Larger Than Life

by Adele Parks

  ‘Why thank you, Karl,’ I smile, barely glancing his way, and I add, ‘And you. Have you been working out?’ Karl is – get this – an Assemblage Account Director (meaning he manages a group of suits).

  ‘Thought you’d be interested in this report, page nineteen hits the issues,’ says Drew, the Emporium Strategist (basically a planner).

  ‘Cheers,’ I smile, taking the paper from him without breaking my stride towards my desk (that’s another rule, never walk if you can stride, but never, ever run; it’s cool to be busy but not frantic).

  ‘Georgie, are you coming to the opening of Champagne Charlotte’s tonight?’ asks Brett, the Officiating Creative Director (the one with the crayons).

  ‘Certainly, I’ll be there,’ I smile.

  The boys and I are all ranked at the same level. Our current positions are mutually dependent upon one another’s success, so we all frequently, loudly and, if necessary, insincerely expound on each other’s talents and profess adoration. Our relationship smacks of ‘friends close, enemies closer’. It’s not that I don’t like them; they are all smart, savvy, sexy and cocksure. They operate in a homogeneous mass; if they ever had individual personalities, they’ve long since been erased. They are the advertising world’s equivalent of a boyband. I do like them. I just don’t trust them. Experience has shown there’s no advantage to being sentimental.

  ‘Georgina, can you read this and give me your opinion on the IPC situation by close of play?’ says Dean, the MD, everyone’s boss, as he tosses an inch-thick report on to the already towering pile of papers I’m carrying.

  ‘Sure thing.’ I broaden my smile an incredible fraction further. I think my face might split. He’s American, so I find myself sounding like a Wild West settler whenever I speak to him; it’s entirely deliberate.

  My title at Q&A is President of Neoteric Enterprise. Brand enhancement is our way of life; hence the overly grand and misleading job titles. Whilst my job is important to me and at times exhilarating (when I’m talking to a headhunter, for example), it does fall slightly short of the title imported from the US. If I didn’t work for an American agency I’d probably have a more modest tide, such as New Business Manager. But then we are talking about an office culture that calls cleaners Industrial Waste Executives, and the woman who doles out the slop in the canteen is a Protein and Vitamin Execution Executive (pronounced Vite-a-min).

  My job essentially boils down to endlessly trawling through personal contacts, newspapers, annual reports, etc., in an effort to identify companies that don’t currently advertise but might be persuaded to, or, rather more lucratively, those that currently advertise and spend heaps of money, but with another agency. I then put together a team and we plot, persuade, coax, cajole, entice and impel said companies to part with large amounts of cash in the hope that we can help them make yet larger amounts, which in turn we help them in spending. I seem to have quite a knack for this. I like to see it as a virtuous circle.

  In truth, I often see it as a fairly undignified way to earn a living.

  ‘Doughnut, Georgina?’ offers Julia, my number two in the office, but also my mate after hours.

  I shake my head and repeat the old adage, ‘a moment on the lips, a month on the hips’. I sing this through my smile, whilst mentally calculating the calories and fat units in a doughnut. Julia immediately throws the doughnut in the bin, which I wish I hadn’t seen. I’ll spend all day thinking of it, languishing there. Uneaten. My smile falters momentarily.

  My usual practice is that I positively bounce into the office every morning, fired up for debating the brand properties of loo bleach or ‘refreshing’ versus ‘thirst-quenching’ as the unique selling position for the latest carbonated drink. But today I feel wiped out, low, feeble, exhausted. I am a used bin liner, as rubbish as that. My head hurts, I feel sick. Think pernicious hangover combined with worst period pains ever. Bingo. The important thing is no one must know this. I finally reach my office. I slump into my chair and lay my head on the desk. I usually conduct my entire day’s business standing up; it’s more intimidating for the audience and good exercise for the calves. Sod that, I’m exhausted. Without lifting my head I rummage inside the top drawer of my desk, where I keep a collection of remedies for all ills. Spare pair of tights in case of ladders, clear nail varnish in case of laddering spare pair (a little blob at the top and bottom of the ladder does the trick). Tippex to be used on ladder in spare pair of tights when I can’t unscrew the lid of the clear nail-varnish bottle. Toothbrush, breath fresheners, comb, an assortment of Boots 17 cosmetics (anything more expensive would be nicked), nail file, tweezers, spare battery for my mobile, modem line, roughly £20 of change in six foreign currencies, a variety of pens, pencils, elastic bands, paper clips, string, business cards and, finally, aspirin. I reach for the packet of aspirin then read the instructions and discover I can’t take any.

