Unnerved, I hurried to what Google Maps told me was the centre of the three tall blocks of flats, found the lift and pressed the button for the sixth floor. I turned the wrong way at first, hearing a barking dog through the door of number 609 and Antiques Roadshow blaring out from number 610, and inhaling the mouthwatering waft of roast chicken from 611 before retracing my steps and knocking on the door of 606.
The woman who opened it was unmistakably Chelsea’s mum, but also totally not the person I expected to see. She had the same killer bone structure and the same ‘don’t you mess with me’ stare. Only she was a good five stone heavier than her daughter, with the kind of ageless skin that could have made her anything from thirty to sixty. She was wearing a sea-green satin dress, fitted perfectly to her ample figure, with a pleated frill snaking from her right shoulder around her waist to finish in a kind of bustle at the back. On her head was a matching hat – a stunning design that Meghan Markle would have been proud to wear.
I held out my hand and said, ‘My name’s Tansy Barlow. I’m here to see Chelsea.’
‘Mariella Johnston.’ The woman gave me her hand to shake, and it was cool and soft.
I could see Chelsea hovering impatiently in the background behind her, but clearly Mrs Johnston believed in standing on ceremony.
‘Won’t you come in,’ she said, ‘and have a cup of tea?’
‘Thank you. That would be lovely.’
‘And maybe a slice of my cherry cake. I baked it yesterday.’
I saw Chelsea roll her eyes and shake her head.
‘That’s so kind. I’d love to.’
A few minutes later, the three of us were sitting around a small table in the world’s cleanest kitchen, drinking strong, milky tea and eating proper old-school cake studded with glacé cherries so red they were practically luminous.
‘This is delicious,’ I said. ‘So do you sew as well as bake?’
‘Do I sew!’ Mrs Johnston laughed. ‘I taught this girl of mine to sew. When she was just a little thing of ten she was making her own dresses to wear to church on Sundays. Not that you’d get her to go near a church any more. Godless child.’
Chelsea rolled her eyes again and said, ‘Mum!’ But the look that passed between the two of them was loving.
‘I taught her to sew, my mammy taught me and her mammy taught her. I wouldn’t be surprised if it went back even further than that. We love clothes in this family. Maybe because we’re all such good-looking women.’ She shouted with laughter again.
I was beginning to wonder whether Chelsea’s taciturn silence wasn’t so much unfriendliness as the result of having grown up being unable to get a word in edgeways.
‘Is Chelsea your only child?’ I asked.
‘I’ve got a bro—’ Chelsea began, but it was hopeless.
‘My Nathan’s seventeen,’ Mrs Johnston said. ‘Three years younger than her. He’s the clever one, so bright, ever since he could walk he’s been into everything. Always top of the class in primary school. He was going to be the first one in the family to go to university. The teachers all said he’d be a lawyer one day, or a judge, or one of them bankers. He’s a good boy, really.’
Which, I thought, was a mother’s hopeful way of making excuses for a son who’d gone off the rails a bit.
But it was none of my business, so I just asked, ‘What do you do for work, Mrs Johnston?’
‘Most important work there is! Bringing new life into the world! I’m a midwife. For twenty years I’ve worked right up the road at Homerton Hospital. And…’ She looked at her watch and put her teacup firmly down in its saucer, ‘I’m on shift in twenty-five minutes. So I shouldn’t be sitting around here in my Sunday best, chatting away!’
She stood up and bustled out of the room, and Chelsea cleared away the tea things. A few minutes later her mother returned, dressed in a dark blue shirt and trousers with a lanyard around her neck.
‘I’ll love and leave you girls,’ she said, kissing her daughter’s cheek and shaking my hand again. ‘Don’t you stay up too late, missy, you’ve work in the morning.’
‘Work?’ I asked, once the front door had closed. ‘But I thought…’
‘Thought I spent all my time designing dresses? As if. I work on the till in Superdrug on one of them zero-hours contracts. The Jobcentre made me take it.’
‘So how do you find time for your other work then? The dresses?’
