Slave to Fashion

by Rebecca Campbell

  The only potential interest in the evening involved a loosely drawn up plan I had for matchmaking Daniel and Kookai. Or Tom and Kleavage. Or the other way round. Either way, it was a challenge. Not so much in the boy-to-girl direction. Whatever else you want to say about them, or not say, Kookai and Kleavage are both easy on the eye—they work in PR, after all. I was much more concerned about retuning K & K to the T & D frequency. But of course, I’d forgotten about the Big Change. And what’s the Big Change? Why, the shift from there being lots of boys in hot pursuit of not very many girls to there being lots of girls searching feverishly for the increasingly scarce presentable man. And by presentable, I don’t mean good-looking, clever, witty, or wise. I mean not weird, psychotic, deformed, or bankrupt. Related to this in some kind of complex way that I’ve never been able to work out (slide rules and log tables may be used, but not calculators) is the fact that deep down every girl, however humdrum, puddeny, slack-mouthed, spotty, snaggle-toothed, frizzy haired, cross-eyed, knock-kneed or rankly fishy, now thinks she deserves a Jude Law.

  It was only when we sat down to eat that I realized that while I had to fight down waves of extreme irritation, Kookai and Kleavage were transfixed by the boys’ usual semi-stream-of-consciousness larking. Although Ludo had done most of the work on the main course, I still found myself in and out of the kitchen, and whenever I came back there would be a new subject bouncing around: bricolage, jelly tots as jewelry, the mystic significance of misshapen chocolates. At one point Tom announced that he was going to invade India.

  “The whole subcontinent must be trembling,” said Luke, never one to miss out on an opportunity for sarcasm.

  “No, you see, that’s just it. No invasion of India has ever failed.”

  “Rubbish—what about the Japanese!” said Daniel.

  “They never made it past Burma, so they never technically invaded India. But my point is that either I’ll succeed and become emperor or be worshiped as a god or whatever, or I’ll blow it, and make it into the record books as the first person to fail to conquer India.”

  “I’m not really happy about you invading India,” said Kookai, furrowing her pretty brow. Perhaps she really did think that Tom was about to leap from a landing craft onto the beach at Bombay. “Can’t you invade somewhere else? What about Denmark or Paraguay?”

  “No glory. But if you ask nicely, I’ll think about it.”

  The next time I returned with a bottle of wine, the relative sizes of genitals among the great apes had come up (doesn’t it always?). Daniel was in the lead this time:

  “. . . it’s all to do with mating strategies. Gorillas operate in families, with one big male who has sole access to the females. So they don’t need much in the way of . . . you know, wedding tackle—there’s no competition. Chimps, on the other hand, live in big, promiscuous groups, where more or less everyone gets a go whenever a female comes in season. So the chimp with the biggest and best equipment wins—he basically flushes out the rivals.”

  Kleavage gave him a steely, blush-inducing look. “And what about you boys? Are you more like the chimp or the gorilla? Or are some of you one and some the other?”

  “W-well,” stammered Daniel, who’d begun his observation in a spirit of scientific inquiry, without expecting so brazen a turn, “that’s very interesting, because humans are midway between chimps and gorillas in, er, um . . . in . . . size. That suggests that our natural mating behavior has elements of both. Perhaps family groups with a bit of infidelity on the side.”

  “What a load of balls,” I said, going for a cheap laugh, but also rescuing Daniel from a blush so deep that even his palms were red.

  Okay, so I suppose some of it was fun, but it really wasn’t fashion. And even if it had been, I suspect that with each sip of my bittersweet Guinness I would still have drifted further away—not into some mythic Celtic Dawn, but into the arms of an altogether real slice of Celtic brawn. Sorry.

  Veronica joined me in the kitchen.

  “Ludo’s lovely, isn’t he.”

  “He has his moments.”

  “Have you set a date yet?”

  It was the question I most hated. There was no smart or clever way out of it, no reply that didn’t make me sound like a sap.

  “Not an actual day, no. More a rough season.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. Roughly when?”

  “Roughly soon.”

  “I bet you’ve designed your dress. Is it beautiful?”

