Wonder Women

by Fiore, Rosie

  She walked her over to the swings and carefully lifted her in. Martha sat very straight, her hands in the air as if she was being held at gunpoint. ‘Mamma always wipes the bar before I touch it,’ she said, clearly distressed, so, against her will, Holly was forced to dig the pack of baby wipes out of the nappy bag and wipe down the swing after all. Once she’d done it (and disposed of the wipe in the bin, on Martha’s instruction), she was allowed to push the swing, very gently. If she got too vigorous, Martha wailed in distress and she had to slow the swing down and resume the slow back-and-forth pace. She asked a few times if Martha would like to go on the slide or the roundabout, but Martha shook her head and continued to sit like a little statue in the swing. It was very dull.

  Holly looked around and saw a lot of the mums (and most of the au pairs) were looking at their mobile phones or chatting to each other, rather than watching their children. She wasn’t surprised. Doing this every day would bore her rigid. As she was babysitting her niece for the very first time, she thought hauling out her phone for a Facebook session or a game of Angry Birds would probably look bad, so she contented herself with people-watching. It was definitely a rather well-off area: all the mums looked very well groomed and nicely dressed, and the pushchairs lined up along the fence of the play area were all new and expensive-looking. She felt scruffy in her old jeans and sandals, and the brightly coloured shirt she had made herself.

  After a while, she got the feeling that someone was watching her. She looked around and saw a tall blonde woman looking at her. The woman was holding a baby girl who had a wild halo of fairish curls, and there was a little boy with a similar cloud of hair, jumping up and down in front of her, talking nineteen-to-the-dozen. The little boy saw his mum was distracted and turned to look at what she was looking at. When he caught sight of Martha on the swing he came running over. He stood squarely in front of Holly and said, ‘You’re not Martha’s mum.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m her aunt.’

  ‘Where’s her mum?’

  ‘At home. Baby Oscar is sick.’

  ‘Snot sick or throw-up sick? Or bottom sick?’

  ‘Throw-up sick. And maybe bottom sick. I’m not sure.’

  ‘I was bottom sick. I pooed on the kitchen floor,’ said the little boy with great satisfaction. Holly wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that, but at that moment his mum came over.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, smiling. ‘Zach saw Martha and wanted to say hello. I’m Jo. Oh … and this is Zach, and Imogene.’ She indicated the baby in her arms. ‘Zach and Martha are nursery friends.’ She was a strikingly attractive woman, tall and strong-boned, with a wide mouth and very blue eyes. ‘Statuesque’ was the word people used to describe women like that, Holly thought.

  ‘Nice to meet you. I’m Holly, Miranda’s sister.’

  ‘Miranda!’ said Jo, smiling widely, as if Holly had somehow given her the answer to a riddle. ‘Miranda, of course! How is she?’

  ‘Home with a sick baby. Zach and I have just been discussing whether it was throw-up sick or snot sick.’

  ‘Oh dear, did he share the kitchen-floor incident with you? He’s very proud of that. It’s a worry.’

  Jo laughed, and Holly found herself laughing too, for the first time since she’d stepped off the plane from South Africa.

  ‘Miranda never mentioned she had a sister,’ Jo said. ‘It’s nice to meet you.’

  ‘Well, for the last ten years, I’ve been the sister who lived on the other side of the world. South Africa. I’ve only just got back.’

  ‘Back to stay?’

  ‘I think so. Not sure yet. Everything’s a bit up in the air at the moment.’ Holly tried to keep her voice as steady as she could, but she found herself pushing Martha’s swing a little harder than she should, and it wasn’t until Martha let rip with a wail that she realised what she was doing. She caught the chain of the swing and stopped it.

  ‘Why don’t you hop out and have a go at something else?’ she said sweetly.

  ‘I want to go on the roundabout with Zach,’ whispered Martha.

  ‘Zach,’ said Jo to her little boy who was running around and around, pretending to be a very noisy aeroplane, ‘will you take Martha on the roundabout?’

  ‘Naaaah!’ shouted Zach. ‘I hate the roundabout. And she’s a smelly girl!’

