Slave to Fashion

by Rebecca Campbell

  Over the next two days, I telephoned everybody else I knew in the business. I no longer thought in terms of production manager: production assistant would do. I didn’t care, I could check skirts, and write dockets, and order buttons, and count shoulder pads until new opportunities arose. But always the same polite rebuff and always the same sense that a circle had closed, leaving me on the outside.

  I wasn’t sure what this all meant. It could be that just at this moment there really wasn’t anything out there. It happens, sometimes. It could mean, being a little less wide-eyed and innocent, that my peers would hardly welcome a rival such as me on board. Or, switching to full-blown paranoia mode, perhaps some combination of Liam’s stinky message and Penny’s malicious stirring had left me as a pariah, an untouchable, the last spangly boob tube on the sale rack.

  But still I didn’t panic. One step back, two steps forward, I kept telling myself. If it came to it, I could do shop work again. It would be a new challenge. I decided to send letters applying for production work and also offering to work in the shops. How could anyone resist? I had done it all before: I was well-known and respected. I was a player.

  The evenings added to the sense of strangeness. My ship had been wrecked, but I’d been washed up immediately onto an island, and although the island might be a long way from civilization, it had on it all I needed for immediate survival. The house often did things together, like go to the pub or one of the cheap local restaurants, and I entered into their innocent world quite easily. These weren’t people I’d normally invest my energy in, but then these weren’t normal times. I drank quite a lot and flirted with Roddy. The pixie trampolinist turned out to be perfectly pleasant, if horribly limited in conversation. Once you strayed from the fairly restrictive subject of vertical oscillation, on which she was happy to chirrup endlessly, her discourse seemed to be limited to random squeaks and a curious, but inoffensive, purring noise. The cretin was easily won over and was soon induced to dote. He was a freelance Web page designer, which was why he was always hanging around the house during the day. The doting accounted for my one failure: Roxanne maintained her hostility with a commendable dedication to duty. However, using what I assume Tom meant when he said that I did by instinct what Machiavelli and Clausewitz had struggled to set down as theory, I soon had her bypassed, isolated, cut off, and beleaguered. Colin the VAT man would go into a preejaculatory shudder every time I remembered his name.

  Veronica and I became closer than we’d ever been. We took to cuddling up together in bed each night (and no, don’t even think about it—this isn’t that kind of story), talking over the day. Usually my day—who, after all, wants to hear about old ladies with sore thyroids signing up for arnica and hypnotherapy? Gradually my things, specifically shoes and clothes, took over her room, driving out the mobiles and candles and too-long-cherished soft toys. It was an object lesson in Darwinism.

  On one afternoon a few rays of nervous late autumn sunshine broke through, and I wandered down to the park—a characterless affair with ducks and trees and other undistinguished parky things. Half-lost, I stumbled across some playing fields. Blotchy, pink-faced youths were running around with sticks. It looked like hockey reinvented by a criminal psychopath. A bell rang and I made a connection: this must be hurley. Was there no escaping from the Irish? I could feel that I was in danger of jabbering. Keen to find work though I might be, the job of park madlady was not one I coveted, and I hurried home.

  So, the week passed and Saturday morning appeared. I felt I’d earned a treat. My finances were a fiasco—I owed nearly three thousand pounds on my credit card, and I was eight hundred pounds overdrawn at the bank—but I had the envelope from Hugh with the best part of five grand in it. You might think that the sensible thing would be to pay off the credit card, but that would have left me depressed and listless, and I knew that I needed to be on my best form over the coming weeks. The only thing, the hard-nosed, sane, and practical thing, was to buy at least one whole new outfit, from shoes to earrings and back again. I’d phoned a couple of nonfashion friends (yes, I did have some—well, two, Carol and Ursula, who’d both taken the family route and had children and dogs and houses, and dull husbands in the City, and time to kill) and arranged to meet them for lunch at Joe’s Café in Fenwicks.

