by Sue Margolis
If Cyn’s jaw had dropped any farther it would have made contact with the desk. “What the . . . ?” “In comes this Audrey Hepburn look-alike in a tiny suit . . .” “Bitch. I don’t believe it. You total, utter and complete bitch.” She read on. “I suggest the end line: Do not doughnut. Why not Low Nut?”
Cyn put her head in her hands. Instead of taking her proposal to Graham Chandler the other day, Chelsea had copied it out, changed a few words around and put her own name to it. Presumably Cyn’s name had gone on Chelsea’s original proposal. But why? Why had she done it? Deep-seated insecurity, Cyn guessed. But Chelsea was so talented. Was it possible she could be so full of self-doubt? So insecure that she needed to steal an idea from a colleague? Apparently so. By now, any doubts that Chelsea hadn’t done the dirty on her over the Smart Car had vanished. Tears of hurt and rage poured down Cyn’s cheeks. Her hands formed fists so tight that her nails dug into her flesh. “She will pay for this. God, she will pay for this.” Distressed as she was, Cyn couldn’t help thinking how much like the end of a Scooby-Doo cartoon she sounded. Nor did it escape her how pleased Veronica, her therapist, would be to discover that she was not only getting in touch with her anger but contemplating vengeance.
Cyn came out of Chelsea’s document file and walked back to her own desk. As she slumped into her chair she noticed a stress ball lying next to the phone. She picked it up and started to pummel it. Chelsea must have been completely round the bend to even think she would get away with it, Cyn thought. At the first meeting to discuss how the project was going, Cyn would have found out she’d pinched her idea. Then she remembered that Graham was in New York. It was possible that meeting would never have taken place and that Chelsea and Graham would simply have communicated by e-mail. But even that would only have delayed Cyn finding out. The truth would have come out eventually—after which Cyn would have told Graham what Chelsea had done and she would have been dismissed immediately.
Or would she? It suddenly struck her that if Chelsea was so scheming and manipulative, and apparently without any conscience, she might well deny stealing Cyn’s idea. What if Graham believed her? Anything was possible. After all, Cyn’s career had taken a bit of a downturn these last few weeks—culminating in the Pickersgill fiasco, which Graham still knew nothing about. Maybe when he got back, Chelsea would convince him that the stress of the job was getting to Cyn and that she was cracking up. Much as she wanted to punch Chelsea’s lights out and promise to tell Graham precisely what had gone on, she decided against it.
Just then the phone rang. It was Lisa Patterson from Anusol. She said she had been off sick and apologized for taking so long to get back to Cyn. “I have to confess to being a bit perplexed about all this,” she said, kindly. “I made a point of asking if the ad was going to cause problems. The woman I spoke to assured me it wouldn’t.”
“This woman,” Cyn said, rubbing her forehead, “did you happen to get her name?”
“She didn’t give a name, but she spoke with an American accent.” Cyn dug her nails hard into the stress ball.
“Look, I understand that you’re upset,” Lisa Patterson went on. “I can’t say I’d be particularly happy driving around in a car advertising Anusol and I work for the company. The thing is, I’m not sure there’s much I can do about it now. I realize you would like something a bit more discreet, but it cost us rather a lot to get the ad done. I’m not sure we have the budget to take it off and replace it with something else. Of course you’re perfectly welcome to return the car.”
Cyn couldn’t really think straight, but her head was clear enough to know that her Peugeot was on its last legs and virtually only fit for scrap. She would have to keep the Smart Car. Plus, apart from the ad, she absolutely loved it. Lisa was fairly junior at Anusol. Maybe when he got back Graham Chandler would speak to one of the bosses and see if something could be done to change the ad. “No, that’s OK,” Cyn said. “I’ll hang on to the car for the time being.”
“Well, if you’re sure. And once again I’m really sorry about the mix-up. Somebody at your end clearly got their wires crossed.”
“Didn’t they just,” Cyn said bitterly. Then she thanked Lisa for calling.
Eventually she got up and went over to the coffee machine. A couple of people noticed her red eyes and asked if she was OK. She said she was fine and made up a pathetic excuse about having an eyelash in her eye.
