Read Online Exposure by Talitha Stevenson - Free Book Online

week at the ad agency where he worked, he had played a recently invented game. It involved a vastly complex set of rules, which were just confusing enough to mean he could almost always win without being absolutely certain he was cheating. For the third time in a row, he got the balled-up chocolate wrapper into the ten-point zone between the computer monitor and the phone. That, added to the work-experience boy's four trips to the photocopier before the clock read a quarter to, and to his colleague Hamish's three sniffs in three minutes, meant the score was now high enough to allow Luke to alter history.
    What had actually happened now was that he had walked over to the table and said hi to Andy Jones. And Andy, of course, had remembered him perfectly because Luke had been a big figure at school—captain of rugby and cricket and tennis. (He had actually been the first person in school history—other than a vast-jawed, bovine-looking boy named Dorian Anderson who featured in ancient crackly photos from the 1960s—to be captain of three sports at once.)
    Andy said: 'Shit, how
amazing
to bump into you like this!'
    Luke lit a cigarette distractedly. 'Yeah, it's good to see you again, too, Andy.'
    'Fuck.
I mean—
Luke Langford!'
Andy slapped his forehead and laughed. At this point Luke raised his hand at a girl he happened to know. (This girl was beautiful and fashionably dressed in maybe a miniskirt or hot pants. She looked as though she would like to come over but was afraid to interrupt—she assumed he was talking business, perhaps.)
    Andy was still staring at him. 'Sorry, I'm really blown away,' he said. 'It's been, what—ten years? Listen, let me introduce you to everyone. I mean, d'you want to meet my friends?'
    'Well ... sure—OK. But, listen, I can't stay long, Andy.'
    'No, of course. Of
course.
Just quickly.' He put his arm round Luke's shoulder. 'Everyone? This is Luke Langford. This is the school fucking hero!'
    And it was then that Arianne had looked down from her pedestal and smiled at him, with a kind of recognition in her eyes.
    It was really hard to concentrate on the Calmaderm shampoo account. He knew he would have to do better that afternoon because, in an ad agency full of neurotic creatives, he was the one who held it all together. Everybody relied on him. Just the day before there had been a scene between Adrian Sand, one of the creatives, and the head of marketing at Calmaderm. Adrian had presented an idea that had been deemed, with a sarcastic smile, 'Just a bit too way out,' and he had thrown up his hands and said what the hell was he supposed to do, this shampoo was just like every other fucking shampoo and he might as well shoot himself in the heart. There had been a stunned silence.
    It was only a shampoo, for Christ's sake, Luke thought. But it was his job as account executive to liaise between the warring factions and—as his boss, Sebastian, said, with a hand on Luke's shoulder—to help get the fucking money in. Luke was renowned as a 'people person'. He knew perfectly well that he had been so successful by the age of twenty-eight because of his sportsman's calm in a crisis, because of his placid, unifying smile and because of his cufflinks.
    He had been left a whole box of cufflinks by his maternal grandfather and one day, to please his mother whom he was meeting for lunch, he had worn a pair to work. With an uncharacteristic sense of self-parody, Luke had noticed that, along with his public-school accent and floppy hair, the cufflinks conveyed to his colleagues a note of patrician authority, which did him no harm at all.
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    When he walked out for his sandwich at lunchtime he looked up at the icy blue sky over Hoxton. The wind pulled his trouser legs taut round his ankles and tugged his hair back straight. The weather was abrasive, at odds with his reflective frame of mind. Movements around him seemed staged, menacingly interconnected. A can of the drink he was