Slave to Fashion

by Rebecca Campbell

  “Sorry, I’m out with the girls tonight.”

  “Which girls?” he asked dully, and without suspicion.

  “The girls, silly.” I knew he wouldn’t inquire further.

  “Oh. You were joking when you put Vivienne Westwood in with Isaac Newton, weren’t you?”

  “Really, Ludo! And I thought irony was supposed to be a male thing.”

  It was five to six. Penny was long gone. The studio was emptying fast. The girls in the shop were poised, like herons over a fish pond, waiting to shut the door and cash up. I was on the phone to Veronica.

  “If you had a boyfriend, Veronica, would you ever think of seeing another man?”

  “Katie!” she shouted. “No! Never! When I give myself to a man, it will be completely, or I’ll never—”

  “Yes, very sweet. But it’s easy for you. It’s easy to be good when you haven’t got the choice.”

  “Look, what’s this about, Katie? You’re not thinking of . . . doing something, are you?”

  “Of course not, stupid. I was just thinking in general, you know, in the round.”

  “But Katie, you don’t do anything in general. You always do things in specific.”

  “Veronica, if I wanted to be psychoanalyzed, I’d have gone to . . .” But I couldn’t think of anyone I’d have gone to, so I settled for, “a psychoanalyst. And who gave you the right,” I carried on nastily, “to tear my character to ribbons? What do you know about anything? You sit there with all your files, and things, and what good do you do? All you can do is criticize and carp, and be sarcastic.” Veronica was a receptionist in an alternative pain clinic, full of acupuncturists, and herbalists, and cranial osteopaths, and other loonies. The nearest I came to complementary medicine was feeling better when somebody told me I looked nice.

  “I’m sorry, Katie. I know you wouldn’t do anything cruel to Ludo. I know how much you love him. But you have treated boys badly in the past.”

  “Name one.”

  “Malcolm Gidlow.”

  “Malcolm Gidlow! He was a joke. You can hardly blame me for that.”

  “Stephen Solanki.”

  “He went away to university, and you can’t expect me to have hung around waiting for his holidays.” I checked the clock on the wall. “Look, I’m sorry, I have to go. Talk soon, bye.”

  I put the phone down. Damned if I was going to be lectured at by Veronica, of all people. A few more quick calls to make. First, directory inquiries to get the number of the Black Lamb. Straightforward enough. And then phone the pub to find out exactly how to get there.

  “Hello,” says a voice.

  “Is that the Black Lamb?”

  “No, er, yes, it is. I mean I’m not, but it is.”

  “Exactly where are you, please?”

  “I’m just on the phone, the one by the lounge bar.”

  “Look, I haven’t got time to play games. Where is the Black Lamb?”

  “Ah now, well, where you are coming from?”

  “The tube station.”

  “Well, just walk down the High Road on the left hand side. There’s some shops and what-have-you, and then you get to us. It’ll take four minutes from the station.”

  That would do.

  The one thing you can say in favor of Kilburn is that it’s on the Jubilee line, the one with the fewest smelly people. Funny it should go to a dump like Kilburn. It took twenty minutes from Bond Street. It was an interlude of intense excitement. I kept saying to myself that nothing would happen, that I’d stay for one drink and then make some excuse. But my body had ideas of its own, and I realized that I was smiling only when a woman opposite, in a covetable fake ocelot, smiled back.

  And when I left the station Kilburn seemed, despite the dark and the drizzle, momentarily less disgusting than I remembered. There were trees here, and a block of expensive private apartments, and a road with the quaint name of Shoot-up Hill. And then I passed under the brooding, dripping bridges: one, two, three, all within a hundred yards of the station. Each had its sinister population of hunched, shabby pigeons. So many bridges: it was as if all the world wanted to pass over the Kilburn High Road, hurrying to and from the places in the world that mattered, the places where nice people lived and money was made.

