Bonding, p.1
Bonding, page 1
Contents
PART 1: Market Research 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
PART 2: Marketing Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
PART 3: Launch Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Acknowledgements
Permissions Acknowledgements
For Stephen
PART 1
Market Research
The activity of gathering information about consumers’ needs and desires.
There was something magical about an island – the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world – an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return.
AGATHA CHRISTIE, AND THEN THERE WERE NONE
1
Ashley was drunk, unsteady on her feet, the smell of her make-up overlaid with booze. She grabbed my arm, lurching against me as I struggled to fit the key in the lock. It wasn’t the first time I’d found her in the stairwell. It must have been midnight by the time I came across her. It was a Wednesday.
‘I’m locked out,’ she said, slurring.
Ashley and I shared a flat together. I’d met her only a few months earlier after the previous tenant had left. She’d seemed fine at the time – normal, solvent, decent company for a stranger. It was why I’d chosen her in the first place. She’d been the front runner in a long line of candidates.
Eventually, the door gave way and I steered her gently to her bedroom where I left her in a clumsy attempt at the recovery position.
‘Thanks,’ she mumbled under her breath.
For a second, I thought she’d stopped breathing, then she opened her eyes and blinked at me
‘Are you going to be OK?’
No answer, so I dragged her pillows out of the way and stacked them neatly on the floor beside her.
It was cold in the flat, the bulb in the hallway needed replacing and there was a stale smell as if the place hadn’t been lived in for a while. This wasn’t so far from the truth, neither of us liked coming home and we didn’t really treat it as if it was one.
In the fridge there were two Gym Kitchen curries (both low-fat, one out-of-date), a half-empty bottle of Blossom Hill, some Coronas and a tub of Glossier Mega Greens Detoxifying Mask. I picked up the technically expired meal, considered eating it, then threw it out. The other I put in the microwave while I ate a handful of spinach from the bag. In the time it took me to complete these tasks, my phone buzzed sporadically, a few texts from a group chat I barely followed and one from a newcomer on the app. The app was always on. I wasn’t having much success with it but I found it hard to delete the thing, so I left it lying there on mute, lurking on it occasionally, skimming over the stream of ‘Hi’s, spam and the occasional, badly focused dick pic. Matt, 36 distracted me while I sat on the windowsill and ate. Earlier that day, he’d sent me a video of a shredder slowly chewing up a piece of paper. This was how the two of us communicated, I sent him close-ups of myself and he sent me pictures of the objects on his desk: a Rexel stapler, slightly damp with sweat, an empty Pret A Manger box. What I’d like to do, he’d said between photos of a pad of yellow Post-its, is meet you in a public place for coffee and then fuck you stupid, like a wolf.
You there? he asked, while I opened the kitchen window, which took some effort as it was sealed with duct tape to stop the draught. Fresh air flew into the room, slightly alleviating the smell of damp. Outside, four storeys below, a dull clanging sound rose from the courtyard. Most probably someone had broken in again and was going through the bins.
In bed, I balanced my laptop on my knees. It took a while to click to Game of Thrones. I’d seen this one before. I’d seen them all but it was comforting, watching these things over again. Most nights, the routine numbed me enough to sleep. I watched a pack of dogs as they chased a naked woman into a forest. I closed my eyes as she screamed into the darkness. When I opened them, Matt, 36 had sent me a photo of the charger for his phone.
•
Bored at work the following afternoon, I sent Matt, 36 a close-up of my skirt. He fired back with a picture of his keyboard and, erotically, the corner of his hand.
It was quiet in the office, quieter than usual. I heard Ed’s footsteps as he approached my desk. It was obvious something had happened.
‘I need a word,’ he said under his breath. He was dressed head to toe in cycling gear, his crotch hovering around my face, its contours clearly visible through an explosion of neon Lycra. ‘Can you come and see me when you’re ready?’
The last time Ed had called me into his office it had been to tell me to take more risks. ‘You’d get more traction,’ he’d said, ‘if you loosened up.’
He liked to give pep talks which erupted randomly, usually when he was bored. He saw himself as an inspirational leader, someone who would lay his life down for his team.
In fact, the work we did was hardly taxing. Ed spent most of his time in meetings, chatting up blue-chip clients, selling them the dream of a health and well-being app for minimizing sick days.
All the same, despite Ed’s efforts, the mood in the office was definitely off. There was a general sense of unease. People had started leaving earlier. That week, I’d heard one of the engineers taking a call from a headhunter at his desk. I’d overheard the whole conversation, he’d barely bothered to hide it. The whole office must have known because that corner of the room was generally quiet, an oasis of hushed keystrokes, whereas the non-tech side was usually buzzing and correspondingly full of junk – reusable coffee cups, novelty phone chargers and piles of promotional gonks from sales, as well as the constant hum of Microsoft Teams meetings and Slack huddles.
