2cool2btrue (11 page)

“I know where the library is,” she says indignantly.

I laugh gently. “No, I meant the address of the website, so you know what to type in.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not much good with computers. The woman in the post office was saying she still can’t use hers properly and I said ‘Don’t look at me.’” She laughs sadly.

“Oh, go on, Mum, have a look.” I’m slightly offended that she won’t even check it out. “It’s incredible—amazing graphics.”

“Graphics? You mean the pictures?”

“Yeah, it looks fantastic.”

“Oh, okay. I’ll have a go. I’ve got to take a couple of books back anyway. Actually, there’s a new—what are they called?—cypher café on the high street. I could go there and have a coffee, a latte or whatever it is they drink now.”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea. You’ll love it, Mum. It’s incredible, what they’ve done.”

“Do you want jelly in it?” she asks, carefully spooning rice pudding into two bowls that she has heated in the oven.

“Please. You can go virtual shopping on Bond Street or Fifth Avenue and find out what’s hip in Hong Kong or Melbourne at the moment.”

“Oh, and that’s right up my street, isn’t it?” We both laugh at the idea and I’m glad to see that she doesn’t dissolve into tears this time.

I get in and watch Lauren sleeping silently. I take my clothes off, brush my teeth, look at myself in the mirror and decide that with those ads for comfy cardigans and geriatric baths looming I was right to make the career change.

S
weetie, can you switch channels? I can’t stand any more of this crap,” I mutter at Lauren from my position on the settee.

“Where’s the controller?” she asks, curled up in a chair next to me.

“Down on the floor, I think.”

She tuts. “If you get any lazier, you wouldn’t bother to breathe.” She finds the elusive remote on the floor and throws it onto my stomach.

“Ouf! I think you’ve broken some ribs.”

“Good.”

But before I can switch channels the phone rings and she reaches over and picks it up. It’s my mum.

“Hello Sheila. How are you?” says Lauren, looking across at me with a face which says “get ready to take this off me very soon.” They chat briefly and then Lauren says, “Anyway, nice to talk to you, Sheila. Take care now. He’s just here.”

“Hi, Mum,” I say, taking the receiver from Lauren’s outstretched hand and still looking at the television.

“Hello, dear. Everything all right?”

“Yep, fine thanks.”

“Good, good.” There is a pause.

“What is it, Mum?” I ask, sitting up.

“Well, I had a look at your website—”

“Great, what did you think?”

“It was er…the pictures, you know the graphics, were very exciting, like you said. Everyone in the library was very impressed.”

“Good,” I smile, enjoying the idea that we had fans in her local library—definitely the 2cool target audience. Not.

“And those clothes: very smart. I liked one of the skirts by that Italian designer, expect for the price, of course. Do people really spend that much money on a skirt?”

“Oh, yeah, you’d be amazed.”

“Incredible. Anyway, we looked at what was, you know, trendy, like you said and then…”

“Yeah?”

“Well, the thing is Charlie, we went on the bit that said ‘Extra Curricula’ and…”

“Sorry, which bit?”

“The little thing called ‘Extra Curricula,’ you know the…what’s it? The icon. The cursor turned into a little hand like it does and we clicked on it and then we found these pictures…”

“What pictures?”

“Charlie, I don’t know about these things and I’m sure you know what you’re doing…”

“Mum, what pictures?”

“Charlie, you must know.”

I sit up and reach for the telly controller. Even Lauren is watching me now.

“No, what pictures?”

She takes a deep breath. “Pornographic pictures.”

“What? Porn? On the site?”

“Yes, dear, didn’t you know?”

I look to Lauren for some reason but she just gives me a questioning frown.

“No, I didn’t. Listen, Mum, are you sure you went to the right site?”

“Oh, yes, everything else was there like you said.”

“2cool2btrue dot com,” I spell out for her just in case.

“Yes, you wrote it down here. I’m looking at it.”

“Somebody’s hacked into the site.”

“You mean, like…like burglars.”

“Yes, exactly. Oh, God, Mum. I’m so sorry about this. How embarrassing. I hope the people you were with didn’t see it all.”

“Oh, they did, we were all looking.”

“Oh, God.”

“Don’t worry, I think the head librarian was very interested in it. He spent ages, you know, checking things. He was still at it when I left.” She laughs shyly.

