A Polaroid of Peggy

by Richard Phillips

  It was odd, but despite all the times the Polaroid had been in and out of my various pockets and my office drawer and wherever else, the fact that it was a Polaroid as opposed to any other kind of photo hadn’t really crossed my mind. In 1979 Polaroid cameras were the only way to get an instant picture and they were – or we thought they were – at the very cutting edge of technological advance. Twenty years on, not that long really, and they were museum pieces. I looked at the Polaroid, with its strange little white frame, and remembered how we used to look at those things just after we had taken a shot, and wait for the chemicals inside, whatever they were, to do their stuff, and for the image to gradually, magically materialise out of nothing and how we used to wave them about in the air or to hold them flat against the heat of our bodies to speed up the process – or so we thought.

  “Can I keep that?” asked Keith Lyons.

  “No,” I said, “you can’t.” There was no way I was letting it go.

  So we photocopied it and, since it was already slightly faded, he had a rather muddy image of Peggy to send off to the States, if that, as I presumed, was his plan.

  It was bucketing down when I got outside Mooney’s offices, and I had another strange frisson – some unlocated, undefined impression – from the past. I ducked into the umbrella shop and bought one, then put it up, and walked, despite the weather, all the way back to Fitzrovia. I let all the taxis splash past me, without once trying to hail one.

  I wanted time to think and what I kept thinking about was the moment just now, when I’d looked at the picture of Peggy and the way that it had registered for the first time that it wasn’t just any kind of a photo, but a Polaroid. And I couldn’t help but think how fitting that was. It was of another time, and now it dawned on me, as it never had before, at least not in that way, that she was too. That we were too.

  But as soon as I walked through the doors of BWD I shut the idea out of my mind. I was too far down the line to let it take hold.

  *

  I was once interviewed by someone, some arse licking trade journo, who asked me about how I dealt with ‘the tyranny of the blank sheet of paper’. It is rather a good phrase, one I’m quite sure he’d nicked from someone else, which neatly points up the pressure you are under when you have to think of something and your mind refuses to engage. There the blank sheet of paper sits – or now the empty computer screen – and stares back at you accusingly. Despite being blank, it doesn’t say nothing. It screams ‘useless, empty headed, talentless idiot’ at you. You’re being paid to do this, and you can’t think of a damned thing.

  I was reminded of that conversation as I sat in my office late one night, a couple of weeks after the joyous day when Legga – I rarely now thought of him as anything else – had come grovelling to me, begging for my help with the cereal account. A fortnight on and I had bugger all.

  I have always found that my most inspired ideas come to me within the first few seconds of first hearing of whatever project it is that I have to think about. In that first instant, I seem to have the vital flash, make the lateral connection, that, in advertising, and other things like it, is an ‘idea’. I have never been a deliberator, someone who carefully weighs the options before reaching the considered decision. (As you may have noticed.)

  The problem with this method, or lack of it, is that once the first few seconds have passed, and nothing jumps into your mind, a tiny worm begins to wiggle away inside. It’s that little worm of self-doubt, and it has a nasty habit of feeding on itself, and yet getting bigger and bigger, until it fills your mind so completely that all you can think of is that you can’t think of anything. This is the way it was with the chocolatey dib dabs that weren’t made of chocolate at all.

  At the end of one day after another I left my office with nothing but a waste bin overflowing with screwed up pieces of paper defaced only by aimless doodles – mostly of Legga and Lucille being attacked with various instruments of torture – and the next morning I would march in determined that today would be the day, but every day the little worm wormed away and it wasn’t. Although it was imperative that this piece of work – which next year must sweep all before it at DADA and Cannes – was seen to be mine, I was not so proud that I wasn’t ready to share a little bit of the credit. (A very little bit.) So after the first fruitless week, I called on all sorts of underlings to help me. It’s usual to work in pairs – copywriter and art director typically – so I lost no face in doing this. Experienced old hands, up and coming middle-weights, callow novices, I gave them all a crack. We considered all the tried and tested possibilities: endorsements by sportsmen, mini sit-coms, cartoons with jingles. At one point, we – whoever it was and I – came up with a combination of all three: a cartoon version of Sylvester Stallone, in some sort of supposed-to-be funny situation in which he’s down on his luck until he has a bowl of this stuff. Rather like building a house by putting the roof up first, this was all put together after we had come up with the line for the jingle: ‘They’re choccy, Rocky’. (We’d tried ‘Be a choccy jockey’ but that led nowhere, and ‘It’s just like chocci gnocchi’ seemed to be not just inaccurate, but slightly beyond the cultural reach of the average British toddler.)

