Famous (3 page)

It hadn’t escaped me that the advertisements we created for men’s products didn’t use these types of words. They seemed to be solely for the benefit, or rather confusion, of women consumers. Men’s ads used words like close shave and silky smooth — straightforward, self-explanatory, no-nonsense kind of words. What I struggled to understand was why we couldn’t take away all of these confusing made-up words and just say things consumers could comprehend? Like
if you use this cleanser then you won’t have poxy skin anymore
. Or
our shampoo will tame the wild beast that is your hair
. Or
when you feel like a piece of crap, this moisturiser will stop your sobbing
. Or
if you use this eye gel you won’t look like a wrinkly old hag in ten years’ time
. Or even
if you use this night cream you will finally get a date
. Things that actually have meaning to women. Things they can relate to. This was the sort of information women needed, the sort of information that would convince them to buy the product. They didn’t want to know about
pH 5.5
or
aqua-fix technology
. They wanted to know about
bits of leather
and
how to avoid
.

I was convinced that by cutting down on all of these superfluous and gobbledegook words the advertisements would be shorter and we would thereby cut our clients’ costs, meaning we’d have a lot more walking through the doors. For example, a tampon commercial that currently used words like
outer-core
and
revolutionary technology
could just say
comes in a pretty packet
and women would be sold. Do they really care about outer-cores and revolutionary technology? No. They just want the packet to look pretty in their handbags and cheer them up a bit when their stomach feels as though it’s eating itself.

And if creatives weren’t using words from another planet, they were bandying about words like
fine lines and wrinkles
and
miraculously disappear
. We all know things don’t miraculously disappear, they just move about a bit when you stare at them too long in the bathroom mirror.

I halted my internal rant and tuned back to the inane discussion at hand. Clearly they had moved on from shampoo.

‘Bumology,’ said Trixie.

‘Bumowhat?’ I asked.

‘Bumology. Y’know…getting your future read by your bottom.’

‘By your bottom? Tell me you’re joking?’ I said, although experience told me she probably wasn’t.

‘Course not, it’s all the rage. Just had it done myself.’

‘You had a stranger look into your future by staring at your bum?’

‘Yep.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘What did they say?’

‘She said big opportunities were going to come my way. Big ideas…big, like, things.’

‘What like cellulite?’

‘No, like y’know, success and stuff,’ replied Trixie, completely failing to notice my sarcasm.

I decided to leave the four of them to it and go back to my office and do some actual work. Plus, if Gareth wasn’t going to listen to my opinion, then there was no point in having one. Although he was the more senior account manager at the firm, and essentially my boss, it seemed to be me who managed all of our key clients these days. Ever since his wife Emma had run off with her Pilates instructor he seemed to be getting grumpier and grumpier. It had been three months already, you’d think he’d be over it by now. She certainly was. Mind you, she was probably getting more sleep than him, being that she’d also left him with the two kids. Having a one-and-a-half-year-old with teething issues and a five year-old with sleepwalking issues was apparently not conducive to getting a good night’s kip. When Emma first left him I was completely on her side. She wanted him to understand what it was like looking after two small kids without an inkling of husbandly support. But ever since three weeks ago, when I was convinced by Gareth when I was in a rare state of not having my wits anywhere about my person to look after the two abandoned tykes for an afternoon, I was beginning to feel sorry for him. Almost. Although technically I hadn’t actually babysat them for the
whole
afternoon. I had dropped them straight round to my parents’ house where my father was overjoyed to have two small boys descend on the place. And I was overjoyed to leave them there. It was more a case of sub-sitting (ie agreeing to look after someone’s children and then farming them off to someone else, preferably someone you know).

I opened up my inbox and set about clearing the piles of messages within.

The first one I opened was from my mother. She had sent me a newspaper article from Chile that blamed television advertising for the fact that two thirteen-year-old Chilean schoolgirls had run themselves to death in an attempt to win a local modelling competition with an international contract up for grabs. Apparently they had done one too many laps of the school field and just sort of keeled over, a hundred metres apart.

