Indelible Ink (34 page)

She watched his jiggling foot, shod in a winklepicker, the end of which he stroked compulsively with his fingers. ‘I thought it was a good idea, Terry. And so did my team.’

‘I don’t check up on creative, you know. That’s your job.’

‘It was my idea. I’ll take the rap.’

‘I could see that, actually. Lim wouldn’t have put forward something like that.’

Blanche let this remark sink in.

‘It’s hip and sexy. And Coke could do with some sexing up.’

‘Really? I wouldn’t buy something because of a guy with an erection.’

‘Terry, it’s a
metaphor
. And I buy products with sexy women on them all the time!’

‘Like what?’

Blanche’s mind went blank. Terry smiled and jiggled his foot some more.

Blanche thought about how the one holding the purse strings was always the real boss, and how tired she was of fighting. She thought about Neil French saying,
Women inevitably wimp out and go
suckle something.
If that’s the attitude you had to have to be a celebrity exec, then god help her. Terry was definitely the one who’d pulled the Dulux ad off YouTube, just when it
was going into the top ten. He was jealous. Blanche remembered her dad’s claim that Jonesy was a failed artist.

‘Look, Coke ads are always so juvenile. Why do we have to be afraid of risk? Risk is sexy. You were saying only a few months ago that you wanted us to be more edgy. Remember the underwater
Levi’s?’

‘A masterpiece. A
cinematic
masterpiece. The market for Coke is mainly juvenile.’

‘Not for Diet Coke.’

‘Blanche …’ Terry looked bemused.

‘What?’

He raised his arms. ‘It was
ludicrous
.’

‘So is wearing jeans underwater. Ludicrousness is the spice of advertising!’

‘I mean it was ludicrous to take that pitch into Asher — you know what he’s like.’

She realised that second that Terry was wearing the same Tsubi jeans she had seen on a Hillsonger a fortnight ago in Redfern. Ha! She clamped her grin. She wanted to grab Terry’s
winklepicker and snap it off. Maybe he was gay. Photographed in the
Telegraph
with an
Australian Idol
finalist. Yeah, right. He had never so much as glanced at Blanche’s body.
Not a single joke let alone flirtation had ever passed between them. Maybe he did fuck women but hated them. Wouldn’t be the first. He only liked her when she made the agency a bomb, or won a
prize. He sighed, and right over here, three metres away on his new couch, Blanche could smell his rank breath. Her nausea stirred. How outrageous for him to come in here with such bad breath and
not think he should do anything about it.

‘Coke, Blanche.
Coke
.’

‘Fantastic couch,’ she said, with total sincerity.

‘Marc Newson. Nineteen eighty-six. Their marketing team is on the verge of advising them to go elsewhere so you’ll have to come up with something else fast.’

Blanche nodded without looking up, absent-mindedly as though in response to her own deep thoughts, because while the part of her sitting here was hating Terry diligently and passionately,
thinking the couch must have cost tens of thousands of dollars and Terry would have had the agency pay for it, another part of her was trapped in a fantasy of straddling Terry in his chair, pulling
out his cock, the fuck moving to this couch, aggressive and desperate. A hideous, frantic fantasy all in one split second sprayed across her mind. She felt herself blush and was glad for the
half-closed blinds. She couldn’t speak. Terry smiled at her, eyebrows raised, hands behind his head. ‘What’s that ad for manchester, with the guy in the bed? Bold for its
time.’

‘I can’t remember.’ Blanche rose to leave.

Although she could remember the ad, and that it was around twenty years old. But her idea was a completely different angle.

God
. How could she have thought those disgusting thoughts about Terry? Where did they come from? Like birdshit dropping out of the sky into her eye. She was ashamed and angry as she went
down the corridor. Was it something to do with neuroscience? Neuroscience was everywhere now, have to do something with that … But, Jesus, get out of my head,
please.
Blanche stopped
to get herself a cup of water from the cooler. Yeah, okay, so the chocolate ad had been sexy too, maybe she could let sex go for a little while. Still, it was a great idea. It would have been
noticed. She dropped her cup into the bin and went down to Lim and Kate’s office to deliver the news.

‘It was too radical for this industry,’ Lim hissed.

‘That is such a shit,’ said Kate to her computer, looking up guiltily as the swish of a full suit landed. Blanche had trashed solitaire and every other game on Kate’s computer
twice, and Kate just reloaded them. She could have had the nous to mute it. ‘Better than googling porn,’ Kate quipped.

‘Okay.’ Blanche hung on to the doorframe. ‘I’m going to Mac up the Revlon.’

‘I’ll do it,’ said Kate.

‘No, it’s fine.’