  “Oh, look, Tom’s acting out a gorilla and Daniel’s being a chimp: let’s go back in.”

  As ever, the beef and Guinness pie had gone down a storm with the boys and at best was barely nibbled at by the girls: teased, flattered, pushed around, and then neglected. At about eleven I made some remarks about an early start the next day, what with collections to design and shops to run. Blahna belatedly tried to get some steers about next winter, but I fobbed her off, yawning, with generalities about tartan being the new brown, or tweed the new velvet. I may even have said something profound about hemlines going down in a recession. She made a pencil note in a little black book, her tongue sticking sharply from the corner of her mouth. We were kissing both sides that year, and leaving took forever, but eventually, mercifully, even Veronica had gone, with a last lovelorn glance over her shoulder.

  “You okay, my sweet thing?” asked Ludo as I loaded the dishwasher.

  “Mmm. Seemed to go quite well, didn’t it?”

  “Yes. You know, I think that Sarenna might actually like Daniel. Or was it Tom? Or did Ayesha fancy Tom? No, she liked Daniel. I don’t know. Someone liked somebody.”

  Ayesha? Sarenna? Who . . . ? Ah. Kookai and Kleavage. I’d almost forgotten.

  Normally, of course, I would have known exactly who’d fallen for whom. That’s what I’m here for. I can read the signs. Again, it’s all to do with focus. The way that girls have of closing in like an owl on a mouse, excluding everything, senses trained on the victim. But to read the signs I need my own focus, and that was elsewhere.

  “I’ve something to tell you,” he said. “I didn’t want to bring it up while the others were around.”

  Suddenly my focus was back right here in our kitchen. It could only mean one thing.

  It was the date.

  He’d fixed on the date!

  Ever since it had become clear that we were going to get married, the date had remained, despite my best efforts, an infuriatingly vague “next year sometime” affair. Well, this was it. It was going to be July 29, or August 3, or June 15, or some real date, a day when real people were going to be born and to die, and we were going to be married. I leaped, yes, literally leapt, into the air, squealing like a schoolgirl.

  “When when when?” I begged, jumping up and down. “I love you love you love you.”

  Ludo gave me a gorgeous shy smile, not a snake-oil salesman’s showstopper, but a wonderfully human, gentle, loving smile; the smile of my man.

  “I didn’t realize you cared so much about it. It’s coming out next month.”

  My squeals died like a cockroach under a boot.

  “I’m sorry? What’s coming out next month?”

  “The magazine. The magazine with my poem. The London Poetry Review.”

  And then I realized what he was talking about. Inspired by the “me me me” woman across the square, the one who put her head in the oven like a cake, he’d taken to writing poems. I half remembered him sending things off. And the mild despair as they returned. Perhaps he had said something about a piece being accepted.

  “Do you want to see the poem they’re using?”

  “Why not?”

  Was he blind or stupid? How could he not see that I was hurt? But no, fired with what he thought was my enthusiasm for his stupid poem, he scuttled off and then came back waving a sheet of A4.

  “I didn’t show it to you before I sent it in. There’s a particularly good bit of sprung rhythm in the sixth line. . . .” Dully, I took the paper he proffered. Within two lines,
say, eight seconds, I was crying. This is why:

  SLEEP

  All elegance awake, my love grows large

  In sleep: her mouth gapes, and grunts escape

  Her scum-encrusted lips. Her big hips barge

  Their way through dreams with hairy-haunched, ape-

  Like indifference. As old dogs leap

  For phantom hares from fireside shagpile

  So she pursues her chocolates asleep,

  Then smiles a drowsy praline-sated smile.

  Impenetrable thermal vest and pants

  Encase her in true, tyrannic chastity–

  A skin as tough as rhino hide ’twixt me

  And her. I dream of knickers made in France

  Of delicate dark lace. But now my love bestirs

  And how can I deny, she’s mine, I’m hers?

  I mean, what would you have said or done? I tore it into little pieces and threw them in the bin. I then took the pieces back out of the bin and stamped them into the wooden floor of the kitchen.

