Day One, Again

Yara had a rule about her enemies, which was that she liked to keep them at agency-across-town distance, and the merger had just relocated her single biggest enemy to the desk beside hers. She found out the way you find out the worst things, which was in a meeting, from a slideshow. The two agencies — hers, Folio, small and sharp and underpaid; his, Mercer Studio, smug and well-funded and somehow always in the design annuals — were becoming one agency, and the slide said so in a font Yara personally would not have chosen, and the next slide had two photographs on it, side by side, under the heading CO-CREATIVE DIRECTORS, and one of the photographs was Yara, and the other one was Obi Adeyemi. Obi Adeyemi. Of Mercer. The man. Yara had been losing pitches to Obi Adeyemi for six years. Not all of them. But enough of them, and always the ones that mattered, the big shiny ones, and always in the same infuriating way — Yara's team would build something rigorous and intelligent and correct, a strategy you could defend in court, and then Obi's team would walk in and do something that was frankly less rigorous and frankly more charming, and the client would go with the charm, every time, and Yara would drive home composing emails she never sent. She knew Obi the way you know a rival. Which is to say: not at all, and completely. She had never had a real conversation with the man. She had also studied his work for six years the way a general studies a coastline. She knew his moves. She knew he over-relied on a big emotional idea and under-built the system beneath it. She had said so, out loud, at conferences, in words she had assumed would never travel — and Obi, she had been reliably informed, had said equally generous things about her, words like clinical, and joyless, and brand strategy for people who are afraid of feelings. So that was the man who was, as of Monday, sharing her job title, her team, and, the floor plan cheerfully confirmed, her bank of desks. He was already there when she came in on Monday. Of course he was. He had got there first, which was itself a move, and he had a coffee, and he had — Yara clocked it instantly — set up his side of the shared desk with a small, deliberate, infuriating tidiness, a single plant, a single notebook, an arrangement that said I am a calm person and you are about to seem like a stressed one by contrast. "Yara Bello," Obi said, standing, offering a hand. He was taller than his conference photos. He had a good, easy, irritating smile, the smile of a man who won pitches with charm. "I've heard so much about —" "You said I do brand strategy for people who are afraid of feelings," Yara said. Obi's hand stayed out for a second. Then he lowered it, recalibrating, and to his credit he did not pretend. "I did say that," he said. "At the Lagos design forum. Two years ago. I assumed it stayed in the room." "Nothing stays in the room. You also said clinical and joyless." "You said I build cathedrals on sand. You said my strategy decks were, and I'm quoting, a mood board wearing a suit." Obi sat back down, unhurried, and the easy smile had changed slightly — it had got more real, and more dangerous, the smile of a man who had just realised the meeting was going to be a fair fight. "So. We've both done our homework. Good. That saves time." Yara put her bag down on her side of the shared desk. Her side did not have a calm plant on it. Her side was about to have a great deal of stressed-looking paper on it, and she resented, in advance, the contrast. "Here's where we are," she said, sitting. "I think your work is charming and structurally hollow. You think my work is rigorous and emotionally dead. We have said these things in public. We now have the same job title and one team who have all read the same slideshow and are, right now, behind that glass, taking bets on how long before one of us quits." She folded her arms. "I'm not going to quit. I didn't claw my way to a directorship to hand it back because the org chart developed a sense of humour." "Neither am I," said Obi. "Then we have a problem to solve, and the problem is not each other, the problem is the project, and what is the project, Obi, do you even know what they've handed us as our first joint —" "A wedding brand," said Obi. Yara stopped. "They've given us a wedding planning company," Obi went on, and now he was definitely, openly enjoying himself, the awful charm of him filling the shared desk like a smell. "A national one. They want a complete rebrand. The two of us. Co-directors. Our launch project, the thing the whole merged agency is judged on, the thing that proves the merger was a good idea —" he spread his hands "— is to make two people who've publicly despised each other for six years stand up in front of a client and sell them a unified, joyful, harmonious vision of two people, joining together, as one." The glass wall behind them held the dim reflection of the whole team, watching, not pretending not to. Yara looked at Obi Adeyemi. Her enemy. Her new co-director. The charming structural-cathedral-on-sand man she had been losing to for six years and was now, apparently, going to have to win with. "I hate this," she said. "I know," said Obi, and pushed his spare coffee — a second cup, she now realised, he had bought a second cup, for her, on day one, before he even knew which way this would go — across the shared desk towards her. "Drink that. We've got a wedding to plan."