We All Fall Down (11 page)

More like too many lunches to attend, too many golf courses to play.

‘You believe far more strongly than I do that this is the right way to go. So it would carry more weight coming from you.'

‘No can do, mate. Trust you implicitly, needless to say.'

Hugh realised, as he walked on alone, that he'd been wasting his time looking to his immediate boss for any support. He was torn anyway. He'd always been keen to run the Bauer account, and was now being given the opportunity to do just that. It was also true that the only time anything went wrong was when other people got involved. When he was left alone, without interference, everything ran smoothly.
I wonder why that is
, he thought, and shook his head in disbelief at what he perceived as the stupidity of his superiors.

5

Back in his office, he found Geoff Wicks sitting on the sofa, his feet up on the coffee table, his hands clasped across his stomach. He regarded Hugh with a sardonic smile, almost as if he wished to convey the fact he knew something Hugh didn't. Being the agency gossip, he probably did. Hugh tried not to look as if he was surprised by this unexpected visit. ‘Good morning, Geoff.'

Everyone in the agency called Geoff ‘Wicksy,' except for Hugh. He had a deep-seated loathing for the practice of what he called ‘the Y Brigade,' those in the business – and they were numerous – who insisted on adding ‘y' to the Christian names and surnames of those they either liked or wished to be on good terms with. Wicks was one of the main perpetrators of this lexical obscenity.

‘Hughsy, what's up?' Wicks was happy enough to reply once Hugh had taken the first conversational step, but was seemingly unwilling to donate one word more. He reclined on the sofa very much in the manner of a crocodile reclining on a river bank, looking relaxed, even half asleep, but in fact waiting to pounce on anyone who might wander by too close. There was something cunning about the man, something wily. He was pale skinned, pasty, almost sickly, and smelt of cigarettes.

Hugh answered his visitor's question with a noncommittal, ‘Not much.' From long experience he knew how Wicks drew information out of people by saying very little, as if by creating a vacuum for his listeners, they then felt compelled to fill it. It often struck him, after a conversation with Geoff, that he'd given everything but received nothing in exchange. He would then promise not to make the mistake of falling into that particular trap again … and immediately do so. He determined now that if Wicks wanted to talk to him, that was fine, he'd listen, but it wouldn't go beyond listening. He succumbed within seconds.

‘Finding you comfortably ensconced in my office obviously means you're under the impression I was also given the flick on Friday, Geoff, and that you're here to appraise my furniture, to see if there's anything worth taking.'

‘Almost got it in one, Hughsy. I was actually trying to work out if it was worth moving in here myself.'

‘Wouldn't put it past you.'

There was a prolonged silence. Wicks continued to smile at him with a superior air, while Hugh closed his briefcase and placed it beneath his desk as he sat down. He would carry on as if Wicks wasn't in the room. His visitor, however, finally appreciated it was going to be up to him to move the conversation on from the banter stage. ‘So what did you make of Friday?'

Hugh should have foreseen this: after all, what else was there to talk about? He frowned. ‘I'm not sure what to make of it. I gather ten or eleven people lost their jobs. What can one say?'

‘It was thirteen.' Said with finality.

‘Lucky!' He grimaced. ‘You'd know better than me. It's very sad.' He grimaced a second time: ‘sad' was not a word Wicks would be able to easily identify with. He sighed. He again felt the disquiet he'd been experiencing all weekend, sympathy for those who'd lost their jobs mixed in with guilt that he'd been fortunate enough to survive. There was relief in there somewhere, too. The rumours about redundancies had been circulating for a long time, and the atmosphere in the agency for many weeks had been one of paranoia. People had spoken of little else. Staff had begun to resemble those small prizes in the bottom of the glass boxes at funfairs, with pincers hanging from a crane device falling to randomly grip and pluck one of them into the air. Who would be selected next? The fact that thirteen people had been – which euphemism could be expected to cause the least amount of distress here? –
let go
on Friday had only made the situation worse. It was hard to remain relaxed, even harder to concentrate on work. The clients were also getting edgy about what was going on in the agency, and already beginning to ask questions.

