When She Was Bad... (24 page)

But she wasn’t going to rush to judge Rupert based on one friend’s opinion. It made sense but, equally, who wasn’t to say it wasn’t coincidence? He sounded very sincere when talking about the hotel, and she’d done good work with the place. Becky had ordered remodelling, advertising, upgrading of the rooms and gardens - all things she’d enjoyed and thought were a real challenge. He was probably expectirg her to fix the hotel and then move into the London offices … °

But she couldn’t stop the nagging doubt, It was in her head now. She had to know iflupert was really in love with her, and not trying to win his case through the back door. It was kind of neat… Lady Lancaster, and any son would reunite everything. Class was important to l

OK, it was most likely bullshit. But she had to test him. She had to find out for herself.

Becky stopped at an off-licence and picked up a bottle of red for dinner, a cheap Beaujoulais which had got a good write-up in the Sunday Times. She entered her building, climbed up the stairs and knocked on her door.

Rupert let her in. She’d known he would be there. He had already showered and changed; he smelled faintly of Floris aftershave, and he looked gorgeous. Becky almost didn’t want to say anything, but she

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steeled herself. She didn’t want any clouds over the way she felt about 1Kupert. He was her boyfriend, her rescuer, her whole life. She had to be able to trust him.

‘How was your day, sweetheart?’ He kissed her and took her jacket. ‘Pretty good.’

‘I heard you were playing hookey. I don’t blame you. Business can be deadly dull.’

‘I was with Sharon for half the day.’

1Kupert didn’t flinch. ‘That’s terrific! How is she? I haven’t seen her for ages.’

‘She’s great. We caught up.’ Becky didn’t feel right telling him about the engagement, at least not yet. ‘And then, you know, darling, I went to see a lawyer.’

She watched 1Kupert carefully. For the first time, she thought she saw his face tighten.

‘That sounds.., interesting,’ he said neutrally, but Becky thought she detected a slight catch to his voice. ‘What would you be seeing a lawyer about?’

‘Fairfield, actually. I’m thinking that it’s a lot of house for two people. I thought we should consider donating it to the National Trust,’ Becky said lightly.

The change in lkupert was instant. She watched the blood drain from his face, then surge back into it. He looked unsteady on his feet. Then he bounded across the room towards her and slapped her, hard, across the face.

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Lita looked across the table at the clients and shook her head.

‘I really don’t think you want to do that.’

Norman Doyle, her account manager, was shaking his head and narrowing his eyes in what he thought was a subtle signal, but which looked to Lita like a mad squint, as though he had something gritty in his eye. She ignored him, the way she usually did. Since she had gotten her latest promotion to Senior Creative Executive, a post created especially for Lita by Harry Weiss, Norman had been trying to rein her in a bit. She was well known to be the copywriter that insisted on coming up with visuals, the woman exec who wouldn’t keep her head down, the barely-there-for-a-year staffer who thought nothing of barging into a meeting of the Board of Directors to press her point. Anybody else would have been fired months ago, but Lira kept confounding her enemies by coming up with campaigns that actually sold stuff.

The ‘Lucy’ campaign, her first, had resonated with urban girls in the NorthEast and launched the scent to national prominence. Kitten Cosmetics had sold their company out, taken the money and run, but not before their chairman had given a grateful speech to analysts, citing ‘the sterling work done by the Doheny advertising agency’. Commissions had gone through the roof. Clients requested Lita by name. Mark Smith and others had predicted she’d be a one-hit wonder, the novelty token female on staff, but Lita had shoved her success right down their throats. Coats, jewellery lines, more scent, lipsticks - everything that came into her office, she managed to find something new and different to say about them. Her famous commercial for Blood Orange, the daring fall shade from Chanel, had featured a broken stick of lipstick smeared across pebbles from the beach, not a girl at all. Her slogan was ‘Think Out of the Box.’ Harry let her run with it,- though he had reservations.., whoever heard of a lipstick sold without a niodel? But it took off, and the industry sat up and took notice.

