Anybody Out There? by Marian Keyes
When we were all ready, the cavalcade moved forward: me, leaning on Dad with my unbroken arm, Maggie pushing baby Holly in the buggy, and JJ, the marshal, leading the party.
Mum refused to join us on our daily constitutional, on the grounds that if she came there would be so many of us that “People would be looking.” And indeed we did create quite a stir: between JJ and his hat and me and my injuries, the local youths felt like the circus had come to town.
As we neared the green—it wasn’t far, it just felt that way because my knee was so sore that even JJ, a child of three, could go faster than me—one of the lads spotted us and alerted his four or five pals. An almost visible thrill passed through them and they abandoned whatever they’d been doing with matches and newspaper and prepared to welcome us.
“Howya, Frankenstein,” Alec called, when we were near enough to hear.
“Howya,” I replied with dignity.
It had upset me the first time they’d said it. Especially when they’d offered me money to lift my bandages and show them my cuts. It was like being asked to lift my T-shirt and show them my knockers, only worse. At the time tears had flooded my eyes, and shocked at how cruel people could be, I turned around to go straight back home. Then I’d heard Maggie ask, “How much? How much to see the worst one?”
A brief consultation had ensued. “A euro.”
“Give it to me,” Maggie ordered. The eldest one—he said his name was Hedwig, but it couldn’t really be—handed it over, looking at her nervously.
Maggie checked the coin was real by biting it, then she’d said to me, “Ten percent for me, the rest for you. Okay. Show them.”
So I’d shown them—obviously not for the money but because I realized I had no reason to feel ashamed, what had happened to me could have happened to anyone. After that they always called me Frankenstein, but not—and I know this might sound strange—not in an unkind way.
Today they noticed that Mum had left off some of the bandages. “You’re getting better.” They sounded disappointed. “All the ones on your forehead are nearly gone. The only good one left is the one on your cheek. And you’re walking faster than you used to, you’re nearly as fast as JJ now.”
For half an hour or so we sat on the bench taking the air. In the few weeks we’d been doing this daily walk, we’d been having un-Irishly dry weather, at least in the daytime. It was only in the evenings when Helen was sitting in hedges with her long-range lens that it seemed to rain.
The reverie was broken when Holly started screeching; according to Maggie, her nappy needed to be changed, so we all trooped back to the house, where Maggie tried, without success, to get Mum, then Dad, to change Holly. She didn’t ask me; sometimes it’s great having a broken arm.
While she was off dealing with baby wipes and nappy bags, JJ got a rust-colored lip liner from my (extremely large) makeup bag, held it to his face and, and said, “Like you.”
“What’s like me?”
“Like you,” he repeated, touching some of my cuts, then pointing at his own face with the pencil.
Ah! He wanted me to draw scars on him.
“Only a few.” I wasn’t at all sure this was something that should be encouraged, so I colored in some halfhearted cuts on his forehead. “Look.” I held a hand mirror in front of him and he liked the look of himself so much, he yelled, “More!”
“Just one more.”
He kept checking himself in the mirror and demanding more and more injuries, then Maggie came back, and when I saw the look on her face, I was filled with fear. “Oh God, Maggie, I’m sorry. I got carried away.”
But with a funny little jump, I realized she wasn’t angry about JJ looking like a patchwork quilt—it was because she’d seen my makeup bag and got The Look, the one they all get, but I’d expected better from her.
It’s been the oddest thing—despite all the horror and grief of the recent past, most days some member of my family would come and sit on my bed and ask to see the contents of my makeup bag. They were dazzled by my fantastic job and made no effort to hide their disbelief that I, of all people, had landed it.
Maggie walked toward my makeup bag like a sleepwalker. Her hand was outstretched. “Can I see?”
“Help yourself. And my wash bag is on the floor here. There’s good stuff in there, too, if Mum and Helen haven’t cleaned me out. Take anything you want.”
As if in a trance, Maggie was removing lipstick after lipstick from the bag. I had about sixteen of them. Just because I can.