What about their parents? I thought. What exactly were they doing while this was happening?

My mother had added her own caption below the article:
The advertising devil strikes again. He is killing our children!

Fantastic. What an excellent start to the day.

My mother was strongly opposed to my choice in career. She was a women’s rights activist, in the loosest possible sense of the words. She was more like the Slyvester Stalone of the women’s movement, a female bulldozer out to mow down as many men as she could. She was vehemently and very vocally opposed to what she termed the ‘negative and discriminating portrayal of women in advertising’.

‘Look at this woman!’ my mother had cried just the weekend before, as she pointed at a magazine ad for an electric juicer. ‘She’s half-naked! What the hell has that got to do with a juicer?’

‘She looks nice,’ I replied.

‘Yes, she looks
nice
. But she doesn’t look like most women does she? Ordinary women who use juicers.’

‘Models use juicers too,’ I protested, half-heartedly.

‘I’m not saying they don’t. I’m just saying that it’s not a fair representation of women in our society, is it? You can bet your burning bra it wasn’t a woman who came up with that ad.’

My mother considered herself fortunate to have borne three daughters, although all three of us were severely lacking in the feminist-icon department. My older sister Vicky, aged thirty-five, was unfortunate enough to be not only married, but also pregnant with her first child. Vicky’s long-term goal was to be an at-home mother with absolutely no desire to ever work again. This was incomprehensible to my mother.

‘What sort of example is that for your daughter?’ my mother would often ask her.

The fact that Vicky didn’t yet know the sex of her unborn child, and that it could potentially be a boy, did not even register on my mother’s radar.

Although not quite as bad as working in advertising, my younger sister Susie, aged thirty, was a beauty therapist.

‘You’re not exactly helping the plight of women by making them beautiful are you?’ said my mother. ‘Couldn’t you have become a lawyer? Or at least joined the army?’

It’s not that my mother was openly scathing about myself and my two sisters (apart from our choice of careers, that is), it’s just that she was somewhat disappointed at not having given birth to Germaine Greer. And it’s not that she wasn’t proud of each of us, in her own slightly barmy way, it’s just that we weren’t exactly firm contenders for taking over the family business.

The happiest I’d ever seen my mother was when Susie confessed she was a lesbian. My mother was over the moon. She even cracked a bottle of champers in celebration, showering Susie with praise and congratulations. I think she was somewhat disappointed she wasn’t a lesbian herself, and this was the next best thing. My poor father visibly drooped at the prospect of yet another female joining our family, until he met Susie’s new friend Roz, that is. Roz was what my father called a
man’s woman
. In other words, Roz was for all intents and purposes a man, but with breasts. I didn’t exactly warm to her. There was something about a woman who knew more about the workings of a Ford Falcon engine than my father which made me nervous.

However, six months later, Susie had decided she wasn’t a lesbian, it was just a phase she was going through. She was in fact a good old-fashioned heterosexual. When Susie broke the news, Mum had excused herself and gone for a long walk, tears framing her eyes. My father was also visibly disappointed by Roz’s sudden departure from our lives, and at being left once again with the three of us, none of whom were remotely interested in donning a pair of overalls and putting their heads under his bonnet.

As a child I had often imagined that I was adopted at birth. I still do hold out some hope. Surely my birth parents were famous celebrities or well-respected businesspeople, who spent their days flitting around the world from one incredibly stylish pad to the next? I’d think to myself. The only holes in this theory were the fact that my sisters and I bore more than a striking resemblance to each other, and that Mum had three photographs of tiny babies covered in revolting matter lying on her very flabby stomach in a hospital bed. Aside from that I was convinced.

I sent a reply to my mother’s email:
What were the girl’s parents doing while they were running around the field killing themselves?

Half an hour later I got another one back:
Their mothers were probably working at their two-dollar fifty-an-hour machinist night-jobs, before going home to make breakfast for their ten children. Their fathers would have either been killed by the Red Rebels, or abandoned the family years ago.

