Selling the Dream

by Hugh Mackay

  Linc was consumed by ambition; possessed by it; propelled by it. His ambition drove everything he did. From the car he drove to the street he lived in. From the charities he chose to (very publicly) support, to the school he sent his young sons to. (He was secretly relieved that he and Hermione had not had any daughters: he felt the climb to the top was still too difficult for women, and he had no interest in raising also-rans.)

  Very early in his career, Linc had worked out which of the accoutrements of power and status to adopt. He hadn’t given extramarital sex a thought. But when he was confronted by the research evidence – contained in an article published in an apparently reputable journal shown to him by Otis – that seventy-three percent of the most powerful men in business had a mistress, Linc didn’t hesitate. A mistress would have to be found. And when Otis further disclosed that most mistresses came from within the organisations where the great men worked – ‘fishing off the company pier’ – the challenge seemed much easier to meet. (‘Fishing off the company pier’ was the sort of phrase Otis loved to use, as a way of demonstrating how fluently he had mastered the local idiom.)

  Joanne Darby, Linc recalled, had always been especially pleasant to him. Unlike many other KK&C units, she showed him great respect, while discreetly managing to convey the impression that she was quite attracted to him. Flowers, therefore, for The Darby, to thank her for arranging a meeting for him. Occasional bottles of wine, gifts from grateful clients, passed on to The Darby. Compliments paid, with a carefully contrived air of spontaneity. Joanne seemed to catch on quickly, and the fact that she made the first overtly amorous move was a relief to Linc, since he badly wanted to avoid the possibility of any future charges of sexual harassment or impropriety (he’d attended a compulsory seminar on all that when he worked at Cocky). It never occurred to him to wonder why The Darby found him so irresistible. Linc had no interest in whys or wherefores: goals and outcomes were his sole concerns. As he was fond of saying, ‘If the end doesn’t justify the means, what does?’

  Lying in the arms of The Darby, Linc was aware of a sensation he couldn’t recall having previously experienced. Perhaps it was bliss, he thought. Perhaps it was euphoria. Perhaps it was – surely it couldn’t be – love. Whatever it was, it was associated with a powerful sense of attachment to The Darby and a reluctance to disturb this tranquil moment of wordless communion between them. It was also associated with another new experience for Linc – the realisation that his own orgasm had been entirely and exclusively triggered by the sheer pleasure of sex with The Darby. Until Linc had been swept into these new and deeper waters, he had always had to turn his mind to recollections of the stimuli of early adolescence – magazine advertisements for lingerie, the sight of a girl’s skirt swirling in the wind, his first glimpse of a naked breast – in order to get himself over the line. He had long regarded sex as over-rated but now, floating on a post-coital cloud, it occurred to him that, thanks to The Darby and in the words of a slogan he had long admired, this was The Real Thing.

  When Joanne finally slid off the couch and opened the door that led to the private washroom she enjoyed as one of the several perks of being Markus Craven’s PA, the sound disturbed Jezebel, Craven’s dachshund, asleep under a table in the corner of Joanne’s office. With her signature string of pearls around her neck, Jezebel had the run of the agency, paying regular visits to particular members of staff – weak-minded units, in Linc’s view – who gave her food. Linc disliked dogs: he wasn’t exactly frightened of them, but they unnerved him, and he operated on the assumption that any situation involving a dog was potentially beyond his control. He couldn’t see the point of pets in general, but he was nevertheless impressed by the way Joanne, still skirtless, grabbed a biscuit from a crystal bowl that sat on the credenza behind her desk and threw it to the dog with well-practised aim. Jezebel caught it and returned to her spot under the table, crunching the biscuit noisily.

