The First Year

by Genevieve Gannon

  ‘We’re going to start with some dolmades,’ the man said. ‘We haven’t decided on mains yet.’ He addressed his date, ‘What do you think, Sally, we could get the grill plate and share it?’

  Sally screwed up her nose. ‘It sounds fatty.’

  ‘I have to tell you,’ Saskia said, ‘I’ve been admiring the silver ear cuff you’re wearing.

  She beamed. ‘Thank you. Isn’t it cute? It’s new.’

  Saskia nodded, wondering if this woman was one of the dozens who had emailed her and ordered the cuff online, or if she’d seen it in Harem or Annie’s boutique.

  ‘Did you get that from Annie Chen’s bridal boutique on Sydney Road?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Harem in Brunswick?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘La Fayette?’

  The girl shook her head.

  ‘Was it a gift?’

  ‘It’s from Fetch.’

  ‘Fetch?’ Saskia repeated the chain store name, confused.

  ‘I work in the Nicholson Street shop. We had a product preview last night. I’m not supposed to wear the cuff until tomorrow when they become available in store. But restaurants are okay. So long as my manager isn’t also at the restaurant, that is.’ She chuckled at her little joke.

  Saskia thought she’d misheard. At least she hoped she had, but the primal panic that had begun to leach into her stomach suggested otherwise. ‘No, I mean the silver cuff in your ear.’

  ‘Yes,’ the woman said.

  The boyfriend, who had a blocky head and cauliflower ears, reached over and caressed Sally’s cheek. ‘You’d think they’d want you promoting it early as possible, to get people through the doors.’

  Saskia spoke slowly, her blood growing cold. ‘You said that silver cuff is from Fetch?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sally. ‘Most of what I’m wearing is from there. We’re supposed to be ambassadors for the brand. We get a forty per cent discount.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ was all Saskia could say.

  The woman was looking at her as if she was dense. She shifted in her seat. Saskia couldn’t stop staring. She had to know how this could have happened.

  ‘Ah,’ Sally’s date coughed. ‘Could we also get some dips to start? The baba ghanoush and taramosalata. And plenty of bread.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Saskia said. ‘Dips.’ But she couldn’t walk away. The girl shot a look of concern at her date.

  ‘We’re not ready to order our mains yet,’ he said, pointedly.

  Saskia was desperate to examine the cuff. What was it made of? How had they copied it? How could this happen? It was her design. Her hours of trial and error and chapped fingers and calloused palms. Her nights away from Andy. Her lost mornings in his arms. Hers.

  She felt like her lungs were closing up.

  ‘I’m sorry, but, I have to ask about that cuff. Were you part of the development team?’ Saskia interrogated. She had meant to sound polite but it came out confrontational, and a little hysterical.

  ‘No,’ Sally said, leaning away from her. ‘I just work in the store.’

  Fetch was a fashion chain that sold affordable, on-trend clothes and a sideline in bags, shoes and jewellery. They had an online store with global reach. Saskia had noticed that they would sell items that were inspired by things she’d seen in fashion magazines. She recognised details and wondered how they got away with it. But this was worse — it was an exact copy of her work.

  ‘Look, are you going to bring our food out or not?’ Sally’s boyfriend was getting annoyed.

  ‘Yes,’ Saskia managed to say. She walked to the kitchen, but the world around her was a blur. How had they gotten her cuff? What could she do about it? She gave Hassan the order for the dips and dolmades then told Nick she had a migraine.

  ‘But your entire section is full,’ he whined.

  ‘I think I’m going to vomit,’ she said. It wasn’t a lie. Her stomach was on spin cycle and there was a roar in her ears. Her heart was racing and she was feverish with panic. She couldn’t believe what she had just heard. She had to get out of there. She leaned against the counter, unsteady.

  ‘Whoa. You really do look like you’re going to hurl,’ Nick said.

  She began to unlace her apron. ‘Can I go?’

  ‘Go, Go! Get out of here. We can’t have you spewing on the restaurant floor.’

  ‘Thanks, Nick.’ She bundled up her apron and shoved it behind the counter. She grabbed her bag and headed towards Randa’s house.

