‘Morning,’ I said, dropping my handbag on my desk on Monday morning. ‘How was everyone’s weekend?’
‘We were eaten by a giant space alien that came up out of the Thames,’ Mir replied. ‘Thankfully it swallowed us whole and we were able to slay the beast from the inside, find a way out after a very thrilling adventure. You didn’t see it on the news?’
‘Must have missed it,’ I replied, updating the numbers on my whiteboard. Four days to go. ‘Sounds fun.’
‘You haven’t replied to a single one of my text messages all weekend,’ she said, closing her laptop to give me the full weight of her stare. ‘I thought you were dead. Did you finish the pitch?’
‘I was at home,’ I replied, as if that was going to be an acceptable answer. ‘I was working. And yes, of course I did.’
‘I told you we’d have heard about it if she’d gone on a murderous rampage,’ Brian said before picking up his coffee. ‘You are a drama queen.’
‘Have you looked at Sam’s Instagram today?’ I asked.
Miranda, Brian, Zadie and Nat all picked up their phones at the same time and smiles spread across their faces.
After Brian left on Saturday, I’d spent the entire weekend putting my new plan into action. Editing photos, researching captions, tagging, retweeting and collaborating and we were already up three thousand new followers. It was a social media miracle. The original plan had been to mix random historical facts with random celebrity pictures and gifs but we’d peaked and stalled at ten thousand fans. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get us past that. There were only so many times people could watch Dawson ugly cry after all, regardless of the fascinating historical titbit attached.
The new plan was beautiful in its simplicity. I’d replaced all the random photos of celebs with not so random photos of a post-makeover Sam. My very own Hot Historian. The first new post was a close-up of Sam taken right after his makeover scratching his stubble and staring straight into the camera. The portrait was accompanied by the text ‘The Anglo-Zanzibar war of 1896 lasted only 38 minutes’ and it already had a thousand likes. I had four more days to find seven thousand new people who liked learning useless factoids and looking at hot men. It couldn’t possibly be that difficult.
‘I like the one where he’s holding a Chihuahua,’ Zadie said with admiration. ‘The dog looks so excited to find out Alexander Hamilton founded the New York Post.’
‘And you can’t even tell it’s Photoshopped,’ I said proudly. ‘That Chiahuahua started out as a nineteenth century thesaurus.’
‘That one picture already has two thousand likes,’ Mir gasped. ‘How did you come up with this?’
‘This is going to be massive,’ Brian said, eyes on his phone. ‘Everyone’s going to love it.’
Everyone except for Sam, I added to myself.
I ignored the sick feeling in my stomach. If Elaine could litter her Instagram with photographs of him, so could I. And besides, he had said he wanted me to win the bet. That’s what I was doing. Winning the bet. Even though I had promised not to use any photos of him on the Instagram account …
‘You’re so good you scare me sometimes, Annie,’ Miranda muttered, gathering her things and chucking them all into a tote bag. ‘Don’t suppose anyone’s got any Tums, have they?’
‘Sorry, nana,’ I said. ‘We can get some on the way. What’s up?’
‘My mum made this Peruvian stew for Sunday lunch and it was terrible,’ she said as she rubbed a nervous hand against her stomach. ‘I definitely shouldn’t have had seconds.’
I picked up my backup printout of our SetPics pitch. Yes, we were a digital agency but one of the most important lessons I’d learned working in tech was that tech fails. All the time. And given that this was the most important meeting of our careers, that simply would not do.
We arrived at the Devitt Building ten minutes before our meeting. Long enough to pull ourselves together but not long enough to psych ourselves out. We were good at meetings, Miranda and I. She gave the spiel while I smiled, nodded and made sure all the slides played in the right order. We were a slick team.
Or at least we usually were.
‘Annie, I don’t feel well,’ Mir muttered as I checked us in at reception. ‘I’m going to pop to the loo.’
She’d been uncharacteristically quiet all the way over, even when I’d relented on our no cab rule and let her book an Uber, but I’d put it down to nerves and the fact she’d spent most of the weekend getting more sex than food or sleep.
