“Have to watch ’em like the hawk. All very lazy. Be havin’ chin wags and coffee left, right, and center on my money if I let ’em.”
We went back into the office. Vicky was standing motionless before the fax machine. For a moment I thought that her reverential silence might signify that she was a member of some weird fax-worshiping new age cult, but then Kamil threw his arm around her shoulder, saying:
“Vic, baby doll. I show you once, I show you thirty million times how to use. Put in numbers here like any telephone, then press blue button like so, and off she goes into the sky, voilà. Ah, okay, maybe not work now, but later, when it warm up.” Then, disengaging and turning to me, he said, “Now Katie, we got a big order in. Lots to be getting on with. You start tomorrow?”
I still wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do, but what the hell.
“Okay. Let’s try each other out for a month.”
Kamil smiled and opened his arms. I think he may have expected me to step forward for an embrace. Er, thanks, but no thanks.
So another new and very different period of my life began. The parallel universe thing could have been made up specially for me; some things were the same. I was, after all, working in fashion . . . well, in garments. But then everything else was different. Here I was, in a sweatshop, working for a company that made the kinds of clothes people rummaged for in grubby little markets, the kinds of polyester abortions people in East Grinstead might wear on a visit to the chip shop or liquor store. Pretty Primrose Hill had been transformed around me into Kilburn, which was, well, not pretty. Ludo once jokingly said I reminded him of Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god of death, or war, or whatever. Apparently, you have to appease him by cutting out hearts and other gory bits, or else he, he . . . well, I can’t remember, but I had the feeling I hadn’t offered up enough hot, still-beating, bloody organs to the bad-tempered fellow. Hence Kilburn; hence Ayyub’s Parisian Fashions.
But to set against all that, I at least had an easy commute. I could take the Jubilee line up to Willesden Green and walk for twenty minutes, or I could hop on a bus, which dropped me a little closer. Heading out of town on public transport at peak hours was curiously soothing. Nobody was in a rush, nobody pushed, nobody jostled. There was always a seat. The other passengers were mainly pensioners about their single-minded, unfathomable purposes.
On the first morning I decided to sort out the office. We filled three bin liners full of rubbish and realigned the furniture. Vicky proved willing enough, as long as you told her exactly what to do and monitored her progress closely. Kamil, as quick and furtive as a stoat, appeared and disappeared at irregular intervals, looking sometimes baffled, sometimes pleased at the rearrangement of his empire.
The big order turned out to be 150 blue knee-length skirts for a market trader. We were supplying them at five pounds each. The label suggested they were made from cotton and linen, but although the fabric may have originated in a plant, the plant in question was on Teesside, had forty chimneys, and pumped toxic effluent into the North Sea.
I looked in on the machinists. Again the fearful glances; again the terror of stopping. I tried to talk to the first woman I came to, middle-aged, with a thick black plait of hair reaching to her waist. She looked at me and shook her head. A voice piped up from the back.
“It’s no good, she don’t speak English. None of ’em do, much.”
I looked to see who had spoken. It was a young girl, perhaps sixteen. Asian, like the others. I went over to her.
“Hello, I’m Katie Castle. I’ve just started to work here.”
“Yeah, we know.”
“Can you ask the girls to stop for a minute? I want to speak to them.”
The young girl looked worried. “If we stop, we don’t get paid.”
“What do you mean?”
“We only get paid for what we do. If we stop, it’s hard to earn enough to live.”
Piecework. I should have guessed. So much for the minimum wage.
“Look, it’s only going to be for a minute. Can you speak to them in their language?”
“Which one: Gujarati? Hindi? Urdu?”
“Oh God. Can you translate them all?”
“Yeah, enough.”
“Look, please just tell them not to worry. I just want to wander around and see how they’re doing. It’s not a test or anything. And sorry, what’s your name?” I felt helpless.
“Latifa. Yeah, I’ll tell them. There’s a couple more speak some English.”
I moved up and down the rows of machines. Some of the women looked up and smiled, some managed to say hello. Some kept their heads bowed.
