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I pulled my Jean Muir face, and hissed out three shits and a fuck. The depot was the worst thing about my job. A hideous warehouse in outer Mile End, full of toiling women whose lives were simply too awful to contemplate. Cavafy was the old Greek who ran the place, with his idiot son, Angel. And the ‘on your way into work’ was typical Penny. Mile End was no more on my way into work than my arse is on the way to my elbow.
‘Don’t look like that, Katie,’ said Penny, which was clever of her given the miles of phone line between her and my grimace. ‘You’ve got Paris the day after tomorrow to look forward to, and Mile End won’t kill you.’
Paris meant Premiére Vision – the world’s biggest fabric fair. For the past two years I’d gone along with Penny, as her Girl Friday/translator/minder. It was the polar opposite of Mile End, the good to its bad.
‘Anyway,’ she added with her characteristic contempt for logic, ‘aren’t you going to a party tonight? I haven’t been to a party for months and I don’t complain.’
‘What about cocktails at the Peruvian Embassy last Thursday to push vicuna yarn?’
‘Darling, that was business and not pleasure. And I still don’t know what a vicuna is, which was the main reason I went.’
‘But didn’t you get legless and have to be escorted out for biting a general’s gold braid to see if it was real?’
‘I was only being playful. And he wasn’t a proper general. But he did have such a virile … moustache.’ The line paused as Penny drifted off into a romantic Latin American reverie involving, or so I imagined, an abduction by the besotted colonel, adventures with wild gauchos, a palace coup, a forced wedding, the adoring crowds, the assassin’s bullet, a coronation … ‘Anyway,’ continued the Queen Presumptive of Peru, ‘that wasn’t a real party. What I want is a party with paparazzi and people I’ve heard of. It’s not for me, you understand: it’s for the good of the company. We need a … one of those things, you know, a higher profile.’
‘Well, why not come tonight then?’ I only said it because I knew she wouldn’t.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Katie. I wouldn’t dream of gate-crashing. And I don’t even know where it is.’ I was a little concerned about the relish with which she pronounced ‘gatecrashing’, which suggested that the idea had a wicked appeal.
‘Look, Penny,’ I said, ‘come or don’t come, it’s entirely up to you. But now I have to get home: I haven’t a clue yet what I’m going to wear.’
‘Oh. Okay. And Mile End – you will remember to kiss Cavafy for me, won’t you?’ she said.
‘Of course, Penny,’ I said, suppressing, with an effort that made my eyes water, a jostling crowd of curses and expletives.
chapter two (#ulink_190be375-9df5-5e45-bab8-c3f7fa0c27df)
in matching knickerbockers (#ulink_190be375-9df5-5e45-bab8-c3f7fa0c27df)
The party to which Penny had alluded to was a launch at Momo’s. I can’t remember what was being launched – chocolate flavoured vodka or something – it never really matters. Milo, naturally, was doing the PR, and the place was packed with B- and C-list celebs. Not all fashion of course but, given that it was one of Milo’s, there was bound to be a fashiony feel. There were models, a smattering of out-of-favour designers, and a few vaguely familiar telly people from daytime soaps, or early evening quizzes. Milo had clearly been coasting: this really wasn’t his best work. The one real catch was Jude Law, who’d promised to make an appearance in return for the indefinite loan of a Gucci lizardskin jacket.
I was in my element. I have, you see, the sort of face that people think they know: people are always convinced that they’ve seen me on something. And best of all, I knew people in several of the discrete clusters that had formed. That meant I could island hop, moving from one to another as soon as the conversation dulled, which, in the PR-fashion cosmos took on average four and a half minutes.
First, there was Milo’s lot by the bar: that’s Milo himself, PR Queen of London, sleek and wondrously handsome in a black neoprene suit and a pair of piebald ponyskin shoes. Next to him, close as a gun in a holster, there pressed Xerxes, Milo’s Persian Boy. Xerxes was an exquisite miniature, eyes dark and lustrous. Milo said he was a Zoroastrian, a fire worshipper, and that he’d never let him blow out a match, but would make him wait until the flame had eaten all the wood, and licked at his fingers. No one had ever heard him speak. Some said he was dumb. Others disputed his origins. I’d heard, of course, the story about Xerxes being a Bangladeshi waiter, but who knew the truth in this world of rumour, fantasy and Fendi handbags?
