Slave to Fashion

by Rebecca Campbell

I won’t pretend that I stopped finding my parents irritating. I suppose you never stop finding your parents irritating. But somehow the irritation coexisted with the love that I found I had neatly wrapped and stored away inside myself, at the back of some interior wardrobe. So my dad’s way of suddenly continuing a sentence that he may have begun years before, to someone else entirely, or my mum’s inability to watch the simplest film without repeatedly asking what was happening, or who was married to whom, or why that man had shot the other man, or stabbed him through the heart with his sword, or gone off in a hot-air balloon in the first place, still made me want to weep with exasperation, but they didn’t make me want to run away, and they didn’t make me ashamed.

  CHAPTER 18

  Strange Meetings

  As the end of January approached, most of the samples were ready. The catwalk show had helped us to define more closely what we wanted to do. I was pleased with the results: one or two things hadn’t quite worked and were discarded, and some ideas, although pretty, proved too time-consuming and costly to make. But on the whole our capsule collection was good. Not outstanding—headlines would not be made, no actress would wear KC at a premiere—but I was proud of what we’d done, and I was sure that it would sell.

  Latifa had been brilliant, growing in confidence and stature by the hour, and the selected machinists had risen to the challenge of transforming quantity into quality, which Jonah described with a sad shake of the head as “very Hegelian.” Even Kamil startled us by showing that he was not altogether useless at absolutely everything. I found that he was quite good at sourcing buttons and fripperies. More surprisingly, he actually had a respectable eye for line, and more than once I took his advice on the shape of a skirt or pair of trousers.

  Things were going so well that I decided to treat myself to an afternoon at the sales: I felt my shoe situation was not all that it could be. The twin absences of a social life and rent meant that my finances were off the critical list, if still in intensive care.

  And so it was that I was patrolling along South Molton Street when a voice called to me, a voice as soft and unsettling as a moth landing on a child’s face.

  “It is you, Katie, isn’t it? It’s been such a long, long time.”

  I turned around. Juliet. Mad, bad Juliet, Penny’s half sister. Ludo used to go white at the very mention of her name. I’d sat next to her once at some family do, a wedding or funeral. She’d spent the whole meal murmuring appalling secrets into my ear about the other guests. Tales of incest, and theft, and murder. Penny hated her, and for once her excessive emotion was justified.

  “Juliet, how nice.”

  “How lucky to have bumped into you. Why don’t you let me buy you lunch? You look so thin.” It was like being confronted by the weaving head of a cobra. I was mesmerized, paralyzed, and I could not think.

  “That’d be lovely.”

  As ever, Juliet was dressed with the impossible precision and elegance of the utterly self-absorbed. She was wearing a high-buttoned Catherine Walker suit obviously chosen to match her emeralds. She was still beautiful in a repellent, Snow Queen kind of way, with huge dark eyes and cheekbones too sharp to be English, too delicate to be Slavic. Her skin had, with age, taken on the fascinating but creepy translucency of a fetus. Sitting opposite her a few minutes later in the Connaught, I was reminded of a slow-moving creature of the night I’d once seen in a documentary, a kind of lemur, called an aye-aye, which could turn its head almost all the way round and picked white grubs out of crevices with one enormously elongated finger. Like it, she radiated a timeless evil, somehow beyond the petty malice that infects most of us.

  “So,” she began after ordering a bottle of champagne and engaging in some initial rudimentary pleasantries, “you know how I have always felt you were a kindred spirit. And now I hear that my dear, dear sister has thrust you also from the bosom of the family. I know what it is like to be isolated, and rejected.”

  Her eyes lied eloquently of the indignities and cruelty inflicted upon her. Juliet had, according to Ludo, spent much of her youth in a lunatic asylum. She had emerged exquisite but damaged: a famous, fatal, beauty. She married a property developer who was intent only on a trophy wife and proceeded to cuckold him with his best friend, his brother, and his father. She left the marriage a wealthy woman, but a pariah.

  “Well, you could say that I had it coming. You’ve heard about the circumstances.”

