The Heat Is On Read online

  ‘Can I have a word?’ he asked Josie, pulling her to one side.

  I stepped out on to the street and waited, inhaling the fresh air. He couldn’t be trying to sell Josie a holiday surely, even if she is more a millennial than a boomer. I tried to stay calm and remember all of Richard’s advice. I’d shown respect but I also had to learn from this competitor; I thought through everything he’d said and shown us.

  Our customers do like the personal service we provide but if he’s going to copy that, advertise everywhere and give fabulous discounts then they’d be mad not to take the cheapest price. No travel agent can afford to give much away, so hopefully, I thought, he’d stop that soon but we had to do something until that happened. Thank the lord for Josie and Charlie – they’d come up with an idea and however insane it sounded, if experience is anything to go by, it would probably work. Josie appeared slamming the door behind her.

  ‘So did he try to sell you a holiday?’ I asked.

  ‘Not exactly,’ she said turning to face me. ‘Sneaky swine thinks he’s god’s gift. He offered me a job.’

  When the Going Gets Tough…

  The tough start selling holidays as if their lives depend on it. I know it’s not as catchy as the original song, so I should probably leave lyrics to other people in future.

  The job offer backfired on Lorenzo – far from feeling flattered, Josie feels threatened. Like a frill-necked lizard her hackles are up and she’s on the attack. We acted quickly after the launch party and for the past few weeks we’ve been working round the clock to contact all of our business accounts to try to tie up their corporate travel for the year, and we offered each and every one a discount they could pass on to their employees. It’s quite a big discount but it’s for a very limited period to try to stop people going to try out Launch. We retained most of them, but some businesses had already been tempted away by our nemesis. Unfortunately, we’re not making much profit on any of the sales but we’ve decided that getting some revenue in is better than nothing at all.

  Josie has taken a leaf out of Lorenzo’s book about being current: she’s trying to capitalise on a documentary about the Outback that was on TV. She sent out an email with a link to the video trailer and urging customers to get in touch for special offers. She’s offered to give them her personal native advice based on what they want to see – we’re still waiting for customers to start calling but we’re sure they will.

  In between selling holidays, Josie and Charlie keep dreaming up plans to bring Lorenzo down a few pegs. I can’t join in. Not because I don’t want to but because despite Mr Branson’s calm advice, I’m starting to bubble with anger. I’ve concluded that he’s the third most horrible person I’ve ever met (the first being my old PE teacher and the second the ex-husband, obviously) and I’m angry that he’s had the nerve to open up opposite us. I’m angry that he’s using our ideas, that he’s stopping us advertising and that he blatantly tried to poach Josie AFTER the thieving hound had casually accepted my precious pen as a goodwill gift. What sort of low life does that? You would never catch me or mine stooping that low.

  ‘I think this one belongs to you,’ says a voice at the doorway jolting me from my indignation. ‘She was wrecking my technology – nice try.’

  I look up and see Lorenzo frogmarching my mother into the shop. I get up and take her from him muttering a quiet ‘thank you’ as he leaves.

  ‘Go on then Mum. What have you done?’ Whatever it is, she’s just handed our competitor the moral high ground I was proudly occupying.

  ‘I just went in to see what all the fuss was about,’ she huffs. ‘They’ve got free coffee in there you know.’

  I should have warned Lorenzo about giving out freebies; this woman can sniff them out from miles away. Then again, maybe that’s our backup plan, letting Mum and her cronies bankrupt him without us lifting a finger.

  ‘Mind you,’ Mum continues, ‘no biscuits. Cereal, that’s what they’re giving away – bowls of cereal. I mean to say, we’ve all had breakfast before we leave the house, haven’t we? We don’t want a bowl of bran flakes for our mid-morning snack. Someone should tell him.’

  ‘It’s very trendy now,’ I explain. ‘There’s a café in the city centre selling just cereal for a fiver a bowl.’

