Cassandra in reverse, p.10
Cassandra in Reverse, page 10
I nod. Be likable, Cassandra. Be a People Person. Don’t just ignore him and open your file like you did last time.
“That is a very interesting origin story,” I say formally. “Thank you so much for sharing it with me.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I’m warily watching Gareth start opening the box, and here’s an interesting fact: the legendary Pandora’s box was never actually a box. It was a mistranslated enormous clay jar, a punishment from Zeus because Prometheus gifted humans fire and thus a calculated way to destroy us all.
Something tells me this one has the power to do it all over again.
“SharkSkin is going to be industry-changing,” Jack continues expansively, holding his palms upward as if he’s presenting the ceiling for analysis. “A brand-new way of looking at men’s skin care. This is about self-love. There’s all this constant chat about women loving themselves, but who says men can’t love themselves too? Don’t real men deserve to look after our skin as well?”
I physically feel my face drop, so I consciously tug it back into a sweet smile and watch as Gareth dutifully starts pulling items out of the box. Greed. Envy. Illness. Pain. Disease. Misery. Death.
Only joking. It’s a few branded jars of face cream.
“Sure,” I say as my throat starts tightening. “Although men have demonstrably been using skin care for thousands and thousands of years already, in multiple ancient cultures all over the world.” I cough. Unlikable. Grating. “But I see what you mean. What a fascinating question to explore further with the public.”
“So these are the prototypes,” Gareth says, laying them all out on the table. “Ready to hit the stores in a couple of weeks. As you can see, they all have a shark on them.” He lifts one eyebrow. “Lots and lots and lots of sharks.”
I stare at the packaging in horror. I’m not sure why, but I think I’d been desperately hanging on to some futile hope that by traveling through time, I might have somehow ended up in a thread of the universe where SharkSkin wasn’t yellow and blue stripes with orange lids and a leaping shark drawn jumping across the front, flecks of blood spinning out of its mouth. I don’t know who the designer is, but they’ve clearly never been to either an optician or an aquarium.
“Sharks are the ultimate masculine animals,” Jack asserts and pushes one toward me. “This is the day moisturizer, Cassandra, which will be our lead launch. Go ahead and smell it.”
“No, thank you,” I say politely.
“Go on.” He nudges it closer. “Smell it.”
I push it away. “I don’t really need to.”
“Smell the cream, Cassandra,” Jack says in a much sharper voice. “I don’t want a PR who isn’t fully invested. It’s algae-based, you know. Lots of antioxidants. I think you’ll be impressed.”
Holding my breath—there’s no getting around it—I pick up a jar and slowly untwist the lid. I’ve had a problem with scent since I was a baby. Anything too rich, too powerful, too meaty, immediately sets off a vicious gag reflex. (“Cassandra must stop being so dramatic at lunchtime.”) I have to pull my jumper over my nose and mouth every time I walk past a butcher’s shop or I vomit on the curb outside the roast-beef-sandwich queue.
But this is my job. My future. My destiny.
Come on, Cassandra. You can do this.
You have been granted the gift of both hindsight and prophecy, and all you need to do in return is...not what you did four months ago. Literally anything other than what you did four months ago is fine. Bending down, I inhale cautiously. It’s a surreal yet extremely potent combination of mold and petrol and mint and a faint whiff of inexplicable pork sausage, and I immediately start gagging.
My mouth fills with water, my throat closes.
No no no no no—
“Fuck me,” I say as my words tumble out in a rush, a punishment from the gods. “That is absolutely disgusting.”
13
Yeah, I did it again.
Now and then, time likes to replicate situations exactly.
* * *
“Excuse me?” Jack snarls as I put a hand over my mouth and try to push the words back in. “What did you just say?”
I can feel my brain scrabbling urgently at the inside of my head like a trapped gerbil, attempting to find a way out, but there isn’t one. I know, because I’ve spent the last four months trying.
“Sorry,” I sigh, closing my eyes.
Let’s try that again.
* * *
“Sharks are the ultimate masculine animals,” Jack says, pushing one toward me. “This is the day moisturizer, Cassandra, which will be our lead launch. Go ahead and smell it.”
“I said no,” I say, screwing the lid back on.
“Excuse—”
“And the fact that you think masculinity is epitomized by cold-blooded predators says a lot about modern society, don’t you think?”
Sorry, but it needed to be said.
Undo.
* * *
“Go ahead and smell it,” Jack says, and I snap on my prettiest Lego smile and pick up the moisturizer.
“Gosh,” I say, holding my breath. “That’s powerful stuff.”
“Yes.” Jack nods, finally satisfied. “I wanted something instantly identifiable. That’s SharkSkin, I want people to say.”
“Oh, they will,” I confirm.
In a matter of weeks, SharkSkin will become synonymous with a scent that makes dogs hurl, along with a misogynistic PR campaign that not only fails to sell product, but will make me personally—as the brand manager—look like a woman who hates women, and skin, and sharks, thus ending my career in an impressively three-dimensional fashion.