  I was out of the door by nine, my heart singing with expectancy. To be properly effective, this had to be done by the book. This wasn’t alternative shopping, it was mainstream bags-with-names, attentive assistants, pain-free, epidural shopping. I soon latched on to the Bond Street fashion jugular, hitting Donna Karan’s black mausoleum, the inevitable Joseph, Liberty (for the sake of one particular adorable, middle-aged, tank-topped assistant I always return to when my fash batteries are low), and the Versace bordello.

  I met the girls already drunk and giddy with shopping. We had a fun time, laughing so much that a very pretty waiter had to come over and tell us, charmingly, to please, please consider the other diners. Carol and Ursula were both convinced I’d find something soon, and I allowed myself to be lulled by their confidence. We drank two bottles of wine and ate a small salad among us.

  I got back to Veronica’s at about three. The post had come, and I found nine letters in creamy thick envelopes waiting for me. Among them, I was convinced, would lie the key to my future, the answer to everything, the silver bullet. Excitedly, I scooped them up and ran to Veronica’s room. The house seemed to be empty. I tore open the first. It was a rejection, but one so enchantingly worded that I actually felt more positive, rather than less, about my prospects.

  Three rejections later, my mood had changed. Each on its own was as encouraging as a “no” could be. Taken together, they felt like a kick in the guts. I quickly opened the others. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  There’s a film effect that everyone was using a couple of years ago, where the foreground rushes toward you while at the same time the background recedes. Something like that happened to me now, and I felt like a little girl in the middle of a huge room, unsupported, alone. Insignificant things became incredibly clear: a raisin on the carpet, strands of my blond commingled with Veronica’s brown on her hairbrush; a fragile exoskeleton of ash from a cigarette; a spent asthma inhaler.

  I wasn’t aware that I’d made any kind of noise, but I must have sobbed, or wailed, or screamed, because the door opened and Roddy appeared. His big handsome head carefully re-formed itself from curiosity to sympathy.

  “Katie, what is it?” he said, coming into the room. Then he looked at the nest of letters around me. “Ah, I see. Fuck ’em, Katie. They’re not worth your tears.” Only with those words did I realize that I was crying. Roddy came and sat next to me on the low bed.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked.

  “They’ve all gone for one of their walks. I had to cram for an audition.” He paused and stroked my hair. “We’ll get there, Katie,” he said softly. “One day, you and me.” It was his first admission that he hadn’t got there, wherever “there” was, yet, and I felt, through my own pain, a welling of sympathy for him. If only I’d had more experience of actors; perhaps then I’d have realized that vulnerability was just another role.

  I gave a little laugh, which ended up as another bout of choking sobs. Roddy “there-thered” me and put his arm around my shoulder. I felt a pricking of déjà vu, which should have been a warning. I also started to feel the, for once unwelcome, electric shimmer of incipient arousal. Roddy’s skin smelled so clean, despite the gentle roughing of golden stubble on his cheeks. Even when he was lying around the house, there was something calculated in his careless elegance.

  Despite the intimacy of our position, perched there on Veronica’s bed, I was genuinely surprised when I felt the pressure of his hand on my breast. He slid his fingers between the buttons on my blouse and began to flick them loose. Although I had been turned on, and pleased that I had attracted him, something about the rapidity and professionalism of Roddy’s maneuver left me cold. Here I was,
for once in my life genuinely vulnerable and in need of innocent comfort, and I was being taken advantage of. I felt like a Victorian parlor maid being groped by the young master. I was about to tell him to stop when something made me look up. And there, standing silently by the door, was Veronica.

  There was a look on Veronica’s face that I’d never seen before. Not the tears, or sadness, or resignation, or shock, or defeat that I might have expected. No. Cold fury. It was a face I would have been proud of.

  By now Roddy had noticed Veronica, and his hand left my blouse with a conjurer’s speed, but Veronica had seen.

  “Get out, please, Roddy. I want to speak with Katie.” Roddy, head bowed, obeyed wordlessly.

  “Veronica, I know how this looks, but just let me explain.”