  I had entered Kilburn proper. I’d forgotten about the kebab houses with their grisly torsos turning on the spit; I’d forgotten about the funny little food shops where Africans and Asians buy their okra and yams and the brown thing that looks like an old lady’s arthritic knee joint (or is that a yam?). Didn’t they know there was a gleaming Marks & Spencer not ten minutes away by car? I’d forgotten about the curious “Irish” bakeries, full of white bread and sticky buns gone fluffy and yesterday’s cakes half price.

  Most of all, I’d forgotten about the sickly sweet smell of the Halal butchers. I was early, and for some reason I stopped and looked through one window at the strips and hunks and flanks of meat. There was a stack of what looked like firewood against the wall opposite the counter. I couldn’t work it out. And then I saw the sign: SPEND £10 ON MEAT AND GET A COW LEG FREE. I started to laugh hysterically. I looked again at the wood. It had feet, hoof things. It was legs. What in God’s name do you do with a cow’s leg? What if you don’t want the leg? I thought. Do you have to take it? I was suddenly caught in the iron teeth of a fantasy, in which I bought some meat from this shop and the butcher chased me down the street, waving the hideous limb above his head, shouting, “Lady, lady, your cow leg, your cow leg!” I hurried on.

  I passed a couple of pubs. They looked like gone-to-seed funeral parlors. And then the Black Lamb. From the outside it had a certain presence, with turrets and cupolas and intricate brickwork. Despite these not especially maritime features, the overall effect was faintly shiplike. A sign proudly proclaimed that the place had been “Rebuilt in 1898.” I wondered what natural, or man-made, disaster had necessitated the rebuilding—fire? meteorite strike? hygiene inspection?

  There were three entrances, which was two too many from my point of view. Which was the correct one? I was vaguely aware of some kind of etiquette to do with different bits of pubs: the lounge, the public bar, the snug, and for all I knew, the mizzenmast, and the hold.

  And what was I to do when I got into the godforsaken place? Of course, I’d been to a few pubs when I was still a student, but that was always in the middle of a huge gang, and even then I was gravitating to bars and clubs and other places beyond the ken of the petty criminals, day laborers, spent prostitutes, and football hooligans that I took to make up the majority of the public house clientele. Did I go straight up to the bar and order a shot of the hard stuff, firing off a phlegm bullet into a handy spittoon? Did I wander around, peering into dark corners, staring out the local hags and hardcases, until I found my man? Or did I go and sit quietly at the nearest table and pray that nobody bothered me?

  Now I’m sorry about this, but I’m going to have to leave me there, poised to enter the secret kingdom for a moment or two, while I indulge in a quick digression on the subject of pubs, and in particular the issue of the relative merits of pubs and other venues for social gatherings. I know this may seem strange, given that I have just conceded my ignorance on the subject, but I had endless heated debates (not infrequently descending to playful little bites and gouges on my part and sulks on his) with Ludo, who was a Friend of the Pub. His point was that in pubs, as opposed to either cafés, wine bars, or clubs, people (by which he usually meant men) talked about “ideas.”

  “It’s the one place,” he’d say, “where, whatever your class or educational background, you talk about concepts.”

  “I thought the point was to get drunk?”

  “Drink is an alibi,” he’d say.

  At all other social gatherings, people (by which he meant women, gay men, and straight men who spent more on trousers than on books and records) talked about people. I asked him for some examples of the wonderful ideas discussed in his last visit to the pub. He pondered for a moment
and then, counting them off on his fingers until he came to the inconvenient eleventh, which was left to hang like a lone sock on the line, he came out with:

  1.Tony Blair: the New Margaret Thatcher, the New Harold Wilson, or the New Benito Mussolini?

  2.(in two parts)

  (i)Why is pease pudding called pease pudding when it clearly has no peas in it?

  (ii)What has it got in it?

  3.Why all modern art is conservative, with big and small c’s [neither abstraction nor Britart playfulness can adequately address social ishoos. Ooo, I must tell the girls!].

  4.Why fascism is camp and camp fascist [something, apparently, to do with a love of display].

  5.The purpose and origins of male nipples.

  6.Hemingway v. Chandler as prose stylist.

  7.Were the Wombles the great underappreciated arthouse glamrock band of the seventies?