“Some of them haven’t even been opened,” she said. “How come Helen and Mum haven’t stolen them?”
“Because they already have them. Just before…you know…everything, I’d sent a consignment of the new summer products. They already have most of these.”
Two days after my arrival Helen and Mum had sat on my bed and systematically gone through my cosmetics, discarding almost everything. “Porn Star? Have it. Multiple Orgasm? Have it. Dirty Grrrl? Have it.”
“They never told me about the new stuff,” Maggie said sadly. “And I only live a mile away.”
“Oh. Maybe it’s because with your new practical look they think you wouldn’t be interested in makeup. I’m sorry. When I go back to New York, I’ll make sure to send things directly to you.”
“Will you? Thanks.” Then, a sharp look. “You’re going back? When? Get a grip. You can’t go anywhere. You need the security of your family—” But she was distracted by a lipstick. “Can I try this one? It’s exactly my color.”
She put it on, rubbed her lips against each other, admired herself in the hand mirror, then was cowed by sudden remorse. “I’m sorry, Anna. I’ve tried to avoid asking to see the lovely things, I mean, under the circumstances…And I’m disgusted with the others, they’re like scavengers. But just look at me! I’m as bad as them.”
“Don’t be hard on yourself, Maggie. No one can help it. It’s bigger than all of us.”
“Is it? Okay. Thanks.” She continued taking things out, opening them, trying them on the back of her hand, then closing them neatly. When she’d examined everything she sighed heavily. “I might as well see your wash bag now.”
“Help yourself. There’s a lovely vetivert shower gel.” Then I thought for a second. “No, wait, I think Dad took it.”
She sifted through the shower gels and exfoliators and body lotions, uncapping and sniffing and rubbing, and said, “You really do have the best job in the world.”
My job
I work in New York City as a beauty PR. I am Assistant Senior Press Officer for Candy Grrrl, one of the hottest cosmetic brands on the planet. (You’ve probably heard of them; and if you haven’t, it means someone, somewhere, isn’t doing their job properly. I hope to Christ it isn’t me.) I have access to a dizzying array of free products. I mean literally dizzying: shortly after I got the job my sister Rachel, who had lived in New York for years, came to my office one evening after everyone had gone home, to see if I’d been exaggerating. And when I unlocked the closet and showed her the shelves and shelves of neatly stacked Candy Grrrl face creams and pore minimizers and concealers and scented candles and shower gels and bases and highlighters and…she stared for a long, long time, then said, “I’ve got black spots in front of my eyes. I’m not joking, Anna, I think I might be about to faint.” See—dizzying—and that was even before I told her to pick out some stuff for herself.
What makes it all exponentially fabulous is that it’s not just Candy Grrrl stuff I get. The agency I work for, McArthur on the Park (founded and still owned by Ariella McArthur, she never sold out) represents thirteen other beauty brands, each more delicious than the previous, and about once a month we have a souk in the boardroom, where a full and frank exchange takes place. (Mind you, this is not official policy and never happens when Ariella is around.)
Besides free products, there are other perks. Because McArthur on the Park has the Perry K account, I get my hair cut and colored for free by Perry K. Obviously, not by Perr
(Free haircuts sound fabulous, but at the risk of seeming ungrateful, sometimes I can’t help feeling it’s a bit like high-class prostitutes being given regular, up-the-frock health checks. It seems caring, but it’s only to ensure the girls do their job properly. Same with me, I’ve no choice about the haircuts. I have to have them and I get no input: whatever is on the catwalks is what I get given. Usually high-maintenance, feathery yokes which break my heart.
Anyway, after Rachel’s visit, she got on the blower and told everyone at home about the goodies closet. A flurry of phone calls from Ireland followed. Was Rachel back on the drugs? Or was it true about all the free cosmetics I gave her? And if it was, could they have some? Immediately I parceled up an indecent amount of stuff and dispatched it to Ireland—I admit it, I was showing off, trying to prove what a success I was.