I laugh a bit too, mainly to encourage her, like I always do, but also to show that it’s all right, I’m a professional, I can handle this little hiccup.

“Oh, hell’s teeth. Listen, I’ll tell the others. Thanks for letting me know. I’d better ring them now, actually. Love you. Speak to you soon.”

I click off and get up to find Guy’s mobile number.

“Someone’s put porn pictures on the 2cool website?” asks Lauren.

“Yep, looks like it,” I mutter, leaving the room.

“Oh, my God,” she laughs. “Let’s have a look.”

“It’s not funny,” I tell her.

In the bedroom, before ringing Guy, I switch on my computer and log in just to check that my mum is right. Sure enough, along the options along the left-hand side is a new one, “Extra Curricula.” I click on the icon and am immediately presented with pictures of girls lying back exposing their crotches, grasping their tits in wide-eyed amazement as if they’d never seen them before, and others with men and women, women and women and men and men having sex together. Most look like they were taken recently but some have a grainy, seventies quality, and some a harsh, lip-glossed, heavily blushered look of the eighties about them.

I’m stunned for a moment. I haven’t been so unaroused by naked flesh since a biology lesson. Then I ring both Guy’s and Piers’s mobiles to warn them. I get voice mails on each of them so I leave messages telling them what I’ve discovered and asking them to ring me at home if they want, otherwise we can discuss it in the office tomorrow.

“Oh, yeah,” says Guy when I mention it to him the next morning.

“So, you did get my message?” I ask, dropping a newspaper on my desk. “About the porn thing?”

Instead of being shocked and angry as I had expected, he simply refers me to Piers, who says what I’m sort of dreading by now.

“Good, eh? Zac put them on yesterday.”

“What?”

“Zac’s been sourcing them over the last few days. We’ve even had some done specially. He uploaded them yesterday.”

“You knew?”

“Yeah, of course,” says Piers, draining his coffee and crushing the cardboard cup with obvious satisfaction.

“Look, I don’t like this. How the hell can you say that porn pics are too cool to be true?”

“Oh, Charlie—” says Piers with a sad smile.

“Oh, Charlie nothing! Why the fuck didn’t I know?”

“Piers should have told you,” says Guy. “Listen mate, I’m really sorry about this but sometimes things move so quickly in this game.”

Piers is looking slightly miffed about being dumped on but finally even he realises that this is his role in Operation Keep Charlie Sweet.

“We need to keep each other informed of what’s going on all the time, after all, we’re supposed to be in the communications business, aren’t we?” adds Guy.

There is a deafening slurping sound as Scarlett finishes her juice and looks meaningfully at him.

“We certainly bloody should, but what the hell has porn got to do with our site?” I ask.

“Thing is, Charlie, porn is what drives the Internet. Eighty per cent of Internet searches are for pornography,” explains Piers.

“But why do
we
have to get involved in it?”

“Because it’s part of modern consumerism,” says Guy, looking up from his computer.

“Oh, that’s so eighties,” howls Scarlett, looking at her own screen. “Look at the blusher and that lip-gloss. And that one’s pure seventies. I love the long beads and the afro hair, and is that a Biba print in the background? Zac, these are brilliant.”

“Thing is, Charlie,” says Piers, and I find myself spinning back to him, “we’re treating these pictures humorously. They’re not for spotty teenage boys to drool over, they’re part of modern-day life. We’re exposed to porn of one kind or another every day—just look at a Gucci or a Häagen-Dazs ad, for goodness’ sake. We’re just having a laugh at it here.”

Once again everyone seems to be in the know and have reached a consensus except me.

“Ironic porn,” explains Scarlett. “Everyone’s doing it. My friend Maria, yeah? She’s a performance artist. She’s made a couple of porno movies. You know, ironically.”

“What? Sort of fucking in inverted commas?”

My sarcasm is wasted on Scarlett.

“They’re really funny—crappy sets, sound quality so bad that you can hardly hear what they’re saying, awful dialogue. At one point she says something like ‘But I’m a good girl from a convent school; can you teach me to be bad?’” Scarlett and Zac yell with laughter. “The guy she was doing it with—he was a fine art student or something—had these, like, huge sideburns. And a gold medallion. And she was wearing false eyelashes like, you know, spiders? And a huge blonde hairpiece. It was
so
funny.”

