In Case of Emergency, page 1
Poorna Bell
* * *
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Poorna Bell is an award-winning journalist and former Executive Editor and Global Lifestyle Head for HuffPost. She won Stylist’s Rising Star Award for 2019 and Red magazine’s Big Book Award for 2019. Poorna has written for Red, the Telegraph, The Times, Stylist, I News, BBC, the Guardian and Grazia.
Poorna has published three works of non-fiction: Chase the Rainbow, In Search of Silence and Stronger. In Case of Emergency is her first work of fiction.
ALSO BY POORNA BELL
NON-FICTION
Chase the Rainbow
In Search of Silence
Stronger
For Mal. You came with me to the ends of the earth, always know that I will do the same for you.
Prologue
1999
Some moments in life are nothing like you expect they will be.
Seeing the Mona Lisa. (Way smaller than the knock-off poster sold in Dartford Market of her smoking a massive spliff.) The first day of your first period. (Not magical and followed by the realisation that you’re locked into a thirty-year contract once a month.) Running away from home. (You quite like having regular food and access to a familiar toilet.)
But occasionally a significant thing happens that is different from whatever you imagined because it is so much more. And while it may be as rare as the sighting of a Great Comet, sometimes that moment is a First, illuminated with such brightness in recollection that the memory of it burns for an entire lifetime.
I wanted my first kiss to be like Angela Chase kissing Jordan Catalano from My So-Called Life, all chapped lips and goofy smiles in the school boiler room, but I think deep down I believed it would be a bit crap. My friends had all experienced terrible first kisses – toothy, submerged in dribble, and almost always shared with someone who just happened to be there and willing. At sixteen, time was running out for me.
It almost happened with Skateboard Steve. I’d had a crush on him ever since I’d seen him in a Nirvana T-shirt, mooching around the town centre with a dog chain around his neck and a skateboard in one hand. We were both at the school disco in the local community centre to mark the end of term. The DJ, also the owner of the local hardware store, Hard Nutz, was trying to jolly along a bunch of sullen teenagers who had peeled off into segregated groups of boys and girls pasted to the walls.
A bunch of us were trying to escape the bad pop music, sitting outside by some scrubby grass and a Pin Bin. Squinting through thick eyeliner, we attempted to look subversive and cool with our bottles of Coke and 7Up mixed with whatever we’d managed to steal from our parents’ drinks cabinets.
As Backstreet Boys’ ‘I Want It That Way’ began playing, Steve started leaning in. It’s happening! I thought. Finally! But then he stopped, went the colour of a lettuce and vomited melon liqueur all over his jeans.
As a fairly unremarkable-looking Indian girl in a predominantly white suburban town, I hadn’t expected an opportunity for a first kiss to come around again quite so soon. My parents were stricter than those of my English classmates and I wasn’t usually the type of girl boys fawned over. Brown women back then weren’t even seen as desirable; the Dartford W. H. Smith had yet to stock the Kama Sutra and dodgy online Indian auntie porn wasn’t yet a thing.
But then, my best friends and I went on our first holiday sans parents, to Cornwall. And there, someone had finally seen me for who I was.
It was like something from a movie, but better. Because in a movie, there’d be someone cheesy like Shania Twain playing as our lips came together, but in real life, it was Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Today.’ Possibly the most perfect song, for a perfect kiss.
Everything felt like it was beginning. Everything felt like it was ending – just like that point before a river meets the sea. The taste of him on my lips, the feeling of knowing someone in a way I had never known anyone before, the sense of freedom and power over my own body, the softness of it all, carried through to a wave of emotion that felt like it would burst right out of me.
‘Shall I go get us some drinks?’ I asked, extricating myself from underneath the old, scratchy blankets that smelled slightly of dog. He placed another kiss on my lips in silent affirmation and picked up his guitar. I pulled on my jacket as scattered notes trailed behind me like confetti.
The sharp air jolted me out of that warm place. Overhead, the sky had transformed from a piercing blue to an expanse of black shot through with diamonds. I looked up at the stars as they shone, ancient and powerful, as if to remind me that the world is beautiful. Even for an unremarkable Indian girl.
I picked out two semi-cold cans of beer from the booze bucket by my friends, all clustered and wrapped in a tangle around the bonfire, whistling and cheering as I returned. I loved them and knew I could count on them for anything.
‘Dicks,’ I mouthed at them, unable to stop a smile so wide, it threatened to glue the corners of my lips to my ears permanently. Walking back to the shed, I sang along to the lyrics booming out.
But as I reached for the handle, the sound of the guitar stopped. I heard two voices. One belonged to the beautiful boy I had just kissed. The other belonged to a person I had sat next to at lunch for the best part of three years, exchanged letters with almost daily at the school gates, who had stayed at my house countless times, eaten my mother’s food and sat with me on my sofa as we debated which one of the Hanson brothers we’d shag, marry or kill. I paused to hear what nice things she might be saying about me. But as I listened, I realised that what she was saying wasn’t nice at all.