  ‘They’re choccy, Rocky’ may not have been much better but so desperate was I that I even ran it past Lucille to see what she thought. Her patronising ‘well you never know, there might be something there’ – she couldn’t get the smirk off her bloody face – swiftly confirmed what I’d known all along.

  The deadline was looming – there was a meeting scheduled for the next day with the increasingly tetchy Mick Hudnutt – and I had all but given up the ghost. I had already thrown the problem open to the whole department, thus giving up the key credit of personal authorship even if I still could have – and most certainly would have – claimed that it was my generalship as creative director that had made all the difference. But there was still nothing to take credit for. In fact, so bare was the cupboard of ideas that I’d had Julia scrabbling on her knees to see if she could dig ‘It’s choccy, Rocky’ out of the waste-bin.

  It was ten o’ clock in the evening and gradually the useless disloyal tossers in the laughingly mis-titled creative department – all of whom owed their entire careers to my selfless care and nurturing – had, one by one, crept out as if they had homes to go to. Which, unless you called my new hideous little flat a home, I did not. So, utterly bereft of inspiration, I slumped there in my lonely office, watching more episodes of ‘Seinfeld’. I was midway through series four, which meant I reached the episode where the characters – including Elaine – have a competition to see who can last longest without having a wank. (Or whatever the slang is for the female version.) Two things occurred to me. First, what genius that they could make the plot perfectly clear yet never refer to masturbation explicitly so that it could be broadcast on American prime-time television. Second, that, given my present personal situation, had I been a character in the show, I wouldn’t have lasted past the opening credits.

  I finally left, too late even to get to a pub, and made for the cold comforts of Bayswater, and when I awoke the next morning, I was as heavy hearted as when I had gone to bed. Mick Hudnutt and humiliation were only hours away. As the clock ticked down, the governor and the chaplain – in the shape of Vince Dutton and Hattie du Vivier – came to escort me from the condemned man’s cell. Neither were in the mood for giving me any last words of comfort. I’d asked Julia to get ‘It’s choccy, Rocky’ typed up again and told them that it was all we had. I offered Vince – I was so defeated I was back to Vince – a feeble, “Sorry mate, best I could do”, in the hope, I suppose, that there was still a little sympathy to be squeezed from twenty years of friendship, but if there was, it was undetectable to me. And Hattie, whom I’d been carefully grooming to be Mata Hari, was now terrified that Mick Hudnutt was going to take his bowl of cereal elsewhere, and that she, as the agency person in charge of the account
, would be left with no account to be in charge of. She clearly held me accountable.

  We left my office on the slow march to the meeting room. There were no chains around my ankles but there might as well have been, and trying to think of anything but the fate that awaited me, an image of Kramer bursting into Jerry’s kitchen drifted into my mind. Wait a minute. I stopped. Wait a cotton picking minute! And there, a few paces from the door, with the sound of Mick Hudnutt’s Mancunian vowels already grating, I turned to them, the blood suddenly coursing through my veins once more. I was suddenly so pumped up I felt like Henry V rousing the troops at Agincourt.

  “Just get in there and keep him talking. Say anything. Talk about the football. Talk about the weather. Anything you fucking like. I’ll be back in ten. I’ve got it. I’m telling you, I have fucking got it!”