Lita had made enemies. Lots of them, not just Mark and Bud. Many of the assistants were jealous and bitched about her in the restrooms

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when they knew she was sitting in a stall and could hear every word. Her male colleagues resented her. Word spread that she had gotten her promotion by crawling under Harry’s desk. One morning, Lira opened her office door to find a hair-dryer laid across her desk with a note taped to it. ‘IZor your next blow job,’ it read. Lita, her face burning, had been reading this little message when she heard the sniggering from the typing pool outside her door. She looked up sharply, but all the girls had their heads bowed, pecking away at their keyboards like so many chickens. She slammed her office door shut, then kicked herself for letting her emotions show.

It would be the last time she made that mistake.

Lira forced herself to disregard other people’s opinions. Your work wasn’t your family; if they didn’t like her, who really cared? She stopped wearing the ‘acceptable’ boxy suits and started to come in in bellbottoms, jeans, Tshirts, brightly coloured dresses. She decided not to bother to play her sexuality down any more. Let them think what they liked. She wasn’t going to hide her body for a bunch of assholes.

Lita decided to let her bottom line do the talking. She pitched for and got an assignment to work on a masculine product. Hex was a line of automatic drills and tools for the home. Lira took Eli, her art director, out to the DIY stores and talked to some guys, then came up with a no nonsense pitch that worked perfectly. ‘Hex. When you don’t have time for mistakes.’

That was when Harry promoted her.

Now Lira was a senior executive, and at 13oheny that meant she dealt with clients direct. It was no longer her account manager who conveyed the brief to her. Clients discussed what they needed in face-to-face meetings.

Norman Doyle had been a senior account manager for five years. He was used to massaging fragile egos, running nice, clean numbers, presenting the sober and responsible face of Doheny to big companies that wanted returns for their marketing dollars. He had made four sets of creative executives lose their Tshirts and sandals for suits and ties, and roped them back from scaring the clients. His job was to make sure things ran smoothly - the wild creative side was only allowed out once the clients had left the building.

Lira didn’t allow things to run smoothly.

‘Excuse me?’

Lira shook her head. She was wearing large dangling earrings and they sparkled as her neck moved. ‘Your idea isn’t going to work.’

‘But you’ve had so much success with ofF-beat commercials.’ Michael Gibson, Product Manager for Flexiclean, was almost pouting. Lira saw

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his all the time. Clients hired an agency to run advernsmg tot mere, they secretly thought they could all do it better. They would come to meetings with ‘a great direction’ for Doheny to go in, which was really a version of the campaign they wanted to see. It invariably sucked. This was no different.

Flexiclean was a bargain washing powder, cheaper by about a nickel than its closest competitor. It wasn’t selling well. It had a dingy box and no clear market image. Gibson had specially asked that Lita should get this job, and he’d come to the meeting alljazzed up about his own idea.

Norman Doyle had blathered that it was ‘incredibly interesting’. But it wasn’t, and Lira had said so.

Gibson’s mock-up was of a young, hot babe with a blonde ‘flick’ hairstyle and a pair of sprayed-on red pants, tossing a box of the powder in the air. He’d come up with a slogan, too. ‘Flexiclean. For the woman who’s different.’

‘This isn’t one of my commercials. This is what you think my commercials are like, Mr Gibson. I go off-beat when it sells the product. Young women aren’t interested in washing powder. Their morns do their laundry, and they’re gonna feel alienated by some sexy chick being called “different”. What are they, chopped liver?’

Gibson looked crestfallen. Norman interrupted. ‘Lira, I really think

that Mr Gibson’s idea deserves serious consideration.’ ‘No, it doesn’t.’ ‘Lira—’

Lita turned directly to Gibson and the suits ranked alongside him. ‘Mr Gibson. You want to make a big splash with Flexiclean, and so do I. But this isn’t the way to do it. Hip is” no good when your core buyers are middle-aged.’

‘So what do we do, then? The same old commercial? A room pulls out her laundry and smells it and goes “Aah”?’

Lira giggled, and uddenly Gibson cracked a snfile. She was so gorgeous. What he wouldn’t give for five minutes, he thought. Amazing tits, a handspan waist and the kind of ass he thought had gone out with the forties. It was a stripper’s body, hidden under the proper clothes. Gibson fantasized about Lita in a strip club, tendrils of dark, curly hair tumbling around a bare shoulder, her breasts .jutting out at him, nipples perked, maybe with a sleazy wash of glitter on them, and a scrap of black lace all that hid that silky little triangle between her legs from everybody’s view …

Hmm. Oh, man … He felt his cock stirring, and crossed his legs, firmly. She was talking.

