Staying Alive. Matt Beaumont

      4. Beneath several tons of sub-standard Stalin-era concrete, seconds after having pulled newborn triplets and their mother from the rubble of a collapsed apartment building, making me:

      1 a Hero of the People in post-quake Uzbekistan.

      2 a Millstone of Guilt around the neck of Megan Dyer as she watches the news coverage. Tough—the burden is something she’ll have to learn to live with.

      5. At the controls of a 747, having wrested them from the grasp of a bug-eyed Arab before banking the jet inches clear of the Canary Wharf Tower as its paralysed occupants look on with unutterable gratitude.

      6. No, no, no. At the controls of a 747 as I plunge it into the Canary Wharf Tower whose paralysed occupants look on with this final thought flashing through their brains: Is that Murray Colin in the cockpit?

      Silly. I don’t like flying. I’m not exactly phobic, but every time I climb aboard I have to work hard to banish visions of the jet plummeting into, say, a tall building. Therefore:

      7. Nothing that involves heights.

      8. Or depths. Diving, submarines, stuff like that. I may be poor at altitude, but I am flat-out terrified of slowly running out of breathable air while being trapped at the bottom of—

      I can’t think about that one without breaking into an icy sweat. Change the subject, Murray, change the bloody subject.

      9. From a spectacularly massive coronary—‘My God,nurse, his heart literally burst!’—while my body is entwined with:

      1 Megan Dyer’s

      2 Megan Dyer’s

      3 Betina Tofting’s, whose thigh—as she allows her skirt to ride up it—looks alarmingly similar to Megan Dyer’s.

      Betina catches me gazing at her legs and yanks at her hem. Feeling shabby, I look away at Niall Haye circling his telescopic pointer around the phrase ‘ Consumer expectation/Taste delivery synchronicity’.

      ‘I’d like now to discuss the crucial point at which the consumer and the brand interface,’ my boss says, turning from the screen to me. ‘Murray, perhaps you’d like to take us through the results of your store checks.’

      Perhaps I bloody wouldn’t. Why does he say that as if I’ve got a choice? Perhaps what I’d really like to do is shove that irritating telescopic pointer up your—

      ‘Thanks, Niall, I’d love to,’ I reply as I reach for the A0 sheet of Polyboard that has spent the last ninety minutes leaning against my chair. This is its Moment. I prop it up on the table and take the Schenker Foods brand group on a tour of five different supermarket freezer cabinets. In a bravura display of top-notch store checking I somehow managed to complete my mission before returning to the office for my bollocking—something to do with invoices, indeed.

      I’m beginning to suspect that advertising isn’t all it was cracked up to be. When I was a goggle-eyed undergrad the recruiters tempted me with talk of drugs, models and shoots on sun-kissed beaches. No one mentioned the store check. Eight years in, the number of lines of coke that I’ve snorted off models’ sun-kissed bottoms runs to not even single figures. Yesterday, by contrast, I completed my ninetieth store check. No, as a career choice advertising does not do exactly what it says on the tin.

      And if ad people can’t even be straight with one another…Well, it begs questions, doesn’t it?

      11.32 a.m.

      ‘Thank you, Murray, that was fascinating,’ Haye says as I sit down. Hard to believe that anyone could, but Niall Haye finds pictures of supermarket freezers fascinating; almost—but not quite—enough to make him forget that I really did mess up on the invoice front.

      Betina Tofting smiles at me for the first time in nearly two hours. This has nothing to do with her forgiving me for staring at her legs. It’s because she too was riveted by my presentation. She’s probably no more than twenty-five, a good two-thirds of her life still before her, yet that life revolves around Schenker Foods’ new line of adult choc-ices; nothing else exists for her. I smile back as if I feel the same way.

      She says, ‘They are excellent photographs, Murray,’ in a Danish accent that’s incapable of irony. Her sincerity puts a glossy red cherry on top of my whipped cream of a depression…Is this as good as it’s going to get? Murray Colin, the world’s finest store checker. You want an oil fire extinguished, call Red Adair. You need a guaranteed thirty goals a season, stump up several million for Van Nistelrooy. You’re after flare-free snaps of icecream packaging, Murray’s your man.

      Haye segues to the final item on the agenda: the media plan for the European launch of ChocoChillout. As he explains in excruciating detail how he proposes to blow an advertising budget big enough to buy every child in Africa three square meals a day, inoculations and a PlayStation 2, I mentally compose a letter to the Chief of Internal Security in North Korea.

       Dear Sir/Madam,

       I appreciate that you must be busy and I apologise for tearing you away from your important work. However, should you be looking for new and imaginative ways of extracting essential information from the many detainees you have in your care, I believe I may have just the thing.

       Forget sleep-deprivation and attaching electrodes to genitals. I humbly suggest that just thirty minutes in a locked conference room with Niall Haye, his telescopic pointer and a selection of overhead projections will have even the most recalcitrant counter-revolutionary screaming for mercy and telling you everything you wish to know—as well as, I hazard, some stuff you didn’t even think to ask about.

       Should you be interested, Mr Haye could be in Pyongyang on the next flight—sanctions permitting, of course.

       Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to pass on my very best wishes to everyone at your end of the Axis of Evil.

       Yours et cetera…

      Job done.

      I close my eyes.

      No, Niall, I’m not going to sleep. I’m concentrating deeply on your exciting proposal to spend 5.2 million giving the lucky citizens of Benelux no less than fifteen opportunities to hear a voice-over promise a sensously silky taste adventure (in Dutch, Flemish and French).

      Never mind how I’d like to die. What will surely kill me is terminal cynicism.

      12.36 p.m.

      The meeting finally breaks up.

      I grab a bottle of mineral water from the middle of the table and take a swig, washing down the three aspirin that I’ve placed on my tongue. My glands are up like feisty walnuts and I feel rough, much worse than yesterday. I shouldn’t be here.

      Niall stands up and announces lunch. My cue to scurry ahead to reception and organise the taxis. Before I leave the room he grabs my arm. ‘You won’t be joining us at the trough today,’ he hisses. ‘I’d like you to spend your lunch hour going through every invoice you’ve issued over the last twelve months. The rest of the board and I would like to know just how many of our clients you’ve wrongly billed.’

       It was a mistake, Niall. An accident. Slightly less than three thou-sand pounds demanded of the wrong client. Nobody died, for God’s sake.

      ‘Of course,’ I say. ‘That’s exactly what I was planning to do.’

      12.41 p.m.

      ‘You look peaky, babe. Not up to the lunch?’ Jakki says with concern (at least thirty per cent of it sincere) as I arrive at my desk. She has me down as suffering from hypochondria, but it’s nothing so serious—just a touch of flu.

      ‘It’s not that. Niall’s put me on punishment duties.’

      ‘Jeez, it