Schadenfreude (2006)

I come back from my annual leave with a tan and at least some of my habitual cynicism scabbed over, but despite all the hours of moping and moaning I put in beforehand I find that the situation’s fait accompli as usual. I’ve acquired an assistant. I didn’t even get to pick my own assistant, so I suppose I’ll never know if any of the other applicants were worse. I find it hard to believe that they could be. He claims to be called Ad, which could be short for Adam or an abbreviation of Attention Deficit. Asking for an explanation of the kid’s name doesn’t seem important, first thing on a Monday. Officially, he’s the magazine’s intern, but since nobody else could think of anything to do with him they told him he’d be my assistant. Internship is a form of work experience popular with kids who’ve so much money they can afford to work for nothing, and could exploit their expensive educations or daddy’s contacts to get any job they wanted anyway. Hate them.

That first morning I walk in and he’s loitering fretfully in front of my desk; searching me out with those baby seal eyes. He’s wearing a tie and calling me sir. Within about fifteen minutes the kid’s flopped over into total intimacy and he’s happily pulling up his shirt to show me his pierced left nipple. When he moves his great big arms, you can clearly see some of the muscles working. I remain ego-damaged and affronted, but also find myself impressed when he explains why he’s got these great cords of muscle in his forearms and these kind of gay porn star shoulders (short answer: rock climbing.) Ad persists in calling me sir, even after I’ve admired his nipple.

By the time my first day of babysitting ends, I’m shattered. I can’t remember if I was complaining about being given an assistant, or not having one. I need another holiday. After two days, I get bored of telling him not to call me sir. Having Ad in your personal space all day is like running a crèche. He has this hyperactive Chihuahua quality. If you take your eyes off him for two seconds, you know he’ll be in the early stages of some disaster or other by the time you’re paying attention again. It might be the kind of inopportune meetings of tea and keyboard that can happen to anyone, or it can be something on the scale of a proper catastrophe; but wherever you don’t put your eyes there will be a fuck up of some description in progress and Ad will be contributing to it somehow. I still don’t think it’s a coincidence that Ad was the last person to use the photocopier before Pippa electrocuted herself just by touching the control panel. She lost the use of her right arm for three days.

Just as a matter of interest, I ask Marnie the editor if you can sack someone who doesn’t get paid. She says no. I think she means “no we’re not going to”, rather than “no we can’t.”

But I let the whole thing settle for a while and generously decide that I’ll try to get through the rest of the summer without either stabbing Ad in the eye with a ballpoint pen or persuading him to blow me in the gents. Either would suit me; anything to shut him up and occupy him for a few minutes. I’m sure he attended a public school, so I doubt it would be the first time he went back after his lunch hour with sore knees and a crick in the neck. But still, I do have some morals and standards.

Actually they’re more like guidelines than morals.

Gene is a glossy magazine For Modern Parents, which means that it would probably be full of saccharine stock photos of cute designer kiddies if I wasn’t here to prevent it. Sometimes depicting children in the magazine is unavoidable, but I won’t have them in makeup. Never. No adults touching them unless they’re under the age of five and it’s a parent feeding them or carrying them. No dressing up like mummy or daddy, or costumed as if they have a job, in fact no creepy role-play of any kind. Ordinary children fidget and whinge so much that we hardly use them as models anymore, but the actor/model/whatever kids we have to use instead are the ones I find really disturbing.

We called one girl in for some photos, only nine years old, but she had the eyes and voice of Lauren Bacall. Not 1940s, Bogart-era, put-your-lips-together-and-blow Bacall. That would be weird enough. I’m talking about Lauren Bacall now. Those X-ray vision doll eyes. That same slow, reptilian beauty. A similar air of disdainful tolerance in a stupid world that isn’t what it used to be. If I thought it would change anything, I’d have done the girl a favour by pushing her even more ghastly mother out of the studio window. She kept clicking her fingers in the air to show her daughter where she should be looking, as if the kid was retarded and whatever the photographer said didn’t count. In lieu of a smile, both mother and daughter had this Joker rictus that they could apparently switch on and off at will, without involving any other part of the face.