She grimaced. ‘In between. Sometimes zero-hours does literally mean zero hours, you know.’
I imagined her getting up in the morning for her shift, coming home afterwards, sewing, drawing or cutting out patterns late into the night, going to work again the next day and repeating the process until it was the weekend, when she had to be manning her stall in the market. And if she wasn’t wanted for shifts, sewing and sewing all day. I felt exhausted just thinking about it. Exhausted, and also overwhelmed, because the challenges she faced were even greater than I’d thought.
‘May I see where you work?’
Chelsea shrugged and stood up. The way she ducked her head, instead of boldly meeting my eyes as she usually did, made me wonder if she was embarrassed, and if so, why. I followed her down a short corridor into what I supposed had once been a bedroom. It wasn’t now, though: it was set up entirely for dressmaking. One wall was lined from floor to ceiling with shelves, on which fabric and second-hand garments were arranged neatly by colour. On the opposite wall was a garment rail holding about twenty finished dresses. A sewing machine stood on a trestle table in the centre; there was just about enough room to move around it.
‘I sleep in the front room now,’ Chelsea said. ‘Nathan has his own room cos he’s a boy, even though he ain’t hardly here.’
I edged carefully around the table to the rail of dresses and looked at them, more closely this time. The work was even better than I remembered, the garments beautifully cut and finished. The labour that had gone into each one was astonishing.
‘Wow,’ I breathed. ‘You’ve got serious talent. But you know that, don’t you?’
Chelsea ducked her head again. Then she raised her eyes and looked directly at me. ‘So, you gonna sell my stuff then? On your website? Along with Balenciaga and Alexis Mabille and all them?’
Damn. I knew that was what she wanted more than anything, and I knew that it wasn’t going to happen.
I said, ‘See, the thing is, Luxeforless is fundamentally a volume business. I mean, it’s not like Primark where you’re talking thousands or tens of thousands of one item, but it’s still volume. We sell designer stuff, sure, and some of it’s high-end, but when we list a line, we need to know that it’s going to sell at least ten or twenty identical pieces, maybe more in the popular sizes. I don’t think that’s where you want your business to be, really, is it?’
‘I could,’ she insisted. ‘I could make more things. I could work harder. Mum could help me.’
I knew this was impossible, and she must have known it too.
‘What I really wanted to talk to you about, though, is this new initiative my boss has come up with. It’s all about helping young people who are just starting out in the business. The idea is, you’d work with a mentor – that would be me, I guess – and learn a bit more about how a fashion company works – all the boring stuff like budgets and forecasts and merchandising and things. And do some work experience at Luxeforless, and maybe at some of our suppliers. It’s, like, a way of supporting people to gain a foothold in the industry who wouldn’t have had the opportunity otherwise.’
I’d hoped I sounded encouraging, but I could hear my voice tail off as I saw the expression on Chelsea’s face. Shit, she’s going to cry, I thought.
‘Fuck off,’ she said. ‘And stop wasting my time.’
Eleven
Three weeks passed, and I didn’t hear from Chelsea again. To be honest, I hadn’t expected to. Felicity’s Instagram feed continued to be populated with images of her in fabulous clubs and restaurants, wearing fabulous clothes,
only now she was accompanied less often by Pru – whose own feed informed me that things with Phillip from Toffee were hotting up – and more often by Renzo. Although she hardly ever showed his face in her pictures, there were glimpses of his flat, his car, the back of his head. Each image was like a punch in the stomach, but I couldn’t help looking at them, torturing myself with the knowledge that, if only I’d done things differently, it could have been me with him still. If I hadn’t resorted to webcam work. If I hadn’t told him about it. If I’d been a better girlfriend to him, so that when I told him, he didn’t mind. If I’d had a chance to see him just one more time, and maybe… Round and round the thoughts went in my head, all those pointless, painful ifs.
Felicity herself was perfectly friendly at work, but she’d stopped offering me sweets when she bought them to snack on at her desk, and she didn’t stop by my workstation to chat any more, or invite me to come out with her and Pru and their friends. And because our friendship seemed to have cooled so much, I realised I’d never have an opportunity to ask her what she’d been doing in the office on that Sunday night in February, when I’d spotted her going into the lift.