  She took my hand in her long, dry fingers. “My darling, do you not see that that is their way, to make you feel that it is all your fault? First they break you, and then they demand that you thank them for breaking you. You must not turn against yourself.”

  “Oh well, I’m not, really. Actually I’ve got something—”

  “You must not turn your hatred on yourself,” she stressed again, “but you must turn it against them. Yes, against them. And what you need is a weapon.”

  “A weapon? What sort of weapon?”

  I knew that everything that Juliet ever said had a purpose. Time and experience had stripped away everything unnecessary or inefficient, leaving her as perfect as an arrowhead. She was not a maker of idle chat.

  “Katie, what do you want from life?” Before I had a chance to reply in some general terms, she added, “Would you like to work again in some capacity, in some higher capacity, for Penny Moss?”

  “That’s not very likely, is it? Given, given . . . everything.”

  “I suppose when I spoke of a weapon, I meant a lever of some kind, a tool with which to . . . bargain.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Juliet, what are you getting at?”

  “Has my dear sister ever told you about her first work for the cinema?”

  I tried to remember. Had she been one of the girls chasing John, Paul, George, and (bafflingly) Ringo in Hard Day’s Night? Was her face caught for a moment, reflected in a mirror in that film where Mick Jagger fucks with James Fox’s head? Was it some Visconti masterpiece? I thought I remembered Penny claiming all of these.

  “She may have; I don’t remember.”

  “I think it rather unlikely. You see, it was not the sort of film she would like the world to know about. You must remember that things were very difficult for Penny back in the sixties, after she emerged from RADA. The problem was that although she had certain . . . assets, she really was quite a terrible actress. And so the usual progression from regional repertory to West End wasn’t on for her. Yes, those were difficult years. Which made her error of judgment perfectly understandable.”

  “What error of judgment?”

  “Albert and Clittoria, I believe it was called.”

  I laughed incredulously. “Wait a minute, are you trying to tell me that Penny made a porn film?”

  “Yes. Quite an advanced one, for its time. Very few of us know about it. I went with . . . well, that doesn’t matter, but I went to see it at a specialist cinema club in Greek Street.”

  “But how did you know it was showing?”

  “Oh, I didn’t, but . . . my friend at the time wanted to take me to experience something novel, and then there she was . . . performing. I confronted her about it afterward, and she had to admit it. She swore me to secrecy, and I have kept the secret till this day.”

  Waiting for the right moment to detonate it, I thought.

  “Look, Juliet, I really don’t know why you’re telling me this.”

  “Come on, Katie, you disappoint me. I mentioned before the weapon, the lever. A copy of Albert and Clittoria must still exist somewhere. These things don’t just disappear. If you were to find it, then Penny would, I’m sure, grant you almost anything you were to ask.”

  The cunning old bitch, I thought. But I can’t pretend I wasn’t interested. Here was a ladder that could take me back to where I belonged. But blackmail was so ugly. Could I really stoop that low? Low enough to brush hands with the serpent Juliet? It was food for thought.

  “Oh look, the bill,” she said. “You must let me.”

&nbs
p; “Jonah?”

  It was two days later, and Jonah had come round to fix the leaking skylight in the kitchen.

  “Yeth?” He had a mouthful of screws.

  “Have you ever had anything to do with . . . films?”

  “What thort of . . .”

  “Dirty films.”

  Jonah dropped his screwdriver and spat out the screws, put put put.

  “For God’s sake, Katie, you’re not going to ask me to get you into the porn industry, are you? I can’t do that, it wouldn’t be right. Okay, so the money’s good while you’re still young, but it doesn’t last. And there’s AIDS. You can do better than that.”

  “No, no, no, you misunderstand me. I meant haven’t you got any contacts in . . . distributing the videos. I assumed that people like you . . . I mean people involved in the what-do-you-call-it, underworld, did things . . . like . . . that.”

  Jonah still looked wary. “I may know a man who knows a man. Why?”

  “It’s nothing sinister, it’s just that there’s a particular film, a classic, I suppose you could say, that I’d like to get hold of, for sentimental reasons. . . .”