  While Joanne was otherwise engaged, Linc seized the moment of privacy to don his trousers and shoes (as a concession to Hermione, he never removed his shirt or socks in The Darby’s presence), before venturing out into the general office. By now, few people would be at their desks, but Linc nevertheless felt it important to adopt an air of brisk nonchalance as he strode neither too quickly nor too slowly from Joanne’s office towards the stairs that led down to his own. He did not want to attract attention or fuel rumours, though Otis had also told him that powerful men shrugged off scandal as easily as criticism. He was still working out how to deal with the mistress thing, and could hardly ask Otis for more specific advice about its management. Hermione would know how best to handle the situation, but she seemed the least likely person to offer dispassionate advice in this particular case.

  3

  NEVER COMFORTABLE WHERE romance was concerned, Linc was on more solid ground in the matter of self-promotion. His name, for instance. He had been christened Michael Lincoln Hunter by his parents, and was known as Mikey for all of his childhood and early adulthood. At the age of thirty, when he caught his first whiff of serious status via a big promotion at work, it dawned on him that a man headed for the top had no business being called Mikey. Too friendly; too cosy; too familiar; too accessible. Even Mike seemed to lack the gravitas he was seeking and, in any case, he knew that it would be too hard to train people to call him Mike or even Michael after they’d always known him as Mikey. A break with the past was needed: a complete rebranding.

  The answer came to him in a flash: Lincoln. Of course. Unlike Mikey, Lincoln was strong, impressive, had connotations of fame and power and was, after all, his actual name. He didn’t even have to make it up; he only had to start using it, and insisting everyone else did, too.

  Having made that initial switch, Linc saw that he had been blessed with yet another opportunity in the accident of his surname. Lincoln Hunter was good; Lincoln Hunter was strong. But in case people failed to appreciate the full force of it, the simple insertion of ‘The’ between his first and last names would bring it right home to them.

  He began cautiously, simply adding ‘T’ to his signature. Then, when he was offered the job at Kelman, Kornfield & Craven, he decided to start as he meant to go on, introducing himself as ‘Lincoln The Hunter’ and insisting that name be printed on his business card. The partners were initially bemused, but then they thought of all the other figures in the ad industry – to say nothing of showbiz more broadly – who had manipulated their names in the service of ‘profile’ or ‘image’ and decided this could be a valuable talking point. Jhon Kornfield had himself switched the ‘o’ and ‘h’ in his name in order, he claimed, to enhance its numerological significance. Markus Craven was originally Marcus, and had only been restrained from becoming Markus Kraven when it was pointed out to him that the agency would then be known as KKK. Even better, they saw how Lincoln The Hunter could be an implied promise; a powerful selling proposition embedded in the man’s name as in a brand: Go get ’em, Linc!

  In his new job, Linc burnished his already glowing reputation as a relentless hunter of new business. Among his clients, he became famous for the development of marketing and advertising strategies that positioned the consumer, unambiguously and mercilessly, as the quarry. Many people in the industry talked of ‘target markets’; Lincoln The Hunter produced PowerPoint slides that showed pictures of consumers with targets actually painted on their foreheads. He brushed aside as fatuous the idea that successful brands were demand-driven. No one ever accused Linc of being too subtle: too brutal, yes; too remorselessly competitive, yes; but subtle? Never. Charming, certainly; smart, without question. Perhaps naïve in the nakedness of his ambition, some astute observers thought. But never subtle.

  Linc was not driven by the sweet smell of success that wafted occasionally into the nostrils of lesser men and women and encouraged them to climb, rung by tedious rung, up the corporate ladder, gradually drawing away from the stench of toil below. Linc was no ladder-climber: he was a rocket heading for the star
s, determined to plot his own trajectory.

  And that’s why, in early June – a little over a year after joining KK&C and still in the preliminary stages of work on the launch of The Ripper – he resigned. He told the partners he intended to become a consultant, and would be pleased to number KK&C among his clients, subject to negotiating a satisfactory arrangement.

