Slave to Fashion

by Rebecca Campbell

  But all along I suppose I must have known what I was going to do. Calculation and rational thought hadn’t helped one little bit. It was time to get my hormones in on the act, and to follow instinct.

  So twenty minutes later I was in yet another taxi. It was to be my last for a long, long time. I’d passed through the cluster of lepers and out of the front door without a further word, my head held high, my heart in tumult. I walked in the gloom down to the Seven Sisters Road, with the life I would lead in East Grinstead projected onto the buildings around me, like the old films in Cinema Paradiso. There I was, on a high gable, welcomed tearfully by Mum and Dad: she ringing her hands in joyful anguish, he holding a brown teapot nestling in a knitted cozy. And there, thrown against the dirty brick wall of the church, I was starting work checking claims down at the housing benefit office, dressed smartly in a blue polyester suit with a white blouse and a bow at the neck. There, on the slate roofs, I was dancing around my plastic handbag at the Please Fuck Me, It’s Friday disco, trying to catch the eye of a fitter (whatever that is), or plumber, or housebreaker, with “loev” and “haet” inked onto his knuckles by East Grinstead’s famous dyslexic tattooist. And there, cast up onto the very heavens for all the world to see, I was standing without tights in the cold, looking for love, smiling at strangers.

  No. None of those things were going to happen. If the worst came to the worst, I might have to go home for a while to recharge my batteries and plot a new course. I wouldn’t be there long enough for the tendrils to grow around me, for the devils to pull me down, like Faust, into that hell. Would I?

  But first there was the little matter of revenge. “Every Sunday, except in Lent,” he’d said. Well, it was Sunday, and it wasn’t Lent. I had at least learned that from Sister Henrietta. A black cab appeared, and I journeyed west, passing perilously close to the places I had come to love.

  I said revenge, but that isn’t quite right. Nor does the instinct/hormone thing quite catch it. I don’t really know what I was doing going back to see Liam. I’d more or less abandoned the idea of actually stabbing him to death, although I hadn’t ruled out the possibility of seeing if my six months of boxercise classes a couple of years earlier had left me with the ability to land a good punch in the throat. But it was more that I just wanted him to confront what he’d done to me; to see how he’d messed up my life; to say sorry. A proverb kept coming into my head: A dog always returneth to its own vomit. Not pretty, but it held a truth.

  I got the cabbie to drop me at the tube station: it was still quite early, and I thought I’d kill time by having a drink at each of the pubs I’d seen on that other, fatal, trip to Kilburn. And if a pub crawl seems to you like a faintly eccentric thing to do in my circumstances, then you’d be absolutely right. Could it be that I was deliberately seeking degradation, debasing myself so that I could go through some weird cathartic rebirth thingy? Or was I nervous and wanted to get sloshed?

  The first pub I came to was called the North Star. From the outside it looked quite nice, almost like one of the girl-friendly, foody pubs of Primrose Hill. Clean bright plaster, neat paintwork. Only the bustle of waiters and the swish of clean blond hair seemed to be missing. I stepped through the door marked PUBLIC BAR and immediately realized how far I had to go before I would come to understand the parallel universe of the pub.

  The Black Lamb had been full of poor and desperate people, but they were there to have some species of fun. They were looking for a good time, elusive and transitory though it might be. But this was very different. As I stepped through the door I was confronted by a wall of hostile faces: sullen, cruel, male. This wasn’t a place for fun. This was a place to drink, to drink until everything kind and human and frail had been dissolved away, and then to drink some more.

  I thought about walking straight back out again, but something about the very grimness of the place chimed with my mood. And anyway, after Penny and the lepers, I wasn’t going to be driven out of anywhere ever again. I marched boldly up to the bar, feeling for the first time in ages that here was a challenge I was actually up to, a problem I could solve. From sheer bloody-minded bravado I ordered a Dubonnet and lemonade, something I hadn’t drunk since I was seventeen. I was with Veronica and one or two other girls from school on a big night out after some mock exams. When we sat down with our proud array of Cinzanos, snowballs, and the other drinks beloved of sweet-toothed teenage girls, Veronica whispered in my ear, “I don’t think you pronounce the ‘t.’ ” I didn’t speak to her for the rest of the evening. Back in the North Star, the barman, big and white and moist, like something carved out of a massive block of genetically enhanced lard, looked at me for a good two seconds, half turned away, spun slowly back toward me, and then turned finally away again. He rocked himself over to a far corner of the bar and returned with the thin magenta liquid.