Silently, Gareth lines up bottles on the table, all of which have our leaping, open-mouthed ambassador plastered all over them. It feels like unfair representation. Sharks are generally very peaceful: I’m sure there are plenty of times they just swim around, not covered in blood, chilling out with their mouths closed.
“There’s going to be an entire range,” Gareth states in a strange voice, and I study his face, but I can’t for the life of me work out what expression is on it. Embarrassment? Indigestion? They look so similar. “Face wash. Serum. Vitamin C. Sun cream. Body lotion. Toothpaste, eventually, but we’re still...working on the formula.”
“It’ll be done soon,” Jack contributes proudly. “Testers don’t seem to want to put it in their mouths.”
Gareth makes a weird choking noise and rubs his nose.
“The thing is—” I swallow, but there’s no way around this: I can muck around with time as much as I like, but I still have to keep trying to nudge this meeting in a different direction or I’m going to end up in exactly the same place again. “Are we all definitely set on SharkSkin as a brand name?”
Jack stares at my leg: I didn’t even realize it was bouncing.
“It’s just that shark’s skin is made up of layers of sharp dermal denticles,” I explain, pressing my right leg with my hand until the bouncing neatly transfers to the left instead. “Each has a vascular pulp section, a middle made of dentine and an outer layer of enamel.”
My client continues to study me blankly.
“Teeth,” I clarify quickly, pushing my research forward across the table so he can see the diagrams I printed out for visual impact. “A shark is literally covered all over in thousands of living teeth and I worry that this isn’t what humans look to emulate with their skin-care regime.”
“The name stays,” Jack snaps. “Next.”
“Okay.” I start quickly rifling through my file, even though I know exactly what the next response will be too. “So I guess the next question is what demographic we’re targeting, because—”
“Men,” Jack says. “Next.”
“Gendered skin care is a little outda—”
“So here’s the campaign.” Jack leans back and props his hands behind his head—while simultaneously balancing on a ball, which is actually quite impressive. “‘Skin Care With Bite, For Real Men.’”
I close my eyes. It’s the same. Somehow, in a completely different strand of the universe with an infinite number of ideas to choose from, Jack’s gone ahead and picked the same shit catchphrase that’s going to lose me my job again.
“It won’t work,” I say flatly.
“But I think it will.”
“It won’t.”
“I’m pretty sure it will.”
“I am telling you, Jack.” My voice is definitely grating now, but there’s no getting around it. “I have seen exactly what will happen if we go down this path, and it will be a disaster. Nobody will cover it. Nobody will buy it. We’ll be laughed at by everyone. Everyone.”
Jack scowls. “So you can see the future now, can you?”
“Yes,” I say sharply. “And we will fail.”
My client stares at me, and with a deep breath I lift my eyeballs and stare back at him: feeling a bit like Patroclus on the beaches of Troy, holding my sword aloft, pretending to be Achilles and waiting to be fatally run through with a spear.
“Your job,” Jack says, and it’s exactly what happened last time, right down to the crimped edges of his voice, “is to support my business plan, Miss Dankworth, which I am paying for. With my private funds. Am I perfectly clear? Not to give me this negative, defeatist attitude and arrogantly assume you know better than I do.”
Don’t do it, Cassandra. Please don’t do it.
Just tell Jack he’s a visionary and a genius—a Daedalus of creative ingenuity, a Circe of chemical construction—because the only logical way to save your job now is to make sure he likes you. Except I can’t. Lying makes me feel sick, and I’ve never been able to fake humility. (“Cassandra has no respect for authority.”) Just as before, I feel a familiar, electric ripple of rage: this time definitely mine, mustard yellow. Because why should I have to pretend? Why should I have to stroke this man’s inflated ego, especially when now I know I’m right?
“My job,” I say, smiling tightly with all the remaining energy I can muster, “is to successfully launch your brand. If you want to sell a lot of product, you’ll need to appeal to a much wider demographic than men who personally identify with sea life.”
Jack lifts his chin and there it is again: the squelchy, resentful sensation that will follow me from now until the moment of my unemployment. He dislikes me, and it starts precisely here. But I refuse to go back in time to change it. I refuse to exhaust myself, just to let him defeat me without a fight.
Instead, I harden my gaze: if he wants arrogance, he’s got it.
“Skin Care With Bite,” Jack asserts again, “For Real Men. That’s the campaign, Cassandra, and it is your job to make it work.”
I nod, jaw tight. “Understood.”
“Coverage in ten pieces of mainstream media,” he adds firmly. “That’s what Barry promised us when we signed with your agency. Ten pieces, including national radio. Not including regional.”
Not going to happen. “Fine.”
We’re going to get one local Norfolk hit and the seventy-six-year-old presenter will mistakenly tell everyone the moisturizer contains actual shark and we’ll get a tirade of hate mail from animal activists and horrified children.
“Great,” Jack says, looking past me and brightening up at my boss, now lingering outside. I’d turn around too, but I can’t or I’ll fall off my ball. “I’ll look forward to being kept up to date, on a daily basis.” Sometimes on a minutely basis, if I remember correctly. “Thank you, Cassandra.”
