by Cathy Kelly
Jojo Hennessy sat in the small office-cum-stockroom in the clothes shop, looking at the order book, and compared what she and her business partner, Elaine, had ordered in Paris with what had actually turned up in their boxes, and felt a paralysing headache coming on.
The headache was not from the small room, which was painted a tasteful warm grey with white woodwork, and which was perfectly organised by Elaine, Jojo’s business partner in I’ll Take It, the mid-sized, mid-priced boutique in Silver Bay that Jojo and Elaine had been running successfully for the past six years.
The stockroom was tidier than most people’s houses, certainly tidier than Jojo’s bedroom, which she would be ashamed to show to anyone other than Hugh, her husband.
Jojo, despite looking supremely, coolly organised on the outside, had a certain chaos attached to her when it came to her own possessions, bits of paper, and things in the fridge that needed to have been used a week ago and might now poison somebody should they dare to eat them.
She spent a lot of life saying to Hugh: ‘I’m going to sort out the fridge, honey, and don’t mind the pile of clothes on the spare room bed. I need to go through them for the charity shop …’ And then being too busy to get round to it.
Hugh, who had fair ruffled hair that was receding, the kindest heart, and adored Jojo, agreed, and then sorted out the fridge himself because he hated mess. A corporate lawyer, one of his best friends in the office was a family lawyer and you couldn’t hear that many stories of vitriolic divorces that had started innocently over who was always leaving the toilet seat up or who never filled the dishwasher correctly without realising that sweating the small stuff did not lead to happy marriages.
‘Dunno how you put up with me,’ Jojo would say when she’d open a pristine fridge where all the about-to-become-alive fluffy things had been put in the compost bin and a cut-up lemon had soaked up the bad smells.
‘Because I love you,’ Hugh said, and Jojo thanked her lucky stars for both Hugh and his mother, a wise woman who’d sent all her kids off into the world with coping skills, including the ability to cook, clean and use the washing machine.
In the shop, Jojo’s partner Elaine anxiously admitted that she was hovering around the edges of mild obsessive compulsive disorder.
‘I’m not imprisoned by it, thankfully, but I’m certainly on the spectrum,’ she liked to say. ‘Although why did they call it OCD? If you have OCD, the placement of the letters is beyond annoying. I alphabetise my Vogues. It should be CDO, as per the alphabet.’
Jojo’s headache that morning was coming from what was emerging from the big cardboard box that had been delivered earlier, one of the later of the deliveries of their spring collection.
She and Elaine had been in Paris in January to pick up some new stock because the early stuff had sold so well another trip had been necessary.
Running a shop like theirs did not mean meeting posh designers in the Plaza Athenée or sitting in the frow at Paris Fashion Week – it involved wearing out shoe leather traipsing up and down Paris’s garment districts and ordering direct from small warehouse shops or ateliers, in certain cases.
Today’s box was from Mimi le Peu Mitzou, a little wholesalers in their usual haunt in Le Sentier. It had piles of fake fur stuff in one window and some lovely knitwear in the other. They’d never bought from Mimi le Peu Mitzou, hadn’t remembered seeing the shop before, but as they’d walked past Elaine had spotted the knitwear in the window.
‘Shall we?’
‘We don’t know them,’ Jojo said, ever cautious, consulting her list of wholesalers.
Despite her untidiness, she was the sensible one of the pair when it came to buying. Elaine was so in love with fashion that she couldn’t help but take the odd risk. Jojo was her father’s daughter business-wise. They could only afford so many risks per season.
Buying wholesale meant instant payment, no credit, so they were careful about what they bought and who they bought it from, but Elaine had spotted some old rose and dusty turquoise knits in a lovely merino wool and she’d felt they might sell well for spring.
They’d gone in, ordered and had spent an hour working out what sizes, colours and how many of each piece of knitwear they wanted. It was a slow process, slowed down by all the other boutique owners there doing exactly the same thing. Job done, they’d gone off to buy more things and had returned three hours later to find their stuff packed up in sealed boxes and ready to be paid for and shipped later. Years ago, the women had brought huge suitcases and taken their clothes haul home with them on the plane but that had been a nightmare, so these days they paid extra for the clothes to be couriered.