Pippin, Milo’s ex, a designer whose name adorned a million pairs of tasselled loafers, hovered close by, although it was hard to work out if his interest was in his old lover, or the Persian Boy, or the barman, or the bar. Pippin was a hard one to like. Pretty, of course, in a high-cheekboned, floppy-haired, pastiche-Eton kind of way – he would never otherwise have kept Milo’s attention for eighteen months. But there was something foetid and creepy about him, as if he’d just pulled himself away from an act of gross indecency with a minor.
Two of Milo’s PR girls fluttered among them. I called them Kookai and Kleavage. Although I always thought of them as essentially the same person, and indeed often mixed them up, there were some differences. Physically they weren’t alike at all. Kookai was a pretty little thing, soooo Asian Babe I could never understand why she wasn’t reading the news on Channel Four. Sadly she was also too dumb to realise that all she had to do was ask, and she could drape herself from head to toe in the Prada and Paul Smith samples that lined the office walls back at Smack! PR. Hence Kookai.
Not a mistake that Kleavage was to make. Less naturally attractive than Kookai, with a jaw line perhaps a little too well defined, she was nearly always the best dressed girl in the room. Best dressed and least dressed, showing off her miraculous tits and supermodel midriff. Where Kookai was sheer gush, Kleavage was always more calculating: you could see her working out the angles, searching with those violet eyes for openings … weaknesses. So different from the broadband PR lovebeam that was Kookai.
I slipped in beside Milo, who was whispering something obscene into the ear of the Persian Boy. He looked at me, frowned for a nanosecond and then kissed me on the lips, sliding in his tongue just long enough to make his point.
‘You look amazing,’ he said with that luscious, creamy voice of his. The voice had been his making; telesales his first arena; cold calling his métier. ‘Yes,’ you’d have said to the double glazing, ‘Yes, yes’ to the encyclopaedias, ‘O God! Please, yes,’ to the financial services, and only ever, perhaps, ‘no’ to the dog shampoo. And so that fifty thousand stake was his, and Smack! PR born.
The tongue trick worked on most people, throwing them off their stride, giving him an instant advantage.
‘Put your tongue in my mouth again you fucking old queen and I’ll bite it off,’ I replied. It’s what I always said.
‘Less of the “old”,’ he said, looking around with theatrical paranoia, ‘there are clients about.’
We bantered for a little while, with Kookai and Kleavage giggling and trying to join in, Pippin smoking and self-consciously ignoring us, and the Persian Boy lost in his private world of fire, or chicken tikka masala.
‘Where’s your handsome rustic?’ said Milo after a while, miming a telescope. ‘Haven’t left him back at the flat with an individual pork pie and a work of improving literature, have we?’
Pippin giggled like a girl showing her knickers to the boys for the first time.
I didn’t like Milo sneering at Ludo – that was my job, and it’s different when you love someone, but I couldn’t object without slithering down a snake to the bottom of the board.
‘Really, Milo,’ I replied quickly, ‘surely you know that it’s after we get married that I start to leave him at home. He’s looking for the cloakroom. Could be hours.’
‘After you’re married?’ said Milo slyly. ‘Have you set a date then? Or are we still in the realms of whim and fancy?’
I wasn’t sure if Milo had deliberately passed from teasing into malice, but he had found his way unfailingly to the nerve.
‘Milo, I know you’re bitter about never having the chance to be the glorious centre of attention of everyone you know for a whole day, and never getting to wear white, and never having troops of pretty choir boys singing your praises, and never having literally hundreds of presents forced upon you, and never having a cake with a tiny statue of you on it, but you have to rise above all that.’
Had I gone too far? Milo was famous for his grudges which could lie dormant for years before bursting into poisonous fruit. But no, the operatic look of spite he threw my way was reassuring.
‘You can keep the juicer,’ he said through pursed lips, ‘and just how many Gucci ashtrays do you need? A wedding is a tiny rent in the straight universe that gives you a glimpse of the infinite glory of the camp beyond. I’m there already.’
