When Life Gives You Lemons

by Fiona Gibson

  She nods.

  ‘Imagine if we had an equivalent for them, like an Ambassador for Youth, who went around asking them how they’re feeling generally, whether they’re experiencing any difficulties in their personal relationships or body issues or whatever …’

  She brightens. ‘D’you think they’d value that? We could have one of those too!’

  ‘No, Rose, I don’t think they would. I think they’d find it weird and intrusive. And if they have issues concerning their job, or anything that’s affecting their performance here …’ I pause. ‘That would be the mentor’s job, wouldn’t it? To support them with that?’

  ‘Right, I see your point,’ she says thoughtfully. While Rose is undoubtedly highly talented when it comes to business negotiations, her people skills can be lacking somewhat.

  ‘I’m delighted that you thought of me for the role, though,’ I add. ‘I mean, I’m flattered.’

  ‘Well, you were my obvious choice.’

  ‘Really?’ Perhaps this is a good thing, I reflect; an indication that she views me as a decent communicator, and approachable – or least that I have a reasonably un-scary face.

  ‘Yes,’ Rose says, repositioning the phone on her desk unnecessarily. ‘I know you don’t talk about it much, Viv. You just work on and on without making a fuss. But I do often see you looking a bit hot.’

  The whole drive home, it’s playing in my mind: so that’s how I’m viewed. Not as someone who’s been doing her best at work, and who has managed the last few months pretty admirably, if I say so myself (despite having married an unfaithful clod), and who deserves to stand on the kitchen table shouting ‘I’m brilliant!’ She hasn’t picked up on any of that. She just sees an unremarkable grafter who works on and on without making a fuss.

  I’m still huffing internally over this, over-reacting perhaps, while I make pleasantries with the after-school club ladies as I pick up Izzy. It’s still buzzing in my brain as we walk home, and Izzy is chattering happily about the model castle (‘with lights in!’) that they’ve been making from old boxes and junk at after-school club, and her eighth birthday, which is still many weeks away (‘Can I have a party?’).

  All the while, I’m thinking, So I don’t make a fuss. Would anyone actually enjoy being described in that way? Not Jules, who has carved out an entirely new, successful career for herself and is clearly loving her life. And not Shelley, who I know makes a fuss on a daily basis – otherwise the numerous families that comprise her caseload wouldn’t have anything like the support she ensures they receive. She deals with child protection issues, alcoholic parents, violent partners, neglect, poverty, mental health issues, drug addiction; she is a walking fuss. Isla, too, makes a fuss in her own persistent, focused way; I know she’s refusing to sit back and accept that the museum may have ‘had its day’, as one of her colleagues suggested recently. As for Penny – her entire life seems to have been fuelled by fuss, from the days when she started selling her clothes on a Portobello market stall to being at the helm of a nationwide fashion chain.

  Fuss is good, I decide as I make dinner. It gets people noticed and makes things happen. ‘Not making a fuss’ seems to equate to remaining under the radar, being insignificant, trying to please and do the right thing, and receiving no recognition for it.

  I’m aware that Rose’s previous PA – my predecessor – was known as a ‘bit of a character’, and a ‘powerhouse’. Although our paths rarely crossed while I was temping, it was clear that she wasn’t the kind of woman Rose would ask to deal with pubic hairs on loo seats, or her patio-hosing man, or to research ‘the best kind of eardrops, the really strong kind – so when you put them in, you can hear the wax crackling. That’s the kind I need. Could you get on to that for me, Viv, and have them delivered tomorrow?’ Sure. Would you like me to drop them into your lugholes while I’m at it?

  I glance across the kitchen at Izzy, who’s doing her homework diligently at the table as I stir our pot of unremarkable, workaday Bolognese. Christ, even my cooking is without fuss. I can remember this being one of my mother’s staples, circa 1983. Nothing wrong with that; she worked full-time in a secondary school, and back then few people knew about preserved lemons and or how to ‘toast’ pine kernels in a pan. If my mum had been presented with a Yotam Ottolenghi cookbook she would have laughed bewilderedly and maybe used it to prop up a wobbly bed.