“And she actually had sex with this guy?” laughs Zac enthusiastically. “Full penetration?”

“Yeah, shaved her minge. Did all that ‘Oh, my God, my God. You’re so big!’ bullshit.” Scarlett runs her hands through her hair, closes her eyes, opens her mouth, licks her lips and throws her head backwards, arching her back ecstatically. Zac looks on, thrilled. I’ve got a horrible feeling that he is turned on in a decidedly nonironic way.

“She’s, like, really creative,” explains Scarlett, now mercifully out of character again. “They had to go all the way. It was a condition of their grant.”

“Look, porn is porn,” I tell them.

“And what’s the moral
minority
going to do about it?” sneers Zac. I give him an evil stare.

“But we’ve had some of these girls shot specially,” says Piers. “They appreciate the irony.”

“Oh, she looks very ironic,” I say, pointing to a girl on my screen in patent leather high heels and a long pearl necklace, spreading her legs wide and grasping her huge man-made breasts as if they might just go off at any minute.

“But that’s a classic porn mag pose.
Mayfair, Penthouse, Hustler,
circa 1973. 2cool readers are immediately going to appreciate the historical reference.” Piers grins enthusiastically. “Anyway, those shoes are specially acquired Manolo Blahniks. How many porn mags use Manolo Blahniks?”

I’m lost for words.

“You never done any nudey stuff then, Charlie?” asks Zac, from a near horizontal position behind his desk.

“Oh, don’t be disgusting.”

“Bit of skin?”

“I said no.”

“What about that pic in the
Post?”

I sigh deeply. “That was to advertise a holiday. There was a woman and a couple of kids in the original photograph. They just cut them out.”

“You looked kinda cute in those groovy little swimmies.”

“Fancy me then, do you?”

“’Fraid not bud, just wondering why they used you.”

“In that picture? Why not? I was a model.”

“Exactly.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Zac flicks a pen up in the air and catches it. “Well, why not some old guy with a beer belly and a hairy back?”

“Because…well, because you obviously use good-looking people in advertising.” My phone begins to ring but I ignore it and let Scarlett get it.

“Oh, right. Good-looking people…showing off their nice bodies…in sexy poses?” asks Zac, innocently.

Oh, very clever.

“It’s not the same, it’s not obscene…I’m wearing swimming trunks,” I tell him sulkily. He carries on flicking the pen in the air and smiling victoriously at me. I’m just wondering how things could get worse when fate obliges.

“It’s Nora Benthall for you,” says Scarlett, holding up her receiver. I look around at Piers and Guy, who nod for me to take it.

“Hey, Charlie,” says Nora.

“Hello,” I say stiffly.

“How’s it going?”

“Fine, how are you?” I say with an effort, aware that four pairs of ears are trained on me, however busy their owners seem to be with other tasks. This will be a test of my communications skills, and my overall professionalism, I realise.

“Good, thanks. Listen, Charlie, I was just looking at the site and I noticed that there’s a new section on it.”

I can imagine that cheeky—dare I say it?—ironic smile at the other end of the phone.

“Yes?”

“Extra Curricula or something? Well, it seems kind of rude to me. I’m just doing a little piece about it, you know, the threat of cyber porn and…”

“Yes?”

“I was wondering why you’d done it? Not very ‘too cool’ is it? How do you answer the allegation that you’re already going downmarket and you’ve gone for the lowest common denominator: pornography.”

Oh, God, I’m really tempted to agree with her. I pause for a moment just to build up a little tension amongst my colleagues. Guy so obviously isn’t reading that piece of paper. “That’s right, Nora, we just thought ‘Fuck it! Sex sells’ and decided to put lots of porn on the site, but I hope you like the boots—they’re real Manolo Blahniks.”

I take a deep breath.

“It’s obviously ironic,” I say.

Around me there is a silent but noticeable feeling of relief as the others realise that I’m going to play ball.

“Pornography is now in the mainstream. It’s all around us, part of the consumer experience. You’ve got to remember that the 2cool audience is one of the most sophisticated on the net, they appreciate this kind of stuff for its, er…” Before I can turn to him for help, Guy immediately mouths “cultural significance” at me. “Cultural significance. They can put it into context.”