‘Ain’t that the truth,’ said Pippin from the bar.
As soon as I felt Milo’s eyes begin to flicker over my shoulder I moved on – talk to any PR for more than five minutes and it’ll happen to you. The core of the next group was formed by three models, one posher than princesses, one of the middling sort, and the last born under the chemical cloud that covers Canvey Island, in deepest Essex. Despite spanning the entire range of the English class structure there were few differences between them discernible to the naked eye: they all smoked the same cigarettes, they all had the same hair, the same black-ringed eyes, the same magnificent bones and here, unshielded by the doting camera’s veil, the same tired skin.
I knew Canvey Island quite well: she’d modelled for us more than once. She had a little more conversation than the other two, but even so it was limited to accounts of her appalling sexual experiences. I always liked her story about losing her virginity at thirteen to a guy with a tight curly perm and pencil moustache, who’d picked her up at a nightclub in Billericay. He started dancing next to her, expertly separating her from her friends, his white slip-on shoes moving like two maggots on a hook. He bought her three sweet martini and lemonades and then led her outside to a Ford Escort van in the car park. He exclaimed ‘ta da’, and threw open the back doors to reveal a flowery mattress, with a stain the size and colour of a dead dog in its precise centre. He bundled her into the back, fumbling at his stone-washed jeans. Her skirt was up and her knickers off before she knew what was happening. His cock was smaller than a mini-tampon, and so she felt little pain. After four weaselly thrusts he came, yelping out an excited ‘fuckfuckfuck.’ With a smirk of satisfaction he tied a knot in his condom and chucked it down the side of the mattress, where it joined dozens more. He locked up the van and went back to the club. She went for some chips, and ate them as she walked home.
She was telling the story again to four men strutting and preening around the models. Two were tall and good-looking, two squat and ugly: a footballer, and the footballer’s agent, an actor and the actor’s agent. The actor had made his name playing East End villains in low budget British gangster films, but a public school drawl kept breaking through the studied cockney. The footballer was famous for biting the testicles of a more talented opponent, and this singular act of brutality had mysteriously given him access to the world of celebrity. I sensed that my presence was desired, and realised at once why – I’d round out the numbers nicely. But I knew I’d be stuck with one of the uglies. Life, like the agents, was too short. And Ludo, of course, was out there, somewhere. I smiled and moved on. Still, the footballer had been rather good-looking, decked out by some tame stylist in an Oswald Boateng suit, conventionally, almost boringly, tailored, but showing, when he moved, flashes of brilliant electric-blue lining, like a fish turning on a coral reef.
There were, naturally, endless journos on the lig. I knew most of the fashion writers, ‘the clittorati’, as Milo called them, as bitchy in the flesh as they are fawning on paper. They were never quite sure what to make of me. They knew that I was oily rag, a production pleb. But they also knew that I was heir presumptive to the Penny Moss throne. And, okay, it’s Ruritania, and not the Holy fucking Roman Empire, but royalty’s royalty, after all.
‘Hi Katie. So what are we all going to be wearing next year?’ said one, but with a flickering eye that added silently ‘as if you’d know’.
‘Oh, you’re in luck,’ I smiled back, ‘it’s kaftans, kaftans, kaftans.’ I pirouetted away without waiting to see if it detonated.
I preferred the non-fashion hacks, honest cynics, eyes peeled for the goody bags and the drinks tray, even if, as one of them slurred into my ear:
‘Christ, Katie, we stand out in this crowd like white clots of fat in a black pudding.’
Who else? Ah, the nervous group of execs from the Norwegian Vodka company, terrified in case they’ve made some dreadful mistake, but completely unaware of what a mistake, or a triumph, would look like. I thought about being nice and talking to them, telling them how well it was going but life, like a Norwegian winter’s day, is just too short.
In truth it wasn’t going that well. Jude Law had still not appeared. I wondered if Momo had perhaps borrowed the security people from Voyage and they hadn’t let him in – ‘sorry darling, this really is more of a snakeskin party’. The free drinks had run out and the journos were quick to follow. I went to find Ludo.