She took the coffee back to her desk. As she sat down, her phone rang again. She thought about ignoring it. Then on about the eighth or ninth ring, she decided it might be something important and picked up. It was Hugh to say he had left his tie at her place the other night. “Oh, right, yeah,” she said. “I found it on the coffee table.”
“Gorgeous, you sound wretched. What on earth’s the matter?”
Slowly, between sobs, she told him what had happened, ending with the call from Lisa Patterson. Hugh was rarely lost for words, but apart from the occasional “My God,” he listened in stunned silence. “Screwing you over with the car is one thing,” he said, when she’d finished telling the tale, “but to steal your idea . . . That’s something else. It’s in a different league. It simply beggars belief. It’s so cruel. So evil.”
“I keep trying to work out why she did it. I mean, was it insecurity, jealousy, an obsessive need for power and control?” She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.
“For chrissake, who cares why?” Hugh said. “You’ve been in therapy too long. You’re the victim here, not Chelsea. It’s not your job to start analyzing her and feeling sorry for her.”
“I don’t feel sorry for her. I hate her.”
“Good. So, have you spoken to your boss?”
“Can’t, he’s away.”
“You could e-mail him.”
“I know, but I’m not sure he would believe me,” she explained.
“Even when you’ve got the evidence on Chelsea’s computer?”
“It proves nothing. Who’s to say the idea wasn’t hers?”
“But it’s on your computer, too. Surely that looks suspicious?”
“Absolutely,” Cyn said, “but in fact it gives Chelsea even more ammunition. She would twist things around and say that the moment she went into hospital I copied her Droolin’ Dream document and transferred it to my computer.”
“Why would you do that?”
“She would argue that it was because I was jealous of her and wanted to discredit her. I’ve no doubt that people in the office would believe my version of events, but Graham has a lot of time and respect for Chelsea.”
Hugh went silent for a moment. “OK,” he said, his voice rising in excitement, “call me a genius, but I think I’ve got an idea. Every document on a computer is time coded. If you go into the proposal she nicked from you, you’ll find the time she started writing it, the time she finished it, the lot. If it’s after the time that you wrote the proposal on your computer, then you can prove without doubt that you had the idea first. Do you know how to get up the properties of the document?”
She said she did.
“Right, why don’t you go and take a look? I’ll hang on.”
Her heart thumping with anticipation, she raced back to Chelsea’s computer and made a few clicks with the mouse. In a moment utter dismay had overtaken her again.
She went back to the phone. “Chelsea turned back the time code and changed the date to make it look like she wrote it days before.”
“God, she’s nobody’s fool. I don’t know what to suggest . . . It’s so ironic—me and Harmony watching Working Girl the other night.”
She gave a small laugh. “Isn’t it?”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“Not sure. I need some time to work things out.”
“Look, if there’s anything you need, I’m always here.”
“I know. Thanks.”
“Love you, gorgeous.”
“Love you, too.”
Sipping the hot coffee made her feel bett
er. After a few minutes she started to think more clearly. She needed to convince Graham of the truth. How she was going to make that happen, she wasn’t quite sure. But somehow she would prove to him that the idea had been hers all along and then he would have to give her the senior copywriter’s job.
She turned her attention to the number she’d written down for Gary Rossiter, the head of marketing at Droolin’ Dream. A thought was starting to take shape in her mind. It seemed so obvious. After all, the Droolin’ Dream idea belonged to her, not Chelsea. What if she went to the meeting with the Droolin’ Dream people instead of Chelsea? Of course she could hardly go in bleating about Chelsea having stolen her idea. It would look highly unprofessional. She would have to invent a reason why she was replacing her, but that shouldn’t be hard. She took another sip of coffee. Maybe she would tell this Gary Rossiter that the Droolin’ Dream commercial had originally been her idea but the whole thing had been passed over to Chelsea when . . . When what? OK, when her flat flooded? She would say she had taken some time off to get the flat sorted, but everything was fine now. She was back on the case and raring to go.
