My uncle John damn near suffered a major heart attack when he got the final bill and lost no time bringing it up at the next board meeting. For once my mum stood up for me. My dad, probably pissed, was reported to have said, ‘John, your class is up your arse! Leave the boy alone.’ Needless to say, I wasn’t given the job of doing the twenty-two parlours in the other states, even though sales had since jumped fifteen per cent in Sydney and a more affluent clientele had been attracted to the family death and dying business. Funnily, none of the other directors in charge of the eighty-eight Little Sparrow Chinese restaurants asked me to design their restaurant interiors.
Now, with my great flat feet planted on a handmade antique Aubusson silk rug spread in front of the desk, I stood opposite my chairman and was forced to revise the idea that Charles Brickman was a little guy. A surprising amount of his torso showed above the beautiful old desk, indicting a taller man than I remembered. He wasn’t wearing a jacket, and his red striped American barbershop braces stood out against a plain white shirt. I wondered briefly if the chairman had received a sartorial tip from his well-known New York agency counterpart, the very British chairman of O&M, David Ogilvy, who famously wore red braces. But where did I get the notion that, like me, Charles Brickman was a short arse? Strange, I’m usually pretty observant and, like all vertically challenged men, I never failed to notice those who are shorter than me.
‘Sit,’ he growled, not looking up from his writing.
I glanced at the two chairs standing directly in front of the desk. They were Louis XV French medallion-back occasional chairs in gilded wood, upholstered in black velvet. The gold was suitably tarnished by age and, while this was a style of chair that was commonly reproduced, I hadn’t the slightest doubt these two were genuine, the real McCoy. If I sound a bit precious, it’s just that I’m into antiques and chose this exact style for the funeral-parlour interview rooms. They are known as SOS (Sales Opportunity Seats), where you settle the distraught Dearly Bereaved, ideally holding hands, their chairs always placed near a large vase of pungent white Easter lilies, and attempt to persuade them to upgrade to a more expensive casket. The death salesman is a peculiar breed, usually puny in stature, slightly hunched, convincing, sincere, sympathetic in manner, apparently guileless but utterly ruthless. Everyone is familiar with the representation of death – a skeleton in a monk’s cowled robe carrying a sickle. But, according to my dad, if you look carefully into the dark shadow it casts, you’ll find a coffin salesman gleefully rubbing his hands.
However, in the case of the funeral parlour’s interview rooms, I was reluctantly forced to accept reproduction Louis XV chairs for the SOS because I couldn’t find enough genuine antiques in Australia. Okay, I admit, that was not quite true. I didn’t try very hard because the tarnished gilding, the ‘don’t touch’ part of any genuine antique, would appear to your average mourner as a worn paint job, signifying a funeral parlour that was rundown and poorly managed. So I opted for reproduction chairs, precise copies handmade with immaculate gilded woodwork, and still expensive enough to cause Uncle John to have another major conniption.
But the problem was that the chairman’s two chairs had arms and were not wide enough in the seat to accommodate my brick-shithouse build without damaging them.
‘What?’ Brickman asked, sensing me looming over him.
‘The chair, sir, I could … damage it.’
Looking up for the first time, he reached for the blue-spiralling cigarette and took a puff. ‘Bloody gaspers.’ He managed several coughs before resting it on the lip of the French ashtray, then rasped, ‘Miss Grace, bring the chair!’ The shout came out as a strangled cough. Realising that his damaged voice wouldn’t carry to her office, he jabbed at the intercom, repeating his demand.
‘Shall I?’ I nodded in the direction of her office.
‘No, stay! She sits on her fat arse all day,’ he growled.
So her surname was Grace – if ever there were a misnomer – and I would learn from Odette that her Christian name was Gertrude and that she was known among the female staff as Graceless Gertie. She was also said to share her boss’s sunny disposition and ready smile.
