Edith was hiding in the least clean bathroom at work, trying not to smile. Her hands were resting on either side of the sink, her breathing quick and loud like a pervert’s. No one would find her here, it was too gross—the women at Winked actually referred to it as ‘the gross bathroom’, and the men did too, even though their bathrooms were probably worse. Maybe it was a place where perverts went, but Edith wasn’t a pervert, at least not in any unusual way. She was there because her ex-boyfriend had just been fired and she didn’t want the rest of the ad agency to know that she was the reason why.
How would a normal human woman act upon hearing this news, she wondered, panting. Now that it was out, as of fifteen minutes ago, people in the office would be watching her closely again—probably wondering if his absence would reignite some misery in her, the least-loved half of a former power couple, or if she would dance on his grave, cackle loudly, start wearing bright red lipstick. Would they just blame it all on the Swedes? She would think about that later.
She had won. Pete would be gone. She wouldn’t need to see him ever again! She laughed and then put two hands over her mouth in case any more got out.
She wouldn’t need to see him make a (weak) long black at the coffee machine on levels one or four. She wouldn’t have to see him get his loyalty card punched at the coffee shop on the corner when he was avoiding the coffee machines in the office, and her. She wouldn’t need to be someone who others would avoid. She wouldn’t need to hear anyone say ‘Great idea, Pete!’—it wouldn’t be any of her business if he managed to have a good idea ever again.
She wouldn’t have to be on such high alert all the time, to make sure she always looked and seemed fine, because he was almost immediately fine—suspiciously fine; serial killers showed more regret—as if the last six years had never happened and his brain had been restored to factory settings. She wouldn’t need to look for his name on every meeting invite, spending the ten minutes beforehand in the (gross) bathroom slathering on coloured goop only for him to look pleasantly surprised when she arrived, as if their attending the same meeting wasn’t crushing, wasn’t something to be prepared for and later recovered from. Maybe he had just forgotten that for years he had felt safe enough to fall asleep on her chest.
Edith was massaging her cheeks in the mirror now, trying to coax her muscles to stop grinning. Even the mole next to her nose seemed to be vibrating. She looked like a cartoon witch. In the office kitchenette just now, when a social climber called Jason told her that Pete was being let go, she gasped like a woman in a silent film and regretted it immediately. Jason, eyes rolling, high on the drama, hadn’t noticed. He pointed through the kitchenette to the staff bar, his hand shaking with adrenaline.
When a social climber called Jason told her that Pete was being let go, she gasped like a woman in a silent film and regretted it immediately.
Pete was sitting on a stool, swarmed by people. He was looking down at his lap, biting his lip, occasionally shrugging in a good-natured way, like a popular president who legally wasn’t allowed to serve any more years.
‘They’ll all be trying to get the reason out of him,’ Jason said, shaking his head. ‘But it’s no use—I already tried. Who knows if it’s the restructure or if he fucked something up? Do you know?’
Edith shook her head. ‘Why is he still here?’
‘Saying goodbye to people,’ Jason said. Jason probably would’ve made a fine town crier in a time before emails; in this time he was just a sales guy who might try to kiss you at a boozy International Women’s Day brunch. His ears always bloomed bright red, like he kept them pressed up against meeting-room doors all day. They both turned at the sound of someone blowing their nose in the other room. ‘Everyone is upset,’ Jason said.
Edith was relieved that Jason was tactless enough not to check if she was upset. Christ, were people properly upset about it? ‘It’s like Princess Diana just died,’ Edith said and Jason frowned, as if he had been personal friends with Princess Diana and found the joke to be very distasteful.
Exhausted by the lack of gossip, more and more people were leaving Pete’s side to hear the background from Jason. The mood was already changing. There was an agitated buzz in the kitchenette, as if they were all peasants waiting for a famously pretty queen to be brought to the guillotine. The more people gathered to listen to Jason, the more he seemed to inflate. Edith hadn’t seen him so self-righteous since the day he had tried to cook a whole fish in the sandwich press. She found herself pushed up against the recycling bin as the kitchenette filled.
Edith hadn’t seen him so self-righteous since the day he had tried to cook a whole fish in the sandwich press.