  “Katie, what’s wrong?” said Ludo, plaintively. “Is it because it’s in such a conventional verse form? There’s been a move back toward traditional forms, as long as they’re handled imaginatively. That’s why I’ve used sprung rhythm and asymmetric caesuras. Or is it just that you think the Petrarchan sonnet is superior to the Shakespearean? For me the Petrarchan doesn’t work in English, there just aren’t enough rhymes in English as opposed to Italian, and so it always sounds forced.”

  “For Christ’s sake, Ludo, can’t you see, you’ve told the world that I’m fat and ugly, and look like an old dog or a rhino, or something? What will people think? You’re a bastard, a total bastard, and I hate you.”

  “But darling, who do you know who’s even heard of the London Poetry Review? It’s an obscure journal with a readership of four hundred people, and you can be sure that none of them have any connection with the world of fashion. But anyway, my love, it’s a poem. It’s an artificial construct that’s got nothing to do with the world. It’s an artifact made of words. It’s not real. It’s not about you. It could be about anyone. Or no one.”

  “Ludo,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Will you please take your Shakespearean sonnet, your asymmetric caesuras, and your gorilla-sized . . . whatever and stick them up your fucking arse in any kind of rhythm you like, sprung or otherwise.”

  And then I went to bed, having made it quite clear, I think, that I did not expect to be joined there by Ludo.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Deed of Darkness

  Well, that’s the background. I’ve laid it all before you: the vague feeling of dissatisfaction, which fed, in turn, the desire for a last little fling before I curled up like a cat into contented, uneventful, safe domesticity; the general irritation with Penny, which gave me a doubtless spurious sense of moral justification for any minor act of betrayal; the arrival into my life of opportunity in the beguiling form of Liam; the immediate, bitter spur of that poem.

  None of those would have been enough on its own to make me do what I did. I often wonder what would have happened if I’d wriggled out of going to the depot that day, or if Liam hadn’t been there, or if the bloody London Review of Stupid Poetry hadn’t accepted Ludo’s crappy poem, or if Penny hadn’t been a cow. I’m not saying that I’d be a candidate for beatification, with old ladies in Peru claiming that I’d cured their warts or irregular periods, and pilgrims going to East Grinstead to bathe in the miraculous waters that sprang from my dad’s rock garden, but I’m sure I wouldn’t have got into so much trouble.

  I didn’t sleep well that night. For what felt like hours, I lay and listened, with that supernatural acuity you get when you’re really pissed off, to the music of the night: car alarms calling to each other; the heavy rumble of the late night train that Ludo says carries nuclear waste through the heart of London; the eerie sound, like babies being roasted alive, of cats fucking in the back garden; the astonishingly clear tone of a man having a pee next door. My mind was racing. Images triggered by the nighttime noises mingled with scenes from the past few days, forming a dizzying, nauseating montage. I tried to calm myself by thinking about lovely shoes by Manolo Blahnik, and Gina, and Jimmy Choo, shoes I would one day own in rack upon rack, like Imelda Marcos. But the shoes kept getting run over by nuclear trains, or worn by roasted babies, or screwed by rampant cats, or peed on by old men.

  Finally, searching for an oasis of calm in all the horror, I settled on Liam. His face, like his voice, both soothed and excited me; his narrow hips, his predatory walk, his hands, long fingered but work-hardened, just plain excited me. And without any act of will on my part, I found myself doing something I’d never done before. I fantasized about a man, a man of flesh and blood who existed in the real world of people and things. Of course, I’d had endless, intense erotic fantasies before, at least one per day, often dozens, but the beauty of a fantasy is that it never needs to be, and in fact should never be, tethered to reality. At school, faceless, perfect boys would come to me as I worked in class and kiss me and caress me as I pressed my thighs together under the desk. One teacher, Miss Plenty, knew, I’m sure, what I was doing, but she only smiled a faint smile and looked through me with her pale gray eyes. The same boys came to me still. Often, when Penny thought I was concentrating on some particularly thorny production problem, hunched over a pattern or a book of swatches, I would be trembling, with my nails cutting deep into my palms and my cheeks flushed.