  So it’s fine, this life of ours. But is ‘fine’ actually enough anymore? Have I slumped, unwittingly, into a dreary working-on-and-on kind of rut, and is that the real reason why my husband stumbled into the knickers of a swishy blonde doctor with perfect teeth?

  Meanwhile Izzy has been given the task of making a poster about wetland habitats in Britain, and the issues and threats they are facing. Yes, she’s the kind of child who works on and on – she actively enjoys homework – but she gives it her all, she goes the extra mile, not to gain praise but because it excites her to do her best.

  When she cooks, it’s a fuss. No one grinds up garlic and rock salt with a pestle and mortar if they want a quick, easy supper. And now, as well as the poster, Izzy has taken upon it herself to make her very own nature magazine: The Wetland Wanderer. I found her some paper and stapled several sheets together, and now she’s filling the pages with facts and drawings, a cartoon strip of a duck family, environment-themed quizzes, a short story about an otter, and a hand-painted poster in the centre featuring a barnacle goose. She’s been using my phone to send photos of her pages to Spencer, who’s responded with, ‘Great work sis!’ And ‘Looking forward to issue two. And a forthcoming media empire!’

  Later, while she has her bath, I try to beat back her chaotic bedroom into some kind of order. And later still, when she’s in bed, I settle downstairs on the sofa with my laptop. I’m intending to browse career advice from those websites aimed at mid-life women; the ones filled with inspiring stories of women who have changed direction and achieved wonderful things.

  I don’t even consider googling Estelle Lang. The last thing I need this evening is to be confronted by her challenging gaze. However, I do find myself veering off track, first as I try again to find out any information about Penny’s boyfriend, Hamish Knowles, the supposedly celebrated composer. Nothing new to unearth there, as far as I can make out.

  Moving on to Penny herself, I sip my lukewarm tea as I flick through interviews with her from back in her heyday (would she take exception to that? That I regard the Seventies as her ‘golden years?’). Although they hark back to a pre-internet era, there’s tons about her online. Some of those early interviews have been reformatted for slick, modern fashion blogs, or scanned in from the original magazine pages.

  When we first became friends, I looked her up and read some of these features out of sheer nosiness. After all, it’s not often you stumble upon someone like Penny Barnett in the park. Izzy and I pored over them together, marvelling over pictures of her as a stunning, vibrant woman in her twenties, not so different to how she is now (she is blessed with one of ‘those’ faces, with big, bright eyes, full lips and incredible cheekbones, that ages beautifully). However, now I’m discovering many more interviews with her – and gorgeous photos – that I’d never seen before. The sight of her smiling face, so open and joyous, plus her glamorous floppy hats and red lipsticked smile, lifts my spirits.

  Since Nick has arrived from New Zealand, I haven’t seen much of her. Despite her grumblings that he’ll ‘only be checking I’m coping’, I have backed off a little, having assumed that they’ll want to spend as much time as possible together. I also worry that his first impression of me is of a raving madwoman (this seems to be bothering me more than it should). Penny has assured me that of course it wasn’t, that he’d been ‘surprised, yes, but impressed by your performance’, and that it was one of the highlights of her year so far. ‘I might start doing it myself,’ she chuckled.

  Curling up on the sofa now, I finish my tea and settle on an article about her from a newspaper’s Sunday supplement in
1978.

  My friends and I loved fashion, it reads, but we had very little money and we couldn’t find clothes we liked. We were paid a pittance in a typing pool in West London. I’d modelled a little, but I wasn’t a big-name model and I didn’t do catwalk or glossy magazines – my look was classed as ‘young and fun’ and I was mainly booked by teenage magazines, or the odd advert for shampoo or lip gloss. And even that was starting to fizzle out.

  By then I had a young son and his father’s architectural practice had gone bust. We’d split up anyway, so there was barely any money, and I had the idea of making clothes to sell at affordable prices to my friends, many of whom were in the same boat as me. So I bought fabric cheaply and started to make outfits late at night to wear at the weekend.

