Slave to Fashion

by Rebecca Campbell

  “How can you undercut? You said good margins.”

  “Because everything’s in-house—design, production, distribution. It’s never been done in this sector before. We’ll be pioneers.” (Okay, so not strictly true, but I was giving Kamil the big sell, and he owed me a liberty or two.) “I can guarantee you that by the spring I’ll have our clothes in thirty good shops across the U.K., and half a dozen more in Ireland and the rest of Europe. That’s just the first year. Who knows what we can do in the long term.”

  I took a deep breath—it was a long speech, and it had worn me out.

  “How much?” Kamil wasn’t such a fool: he realized that my plan would need some up-front investment.

  “Not much, to begin with. All I need is a couple of dozen yards of good cloth to make the samples. We can drive around to the shops, so we don’t even have to fit out a decent showroom. We don’t have to buy cloth in any real quantity until we get the orders in.”

  “How much then, up front?”

  “If things go well, I’ll need ten thousand for the cloth.”

  “Ten thousand! You make big joke, ha ha ha. Where can I get ten thousand pounds from? Father Christmas doesn’t visit Kurdish houses.”

  “Kamil, it’s a one-off. After that, the whole thing will be self-financing. And I’ve seen that you have . . . payments that come in sometimes. Big payments.”

  “Ah, that’s my special dealings. They don’t concern your business. Look, I’ll see what I can do. What about five thousand? I maybe can by wheeling and dealing get five thousand.”

  “Well, it would be a start. But there’s something else. If we’re going to shift up a gear, we’re going to have to change the way we pay the girls. Piecework is fine if all that matters is quantity, but now we need quality, and quality means time. We’re going to have to pay by the hour. It means the minimum wage.”

  Kamil was laughing.

  “Katie, Katie, you sly fox. Soon you’ll be flying red flags and singing ‘Internationale.’ But I think maybe I like your idea. Like I said, I’ve been thinking about going upmarket myself. It’s why I find you. I says to Mister Jonah Whale: ‘Get me a girl with the experience of Vogue and suchlike.’ We’ll see if you get good orders for the high-margin clothes. If you get the orders, then we’ll pay minimum wage.” Then he added, half to himself: “Ha, always makes me laugh, that ‘minimum wage.’ Really mean big maximum wages. Makes me laugh, ha ha.”

  “And I’ve thought of a name.”

  “Name for what?”

  “For the collection. KC.”

  “KC, KC, what is this KC?” Kamil said suspiciously. “I know what for this stands—”

  “For Kamil’s Couture,” I put in quickly.

  “Oh, KC, Kamil’s Couture, eh? Gotta nice ringing to it.”

  “One last, final thing.”

  “Ah God, more last things. More money I bet.”

  “I’ll need a production assistant. Latifa is perfect.”

  “And Latifa?”

  I had just called her into the office and told her about her new role. She was excited but tried to play it cool. Kamil was out, “wheeling and dealing” for cheap teabags and toilet rolls down at the cash-and-carry. Vicky was outside having a fag break.

  “Yeah?”

  “How much do you know about Kamil and his family?”

  “Well, I know they’re big in the Kurdish community. They’re meant to have a load of money.”

  “And Kamil, does he get up to anything, um, funny?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I just wondered if you or the others knew if he had any other income, any other activities.”

  “Oh yeah. Maybe I shouldn’t gossip, but one of the girls, Roxana, who speaks a bit of English, heard him talking to one of the market traders.”

  “What about?”

  “Women.”

  “Women?” I smiled.

  Latifa giggled. “I don’t mean his girlfriends. I don’t think he’s got one. I mean he has girls, you know, for sale.”

  “Prostitutes!” I gasped.

  “Yeah, he’s got loads of ’em in houses all over. Roxana heard him say they were ‘high-class ones, not scrubbers, white, black, brown, you name it.’ ”

  Well, it sort of fitted. It explained the occasional cash injections. It was a pity. I really thought my business plan might be a runner. It would have been fun trying, at least. But I couldn’t work for a pimp. Almost anything—work in a shoe shop, even East Grinstead—would be better than that. It wasn’t really a moral thing, more that it was just so tacky. I decided to resign as soon as he showed his face.

