Matt Beaumont - Staying Alive

You might wonder why I remember some relatively minor politician’s fall from grace so vividly. Well, I lived and breathed it vicariously through Megan. She was a junior in Channel Four’s legal department at the time. For her it was the clearest case of good against evil since Superman versus Lex Luthor. The TV channel’s cause looked hopelessly lost, but at the eleventh hour their barrister put in a barnstorming performance. He stood up, cleared his throat and reduced the plaintiff’s key witness to tears as he showed her to be nothing more than a brazen liar. Of course, that she was only thirteen might have helped him. At the time a saying about candy and babies sprang to mind, but I didn’t mention it to Megan.

I wish now that I had. The barrister was a bloke called Sandy Morrison.

I watch Richard Hyam-Glass bounding up and down the steps on his set, allowing his audience one or—if they behave—two words in edgeways. The show, like all these things, has nothing to do with giving ordinary people a voice and everything to do with providing a TV studio large enough to contain its presenter’s bloated ego. He’s tossing out empathetic phrases: emotional credit account and the long and winding road to closure . He could be talking about anything that entails trauma—which these days does mean any thing—and I have to look at the caption to see what the topic is. Living with cancer.

I switch off the TV— not because I’m in denial, but because I’m late for work—and head for the bathroom. I run the shower and climb in. I squeeze a dollop of gel into my hand and soap my body. Same order as always: face, shoulders, arms, torso, groin…I can feel the lump and I don’t know if it’s an effect created by the blast of water bouncing off my scrotum, but it feels as if it’s alive, like it’s setting off on an impromptu growth spurt for the benefit of my soapy fingertips.

Stupid . Of course it isn’t growing. But I’m panicking now. I rinse off, towel myself dry and dress. Then I head for the office. But not before I’ve retrieved the letter from the bin.

10.54 a.m.

‘You’re late. Again ,’ Haye snaps. ‘And you’ve got soap in your ear.’

‘Sorry—I seemed to run out of time this morning.’

‘Well, don’t let it happen again. This isn’t the image Blower Mann likes to project to its clients.’

Haye is big on four things: store checks, punctuality, contact reports and the image Blower Mann likes to project to its clients. To give him his due, soap in ear surely breaches the spirit, if not the letter of the Blower Mann dress code.

‘Anyway,’ he continues, ‘it’s assessment time. I’ve got you down for a thirty-minute slot on Thursday morning. Make sure your diary’s clear.’

After I’d left uni I got a letter from Blower Mann informing me I had an interview with one of their group account directors—Niall Haye. Wow , I thought, Niall Haye . Of course, I’d never heard of him, but what a sexy-cool name—a twinkle-toed Irish footballer’s name, an edgy author’s name, a rock star’s name.

Never be seduced by a name.

Got that?

Never.

Niall Haye is a drone. Of all the drones in the hive, he is the droniest. A hundred-grand showbiz Porsche sits in his designated parking space, but it can’t conceal the man’s total lack of colour.

And if any one thing has killed my ambition it’s the fact that twice a year he sits me down for my assessment and dangles the promise that if I work really hard then one day I could turn into him .

‘Thursday, Thursday,’ I burble as I feel the bump of the hospital letter in my jacket. ‘Er…I can’t, Niall. I’ve got a hospital appointment…Sorry.’

‘Nothing I should worry about, Murray?’

His uncharacteristic display of tenderness surprises me and the words, Er, it’s almost certainly nothing, but I’m having a very minor lump checked out , almost spill out…but not quite. What I say instead is, ‘It’s nothing really…It’s kind of personal.’

Which is a mistake because, now I think about it, Haye is big on five things: store checks, punctuality, contact reports, appear-ance, and the prevention of personal affairs impacting (his favourite verb—though, of course it isn’t actually a verb; just a word that he and his kind have press-ganged into performing against type) on work. Worse still, the linking of a hospital appointment to the phrase it’s kind of personal surely has him picturing a visit to an STD clinic.

‘You of all people,’ he says, ‘should not be taking your biannual appraisal lightly. If I may use my favourite analogy—’

Let me guess. Space, the final frontier?

‘—a career is rather like interplanetary travel—’

Bingo!

‘—The slightest misfire on your rocket’s trim controls—’

Trim controls, trim controls…Must have left them in my workstation. In my desk-tidy perhaps? Oh, I was forgetting; this is an analogy.

‘—and you’ll miss your destination by light years. Your ship, my friend—’

Pur-lease, Haye—I am not your friend.

‘—has yet to leave the launch pad. If you’ve any interest at all in achieving lift-off, you’ll reschedule the hospital.’

Oh yes, how I’d love to cancel an urgent investigation into a potentially life-threatening disease so I can listen to you marking me out of ten on my performance across fifteen key criteria.

‘I’ll do my best,’ I say.

He turns and walks briskly away, all things-to-do-people-to-see. I can’t believe how jaded I feel. A thirty-one-year-old burn out. Yet there’s one thing that gives me hope. I do, after all, have a dream, though not one of which Megan would approve. I’m not sure I entirely approve of it myself. This is how it goes:

Haye: Murray, something huge has come up, a gold-plated revenue opportunity and a chance to make the world a better place.

Colin: What is it, Niall?

Haye: Before I tell you, I need to know I can count on you one hundred and ten per cent. You’ll be playing on the A team, pissing with the big boys, and I need to know you’re up for it.

Colin: You know I relish a challenge, Niall. Show me your biggest executive urinal and let me hose down that porcelain.

Haye: We’ve been appointed to handle Mr Muscle.

Colin: Fantastic! Stupendous. This is the one we’ve been waiting for.

Haye: Isn’t it? We’ve got the whole lot. The kitchen spray, the bathroom cleaner, the entire kit and caboodle.

Colin: Even the oven spray, the drain cleaner and the handy orange-scented kitchen wipes?

Haye: Their entire product portfolio is ours and I believe there’s only one man who can handle it…(Unnecessarily over played dramatic pause)…Murray, this is your baby.

SFX: Manly backslaps and high fives.

It isn’t always Mr Muscle. Sometimes it’s Cif, sometimes Dettox. Other times, as a sop to my ex, it’s an as yet un-launched range of eco-friendly products that really do make the world a better as well as a cleaner and more fragrant place.

Murray: Can you believe it, Meg? Thanks to me the Midlands and the Southeast have been officially pronounced germ-free, and it’s been achieved without any increase in CFC and chlorine levels.

Megan: Oh, Murray, you really have made the planet safer for our unborn child and you’ve done it without sacrificing market share. Come here and let me smother you with kisses.

Whatever, I honestly think that being given control of a bigspending household cleaner account would give my life meaning and purpose. I imagine the factory tours where I’m shown how they mix the chemicals that cut through grease, yet leave no unsightly powdery residue. I picture myself in a white protective suit being allowed a glimpse of the aggressive solvents that, if they weren’t so busy breaking down baked-on filth, could be used by some crazed despot for his WMD programme. I dream of brainstorming sessions where I lead a crack team of marketing pros and detergent boffins in search of the Holy Grail: a multi-surface cleaner suitable for kitchens and bathrooms. It’s a question of fragrance. You may or may not have noticed, but kitchen cleaners smell entirely inappropriate when you use them in the bathroom and vice versa. It’s only a little thing, but a one-product-fits-all solution must be out there…If only they could find the right scent.