Do You Want to Know a Secret? Page 10

‘Fabulous. I’d have sworn there was a Scotsman in the room with us, and I’m only amazed you’re not in a kilt.’

  I give him a round of applause and he grins, then I half-glance at my watch. Not being rude or anything, but I really have to get back to my office.

  ‘You’re rushing?’ he says.

  Shit, I thought I looked at the watch subtly.

  ‘Yeah, you know yourself. Mad morning ahead. I have to get back to work, sit by the phone and then pray very, very hard that somehow, miraculously, I land this contract.’

  I badly want to ask him whether I overstepped the mark in the meeting, but my instinct tells me it’s probably not a good idea to ask the office messer. Chances are he may not even have been awake for half of it. He nods and twinkles down at me.

  ‘OK, well, here’s my card. I’m sure we’ll be in touch with you very soon. Great ideas, by the way.’

  ‘Thanks for the encouragement, but I’ll be starting a novena the minute I get into my car. Nothing like hedging your bets, is there?’

  ‘Don’t forget these,’ he says, handing me my oversized bag of Choca-Mocha kisses as he walks me to the lift. Well, I stride and he ambles would be nearer the mark.

  ‘Freebies and celebrities,’ he says, pressing the lift button for me. ‘The twin pillars of the advertising industry. Fond of chocolate, then, are you?’

  ‘It’s the single girl’s best friend. Are you a betting man?’

  ‘Only on monumentally important stuff. You know, like who’ll be the first housemate evicted from Big Brother, or how long celebrity marriages will last, that kind of thing. What, are you suggesting that I’m some kind of timewaster?’

  He grins and I notice he has the cutest dimple under his chin, like one of the Douglases, Michael maybe, or the dad who played Spartacus.

  ‘Well, you see this pack?’ I say, waving the bag of kisses under his nose, mock-threateningly. ‘I can confidently bet you, that by the time I hear back about this contract, I’ll have worked my way through the whole thing. A sugar high is the best recipe in the world for beating stress, in my book. If I do land this gig, I’ll probably be four stone heavier next time you see me.’

  He laughs. The lift doors open and I hop in and make a ‘fingers crossed’ gesture. Just as the door is gliding shut he says, ‘It was lovely to meet you. I’m Daniel, by the way. In case you didn’t catch my name.’

  ‘Nice to meet you too, Daniel.’

  The lift glides down and I roll my eyes, thinking, yes, he’s sweet, yes he’s a laugh and no, he’s not married. (No ring, I checked; I always check.) But I know right well that if I worked with someone like that, I’d never get anything done. Fellas like that are just too much of a distraction.

  I get back to the security of my car and check myself for dribbly mascara in the mirror and it’s then that I make two horrifying discoveries: a) All around the edge of my mouth is the remains of the Choca-Mocha kiss I wolfed down before the meeting, so as I was pitching and doing my best to come over all businesslike and assertive, I must have looked like the girl who ate all the pies, but that’s nothing to point b).

  It’s only as I’m putting Messer Man’s card into my wallet that I get a look at his full name and title.

  There it is, in dirty big black-and-white italics.

  DANIEL BEST

  CHAIRMAN AND MANAGING DIRECTOR

  BEST ADVERTISING AGENCY

  Chapter Eight

  GOD BLESS GOOGLE, that’s all I can say. It really is the single girl’s best friend. I mean, I just don’t know what any self-respecting desperado like myself did before it came along, short of hiring private detectives to get the ‘911’ on a guy. (Excuse the Americanism; I watch a lot of crime dramas in the Law and Order vein.)

  OK, so it may not give the really vital information we all need about guys, you know, like star sign, annual income or marital status, but you’d really be amazed at some of the things you can pick up. The minute I get back into my office, I switch on my computer and look him up.

  Yes, bingo, there he is in glorious Technicolor, and I’m not messing, there’s only about forty entries.

  DANIEL BEST, BEST ADVERTISING, CHANCERY ST. Cutting edge advertising agency, founded in 1998, winner of the 2007 IMA creative award for excellence . . . company annual turnover well in excess of twenty-five million (WHAT!!!) . . . extensive client list including Guinness, blah, blah, blah . . .

