by Hugh Mackay
‘Then don’t,’ said Joanne.
‘Hang on a minute. I’m just thinking lunch. It’s much harder to stay silent across the lunch table than it is in the –’
‘Stop!’
‘Sorry. I didn’t realise you were so sensitive about these matters, Jo.’
‘I’m not a tart, Markus. The ticket to Russia – thank you for that, by the way – is for services rendered, but not those services. You’re hoping for some bulletins from inside the mind of Linc, and I simply don’t have any. Not yet. If there was anything to tell you, I’d have told you. I want to keep my side of the bargain. But maybe there’s actually nothing there. Nothing to find out. Maybe you know all there is to know about Linc.’
‘Or maybe he’s smarter than we are.’
‘Hmm.’ Joanne was reflecting on the combined fire-power of Wynken, Blynken and Nod. In a contest of wills, she’d back Linc against this lot, any day. She knew that Linc was playing with her, just as she was playing with him, and that he was unlikely ever to let slip information that he didn’t want to divulge. She knew he didn’t regard her as his friend, after all.
‘Give it a try. Ask him to lunch. Get him talking about . . . his dreams. Get him blue-skying about his life.’
‘Really? Linc? I can’t see that happening, but I’ll give it a go. Nothing to lose. Anyway, it’s time someone handsome took me to lunch.’
■
‘I feel a bit like a callgirl,’ said Joanne, as she lay on the sofa of her office with Linc wedged awkwardly beside her. She had allowed him to partially undress her and then halted proceedings.
Linc was puzzled, as well as frustrated. A callgirl? What could she possibly mean? No money had changed hands. He waited, hoping for a signal that, in spite of this rather unexpected interruption, they might proceed.
‘All you seem to need me for is sex.’
Ah, thought Linc. I think I see where this is going: do I want her for more than her body? He had read about this kind of thing in a couple of novels he had been obliged to study for one of his university subjects. (Novels, like films and, indeed, pets, were regarded by Linc not so much as a waste of time but as things that simply didn’t serve his interests or further his career. He couldn’t see the point.)
It was difficult to know what to say. He could scarcely tell The Darby how this had all begun – that riveting research about the mistresses of powerful men that Otis had shown him – yet some response seemed called for.
‘What would you like me to do?’ he said, fearing what her reply might be. He had thought it clear from the start that this was to be a sexual relationship with no bearing on any other aspect of either of their lives. Once or twice, he had encountered a similar problem with clients. Not sexual issues, obviously, but a lack of clarity about the boundaries of their relationship and the limits to the demands a client could make on him. These days, he was more careful – indeed obsessive – about setting those limits right from the start. He should have done something similar, something more explicit, in his preliminary negotiations with The Darby, but, on reflection, he could see that things had moved rather too quickly for that. When he tried to recall any discussion of boundaries, he realised there had been none: everything was implicit, but he now sensed that Joanne’s underlying assumptions and expectations might have been different from his.
‘Well, you could take me to lunch, once in a while,’ she was saying. ‘Or on one of your interstate trips. We need more together time, my Hunter. Quality time. We need to share more. To play in the sandpit as well as on the couch.’
‘The sandpit?’ Linc was mystified by this reference.
‘I mean . . .’ Joanne searched for a less metaphorical way of putting it. ‘I mean, do some of the things that normal adults do when they have a relationship. We’re not just animals, my Hunter.’
Damn, thought Linc. A complication. He should have seen this coming. Had he discussed all this with Hermione in the first place, he was sure she would have warned him that things could get out of hand; she had a deeper understanding of women than Linc. But he realised that was a foolish, impractical thought. He was on his own in uncharted territory, and he didn’t like it. (On the other hand, he found he did like it when Joanne called him ‘my Hunter’.)
‘We never do anything except make love,’ Joanne was saying. ‘We’re not acting like a real couple at all.’
