by Linda Grant
“And how did you book it?”
“There was a small ad in the back of the Sunday Times magazine.”
“An advertisement? So you are susceptible to advertising?”
“For heaven’s sake, that’s not the same thing at all.”
“Really? It’s exactly the same thing, it’s just that you are a snob. More than half of the advertising in the Sunday Times magazine comes from classifieds, but you perceive them not to be advertising but individual things for discerning people like yourself.”
“Come off it, Ivan, you sell people toothpaste and washing powder and bog roll,” said Grace. Grinning, smirking yuppies bobbed their heads up and down. This fucking country, she thought.
(Back in Harlem the transitory gardens would be reemerging, the tomato seeds rushing up from below the earth, threatening the foundations of the buildings that had been raised on top of them. Under London there are fields and rivers. What is under this house? Suppressed rivers. Let them come, let them rise up and overwhelm fucking Islington.)
“And can you do without toothpaste and washing powder and toilet paper? Is there anyone around this table who doesn’t use any of these products? Or do you make your own soap and your own shampoo?”
“No, I don’t make my own soap, but in the Third World they probably do,” said Amy, turning to Grace and nodding, incorrectly perceiving her as an ally. Grace ignored her.
“In the Third World, as you call it, they would far rather have a shampoo made by L’Oréal than wash their hair with bananas. Why do you think L’Oréal sells all over Africa?”
“Because you’ve forced them to believe L’Oréal is a superior product,” Amy said.
“That’s because it is. Have you actually tried washing your hair with bananas?”
“Oh, do stop talking about bananas. The point is, how can a grown man earn a living persuading us to buy Bold rather than Persil?”
“Because they’re different. It’s all in the name. They may seem the same to you but few people use them interchangeably. In fact, I’m prepared to bet that you’re brand loyal. You pick up the same packet of soap powder every time.”
“Yes, of course I do. I’m not going to agonize over which powder to buy. I don’t want to have to think about it because they are all the same.”
“No, they are not. They have personalities, as the people round this table do. You’ve got your powerful, brash Bold, which will clean a car mechanic’s overalls, you’ve got your Fairy, which is nice and soft, to wash baby things and delicates, and then there’s your Persil—it’s on Mum’s side, the understanding brand, for kids’ dirty T-shirts, and finally Ariel, which is ‘scientific.’” He raised a finger on each hand to indicate quote marks, which everyone understood and laughed at, even Amy, who could see now that she had unwittingly set herself up as straight man for a well-worn comedy act.
“On the surface,” Ivan went on, “it’s a parity offering, but the formulations are completely different, and instead of boring you with formulations, we’ve given them brand identities, so you know what to choose.”
“And what’s the difference between toilet paper?” asked Stephen. “All that does is wipe your ass.”
“Aha! Now, toilet paper is a problem because there’s only one consistent brand, which is Andrex, and the only way you can sell someone another product is if you offer them something Andrex doesn’t, so you could make it quilted or with added aloe vera. Why would you do that? Well, you categorize by attitudes to the physical usage. The hurried three-sheeter, the hygienic six-sheeter, et cetera. You find all that out through focus groups. The point is that men never buy it so it’s one of the most fascinating and most discussed problems in advertising, how you get a woman to buy a brand of toilet paper which suits every member of the family, including the little kid who’s just toilet-trained and is starting out on the lifelong event of wiping his own arse. You see, no one ever talks about how they wipe their arse, it just doesn’t come up in conversation. Do you fold or scrunch? At what stage during your piss or shit do you release the paper from the roll to have it ready, and should the sheet hang over the top of the roll or behind it? Arse-wiping is one of the most secretive acts a human being can perform, and yet we do it once a day if you’re a bloke, more often if you’re a woman, and absolutely no one wants to walk into a bathroom and find that it’s run out of toilet tissue, as we call it in the trade. The lack of toilet paper takes us back to our animal selves, and that’s before we even start to think of what color the paper is. I suppose all of us prefer white and think pink and green and purple are naff. But if you really want to understand advertising, Amy, the holy grail is how you sell to men. They’re the mystery because they believe they’re above influence.”
“How so?”
“I’ll give you an example. We pitched a few months ago for a new client, a private health-care plan which felt its campaigns weren’t reaching their target market, middle-aged men with disposable incomes. All our rivals did a study of public attitudes to private health care, and to the NHS. How do you persuade someone who gets something for nothing to pay for it instead? It was totally the wrong track. Our competitors kept on showing the client more of what they already had, shots of men being wheeled into surgery, and doomy music and images of wifey and kids at home. The idea was that it would trigger in breadwinners an anxiety about what was going to happen to their family while they were ill.
“But when we did our research we discovered that men cannot stand the idea of themselves being sick. It’s like opening a tap and draining away our testosterone, the image of a man ill is the image of a man castrated. Now, women have stuff happening to their bodies the whole time—periods, contraception, cervical smears, mammograms, childbirth—and these are not perceived as illnesses, even when they involve pills, and hospitals. So what we did was to create a campaign in which we showed the wife lying in a hospital bed in a nightie, surrounded by her family, which guilt-tripped the men—who after all were going to be the ones who would write the check—into thinking that they weren’t good providers if they left their loved ones in the hands of the NHS waiting lists.”
