Free 2cool2btrue by Simon Brooke Page B

advertising. Ten years ago he set up an agency with two colleagues half his age. Dad is actually an accountant and was working with them in a big agency balancing the books and looking for tax breaks, but when these two guys—Cambridge educated, off-the-wall twenty-somethings who exist in a world of street-fashion labels, pop culture and wall-to-wall irony—decided to go solo, they realised that his dull, safe financial know-how could form an essential bedrock to the company and so they invited him to join them.
    Needless to say, my mum wasn’t keen. She pointed out the risks of starting a new business with reference to her auntie, who had opened a wool shop in Lewes in the seventies and failed, reminded him that he was comfortably on his way to retirement, and just sighed a lot when these two arguments failed to convince him. I think it was her retirement point that actually clinched it for him and made him go out and do it.
    He pointed out that he had just about paid off the mortgage, the children had left home and, after all, nothing ventured, nothing gained. He didn’t mention the real reason: midlife crisis. But then perhaps he wasn’t aware of it.
    The new company, Matthewman Kendall Barrett (the order of names should tell you something), won a clutch of big accounts with their cheeky, irreverent approach, grabbed some headlines in Campaign magazine, provoked a couple of outcries from the Daily Mail over risqué copy lines and then quickly floated. Suddenly my dad was fifty and a millionaire. He decided to get a new wardrobe and a new car. He got rid of his old suits, his Volvo estate and his wife, and set up home in a Docklands penthouse flat that has its own lift, speakers in the ceiling and panoramic views of the Thames—just beyond some corrugated-iron sheds and a double-glazing storage depot, that is.
    Getting there is near impossible: you have to go to a perpetually windswept station and then ring for a taxi which takes you along the dual carriageways through the post-industrial wasteland to a shimmering white residential Fort Knox which has a surly security guard and a “marketing suite” which is permanently open.
    Dad has had a number of girlfriends since he left my mum, but to be honest I tend to get them confused: they’re all thirty years younger than him, all blonde, all leggy and have names that end in i like Linzi, Leoni, Nikki and Toni. I’m sure most of them put a smiley face in the dot of the i when they sign their names, although none of them has ever written to me.
    Amongst other things, my dad bought a coffee table supported by the kneeling fibreglass figure of a naked woman in a leather basque which he proudly showed to me when I went over there once. Holding our shots of frozen flavoured vodka, we circled it, studying it intensely.
    “Sexy, eh?” said my old man, eyeing up the cellulite-free, rock-hard curves of her behind in a way that still makes me shudder slightly.
    “I think it’s supposed to be ironic, Dad,” I said uneasily, trying to make out the woman’s expression. He walked round to get a better view of her face too.
    “Yeah, whatever,” he said.
     
    When I finally penetrate the security and arrive at my dad’s flat, he has obviously just got up and is still in a sort of kimono thing. My initial reaction is to say “I think you’re a bit old for that, aren’t you?” but then, of course, that observation applies to his entire life, so really what’s the point? Dad thinks he is Hugh Heffner made over by Calvin Klein. My sister says that he is more Austin Powers meets JC Penney.
    “Hey, Charlie,” he says, hugging me and slapping me on the back. Unlike my mother, Dad does call me Charlie and he seems to really like the name. Whose idea was “Keith,” anyway? But I still call him Dad, not Jared, as he sometimes asks me to. I suppose Jared is similar to John, but then it was John who was married to my mother and fathered me so I’m a bit sensitive about