‘No. We need something unique, something for Flexiclean. My

t

onmercials aren’t really about hip. They’re about unique. And you

have something unique.’

They leant forward in their seats. Norman Doyle assessed the situation and bit back the retort that was bursting to come out of him. She was infuriating, but she had them hooked. Shit, look at her. They were dying to know what she had for them.

‘Flexiclean is cheap. Cheaper than the rest of the powders on the

shelf. Now this has worked against you in the past, because you’ve been seen as the poor woman’s powder. Mrs Jones is embarrassed for Mrs Roberts to see her with Flexiclean because she looks like she can’t afford Tide.’

‘So?’

‘So we switch it. Instead of making the price something to be ashamed of, let’s make it a selling point. Mrs Jones doesn’t look poor any more, she looks savvy. This is what Eli Green and I came up with.’

Lita reached behind her and laid out huge sheets of paper covered

with sketches on the table, their storyboard for a TV commercial. The lqexiclean commercial would be her first on TV. And TV was the big time. Magazine ads were great, but TV was where millions and millions of units sold. A few years dreaming up successful TV campaigns, and you could write your own ticket.

‘Let’s have a look,’ Michael Gibson said.

At the foot of the table. Harry Weiss watched silently. He had wanted

to see how the Morales girl would do. He wasn’t about to interfere. He thought she had a nose for selling. ‘

The storyboard showed a thirty-something woman picking up a box

of Flexiclean. Another woman passed her and selected more expensive washing powder. The first woman grinned and said she liked saving money. The second woman admitted that the bills tended to mount up. The first woman winked and said, ‘Not in my.house.’ Then she patted the box of Flexiclean.

Lira went through the storyline frame by frame. She didn’t even

manage to get to the end before Gibson started thumping the table.

‘I love it. That’s brilliant,’ he said.

‘What actress shall we use?’ Ed Dresden, their Vice-President, asked eagerly.

Harry scratched a note to himself on his yellow legal pad. He needed

to get to know P, osalita Morales a little better. That much was obvious.

‘I thought we could check with Family Models. They provided an interesting lead for the last Nescaf6 commercial,’ Harry said, and all heads turned to him. Lira sat back in her chair. Harry was in control now. Her part in the meeting was over.

c

Harry went down to see Lita at five. It was the first break in his schedule that day. Doheny was getting busier, and it was Harry’s job to juggle the creatives. He reported directly to Robert Dawn, the Managing Director. And Robert didn’t care about Harry’s workload. He wanted to see profits go up. It was all about bonuses in this game. And stock prices. Lita Morales was good for both.

He heard the shouting when he was two corridors away - Norman Doyle’s high, reedy voice and Lira’s low, insistent, warm, accented tones snapping back at him. Harry smiled to himself. Norman was a little staid

for Lita, perhaps. He strode into the office.

‘Norman, hello.’

The senior account manager stopped in mid-yelp.

‘Hi, there, Harry,’ he said. Weiss noted his cheeks were a dull purple colour, a colour he often saw around the men that worked near Lira Morales.

‘Norman, could you give me a few minutes here? I need to have a quick word with Lira.’

‘Yes, Harry,’ Norman said smugly, shooting a foul look at his copywriter. ‘Certainly. I think that would be a very good idea.’

Lita opened her mouth to protest, but said nothing. Norman swept out of the room triumphantly, and Harry closed the door.

‘I can explain,’ Lita said immediately. Weiss saw her body language fists clenched at her sides, back stiff. She was spoiling for a fight. ‘Oh, can you?’

‘Yes. This is the way I conduct my business. I don’t tell clients that dumb ideas are great. That wastes time, and I need to get a good idea out there before some other guy has the same idea and beats us to it. My job isn’t to—’

‘Shut up,’ Harry said.

Lita blinked. ‘Excuse me?’

‘I said shut up. You’re excusing yourself for something I approve of. I don’t want to hear you go blathering on like a scratched record. Get it? Got it? Good.’