  “Ice,” I said, meeting his eyes, which were bloodshot and malevolent. I guessed that he was a collector of child porn and Nazi military regalia.

  He pointed to a bucket on the bar, then grunted, “Two pounds.”

  I gulped down the Dubonnet at the bar, dribbling a little from the corner of my mouth, and walked out. Bizarrely, the experience gave me courage: surely there could not be a worse pub anywhere in the world? And I had survived, drunk a Dubonnet and lemonade and walked away.

  Just over the road from the North Star I saw something that appeared a little more promising. Powers Bar was obviously designed to look like one of those quaint little pubs you see in Irish postcards, perhaps with a donkey parked outside. The front of the place was quite small. It was painted a bright blue. I stepped through the door and into a world of warmth and noise. The music was student/Indie stuff, which I didn’t really expect in Kilburn. It was obviously where the local bohemians and nonlaboring youth drank, and it had a vaguely alternative, arty feel. The walls were pleasantly hung with irony: a huge buffalo-head thing loomed out of the gloom. There were real fires, which were welcome—it was clear and cold out, and I wasn’t wearing enough clothes. Even more welcome, there were women: not ancient, drunken hags, but young women in moderately fashionable gear. They weren’t like me, but I felt we wouldn’t need a translator to talk. I thought it was even worth risking a glass of wine. A pretty young Australian served me and poured out a proper big glass of Chilean Sauvignon Blanc.

  Although the bar was crowded, I still managed to find a corner to sit in, not far away from one of the fires. The next table was full of overweight middle-aged men in ponytails and/or goatees, talking loudly about music videos. One seemed to be a director, another worked for a record company. A third, spindlier than the others, was wearing those black oblong spectacles that scream out to all the world “Look, I’m a music journalist. Ha!”

  “Gotta throw at least one fifty at it,” said the director, straining at his leathers. “You know as well as I do the shittier the band, the better the video.”

  I made a bet with myself that they’d speak to me within five minutes. I must have been giving off scary signals, because during the time it took me to drain two glasses they did nothing more than venture the odd furtive glance. I had the impression that they may even have caught my mood, and their conversation had died by the time I left.

  “Still think shit’s a bit hard,” said the journo.

  Crossing over the road again, I came to McGovern’s, which looked like an Albanian bingo hall. I strode in without a thought. It was so full of closely packed men that I at first thought it must be a gay bar. But no: not a decent haircut among them, and they looked as though they’d all just raided a tweed warehouse and run away dressed in whatever came to hand, however ill fitting. But there was an atmosphere of jollity among them: backs were being slapped, grins exchanged. Laughter rolled back and forth along the bar. Nobody seemed bothered about my presence, and I squeezed through the crush and ordered a Guinness. Turning away from the bar with what felt like an enormous quantity of drink, I saw an old man on a bench by a wall smile at me. He looked f
amiliar. Of course, it was the fiddler. I couldn’t remember his name. He beckoned me, indicating a space by his side. Although the thought of his wheezing, deathbed breath nauseated me, I could think of no way of escaping, so I went over to him.

  “It’s Katie, isn’t it?” He sounded surprisingly sober.

  “Yes. You remembered. And you were right: he blackguarded me.”

  “The dirty, dirty swine. If I was thirty years younger, I’d see to him myself. But what are you doing over here, child? I’d heard something of your trouble, and I didn’t think we’d be seeing you again.”

  “I can’t really explain it. I just had to see Liam. Hit him, or something.”

  “What good would that do? Why don’t you just go back to your own part of town, your own people?”

  “Easier said than done. I haven’t really got a part of town anymore. And my own people? Don’t make me laugh. Will Liam be in the Black Lamb tonight?”