  A little later Vicky reappeared, snuffling and shuffling. I was really annoyed and came straight out with, “So I suppose you knew about the prostitutes?”

  Vicky started, then put a shushing finger to her lips. “Nah, not prossies,” she whispered. “Not Kamil.”

  “One of the girls has told me all about it, there’s no point pretending.” I assumed Vicky was implicated in some way. Perhaps it was how she earned enough for the methadone.

  “You just don’t get it, do yah? You see, the prostitution thing is a one of them thingies, a smoke screen.” My face betrayed my incredulity. “Nah,” she went on, “you’ve got it all wrong. It’s drugs.”

  “Drugs! Oh, well, that’s all right, then. What do you mean, drugs?”

  “Well. You see, the prostitution thing is to hide the fact that he’s importing drugs from Turkey, where his lot are from. But nothing bad, you know, just the usual shit, heroin and stuff. The police think he’s just a pimp, and they don’t bother him. It’s brilliant, really.”

  “Yeah, sheer genius.”

  So it was drugs, not prostitution. Better or worse? A close call, but given that it was heroin and not just a few spliffs’ worth of blow, worse on balance, I supposed. Either way I was furious with Jonah for getting me into this.

  Eventually Kamil returned, peering over a pack of seventy-two economy toilet rolls.

  “Piss off and have another fag break, will you, Vicky—it’s been almost half an hour since the last one,” I snapped. She was too indolent to tut.

  “Katie, not like you use bad foul language like piss. What’s up?”

  “What is it, Kamil, drugs or whores, or both? Either way, I’m out.”

  “Katie, Katie, what the ladies saying? You’ve been had on. You don’t understand.”

  “One of the machinists told me about the prostitution, and Vicky said it was just a front for drug running. I don’t want anything to do with them, or you, or anything.”

  I picked up my bag and coat. Kamil put out an arm to stop me. All the humiliation and bitterness and pain and frustration of my fall from grace exploded into one, perfect punch, landing exquisitely on the point of Kamil’s jaw. He fell down like a sack of shit, ’scuse French. Unfortunately, he was slumped in front of the door, and as I tried to drag it open, he began to plead.

  “Katie, let me tell you about it. Tell you about my people. Not any drugs, not any whores. My people are Kurds. Turkey shits on the Kurds, Iraq shit on the Kurds, Iran shit on the Kurds. And then the U.S.A. shits on the Kurds. Everyone shit on the Kurds. Only the PPK stands up for the Kurds. I work for the PPK. I get them help. Guns, medicines, radios. I just pretend with the drugs and the girls. Please. It’s true. For this some money comes in and some money goes out. We are freedom fighters!”

  This last bold assertion was rendered less than stirring by the fact that it was uttered in a high-pitched squeal, as the door I was still wrenching pinched into the flimsy muscle on his skinny thigh. I sat down. Was it any less plausible than the prostitution and drugs? Yes, slightly less plausible. Was it—international terrorism—any better? Well, I supposed it was. I was dimly aware of the plight of the Kurds. It did seem that there had been a pretty general excremental evacuation in their direction, as Kamil had claimed. I wanted to believe it. It meant I could carry on with my scheme with something like a good conscience. And after all,
what else did I have?

  CHAPTER 17

  Tea with the Ayyubs,

  A Gaudy Bullfinch,

  and Other Festivities

  “On Sunday I see my uncle Shirkuh. He’ll maybe help us with pump-priming finance, you bet.”

  Another week had passed, and I’d drawn up a business plan. Realistically, we had to hit the retailers with our samples by the end of January. That gave me a couple of months to design the collection and make up the samples. Tight, but not impossible. I’d decided to forget London. There was too much blood on that carpet. Anyway, most of the Penny Moss wholesale customers, and therefore my connections, were scattered around the south of England, with a few northern outposts, a shop in Dublin, another in Cork, and three or four in Europe.

  I phoned half a dozen of my best contacts: buyers with whom I’d worked up a good relationship, usually on the basis of a shared exasperation with Penny. They had all heard vague rumors about me “moving on,” but the whole truth seemed to have been kept within the M25 whisper zone. I told them what amounted to the truth, that I had been doing much of the Penny Moss design work for the past couple of years and had now gone into partnership with an established U.K. manufacturer. Each of the buyers was more than willing to have a look at a collection that promised Penny Moss quality but undercut by a third in price.