  We were almost there. The first appointment was scheduled for a Monday, in Winchester. We’d taken on Pat as our driver, on the understanding that he get a new anorak, fumigate his van, and park it well out of the buyers’ eyeshot. By five o’clock on Friday there was just one sample left unfinished, but it was an important one, my showcase halter-neck wrap dress. I asked Vimla to come in to do it on the Saturday, and she didn’t seem to mind, as long as she could sort out some child care. Latifa also volunteered to come in, mainly because she liked hanging around with me, but there were always little jobs I could find for her about the place. I, on the other hand, once I had opened up the office, had nothing much to do, albeit in a calm-before-the-storm kind of way. Bliss.

  At nine o’clock Latifa appeared at the door, rolling her eyes.

  “Katie, trouble.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s Vimla. She called me at home this morning. Her child minder’s run off with a man who delivers hot face towels to curry restaurants. She’s got no one to look after the baby.”

  Shit. Vimla was the best seamstress we had, one of the best, in fact, that I had ever seen. Even if I could persuade one of the other women to come in to finish the job, it wouldn’t be the same quality.

  “Couldn’t you go and baby-sit for her for a couple of hours?”

  Latifa looked worried. “Yeah, if you want, but I’m a bit scared of kids. I always drop them, or leave them behind in shops, or give them the wrong stuff to eat.”

  I had an impulse.

  “I’ll tell you what, Latifa, I’ve got nothing much to do today. Why don’t I leave you in charge, and I’ll look after Vimla’s baby for the morning. It shouldn’t take her more than a couple of hours to finish the job.”

  Was it some sly squeak from my ovaries? Curiosity? Boredom? I don’t know, but it proved fateful. I phoned Vimla, who seemed content, if baffled, by the arrangement. Then, standing up quickly, I somehow managed to overtip a full cup of cold, neglected coffee over my outfit.

  “Fuck fuck fuck,” I swore quietly to myself. “I said I’d be straight round. Do you think I’ve got time to nip home and change?”

  “It’s a bit tight, Katie. But if you’re only baby-sitting, why not just put on something from the factory?”

  I had a quick look in the machine room. I didn’t want to risk wearing one of the samples, so it was a choice of hideous skirts and terrible tops.

  “What about these?” said Latifa, smiling and holding up two pieces of malevolent pink nylon tracksuit.

  “My God, do we still make those? I thought they’d been humanely killed.”

  “Just a couple left over. Go on, it’d be funny seeing you in this.”

  And she was right. The idea of it tickled me, well, pink. I put it on and Latifa emitted a high-pitched squeal of laughter. I joined in.

  “Just let me do this,” she said, taking a handful of my hair and tying it into a topnot with a glittery hairband she’d found on one of the tables. She bit her lip with glee. “There, perfect!”

  What the hell? It might be amusing to wander around Kilburn in disguise. After all, haven’t I always been a bit of an actress?

  Vimla lived in a big council block not far from me in Kilburn. Even on a bright, fresh morning like this, it was a grim place. I walked around it for twenty minutes trying to find out how to get in, but it seemed that wherever I turned I’d meet a slab of concrete, or a wall of glass, or find myself suddenly deep in the stinking, dripping, subterranean car park. So I phoned up to her on my mobile and asked her to meet me in the street.

  Vimla’s baby, a little girl called Seema, had a scrunched-up face and a disconcertingly full head of hair, which made her look a little like some scary trophy in a rain-forest clearing, designed to ward off evil spirits or strangers. She was fast asleep.

  “I know you’ll be careful with my baby,” Vimla said hopefully. “Here is bottle, here is nappy. Feed please in two hours.”

  “She’ll be fine with me, I’m used to kids,” I lied.

  What on earth was I playing at? Scratch the squeak from the ovaries: I must have been insane. As soon as Vimla got on the bus, Seema woke up and started to wail. Thank God it was sunny. There was a park just off the High Road. It was quite nicely kept, with tennis courts and a toddlers’ play area, as well as wilder bits harboring drunks and worse. I don’t know why, but I’d grown fond of it, and I often spent a half hour there reading a book or a magazine or just watching the elaborate courtship of the pigeons.