This struck Linc as an unreasonable proposition. For a start, he thought, making love, as The Darby so quaintly called it, was precisely what real couples did; the very essence of real coupling, surely. Beyond that, Linc could see no other way in which he and The Darby could be construed, or would ever want to be construed, as a ‘real couple’. In any case, there seemed to be a logical inconsistency in what she was proposing: if he took her to lunch – he assumed she meant something more than a sandwich in the park – then there would be a significant dollar value attached to the transaction and she would, paradoxically, be positioned more like a callgirl than now.
‘Lunch would be good,’ he said, without conviction. He tried to visualise how this could be handled without attracting unseemly attention from clients or colleagues who might see them together. Then the research Otis had shown him came back to him: successful men shrug off scandal as easily as criticism. He didn’t want to create a scandal, but an occasional lunch with The Darby, provided they never went to the same place twice, would hardly count as scandalous. Didn’t Bob Kelman often take his PA to lunch? And didn’t Joanne herself sometimes travel interstate with Markus Craven?
‘Yes, good idea. Sorry I didn’t think of it first,’ he said. Having adequately, to his mind, assuaged Joanne’s concerns, he moved to complete the task of undressing her.
Again she resisted. ‘Let’s just talk,’ she said. ‘Let’s spend this little bit of time we have together just now being – I don’t know – being more like a normal couple. Some conversation.’
Was this, then, to become a replica of his home life? Linc had made a point of not enquiring too closely into The Darby’s private life – that would have seemed both intrusive and irrelevant to the nature of their relationship, such as it was. Now he began to suspect that there might not be a significant man in her life, and she may be in danger of looking to him for more than he could reasonably be expected to provide. Conversation?
This had the potential to become messy, he realised, but the short-term rewards were significant, and Linc was reluctant to give them up just yet. He would have to see how this might evolve. But lunch must definitely be on the agenda, and soon. There was very little to be gained by spending these precious private moments with Joanne talking. What did she imagine they might talk about?
8
TOWARDS THE END of July, with less than two months to the launch, the Ripper Task Force gathered in the teal conference room, awaiting the arrival of Linc. This was the moment when he had promised to show them something more detailed, something more tangible than concepts and projections, riveting though all of those had been.
As far as Jerry and his colleagues at GBH knew, Linc was still as strongly wedded to KK&C – and therefore to servicing the GBH account – as ever. Though some of his colleagues at the agency muttered to each other about Linc’s acquisition of Bob Kelman’s cast-off Aston, his international travel and the lavish redecoration of his office, no one imagined that his relationship with KK&C had undergone the radical change that Linc had so successfully engineered.
More confident of his position than ever, Linc strode into the teal room clutching a duffel bag, which he placed on the floor beside his customary seat. He put some notes on the table, took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves and beamed at Jerry.
‘What have you got for us, Linc?’ Jerry was eager. With Dayton having already set a date for their visit to see the strategy presentation, he needed something concrete – online posters, radio and TV commercials, promotional vehicles, billboards, PR releases, merchandising material, anything. He was surprised that
Markus Craven had not yet joined the RTF, but was loath to mention it. He knew better than to question Linc’s way of doing things; after all, Linc had the weight of history on his side.
‘Commitment time, Jerry,’ said Linc. ‘This is where we ask you to flick the switch to big. Big idea. Big strategy. Big commitment. Go big or go home – right? Well, we’re not going home, Jerry, I can assure you of that. Project Cry Havoc, here we –’
‘Shhh!’ Jerry placed a warning finger over his lips. ‘The project that must not speak its name, Linc. PROCH, remember?’
Linc nodded. ‘Actually, Jerry, I’m not going to say too much – I want to let the concept speak for itself in a moment – but I need to set this up by reminding you that the space we’re moving into with The Ripper is uncharted territory for GBH. A dark space. A wild space. A reckless space. With this one, we’re stepping right outside the spiritual matrix of LJP – love, joy and peace – and creating a whole new matrix of our own. Call it the shadow matrix, if you will. I’m borrowing from Jung, of course.’
Jung! Jerry was in heaven.
