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That was the day my one-woman talent agency advanced from semi-pro to Premier League status, when I booked Vincent as a last-minute replacement for Katie Price on SlamChannel Ireland's "Celebrity Apocalypse".
Like an interstellar probe aiming for a faraway planet, I used the momentum of that minor success to slingshot toward greater ambitions.
I rang the receptionist who had just called to connect me with Faron, the "Celebrity Apocalypse" casting executive.
Faron's girl picked up. I switched on the sugar ray and I lied.
Cassie love, I said. It's Peachy again, can you hear me alright? Shit signal, Faron had me holding for Marian Moore and my phone dropped the call. Can you patch me through? Thanks babe.
My next breath didn't quite fit. I lifted my chin as if fighting to hold my head above swift water while Cassie connected me to Amazon U.K.'s Chief of New Media and the founder of SlamChannel Global, Marian Moore.
I greeted Marian like we were dear old friends from Planet Wayback. In the split second before she could think deeply enough to realize that we had in fact never met, I squeezed the trigger and took my shot.
Sixty seconds later Marian's assistant came on the line to schedule my pitch meeting for a reality series featuring Vincent.
My fingers tingled and turned to useless stone. Over and over I tried to press the appointment into my calendar app and I panicked, snapping the bond of one pepper-red nail against the screen.
I placed my phone on the table. Took a breath, made a fist, gripped my wrist and set a reminder with one curled knuckle. Sat back and let the professional upgrade sink into my bones like the bite of a radioactive spider.
Marian effing Moore gave me a meeting.
Eighteen months before that phone call I'd not heard of Marian Moore. I was an Oxford dropout with no fixed address, squandering the inheritance meant to fund my tuition by furthering an agenda of reckless adventure across the American Midwest.
It proved a tricky affair, managing the sum of money my grandfather left me.
When disbursed from grimy cashpoints as U.S. dollars, the unfamiliar faces on those Yankee notes rendered their value alien and insignificant. An exchange rate of nearly two to one in favour of the powerful pound sterling bolstered the illusion I was playing games with a bottomless bank of Monopoly money.
I allowed things to slip in the accounting department. Then more serious complications arose and I was deported back to England.
Returning to my parents' home in Essex was impossible. My disgusting sister and I remained deadlocked in a silent state of war and the only friends I had left in London were far from friendly. They were two-legged snakes, hatched and reared by sour souls from the same Clash-to-Thatcher generation that produced my mother and father.
Anyone willing to take me in would do so only to savour a front-row seat to my downfall, leaning into the wreckage like frost-nipped travellers warming themselves before a fire. If the roles were reversed I certainly would have done the same.
Phoning Majid was my final option. His assistance would come with a few filthy strings attached, but my time in the States forever cured me of feeling uneasy about exchanging something I had for something I wanted.
I know how that sounds.
And I'm sure I know exactly what you're thinking right now, but this story doesn't turn out that way, because I'm not fucking stupid.
Are you listening?
I have never been a victim.
I modelled myself as a social contractor. A consenting professional furnishing personal services for trusted associates.
Majid was the very first of those associates. Call him Client Zero.
From the day we met as Aramco brats in physics class at Swiss International Scientific in Dubai, everything that happened between us was strictly business. I could always rely on him to behave like an actual gentleman, you know? To keep it that kind of cool.
So I took my dirty finger out of my mouth and I rang the man.
Seventy-two hours later he was there to pick me up at Heathrow when I shuffled through customs without luggage or money. Majid's battered Audi Quattro was a fetid pressure-cooker of cigarette smoke, vanilla air freshener and counterfeit cologne he sold from the boot when we were at college. Those odours coated my throat with a stinging range of flavours, set my head whirling as we negotiated the terms of my lodging on the way to his flat.
I showered. Cleaned my teeth, necked three cans of lager and turned out the lights. Collapsed upon Majid's lumpy bed and let him fuck the first week's rent out of me while I was still too numb to form significant memories. I showered a second time and heard him coughing as he shoved the living-room couch to a spare room bare of carpet or curtains. He covered the cigarette-burned cushions under mismatched linens that smelled worse than his car.
I took the empty lager cans to my new bedroom and stacked them against the closed door. Pried open the window with the chipped tips of my nibbled nails and let the air and energy of London tumble in. Leaned over the sill and took it into me, the lurch and rough hush of bus brakes, the buzzy bawl of courier scooters, every lovely bit of the city's dirt and wreck and noise. I held it deep and tight inside like a strong dose of medicine or a silly birthday wish.
