2cool2btrue (10 page)

Perhaps I’m just getting old, but that is bloody rude isn’t it? Suddenly someone slaps me on the back.

“How’s it going?”

It’s Piers.

“Great,” I say miserably.

“Splendid,” he bawls.

I find myself talking to a woman from an expensive shoe company.

“Think Jimmy Choo on acid,” she says.

“Okay.” I don’t think I could imagine that even if
I
was on acid.

“Think classic with a surrealist twist.”

“Right.”

“We’re talking deconstructionism taken to its logical, terrifying conclusion—in terms of slingbacks, anyway.”

“I see.” I wish I did have some acid now.

Suddenly she takes a step further towards me and says, “After all, you know what they say: ‘Shoes are the windows of the soul.’”

“It
is
all pretty impressive isn’t it?” I say to Lauren as she nestles under my shoulder in the car on our way home. It’s gone four and we were almost the last to leave. Guy and Piers are still chatting up the remaining potential investors and partners. Peter is talking to some “old mates” from the Beeb and Nora must have gone without saying good-bye to me.

“Oh, yes, it’s amazing. Your friend Guy certainly knows his stuff.”

“He’s brilliant. So…what’s the word? Cerebral. I think that’s why they like him. They sense that here is someone with something new, something different to offer. Did you have a good time?”

“We did, yeah.”

We?
What’s with this
we?

“Peter enjoyed himself too, did he?”

“Yes, it turned out he knew quite a few people there. Mind you he knows so many people.” Now that his name has been introduced again it feels as if he is in the car with us, crammed on the back seat. The atmosphere is suddenly soured. My arm’s going to sleep a bit anyway so I pull it out from under Lauren’s head, perhaps a bit more roughly than I had intended. We sit in silence as the car speeds along Knightsbridge.

Finally Lauren says, “Who was that strange-looking girl you were talking to?”

“Which strange-looking girl?” I ask unnecessarily.

“The one in the maroon dress. You seemed to be having a great laugh at one point.”

“Oh, her. That’s that journalist who wrote the piece in the
Post.”

“Oh.” There is a pause as store windows fly past, their reflections dancing over us. A few late-night stragglers walk backwards looking for cabs and night buses or joke with their mates, while others stagger around drunk. “Well, you seemed to be giving her a good talking-to like you said you would.”

Lauren’s sarcasm hangs in the air like a challenge. I try to neutralise it.

“We discussed the piece and she explained why she’d written it.”

Silence.

“And that’s that?”

Silence.

“What do you want me to say? We discussed it. I told her what I thought of it, she told me why she’d written it the way she had and that was that. Piers asked her to do it like that apparently.”

Silence. With Peter
and
Nora in the car with us now, things are getting very cramped and uncomfortable.

“I see.”

Silence.

“Look, I’ve got to keep her onside. She’ll be very useful.”

“Huh. What for?”

“For promoting the site. Now let’s leave it shall we?”

“What’s her name again?”

“Nora. Nora Benthall.”

“Never heard of her,” says Lauren. “She’s obviously slept her way to the bottom.”

Lauren and I get ready for bed in silence. When I get in she has her back to me. I wriggle over to her and put an arm round her. She mutters something about being tired.

I
t takes me ages to get to sleep. My mind is still buzzing from the party. I’ve got lunches arranged from now until the end of my life and there is a stack of business cards on the dressing table. I can still hear the voices: “So exciting,” “Excellent product,” “So looking forward to doing business with you,” “You certainly have a wonderful proposition here,” “Tremendous opportunities for developing synergies.” Or something like that. Smart people, rich people, powerful people, famous people asking for a piece of the action, a piece of me.

The light wakes me up. I reach round instinctively for Lauren, looking for some lazy Saturday morning sex. The kind where you don’t mind if you come or not. But she’s not there. The curtains are open already. I squint my eyes up against the harsh, unforgiving light. I can smell coffee. I fumble for my watch and check the time: just before eleven. I get up and stumble into the kitchen. Lauren is chewing on a piece of toast and flicking through the newspaper. I come up and put my arms round her, nestling into her hair and kissing her neck.

“Morning, hon,” she says quietly, still reading the paper.

“You’re up early,” I say, wandering over to the fridge.

“Mmm? Yeah, I know, we’ve got access to a studio today, so I’m going to do some autocue practise.”

“What? Today? But you were at it last Saturday.”

