Felicity’s eyebrows had practically disappeared under her fringe. I kept my face still and didn’t meet her eyes.
‘Our corporate responsibility statement frames our ethos in a manifesto built on three pillars,’ Barri said. It was the first I’d heard of any such manifesto; the marketing team must have been working overtime to draft it. ‘First, our people. Within Luxeforless, we work tirelessly to promote diversity and equality. We provide a working environment that is supportive and nurturing, giving everyone in the Luxeforless family the opportunity to grow and become their best selves, while promoting a healthy work–life balance.’
Sally, who’d had her annual leave cancelled the week before because she was ten per cent below her sales target, made a sound that turned into a cough but had definitely started off as a laugh.
‘Second, our planet. We work to ensure that the workers all around the world who bring our designers’ visions to life are treated fairly. Within our own office, we operate as far as possible in a paperless environment.’
This at least was true, thanks to a recent bollocking email from the office manager about reducing stationery costs.
‘And third, our community. Luxeforless team members are always an active presence at Pride marches. And some of you regularly volunteer at soup kitchens in the local area.’
True again, but Barri neglected to mention that all these worthy initiatives happened in his employees’ own time.
‘This is just damage limitation,’ Felicity whispered. ‘He’s trying to whitewash over that scandal about the Bangladesh factory.’
I nodded silently.
‘However,’ Barri went on, ‘I feel that it’s time to take this spirit of community involvement up to the next level. I know how deeply you all care about providing opportunities in this industry for those less fortunate than yourselves. I myself started my career folding T-shirts on the shop floor, but I know only too well that talent alone is not enough to ensure success.’
I looked down at my shoes. Every time Barri reminded us of his humble beginnings, I felt a fresh, if grudging, respect for how hard he had worked and how far he had come. If I had anything like his determination and ambition, my life goals would extend beyond getting Renzo back.
But I didn’t want to allow my thoughts to go down that path, so I looked up again and carried on listening to Barri.
‘Skills-based volunteering is a highly effective way for people to pass their knowledge and experience on to the wider community,’ he said. ‘Through mentoring, we can enrich our own working lives, too.’
Oh, do stop, I thought. But Barri didn’t. He went on for another ten minutes about how Luxeforless was deeply proud – humbled, even – to be launching its most innovative corporate responsibility programme to date. Which wasn’t that hard, given that the words ‘corporate’ and ‘responsibility’ had, as far as I was aware, been used together for the first time in our office that afternoon.
At last, he cut to the chase. Each and every one of us, he said, would be given the opportunity to take an afternoon every fortnight to spend engaging in a mentorship with an ambitious young person or group of people from a disadvantaged background. If we were interested in taking part, we should set up a meeting with Daria in HR by close of business, ten working days from now.
‘That’s all, team,’ Barri said. ‘Thank you for your attention and, once again, for being part of the Luxeforless journey.’
Kris went, ‘Woohoo!’ and clapped his hands a few times. Some of the admin team joined in and then, reluctantly, so did the rest of us.
Then everyone hurried back to their desks, collected their coats and bags and raced to the lift to make the most of what was left of their lunch break.
‘If I dash, I’ll still make that mani,’ Felicity said. ‘My cuticles are fucked.’
I followed the crowd more slowly outside and walked down the stairs to the ground floor rather than waiting for the lift. Wrapping my scarf high around my neck, I threaded my way through the crowds of tourists on Piccadilly Circus and towards Dover Street, where Renzo worked. I knew that my mission was futile – the hedge fund splurged huge amounts on stocks of sashimi, protein bars and salad so that no one needed to take their eyes off what the markets were doing in order to actually leave the office to eat.
I was damned, I said to myself, if I was going to put myself out to help Barri make good the damage his own relentless focus on the bottom line had done to the company’s reputation.
He can do one, I thought. I even considered taking an extra-long lunch and having my nails done, like Felicity. She, weirdly for a new starter, seemed to have acquired the cynicism the rest of us felt after a few months working for Barri on her very first day; for me, it had taken several months for the gloss of working for such a prestigious brand to wear off and the reality of Barri’s bullying and mismanagement to sink in.
Well, good luck finding people willing to go along with your mentoring idea, I thought. I’m out.
And then I remembered Debbie.
It’s funny – it had been months since I’d really thought about her, even though we were friends on Facebook and followed each other on Instagram. She occasionally posted pictures of her outfits and spectacular views of Sydney, where she’d moved a decade before. But now, walking down the freezing London pavement, I found myself thinking about a very different street in a very different season.
It had been high summer and peak tourist season when Debbie opened her shop in Truro, the town in Cornwall where I grew up. I was fourteen and absolutely miserable. Until a couple of months before, we’d been living in a pretty little chocolate-box cottage with a view of fields from the window, and I’d been happily settled in at school, getting decent marks and playing on the netball team. But then Mum and Dad dropped a bombshell: owing to unforeseen expenses and Dad’s cabinetmaking business not doing as well as they’d hoped, the cottage was going to have to be sold. We were moving closer to town, into a rented house, and Perdita and I would be starting at a new school in September.