Miss Grace, her sucked-lemon expression even more sour, was plainly not happy. She entered carrying a solid oak, straight-backed dining chair. I moved towards her to take it, but she rudely pushed past me. I jumped aside just in time to prevent a collision and caught a glimpse of the back of Brickman’s desk out of the corner of my eye. The bugger had his chair set on a platform. Jesus, the conceit. Miss Grace plonked the chair down hard on the Aubusson rug as if hoping she might damage it. Then, without saying a word she turned and marched out. There was a ladder running down the calf of one of her nylon stockings. Her legs weren’t bad. Funny, while some women cop varicose veins and puffy ankles as they age, with others the legs are the last to go. Miss Grace was one of the lucky ones.
Brickman watched her depart and then, shaking his head slowly, wheezed, ‘You fuck ’em when they’re young and sweet and you spend the rest of your life paying for it.’ I was taken by surprise, not sure I’d heard correctly. This was not the sort of comment I’d expected. I couldn’t believe the elevated seat either. Clearly there was something I didn’t understand, about him, about her. I reminded myself to check if he wore built-up heels and to buy Odette a drink.
‘Sit,’ he said, nodding at the oak chair. ‘And thanks, Koo. That frog chair cost a few bob.’ Something resembling a grin momentarily revealed a sticky glimpse of tobacco-stained teeth.
I guess all this taken together meant that, in the chairman’s eyes, we were off to a reasonable start. I sat down on the hard wooden chair. I still didn’t know why I was here. Should I have brought the layout I was rendering for the two o’clock Wills meeting, I wondered. I couldn’t think why – it was the usual research-inspired crap, a hand holding up the new pack, three cigs city-sky lining, poking from the top of a red packet at various heights. The subliminal message they were meant to convey was one for me, one for my mate and one to offer to someone as a friendly gesture – the holy trinity of the tobacco industry: personal satisfaction, mateship and new friends. One research report allowed that the third cigarette was for your lady friend.
The problem was that the client believed all this unadulterated research crap. Then there was the headline, the result of some independent research outfit flogging what they maintained the public really thinks. This deep probe into the public mind was invariably presented in a specially convened client meeting by some good-looking Economics graduate in a miniskirt, and wearing stilettos. Rather than seriously analysing the numbers her research company had crunched in a so-called ‘five-state definitive survey’, Miss Tits and Arse would be doing more work in the presentation with her eyes and body, crossing her legs, leaning forward to show her cleavage, turning to the slide screen to wiggle her cute little bum at the client product manager. It was show-and-tell in the adult world, and the client lapped it up, as it allowed him to stay safe and not to rock the boat with something that might resemble an original advertising idea. I was finalising the brilliant result for the meeting: New Templeton – The Satisfaction of Full Flavoured Mildly Toasted Virginia Tobacco! Every word in the headline was justified by the research gurus as ‘deep and meaningful’. For fuck’s sake! That ought to have the punters queuing up at the corner shop before dawn on the day of the launch.
W.D. & H.O. Wills hadn’t yet caught up with the creative revolution in advertising. In fact, it hadn’t even begun to penetrate the cloud of tobacco smoke fogging up the meeting room in their advertising department. In the five years I’d been with the agency Charles Brickman had never once asked to see a layout. As I mentioned before, he’d never even attended a client meeting. His part of the job was to smoke the product and massage the ego of Sir John Smith, the tobacco-company chairman. My job was to churn out endless shitty research-guided layouts and then spend hours discussing their subtle differences and how these would turn existing smoker
s on to the new brand. That was another tobacco industry shibboleth: We don’t cause people to take up smoking, we only try to influence them to switch brands. The senior advertising manager responsible for that little gem, James Pudsworth, was promoted to the local company’s board.
Brickman killed the fag, stabbing it into the ashtray, crushing it as if it were a deadly worm – unconscious malice in the gesture – then promptly lit another one. Earlier that year, the first warnings had appeared on cigarette packs in the US: Cigarette smoking may be injurious to your health. This got a bit of local publicity and Wills convened a special ‘explanatory’ meeting in the agency. They worked with the word ‘may’ in the message and pointed out that lots of things may be injurious to your health: coffee, sugar, alcohol, too much fat in your diet, even crossing the road. You can do a lot with an ambiguous word like may. If you heed every warning you get in life, you may not get out of bed in the morning. Then their tame medical researcher (nicotine-testing lab manager was a better description) stood up and said there were no definitive studies that showed tobacco was injurious to health. He pointed out that Europeans had been smoking tobacco since the Spanish introduced it in the early 1500s, along with potatoes, both, incidentally, from the same family as deadly nightshade. ‘So there ought to be a warning on potatoes,’ the so-called boffin concluded. This got the mandatory laugh. We knew he meant it as a joke, but we wanted to believe, insisted on believing him. The upshot of the meeting was that the operative word may won the day and we all left feeling safe. We should have recalled that the word may was also part of the cry uttered by those in deadly peril – mayday. The warnings on American packs were, in fact, the first mayday call about the physical harm done by smoking tobacco. Wills was, after all, the biggest account the agency had, our bread and butter; lose it and the agency would take a real belting in its financial billings.
