by Simon Brooke
“New challenge?” suggests Guy, raising his eyebrows.
“You’ve got a degree you haven’t used yet,” says Piers.
I think about it for a moment. This is a proper job they’re talking about. I’m about to ask whether I’ll have to wear a suit, then realise that I should probably find out about something a little more serious such as private health insurance or noncontributory pension schemes or something. Instead I just say, “Ummm.”
“Well, think it over,” says Guy, handing me a card.
“It does sound very interesting,” I say, trying not to sound like a complete dingbat. “It’s just that I haven’t done any marketing for, well, since I was at university.”
“Oh, you’ve got the basics,” says Piers. “This thing can really market itself.”
“Anyway, the important thing,” says Guy, “is that you’ve got the personality and the look. We’ve done the hard work, what we need is someone to charm the investors and customers, schmooze the media a bit. We’ll brief you on the company and what we’re doing. We’d like you to be the face of 2cool2btrue dot com.”
“2cool2btrue?”
“Dot com,” adds Guy, helpfully.
“It’s a second-generation Internet venture, learning from the mistakes of the first,” says Piers.
“Yeah, you said. But what does it do, exactly?”
“Have you got a moment now to talk about it? Shall we go for a drink somewhere?” says Guy.
We find a quiet pub across the road and Piers buys three Cokes while Guy begins their presentation. By this time, I’m over the initial shock, a bit more switched on. I decide to play devil’s advocate a bit.
“So what’s different about 2cool2btrue? I mean, what’s your unique selling point?” I ask.
“I thought you’d forgotten all your marketing stuff,” says Piers, setting down the drinks. “USPs already, I’m impressed.”
Guy ignores him and pauses for thought for a moment. “Image is everything these days, isn’t it?” he begins, putting his hands together as if in prayer. “Labels, market positioning, brands are what counts. No one, well hardly anyone, buys things today because they need them or because they’re the cheapest or whatever. They buy a product because of what it says about them. Look at advertising in the fifties and sixties and even the seventies—it was all about things working better than their competitors—”
“Or being cheaper,” interjects Piers.
“Exactly, or being cheaper, but no one really cares about that nowadays.”
“Mmm,” I say. It all makes sense to me, but I decide to keep looking sceptical.
“Now it’s the label. You buy Armani, Mercedes, Nike or Apple Mac or Smeg cookers or whatever not because they’re better put together or they fit you, and certainly not because they’re cheaper, but because you want to be seen with them.”
“Take your sneakers,” says Piers.
I look down quickly at them.
“What make are they?”
“Nike,” I say, pretending to have to look.
“But lots of other people make them—why not George at Asda, for instance?”
“And what make of jeans are those?” asks Guy.
“Levis. Engineered.”
“Why not M&S? Their jeans are just the same, only slightly cheaper.”
“Because you’d feel like a middle-aged man,” suggests Piers.
“What kind of car do you drive?”
“I don’t. Don’t need one.”
“Okay, your dad. Volvo? Audi?”
“Not a good example,” I say.
“Oh, sorry, is he…?” Guy asks, awkwardly.
“Dead?” says Piers.
“No, he’s not, he’s alive, very alive. Too alive, if anything. Anyway, he drives a Porsche.”
“Ah ha,” says Guy. “Middlescent?”
“Mm?”
“Middle-aged man trying to be an adolescent,” he explains.
“Sort of,” I groan at the thought of him.
“Underwear?” says Piers.
I don’t really want to think about my dad in his underwear, actually, but Piers is off.
“Armani pants are really just like anyone else’s—M&S or John Lewis, except that they say ‘Armani’ on them. Or 2(x)ist if you’re really cool. And, of course, only you know that when you’re wearing them, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I say. Because I do. Like now. Like Lauren says, always wear good underwear to a job.
“So it’s all about the label, the image. Brand image is so important. Armani will not let just anyone sell their underwear, for example. If you want them to supply you, they’ll come and inspect your shop to make sure that you’re not some pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap merchant in Leyton High Road.”
