Hey Yeah Right Get a Life

by Helen Simpson

  A forest of trees stood shining in their front-room havens, winking their fairy lights at her as she stood out on the pavement. Round the rugged rock the ragged rascal ran. The rooms which sheltered them would be balmy with spice, evergreen and zest. In the light of their beauty she felt a kick of stubborn happiness as well as everything else. She blew her nose like a trumpet. Then she picked up her carrier bags of presents one by one, and set off on the rest of the walk home.

  Wurstigkeit

  ‘What have you told them at work?’ she asked.

  ‘What have you told them at yours?’ I countered.

  ‘I don’t need to tell them anything,’ she said, looking down her long nose at me unsmilingly. ‘I’m in charge.’

  We had met as arranged on the pavement outside the Huguenot house in Fournier Street, the one whose area railings are headed with thistles rather than spears. I had been out east that morning to see the man at the Regulators about some recent embarrassing losses suffered by Leviathan Bank, whose compliance department I was running. On the way back from Canary Wharf to my lunchtime assignation in Spitalfields I had had the bad luck to be driven by one of those furious obsessive cabbies who hate traffic and know a thousand secrets about London’s backstreets. He scorned the obvious routes, refused Commercial Road, shot off up in the direction of Bow then lost his temper at the first red light and tore off round Salmon Lane to grind to a swearing, cursing and of course entirely foreseeable halt on the Mile End Road. I was feeling mildly sick by this point but he would not be satisfied until he’d swung us madly north up into Bethnal Green. At Weavers Fields I began to despair of ever escaping, but then at last he dropped me at the top of Brick Lane, expressing indignant incredulity at the one-way system, which, as any child knows, is nothing if not long-established.

  Even so, I was early. I was feeling buoyant and restless when I looked forward to the next hour or so. While I waited for Isobel Marley, I watched an old man running for a bus which had overshot the stop. He was creeping along, legs low down like a jaguar stealthily approaching its prey through the rainforest, with a broad ingratiating grin of pain on his face. I’m not really young any more, it came to me, wincing in sympathy; but then (cheering up) I’m not that old yet either.

  Isobel’s black cab drew up at last, gleaming and purring. She took her time unpacking her long-limbed full-bellied self from the back. It had taken her over twenty minutes just from Gray’s Inn Road, and she made the driver write out a receipt. We exchanged nods, avoiding each other’s eyes. Guilt and complicity hovered in the air like creaky old stage conventions.

  ‘So,’ she said, after we had exchanged formal greetings. ‘Where is this secret cavern of temptation?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to say,’ I said, truthfully. ‘You’ll just have to follow me.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’ she hissed as I led her down past Fashion Street and the police station, then left into Chicksand Street. ‘Ludicrous! Who do they think they are?’

  I had met Isobel Marley two days before at Iddon Featherstone’s reception for their corporate finance clients in Seething Lane. Iddon Featherstone is a smallish law firm and its partners are always hoping I’ll put work their way. Sometimes I do. I went along this time because I’m curious about their mooted merger with the German law firm Marbeiter Rotenhart, which is looking both inevitable and, for some Iddon Featherstone partners, disastrous.

  ‘The trouble is, Laura, we need more than a toehold in Frankfurt,’ fretted John Mannion, head of Corporate Finance. ‘We may not like it but we’ve got to bite the bullet.’

  ‘Difficult,’ I commiserated, taking a sip of mineral water. I glanced round the room. It was a picture by Manet rather than Monet. Everyone there was in the self-concealing monochrome of corporate life. The only flashes of colour to contradict the moonlit effect were provided by the men’s ties.

  Not far from us a very tall strong-featured woman stood talking to Iddon Featherstone’s managing partner, Graham Groton. She must have been six or seven months pregnant, and I couldn’t help thinking how much better pregnancy looks in tailored worsted than in the more traditional maternity smocks.

  ‘Of course, it’s the way the whole world’s having to go now,’ I said. ‘There’s been a positive stampede of mergers in the broking sector. Everyone’s very jumpy.’

  We both watched as a waiter approached and the tall woman held out her glass for more champagne.

  ‘That’s illegal now, isn’t it?’ said John Mannion. ‘Boozing while up the duff? You’d get lynched in the States for less than that.’