  ‘Sorry,’ Jo said, smiling ruefully. ‘He’s in that sexist phase. All boys are brilliant and all girls are smelly or boring. I’ll beat it out of him eventually.’

  ‘I think nature will probably do your work for you … In a little while, he might start to see girls differently.’

  ‘No hurry for that!’ said Jo.

  Martha whispered something, and Holly had to lean over the swing and ask her to repeat it three times before she worked out that the little girl was saying, ‘I want to go home, please.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, and lifted her out of the swing. She turned to Jo. ‘I’d better take her home and see how Miranda’s coping in the sea of baby sick.’

  ‘Oh, what a pity,’ said Jo. ‘I was just about to ask if you wanted to get a coffee. Another time, maybe.’

  ‘Another time,’ said Holly, and smiled. She couldn’t imagine when she’d next be in North London in a park full of small children and mummies, but Jo seemed a nice woman. She took Martha’s hand and they walked slowly home. Martha didn’t speak the whole time, and Holly was aware of how small Martha’s hand was in hers. The little girl seemed permanently slightly bewildered, as if the world was too loud, too busy and rather frightening, and she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to join in. And Holly certainly knew how she felt.

  5

  HOLLY THEN

  Holly was born with the show-off gene that is often granted to the youngest child in largish families. Her siblings, David and Miranda, were close in age to each other, and five and four years older than her respectively. Theirs was a family where roles were assigned early and did not change. David was the clever one, who did well academically, got a scholarship to a very exclusive boys’ school and then a place at Cambridge, followed by a distinguished career researching and lecturing in economics. Miranda was the good one, the average student who never gave her parents a moment’s worry, loved to bake and sew and babysit the neighbours’ children, had a series of unchallenging jobs and then sank with relief into marriage and life as a stay-at-home mum.

  And Holly was the maverick, the funny one, the creative one. When she was little, everyone had adored her because she was pretty and sassy and outgoing. As she got older, her mother seemed to spend most of her time sighing and saying, ‘Oh, Holly.’ Holly’s dad died of a heart attack when she was ten and Miranda and David were fourteen and fifteen. It was a profound shock to the whole family, and Holly found herself assuming the role of family clown in a desperate attempt to lighten the mood at the silent dinner table or on family outings. Between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, she dated a few unsuitable boys, learned to play bass (badly) and joined an all-girl metal band, got her lip and eyebrow pierced and dyed her hair some unfortunate colours. At sixteen, she started sewing her own clothes, and horrified her mother with her outlandish and experimental outfits. It wasn’t as if she was properly crazy or even very wild … she was just a rather exotic bloom in her very domestic family bouquet. A tiger lily among the carnations. She was tall, with dark auburn curly hair and loads of freckles, and even as a teenager, she had an indefinable but very real sex appeal.

  She was profoundly uninterested in school. She just didn’t see the point, and when she could be bothered to participate in class, asked difficult and unanswerable questions. After Miranda’s quiet path through the school, Holly was something of a shock to the teachers, and they didn’t know what to make of her. She got average GCSEs and even more average A levels, certainly not good enough to get her into university.

  She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do when she finished school, so she did a foundation course in dressmaking. Once she’d finished that, she still didn
’t have a career path in mind, so she decided to go travelling. Her plan was to start in South Africa and get a job and earn some money so she could travel up through the African continent. Instead, she ended up flying into Johannesburg and staying a decade.

  Johannesburg was a vibrant, exciting city, fast-moving and brash and full of opportunity, if you were brave and ready to work hard. Holly had no real skills other than her dressmaking and no work permit, but she managed to get a job in a small independent evening-wear shop in one of the big shopping malls, where the manager was prepared to turn a blind eye to her lack of paperwork because she had a nice English accent and was pretty and personable. There she sold ridiculously overpriced evening gowns to society ladies with more money than sense.

  One day a glamorous but tiny woman swept into the shop, announcing she had a gala to attend that evening and she had nothing to wear. Holly gathered up an armful of dresses in the right size, but the woman swept them all aside and fell on a sheer tangerine floor-length dress with an asymmetrical neckline that left one shoulder bare.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘I’m worried it’ll be too long for you,’ Holly said tentatively. ‘Even with very high shoes …’

  ‘Let me try it on,’ said the woman. Sure enough, Holly was right. The grown trailed on the floor, and it was a little loose over her breasts. The colour was great against her chocolate skin, but the dress just didn’t fit.