As I’d figure-of-eighted around the room, Ludo had waited patiently in a corner, moving only to reach for the trays of chocolate flavoured vodka, or vodka flavoured chocolate, or whatever, as they floated by. He was hammered, and had turned melancholic.
‘Fucking hell, Katie,’ he began, the language harmless in his gentle voice, ‘you’ve left me standing here like a cunt all evening.’ He’d taken to using the dreaded c-word. He claimed he wasn’t trying to shock, but that it was an attempt to reclaim it, like rap artists calling each other nigger. I didn’t quite see how that worked, with him being a man, and not a woman, and therefore not having one to reclaim, but I usually let it pass.
‘Ludo, you’re a grown-up; there are plenty of people here who you know. Why didn’t you talk to them?’
‘I tried a couple of times. But you know how it is: there’s nothing I have to say that would interest them.’
I pictured Ludo explaining some innovative use of a scientific metaphor in the poetry of John Donne to a ditzy Marie Claire stylist, and I felt one of my waves of affection. Perhaps I should have talked to him, or introduced him, or something. But I’d been trying that for aeons, and it never worked. I’d introduce him to someone nice in fashion, or a Channel Five TV director, and he’d bark into their ear about sea eagles and that would be that. And I had to be strict: every couple needs at least one set of teeth between them.
‘Oh come on, Ludo. It’s not my fault that you’ve got about as much small talk as a cactus. And you hate fashion people, and anyone trying to sell things, or make money, or enjoy themselves.’
‘Then why do you make me come to these bloody things?’ The tone was half whine, half grump. Not attractive.
‘No one made you come, and you know you’d only sulk if I didn’t invite you.’
‘I should have been marking,’ he slurred on. ‘I mean, look at these people. What have they got to offer the world? How would the world be a worse place if they were all burnt to death in a tragic airship disaster?’
‘But who would organise parties if Milo wasn’t around? And who would people take pictures of if there weren’t models? Really Ludo, you are silly.’
It was then that I noticed it arrive. I’ve no idea how it managed to pass through the security cordon: perhaps the heavies were shocked into torpor. The ‘it’ was a beige safari suit, fastened at the front with a mathematically ingenious system of leather laces and eyelets. And at the bottom, ohmygod, there they were in all their obscene glory: the matching knickerbockers, laced with wanton exuberance under the knee. This wasn’t seventies revival, oh no. This was seventies pure and simple, served straight up, as she comes, rayon in tooth and claw. It was prawn cocktail, and steak tartare, and Bird’s Angel Delight; it was Demis Roussos backed by the Swingle Singers. It was Penny.
The conversation came back to me. Days before in the office Penny had described the suit.
‘That’s so in,’ I’d said. ‘You have to wear it.’
It’s the kind of thing you always say when people tell you about the old stuff in their wardrobes.
‘Really? Perhaps I will,’ she replied, and I tuned out to concentrate on the dancing lines of figures in the costings book.
The problem, the mistake if you like, was the gap between the seventies in the seventies and the seventies now. You see, whenever there is a revival there are always touches, not necessarily subtle, that distinguish it from the real thing. Miss those touches and you look like a children’s entertainer. Penny was certainly providing entertainment. Her progress through the party was followed with rapt attention, the very intensity of which somehow drove out the wholly natural laughter reflex. Penny’s actressy poise, her wonderfully controlled refusal to glance around her, gave the whole thing something of the flavour of a visit by an aloof Habsburg dowager to a small town in Montenegro.
Ludo saw her too. ‘Mum, oh Mum,’ he mouthed, and shrank back into the shadows like a schoolboy who knows he’s about to be kissed in front of his mates. I was caught between admiration and horror. How I’d love to have a tungsten ego like that, such a flagrant assumption that my whims were a sure guide to glory. But for now it was good to be on the outside laughing in.
Bloodhound-keen, her nose led her to the bar and, coincidentally, into the middle of Milo and his courtiers. I winced in anticipation of the rebuff she must surely receive: would she perish by fire or by ice? Milo, abetted by his jackals, was adept at both.
