'But you were the catalyst.'
Jean-Paul returned with reinforcements for the delivery of what might have laughingly been called our mains. Others have commented on the nature of nouvelle cuisine being the presentation of child-sized portions laid out by an interior decorator, but quite why it took a retinue of three and the guidance of Jean-Paul himself to deliver two plates of scraps escapes me. The average kitten gets heartier helpings.
'Anyway,' said Pid. gesturing magnanimously as number two arranged a green bean and a couple of translucent slivers of carrot on my plate, 'that, in a way, is what all this is about.'
I decided I'd have to watch my breathing or the veges could become airborne.
'I don't follow,' I said picking up a napkin and trying to unfold it. The damn things were starched so stiffly you had to snap them to get them into your lap.
Waiter number three was wrestling with my fruits de mer; a prawn, a mussel, a squid-ring, a scallop and a piece of black stuff resembling rubber. Heavy work. Arranged on my plate they looked as though they'd died sad deaths in solitary confinement until Jean-Paul sloshed some sauce around them. Then they looked like the flotsam washed up by a poisoned tide.
When they'd finished serving Jean-Paul started messing round with my plate so I could view it as the work of art it was supposed to be. Half a turn clockwise, back a fraction, a little more to the left ... I whacked him across the knuckles with my knife.
'Barry wants me to offer you a job.'
'Pardon?'
'I said, Barry wants me — on his behalf — to offer you a job.' I made to speak but he held up a hand, a fork and an impaled butterbean. 'Not full time, not permanent, on a sort of contract-cum-trial basis.'
I made to speak again but he waggled his butterbean. 'A trial basis for you both, really. To see if you can work together. Not that you have to work
side by side or anything like that — it's not that sort of a job. To see if we can use your ideas and you like the work. In fact, as a freelancer, you'd technically be working for the agency.'
The bean met its final release and I asked, 'What as?'
'Pardon?'
'What would I be doing?'
'Oh, like all that story stuff you've been playing around at for years,' he said. 'Copy. Ideas. Speeches. One-liners. That French stuff you were giving me in the car, we might be able to use it somewhere, even build a speech around it. The sort of stuff you said to Barry at the party. Anything. If it's good, we can use it.'
I started building a dam with half a squid-ring to protect the carrots from the seafood sauce.
'The way it'll work is that Barry and I will set the direction and strategy, and you'd come in as one of our creative assistants. We'll take a topic, a venue, a personality, an idea, anything, and brainstorm it. Then we'd send you away to pull it together, give it some shape and substance and that laconic viewpoint of yours.'
The squid-ring wasn't enough and I had to extend and reinforce it with beans.
'So, how would it work in practice then?'
'Well, let's say Barry had to formulate some ideas on defence. We call you up or email you, and you might come back with ''It's time we did something about de fence 'cause de neighbours dog keeps getting through de gap."'
'You mean you want me to write jokes for you?' I was running out of beans and eyed Pid's plate. But he'd eaten both his.
'Yes and no. We want anything. Anything and everything. That's just the point. When you brainstorm you dump all your ideas. They may be witty and irreverent or deep and meaningful. It may be just a corny joke, but we might still be able to use it. ''I asked the leader of the Opposition what he thought about defence and he said ..." See?'
'And you'd pay me for this?' I asked, hunting for something to plug in the increasing number of breaches.
'Hell yes!' he exclaimed, the idea of doing something for nothing anathema to him. 'We'd pay you a weekly retainer, plus bonuses for good material and extra payments if, say, we wanted you to write a speech or something like that.'
It was hopeless without a good blob of mashed potato. Sauce was trickling round and through the ramparts and I decided to end it all quickly. I speared the squid-ring and whipped it aside. The carrots hardly had time for a startled gasp before being swallowed by the tide.
'So what d'ya reckon?' asked Pid.
'Sounds interesting,' I said.
• • •
'Deed Messieurs’s enjoy ze meal?' asked the maître d' as Pid rifled through his purse in order to display his credit card collection.
'Exquisite as always, JP,' said Pid.
'Mine tasted like fruits de merde,' I muttered.
'Glad to hear it,' he replied quietly, without a trace of an accent. 'I'd hate to tell you what that froggy bastard in the kitchen's costing me.' He zapped Pid's card, returned it and added sotto voce, 'You can fuck off now, Stu. I've got your money.'
'Thanks, John,' grinned Pid. 'Oh, your moustache is lifting.'
He shot a hand to the errant corner indicated, only to find no such occurrence.
'Bâtard,' he mouthed, accent restored, before bustling off to retrieve our gear. 'L'équipe de football.' He handed me my bag. 'And Monsieur’s overcoat,' he said to Pid. 'Such a fashion statement! L'Armée de Salut, I presume?'
As we walked back to the car I said, 'So he's not really French then?'
'Nah. We were at varsity together.'
Friday, May 8
The speed of light might be the fastest thing around but the speed of rumour is right up there too. Thinking about Marie's note last night I came up with an idea of my own and, after a brief consultation with her on my arrival, added it to the arsenal. Not only was a photocopy of a certain someone's desk diary doing the rounds this morning, but also a report from one of the cleaners that she'd found used prophylactics in a certain someone's rubbish tin last night. What was even more gratifying was that by the time I returned from lunch the rumour had undergone inflation by Chinese whisper and was returned to me as the cleaner having discovered them in flagrante on the desktop. But the really interesting thing was that I hadn't actually said who the rubbish tin belonged to! I think I could rather get to enjoy this disinformation lark ...