I retreated back to the office and mulled.
The next day, Friday, I started to go through the books. It was clear that Ayyub’s Parisian Fashions was not a multimillion-pound operation. The profits were there, but they were meager. Here and there odd payments came in that didn’t appear to relate to anything else. It was those payments that seemed to be keeping the company going.
That weekend I worked hard at making the Kilburn flat look nice. I hadn’t even had the chance to unpack all my things. Jonah called on Saturday afternoon and offered to take me out to dinner, but I declined, which I think was a relief to him. Instead he brought me round a portable telly, which was thoughtful, even if the reception was so bad that it was hard to tell what you were watching. Still, its fuzzy blue light made me feel a little less lonely.
Although the flat looked okay, with pretty fabrics draped over that which ought to be hidden, and fresh flowers, and simple curtains, by eight o’clock I still felt desolate. Never had I been so isolated, never so weak, never so lost. There was nobody I could call, nobody I could chatter inanely with. It was really rather poignant: I had all these hilarious stories about the events of the past weeks (I’d already perfected my Jonah impersonation, and my Kamil voice wasn’t far behind), but they were transformed from comedy to tragedy by the fact that I had no one to tell them to.
As I sorted through the last of my possessions, I came across a ragged plastic bag that I couldn’t quite place. The handles were knotted together, and I had to tear the plastic to see inside. The first breath of air from the bag told me what it was. The air was slightly stale and musty; not clean, but not at all offensive. In fact, it smelled to me more sweet than Coco Chanel, more rich and blissful than fresh coffee, and sadder than honeysuckle on a grave.
I tore a bigger gash into the bag and emptied its contents onto the bed. Out spilled Ludo’s dirty socks and underpants, his mixture of threadbare, pre-me M&S, and the designer stuff I bought for him, but which he hardly ever wore, claiming they were “for best,” a best that seemed never to come. I don’t know how the bag of dirty clothes came to be caught up with my things, but having Ludo so tangibly with me was more than I could bear. The tears I cried in the immediate aftermath of the disaster were bitter little tears, tears that I know brought me no credit or sympathy but gave some small physical relief. Now, with Ludo’s dirty things all around me, I cried again. My mind was suffused with images of Ludo: Ludo smiling, Ludo talking and joking, Ludo making love, trying so hard to do it right. I swept armfuls of the pants and socks to myself and squeezed them tightly. I rubbed my face into them and breathed deep their pure essence of Ludo. I screamed and wept, and wailed, and ululated. God knows what the neighbors thought.
I slept that night with Ludo’s things in bed with me. In the morning I found a nice new bag for them, which I then kept in the bottom of the wardrobe, to be used only in the direst of emotional emergencies.
The next week I began to get a clearer idea of what my job was all about. I was there to choose which designs we ripped off, to get the patterns done as cheaply as possible, and to crack the whip while the girls churned them out. Simple and yuckie. Kamil did the selling, which mainly involved getting drunk with burly, tattooed market traders or poor-looking Asian retailers with black circles round their eyes. These sessions would occasionally end back in the office in bitter te
ars as Kamil wept about being a bad Muslim and a disgrace to his family, both of which accusations had the ring of truth.
I spent Wednesday at the Kilburn shop, which was a five-minute walk from the flat. Most things in the shop cost less than a coffee and sandwich in Bond Street, and most of the stock looked highly flammable. Animal prints on nylon; pink Lycra tube dresses; shorty shorts and microtops conspiring to reveal exactly that which should never be seen. Dolce & Gabbana redone by a blind madman with no taste and a hatred of humanity and a toothache. I was amazed we sold anything at all, but there was a steady stream of teenagers, and mad people, and the poor. The two shop girls, Stacey and Charity, were borderline gormless, as well as overweight, lazy, and unhelpful. It was quite nice having the chance to shout at an underling. By the end of the day I had them acting and looking a bit more like people who might be quite interested in selling you some clothes, rather than two rottweilers half-doped by the burglar’s poisoned sausages. I even managed to win them round by choosing a couple of outfits for them from the stock, although Stacey may have been less pleased about my recommendation of a good deodorizing soap.