Penny began a conversation. I heard the odd phrase - ‘Warren Beatty and I … Prince Rainier … often at Sandringham …’ above the renewed party hubbub. And miraculously I saw that Penny was dappled with laughter. Milo smiled indulgently on her; Pippin had turned from the bar and was whinnying appreciatively; Kookai and Kleavage coiled themselves like cats around her legs. The explanation was simple: Penny had found her way by chance or instinct to the one place in the party where she would find a receptive audience. You see, as had suddenly become clear to me, Penny was a fag-hag waiting to happen: and her moment had come. Here the absurd miscalculation of her attire was transformed into a camp triumph. Here her curiously masculine femininity could be seen as the playful challenge of the drag queen.
I thought about rejoining the group, but decided that the moment was too perfect to risk spoiling. And anyway, it wasn’t fair on Ludo. He looked pleadingly at me and said, ‘Please please please, we have to go now, before she sees us.’
I kissed my way to the door with Ludo clinging to my hand, and we went to find a taxi. As always, the taxi worked its aphrodisiacal magic on him, but I really couldn’t be bothered with it.
And that isn’t like me at all.
So that’s the immediate background to my trip to the depot. It isn’t quite true to say that I was in two minds over marrying Ludo. I loved him, by which I mean that whenever I said it or even thought it, it rang true to me, and I never felt that I was pretending. I never thought for a moment of dumping Ludo. Apart from the love thing, there were practicalities: life would be impossible without him. Where would I live? What would I do? My life was built, not around him, exactly, but directly above him. It assumed his continued existence, as a city assumes the continued existence of good drains. Sorry if that sounds unkind, but I’m trying to be honest.
But despite the love, and despite the need, I was still tingling with that faint, unpleasant dissatisfaction that comes when you know you have to do something, and you know that it is for the best, but it means not being able to do lots of other things that you’d really rather like to do. Yes, I was desperate to get married, and frustrated about his dallying over the date. But equally, if I was going to do something naughty, and on balance I thought I probably was, then time was running out.
chapter three (#ulink_00b4c628-ff32-5a72-afc5-f734dbe75a64)
cavafy, angel, and the loading bay of doom (#ulink_00b4c628-ff32-5a72-afc5-f734dbe75a64)
The tube was full of the usual freaks, psychopaths, and mutants. It really annoyed me that Penny would never pay for a taxi out to Mile End. She always said, ‘but Katie, darling, the tube’s so much quicker. And think of the environment, you know, the hole in the rain forest, and whatever it is that’s wrong with the ozone layer. Save the whale, and the pandas and things.’ She hasn’t set foot on public transport since they put the electronic gates in the tube stations, the operation of which proved to be completely beyond her mechanical capabilities.
I say the usual freaks and psychos, but there were actually two rather good ones. One was a woman, normal looking, prim even, but about once a minute her face would convulse and contort into a hideous grimace, as though she’d just found half a worm in her apple. The awful thing is that she obviously knew it was going to happen, and she would try to cover her face with a newspaper, but she was always a split second too late. It was impossible not to stare, not to wait, breath held, trembling with expectancy, for the next fit.
Because of the convulsion lady, I didn’t notice Rasputin until a few moments before my stop. Everything about him was long and filthy: his hair, his nails, his smock, his teeth. He had a big rubber torch in his hand, that he kept switching on and off. And he was staring at me. He’d been staring, I guessed, for the whole journey. I felt myself blushing. ‘Please God, let him not speak to me,’ I prayed. You see, nutters on the tube are bearable until they speak to you. If they speak to you, you enter a whole new world of pain.
‘He’s dead. We’ve killed him.’
That was enough. I got up and walked down to the other end of the carriage. Mercifully we were just coming into the station. I’d never been so pleased to reach Mile End. As I hurried along the platform I glanced back. Rasputin was staring at me through the window, his face pressed to the glass. Over his shoulder I saw, for one last time, the woman’s face contort.
It’s only a ten minute walk up the Mile End Road to the depot, but it always manages to get me down. People outside fashion think it’s all about Milan and catwalks and supermodels. It’s only when you find yourself on the inside that you see the sweatshops and the depots, and the dodgy deals, and Mile End.
