Slave to Fashion

by Rebecca Campbell

That’s the kind of thing I had to endure.

  I began to be embarrassed about my parents when I was eleven, which is quite late these days, but once I’d begun, there was really no end to it.

  St. Simon Stylites Junior School had been fun, or at least easy. It was there that I met Veronica—Veronica Tottle, as she was then, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen. She was upside down in the clay bin (which was, literally, a big plastic bin with modeling clay in it—all classrooms used to have them when I was a kid, although they may have gone the way of slide rules and log tables and free milk), so all I could see were her fuzzy green knickers, her blotchy pink-and-white legs, her sad, graying socks, and her scuffed red sandals. She was blocking my route to the clay, so I pulled her out of the bin by the ankles. I think she’d been stuck in there for several minutes, too shy to scream for help. She’d been crying quietly to herself, and her tears mixed with the brown clots of clay adhering to her face. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and ran away.

  Even in those days she was a fat little thing, with greasy hair and eyes of no special color. My act of charity left her in bondage to me, a bondage that was to last until . . . well, that you know. Poor Veronica worked hard to fight her way out of the bottom third of the class, without ever quite making it. She was never naughty, never late. If she was blamed for something she hadn’t done, she would never complain, but simply lower her colorless eyes and accept her punishment. It made her profoundly useful to me.

  I was naughty nearly all of the time. But because I was clever and, more important, pretty, I was seldom punished. I was only ever spanked once at school. Sister Henrietta (usually called Hairy Henry, because of the mole) had read to us the story of Perseus and the winged horse Pegasus. Hairy Henry drew an outline of Pegasus on a giant sheet of cartridge paper and stuck it on the wall. We all had to cut out feather-shaped pieces of paper, curl them between the scissor blades, and stick them on the wings. For some reason I couldn’t get my feathers to curl, so I stabbed Veronica in the arm, drawing a tiny spot of blood. Henry then loomed out of nowhere, a look of hellfire on her horrid hairy face. She lifted up my skirt and smacked the backs of my legs. That made Veronica howl:

  “Sister, don’t, please, it was an accident, it was my fault,” she implored.

  Henry then looked even more enraged. “Why didn’t you say so before you contrary monster?” she said, and then smacked Veronica on the backs of the legs as well.

  Life at Pontius Pilate High School followed the same pattern. I was popular and successful, despite the ever-present threat of people finding out how gruesome my parents were. Veronica limped along behind: she was the one the boys tormented and the smart girls ignored. If ever a plastic bag came blowing down the street, you’d know it would head for Veronica and wrap itself around a foot and stay there, immune to any shaking, scraping, or pulling. Exotic birds would migrate to East Grinstead solely to pooh on her shoulder. She’d always get the doughnut without the jam.

  My main concession to her was to allow her to occasionally carry the can for my misdemeanors. Cigarettes would find their way into her bag during spot inspections. There was the notorious incident with the Durex.

  I was the fifth girl in the year to have sex. The third if you discount those whose partners were blood relations. I was twelve when I had my first boyfriend, a harmless, gangling, floppy-haired youth called Tony. On our first date we sat on a bench in the park and shared a packet of pickled onion–flavor Monster Munch and a Yorkie bar. On the second date he took me fishing. He’d never been fishing before, and the episode was a disaster. He couldn’t sort out the rod and line and things and ended up hugely losing his cool and throwing the whole lot out into the reservoir. But then he somehow pulled it round by making a joke about a hand appearing and catching it, like the Lady of the Lake in the film Excalibur. I let him kiss me on the shingly bank (and no, that is not a euphemism), and he gave me my bus fare home. For the third date he took me to the cinema, and for the first time I tasted human tongue and found it good.

  But Tony was a touch lame and lacked any kind of killer instinct, and I soon moved on to Mick Tordoff. Mick was the best Ping-Pong player in the school. The boys used to play winner-stays-on in the common room at break, and Mick was unbeatable. Tony played him once, all disjointed arms and legs and his hair in his face. It was 20–6 to Mick, when Tony stepped on the ball. With the quiet efficiency of a Mafia assassin, Mick walked around the table and punched him in the face. Mick’s groping technique was as proficient as his table tennis and his thuggery: he could undo a bra with his eyelashes.

