And I felt more alone than I could ever have imagined.
CHAPTER 6
SAM MANDOVINI'S over-bright clothes did nothing for my hangover—and she wouldn't stop talking, her voice low and monotonous, which didn't help either.
“I just can't believe it,” she mumbled. “I spoke to her on Wednesday morning. On the phone. She was working from home.” She was distracted, picking at the tasselled hem of her crop-top, looking at the ground, the street, the sky—anywhere but at me. I stood on the pavement, because she had not yet thought to invite me in. The London fumes were making me feel sick.
I had woken late, with the sun shining directly into my eyes. Dizziness and nausea had struck the moment I tried to lift my head. This wasn't just a headache; this was the kind of hangover that convinces you you're genuinely ill. Grilled some bacon for a sandwich, nearly threw it up. Ran a hot bath, couldn't face it. Switched on the telly and lay on my bed, not really watching, and wondered whether the black coffee I was cradling was such a good idea after all. But being alone with my thoughts didn't suit me either, and in any case I had a job on later in the day. Time to get going. I went to the corner shop and bought a newspaper, which I couldn't face reading. Eventually I admitted to myself that my first duty of the day was to deal with Verity's Filofax.
It was sitting on the table in the living room, with the keys and the postcard next to it—Paris, babes, slay 'em or die!!!—and I had decided that maybe I could delay the Filofax by going to see Sam. Perhaps she would help with it. I flicked through it, trying to gauge the scale of the task. Names and addresses, some that I knew, many I had never heard of; diary dates heavily circled or with exclamation marks next to them—dates she had never mentioned. There was even an entry for the day she had fallen: “3.30,” ringed, with “B. Gap Hotel, thatched bar” next to it, and below that, “A259 => Eastbourne. R turn—BIRLING GAP.” Three-thirty—five hours before she fell. What had she done with those hours? Who had she spent them with? I looked at a map. Birling Gap was between Brighton and Eastbourne, on the coast near Beachy Head. Whatever she had been doing there, I couldn't see how it could have kept her more than a couple of hours. If she had been there at three thirty, she would have had time to get back to Jim's by half past seven for her date with good old Harry—Harry who, it seemed, knew next to nothing about the life of his closest friend. I folded the Filofax back together, and trudged to the tube station.
And now, with my hangover ripening nicely, I was facing Sam and wondering if she would be any help at all.
“I mean, it's just dreadful.” Her voice was flat and dull. She studied the buttonholes of her tiny fuzzy pink cardigan. Sailcloth trousers and black platform shoes completed her outfit. “It's just...”
Her gaze flicked to me and then away, to follow a bus as it growled past. “She... I can't believe she...” Finally her eyes locked with mine, and widened in surprise. “Oh... I'm sorry, Harry. I'm just... come in. You look dreadful.”
It's always nice to start the day with a compliment.
She led the way. A piece of paper had been stuck to the wall with masking tape, falling away where it had pulled at the flaking pale green paint: “Verity Hadley, Sam Mandovini, Fashion Services,” and an arrow pointing up. Another beginning, I suppose. The day I began to look for the truth about Verity.
The studio was three storeys up, right at the top of a mouldering building in the no man's land that fringes Soho to the north. You entered through an anonymous door squeezed between a shop selling old vinyl records—singles in a tottering wooden tray outside, LPs in a chaos of piles and racks inside—and a boutique with a tiny mullioned window and a minimalist display: two lava lamps and a cigarette lighter shaped like a penis. Each storey of the building was separated by four narrow flights of stairs. The boards were worn and grey, with green paint at the edges. The turns between each flight were so tight you had to edge your way round.
Verity and Sam had the usual Soho collection of neighbours. The first floor was a knocking shop (“As in ‘knock twice and ask for Rosie,'” Verity used to say). The second floor was a flat; an old and completely silent man lived there, with a wild look in his eyes, a drooping fleshy nose, and a torn once-white vest. When anyone came or went, he would open his door a slit and watch them pass. He never spoke. Verity and Sam had decided unilaterally that they would call him Norman. Verity swore she'd seen young women traipsing in and out, and that he held regular orgies, but he was seventy-five if he was a day, and the flat stank—you could smell it even when the door was closed.