  I was like my own advertisement, running around London in my home-made clothes. Friends would ask me to make similar pieces for them: little A-line minis, shift dresses and simple tops. All very basic but in fun, bright colours: pinks, oranges, yellows. I’d go to Portobello Market on Friday lunchtimes, as it was close to my office, and I got to know one of the fabric stall owners there, a man called Saul Jackson, who was quite a bit older than me. He started calling me Girl Friday and we became friends.

  ‘Hey, Girl Friday!’ he’d say. ‘What are you going to make this weekend?’ And I’d laugh and say, ‘Mischief!’

  Saul helped me get my own stall on Saturdays, so I could sell my clothes there. Week after week, I kept selling out. I made kids’ clothes too – my son would be with me, helping, and wearing them. But it was still tough, money-wise, surviving in London. My boy and I were living in a disgusting flat, and the landlord was a monster who was constantly harassing me. There were barking Alsatians below us and a brothel upstairs …

  I pause as this new information sinks in. I had no idea it had been so tough for her when she’d started out. From what she’s told me – the Angel Delight period, Nick running naked around the library – I’d imagined it had all been rather bohemian, full of capers and fun. She hadn’t seemed to need the mother and baby groups that I’d clung to like life rafts when I first became a mum. When I’d happened to mention Izzy’s school’s PTA, Penny had had no idea what I was talking about.

  ‘PTA?’ she’d repeated. ‘Is that something to do with time of arrival?’

  ‘That’s ETA. PTA is the parent-teachers association. It’s a bit of Mafia actually …’

  ‘God,’ she’d shuddered. ‘Why on earth would anyone want to be involved with that?’

  I read on: … So I made the decision to move back to Glasgow, where I was born and brought up. My son and I lived with my parents at first. I found a tiny shop in a part of Glasgow that literally no one ever went to. The place stank. We scrubbed it and fitted it out ourselves, and people liked it. So they kept coming back.

  How did I arrive at the Girl Friday style? [Pauses, considers this]. I knew the clothes I wanted to wear myself. I could picture the outfits right down to the braid, the buttons, the finish on a hem. So I made them just like that – not from anyone else’s patterns or designs, but from the pictures in my own head.

  I close my laptop, feeling a little overwhelmed, like when you emerge from the cinema having watched a film that’s totally entranced you. Then you step outside the cinema, into the bright sunshine, and it takes a few moments to readjust to the real world.

  ‘I made them just like that,’ Penny had said, as if she’d been talking about constructing a hedgehog pincushion in needlework class (a project that took me an entire term to mess up; not even my mum could find anything positive to say about it). And I replay Rose’s words from this morning, the gist being: if I don’t want a Menopause Ambassador role, then there’s nothing else she can offer me. At least, nothing new. No promotion, no opportunity in the whole ‘let’s invigorate Flaxico’ mission.

  But I don’t need Rose, I decide now, as I go through to the kitchen and unload the washing machine. I don’t have to sit there, year after year, running her errands ‘without fuss’. Penny, Shelley, Isla and Jules are all strong, confident women seemingly unhampered by fear. I might not possess anything like their courage and drive, but I can stand on my own kitchen table, bellowing my lungs out.

  I think again about Isla; my quieter friend, who is passionate about the museum where she has worked diligently for so long. Her attention to detail is astounding, her knowledge vast. I know she’ll be heartbroken if the place closes.

  She agrees that a fashion event is a brilliant idea, and now I’m convinced that Penny should be involved – not merely as an adviser for a Seventies theme, but as the sole focus of a show. Okay, the museum might not have the resources to stage a major Dior or Frida Kahlo exhibition – but the thrilling thing is, a Girl Friday fashion show has never been done before. It would be unique, focusing solely on the Glasgow girl who sat up half the night, her sewing machine whirring, and was, for a few years in the 1970s, one of the shining lights in British fashion.

  As I start to wash up, I remember that evening when Penny, Hamish and Isla were here, drinking wine in the garden; how reluctant she seemed to have her work celebrated. And her prickliness over Hamish’s Rolling Stones remark: ‘All anyone wants are the old hits that everyone knows.’ But she doesn’t have to know; at least, not in the early planning stages. We could keep it under wraps. We could go all out to gather in as many original Girl Friday pieces as possible, then set them all out to show her, and tell her what we’ve been up to – in secret.

