A Polaroid of Peggy Read online

  It wasn’t just that the prospect of watching an amateur production of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ performed by the members of a suburban synagogue made me worry that I’d soon be thinking that Uncle Vanya in contemporary Nicaragua wasn’t so bad after all. And neither was it the deflating sensation, one I’ve experienced many times in my life, that when you finally seem to be in sight of getting what you really, really want, you find you don’t really want it at all.

  No, what this was about, at least in part, was a battle of wills. And we were locked in stalemate. She just wouldn’t give in. And I wouldn’t give up. I hadn’t been constantly pressing her to come and live with me and the cat, nor pushing the probably more saleable line of looking for somewhere else to live with me but without the cat. Yet somehow, on some telepathic level, that was the message I know I was insistently transmitting. And you can fairly accuse me of handling this totally wrongly, of being my own worst enemy, of simply not backing off enough to give her the time and space that she kept saying she wanted. Surely, I should have seen, that in the scheme of things, four weeks on Noreen’s couch, or even four months, was nothing to get worked up about. Notwithstanding the inconvenience and irritation to me of this arrangement, we were, as I have just described, having a pretty terrific time, were we not?

  And you could also ask, if it meant so much to me, why I didn’t just say stuff this patience lark for a game of soldiers and go all out for the boldness? Why did I not go off to a jewellers one lunchtime, buy an engagement ring, take her for a candlelit dinner and flip open the box between courses? I suppose one answer is, that for all my supposed ardour, and the long term possibilities I entertained, and the Tarzan and Jane flights of fancy, I wasn’t yet ready to go that far.

  (But I will say this in my defence. Wasn’t Peggy, in spending so much time with me, in sleeping with me a little more than occasionally, in twice inviting me to meet her parents, and yet also making such a business of declaring her need for independence, sending out slightly mixed signals?)

  Finally – except was it really, really finally? – there was Miller.

  Yes, she had at last quit that particular hearth and home. And reassured me a hundred times that the embers of their one-time romance had grown so cold in the grate that they couldn’t have been revived if you’d thrown a tanker load of petrol over them and chucked in a lighted blow torch. But what about all those boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back stories? Such things happened. So, from my perfectly reasonable, utterly paranoid point of view, for as long as Peggy wasn’t safely stamped as my property, and preparing the fricassee of hairy mammoth in my cave, why shouldn’t such a thing happen again?

  All that was why, when I said in reply to Peggy’s second invitation to New Rochelle, “Brilliant. Yes, I’d love to come”, I may have said it just a little – a tiny bit – wearily.

  And it was why, when I overhead Peggy saying she was going for lunch with Miller, it was a racing certainty that two and two would add up to anything but four.

  *

  I awoke looking up at a moulded (and probably mouldy) ceiling with peeling yellowy paint and a single naked light bulb hanging from it, thankfully unlit. I had no idea where I was or how I had got there. It seemed that I was lying on someone’s bed but, again, it was a mystery as to whose. I tried to turn my head to see if there was anyone else present who might be able to offer some useful clues but a series of violent explosions in what, I would guess, was my cerebrum, advised against sudden movement. In between the explosions, I could detect the sound of rain beating against a window and those were the only signals my brain seemed capable of receiving until there was a click and a blinding flash.

  “Turn the fucking light off.” Not perhaps the politest way to greet a stranger.

  “So, you avake,” came the reply, husky, feminine, mittel-Europeanish by the sound of it.

  At last the pennies, began, one by one, but very slowly, to drop. It was probably not a stranger after all. It was almost certainly the girl with the green spiky hair, who’d turned out be German, and whose name was – fuck knows. Had she told me? Had I asked her?

  “Not vonting to be pogoing now, Andrew, yes?” she enquired and then laughed.

