In a matter of weeks, SharkSkin will become synonymous with a scent that makes dogs hurl, along with a misogynistic PR campaign that not only fails to sell product, but will make me personally—as the brand manager—look like a woman who hates women, and skin, and sharks, thus ending my career in an impressively three-dimensional fashion.
Silently, Gareth lines up bottles on the table, all of which have our leaping, open-mouthed ambassador plastered all over them. It feels like unfair representation. Sharks are generally very peaceful: I’m sure there are plenty of times they just swim around, not covered in blood, chilling out with their mouths closed.
“There’s going to be an entire range,” Gareth states in a strange voice, and I study his face, but I can’t for the life of me work out what expression is on it. Embarrassment? Indigestion? They look so similar. “Face wash. Serum. Vitamin C. Sun cream. Body lotion. Toothpaste, eventually, but we’re still...working on the formula.”
“It’ll be done soon,” Jack contributes proudly. “Testers don’t seem to want to put it in their mouths.”
Gareth makes a weird choking noise and rubs his nose.
“The thing is—” I swallow, but there’s no way around this: I can muck around with time as much as I like, but I still have to keep trying to nudge this meeting in a different direction or I’m going to end up in exactly the same place again. “Are we all definitely set on SharkSkin as a brand name?”
Jack stares at my leg: I didn’t even realize it was bouncing.
“It’s just that shark’s skin is made up of layers of sharp dermal denticles,” I explain, pressing my right leg with my hand until the bouncing neatly transfers to the left instead. “Each has a vascular pulp section, a middle made of dentine and an outer layer of enamel.”
My client continues to study me blankly.
“Teeth,” I clarify quickly, pushing my research forward across the table so he can see the diagrams I printed out for visual impact. “A shark is literally covered all over in thousands of living teeth and I worry that this isn’t what humans look to emulate with their skin-care regime.”
“The name stays,” Jack snaps. “Next.”
“Okay.” I start quickly rifling through my file, even though I know exactly what the next response will be too. “So I guess the next question is what demographic we’re targeting, because—”
“Men,” Jack says. “Next.”
“Gendered skin care is a little outda—”
“So here’s the campaign.” Jack leans back and props his hands behind his head—while simultaneously balancing on a ball, which is actually quite impressive. “‘Skin Care With Bite, For Real Men.’”
I close my eyes. It’s the same. Somehow, in a completely different strand of the universe with an infinite number of ideas to choose from, Jack’s gone ahead and picked the same shit catchphrase that’s going to lose me my job again.
“It won’t work,” I say flatly.
“But I think it will.”
“It won’t.”
“I’m pretty sure it will.”
“I am telling you, Jack.” My voice is definitely grating now, but there’s no getting around it. “I have seen exactly what will happen if we go down this path, and it will be a disaster. Nobody will cover it. Nobody will buy it. We’ll be laughed at by everyone. Everyone.”
Jack scowls. “So you can see the future now, can you?”
“Yes,” I say sharply. “And we will fail.”
My client stares at me, and with a deep breath I lift my eyeballs and stare back at him: feeling a bit like Patroclus on the beaches of Troy, holding my sword aloft, pretending to be Achilles and waiting to be fatally run through with a spear.
“Your job,” Jack says, and it’s exactly what happened last time, right down to the crimped edges of his voice, “is to support my business plan, Miss Dankworth, which I am paying for. With my private funds. Am I perfectly clear? Not to give me this negative, defeatist attitude and arrogantly assume you know better than I do.”
Don’t do it, Cassandra. Please don’t do it.
Just tell Jack he’s a visionary and a genius—a Daedalus of creative ingenuity, a Circe of chemical construction—because the only logical way to save your job now is to make sure he likes you. Except I can’t. Lying makes me feel sick, and I’ve never been able to fake humility. (“Cassandra has no respect for authority.”) Just as before, I feel a familiar, electric ripple of rage: this time definitely mine, mustard yellow. Because why should I have to pretend? Why should I have to stroke this man’s inflated ego, especially when now I know I’m right?