I hate Mile End. I hate its dreary streets, its horrid little houses, its crappy shops. I hate the people with their cheap clothes and bad hair. I hate the buses in the high street, and the fish and chip shops offering special deals for pensioners. I hate the way it always rains. I hate it because it reminds me of home. I hate it because I know it wants me back.
It’s okay – I’ve stopped now. I promise no more whining about Mile End, which I don’t doubt is a fine and noble place, beloved of its denizens, admired by urban historians for its fascinatingly derelict music halls and art deco cinemas, and seen as Mecca by those who worship the Great White Transit Van. The Mile End I rage against is a Mile End of the mind, a metaphor, a symbol. And what is it a symbol for? Well, you’ll know when we get to East Grinstead in, oh, I don’t know, about another hundred pages.
Back to the depot. The depot is where we store our cloth. ‘Depot’, believe it or not, is actually too grand a word for what we have. Who would have thought that depot could be too grand a word for anything? And what we have is a room, about the size of your average two-bedroom London flat, stuck onto the side of Cavafy’s Couture. Cavafy’s is a big shed, in which toil four rows of six machinists, middle-aged women with fat ankles and furious fingers. I always make a point of chatting to the machinists as I walk through to our depot. They make jokes about me being a princess, and I suppose I must look like some exotic bird of paradise dropped down into a suburban back garden. I always pause by the woman who sits nearest the door that leads off into our depot. She’s probably the last woman in the country to have been called Doris. She must have been born right on the boundary between ‘Doris’ signifying something sophisticated and classy, cigarette holders and champagne flutes, and it meaning ‘look at me, I clean other people’s houses for a living, and I wear special stockings to support my varicose veins, and my hair will always smell of chip fat, and I will never be happy, or fulfilled, or loved’.
‘How’s that chap of yours then, my love?’ she said, her fingers never pausing as she worked her way along a seam.
‘Oh, you know men,’ I replied, smiling and shrugging.
Doris shrieked with laughter, as if I’d just come out with the joke of the century. As she laughed her fibrous hair, the texture of asbestos, moved as a piece. Her dress, a grey-white polyester, sprayed with pink flowers of no particular species, picked up I guessed from the local market, having failed C&A quality control, would have looked almost fashionable draped over a girl half her age and weight.
‘Men! Oooo men!’ she cooed, as if she’d sampled them all, from lord to serf, and not just the abusive, hunchbacked railway engineer who’d stolen away her, in truth rather easy, virtue, twenty-six long years ago, and left her with the baby and no teeth. ‘But you’ve a good un there you know. And I says when you’ve a good un, you ang on in there.’
I blushed a little and looked around. Cavafy was in his office – a glass-fronted lean-to affair at the other end of the factory. Angel was there too. Angel was, is, Cavafy’s son. He loves me.
Everybody loved Cavafy. He’s one of those tiny old men you just want to hug. I’d never seen him without his brown lab coat, with at least six pens crammed into the breast pocket. I think he rather hoped something would happen between Angel and me. He’d invite me into the office for a coffee, and embarrass the poor boy by listing his many accomplishments ‘… and the high jump … only a small one, but the jumping, the jumping he could do.… And the running. And the GCSEs, look, we have them all on the wall, see, in frames: geographia, historia, mathematica, only a D, but a D is a pass.’
But Angel, Angel. Years ago, when I was still in the shop, I’d come up here to the depot to help schlep stuff around. Angel had just started working for his father. He’d trained as an accountant, without quite passing his exams. I shouldn’t really have called him Cavafy’s idiot son. That was ungracious and unnecessary. In fact we used to have a bit of a laugh together: he’d make fun of Cavafy, and I’d make fun of Penny. Tight curly hair, fleshy lips, really rather good-looking, except for the height thing. Angel, you see, was a good three inches shorter than me. And that really wouldn’t do.