  Because I’m pregnant.

  I try thinking about butterflies and freshly squeezed orange juice but the visualization technique fails miserably. It’s bollocks, actually. I feel even more nauseous and quite extraordinarily ravenous. The doughnut in the bin is the only thing that I can imagine will help. But only if I eat it now. Now, now. Not now as in how long it will take to nip out and buy another one. I have to eat the doughnut that is in the bin and I have to eat it now. I turn round and see that Julia is standing by the scanner, leaving her desk and, more particularly, the bin-languishing doughnut unguarded. Moving like James Bond on blades, I speed back to her desk, retrieve the doughnut, hide it in between my files, dash towards the privacy of my own office, which thankfully has a door – a perk negotiated with my last promotion, along with a beechwood desk and a dry-cleaning allowance – and then I eat the doughnut. To put this into context, this is the first cake I’ve tasted since my twenty-first birthday. This 007-like operation takes me about four seconds. I feel well for a further four seconds and then I throw up into my bin – the white one, which is for paper. I suspect this is a little more than the office administrator was bargaining for in terms of recycling materials. I move the bin outside my office door, but I have the feeling that the stale smell of spew will linger all day.

  The indignity is staggering.

  I don’t have time to spray perfume around the office before the phone starts to ring. I pick it up. Someone wants to know something about portfolio planning. My second line is ringing, a question about relative market shares, and then Julia is suddenly by my side, trying to get me to sign a pile of papers, which I do – with my free hand, whilst reading them with one eye. A coffee appears on my desk. I cradle the phone under my ear and then take a sip. I finish the call about commissioning market research into teenage girls’ views on digital TV, put the phone down and it immediately rings again. My lead-like limbs are operating in their own time zone, refusing to keep pace with my mind, which, anyway, is lagging behind the required canter set by my job description. I knock back the plastic cup of coffee, hoping the caffeine will take effect a.s.a.p.

  Yuk.

  ‘Julia, have you switched coffee house?’

  ‘No, it’s the same old, same old,’ Julia replies.

  Julia wears her hair cropped short and spiky, a look which really only suits elf-like girls, which Julia is not, in fact, but she considers herself to be so. I am jealous of her misplaced confidence. It’s odd, isn’t it, that some girls who aren’t naturally beautiful become intrinsically beautiful once they believe they are. And other girls, like Sam for instance, are gorgeous but can never really believe it. I’m somewhere in between. I know I’m beautiful when Hugh says I look ‘good’, then I’d happily sunbathe in a bikini next to Miss Universe. I disappear altogether when he doesn’t notice my new outfit. Yes, I do realize that this is unhealthy. Every self-help book I’ve ever read has violently condemned over-reliance on other people’s opinions and praise. I’ve given all my self-help books to the local Oxfam.

  Julia changes her hair colour every week; this week it’s plum.
Her hairdresser’s bill must run to thousands a year. She has huge, brown eyes (so laid-back they’re insolent), which she frames with trendy, square, yellow Calvin Klein glasses. I’m not sure if she is genuinely short-sighted, or if the glasses are a fashion statement. She wears skimpy, clingy designer T-shirts with things like roger me senseless printed across her breasts. Diesel jeans and the latest, trendy, must-have sneakers from the States. She always looks cold and bored. But cool. At a guess I’d say she spends 90 per cent of her wages on clothes; the remaining 10 per cent is spent on newspapers and style magazines. Her father pays her rent and her ‘friends’ pay for her gigs and drinks; she doesn’t eat. Julia has a low boredom threshold so the words ‘same old, same old’ are her anthem. She’s been known to use them when referring to an outfit she purchased fifteen minutes earlier, or about a guy she’s accepted her first drink from. I see a low boredom threshold as the sign of a lively mind, so whilst I don’t mind her response, I do doubt it.