  One last lingering look at their doubtful faces – O ye of little faith! – and I was off back to the creative department. Now where were those two idiots who’d done that cornish pasty script?

  Chapter 18

  New Rochelle and New York, 1979

  Herb was word perfect. He had exactly the right number of yibbys and dibbys, biddys and yubbys, and dums and bums. And, by the time he was finished, I was pretty well yubby dibby biddy perfect myself.

  If he’d been machine-gunned to death and had his head impaled on a stick on the way to the Temple Israel Community Centre – anything less and he’d have insisted on carrying on – I could very probably have stood in for him, because he’d spent the whole afternoon going through his script with me, checking off every word and every syllable of every whatever it is that a yubby, a dibby and a biddy is categorised as.

  *

  On Herb’s big day, when he would become the Tevye by which all future Tevyes in New Rochelle productions of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ would be judged, I had, as before, taken the train out from Grand Central. It had been agreed that I should be there in time for lunch – leaving plenty of time afterwards for the food to digest and the excitement to build. This time I travelled alone. After the girl with the green spiky hair, I had decided that I should give Peggy a bit of that space that she so craved. More to the point, having made up my mind what I was going to do, I needed time to screw up the courage to do it. So when Peggy said she was wanted to spend the Saturday night before at her folks place I offered no objection. Sunday would be soon enough.

  It was Peggy herself who picked me up from the station, and that was a slight shock. I had never seen her drive before. None of my contemporaries had a car in Manhattan so to see anyone I knew at the wheel would have been strange, but Peggy was so slightly built that, though all those cheap ethnic meals we’d been having certainly seemed to be filling her out, she seemed dwarfed behind the wheel of the enormous Pontiac. For all that, it gave her a kind of assumed authority – she was the captain of the ship. I found that vaguely odd – perhaps it was a touch of old fashioned chauvinism – but I felt at a slight disadvantage somehow, and because of that, perhaps I tried to compensate by being assertive. Which was exactly the opposite of the way I had planned to be. Or maybe that had nothing to do with it. Maybe I was just nervous. Who wouldn’t be? I had come to confess all. To throw myself on her mercy. To be honest. To be contrite. But it went wrong from the start.

  “Peggy,” I said, “there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  “Well, there’s something I want to talk to you about too.”

  “I think I know what that is.”

  “You do?”

  She glanced sharply at me, braked suddenly, skidding a touch – yes, it was raining again, and we pulled over to the side of the road.

  “You’ve been seeing Miller, haven’t you?”

  “What?”

  “I know you saw him the other day for lunch – if it was lunch you were having.”

  “WHAT?”

  I had started off down the wrong road, and now I didn’t know any way off it. And even as I spoke, my completely absurd, hysterical jealousy of Miller was fuelling my sense of self-righteousness.

  “Well, you’re not the only one who can carry on like that.”

  “Carry on? Like that? Like what? Are you crazy?”

  Good question. But I ignored it, and blundered on.

  “I went out with Brett and Bart the other night. Same day you had lunch with Miller.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “And I met someone.”

  “You met someone?”

  Now we had got to the heart of it. And at last I had the sense to change tack.

  Or rather, confronted by the immediate problem of explaining the inexplicable, the bravado just fell away.

  “Yes, well, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to lead – well, where it led. I got really drunk – and stoned – I was upset about you seeing Miller. It got out of hand. I know that’s not an excuse. That’s what I wanted to say. I’m sorry.”

  Peggy sat with her hands on the wheel and it seemed like an age before she spoke.

  “You really are a total jerk, Andy. A total jerk. I don’t know how you knew I saw Miller but you know what, it was just to give him his fucking keys back. Sure we had lunch. I lived with him for two years – he never hurt me – I mean not physically– he never cheated on me – I’m not just going to never speak to him again.”

  Of course, put like that it sounded as reasonable as it was.

  “I’d better go back to New York.”

  “No. That’ll just upset everything with my dad. He’s put so much into this. We’ll just – I don’t know – pretend, I guess, for the day.”