Obviously the Satanic prematurely-elderly stage school divas creep me out; but the other reason I don’t want the magazine to be full of child pictures is much simpler. I can’t bear thinking of somebody looking at a kid’s picture in Gene and having a quick one off the wrist because of it. I know I’m totally paranoid and most people aren’t paedophiles, but I’m still constantly trying to find ways of not showing children. I’ve done lots of clothes on hangers, clothes on washing lines, real clothes on illustrated children.

There was an article on the different varieties and stages of baby crap, and their significance. I imagine a few determined coprophiliac extremists would get a thrill out of something like that. I’m sure that for every conceivable permutation of every possible weird or perverted thing in the world there’s probably a few dozen people who get off on it to the exclusion of everything else, and a website to support that particular kink. Eventually I managed to sanitise the whole baby’s crap thing by commissioning some nice super-macro shots of fruit and splashes of milk. I thought I’d look on bright side, go lateral, and think pre-digestive rather than post. This gives you a good idea of what I’m expected to work with. Two thousand five hundred words about shit.

Of course, the advertisers always want the saccharine stock photos of cute designer kiddies that I hate so much. They frequently use these kinds of images in advertisements that sit opposite my thoughtfully and responsibly commissioned artwork. Like old caravans at a beauty spot. Someone here at Gene sold space for a disposable nappy advert to go opposite the baby faeces article, complete with the obligatory blue stuff they always use as a less shocking stand-in for human waste products. The same advert also featured a gigantic, hovering, disembodied infant head that was positively nightmarish; I presume it was indicating approval of the strange blue gel deposited in the nappy. On another occasion, they stapled a paid advertising pullout on the efficacy of SSRI antidepressants right into the middle of an article about men who have affairs after they’ve fathered their first child because their wives are too prenatal, postnatal, preoccupied or exhausted for sex. There was a hypersaturated full-pager of two obviously naked six-year olds getting sun cream rubbed into their bare backs by some smirking, glassy-eyed teenage Eurobabe who’s evidently never squeezed out twins. Four pages later, you’ve got a think piece about what does and doesn’t constitute appropriate touching between children and adults.

What I’m saying here is that I’m probably one of the few people at the magazine who understands the concept of sexuality being appropriate at some times and not at others. We’ll get to that in a moment. Meanwhile, I’d like to assure you that there’s no puritan impulse behind all this. I’m an above-average-to-attractive man in my prime, I like having sex and I do so nearly as frequently as I’d like to. Apart from a predilection for compulsively using the office computer to Google for free gay porn plus occasional bouts of extreme misanthropy and clinical depression, my genes turned out great. To look at I’m sort of Heathcliff, blue eyes and the kind of dark hair that tends towards the out on the wild and windy moor look. There’s a vague, complex and non-explicit smart casual regime in the office. I have quite a hairy chest; I enjoy showing it off. I usually wear a polo or a nice dress shirt with one extra button unfastened at the top— two at most— enough to give people a nice preview of the chest fur, if they’re interested.

One Friday, last thing, Marnie calls me into her office. The whole experience is as much like being the bad boy at school as it sounds. She tells me to button up, or wear a T-shirt underneath. It’s summer, the sun is out and it’s blasting through office windows we can’t even open; I refuse to layer. Probably three quarters of the women in the office are exhibiting a portion of breast somewhere between a crescent moon and half a hemisphere. I inform Marnie that the hairy chest is a man’s equivalent of cleavage. It’s saying: here are my secondary sexual characteristics for your reference and comparison. Except that it’s not even a chest, it’s a pair of clavicles; it’s the slight indentation at the base of my throat, and whose name escapes me right now. I’m not walking around with my shirt off. I never wear the same shirt twice in a row, and I’m not musky or knowingly pheromonal.

Marnie claims I have to button my shirt up because she doesn’t want a sexual atmosphere in the office. I point out to her that I’m unwillingly privy to the full range of cup sizes represented in the mainly female office, and since we’re all adults surely everyone can cope with the fact that I’m a man and like most European men I have hairs on my chest. Marnie says chests and breasts aren’t the same thing, because breasts aren’t sexual.