  Yet it was not Mick, or any English boy, who had the prize. That fell, on my fifteenth birthday, to an Italian called Guido. I met Guido on a school skiing trip. My parents couldn’t really afford it or the expensive outfits I insisted on taking with me. But I was damned if I was going to look uncool on the slopes. I’ve no idea how old Guido was—neither of us could count past three in the other’s language. He turned up on the last night disco. He wore his labels discreetly, but his Armani and Gucci trumped the C&A, Mister Byrite, and Levi’s (slight seconds) casuals of the boys from Pontius Pilate. I took him up to my room an hour into the disco. The teachers were too busy getting drunk on grappa to notice. There were four bunk beds crammed into the room, which made Guido laugh.

  “No babies?” he said. What did he mean? Did I have any? Did I want any? Perhaps it wasn’t a question, but reassurance. I shook my head. I didn’t know what to do next, but I knew this was it.

  “I careful.”

  We lay down on one of the bunks—not mine, Veronica’s. I felt as if I had been programmed and had no will of my own. I liked it. He kissed me. Then he took hold of my hand and put it on his cock, which was sticking out through his zip. It was long and thin, and I thought to myself, Thank God, it won’t hurt as much. Somehow I was naked except for my bra, which was pulled up over my breasts. He was still fully clothed. He spat on his hand and rubbed it gently into my lips. And then, with his cock still just sticking out through his pants, he entered me. And it really didn’t hurt very much. Nor was it particularly pleasant, but what can you expect for the first time? He came in four diminishing squirts over my belly and the duvet. I’ve done it, I’ve done it, I’ve done it, I’ve done it, I thought. And with an Italian.

  I closed my eyes and luxuriated in how shocked and disgusted and disappointed my parents would be. The knowledge of what I had done turned me on much more than the act itself, and I wanted to do it again. And only then did I become aware of the fact that I was alone. Guido had gone. I never saw him again. I wiped myself clean with a Bugs Bunny sweatshirt I found on the bed, went back down to the disco, and danced the night away with the boys and girls of Pontius Pilate High School.

  With all this talk of skiing and sex and Italians, I’m making my life sound far too colorful. In fact nearly everything in East Grinstead was brown, as if the world were made of run-together Plasticine. The houses, the streets, the trees, the birds, all brown. In this dun world there was nothing for teenagers to do except try to find somewhere to have sex. Even the drugs were comical household materials: glue, boot polish, lighter fuel, Domestos.

  All I wanted to do was escape, and as long as I could remember, I knew the way. It had to be fashion. Somehow I was always aware that everyone in East Grinstead looked terrible. Not just that they all had bad hair and bad teeth and bodies like something you’d find in the hold of a Russian factory ship. I knew when skirts were the wrong length and trousers the wrong shape. I hated the lumpy bodies squeezed into scratchy suits. I hated the mechanically extruded polyester slacks with the seam down the front that you could have in any color as long as it was, yes, you’ve guessed it, brown. That seam always offended me: both functionless and ugly. Some actual person who had a nameplate on his door telling the world he was a DESIGNER sat down one day and decided that he would put that seam there, drawing attention to the awfulness of the fabric, the ineptitude of the
cut, and the flabbiness of the thigh to which it invariably clung.

  The only real glamour in my life came from the magazines I pestered my mum and dad into buying for me. When I reached the age of fashion consciousness (in my case, ten), I wouldn’t let Mum get the Women’s Journal anymore, but forced her instead to progress through Options, Elle, Vogue, American Vogue, and finally French Vogue (where I’ve stayed ever since). It was the only order for French Vogue ever placed at our local news agents, and the first time I went with Mum to collect it, Mr. Forster, the drab little man who stood behind the counter, called back to his wife, “Come and look, Netty, it’s them that ordered the foreign magazine.” My mum said she’d never live down the humiliation. But once in Vogue, I was out of East Grinstead. Vogue was a Wonderland, and I was Alice.