  ‘Shall we look for something else, maybe?’ Holly ventured.

  ‘I don’t like anything else,’ said the woman, like a petulant child. ‘I like this dress. Can’t you fix it?’

  ‘Before tonight?’ said Holly disbelievingly, but the woman just looked at her, as if the request was not at all unreasonable. They sent their alterations out to a woman who worked nearby, and the turnaround time was usually about a week. However, the dress was one of the most expensive in the shop, and Holly knew if she sold it, the commission would make a sizeable difference in her pay-cheque at the end of the month.

  The manager was out, and luckily things were quiet, so Holly ducked behind the counter and collected a box of pins and some tailor’s chalk. She pinned up the hem and made two tiny darts in the bust. The asymmetrical neckline made this even trickier, but she did it well. Carefully, she helped the woman to slip out of it and sent her off to finish her shopping and get a coffee.

  There was no sewing machine in the shop, and Holly wouldn’t have trusted a machine anyway, as the fabric was so sheer and had a slight stretch to it. There was a haberdashery shop two doors down, so she put a ‘Back in five minutes’ note on the door and dashed along the mall to grab some thread. She was lucky to find a pretty close match to the tangerine of the dress, and she sprinted back to the shop and set about taking up the hem with tiny, neat invisible stitches. She was just stitching the second dart when the woman came back.

  ‘Are you finished?’ she said shortly, as if she expected nothing less.

  ‘One more stitch,’ said Holly, and the woman sighed rather impatiently. But when Holly lifted the dress and slid it over her head and it fitted as if it had been made for her, she smiled radiantly.

  As luck would have it, the manager, Susanna, came back just as the woman was admiring herself in the mirror. Susanna went into full-scale obsequious mode and fussed over the customer extravagantly.

  ‘Oh, madam!’ she said smoothly. ‘It’s such a privilege to have you in my shop. You look absolutely stunning! That dress is perfect on you.’

  ‘Well, that’s thanks to this girl here,’ said the woman, waving her hand in Holly’s direction, although without taking her eyes off her own reflection. ‘Very good alterations.’

  ‘Alterations?’ said Susanna faintly. ‘But Holly can’t do …’ She caught herself and looked over at Holly, who mouthed that she would explain later.

  The woman drew a black credit card from her tiny, expensive handbag, and Susanna didn’t ask any more questions. As she put through the transaction, Holly went into the changing room and helped the woman out of the garment. She folded it carefully in tissue and packed it into a box. When she carried it out and put it on the counter, Susanna, pretending that the dress needed refolding, took it out of the box and cast an eagle eye over the alterations Holly had done, before repacking it and handing it over to the woman with more fawning smiles and compliments.

  ‘I’ll be back,’ said the woman. ‘And I’ll let some people know about you.’ And she swept off in a cloud of expensive perfume.

  ‘Do you know who that was?’ breathed Susanna. ‘Oh my God, Holly, do you have any idea at all who that was in our shop?’

  Holly couldn’t help noticing that Susanna had called it ‘our shop’, not something she’d ever said before. ‘No, who was she?’

  ‘That’s Zini Kekana. She’s a TV presenter. She’s a HUGE star. What did you do?’

  ‘She wanted the dress for an event tonight but it was too long. I went and got some thread and took the hem up by hand and took in the top a tiny bit.’

  ‘But it looked perfect.’

  ‘I did study dressmaking,’ said Holly defensively.

  ‘Oh … I think I remember that from your CV,’ said Susanna, her eyes gleaming. ‘Well, well done! What a great sale! And if we can offer alterations while people wait, we’ll have something totally unique here!’