  My eye scrolls down the page, looking for, shall we say, information of a more personal nature. Can’t help myself. I click on the Best website and it’s so bloody good it makes me red-faced. I’m not messing, the Harper PR page looks so primitive and prehistoric by comparison, it might as well be carved in stone. Best’s is just so cool and ‘out there’. Every client they represent has a logo on the home page, and when you click on it, the advertising theme tune used in their campaign comes up, along with sound effects, the works. Randomly, I click on a big detergent company they represent and up pops the ad they shot for it on a tropical paradise island, palm trees, sound of crashing ocean waves, the whole shebang.

  Right, that’s it.

  Note to self: I am seriously revamping my company’s image next time I get a minute.

  I’m absolutely dying to pick the whole morning over with Barbara in her official capacity as project manager with particular regard to relationships, but can’t risk it until Paris and Nicole have gone out for lunch. Now, I do have my own office, but the partition is only frosted glass, and what can I say? There are certain conversations you don’t want anyone overhearing. Particularly as I wouldn’t put it past either of them to actually know Daniel Best socially. The two of them are both unbelievably well-connected and are always turning out to be boozing buddies or goddaughters or VBFs with all sorts of famous people, which, as you can imagine, comes in incredibly handy whenever I’m trying to get ‘faces’ to come to a launch.

  In fact, on that subject, I’m still in bewildered awe of the time I was organizing a party to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Film Festival and was like a madwoman, practically tearing my hair out going through my little black book of celebrity contacts. (Well, OK, so some of them are soap-opera actors, that you’d look at and know the face but not the name, but there are one or two you might just have heard of in there, honest.) Anyway, as bad luck would have it, the event coincided with the Cannes Film Festival, so any genuine A-listers I could have bagged were all out of town. Or washing their hair or getting their spray tans done or their bikinis waxed, well in advance of it. So there I was, having zero per cent success, working my way from the A-listers to the Z, on the verge of really scraping the barrel and just ringing up the local TV station’s press office to beg/cajole/bribe with free booze (which always guarantees a few famous liggers) absolutely anyone, just to come along and show their face, in the hope we could garner some column inches. Honest to God, I was so desperate I’d have settled for a few weathergirls, a late-night DJ, the guy who does the Lottery numbers, anyone.

  Next thing, just as I’m about to hit the gin bottle in my despair, Paris, who at that stage had barely started working for me, pipes up that her VBF’s brother is only Colin bloody Farrell. Who she happened to know was in town. Who she also happened to miraculously know was at a bit of a loose end. Cut to the most over-publicized launch you ever came across, with pics of Colin falling out of the party with a brunette tucked under each arm, actually making the front pages.

  Cut back to me giving Paris a pay rise and extending her contract, pretty much for as long as it suits her to stay.

  Note to self: never, ever refer to Daniel Best in front of either of them, on the principle that loose lips cost ships.

  I wait till they’ve both preened themselves to trot off for lunch then pick up the phone to Barbara. One o’clock, yup, she should definitely be well out of bed by now. She answers immediately.

  ‘Well, prepare to relinquish your breath,’ I say dramatically.

  ‘Huh? Vick, that you?’ God, she st
ill sounds half-asleep. ‘Hey, how’d your big pitch meeting go?’

  I fill her in on the morning’s events and it’s like the more I talk about it aloud, the more I think I must have come across as being completely out of my depth in there, and that it’ll be a minor miracle if I ever hear from Best’s ever ever again.

  ‘Your idea for the product sounds amazing,’ says Barbara loyally. ‘And if they don’t like it, let them shag off. Their loss. That it? Can I roll over for my second sleep now?’

  ‘And I wouldn’t mind, but I met an attractive man when I was in there, too,’ I say, not letting her off the phone. ‘And before you even ask, no, there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with him, he doesn’t have two heads or anything like that. No wedding ring either. But what’s really going to shock you is . . . now, are you sitting down for this?’

  ‘Yeah. Well, technically, lying down. Still in bed.’

  ‘Oh, right. Anyway, I Googled him and he’s like . . . founding director of the company and like a multi-millionaire into the bargain.’

  ‘Ah, multi-millionaires. The forgotten minority.’

