2cool2btrue (7 page)

“Good coffee,” I say again to the sphinxlike Kari.

“Should be,” says Dad proudly. “Kari works in Caffè Nero, don’t you, babe?” Presumably after school. “So what’s this new job?” he asks, turning to me.

“I’ve jacked the modelling in. I did a shoot for an Internet company last week and they offered me a job as marketing manager, I mean, marketing director.”

“Director? You’ve got equity in this thing?”

“Er, no. How do you mean? Have I invested something? No. I’m just on a salary.”

“That’s good.”

“I thought I’d wait,” I say, enjoying this paternal approval.

“What’s it called?”

“2cool2btrue dot com.”

“Right, heard of them.”

“Really? Have you?”

“Oh, yeah, there’s quite a bit of talk in the creative and media industry about them at the moment,” says Dad levelly. “Sort of a lifestyle site or something isn’t it?”

“That’s right. It’s a second-generation website. It’s going to be the first of the truly aspirational Internet
brands.
You know, the web equivalent of Gucci or Louis Vuitton.”

“Interesting,” says Dad.

“I think it will be.”

“All life consists of a label of one kind or another,” says Dad, running his fingers through Kari’s hair as she stares at silent MTV on the massive TV screen.

As I leave a couple of hours later, it occurs to me that it would sometimes be nice to have a dad who mowed the lawn on Saturday before falling asleep in front of the cricket, and spent Sunday mornings in the john with the papers, but then you can’t choose your parents.

I do some shopping in town on the way home and then, because it’s quite near to Chiswick anyway, drop in at the pub in Barnes we used to meet at post-Saturday-afternoon footy. I walk in, avoiding the gaze of the girl at the bar, and look around for the old gang. But they’re not there. I do another quick tour just in case I’ve missed them or don’t recognise them and then I stroll back over the bridge to Hammersmith and get the bus to Chiswick.

It’s nearly seven when I let myself in. I smell cooking and hear Lauren laughing. I leave my bags in the hall and wander into the kitchen. She is sitting on the work top, swinging her legs and laughing at some middle-aged bloke who is stirring something on our hob and telling her a story.

“So this girl’s reading the bloody autocue as fast as she can and the director’s shouting, ‘For God’s sake….’” He trails off as he sees me. “Hello. You must be Charlie. I’m Peter, Peter Beaumont-Crowther,” he says extending a hand.

“Hi, Peter,” I say. I’ve just realised that I really can’t be bothered with this. I just want to lie in front of the telly with Lauren and a good bottle of wine and a crap video. I look down at what he’s cooking.

Lauren fills the silence.

“Peter came to Sainsbury’s with me after we’d finished and it turns out he makes this chicken casserole thing. I thought it sounded delicious so I bullied him into doing it.” They both laugh. I know Lauren on charm mode so well. It’s just a bit unnerving to see it happening in our kitchen. I’m not sure who is the target of it, me or Peter.

“It’s a kind of chicken cacciatore but with a few
secret
ingredients,” Peter tells me, raising his eyebrows.

The first thing that strikes me about him is “Why don’t you get a haircut?” His hair flops forward and he is constantly sweeping it back with his hands. He has a pudgy, fleshy face, big lips and a sharp nose, and he’s just a bit too smooth for my liking.

“Smells great,” I say and leave the room. I’m kicking my trainers off in the bedroom when Lauren comes in. She watches me for a moment as I take my T-shirt off.

“What’s the matter?” she asks from the door.

It’s decision time: I can either go for a fully fledged sulk which is what I feel like but which would make tonight a hell of an effort for both of us and probably result in at least forty-eight hours of awkward silences and bickering, or I can just give in and be a good boy. I choose the latter.

“Sorry, babe, I’m just beat.”

Lauren sensibly meets me halfway. “That’s all right.” She puts her arms round me, whispering in my ear. “Sorry about this. Peter insisted we try his chicken thing and you know I’ve got to be nice to him.”

“I know. I’m just going to have a shower and then I’ll be fine.”

