We All Fall Down (18 page)

‘My life's fine, just as it is. It would be nice to have some support, that's all.'

‘That's such a lie. You do have my support, you just can't see it.' She leant forward, turning her head towards him, so earnest it unsettled him. She was tense, her forearms on her knees, her hands clasped together as if she was about to beg something off him. ‘I love you, Mr. Drysdale, but I hate what you're doing to us. I hate the way you're allowing your work to ruin your life –
our
lives.' She waited for him to say something. She stared at him, but he had no idea what he was expected to say. What he thought she wanted him to say, he couldn't say, so he remained silent. In fact he looked away. A minute or two later, she stood up. He almost made a move to stop her, to hold her, but couldn't find the energy to stir. He felt it would have been interpreted as an admission of weakness. It was one of those moments, however, that might have set them back on the right path, and yet he did not, or could not move. So the moment passed, as such moments always do.

‘I never wanted to live out here in the sticks. It's not my fault we have a large mortgage. I hate this house.' She said it with such passion, he was shocked. Even from across the room he could see she was trembling. ‘I hate it! Spending a few days on the North Shore has made me realise what we're missing.'

‘You don't hate it, Kate. Even if you did, you will come to love it one day. I'm sure you will. You just have to give it a chance.' He wanted to placate her, to calm her down. It was all right for him to be angry, but not her. That he found difficult to cope with.

‘I have given it a chance. I've given it almost two years of chance.'

‘That's not long enough …'

‘We live in this huge house and –' She hesitated, momentarily lost for words, closing her eyes to concentrate, then shouting, ‘And do what? Keep up appearances? We don't have any money. We don't have a life. We're stuck in the middle of nowhere, doing nothing. My friends all
do
things, Hugh. They go to the theatre, to the cinema, to restaurants, to – I don't know. They live! We don't have lives. We barely exist. And it's not enough. I want to live, too!'

‘I've told you, I'll get a salary increase soon. Money will come in. We'll be fine. We'll be able to do more then. This is a great investment. We just have to be careful now. Things will be tough for only a short time.'

‘Fuck the investment! Fuck it! Money, money, money, that's all I ever hear about. It's like living with my parents.'

And with that damning comment, she left the room, wiping tears away with the back of her hand as she crossed the parquet flooring. He sat down on the sofa. He finished his whisky, and poured another. He stared at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was still Easter Monday. It came back to him that Christ had risen, and he wondered briefly, bitterly, why He'd bothered.

8

There was a message on his office phone to call a Caitlin Davies. The name didn't mean anything to him. Anyway, it was more important he speak to Kate first. When he called, she was cool, almost offhand. ‘It would be nice for Tim if you didn't wipe yourself out.'

‘I'll be too late to see him tonight.'

‘I'm talking about tomorrow morning.'

‘I don't even want to go.'

‘You can always say no.'

‘I have to go, you know that.' Her silence told him what she thought of that. ‘I might see you later.'

‘Don't wake me.'

He rang off and called Caitlin Davies. Their conversation had lasted about a minute before it was cut short by Russell walking into his office and pacing up and down as if he was some caged big cat. ‘Sorry, Caitlin, can I call you back?' He'd lost focus with Russell in the room. His ears were buzzing. He put the phone down and fell back in his chair. The managing director stared at him. ‘You OK, mate?' Hugh nodded, trying to gather his thoughts. Russell added, ‘What do you reckon?'

Hugh frowned. ‘It went all right, I think.'

‘Just all right?' He stopped pacing.

‘Dieter can be hard to read sometimes.'

‘You've known him long enough.'

Hugh put on his jacket, and hastily cleaned away a few papers on his desk.

Russell was leaning against the doorway. ‘Simon was good.'

‘Yes, he was.' He could see no point in owning up to the fact he hadn't been impressed.

In the boardroom, Dieter was on his mobile, and drinking the beer they'd left him with. He was speaking German. He finished the conversation when they entered the room.

‘Simon's joining us at the restaurant,' Russell said.