  ‘Good luck to her,’ I said.

  ‘It’ll be her fourth,’ said John Mannion, and for a moment I thought he was referring to her alcohol intake. ‘Isobel Marley QC. She’s done a great job for us on that money laundering case in the Philippines.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I frowned, recognising the name from an article about high-flying women in that week’s Financial Times. ‘In the Updraught.’

  We watched Graham Groton raise his glass to her. He is rather short, Graham, and she was having to talk down to him.

  ‘I only like tall men,’ I said flippantly.

  I’d been working like a maniac towards the CGGI deal that the board kept insisting should go ahead despite all the counter indications of shadiness I had been urging them to consider. My integrity was on the line. The man I had met earlier that year and whom I might, given time, have grown to love, had understandably grown tired during this CGGI case of waiting until ten or eleven at night for my work-weary self to grace him with an hour or two, and had gone.

  ‘I like to look up at a man,’ I explained.

  ‘To,’ said John Mannion, with a startled roll of the eye. I realised he was several inches taller than me.

  ‘No, at,’ I said, and smiled.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Got you. But let me introduce you to Isobel. You must meet her.’

  Isobel Marley had been listening for long enough to Graham Groton’s gung-ho line on the merger and how we were all now part of one big European family for her face to register as we approached a flash almost of joy. Only almost, for her face was singularly serious, impressively so, and, except for the odd luxury of a frown, impassive.

  ‘But how can Europe be one big happy family,’ I launched in, unable to let this go; it was Europe’s various madly conflicting regulatory regimes which had kept me on fifteen-hour days these last two months. A deal which was whiter than white in one country could be distinctly off-colour in another and downright criminal in a third. The Euro wasn’t the half of it.

  ‘You must feel like the Lone Ranger,’ chuckled John Mannion. ‘You and the other compliance guys. Galloping around after the outlaws. Them thar traders.’

  ‘Hi ho Silver,’ I said. ‘Someone’s got to do it.’

  ‘Not exactly bad news for law firms,’ said Isobel, but her heart wasn’t in it. She had been distracted; she had noticed what no man would ever notice.

  At this point, John Mannion and Graham Groton were drawn away by another Iddon Featherstone partner to meet the grauen emminenz from Marbeiter Rotenhart, who was over in London on a rare dynastic visit.

  Isobel paused, then allowed herself to comment, ‘That’s a nice shirt.’

  I was wearing a white shirt with my grey suit, boringly meek and plain. Only a member of the unofficial ocular freemasonry would have noticed that it was made of nun’s veiling, with a faint grey stripe the width of a pencil lead.

  ‘Why,’ I remembered asking the sales assistant at Wurstigkeit that time, staring hard at the beautiful but after all plain shirt, ‘Why, um, is it so much money, this one?’

  ‘Ah, this one,’ he had replied. ‘Look, there, the stripe, you see? It is because the line is broken.’

  Sure enough there were minute sugar-grain sized gaps in the fine stripe.

  ‘Of course,’ I’d said. And bought it.

  ‘Thank you,’ I now said to Isobel.

  I saw her struggling with herself. She wa
s an intensely competitive type, that much was obvious, and she would not be able to bear not to ask.

  ‘It’s nice cloth,’ I taunted, almost laughing. ‘Like down against the skin. And see, the line is broken.’ I held out my cuff for inspection.

  ‘So it is,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

  She paused again, poker-faced, then could not help herself and asked, ‘It’s not from that shop, is it? That mad shop with the password where they won’t give out their address? What’s it called?’

  ‘Wurstigkeit,’ I said, blushing slightly.

  ‘What a ludicrous idea, a shop with a password,’ she scoffed.

  She couldn’t bear to feel excluded, it was obvious. She was used to being on every list, right at the top.

  ‘It’s eccentric,’ I agreed, blithely.

  ‘Isn’t it terribly expensive?’ she sniffed.

  ‘Not to someone in the updraught,’ I said. ‘Surely.’

  It was far too expensive for me now, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. Since I first visited, Wurstigkeit’s prices had quintupled, sextupled, rising by at least a hundred per cent each year. Market forces!

