Celebrity Shopper

by Carmen Reid

  No way could forty-five fashion buyers and twenty-five members of the fashion press be invited here. How would they hold a catwalk show? Join all the wobbly Formica-topped tables together and somehow hope the models would balance on top of them?

  Anyway, Annie reminded herself, there were no models. There was only Anoush and she was technically too small; the dresses in Elena’s holdall were bound to have been designed to hit 5-feet-10-inch models on the knee.

  ‘Oh no!’ Elena was starting up again, ‘Oh no! This will not work! This will not work at all. This is horrible!’

  Svetlana looked at Annie. They both knew it was true.

  Anoush looked horribly embarrassed. Her mother asked her a question and she answered in halting tones, obviously explaining the situation.

  Although his camera was running, Rich didn’t dare to put it up on his shoulder. He felt like an undercover documentary-maker in a very dangerous situation. If he blew his cover now, they would turn on him. It had never occurred to him before that fashion could be so deadly.

  Anoush’s mother relocked the hall door as they all stood about hopelessly in the courtyard.

  ‘Why did we let the taxi go? How will we get another one out here? Oh, it’s over,’ Elena wailed, ‘it’s all over!’

  Annie looked once again at the church. It was really an incredibly pretty building. Right here in this ordinary street, in this down-at-heel corner of town. It must have been built over a hundred years ago, when maybe there was just a little village here.

  ‘Do you have keys for the church?’ Annie wondered out loud.

  Anoush translated and her mother nodded.

  ‘She just clean the church, she not have any control of the church,’ Anoush added, just to make it clear.

  Latifah walked them to the wooden double doors and in the few moments it took her to once again open up many heavy-duty locks, Svetlana asked Annie: ‘What are you thinking? A fashion show? In a church?’ Her tone of disbelief was obvious.

  Elena snorted.

  ‘We’ll just have a look,’ Annie answered, ‘it might give us an idea.’ She knew it was desperate.

  Elena’s BlackBerry began to ring. When she answered, they could all tell by the false cheerfulness in her voice that it was one of the many reporters she had booked for the show. ‘Hi, yes, good to hear from you, how are you?’ she gushed. ‘Well, I’m very busy … Yes … Preparations … Aha … Last-minute problems, of course.’ They could all hear her voice break with these words. ‘Call you later, OK.’

  When she ended the call, she switched off her phone.

  Annie followed Latifah into the vestry. Inhaling the strong scent of incense, she admired the stone font and the ornate wooden and glass panelling separating this small space off from the rest of the church.

  For a moment, Annie thought fleetingly of all the brides who must have waited in here, decade after decade, smiling nervously at their fathers, adjusting their white dresses and lowering their veils, waiting in heightened expectation for the next chapter of their lives to begin.

  Then Latifah opened up the connecting door and they all tiptoed reverentially into the small but unexpectedly beautiful church.

  ‘Oh!’ Elena was the first to gasp.

  The sunlight filtered only very dimly through the many multi-coloured windows, landing in splashes of red, blue, yellow and green all over the dark wooden pews and black and white floor tiles. A wooden cross hung above the altar and the precious colours from the windows stained the snowy altar cloth.

  The effect was like walking into a jewellery box full of unexpected treasures.

  ‘The audience sit in the pews? The girls come down the aisle in the dresses?’ Svetlana suggested, thinking out loud. Forgetting that at present she only had one girl. Not to mention all the other hurdles.

  ‘We squeeze the DJ over in this corner?’ Elena added.

  ‘They could even wear veils,’ Annie suggested, caught up in the vision too. ‘We’ll make the veils in the same colours as the dresses.’

  The beauty of the church overwhelmed them and now everyone seemed to forget the principal problems: they had no permission to use the church; they had no models; they had to redirect seventy people to Saint-Denis; they didn’t know a DJ; and, worst of all, the show was due to start in exactly seventeen hours.

  ‘Can we use the church for the show?’ Annie asked Anoush.

  Anoush just shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘We pay,’ Svetlana added immediately. ‘We pay very, very good for this. Priest can buy a new … whatever a priest needs. Or he can go on holiday to Barbados.’