At first I’m not even sure I’ve really heard what I just heard. I’m no expert, but surely she has this the wrong way around? I nearly snort with laughter, but turn it into a cough instead and take a pretend sip from the lukewarm and overly complex coffee I’m still holding. We all know already that Marnie doesn’t want a sexual atmosphere. Ever. Anywhere. A year ago she had a baby, which we’ve never seen except in pictures. Six months ago, Marnie’s assistant editor Claire BCC’d everyone an email from Marnie’s husband; he was literally begging his own wife to give him another chance and let him have sex with her. Poor bastard. Marnie’s got her baby and now her breasts aren’t sexual anymore. Ergo, nobody else’s are either. Sex is over.

There’s a picture of her rug rat in a frame on the desk. I can’t tell whether it’s a boy or a girl. It’s such a generic baby it could almost be the kind of picture that comes with the frame when you buy it. I suppose you’d expect Marnie’s baby to look like some kind of magazinoid pseudo-person. Just like Marnie does.

Anyway, we’re a magazine For Modern Parents. And guess what? Children are usually the result of Modern Parents having sex with each other, which one would hope takes place in a sexual atmosphere otherwise it’s like being a battery chicken on a farm. Presumably she and her husband made their baby by sexual means. And what fucking kind of name is Marnie, anyway?

Clearly, the whole thing rankles. Now I have Ad to think about as well.

Exactly a week after I walk out of Marnie’s office and completely disregard her edict regarding chest hair, Ad and I are working on some ideas for a photo series to go with a huge article about this system of therapy where wife beaters and their victims are encouraged to re-enact their crimes and traumas using toys as protagonists. To me it sounds like a recipe for madness rather than catharsis, so it seems appropriate to do something silly like going to Toys R Us and getting some toys so we can illustrate the article by posing them in various violent and psychosexual scenarios. It turns into more of an excuse to play with the dolls than any attempt at work. Each of us has a bear and we push their groins together, making them go unh unh UNH. Sitting next to Ad and doing this turns me on a little, in some peculiar way that I don’t care to analyse.

After a gruelling shift at the consumer coalface, Marnie likes nothing more than weighing anchor and unloading shopping at the office because it emphasises the fact that she’s the queen here. Before that morning’s expedition to the heart of capitalism, Marnie will have borrowed her daughter from the nanny for long enough to spoon three token mouthfuls of organic vegetarian baby food into the infant’s gob, dozed off, then struggled out of bed again at 10.30 and spent the rest of the morning buying clothes. None of the other Gene women can shop or see their children in the daytime because they have to work at the magazine For Modern Parents.

Marnie sees what Ad and me have been doing and she flips. She doesn’t just ask us to pack it in, grow up and stop wasting time, which is what everyone expects and we kind of deserve. That’s what a normal person’s reaction would probably be. Instead she sweeps the bears, bunnies and Polaroids onto the floor with one melodramatic swing of her arm. She says NO once, loudly and firmly; like you would to a bad dog you just caught doing some shocking and unhygienic.

We’re all adults, the readers are adults, and the characters in question are fluffy toys who don’t even have genitals. For Marnie, though, we’ve trespassed into the depths of her private uncanny valley. Touched a nerve, pushed her bad button, however you want to put it. The office goes into pause mode. Wide eyes and raised eyebrows hover above monitors. I notice that Ad’s hands are quivering with shock and I almost want to put my arm around him.

Nobody sees Marnie for the rest of the day. On Monday I discover that over the weekend she’s gone through the nice A4 Moleskine I use as a combination of sketchbook and scrapbook. I also guess, incidentally, that she’s gone completely mental. Almost all my drawings and photos have vicious cross-outs slashed over them in thick black marker. On a blank page near the back she’s scrawled the word NO, in capitals.

I’m considering talking to her until Claire tells me that Marnie’s been sitting next to the telephone since before anyone else was at work, just holding the handset and staring at the buttons. I know far too well what it’s like to be trapped inside a head like that: it doesn’t matter who she calls because nobody can help her. Remember the clinical depression? I really do feel for her on some level, but by this time I’m stopping being amused or compassionate and starting to be scared of what she’ll do next to me or to herself.