“’kay,” she says. She kisses me. “Hurry up, though, the others will be here in a minute.”

I’m about to walk out of the bedroom naked as any man would naturally do in his own flat, but then I remember about Peter. Oh, screw it, I do it anyway.

I
’m such a devoted boyfriend/crawler/good actor/spineless wonder or mixture of all four that I even ask to taste Peter’s stupid bloody chicken creation.

“Mmm,” I say, licking my lips as he holds the spoon inches away from my mouth, his hand poised underneath it to catch the drips. “That’s delicious.” In fact it’s just about okay. It tastes like chicken casserole with tinned tomatoes in it to me. “Babe, have you tasted this?” I say, deciding to put my back into this crawling.

“Yep, good, isn’t it?” says Lauren who is slicing zucchini at the other end of the kitchen. I know I’ll get my reward for this tonight.

Peter is smiling knowingly. Oh, leave it alone, you smarmy prick. It’s just bloody chicken.

“Can’t wait,” I say moving away, having done my duty. Getting drinks and laying the table is the limit of my culinary ability. Besides, it’s not a good idea to get in the way of Lauren while she is cooking unless she tells you to.

Sarah is relating her favourite dinner-party anecdote.

“So I came back early one day because I had to pick up a file I’d accidentally left on the dining table,” she tells Peter in her heavy, throaty, thirty-Marlborough-Lights-a-day voice. She is the only smoker that Lauren allows in the house and she revels in this privilege. “And I know the cleaner is there obviously because it’s a Tuesday. So I put my head round the door to say hallo and let her know I’m not a burglar or a mad rapist, and there she is doing the washing up at the kitchen sink.” She pauses. “Topless.” She punctuates her punchline with a slurp of wine.

“No!” Peter is leering across the table in disbelief.

“Seriously. And she’s not exactly Kate Moss either, yeah?”

Peter roars with laughter. “What was she doing?” he asks.

“It’s just for cleaning the glasses,” I explain, twisting two imaginary glasses over my own chest.

Peter roars again. “What did you do?”

“What
could
I do? I just said ‘Oh, hi, Janet, could you do the oven please if you get a moment?’”

“But preferably not with your tits,” adds Sarah’s husband, Mark.

More guffawing from Peter.

“Oh, not that awful cleaner story,” says Lauren, entering the room with two more bottles of wine and a basket of warm, rosemary-infused foccacia which we immediately fall on.

“Cleaners are such a problem, aren’t they?” says Sally. Everyone nods and mumbles agreement. Then Sally says, “The woman next to us has a Brazilian.”

I can’t help it: “Have you looked?”

Sarah is howling with laughter. “I think Sally’s talking about her cleaner, Charlie,” she says. “Not her bikini line.”

“Oh, right, sorry,” I groan, overdoing it. There is a pause while Sarah and Peter try to control themselves.

“Ooh, can I help you, Lauren?” says Sally suddenly, always glad to lend a hand. Whenever she and her husband Tim come over, Sally seems to spend more time in our kitchen than most of the appliances.

“No Sally, honestly, sit down, thank you. Charlie can do it.”

“Charlie’s doing the wine,” says Sally. “Here you are.” She gets up. I let her. After all, I’ve done my bit with the brown-nosing casserole appreciation.

“So, Peter, you’re in television,” says Mark who does something with futures in the City that we’ve all given up trying to understand a long time ago.

“Yes,” says Peter. “I run a company called Freak Productions.”

“What kind of thing do you make?” asks Sarah, obviously feeling she should repay him after his tremendous reception for her cleaner story. At least I’ll find out a little bit more about Lauren’s New Best Friend without actually having to talk to him.

“Mainly lifestyle programmes, like
Ready Steady Cook.”

“You make
Ready Steady Cook?”
says Sarah. “I
love
that programme.”