  8.Flat back four vs. wing-back system [don’t ask me, but something, apparently, to do with football].

  9.What was the little bloke in Boney-M for?

  10.The relative merits of Psion organizer and PalmPilot [the latter, it seems, is not a euphemism for masturbation, but an electronic diary].

  11.Is love still possible in the postmodern world?

  I was obviously supposed to be impressed.

  “But why is it better to talk about football and art than about people?” I asked, not unreasonably.

  “Because what that usually means is talking about yourself. It’s all just narcissism. We have a duty to go out and understand the universe, not just the world inside our heads.”

  “And pease pudding is the key to the universe?”

  “No . . . yes. Can’t you see that wanting to know what goes into making yellow gloop, wanting to know how you make complex things out of simple elements, is the beginning of alchemy, which leads to chemistry, which leads to . . . everything. But the point is that the powers-that-be”—a phrase he used without embarrassment or irony—“want you, us, to go on gossiping about who’s sleeping with who, and what they were wearing before they did it, because it means we’re not scrutinizing them. And the way we scrutinize them is to find out how the world is made. When you do that, you can show how most of what they say is lies.”

  “It seems to me that when you say you talk about ideas, what you mean half the time is that you talk about things, which are surely the opposite of ideas,” I said. I was getting annoyed at his implied—no explicit—criticism of everything I liked best. “All you’ve said is just to cover up the fact that you like stuff better than people, because you’re a social inadequate with just two friends.”

  Just so you know, I said the last bit with a big smile and gave him a kiss at the end, which had the result of ending the argument on my terms and leaving everyone content.

  But back to the middle door of the Black Lamb. I took the plunge. It was locked. I could see people inside. They looked around, faces blank and uninquisitive as I pushed at the door, rattling some loose system of chains and bolts. A man jabbed his thumb toward another of the doors.

  As I entered, my eyes lost the ability to focus, so thick was the fog bank of fag smoke and beer vapor. I had no idea which way to turn, where to go. I wanted to cry. Close to panic, I decided to leave. Suddenly Ludo seemed like the most perfect man in the world, and I felt an idiot for ever considering so rash a venture.

  And then I felt a touch on my shoulder, and a mouth was at my ear, close enough for me to feel the warm breath.

  “Give you a hand there, Katie?” he said for the second time. “Not going already, are you?”

  “I couldn’t see you. I thought it might be the wrong place. Can we sit down?” I was talking too quickly.

  Liam was dressed simply in a white shirt and a soft moleskin suit. I noted with amusement that a thickish golden hoop was threaded through each ear. I couldn’t believe that I was meeting a man with earrings. So very David Essex, circa 1974. It gave him a gypsical or piratical air. But although in theory I loathed them, I also found myself a little intrigued. Uncannily, when I weighed up my feelings, I found that the revulsion and attraction of the earrings exactly canceled each other out, leaving me precisely where I began.

  Liam found a table.

  “So it’s a Guinness, then,” he said, the gentlest touch of satire in his voice. He obviously expected me to opt for something more appropriate. He probably thought real ladies drank nothing but Malibu, or crème de menthe, or Advocat.

  “Yeah, pint, please.” I’d been rehearsing the phrase over and over in my head.

  As Liam fought his way to the bar, I began to take in my surroundings. The place was amazing. The dark green walls and oxblood ceiling were covered in gilded moldings. The walls bore elaborate reliefs, showing what I took to be Poseidon with a train of nymphs and zephyrs and dryads and other pretty mythological girlies. The ceiling had even more complex, but abstract, designs that mixed hallucinogenically with the swirling clouds of smoke. I wondered for a moment if the gilding might just be deposits of nicotine, caught on the peaks like snow on the Alps in summer. The overall effect was part classical, part gothic, all weird.

  A huge blackened oak bar ran the length of the main room. Rows of optics ascended glimmering behind it, the contents ranging from pale amber to burnt umber. A panda in a clear plastic bag, a prize, I guessed, for some forlorn raffle, hung like a sacrificial offering to the god of whiskey.