Jack says my name with just enough emphasis to make it sound unfashionable and outdated, then leaves the room while I carefully bounce up and down a few times, preparing to stand up as if I’m on a space hopper. I can’t believe it. That meeting went almost exactly the same as it did originally. I’ve got literally all of time on my side—an eternity of do-overs—and I haven’t fixed anything at all.
“He’s just really invested,” Gareth says awkwardly, putting the bottles neatly back in the box. “Jack’s not a bad guy. I’ve—”
“Known him since you were at school,” I say tiredly. “Yes, I know.”
“Yeah.” Gareth frowns and studies me. “I guess Jack told you at the pitch meeting. There’s a lot of—”
“Pressure on him to get this right.” I roll to my feet. “There’s a lot of pressure on me too, you know. My whole career depends on it.”
“Right.” I can feel Gareth’s eyes on me as I gather my totally unused file of ideas. I might as well have brought in a year’s worth of the Beano. “And exactly how certain are you that this strategy won’t work?”
“A hundred percent.”
Maybe I should just cut my losses and leave my job now, before I have to listen to jokes about having bitten off more than I can chew for the rest of my PR career. Except...if I mess with this strand of history, who knows the impact it will have on all the others? What about Will? What about my flatmates? What about the rest of my plans? I suddenly feel like Theseus, carefully unraveling his red thread around the labyrinth so he knows how to get back out again when it’s all over.
I can’t risk cutting the thread and doing it all in the dark.
“If you can think of a way around this,” Gareth says as we walk back into the main office, “call—”
“You directly.” I nod flatly, holding out my hand for his business card. “Got it.”
Gareth stares at me for a few seconds.
“You’ll do what you can to help,” I prompt, wiggling my fingers. “If I can think of any way around it, I must let you know.”
Except I won’t, because I don’t have the faintest idea of what to do next. I’m not a good account manager at the best of times, and now I’ve been painted into a corner that I am simply not creative enough to get back out of. I’ve tried before, and I’ve failed. I’ll just get impatient and try to tiptoe directly out of the room, ending up with thick white emulsion all over my socks and footprints all over the house.
“Gaz, are you coming or what?” Jack says, poking his head back around the agency door. “We’re going for—”
“Sushi,” I finish, even though the irony is lost on him.
Gareth frowns at me for a few seconds—thrown by my creepy omniscience—then hands me his business card and disappears. With a small sigh, I search the office for Anya and Miyuki, but they’re already giggling next to the photocopying machine. Apparently they’re having a not very secret but extremely passionate affair that everyone in the office knows about but me, and it will become a running colleague joke that I don’t figure it out for another seven weeks.
Carrying my folder in my arms, I return to my desk.
“Fun?” Sophie smirks.
“No,” I say flatly, pulling on my headphones and glancing at the empty desk next to me with a sudden sense of foreboding. No Ronald. No rubber plant. Except on some level I’m watching for them, waiting for them, and it suddenly hits me that I’m allowing my life to fall back into exactly the same shape it was the first time round: gravitating toward familiarity and repetition, the way I always do. Encouraging the sameness, because even when it’s awful, I still like it more than change. Slipping back into time as if it’s an old pair of comfy slippers I refuse to throw away, even though they’re not even that comfortable anymore and my toes are sticking out and getting cold.
And this wasn’t the point of what it is I’m trying to do.
I’m supposed to be taking risks, making changes, and if I don’t—if I simply wrap myself in the comfort of a timeline I already know—I’ll just end up where I was at the beginning, and I’ll have wasted my time.
Worse: I’ll have wasted all of them.
* * *
Swallowing, I get out my phone.
Hi Will. It’s Cassie. Would you like a drink
sometime?
In my original timeline, Will texted me first. I waited, and checked my phone fifteen times an hour, and then I assumed I’d read the entire situation wrong and gave up. Except maybe that was the start of our failure to connect: me, failing to take the initiative. Me, being too cautious, lacking spontaneity or impulsivity. Me, reading things wrong and processing the world fifty times too slow.
Maybe love prefers to be eaten warm, like biscuits out of the oven.
My phone pings.
I’d love a drink! You free tonight? Xx
And obviously my answer is no. My answer is: I have never in my entire life been free tonight, because if we haven’t arranged it days in advance and I haven’t spent the day mentally preparing myself for social interaction, I am not coming.
Your poorly arranged plans are of no interest to me.
Except, last time all my dates with Will were subjected to my schedules and itineraries—a color-coordinated calendar, shared across emails—and now I’m starting to wonder if that doesn’t rip the romance out of a blossoming relationship somewhat. From a boyfriend’s perspective, I can see it might be difficult to connect with a woman who needs advance warning in writing before any interaction can take place, like applying to the council to build an extension.
Icarus may have ignored warnings and flown too close to the sun—culminating in a flaming, drowning ball of feathers—but at least he leaped. I’d have been stuck in that Cretan tower forever: planning flight paths, double-checking the fortnight’s weather conditions and laminating blueprints.
It’s time to be brave, so this time I type:
Sure thing! Where? Xx