‘Sad about Fi.' Trying to claim a friendship that had never been there because he knew Hugh and Fiona were great friends.

Hugh ignored the bait. ‘It was.'

His colleague rolled his eyes around the office as if he expected to see nothing of interest there, then changed tack. ‘Did you hear about Lucy?' (The ‘Y Brigade' happily delete the 'y' when it is already present, which always struck Hugh as both perverse and bloody-minded.)

He hadn't heard about Lucy, and wasn't even convinced he wanted to. ‘What about her?'

‘She only started her holiday last week, and it seems HR called her mother, got the phone number of where Lucy was staying in Italy and rang her to say not to bother to come back.' Geoff, like a vulture hopping eagerly towards the carrion, was warming to the subject at hand.

‘That's hardly the message one wants to hear when lying on the shores of the Mediterranean, basking in the sun.'

This longer than expected response seemingly raised in Wicks the expectation that more was to follow, that, if he could hold on, the floodgates might open. But it was followed by silence. Wicks waited, mouth half open, for a further conversational morsel, failing to appreciate that Hugh wasn't the kind of person who was keen to discuss the whys and wherefores of all the people who'd lost their jobs on Friday. ‘Unlikely to make her holiday more enjoyable, that's for sure,' was the modest contribution cast up from the couch, and intended to tempt.

Hugh knew Wicks would be spending his morning visiting as many offices as possible, gathering stories about what had happened to whom on Friday, who'd said what, and why. Hugh's office must have been one of the first on the list. He wanted no part of it but, as usual, felt obliged by his visitor's reticence to say something.

‘A lot of those people will have planned to go away over the Easter break. It's hardly a good time.'

‘They had to get rid of someone, Hughsy. We've lost too much business.'

Hugh appreciated this was the logical conclusion, the accepted way for management to deal with lost business, yet it didn't lessen his feeling of unease when people lost their jobs. He felt and understood the misery it caused, and always wondered if there was not a better way to ride a business downturn. Why couldn't the agency carry a few surplus staff until they put on new business? Somewhere, once, he'd read that during the Depression Proctor & Gamble had a policy of not firing any of their staff anywhere in the world. That had impressed him. To consider the welfare of your staff when it was uneconomic to do so, that was the right way, the decent way to handle things. It was humanitarian, but it was probably also old fashioned. Today, everything had to be sacrificed for the bottom line, and that included people.

‘In my book, many of them deserved to go. Without question. Didn't pull their weight.'

It went through Hugh's mind that Wicks hardly deserved to keep his job, yet somehow he'd avoided the cull. It was probably because he played the game. He was one of those people who make sure they're seen rushing around the corridors of a company at different times of the day, clutching folders or reports and shouting out to everyone they run into that they'd love to stop and chat but they're too busy right now, because management or a client or someone very important was screaming for this information that would, at the very least, save the agency's most valued piece of business – possibly even the planet – before retreating back to their office to continue with the personal phone calls, playing Solitaire and surfing the World Wide Web.

Hugh was irritated by his visitor's feet resting on his coffee table. He felt it displayed an unacceptable degree of complacency and self-satisfaction, neither of which, in his opinion, were deserved. ‘That's a little harsh, isn't it?'

‘It's true.'

It was true that Geoff had his supermarket account pretty well tied down, if only by means of regular and prolonged drinking sessions with the client, so his job was likely to be more secure than most. In Hugh's opinion, this was not deserved. But companies – and agencies were no exception – were notorious for getting rid of the wrong people.

Wicks was saying, ‘Lucky bastard, aren't I, being in retail? Not as glamorous as your side of the business of course, but supermarkets are never going to stop spending. That's the bottom line. Everyone has to eat, Hughsy, even when times are tough, even in the middle of a recession.'