■
The spiritual matrix was another Otis original – a way of locating what he called the soul position for any brand handled by KK&C. To secure the consumer’s total emotional commitment, Otis argued (and Linc wholeheartedly endorsed any proposition that bamboozled clients as well as this one did), brands had to add a spiritual dimension to the material benefits of the product, so consumers would feel that spending their money was virtuous and uplifting and made a positive contribution to their self-actualisation. To occupy such a special place in the consumer’s soul, a brand had to harness at least one of the three great spiritual drivers: love, joy and peace.
Otis often used Bob Kelman and his Aston Martin as an example. ‘There’s a full-blown LJP brand for you. Just ask Bob. Like most Aston owners, Bob is in love with the brand’s cachet.’ (If Bob was in the meeting, he would smile beatifically at this point.) ‘Aston owners experience the joy of motoring to the full when they are behind the wheel – again, just ask Bob. And they enjoy the peace of mind and sweet serenity with which most luxury cars imbue their owners. So there you have it – three out of three.’
Whenever he was invited into meetings – more often by Bob Kelman than by Linc – Otis mesmerised clients with his spiritual matrix presentation, though he never revealed to them that, in his view, love, joy and peace were all essentially gut reactions – the duodenum and bowel more or less the opposite of what most people think of when they say ‘soul’.
After inviting his clients to soar, in their imagination, to the lofty heights of luxury-car ownership, Otis would bring them back to earth with a more ubiquitous, less aspirational product: the smartphone.
‘Consider the iPhone,’ he would say. ‘Why is the iPhone a tearaway global success story? It’s a full-on soul brand, that’s why. It scores strongly on all three dimensions of the spiritual matrix. It’s a love object for most of its owners – they can’t bear to be separated from it, in fact. Many people will tell you their phone is the last thing they look at before going to sleep, and the first thing they look at when they wake up. And it’s a classic joy brand – the joy of endless stimulation coupled with the thrill of access to the worldwide web. But here’s the clincher: on top of all that, it’s a peace brand as well. The peace of mind that comes from knowing your friends are just a click away. Peace of mind for parents who feel they can keep track of their offspring. And the deep peace of feeling connected. That worldwide web again. Beautiful! The internet is the closest thing we’ve yet found to a symbol of one world – the truest manifestation of the global village, the one invention most likely to lead us to world peace through worldwide connection and worldwide sharing. And the smartphone is the most potent, and the most accessible, symbol of that.’
Because Otis kept a straight face as he said this, so did his audience.
‘It’s also the great peacemaker,’ he would continue. ‘Nothing settles an argument quicker: whip out your phone and, courtesy of Google, you can find the answer to everything. How’s that for a peace effect, eh? Instant elimination of conflict. Instant reduction of tension. Instant satisfaction of curiosity. Anything you want to know. Is there an omniscient God? There is now, my friends. This little device –’ Otis would hold up his own phone at this point ‘– is the perfect blend of technology and spirituality. The smartphone is soul magic.’
By the time Otis had finished his eulogy to the iPhone – even though KK&C didn’t yet have a single slice of the Apple pie – most clients were sold on the spiritual matrix. They could suddenly imagine themselves at dinner parties, defending their marketing strategies – their entire marketing careers – in a radically new way.
As Otis was fond of saying, consumers can find love, joy and peace in the most unlikely places when they are encouraged to look – think of their devotion to particular brands of laundry detergent, bottled water or frozen vegetables that are indistinguishable from their competitors. At one of his presentations, Otis had charmed the marketing team at Cocky by convincing them that the aura of romance surrounding their pre-mixed cocktails qualified Cocky as a love brand, and since their confectionery products all delivered a reliable sugar hit, it was a joy brand as well. Two out of three; not bad. The real challenge, Otis always said, was to find a position in the consumer’s soul that was strong on at least two, and preferably all three, of the spiritual dimensions. Then you had an irresistible seducer.