  “That’s great,” I said, not really listening.

  “Only one small problem.”

  “Mmm, what’s that?” I was thinking about buttons. Nice buttons can make a huge difference. Amazing how often a decent suit is let down by—

  “My uncle Shirkuh, he’s a bad man. He thinks it’s a big joke ha ha to make fun of me. And, well, he says bad things about me.”

  “What kinds of things?” I was getting interested, but not very.

  “He’s an old lying bastard, and here I make no excuse for French. He says I don’t like girls, that’s why I’m not married, despite being forty-two years. He says I like boys.”

  “Oh, do you?”

  “ ’Course I don’t like boys, crazy lady. I like girls so much that’s why I don’t get married, too busy playing field, eh, Vic?”

  Vicky, who had been hard at work reading her horoscope, looked up and said, “Yeah.” She caught my eye and smiled.

  “So,” Kamil carried on, “I got the small problem I said. Thing is, I shut his fat mouth, and he’ll give us the pump priming, if I turn up with a top foxy chick, who’s my girl, maybe fiancée or something like that.”

  I laughed out loud. “I get it. You want me to pretend to be your girlfriend, to persuade Uncle Shirkuh you aren’t a queer, so he gives us the money for the cloth?”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  “Can’t you take Vicky?”

  “Well, no offense, Vic, but she ain’t the sharpest tool in the pack. Better if you come, and then you can help explain how the margins are bigger, and the new shops, and everything.”

  The idea was so preposterous, it couldn’t help but appeal to my sense of the absurd. Anyway, he’d called me a top foxy chick, so I owed him a favor.

  “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  Later, when Vicky and I were alone, I asked her if she’d had a thing going with Kamil.

  “Well,” she said, “he took me out a few times, and I was pleased, because I wanted to try out the IUD I’d had fitted. But he didn’t do anything, for ages. And then when he finally asked me back for a coffee, all he kept asking was if I’d like it, you know, up the bum. And I said not likely and told him where to get off, and that was it, really.”

  So the next Sunday afternoon I was riding in Kamil’s maroon Jaguar up to Wood Green to meet the fabled and fearsome Shirkuh, for what Kamil reverentially called “high tea.” Kamil was nervous and seemed to be rehearsing sentences as he drove, of which I caught scraps: “. . . low end is low margins, complete crap,” “go international,” “fly business class,” “four, maybe five kids.”

  The senior Ayyub’s residence was an unimposing semidetached, in a quiet street. Kamil knocked on the door, which was answered by a young girl with big, sad brown eyes. She turned over her shoulder and screamed, “Mam, it’s Kamil and a lady.” She then ran back into the house. We followed.

  The house smelled strongly, and pleasantly, of spices, but my immediate feeling was of slight panic, as I sank into the deepest shagpile carpet I’d ever come across.

  “Take off your shoes, please,” whispered Kamil, but I’d expected that. I was wearing my longest skirt and a very sensible jacket. No point offending the old tyrant. We stepped into the living room. It was alive with writhing children. It was impossible to count, but there may have been seven, not counting the ones lost forever in the shagpile. There were also two grave, but pretty, teenage girls and a smiling middle-aged woman in what I took to be Kurdish dress.

  “Hello, hello, welcome,” she said to me warmly, ignoring Kamil.

  “Auntie, this is Katie. Katie, this is my auntie.”

  We shook hands.

  “Where is Uncle?” Kamil asked.

  “He’s having one of his bad days. It could be his thyroid or it could be his gall,” replied Auntie, and then added something else quickly in Kurdish (or Klingon, for all I knew). “But please sit down,” she said to me. “You will take tea?”

  There followed a mildly amusing half hour as Auntie tried to find out more about me. In order to get at the truth, she fed me with pastries so toxically sweet, there was probably an international treaty limiting their proliferation. There was doubtless an old Kurdish proverb, translated as “Son, be a dentist, your hands will never be still or your purse empty.”