“Poor Verity,” Sam muttered, as she climbed up past Rosie's knocking shop. She glanced back over her shoulder to check I was following. “And there's Paris in two weeks. This is a nightmare.” The old man's door was closed, but she yelled cheerfully, “Mornin', Norman,” and paused briefly on the landing for a reply. Something rattled woodenly behind the door. Sam wrinkled her nose, and resumed climbing.
‘I mean, why now? Paris was going to be dynamite. Her collection's brilliant—really, it is. She was so happy.” The stairs ended with a blank door, flat and painted a deep, flaking blue. There was a Yale lock set into a flat metal plate. Sam prodded at it with a key. “Why didn't she tell me?” She pushed into the studio without looking back.
*
It was a long, low room with floor-to-ceiling windows along the length of one wall. Ancient cast-iron radiators stood in front of them; the marbled lino had curled up round them, and buckled seams stretched in parallel lines across the floor. Rolls and swatches of fabric were jumbled on trestles, making the room almost impassable and filling the air with the sharp, solvent smell of new cloth.
A young man was just visible in a far corner, half buried under a mound of gaudy material. He was bent over a sewing machine, his wet-look hair almost touching it. As he worked, his head wove slowly back and forward as though he was trying to puzzle the meaning of what he was creating. In fact, he was so close to the gauzy orange fabric that I was half convinced his nose-stud would catch on it and rip it. Or the spike in his eyebrow. Or the one just above his chin. Nearer the window, another boy was fussing around a clothes dummy, also pierced in unlikely places—him, not the dummy. He was scrawny, dressed in army fatigues and a vermilion-sequined waistcoat. He had a mouthful of pins and a haggard look. “You remember Jean-Marie and Nathan, don't you, Harry?” Sam said.
I didn't. The boy at the machine glanced up for a moment but said nothing. The other looked over and said, “Mmm-mm-mmmm,” through his mouthful of pins.
“Nathan, Nathan, looser, love-bun. Pleeease!” Sam dashed over to the dummy and primped at a seam near the waistline. To me the dummy looked as though it (He? She? Impossible to tell) was wearing a patchwork of discarded plastic bags—but then, I was far too unhip for the fashion business, as Verity had never stopped pointing out. Even Nathan's studs unnerved me. Sam looked back at me, still fiddling with whatever the dummy was wearing. “Made from supermarket bags,” she called, in my direction. “Part of Verity's collection. Brilliant, isn't it?” Her hands fluttered uselessly for a moment, and then she collected herself and walked back to me, suddenly matter-of-fact and bleak. “’Damaged Goods‚’ she called it.” She moved her finger along an imaginary banner and gazed at me expectantly. “The name of her collection. ‘Damaged Goods.’ Had a slogan too: ‘Damaged clothes for damaged people in a damaged world.’ Brilliant.”
And there was me, thinking fashion had something to do with dress sense.
Sam nodded for me to turn and lead the way to the office area. I did, skirting another trestle, which threatened to topple several tons of samples on top of me. Two facing design desks were partitioned from the rest of the room by another dummy, with a note pinned to its heart reading, “Abandon hope, all ye...” One of Sam's. She gestured for me to sit on Verity's stool, then leaned against the edge of the desk and pointed at the scraps and drawings in front of me. “This was the big one,” she said calmly. “I really think she'd cracked it. Paris was just goi
ng to be amazing.”
Verity had always been cagey about her designs. She'd always told me to wait and see. On the occasions when I met her at the studio, if one of her creations was on the mannequin, she'd always screamed shrilly at me not to look. I'd never been allowed near her desk. Perhaps she thought I wouldn't understand, and perhaps she was right. In front of me was a series of sketches of waifs and thugs. Their clothes were ripped and unshaped, partial garments held together by outsize zigzag stitching that looked more like the scars of Frankenstein's surgeon than the work of a seamstress. Gashed leather flapped around their toes—when they had shoes at all. Vivid streaks of filth patterned their bare skin, and there was lots of that. The models all had cuts, or trickles of blood, or swollen bruises that puffed their eyes shut. Some, of both sexes, looked impassive; others were drawn as if they were in pain. On some, the clothes seemed to have been ripped away. Breasts and genitals were half-covered by inadequate arms and hands. Beneath uneven punky hair, their faces were wide with horror or thrill—and what shocked me was that I couldn't tell the difference.