■
Linc was never sure how far to go with concepts like the spiritual matrix, let alone the shadow matrix – especially where Jerry was concerned. Jerry, it was widely acknowledged, was possessed of neither formidable intelligence nor boundless imagination, and having seen him go misty-eyed at the mention of Jung, Linc decided it was time to bring the meeting back to earth with a more solid, tangible example. Jerry being a well-known rugby tragic, Linc drew on the New Zealand All Blacks to illustrate how the shadow matrix worked. ‘Most New Zealand products perform strongly on the spiritual matrix,’ Linc said, ‘because we love the natural beauty and charm of the place and we trust the integrity and purity of its produce. All sweetness and light, right? Ah, but the thing of it is, all that love, joy and peace is what gives the All Blacks permission to be so dark, so aggressive, so menacing. They are the shadow of New Zealand’s purity. Enmity, not love. Aggro, not joy. Disruption, not peace. The big dark storm rolling in from the land of the long white cloud. Are you with me, Jerry?’
Jerry had no real grasp of any of this, but he was in a state close to ecstasy, swept away by Linc’s passion. If Lincoln The Hunter believed it, that was good enough for Jerry Weisbrot. In fact, Linc neither believed nor disbelieved it: that wasn’t the point. Sometimes, he himself could scarcely credit the tosh that poured from his own mouth and was often quite unsure of what he was going to say until he’d said it. But if Jerry was buying it, then Linc was selling it.
‘So that’s where we’re going to position The Ripper, Jerry,’ Linc said. ‘Not in the heart, but deep in the guts. In a visceral, ugly place. The shadow matrix, Jerry. EAD – enmity, aggro and disruption. The power of the shadow, that’s what we’re drawing on. The dark side. It’s paradigmatic, Jerry. Not so much a paradigm shift as a paradigm leap.’
Jerry was filled with admiration and awe, tinged with terror. He’d heard someone talking about paradigm shifts quite recently when he’d accidentally strayed onto Radio National on his car radio, and now here he was apparently in the thick of one.
Linc drove on relentlessly. ‘Our qualitative research has told us there’s a little bit of The Ripper in all of us. Call it a death wish, if you like. Just saying. The pack is black for a very good reason. The warning isn’t a joke – there’s real poison in The Ripper. We mustn’t shy away from that, and we don’t have to. Just think back to your own adolescence. Think of the inexplicable things you did, the potentially self-destructive things. Things you could hardly believe you’d done, even a few yea
rs later. Ah, but these things were not inexplicable after all. We now know how to explain recklessness in the young.’
Linc reached into his duffel bag and pulled out a disturbingly life-like model of a human brain, borrowed from Otis. Several people looked away; others leant in.
‘I want to say a word about frontal lobes. This is the sensible part of the brain – the place where we do our long-term planning, develop our self-awareness, make our judgements, especially our moral judgements. These babies –’ Linc touched the frontal lobes on his model and then touched his own forehead ‘– are the check on some of the mad impulses we receive from other parts of the brain. The frontal lobes are a bit like parents who restrain their children from doing impulsive and dangerous things. Some neurologists refer to this as the brain’s executive function. Okay so far?’
Jerry, at least as far out of his depth as Linc was, gave a noncommittal shrug.
‘I won’t get too technical, Jerry, but the key thing here is myelin. Myelin insulates the axons which conduct electrical impulses around the brain. That process starts in the back of the brain, so our most primitive impulses are transmitted more quickly when we’re young, and . . . you can see where I’m going with all this, can’t you?’
Linc felt reasonably secure describing the leap from the spiritual matrix to the shadow matrix, and he could almost convince himself he had some grasp of the frontal-lobe story. But now he was onto myelin, he had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. He was merely delivering his lines as convincingly as he could. But Jerry was transfixed. His younger colleagues were bored out of their brains, frontal lobes and all, but Jerry was mesmerised. Myelin! How could he ever have doubted, even for a moment, that Linc was on top of the brief, on top of the schedule, on top of his game? This was a man who understood things in a way Jerry knew he himself never could. This was a man who took him and his products and the whole edifice of GBH seriously. The shadow matrix! Frontal lobes! Myelin! What next? You could tell Linc was married to a doctor.