Anybody Out There - Marian Keyes (3 page)

Anyway, after Rachel's visit, she got on the blower and told everyone at home about the goodies
closet. A flurry of phone calls from Ireland followed. Was Rachel back on the drugs? Or was it
true about all the free cosmetics I gave her? And if it was, could they have some? Immediately I
parceled up an indecent amount of stuff and dispatched it to Ireland--I admit it, I was showing
off, trying to prove what a success I was.
I am not just permitted to wear Candy Grrrl products, I am obliged to. We all have to take on the
personality of the brands we represent. Live it, Ariella urged me when I got the job. Live it,
Anna. You are a Candy Grrrl girl, 24/7, you are always on duty.
However, when you're sending products to other people, you're supposed to "sign them out"--
every eyelash curler, every lip balm. But if you say they're going to the Nebraska Star, for
example, and they're really going to your mammy in Dublin, people are unlikely to check: I am a
trusted employee.
The strange thing is that normally I'm an honest person: if someone gives me too much change
in a shop, I'll give it back, and I've never, in my life, done a runner from a restaurant. (Aren't
there better ways to have fun?) But every time I liberate an eye cream for Rachel or a scented
candle for my friend Jacqui or send a care package of the new spring colors to Dublin, I am
stealing. And yet I don't have the slightest twinge of guilt. It's because the products are so
beautiful, I feel that, like natural wonders, they transcend ownership. How could you fence off
the Grand Canyon? Or the Barrier Reef? Some things are so wondrous, everyone is entitled to
them.
People often ask me, their faces distorted with jealousy, "How do you get a job like yours?"
Well, I'll tell you.
3
How I got my job
A     fter I got my diploma in PR, I got a job in the Dublin press office of a low-rent cosmetics
company; it was crappy money, backbreaking work--mostly stuffing envelopes for mailshots--
and as our bags were searched every evening when we left work, I didn't even have the
compensation of free makeup. But I had some idea of how PR could be, the fun and creativity
you could have in the right place, and I'd always had a hankering for New York...
I didn't want to go on my own, so all I had to do was convince my best friend, Jacqui, that she,
too, had a hankering for New York. But I didn't give much for my chances. For years, Jacqui had
been like me--entirely without a career plan. She'd spent most of her life working in the hotel
trade, doing everything from bar work to hostessing, when somehow, through no fault of her
own, she got a good job: she had become a VIP concierge at one of Dublin's five-star hotels.
When showbiz types came to town, whatever they wanted, from Bono's phone number, to

someone to take them shopping after hours, to a decoy double to shake off the press, it was her
job to provide it. No one, especially Jacqui, could figure out how it had happened--she had no
qualifications, all she had going for her was that she was chatty, practical, and unimpressed by
eejits, even famous ones. (She says that most celebs are either midgets or gobshites or both.)
Her looks might have had something to do with her success; she often described herself as a
blond daddy longlegs and, in all fairness, she was very hingey. She was so tall and thin that all
her joints--knees, hips, elbows, shoulders--looked like they'd been loosened with a wrench, and
when she walked, you could almost believe that some invisible puppet master was moving her by
strings. Because of this, women weren't threatened by her. But thanks to her good humor, her
dirty laugh, and her incredible stamina when it came to staying up late and partying, men were
comfortable with her.
The visiting celebs often bought her expensive presents. The best bit, she said, was when she'd
take them on a shopping trip; if they bought tons of stuff for themselves they'd feel guilted into
buying something for her, too. Mostly teeny-tiny designer clothes, which she looked great in.
Like the professional she was, she never--well, rarely--got off with the male celebs in her
charge (only if they'd just split up with their wives and were in need of "comfort"), but
occasionally she got off with their friends. Usually they were horrible; she seemed to prefer them
that way. I don't think I had ever liked any of her boyfriends.
The night I met her to make my pitch she showed up, her usual shiny, happy, hingey self, in a
Versace coat, a Dior something, a Chlo� something else, and my heart sank. Why would anyone
leave a job like this? But it just goes to show.
Before I even mentioned New York, she confessed that she was sick of overpaid stars and their
silly requests. Some Oscar-winning actor was currently in residence and making her life a misery
by insisting that a squirrel was staring in the window at him and following his every move.
Jacqui's gripe was not that it was mean-spirited to object to a squirrel looking at you, but that
they were on the fifth floor--there was no squirrel. She'd had it with celebrity, she said. She
wanted a complete change, to get back to basics, to work with the poor and the sick, in a leper
colony if possible.
This was excellent, if surprising, news and the perfect time to take the U.S. work-permit
applications from my bag; two months later, we were waving Ireland good-bye.
When we arrived in New York, we stayed with Rachel and Luke for the first few days, but this
turned out to be not such a great idea: Jacqui broke out in a sweat every time she looked at Luke,
so much that she nearly had to start taking rehydration salts.
Because Luke is so good-looking, people go a bit funny around him. They think that there has to
be more to him than there is. But basically he's just an ordinary, decent bloke, who's got the life
he wants, with the woman he wants. He has a gang of look-alike pals--although none are as
physically devastating as him--collectively known as the Real Men. They think the last time
anyone made a good record was 1975 (Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti) and that all music made