Blanche went back into her office and shut the door. They had to think up a new pitch. She had to go through the media schedules for Narva. There was a meeting with Roche in two days. They had
to think up a new Diet Coke pitch, and fast. Blanche had had a dozen sheets of top-quality art paper and three boxes of charcoal delivered, all on the office-supplies account. She had a craving to
draw, with charcoal soft as kohl, to feel it working into the grain of her skin while her fingers worked it into the paper. But when would she find the time? She lay on the floor, pulled her Thai
silk pillow beneath her head and dropped Refresh into her eyes.

So her childhood home had been sold and a wall had risen around Sirius Cove. She had been relieved that her mother and Clark hadn’t attended the auction because the loss had felt so
personal. Let alone the ignominy of the price. She couldn’t have borne it with them there; somehow the punters hadn’t interfered with that intensely private ritual of letting go and
grieving: like an audience they had wrapped a warm anonymous blanket around it. It was strange to think of her mother still there, sleeping, eating, probably even still gardening in this house that
now felt like a corpse. It was a death yet here Blanche was, at work as usual. When she should have been marching down the main street in a funeral cortège, the world witness to her grief.
She unzipped her skirt to free her legs and one by one brought her knees to her chest. It was cold in the air-conditioning, which made her back ache more. She realised she was crying when Kate
knocked. She hoicked down her skirt and scrambled to her feet. ‘Come in!’

She was standing, hands on knees, as Kate came in.

‘Ya righ’?’

Blanche couldn’t get used to Kate’s vernacular for
How are you?
It always felt like an interrogation and put her on edge. ‘I stood up too quickly,’ she panted.
‘Headspin.’

Kate stood politely by the door. When the thrumming in her head had subsided, Blanche went and sat at her desk. ‘My back’s out.’

‘D’you have a good osteo? I’ve a fan
tastic
osteo, I’ll give you her number. I’ve also been getting loads of acupuncture lately and it’s totally changed
my life.’

‘I’ve got a chiro.’

‘Don’t you find chiro a bit
violent
?’

‘I need a bit of violence,’ Blanche said with a touch of the ham. ‘I’m tough.’

Kate smiled. She stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, a bag of cashews in her hand. She had taken to wearing long white socks beneath her cowboy boots, short kilts and sleeveless shirts
done up high. A quirky old-fashioned rock’n’roll look. Her legs were disgustingly athletic and smooth, and covered in goose bumps. Look at that amazing black skin. No sunburn, no
cancer, so healthy-looking. Blanche wished she had skin like that.

‘I just wanted to apologise for before,’ Kate said. ‘It was out of line.’

‘It’s okay. Sit down.’

Kate sat on the edge of the couch with her feet together, her huge liquid eyes on Blanche. ‘I just trashed solitaire. Promise. I’m really sorry, hey. I’m itching to do some
work, honestly. I’d really love to do the Revlon. If you’re busy or stressed, whatever I can do to take a load off.’

Blanche looked at the pillow she had left in the middle of the floor. She felt like she’d exited the toilet with her skirt stuck in her knickers and been haplessly walking around like that
ever since. She hated ceding. Delegating work was a form of ceding. Having her vulnerabilities on display like this was ceding. ‘Okay,’ she said, ceding. A shiver ran through her body.
‘It’s cold in here, isn’t it.’

‘You alrigh’?’ Kate said again. ‘You look really pale.’

‘I’m just stressed.’

‘D’you eat lunch? You can’t skip lunch.’

‘I ate some yoghurt,’ Blanche lied. ‘And fruit. I had a big breakfast. I just feel so leth
argic
.’

‘I’d offer you a cashew but I’m not sure they’d be good for you.’

‘That’s fine, I don’t feel like one anyway.’ Blanche had received more Narva that morning, but didn’t want to get the block out in front of Kate because then she
would have to give her a piece, and she wanted to keep it all for herself.

‘What blood type are you?’ said Kate.

‘I have absolutely no idea.’

‘Cos you know it’s important to eat according to your blood type?’

‘Really? Why?’

‘It’s all about antigens and how your body absorbs food. Different blood types have different antigen markers, and they react badly with certain foods. And stomach acidity and
digestive enzymes vary too, according to types, so we all absorb food differently. Like, you know how sometimes you eat what you think is a really good balanced meal and you end up all bloated for
no reason?’

Blanche didn’t know what antigens were but right now felt as bloated as a puffer fish. The cashews smelt incredibly strong and strangely repulsive. She tried to pay attention to
Kate’s rapid-fire speech. ‘Well … yeah, I guess so.’

‘Exactly!’ Kate sat forward, her speech accelerating. ‘So if you absorb and digest food more efficiently you’re bound to lose weight and function better. It goes back
like tens of thousands of years, to BC, to how our ancestors ate. So blood type O came first, then A.’