Deciding her excuse sounded perfectly feasible, Cyn picked up her work clothes, which were draped over the back of her chair, and went to the ladies’ room to get changed. She’d made up her mind. She was off to Slough.
As she was touching up her makeup it occurred to her that she had done absolutely no preparation for this meeting. Suddenly she wasn’t sure she could handle it. She had absolutely no idea what the Droolin’ Dream people would want to know. “Course you do,” she said to her reflection. “You’ve done these things a hundred times.” She was right. Meetings like this were a formality more than anything. They would ask a few questions, but nothing she couldn’t handle.
She came out of the ladies’ room, picked up her bag and coat and went to find Brian Lockwood. He was one of the senior creatives and had been left in charge while Graham was away. She told him that she had an afternoon meeting and wouldn’t be back today. Brian was a piss artist who, even when he was sober, only took in a quarter of what was said to him. Right now he had just got back from a boozy lunch at the Oxo Tower and was looking particularly bleary-eyed. “Right, fine, whatever,” he said, barely bothering to look up.
Chapter 6
The Droolin’ Dream HQ was on one of those ominously depopulated, tinted-glass-and-metal industrial parks. As Cyn drove past the immaculate lawns, beds of daffodils and newly planted conifers, she half expected to see mad government scientists in white coats and wiry hair accompanying a group of freshly programmed Stepford Wives on their afternoon constitutional.
Cyn felt a sense of mild relief when the girl at the Droolin’ Dream reception desk turned out to be a Britney Spears clone and couldn’t have looked less ominous if she’d tried. When Cyn walked in, the girl’s hair was draped over her face like Cousin Itt and she was busy examining the strands for split ends. At the same time she was yakking away on the phone. “So anyway, I’m like, ‘Tell it to the hand’ and she’s like, ‘You bitch.’ Dah. I mean who’s the bitch here? She slept with my boyfriend.” At this point the girl noticed Cyn, made her excuses to whomever she was speaking to and put down the phone. She tossed back her hair. Cyn said she was there to see Gary Rossiter.
“Oh, right chyew are.” She tapped out his extension with an impossibly long nail that had a tiny fake diamond stuck to its center. “Mr. Rotisserie, yer three o’clock’s here.” She looked up at Cyn. “Says he’ll be down in a jiffy.”
Cyn sat down on one of the imitation brown suede armchairs. The receptionist went back to her split ends. Several jiffies passed. After about ten minutes, a beaming chap in his midthirties came bounding toward her. He was short and chunky, rather like a small sofa, Cyn thought. He also had a smile full of crooked teeth.
“Chel! So, you found us all right.” Chel? What was with the Chel? Talk about overfamiliar. Loathe Chelsea as she did, she couldn’t help feeling indignant on her behalf.
“Yes. No problems.” Cyn smiled, extending her hand toward him. But Gary Rossiter ignored the hand. Instead he leaned in toward her and kissed her on both cheeks. Strong whiff of coffee breath. “We don’t stand on ceremony here at Droolin’ Dream. Anyway, after all those e-mails I really feel like I know you.”
“Ah, right. Well, actually, I should put you straight on that. You see there’s been a change of . . .” But she could see he wasn’t listening. Instead he was doing up the button on his shirt, which had burst open at the midsection of his paunch.
“So, not too much traffic on the M4, then? Nice one! I was just saying to our boys upstairs in sales that our roads must seem pretty pathetic to you. I mean, where you come from it’s all six-lane highways. I was watching a helicopter police chase in Florida the other night. Amazing. And I mean amazing with a capital Wow. Do you get a lot of police chases where you come from?”
“No, Crouch End tends to be pretty quiet as a rule,” Cyn said.
Gary cracked up. “Nice one! I like it. I like it. No, I meant, do you get a lot of police chases where you come from originally?”
“No. Not really,” she said briskly, aware that if she didn’t tell him who she was right now, the situation could spin out of control. “Look, Gary, before we go on, there’s something I need to explain.”
“Call me Gazza. Everybody does.”