I’d replied, a bit reluctantly, to Debbie letting her know that of course it was absolutely fine for Josh to come and stay for a while – as long as he wanted, I’d written through gritted teeth – in fact, I was really excited to see him again after all these years, and please pass on my email and WhatsApp details. She’d thanked me profusely, but I had heard nothing from him.
Maybe, I thought, he’d changed his mind. Or maybe, like any normal, functioning flipping adult, he’d found a place to stay with friends of his own, not some random his mother had known years ago.
But then, when I was eating my lunch in Soho Square on a blissfully, unseasonably warm March day, I received a text message from him.
Hey, Tansy! Josh Valentine here. Thanks for the invite to crash at your place, really appreciate it. My flight lands tomorrow just before 6am. Guess by the time I make my way from Heathrow to Hackney you’ll have left already for work! Any way I can pick up the key somewhere? No worries if not, I can just hang out and explore London for the day, and catch up in the evening. I don’t want to put you to any trouble!
Fucksake, I thought. How arrogant – how typical! Just like he used to be, expecting everything to happen the way he wants it to, without any effort on his part. Doesn’t bother making contact until he’s practically in the air and expects to swan in and be welcomed like a long-lost friend. And there was no way I could let Debbie’s precious only son hang around London all day on his own, no doubt jet-lagged and with a massive suitcase to lug around. He’d be mugged or get lost, for sure. I’d have to wait in until he arrived, or ask Adam if he could work from home for the morning.
Then I remembered that the next day was Friday.
No problem. Odeta, our cleaning lady, will be at the house from nine until twelve, so she’ll let you in. Have a safe flight, looking forward to seeing you.
I wasn’t, not even slightly, and I also thought yet again how Adam and I could save more than a hundred quid a month if we dispensed with Odeta’s services and did the cleaning ourselves, like most other people.
But when I’d mentioned it to Adam, he’d looked horrified and said, ‘But Tans, I don’t know how to clean. And anyway, think how precarious Odeta’s situation must be feeling right now, with Brexit and everything. She told me the other day some people graffitied “Fuck off home to Romania” on the front door of her house. Well, the house she and her boyfriend share with about eight other couples. If you can’t afford her I totally understand; I’ll keep paying her wages until you can.’
And so that was that – Odeta had stayed and I’d carried on paying my share.
I felt oddly nervous on my way home from work the next evening. Not just about seeing Josh, but about the disruption to what had become normality. We’d never been much of a party house. Adam, Charlotte and I all worked hard, and put in long hours, and the most we’d ever really been up for together was a quiet drink down the Prince George, pizza night at the Daily Grind or an Indian takeaway in front of the telly.
Now, our sedate routine was going to be disrupted. If grown-up Josh was anything like teenage Josh had been, he’d have loads of mates who he’d want to bring round – and maybe even acquire a girlfriend in short order, too. It would mean change. He might want to use the bathroom at times that clashed with mine. He might come home late after gigs and start drunkenly making toast and set off the smoke alarm. He might snore.
Pull yourself together, Tansy, I told myself firmly. He’s Debbie’s son, you owe it to her to be nice to the bloke. Take him out for a pint, get to know him a bit. He might not be so bad. You’ve grown up in the past eleven years, you’ve changed. He probably has, too. Stop being a wuss.
Still, walking back from the bus stop, I felt exactly like my fifteen-year-old self had felt walking to school in the morning: all hollow and sick with apprehension, half-expecting the crowd of teenagers hanging around outside McDonald’s to start laughing and taunting as I passed. They were surrounded by a cloud of smoke from the joint they were passing around, and I wondered if one of them could be Chelsea’s brother Nathan.
They didn’t laugh or taunt, although one of them said, ‘Some legs you got there, girl,’ and in spite of myself, I laughed.
So it was with a sense of determination and a sunny smile plastered onto my face that I unlocked the front door and went upstairs. But the smile was wiped off immediately when I stepped onto the landing and immediately tripped over a discarded bright yellow trainer.