“Okay,” says Guy. “So you get the idea. At the beginning of the third millennium, the label is what counts. Look,” he points out of the window at two black kids walking past. “See that? ‘Dolce & Gabbana’ all over their T-shirts. People don’t even want designs these days: the label is the design. The label has to be visible—the bigger the better.
“That’s why these companies are diversifying; you can now buy Armani for the home, Ralph Lauren paint. You’ll soon be able to buy their food.” I think of the Harvey Nichols coffee and chocolates I bought the other day for Lauren’s mum when we went over for lunch.
“Everything must have a label, otherwise we’re just not interested,” says Piers.
“So 2cool2btrue is a label.”
“Exactly,” says Piers. “Think of an ultrachic, upmarket website.”
“Like Armani dot com?”
“Armani dot com is just the web presence of the company.”
“Well, Mercedes must have a pretty cool site.”
“But again, it’s just the website of a smart car company, not a smart website in its own right,” says Piers.
“2cool2btrue dot com will be the web equivalent of Armani, Prada, Rolls-Royce, Wallpaper*,” explains Guy.
“You’ll be proud to have it on your Favourites list.”
“Your boss will be impressed when he sees you visiting it at work.”
“What will you sell, then? Clothes?” I ask, playing with a beer mat.
“A whole lifestyle experience,” says Guy.
“People will be able to live 2cool2btrue.”
“They’ll want to live it.”
“People like you.”
“People who want to be like you.”
“Very flattering,” I offer, mainly just to halt the tide for a second.
“Nothing of the sort,” says Guy, “It’s just effective marketing. 2cool will be the smartest, coolest, hippest thing in cyberspace and you will be the human face of it.”
I gaze up at a sign saying BAR SNACKS: COD ALMIGHTY—TASTY BITE-SIZE BATTERED COD PIECES SERVED WITH OUR OWN TARTAR SAUCE. £3.95. VEGETABLE LASAGNE SERVED WITH FRIES AND SALAD. DRESSING OF YOUR CHOICE. £4.95.
A large-screen TV is playing American football at the back, slightly out of focus. An old man with a pint of mild is trying to watch it, brow creased with confusion and irritation at the mystifying, blurred images. He reaches over almost painfully to tap ash into a huge, grubby, plastic ashtray emblazoned with Castle-maine xxx. Pubs, when he was a lad, had pianos; ham rolls under a glass dome; and busty, blowsy landladies; not big-screen all-sports cable television and Australian backpackers wearing T-shirts with the pub’s corporate owners’ logo and a name badge.
Glacial Purity. Six pounds a bottle.
Chapter
4
I think it sounds like an excellent opportunity. Pass me the balsamic vinegar,” says Lauren.
“It does sound quite exciting, doesn’t it?” I do as she says. “But I’m just a bit wary; it all seems a bit too clever, somehow.”
“That’s probably what somebody said about television, or the Internet,” she says.
“And half a dozen other crackpot schemes we’ve never heard anything more about.”
“Is it? Sorry. Here you go. I am interested—just a little bit sceptical.”
“Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I think this is an opportunity staring you in the face,” says Lauren, picking some basil leaves off the plant on the window sill which is now bathed in the low, evening sunlight. “Check it out. If the worst comes to the worst you just go back to modelling.”
“True.”
“Anyway, I had some interesting news today,” she says, in a bashful, little girl kind of way.
“Do tell,” I say, aware that we’ve been talking about me for the last half an hour.
“We-e-e-ell, you remember that audition tape I did for the shopping channel?”
“Yeah, did you get it?”
“Not that particular one, but I’m actually quite glad. That is a bit tacky, I think. Anyway, they showed it to this other producer and he thought it was great. He thought I had real screen presence.”