“Yes. That’s when the studio’s free. Do you know how much these things cost to rent? Thousands. Thank goodness Peter knows someone who said we could borrow it for nothing.”

“So you’re going to a studio this Saturday as well?” A pretty pointless summary of the situation, but I want her to understand how ridiculous it is that she’s working all day, given that we’ve seen so little of each other over the last week or so. Instead she takes the opposite view.

“Yes, like I say, it makes obvious sense.”

“When will you be finished?”

“I don’t know. When I’ve had enough. When Peter thinks I’ve done all I can.”

“Will you be back by five?” I ask, drinking orange juice out of the carton because I know it will annoy her.

“I don’t know, Charlie, please don’t pressurise me.” I turn up the sulk meter a bit more. She comes over to me and studies me for a moment, then she laughs. “You look like a little boy with your hair all messed up.”

I narrow my eyes at her with mock crossness.

She laughs again, takes the carton out of my hand, puts it back and then says, “What am I going to do with you?”

I look into her eyes, pull her towards me and say, “I can think of one thing.”

She pinches my cheek and giggles. “That’ll have to wait.” She pulls away. “I’m going to be late.”

I catch her arm but, instead of asking her what she wants to do tonight I find myself saying, “Do you love me?”

She pushes my hair out of my eyes.

“’Course I do.”

I pick up the paper after Lauren has gone and begin to flick through it, making my way towards the sport to see whether Chelsea are at home. Halfway through there is an article by Nora along with a picture of her, looking cheekily over her black-framed glasses. It’s called “Why I’ll Never Marry a Man Who Waxes His Behind.” I have to read the title twice to make sure I’ve got it right. The piece is about how women hate male vanity and how she and her friends (who are her friends? Other clever, barmy women with strange names? Or does she just invent them too?) would rather have a man with shaggy nose hair than one who spends hours in the bathroom cutting it with his nail scissors. It seems that her friend Amanda, who works in marketing, once went out with a bloke who waxed his butt—hence the headline. My buttocks clench at the thought of it. They clench even tighter as I read on.

I finish the paper and go into the living room. Now where did Nora get the inspiration for that? I’m not being vain, it’s just an obvious connection. Actually I did know a guy who shaved his chest. Gary had the kind of body that looked like it had been carved out of granite at the dawn of time. Underpants were his speciality. I still see him—well, his six-pack and lovingly sculpted (and shaved) pecs—on packets in department stores. He told me that he was once doing a shoot and just as the client arrived he felt himself getting a hard-on. Desperately he tried to think about his tax return or Billy Crystal but it had no effect. As six women from the client company entered the room he found himself saluting them through their soon-to-be-launched cotton and Lycra microfibre-mix knitted trunks.

I flick on children’s Saturday morning television and watch, feeling rather confused and out of it. After a phone-in in which Leanne from Burnley correctly identifies Ronan Keating’s star sign and wins a baseball cap and a CD, a girl band comes on:

I rub my chin, trying to decide whether to have a shave. Screw it. It’s Saturday.

At about seven I ring Lauren on her mobile. I’ve been avoiding doing it all day, not wanting to pester her like the good boy that I am, but now I’ve had enough. I want to know what we’re going to do this evening. I want to spend it with her.

I get her voice mail and, with superhuman effort, manage to sound casual and friendly. “Hi, babe, just wondered what time you thought you’d be finished.” I wait nearly an hour and then decide to go for a run because I can feel anger rising from deep within me and I can’t think how else to release it, other than yelling at her when she rings, or just throwing things around the flat. But that would just make things worse and I simply can’t bear to do that, although part of me feels I should. Perhaps I would if I were a real man, not just an ex-male-model now working in the virtual glamour business.

I only run for twenty minutes or so, just round the block, but laziness—and the sight of other couples walking along hand in hand—draws me back home. It’s just long enough, though, for Lauren to have called.

“Hi babe, are you there…Charlie…Charlie? Okay, well just to say sorry I couldn’t talk to you just now, had to turn my phone off. But listen, babe, we’ve bumped into some friends of Peter’s and they’ve offered to take us to dinner, so I’m just going to have a quick bite to eat with them, but I won’t be late. Sorry about this, but I’ll make it up to you tomorrow night I promise. Love you.”

I have a shower, during which I find myself singing that stupid girl band song from children’s television. I knew it would get stuck in my mind when I heard it.