since then has been unadulterated rubbish. Their idea of a big night out is the air-guitar-playing
championship--there is such a thing, honestly--and although they are all gifted amateurs, one of
them, Shake, showed real promise and actually got as far as the regional finals.
Jacqui and I set about looking for work, but unfortunately for Jacqui, none of the leper colonies
were hiring. Within a week she'd got a job in a five-star Manhattan hotel, in an almost identical
post to the one she'd left behind in Dublin.
In one of those strange twists, she met the squirrel man, who didn't remember her and spun her
the same story about being spied on by a squirrel. Only this time they weren't on the fifth floor,
they were on the twenty-seventh.
"I really wanted to do something different," she said to Rachel, Luke, and me when she came
home after her first day. "I don't know how this happened."
Well, it was obvious: clearly she was more in thrall to that glittering, celebtastic world than she'd
realized. But you couldn't say that to her. Jacqui had no time for introspection: things were what
they were. Which, as a life philosophy, has its merits--although I love Rachel very much,
sometimes I feel I can't itch my chin without her finding a hidden meaning in it. But on the other
hand, there's no point telling Jacqui if you're depressed because her response is invariably, "Oh
no! What's happened?" And most of the time nothing has happened, you're just depressed. But if
you try explaining that, she'd say, "But what have you got to be depressed about?" Then she'd
say, "Let's go out and drink champagne. No point sitting around here moping!"
Jacqui is almost the only person I know who has never been on SSRIs or seen a therapist; she
barely believes in PMS.
Anyway, just before Jacqui went into muscle spasm from mineral depletion from looking at
Luke, we found a place of our own. A studio (i.e., one room) in a crumbling block on the Lower
East Side. It was shockingly small and expensive and the shower was in the kitchenette, but at
least we were in Manhattan. We weren't planning on spending much time at home--it was
simply for sleeping in and having an address, a tiny foothold in the naked city. Luckily Jacqui
and I got on very well, we could take such close proximity to each other, although sometimes
Jacqui went out to bars and picked up men, just so she could have a good night's sleep in a
normal apartment.
R    ight away I registered with several ritzy employment agencies, bearing a gorgeous, slightly
embroidered r�sum�. I went for a couple of interviews but got no solid offers and I was just
starting to worry when, one Tuesday morning, I got a call to hotfoot it to McArthur on the Park.
Apparently the previous incumbent had had "to go to Arizona" (NYC speak for "going into
rehab") in a big, fat hurry and they urgently needed a temp because they were preparing for a
major pitch.