Over the week I had the machinists into the office one at a time, with Latifa to translate where necessary. They were browbeaten and submissive, but between them they had a lot of experience. I looked at the quality of their work. Sure, the fabrics were awful, and the designs, a mixture of badly copied H&M and monstrosities engendered by the sleep of reason, were at best dull, at worst plain horrid. But, surprisingly, some of the workmanship was good, amazingly so given the speed at which they labored. The fastest of them could hope to earn perhaps three pounds an hour, but the average was more like two fifty.
I can’t say I was particularly shocked. And you wouldn’t swallow it if I came out as a champion of the poor and downtrodden. I knew what the fashion world was like. To compete with cheap imports, people like Kamil had to pay poverty wages. And I knew that there were worse places than Ayyub’s. At least here there was a toilet and a place to prepare food. The problem was that the margins were so tight at this end of the market. And turning out cheap tat hardly fulfilled the potential of the workforce.
Nor will I pretend that I bonded with the women, but I did soon begin to see them as individuals, rather than as an undifferentiated mass. I learned that Vimla, a handsome and serene woman in her mid-thirties and one of the most skilled seamstresses, had a three-month-old baby, and it broke her heart to be away from him; I learned that Roshni was ill with some unpleasant and painful gynecological condition but couldn’t afford to take time off, as Kamil would not give them sick pay. I learned of the long-running feud between Pratima and Bina, the origins of which even they had forgotten. I also became aware of the division between the Muslims and Hindus, although that division was undermined by individual friendships. There were also more subtle and elusive tensions, which I initially put down to caste, although for all I knew they could just as easily have been based in geography or support for rival football teams. As well as Urdu, Hindi, and Gujarati, some of the girls spoke Bengali, Telugu, or Punjabi, and I soon abandoned my early intention to learn how to say hello and good-bye in each, convincing myself the women would find it patronizing.
Most of our dealings were through Latifa, who was a clever little thing, not sixteen, as she looked, but twenty. She wasn’t particularly good on the machines, but she was quick-witted and lively. I found it hard to believe that she couldn’t do better. I asked her what she was doing working in a place like this.
“My dad wanted me to marry a man in Bangladesh. He was all right, but I already had a boyfriend here. My mum didn’t want me to go, so Dad kicked us both out. She’s old and I’ve got to look after her.”
“Shouldn’t you go to college or something?”
“Yeah, well, I’m saving up.”
When Kamil next showed his face, I asked to speak to him.
“You’re not paying these girls the minimum wage, are you.”
“Oh, shit, Katie, excuse French, you’re not going to break my balls, are you? This business is on a knife edge. It’s a cutthroat market out there. If our costs go up, who’s gonna buy jack diddly anything off us? And these ladies, half got no papers, half illegal. They are all happy to have a good job. Why do you want to make their life ruined?”
I had a counterargument, but I didn’t want to use it yet. I had to find out more about the business. I let him think he’d won me round with the brilliance of his rhetoric.
Most days I’d sit on a box in the scuzzy yard to eat my lunchtime sandwich; unless it was raining pretty hard, it beat watching Kamil pick his teeth or listening to Vicky sniff. I was usually left alone with my thoughts and my lettuce-and-tomato with lo-cal dressing, but one day Latifa came out and sat next to me.
“I saw you out here, and I thought you looked a bit sad.”
“Do I? I thought I was more enigmatic than that.” I was surprised that Latifa had come to join me like this on her own initiative. Pleased, too: I didn’t get the chance to talk much, apart from buttons and bows.
“You normally hide it pretty well. What made you come here to work for Kamil? I mean you don’t seem like the type.”
“Long story.”
“Well, we’ve got the full twenty minutes Kamil lets us have to eat our chapatis,” she said with pleasing sarcasm. I noticed that she carried an apple and a Diet Coke.
“I used to have a good job. . . .”