  ‘Barbara, the point is, there’s a very good chance I made a complete show of myself in front of him, not to mention all his creatives. Bet they’re sticking darts into a photo of me right now.’

  ‘It’s beyond your control and you’re only wasting energy in focusing on it. And as for this attractive guy, you are absolutely not allowed to do your usual trick and focus on him to the detriment of any other fella you might meet. I’m speaking now as your project manager, you understand. No more putting all your eggs in one basket.’

  ‘As if,’ I say, a bit too quickly.

  God, it’s amazing how fast Barbara can go from half-asleep mode to Donald Trump in . . . like . . . a nano-second.

  ‘All I’m saying is, today I met an eligible, reasonably good-looking man who entertained me in light conversation for approximately three minutes and who wasn’t married. Compared with last month, this is Mardi Gras.’

  ‘Hey, don’t get me wrong,’ she yawns, ‘it’s all good, and moving in the right direction, baby. Just keep Thursday night free. And I don’t give a shite how frazzled you are after that pitch meeting, you’re coming out to man-hunt and that’s an order.’

  Right then. Here goes.

  Pre-on-the-town check list for night out with Barbara.

  Keep telling myself that if I can be successful in work then I can be successful with fellas.

  On that subject, do not go on about work. This is my night off and must remember to relax and enjoy myself. Even though the pitch meeting was on Monday, it’s now Thursday, three full days have passed and I still haven’t heard anything back from Best Advertising yet about whether or not I got the contract. Which makes me think the worst: that I really did piss people off, and now they’ll never use me again. And it’s really driving me nuts. Especially because I can’t very well ring them, and therefore have to sit back and behave like a model of patience and forbearance until I hear back from them with either good, bad, or terrible news. Jaysus.

  As per my detailed instructions from Barbara, must constantly remind myself to avoid ‘trying too hard’ with guys tonight, on grounds that it’s a major turn-off. This I find fair enough.

  Well, no, actually, on second thoughts, maybe it is just the teeniest bit unfair. According to her, this even covers how I’m dressed: she’s banned me from too much make-up on the grounds that men hate it and will never go near someone who looks ‘like a drag queen’. (Her phrase, not mine.) I think she meant well by this but . . . ouch. She can be very strict, Barbara, and has furthermore vetoed my bringing emergency touch-ups with me so I can ‘do my usual’ as she puts it. According to her, whenever we’re out and I do get chatting to a DSM, this involves my alleged tendency to run to the Ladies and lather on a few extra layers of war paint, gloss, whatever you will, in order to maximize my chances, which she says all comes under the banner headline of ‘trying too hard’. Personally I find this very tough to accept and suggested to her that she’s talking through her bum. (Secretly don’t believe the male population are ready for the sight of my bare face, so am limiting self to tinted moisturizer, concealer, nude eye-shadow, long-lash mascara and a juicy tube. Will smuggle these in my handbag and hope she’ll be too plastered by the end of the night to even notice. Or care.)

  Ditto, my clothes. Barbara has limited me to jeans and shirts, no work suits, flashy handbags/earrings/anything that says ‘I earn a few quid’. Smashed broke, apparently, is less threatening to guys. Honest to God, the girl has more ludicrous rules than Blockbuster video.

  No dust-flecking at any time on grounds that if it’s irritating to a woman, just imagine how guys must feel. On this point, at least, we agree.

  Right then. I give myself a very thorough up-and-down self-inspection check, just to make sure there’s no grout stuck to any part of me. (Not as daft as it sounds, only last week, I found a gloopy bit of it stuck to the back of my good Karen Millen jacket. Very attractive.)

  And if you think this is all obsessional detail, you should have heard Barbara on the subject of where we’d meet. Again, I had to bow to her on this one as no one knows the clubs and pubs of this city better than her. In fact, she could probably write a chapter in the Lonely Planet guide to Dublin.’ Easy.

  ‘It has to be somewhere MOR,’ she said to me on the phone earlier.

  ‘MOR?’

  ‘Middle of the road, dopey. Can’t be too posh or expensive. Put it this way, the Four Seasons is right out.’

  ‘Ah, no why?’ Shit, I was kinda looking forward to one of the amazing margaritas they do there.