I knew about Ariella McArthur because she was--aren't they always?--a PR legend: fiftyish,
big-haired, big-shouldered, controlling, impatient. She was rumored to sleep only four hours a
night (but I later discovered she disseminated that rumor herself).
So I put on my suit and showed up, to discover that the office suites really were on Central Park
(thirty-eighth floor, the view from Ariella's office is amazing, but as you're only ever invited into
her inner sanctum to be bollocked, it's hard to savor it).
Everyone was running around hysterically, and no one really spoke to me, just shrieked orders to
photocopy stuff, to organize food, to glue things to other things. Despite such shoddy treatment, I
was dazzled by the brands McArthur represented and the top-end campaigns they'd run and I
found myself thinking: I'd give anything to work here.
I must have glued the right things together, because they told me to come back the following day,
the day of the actual pitch, when they were all even more twitchy.
At 3 P.M., Ariella and seven of her top people took up positions around the boardroom table. I
was there, too, but only in case anyone needed anything urgently--water, coffee, their forehead
mopped. I was under instruction not to speak. I could make eye contact if necessary, but not
speak.
As we waited, I overheard Ariella say in a low urgent voice to Franklin, her second in command,
"If I do not get this account I will kill."
For those who don't know the Candy Grrrl story--and because I've lived and breathed it for so
long, I sometimes forget there are people who don't--Candy Grrrl originated with the makeup
artist Candace Biggly. She began mixing her own products when she couldn't buy the exact
colors and textures she wanted, and turned out to be so good at it that the models she was making
up got all excited. Word began to filter down from The Most Fabulous On High that Candace
Biggly's stuff was something special; the buzz had begun.
Then came the name. Countless people, including my own mother, have told me how "Candy
Grrrl" was Kate Moss's pet name for Candace. I'm sorry if this disappoints you, but it's not true.
Candace and her husband, George (a creep), paid an expensive advertising agency to come up
with it (also, the growling-girl logo), but the Kate story has entered popular folklore and what's
the harm in letting it stay there.
Stealthily, the Candy Grrrl name began to appear in beauty pages. Then a small store opened on
the Lower East Side, and women who had never been below Forty-fourth Street in their life
made pilgrimages all the way downtown. Another store opened, this time in L.A., followed by
one in London and two in Tokyo, then the inevitable happened: Candy Grrrl was bought by the
Devereaux Corporation for an undisclosed eight-figure sum ($11.5 million, actually. I found it in
some papers in the office last summer. I wasn't looking, I just stumbled across it. Honestly).
Suddenly CG went mainstream and exploded onto counters in Saks, Bloomingdale's, Nordstrom
--all the big department stores. However, Candace and George weren't "comfortable" with the

in-house public-relations service Devereaux was providing, so they invited some of New York's
biggest agencies to pitch for the business.
"They're late," Franklin said, fingering a little mother-of-pearl pillbox. Earlier I'd seen him not
so discreetly pop half a Xanax; I reckoned he was considering taking the second half.
Then, with a surprising lack of fanfare, in came Candace, looking nothing like a Candace--
brown unstyled hair, black leggings, and strangely, not a scrap of makeup. George, on the other
hand, could be considered good-looking and charismatic--he certainly thought so.
Ariella began a gracious welcome, but George cut right across her, demanding "ideas."
"If you got the Candy Grrrl account, what would you do?" He pointed a finger at Franklin.
Franklin stammered something about celebrity endorsement, but before he'd finished, George
had moved on to the next person. "And what would you do?"
He worked his way around the table and got the usual cookie-cutter PR ideas: celebrity
endorsement; feature coverage; flying all the major beauty editors somewhere fabulous--
possibly Mars.
When he got to me, Ariella desperately tried to tell him that I was a nothing, a nobody, just one
step up from a robot, but George insisted. "She works for you, right? What's your name? Anna?
Tell me your ideas."
Ariella was in the horrors. More so when I said, "I saw these great alarm clocks in a store in
SoHo at the weekend."
This was a pitch for a multimillion-dollar account and I was talking about weekend shopping
trips. Ariella actually put a hand to her throat like a Victorian lady planning to swoon.
"They're a mirror image of a regular alarm clock," I said. "All the numbers are back to front and
the hands go in the wrong direction; they actually turn backward. So if you want to see the right
time, you've got to look at the clock in the mirror. I was thinking it would be perfect to promote
your Time-Reversal Day Cream. We could do a shout line like `Look in the mirror: You're
reversing time.' Depending on costings we could even do an on-counter giveaway." (Note to the
girl who wants to get ahead: never say "cost"; always say "costings." I've no idea why, but if you
say "cost" you will not be taken seriously. However, liberal use of the word costings allies you
with the big boys.)
"Wow," George said. He sat back and looked around the table. "Wow. That is great! The most
original thing I've heard here today. Simple but...very wow! Very Candy Grrrl." He and
Candace exchanged a look.
The high-tension mood around the table shifted. Some people relaxed but some others got even
more tense. (I say "some others" but I mean Lauryn.) The thing is, though, I hadn't planned to