“You mean there’s somewhere better than this?” Latifa could be very deadpan when she wanted to be.
“Different.”
“Better?”
“Better.”
“What happened?”
“I sort of messed up.”
“On the job?”
“More a personal thing.”
“Shagging?”
“Latifa,” I spluttered, laughing. “I didn’t think you knew words like that!”
“Well, what do you think we talk about at the machines—good places to buy curry powder?”
“Look, Latifa, you don’t have to keep trying to prove to me how you’re not all from another planet. For God’s sake, I live in the most cosmopolitan city in the world. I know we’re all the same underneath.”
“Try telling that to Pratima and Bina. It’s not that we’re all the same. It’s that we’re all different.”
“Latifa, I know.”
“But you have this look on your face sometimes.”
“What look?”
“A ‘Who are these people and what am I doing here?’ kind of look.”
I knew the kind of look she meant.
“And sometimes something worse—a kind of a sneer.”
“Oh, Latifa, it’s not a sneer. But the thing is, I’ve always been a bit of a cow. It’s what people used to like about me. I’d say bitchy things and generally take the piss. I’m not suddenly Mother Theresa because I’ve come to Willesden. I still think cross-eyed people are inherently funny, and people who can’t pwonounce r’s, and people who come out of the loo with their sari tucked into their tights. It’s just that now it’s got nowhere to go, because I haven’t got any friends left to share it with.”
Latifa was laughing. “It wasn’t me, was it?”
“What, with the sari? You don’t even wear one. No, it was Roshni.”
And we then spent ten minutes having a general, all-round, low-intensity bitch. It was like plunging my face into a cool mountain stream. Latifa then put on an almost serious face and said:
“How long before you move on? I mean, you’re only slumming here, aren’t you?”
I looked closely into her eyes, which were steady. She really was a self-possessed young woman.
“I won’t lie to you, Latifa. I don’t want to spend my life making crap clothes for Kamil. But I don’t want any of you to do that. And we won’t have to.”
“Why, have you got a plan?” she said with a delicate, needling irony.
I smiled. “Well, yes, I have, actually.”<
br />
And I did. Sort of.
After a couple of weeks I asked to speak to Kamil again. I’d spent the time thinking carefully, scheming, calculating. It helped to fill the long, empty hours; helped to block out the sound of traffic on the Kilburn High Road; helped keep my mind off Ludo and the lost world.
Things had gone quiet, and Kamil was beginning to mumble about laying off some of the girls. I knew that I wasn’t going to get anywhere by appealing to his better side.
“Kamil,” I began, “I think this business has potential.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m thinking of myself expanding to cover Golders Green and maybe even Wembley. Big potential.”
“Good idea, but that’s not quite what I mean. Every good businessman knows that it’s all about people. People are your number one asset. You’ve managed to recruit some excellent staff. You’re a good judge of character.”
“Yeah sure, school of real life, plus North London Polytechnic business studies, you bet.”
“And I think that with your know-how, and some of my ideas, and the skills of your girls, we can do some amazing things, some new things.”
Kamil was listening carefully. “I think you are up to something, Katie Castle,” he said craftily. “I know what you are like. You are a naughty girl.”
I decided it was time to get to the point.
“Kamil, I’ve looked at the books, and basically we’re flogging our guts out just to stay solvent. There’s no money to be made at the bottom end of the market: we just can’t compete with the Far East, or even places like Poland and Lithuania. And we can hardly say that we live in a more beautiful world because the unemployed teenage mothers of Kilburn and Willesden Green wear our microskirts and boob tubes.” Kamil mimed hurt, shocked, and outraged in quick succession, but I plowed on before he had the chance to interrupt. “Our only hope is to move upmarket. It’s the only way to increase our margins. And to tell you the truth, I’m wasted here at the moment. I’ve got the experience, and I’ve got the contacts. All we have to do is to draw up some basic, classic designs—I can do that in a couple of weeks—then invest in some decent fabric, and we can undercut every middle-market manufacturer in the country.”
Slave to Fashion Page 20