I put my bathrobe on and go into the kitchen. There is no wine in the fridge and the only stuff in the cupboard is a Châteauneuf du Pape which we bought last year in France and promised to drink on a special occasion. I shut the cupboard and begin to wonder whether I can be bothered to get dressed and go up the road to the off-licence and buy another.

I can’t, so I open the cupboard again and take the expensive, slightly dusty bottle out.

I don’t bother to get a coaster and, glass in hand, I flop down on the settee and switch on the telly. I flick between channels and watch Davina McCall explaining to a group of lads with viciously gelled hair and Nike sweatshirts, and girls with diamond nose studs, exactly how they can earn points and what they can do with them. “But,” she explains from behind a huge Perspex lectern bathed in a ghostly blue light, “if someone from the opposing team gets the answer before you then you have to give them half as many points as your total so far, although you can of course challenge them to gamble their bonus points provided they haven’t earned any bonus points this round. Okay?”

I must be getting old because I can’t understand a word of it, so I switch off and throw the remote down next to me. The flat is suddenly silent. I get up, shuffle morosely over to the music centre and flick through the CDs. Opera highlights, Ministry of Sound Chill Out sessions, Dido, the best of Frank Sinatra, jazz compilations. They’re all Lauren’s. Where did mine go? I go back into the bedroom and reach up to the top shelf of the wardrobe where there are some boxes of my stuff from before I moved in with Lauren. She didn’t seem to like any of my music and so it all got tidied up into these cardboard boxes along with photographs from college and various other personal effects from My Life Before Lauren.

I flick through the cassettes and find Suzanne Vega. I don’t know why but I’ve always had a bit of a thing for a chick with an acoustic guitar. I stick the tape in the machine, turn up the volume and let her plaintive, melancholy voice fill the room. Then I take a big gulp of expensive wine and lie back, committing aural adultery.

I
’m the first in the office on Monday morning, just before nine. There is a pile of letters waiting on the mat. I scoop them up and put them onto Scarlett’s desk. Then I realise that I might as well open them, partly because I am, after all, one of the team, so I have every right to. And I’ve got nothing else to do. There is nothing very exciting amongst them—just routine correspondence from the phone company, the computer people and the landlord.

There are also letters of welcome from the bank. Quite a few banks actually, including some in the Cayman Islands and Monte Carlo, thanking 2cool for using their services and promising that they are always on hand to help us. And there are some bills, lots of bills in fact, most of which come from the do on Friday night but also from taxi companies, stationers and a florist. Even our in-house masseur, whom I don’t seem to have had the benefit of yet—Scarlett and I had to go down the road for our treatments, although admittedly we charged them to 2cool. There is something from a Paris
chocolatier
which seems a bit bizarre, as well as invoices from The Communications Game and various Bond Street stores.

“Morning,” says Guy, striding in with a coffee in his hand. “How are you, Charlie? Good weekend?”

“Yeah, great thanks,” I lie. “You?”

“Erm, yes, yes good,” he says, eyeing the pile of post.

“Recovered from Friday?” I say by way of conversation, suddenly feeling a bit shy of him now that there are just the two of us in the office.

“Eh? Friday, oh yes, of course. We had breakfast afterwards with some of those money men. Most of them were still working on West Coast time, so they weren’t that bothered about going to bed at all really—look, why don’t you just shove all that crap on Scarlett’s desk, let her deal with it?” he says, snatching the sheaf of letters from in front of me and thrusting them into Scarlett’s in-tray.

“I don’t mind going through them,” I say. “At least until Scarlett gets in.”

“No, don’t you worry about that. Your time would be better spent chasing up some of the valuable contacts we made on Friday night. Look, let’s work up a list of people to see, get some lunches planned, set up some meetings with the potential 2cool partner organisations, shall we?”

“Sure,” I say.

Later that morning, a range of specially imported Italian crockery and cutlery is delivered, as is a huge cappuccino machine. We all look at it appreciatively as it’s being plumbed in, but then realise that we can’t actually be bothered to use it so we’ll just stick to Caffè Nero round the corner.

“I got you a wheatgrass shot,” says Scarlett, putting the tiny plastic container carefully down on my desk as she arrives just after half past ten. “I’ve already had a double.”

“You’re such a health freak,” I tell her.

“Yeah, I know, but I dropped two Es on Saturday night and I just
cannot
get my shit together today,” she explains.

