Go
“How’s the conference?” Jools asks.
I’m sitting on the bed in my hotel room with Jools on speaker, wrapped in a dressing gown with a staggeringly expensive seaweed mask tacked to my face, a vain attempt to minimize my pores before tomorrow.
“It’s very... conferencey. I mean, everyone’s trying to pretend it’s not a conference, because we’re ‘creatives,’ but it is. There’s lukewarm coffee and custard creams and PowerPoint and breakout spaces. It’s definitely a conference.”
It’s my second night at this four-star golfing resort in Surrey, where I’m attending the Association of UK Creatives’ annual conference, on behalf of Supernova. Today has been a mad dash between master classes, workshops and roundtables, where I’ve listened to industry experts speak about everything from behavioral data to junk food advertising to the agency-client symbiosis. The program finished about an hour ago, and I’ve got another forty minutes or so spare before networking drinks and then dinner.
I’ve been invited to deliver a presentation tomorrow on my contribution to “A Whole New World,” the now-acclaimed campaign I created with Seb over a year ago, which, unbelievably, is still getting traction. It seems that pretty much anyone who’s anyone in the advertising world is a delegate at this conference—including Zara, plus a couple of other senior Supernova executives. The room I’ll be presenting inholds up to two hundred people; Zara’s also been hinting over the past couple of months that a promotion might be in the cards for me. If I mess this up, the repercussions won’t be good.
The hotel’s pretty nice. I even managed to sleep peacefully last night. Since the new year, courtesy of Max’s medical insurance with HWW, I’ve been seeing a psychologist, Pippa, once a week. She’s been helping me explore what happened with Nate, and I’ve started taking some risks in baby steps, to overcome my tendency to panic in unfamiliar spaces. I hadn’t known how much I needed to talk to someone about it until I finally did.
I don’t talk too much about it with Max. Though he’s been nothing but supportive, I can tell he thinks psychological intervention is best left to the professionals. And maybe he’s right. I’ve said things to Pippa I would never say to Max. Your boyfriend can’t fulfill every relationship role in your life. Sometimes it’s healthier to offload onto someone else.
“What time’s your presentation?” Jools asks.
“Ten.”
“Feel ready?”
I’ve been prepping for two months now, working on the thing nonstop at evenings and weekends. It’s fair to say it’s the most pressure I’ve ever been under, professionally speaking. But it’s a good kind of stress. Like walking up the aisle, or buying a house. Seb’s been helping me out, animating parts of my presentation so there’s no risk of death-by-PowerPoint. I can recite my speech in my sleep, I’ve repeated it to myself over and over—in the shower, on the tube, in the loos on girls’ nights out—and I’ve even recorded it on my phone, so I can listen to it whenever I get a free moment. I’ve asked Max to film me speaking; I’ve invited friends and family to the flat and forced them to listen to me practice. This needs to be twenty minutes of gold. Ihaveto nail this.
“Yes,” I tell Jools firmly, because at this point, exuding confidence is almost as important as the words I’ll be saying. “Yes, I’m ready.”
I ask how Nigel is, and Jools sighs dreamily. They’ve been together nearly ten months now. I suspect they’re going to be one of those couples for whom the honeymoon period never ends.
“We had this little impromptu gig at the house last night,” she says. “All these people turned up. I didn’t know most of them. But Nigel played for everyone, and theylovedit. Everyone was dancing around the living room.”
I prod at the stiffened face mask with my fingertips, wiggle my mouth a bit. I really want to smile, but whoever made this mask clearly modeled it on cement.
“The finale was ‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys,” Jools continues. She loves that song. “It was so beautiful, Luce. He’s so talented.”
“You’re welcome, again,” I say.
“For what?”
“Me moving out.”
She laughs. “How long am I going to be in debt to you for that?”
“As long as you and Nigel are together. So... forever?”
I hear her bite into an apple. “Come on then. Thrill me—what’s on the conference agenda for tonight?”
“Oh, the usual. Drinks, networking, dinner. Then a quiz, I think. All very dull.”
“But you love your job.”
“Exactly. I love myjob. I don’t love pretending to get excited about the history of advertising so I can win a hamper full of jam.”
“What’s Max up to tonight?”
“Oh, working. He’s got loads on at the moment. Macavity’s helping out.”
We adopted Macavity after Tash and Simon discovered Dylan was allergic to pet hair. Mum and Dad are holding firm on their sailing-around-the-world plan, so Max and I said we’d take Macavity. He’stwelve now, so he’s pretty low maintenance, and he’s always been an indoor cat, which means we don’t have to freak out about passing cars or decapitated mice.
Max wasn’t sure about having a cat at first, but the pair of them are best buddies now. I love sneaking up on them late at night, finding Max dozing on the sofa with Macavity purring contentedly on his chest.