“Er, no, but programmes like it,” says Peter. “I do one for a cable channel where a celebrity chef comes round to your house and makes over all your boring, ordinary food, takes it up a peg or two. So if you’re giving your kids beans on toast, for example, he’ll make it really special by adding some extra ingredients or showing you how to make your own beans on toast with real cannellini beans, fresh tomato sauce and newly baked sourdough bread.”

“Oh, right. You must really learn something,” says Sarah. She mulls it over while Peter looks on, delighted at the brilliance of his baby. “But on the other hand I think I’d be tempted to say, ‘Okay, you try keeping a three-year-old and a five-year-old from killing each other while you piss about with cannellini beans and skinning tomatoes.’ You know what I mean?”

But apparently Peter doesn’t. Tim, who has also been listening to the exchange and who deals in commercial property, doesn’t really do jokes, unless they come from a client. So there is only one person now roaring with laughter in the room. Oh, dear, it’s me.

“It’d be wasted on our kids,” says Mark, inadvertently twisting the knife, I mean the reinforced steel, Sabatier cook’s paring knife, in the wound.

Fortunately at that moment Lauren and Sally come back in, each with a tray full of starters arranged on small plates.

“…it’s called centre height,” Lauren is saying to Sally. “The idea is that you arrange the dish so that it’s raised at the centre—looks more dramatic, more interesting, then it’s so easy, you just chop up a packet of herbs and sprinkle them over. Gives it a more professional appearance in no time.”

“That’s another thing we do,” says Peter. “We give little tips on how to get that professional look.”

“Oh, that would be useful,” says Sarah, clearly feeling guilty about her last joke. I know she couldn’t give a toss, though, and so I’m trying not to laugh again.

Over the main course, the others ask Lauren about her new career and she smiles knowingly at Peter. Then they ask about my new venture. Mark doesn’t say anything, even though I address most of my comments to him. He nods in an interested but noncommittal way.

I make my usual contribution to the meal by taking the dinner plates into the kitchen and putting them in the dishwasher. Then I carefully take the Patisserie Valerie
tarte aux fraises
out of its box. Two things are racing certainties at this point: one is that I’ll nearly drop it—which I do, breaking the crust slightly—shit! Lauren will notice, even if no one else does. The other is that Mummy’s Little Helper will make an appearance.

“Can I do anything?” asks Sally from behind me.

“No, it’s fine, honestly. No problem. Thanks.”

“Are you sure?” she asks, her voice rising another octave.

“Yes, honestly. It’s very kind, Sally, but there’s no need.”

“Really? I feel so guilty leaving you out here doing all this while we’re in there having a good time.” I’m probably having a better time loading the dirty dishwasher and struggling with an uncooperative
tarte aux fraises
than I would be in there, but I don’t say it.

“No, I know my place, Sally. The old kitchen porter.”

“Oh, you are good.” Oh, you are annoying. “Are you sure?”

“Oh, go on then, clean the oven, will you?”

There is a silence from Sally as I crush up the tart box and bash it down into the overflowing bin. Obviously not my funniest line ever. But when I turn round, Sally, in her pearls and immaculate Thomas Pink shirt and pressed blue jeans is peering anxiously into the oven.

O
n the way to the tube station on Monday morning I grab a copy of the
Post
to see Nora’s piece. I have to read through quite a bit of other stuff before I find it and by this stage I’m sitting on the train, so when I say, “Oh, shit,” loudly, quite a few people around me notice.

The first thing I see is a picture of me. It’s from a job I did last year, or the year before, for some Swedish fashion house. I’m in a white linen shirt with most of the buttons undone and an old pair of jeans and cowboy boots, lying back against a huge, moss-covered log in a wood, hair ruffled, giving it the old three-quarters-to-camera, frowny “come to bed” look. I hated the picture when I first saw it and never even put it in my book. Now coupled with the headline

AT LAST…THE NET NERD GETS SEXY

I hate it even more.

It’s huge—across nearly two whole pages. There are other pictures, including one of me in a tux which is taken from a catalogue, and another featuring me on a beach, wearing some stupid bright yellow trunks, I was originally advertising a holiday brochure, but now my “family” have been carefully cut out so I look like an extra from
Baywatch.