  “Well, yes, he may be. But what’s the profit of any of this? Go home, child, go home.”

  “You’re a sweet man, but I haven’t got anything else to lose now.”

  “Nobody’s so low they can’t sink lower. I myself have had times when I thought now, surely to God this is the bottom. Surely now I’ve hit rock. But then you find it’s just a crust, and down you go again.”

  “Thanks, that’s helped cheer me up.” I said it with a smile, because I didn’t feel that bad. I think the Dubonnet, the wine, and the Guinness were doing their thing. “And now? Are you at the bottom yet?”

  “Ah!” he said, also smiling. “Well, you know in those films with submarines, when they get the hell blown out of them by the boys up above? And they have to take her down, and some fella goes around and changes all the light bulbs to red ones, and then a pipe bursts and some other fella hits it with a spanner until it stops? Well, I’m a bit like that: red in the eye and a bit leaky.”

  With that he stood up, pointed toward the gents, and, with a wink that might have charmed a Kerry milkmaid back in 1932, waddled off. I finished my Guinness and left. It was time to go to work. I crossed again over the Kilburn High Road. No pausing this time outside the Black Lamb. I walked straight into its gothic/baroque arms.

  It was fairly quiet. I looked around for Liam but couldn’t see him. I ordered a large G’n’T at the bar. There was no one I recognized from my first visit. I felt relieved and disappointed. I could still feel the tingle of adrenaline. Or was it some other hormone? As I sat down, a thought came to me. Perhaps after all I wasn’t here for revenge. Could it be, could it just possibly be, that I was here for a shag? No no no. Too simple, and too horrid. I was here to achieve closure, to scrape the poison out of the wound. Oh, God knows.

  I sat at the same table. The positive blip in my mood was gone, and I slumped into a brooding depression. The little fiddler man was right. It was mad to have come here. Mad and sad. Mad and sad and stupid. There was nothing Liam could do now, anyway, to help me. I was already old news. What is fashion for, after all, if not moving on? And I’d been left behind. I looked around at the exuberant decoration. The nymphs and dryads had become mocking devils. The birds etched into the glass were vultures. The walls ran with blood and gore. I ordered another G’n’T.

  I was struck again by how my life seemed to be repeating itself. People think that fashion goes in circles, but that’s wrong, as Penny showed with her safari suit fiasco at the vodka party. It’s more a sort of a spiral, and so things come back round again, but displaced. And the loops of the spiral get smaller and smaller, so things come around again ever more quickly, giving that disorienting impression of simultaneous novelty and tired recapitulation. That’s how my life felt, the eternal recurrence, everything the same and yet different; my world spiraling down uncontrollably.

  “You look like you need a friend.” The voice jolted me out of my reverie. It was grave, and deep, and scary, like the sound of old bones being ground up in a monstrous mortar. My head had sunk almost to the dank tabletop. I looked up and saw a huge slab of a man, like a lost lump of Stonehenge. Like many of the other older drinkers, he was wearing a suit, but his was dark and well cut and looked as if it might have been made for him. It was certainly hard to imagine anything off the peg fitting his massive shoulders. I recognized him as the Frankenstein that Liam had been talking to.

  “I know you. Jonah. Big Jonah. Should be Giant Jonah. Or Big Boner. Ought to alliterate.”

  “Your face is familiar, I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,” he replied with the strange courtesy of a diplomat feeling his way into a new language. Although he was built like a monolith, there was nothing particularly threatening about Jonah. I suppose it’s that old chestnut about really hard men not having to prove it. Especially not to eight-stone girls in an obvious state of distress. (Okay, okay, eight and a half.) That, or I was so drunk that I’d have petted a tiger. “Wait,” he went on, “I know, you’re Katie, aren’t you? Katie . . . Katie . . . Castle.”

  “Yup. Got it in one.”

  He smiled. His teeth were strong and yellow. “Three things I never forget: a name, a face, a debt. Mind if I have a wee sit and a chat?” I shook my head, which could have meant either yes or no. He took it as a yes.

  “Liam told me about . . . well, he mentioned you.”

  “I’ve come here to talk to him. There are things I . . . want to say.”