  She waves her hand at me incredulously. ‘Don’t be daft,’ she laughs, ‘I’m not falling for that one.’

  I won’t even mention the Cat Café then.

  ‘So, anyway, he threw you out for eating all his cereal, did he?’ I ask.

  ‘I wouldn’t touch that stuff,’ she replies. ‘No, he said I was going to break his little eye-patch things.’

  I roll my eyes, as I can see she’s just playing to the room now. In her late seventies, my mother sees absolutely no point in accepting social norms any more. After a lifetime of being utterly respectable, she has decided that now is the time to do whatever she pleases. If there were an award called ‘Pensioner Behaving Badly’ – she’d probably win. Nevertheless, Josie is loving it.

  ‘Eye-patch? Oh my god you mean the iPads? Hilarious, go on, what did you do with them,’ she asks dying to know the details and giving Mum the audience she wants.

  ‘Well, I didn’t like the picture on the screen, I wanted to change it,’ she explains. ‘So I just picked it up and shook it.’ She demonstrates her actions shaking an imaginary tablet violently.

  ‘Mother dear,’ I say shaking my head, ‘it’s not an Etch A Sketch and you know it, you’re not daft.’

  Josie and Charlie are doubled up with laughter.

  ‘Oh I can just picture it,’ cries Charlie through his tears. ‘Good job she didn’t think you had to write on the screens.’

  ‘Well done Mrs Shepherd,’ laughs Josie, ‘you’ve made my day.’

  Despite myself, I can’t help but join in the giggling; just the thought of Lorenzo and his cool-cat customers being disturbed by a septuagenarian blunderbuss.

  ‘Was it busy?’ Charlie eventually asks when he’s calmed down. Mum nods ferociously.

  ‘Oh yes, and people were tapping their watches on them screens to book their holidays. It looked dead easy.’

  ‘Just so you know, your old Sekonda wouldn’t work,’ I tell her just in case she tries to give that a go too.

  Mum looks round at our shop. ‘It makes this place look a bit shabby really. Have you been this quiet all morning?’

  And there it is, the thing none of us are actually saying to each other. We’ve been quiet for quite a while now, but rather than confront it we’ve pretended to be pleased to be able to finish up the admin or clear emails while we wait for our marketing efforts to start working. Well, the emails are clear now and not many more are coming in. Mum senses she’s dropped a clanger, so leaves us to ‘get on with things’. The three of us sit looking at the floor until Charlie breaks the ice.

  ‘So what are we going to do?’ he asks.

  The silence continues for a moment and I imagine, like me, the others are running through options in their heads. I don’t want to turn Mercury into a lightweight version of Launch – I genuinely don’t think that’s what customers want. Then again, our shop is empty, so perhaps I’ve got it wrong. We only decorated a year ago but perhaps I was too traditional back then. The wine bars and restaurants that have opened in the past year have looked so different with their mish-mashed furniture and retro crockery. I wonder if you only like retro things when you don’t remember them the first time around. I couldn’t wait to get rid of all those garish seventies tea sets and now I can’t find a coffee shop that doesn’t use them. My mind is wandering again and the guys are staring at me waiting for a response.

  ‘Before I do anything, I want to ask some Mercurians what they think,’ I say. ‘I’m too biased and I just don’t know what we could be doing differently.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to step up the marketing even more,’ says Josie. ‘More emails, reviews, social media – you won’t be able to move for hearing about the great times people hav
e had with Mercury.’

  ‘And I’m going to tidy the shop up,’ adds Charlie. ‘I’ll go in a completely different direction to Lorenzo – a bit less clutter but a bit more luxury, maybe some velvet…’

  We let him ponder his interior design while we get on with our tasks.

