Unserious

It’s Thursday, and it’s miserable.

I’m sitting at the gate at Luton Airport with my carry-on by my feet, waiting for our 7am flight to Amsterdam. I’m exhausted from my 3.30am wake-up but wired, running on 2 cups of terrible airport coffee, my laptop on my lap, open to a deck I’ve fine-tuned several times over the last 4 weeks.

Tracy, our Group Account Director, is sitting next to me flipping through a magazine, her chin-length bob sharp and her red lipstick immaculate.

Nathan’s disappeared to Boots to pick up something for his nausea because he gets travel-sick. I don’t, thankfully, suffer from that, but I am a nervous flier. I worked my way up the not-so-corporate ladder in advertising partly on the assumption that the further up I got, the fewer planes I’d have to get on. For the most part, it’s worked.

Not when it comes to this account, though, and certainly not when it’s up for renewal, and we’re up against 2 other agencies for the creative work.

I was promoted to Account Director last year, and this is my first major renewal at this level. After 4 weeks of living and breathing this pitch, I feel like I’ve anticipated every question, objection and curveball they could possibly throw at us. There’s a lot riding on this afternoon, but I know the work is good, really good. I just need to get us there.

I check my watch. Sam’s late.

He hasn’t called, and he’s been inactive in our group WhatsApp. We board in less than half an hour, and if he doesn’t make it, I’ve memorized his slides - I guess I could cosplay as someone who’s knowledgeable about creative, hooks and angles; God knows I’ve been in enough meetings with him that I’d be able to mimic his cadence, his tone, his jokes well enough to be convincing.

I’m just about to check my phone again when he appears, completely unbothered, coffee in hand, looking exactly like what you’d get if you asked someone to describe an Art Director. He’s long since abandoned the curled moustache phase, thank God, but everything else is textbook: Carhartt jacket, denim shirt, black jeans rolled slightly at the ankles, white socks deliberately exposed above black New Balance trainers. He hasn’t bothered to put wax or gel in his hair, but the “I’ve just rolled out of bed” look somehow looks endearing. He always looks effortlessly put together, as though he’s never once stood in front of his wardrobe wondering what the fuck to wear.

Put him in a room with Nathan, and it’s annoyingly obvious why they’ve been paired together for years. Nathan can take the most complicated brief imaginable and reduce it to 5 words that make you wonder why nobody thought of them sooner. Sam somehow knows exactly what those 5 words need around them. He knows what the audience should notice first, what an image needs to communicate before they’ve read a single word, and, more importantly, what they should feel when they see it. Excited. Curious. Nostalgic. Like they’re missing out on something everyone else already knows about. He uses colour, composition, typography and imagery to build that feeling alongside Nathan’s words.

Together, they’ve done wonders for this client. It’s a shame Sam’s time management remains fucking atrocious.

“Cutting it a bit fine, aren’t you?” I say as he plops down in the empty seat opposite me.

He raises his coffee at me. “Good morning to you too.”

“Flat white?”

“Obviously.”

“Can I have a sip?”

“No, you’ll get your lip gloss all over it.” I almost challenge him when he pulls a brown paper bag from somewhere inside his jacket and hands it to me. “Would you care for a croissant instead?”

I look from the bag to him. “You got me breakfast?”

“I got you a croissant.”

“Same thing.”

I take it from him and smile. “Okay, you’re forgiven for being late.”

“I wasn’t late.”

“And just like that, you’re on thin ice again,” I say through a mouthful of croissant, but I’m mostly relieved. He’s here; I don’t have to cosplay as an Art Director, and I can focus on my own sections of the pitch.

He grins. “Worth it.”

Tracy tuts, the corner of her mouth lifting.

“God, 5 years of this,” Tracy says, looking between us as she turns another page. “I still can’t decide which one of you is going to miss this more.”

“Please.” I look back at Sam. “I’m looking forward to the peace and quiet.”

He rolls his eyes as he brings his coffee to his lips. “You’d be bored within a week.”

“I’d cope.”

“We’ll see,” he says with a cheeky grin.

“You haven’t even left yet, and you’re already becoming unbearable.”

“Becoming?”

Tracy snorts beside me. I ignore them both, taking another bite of my croissant as I glance down at the presentation in front of me. Between Sam finally turning up and the food settling my stomach, some of the nervous energy I’ve been carrying all morning has started to ease, but Tracy’s comment replaces it with something else.

Sam’s a pain in the ass, but since he handed in his notice 6 weeks ago, I’ve been dreading him leaving. When we’re like this, it’s easy to forget that in a few days there won’t be another airport queue, another client meeting, another morning spent giving each other shit over coffee. After 5 years of working together, things I’ve never thought twice about are suddenly starting to feel finite.

Somewhere along the way, Sam stopped being a colleague I got on with and just became my friend. We’ve spent enough evenings in pubs after work that those drinks eventually turned into birthdays, weekends out, and occasionally dragging our friends and flatmates along too. Add in the agency away days and stupidly late nights eating whatever was still open after work events, and I stopped thinking of our friendship as something that only existed on weekdays between 9am and 5pm a long time ago.

I know leaving the agency doesn’t mean he’s disappearing, but I also know it won’t be the same.

Tomorrow is officially his last day, but it doesn’t feel like it. Usually by someone’s final week they’re already halfway out the door, projects handed over, calendars suspiciously empty, their biggest responsibility deciding where everyone’s going for leaving drinks. Sam’s somehow been as busy as ever. There’s no replacement waiting in the wings; he’s still been pulled into client calls, still reviewing work, still arguing with Nathan over creative, and now he’s flying to Amsterdam to pitch for another year on an account he won’t even be around to see through.

I feel bad that his leaving do on Tuesday had to be so subdued. For someone who’s had his fingerprints all over some of the agency’s best work, he deserved a better send-off.

I’m so lost in the thought that I don’t notice Nathan returning until Tracy speaks.

“Successful mission?”

I look up. He’s standing in front of us, a small paper bag from Boots in one hand and a bottle of water in the other.

“Ginger chews, travel sickness tablets and the knowledge that airport Boots charges approximately 400% more for everything.”

“Worth it if you don’t throw up on the client,” I say.

“That happened once.”

My head tilts, unsure for a moment if I’ve heard him correctly. “You’ve thrown up on a client?”

“Near a client.”

“That feels like an important distinction you should’ve led with.”

“It was years ago.”

Tracy lowers her magazine. “How near?”

Nathan taps the side of his nose, indicating the story is on a need-to-know basis, then digs into the bag and pulls out a packet of individually wrapped chews. He tears it open, takes one for himself, then holds another out towards me.

“For takeoff.”

“I’m fine.”

“Lia.”

“I am.”

He keeps holding it out, but I don’t move to take it. I’m a nervous flier, not a sick one, I want to say, but I take the chew and slip it into the pocket of my blazer before he can insist, as the announcement for our flight crackles through the speakers.

Tracy closes her magazine immediately and gets to her feet. “Right. Passports. Phones. Laptops.” Her eyes land pointedly on the presentation in front of me. “Nobody leave anything behind, please.”

We join the queue, passports in hand, my laptop packed away, carry-on bags on our backs, and boarding passes open on our phones. I say a silent prayer, hoping this flight is fast. The sooner we get there, the sooner this pitch will be done, and I can finally breathe.