Another bad sign – in the past month there had been two visits from two different branding agencies. The first one had shown us a portrait of our target demographic: Rocket and Parmesan Woman. She had a white-collar job but was time poor and, it turned out, she was a bit of a soft touch – she wanted the app to provide ‘a safe and supportive environment’ that would allow ‘everyone to achieve their fitness goals without judgement’. The second consultant contradicted this completely. Her talk was all about competition. ‘No one exists in a vacuum,’ she’d written in green ink across the whiteboard. She’d had a deep German accent and had stridden in wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, her grey hair tied back in a severe ponytail like the designer Karl Lagerfeld. ‘This is why social listening is key,’ she’d said in her gravelly voice. ‘We buy into services not only for their convenience but to display our status to others.’ She’d started prowling around the room, her leather trousers squeaking. ‘As our tribes become ever more dynamic, personalized and segregated, agile listening becomes key for delivering insights that can be actioned in real time.’
None of this had any bearing on the actual work we did but it did fuel the sense of low-level anxiety. In the pub, there was talk of doom on the horizon. Growth was slowing, funds were drying up. Any hope of a big sell-out – or even, for the real dreamers, an IPO – anything that might leave us with a decent payout before our time ran out – all of that was all receding faster than Ed’s hairline.
Despite these omens, my heart stopped when Ed said, ‘The big guy is going to join us.’ I went to the bathroom and spent a long time staring at my reflection in the mirror. I’m not sure how long I was there but after a while, I started to look like someone else.
•
At school, I’d been instilled with a romantic view of what the future held for someone like me. Like most people of my generation, I’d been told that I could do whatever I wanted, as long as I was prepared to work for it. Ms Hidehouse, our mullet-haired, marathon-running headmistress, had drilled this with extra ferocity into the girls: all we had to do was work. Effort and ambition would lead us to success, not only for ourselves but for society as a whole. We’d triumph on our merits and then we’d lift up those less fortunate than ourselves. This almost spiritual indoctrination seemed, in retrospect, laughably off-base. I didn’t know anyone whose life had played out along those lines. Most of the women I knew had turned out like me: overdrawn, plagued with anxiety and full of an uneasy sense that something, somewhere had gone wrong. And most of us had nothing approaching the sort of career that was supposed to make it all worthwhile.
My only other memory of Ms Hidehouse was that she took the opposite approach when it came to sex. Sex was something she thought should happe n casually, as often as possible, in the name of adventure. Sexual caution was oppressive, a hangover from the bad old days. I wasn’t sure about this part yet, but so far, things weren’t going well.
•
In his office, Ed sat next to Rory Haynes, the company’s founder and CEO. Haynes must have been about twenty-eight, a former public schoolboy with a transatlantic accent that he’d picked up during his internship at the Apple HQ in Cupertino. He was wearing a light blue Oxford shirt with, I noticed, one button missing and another that had become dangerously unravelled. On his feet, below the baggy jeans, was a pair of threadbare Vans.
‘Heeey!’ Haynes greeted me like an old friend. ‘Looking gooood Mary, looking gooood. Take a seat. As you know, we’ve got some major changes coming up so there’s a lot to talk about today?’ This was news to me. There hadn’t been any redundancies announced.
‘It’s no reflection on your performance? We’ve just been rethinking how we work?’
I tried to look as neutral as I could.
‘We’re reskilling for the pivot into retail? So, we’ve had to rethink your position?’
‘You’ll be looked after,’ Ed said kindly, before announcing the terms of my pay-off.
I made a quick calculation as I sat there. It wasn’t enough, it wasn’t anywhere near enough.
‘I hope we’ll stay in touch?’ Haynes said brightly. ‘You know how it goes? Don’t be a stranger?’
I stood, unsure if I should leave, while Haynes glanced discreetly at his phone. I wondered how much he was paying himself. I knew he’d just bought one of those penthouse lofts on Hoxton Square.
I was out of the room within minutes, unemployed and slightly dazed, my exit signed off with just about enough to get me through the next few weeks.
For a moment, I stood at the entrance to the office. Healthify, it said in wooden letters on the wall. Everyone was quiet, their headphones plugged discreetly into their ears. Around me was an angular composition of oak beams and exposed brickwork. On one table was a mug that said: There Ain’t No I In Team. On the kitchen corkboard – underneath the firm’s diversity policy – a poster had been pinned that said: LEADERSHIP MEANS THINKING ABOUT WE NOT ME. My past at the place flashed through my mind as if I was drowning in a sea of white Formica. The future, on the other hand, presented itself as a terrifying void. Outside, the rush-hour traffic had already begun. The pollution hit me like a warm breeze.
