Do You Want to Know a Secret?

NOW, IF YOU’RE going to do a thing, you might as well do it properly, I always say. The only trouble is, my workload in the office has gone virtually stratospheric and I’ve had damn all time to sit down and actually organize my own project management task: turning our Barbara into a household name within twelve months.

Anyway, the following Friday after the birthday weekend, I’m still in the office late in the evening, working so hard it’s almost like I’m stuck in a time warp. I have to come up with a pitch for a huge cosmetics contract I’m hoping to land, and pitching, let me tell you, is THE single most difficult part of my job. The idea is that I have to condense every single idea I’m simmering with for this product launch into a single sentence, then hopefully use it to bewitch a jaded advertising executive, who’ll fall in love with my idea and pay me a fortune to make it happen. At least, that’s the plan. The phone rings and I grab it, automatically answering, ‘Hello, Harper PR?’

‘Oh, listen to you, Cinderella, little Miss No-Date, still in the office at nine o’clock in the evening.’

Barbara, cutting to the chase as always. There’s never any preamble with her, never a: ‘hi, how are you?’ She’s always just straight in, straight to the point.

‘Shit, I didn’t realize it was so late. I have to have a pitch done for a meeting on Monday morning and I’m not happy with what we’ve got so far.’

That’s Barbara’s nickname for my two assistants, which actually really suits them as one is a tall blonde with long, swishy hair extensions hanging out of her, and the other’s a skinny brunette. Anyway, they’re both perky and pert and only about twenty-five. So, of course, working here for them is just the perfect excuse to go to a lot of parties and premieres, while they’re waiting for Mr Right to show up.

Honest to God, there are times when I look at the pair of them and really think I got my life priorities all wrong. And even though I know to the penny exactly what I pay each of them, they’re both always miles better dressed than me and always seem to have far more disposable income. Oh, and their real names, for the record, are actually Lucy and Kate, but somehow, behind their backs at least, the Paris and Nicole tag just stuck. Believe me, it just seems to suit their personalities an awful lot better.

‘Left hours ago. Gone husband-hunting. Like single people are supposed to on a Friday night.’

‘Cos they’ve gone to one of those cool trendy bars where the only people you see over the age of thirty are there to collect their kids. Plus, I have to work.’

‘Yeah, right, fine, way to go, Vicky, put work ahead of all else, that’s what has you sitting in an empty, cold, dark office all alone on a Friday night while all the normal people have gone out to play.’

‘Barbara, this isn’t a Charles Dickens novel, you know. My office does actually have light and heat, thanks very much. You make it sound like there should be hounds baying at the window under a full moon.’

‘Just know that you’ll end up at Paris and Nicole’s five-star, fancy double wedding like some toothless maiden aunt, sitting in a corner hoping beyond hope that you’ll catch the bouquet, and that the groom’s seventy-year-old uncle, who’s on a waiting list for hip replacement surgery, will ask you to bingo with him some Sunday afternoon. You keep this up and that’s the road you’re headed down, baby.’

‘I know, I know, I should be out there, but it’s just that this meeting on Monday is a big deal and I still haven’t finalized the pitch,’ I whinge, in an effort to get off this highly embarrassing subject. ‘And on top of everything else, the clients are so bloody vague. All I can get out of them is that they want the product to evoke “the glamour of Hollywood during its golden era”.’

‘Cosmetics. Oh, the usual, you know, face cream and foundation developed by scientists at NASA and so grossly overpriced, you’d swear they were personally hand-squeezed by the Queen from the hind leg of last year’s Grand National winner.’

‘Hmmm, biblical. Yeah, loving it. So what have you come up with for your pitch?’

‘I’m thinking of a film noir theme for the launch. You know, the kind of party where just walking through the door will almost feel like stepping back into a black-and-white movie. Piano music, champagne cocktails, models floating around who look like Barbara Stanwyck, with the guys dressed like Humphrey Bogart in white tuxes. Classy and sophisticated. Think Cole Porter. Think art deco. And of course the freebie bags will be stuffed with that pillar-box red nail varnish and the heavy lip-gloss all the great femme fatales used to wear.’

‘Piece of cake. The hard bit will be trying to talk the creatives into this. God alone knows what kind of ideas they have up their sleeve.’

‘Just don’t forget to wangle me an invite to the launch. You know me: I’m your girl for freebies. Well, freebies that other people end up paying for.’

‘And while you’re at it, any chance you’d ask them to cast me in their ad – sez she cheekily, fully expecting the answer no?’

‘Barbara, by the time I’m finished with you, you’ll be such a household name, the cosmetic companies will be queuing up for you to front all their ad campaigns. You’ll be like Keira Knightley on the Chanel ad.’

Now that’s actually not such a bad idea, I’m thinking, if Barbara was only world-famous, she’d be a terrific brand representative, she’s so gorgeous-looking and funny and charismatic. I mean look at Nicole Kidman or Catherine Zeta Jones or any of them: plugging perfume and night cream didn’t exactly do their careers any harm, now did it? Or their bank balances, come to think of it . . . hmmm . . . I start absent-mindedly drumming a pen on my notepad thinking about just how in the hell I’m going to get her there . . .