“I took out private health insurance,” said Stephen. “I took it out when the ads still showed guys being wheeled into surgery.”
“That’s because you’re a hypochondriac,” Ivan said. “We can’t get enough of you.”
Grace lit a cigarette. She was the only person in the room who still smoked, apart from Ivan’s after-dinner joints. “I remember you when you were an anarchist at Balliol. I remember you when you had a full head of hair. And didn’t talk bullshit.”
Poor Grace, Ivan thought. She had been such an exciting girl at nineteen. He had lost his virginity to her. He remembered his hand trembling on her breast because it was the first breast he had ever felt, and her colored tights peeling off so he could feel the damp triangle of lace, and then she’d blown him. The very first time he’d had sex he’d been blown. She’d only been up a few weeks, yet she was already famous. He had stopped, gaping, at the sight of her on her bicycle in her outlandish clothes, lifting her arm to indicate a turn as she swerved left into the Broad and he lifted his own: he saluted her. She smiled and carried on.
They were in his room in college in the middle of an autumn afternoon, he rolled a joint afterward, and when they came out onto the street it had been raining, hard. The street was an archipelago of wet coppery leaves plastered to the pavement, gusted from the trees by high winds. He had taken her hand and she had let go of his immediately. “I’m not your girlfriend,” she said. “Shall we go and have some tea?” he asked her. “You can, if you like, I’m meeting Andrea.” And this was the first he had heard of her best friend. A blow job on a wet afternoon in the sixties, skin reeking of patchouli oil, and now a lunch of poached salmon and champagne in a room smelling of roses and the lighter Chanel perfumes which all the women wore and his own skin scented by the Dior Homme he’d bought at duty-free.
He was lucky to ha
ve started on her but he could not imagine what that body would look like now, beneath the manky bit of cloth she had wrapped round it. He was surprised, really surprised at what had become of her. He blamed himself that he had done nothing to protect her. She could have come back to Belsize Park during the vacations. His own mother would have taken her in. But after all, she was damaged goods, right from the start, and it was too late to fix her now. What a shame.
“That was just the influence of my father,” he said, “who was then and still is an anarchist. I liked him too much to rebel against him. He really does think the law is an ass. As for the hair, what can I say? All of us are follically challenged. Look, this job is just an intellectual exercise, Grace, it’s exactly the same as what we did in our tutorials. Take sanitary protection…”
“For Christ’s sake, Ivan,” said Stephen. “We’re still eating lunch.”
“No, no, listen. You have this massively successful brand, Tampax. A woman goes into a chemist’s once a month and buys a product, what we call an offer. This is not something she’s going to do brand experimentation on. She starts with a brand and she sticks with it for the next thirty-five years, and when her period is due, she wants to walk over to the bathroom cabinet, get out the trusty blue box and know that for the rest of the day she’s going to be comfortable and leak-free. Thirty-five years of using the same product for three to five days, every single month. And if she has daughters, she introduces the brand to them. Yet Tampax is declining in market share. Why? Because it’s perceived as Mumsy. It’s the cardboard applicator, it’s seen as being from an era when women didn’t want to touch themselves ‘down there,’ as they used to call it. So Lil-lets, which is a simple tampon which you push in with your finger, is gaining on them.”
Marianne stood at the door of the dining room, listening and watching. She had identified Grace immediately and felt herself to be on her side in this argument, the earth was being raped for toilet paper.
Grace was not what she remembered. She had thought of her as a fairy queen in a crown, like the lovely Witch of the North in The Wizard of Oz. It was rubbish, she understood that, yet Grace, who had stood by her bed when she was born and named her, who came and went with no notice, who obeyed no rules except the ones she had invented, had been her secret inspiration. The gaunt leathery woman with the hair now white rather than ash blond had an interesting face, the most interesting in the room. Lines radiated around her mouth like a child’s drawing of the sun. Her exposed breasts were brown and wrinkled. She’s like a woman hobo, thought Marianne.
And she saw Grace turn, stare at her, take her cigarette from her red-painted lips and say, with an astonished drawl, “God, what a fat lump.”
Magic
Max came down the stairs with his conjuring paraphernalia, the sliding boxes, the silk handkerchiefs, the packs of cards, the cups and balls and the lengths of rope, to find Grace jammed against the wall of the hall outside the dining room and his father with a vein popping in his forehead, stabbing his finger in her face.
The face was a long white plank. His sister was sitting on the stairs, Ivan’s arm around her, looking as if she had been punched, knocked down, winded: an expression Max knew from her first weeks at her school in Highgate when she came home and slammed the door of her room. He had not seen it for several years. She had learned to deflect the blows, which were always about her appearance. He could laugh her out of them by doing simple tricks. They did not talk much, but operated by telepathy, a system they had perfected during the time he was deaf. Someone had said she was fat. He knew who. That dreadful woman with the ugly face.
Max waited quietly but felt thwarted, he had planned a grand entrance into the dining room, which was blocked by his mother standing in the doorway trying to speak in her soft voice, drowned by his father’s, which sounded to Max like metal scraping against metal.