  *

  ‘I thought you were working tonight?’ Randa said when Saskia arrived home.

  ‘You won’t believe what happened.’

  ‘Andy turned up at Tiba’s?’

  ‘Yes.’ Saskia clutched her throat on the verge of tears. ‘That’s not all.’

  She told Randa about the Fetch cuff and the sales girl who’d said they were about to become available in shops all over the country. She punctuated the story liberally with ‘fucks’ and ‘mother-fucking rip-off merchants’.

  ‘Call Annie,’ Randa said. ‘She’ll know what to do.’

  Annie was speechless after Saskia explained what had happened over the phone.

  ‘I can’t believe how fast they got them into stores.’ Saskia bit her nail.

  ‘Can’t you? If Angelina Jolie wears chandelier earrings to the Oscars, the chains get copies in store in the following weeks. Remember all the replicas of Princess Kate’s wedding dress?’

  ‘I remember. I have to stop them, but I don’t know how.’

  ‘You need to start by getting your hands on one of those cuffs,’ Annie said.

  Day 251, Friday, June 19

  Saskia lay awake all night grinding her teeth. When the birds began to chirp she threw off her blankets, ready to go to war.

  She pulled a cap over her hair, brushed her teeth, slid on her boots and ran downstairs.

  The nearest Fetch was on Nicholson Street, in an old stone building that used to house one of Saskia’s favourite stores that shipped in embroidered dresses and flamboyant pants from designers working in Cottesloe and Mornington. She could never afford the clothes but she loved to go there and trail her fingers over the fabrics. To her, it was a different type of gallery.

  Fetch sold homogenous shadows of other people’s ideas. Copied, Saskia learned, not from the catwalks of Europe, but from chain stores overseas that had themselves plagiarised runway trends but changed them by thirty per cent. That was the magic number if you didn’t want to run afoul of copyright laws, Annie had told her.

  The store’s security gate was still closed when Saskia arrived. It was 9.47 a.m. and the shop wouldn’t open until ten. She laid her palms against the glass and peered at the rows of silver and gold on the back wall where the accessories were displayed. She squinted at the shiny jewellery and huffed an exasperated cloud of condensation onto the window. She hoped that Sally wasn’t the one rostered to open up this morning. After the way Saskia had behaved, Sally would in all likelihood call the police if she saw her waiting on the entrance.

  All along the street, metal rollers were down. A pile of free Fashion Journal magazines sat by Saskia’s foot. She picked up a copy. It was brittle and faded from exposure to the elements.

  At 9.57 a.m. a skinny girl in oversized sunnies and a long T-shirt dress arrived, holding a set of keys in one hand and a green smoothie the size of her head in the other. As she bent towards the lock, the scarf around her neck fell forward, forcing her to stop what she was doing, straighten her back, and toss its tail over her shoulder. Saskia watched impatiently.

  The lock removed, the girl unwound the chain that held the metal security gate closed before she started on the locks on the glass door. Saskia stood by, determinedly watching the girl, who ignored her with matched dedication. The girl opened the glass door a fraction, snuck between the opening then shut it behind her, mouthing ‘Ten o’clock’ to Saskia.

  Saskia paced as the girl drifted towards the register. She opened the till and slo
wly counted the float. Then, instead of unlocking the door, she began straightening bottles of nail polish displayed on the counter.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ Saskia said, hopping from foot to foot.

  When the sales assistant finally opened the door Saskia darted straight to the accessory wall. She started in the top left corner and worked her way across, searching the rows of costume jewellery for her ear cuff. She hoped it wouldn’t be there, and that the whole thing had been a misunderstanding.

  Two rows from the top she saw it. Saskia reached out and touched the silver cuff to be sure she wasn’t imagining it. The leaves were the same as hers. The design identical. It hadn’t been changed thirty per cent, it hadn’t even been changed three per cent. It was her design attached to a Fetch tag. She picked it up to examine it. It was shinier than hers, made of nickel, not silver, the label said, and it was called The Gladiator Cuff. Her eyes flicked to the girl behind the counter who was engrossed in her phone. The cuff’s price tag read $29.95, and Saskia thought, Fuck. That. Closing her fingers around the accessory, she made her way to the front of the store. The girl looked up from her phone a moment. Saskia grabbed a pineapple print shirt hanging on a rack and pretended to admire it. The sales girl turned back to her phone and Saskia kept moving towards the door.