Did she have to be such a pessimist and humanitarian know-it-all? She should take an overseas posting with Amnesty International and leave us all in peace.

2

My life continued its downward spiral when I was invited to a baby shower, a couple of weeks after my date with Jasmine. Laura, who used to work at the firm, was eight months pregnant with her first offspring. She used to be called Legless Laura, on account of the fact she could always be relied upon to drink until she fell off whatever it was she happened to be sitting on. At which point she, or someone else, would invariably pick her body up from the floor, place it back onto its perch, and it would immediately carry on drinking. She was rarely seen without a glass of champers in one hand and a lethally swinging cigarette in the other. I had absolutely no idea what to buy a baby so I bought Laura a very expensive bottle of champagne instead. No doubt she’d be feeling like a drink when the whole hideous birthing part was over and done with.

I was the last to arrive and upon entering Laura’s living room it was glaringly obvious I was the only person out of the ten women present who either hadn’t given birth or was going to be doing so in the very near future. And who wasn’t sporting either an engagement ring or wedding band. The sunlight reflecting off the enormous diamonds on fingers rendered me temporarily blind.

‘Oh…thanks, Sam,’ said Laura, unwrapping the champers and giving me an odd searching look. She wasn’t nearly as excited by my present as she should have been.

Lord how times had changed, I thought to myself. Barely a year ago she would have torn the cork out with her teeth and polished off the bottle in a nanosecond, chilled or not, before declaring it by far the best gift she’d ever received.

‘Coffee Sam?’ asked Laura.

Coffee? What about a good old-fashioned glass of wine? Wasn’t this supposed to be some sort of celebration we were having here?

‘Lovely,’ I replied. ‘Thanks.’

I sat down in the only vacant seat, in the middle of a sofa, sandwiched between two lactating women.

‘Hi Sam,’ someone called out.

I looked at the culprit, a rather plump woman with short brown hair sitting on the sofa opposite. The voice sounded familiar but I had absolutely no idea who she was.

‘Hi,’ I replied, stalling for time. ‘How are you?’

‘Oh you know,’ she replied. ‘Busy busy.’

No clues there. Who was she?

‘How about you?’ she asked.

‘Oh good. Still working away, you know.’

‘You remember Louise, don’t you Sam?’ said Laura, handing me a cup of coffee.

Surely not? It couldn’t be? Louise? Laura’s best friend? Louise who was known for her agility and skill at bar-top dancing? Louise who coined the phrase ‘cheap bubbles leads to trouble’?

‘Of course,’ I lied.

But Louise was skinny as a rake with long blonde hair. And stunning. What in God’s name had happened to her?

‘Lou’s little girl’s almost one now,’ said Laura.

Oh, there we go then.

I had seen Baby Makeovers before. But this was by far the most extreme case I had ever witnessed. From gorgeous, blonde, champagne-swilling girl-about-town to short-haired, plump nappy-hugger in less than two years. Unbelievable!

‘So, what do you do Sam?’ asked Eve mother-of-two, sitting on my right.

‘I work in advertising,’ I replied. ‘Account manager.’

‘Oh…a career woman,’ she said, raising her eyebrows in a manner that suggested being a career woman was akin to having genital scabies. ‘You must work long hours?’

‘Yes.’

‘Married?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Are you married?’

What kind of question was that?

‘No,’ I replied, flicking her the Death Stare.

If she sticks her beak out any further, I thought to myself, I’ll lose an eye.

‘Oh,’ replied Eve, as though she had just taken a large swig of vinegar instead of coffee.

‘Sam’s a lucky single girl,’ piped up Laura, adding for enthusiasm, ‘God how I miss it!’

This comment solicited several
well, yes of course, but look how complete our lives are now!
smug grins from the others.

Before Eve had a chance to further interrogate me, the talk somehow turned to nappies. I had absolutely no idea how.

‘Yes, but disposables are so much easier, aren’t they?’ said Ursula mother-of-one.