Piers bursts in at lunchtime. He’s just driven up from Gloucestershire, he enthuses, where’s he been staying with friends who are all very excited about the new site. A girl called Suzie, who does PR for a newly launched line of luxury French silks, thinks they might be able to work together, he tells me, so will I ring her? He throws a business card at me, but before I can ask exactly what he envisages us doing together Zac calls him over to show off some new visuals on the computer, and he goes into paroxysms of delight. “Have you seen this, Guy?” he asks. “Here Charlie, look at this new gizmo our brilliant techno-whiz here has cooked up. It’s just…just…”

“2cool2btrue?” asks Scarlett.

“Yes, yes,” says Piers. “It is, that’s exactly it.”

We crowd around the monitor in Zac’s corner of the room to watch a new computer graphic which allows us to sit inside the new Bentley sports car and imagine we are being driven in it. We then “drive” into a virtual mall and a chauffeur in the form of Oddjob from
Goldfinger
(“I wanted someone who was instantly recognisable, an iconic chauffeur,” explains Zac morosely) reaches out, picks up items and hands them over to us in the back seat.

“You can sit in the front if you prefer,” he says. He taps away at the keyboard and suddenly we are alongside Oddjob. “Or you can swap places with him if you’d prefer to drive.”

“Absolutely fan-fucking-tastic,” says Piers.

But Guy just says, “Great. Look, I need to talk to you, Piers. Erm, let’s step outside for a moment.”

The three of us 2coolers remaining exchange glances.

“That’s incredible, Zac,” says Scarlett, standing up straight and going over to her own desk. “Even better with an E hangover.’

“Most hi-res graphics look better if you’re slightly drug-fucked,” says Zac, racing his mouse around its pad.

“That’s true. I think I need something to jump-start me a bit. I’m just going to get a shot of wheatgrass,” says Scarlett.

“You’ve already had a double this morning,” I tell her.

“Have I? Christ I have, haven’t I?” She sits down and taps away at her keyboard a bit. Then she says, “Spirulina, that’s what I need.”

“What?”

“Spirulina,” she says. “It’s a nutrient derived from algae.”

“Yum,” I say.

“It’s the dog’s bollocks. Want some?”

“I’d rather have a ginger, carrot and apple.” I can’t believe I’ve just asked for this, as if I’m offering it as a sane alternative.

“Sure. Zac?”

“Doctor Pepper, please.”

“Have you any idea how much sugar there is in those things? Like a ton in every mouthful.”

“That’s what keeps me sweet.”

Scarlett looks completely mystified. As she opens the door to leave, Guy and Piers come back in.

“Where are you going?” asks Guy.

“Bikini wax,” she tells him. Guy opens his mouth to say something but then just looks away, embarrassed. Piers throws himself down in his chair and stares at his desk for a moment.

“Everything all right?” I ask, partly out of genuine concern and partly to point out that hurried meetings outside in the corridor with no subsequent explanation aren’t exactly good for staff morale.

Piers opens his mouth but Guy speaks. “Fine. We just needed to talk about the second tranche of financing.”

“Sure,” I say, relieved.

Then Piers opens a drawer of his desk. “Taste this,” he says. He holds up a jagged piece of dark chocolate. I take it from him, put it in my mouth and let the familiar sweet, cloying sensation flood over my tongue.

Piers is watching me. “Just imagine—something that tastes like chocolate, feels like chocolate and yet has no calories whatsoever.”

“That’s incredible,” I say, running my tongue over my teeth. I swallow hard in near disbelief. “Every woman in the country—and lots of men too—would go mad for this stuff. What is it?”

He looks at me for a moment, slightly confused, slightly disappointed.

“Well, it
is
chocolate actually,” he says, throwing the bar back in the drawer. “But just imagine if you had something that wasn’t chocolate but tasted like that.”

Now it’s my turn to look confused and disappointed. “Right, yeah, it would be…great.” I try and redeem the situation. “Very marketable.”

“It would, absolutely,
very
marketable,” says Piers, getting back into his stride. He gets up from his desk and moves over to the window. “You see, Charlie…” and he is off again.

I spend the day making appointments to meet some of the people whose cards I collected at the party, and take the opportunity to leave that evening when Scarlett does, just after six.

“Do you think everything’s okay?” I ask as we step out of the front door and into the street.

“How do you mean?” she says.

“You know, with the company, with 2cool?”

“Yeah. Why shouldn’t it be?”

“I didn’t like that hurried meeting Guy and Piers had this morning. They sounded distinctly worried.”

“Oh, that. Well, they both cheered up later in the day, didn’t they?”

“I suppose so.”