It wasn’t until I was older that I found out the truth behind this upheaval and the full extent of the financial mess into which Dad had plunged our family. Back then, my parents were still presenting a united front, and the decision was one that I, with typical teenage angst, railed against in every way I could think of. I cried. I sulked. I ranted about how unfair it was.
I may even have uttered the immortal words: ‘I never asked to be born!’
But nothing I said made any difference. The move was going ahead, an offer had been accepted on the house, Mum had taken a job in the local supermarket. There was nothing whatsoever I could do to change things.
So, on that sunny Saturday morning, I was sunk in deepest gloom as I meandered down the high street. Some of my friends were going to the beach, but I’d said I had other stuff to do. What was the point, when I wouldn’t be seeing them every day once the new school year started? They’d all move on, and forget about me.
My life was over, I thought. There was no point in anything – no point in me.
And then I noticed Debbie’s shop, and it made me stop and look up, instead of down at my chipped blue toenails. Even in the bright sunlight, the boutique looked lighter than outside. Everything was white and clean. The simply cut shift dress in the centre of the window made me think of France – or at least how I imagined France to be. The woman who wore it would be effortlessly elegant. She’d stroll along a boulevard or lounge against the railings on the deck of a yacht, and she’d turn heads without even trying.
I was having my first fashion moment. It was as if an invisible thread pulled me in through the door, and I stood inside and gazed, breathing in the serene atmosphere and the scent of the air, which was a mixture of new paint and some sort of room fragrance, fresh and clean.
I was so transfixed by the displays that I hardly noticed the woman standing behind the counter, carefully draping silk scarves so they spilled out over the rim of a driftwood
bowl. But I couldn’t help noticing the boy next to her, idly snapping the cash register open and closed to make it ping. I noticed him, and then I tried to look at him some more without him noticing me. He was wearing board shorts and a white T-shirt that was stretched tight over his broad shoulders, but was baggy around his waist. His hair was the colour of wet sand and flopped over his face in a long, shaggy fringe. His hands were long and bony, and looked too big for the rest of him.
Then he said, ‘Hello, can we help you?’ and I shook my head dumbly and legged it outside again.
After that day, I took to stopping outside the shop whenever I saw something new in the window, just to look. After a couple of weeks, I was brave enough to go in again, just to look. Okay, and sometimes to touch things, marvelling at the way the natural fibres – linen, cotton and silk – felt under my fingers, so different from the scratchy cheap polyester clothes that were all my mum could afford to buy me.
The woman – the owner, I guessed – was always there, rearranging the displays or chatting to customers. She was effortlessly elegant, too, with cropped dark hair and long, smoothly tanned limbs: the perfect ambassador for her brand, although I didn’t know back then that that was even a thing. She never asked if she could help me – she must have been able to tell at a glance that there was no way I could afford to buy anything, and guessed that if she spoke to me I’d leave, spooked and shy, and never come back.
The boy – whose name I learned was Joshua – went to the same school as me. But that didn’t mean our paths crossed – well, only about as much as your path would cross with Robert Pattinson’s when you downloaded the Twilight box set.
It took me almost a year to pluck up the courage to speak to Debbie. For the first time, I actually picked something up, rather than just tentatively brushing my fingertips over things.
It was a pendant on a leather band, a chunky, smooth piece of silver that seemed to have been made by splashing the molten metal randomly from a height and leaving it to cool and set, so its shape was organic and asymmetrical.
‘That’s so beautiful,’ I heard myself say, although I hadn’t meant to speak.
‘Do you like it?’ Debbie asked. ‘They’re made in Malawi, in Africa, by a company that teaches local women craft skills to help lift them out of poverty, so the story behind it is beautiful too.’
I just nodded and smiled, and put the necklace back in the pottery dish where I’d found it.
‘You live locally, don’t you?’ Debbie asked.
I nodded again, and managed to say, ‘My name’s Tansy.’
‘Debbie Valentine,’ she said, giving me her cool, slim hand to shake. I’d never shaken an adult’s hand before. ‘I don’t suppose you’re looking for a Saturday job, are you? I could really use some help this summer, if it’s as busy as last year.’
And that, I suppose, was the beginning of my career in fashion. All through high school, I worked in the shop, at first just folding and tidying, later working on the till and advising customers on their choices, and later still browsing the internet for pieces that I thought would work as part of the Valentine collection.
It sounds cheesy, I know, but Debbie came to have a special place in my life. She wasn’t a substitute for my own mother and she wasn’t quite a friend, either. But she talked to me like I was an adult, asking me about my life and making me laugh with anecdotes about her own. I sometimes thought, through a fog of teenage angst, that those Saturdays in the shop were the only times I was truly happy.
After Debbie moved to Sydney with her son Josh, we kept in touch. She encouraged me to go to university and study fashion buying management. She arranged for me to do work experience at Vivienne Westwood through a friend of hers who worked there, and the friend knew someone else who worked at Harvey Nichols, which led to another internship and, after I graduated, a job as an assistant in the buying department.
Even though I hadn’t seen her for years, I sometimes caught myself wondering, when I was grappling with a problem at work, what Debbie would do. And whenever I thought of her, it was always with fondness and gratitude that she’d given me my first chance to enter such a highly competitive profession.