Home.
Soon I was sleeping through the night and eating proper food again. Before the next instalment of rent came due Majid developed a chest infection with a dry sandy hack that wracked his box-kite frame and left him breathless.
You can't strap a condom over a cough. Majid was lonely and miserable but agreeable to my new terms. Rather than lay with him each fortnight for five minutes of sad sex ranking barely better than a pelvic exam from a jittery gyno with a hook for a hand, I took on the shopping and the cooking. Lugged sacks of wash to the corner launderette. Dabbled at cleaning the flat, sanitizing shared surfaces to avoid hosting the unknown ailment that scoured the warm tones from Majid's olive skin and left him stained greenish grey.
His condition deteriorated. One afternoon he cut his shift short, came home and went straight to bed. That night he developed a fever and wet himself in his sleep but he refused to see a physician.
Each day I brought hot soup and chilled spring water to his pissy chamber and found yesterday's bowl untouched, skinned over smooth and freckled with cigarette ash. The warm water bottle I replaced with a cold one was typically unopened, as Majid preferred to drink flat Morrisons own-brand cola from two-litre bottles crowding his nightstand like a plastic pipe organ.
A trip to A&E at two in the morning confirmed double pneumonia. Majid stayed in hospital for three weeks. I downloaded the Uber app and drove his car with the windows down at all hours, taking an even split of income after expenses until he recovered and came home.
I earned enough to upgrade my aesthetic effect with a styled salon haircut and new nails. Majid increased his daily intake of fluids and quickly returned to top form, driving full time and smoking two packs a day.
I bought second-hand outfits from charity shops. Paid a month's rent in cash, submitted CVs online and landed work picking up phones at a talent agency in Soho.
My insomniac boss, Susan, was a founding partner and head of PR at Prestige Media Accord. Each morning I brewed tea for the office, started Susan's first pot of black coffee and sat down to sort an inbox she filled overnight with forwarded cat videos, woke memes, and news about the heavy hitters of U.K. music, theatre, film and TV.
The time stamps on that digital traffic proved Susan slept in a staggered series of naps between two and five in the morning. I summarised those articles and interviews for her, tagging principal figures and copying the lot to a shared folder labelled RESEARCH.
Susan's daily information dump introduced me to the extraordinary woman who would become what Maddasyn, my American redneck suitemate at Oxford, would have called my "spirit animal".
That's how it began, my obsession with learning all about the rise and reign of media mogul Marian Moore.
In the past ten years no one had hoisted a BAFTA, Golden Globe, Emmy, Oscar or Blue Peter badge without thanking Marian. Her name was the bold-faced common denominator underwriting anything worth reading about in Variety, The Stage and Deadline Hollywood.
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She refused to participate in Edinburgh's annual anointing of the fringe. While others gathered to graze on new blooms, Marian tunnelled underground after the roots of radical talent. Listened for whispers from the brave new voices, brought them to the surface and taught them to shout.
When The Guardian's got shots of some fresh new face wearing a Boohoo jumper, hugging her knees in front of a brick wall, nattering on about something daft like 'guilty Sunday pleasures' then I've missed a fucking trick and it makes me furious, she said in an interview with The New Yorker. That talent was meant to be my Shiny New Thing.
Marian was also a public-relations necromancer, resurrecting stalled careers, rehabilitating brands and redeeming fallen figures. She began at her profession's entry-level dead end, answering phones for a flack firm in the early 1990s.
I listened to everyone's telephone calls, she told Variety. Of course I was keen to learn the professional secrets of representing talent and promoting a brand, but all I heard were boring men telling great bloody lies. It isn't written on the tin but that's the sum and centre of crisis PR. You create a red-hot lie and hand it off to someone with the power to amplify it. When your lie becomes larger than the truth, you've won.
One morning I'm dressing for work and the phone rings, wrong number from Spain. The caller hangs up but for more than a minute I'm stood half-naked in my kitchen, hypnotized by the dial tone.
That's when I realized I didn't need an office in Soho to break into the lying game. I could craft perfectly marketable lies from my kitchen table. Despite my Tottenham postcode, the telephone in my hand was capable of reaching anyone from Hollywood to Hong Kong.
I only lacked the vital connections. The names and the numbers of the people who say yes and front all the money when the circus comes to town.
If I could overcome that simple deficit of data, then I could make my move.
Marian's move was direct and dead simple. She compiled a list of the biggest entertainment careers her firm failed to salvage, the top-ten toxic and untouchable clients. Nicked the Rolodex off her boss' desk, walked away from the job and launched Moore Herald Creative from her kitchen table.