  ‘We can’t pay too much,’ Elena chipped in, ‘we have a sixteen-thousand-euro hole in the accounts!’ She treated her mother to a glare. Lest Svetlana forget.

  Anoush began to speak to her mother. The exchange took several moments as Latifah frowned, gesticulated and looked very uncertain.

  Finally, she headed out of the church door.

  ‘She go phone,’ Anoush explained.

  Although it was obviously a tense moment, Rich decided he would take a chance.

  ‘Girls,’ he began, ‘I’m going to switch on the camera.’ He was fibbing; it had been running all this time, but he wanted it up on his shoulder to get some decent shots now. ‘I’ll film some church interior, OK? It’s gorgeous, I just want a little bit of footage. Is that all right?’

  ‘Now?’ Annie snapped. ‘You have to film now? While we stand here on bloody tenterhooks waiting to see if this whole thing is going to happen or not?’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Micky ready to go out:

  Denim dungarees (Baby Gap)

  White top (Petit Bateau)

  Orange giraffe-print hat (IdaT)

  Fleece outdoor suit (Osh Kosh)

  Total est. cost: £90

  ‘Waaaaah!’

  Dave the dog looked up at Ed. The mongrel cocked his head to the side and gazed at Ed with deep brown, mournful eyes. Ed knew what that look meant. Before the arrival of the twins, Ed and Dave had shared a simple but nevertheless close relationship.

  Ed and Owen had rescued Dave from the dog home, even though Dave was ragged, middle-aged and hard of hearing. Although Dave loved Owen and was deeply affectionate towards him, his true devotion belonged to Ed. Ed had once walked him every single morning and evening, Ed was still the one who fed him and Ed even let Dave sit on the sofa, in a snug and comfortable corner, just so long as no one else was watching.

  Before the arrival of the twins, Dave had felt like an important element in Ed’s life. But, since the arrival of the babies, well, everything had changed. Now Dave was just a dog. A dog who had to wait his turn. A dog who had to wait for his walk to finally come round at unexpected times of the day, like 4.30 p.m. A dog who sometimes had to suffer his biscuits being carted off from his bowl by the small squawking people, a dog who had suffered the ultimate indignity, when the babies were tiny, of being tied to a lamp-post for several hours and forgotten. It didn’t matter how nice Ed had been when he’d finally returned to collect him, Dave had been tied to a lamp-post for hours and he wasn’t going to forget it. Every time Ed had tied him to a lamp-post since, Dave had whined just to remind him.

  ‘You poor old boy,’ Ed told the dog now, understanding the look of resigned self-pity perfectly, ‘we’ll go out. We’ll go out just as soon as Al has finished making his hole.’

  Ed was strongly of the view that as the hole was definitely going to be made, he should be in the house when it happened. He and Annie had spent thousands of pounds repairing the roof with blue slate tiles specially colour-matched in Wales. There had been weeks of listening to the workmen tap-tap careful nails to fix each slate to its rafter.

  When Ed’s mother had lived in the house, the roof had been so leaky that the attic rooms were out of bounds, the rooms below them had murky brown stains on the ceilings, and throughout the winter, the house had resounded with the plink plonk of water dripping into buckets.

  Ed coul
d now hear Al tapping at the ceiling. In Ed’s relieved opinion, the tapping sounding slow and careful. Tap … tap … as if Al was gingerly and cautiously removing pieces of plaster with his sledgehammer.

  Ed had been further relieved to see that for the first time since the bulldozer was around, Al was wearing a hard hat. Surely if you were taking down a section of roof that made sense? Plus, Al had Janucek with him, holding his ladder and passing up tools.

  ‘We’ll go for a walk,’ Ed told the dog, ‘as soon as Al’s finished.’

  The word ‘walk’ set Dave’s tail in frantic motion.

  Just as Ed looked back from the dog to the babies, he saw Minnie take hold of a chunky wooden block and, without the slightest intent, fling her hand backwards, smacking Micky hard in the face with the block.

  His sharp ‘Waaaaaaah’ of pain surprised Minnie so much that she joined in the wailing too and once again Ed had his arms full of two screaming babies. He sometimes worried about the damage being done to his eardrums as two babies cried at top volume, one against each side of his head.