  The street was quiet. A fog hung over the morning. A group of friends Saskia’s mother’s age were making their way down the footpath, laughing, with their arms linked together. Saskia envied their easy joy. Once they had passed she put her head down and bolted out the front door, sending the alarm flying into a fit of screeches. The sales girl dropped her phone in fright. The alarm wailed but Saskia didn’t stop. She raced across the street and ran and ran and ran, her fists balled and knuckles white, until she felt like her lungs were going to burst.

  *

  While Saskia was shoplifting, Andy was across town having brunch with his mother.

  ‘I don’t want to see you unhappy,’ she said.

  ‘But?’

  ‘Honestly, Andrew these bohemian artist girls, they’re as common as colds.’ She paused. ‘Now aren’t you glad you signed that pre-nuptial agreement?’

  ‘Well, I lost my job, so her jewellery line was paying our grocery bill.’

  That wasn’t strictly true, but it was true that her business was soaring, while his career was stalling.

  Millie refused to be shocked. In front of her was a plate of Heirloom carrots, purple and withered like witch’s fingers, drizzled in viscous balsamic vinegar. She pierced one with her fork, and began sawing off little pieces that she put in her mouth. She chewed mercilessly.

  ‘Andrew, don’t look at me like that,’ she said. ‘I’m not happy she left. All I’m saying is, she wasn’t the Marquis of Melbourne. Perhaps this is a blessing. A chance to choose again.’

  *

  Ray Hill opened the door to his daughter’s pounding, dressed in a fraying jumper he’d owned since she was small enough to climb onto his lap. She was panting, having run to her car, then sped to his flat.

  ‘What’s wrong, love?’

  Saskia threw her arms around him. ‘Dad.’

  Once her hiccups had abated, she told him about the woman in the restaurant and showed him the Fetch cuff she’d acquired. Ray — who had proudly bought three of Saskia’s cuffs and given them to women who lived in his block of flats — went red.

  ‘They ripped you off?’

  ‘I’m so angry,’ she said, her fingers gripping her hair at the roots. ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘What about that lawyer husband of yours? He must know a thing or two about it.’

  ‘No.’ Saskia shook her head. ‘We had a fight.’

  She swiped tears away with the back of her sleeve. She didn’t want to go into that. If she thought about Andy she would crumble, and she would be no good.

  Her father held the two pieces of silver in his stubby fingers, saying, ‘Hmm,’ before he shuffled to the cupboard at the end of the hall and retrieved a shoebox that was overflowing with paper.

  ‘You could send the company a cease and desist letter. Let them know you’re on to them. Hang on a tic.’ He licked his finger and began to leaf through the box. ‘I’ve been sent hundreds of them. Let’s see here.’

  He pulled free a letter on official-looking paper from the Moonee Valley council asking him to stop stealing the residential rubbish bins (Several witnesses say it was you).

  ‘Turn on that computer there, and we’ll draft a letter.’

  Saskia obeyed, going to the ancient machine in the corner of the room. It was grimy with dust and made a noise like a fighter jet as she flicked the start switch.

  ‘We’ll make it sound real official,’ Ray said, his eyes darting around the room. A bottle of Kraft tomato sauce stood on the table. ‘We’ll call ourselves Kraft and partners.’

  ‘Can’t we just send an email?’ Saskia asked.

  ‘No. Law firms send letters. Now, let’s see, say striking similarities between their jewellery and an original piece have come to the attention of our client.’ He looked up at Saskia. ‘That’s you.’

  ‘We’ll say they copied it, apropos of nothing,’ she typed, feeling better already. ‘Andy always used to use that phrase. I think it means, for no reason.’

  ‘Good,’ her father said. ‘We’ll demand that they stop selling the rip-off immediately.’

  ‘Yes, but we won’t say rip-off. We’ll say . . .’ She tried to imagine how Andy would put it. ‘We’ll say, “Please cease the sale of the fraudulent item”.’