  “Shut up, Katie. I’ve been listening to you for twenty years, and now it’s my turn to say something. I believed you when you said that you hadn’t done anything with that French person, or the van driver. They all said you were poison. I defended you. Nobody else did. All these years, Katie, I’ve put up with the selfishness, and the conceit, and little catty insults that you think I don’t get. I’ve watched you climb over the backs of people to get ahead. I’ve seen you lie and steal and manipulate and connive. But all along I thought that you were a good person underneath. All because of one act of kindness years ago, when you rescued me from—”

  “Yes, yes, yes, the clay bin.”

  “Well, Katie, I think I’ve repaid that debt. And you know, I’m actually quite pleased that I caught you with Roddy. Now I know what you’re really like, the true Katie Castle. You’re a bitch, and a slut. Roxanne said you were trying to seduce Alan. . . .”

  “Alan? Give me some credit. I’m a fashion designer, not a social worker. I wouldn’t touch that moron without surgical gloves.”

  “I believe you. Because he wasn’t good enough for you, was he?”

  “Too right.”

  “But Roddy was, is. And so you decided to go for him, even though you . . . even though you knew that I . . . that I . . .”

  And finally she broke down and cried, screwing her fists into her eyes like a little girl.

  What could I say? I tried again to explain my way out of this quagmire.

  “Veronica, please, please listen. I was upset because I got rejected by everyone I wrote to. I was here on my own, and Roddy came in to comfort me. And then he started to touch me. I’d only just worked out what he was up to when you came in. It was his fault—I didn’t encourage him, I promise.”

  “Stop it stop it stop it!” screamed Veronica. “Why do you have to contaminate everything? Why do you have to drag everyone down into the filth with you? I know it was you and not Roddy. It’s always you. I just want you to get out now. Get out forever. I never want to see you again, ever ever ever. I hate you hate you hate you.”

  The door opened and Roxanne and Tracy came in, hurling Medusa looks at me.

  “Look what you’ve done,” spat Roxanne. “We let you stay here, and you’ve repaid us with nothing but spite. You vamped Alan, and he wouldn’t have you, so you tried it on with Roddy. Nobody wants you, nobody likes you, nobody cares if you die in the street. Just go away and leave us alone.”

  It was funny, genuinely funny: I was being rejected by the leper colony. Oh, how I wanted to lay into this collection of retards. But I couldn’t. Not yet. For the second time I was forced to ask an implacable foe, “But what am I supposed to do? I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

  “You can go to hell,” said Tracy. “I’ll call you a cab.”

  “No,” said Veronica, looking over the stockade of arms that encircled her, “you can go home, Katie, you can go home.” And with that she threw back her head and laughed like a lunatic.

  CHAPTER 13

  Katie Looks

  Back in Languor

  Home, home, home: only Veronica could know how that very sound was like a bell tolling for the death of my soul. By home, she meant not any place in which I might happen to reside during the course of my London life, but that maelstrom of tedium, the place that is to boredom what New York is to salt beef, and Siberia to salt mines: East Grinstead.

  So I suppose the time has come for me to tell you a bit more about the early life of Katie Castle, describing for you the fetid compost heap from which I sprang with such revulsion, and joy. This isn’t pleasant for me, so I’ll ask for as much sympathy and understanding as you can manage.

  East Grinstead. How could anything good happen in a place with a name like that? East Grinstead was home for the first eighteen years of my life, although “life” hardly seems the right word.

  Where to begin? My parents seems logical. You’ve probably guessed that I was an only child. I came late to my parents, and they loved me beyond reason. It had cost them years of humdrum toil to create a little refuge of order out of the chaos of the universe in a house they called Daisybank, but which was really 139 Achilles Mount. And into that mundane Eden came I, Adam and Eve and the serpent rolled into one. All of their hopes and dreams rested with me, but in such a meek and helpless way that it felt more like an irritant than a burden. I was the princess and they were my pea. It took considerable ingenuity to find ways of hurting them.