The scuttled talent Marian raised from obscurity formed a loyal salon of second-chance savants. Under her leadership those retreads birthed a ghost-shirt cult of old and new media mavericks, a fearless movement The New York Times dubbed "Pariah New Wave".
Google revealed that a Rolodex has no USB cable and no screen. Amazon confirmed the manufacturer was still doing business and I simply had to have one.
A 500-card Classic Rotary File was added to my next supply order at work. On the day it was delivered I feigned a grinding migraine and left the office at lunch to smuggle my Rolodex home. Dashed up the stairs like a child with a new toy and tore open the package in my room.
I wrote Marian's known information on the first blank card. Clipped it under M and turned the carousel over, watching her name flutter in and out of view. The device was analogue, old-school. Positively Victorian and I fell into a trance of ambition, imagining the powerful names I would see among the flickering frames of my A-to-Zed zoetrope before the year's end.
Call me, let's meet for a drink.
Drop by my office tomorrow, I want to talk about that thing.
In the morning I reported early to work and fired up Susan's first pot of coffee. Circled the date on my desk blotter calendar with a red Sharpie and officially set Phase One of my plan into motion.
Have you heard that Johnny Cash song about the automobile assembly-line worker who steals a new Cadillac over a period of years by sneaking parts home each day inside his lunchbox?
With one of my monstrous H&M totes on his arm that man would have been on the road in a matter of months.
I pilfered stationery and postage stamps, padded envelopes and rubber bands. A lovely label printer, neon slabs of Post-it notes, boxes of pinchy binder clips and one thousand Biros. I stole toner cartridges meant for the office photocopier and when a full carton's count accumulated in my bedroom Majid flogged the lot and took ten percent.
I took Majid to lunch at the Glasshouse Street Nando's. Over peri-peri chicken and a ten-wing roulette we used Gov.UK to found my new agency, Ursari Global Consort, as an insured limited company on his iPad. Majid reminded me to keep the receipt and write off the lunch as a business expense. I placed an order of halloumi sticks and dip to go, my first official action as CEO.
Next we visited his cousin Zahir's off-license to set up a smokescreen Soho address for my imaginary office suite under the shop's W1D postcode. I bought two new phones to separate my agency's front desk and executive contacts. Zahir threw in a third device at no charge and I dedicated that line to managing my firm's social media.
Money changed hands. Zahir bumped my fist.
That's you all set now, he said. Captain of industry, yeah? An' if there's more of that copy machine toner going, I got a man who's ready to deal so you remember Zahir.
Phase Two was dedicated to gathering intelligence.
If an agent wanted copies of contracts or correspondence I ran a second set for myself, folded the warm pages into my purse and studied them at night to learn the phrasing of hype and haggle, the jousting language of offer and counteroffer.
My greatest education came when Susan and her team circled wagons behind closed doors to launch a PR campaign for a bloodied brand or a supremely embarrassed celebrity. She recorded those strategy sessions and tasked me with transcribing action items and other excerpts, according to her handwritten list of timepoints. I forwarded the sound files to myself and dissected each meeting at home in full.
Outside of a conference room, it was easy to dismiss Susan as scrambled and a bit dizzy. Dressed daily in clashing colours and the loud patterns of her signature tights, she could read like a past-prime Bridget Jones, prone to seasonal stammering in warmer weather when couriers from DHL, UPS and FedEx made deliveries to the office in shorts.
The woman I heard in my headphones, however, was a holistic healer of contemporary public image. Astute in her triage of damage done to a brand's fragile anatomy, Susan could restore honour to the politician caught acting out instead of proudly coming out, or put polish on the footballer convicted of domestic battery by coaching him to pledge to "do better".
The drama of those recordings kept me awake at night. I paced the floor of my bedroom, chewing on my headphone cord as Susan worked to broker social atonement for a Dutch confectioner that manufactured guncotton for the Nazis and it was gripping, like listening to a half-mad director workshopping a Mamet play in a crowded pub. I scribbled notes as all the king's horses stretched intangible metrics to assess the situation and estimate the client's likelihood of returning to work and earning again.
Susan hammered her team with hypothetical questions. Challenged them to convince her. Begged to be swayed by information or emotion and made to believe the best things one might say about the client while holding a straight face. At the point when nothing new could be shouted, no geometric proof of character shaken down by a cruel battery of testing, she shushed the room to issue a course of action.