As predicted, the luncheon with my brother proved to be dripping with significance and decidedly dodgy. In short, he's offered me a part-time job as a so-called creative assistant to none other than himself. In actual fact I'll be working exclusively for Barry Kennedy but through Stuart. (There's something shady in this arrangement and Stu clammed up when I asked him for details. All that I could glean was that his agency has an 'informal' deal with Kennedy and that Stu felt using me had the added security of keeping it in the family. It also appears that it's being done under the guise of normal PR consultations for government ministers although, because some of it might be construed as electioneering, it's not all being charged for. Either someone is repaying a favour here or anticipating an awfully big one in the future.)
From my own perspective I was still a little unsure — that is I until certain events that transpired after my return to work. Now, I might need the job.
It'll be a strictly part-time arrangement, something, Stu thinks, I can do in my own time in the evenings and weekends — at least to start with. I've always been somewhat (no, make that hugely) cynical about the public relations/advertising/marketing business but, especially from a storyteller's perspective, it does have a certain appeal. And it's not as though I'm really selling out. It's only part-time and may not even last.
Marie and I had afternoon tea together and I reported back on the results of my handiwork this morning. She was delighted. Like Stu, she was being cagey about what she could get out of it — apart from the embarrassment factor — but I can put two and two together. Tom apparently has a fabulous house and of course every one knows about the Coutts family trust.
She did misjudge one thing, though — the aforementioned speed of rumour. Part of the longer-term plan was for a positive pregnancy test, but it may not get to that because things are moving faster than anticipated. As we were heading down the stairs from the cafeteria a voice boomed from above us, 'Just a minute young lady, I want a word with you,' and the gentleman himself joined us on the landing.
'You can carry on, Steven, this is private,' he said.
'No don't, Steven,' she retorted. 'I might need a witness.'
I stayed where I was.
'I don't know what the hell you're playing at but you can stop it right now,' he said.
'I don't know what you're talking about.'
'Oh yes you damn well do. I've just come back from the tenth floor after having to answer to some ludicrous allegations. I don't know where this poison's coming from, but I have a pretty good idea. That slutty get-up you're wearing, cracks about cellphones, ordinary business reports sealed in envelopes marked "Private and Confiden ...'
'Oh, you mean it's not from a certain story about a fictional sexual conquest last weekend then?' That stopped him in his tracks. 'Or about the theft of an item of my personal clothing? Maybe I should be the one talking to the tenth floor.'
'If you say anyth ...'
'I don't have to say anything. Not now I've got their attention. I've only to walk out of your office adjusting my skirt or buttoning my blouse and they'll say it for me.'
'You little bitch.'
'I am what you've made me, Dr Frankenstein. I'm all your own creation.' With that she walked off, leaving Tom and me alone.
He glared at me. 'I see your grubby little fingerprints in all this too, Spalding. I suggest you start looking for another job because you're going to find things around here getting tougher and tougher.'
Homo
The television set in the central reception area leading to my brother's office screens nothing but commercials on an endless, nauseating loop. You probably have one at home that
does the same. The difference here, though, is that the set in the lobby of Gabble, Garble, Flannel and Tosh screens nothing but their own commercials, and very informative they are too. If one wades past the constant stream of dancing cows, gurgling infants, earnest indictments, silly rhymes, clever editing and bad acting, there's a lot one can learn. Important stuff such as the fact that feelings of fatigue, boredom, loneliness and despair are the result of a poor choice of lavatory cleaner; that ten percent toxic content is actually ninety percent toxin free; that the most powerful aphrodisiac in the universe is steak and kidney pie; and that five thousand years of philosophical angst have been wasted because the real meaning of life is margarine.
The interesting thing about advertising is the world it presents to us while supposedly pandering to our wants and desires. If we're to believe the agencies — and there's no reason why not since they spend vast sums of money researching the subject — our fantasy life is that of earnest white middle-class folk involved in a constant daily battle with dirt and grime in vast, trendy kitchens and enormous bathrooms. Beautiful nineteen-year-old parents cheerfully chivvy along their ten-year-old offspring, yet Mum is still concerned about wrinkles and spends a large part of her day dabbing chemicals on her phizog. Dad — when he's not out in his racing yacht, down on the sports field winning the Olympics or at the pub with his mates purely for the benefit of their company and nothing to do with the brown liquid sloshing around by the bucketful — spends his time either driving a fabulously expensive sports car or an electric razor, switching quickly between the two. But in spite of all their earthly treasures, they're basically simple souls since something as banal as an extra slice of pickle in their hamburger is likely to send them into ecstatic raptures and quite possibly a song and dance number too. It's a glossy, happy, helpful, cheery world that would have anyone with an IQ in double digits reaching for an AK-47 within minutes.
Which possibly explained the central area receptionist.
'Mr Spalding shouldn't be long sir. Who shall I say is calling?'
'Mr Spalding.'