  Five years ago I had met a man from Shibui Investments for lunch in a restaurant near Liverpool Street. He had been summoned by his mobile to an emergency deal-breaker before we had finished the amuse-gueules and so, finding myself with a rare uncharted hour, I had allowed myself to drift outside mapless into the dusty sun. It was at a point in my life when I could not sleep for worrying. I was starting to experience low-level panic attacks at night when I could hear my jumpy heart and ragged breathing as myriad horrors, regrets, fears and raw-heads hurtled towards me (lying doggo beside my now ex-husband pretending to sleep) in a shower of meteorites. I had taken to carrying with me in my briefcase a collection of small bottles of flowerdew remedies, each claiming to protect against a specific misery. The ones I used most were Rock Water, labelled ‘For the self-repressed who overwork and deny themselves any relaxation,’ and Wood Betony ‘For those who find it difficult to love themselves.’

  Anyway, it was during this window-like hour at a less than euphoric stage in my life that, by chance, I stumbled into Wurstigkeit, which had opened only that week. It was like stepping into the fabled wardrobe and finding yourself in another country. The point was, it was an experience in weightlessness. It subtracted your centre of gravity.

  ‘Wurstigkeit,’ said Isobel. ‘I wonder what that means. Sausage something, it sounds like.’

  ‘Laura,’ said John Mannion, waltzing up with an older man in tow. ‘Laura, I’d like you to meet Günter Mangelkammer. Herr Mangelkammer is head of Commercial Litigation over in Frankfurt. Herr Mangelkammer, this is Laura Collinson, head of Compliance at Leviathan. And this, this is the distinguished QC, Isobel Marley.’

  ‘How fortunate,’ said Isobel, smiling at Herr Mangelkammer. ‘We were just puzzling over the meaning of a German word. Perhaps you will be able to help us.’

  ‘I might be delighted,’ said Herr Mangelkammer warily.

  ‘What was it, Laura?’ Isobel asked.

  ‘Wurstigkeit,’ I said.

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Herr Mangelkammer, visibly relieved. ‘I know this. It is an expression introduced by Bismarck. It describes a mental state. How must I say? To do with sausages.’

  ‘Sausages?’ said John Mannion, his eyebrows in his hair.

  ‘A state of sausage-like behaviour,’ persisted Herr Mangelkammer.

  ‘Sausageness,’ I put forward.

  ‘Sausageness is good,’ he agreed. ‘Meaning, people don’t care. They don’t care a sausage’s worth.’

  ‘They don’t give a fig?’ I offered.

  ‘They don’t give a fuck!’ cried John Mannion, laughing heartily. ‘They don’t give a flying fuck!’

  ‘Your way is better, I think,’ said Herr Mangelkammer, honouring me with a nod.

  We turned from Chicksand Street into Frostric Walk, then down a villainous urinous alley so narrow that where a moment before there had been enough blue sky above to cut out a pair of sailor’s trousers, now there was nothing but a forget-me-not ribbon.

  ‘Are you quite sure you know where we’re going?’ asked Isobel with some asperity as she picked her well-shod way between various noisome puddles.

  We took a twist at the end here, then on to one last dark paved lane, and we had arrived.

  ‘You must be joking,’ said Isobel flatly, staring at the scuffed and numberless portal with the blacked-out picture window beside it.

  She glanced at her watch with irritation, then at me.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ I said.

  On the wall at the level where a doorbell should have been was the bas-relief head of a satyr, and into the ancient whorled ear of this creature I whispered the password. Then I stepped back and waited.

  The door opened slowly on backward hinges, and we followed. Inside, it was the hall of the Mountain King filled with the trousseau of his robber bride. I caught my breath, and started to feel bouncy and oxygenated, airy and greedy. My eyes lusted around all over the place. The colours teased and tingled and clashed like music, while the walls receded into velvety darkness. I tried to keep some semblance of indifference but the smiles kept crossing my lips, and soon I was cooing and clucking and gasping as I moved from rail to rail. Isobel riffled through this rack and that, pursing her lips. I saw the stuff through her eyes, as when I’d looked in for the first time five years ago. What a load of tat, I’d thought. What a heap of magpie rubbish, little bright bits of rubbish.