Before she could unveil her plan I paused the recording and made my own odds on redemption or rejection. Calculated the client's sentimental footprint upon the public's soft squishy heart. Scripted a PR response, an order of battle drawn from my previously shackled common sense, divinely guided by the guerrilla gospel of getting ahead according to Marian Moore.
Then I pressed play and compared my proposal to Susan's conclusions. There was no trace of the gentle healer at this stage. Word came down from a crafty tactician mustering forces on multiple fronts. Offence, defence, contrition. Escalation, outrage and denial.
My learning curve was steep. Soon my recommendations met or mostly matched the scope of Susan's designs. I experienced the same triumph of fluency that rewarded my study of Advanced French, when Majid and I stayed awake for four days revising until the new tongue took hold and I awoke from a night of fever-dreaming au féminin et au masculin.
In my Aladdin's cave of office supplies I stood four Red Bull cans on end in front of the closed door. Stretched out on my creaky couch-bed and considered the coming days charted on the Oxfam calendar beside my window. Wondered which lucky numbered square held the hour of my Marian Moment.
Too many talented women wait for permission instead of going Next Level, Marian said to Vanity Fair. That lack of action is fatal. Begging for an invitation to belong is a guarantee you'll never grow higher than the hothouse glass allows. Nobody looks for talent anymore. The ideal candidate will fit like a spare part.
I want hungry bitches on my team. Hunger puts a compass in your gut and if you're starving you'll follow wherever it points, won't you? Over mountains. Through fucking fire to ensure your success, your survival. That's the sort of partner I'm looking for. One who takes big bites without slowing down for the bones. A creator of that calibre should not hesitate to get my attention. But on this tiny island chances are good I'm going to hear her roar, and I'll find her first.
My Next Level Marian Moment came on a grey and rainy Friday, when the majority of Prestige Media Accord's founding partnership demanded Susan break ties with her oldest client, novelty rapper Sir Peanut Majestic.
An intrepid Redditor dug deep into Sir P's civilian Twitter history and unearthed a troubling fossil record of racist, sexist and homophobic comments from the twenty-tens. Susan had just positioned the man to reboot his career as a supporting act for Five Ways' European reunion tour. Now Sir P was kicked to the curb, officially cancelled.
On that morning I clocked in early and sat down to an empty inbox. The lights were on in Susan's office, black handbag and raspberry gloves on her desk beside an uneaten Starbucks scone. I crept to the closed conference room and heard Susan's voice, strangely softened and almost lost under a duet of high gobbling tones and a low humming mumble.
The publicists and agents arrived at the hive in pairs and odds, propping wet umbrellas against the foyer wall. I counted heads and confirmed the person or persons sitting down with Susan could only be precious gems from the firm's upper echelon on the Fourth Floor.
At half-eight I pushed the squeaky chrome tea cart round the office and I lingered at every stop. Took snoopy looks at the agent's screens, the documents on their desks. Tried to invite small talk and stimulate a gossip response from anyone nosy enough to know something, but no one knew anything.
Of course the meeting broke up while I was in the lav. I returned to my desk as Nathan, an obese founding partner, held the door to assist the egress of the firm's in-house solicitor, a grim and brittle satchel of tissue and bone named Naomi.
Nathan and I traded mute nods, a twitchy exchange many Fourth Floor partners relied on to feign familiarity and mitigate the awkwardness of forgetting my name. A thin smile crimped the flabby slabs of tissue between Nathan's nose and his butterpuddle chin. He turned and bumbled into the hallway after Naomi like a Beatrix Potter badger in a strained waistcoat.
An e-mail from Susan headlined my inbox as I raced to pour a cup of coffee and create a reason to knock on her office door.
Cancel my two o'clock and hold all calls please. I'm not to be disturbed.
The firm emptied early as it did on a Friday.
Mine was the last brolly standing and Susan still hadn't shown herself. I received no reply when I e-mailed to ask if she required anything before I went home.
I unplugged Susan's coffee pot and pulled my coat over my shoulders. Rattled my keys to generate maximum racket and bade goodnight to no one as I snapped off the hallway lights and locked the door behind me.
On the ground floor I stepped out of the lift. Did a clumsy Columbo in the centre of the lobby and dashed back before the doors clunked shut. Some sort of mega-major upset had erupted and blacked out the sunny skies of Susan's professional hemisphere. I knew I wouldn't eat, couldn't sleep until I fed the curiosity clawing inside me. I had to find out exactly what went down.
continued next chapter ...