Photocopies of the Moleskine book of madness circulate. Most of my best ideas rub off in the process, as my private inspiration gets passed around the office like an unconscious sixth former at a Rotarian social. It’s like they don’t need me the person anymore, because they’ve got my ideas. Marnie apparently won’t take a sick note or see the man from Personnel. I don’t blame her, because the man from Personnel is clearly a complete nutter in his own right. He frequently sits with his hand stuck inside the waistbands of his trousers and underwear. When he thinks nobody’s looking, he takes the hand out and sniffs it.

Marnie’s still the editor, big boss and captain of Modern Parenting; she continues to turn up for work. But she’s morose and as close to catatonic as makes no odds (or paralytic— she often leaves a kind of ethanol residue in her wake although Claire reports that she never catches Marnie drinking or finds any bottles.)

Then the revenge starts. There’s stories in the magazine about uncontrollable rage, the darker implications of office politics, and about furries. If you’re lucky enough not to know this already, furries are people who dress up in animal costumes for fun or sexual gratification or because they imagine they’re in some way akin to the animal in question. This supports my somebody’s-turned-on-somewhere theory. Gene starts running speculative and scientifically unsupported articles about long-term post natal depression; why some straight women fixate on gay men and what happens when those relationships go wrong; professional women cracking under the dual pressures of motherhood and the responsibilities they face in their careers; if women ever get anything except sore when they let their partners give it to them up the shitter.

I don’t think any of these women know much about Marnie’s real life. They’re just enjoying her damage. She’s certainly in no state to fend off these malicious jabs or set the story straight. She’s in the depths of a nervous breakdown or major psychological crisis that seems to have landed on top of her IN tray and is staying there until she decides to deal with it. It gives everybody the freedom to fabricate a back-story for her in articles, get back at her for every indignity and slight she’s inflicted on them, and they take the fullest advantage of it. There’s an underlying glee in all this that reminds me of the Maenads from a book of mythology I read, women united in such a frenzy of oestrogen-fuelled malice that they’ll physically tear apart any poor loser they happen across. If it’s another woman who’s been lording (or ladying) it over them, that’s a bonus.

I don’t really have time to worry about it, or to consider whether or not thinking something like this means I’m turning into the kind of horrible misogynist fag I’ve always hated. Thanks to the teddy bear sex incident and what everyone’s seen in my ideas book I have to art direct all these stupid stories and commission the images for them. As the months go by Gene becomes a fairground mirror image of Marnie’s crisis. Everyone says I’m paranoid and it’s just that Gene’s house style or character or whatever is evolving. I should be flattered, they say. I suppose I have to blame myself. And Marnie, obviously.

At an editorial meeting (Marnie AWOL), Ad suggests a fashion shoot where we use Photoshop to erase every visible part of the children except their mouths and hands. The idea is supposedly to maximise the impact of the clothes. This idea is, firstly and primarily, a stupid idea (also sinister, disturbing and wrong). Secondly, it’s my deliberately bad idea that I mocked up with fake Marnie strikeouts and NOs, to make fun of the imbeciles who work on the magazine. I photocopied it and sent it round the office as either a joke or a trap. I deliberately came up with an idiotic, rubbish idea. I should have known that Ad would be the one to fall for it and the whole thing would backfire on me.

I’m probably the sort of person who likes to imagine I’m subverting things while everyone else just assumes I’m trying to be funny or clever. Claire thinks the Cheshire Cat children are a fabulous idea, but then Claire also thinks it’s a fabulous idea to go round and see Marnie’s husband one Saturday when we’re absolutely positive Marnie will be at her yoga.

Her husband doesn’t seem to be at home either. Our visit has to be unannounced or Marnie could find out. Claire, Ad and I creep into Mr and Mrs Marnie’s back garden. It’s a full-on mad person’s back garden, all bramble and dried up grass. Ideal for lions to await a passing zebra, not so chic if you’re supposedly some kind of glamorous magazine editor. This garden hasn’t been touched for at least a year, probably. We look up at the house and somebody’s left a window ajar upstairs.