  In a series of rapid, angry movements, she restarted the car, put her foot on the gas, yanked on the wheel and lurched back out into the traffic. I reached out my hand and put it on her arm. She shrugged it off, and in a voice choked up with tears just said, “Andy, will you please just fuck off.” It wasn’t a question.

  We drove for a few minutes in silence and then, as we waited at a red light, the wipers arcing to and fro, I said, “So, if it wasn’t about Miller, what did you want to talk to me about?”

  She shook her head slowly from side to side; utter disbelief.

  “If it wasn’t about Miller? – Jeez, you never let go do you? You know what Andy, forget it. I take it back. There is nothing I want to talk to you about!”

  When we got back to Overlook Road, we managed to put on a pretty good show for Herb and Barbara – rather like, now I think about it, Alison and I did for Glenda and Vic – and, likewise, when her grandmother appeared. But whenever we were briefly alone, Peggy made sure she stayed well out of touching distance. With the atmosphere as it was, I was actually quite grateful to be seconded to the post of Herb’s rehearsal buddy.

  Well, I can hear you saying, you have no-one to blame but yourself. Who doesn’t know that confessing to infidelities is the quickest way to becoming single again? And why exactly did you confess? Why does anyone confess? Not for the benefit of the person who’s been betrayed. It’s not their slate you’re trying to clear. You confess because you want to be absolved, but, in doing so, you put doubt in their mind they will never entirely be free of. No, if you’re going to be unfaithful, man up and carry the burden of your guilt. If you can’t live with your imperfections why should you expect anybody else to?

  So, in summary: I had fucked up royally. And then made it ten times worse. Out of jealousy, impetuosity, stupidity I had managed to make the girl who had totally liked me and about whom I was just as bonkers as ever – well, I had managed to make her what? Doubt me, yes, no question about that. And, very probably, almost inevitably, reject me out of hand, forever.

  The ninety-nine per cent of me who was always convinced the sun would sooner or later fall out of the sky could see no way out. But the last little bit of me that carried my one or two, leftover, incurable optimist genes – personally I’d never been big on
the chosen people thing but we had got out of Egypt hadn’t we, despite four hundred years of the Pharaohs – still saw little Williamses with dark wavy hair and brown black almondy eyes running about somewhere in the distant future.

  *

  I’d bought the Sunday edition of ‘The New York Times’ before I left New York, but its overblown bulk sat on the empty seat beside me, every one of its umpteen sections still pristine and unread. I had a lot to think about that day, and not just about my imminent confession to Peggy. Given the hash that I was to make of it, you may find it hard to believe that I’d given it any thought at all, and it’s true that, as I looked distractedly out of the window and the soggy glories of a rainy New York State rushed by, my mind was on something else entirely; something else, perhaps, that I should also have been telling Peggy about, but which had been such a surprise, I needed time to properly gauge my own reaction first. At about 11.30 a.m. on Friday, it had come straight out of left field – literally, you might say, if I’d been sitting facing South. And which, it may not surprise you to learn, I absent-mindedly calculated – somewhere between the stops at Mount Vernon East and Pelham – that I had been. Seeing as the desk in my office faced downtown, more or less, it would have been to the left of me that the Atlantic Ocean and, therefore, England lay.

  England. It was weird how little thought I had given it since I had been in New York. As I was to do with Peggy when I got back to London, I had wiped it from my mind. I had the occasional call to Mavis and Syd and I exchanged the very infrequent aerogramme – remember those? – but in 1979, three thousand miles was still three thousand miles. And then suddenly Laverne burst into my office and told me there was a phone call for me from London but that I should take it in Nick Moreno’s office. The weirdness of that last part – I had never felt welcome in Nick’s office and certainly, following the bee/bonnet fiasco, not now – immediately put me on trouble alert but, as I drew little hangman figures on the steamy train window, it occurred to me that I may well have missed the true significance of that.