Now, in the giant box with everything packed into separate cellophane bags that slithered through her hands like plastic fish, Jojo could see creams and blacks, nothing in marl grey, which was always a fabulous seller, and no old rose or dusty turquoise, either.
The true source of her headache were the six long beaded evening gowns that had been carefully tissue-papered and packed in and as she pulled the last one out, she didn’t know whether to curse or cry. The dresses were exquisite.
But their shop in Silver Bay was not the place where women went to get Oscar-worthy dresses. It was, instead, a shop where ordinary women found comfortable yet modern clothes, clever simple things that you just threw on and forgot about, a shirt they could wear to work with a simple, on-trend skirt or dress up with heels for night.
Jojo and Elaine had built their shop up on the basis of being a spot where both clothes-addicts and those uninterested in clothes could rush in, find a capsule wardrobe and then jazz it all up with one of Elaine’s mad buys, like the lipstick-pink trenchcoats that had sold out in a week, or the matte sequinned navy bomber jackets that everyone from thirty to seventy wanted. These six Oscar dresses were wrong, wrong, wrong and Jojo knew that she hadn’t ordered them.
She’d heard of wholesalers who did this to customers who weren’t regulars or who might not be back: inserted something crazy and took out the easily sold garments, meaning that the shop in question would either have to ship the wrong things back, at great expense, or just take the hit and try to sell them – even though they weren’t right for their market. Why had she tried a new supplier instead of sticking with her old friends? This had never happened to her before. She’d bet it was a new shop and would be gone if she went back. Someone who was messing up business for all the professionals in the Parisian garment district.
The dresses weren’t listed on the invoice, so by checking her iPad for the code to understand the complicated pricing on the list of figures on the garments, Jojo worked out that the dresses had cost 200 euros each wholesale. If she applied the basic shop principle of mark-up, she’d have to charge at least 560 euros for each dress. Nothing in the shop, not even the expensive leather knee boots in Spanish leather that everyone was lusting after, cost anything near that.
Damn. This was what happened when they went off-track with buying and went to unknown wholesalers. They ran the shop on a tight margin and couldn’t afford a hit like this.
She looked at the evening gowns and sighed again.
Her smartphone shoved into her jeans pocket buzzed and seeing it was her Aunt Nora, who was as close as a mother these days now that her own darling Mum was gone, Jojo answered.
‘Hello, pet, are you working hard? You work too hard, you know.’
Jojo smiled into the phone.
Nora always started conversations this way. It was comforting, and sad too. Jojo’s own mother would never say those things to her again, although Lottie used to say, ‘Get out of that stockroom, darling, and come and meet me for a coffee! You’ll get neck strain from dragging boxes around.’
‘I don’t work too hard, Nora,’ said Jojo, trying to wipe her eyes without entirely ruining her eye make-up. In the first year after her mother had died, Jojo had worn very little make-up because she routinely scrubbed it off and she finally discovered why people liked those eye drops so much. Not that
she cared about having red eyes but the sight of them made people put sympathetic hands on her and say, ‘How are you feeling?’ which made Jojo want to stab them.
‘How do you think I am feeling?’ she wanted to demand.
Sick, desperate, hollow, frozen, as if I will never be happy again!
And who wanted that conversation?
The death of a parent was such a huge void in a person’s life and when the parent was as close to her child as Lottie had been to Jojo, it was more than a void: it was an abyss that kept looking back grimly.
The abyss had been made worse by her father marrying again.
That was the betrayal from which Jojo could not recover.
It was as if, in one swift move, he’d made her childhood home and love mean nothing because how could he ever have loved her mother if he could marry again so quickly?
‘I bet you’re in that stockroom hauling things around,’ Nora said.
‘Crystal ball out again?’ joked Jojo, thinking that this must be progress if she could joke.