  Then I’d suddenly got caught. Was it a corsair’s slanted stripes down the front of a structured cardigan? I’d thought, how can they charge more than a fiver for this nonsense; and, a second later, the scales had fallen from my eyes. I’d understood that here was something indefensible at work, and had reached for my chequebook. It was the story of the Emperor’s new clothes, but backwards.

  Now Isobel was reaching for the price tags and huffing and puffing and casting stuff aside with a curled lip.

  ‘Don’t look at the price tags,’ I advised. ‘Look at the clothes.’

  I took a long viridian garment from its hanger and held it out behind her. Instinctively she slid her arms back into the sleeves and shrugged it on. We looked at her guarded face in the long mirror, and at the grande dame opera coat whose plaited, puffy, serpentine collar she had drawn superbly up to her chin.

  ‘No,’ she said, casting it aside. ‘I’d never wear it. When would I wear it.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ I started to say, but decided to wait.

  Perhaps after all she was merely status-seeking, an acquisitive label-conscious shopper. If so, I had misjudged, and this was a waste of time.

  I remembered that FT interview with Isobel Marley. A blur of phrases came back at me, things like, a hundred and twenty per cent, superleague, total commitment, that sort of stuff. She had been quoted as saying, ‘I’m a workaholic, I’m fantastically good at what I do,’ and had rejected the soubriquet of fatcat with talk of freedom and markets. That was all distinctly unpromising. Surely she had no time for anything else.

  On the other hand she had been the one to fall in love with a shirt, I reminded myself; so she must have something.

  ‘There is nothing here that I could wear to work,’ she said. ‘There is nothing here that I could wear at home. Family life. What’s the point?’

  ‘But it’s you, that coat. You can see that,’ I declared. ‘Apotheosis clothes, that’s what this place is for.’

  You would never look at me and think, There goes a well-dressed woman. Outside work I do not dress to please anyone except myself. The concept of rational dress has always appealed strongly: useful pockets and plimsolls and William Morris’ thoughts on vegetable dyes. If I want to look like a happy madwoman, I can. I’m paying for these clothes, I’m having fun. All this goes against the revered French approach: the top two buttons undone; the neat waist cinched; the short short skirt. The French wouldn’t like this shop – i
t’s too eccentric, there’s too much colour. And as for that vile cynical Gallic maxim which holds that clothes should be chosen expressly pour mettre en valeur various good bits of the body! Leg or breast, sir? Bah, I say to this; à bas les vêtements pimpants; pimp clothes I call them. And for your information, no I am not fat. Nor am I thin. I’m just right.

  Then Isobel caved in. Her defences crumbled, reason fled. She didn’t care about the money any more, she stopped looking at the little tickets and their prices. Instead she narrowed her eyes and started to hunt down the most fantastical, the most artfully bizarre. I knew I hadn’t been mistaken. I knew she had an eye. We were two of a kind when it came to this. She’d caught on. She was caught in. From now on she was a driven woman.

  Soon we had amassed enough between us to start trying on. In the little side lavatory off the showroom – Wurstigkeit had nothing as utilitarian as a changing room – with silks and velvets over the rusted old wash basin, elbows in each other’s faces, we struggled into mad dresses, lunatic ensembles. I barely knew this woman, I’d only met her once before, yet here we were taking off our clothes together in a rusty cubicle.

  I tried on a cotton shirt first, raspberry-coloured and almost raspberry-scented as I pulled it over my head. I could smell the cleanness of the cotton, and the pleasant smell of our sweat, recent, slight and grassy, then wafting stronger from under our arms. Touching the cotton to my face, my cheek, I found it as fine as a baby’s skin, and sighed.

  She’s much taller than me, Isobel. I’m not short, but my eyes were level with the great mamelonated nipples of pregnancy spread out by the gauze of her bra. I looked away. I hoped she wouldn’t appraise what she saw of me with that merciless female regard which is so chilling. You must have seen the way women look at each other in dressing rooms or at the gym – furtive, assessing, without lust or kindness, hypercritically alert to any sign of age or deterioration. No wonder there is so little nakedness in British life. We live under a cloud inside our clothes, blue-veined as cheese, bluish-white as milk.