Ad says he could easily get in through that window. Though I know it’s a bad idea I should cut off straight away, I still ask him how he’s going to get up there. He grins like the imbecile he sometimes is, and rubs his palms together quickly. I remember the first day at the office: Ad and his rock climbing. That boy scales the back of Marnie’s house in about sixty seconds. He must have arm muscles like Spiderman.

Claire and I look at each other in silent amazement and dismay as Ad’s feet disappear through the window. We don’t speak, but it simultaneously occurs to both of us that the whole thing might seem less criminal, or less invasive of Marnie’s privacy, if we went around to the front of the house again. Then at least we’ll look more like concerned visitors and rather less like the creepy voyeurs and housebreakers that we are.

We’re standing on the drive and wondering what to do next when my phone rings. I leap about three feet into the air. Claire yelps, stifles herself theatrically, looks at me and sniggers nervously through her hand.

‘Hello?’

‘I’m standing,’ Ad says, ‘I’m standing in a baby’s room, or the nursery or whatever. And it’s like… scary because it’s totally pristine. And… Oh fuck.’

Marnie’s husband flings back the front door and asks us what we’re doing. For a moment, we’re speechless. What is he doing? Without his head on I’m initially not sure what he’s meant to be, until he turns slightly and I see the fluffy white bobtail. He’s also sporting an unavoidably apparent erection inside his hastily zipped-up grey fur suit. I think he was expecting Marnie. I hope so, anyway. Alternative scenarios don’t really bear contemplation. The furry guy ducks back behind the door, either to hide his erection or to downplay the fact that he’s dressed as a man-sized rabbit.

Luckily he’s met Claire once before and knows she works for Gene, so she’s able to bullshit him and keep him talking even though he’s mortified and she’s so aghast that all the blood seems to have drained out of her face. All the blood’s drained out of his, too, and we know where it’s gone. A few excruciating minutes later Ad reappears from behind the house, grimacing like an idiot and putting his thumbs up. Presumably he’s climbed out of the same window and down the back wall.

Thumper doesn’t ask us inside. Claire asks after the baby and this totally confuses him because Marnie’s never even been pregnant. They’ve been trying, but it’s just not happening. It’s all his fault, not hers. He apologises for embarrassing us with the costume— he doesn’t mention the erection— but this is how they, you know, have to do it. He half-whispers this in my direction, like between me and Claire I’d obviously be the one who knows what it’s like to only be able to get off when I’m dressed like a rabbit.

Maybe I’m nosy, but I’d really like to know what Marnie had stuffed under her clothes for nine months, and what she did during all that time she was supposedly on maternity leave.

And with that double twist in the plot, we walk away from Marnie’s house. Ad leaps some fences and rejoins us around the corner, then all three of us let our shock stumble us to the nearest pub where we spend the rest of the afternoon getting completely out of our minds.

There’s not a gram of excess fat anywhere on Ad’s body. It’s really quite frightening. He has this little patch of very straight hair in the indentation between his pecs, and almost none anywhere else except below his navel, leading downwards.

Ad affectionately rubs the hair on my chest up and down as if he’s petting a puppy. He tells me I’m quite hairy, really. Probably some kind of throwback to prehistoric man, in his entirely serious opinion. Part of me wishes I could be twenty-one again and be simultaneously so confident and so full of shit. I grab him by the ring that passes conveniently through his left nipple and I reply that I don’t think he’s treating me with a sufficient degree of respect, considering that he’s supposed to be my unpaid assistant and I let him steal my ideas without me killing him instantly. OK, they were stupid ideas, but even so I think he owes me.

Somebody somewhere’s always getting turned on somehow by something or someone nobody else understands. It’s what separates us from animals. That, and the ability to put together an outfit. Plus the urge to produce and consume glossy magazines. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just saying.

© Alistair Gentry 2006. From 'Uncanny Valley: Collected Short Stories'.