  Josie is on a mission and she unpleasantly cracks her knuckles before she starts. She pulls up all the compliments we’ve been sent over the year, all the customer photographs and the publicity. She drafts a very funny text reminding people where they were last year and showing where they could be this year. She creates a video of customers saying they’ve simply had the best time ever and loads it on to Facebook, then edits a clip of the award ceremony when we were voted the People’s Champion for our customer service. Finally, she emails everyone on our database the Mercury Travel Club calendar, telling them that anyone who books next week will be entered into a draw to win a fabulous prize.

  The next day, Charlie gets to work. Instead of velvet, he’s decided to emulate our (hopefully) future island beach bar, replacing our wooden window blinds with floaty voile curtains, creating a brochure-reading area with some white rattan furniture, and deciding on a uniform of turquoise shirts over linen trousers. They’re going to look pretty creased by the end of the day but this is not a time to criticise any effort whatsoever. Instead of a coffee bar, Charlie has stuck to his theme and has a range of ready-made cocktails chilling in a little fridge, non-alcoholic ones of course – we have to ensure Patty doesn’t take up permanent residence, after all.

  Charlie’s interior design is definitely noticed but the marketing seems to be getting nowhere. The very few customers who cross our threshold are lingering a little longer, meaning we have more time to tell them about the trip, but by the end of the week we’ve charmed the espadrilles off as many people as we can and the bookings are nowhere near last year’s levels. What is happening? It’s time for me to go out and do my job – to ask people what we’re doing wrong.

  Josie, Charlie and I invite some of our customers to talk to us about Mercury and we meet in a private room of the local pub, getting everyone a free drink for coming along. Although Mum would have come along anyway, I still have to get her one, and seeing as someone else is paying, she has the bloody cheek to ask for a bottle of ‘that sparkly stuff you all go mad over’ for her and her friends. She’d better book a holiday after this.

  Josie starts the conversation in a relaxed way. If she hadn’t, I’d be at risk of falling to my knees pleading, ‘Why, oh why have you deserted us?’, which probably wouldn’t inspire them.

  ‘It’s so good to see you all,’ she says, ‘I remember you two from the karaoke in New York.’ She points at a couple who had led the singing on that trip and they take a bow.

  ‘What’s been your favourite Mercury trip?’ she asks and the room becomes animated.

  ‘Oh when Angie got propositioned by that man in Monaco,’ says one and Mum feigns shame at the memory.

  ‘When Charlie got dressed up as the ghost,’ says another.

  ‘When Patty was part of the Granny-Okes,’ comes a cry from the back.

  They’re all such fond memories of our first year as the Mercury Travel Club but nostalgia can’t keep a business going. I keep my voice calm and start to ask about now.

  ‘So what do you think about the new trips we’re advertising?’

  There are lots of positive murmurs in the room.

  ‘And do you like all the emails and messages?’

  Again lots of positivity rises from the group.

  ‘Oh they’re so funny,’ says one.

  ‘They make you feel like booking up straight away even if you weren’t thinking of a holiday,’ says another, so I decide to ask the key question.

  ‘So are you going to book up?’

  Our customers look at each other fairly puzzled.

  ‘I did book,’ one of them starts to say. ‘I clicked on the link you sent in that second email and put my card number in, it was so easy.’

  Other people in the group nod to say they did the same. I start to have what seems like a near-death experience. I’m floating outside myself again and what must be less than a minute of silence seems to last for hours. I don’t know what has happened but none of these people are booked up with us and I don’t want to cause a panic. Charlie picks up the thread.

  ‘Has anyone still got the link by any chance?’

  One of the customers gets out their phone and shows Charlie the email they’re all talking about. Josie takes the phone from his hand, her eyes nearly bursting out of her head. She signals me to take a look.

  ‘What’s happened?’ I ask.

  ‘It’s Lorenzo,’ she says quietly. ‘He must be on our mailing list and when I’ve sent out our email, he’s just pressed “reply all” offering something very similar and a discount if they click the link and book up immediately. He’s stolen our ideas.’