2
The next day I felt the need to leave the flat. Westfield in Stratford was my nearest destination. A sign beside the entrance told me that this was the third largest shopping centre in the UK and that, taking the surrounding area into account, it was in fact the largest urban shopping zone in Europe. As I approached the escalator, I noticed a line of uniformed police officers standing across the mezzanine, submachine guns strapped across their chests as they filtered the waves of people emerging from the Tube into single file.
Inside, a sea of bodies dispersed through tiered walkways. Voices echoed around the glass interior, a mass of dialects I couldn’t understand. I stopped briefly in Sephora to try a Brazilian Honeybronze Glow, then I messaged Matt, 36 while I was waiting in the queue.
What’s up? I sent him a photo of my golden, gloss-slicked arm.
No answer, so I tried a new approach. I picked out a shot of myself half naked, my head cropped out, my bra bathed in the amber light of the bedside lamp. I watched the message shift from delivered to read. He started typing and then stopped. I paused in case he needed time to think.
Eventually he replied: Sorry, slammed at work
At Victoria’s Secret I ran my hands through a pile of acid yellow thongs. A tinge of panic bolted through my blood as it occurred to me that I didn’t know what I was doing. I made my way back out onto the concourse and sat in Caffe Concerto. Patisserie and Prosecco Bar, it said in gold italics on the wall. I pinned myself on Instagram, adding a photo of my green pistachio slice. It was only £4.45 when you tagged yourself and left a good review. On impulse, I started searching for flights. Hundreds of options drew me through the network. There were rows of offers with links, most of which had already sold out. Eventually, I found what I was looking for. I must have been sitting there for a long time because when I finally looked up, the lights had dimmed and it was almost dark.
‘Thank you for shopping at Westfield,’ a voice boomed above my head. ‘Our stores will be closing shortly.’
•
The flat was empty by the time I made it home. The curtains in Ashley’s room were drawn and I noticed that she’d left her gym gear in the kitchen. Her bag was lying by the cupboard we’d taped shut because the place got so damp in the winter that a colony of slugs had eaten through the wall. It was 4 July, the day before my birthday. I was going to be thirty-two years old. I lay on the sofa and glanced at my laptop. It was still showing the last thing I’d watched, an old Agatha Christie series. It was a Christmas special: The ABC Murders, one of her best works, in my opinion.
Christie was the first adult writer I came across as a child. I used to search her books out in charity shops, they were always available and they were cheap. I especially liked the 1970s editions, the ones with the dark, surrealist covers. I’d read almost everything she’d written by my teens, by which point I was facing adulthood myself, a transition I quickly realized was going to be a disappointment.
For some reason, I still had vivid memories of the books I’d read as a child. They were often more real and more affecting than my memories of actual events, more so than anything I’d seen on TV or at the cinema. It sounds old-fashioned but even around the turn of the century, this sort of thing wasn’t unusual.
I pressed play at the end of episode two and contemplated what I’d loved so much about Christie’s writing. It must have been fairly universal – she was the bestselling author of all time. It wasn’t her characters, although her detectives evolved expansively over thousands of pages, it had more to do with the world they lived in. It was a world suffused with hierarchy but also with an interconnectedness that had a comforting, almost tranquilizing effect. Everyone’s lives were intertwined and as a result, everyone was implicated, from the servants to the upper aristocracy. Her novels played out like symphonies, each player intimately related to the others. It was the minutiae of these relationships that held her rigorous mysteries together. Indifference barely figured in her world. Even the worst of her villains were products of these networks. There were exceptions obviously, especially as her plots became more conceptual, but these only served to prove the rule. It was a formula that soothed you like a warm bath.
While I was still at school, I’d taken all of this for granted. My tween self was looking forward to a life of communal cruises down the Nile, country house weekends and fireside gatherings somewhere in the Alps. It was a shock to discover that life in twenty-first-century London was, to say the least, different. Communications had transformed completely. Social life was now inextricable from work. Beyond school, you met people through your job or you met them online. Society had become more abstract to the point that relationships hardly ever happened and when they did, they were subject to weird and unpredictable distortions because, like everything else, they were now shaped by digital efficiencies. I sat back and let Poirot wash over me. Around halfway through episode three, the video player faltered. A grey box appeared:
Network error: there is a problem. Please try again later
While I was waiting for the Wi-Fi to reconnect, I reached instinctively for my phone. There were a few messages, not many. Someone from the office had tagged me in a post. There was an invitation to a virtual conference from something called the Institute of Human Development. My cousin had sent me a birthday text. Happy BD! I hope you have a good one!! Underneath was a gif of a puppy staring, uncomprehendingly, at its own reflection.
•
The following Monday, I had an interview with a man who managed a chain of health clubs. While I waited in the lobby, I looked at the company’s website. There were muted portraits of people working out, some shots of food, a picture of the skyline. On their social media was a comment about last night’s news. A teenager had died under restraint by the police. They’d linked to a video of his final moments, the camera crawling over his face.