‘Anything could happen now,’ Jason said. ‘It’s the wild west. Who knows what will go down at the retreat?’
‘Feels completely random,’ Edith said from beside the bin.
Jason nodded very enthusiastically, though Edith hadn’t really said anything different from what he had just said. It was a trick she had learned a long time ago.
Edith had been a copywriter at Winked for seven years. It wasn’t a place where people’s job titles were things like ‘Studio Ninja’, but they did say things like that in the office, and only sometimes in an ironic way. In periods of great success, Winked expanded rapidly, creating new departments for which shiny desktop computers materialised on communal hot desks. Then, when business was lost, a great shaving would occur. Sometimes, when she saw a group of worried executives in a glass meeting room at the beginning of one of the shavings, Edith imagined them as regretful Ancient Roman senators in togas trying to vomit up the feast they had just eaten to make room for new things. (People had vomited in those rooms before, but mostly because of tequila.) Once at an EOFY lunch, the CEO had stood at the head of a long grazing table and said, ‘The work we do is like falling in love. There’s a romance to it. It’s why people show such commitment. They will sacrifice for that love.’
It was hard not to think of the upcoming retreat as somehow being connected to a new sacrifice. There had been rumours about a restructure for months. Usually when Winked’s CEO came to the office, which wasn’t often, he would strut between desks booming, ‘How are we!’ to terrified juniors he didn’t know the names of, clapping them on the back. Now the CEO just rushed into meeting rooms with senior staff and mystery third parties—crucially, the rooms without glass walls. After the meetings, he would appear in the corridors massaging his head and then would be gone again.
‘What’s happening?’ Edith asked her boss, Danny, one day, as they watched the CEO walk into an elevator, his fingers pushing into his temples like he was trying to electroshock his brain.
‘The Swedes are coming,’ Danny said.
It turned out Winked had been negotiating with the large Swedish advertising group Nöje for at least six months. It suddenly made sense to Edith why the concept of ‘optics’ had become such a topic of conversation recently. A copywriter named Eun-ji had been told to speed up her pace when walking past meeting rooms, even if she was only going to the kitchenette to get a cup of tea. ‘Act like someone is about to kill your parents at the end of the corridor and you have to rush to save them,’ the CFO said. ‘And try to always be holding a piece of paper.’ Winked was advertising itself.
‘There are big things on the cook,’ Danny told Edith late one night, sipping gin on the floor of a conference room surrounded by A3 printouts. ‘A lot is going to change. It’s an important time to be noticed.’
It was hard to explain to Danny that she was always guarding against being screwed over anyway, constantly on the lookout for the giant hand about to smash her skeleton and squish her guts out, so this wasn’t anything new. Still, she was exceptionally nervous about Nöje. She didn’t know what these Swedes were looking for, and so couldn’t contort herself to their liking. There were rumours that the Swedes favoured the streamlined look and feel of start-ups and would gut the agency for aesthetics alone.
‘They’ll want to keep their people,’ Jason said at Monday’s after-work drinks, pinching his nose with two fingers. Jason seemed to get a nosebleed anytime any of the Swedes visited the office, but Edith wasn’t sure if this was just a coincidence. ‘Europeans are more impressive than us, they’ll get rid of any double-ups here.’
‘Danny is British,’ Edith said.
‘That’s the wrong kind of European,’ Jason said. ‘But managers are definitely safe anyway.’
Edith didn’t really care about the work she was doing, but she did care about her job. The ceremony of presenting an idea to a high-end jewellery label or American burger chain in a 21.5 degree room that smelled of imported Japanese candles: knowing what they needed and being able to give it to them, answering questions they hadn’t even thought to ask yet, flattering them that her creative idea was actually their idea first, she had just put it in a mind map for them. Putting on a crisp shirt and solving their problems, being the one to fix things. Being told ‘thank you’ again and again and again. She was so good at it. So much had gone wrong for her lately that she needed to belong somewhere she was good. ‘I’ll die if I get let go from Winked,’ she told Danny that night on the floor with the gin, and she meant it. He just laughed and took another sip of his drink. He seemed pleased.
So much had gone wrong for her lately that she needed to belong somewhere she was good.