“The ultimate fashion victims,” Sam breathed. “Real victims. Says it all.”
I had always felt excluded from Verity's work, shut out because I was inadequate and could not share her visions. Now I was glad that she hadn't shown it to me, because I don't know what I could possibly have said that wouldn't have widened the gap between us. And for the first time it occurred to me that maybe she hadn't wanted me to judge her because, on the surface of it, Verity's collection was just another ridiculous piece of fashion madness. But looking at it, and thinking of her, looking at all the agonisingly fragile people she had conjured, I felt a tiny shock of guilt and grief. “Damaged Goods”… well, Verity certainly was that, now.
‘I never knew,” I said.
“Yes. Well…” Sam answered brusquely. She pulled up a sheet of paper that had been flopped over the back of the desk. It floated down over the pictures, covering them all. In a way it was a relief, but it did seem horribly final.
“Look, I know this is daft, Sam,” I said, “but I really thought she was happy. I know she's always up and down, but I never thought the downs were so bad that she'd—you know... I thought she was on a bit of a high.”
Sam shrugged. “Me too,” she said simply. “Paris was it. We were both going to make it big. Big.” For a moment she looked utterly lost.
There was a yell and a crinkly thud from Nathan's direction. The mannequin had fallen on him. Flailing limbs and shreds of plastic were everywhere. Jean-Marie strolled casually over to help him, and I worried all over again about whether the studs would catch on anything. Sam sighed. My hangover thumped. “What am I going to do, Harry?” she said bleakly. “I'll have to move to a smaller studio, lose one of the boys, heaven knows which. Or both. Maybe go and work for one of the big houses again.”
I rubbed my throbbing forehead and tried to keep calm.
The charitable way to put it is that Sam was an enigma to me. I could never tell what she was thinking. She and Verity had met at art school. They'd got on, but they weren't particularly close. They'd been flatmates for a while, and then they'd gone their separate ways. Their friendship had grown stronger when they were in their late twenties. They had both decided to set up their own studio, and to keep costs down they had decided to share office space and apprentices-cum-dogsbodies (Verity called them rent-boys, but not to their faces). Sitting together all day, sharing the dramas and traumas of fashion life, they had grown closer. Sam quickly became Verity's best girlfriend. It was about then that Verity started trying to matchmaker—“Sam's gorgeous, and she's just desperate for a hunk like you. And she really likes you, she told me...” But the truth was that I hardly knew her, and I did not have eyes for her at all. She was gorgeous, but I found her more striking than beautiful. She could have been a model. Tall, high-boned, gaunt, with astonishingly sleek, almost white hair. Her powerful pale eyes, to me, expressed almost nothing. I couldn't read her. She made me uneasy.
“Nathan?” she called anxiously, distracted again by muffled sounds of plastic being crimped and pleated. She half got up, craning her neck. He squinted at her, his mouth still full of pins, then bent back to his plastic bags. Sam settled again, looking uneasy.
“Look, I've been going through her Filofax,” I said.
“Nathan!” Sam leaped off her stool and bustled over to him. “Not the red, the blue. Blue, blue, blue.” She fished around in the heaped plastic bags around the base of the dummy's stand, and pulled up a thick navy bag with white lettering. “Blue for the patches, red for the lining.” She shoved the bag at him. “For goodness' sake!” She picked her way back towards me. ‘Listen, Harry, I really can't think about it with all this going on, it's just too much.”
I sighed. “Okay. Look, can you spare me a few minutes some time when you're not so busy?” I slipped past her to get my coat, which was on a hook behind Verity's desk.
Sam hovered round me, uncomfortably close. My head thumped harder. “It really is just a nightmare at the moment,” she twittered. “There's Paris coming up, and now I've got to do it all on my own, and—”
—and I gave up.
“Sam? Fuck Paris. ”
She looked at me like a startled doe. I pushed briskly past her, and slammed the door as I left—unnecessary, but I couldn't help myself. Perhaps there's a bit of the drama queen in all of us.
I clattered down three flights, and had almost reached the next floor down when the door above creaked open. I heard her boots on the bare boards.