  Holly was rather taken aback, and not at all sure she wanted to spend her days doing rapid alterations under pressure without the proper equipment, but she needed the job and didn’t want to say no. Zini was as good as her word, and one by one the great and the good of the South African entertainment industry started to come through the doors of their little boutique. Susanna grudgingly bought a sewing machine for Holly to use. She worked her fingers raw pinning and stitching, often with Susanna standing tensely over her, telling her to hurry up. It was no fun at all, and as Holly hadn’t thought to charge Zini extra for the first set of alterations, word got around that she would do alterations for free, so she wasn’t even making more money doing them.

  She was a bit miffed, to be honest, but she couldn’t afford to leave the job. She’d dug into the small amount of money she’d saved for travelling to pay the deposit and rent on a room in a rather nice shared house with a pool and a big garden, and she needed to earn some more before she could begin her great big African adventure.

  One long weekend, she’d taken the shop’s sewing machine home to alter some white linen trousers for a customer. It was a Friday afternoon, and by two o’clock, she found she had finished and had nothing to do. There was only sport (and that was mainly rugby) on TV. She hadn’t a book to read. The weather wasn’t great, so even sitting by the pool was out. Her housemate, Pierre, was a sweet Afrikaans boy, very camp and fey, who worked in advertising. He found Holly sitting at the counter in the kitchen grumpily swinging her legs and staring out of the window at the rain.

  ‘Shame, skattie,’ he said, patting her shoulder. ‘You look so sad.’

  ‘Not sad. Just bored. Nothing to do, not much money, hating the job. You know, the usual.’

  ‘Well, come with me, I’m going to the Plaza. I want a new hat.’

  ‘The Plaza? Is that a hotel?’

  ‘No, man, the Oriental Plaza. Clothes, fabrics, cool stuff. All very cheap. And fantastic curry. I’ll treat you.’

  It sounded like a good offer, so she got into Pierre’s bright blue Mini and they headed for Fordsburg. The Plaza was just amazing … packed with tiny fabric shops run by Indian traders who encouraged you to haggle for their wares. For a very small amount of money she got a few metres of gorgeous cherry-red satin and some gold tulle. Then she and Pierre shared a fabulously hot and fragrant lamb curry. It was the most fun she’d had since she’d got to Jo’burg.

  They headed home in the late afternoon, and Pierre went to his room for a nap. Holly found an old newspaper in the kitchen, taped a few sheets together and began sketching out a pattern. She cut out the pattern pieces and pinned them together, then
set about cutting and stitching the pretty fabrics she had bought. She worked until late that night, snatched a few hours’ sleep and then carried on early in the morning. By the time Pierre emerged from his room at about ten, she was standing in the living room, admiring her new dress in the full-length mirror. It was a cheeky take on a 1950s cocktail dress, with a fitted bodice and flared skirt. She’d lined the skirt with layers and layers of the tulle, and then hooked up the hem on one side so you could see the gold froth beneath.

  ‘Oh my heavens!’ said Pierre. ‘It’s stunning! Totally, totally stunning! I can’t believe you made that!’

  ‘You like?’

  ‘I love it. I LOVE it! It needs a hat though, and shoes. The perfect shoes. Black patent leather stilettos, I think. Or gold! And the hat needs to be a little pillbox number with a veil. Let’s go shopping.’

  ‘Stop!’ laughed Holly. I haven’t got any more money. And I’ve got shoes.’

  ‘Well, at the very least, that dress needs to go out on the town. My friend Tertius is doing a drag show in Norwood tonight. You have to come.’

  Holly agreed happily. She was proud of the dress and keen to show it off. However, she was not at all prepared for the response she got. The dress caused a stir from the moment she walked through the door, when a friend of Pierre’s came rushing up. He had a cloud of curly blond hair and thick glasses. ‘Oh, darling!’ he breathed reverently. ‘You look like Jane Russell and Marilyn and Cyd Charisse all rolled into one!’ he fingered the fabric of the skirt. ‘Where did you get this? It’s DIVINE!’

  ‘She made it,’ Pierre said proudly, as if he’d made her. ‘This is Holly, my housemate. She comes from London. Holly, this is my friend Wouter.’

  ‘I lived in London for a few years,’ said Wouter. ‘Willesden Green. Where are you from?’ He took her hand and drew her into the restaurant towards the bar. Pierre followed.