  ‘Are you sure that you didn’t get this from the vending machine?’

  ‘I’m certain. I know how you feel about your double espresso from CaféCafé. Although your predictability in such matters does surprise me.’

  Traditionally my life has lacked certainty, therefore sticking with a coffee brand is disproportionately important to me.

  ‘Why, what’s wrong with the coffee?’

  ‘It tastes bitter and smells odd,’ I complain.

  Because I’m pregnant.

  Of course, I shouldn’t even be drinking coffee. I’m saved from explaining the fickle nature of my taste buds as my landline screeches at me at the exact same moment that my mobile pings to let me know I have a text message. I’m pretty certain that both desperate attempts at communication are from the same source.

  ‘Hi, it’s me. Have you got time to talk?’

  I say no but Sam talks anyway.

  I love her dearly; remembering her antics during Freshers’ week still brings a smile to my face and a tear to my eye, and makes me wonder who her lawyer is. Yet her scatter-gun approach to her love life is irritating in the extreme. Oblivious to the fact that I may be very busy (which is normally the case), or that I am very pregnant and therefore feeling more filthy than a dog’s arse (which is admittedly news), we, yet again, re-enact a conversation we have had several times a month for the last thirteen years. An endless, directionless flow of self-pity about her being very nearly thirty-five and ‘half her life being over’. I point out that with extended life expectancy Sam can reasonably anticipate living into her nineties. She counters that a long life will be torturous as the best bit is already over, and then she starts comparing quality of life: roller-blades vis-à-vis Zimmer frames, blooming new bosoms and sagging tits, university and retirement homes. She has a point and she makes it well but my patience is stretched. Sam is not suffering from a deadly disease or redundancy, her flat hasn’t fallen into negative equity, nor has she broken a nail. The source of her desolation is, in Julia’s phrase, ‘same old, same old’. Last night her date stood her up. Her life’s over.

  I hope my silence is condemnation enough. Sam knows I think she’s pathetic. She thinks she’s pathetic too – it’s this refreshing honesty that makes me love her; everyone else our age pretends to like being single.

  Sam’s original life plan has gone way off course. According to it, by now, she should be a corporate wife, lovingly supporting a dynamic husband as he thunders his way up the corporate ladder. She should be mother of two adorable children, one boy, one girl – dark and blonde respectively. She should be living in a large detached house somewhere in the green belt, with a huge manicured garden and perhaps even a pool. She should be heavily involved in the PTA and organizing a weekly rota for the school run. Ideally, she’d be driving a Land-Rover.

  Need I go on?

  Sam’s current position – lying under the duvet with nothing more than a box of Kleenex for company – is a situation which is horribly, depressingly familiar. Her life achievements to date (has made junior partner in a huge firm of management consultants; has swum with dolphins off the coast of South Africa; can fly a helicopter; has bungee-jumped from Victoria Falls; owns a racing-green MG) are forgotten. What grieves and shames Sam the most is that she could have lived without all that stuff if only she were surrounded by silver-plated photo frames displaying testaments to her success as a wife and mother. I can’t think of any heartfelt words of consolation, so resort to the comfort of the cliché and mutter, ‘Still. Never say die.’ Sam complains that I’ve worked too long in advertising if I think an old saying like that is any help at all. This is hilarious coming from Sam, who speaks almost entirely in terms of ‘fish in the sea’, ‘a change is as good as a rest’, ‘all that glitters’, ‘a stitch in time’ and other such non-profundities. Anyway, what choice do I have? I can’t tell her that she wears her desperation as conspicuously as most other people wear Vivienne Westwood – and, to men, it smells more intrusive than Poison perfume – although this undoubtedly is the case. Besides which, I simply can’t see the mild embarrassment of being stood up as anywhere near as serious as the issues I’m currently facing – i.e., the embarrassment of the stench of regurgitated stolen doughnuts drifting condemningly through my office. I want to tell her that I’m pregnant, but don’t know how. In the past it’s been our habit to share our lives, entirely. We’ve always confessed to every love affair, emotion, victory, loss, piece of luck, joyless fuck and paranoia going.