‘Excellent,’ says Barbara. ‘Glad to see you’re on the case. Anyway, that’s why I’m phoning you. I spoke to our lovely Laura and we’ve arranged to meet up tomorrow night to kick-start our cunning plan. I was calling our little gathering the “Maisonettes”, you know, because we’re there to help each other, like an all-girl freemasons, but Laura reckons it makes us sound like the Tiller Girls.’

‘Yeah, it does put me in mind of the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, all right.’

Next thing I start doodling a picture of a butterfly . . . well, that’s what the three of us are trying to do with our lives, aren’t we? Change, just like butterflies . . .

‘So, eight p.m. it is,’ Barbara goes on. ‘You provide the tequila and I’ll bring the margarita mix. And I already know you’re free and dateless, because that’s what the whole point of tomorrow night is.’

‘Thanks so much, why don’t you just throw a toaster in my tub while you’re at it?’

‘Do you want to get sensitive or do you want to get a man, Miss Lonely Heart?’

‘Point taken. You’re right, I have to change my attitude a bit. OK, here goes. This is the start of the official countdown from Cape Harper to boyfriend-land. Right, there you go. Does that sound pathologically optimistic enough? Here I am, in the prime of life, ready for commitment.’

Barbara snorts down the phone. She never laughs in a girlie, tinkly, clinking-champagne-glass way like some women do, Paris and Nicole for instance; no, hers is a gutsy, bawdy, full-on belly laugh. When she laughs in bars or restaurants, people always stare over, and you can almost see the thought-balloons coming out of their heads: ‘God, look at that table, they’re having all the crack.’ And usually they’re right. Anyway, just the sound of Barbara’s laugh is always enough to get me into giddy form as well. It’s unladylike, as my mother would say, it’s infectious but most important of all . . . fellas go mad over it. One bloke even told her he’d fallen in love with her purely on account of her laugh, which made me try impersonating her for a while, but I just ended up sounding like Dolores O’Riordan from The Cranberries. Only worse.

‘That’s the girl,’ she says. ‘You just wait and see, this time next year, you’ll be living the life of a Danielle Steel heroine. I have great plans for you, baby. I’ve done homework on your behalf and everything.’

I’m just thinking, bless her for taking all this so seriously, she’s so fab, when, out of nowhere, something strikes me.

‘Barbara, hope you don’t mind my asking but, how come you’re home tonight? Not like you, hon. Friday night and all that.’

‘I do have a date, I’m just running late, that’s all. With the casting director from the commercial last week, remember? Can’t even remember his name. It’s something . . . somebody Vale . . . I remember thinking whatever he’s called, it sounded like a housing estate out in the suburbs.’

‘Are you seriously telling me you’re going on a date with a guy whose name you don’t know?’

‘Honey, I’ve woken up with guys whose names I didn’t know. Besides, I don’t hold out much hope for him, he’s taking me to Bang Café, and we all know that place is just full of knickerless Ukrainian executive-stress consultants and record-pluggers. You know, one of those kips that’s like a rehearsal room for every lame pick-up line that doesn’t work on match.com.’

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to . . . my relationship coach. The woman I’m pinning all my hopes and dreams on, of ever meeting a DSM by this time next year.

Oh God, even thinking about what I’m hoping to achieve in the space of twelve short months makes me break out in a flop sweat . . . right then. Only one thing for it. I reach over to my handbag and fish out The Law of Attraction, which, tonne weight and all as it is, I’ve been toting around with me all week, dipping in and out of it whenever the need arises. Like now.

‘Before you go,’ I say. ‘I just opened the book you gave me, at random, and here’s the perfect affirmation quote for me to leave you on. Are you ready for this?’

Then a text message from Laura, which is never a good sign. It usually means there’s a fresh crisis with one of the kids, such as the time her youngest threw the main house phone down the loo, and her oldest brother didn’t realize and weed on it. Anyway, she asks if it’s OK if we convene at my place the following night, that her mum has agreed to babysit, and that she badly needs a night off or there’s a fair chance she’ll strangle someone, so I text back, saying grand, no worries, my house it is. Well, house slash building site would probably be more accurate.

It WILL be lovely when it’s finished, is my permanent mantra as every morning I sit gulping down cups of coffee at my washing machine, which is doubling up as a kitchen table for me at the moment. I’m not kidding, the house and renovations are costing me so much that I can’t afford proper furniture.

It’s a dotey, tiny little doll’s house Victorian railway cottage, which was waaaay over my budget when I bought it last year, in the face of a great deal of opposition from my nearest and dearest which I can neatly summarize thus:

DAD: ‘It’s nothing but a money pit, there’s damp downstairs and I’d swear I see a bit of dry rot, and you know the maintenance on an old house is constant, a bit like the Golden Gate Bridge, you start work on one end and by the time you finish, it’s time to go back and start all over again blah, blah, blah etc., etc. . . .