‘Educated guess. Your mother always said you spent more time in that room than on the floor, figuring out what had sold, what was a mistake, trying to analyse it all.’
‘Yeah, she did,’ said Jojo.
That was the other great thing about Nora – she talked about Jojo’s mother, didn’t avoid the subject as if Lottie Brannigan had never existed and they’d all be better if they just forgot about her.
Did people think that helped you deal with death? Ignore it, like a giant elephant in the room that everybody carefully avoided mentioning.
Jojo’s father, Edward, didn’t talk about his dead wife. Not any more. Not since he’d married that bitch, Bess.
‘A pot of tea? I’m just around the corner?’ said Nora, who must indeed have a crystal ball, so quickly did she move the conversation on. ‘Elaine’s in today, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, she is and I’d love to see you,’ Jojo said.
They arranged to meet and Jojo hung up. From outside on the floor, she could hear Elaine trying to sell something/anything to one of those customers who came in, tried on everything in the shop, and then said they’d go home ‘to think about it’.
‘They’re bored, they don’t want to buy.’ Jojo shrugged. She had seen it all before and no longer got irritated by such behaviour.
Elaine took this as a challenge.
‘When they make me find every size possible and locate long-lost scarves to accessorise, and have to have shoes and jewellery, and then march off to say they’ll think about it, I go insane! I want them to buy something. Even a bracelet!’
Jojo finished her tidy-up of the stockroom and came out to find Elaine vacuuming the already-spotless shop floor with a certain degree of rage.
‘Not even a bracelet, huh?’ said Jojo, when Elaine had banged the vacuum’s ‘off’ button with her heel.
‘She tried on the most expensive thing in the shop—’
‘The navy silk dress?’
‘The navy silk,’ confirmed Elaine, ‘and it suited her, actually, the old cow, and then, once she’d sweated all over it for half an hour and I had found five pairs of shoes and three jackets to try different looks, says she “would think about it …” As if that woman has enough brain cells to think? Can’t I put my Most Wanted poster list on the door?’
Jojo laughed. Elaine’s latest plan was to hang a facsimile of the FBI Most Wanted poster with the most serial offenders of the ‘trying everything on and buy nothing’ photos on it on the door. These women were to be denied access to the shop on the grounds of sheer irritation. Or on the grounds that they were trying everything on to then go home and order it cheaper on the internet.
‘We would be out of business in a day, honey,’ Jojo said. ‘Lots of people come in, try stuff on and leave. That’s how shops work. We can’t stop the internet-checker-outers, either.’
‘These cows never buy anything! You know they don’t. Imagine the sheer the pleasure of barring them—’ said Elaine, lost in the daydream. ‘A woman came in looking for a necklace while Madam was in the changing room and I had to race to serve her, and I’m sure she’d have tried some stuff on if that old cow hadn’t been hogging my attention.’
‘When we write our memoirs,’ Jojo said soothingly, ‘we can include them all.’
‘The ones who insist they’re a size six when they’re not and tell us all our clothes must be cheap junk with the wrong sizes on them?’
‘Those ones too,’ Jojo said. ‘I’m dropping out for a coffee with Nora. Can you manage? Not kill anyone by strangling them with the vacuum hose?’
Elaine laughed. She was, at thirty-three, one year younger than Jojo, but Jojo was convinced that these days her friend looked ten years younger somehow. This was partly due to Elaine’s pixie face with huge dark eyes and dark hair cut in a complicated style that looked as if it needed four hairstylists at it every morning, but which Jojo knew – from sharing a room on their buying trips – Elaine styled by simply running her hands through it with a bit of styling wax.
Jojo’s hair needed fixing every morning because she woke looking as if she’d been electrocuted as she slept, while Elaine’s looked cutting edge with a mere hand rubbed idly through it.
‘It’s nothing to do with me, I just have obedient hair,’ Elaine said, when Jojo went at her frizz with the hair straighteners for a good fifteen minutes.