  That must sound very cruel, and I’m going to have to get a lot crueler before I’ve finished. But what you have to remember is that what follows is a view of my parents through the eyes of a selfish, bored, clever, thin-skinned teenage girl, whose life was ruled not by hate, as it might sound, but by embarrassment, which so often looks and smells and tastes like hate. And underneath, often, I admit, a long, long way underneath, love moved.

  Mum, poor Mum. I’ll tell you the three most annoying things about Mum:

  1.As she walked down the street she would speak the names of the shops: “Woolworth’s, Smedley’s the Family Butcher, W. H. Smith’s,” and on until the street stopped or I hit her. After years of nagging and cringing, I finally got her to stop saying the names out loud, but you could still see her lips forming the hated syllables.

  2.She used to write to manufacturers of washing powders, household cleaners, and processed foods, thanking them for their products.

  3.She agreed with everything anyone ever said to her.

  Unkind, I know. And which of us could stand up to that cold-eyed, penetrating teenage gaze? My mum had nothing but goodness and sadness in her soul, and by the time I was sixteen I spent my evenings imagining ways in which she would disappear from my world. Hezbollah kidnapping, alien abduction, arrest and imprisonment for cocaine smuggling: none came to my rescue.

  My mum wore aprons all the time. She had her hair done once a fortnight at the local salon. With impossible optimism she would ask for Kevin, the head stylist, but she always got the newest trainee, Anita, or Shelley, or Rubella. The trainee would commit some act of gross indecency upon her head, which would be washed away in silent grief that same evening.

  My mum, at least, had the traditional woman’s gift of invisibility. She was the most ignorable person I ever met. Perhaps it was just that her clothes bore uncanny resemblances to the curtain or upholstery fabric of her surroundings, but she seemed to be able to melt into backgrounds, like a chameleon on a bad hair day. And her voice was like piped music, an unobtrusive, endless sound wave, maddening only when a peek flickered briefly into consciousness.

  If only Dad had been so hard to notice. He worked as an actuary for the local council. If you asked him what he did, he’d say, wheezing at his own joke, “I’m one of the four accountants of the apocalypse.” He was small and bald, with a classic three-strand comb-over that really belonged in a jar of formaldehyde in the Black Museum at Scotland Yard. And yes, he wore tank tops, and cardigans, and carpet slippers, and trousers coarsely woven of fluff, mold, mildew and the heavy air from an old tomb.

  The most interesting thing about Dad was that he pronounced “Castle” to rhyme with “hassle” and not, well, “metatarsal” (it’s a bone, I think). This was something to
do with the fact that his father, my granddad Castle, was vaguely northern. My only memory of him—in fact my only memory of any of my grandparents—is of his heels, which were protected by special doughnut-shaped pads because of his bedsores. He was dying of cancer in Dewsbury, or Doncaster, or Halifax, or wherever it was. After he died I was convinced it was the bad heels that killed him.

  Once a year Dad would get drunk at the office party. One time (I was fourteen and at my most vulnerable), he came in bleary and boozy. He went straight to the bathroom and threw up in the loo. Mum tutted, good-humoredly. I wept inwardly. I was dying for a pee, and when Dad finally flushed the loo and staggered out, I dived quickly in, avoiding his ghastly, bloodshot eyes. I was about to pull up my knickers when I happened to glance down. I saw something glittering beneath the amber water in the bowl. I peered more closely. It was some kind of contraption made of plastic and metal. Intrigued, I fished it out with the loo brush.

  Oh, God.

  It was teeth.

  There, on the end of the brush, was a gruesome, intricate dental appliance, the like of which I’d never seen or dreamed of. It had several distinct and isolated teeth, separated by cantileverings of wire and smooth arches of glaucous pink plastic. As soon as I realized what I’d harpooned, I screamed and leapt back, hurling the thing into the bath. At the same moment my dad burst into the bathroom. He covered his mouth with his hand and half wailed, half groaned, “Whu ith it, whu ith it?” Numbed by shock, I pointed to the bath. Dad pounced, and before I could stop him, he fitted the monstrous device into his mouth, jigsawing together the real and the false teeth.