I am not just permitted to wear Candy Grrrl products, I am obliged to. We all have to take on the personality of the brands we represent. Live it, Ariella urged me when I got the job. Live it, Anna. You are a Candy Grrrl girl, 24/7, you are always on duty.
However, when you’re sending products to other people, you’re supposed to “sign them out”—every eyelash curler, every lip balm. But if you say they’re going to the Nebraska Star, for example, and they’re really going to your mammy in Dublin, people are unlikely to check: I am a trusted employee.
The strange thing is that normally I’m an honest person: if someone gives me too much change in a shop, I’ll give it back, and I’ve never, in my life, done a runner from a restaurant. (Aren’t there better ways to have fun?) But every time I liberate an eye cream for Rachel or a scented candle for my friend Jacqui or send a care package of the new spring colors to Dublin, I am stealing. And yet I don’t have the slightest twinge of guilt. It’s because the products are so beautiful, I feel that, like natural wonders, they transcend ownership. How could you fence off the Grand Canyon? Or the Barrier Reef? Some things are so wondrous, everyone is entitled to them.
People often ask me, their faces distorted with jealousy, “How do you get a job like yours?”
Well, I’ll tell you.
3
How I got my job
After I got my diploma in PR, I got a job in the Dublin press office of a low-rent cosmetics company; it was crappy money, backbreaking work—mostly stuffing envelopes for mailshots—and as our bags were searched every evening when we left work, I didn’t even have the compensation of free makeup. But I had some idea of how PR could be, the fun and creativity you could have in the right place, and I’d always had a hankering for New York…
I didn’t want to go on my own, so all I had to do was convince my best friend, Jacqui, that she, too, had a hankering for New York. But I didn’t give much for my chances. For years, Jacqui had been like me—entirely without a career plan. She’d spent most of her life working in the hotel trade, doing everything from bar work to hostessing, when somehow, through no fault of her own, she got a good job: she had become a VIP concierge at one of Dublin’s five-star hotels. When showbiz types came to town, whatever they wanted, from Bono’s phone number, to someone to take them shopping after hours, to a decoy double to shake off the press, it was her job to provide it. No one, especially Jacqui, could figure out how it had happened—she had no qualifications, all she had going for her was that she was chatty, practical, and unimpressed by eejits, even famous ones. (She says that most celebs are either midgets or gobshites or both.)
Her looks might have had something to do with her success; she often described herself as a blond daddy longlegs and, in all fairness, she was very hingey. She was so tall and thin that all her joints—knees, hips, elbows, shoulders—looked like they’d been loosened with a wrench, and when she walked, you could almost believe that some invisible puppet master was moving her by strings. Because of this, women weren’t threatened by her. But thanks to her good humor, her dirty laugh, and her incredible stamina when it came to staying up late and partying, men were comfortable with her.
The visiting celebs often bought her expensive presents. The best bit, she said, was when she’d take them on a shopping trip; if they bought tons of stuff for themselves they’d feel guilted into buying something for her, too. Mostly teeny-tiny designer clothes, which she looked great in.
Like the professional she was, she never—well, rarely—got off with the male celebs in her charge (only if they’d just split up with their wives and were in need of “comfort”), but occasionally she got off with their friends. Usually they were horrible; she seemed to prefer them that way. I don’t think I had ever liked any of her boyfriends.
The night I met her to make my pitch she showed up, her usual shiny, happy, hingey self, in a Versace coat, a Dior something, a Chloé something else, and my heart sank. Why would anyone leave a job like this? But it just goes to show.
Before I even mentioned New York, she confessed that she was sick of overpaid stars and their silly requests. Some Oscar-winning actor was currently in residence and making her life a misery by insisting that a squirrel was staring in the window at him and following his every move. Jacqui’s gripe was not that it was mean-spirited to object to a squirrel looking at you, but that they were on the fifth floor—there was no squirrel. She’d had it with celebrity, she said. She wanted a complete change, to get back to basics, to work with the poor and the sick, in a leper colony if possible.