“Harry?” Sam called. She sounded anxious.
I stopped and listened. There was a longish silence, which I suppose I could have broken. “Yes” would have done the trick nicely—but I didn't. After a while, I heard the door scrape shut again. I continued down, more slowly. The door to Norman's was open a slit. A wild and watery blue eye stared at me. I snarled at him and feinted a lunge. The door clicked sharply shut. That cheered me a little, and I rattled down the last stairs and out on to the street.
I had work to do.
*
It was a family portrait. The Carlisles: a simple enough job, but time-consuming—and most definitely not what I would have chosen to do that afternoon. I had rung to ask if they would consider rescheduling, but they refused. Mr. and Mrs. had both taken the afternoon off work; they had given the nanny a half-day, the elder child had been brought home early from nursery. I can't say I blame them, but I could have done without the lecture Mrs Carlisle gave me on the phone.
“Mr. Waddell—” This, despite my pleas to call me Harry; everything about the way she spoke was designed to put me in my place. “I'm sure we're all terribly sorry about your friend, but I really don't think you understand. It's all very well for you to change your plans at short notice, but some of us have other commitments. It cost a great deal of time and money to arrange this afternoon. I've had to cancel two very important meetings. Goodness knows how my husband managed to get the time off. We're paying for the nanny even though we're not using her, and we've already paid you—quite handsomely, I might add. We've had several far better quotes since we talked to you, but we'd already booked you and I always stand by my agreements...” She went on, but I shut it out. I know when I'm beaten. Her voice had a nervous edge, as though she was just barely keeping control of a chaotic and impossibly busy life. Her substitute for control, I thought, was an insistence on formality. The effect was of a woman so brittle that if you shook her hand it would probably shatter.
“That's fine, Mrs. Carlisle.” I tried not to snap. Perhaps she was just having a bad day. “I do understand. We'll stick to the original plan. I'll be with you at one-thirty.”
‘Well, good. Oh, stop it, Giles!” A small child's howl was building in the background. I hastily confirmed their address and rang off.
The conversation was still fresh in my memory when I pressed their doorbell. I'd had plenty of time to think about it because I'd arrived three-quarters of an
hour early. I bought a sandwich and parked round the corner from their house, eating to kill time and listening to the news on the radio.
For me, severe hangovers bring with them a kind of self-hatred, and now, with nothing else to occupy me, it crept over me. I was still smarting from my conversation with Adam the night before. I had been angry. I had repaid his effort and concern with irritation at every question he asked, every point he made. I needed Adam, now more than ever, but I'd done my best to push him away. Fresh from that, I had sworn at Sam. Replaying the incident now, her behaviour seemed more like distress than disinterest. And with Sam thoroughly alienated, the crowning glory was that I had now also managed to piss off Mrs. Carlisle, a woman with whom I was going to spend the next several hours, being paid to make her and her family look good.
I groaned aloud.
On the news: some crucial negotiation or other had failed, violence was expected; stories of children lost or excluded or starving; riots, murders, arms, and executions. The old, relentless suffering, inflicted in the name of what someone somewhere believed was right.
I was ten minutes late ringing the doorbell, and my eyes were red. And, bless her, Mrs. Carlisle was kind to me. “Harry? Hi. Emma Carlisle. Thanks so much for coming. I'm so sorry we couldn't rearrange. You must have thought I was a real dragon on the phone...” She was charming. She talked without stopping until she had ushered me in, taken my coat, and led me through the house to a kitchen at the rear. Coffee and two children were produced: a baby, and a toddler who hid behind her legs and refused to talk to me. The husband thumped heavily downstairs and introduced himself—Tom. We chatted for a few minutes, and then Emma suggested we get on with it, briskly, but pleasantly enough.
Their garden had crumbling red brick walls, softened by flowers and climbing plants. It must have been about seventy feet long. There were a couple of small trees, plentiful shrubs, trellises of jasmine and roses. The house itself was four storeys and double-fronted. This was a smart area of Fulham; the Carlisles weren't short of a few pennies. For my purposes, the garden was perfect. The early afternoon sun was slightly hazed, blunting the sharp edges of the shadows while keeping the colour and definition of the gardenscape.
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