I was unable to believe this was happening. The euphoria I’d felt turned to ash in my mouth. Imagine: the worst things you think about yourself, being said by someone you thought would always love and protect you.
We all have expectations of those big moments in life. First kisses, first loves. We even have expectations of the less nice moments, like heartbreak. I always thought my first proper heartbreak would be the result of a great love, and I’d play The Cure and Air Supply so loud my mum would bang on the door and then make me a ham and cheese toastie to cheer me up.
But I never expected in a million years that my first heartbreak would follow so soon after my first kiss. Or that the first person to break my heart wouldn’t be a boy, but one of my best friends.
1
2019
‘You saw the Chelsea match, yeah?’ said David from Commercial Partnerships. I inwardly groaned. My male colleagues started talking excitedly about players and penalties and how ‘they were robbed, mate’. One of the more kindly ones – and it was usually one of the dads who had a daughter – took a look at me and asked: ‘Do you watch football, Bel?’
I shook my head and the rueful expression on his face confirmed what he thought he knew: girl, not interested in football. Which, if he’d ever met my older sister Devi or my niece Karen, he would know was an outdated stereotype.
Instead, I fiddled with the cable connecting my laptop to the main screen of the boardroom we had all gathered in for our quarterly directors’ meeting. As head of New Creative, I was expected to give the first presentation. As was always the case when I was the only woman in a room, I was made to default to the role of mummy, only stopping short of burping them. It was expected that I’d oversee all the extra stuff, from double-checking the assistant had made enough coffee to making sure the tech had been set up. I hated doing it but had learned the hard way that if I didn’t, no one would, and I’d be the one left without coffee.
A full-bodied hush rippled through the room, which meant our CEO Crispin had arrived. I took my pre-assigned seat near the top of the table, which had real front-of-the-bus vibes, but at least I wasn’t seated anywhere near Tristan. Like me, he was one of the youngest directors in the advertising agency. Unlike me, he was a man whose unique brand of arrogance had no doubt been fermented at private school, matured as he stepped from one plum opportunity to the next with minimal effort, and distilled into the person I knew today. That is, a bozo who wielded his good looks for evil ends and, if rumours were true, had a penchant for charming new female interns then ghosting them to the brink of madness.
I focused instead on Crispin, who was as always neat and beautifully dressed. He was vocal about maintaining his lean figure with daily cardio and strict food rules. At client lunches he would only eat white fish or vegetarian food. Cheese, he said, was the Devil’s smegma, and he’d stopped eating bread in 1998. This meticulousness did not, however, extend to alcohol and other substances. His age was rumoured to be anywhere between sixty and seventy-five, indeterminate because of light brushstrokes of Botox and fillers.
There was one highlight to being in this meeting. Although he wasn’t in town often, when he was, Crispin favoured me, and not in a creepy way. His ex-wife was Indian, and although she turned out to be ‘a Satanic bitch viper who stole half his money’, he doted on their daughter Tamara. I think I reminded him of her even though we looked nothing alike – she was tall and looked like an Instagram model with latte-coloured skin, while I was short, a rich shade of walnut with bodily proportions that would have been fashionable in an ancient Hindu text circa 400 BC. Sturdy forearms, robust breasts, a melon bottom all condensed in slightly too small a space. But perhaps it was also because he didn’t scare me, and I didn’t simper around him, that I had won favour. Just as he treated me like a proxy daughter, I treated him like a proxy father and my lighthearted nagging was always in his best interests.
‘Good to see you all, gang,’ he said, standing at the head of the table. ‘Much to discuss. Is it too early for whisky?’ It was 9.30 a.m. The men puffed out their chests like pigeons swaggering on the cornices of Trafalgar Square and murmurs of ‘it’s five o’clock somewhere’, ‘whisky breakfast’ and ‘never too early’, filled the air. But their expressions said otherwise. Most of them were entering their forties or fifties and simply wanted to make it through the day and get home in time to put their kids to bed.
‘No, Crispin, we’re not having whisky,’ I said. ‘Most of us haven’t even had a coffee yet.’ He looked at me and then at his assistant Jane, who also shook her head. ‘Oh, boo,’ he replied. ‘Fine, we’ll wait until lunch. Fun sponge.’
I could sense the relief rippling through the room and some of the directors gave me a grateful smile, looking at me properly for the first time that day. I’d been a director for two years, and still some of them seemed surprised when I turned up to a meeting. At 36, I wasn’t that much younger than some of them, but because I looked younger, I had to constantly reinforce that I wasn’t some fresh-faced newbie who’d been hired to fill a seat. There was often a momentary delay as they registered how I was dressed and spoke, during which they had to reconfigure their mental Rolodex of reference points for people who looked like me: corner shop owner’s daughter, demure, frigid onion-chopper, garlic-masher, terrorist’s wife.
‘I’ll get us started, shall I?’ I said and stood up confidently, inside feeling as if any moment, the woven cream carpet would give way to molten lava. Crispin smiled in silent approval. There was no sign of the hurricane clamped behind his teeth that would very soon begin the sequence of events that up-ended everything.