  Yes, I most certainly did not want to be pogoing or doing anything more strenuous than staying stock still, exactly where I was. As to how I had got there, I dare say you can fill in most of the blanks yourself. But, very briefly, in case you think that’s my job, I’ll cover the bases:

  Pogo-drink-snog-pogo-puff-pogo-grope-pogo-drink-puff-leave-snog-grope-walk-drink (brought it from club) walk-puff-snog-snog-snog-jog (interest rising) arrive (here) climb-climb-climb-climb-rest (now I was beginning to remember – this was what they called in New York a cold water walk-up, and a sodding long way up too) climb-climb-unlock-unlock-unlock (not many for a New York door) and – the usual. Actually, it wasn’t that usual, at least not for me, whatever impression I might like to give to Bart and Brett, and neither do I want to demean – still can’t remember her name – by claiming that I didn’t enjoy myself with her or suggest that she wasn’t a very sweet girl with a nice bod whose number I wouldn’t, at a different point in my life, have been very pleased to take.

  But Peggy, whose face suddenly floated into view, she was not. Jesus H. Christ, what had I done? No, forget the question mark. !!!!!! (No question was ever more rhetorical than that one.)

  I fell out of the building – which turned out to be miles across in the Lower West Side, practically by the Hudson and not nearly such a smart address as it is now – and into the very, very damp street down which Noah could easily have floated. The rain continued to cascade down, and as I had not had the foresight to equip myself with a raincoat, hat and umbrella before going off on my drink and drugs and dancing and doing it with a stranger binge, the huge fat drops plastered my ever thinning hair to my scalp and ran in rivulets down my forehead and my face, and down the upturned collar of my second hand Hawaiian shirt – did I mention that? Not very punk but purchased from a store in Hudson St, v. cool at the time – and meanwhile my shoes squelched their way through puddles the size of Lake Superior.

  As I aquaplaned my way across town, my brain at last began to re-engage, and I realised today was a working day, and what is more, that I had a deadline to meet on the print ad I was supposed to be writing for the newest rust bucket out of Detroit, the producers of which had, in their wisdom, chosen to employ an advertising agency who, in their turn, relied upon the lightning wits of people such as Bart, Brett, and myself. More fool them, you may say, and it would be hard to disagree, but still, good manners decreed that the agency, and therefore, I, should have something to show. That being the case, and, taking into account my deteriorating relations with Todd Zwiebel, and that this job was at least two weeks overdue, I decided that I would have to head for McDonnell Martin rather than take the preferred road home.

  Leaving a small pond in the elevator, and a river of drips as I passed the ever supportive Laverne – “That another new look, Andrew? Think I preferred the two ties” – I eventually reached my desk, and sat shivering in the freezing cold of my air-conditioned office. On my desk was a handwritten note, short and to the point: ‘Where the hell are you? Bring your stuff straight to meeting. Nick.’ Nick was Nick Moreno, my immediate creative supervisor. And there was a PS, cryptic and rather menacing: ‘This matters!’

  I looked at my watch. Fuck, it was nearly eleven and I had barely half an hour to think of something. The art director who I was supposed to be working with on this particular brief was Christo, but, frankly, he was a dead loss at coming up with anything resembling an idea, and it was always understood that when on a job with him, the writer came up with the thought, and Christo, having, it had to be admitted, a bloody good eye, would tickle it into visual shape. In other words, if I didn’t have a brainwave rapidamonty it would be my fan that the shit would be hitting.

  Any w
riter, of whatever kind, will tell you that the only thing that really gets the creative juices flowing is fear of the rapidly approaching deadline, and so it was that day. The three muses popped into my office on cue and presented me with a stunning idea which – you would have thought – fitted perfectly with the brief. This was, according to the briefing document with which I was mopping the rain off my head, to highlight the quietness of our new compact’s engine. (Compacts – e.g. vehicles slightly less enormous than last year’s ludicrously over-sized models – were, following the latest oil price hike, all the rage in ’79.) And my inspired solution to the problem, my knock-em-dead headline for the ad, was: ‘Do you have a bee in your bonnet about compacts?’