It all came to a head one afternoon when I was sorting through some rolls of linen for a remake on that season’s bestselling outfit: an oyster duster coat that would fall open to reveal a tight sheath in a pale pearly grey to match the coat’s luscious silk-satin lining. Even doughy-fleshed, big-boned County girls became simpering Audrey Hep-burns (such was the Penny Moss magic recipe). Suddenly I felt a presence. I turned round and Angel was close enough for me to smell the oil in his hair and pick out individual flecks of dandruff. He didn’t say anything: he just had a look of utter determination in his eyes, and I could see his jaw was rigid with fear or anxiety or lust.
‘Angel!’ I said breezily, determined to avoid a confrontation. ‘How about a hand with this stuff. It weighs a ton.’
But Angel still stood there, straining forwards, apparently unable to move his feet.
‘Angel, you’re being silly,’ I said, beginning to feel uncomfortable. And then he reached out and put his hairy hand on my bottom, where it stuck clammily to the pale silk. Somehow I knew that this wasn’t intended as a gross sexual assault and I never felt my virtue was at stake: Angel simply couldn’t get the right, or indeed any, words out and his mute gesture was his only way of expressing his feelings. Had his pass been verbal, I would have been happy to parry verbally. But it wasn’t and so I felt that there was only one way to bring the incident to an end. And anyway, I suspected that Angel’s hand would leave the damp print of his palm and fingers on the skirt, and that annoyed me. So I slapped him.
I’d never slapped anyone before: it always seemed like such a pointlessly feminine gesture, an admission that you haven’t the wit to inflict a more serious injury. Almost as soon as I’d done it, I regretted the act (and I certainly had cause to regret it later). Angel took his hand off my bottom and put it slowly to his cheek. A fat, oily tear built in the corner of his eye and rolled down his face until its way was blocked by the broad fingers, whereupon it found some subterranean passage and disappeared. Still without saying a word, Angel turned and walked away.
Boys don’t understand how hard it is to break a heart. They think we have it easy, dispensing joy or misery with a nod or shake of the head, as they cavort around us, offering themselves for humiliation. But you really have to be a complete bitch to derive any pleasure out of kicking some hapless youth in the teeth. In fact the only thing worse than having to reject a boy is having no boy to reject at all.
Anyway, after a few minutes I went out to apologise to Angel. I liked him, and I didn’t want things to be awkward. I saw that he was in the office. Cavafy had his arm around him. He looked at me blankly, and made a slight shooing gesture when I began to walk towards them.
It was shortly after the Angel incident that it all began with Ludo, and for one reason or another it was a couple of months before I went back to the depot. On that first post-Ludo visit, Angel was nowhere to be seen, and Cavafy stood silent and stony faced in his office, staring icily through the plate glass. Even Doris sat aloof, and barely returned my smile. Penny must have told Cavafy. The two of them had known each other for decades. The old Greek had made her first collection. Although Penny had moved on to bigger and better things she would still send him the dockets for fifty or so skirts, or a couple of dozen jackets, for old time’s sake. I can imagine what kind of spin Penny put on it: Katie the gold digger; Katie the counter-jumper; Katie who thinks she’s too good for your son; Katie servant of Beelzebub; Katie mistress of the secret arts; Katie who suckles her cat familiar with her third teat; that sort of thing.
But I toughed it out (and in truth it wasn’t that tough, bearing in mind that everything else in my life was starting to go so well) and it seemed that things had blown over. After a couple of months you’d hardly have known about the crisis, except for the sullen yearning you sometimes saw in Angel’s eyes, and, if I’d been more perceptive, something colder in Cavafy’s.
I sensed the sullen yearning thing as I slipped by Doris and through the door into the depot. It didn’t take me long to sort out the interlining: it was hiding under a roll of wool crêpe. The depot has an exit out to the loading bay, and I didn’t fancy going back through the factory, with Angel moping at me. The exit leads on to a ramp, and, as you know, heels hate ramps, so I usually sat at the top with my legs dangling over the edge, and let myself down the few extra inches. I was just doing that when something emerged from the shadows.
‘Give you a hand there, Katie,’ came a voice, the type of gorgeous, Irish voice that just cries out to be called ‘lilting’, and bugger the clichés. I managed to feel both startled and soothed at the same time. A face followed the hand out of the shadows. It was vaguely familiar.