  In Linc’s mind, this was the perfect moment to act. GBH had become the agency’s largest and most lucrative client, and The Ripper was poised to become the biggest addition to its product line that anyone could remember. And Linc was effectively running the entire project. He had seemed even more enthusiastic about the product than the GBH people themselves, which was why Jerry Weisbrot had invested such faith in him. With the help of Otis, Linc had quickly designed a rigorous program of concept testing, product trials and attitude research more comprehensive – and more experimental – than anything previously undertaken by GBH. By the time The Ripper made it onto the market, Linc was confident this would be the most thoroughly researched product launch in the company’s history.

  ‘There will be no questions left for Dayton to ask,’ Linc had assured Jerry, borrowing the line from Otis.

  Given the unassailable position of control and influence Linc had established for himself as the mastermind of The Ripper’s launch strategy, he felt confident that his resignation would strike panic – possibly even terror – into the hearts of the agency’s three partners. Quite apart from his intimate relationship with GBH, Linc had made himself appear indispensable to a small but crucial selection of other clients, equally in thrall to him not only for his insights (borrowed from Otis, whom he rarely acknowledged or invited to client meetings), his charm and his attentiveness, but also for his ability to pull strings when any of those clients wanted tickets to the Australian Open, front stalls for Michael Bublé, a dozen Grange Hermitage at short notice, or a weekend hideaway safe from prying eyes. In his youth, he had enjoyed modest success both as a tennis player and a sailor, and he was sometimes invited to take part in tennis matches and harbour cruises organised by clients trying to impress their international visitors. Linc seemed to have contacts everywhere, and was willing to use them in the service of his clients and of his own ambition. Win-win.

  When he submitted his resignation, Linc was therefore gratified that the partners seemed appropriately astonished.

  ‘Why now?’ they wanted to know, affecting agitation.

  Linc knew the answer to that, but it was not the answer he gave. ‘I have to think of my own future,’ he told them. ‘This feels like the right time to go out on my own, just as you guys must have felt when you set this place up so brilliantly, all those years ago.’

  Eventually, the partners persuaded Linc to let KK&C be the first and, for a period of twelve months, the only client of his new consultancy. They made it abundantly clear that he could practically name his terms, and so he did: a consultancy fee twice the size of his salary and an Aston Martin (not necessarily new) supplied by the agency. With a convincing display of great reluctance, he also yielded to Bob Kelman’s pressure to remain in his existing office (provided it was fully refurbished), so that from GBH’s point of view nothing at all would seem to have changed.

  As the agency partners sensed they could achieve a short-term solution that stopped short of offering Linc a partnership (a move none of them could have stomached), they pressed him even harder. Would he agree to maintain his public persona as an employee of the agency, mainly for the benefit of their relationship with GBH? On reflection, he thought he could manage that, for the time being, in return for a wardrobe allowance.

  Did that mean he would agree to say nothing to his colleagues or to any of his clients about his change of status? He supposed he would agree to that, yes, in return for an overseas trip, though surely the accounts people would realise he was being paid as a consultant and not as an employee?

  Leave that to us, said his agency masters who, in Linc’s mind, were about to become his masters no more. He was off the chart, and on his way to glory. Best of all, he had won his independence without the need to complicate – let alone sacrifice – his increasingly satisfying encounters with The Darby, which were starting to feel to Linc like . . . well, like a harmless and rather pleasant addiction.

  4

  A MONTH BEFORE Linc dropped what he had hoped would be his bombshell, Bob Kelman, Jhon Kornfield and Markus Craven had met over drinks on the deck of Bob’s home to gnaw away at what they were by then describing as ‘the problem of Linc’. They sensed he was becoming restless, and had been warned by several people who had worked with him in the past that, about a year into any new job, he usually threatened to resign. It was a tactic so transparently designed as a bargaining chip that most people wouldn’t get away with it, but Linc always timed his move with exquisite precision.

