Staying Alive

‘Never mind. What’s up?’

‘You’d better get back here. Niall’s having a shitfit. You’ve fucked up, apparently,’ Jakki tells me. ‘Something to do with invoices. Don’t ask me to explain. He wants to see you.’

‘Well, he wants me to do store checks in five different supermarkets before tomorrow’s meeting as well. Which is it to be?’

‘It’s serious. You’d better come back…’

‘OK.’

‘But don’t come without the ice-cream shots.’

Silence, but only because I’m stifling a sneeze.

‘You all right, Murray?’

‘I’m coming down with something, you know.’

‘Got the sniffles? You’re such a wuss,’ she laughs.

‘Am not.’

Sitting behind her desk manning the phones and diaries she has no concept of what it’s like out here in the field. Every time I head for the supermarket freezers I risk death from hypothermia. I’m the Captain bloody Oates of advertising.

I end the call and as I re-aim the camera at the ice-cream display, the sneeze finally explodes. Definitely coming down with something. I look through the viewfinder and wonder if the Schenker Foods brand group will spot the shiny glob of snot on Heidi’s embroidered bodice.

two: nobody died (#ulink_61896677-0ce4-52f9-84c5-526c0d3618d8)

tuesday 4 november / 11.15 a.m.

I’m sitting in a conference room on the seventh floor of the Canary Wharf Tower, wondering how I’d like to die…

1. Peacefully, boringly in my sleep…

God, that is so me.

2. Surrounded by loved ones as I utter some carefully chosen, though seemingly spontaneous last words: Megan…Forgive her for she knew not what she…uuugggghhhhhh…

3. Alternatively (and, let’s be honest, more likely): Nurse…is it time for my enem…uuuugggggghhhhhhhh…

That’s the trouble with final words. Timing. Surely the hard part is catching that moment when there’s just enough breath left to squeeze out the ultimate sentence. With all the distractions of being terminal—pain, drugs, tubes, iron lungs and whatnot—the chances are you’d miss your cue. But that’s not the worst that could happen. No, imagine coming out with your killer epilogue and then…you don’t die. You linger. Maybe for hours. Or days. Picture the awkwardness. Lying there knowing what they’re thinking: ‘Well, he’s delivered his punchline. He should at least have the manners to get off the stage.’ No, best keep it zipped.

Where was I?…Meeting. Seventh floor. Canary Wharf Tower. Wondering how I’d like to…

4. Beneath several tons of sub-standard Stalin-era concrete, seconds after having pulled newborn triplets and their mother from the rubble of a collapsed apartment building, making me:

1 a Hero of the People in post-quake Uzbekistan.

2 a Millstone of Guilt around the neck of Megan Dyer as she watches the news coverage. Tough—the burden is something she’ll have to learn to live with.

5. At the controls of a 747, having wrested them from the grasp of a bug-eyed Arab before banking the jet inches clear of the Canary Wharf Tower as its paralysed occupants look on with unutterable gratitude.

6. No, no, no. At the controls of a 747 as I plunge it into the Canary Wharf Tower whose paralysed occupants look on with this final thought flashing through their brains: Is that Murray Colin in the cockpit?

Silly. I don’t like flying. I’m not exactly phobic, but every time I climb aboard I have to work hard to banish visions of the jet plummeting into, say, a tall building. Therefore:

7. Nothing that involves heights.

8. Or depths. Diving, submarines, stuff like that. I may be poor at altitude, but I am flat-out terrified of slowly running out of breathable air while being trapped at the bottom of—

I can’t think about that one without breaking into an icy sweat. Change the subject, Murray, change the bloody subject.

9. From a spectacularly massive coronary—‘My God,nurse, his heart literally burst!’—while my body is entwined with:

1 Megan Dyer’s

2 Megan Dyer’s

3 Betina Tofting’s, whose thigh—as she allows her skirt to ride up it—looks alarmingly similar to Megan Dyer’s.

Betina catches me gazing at her legs and yanks at her hem. Feeling shabby, I look away at Niall Haye circling his telescopic pointer around the phrase ‘ Consumer expectation/Taste delivery synchronicity’.

‘I’d like now to discuss the crucial point at which the consumer and the brand interface,’ my boss says, turning from the screen to me. ‘Murray, perhaps you’d like to take us through the results of your store checks.’

Perhaps I bloody wouldn’t. Why does he say that as if I’ve got a choice? Perhaps what I’d really like to do is shove that irritating telescopic pointer up your—

‘Thanks, Niall, I’d love to,’ I reply as I reach for the A0 sheet of Polyboard that has spent the last ninety minutes leaning against my chair. This is its Moment. I prop it up on the table and take the Schenker Foods brand group on a tour of five different supermarket freezer cabinets. In a bravura display of top-notch store checking I somehow managed to complete my mission before returning to the office for my bollocking—something to do with invoices, indeed.

I’m beginning to suspect that advertising isn’t all it was cracked up to be. When I was a goggle-eyed undergrad the recruiters tempted me with talk of drugs, models and shoots on sun-kissed beaches. No one mentioned the store check. Eight years in, the number of lines of coke that I’ve snorted off models’ sun-kissed bottoms runs to not even single figures. Yesterday, by contrast, I completed my ninetieth store check. No, as a career choice advertising does not do exactly what it says on the tin.

And if ad people can’t even be straight with one another…Well, it begs questions, doesn’t it?

11.32 a.m.

‘Thank you, Murray, that was fascinating,’ Haye says as I sit down. Hard to believe that anyone could, but Niall Haye finds pictures of supermarket freezers fascinating; almost—but not quite—enough to make him forget that I really did mess up on the invoice front.

Betina Tofting smiles at me for the first time in nearly two hours. This has nothing to do with her forgiving me for staring at her legs. It’s because she too was riveted by my presentation. She’s probably no more than twenty-five, a good two-thirds of her life still before her, yet that life revolves around Schenker Foods’ new line of adult choc-ices; nothing else exists for her. I smile back as if I feel the same way.

She says, ‘They are excellent photographs, Murray,’ in a Danish accent that’s incapable of irony. Her sincerity puts a glossy red cherry on top of my whipped cream of a depression…Is this as good as it’s going to get? Murray Colin, the world’s finest store checker. You want an oil fire extinguished, call Red Adair. You need a guaranteed thirty goals a season, stump up several million for Van Nistelrooy. You’re after flare-free snaps of icecream packaging, Murray’s your man.

Haye segues to the final item on the agenda: the media plan for the European launch of ChocoChillout. As he explains in excruciating detail how he proposes to blow an advertising budget big enough to buy every child in Africa three square meals a day, inoculations and a PlayStation 2, I mentally compose a letter to the Chief of Internal Security in North Korea.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I appreciate that you must be busy and I apologise for tearing you away from your important work. However, should you be looking for new and imaginative ways of extracting essential information from the many detainees you have in your care, I believe I may have just the thing.

Forget sleep-deprivation and attaching electrodes to genitals. I humbly suggest that just thirty minutes in a locked conference room with Niall Haye, his telescopic pointer and a selection of overhead projections will have even the most recalcitrant counter-revolutionary screaming for mercy and telling you everything you wish to know—as well as, I hazard, some stuff you didn’t even think to ask about.

Should you be interested, Mr Haye could be in Pyongyang on the next flight—sanctions permitting, of course.