  Mum and Dad humored me. They thought it was a phase. My dad’s ambition was that I should become a chartered accountant, a profession that for him held the same allure that head designer at Dior had for me. GCSEs were a breeze, and A levels were straightforward enough, except for my habit of becoming whichever character took my fancy in the set texts we were doing. When it was Vile Bodies I was one of the Bright Young People, and everything became “too, too sick-making” or, occasionally, “too, too bogus.” Lady Macbeth was fun for a while, but I suppose it was lucky that there was no one called Duncan in the sixth form, or I might have had somebody stab him. Critics might have said that my Phlebas the Phoenician (a fortnight dead) took things a little too far, but how else is one to find out the limits of one’s world?

  Perhaps the highlight of my school career came when Miss Cruikshank mentioned the importance of the novels of Fanny Burney in the history of women’s fiction. My reply was instant, as was the fame that followed.

  “Fanny Burney, miss?” I said, putting on my best wide-eyed-and-innocent look. “Surely that is a medical condition and not an author.”

  Miss Cruikshank looked cross for a second or two, then smiled indulgently, which was all the consent needed by the five girls and two boys in the class to burst into gasping laughter. Veronica beamed proudly, for all the world as if she’d come out with the joke.

  So you see, I was really quite clever, and you know you can trust me when I tell you I was, because I’ve told you all the horrid stuff as well, like stabbing Veronica. Almost everything that I wanted to do, I could do, with the exception of burning East Grinstead to the ground and banishing its inhabitants to hell, or Slough.

  When the exams came around, it became clear to me what had to be done. I got straight Ds. Anything better would have meant economics and accountancy at Somewhere Earnest. Three Ds was all I needed for the small fashion college in London I’d set my heart on, so three Ds was exactly what I got. This brilliantly ruled out any pressure Dad might have tried to exert in the direction of accountancy. I think it may have broken his heart, but I had other things on my mind.

  Veronica, of course, had followed me doggedly in my fantasies; she was the Nurse to my Juliet, the Grace Poole to my first Mrs. Rochester. By this stage she had grown from an ugly duckling into a glorious goose. She did have a boyfriend, or boyfiend, as I called him. A Trevor, inevitably. He used to drive her off into the country, where he’d park in a lay-by and try to fight his way through her all-too-solid defensive wall (complete with moat). The really amusing thing is that he’d charge her “taxi fare” for driving her home. When she told me this, I naturally enough told her to dump him. Nobody, surely, could be that desperate. Veronica, however, incapable of seeing the world as it is, and grateful, no doubt, for the grubby affections of Trevor, pleaded on his behalf:

  “But Katie, he phoned around to all the local cab companies and asked them what they charged, and then he matched the lowest fare. That shows a true generosity of spirit, doesn’t it?”

  Poor Veronica could not, of course, follow me to fashion college. For her it was something to do with geography at Bangor. The annoying thing is that she ended up with better grades than I did. And although I told everybody at school about my plan, I don’t think they really believed me. Except Veronica herself. But the truth is that I couldn’t have cared less what the honest folk of East Grinstead thought about me. To me they were already shadows, scarcely perceptible against the glorious bright light of London, toward which I was moving.

  Dad wanted to drive me up into town, but I wouldn’t let him in case we were seen. So they waved me off at the station, two sad, gray people, dwindling from tiny to invisible.

  After my expectations, London life itself proved, as I guess it always proves, a disappointment. I was no longer a peacock among pigeons, but now just another pigeon, insignificant in the flock. I hated the fact that most of the other students were more fashionably dressed than me—they had, after all, the advantage of not coming from East Grinstead. Suddenly I was a kind of Veronica. That didn’t last long. Within a week I had made the appropriate adjustments. But I didn’t have the money to shine. It was a valuable lesson.

  When it came to my course, valuable lessons were few and far between. I can honestly say that nothing, not one solitary fact, technique, or principle I learned in the lectures, tutorials, and workshops of the college, was of any use to me when first I tried to get a job, and later worked, in the fashion world. True, I found out that Madeline Vionnet was “the Euclid of fashion”; that Fortuny was “the Magician of Venice,” and that Elsa Schiaparelli invented shocking pink. I learned how to make hats out of objects found in a Dumpster. I learned how to incorporate decorative motifs from Aztec, Polynesian, and Celtic art into my designs. I learned how to talk about fashion as one of the high arts, how to sneer at mundane concepts like wearability; how to mock the High Street and its shoppers.