Hugh had an unexpected and irrational desire for Geoff to reassure him that, despite working on what he called the glamorous side of the business, his job was safe. Geoff wasn't management, so the gesture would have been meaningless, yet it may have made him feel more confident. But he knew Geoff was far too self-involved to ever consider, for even a fraction of a second, the welfare of anyone else, and that such reassurance was therefore unlikely to be offered.

His visitor got up off the sofa, which he regarded with an air of disdain. ‘You should get that replaced. Pinch the one out of Willett's office before anyone else gets in there.'

‘Was he fired too?'

‘Not fired, let go.'

‘That's not a nice way to treat the dead, Geoff. Anyway, why don't you take his sofa?'

‘Too big for my humble office, Hughsy, but perfect for your palatial abode.' And he disappeared down the corridor without a word of farewell.

* * *

It was unusual, if not a first, for Alpha to go back to a client and suggest the agency wanted to reconsider, and hopefully improve on, creative work that had already been presented. This was because Alpha management did not consider creativity to be their raison d' être, regarding it more as a necessary evil, something the agency had to provide, and the sooner they could put it behind them the better. So it was with great reluctance that Hugh called the German marketing director, and arranged to go and see him after lunch.

Dieter received the news in his customary deadpan way. He listened to Hugh's little speech, his reasons for wanting to do a new campaign, keeping his hands clasped on the edge of his desk throughout, before he said, ‘But I am happy with the campaign you have given me, Hugh, and it is already sent to Mannheim.'

Hugh made an effort not to look pleased. If the campaign had already been bought by head office, he wouldn't have to continue with this sham. ‘And what do they say?'

‘They say nothing. They have not yet got back to me.'

Hugh now tried not to look disappointed. He would have to continue with this charade after all. ‘We want to make sure we give you the best, most effective campaign, Dieter. It's as simple as that. Russell and Murray also asked me to emphasise that you aren't expected to pay for this extra work.'

‘Ya, ya, of course, I would not expect to.'

‘In my opinion, you've nothing to lose. If you like the new campaign, you'll be happy. If you don't like it, we'll go with our original concept and you'll still be happy. It's a win-win scenario, as they say.' He hated trotting out business clichés, and normally went out of his way to avoid them, but he also appreciated that most clients found them instantly understandable. It was their regular method of communication, sometimes their only method of communication.

Hugh suspected Dieter would have problems with the new campaign anyway. If Simon Hogg – or Si as everyone in the agency already called him – lived up to his reputation, Dieter would most likely find it far too ‘creative'.

Fiona, supported by Hugh, had been proud of the fact that, step by step, she'd led Bauer down the path towards more creative advertising. Nothing revolutionary, nothing that would win an award in New York or London, but more adventurous than anything the company had run elsewhere in the world. Fiona considered her biggest success to be the fact that Dieter no longer insisted his commercials were shot on the Great Ocean Road – as were nine out of ten car commercials in Australia – and that there could be a story in the commercial as opposed to a string of images. One commercial she loved, which had proved too challenging for the Calvinistic marketing director, showed a bored God, reclining on a cloud, amusing Himself by throwing bolts of lightning at a speeding Bauer. The driver dodges them all (showing the car's exceptional acceleration, braking and cornering), prompting God to give up His little game and stalk off in a huff.

‘Ya, very funny, Fiona,' Dieter said at the end of the presentation, ‘but, nein.'

‘Why not, Dieter?'

‘It will offend too many people.'

‘There's nothing offensive about it. We're not saying anything against God.'

‘You're saying He's bored.'

‘It's a bit of light-hearted fun.'

‘You're saying He's nasty, that He tries to kill my customers with bolts of lightning.'

‘No one's going to take it literally, Dieter. No one's going to actually think that.'

‘It is also, to some people I believe, being offensive.' And that proved to be the end of the discussion.

Hugh, as with many things, felt most comfortable somewhere in the middle. He believed in creative advertising, in advertising that was both intelligent and humorous, but he also believed in a strong selling message. He had a good feel for what clients would find acceptable.