‘Do you need me to come with you?’ I asked, suddenly worried. I grabbed the black leather laptop bag she thrust at me.
‘No, stay here,’ she replied, pawing at a suddenly sweaty forehead as she turned and ran. ‘I don’t think you want to be part of this.’
I took a seat on the little cube sofas in the lobby while Mir walk-ran into the bathrooms, dodging assorted men in suits.
‘Annie, how nice to see you here. Twice in one month, how lucky am I?’
‘Gordon,’ I replied, scratching the side of my nose with my middle finger. He couldn’t see but it made me feel better.
‘What brings you south of the river on a Monday morning?’ he asked, two lackeys from the Oz Agency hovering behind him with matching grins on their bearded faces.
‘We’re here for the Uniteam pitch, as you well know,’ I said, not wanting to show him how much he annoyed me but struggling to hide it. ‘I hope your meeting went well.’
‘Exceptionally well,’ he confirmed, nodding. ‘I have to say, I think it’s fantastic that they’re still seeing you. It’s important for small businesses to pitch above their level, helps you to grow, doesn’t it? I mean personally of course, not work-wise. Because I’m going to win this.’
I smiled pleasantly, trying to think of something clever to say.
‘Fuck off, Gordon.’
Sometimes you didn’t need to be that clever.
‘It’s a shame you’re not still working for me, Annie,’ he commented, shifting his man bag onto the other shoulder and pretending not to have heard me. ‘I would have had you on this account. You’d have been good at it. You always did have a knack at knowing just how to communicate with people.’
‘Well, we’ll be hiring when we win,’ I said sweetly. ‘Maybe you can come and work for us?’
He took a sharp inhale, as though he was about to say something particularly unpleasant but instead he smiled, turned away and walked out, tossing his security pass at the girl on the front desk as he went, his two helper monkeys scurrying after him.
‘Annie Higgins?’
A young man wearing a Mark Zuckerberg-approved hoodie and jeans combo appeared from nowhere.
‘I’m Annie,’ I said, standing to shake his hand. ‘My partner Miranda is just in the bathroom.’
‘We’re running a bit tight on time, will she be long?’ he asked, glancing down at an iPad Mini.
‘Let me go and check on her,’ I said, leaving my bags on the sofa. ‘Won’t be two secs.’
But we were going to be two secs. We were going to be considerably more than two secs.
‘Miranda?’ I called, bending over to peep under the closed stalls in the ladies’ loos. ‘Where are you? They’re ready for us.’
‘Annie.’ A weak, raspy version of my best friend’s voice called from the last stall on the line.
‘Mir? Are you OK? Open the door,’ I ordered, pushing against the lock. ‘Let me in.’
‘Babe, I can’t do that to you,’ she said through the door. ‘You don’t want to see this.’
If it looked anything like it smelled, she was quite correct.
‘Do you need to go to hospital?’ I was starting to panic. What if she was really ill? What if it was a bacterial infection or a parasite or—
‘I’m puking up Peruvian stew,’ she interrupted my chain of thought, reading my mind like she always did. ‘I’m sorry, I’m a twat but I’m not going to die. You’re going to have to do this one on your own.’
She
may have spoken too soon on the ‘not going to die’ part.
‘Please, Annie, we might never get another chance like this,’ Mir said. ‘You don’t need me.’
‘But I do,’ I wailed, catching sight of myself in the mirror. My neck, my chest and my face were flame red. ‘We’ll postpone. I’ll ask them if we can come back tomorrow.’
Miranda’s foot suddenly shot out from under the stall door, kicking me in the ankles.
‘You’re going to go in there, you’re going to give this presentation and you’re going to win,’ she was very assertive for someone who was currently turning themselves inside out in a public toilet. ‘Never give up and never give in.’
‘I hate when you use my own words against me,’ I said, dodging the foot as it came back for a second swipe. ‘Are you sure you’ll be OK?’
‘Can you hand me some toilet paper?’ she asked, one hand appearing where the foot had been. ‘Like, a lot of toilet paper?’