  “Maybe that’s not such a good idea.” That refrain was getting boring.

  “How the hell would you know?” Careful, Katie. Remember the man’s a brutal villain. Jonah ran a big hand over the back of his close-cropped, graying head.

  “Are ye at all familiar with the works of Friedrich Nietzsche?” he said after a pause.

  “Are you going to hit me with your hammer?” I asked, doing a Betty Boop. He looked disappointed.

  “The hammer’s a useful tool. With a hammer you can build things and you can break them. But I only use a hammer when a person has proved himself incapable of following a simple syllogism.”

  “What’s a shyllogimsum?” Dammit! Thought I was playing it pretty cool. But I’d had one Dubonnet too many for a tricky new word like that.

  “It’s an argument with two premises and a conclusion like—”

  “Yeah, I know,” I cut in, anxious for a chance to reestablish my credentials, “all men are bastards, Liam Callaghan is a man, therefore Liam Callaghan is a bastard. Fuck philosophy—philosophy sure fucked me.”

  Jonah smiled his faintly (but only faintly) sinister smile. “I was saying, Nietzsche . . .”

  “Big mustache.”

  “Aye, big mustache.”

  “Bit of a fascist?”

  “Aye, well, maybe a bit of a fascist. But he was no anti-Semite. He thought the Jews were the nearest thing to a master race in Europe. But I’m maybe thinking I should tell ye about the three metamorphoses of the spirit. It might bring you a parcel of inner peace, or at least some understanding of where you are.”

  “Sounds like fun.” I was running out of energy again, and sarcasm was all I had left.

  “Well, maybe not fun, but the man was a great one for joy. Anyway, you see, the spirit has to pass through three stages. First of all the spirit has to become like a camel—”

  “Camel? Ugly, smelly, spits at people. Thanks. Just what I need.”

  “Like a camel, and has to feed upon the acorns and grass of knowledge, and to suffer, and to bear great weights, and travel stony paths into the desert.”

  “Well, you’ve sold it to me. Where do I sign up?”

  “It looks to me like you already have.”

  “Couldn’t I be something prettier, a gazelle, or antelope, or something?” I was beginning to enjoy the conversation, in an odd, surreal sort of way.

  “Has to be a camel. But as I’ve said, there are three stages. In the second metamorphosis you must become a lion, and struggle to wrest freedom from the great dragon.”

  “Sounds a bit more like it. I suppose the dragon stands for s
omething?”

  “Aye: ‘Thou shalt!’ And the lion answers. ‘I will.’ In that ‘I will,’ the lion renounces all existing values. It creates for itself new freedoms, new values.”

  “I could do with some of those. And what about the third stage. Elephant? Rhinoceros? Tapeworm?”

  “Well, no, not exactly.” Jonah, it turned out, was not one for quips and repartee. “In the third metamorphosis of the spirit the lion becomes a child.”

  “Bummer! Should have guessed. It’s always a child, isn’t it. Becoming one, I mean. So what does the child have to do? Renounce all values by dribbling and pooing his pants?”

  “The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes.”

  If it hadn’t been for a yes, I thought to myself, a yes perhaps more profane than sacred, I would never have found myself in such a fucking godforsaken mess. The charm of pub Nietzsche had faded, and I was beginning to get bored.

  “Look,” I said, “do you really think I’m going to be impressed by all that? Fashion’s dripping with the same old hippie-dippie, up-yer-own-arse Buddhist/Taoist bullshit. Haven’t you ever seen Ab Fab? You’ve really got to work on your chat-up technique.”

  Jonah shook his head like an actor miming sorrow. “You know, you people disappoint me. You’re just not prepared to put in a wee bit of work, just a little time and thought. All you want is the quick escape, the easy way out.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of white pills, each, I saw, embossed with a leaping dolphin. “This is all you want now. Philosophy in an easy-to-swallow capsule. I took these off some lads outside earlier on. I don’t like my drinking disturbed by that kind of thing. I explained to them the error of their ways.” He stroked his jacket, and I thought I saw the outline of a useful carpenter’s tool for a moment dimpling the dark wool.