  He soothed the twins both with his voice and by jiggling them gently.

  Maybe a walk right now wouldn’t hurt. Maybe he would wrap them both up in the buggy, put Dave on his lead and head out to the park.

  Al sounded as if he was getting on fine. At this slow and careful rate, Ed could easily go out for half an hour or so and still not miss the grand opening of the roof.

  ‘Are you going to be OK there?’ Ed shouted up the stairs, just before he put the babies into the pram.

  ‘Yeah, no worries,’ Al shouted down from his ladder outside the attic rooms on the second floor. ‘Slow progress, mate,’ he added. ‘I’m taking the plaster out piece by piece just to make sure the hole doesn’t get too big.’

  ‘Good stuff,’ Ed called back. He buckled in the babies, clipped Dave’s lead on to his collar and headed out of the front door.

  Al breathed a sigh of relief. Now that Ed had finally left, he was going to take a proper swing at this ceiling. He couldn’t understand what the bloody hell was the matter with it. He had been chipping and chipping at it for ages and just tiny pieces of plaster were coming away.

  ‘Now, Janu,’ he told his workman, ‘let’s take a proper crack at this.’ Al leaned slightly away from the ladder and swung his hammer hard.

  The head of the hammer struck first the plaster and then the very old, very brittle rafter lying right behind it.

  The second hammer blow split the rafter, softened by years of leaks, but the third blow was fatal. The rafter broke, splintered off in all different directions and loosened a whole cascade of tiles.

  The heavy slate tiles, specially colour-matched in Wales, slid at speed through the large hole in the ceiling.

  Al, clutching at his ladder but still flailing with his hammer, barely had time to say: ‘What the …?’ before eight sharp-edged tiles rained down into his face, plaster dust flew into his eyes and he felt himself wobble and overbalance.

  Janucek, despite the tiles that had fallen on to his own head and shoulders, was holding the ladder firm, but although he shot out a hand, he wasn’t able to save his boss. Al fell backwards and landed with an ominous crunch.

  Chapter Twenty

  DJ Paul:

  Oversized promo T-shirt (freebie)

  Baggy black tracksuit trousers (Adidas)

  Red and white sneakers (Vans)

  Bowler hat (Jerry’s, New York)

  Sunglasses (Versace)

  Gold earring (Tiffany)

  Total est. cost:€390

  ‘Quoi?’

  When Anoush’s mother walked back into the church, she had enough of a smile on her face for Annie, Svetlana, Lana and Anoush to feel a surge of hope.

  ‘Did he say yes?’ Annie asked Anoush.

  As soon as Anoush’s hurried conversation with Latifah was over, she turned to them and said: ‘He say yes. One thousand euros. You can have church today and tomorrow morning. At two p.m. there is … mmm, for baby … baptême … ?’ she ended hesitantly.

  ‘Baptism, yes, but no problem. We all finished by then? Huh?’ Svetlana directed the question at Elena.

  Elena had a look of total concentration on her face. She looked at her watch and, for a few moments, she said nothing as her busy mind went into overdrive.

  ‘We are going to have to work,’ she began, ‘we are going to have to work so hard …’

  ‘No problem,’ Annie assured her.

  ‘No,’ Svetlana agreed.

  ‘I help too?’ Anoush asked. ‘And my mother,’ she volunteered.

  The crease of deep thought that Svetlana so disliked appeared on Elena’s forehead. ‘I need to contact everyone and tell them that the venue has changed. We need someone to do lights—’

  ‘I can help with that,’ Rich volunteered. ‘There’s a guy I know who runs a photographic agency in Paris; I’ll phone him, borrow some stuff.’

  Elena gave him a nod. ‘We need a DJ,’ she added.

  ‘I’ll ask at the agency,’ Rich offered again.

  ‘Annie is going to make the veils,’ Elena added.

  Annie nodded, even though she was thinking: Am I? How? What with? And where will I get it?

  ‘We have to make the church beautiful,’ Elena said next.

  Svetlana and Anoush’s mother both nodded at this. Maybe this meant they would take it on.

  ‘And we have to find more models!’ Only when Elena uttered these words did her voice sound stricken.