They made a good team: Jojo was the tall, cool one and Elaine was the sparky one, the life and soul of every party, the person doing tequila shots and organising dancing when everyone else was thinking about getting taxis home.
People assumed Jojo was the organised one too and she was when it came to money and stock control, but otherwise Elaine ruled the roost.
‘You look cool and calm,’ Elaine said, ‘which is entirely misleading since you can’t hold on to your mobile phone for five minutes and you’re a cauldron of wild passion, while I look like the “mad” one. It’s the blonde hair. If my hair was straight and blonde, decent, sensible men would ask me out instead of all the lunatics who seem to make a beeline for me.’
‘I only wish my hair was naturally straight,’ Jojo pointed out, ‘and besides, you like lunatics.’
‘I’m thirty-three now,’ said Elaine. ‘You can only go out with crazy, “let’s-drive-to-Belfast-tonight-just-for-the-hell-of-it-because-my-friend’s-band’s-playing” men for so long. I want to settle down, stop going out with musicians or people writing avant-garde plays that nobody wants to put on. I want my own version of Hugh: kind, sensible, gorgeous and in love with the woman he married. Can’t you have him cloned for me?’
‘The two of you are far too organised to ever be together,’ Jojo said, laughing. ‘It works between us because I drop my coat on the newel post and Hugh takes it upstairs and hangs it up. With you, you’d be fighting over who got to hang things up and arguing over who had control of the kitchen pot scrubber. No, you need a nice chaotic man who wouldn’t recognise a pot scrubber if it bit him.’
‘The world’s full of them,’ Elaine said gloomily, ‘although I feel as if I’ve gone out with them all already. All I need is for a fresh batch to be released from prison with abs of steel and prison ink tattoos to say who they’ve killed and which white supremacist gang they like best, and I’ll probably fall for them despite myself and my liberal, anti-racist views. You need to save me from my hopeless taste in men. Not keep recommending mad ones.’
They’d known each other since college, although Jojo felt she was ageing far faster than the one-year gap implied. Elaine’s skin was unlined while hers – well, if you could have Photoshop for your daily life, she’d have signed up for it.
Particularly now.
The menopause was hard on the skin, even when you were thirty-four. Even if it was a fake menopause caused by fertility treatment. In fact, especially then. Because surely normal menopause came when you were ready for it, had – hopefully – had your chance for children, had done zillions
of cycles of menstruation, were expecting what was euphemistically called ‘the change’.
But being forced into an unnatural menopause so that the infertility people could be in total charge of her cycle, that played havoc with everything: skin, mood, anxiety, a desire to scream at people, crying bouts. Worse, she had no mother to tell about it all. The only people who knew were herself, her husband, Hugh, and her cousin, Cari, without whom Jojo might currently be in jail where she could get her own prison ink: a teardrop on her cheek signifying how many people she’d killed. She’d only need one, for Bess.
Only Cari knew how angry and upset Jojo really was by her father marrying that bitch; only Cari knew how betrayed Jojo felt; and because telling Nora, Cari’s mother, about the infertility would remind her too much of how she’d never been able to tell her own mother, only Cari knew about that too.
Her younger brother Paul wouldn’t understand – Paul had got married and had a baby within a twelve-month time frame. He would say something anodyne like ‘Give it time, Jojo,’ and she’d have to hop on a plane to Manhattan and kick him in the shins the way she used to when they were kids and he’d annoyed her.
No. He couldn’t know. Nobody could.
Nobody could know that Jojo and Hugh were currently on their third course of infertility treatment, treatment that meant daily injections for Jojo to regulate her cycle, injections that had transformed her into a woman suffering from triple grief: the grief of childlessness, the grief of her mother’s death and the grief that came with being on a third IVF cycle because the other two had failed so spectacularly. She’d thought it would work first time. That getting pregnant would be her gift from the heavens for losing her mother: a trade-off. What an idiot she had been.
She was no psychologist, although she and Hugh had to see one before each cycle to see how well they were coping with the whole thing, but Jojo knew that secrets, infertility and grief were not good for a person’s psyche.