‘Oh, for fuck’s…’ I picked it up. It was by Allbirds – a brand I knew because it was developing quite the cult following and Kris was in talks with the manufacturers in New Zealand about us stocking it – and it was absolutely fricking huge. Either Debbie’s son favoured flapping about in footwear like a clown, or he’d put on a serious growth spurt over the past decade.
I put the shoe down and looked around. Also on the landing were, in no particular order, an open guitar case, five T-shirts in assorted colours, an aluminium water bottle, three jars of Vegemite, a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin half falling out of a duty-free carrier bag, a tub of hair pomade and a tube of Berocca.
And, coming through the door of Charlotte’s old room, music was playing – the kind of music that sounds loud even when it isn’t. It might have been Dire Straits, or Led Zeppelin, or one of those bands your dad used to listen to that are suddenly cool again, if you’re the kind of person who wanks endlessly on about the superior sound quality you get from vinyl.
I walked determinedly towards Charlotte’s door – well, Joshua’s bloody door, I supposed – ready to tell my new housemate kindly but firmly to please get his shit together.
Then, in the doorway, I stopped. The bedroom looked as bad as the landing – worse, even. A backpack had spewed its contents out over the floor: jeans, more T-shirts, a down gilet, a sleeping bag, two pairs of sunglasses, a trilby hat, the guitar that presumably belonged in the empty case and various bits of tech: a laptop, a tablet, headphones and a tangle of chargers.
Poking out from one end of Charlotte’s duvet was a pair of enormous feet, and from the other, almost covered, a shock of dark blond hair.
Josh was fast asleep.
Call me a sucker, but I couldn’t bring myself to wake him up and give him the bollocking he deserved. He’d had an awfully long flight, after all. He’d be jet-lagged and probably homesick. We were going to have to live together, for a few weeks at least, and there was no point starting things off on an unpleasant footing. Tomorrow was Saturday, and I’d sit him down over a cup of tea and read him the riot act. In a friendly, hospitable way, obviously.
I carefully picked up the stuff on the landing and ferried it into the bedroom, one item at a time, treading softly so as not to wake its owner. I found the portable speaker the music was coming from and turned it off, then froze, wondering if the lack of sound would wa
ke him when the sound itself hadn’t, but he didn’t move.
I retreated back onto the landing and paused. It was hard to know what to do next. Normally, I’d have had a shower, changed into slobbing-around clothes and gone downstairs to watch telly. But in my ideal, old-normal life, I wouldn’t even be there on a Friday night. I’d be having a cocktail with Renzo before going on to dinner somewhere amazing and then back to his to spend all night in his arms in bed.
Or, more recently, I’d have been getting glammed up for a night out with Felicity and Pru. But both those ships had sailed.
Now I was home, on my own, but with a stranger in the house whose presence made me feel uncomfortable about taking my work clothes off and going to the bathroom wrapped in a towel.
Or was I alone?
Adam’s door was closed, but I gave it a gentle tap and, seconds later, he opened it and stepped out to join me on the landing, looking narky as anything.
‘Tans,’ he said. ‘Listen, this just isn’t on.’
‘I know,’ I soothed. ‘Look, I’ve cleared some of the stuff up. I’m sure he’ll sort it out in the morning. Why don’t we go downstairs and put the kettle on, or head out for a drink?’
Privately, I thought Adam was being a bit melodramatic. I mean, it’s not like he was Mrs Perfect Housewife, either. I’d seen the face on Odeta sometimes when she went into his room to clean.
‘Not the mess, Tans. Who cares about that?’
‘So, what…?’
Adam didn’t say anything. He just pointed, and I noticed his hand was actually trembling, as if he was in the grip of an emotion so strong it couldn’t possibly be provoked by something as trivial as an untidy house.
I looked where he was telling me to look, and saw what I’d missed when I first tiptoed into Charlotte’s old room.
It's Not You It's Him: An absolutely hilarious and feel-good romantic comedy Page 12