If the pictures are toe curling, the text is worse:

Did I? Possibly, during lunch at some point, but I was being sarcastic. Tongue in cheek. Didn’t she understand that? Well-aired observations about Americans and irony flit through my mind.

No, I’m not—and I told her not to use the phrase
“male
model.”

I’ve never used that phrase in my life.

No, you didn’t.

When did
that
happen?

I can’t wait for Penny to read that.

Feeling light-headed with the initial shock, and anger welling up inside me, I fold up the paper as the woman next to me quickly goes back to her book after allowing herself one final glance at my face.

I get off at Piccadilly Circus and feel, or at least imagine I feel, thousands of pairs of eyes on me. I’ve been stopped in bars, at the gym and even on the street before with the question, “Aren’t you the bloke from—?” Or, “Sorry, but aren’t you in that ad for—?” It goes with the territory and it can even be quite funny sometimes, depending on who makes the comment and what kind of mood you’re in, but “Hang on, aren’t you that vain, arrogant jerk in today’s
Post?”
isn’t quite as much fun somehow.

As I open the door of the office, Scarlett and Piers, who are the only ones in, cheer in unison.

“Our media star,” says Piers, beaming.

“You mean your media twat.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t think he likes the piece, Piers,” says Scarlett dryly.

“Don’t you? Why not?”

“Why not? It’s just so fucking embarrassing.”

“Is it? Why? Where?”

“The pictures, for a start, and all this shit about me being Mr. Super Cool, drop-dead elegant….”

“I liked the picture,” says Scarlett. “Nice bod, honey. Is is true that male models—?”

“No, it’s not. Well
I
don’t, anyway.”

“Look, Charlie,” says Piers, putting an arm round my shoulder and walking me over to my desk. “I’d be lying if I said we didn’t employ you for the way you look, but it’s much more than that. It’s your style, your presence, the way you wear your clothes, the way you carry yourself…you’re our…what’s the word, Lettie?”

“Muse,” says Scarlett, scraping the bottom of a yogurt pot with a plastic spoon.

“That’s it, you’re our muse. We want to create a website, oh, more than that, a lifestyle, a
façon de vivre
for people who want to be like you.” He pauses for effect. “That’s why that piece is so good, so important.”

“But, Piers, I look like a total bullshitter and a total tit,” I say, shaking his arm off me and sitting down heavily.

He puts his hands on my desk, leans over and looks at me. “Charlie, you think you do because you’re a nice guy, a modest sort of bloke who is embarrassed by this kind of adulation, okay? But believe me, to the ordinary customers out there, to those
Post
readers, you’re the smartest, hippest thing ever. You simply
are
2cool2btrue. You represent what they want to be, what they want a piece of. This is exactly what our target audience is looking for. Aspirational! You said it yourself.”

I get some water out of the fridge. It’s that six quid a bottle stuff. Glacial Purity. Actually, I never mentioned the word “aspirational” to Nora. Did I?

I ring Nora at the
Post’
s office just to see if I can at least ask why she wrote what she did, but funnily enough she is not around.

“Who? Nora?” There is a laugh. “No, she’s sort of out at the moment.”

“Sort of out?” What does that mean? Just generally out of it?

“She will be back later. Can I take a message?”

“Yes, please. Could you ask her to ring Charlie Barrett?”

“Will do.”

“Ta.” I put the phone down. Can’t that girl even be
out
in a normal way?

Lauren rings towards lunchtime. She has just done a casting and someone we both know pointed out the article to her.

“Oh, don’t! Who was it?”

“Jo Preston.”

“Shit. What do you think of it?”

“Well…”

“Oh, fuck, don’t say ‘Well.’”

“Are they pleased at the office?”

“At 2cool? Yeah, Piers is delighted.”

“Well, that’s what I was going to say—that’s the important thing. If they’re pleased then you’re doing your job.”

“I suppose so.”