“That’s brilliant,” I say, coming round from the other side of the work top where we are both cooking—well Lauren is cooking up dinner and I’m cocking it up.
“He said I was, oh, what was it? ‘Warm but authoritative.’”
“That’s you,” I say, turning her away from the chopping board and putting my arms around her.
“Don’t make fun, Charlie, this is serious,” she says crossly, slapping my shoulder.
“I am being serious. That is you. You are friendly but authoritative.”
“Warm but authoritative.”
“Yeah, whatever. Exactly,” I say, kissing her neck.
“Well, don’t you think that’s good?”
“Yeah, I do. So what’s next?”
“He wants me to go in and discuss some programme ideas with him and some of his colleagues later this week.”
“That’s great. What kind of programme ideas? Who for?”
“We don’t know yet, but they’ll probably be lifestyle or property related. Perhaps something like Changing Rooms or Ready Steady Cook but with a new twist.”
“Brilliant. You mean for the BBC or Channel Four or something?”
“It would probably start off on cable but then it could transfer to terrestrial at a later date,” she says, letting the jargon roll off her tongue.
“Hey, you could do something for 2cool.”
“A tie-in? It might work, mightn’t it? I’ll suggest it.” We both chop and stir in silence for a moment, then she says, “So you’re going to do this thing then?”
“Yeah,” I say, realising that I’ve already made up my mind. “Yeah, I am. What have I got to lose? They’re going to pay thirty-five thousand pounds a year and if the whole thing crashes I’ll just go back to modelling, like you say. Or I might even set up my own website.”
“Mmm,” she says. Dinner is actually ready now: grilled organic chicken, penne with homemade tomato sauce and salad of rocket, cherry tomatoes, shaved parmesan and balsamic vinegar dressing. But somehow we’re not ready to eat yet, too lost in thought and excited by the prospects of our future career plans stretching out before us.
“I think we should do it, both of us,” says Lauren looking across at me. “I think it’s time we made a change.”
“Here’s to new careers,” I say, holding up my glass.
I only got into modelling because a friend of mine from university wanted to do it. Paul was very good-looking with his wavy, dark hair and Tom Cruise eyes, and he knew it. He was planning to take a year off after we graduated and had decided to try and earn some money as a model. He suggested I have a go too. I wasn’t that bothered, in fact I didn’t really fancy the idea very much but I told him I’d come with him. So we both got some pictures taken by a photographer he’d had recommended to him and we took them to a few agencies. Obviously we didn’t tell anyone.
We started at the top and not surprisingly were told that we both had a great look but it wasn’t quite right for them at the moment.
“Never mind,” I said, assuming we’d knock it on the head and go and work in a bar or photocopying in an office like most of our friends. But Paul wanted to try some other agencies, so one hot afternoon in July, street map and travelcard in hand, feeling like a complete jerk, I followed him from one address to another. On one occasion, just as we were leaving a girl called to us.
“Sorry, excuse me a minute.”
Paul froze. This was it, at last, a break—someone had seen what the others had missed, someone ready to take a chance, trust an instinct. The girl looked closely at him and said, “Can you leave this at reception on your way out,” as she handed him a large envelope. Whether it was simply economy of effort on a hot day or just casual sadism, I don’t know, but, either way, I was already pretty sick of this.
Then, after I had been so keen to leave yet another large, sun-flooded room full of beautiful people talking on the phone and surrounded by photographs of even more beautiful people, that I had walked into the stationery cupboard instead of out onto the landing, still saying, “Okay, thanks anyway, g’bye. No problem, thanks,” I secretly decided I’d do just one more of these and then leave Paul to it.
So, finally, we visited a woman called Penny who was based in an attic in a street just off the King’s Road in Chelsea. She was on her own apart from a very pretty-looking Oriental bloke in a black polo neck, and a rather preppy girl in a faded denim jacket. Cig in mouth, she flicked through Paul’s cards at ninety miles an hour as the others had done and said they were really great but they weren’t quite right for her at the moment. Then she looked at mine.