Wrenching the cover off the dispenser in the next loo, I pushed the whole roll under the door.
‘Thank you,’ she said as it disappeared into the stall of despair. ‘I love you.’
‘I love you too,’ I said, squeezing her hand for just a second before standing to wash my hands under an aggressively hot tap. ‘Shall I see you back at the office?’
‘You’ll see me back here,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m going to be here for a while.’
‘OK,’ I said, wincing as someone else walked into the loos, a sudden look of shock crossing her face. I mouthed an apology as I held the door open. ‘I’ll be back down as soon as I can.’
‘That’s my girl,’ Mir called weakly.
‘We’d like to thank you for putting this together at such short notice,’ said Harry, the head of SetPics communications, as he filtered through a stack of pitches in front of him, looking for the one from Content. He sounded friendly enough, but there was certainly a sense of someone desperate to press on with their day. Probably because he’d already decided to give the business to Gordon, whispered the devil on my shoulder. I pushed the thought out of my head, it wasn’t helpful.
‘Your work has been very impressive, far and away the most creative campaign we have seen,’ Harry went on, scratching his stubble. ‘I can’t imagine what you’d have come up with had you had the same amount of time as the other agencies but, to be honest, you did the best at getting to grips with the DNA of Uniteam 3000.’
I nodded and tried not to drip sweat on anything electrical. Harry’s IT guy was busy hooking my laptop up to their system while I stared up and down the table. Two people, maybe three, Miranda had said. Or alternatively, I’d be presenting to seven people. Seven unsmiling, bored people who had already sat through god only knew how many presentations so far that morning.
‘Thank you,’ I said slowly and deliberately before giving them all a big, bright smile. Not too big, you don’t want them to think you’re mental, I reminded myself. I dimmed the megawatt grin by fifty per cent.
‘While we loved the work you sent over, you are the least experienced of all the agencies we’re talking to.’ Harry gave my forced smile a brief look of concern before turning to his notes on our pitch. ‘Which leaves us with some uncertainty. We can all see you’re very talented and you’ve got solid ideas, but you can understand why we’d be wary of committing such a huge project to a relatively untested agency.’
‘OK,’ I replied. I was unsure what I was supposed to say to that kind of backhanded compliment. ‘We know we could do it though, or we wouldn’t be here.’
They all looked at one another, not talking but definitely communicating in some kind of telepathic language which I had to assume translated to ‘ridiculously cocky for a small agency’.
‘I get that there’s a comfort factor in going with a more established agency but I don’t think you want comfort, I think you want new subscribers,’ I said as, against all odds, our presentation appeared on their pull-down screen. ‘Shall I walk you through the pitch?’
‘We’ve read the pitch,’ Harry said, speaking on behalf of all the silent judges around the table. ‘We want to get to know you. Talk to us, Annie.’
It was literally the worst thing they could have said.
‘What do you want to know?’ I asked, throwing open my arms and knocking over a stack of paper cups. ‘I’m an open book.’
This should have been Miranda’s time to shine. Everyone knew I talked either far too much or not nearly enough when I was nervous, and my incredibly sweaty palms suggested I was definitely nervous. I’d done my bit, I’d written the slides, I’d come up with the ideas. Miranda was the one who did speaking, that was the deal. Stupid bloody Peruvian stew.
‘We have brilliant in-house PR and marketing,’ Harry said, leafing through a print out of our presentation as he scratched his head. ‘But we’ve struggled with social media. We just can’t seem to get it right. Looking at where we’ve been, what would you do differently?’
‘It’s not as easy as it looks,’ I said carefully. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I heard Sam’s voice. There was no need to be nervous, I knew what I was talking about and I was prepared.
‘Social media is its own language,’ I said. ‘And you need to be fluent. You can make yourself understood without that, but if you really want people to listen, you’ve got to talk to them in their own language.’