  This was when Annie decided to voice her idea: ‘I think …’ she began hesitantly, ‘I think we should all model the dresses.’ She took in the whole group with her gesture. She meant Elena and Svetlana and Anoush and Latifah and was even offering herself.

  ‘Huh?’ was Svetlana’s response to this.

  ‘We should all model because these dresses are designed to flatter every shape, so Anoush will wear hers long, yours will be above the knee, Latifah and I have boobs, so we’ll have them open to the waist with camis underneath … d’you see?’ Annie was warming to her theme. ‘We want to show how good anyone can look in the dresses. Every designer loves to claim every year that they’re making “real” clothes for “real” people and then what comes stalking down their catwalk? Stick insects dressed as if they’re all set to be fired into outer space!’

  Anoush turned shyly to her mother and began a translation. When Anoush finished, her mother pointed at herself and let out a peal of laughter. She shook her head firmly.

  Svetlana and Elena were also looking unconvinced.

  ‘We will wear the dresses, ya, but we have to talk to people,’ Svetlana said.

  ‘We can’t model,’ Elena agreed, ‘but you and Anoush, yes, and maybe you are right: some more ordinary people.’

  ‘Do you know anyone else who would like to model?’ Annie asked Anoush.

  Anoush smiled broadly and nodded. ‘Friends … and I meet one girl at the Louvre,’ she replied.

  ‘They’ve got to have pretty faces and like to show off, but they don’t need to have perfect bodies,’ Annie instructed. ‘Go phone them, find them and bring them here. Does your mother maybe have a friend too? It would be great to have someone older, wouldn’t it?’ Annie looked at Elena, who was nodding now but in a slightly dazed kind of way.

  ‘You do have some other sizes in your bags for the buyers, don’t you?’ Annie remembered, hoping she wasn’t going to have to squeeze women of all different shapes into standard UK size 10s.

  Elena nodded again.

  ‘OK.’ Annie pushed up the sleeves of her blouse. ‘We’ve all got loads to do now. I need to get netting; Svetlana, flowers! Rich, lights! Go, Anoush! Elena, start phoning! C’mon, let’s go, girls!’

  Annie was quite relieved to leave the busy chaos in the church and head off for one of the bustling main streets of Saint-Denis. The day was sunny now and surprisingly warm. She wondered if it was still snowing in London. It was nearly 5 p.m., Owen and Lana would long have finished
school and be doing whatever else was on the agenda for today: homework; music practice; visiting friends. The babies would be getting hungry and Ed would be thinking about venturing into the battle-scarred kitchen to rustle up dinner.

  For his sake, she hoped the snow had stopped.

  She would bring them all a present from Paris, even though she had no idea when the shopping moment would come.

  This was a busy, lively street. There were ethnic takeaway shops vying with ironmongers and grocers, boxes piled with exotic overripe fruit spilling out on to the pavements, noisy clatter and the smell of sizzling oil and onions everywhere. Somewhere there was going to be a fabric shop, she just knew it.

  All around streets like this there would be homes full of clever, frugal women who sewed to make the family budget stretch further. She walked on, looking hard until she spotted rolls of fabric propped against a doorway, hopefully a sign that she’d found the shop she was looking for. She ducked in through the entrance and came into a tiny room packed from floor to ceiling with rolls and rolls of fabric.

  ‘Bonjour, madame!’

  A man with the darkest, shiniest skin dressed in a vibrant pink and yellow T-shirt smiled at her from the counter.

  ‘Je puis vous aider?’ he asked, making the ‘s’ buzz like a bee with his accent.

  Annie looked at him. Annie smiled. Annie racked her brain for what on earth the French word for ‘netting’ could possibly be.

  ‘I look,’ she said, pointing to her eyes and then around the shop.

  ‘Yes, you look, welcome!’ the man behind the counter enthused.

  Annie began to rummage in amongst the rolls of fabric, cheerfully certain that inspiration could be found. Inspiration could always be found, even in the unlikeliest of places.

  In fact, the shop turned out to be a netting treasure trove. There were all kinds of nylon laces and nylon nettings in all sorts of colours: pink, white, a neon green that she particularly liked and gaudy gold. Now that would look great made into a tiny little veil coming down from the crown of someone’s head.