‘You’re Chinese, Koo,’ Charles Brickman said. It was a statement, not a question.
‘No, sir, fourth-generation Australian.’
‘Yes, but still Chinese. Your lot don’t intermarry!’
‘Well, no, sir, that’s not strictly true. As a matter —’
‘C’mon, cut the bullshit – take a look in the mirror next time you’re in the toilet, son,’ he interrupted.
I was almost at the first stage of really disliking this bloke. ‘I’m a throwback, sir, to my great-great-grandmother. My sisters and several of my cousins look less Chinese than you do …’ I remembered just in time to add ‘sir’.
‘Four generations, that’s impressive,’ he said, patronising me.
I ignored the tone. ‘Not really, my great-great-grandfather came to Australia in the gold rush. I guess most people could trace their forebears back to convict times. After all, transportation to New South Wales only stopped fifteen years before the gold rush. I guess both our families were originally migrants in this land.’ I was aware of overstepping the mark, but I was a little miffed. He obviously thought of the Chinese as intruders who didn’t belong here. Or was that a chip on my own shoulder?
He didn’t appear to notice. ‘Yeah, you’re right, I suppose, but it’s always been easier for us British.’ Then he added with a chuckle, ‘Our throwbacks are not so noticeable.’
Jesus, this bloke’s my chairman! What do I say next?
My Singaporean-born Chinese mother, desperately worried about the fact that I’m the last Koo unless I start producing sons – and the sooner the better – was extremely grateful that I was a throwback to Little Sparrow. Not that she didn’t cherish my three distinctly Caucasian-looking sisters; she did. But my appearance was so intrinsically square, flat-faced peasant Chinese that, with her own ancestral genes coursing through my blood, she harboured a modest hope that a new oriental influence would permeate the next Koo generation, especially if I married a Chinese.
My mother had done a good deal of research into my dad’s family and I had subsequently added to it with research of my own. She had passed all she knew on to us kids as faithfully as if it were about her own family. All this had produced an affinity with Little Sparrow so strong that she had developed a kind of ancestor worship, which meant that our great-great-grandmother had always been a strong presence in our childhood. Our growing years had been peppered with alleged Little Sparrow-isms. All of these were based on traditional wisdom and intended as guides to show us how we should behave. So that ignorant, silent, strong-minded peasant ancestor had become an iconic figure in our lives. One of her mythical sayings, transported telepathically all the way from the celestial realm to my mum, was: When you are confused or angry, say nothing. Or, put into my dad’s lingo, ‘Tell ’em bugger-all, son!’
Charles Brickman, his expression quizzical, said, ‘You speak the language, of course.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘What language is that?’ I asked, knowing full well.
He clucked his tongue, a wet sound. ‘Chinese! What else?’
I’d decided not to give the bastard an inch. He could fire me if he wanted to. With two ads in the New York Art Directors Annual, there wasn’t an agency in town that wouldn’t welcome me with open arms. ‘I suppose you mean Mandarin, Hokkien or Cantonese. There are almost three hundred languages in China.’ I paused meaningfully. ‘I don’t speak any of them.’ This wasn’t strictly true; my mum had taught us Cantonese when we were kids and she’d regularly converse with us, but this hadn’t happened for ages and I wasn’t sufficiently confident to claim it as a language I knew at street level.
His expression didn’t change and, ignoring my less than subtle putdown, he asked, ‘How would you like to go overseas, Koo?’