“My job,” I say, smiling tightly with all the remaining energy I can muster, “is to successfully launch your brand. If you want to sell a lot of product, you’ll need to appeal to a much wider demographic than men who personally identify with sea life.”
Jack lifts his chin and there it is again: the squelchy, resentful sensation that will follow me from now until the moment of my unemployment. He dislikes me, and it starts precisely here. But I refuse to go back in time to change it. I refuse to exhaust myself, just to let him defeat me without a fight.
Instead, I harden my gaze: if he wants arrogance, he’s got it.
“Skin Care With Bite,” Jack asserts again, “For Real Men. That’s the campaign, Cassandra, and it is your job to make it work.”
I nod, jaw tight. “Understood.”
“Coverage in ten pieces of mainstream media,” he adds firmly. “That’s what Barry promised us when we signed with your agency. Ten pieces, including national radio. Not including regional.”
Not going to happen. “Fine.”
We’re going to get one local Norfolk hit and the seventy-six-year-old presenter will mistakenly tell everyone the moisturizer contains actual shark and we’ll get a tirade of hate mail from animal activists and horrified children.
“Great,” Jack says, looking past me and brightening up at my boss, now lingering outside. I’d turn around too, but I can’t or I’ll fall off my ball. “I’ll look forward to being kept up to date, on a daily basis.” Sometimes on a minutely basis, if I remember correctly. “Thank you, Cassandra.”
Jack says my name with just enough emphasis to make it sound unfashionable and outdated, then leaves the room while I carefully bounce up and down a few times, preparing to stand up as if I’m on a space hopper. I can’t believe it. That meeting went almost exactly the same as it did originally. I’ve got literally all of time on my side—an eternity of do-overs—and I haven’t fixed anything at all.
“He’s just really invested,” Gareth says awkwardly, putting the bottles neatly back in the box. “Jack’s not a bad guy. I’ve—”
“Known him since you were at school,” I say tiredly. “Yes, I know.”
“Yeah.” Gareth frowns and studies me. “I guess Jack told you at the pitch meeting. There’s a lot of—”
“Pressure on him to get this right.” I roll to my feet. “There’s a lot of pressure on me too, you know. My whole career depends on it.”
“Right.” I can feel Gareth’s eyes on me as I gather my totally unused file of ideas. I might as well have brought in a year’s worth of the Beano. “And exactly how certain are you that this strategy won’t work?”
“A hundred percent.”
Maybe I should just cut my losses and leave my job now, before I have to listen to jokes about having bitten off more than I can chew for the rest of my PR career. Except...if I mess with this strand of history, who knows the impact it will have on all the others? What about Will? What about my flatmates? What about the rest of my plans? I suddenly feel like Theseus, carefully unraveling his red thread around the labyrinth so he knows how to get back out again when it’s all over.
I can’t risk cutting the thread and doing it all in the dark.
“If you can think of a way around this,” Gareth says as we walk back into the main office, “call—”
“You directly.” I nod flatly, holding out my hand for his business card. “Got it.”
Gareth stares at me for a few seconds.
“You’ll do what you can to help,” I prompt, wiggling my fingers. “If I can think of any way around it, I must let you know.”
Except I won’t, because I don’t have the faintest idea of what to do next. I’m not a good account manager at the best of times, and now I’ve been painted into a corner that I am simply not creative enough to get back out of. I’ve tried before, and I’ve failed. I’ll just get impatient and try to tiptoe directly out of the room, ending up with thick white emulsion all over my socks and footprints all over the house.
“Gaz, are you coming or what?” Jack says, poking his head back around the agency door. “We’re going for—”
“Sushi,” I finish, even though the irony is lost on him.
Gareth frowns at me for a few seconds—thrown by my creepy omniscience—then hands me his business card and disappears. With a small sigh, I search the office for Anya and Miyuki, but they’re already giggling next to the photocopying machine. Apparently they’re having a not very secret but extremely passionate affair that everyone in the office knows about but me, and it will become a running colleague joke that I don’t figure it out for another seven weeks.
Carrying my folder in my arms, I return to my desk.