  I’d never even, with one exception, moved from these exquisite, pure, ethereal forms to pop stars or actors. The exception was David Bowie, who used to enter like a ghost into the spindly, pimply frame of Conor O’Neil as we snogged at the Methodist youth club disco, with Veronica looking on.

  But now here I was summoning his presence, touching my breasts with his hand through my hand, writhing and undulating to rhythms I gave him. At last the night noises were banished, and I finally fell asleep with my hand still clasped moistly between my thighs.

  Well, at least it sent me off with a smile on my face.

  And then it was morning. On came the radio alarm, tuned, irritatingly, to Radio 3. I pinged it back to 4 and rolled over to elbow Ludo into the kitchen. It took me a second or two of elbowing air, pillow, and duvet before I realized what was happening. Morning tea with Ludo was always one of our best times, talking over the day to come, laughing at all the silly things in the world. Well, not today. I was too annoyed to go for a snuggle on the couch, where, I guessed, he’d spent the night.

  Dressing was a bit of a dilemma. If I met Liam, I’d be going out straight from work, so my outfit had to do for both. The girls at work are like Eskimos with snow: they can spot nuances invisible to the untrained eye. If I laid it on too thick, they’d know I was going out. And they’d know it wasn’t with the girls.

  In the end I opted for La Perla underwear (obvious, I know, but sometimes obvious is just right), a vintage YSL dinner jacket, Chloe indigo jeans, and some funky fuchsia mules. I grabbed my Bill Amberg case, a lovely present from Milo, who does the PR, or rather did, before he was eased out for purloining too many goodies for his intimates, and went for a coffee on the corner. I sat in the window for twenty minutes, smoking three whole Silk Cuts, my heart hardening with each shallow draw.

  I hadn’t written it down, but I remembered the name of the pub. I hadn’t yet quite decided to go, but I had decided that I definitely wouldn’t not go. If you see what I mean. The idea of Kilburn was a bigger obstacle than infidelity. I’d only ever been to Kilburn once, and that was by mistake. It was truly horrid. Brixton may be a bit hairy, but at least it’s cool, and there are places in Brixton where you might actually want to go. But Kilburn just seemed to be a seedy high street, with shops for poor people, selling cheap batteries and East European cooking implements, and wherever you looked there were drunks lying down on the pavement, and women with no tights, and dirty little children holding on to the pram, and old people with nowhere t
o go because all they had was their state pensions, and ugly men with dogs, staring at you and hating you and wanting to kill you. Well, that’s what I thought in the seven minutes it took me to get a taxi the hell outta there.

  At midday Ludo called to apologize.

  “I’m sorry. I think I understand why you were upset. I can see it was insensitive.”

  “Forget it,” I said, spitting out the words like a curse.

  “Oh, God,” said Ludo, dismayed, “you’ve done that hardening-your-heart thing, haven’t you?”

  “I have, actually, yes. If you’d been in the café this morning, you’d have heard it, like pack ice forming.”

  “Please don’t do that. Look, I’m going to do my guppy face for you now. You know that always makes you laugh. Are you ready? Here it comes.”

  There was a pause of four or five seconds.

  “You’re not laughing, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Right. That’s it. I’m going to walk like an ape. That always works.”

  I was determined not to laugh. If I laughed, I’d feel a love surge, and I wouldn’t be able to do the bad thing; and I wanted to do the bad thing.

  “Look, just please stop it. I’m not in the mood. Give me a couple of days and I’ll be okay about it.”

  “I can’t wait a couple of days. I feel sick. You know I’d give anything for that poem to have been rejected.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. I would. How would you like it if I told everyone that you couldn’t get it up?”

  “That’s not fair. How many times has that happened? Twice?”

  “Four times, actually, but you’re missing the point. The point is that if you’d sat down with the greatest minds in history, Albert Einstein and Madame Curie, Isaac Newton and Vivienne Westwood, and whoever else you want, you couldn’t have come up with anything more insulting.”

  “Look, I’ve said I’m sorry, I’ve tried to explain that it’s not even about you. I don’t know what else I can do. Let’s go out and get drunk tonight and it’ll all be all right.”