His question came as a surprise, though later I castigated myself that I should have seen it coming a mile off. ‘Overseas?’ My heart skipped a beat. Shit! New York! Madison Avenue!
‘New York have asked us to send someone suitable from creative.’
Jesus! New York! Me! ‘To the New York office, sir?’ I asked, hurriedly reintroducing the ‘sir’.
The chairman drew back in surprise and started to cough violently, then reached into his trouser pocket for a handkerchief, brought it up to his mouth and spat into it, albeit fairly politely, then spoiled it all with a final hoarse clearing of the throat. ‘Have you not been listening to a single word I’ve said, Koo?’ He took a deep breath. ‘Singa-bloody-pore! Ferchrissake! They don’t have Chinese working in the New York office!’
Despite myself, I drew back and repeated, ‘Singapore?’ as if it were a dirty word.
‘What’s that mean?’ he spat.
‘Well, it comes as a bit of a surprise. I didn’t know we had a Singapore office.’
‘We do now, son! What do you imagine we’ve been talking about?’ He waved a hand, indicating the office and its furnishings. ‘If you weren’t so busy calculating the value of the stuff in my office, maybe you could concentrate for a minute or two!’
I felt my flat face burning. There was a Louis XV wall clock tick-tocking away to his right, a receipt for which, if handed to Uncle John, would put him into one of our super-deluxe gold-handled caskets. ‘May I think about it?’
‘What? You’re not going?’ He stabbed at the intercom. ‘Miss Grace, have Odette get me New York!’
I don’t want to be a smart-arse, but as I said previously, I’m a time freak. Besides, Jonas called us from time to time. New York was fourteen hours behind Sydney, so it was after 11 p.m. yesterday, New York time. Only the cleaners would be at the agency that late. I wonder if there are any Chinese cleaners in the New York office – a wayward thought.
Miss Grace crackled through the intercom. ‘It’s 11 p.m. yesterday in New York. The office is closed!’ Even through the intercom, her glee at one-upping him was palpable.
‘Yeah, righto,’ Brickman sniffed, not transmitting this back to her.
‘Perhaps I can have a few more details?’ I asked.
He snatched at a lone scrap of paper in a green felt-lined gold-embossed leather in-tray. ‘Yeah, he
re somewhere,’ he stopped and coughed. ‘They’ve bought a Chinese … er, Singapore agency owned by …’ he squinted at the paper, ‘the Wing Brothers.’ He looked up at me. ‘Wing – that’s Chinese, isn’t it?’ He didn’t wait for my confirmation. ‘Wing Brothers Advertising – the Americans are sending in a manager but the Chinese haven’t got a creative department and they need a Western-trained creative director to start one.’ He flashed me one of his stained smiles, then winked. ‘Jesus, Koo, think of all that free Chinese pussy! At your age I’d have bloody jumped at it!’
There it was again. He was five feet five at the most, damn near a cripple, had half a dozen strands of grey hair pasted over his small pink head, obvious breathing problems, and when he opened his mouth it looked like he’d been eating shit. Like me, he was not exactly handsome and obviously never had been. Yet he gave the impression he was a veritable roué! I guess it went with the elevated chair. Poor old bugger. Miss Grace was probably it, his single amatory adventure. But then, in contrast, his office was in brilliant taste, not ostentatious but idiosyncratic and understated – he hadn’t put a foot wrong, except, if you were being picky, for the painting. There was a single large painting on the wall behind me that I’d glimpsed when I turned around to try to help Miss Grace with the chair: a Sidney Nolan from his Ned Kelly series – ten grand, if it was worth a penny. Two walls were glass, looking out at a wide sweep of the harbour. I wondered to myself if the Ned Kelly was a bit of self-imaging.
‘I’d like to think about it,’ I said, realising suddenly I could have a bit of a personal problem at home with my mum, who might see the transfer as opportune. According to her, Singapore was three-quarters Chinese and therefore a much bigger marriage market than Australia. I was also most anxious to get out of the chairman’s office and deliberately checked my watch. It was three minutes to two. ‘Sir, I’ve got a Wills meeting at two o’clock.’ I put on a concerned look. ‘I really should be there. New brand, big budget.’
FORTUNE COOKIE Page 6