The Warehouse was the city's hot new restaurant, or it was according to The Alpha Agency's finger-on-the-pulse-of-fashionable-places-to-be-seen managing director. It was located in a warehouse – no surprises there, thought Hugh – all timber beams and girders, with aluminium pipes and uneven floorboards. Very chic, he said under his breath, without conviction. A famous chef from some other hot restaurant had opened the place, and his fan club, like a pack of drooling hounds, had followed him across town, their wallets, like their mouths, agape.

‘Isn't Murray joining us?'

Sitting down at the table next to his client, Hugh said, ‘You should know Murray by now, Dieter. Never goes out in the evenings. His wife isn't well. He doesn't talk about it, but he likes to get home and look after her.' Left unsaid was the fact Murray couldn't drink.

‘There's a lesson there for all of us.' And with those few words Russell managed to convey that looking after a woman when she wasn't well was tantamount to being under her thumb. He placed his jacket over the back of his chair in a gesture that implied he meant business. From the still hovering waiter, he ordered a bottle of French champagne. ‘We must celebrate.'

‘What are we celebrating?' asked Dieter.

Hugh suspected he wasn't being as naïve as he sounded. Although momentarily taken aback, Russell recovered so fast possibly only Hugh noticed the hesitation. ‘Life, mate, life! That's worth celebrating, don't you think? Being alive in this beautiful city of ours, spending the evening at this top eatery, and of course, enjoying the company of Alpha's oldest client.'

Hugh wondered if that wasn't a little pointed. Dieter half smiled.

The three men settled down to study the large menus in silence, sipping from their champagne flutes. Their waiter ran through the specials. Russell was looking expansive, possibly even effusive. His phone hummed. He spoke briefly then shut it off with a decisive flick. ‘Simon'll be here in fifteen. We'll get a starter while we wait.'

The conversation was polite, if a little stilted. Hugh suspected that if he and his client had been alone, the conversation would have flowed more smoothly. Dieter, even by his usual standards, was being opaque. Hugh hadn't had an opportunity to ask him what he thought of the presentation, and was worried by his reaction. Simon Hogg's creative work was likely to have come across as revolutionary to Dieter. The commercials were entertaining, one or two were even funny (and was that the right approach for such a prestigious brand, Hugh wondered?), but there were no extended shots of Bauers being driven through modern cityscapes or prehistoric landscapes and, potentially much more disturbing to a car client, no beauty shot at the end of the commercials, nothing that showed the car in all its pristine glory against the rays of the rising or setting sun. When Dieter queried this during the presentation, Simon said, ‘Everyone knows what your cars look like, mate. We're selling a dream here, not a piece of steel.' ‘I hadn't realised,' Dieter replied, in such a way that Hugh hadn't been sure if he was being sincere or sarcastic. Nor was there a voice over extolling the virtues of the car's awesome engineering features or breathtaking ability to accelerate from nought to one hundred kilometres an hour in some miniscule number of seconds. Such things, including a low shot from a three-quarter degree angle, are what car clients love to hear and see. That's what they believe their business is all about and what they're convinced will sell their vehicles.

Hugh suspected it was all too much for his client. He certainly doubted that Russell understood or truly appreciated the campaign either, but knew his managing director was a great jumper-on-of-bandwagons, of whatever was fashionable at the time, and Simon Hogg was definitely fashionable. He was a multi-award winning creative director and – an even more impressive credential – was from London, the centre of the advertising world. Russell would also instinctively understand that, having chosen the new creative director, he was now obliged to back him. For at least a few months it would be impossible for Simon to do any wrong. The only positive sign, so far as Hugh could tell, was that at the end of the presentation Dieter hadn't used his favourite expression: ‘Ya, very funny, but nein.' However, that may only have been because he felt outnumbered by the agency people in the room.

When Simon joined them at the restaurant, the conversation became noticeably livelier. He was one of those Englishmen who should automatically be declared an honorary Australian, an ocker from London, blokey, funny and a piss taker. He had, it seemed, little reverence for anyone, or anything.