  But suddenly I’m stuck for words.

  The thing is, I’m sure she’d tell me this is brilliant news and I’m sure it is. I know it is. Hugh says it is. I’m just waiting to feel that it is, or, more accurately, to feel that it is for longer than ninety consecutive seconds. I’m bound to get excited soon, aren’t I? I’m bound to go gaga about little socks in babyGap. I wonder if they come with instructions on how to get them from the packet to the foot? It’s just so new and unexpected and unplanned that I haven’t had time to digest, process and react appropriately.

  And I’m nothing if not appropriate.

  I’m a slave to the magazines that tell you how to file your nails, buff your skin, wash your hair for optimum shape/ silkiness/shine. I know which shoes go with which length skirt. I know which denier stocking to wear for every occasion. I know how much to tip taxi drivers, bellboys and waiters in every European country, Canada and the States. I have an appropriate response to a discussion on any election – local, national or international. In fact, I have an appropriate response to just about any conversation: the arts (‘fascinating’), food (‘This is delicious, is that cinnamon I can taste?’), football (‘I’d like to see it become a family sport again’) and politics (‘it’s a serious matter’). For the record, I can discuss a number of other subjects in depth. I know an awful lot about Renaissance literature, Helmut Newton’s early work and the history of Punch and Judy shows, amongst other topics. You’d be surprised how rarely an in-depth knowledge of anything is considered appropriate. My adult life has been a series of goals, which I’ve set, then achieved. I’ve always known the direction I was travelling in, even during those long years whilst I waited for Hugh – at least I had decided to wait for him. It was my choice, my decision. I have always been unquestionably, undoubtedly, assuredly, 100 per cent in control. The thing is, I don’t make mistakes. I don’t make blunders, miscalculations, slips. The only ‘err’ I’ve ever made is to err on the side of caution. I haven’t so much as made an impulse purchase in a sale that I’ve later regretted.

  And now this.

  I decide against mentioning it over the phone and instead tersely advise Sam to get showered, get dressed and get into work before anyone notices her absence. I promise I’ll ring her tomorrow and then I hang up quickly to avoid hearing her cry.

  6

  The morning passes in a smudge, not even a blur. A blur would at least suggest activity. I wonder if I appear to be exactly the same George to everyone else? Probably. Which is odd – in fact, I
am entirely different.

  At lunchtime I nip out to buy a maternity book, as it strikes me that whilst I have some vague notion that being pregnant means my periods stop and I’ll get fat, this is all I know. I’m spectacularly uninformed on the subject.

  The wet London streets are teeming with shoppers, hoping to take advantage of the dregs of the sales. I watch them scuttle from shop to bus trying and failing to avoid the rain. The shoppers are the only things moving. The rest of London is at a standstill, partly because of the pouring rain, and partly because the lorry drivers are protesting against something or other, they have a taste for it. I think that today they are objecting to the French exporting French cheese. A point of principle that evades me.

  On the way to the bookshop a strange thing happens to me. I swear I have never, ever seen a pregnant woman in London. Not one in all the years I’ve lived here. But on the short walk from Golden Square to Piccadilly, which can be no more than a few hundred yards, I see three. Three. And two women with babies strapped to their front in those sling things, plus countless women with pushchairs (and therefore babies). I keep expecting Jeremy Beadle to jump out from behind a lamp-post and tell me that I’ve been framed, that this is all a joke, that the waddling women are really extras with cushions stuffed up their dresses for my benefit.

  Although their misery looks real enough.

  And they are miserable-looking. Tired, uncomfortable, fat. Not blooming, blossoming or benign as promised by prevailing myth.