“Cheer up. I’ll save a copy for my mum. Love you. See you tonight.”

Karyn also rings to tell me she has seen it, as indeed has Penny.

“What are you going to tell her?” asks Karyn.

“Well, I’d better be honest I suppose.”

“Why?” says Karyn.

I laugh. “You’re right, Penny’s never been much into honesty, has she?”

“Why don’t you just say that it doesn’t change your relationship with us greatly and that you can still do the occasional job. Penny will hate to see you go.”

“You’re right, I’ve been dreading telling her.”

“I’ll put you through to her now. Let me just see if she’s in her office…er…yep. Okay, just tell her what we agreed and don’t say anything more. Ring me back and let me know how it goes, if you want.”

“Ta, babe.”

There are a few minutes of a dance track and then Penny picks up.

“Hello, Charlie.” She is curt.

“Hi, Penny, how are you?”

“Fine.” Oh, shit.

“I suppose you saw that piece in the
Post
today,” I begin, flattering her that she is on the ball and reads more than
OK
and her stars.

“Yes, I did, Charlie. I was rather surprised, I must say.”

“Yes, it all happened rather quickly.”

“It must have done.”

“I wasn’t sure initially how much of a commitment this job was going to be or even if it was going to be full-time,” I explain, glad that the others are out at lunch and can’t hear this statement.

“Well, is it?”

“Yes, yes, it is, but they’re giving me quite a bit of freedom, so obviously if any good jobs come up…” I decide not to be too specific here.

“Okay, we’ll see how it goes,” she growls. “A lot of clients will be very disappointed about this but I suppose we could say something like you’re available by special arrangement only and hope that works. I can’t promise anything, though, and don’t come running back here when it all goes tits up.”

“No, sure. Well, as you say, we’ll see how it goes. That’s great.” Then I play my only trump. “Obviously we’ll be using Jet models whenever possible.”

She hardly skips a beat. “We’d be very happy to work with you.”

“Great. Thanks Penny.”

“Bye.”

She hangs up and so do I after I’ve made a face, and I give the receiver the finger.

“Oh, she could have been a lot worse,” Karyn points out when I ring her back later on the mobile and she pops out onto the fire escape to talk. “You know how it is. Remember Paul Sommers.”

Paul Sommers, an affable Australian, was caught doing some “freelance” work for a shifty photographer. The pictures ended up being used everywhere and eventually Penny saw them. She screamed at Paul across the office, “You’ll never model in London again!” and threw his cards at him. In fact he went back home, got into some soap and now he’s coining it, but no one wants to feel the full, Concorde-engine force of Penny’s wrath.

I try to get on with some work such as finalising the details for the party and chasing the PR company for a draft of the press release. Perhaps Lauren is right. And even Piers. I might not like the coverage, but it might be right for the target audience, whatever I think. All the same: “chiselled jaw,” “well-toned body”…Oh, God!

On Tuesday after lunch, when Scarlett is out having a cranial massage and Zac is…well, just not in the office, I ring my dad on his mobile.

“I thought it was great—very positive coverage.”

“I thought I looked like a tit.”

“Yeah, but it’s not aimed at you, is it? Think of your target audience.”

“So what? I still look pretty daft. Everyone I know will be laughing at me.”

“Not when you make a mill or two out of this thing. Look, I’ve got to run. I’ve got a busy morning ahead of me.”

“What do you mean ‘morning’? It’s afternoon. Where are you?”

“I’m in New York. Someone faxed that piece over to me yesterday, as soon as it appeared. We’re just keeping an eye on 2cool.”

“Okay, give me a ring when you get home again. Come and find me. I’ll be in hiding up in the hills.”

“Will do. Don’t worry, like I said, it’s brilliant brand positioning.”

It’s this comment and the realisation that he saw the piece not because of any paternal pride or interest but because of the commercial opportunity associated with it that makes me snap at him.

“I’m not a brand, I’m your son,” I point out. But he has gone and I’m left shouting to no one across thousands of miles of empty air.