  ‘Because, oh socially challenged one, everyone knows that places like that attract married men on the pull like flies to shite. Known fact. Same goes for anywhere that charges more than eight euro for a bottle of fizz you’d buy in Tesco at half the price.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I say, a bit worried we’ll end up with a load of bikers in the Hard Rock Café.

  ‘And I’m not taking you anywhere too rough and ready either, cos they only attract gangs over on stag nights from Liverpool.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that.’

  ‘The kind of place we’re ideally looking for is . . . well, put it like this. If it was a singer, it would be . . . Frank Sinatra. Someone unobjectionable, someone that everyone likes. Or maybe at a push Norah Jones.’

  This, I should tell you, is like a game we’ve been playing for years. ‘If X was a country/cocktail/household detergent then it would be Y,’ that kind of thing. Got a bit nasty one drunken night when Barbara said if I was a drink I’d be a milky cup of tea and if I was a car I’d be a second-hand Nissan Micra. To get her back, I told her if she was a TV presenter, she’d be Janet Street Porter WITH the teeth and the accent, and furthermore if she was an alcoholic drink, she’d be a flagon of cider, drunk under a park bench. A cruel game, you’ll notice, but in public at least, it’s a very handy language code that’s come in useful on more than one occasion.

  ‘Got it,’ she says. ‘We meet in Odessa for a quick margarita, then progress our way through Temple Bar. A strict one-drink minimum per establishment quota will apply, so get some soakage in first, baby, and you can tell Paris and Nicole you’ll be late to work on Friday.’

  ‘Oh God, but I can’t, I’ve a meeting on Friday . . .’

  ‘Then you cancel it and reschedule. Thursday it is. I’ve found I straggle home with approximately a fifty per cent higher hit-rate with fellas on a Thursday than any other night of the week. Don’t ask me why, it’s just a mystery.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You know, there are certain things in this life we’ll never fully understand. Why Kelly Osbourne has a career, for one. And another thing; if we have to stay out till six in the morning, we are not coming home till you’ve picked up three new phone numbers. As God is my witness, you’ll never be single again,’ she throws in, doing her Scarlett O’Hara voice.

  I hang up, r
eally touched at all the trouble she’s taking on project me, bless her.

  I could hug Barbara.

  Chapter Nine

  9.05 P.M.

  I could kill Barbara.

  I’ll give her this much, she is on the money about her equation between Thursday night and single men, the place is crawling with them. (Something to do with it being pay day, perchance? Anyway, I digress.) These guys are bearing all the hallmarks of boom warriors: they’re attractive, well-dressed, hot-to-trot, all in packs and all eyeing up women. That last one probably being the most important. There’s just one bloody problem, every time a guy approaches us (or, approaches Barbara would probably be more accurate), she yanks me away and, on my behalf, is rejecting perfectly normal, ordinary fellas on the flimsiest pretexts you ever heard of.

  Example one: ‘Stay away from him, he has Red Bull breath,’ she snapped as one poor fella walked/staggered away from us. Now, fair enough, the guy may, just possibly have been drinking since lunchtime, there was a LOT of swaying going on and maybe, yes, I did have to keep asking him to repeat everything he was saying he slurred so much, but apart from that there was nothing wrong with him. Oh, yeah and he did burp really loudly into my ear at one stage. But hey, nobody’s perfect.

  Example two: ‘Half of what that guy says is just plain stupid, and the rest of it is boring.’ Right, well in fairness, Barbara mightn’t be a million miles off the mark here. This was a guy who just plonked down at our table, asked us what we both did, then launched into his theory about why the computer will be dead in about five years’ time. I think he meant to be entertaining in an ironic way, but then again, there’s always the chance he was just as thick as the wall.

  Example three: ‘Eugh, I HATE that “too cool for school” type, he should be taken outside and sprayed down for Tarantinos,’ she groaned about a fella who I thought was perfectly acceptable. To my eyes, anyway. Very little wrong with the guy.

  That is, hardly anything. Yes, OK, admittedly he may have been wearing shades indoors, and admittedly, he did go on a bit about how pop culture influenced the beat poets in sixties Merseyside, and somehow, through a lot of rambling and free association, somehow got from that to telling us that he’s the country’s first professional blogger, but nothing I couldn’t have put up with or sanded down over time.