  The people, though odd and emphatically not of my world, could not hope to match the strangeness of the building. Most of them were men. The older ones wore suits and frayed polyester shirts. The younger ones wore the standard casual uniform of T-shirts and jeans and trainers. They had thick necks and short hair and rough hands, but they seemed strangely gentle, like broken circus lions.

  The few women were again divided into old and young. The old were stout in heavy tweed coats, clutching string bags and cackling. All the young girls had hair bleached a shade too blond. There was something tragic about their desperation to look pretty and enjoy themselves. Perhaps the sadness was greatest in those who came closest to achieving the look they had seen in the magazine or on the TV. It showed that even effort, and ingenuity, and decent raw material were never enough. For a few seconds I was aware of how little would have to have been different in the world for me to be one of them: a matter of a few miles east or west, or some other tiny variation in events long ago. But then I shuddered and dismissed the thought. I was glad I wasn’t one of them. And here was Liam.

  He put down the Guinness in front of me. It really was rather a beautiful thing, with its profound black depths, still faintly agitated, as if star clusters and galaxies were being formed at its heart, and its head the color and texture of clotted cream. I put it to my lips and shuddered. It was just as disgusting as I remembered.

  “Delicious,” I said.

  Liam narrowed his eyes at me. “Not quite your sort of place, is it, Katie?”

  “No, not quite.”

  “Do you want to go somewhere else? There’s a new bar just down the road full of people like you.”

  “And what do you mean by ‘people like me’?” I wasn’t sure if he was teasing me or just stating a fact.

  “Now Katie, you know exactly what I mean. I mean, if you had a big sieve, and you put all that crowd and all this crowd in it, and you as well, and gave it a good shake, there’d be this lot left in the sieve, and then the other lot’d fall through, and you with them.”

  How very homely a metaphor, I thought. I had a sudden image of Liam in a pinafore. Or, come to think of it, perhaps it was more ghoulish than gastronomic, like some painting by Hieronymus Bosch, with a huge devil sieving out the damned from the saved. I switched to an image of Liam with horns and a trident. It suited him rather better.

  “And where would you be? Caught in the sieve with the lumps, or through with the flour?”

  “I’d follow you anywhere,” he said, smiling.

  I wasn’t sure exactly when the
music had started, but I knew that it was terrible. Country-and-western standards, with an abysmal electric piano and drum machine backing, wafted in from another room, interrupted by sporadic applause and the odd whistle. I suppose Milo might have found some charm in it in a “so crap it’s cool” kind of way.

  “I thought you said the music here was good. I was expecting something a bit more traditional. You mentioned fiddles. All I can hear is a cowboy riding a synthesizer.”

  “Ah, you mean you’re after the uileann pipes, and the pennywhistle, and a beard in a woolly jumper singing about the troubles and the great rebellion of ’98?”

  “Well, yes, actually. Beats ‘Stand by Your Man,’ ” I sang, echoing the last verse from next door.

  “It’s what the people want. Reminds them of the dance halls back home. If you hang around, you might hear a bit of the fusty auld stuff later.”

  The pub was filling up, and soon the place took on a new character, humming, vibrant, drunk. We chatted, moving gradually away from the shallow end of fashion to the deeper waters of personal history. I found that I was enjoying myself. Liam had an easy way about him and a manner that made the simplest of his statements seem engaging. Best of all, he had the feminine trick of appearing to find you interesting, and your jokes funny, and your observations profound. Pease pudding, male nipples, and the flat back four made a brief appearance, purely for humorous effect. The fizzing excitement I had felt earlier left me, but its place was taken by something close to real pleasure.

  Somehow I managed to finish the Guinness. Time for another drink. I decided to ask for a glass of white wine. Liam had the good grace not to smirk. The request seemed to cause a mild panic behind the bar. Heads were shaken. A boy scuttled off and came back with a two-liter screw-top, which he tipped into a sherry glass. Drinking it was a bigger ordeal than the Guinness, and I thought the best way to minimize the horror was to throw it back in one.

  Liam said, “Bravo! Another?”

  “Gin and tonic, I think, this time.”