  Complex, I will grant you, multi-layered, but utterly brilliant. It addressed the number one consumer concern – as shown by reams of research – that smaller cars with smaller engines made for a noisier, and therefore less desirable, driving experience than the six litre monsters that American motorists had always had before, and would really much rather have now. Do you see? A bee in your bonnet. As in a persistently worrying idea. But also: As in a noise coming from your engine. How fucking clever was that! (In case you insist on answering that question, and doing so by saying something like ‘not fucking clever at all, just obscure and totally dreadful’, I would say, while conceding the basic point, that sometimes when striving desperately to be creative, the totally dreadful and the fucking clever can be easily confused. Anyway, at this point in proceedings I had no such doubts.)

  Suddenly, all worries about my unforgivable disloyalty to Peggy were forgotten. Self-flagellation would cease. Non-stop patting on the back from Todd Zwiebel would follow. That was always the way for me, and I am sure I am not alone. I got such a rush from having an idea I thought was really good – in advertising that’s your fundamental raison d’etre – that any pain I was feeling about anything would instantaneously evaporate. The trouble always started when I realised that it really wasn’t that great an idea after all. Then I would be plunged into despair quicker than a butterfingered trapeze artist.

  So this was what preceded the moment when I ran into the creative review meeting with my piece of paper and my brilliant line written on it. I hadn’t even had time to speak to Christo beforehand so it was new to everyone in the room: to him, to Nick Moreno, to the account men, who, first thing in the afternoon, were due to meet the client. And also there was the Manatee himself, who, completely unexpectedly, had descended from Mount Olympus for a second time in as many months, quite possibly, one could not help but surmise, because the rust bucket manufacturers were exhibiting the same signs of itchy feet as the shampoo charlies. (This, I felt, shed light on the cryptic PS.) Still, not to worry. The greater the agency’s need, the greater my glory would be.

  “So,” began Nick Moreno, who had never trusted me, being a hard bitten Italian American from New Jersey, and for whom, therefore, it was an article of faith that all Englishmen were faggots, “tell us what you got.”

  And so I presented my brilliant idea and waited for the metaphorical thunder of applause. (And, it might not be too much to hope, perhaps the odd literal ripple.) But there was no metaphorical thunder. No literal ripple. Not a single palm slapped another palm, not in reality nor as a figure of speech. Instead, there was a mystified silence. At the very most, there might have been the tiny susurrus of air movement brought about by collective furrowing of brows or dropping of jaws.

  Sensing, a trifle anxiously, the possibility that my audience might not have grasped all the subtleties of my brilliant idea, I went through the aforementioned rigmarole about the various implications of bees and bonnets. The account men looked at each other, Nick looked at Todd, Todd looked to the heavens, and Christo looked at me with the expression of a man on a plane who’s just looked out the window and noticed the wing’s dropped off.

  Then Nick said, clearly enjoying the moment regardless of the fact that we had less than a couple of hours before the now distinct possibility of walking naked into the conference chamber, “Well, let’s see now. Number one. In America, the part of a car that covers the engine is called a ‘hood’ and not a ‘bonnet’.”

  “Number one?” I squeaked back, thinking ‘there’s a no.2? Because no.1 alone has just totally screwed me.’

  “And number two—” Nick paused for effect.

  “Number two, there is no such expression in America that I have ever heard of—”

  Here he paused again, and looked around the room just to make sure he was not unique in this deficiency. He wasn’t.

  “—there is no such expression as ‘a bee in the bonnet’.”

  Ah.

  I walked out of the meeting with my head held as high as it could be – not that high – and to the accompaniment of Nick saying to Christo that he shouldn’t worry, they’d get someone else to work with him through lunch. He didn’t even bother to ask me to have another go, even on my own, when, given the urgency of the situation, they would have been grateful for any half-baked idea from the doorman. And he didn’t even bother to say to me directly – not that he needed to, but still – that I was being stood down. (On the grounds of my hopelessly, incurable, effete Englishness.)