But this time she did it at thirty miles per hour and then showed them to the Oriental bloke. He looked through as well, looked up at me, raised his eyebrows at her and nodded and then handed them back. Then she called over to the girl to get a portfolio. She began to slide them into it, taking a moment to choose the best order for them.
“Okay, lovey, you’ll have to get some more done and we’ll need to talk about a card,” she said as she pushed my stupid, clumsy, amateur pictures into plastic wallets inside the black, shiny book with JET written in big red letters over the front. Still with the cig in her mouth, its ash wilting precariously now, she showed me a contract and told me to sign at the bottom, which I did in a slight daze, with the pen the girl gave me as I opened my mouth to ask for one. Paul looked on as we both realised that weirdly enough, at the end of this long, hot, exhausting day, our faces glazed with perspiration and pollution, I had done it. I had entered the world of modelling, even though I wasn’t really sure I wanted to.
Afterwards Paul was dismissive. “Never mind, mate, thanks for coming along with me,” he said over a very welcome cold beer in the Chelsea Potter in the King’s Road.
“No problem,” I said, just wishing we could swap places. He obviously wanted it so much and I just wasn’t that bothered.
Penny’s agency grew, moved to bigger offices, took on more people, and my career has sort of taken off with it over the past eight years. My current booker, Karyn, joined three years ago and we speak almost every day. We sometimes go out for a drink, and I was the first person she rang after she split up with her boyfriend. She came over for dinner, which should have been fun, but she and Lauren didn’t seem to get on, so I don’t mention one to the other now.
Am I good-looking? Well, I must have something, although I’m never quite sure what it is. When I first started working, one girl said to me thoughtfully, “You’ve got the kind of face I’d like to see if I was lost in a foreign railway station and I didn’t speak the language.”
I think that’s a compliment.
Having waved modelling goodbye—perhaps only temporarily, of course—my first day in my new job, on the second floor of a building in Soho, drags a bit because there is so little for me to do. The office itself has maroon walls and all the desks are heavy constructions in dark wood which contrast beautifully with our white and clear Perspex, state of
the art Apple Macs, I notice. That, somehow, can’t be a coincidence. There is a sort of fresco painted on the ceiling. Piers has already explained that the room is intended to look cool but understated and cost effective, to make it clear to our investors and trading partners that all their money is going into the product. Whatever that is.
He shows me my desk.
My desk.
What my parents always wanted. Okay, I’m not wearing a suit but I’ve still got a desk with a phone on it. Their reaction when I told them that I was going to start modelling was every bit as joyous as if I’d said I was going to join a monastery or become a Bangkok ladyboy. I kept trying to explain that I was just going to do it for a while until I worked out what I wanted in the way of a career. Their sad, anxious looks every time the subject was raised drove me bonkers with irritation.
“What shall we tell our friends when they ask what you’re doing now?” said my mum as if this was the final, clinching argument against this whole daft idea.
“Just tell them I’m dead,” I shouted as I headed upstairs to my room, now more determined than ever to do it, and to succeed at it just to spite them. What better driving force for a career could you hope for than revenge on your parents?
They relented slightly when they saw that I was making a living and enjoying it—that being the order of importance to them. I just worry sometimes that my career decision is what made my dad turn out the way he did.
I haven’t actually told the agency about my new job. You know, just in case. Well, I told Karyn. She said she couldn’t believe it and she was very sad but she wished me all the luck in the world. In the end we agreed that I wouldn’t go to castings unless they were “requests,” in other words the client has specifically asked to see me, but if jobs came up she would definitely pass them on and I’d take a day off to do them.
I sign another form about being a director and then get introduced to a guy called Zac who is the technical whiz, as Piers puts it. Zac sits in a corner surrounded by two giant computer screens, a number of keyboards, a computer graphics drawing board, some CPUs and an explosive spaghetti of wires and cables.