  Some things I picked up were useful, but that knowledge was generally accessed outside the classroom. I learned how to drink my coffee and smoke my cigarettes. I learned how to flirt with gay men and straight women. I learned how to get into clubs without paying. I learned how to live on fifty pounds a week. It was all huge fun, breathless, trivial, superficial, empty, transient fun, but fun.

  And then it was over. Two interviews were all it took for me to discover that I had a practically useless degree. The options were stark. Back to Dad for a loan to study accountancy; or a trashy job and cheap digs, and wait for the opportunity that I knew, in my childish innocence, would come.

  So I worked for three months in Whistles, for six months in the Paul Smith sales shop, for a week in Selfridges. For most of that time I was going out with a Danish architecture student called Cnut. He was very serious in manner, but very silly in dress, favoring frock coats and cravats. Mysteriously, I found him quite cool at the time. I chucked him over a joke. It was his birthday, and on his card I wrote “to Cnut” (along with some love stuff you don’t want to hear about), but with the “C” backward.

  “Katie, this is incorrect,” he said, pointing to the errant letter.

  “What, you mean you can’t turn back the c, Cnut?”

  That was supposed to be my present to him. It took me ages to think it up. He looked at me for a good fifteen seconds without saying anything, then finally said:

  “I understand. That is supposed to be a joke, yes?”

  “Yes. It’s for you. Do you like it?”

  “In my country it is not considered to be polite to make fun of the names.”

  And that was that.

  I wasn’t at all at a low ebb through all of this. And it’s okay being poor when you’re twenty-two. I don’t think it stops being okay until you reach twenty-four. No, that’s a little harsh. Twenty-four is still just on the right side of the border. But twenty-five and poor is unforgivable, in any woman of ingenuity unencumbered by ethics or facial deformity.

  I went back just once to see Mum and Dad. They were less irritating than I remembered, but more pitiable, which is much, much worse. Dad was retired, and I was all they had to think about. It had been two years since I’d seen them, but I was still woven into the texture of their dail
y lives. Despite the fact that my screaming-at-them days were over, they knew better than to ask me any detailed questions about my life.

  “How’s things in, you know . . . fashion?” asked Dad, nodding toward the corner of the room, as if that were where fashion lived. Mum mouthed “fashion.”

  “Just fine.”

  In true bereaved parent style, they’d kept my room exactly as I’d left it at eighteen, with my retro David Bowie and Roxy Music posters, and my animals, Stinky the Penguin, Freddy Teddy, and the Blue Thing, which wasn’t any species known to science and so couldn’t have a human name, either. My books were still there, dusted daily, but now yellowing: a row of Judy Blooms, Rebecca, The Wide Sargasso Sea, Fat Is a Feminist Issue (no, it’s not). It was all too sad to bear. So I slipped away before tea, saying I had to be back in town for a catwalk show, knowing that it was something they’d understand.

  Well, that’s more or less where I was the day I walked past Penny Moss and saw the HELP WANTED sign. And if it doesn’t tell you why the thought of going back home to Mum and Dad filled me with the same feelings of joy and expectancy as female circumcision and flaying alive, well, then I give up.

  PART TWO

  The Three

  Metamorphoses

  of

  the Spirit

  CHAPTER 14

  Katie’s

  Dead-Dog

  Bounce

  “One more night, on the couch.”

  I’d wrung that single concession out of Veronica, reluctantly accepted by the others.

  “But I don’t want to see you tonight, and you’re gone by the time I get home tomorrow.” I was clearly bringing the best out of my dear old friend. I considered saying something about vipers nurtured in bosoms, but that would have been too, too Veronica. Anyway, which the viper, who’s the bosom? as someone was liable to ask.

  But what could I do with this final evening? We weren’t going to sit around together watching Antiques Roadshow, that was for sure. I couldn’t face any of my other friends. I couldn’t face fashion chitchat and bitching with Milo, assuming he hadn’t already erased me from history. Yes, of course, my face had already been retouched out of the politburo snapshots. I wasn’t too proud to beg for charity from somewhere, but I just couldn’t think of anyone to beg from.