‘Shit soccer team your country has now, Dieter.'

‘I would – how do you say? – buy that.' Hugh nodded, a little apprehensively. ‘I would buy that,' repeated the German, very serious, very considered, ‘from anyone but an Englishman.'

Simon laughed loudly.

‘Don't mention the war,' Russell said to Simon in a mock German accent and, when no one laughed, added, ‘The soccer war, mate. I was talking about the soccer war.' Hugh wanted to hide under the table.

Like a true creative, Simon could drink. He was knocking the wine back as fast as Russell, who had a reputation in the business for possessing hollow legs. Hugh and Dieter were a little more circumspect, but only a little. Simon took it on himself to help Russell select new bottles when required, and was already using the word ‘mate' with as much frequency as the managing director. They were on the same wavelength.

Half way through the main course, Russell waved his knife vaguely in the direction of Darling Harbour. ‘You don't get views like this in London restaurants.'

‘True. But our restaurants are good now, the real thing. Not like in the past.'

‘That's 'cause they all have Aussie chefs running them.'

‘Rubbish, mate.'

‘I've heard the same, actually' said Hugh, thinking he should try and join in the conversation. ‘Many of the best establishments in London are run by Australians.'

‘Find that hard to believe.'

‘We should send some of our chefs across to Germany as well. Isn't that right, Dieter?'

‘But we are very happy with our food, Russell. Foreigners are very quick to laugh at our expense, but we like our sausages and frankfurters and sauerkraut. We have no need of foreign chefs.'

‘Good for you, Dieter,' said Hugh, playing the diplomatic account man and siding with his client.

After a short pause, during which he polished off the best part of a glass of the highly acclaimed, wallet-shrinking Henschke's Hill of Grace, and not in any obvious way giving it the appreciation it deserved, Simon said, ‘One thing you can't teach us Poms about is creativity. From what I've seen, the Aussies are way behind the rest of the advertising world creatively. It's like a time warp here.'

Not wishing to comment, Hugh hurriedly took a mouthful of food. Dieter looked bewildered. The ball was very much in Russell's court.

‘The Brits are responsible for the best advertising in the world, I'd agree with that, Si – although the Americans do sometimes come close. But you guys have the budgets. We don't have the population to merit putting vast amounts of money behind our commercials.'

‘It's not about money, mate, it's about ideas. It's about originality. And you guys aren't original. You're like the Japs; you copy everyone else.'

‘That's because we're a bunch of convicts.'

‘Not what I'm saying. I'm saying you guys don't have your own voice. You simply try and mimic our commercials or America's commercials, and don't even do a very good job of that.'

‘We've done some good work in recent years.' For Russell, this was said with an unnatural lack of confidence.

‘Very little. And what have you got to show for it? Where are your Cannes winners, your Design and Art Direction pencils, even your One Show statues?' he asked, referring to the top international creative awards in Europe, the UK and the US. ‘You can't be that hot if you don't have any of those in your bathroom.'

Dieter leant across the table. ‘Tell me, Simon, I think it is more important for you to win these awards than it is to sell your clients' products, am I right?'

‘No, that wouldn't be right, Dieter.' And it struck Hugh that Russell was a little unsure as to whose side he should be taking.

‘Award winning advertising
is
effective, Dieter. It sells. That's what a lot of clients don't get. I worked on a campaign in the UK – you may have heard of it: Egg. It's a bank.'

Dieter nodded. ‘Then you may also know that it went from zero, when it was launched in 1998, to becoming the world's largest pure online bank today. And it was the creative work that brought that about.'

‘I am not in agreement with you there. The creative work maybe did not hold the product back, but I think it was so successful because of the idea. The public saw it as a revolutionary new way of doing banking. That is why it appealed to them.'

‘You're wrong.' Hugh winced. ‘But here's another example – Super Noodles. That was a tired old product. Its market share was way down before it was relaunched with a great new campaign, one that also happened to win a string of awards. And in what's an extremely competitive segment of the market, it increased its share by over thirty per cent in two years.'