  The three partners were known as Wynken, Blynken and Nod among the younger members of staff who thought, correctly, that the agency bosses were seriously out of their depth when it came to the IT revolution in general, and the use of social media as a marketing tool in particular. Markus Craven, it was generally recognised, hadn’t even mastered his own smartphone. In meetings of the creative department, some of the young copywriters would throw in fictitious acronyms that sounded plausible enough – BQs, JRLs, ‘the famous InterFaken algorithm’ – for the pleasure of watching Markus trying to mask his bewilderment with a knowing smile or a nod.

  But no one denied that Markus had once been a genius when it came to creative solutions (and was still unrivalled when it came to strategic weeping). It was he who had single-handedly rescued another GBH product called ’allo! – a liquefied butter-and-aloe mixture so bitter that it had failed every taste test before its launch – with the slogan ‘Bitter butter better batter’. The product had crashed, as predicted, to be remembered only as another case study in disaster, but Markus’s campaign was credited with propping it up for long enough to allow the two key players to secure transfers to even more remote outposts of GBH’s global empire where they could do no further harm.

  All three partners felt uneasy about having Linc in their midst. They were appalled by his ruthlessness and assumed his own interests would always be put ahead of the agency’s, but at the same time they were astonished by his business-acquisition skills and knew their clients regarded him as a kind of secret weapon in their constant battle for market share. So their uneasiness was mixed with awe. They certainly didn’t want him working for anyone else. Not yet, anyway.

  When the partners learnt from someone inside the agency that Linc was registering his own business name, they assumed the resignation tactic was about to be deployed. At first, Bob Kelman and Jhon Kornfield had been anxious. They had thought the business-name registration thing sounded rather more serious, rather more substantial, than just another idle threat to resign. It was Markus Craven who calmed them down with the idea of working out a short-term Linc-retention strategy that would, at the very least, keep GBH quiet until the agency could find a successor to The Hunter.

  ‘He’ll try to play hard ball,’ said Markus to his partners, ‘so we must be ready with offers that look like a cave-in. He’ll want a car as good as yours, Bob, for a start.’

  ‘He can have mine,’ said Bob without hesitation. ‘I’d quite like to get my hands on the new model, as a matter of fact.’ It was Bob who had always resisted any suggestion that KK&C should pursue a mass-market car maker as a client: he knew he would end up having to drive the client’s product and, as a dyed-in-the-wool Aston man, he found that simply unthinkable.

  ‘Okay. That’s the car. What about the money?’

  Bob again: ‘We could triple what he’s earning now and still be getting value for money. The Ripper will push our revenue to an all-time high, as long as GBH can be convinced to throw what they’re threatening to throw at the campaign. And we all know Linc is the man to convince them.’

  Jhon Kornfield, not renowned for strategic think
ing about anything but money, had a strategic thought: ‘We need him to become addicted to us. Just like consumers get addicted to the gunk you guys seem so eager to push. I mean, really hooked.’

  His partners gazed at him with interest. ‘Addicted to what, exactly?’ asked Bob Kelman. ‘Not food or drink – he can get them anywhere. You mean addicted to something about this place? Not the esprit de corps – we all know Linc is the opposite of a team player. And not the money – that’s the most transferable thing there is.’

  ‘What about sex?’ said Markus with his customary insouciance, as if this were just another minor tactical detail of yet another campaign. Markus had an exalted view of his own creative powers and he enjoyed reciting the list of big names in art and literature who had once worked in advertising agencies. He intended to join them one day.

  ‘Sex?’ his partners responded together.

  ‘He’s pretty solid with Hermione,’ said Bob Kelman, with a touch of envy.

  ‘He’s the least sexually driven bloke I’ve ever seen,’ said Jhon Kornfield. ‘He never shows the remotest interest in the women around here – and, let’s face it, some of them are stunners. He’s more interested in money and power than women. I doubt he’d even notice if a woman walked into his office and took all her clothes off. Well, maybe he’d notice. But he’d probably just offer her his coat and get on with his work.’