Bedstuff website
It was humiliating to see her own scrawly, carefree, confident handwriting with its flippant exclamation marks. The smiley face next to the Bedstuff website, because they’d worked so hard to get that job, pitching against bigger companies, and then, yes! They’d won it. She’d drawn that smiley face yesterday, when she was ignorant of the secret that Will and Felicity were sharing. Had they exchanged rueful looks behind her back when she’d drawn the smiley face? She won’t be so smiley-faced once we confess our little secret, will she?
The phone rang again.
This time Tess let it go to the answering service.
TWF Advertising. Their names entwined together to form their little dream business. The idle “what if” conversation they’d actually made happen.
The Christmas before last they’d been in Sydney for the holiday. As was traditional, they spent Christmas Eve at Felicity’s parents’ house. Tess’s Aunt Mary and Uncle Phil. Felicity was still fat. Pretty and pink and perspiring in a size eighteen dress. They had the traditional sausages on the barbecue, the traditional creamy pasta salad, the traditional pavlova. She and Felicity and Will had all been whining about their jobs. Incompetent management. Stupid colleagues. Drafty offices. And so on and so forth. “Geez, you’re a miserable bunch, aren’t you?” said Uncle Phil, who didn’t have anything to whine about now that he was retired.
“Why don’t you go into business together?” said Tess’s mother.
It was true that they were all in similar fields. Tess was the marketing communications manager for a but-this-is-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it legal publishing company. Will was the creative director of a large, prestigious, extremely pleased with themselves advertising agency. (That’s how they’d met. Tess had been Will’s client.) Felicity was a graphic designer working for a nasty tyrant.
Once they’d started talking about it, the ideas had fallen into place so fast. Click, click, click! By the time they were eating the last mouthfuls of pavlova, it was all set. Will would be the creative director! Obviously! Felicity would be the art director! Of course! Tess would be the account executive! That one wasn’t quite so obvious. She’d never held a role like that. She’d always been on the client side, and she considered herself something of a social introvert.
In fact, a few weeks ago she’d done a Reader’s Digest quiz in a doctor’s waiting room called “Do You Suffer from Social Anxiety?” and her answers (all C’s) confirmed that she did, in fact, suffer from social anxiety and should seek professional help or “join a support group.” Everybody who did that quiz probably got the same result. If you didn’t suspect you had social anxiety, you wouldn’t bother doing the quiz; you’d be too busy chatting with the receptionist.
She certainly did not seek professional help, nor tell a single soul. Not Will. Not even Felicity. If she talked about it, then it would make it real. The two of them would watch her in social situations and be kindly empathetic when they saw the humiliating evidence of her shyness. The important thing was to cover it up. When she was a child her mother had once told her shyness was almost a form of selfishness. “You see, when you hang your head like that, darling, people think you don’t like them!” Tess had taken that to heart. She grew up and learned how to make small talk with a thumping heart. She forced herself to make eye contact, even when her nerves were screaming at her to look away, look away! “Bit of a cold,” she’d say to explain away the dryness of her throat. She learned to live with it, the way other people learned to live with lactose intolerance or sensitive skin.
Anyway, Tess wasn’t overly concerned that Christmas Eve two years ago. It was all just talk, and they’d been drinking a lot of Aunt Mary’s punch. They weren’t really going to start a business together. She wouldn’t really have to be the account executive.
But then, in the new year, when they got back to Melbourne, Will and Felicity had kept going on about it. Will and Tess’s house had a huge downstairs area that the previous owners had used as a teenagers’ retreat. It had its own separate entrance. What did they have to lose? The start-up costs would be negligible. Will and Tess had been putting extra money on their mortgage. Felicity was sharing an apartment. If they failed, they could all go back out and get jobs.