Dad, I should tell you, fancies himself as a great handyman, on account of a power drill we got him one Christmas, and even though he spent ages swaggering around the house with a very authoritative-looking tool belt strapped to his waist, all he really ended up doing was putting a load of Swiss cheese holes in my mother’s good IKEA occasional table. Poor Mum, every bank holiday weekend she has to put up with him strutting around, dismantling her hostess trolley and magazine stands to illustrate how badly they’re made. (‘Held together with glue, do you see? Total crap.’) Then abandoning everything and leaving a big mess all over the living-room floor the minute a Cup Final match comes on.

MIDDLE BROTHER: ‘Should have gone for a cool penthouse somewhere in town instead, Vick, guys love that, plus you’ll never get the old-lady smell out of that house. And is that actual stippling on the ceilings?’

MY INCREDIBLY CONDESCENDING SISTER-IN-LAW, A WOMAN WHO’D MAKE A STEPFORD WIFE LOOK LIKE WAYNETTA SLOB: ‘It’s so . . . what’s the word? Oh I know, cosy.’

Which, by the way, we all know right well is code for ‘small’. You know, just like when you say a guy is ‘distinguished’, it’s actually a euphemism for ‘really old and I wouldn’t go near him in a sugar rush’. Then to add insult to injury, when I did eventually move in she said, ‘I LOVE coming around to visit you, Vicky. It’s just like camping out. And I can totally sympathize. When we had the builders in a few years ago, my masseuse said she never saw me retain such tension in my shoulders. Never get a conservatory, sweetheart, it’s soooo not worth the hassle.’

Even Barbara had a go. She came to a viewing with me and grudgingly said, ‘Buy it if you want, but you’ll never get a man to move in here with you. For God’s sake, the outside is painted pink. Pink, as a colour, is a very well-known man-repeller. That’s a fact. Bit like a single woman with a cat. Guys tend to think you’re a total weirdo.’

See what I mean? I ignored the lot of them and bought it anyway, all swept up in the romance of owning a house with beautiful period features, bay windows, a cast-iron fireplace in the bedroom, and a lovely, bright downstairs kitchen with actual coving on the ceiling. ‘Listen to you, your trouble is you’ve seen too many Merchant Ivory movies and now you fancy yourself as Helena Bonham Carter in a tight corset, clutching your pearls, looking out the sash window,’ Laura quips at me every time I enthuse about how lovely it WILL be in about two hundred years’ time, when my builder, probably the single most useless individual in the northern hemisphere, eventually gets around to finishing the job. ‘You’ll end up selling, mark my words.’

I’m too bloody stubborn, and I’ve shelled out far too much cash at this point to swallow my pride and admit that she might actually be right. Instead, I’ve schooled myself to look on the whole renovation project as a lesson on the triumph of optimism over bitter experience – with such absolute force of will that if I could only apply the same attitude to my love life, sure I’d be laughing.

Honestly, every time I come home it’s like there’s a fresh disaster waiting for me with the builder, who is now a full six months behind schedule. He was to be finished at Christmas, it’s now well after Easter, and I’m still living in a building site; dust everywhere, all my stuff in boxes, and only a travel kettle in the kitchen to make the odd cuppa tea with, which I have to drink out of plastic cups because I’ve no way of washing anything.

I’m not making this up: the other night I came in to find my beautiful original wooden floor in what WILL be my elegant sitting room (trust me, even just saying it is an act of faith) completely and utterly destroyed. Builder-from-hell was supposed to sand it down for me, nice and evenly, then varnish it in a lovely dark, shiny teak; like the kind of floor you’d expect to see Fred Astaire swirling Ginger Rogers around on in a thirties black-and-white movie, at least that was my humble little vision. What I actually ended up with was the whole thing covered in lumps and bumps, not unlike the cellulite on my thighs, except all sealed in with varnish.

‘Do you like it, love?’ he asked me cheerily, seeing the ‘slapped mullet’ look on my face. ‘It’s all the go in these old houses. Gives a kind of “antique” effect. No extra charge for it now, don’t worry.’

Anyway, for better or for worse, my house/building site it is. Barbara’s flat is sadly out of the question as she shares with another ‘resting’ actress, so there’s never any hope of peace or privacy. Now, I love her flat and I love going around there, it’s kind of like a flashback to student days: pizza boxes and empty wine bottles everywhere, with Barbara usually wandering around the place still in her nightie at three in the afternoon watching Oprah. Great fun, but our Laura, hygiene fascist that she is, the woman who famously never goes anywhere without Parazone wipes in her bag, reckons she can only ever drink alcohol there, so it’ll kill whatever germs are floating around the glasses. And it’s not really fair for us to land on Laura either, mainly because, God love her, she’ll always jump at any chance she can to escape for a night. It’s rare, believe me, as she can never get babysitters, and, as she says herself, it’s hardly surprising. Any child-minder in their right mind would demand payment in gold bullion to take responsibility for her precious angels. In fact, Laura reckons pretty much every seventeen-year-old in the area has her blacklisted by now.

No, hate it, too self-helpy. (Please understand I just love attaching names and titles to things; it kind of comes with my job.)

Now all we have to figure out is how in God’s name we’re going to completely and utterly do a three-sixty on each other’s lives. Within one year.