‘Oh, okay. So you’d be O because you’re black?’

Kate’s eyes narrowed. ‘We
all
came from Africa, remember?’

‘Right.’ Blanche squirmed. ‘I really didn’t mean …’

‘It’s fine. B came last, when we started nomadic societies and started to move around, so B gets to eat most things. I’m AB, the most recent and rarest type. It only emerged
about a thousand years ago.’ Kate smiled about herself as though she were the latest, most efficient product; the meanest machine. She ate more cashews. Blanche was overwhelmed by their
odour. She had never even known that nuts had a smell until now. Kate said, ‘Are you vego?’

‘No.’

‘You shouldn’t be vego if you’re O.’

‘Well … I don’t eat
that
much meat, I don’t think.’

Blanche reflected on her diet. A double-shot latte when she got up, made at home. A second from Machiavelli’s on her way into work, with a croissant or muffin or Portuguese tart. A third
coffee with lunch but never after three. She had stopped smoking when she was twenty-nine and taken ecstasy a few times in her twenties, but not for years, not since Hugh, who hated drugs. She
didn’t count her occasional lines of cocaine. ‘I stopped smoking when I was twenty-nine,’ she said.

Kate nodded. ‘That’s good, that’s really good.’

For lunch Blanche usually had a Caesar salad or focaccia or roll-up. Not much meat there. Dinner was usually Thai takeaway or sausages, steak or pasta. Her favourite foods were red duck curry,
fish cakes and wood-fired pizza with goat’s cheese, rocket and kangaroo. ‘I think I probably eat more poultry and fish than red meat.’

‘Everybody thinks that’s better, but in fact if you’re type A you should be practically vego and avoid dairy. D’you eat much dairy?’

Blanche felt suddenly despondent again, remembering chocolate, corn chips, cheese on toast, a million and one random snacks. What relation did Pringles and Twisties have with the food of BC
hunter-gatherers? she wondered. She was hopeless at keeping track of this sort of thing, never wrote down her periods, for instance. She had to admit that she didn’t really know what she ate,
when it boiled down to it. She felt completely out of touch with her body, trapped inside it like a snail in a shell.

‘How old are you? If you don’t mind my asking.’

‘Thirty-seven.’ Blanche pulled a face.

‘God, you look great for thirty-seven. You only look about thirty-three. Anyway, all the nicotine would be totally flushed out of your system by now.’ ‘

Yeah, my lungs feel fine.’

‘You should do a blood test, honestly. I’ve changed my diet and I feel incredible. I’ve lost weight and I’ve got like
so much
energy. Type AB is quite rare but good cos it allows me to eat a variety. The hardest thing was cutting out chips
and hamburgers — I was a closet McDonald’s binger, you know. It’s about exercise too, as in the type suitable for your blood type.’ Kate looked shrewdly at Blanche.
‘You strike me as an O, you know.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Dunno why I think that. But I bet you are. Most of England is O. Maybe that’s why I can tell.’

‘Oh.’

‘You shouldn’t be eating yoghurt for lunch. High protein, low carbs is what you need. And you should be doing aerobics and running.’

Blanche groaned. ‘My poor gym membership!’

‘There’s loads of research on it, just google and you’ll find a million articles. It’s fascinating.’

‘Okay. Thanks, Kate.’

‘Should I do the Revlon, then?’ Kate stood up.

‘Yeah. That’d be great.’

‘I’ll have it done by five.’

‘Great!’

For the rest of the afternoon, Blanche slowly made her way through a block of Narva with almond slivers as she googled blood types and diet. The nausea did not abate, nor, weirdly, the smell of
cashews. Chocolate was the only thing she could hold down. She was surprised to find how much information there was that backed up Kate’s theories, sceptics notwithstanding. She googled
female executives and creative directors and found five depressing articles that all alluded directly or indirectly to sexism in the advertising industry and the glass ceiling. Then she realised
she had read two of the articles already. She checked her email and side-surfed onto YouTube and got envious, inspired, angered and bored by a variety of ads, then ended up on the MySpace page of a
fabulously rich and successful American executive, thirty-six years old, a big deal at Apple, with enormous lips, tits and muscles, sunbed suntanned, a tiger tattoo on her upper arm, kissing her
boyfriend, a chumpy guy in a baseball cap.
So
LA. Then she went onto the facebook login page and was considering joining, for about the tenth time, when Kate was back in her office with the
Revlon print. Blanche looked over with glazed eyes. It was flawless. ‘That’s great, Kate! But maybe ... yeah, um, maybe you could move the print down a little?’