Heliopolis by James Scudamore Read Free Book Online Page B

you.’
    And then she kisses me, and I forget what I was saying.
    I know perfectly well that she is a hypocrite. All that talk of how much she values Ernesto and the work he does doesn’t stop her from frequenting shopping centres so exclusive that you need an appointment, and being almost as wary of the pavement as her father. I never point this out to her, of course. I might miss out on the kiss.
     
    It may sound cold, but I don’t want the responsibility of working out how to deal with the kid I might have been—the one who lived in a wooden crate and spent his formative years playing in the sewage pipe, or jumping rubbish on his bike. Big ideas scare me. The thought of doing something that actually matters is enough to bring me out in a rash. Instead, I pay my taxes and I give to charity, in the hope that someone worthy like Rebecca or Ernesto will tackle the big issues on my behalf. Meanwhile, I spend my days gently informing women which cleaning products are most deserving of their hard-earned wages, and showing kids who want to be the next football hero how one choice of boot might be wiser than another.
    The posture of cool that supposedly defines life in my office is belied by a corporate culture every bit as backbiting as you’d find outside a ‘creative’ industry. Our building may be a reclaimed squat, our reception desk may be the wing of a Vietnam-era American bomber, and my boss may sometimes wear designer trainers, but we might just as well be toiling away in some bureau of nightmares with acres of anonymous desk space and the façade of a Soviet ministry. At least that would be honest. Although a veneer of funky self-assurance coats every employee in the building, you don’t have to scratch hard before it chips off in your hand. Under the surface, everyone lives in fear. Fear of being found out, of not being found out. Fear of the possibility that the white goods, mobile telephones and confectionery they are paid to promote might be all there is to life.
    But what a life! I marvel at what we achieve. Our communication for a certain vitamin-enriched, hormone-injected dairy brand is so successful that rural farmers are selling off their own milk and eggs in order to go down to their local MaxiMarket and buy the enhanced versions. Enraptured by what we tell them, people have been known to have perfectly good teeth knocked out of their mouths so they can benefit from the glamour of a false set. We are magicians!
    Take cereal: our client bulk-buys the crop, which it gets at a knockdown price, converts it into air-dried flakes, adds flavouring (it’s more cost-effective to use artificial sweeteners than homegrown sugarcane), then sells it on, informing consumers exactly how and when the cereal should be eaten. In return for the addition of this lifestyle data, our client receives roughly fifteen times the worth of the original raw materials—and that’s where my fee comes from. Alchemy exists; we call it branding, that’s all.
    Zé got me the job after my unexpectedly early return from the United States. Through his friendship with my boss, and a veiled threat that he might one day look elsewhere to advertise the MaxiMarket chain, which is by far the most profitable account the agency handles, he saw to it that I got to work on the most interesting brands in the building: a chocolate company owned by an American multinational, the nation’s leading detergent, and two children’s breakfast cereals. It can be a ruthless place, so this status as the
filho de papai
is invaluable, even if the Papai in question is only an adoptive one. I have known my boss, Oscar Cascavel, all my life. He plays tennis with Zé every other week, and he was a regular weekend guest on the farm. But he still makes me nervous. He’s an amoral little monster who dry humps you in the corridor when his serotonin is up, and trashes your day for fun when it isn’t. A guy who used to work here told me that Oscar actually fired him by