  She’ll be thrilled! In fact, I suspect she’ll be overwhelmed. I know Penny is rightly proud of what she achieved, even though she tends to underplay it. It’s understandable, I guess. She admits that it had a ‘shelf life’, and ultimately Girl Friday went the way of the poncho at the start of the Eighties, possibly in a messy and unpleasant way. Although she’s never divulged who her backers and business partners were, she couldn’t have established and grown her fashion empire from her market stall takings.

  So, yes, Girl Friday died a possibly painful and ugly death. Perhaps that’s why Penny seems unwilling to recognise the impact she had, and why she shrugged off the suggestion of getting involved with the museum at all. Maybe – and I still find the possibility hard to believe – she views herself as a failure.

  It strikes me now that, whenever we talk about those days, it’s usually me who’s brought it up. Izzy, who adores dressing up, isn’t shy of quizzing her either. However, Penny’s designs were fabulous; high fashion with instant appeal, yet apparently extremely well made, due to her attention to detail. So the chances are, there are plenty of pieces still in circulation. Surely vintage stores must have the odd item; collectors too. There might even be some stashed in wardrobes, possibly still worn.

  It’s entirely feasible, I decide. I’d imagine the museum has virtually no budget, but that’s okay; pieces could be borrowed, then returned to their owners after the event. When I worked in theatre I often pulled together productions with hardly any cash. I’m used to operating on a shoestring; in fact, I love the challenge.

  My heart is racing now as I make a vow to myself to put together a proposal for a fashion show and exhibition, with all the details worked out. I’ll take it to the management team at Isla’s museum – not for money (I’m aware that there isn’t any), but because it will be a brilliant project, in the way that The Wetland Wanderer is brilliant.

  Sometimes you take on a thing just for the love of it. You hurl yourself at it, despite the fact that your confidence has been battered and your boss takes you for granted and has you running around, researching the pillow quality at hotels all over the globe. You do it simply because you know it’ll be amazing – and because, if anyone can make it happen, it’s you.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Friday, September 6

  Rose remarks that I am looking ‘jolly’ today. First hot, now jolly; I sound like an overworked clown.

  ‘Just feeling good,’ I say with a smile. Meanwhile, our workplace is a hive of activity.
The air buzzes with drills and sanders and whiffs of fresh paint. The low boardroom is being transformed into an open-plan ‘space’ (not an office) where the Platforms for Innovation (now ‘PFIs’) will be based. It’s going to be beautifully designed, ultra-modern, with special fake ‘windows’, according to Jean, who seems to have her ear to the ground.

  ‘What d’you mean, fake windows?’ I ask over lunch.

  ‘They’re designed to look like windows,’ she replies, ‘with glass and a frame and everything, but there’s a special kind of daylight-type light behind them.’

  ‘As a way of un-basementing the basement? That’s clever!’

  She nods. ‘The design guy who was here, he reckons young people regard natural light as pretty important.’

  ‘They’re so demanding,’ I chuckle, ‘with their avocado on toast and their fondness for being able to look out and see the sky.’ I finish my tuna salad. As part of the modernisation of Flaxico, the canteen now offers fresh greenery, the appearance of rocket causing almost as much of a stir around here as the rabbit food scandal.

  It’s all positive, of course. I’m cracking on with my work and scheduling interviews, as Rose is focused on a rapid recruitment drive. Meanwhile my head is buzzing with the Girl Friday project, and the list of vintage stores I’ve started to compile, with a view to a mass mail-out to try and gauge how many original pieces are still out there in circulation. I started researching last night: the brand history, the key pieces, any associations with big-name models and celebs of the day. It was fascinating, and I ended up beavering away up until 2.45 a.m., boosted by Isla’s enthusiastic response to my text and her promise to show my proposal to the person who makes the decisions about temporary exhibitions. If that goes well – and I’m pretty certain it will – then the next step will be a face-to-face meeting.