  Walking the pram in the weak sunlight calmed the baby. She looked up at me with her black eyes, and I wondered what she saw. A high-flying fashion designer, friends in all the right places, beautiful flat, handsome and devoted partner? A single mum, scrimping on milk to pay for the smack? Or just a blur because little babies don’t know how to focus?

  “Katie!”

  I looked up. A group of men, some sitting on a wall, others lolling on the ground, had turned to face me. Hard faces, some florid but scraped clean, some pale and stubbled. Hair—dirty white, nicotine yellow, greasy brown—went in all directions, like a turbulent current playing over a dying coral reef. They were clutching the usual drunk’s assortment of aviation-grade lager, British sherry, Thunderbird wine, and cheap cider.

  “Katie!” the voice repeated. “Don’t tell me you’ve been snatching babies again.”

  It was Jonah. He seemed to be at the epicenter of the group. But what was he doing with the drunks? He may not have been a regular in the Tatler diary, but I’d assumed he moved in a slightly higher society than this. And then I saw the books. The reading group.

  “Well, we can’t all be beyond good and evil,” I said back pertly, which was one of those remarks that sound funny at the time but turn out not to mean anything when you replay them later. Nevertheless he laughed, and the others joined in, raggedly.

  “Come on over and meet the boys. We’re discussing the point at which it becomes illogical to continue asking ‘Why?’ ”

  Unsavory though the members of Jonah’s academy were, I had nothing much else to do, and I thought he might be offended if I turned down his offer while continuing to push my burden around the park. Anyway, wouldn’t we all like to know the point at which it becomes illogical to continue asking “Why?” A place was made for me and the pram in what now took on the form of a rough circle around Jonah. They may have been drinking and scruffy, but at least they didn’t smell, which said something. In fact, I’d noticed how the drunks of Kilburn always began the day looking spick-and-span, as though a team of devoted wives had got them ready for the day ahead, straightening ties, brushing jackets, pecking cheeks with a fond “Have a nice day at the office.” The splattering vomit, the spray of blood and mucus, the growing stain at the crotch, all followed much later.

  “We’ve all been there,” Jonah was saying, “when s
ome young brat keeps asking ‘Why?’ ‘Why can’t I have that bike?’ ‘Because I can’t afford it,’ you say. ‘Why can’t you afford it?’ ‘Because I haven’t got the money.’ ‘Why haven’t you got the money?’ ‘Because I haven’t a job.’ ‘Why haven’t you a job?’ ‘Because I hit the foreman.’ ‘Why did you hit the foreman?’ ‘Because I was drunk.’ ‘Why was you drunk?’ And on it goes.”

  There was a general murmur of comprehension and agreement. Someone said, “Ah, the young pup, he’d be feelin’ the back of my hand.” Another added, “The price of bikes an’ all.”

  “Well,” continued Jonah, “there’s a time when this same young buck asks why is it wrong to lie, or to steal, or to kill. And what do you say?”

  “The church says they’re all wrong. There’s a Commandment for each of ’em, sure to Jesus Christ all-fecken’-mighty.”

  “Well, you might say that, but that’s hardly a philosophical answer, is it? It’s wrong because some book says it’s wrong. And the young fella, now he can still say ‘Why?’—‘Why does the book say it’s wrong?’—and there’s nothing illogical in it.”

  “Ah, but the book’s only the Word of God, is it not?”

  “Fine, so you say that the Bible is correct because it is the Word of God. But what if God had said something different? What if the Commandment had been Thou shalt kill?”

  “Why would he say that?”

  “Why shouldn’t he?”

  “Because that would be wrong.”

  “Well, here’s a development. You’re saying God says what is right because it’s right, not that whatever God says is right.”

  There was a long pause, followed by a few ahs and ohs, which may or may not have signaled understanding.

  “And if that’s what you’re saying, we still aren’t at the bottom of it, and our young hooligan can still ask ‘Why?,’ can’t he, without being illogical.”

  Again, a murmur of consent.

  “And the truth of it is, you never get to the bottom, you never reach a solid foundation. Someone might say that what is right is what promotes the general happiness. . . .”