  ‘Is our holiday safe?’ asks one of the group who senses our unease and has been trying to listen in. We reassure her it is; it’s just been booked through Launch rather than Mercury. They assume the agency is just another branch of ours as we both have intergalactic names. We smile and let them think that for now.

  I can see Josie getting angrier but I’m more concerned for our customers. I hope he’s going to take care of them. If they do believe Launch is a new Mercury Travel branch, then everything he does will reflect on us. We need to stay calm and agree a strategy. For now, I lead the group back to talking about the great times we’ve had together and then we end the discussion earlier than planned. We now know what has happened and we have to work out what to do about it.

  As the last customer leaves the room, Charlie, Josie and I sit stunned.

  ‘Is what he’s done legal?’ I ask.

  ‘Don’t bloody care,’ says Josie, ‘I’m gonna chop his balls off.’

  ‘As much as I’d like to do the same, I think we should start by talking to him,’ says Charlie. ‘He can’t behave like this.’

  ‘Coward,’ replies Josie, finishing her drink in one combative gulp.

  * * *

  We get some advice before emailing Lorenzo and asking him to start playing fair. His response, like the legal advice, is that he hasn’t done anything strictly illegal. He received an email alongside lots of other people and he’d simply replied to them all with an offer of his own. If anything, we’d been at fault for not protecting our customers’ details. If we kick up a fuss then we might just find ourselves worse off. I can’t believe he’s bluffing and the last thing we need right now is a data protection scandal.

  The next day we close up slightly early and catch him as he’s locking up. A high street brawl isn’t going to enhance our reputation but Josie goes for him before I can get hold of her.

  ‘You’re still a scabby old snake,’ Josie tells him. ‘Why don’t you get some ideas of your own?’

  ‘I couldn’t help myself, I just love what you’d done,’ he tells her, ‘honestly Josie – your emails are brilliant. I hope Mercury knows how lucky they are to have you, I’d double your salary if you worked for me.’

  ‘In your dreams,’ spits Josie. ‘I like to work with people who have an ounce of integrity, which you don’t seem to possess.’

  ‘Although it wouldn’t surprise me if they sacked you now,’ he baits her further. ‘I’m presuming it was you who sent out the unprotected email? Directors can be prosecuted for giving out customer details you know.’

  I have to stop her hurling her rucksack at him; there’s no point in arguing and I think he’s enjoying it far too much. I could kick myself right now. He’s right, it was our mistake and we did just hand him our customers on a plate. I round Charlie and Josie up then take them to the pub for one conciliatory glass of wine to help us calm down before we get home.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ sighs Josie. ‘This is all my fault.’

  She really does look as if she’s been punched in the stomach.

  ‘It�
��s not,’ Charlie tells her and I give her a hug to show I feel the same. ‘Lorenzo seems the type to cause trouble whatever we do and at least we truly know what we’re up against.’

  ‘So now we can beat him at his own game,’ says Josie. ‘We can sneak into his backroom and cut off his electricity so none of his damn flat screens work.’

  ‘What, in a Catwoman outfit?’ I say, picturing Josie all dressed in black doing fancy gymnastic moves over infra-red beams. I watch too many movies, I know.

  Charlie grabs Josie in a friendly headlock.

  ‘OK missy,’ he says tapping her on the head, ‘let’s knock some reason into you. We are NOT going to stoop to his level – OK?’

  She mutters ‘OK’, so he grabs her more tightly.

  ‘Louder,’ he insists. ‘I want to hear you say it like you mean it.’

  ‘OK!’ she yells and he releases her then gives her a kiss on the cheek.

  ‘Come on guys, what can we do?’ I ask. ‘We need to show him we’re no pushover.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to search the email file and take his name out for a start,’ says Josie.

  ‘We need to win the Formentera bid more than ever,’ adds Charlie. ‘It would be easy to back out with all of this going on but I think if we had such an exclusive offer, it would take the wind out of his sails. We need to change league.’

  I nod my agreement. Now is not the time to back down and I’m glad Charlie has said it first.