*
We were over halfway through the morning. Aside from the fact that this was one of the most important meetings of the year – a quarterly update on each department – time with Crispin was limited because he was mostly based in Monaco. It was the ultimate cliché, but he had vast sums of disposable income and took every opportunity to sunbathe, eat lobster and drink champagne for as long as he was able. Leopard, our agency, was one of many in his portfolio of businesses, but as he had built the agency from the ground up himself, he took more of an interest in what we did. And he liked to get involved.
Unlike other big bosses who sat in an open-plan office with their employees in an attempt to convince their teams they were ‘just one of the gang’ (while the actual gang liberated company stationery and toilet paper because they didn’t get bonuses or six-figure salaries), Crispin had no interest in dissolving the hierarchy. As much as I knew I had a seat at the boardroom table because I had earned it, there was a part of me that never felt fully in my own skin here, always misty-eyed with regret for the dream I had relinquished of working at a small, independent agency to make money and a name for myself.
Working at a smaller company might have been less toxic for the soul, but I also knew that I liked £4 hipster coffees and not having to worry about paying my bills, or what I spent on nights out. Maybe playing a part and wearing a cape dress that made me look like a flying squirrel – even though the shop assistant had assured me I’d feel powerful in it – weren’t the worst things in the world.
Along with everyone else, I needed to overegg my successes and spin failures into candyfloss, sweetened with promises of how we’d do better. This meeting would determine our budget for next year. We had brief, high-pressure windows to impress Crispin. Those who didn’t invariably found their department restructured. Tristan, Head of New Media, was in the middle of his presentation and people were discreetly checking their phones as the clock inched towards lunch. Crispin cut him off midway, which was never a good sign.
‘This is great, Tristan, but I have a question for you – what the fuck happened with Lightning? That’s your area, right?’
Tristan’s face froze. ‘Lightning?’ I’d never seen him rattled before. I liked it.
‘Yes,’ said Crispin. ‘The Oseni fuck-up.’
Everyone put their phones down, sensing that at any moment things could explode. By now Tristan had rearranged his face into a mask of self-assurance.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it was an easy mistake to make, and I’d say that it was a team failure, not just New Media’s.’ It wasn’t an easy mistake to make, and worse, I had the feeling that some of us were about to be fed to the furnace of Crispin’s wrath.
‘Yes,’ said Crispin, ‘but it also cost us a lot of money. I don’t care whether it was a hard or an easy mistake to make: how the fuck did this happen?’
The Oseni Fuck-Up, as it was referred to, was related to a campaign that we’d put together for Lightning, an emerging, cutting-edge sports brand, who wanted a prominent Black personality to lead it. The client was spending a lot of money and wanted the Premier League footballer Edward Oseni, who’d just won the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year Award but was known as much for his philanthropy as for his sporting skill. In one of the early meetings, we’d had a big discussion about maybe instead going for someone like the up-and-coming rapper Eric O, whose star was on the rise and who had already been seen wearing their clothes. Eventually, Lightning went for Oseni, though, and on the day of the meeting to celebrate the partnership, our social media manager had sent his intern to fill in for him and take notes because he was off on annual leave.
Maybe the intern was hungover from the night before or maybe, like most people in the company, he was some little snotnose who got the gig because of nepotism and didn’t actually care about being there. But whatever the reason, when he put out tweets about the campaign, he used a picture of Eric O, but captioned it with Edward Oseni’s name. And because that team had zero Black people in it, no one noticed for about six hours. The ensuing outrage from media outlets and influencers was tremendous. Memes were created and Lightning pulled the campaign.
Crispin looked pointedly at Tristan, who quickly said: ‘I mean, yes, there are definitely people in my team accountable, but we all help out across each other’s campaigns. I’m surprised Bel of all people didn’t catch it sooner, to be honest.’
I started in my chair at the sound of my name. The rest of the earthworms around the table were blind to the undercurrent of what was really happening here. New Creative and New Media worked quite closely together, so they assumed I was being dragged into it because of my role. But I knew Tristan wasn’t that stupid. I’d heard him making ‘jokes’ about diversity hires.
And now it seemed it wasn’t enough that the company trotted me out whenever they needed to show a flash of diversity; apparently I was meant by default to be the race monitor just because I wasn’t white?
I looked at Tristan poisonously. ‘Why should I of all people have caught it?’
He shrugged and smiled. ‘Because I know how much you care about D&I.’
D&I: Diversity and Inclusion. Everyone knew that it was the hot topic of discussion at industry events, with actual change being far off because the only people who took it seriously were those most impacted by it but with the least power. And the people who ran companies, sat on boards and chose leadership teams, continued to hide behind the ‘best person for the job’ rationale, and it remained a mystery or perhaps sheer coincidence how the ‘best’ people just happened to look and behave exactly like them.
Catching a hint of suppressed fury in the air, Crispin said: ‘Well, look, let’s move on. We’ll discuss it later, Tristan. Dan, you’re next …’