Now, though, I didn’t exactly ask myself what Debbie would have done in my position, partly because she would probably have told Barri exactly what she thought of him long ago and moved on. But I had to acknowledge that the Luxeforless mentoring scheme was an opportunity to help someone in the same way she’d helped me.
I’d passed Renzo’s office a long time before, and there had been no sign of him, so I turned and retraced my steps, stopping on the way to buy a tub of carrot and coriander soup. When I got back to my desk, I sent an email to Daria asking her to sign me up.
Year Ten
You know how it is at school: kind of like a pyramid. Or maybe more like a solar system. At the top – or at the centre – there’s a little clique of the cool kids. They’re generally the ones who are good at sport and do okay academically, even though they take pains not to be seen to be working too hard, because achievement isn’t what they’re about. They’re all about being popular.
They’re the ones who hang out in the park in the evenings with their mates, listening to music and – if it’s the weekend – drinking bottles of WKD and smoking fags that one of them gets their older brother to buy for them. Often, just having a big brother is a sufficient qualification for entry to the cool kids’ clique. They’re all good-looking (except maybe the one with the big brother), but in a kind of no-care way. They talk to each other in a type of secret language that sounds just like normal English, except words have slightly different meanings, and if you use a word wrong they look at you in silence for just a second, and then they all laugh.
Surrounding them – like an asteroid belt, maybe – is a satellite collection of boys and girls who want to be part of their group but have never quite made it. They’re included in the alpha group sometimes – just close enough to feel the warmth of the sun – but they know, and everyone else knows, too, that they’re tolerated for their usefulness and that one false step could mean they get cast out.
Then there are the ones who make no effort at all to fit in – the emos, or the really bright ones who go to code club in the afternoons, or the ones who have an all-consuming interest that raises them above the petty concerns about who’s popular and who isn’t. And, of course, the ones like Josh Valentine, who don’t seem to try and fit in anywhere at all, but do anyway.
Then, making up the base of the pyramid – I know I’m mixing metaphors here but what can I say? English was never my best subject – are the rest. The ordinary ones, who have their own little friendship groups, and muddle along quietly with their lives, hoping that if the inner circle ever recognises them, it’ll be for the right reasons, not the wrong ones. Sometimes, randomly, one of them will get incorporated into the popular group, but it rarely lasts – just as quickly as they were sucked in, they’re spat out again.
And then there are the outcasts. The fat boy with thick glasses who once wet himself in Year Three and has never lived it down. The girl whose mother has mental health issues and can’t get it together to buy her school uniforms or even wash them, so her clothes are always ill-fitting and dirty and everyone whispers that she smells of BO. The twins whose parents are refugees and who barely speak English, and just sit at the back of the class and watch the other kids with wide, wary eyes.
I was in the base of the pyramid – just. I knew that one false step would get me chucked into the outcasts. At only fourteen, I was already five foot nine. I towered over all the girls and most of the boys no matter how much I slouched to hide my height and my breasts, which seemed enormous compared to the other girls’. And I’d arrived at the school suddenly, when my parents had to sell their cottage and move to a rented house in a grotty part of town. Even though I never told anyone what had happened, they all seemed to know anyway and assumed I looked down on them, even though I didn’t (no more than some
one as tall as me had to, at any rate).
I was terrified of them, and painfully shy, and my fear and awkwardness were interpreted – I suspect deliberately – as stand-offishness. I had no friends. I sat at the back, next to the twins from Somalia, and made myself as small and inconspicuous as I could. I ate the sandwiches Mum made me, because she was too proud to have me on free school dinners, alone at break time, pretending to listen to music or read a book.
But really, I was watching the cool kids – Anoushka, Ben, Kylie and all the rest of them – trying to figure out what they were doing right and I was doing wrong. I knew perfectly well that I was as likely to fly to the moon as join their group, but I tried to understand their language, the subtle cues that set them apart, so I could behave a little more like them and be a little more accepted, a little less different.
Most of all, I watched Josh. He seemed to drift in and out of the cool kids’ group, not because they chose to cast him out, but because he didn’t particularly care about the secret language or the contraband fags, or about fitting in. But, even though I was a constant presence in Debbie’s shop at weekends, whenever he saw me there or at school, it was like he didn’t notice me at all.
And that was fine by me. I didn’t want to be noticed – I wanted to be invisible.
But then suddenly, when I’d been at Trelander Academy for almost three terms and had just turned fifteen, I did get noticed. I got noticed not just by one of the ‘in group’ but by Connor, Kylie’s big brother, the one who bought the illicit booze and fags from Mr Nabi’s corner shop.
Connor, the absolute apex of cool. He was way, way cooler even than Josh: the sun in the solar system, or a star floating high above the pyramid.
He was coming out of the shop, carrying two blue plastic bags rattling with bottles, and I was going in to buy a pint of milk for Mum. Because I’d got into the habit of slouching, I was staring down at my shoes and didn’t see him until we almost bumped into each other.
It's Not You It's Him: An absolutely hilarious and feel-good romantic comedy Page 4