“Don’t worry. Media projects, especially major ones like this, require a huge initial cash outlay. It all comes out in the wash.”

“Does it? I suppose the important thing is that the investors still have confidence.”

“Oh, yes. They’re not going to pull the rug from under our feet. They know that this is a second-generation e-commerce operation and has the potential to be, like, a
major
money spinner. Most of them are just bursting to get back into the whole net business as soon as possible, anyway.”

“I just couldn’t help noticing how much money we’re spending, like the party on Friday and things.” I hadn’t originally planned to say all this to her, but what the hell. “And all those bills this morning. And those bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. What’s that all about?”

“Look, don’t worry. It’s the same in the film business. Most creative industries are like this. It’s what they call the J curve, or the V trajectory or the U bend or something.”

“If you say so,” I mutter, even less reassured. We march out of Old Compton Street into Charing Cross Road, our speed and Scarlett’s bright red dreadlocks terrifying some ageing Japanese tourists.

“People who are really closely involved in the development of a project often get cold feet at this stage,” says Scarlett. She’s probably right. “I mean, my sister, yeah?” she says. “She’s a stylist, works with
Dazed and Confused
and does a lot of pop videos, yeah? Anyway, she’s bought a cat, yeah? And it just won’t go into the kitchen. Any other part of the flat, no problem, but the kitchen? It’s like it’s spooked or something. It’s the same thing, yeah?”

We walk along in silence for a moment. It’s no good. I’ve got to ask her.

“How is that the same thing as 2cool’s financial situation?”

“How’s what the same thing?”

“Your sister and her cat.”

Scarlett stops for a moment, thinks, and then carries on walking. “Oh shit, sorry, did I say that? That’s the E talking again. Don’t worry, I should be okay by Thursday.”

I can’t wait.

We get to Leicester Square tube station and as she walks towards the Northern Line barrier I say to her, “Bye, then, see you tomorrow.”

She looks around and then, apparently slightly surprised that I’m not coming all the way home with her, calls to me, “’Kay babe. Stay beautiful, yeah?”

God, I hope no one heard that.

That evening I go to see my mum. It says something about my relationship with Lauren at the moment that I think an evening with my mum would be more fun than one spent with her. I take the tube to Barnet but give up on the bus and take a minicab into the tightly knit pattern of streets in which she now lives. After they split my dad more or less gave her the family home since, thanks to the power of advertising, or its financial clout anyway, he didn’t need it any more. My sister regarded this piece of thoughtless generosity as the final insult.

“How could I live in that place without him?” pointed out my mum as the tears dripped into her tea.

So now she lives in a small thirties-style house in a quiet, nondescript street. It’s actually so nondescript that it always takes me a moment to confirm that it really is the right house and the right street.

She opens the door on the chain and then lets me in. She’s getting liver spots on her hands, I notice.

“Hi, Mum,” I say, bending down to kiss her on the cheek.

“Hello, dear,” she whispers.

“Brought you some flowers.”

“Oh.” She takes them from me. “I’m not sure if I’ve got a vase big enough for these.”

“Oh, well.” I mentally roll my eyeballs.

“Well, it’s very kind. I’ll put them in something. Now do you want a cup of tea?”

“I’ve brought some wine as well,” I tell her, holding up a bottle of Australian Chardonnay. We always go through the “Tea? I’ve brought some wine,” script.

“Wine? Really? Oh, well, how nice,” she says as usual.

We have shepherd’s pie, peas and diced carrots sitting opposite each other in her spotless kitchen, and I listen to her prattle on about the neighbours I don’t know and about my brother-in-law and how well he’s doing at work but how she wishes he would spend more time at home with my sister and the baby. She asks how Lauren is, and I look down at my plate as I say, “Fine, fine.”

“And how’s the new job going?” she finally asks, as she stirs a saucepan full of rice pudding, and I wonder why she never uses the microwave I bought her for Christmas two years ago. I’m sure we ate better than this when we were growing up—ratatouille and spaghetti carbonara even made an appearance when I came home from university—but it’s as if she has withdrawn into a sort of culinary nostalgia, resorting to the familiar comfort food of her childhood.

“It’s going very well,” I tell her, as much to convince myself as anything. “We had an incredible launch party on Friday at Frederica’s, this ritzy nightclub in Berkeley Square,” I say, adding my own footnotes. “And now it’s officially up and running. You can actually visit the site if you want to. Go and use one of the machines down at the library. Here, I’ll write the address down.”