This was excellent, if surprising, news and the perfect time to take the U.S. work-permit applications from my bag; two months later, we were waving Ireland good-bye.
When we arrived in New York, we stayed with Rachel and Luke for the first few days, but this turned out to be not such a great idea: Jacqui broke out in a sweat every time she looked at Luke, so much that she nearly had to start taking rehydration salts.
Because Luke is so good-looking, people go a bit funny around him. They think that there has to be more to him than there is. But basically he’s just an ordinary, decent bloke, who’s got the life he wants, with the woman he wants. He has a gang of look-alike pals—although none are as physically devastating as him—collectively known as the Real Men. They think the last time anyone made a good record was 1975 (Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti) and that all music made since then has been unadulterated rubbish. Their idea of a big night out is the air-guitar-playing championship—there is such a thing, honestly—and although they are all gifted amateurs, one of them, Shake, showed real promise and actually got as far as the regional finals.
Jacqui and I set about looking for work, but unfortunately for Jacqui, none of the leper colonies were hiring. Within a week she’d got a job in a five-star Manhattan hotel, in an almost identical post to the one she’d left behind in Dublin.
In one of those strange twists, she met the squirrel man, who didn’t remember her and spun her the same story about being spied on by a squirrel. Only this time they weren’t on the fifth floor, they were on the twenty-seventh.
“I really wanted to do something different,” she said to Rachel, Luke, and me when she came home after her first day. “I don’t know how this happened.”
Well, it was obvious: clearly she was more in thrall to that glittering, celebtastic world than she’d realized. But you couldn’t say that to her. Jacqui had no time for introspection: things were what they were. Which, as a life philosophy, has its merits—although I love Rachel very much, sometimes I feel I can’t itch my chin without her finding a hidden meaning in it. But on the other hand, there’s no point telling Jacqui if you’re depressed because her response is invariably, “Oh no! What’s happened?” And most of the time nothing has happened, you’re just depressed. But if you try explaining that, she’d say, “But what have you got to be depressed about?” Then she’d say, “Let’s go out and drink champagne. No point sitting around here moping!”
Jacqui is almost the only person I know who has never been on SSRIs or seen a therapist; she barely believes in PMS.
Anyway, just before Jacqui went into muscle spasm from mineral depletion from looking at Luke, we found a place of our own. A studio (i.e., one room) in a crumbling block on the Lower East Side. It was shockingly small and expensive and the shower was in the kitchenette, but at least we were in Manhattan. We weren’t planning on spending much time at home—it was simply for sleeping in and having an address, a tiny foothold in the naked city. Luckily Jacqui and I got on very well, we could take such close proximity to each other, although sometimes Jacqui went out to bars and picked up men, just so she could have a good night’s sleep in a normal apartment.
Right away I registered with several ritzy employment agencies, bearing a gorgeous, slightly embroidered résumé. I went for a couple of interviews but got no solid offers and I was just starting to worry when, one Tuesday morning, I got a call to hotfoot it to McArthur on the Park. Apparently the previous incumbent had had “to go to Arizona” (NYC speak for “going into rehab”) in a big, fat hurry and they urgently needed a temp because they were preparing for a major pitch.
I knew about Ariella McArthur because she was—aren’t they always?—a PR legend: fiftyish, big-haired, big-shouldered, controlling, impatient. She was rumored to sleep only four hours a night (but I later discovered she disseminated that rumor herself).
So I put on my suit and showed up, to discover that the office suites really were on Central Park (thirty-eighth floor, the view from Ariella’s office is amazing, but as you’re only ever invited into her inner sanctum to be bollocked, it’s hard to savor it).
Everyone was running around hysterically, and no one really spoke to me, just shrieked orders to photocopy stuff, to organize food, to glue things to other things. Despite such shoddy treatment, I was dazzled by the brands McArthur represented and the top-end campaigns they’d run and I found myself thinking: I’d give anything to work here.