  Saskia read over the letter.

  ‘I don’t just want them to stop. I want them to pay me for stealing my design. They’re selling it for less than half the price because they’re not using real silver. They’re not making them with their own hands. That cuff would have cost Sally more than a hundred dollars if she’d bought it from me.’ It dawned on her that she was taking on a huge opponent. Her shoulders sagged. ‘They’re not going to listen.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ her father said. ‘We’ve got to give it a shot.’

  ‘Why would they listen to me? They have more than sixty stores across Australia,’ she said.

  ‘So what? That doesn’t mean they’re right.’

  In addition to selling her cuff in their outlets, they sold it online too. Saskia pulled out her phone and opened the website to show Ray. Fetch.com was professionally designed with a bubble-gum colour scheme and perky models contorted into pin-up poses. Punchy disco music pulsed from the speaker of her phone.

  Saskia swiped through to Fetch’s jewellery section, showing her father her work.

  ‘They’re nowhere near as good as yours,’ he said. ‘Let’s get back to the letter. Loss of income, loss of reputation . . . Kraft and Partners will ask them to pay their client ten thousand dollars.’

  ‘They’ll never pay that.’

  ‘That would be the annual office biscuit budget for an outfit like that.’

  ‘Maybe we should ask for more?’

  ‘Post that and we’ll see.’

  Saskia hugged her father again.

  ‘Now, now, we’ll sort it out.’

  Ray Hill burrowed in his kitchen drawers until he found an envelope. He told Saskia to use his PO Box as the return address.

  ‘You really are good at this.’

  ‘You have to be with the cost of lawyers,’ he replied. ‘Going to court is a pricey business.’

  Saskia’s stomach lurched. She had been to court once when Ray was being sentenced for a series of post office robberies. It was a grim, unfriendly place. She didn’t want to go back there.

  ‘What if it doesn’t work?’

  ‘Then we try something else. They’ll be banking on you giving up. Now, read this over one more time. Tell me if it looks all right to you.’

  ‘It looks very professional.’

  ‘Good. Print it, post it. And then we wait.’

  Day 263, Wednesday, July 1

  Andy hung back as th
e swarm of suits shuffled off the tram and into the din of the Collins Street rush hour. The heaviest of winter coats were out, along with gloves and ear-muffs, as the bureau of meteorology had predicted the coldest July day since 1918. He stopped in the shadow of an advertisement for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. His client worked in the building next to HM&L’s headquarters and he didn’t want to come face-to-face with an old colleague or, worse, one of the partners. He bent and pretended he needed to tighten a shoelace as the commuters dispersed towards their offices. Andy was early, so he took himself to a cafe to keep warm and read the paper.

  ‘Why, hello there.’ Alexa, the AdFit CEO, stood before him, wrapped in a raspberry-coloured coat. ‘You never called.’

  ‘Oh hello. I’m sorry?’

  ‘About the job. Remember? In the lift, we discussed you potentially doing some work for AdFit.’

  ‘Ah, that’s right. You see I’m not longer with HM&L.’

  She raised a brow. ‘But you do still have a law degree?’

  He smiled. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m interested in working with HM&L if you’re no longer there. They seem a bit . . . retrograde. That partner — what’s his name? The one that looks like old Hollywood and always smells of shoe polish and brandy.’

  ‘Franklin Harris?’

  ‘That’s right. Do you know what he said to me? He said I should consider appointing a male figurehead so that other companies will take us seriously.’

  Andy grimaced. ‘I wish I could say I was surprised.’

  Alexa pressed herself against his table, her hip grazing his fingers, which were resting on the surface. ‘Why are you hanging outside the office if you no longer work there?’

  Andy moved his hand. ‘I have a meeting next door. I’m early.’

  ‘And you don’t want to run into old colleagues?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’re free for lunch, are you?’

  ‘Today? I—’

  ‘A business lunch. I have some new clients. I want to convince you to take a look at the contracts.’

  ‘I’m not really . . .’

  ‘Please,’ Alexa said. ‘The lack of expertise in this area is precisely the reason I need your help.’