Gazza? Gawd. “Right. Gazza. Well, you see . . .”
“It’s funny, your American accent is not as pronounced as it was on the phone . . . Oh, must get you a visitor’s pass before we can let you go upstairs.”
“Right.” Bugger. Now he’d noticed her accent. Tell him. Tell him. But Gazza had walked off and was already standing in front of the reception desk. Cyn followed him. The It Girl was faffing around looking for a pen that worked. “By the way, Kelly,” Cyn heard Gazza say to the receptionist in a taut whisper. “The name is Rossiter. Right? Not Rotisserie. Got that?”
“Right chyew are. Sorry.” With the kind of slowness that would have driven even Pollyanna to eat her own head, the girl filled out a card and tucked it into a plastic pouch. Gary insisted on clipping it to the lapel of Cyn’s jacket. “OK,” he said, “your lift awaits. If you’d like to follow me.”
“Fine. Lead on. Look, Gary . . .”
“Come on, now,” he grinned, wagging a playful finger, “you promised you’d call me Gazza.”
“Sorry. OK. The thing is, Gazza . . .”
The lift arrived and Gazza stood back to let her in. “You know, Chel,” he said as the lift doors shut. “You don’t mind me calling you Chel, do you?”
“No. I mean yes. Well, you see, actually . . .”
“Nice one. You know, Chel, I have to tell you from the get-go that all of us at DD were massively impressed with your concept. And I mean massively with a capital Huge.”
“Wow. That’s great, but there is something you should know.”
“Of course our chairman is a bit of a—well, to be honest with you, he’s a bit of a dinosaur—and he couldn’t quite see where you were coming from artistically speaking. In fact he couldn’t see it at all. Took some persuading from the rest of us, I can tell you. But when we mentioned your name his ears pricked up, I can tell you. ‘If she’s good enough for Procter and Gamble, then she’s good enough for us,’ he said. Until then he’d been thinking of giving the account to Saatchis, but it was your name that won him over.”
“Really? I’m flattered.”
“And so you should be. Do not doughnut, why not Low Nut? It’s genius. And I mean genius with a capital Mastermind.” Cyn’s heart was pounding in her chest. God, what did she do now? If she told him she wasn’t Chelsea Roggenfelder, PCW could lose the Droolin’ Dream account. If she pretended to be Chelsea she would be committing a gargantuan act of deceit. Of course she knew what Tess McGill would have done, but this wasn’t some daft Hollywood movie, it was real life and in real life people didn’t go round imitating other people to get even with them—even when
it could be argued that said imitation was utterly and completely justified. The lift bell pinged. The doors opened.
“You know, Chel,” Gazza said as they stepped out, “your voice really does sound different from how I remember it on the phone. What happened to the accent?”
“My accent? Right, my accent . . .” OK, she either had to backtrack and reveal her true identity or pretend she was Chelsea and explain why she sounded so different. She could feel sick panic rising inside her.
Veronica said she needed to be in therapy to learn how to be bad, but not this bad. Cyn had been thinking more in terms of allowing herself to go overdrawn at the bank a couple of times a year or performing the occasional illegal U-turn. She had planned to give herself five years or so to reach this level of bravery. Now she had five seconds.
If she was going to commit the biggest sin of her entire life—or to be more accurate, the first sin of her entire life—there was no time to consider the morality of it all, no time to think about the consequences, no time to phone Hugh and Harmony so that they could reassure her she was doing the right thing. If she was going to do it, she had to decide now.
“Oh, right, of course, my accent. My American accent. Yes, well, um. You see, the thing is . . .” Make a decision. Make a decision. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest. She inhaled deeply. “OK, the thing is that Graham Chandler, our managing director, is very conscious of wanting PCW to come across as a very British company—you know, Cool Britannia and all that, and he . . .” He what? What? “. . . and he insisted I went on a course. That’s it—a course, to learn how to speak with a Bridish accent. I mean, a British accent, there I go, nearly getting it all wrong again.” Omigod. She had done it. She was actually pretending to be Chelsea Roggenfelder. She half expected to hear a thunder-clap from on high.