‘You have?’
‘Since the first time I saw you.’
20
Tuesday, 13 September, day one
Irritably I weave through the dithery throngs in Heathrow – I keep hitting little pockets of rage, like emotional turbulence – and finally reach the tube.
Since I left home I’ve been afraid a full-blown panic attack will grab me, and the way we’re squashed into the train makes me feel even more tight-chested and gaspy. This is going to be a tough day.
With no internet to distract me, worry about Hugh starts to gnaw. What if the blow from my hairbrush causes bleeding in his brain? There had been something on Grey’s Anatomy – he could have an aneurysm. The thought of him collapsing in some foreign city, surrounded only by strangers, makes me cold.
He might die.
Yeah, well, we’re all going to die. And he’s brought it on himself. If he hadn’t decided to take off for six months, he wouldn’t have had a hairbrush thrown at his head. I’ve been with him for more than seventeen years and I’ve never thrown a hairbrush at him before today. Go figure.
Marble Arch is my stop. I push through the rush-hour crowds, and ten minutes before my first meeting I arrive at my ‘office’. It’s actually Home House, the private members’ club. Both Alastair and I belong to it because the annual fee is a lot less than running a London office.
The next two days will be busy and that’s probably good: downtime is no friend to me, not even the occasional second to think, because any hiatus will be like an abyss, and if I tumble in, there might be terrible difficulty in getting back out again.
Over the next forty-eight hours I’ll be required to eat and drink a lot, and while the eating might prove a challenge, the drinking bit should be nice.
A good PR firm keeps in with as many influential journos and TV producers as possible so that when the shit hits the fan there are friends to call on for help.
Keeping in with the Irish media is no bother because everyone knows everyone. Then Tim, Alastair and I cover the UK as best we can: Tim goes to Edinburgh every second Thursday; I’m in London every Tuesday and Wednesday and Alastair takes over from me on Thursdays and Fridays.
Unless a crisis blows up – and that happens a fair bit – my work (which doesn’t sound like work at all, I know) mostly involves me and my laptop taking up residence in Home House and showing media people some love. I enquire about sick kids, I remember spouses’ names and, above all else, I ply them with food and drink.
My day tends to move from breakfast meetings to brunch to lunch to afternoon tea to dinner, and my weekly alcohol unit allowance is nearly always used up by mid-afternoon on Tuesday, thanks to Mimosa at breakfast, Prosecco at brunch, wine at lunch and Champagne at afternoon tea.
I wish I didn’t have to drink so much but people take a dim view of me urging them on to get scuttered while restricting my own consumption to sips of fizzy water. However, right now, I’m very grateful to have a job that involves compulsory mid-morning alcohol.
What I do is basically horse-trading – for example, if you kill the story about my client Mr X being cruel to kangaroos, I’ll give you an exclusive comeback interview with another of my clients, Ms Y, as soon as she’s out of rehab. (Honestly, for every story where a famous person does something idiotic or illegal, there are probably ten that are never published. The stuff that goes on, I tell you, you just wouldn’t believe it. And it’s usually the least powerful and most vulnerable who are publicly shamed. Anyone with any kind of heft gets the bad stories dropped.)
As a teenager my career aspirations involved something arty – to do with clothes, maybe, or interiors. But I hadn’t done art at school – Pop wouldn’t let me, insisted it wasn’t a real subject – so when I moved to Leeds with Richie, with no qualifications at all, it was just pure chance that my lowly receptionist job happened to be at a PR firm.
I’d known nothing about the publicity game but those people saw something in me, began involving me in campaigns, and I learnt on the job.
So I’ve been doing this for a long time, first in Leeds, then London, then splitting my time between Dublin and London. Over the years I’ve got to know a lot of media people, and the long and the short of it is that I’m terrified of causing offence and engendering their enmity.
Hardly comparable to being down the mines, I know, but in its own first-world way, it’s scary work. Media types have so much power. Also they’re usually mad for a bit of banter, and even though I make game efforts to join in, I’m never sure where the line is.
Which means that as soon as the person has left, my brain starts replaying the conversation and my stomach gushes acid. Was it a mistake to laugh at the story of their burglary? Who in their right mind would laugh at a burglary story? But it had been narrated in a funny way and I’d been afraid not to laugh. On reflection, should I have found a way that acknowledged (a) the person was a comic genius who’d (b) had a traumatic experience?
My first meeting today is with an eighties pop star who’s flirting with bankruptcy and hoping for a rebrand. I should float the EverDry ambassador’s job by her, but under the circumstances I simply don’t have the emotional energy to finesse something so thorny. All in all, our meet doesn’t go so great. And neither does the next one, just a ‘catch-up over coffee’ with a household-name columnist for the Guardian, or the one after that, brunch with a hot-right-now young TV producer.
My head is a long way from being in the game and my lungs won’t play ball.
But I’m functioning – saying words, standing, nodding, breathing occasionally. Frankly, I’m pretty impressed with myself. Perhaps this is one of the benefits of adulthood – you can feel as if you’ve lost everything that ever mattered and still eat an omelette and enquire after a journalist’s pet poodle.
After lunch I have to venture into the actual world. Currently I’m in the process of rehabilitating an ex-politician (expenses scandal) and one of my stratagems is to offer her up as the figure-head for Room, a homelessness charity. It’s not a natural fit. My ex-politician, Tabitha Wilton, is posh and brisk. Her voice is a ringing, confident affair that commands instant dislike. Today she will meet with her potential ally face to face and I’m a peculiar mix of nihilistic and profoundly nervous. It’s been a battle to get any charity interested in partnering with her – even without the expenses scandal, she doesn’t rate highly on the likeability scale.
Yet, if this works, it could do wonders for Tabitha’s image, while the charity’s profile would definitely rise – with, of course, a commensurate increase in income.
The whole business is as grim as an arranged marriage, with Tabitha as the bride and me as – I don’t know – the matchmaker? The bride’s down-on-his-luck father? I feel hand-washy and obsequious.
The three representatives from Room are men in suits and I’m not feeling the love.
‘What do you know of homelessness?’ one asks, somewhat sneerily.
‘Very little!’ Tabitha announces, as if she’s addressing people four counties away. ‘But willing to learn.’
‘How about you come on a soup run with our volunteers? This evening?’
Tabitha wavers – and recovers. ‘Certainly!’
I exhale, a little too audibly.
‘You own two homes?’
‘Mortgaged to the hilt! Bank talking foreclosure! Bloody terrified, if truth be told!’
This goes down well. One of the suity-men does a small scribble on his jotter. He could be just reminding himself that he needs to buy tissues, but if he’s anything like me, he’ll want her to repeat that precise line in a press interview.
‘May well be calling on you myself, if something doesn’t come through for me soon!’