Last Chance Saloon - Marian Keyes [22]
‘Morning, Katherine,’ Desmond, the porter, called, as she made for the lifts. ‘Bunch of tossers getting you to come in on the weekend, eh?’
But instead of receiving the bitter tirade of agreement that he’d got from the other employees who were already in, Katherine just smiled noncommittally and said, ‘I suppose someone’s got to do it.’
Desmond was baffled. ‘An odd fish,’ was how he described her. ‘And no young man waiting for her, that’s plain to see. Else why’d she be happy to come to work on a Saturday? It’s no life,’ he’d say, with a heavy sigh, ‘for a young girl.’
Breen Helmsford was small by most advertising agency standards, with only about seventy employees, crammed into two huge, open-plan floors, with occasional glass boxes as offices for the higher-ups.
When Katherine walked in, lots of people were already there. As well as Katherine’s assistants, Breda, Charmaine and Henry, there was a clutch of ‘creatives’, who considered themselves to be the real staff, not like that crowd of awkward bureaucrats who withheld expenses for no good reason. The creatives – a bunch of elaborately trendy New Lads who looked like they’d bought up the entire stock of Duffer of St George – were putting the final touches to a presentation they were giving on Monday to a tampon company. Lots of images of beaming girls landing on the moon and on a yellow landscape that was supposed to be the planet Venus, overlaid with George Michael’s ‘Freedom’. The hook lines they were proposing to use were ‘I bet she drinks Carling Black Label,’ and ‘Possibly the best feminine hygiene product in the known universe.’
Two hard and fast rules existed for tampon ads: the product is only ever referred to euphemistically; and the colour red must never appear.
Everyone automatically looked up at Katherine. Then looked away again when they saw who it was. Katherine wasn’t terribly popular with her colleagues. She wasn’t unpopular either. But because she didn’t go on the piss several nights a week or sleep with all her male co-workers, she didn’t really exist.
Sex was very high on the list of activities at Breen Helmsford. As the staff regularly found themselves in the position of having slept with all their colleagues of the opposite sex, the arrival of a new temp caused more excitement than the landing of a new account. Luckily, the creatives were sacked and replaced at dizzying speed, so there was always new blood being brought into the company, fresh bodies to sleep with.
Katherine was called the Ice Queen. She knew about this, and her only objection was that she thought an advertising agency might have had a bit more imagination.
The tampon-account director, Joe Roth, was in the thick of the five lads, who were passionately saying things like ‘Everyone knows you can do a bungee jump while you’re wearing a tampon,’ and ‘Yeah, bungee jumps are yesterday’s news,’ and ‘Space-landings are so now!’ He watched Katherine as she walked over to her desk and switched on her PC. ‘Nice piece of work, boys,’ he praised his team. ‘Personally speaking, I’d buy these tampons. Hell, I nearly wish I got periods.
‘Now, if you’ll excuse me,’ he said, his sights on Katherine, ‘it’s time for my daily knock-back.’
Joe Roth was intrigued by Katherine. He’d only been at Breen Helmsford three weeks – in other jobs this would mean he had barely started, but advertising years were like dog years. Three