“You come here, you accept our hospitality, you eat our food and sleep in our bed and you insult children. I’m sick to death of you, you are a monster, you couldn’t give a shit for anyone but your own sick self. What is the matter with you? Can’t you grow up? Is it because she’s my kid, is that your problem, that you think you can insult me through her?”
“Leave me to deal with this,” Andrea said, who tried to pull her husband away from Grace.
“No, I’ll do it,” said Ivan. “Come on, Grace, let’s go for a walk.”
Grace said nothing. She felt herself to be a bird that had stumbled by accident into an overheated house and crashed into mirrors and panes of glass and chandeliers. She scattered her droppings across pale carpets and in a straight line along a table of artfully prepared food, tasteless food. Andrea’s cooking was always undersalted. Her wings were beating in the stifling air, people were raising slingshots and air rifles to bring her down, she could fly this way and that, but she was unable to find the exit, the gap out of which you swooped upward and out into the blue, beyond the clouds. In Mexico one time she had seen flights of pelicans, lumbering brown birds with heavy spooned bills which swept down onto the water to fill with brine and fish. Frigates glided above them in the thermals. That is me, she thought, that is me, one of the ones up there.
“We’ve got to go back into the dining room,” said Marianne. “Max has been practicing his show for weeks.”
“She needs to apologize to you first,” Stephen said.
“I don’t care.”
Marianne knew she was a fat lump. She knew she was a secret, uncontrollable eater and that she was able to deal with the world only through the unpredictability of her observations, which unsettled people, and by staying behind the lens of her camera. Years ago, Grace had told her that she never explained or apologized, it was the first time Marianne had heard this maxim. Her mother was all for ceaseless explanation and apologies meant to redress wrongs and move beyond pain. Marianne understood that an apology from Grace was worthless, she would never mean it, it was just words, and she had lived with a deaf brother, she knew how insignificant words could be.
“I’ll go to my room,” said Grace.
“Your room?”
“Yes. The one I’m sleeping in, which you gave me to sleep in.”
“But I’m doing my show,” Max said.
“Everyone else is here,” said his father. “There’s plenty of people.”
“No, she has to stay.” He couldn’t bear to lose a single member of the audience.
He went to Davenports’ children’s magic club and graduated from cups and balls to card tricks, using American decks that real conjurors used. He had learned that the great magicians taught themselves, through hours of patient practice, to shuffle the deck so that the cards would stay in the same order. But the elementary stages of magic were the lesson that each finger had its own role to play, the digits of his hand were little actors, each taking on a different part. Unless they performed together, the trick could not work. He had been taught how to angle his arm from the shoulder to the tip of the farthest finger and where to place his eyes, because he had found out that where the eyes went the audience’s eyes would follow. If you get the audience to focus on one hand, the other one could do what it wanted. What he said was the misdirection. “Look, I’m not touching it!” but the trick was already done.
But the hardest lesson he had learned from watching videos over and over again was that the kind of magician he wanted to be was the kind who has a personality.
“You’re looking for the moments when the audience is relaxed,” Ralph had told him. “If you can find that moment, you can do anything, you can produce an elephant. But you have got to relax them.”
“How do you do that?”
“You win them over. There’s more to it than just the trick.”
Ralph had never achieved what Max already hoped to do, aged fourteen. Max observed that this was because he did not have the right mental condition to be a very good magician, which was mathematical logic. Max had his father’s brain, but his father did not realize
it, his father recognized mental attributes only when they were measured by school grades. But Ralph had had a personality; it was the same one he used to sell a housewife a foundation garment or a flannel nightdress. Ralph had the capacity, when he turned it on, to be what Stephen called a schmoozer.
Max was so absorbed in the practice of magic, alone in his room with the door locked, that he rarely bothered masturbating. It seemed a waste of time to do that with his hands, and he was too afraid of injuring them. His highs and lows rocked between the sense of terror and shame if a trick went wrong and the exhilarating power of its working.
He had been promised that the dining room table would be pushed back against the wall and two rows of chairs laid out. It hadn’t happened. He had come down, on cue at 2:45, and they were bickering.
“It’s time for my show,” he said. “Everyone has got to go back into the dining room.”
“You,” Stephen said to Grace. “The only sound I want to hear from you is your fucking hands clapping.”
The guests rearranged the furniture to make an intimate little nightclub in the broad daylight of a summer Saturday afternoon. They sat down in chairs and waited for the children’s entertainment. Max entered and smiled. It was an expression of vulpine cunning, the trickster’s smile of fake sincerity.
He understood at once that this was his first failure, he had not pulled off what he was hoping for, he had failed to relax them, instead they were startled.
Ivan took up his position by the mantelpiece with his video camera. The next day Stephen and Andrea would play the tape of the performance over and over again until they relinquished it to their son to study his mistakes.
“He’s doing what is logically impossible,” Stephen said, “you know that it’s impossible yet it has just happened. So it has to be based on lies, but it’s more than that because the brain is colluding with the lying, it seems to be wired to be deceived, this has to be the reason, you don’t seem to be able to force yourself to look the way that’s not intended.”