This was the truth. The number of times my sister had texted me asking for definitions of online abbreviations. And truly, I rued the day I set up my mum’s Twitter account. No one should have to spend a Saturday afternoon talking their sixty-year-old mother out from an Urban Dictionary click hole. I would never forget the moment she explained to my grandmother that she was a proud PAWG at the Easter dinner table.
‘We know where people are and we know how to talk to them,’ I said. ‘And we make it fun. You can’t expect people to engage with something if they’re not enjoying it or if it doesn’t make them feel anything. Like anything else in life.’
I reached out for a glass of water with a shaky hand and raised it slowly to my mouth.
‘What else would you like to know?’ I asked as I set it down successfully.
Harry leaned back in his chair, his face interested.
‘And what about you, Annie?’ he said. ‘Why should we want to work with you?’
‘Because I get nervous when I care about something and I’m incredibly nervous right now,’ I answered, trying to laugh. Everyone else went with a polite chuckle. ‘So I must care about this an awful lot. Also, people keep telling me I’m incredibly competitive and I suppose that could work in your favour.’
‘A lot of people say that like it’s a bad thing, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case,’ a woman across the table in an actual Steve Jobs polo-neck jumper said. ‘Do you think you’re competitive?’
‘Competitive people want to win,’ I said slowly, feeling out the truth in my words before I said something I might regret. ‘And I think that used to be true of me. Win at all costs, add another tick to the tally. But now I’m thinking winning might not be as important as getting it right. I wouldn’t want to win this account if I didn’t think I could do it well. That wouldn’t help me, not in the long run.’
No one said anything so I did what I do best in these situations, I just kept on talking.
‘I’m not trying to sound like an inspirational Instagram post,’ I said, fiddling with a stray highlighter in my lap. ‘Because I’m sure I’ve done things in the past that I wouldn’t put on Father Christmas’ nice list, all because I wanted to get a win.’
Clocking Marie Brown with a hockey stick, for example.
‘But ultimately, you want to start a conversation with people and conversations need to be honest,’ I said, satisfied I was finally getting to my point. ‘You can only fake it so many times, you can only apply so many filters. For this campaign to work for you, you need trust and you need the truth.’
Harry and all Harry’s coll
eagues looked at me, then looked at each other and then looked back at me.
‘It’s easy to throw the words “sincere” and “authentic” around, but honestly, they don’t mean anything any more. Chances are, your audience is going to find it condescending. This is a teen show and Generation Z, the post-millennials, they grew up with social media. They know if it’s real or not. It won’t matter how cool your graphics are or how sophisticated your bots might be, they’ll sniff out a fraud at a hundred paces. We can do it right, and we can do it well. No bullshit, no faking – real honest conversations with the people you want to talk to.’
There was some encouraging nodding as I talked and, much to my delight, everyone looked interested. I finished with a breathless ‘Any questions?’ When no one replied, I gave my best professional smile. ‘That’s really all I have to say.’
‘So, we’re going to take a couple of days to go over all the presentations,’ Harry said slowly, keeping one eye on me. Everyone else pulled their papers, pens and phones into little piles and made noises to excuse themselves. I clicked the cap on and off the highlighter in my lap, impatient for this to be over. ‘And we’ll get back to you soon. I saw you’re up for a couple of TechBubble awards. Will you be at the do on Thursday?’
‘Yes,’ I replied, slyly wiping my hand on my chair before I stood to shake his hand. ‘You must stop by our table.’
‘Then we’ll see you there,’ he said, looking down at my white skirt and immediately pulling his eyes back up. ‘It was very nice to meet you, Annie.’
I glanced down at myself. The highlighter had leaked everywhere, leaving a very attractive yellow stain in my lap.
‘Can I see you out?’ the man from the lobby asked.
‘Probably best,’ I said, following him out the door.
‘What I don’t understand is how I spent the last hour turning myself inside out from end to end and you’re the one who walked out of a meeting looking like she’d pissed herself,’ Mir said as we arrived back at the office. ‘Wait here, I want to get a Coke.’
‘Shouldn’t you be nil by mouth for twenty-four hours?’ I loitered at the bottom of the stairs.