  “And your father is an actuary? How good,” about summed up the conversation. But Auntie was really, like her pastries, very sweet, and I liked her. Even the children were, squirming aside, polite and helpful, acting as tiny servants to bring more sweetmeats and frightful tea. The two teenage girls stared at me, taking in details of hair, and clothes, and toenails, as I sank deeper and deeper into the softest of soft furnishings.

  Kamil was fidgeting.

  “Best see Uncle. I will go first, and call you in five or ten minutes, after I soften him up.”

  A few moments later I heard a voice cry out, “Don’t show me the monkey, I want the organ grinder! Show me the organ grinder!” Kamil then called down for me. Prompted by Auntie, one of the little girls took me by the hand and showed me up to Uncle’s room.

  The door was open. There, on the bed, swathed in folds of white cotton, which might have been some ethnic garment, or simply the bed linen, lay a very fat man, completely bald, smiling. His age was hard to judge, but I’d have guessed he was about seventy. Either by design or accident, the sheets were parted over his midriff, revealing a brown belly that seemed to possess a malevolent power entirely independent of its owner. It looked as if it might move, amoebalike, to engulf you, quite of its own volition. Shirkuh looked every inch the sybarite, a depraved emperor living only for the gratification of his appetites. “Another quail, boy,” I imagined him saying. “No, no, not to eat, not to eat, mmm, yessss, ughhhhh, aaahhhhhhh, aaaahhhhhhh, aaaaaahhhhhhhh! That’s better. Now I’ll eat it.”

  “So, young lady, you want me to pump and to prime?” The voice was thin, humorous, and engaging. “I’m most terribly sorry about the bed. I have a weak back, and my gall is, galling, ha ha hee hee.”

  I changed my mind about the sybarite and apologized, internally, over the quail.

  “Yes, after a fashion. Kamil’s sent you the business plan?”

  “He has indeed. And very impressive, too. Tell me more about your experience, and about your contacts in the business of fabric importation.” Patting the bed, he added, “Sit down, my dear, sit down.”

  There ensued a long and detailed discussion of the plan. Shirkuh had an excellent grasp of the opportunities and potential pitfalls. He knew the rag trade inside out. Kamil’s little operation was only one of his interests. It seemed he had businesses all over London, as well as enga
ging in mysterious-sounding import and export activities. Poor Kamil, afraid to interrupt, sat quietly on the floor, his legs crossed.

  We must have been at it for about an hour, when Shirkuh said: “Kamil, my dear boy, please go and get your uncle an aspirin and some water. It will take you several minutes.”

  When he was gone, Shirkuh said to me, “I suppose Kamil was fantasizing when he suggested that you and he were betrothed?”

  There seemed little point in lying.

  “Yes. He thought it would help with the proposal.”

  “Mmm, mmm. I appreciate your frankness. I must also ask you, has he talked about his involvement in various activities? Illegal, or disreputable activities?”

  “Well, yes. But I know the prostitution and drugs were invented to hide his gunrunning for the PPK.”

  Shirkuh laughed, wheezed, and coughed.

  “PPK! PPK! And a clever woman like you believed it?”

  “I liked the idea of it better than the other . . . possibilities.”

  “Dear Miss Castle, Kamil is not involved in anything other than running a small and not very successful business manufacturing and supplying cheap garments, worn largely by women living on social security or poverty wages.”

  I saw it. The gunrunning was a cover for the drugs, which were a cover for the prostitutes, which were a cover for the sad fact that Kamil was a failed fashion tycoon living on handouts from his fat uncle. I felt a bijou wave of affection for the little man and a surge of desire to make our plan work.

  “Kamil’s not a bad boy,” Shirkuh went on, his voice losing some of its humor and taking on a more tender tone, “but he was always embarrassed about being in the rag trade. His cousin, my son, was killed fighting for the freedom of our people against the Turkish army. Kamil feels it should have been him. Feels the family looks down on him for not dying like a man. But I can tell you that I would give anything for my son to be alive and well now, working, for all I care, as a cleaner in a public toilet, than to be dead, and not even a grave where I could weep.” His eyes glistened, but he smiled. “Kamil, come in, don’t be hovering there. Give me my aspirin.”