Free The Zoo by Jamie Mollart

for our first wedding anniversary. A stay at a country hotel. She’s dancing on the bed, a towel around wet hair, laughing as it unravels and she whips her hair around and around, and I’m laughing too.
    â€œThese are all our names. All of them opted in and all of them are used to receiving offers from us. These are hardened Internet shoppers. They look forward to our mails.”
    I doubt this. Instead I look out of the window. An aeroplane has written my initials in the sky.
    â€œThese are people who love offers, they wait for them,” he continues. “If you get the creative right, which I’m sure you will, you guys know what you’re doing, then they’ll fucking lap it up.”
    â€œOkay. I’ll get accounts to raise you a purchase order. How soon can I have the data?”
    â€œYou get me a PO now, I can put a call into HQ, and you’ll have it asap.” He holds his hand out as if he is going to spit into it. I shake it, feel like I am arm wrestling, testing his strength and wonder how many poor people are going to have their in-boxes invaded with mindless crap to generate 20,000 visitors. It must run into hundreds of thousands. Information waste on an unprecedented scale.
    When he has left I get a bottle of vodka out of my desk drawer, lock myself in one of the tele-conferencing rooms, pull the blinds and drink until my throat burns.
    Â 
    Now in the room, here . This room. Now.
    There is a noise. It sounds like music.
    I get up from the bed. Scrabble around looking for the source. Too quiet to hear, I can’t work out the tune, but it’s there. I know it’s there. Louder now, nearly loud enough for me to find it. On my hands and knees under the bed, I follow the wall, until I can just make out the beginning refrains of Helter Skelter .
    I am on my knees in front of The Zoo listening to it sing and I know that it is coming. It is coming for me and it won’t be long.

19.
    Jessica wafts through the office on a wave of Angel. Heads turn. Collins mouths ‘fuck me’ in my direction. It’s the first real communication we’ve had since I told him. I arch my eyebrows back at him and lead her into the boardroom. Hilary joins me. Alan is already there, peering out over his laptop. We sit either side of him. Jessica demurely arranges herself opposite.
    â€˜Good morning, Miss Hardy,’ says Hilary, eyes over glasses, ‘You’ve met Mr Marlowe, and this is Mr Reach, our Client Services Director. Whoever gets this role will be reporting directly to him.’
    â€˜You’re the one I need to be nice to, then?’ she asks and Alan laughs like a little girl.
    We talk her through the role and what is expected of her. She takes it all in. When she concentrates there are small furrows either side of the bridge of her nose. From the corner of my eye I can see Hilary trying to lean forward enough to look down her shirt.
    â€˜You know what we do here?’ I ask.
    â€˜You’re a full service agency.’
    â€˜Yes. But you know what we do?’
    There are those furrows again. Nose all wrinkled up. ‘You help people sell things?’
    â€˜Well, yes we do. But we essentially make people do things they don’t want to do by being smart-arses. Can you live with that?’
    Furrows. ‘I think so,’ she says.
    â€˜Look at it this way. The gap between person and product has been reduced to a microsecond. It’s not just a case of making your product better than the next one on the shelf, it used to be but it isn’t anymore. What we do has been narrowed down to a simple point of differentiation. You either have a product that someone loves or you have a product that isn’t as annoying as its competitors. An annoying product is never going to be loved, but if it’s less annoying than the other products on the market it will become a leader. A product that someone loves is the goldmine, because they’ll