  I couldn’t even face Brett and Bart. I thought of turning to the one I loved for consolation – for who else should you turn to in such circumstances? But then the night’s misdemeanours suddenly swung back into view, and I slumped forwards onto my desk in a miserable heap. Never mind two ties. My next fashion statement would be sackcloth and ashes and those spiked metal garter things that those Opus Dei chaps are supposed to wear. And, if that didn’t work, I might do a bit of thrashing myself with chains, too.

  I did wonder about something though. And that was this: given that only an hour before, when under the illusion that I’d had this brilliant idea, I’d succeeded in putting my unfaithfulness to Peggy completely out of my mind, was I feeling quite as sorry as I was telling myself? Or was I just feeling sorry for myself?

  I didn’t like to think I was quite that shallow – I hadn’t come to accept my true flawed self as I have today – so I took a fateful decision (and, as you will see, stuck to it) to ensure that I took full responsibility for my errors.

  In other words I was in a hole, and I called in a JCB.

  Chapter 17

  London, 1999

  “Eebahgum.”

  It was Frank Connor, BWD’s financial director, speaking.

  I looked up, startled. Frank was from Dagenham originally, and had never quite managed to lose the accent. I hadn’t been paying a lot of attention but I couldn’t imagine why he’d suddenly broken into broadest Yorkshire.

  “Pardon?” I said.

  “E-bit-da,” he said very deliberately, and then stopped to make sure I had taken it in.

  Ah, not ‘eebahgum’ but ‘ebitda’. Well, that explained that then.

  “For goodness sake, Andrew, do listen. You asked me to help, so you might do me that courtesy. Ebitda is what it’s all about. You’ve got to have your Ebitda before you can start.”

  I think he started to notice my eyes glazing over again. He got more animated. “It’s an acronym, Andrew. For a formula. The letters stand for the things we base the value of a company on. E-B – earnings before, I – interest, T – tax, D – depreciation, blah, blah, blah …”

  Frank didn’t exactly say blah, blah, blah, but he might as well have done. Like all creative types I regarded the bean counters as even lower in the pecking order than the suits – unless I needed them to sign my expenses or something, then I prostrated myself before them – and I could never be bothered to clutter up my brilliant mind with tedious figures. The only reason I was with Frank was that Harriet Braintree insisted I provide her with an accurate picture of my financial situation and for that I needed to know what my stake in the company was worth. Frank was the guy who could tell me.

  B
efore I had started to get hold of this stuff about my ‘net worth’, Harriet had been at pains to warn me to play with a straight bat – “No hiding the Rubens in the attic, Andrew, no secret bank accounts in Lichtenstein, ha ha ha.” And being the wuss I am, the type who goes cold at the very thought of the old bill or the taxman or anybody else knocking on the door at the dead of night, I dutifully complied. As far as this part of the exercise went, that meant not succumbing to the temptation to have a quiet word in Frank’s shell-like. Harriet’s warning was not to be ignored. “Believe me, Andrew, they’ll know if you’re playing ducks and drakes.”

  So while Frank tapped away at his calculator, muttering about multiples and cash flow and other such impenetrable financial rhubarb and wrote down lots of numbers with his fountain pen and made his careful computations, I wandered about his office, checking out the view – nothing to write home about, facing into the well like Lucille’s – looking over his shoulder at the silver-framed photos of his wife and children – nothing to write home about either – and keeping my mouth shut like a good boy.

  After an eternity Frank waved me back to my seat, and wrote something down, which I presumed was the amount he’d arrived at, on a post-it note which he very deliberately folded in half before pushing it across the desk towards me. (Why do people insist on doing that? Do they think they’re in the Mob? Did Frank think I was wearing a wire? The door was shut, we were on our own, why couldn’t he have just told me?) I went to pick the post-it note up, but he clamped his hand over mine, and then lamented over the amount we’d overpaid for the design company and the losses that had been haemorrhaging from the PR outfit.

  “If it hadn’t been for them – and salaries, over budget again this year – and the renovations – paid through the nose if you ask me – it would have been a fair bit better. Be that as it may, we have a total company value of fifteen and a half, I would say, which makes your share …”