by Mary Portas
‘I’ll make a pot of tea, then, shall I, sweetheart?’ Dad says, and bolts out of the room.
The clock ticks. The canary starts to sing.
‘Would you like a cake while you’re waiting?’ Tish says eventually.
‘Why, thank you, dee-aih.’
Rebecca bites delicately into a yellow French Fancy. Wearing blue eye shadow and red lipstick, she looks like a giant mouse in drag nibbling cheese. I think of the delicate stroke of coral lipstick that Mum used to wear.
‘Very nice,’ Rebecca says, as she looks at Tish. ‘Although I do love Marks & Spencer’s cakes.’
My father reappears with the teapot and starts to fill cups. ‘How about another wee cake, darling?’
‘Thank you, Sam.’
Rebecca sits bolt upright. Her feet – clad in cream patent shoes – are neatly placed one beside the other. I wonder if she smells of violets.
‘Are you going to show Rebecca the pigeon loft, Dad?’ Joe asks.
My father’s face reddens. ‘She doesn’t want to be seeing that now, Joe.’
How long are we going to have to sit here? John is taking me out later and I want to wash my hair. Since meeting him, I seem to spend half my life washing my hair and the other shaving my legs.
‘Well, isn’t this grand?’ Dad says. ‘How about another cup of tea?’
Rebecca dabs the corners of her mouth as he pours.
‘I’m glad you’re here with us, darling,’ Dad says.
‘And so am I, Sam. It’s been a hard year for you but you’ve done such a wonderful job. Look how well you’ve done. Five children to bring up all on your own. They must run you ragged.’
We stare at each other as she takes a sip of tea.
‘I have to confess that I couldn’t look after so many. My Raymond is such a good boy. No trouble at all. I’m always saying how lucky I am. There’s no mistake. A mother couldn’t ask for more.’
‘And a lovely boy he is,’ Dad says. ‘No doubt about it. He’s about your age, Lawrence. You should meet him.’
My brother stares mutely at Dad. Rebecca raises a hand to pat her hair, as if to check that the carapace of Elnett hasn’t failed.
‘Do you want me to get you an ashtray?’ Tish asks Dad.
He delves into his pocket, takes out a packet of Polos and hurls one into his mouth.
‘And what would I be wanting that for, seeing as how I don’t smoke?’ he hisses. We look at each other in confusion. Rebecca stares at Dad. Her mouth twists into a grimace of a smile.
I wonder how long it will take for her to go the way of Bernadette.
Moving on
On a cool September morning I walk into Cassio College where the faint tang of bleach hangs in the air.
I phoned the college last week in a haphazard attempt to get out of working at Bosch for the rest of my life. After making friends with Alan, the guy who designed signage and advertising materials for the salesmen, I’d often chatted to him in his studio. It was full of ink, pens, paint and glue, and I’d decided that graphics seemed an okay job because at least you got to draw and be a bit creative. After drama, my second love was art.
‘You need to get onto a course,’ Alan had told me. ‘There’s one at the art school in Harrow. Or you could try Cassio College in Watford.’
Days before the start of term, I’d phoned Cassio and a woman had told me someone had dropped off the course at the last minute. ‘This doesn’t usually happen,’ she said. ‘It’s an HND course. One of the best there is. Our students go all over. Can you come for an interview tomorrow?’
‘Of course.’
‘One thing, though: we only do graphics with visual merchandising.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Shop windows. You’ll learn everything there is to know about how to put windows together. Like those big ones you see in Clements, dear. Props and lighting, signage, things like that.’
I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about and I certainly didn’t want to work in a shop for the rest of my life. But Cassio was local. It was the only kind of way out that I could hope for right now.
‘Y.M.C.A.’ by the Village People
‘Never underestimate the power of polystyrene,’ said Mr Lawrence. ‘You should have seen what I used to do with it in the Christmas grotto.’
Brown suit, Craven A fag and decades of experience at Cordells department store, Mr Lawrence was in charge of teaching us about creating signage and props. We put them into mocked-up shop windows every Friday, and the rest of the week was spent working towards that moment. In a studio filled with ten-foot-high black boxes that doubled as windows, we painted and sprayed backdrops before installing the props we’d made and placing the product that formed the centrepiece of our windows. One week we’d do a soup display, the next china and towels; kitchenware was followed by Grand Marnier.
Sally, who wore Kicker boots and had worked in beauty, was responsible for overseeing the creation of our windows. Alan Springhall was the man who helped design them first on paper by teaching us to make 3D drawings of our displays. I had quickly realized that graphics required an attention to the most minute detail that I would never possess. A lot of girls fancied Mr Springhall – he was at least a decade younger than most of the lecturers and had a camera permanently slung round his neck – but, then again, they would because they were mostly sixteen. Two years can feel like a lifetime when you are eighteen and even more so when you still cry as your old school bus goes past because you so desperately miss the one constant you had after your mother’s death.
Cassio didn’t stand a chance. I put a hard shell around me as I tried to adapt to change and adopted a dismissive air to everyone and everything. My fellow students were young and small-town, I decided. I was running a home while they were talking about pocket money; I was going up to Kensington Market at the weekends while they were still shopping at Chelsea Girl; I was worrying about getting my younger brother out of bed in the mornings, they were arguing with theirs; I was going to clubs like the Roxy in Soho where Siouxsie Sioux & the Banshees, the Clash and the Jam played while my classmates were still at the New Penny.
‘So what are you going to put in your window tomorrow?’ a girl called Tracy had asked me, as we queued in the canteen for a coffee.
‘Blondie. Parallel Lines.’
She had crashed onto the scene in a blaze of peroxide, red lips and ripped T-shirts, and I was besotted with her: the insouciance, the disdain, the girl with a one-of-the-boys attitude. Joe had bleached and blunt-chopped my hair and I’d started tie-dyeing jeans on the sly in the photography dark room at Cassio during my lunch breaks. Our windows tomorrow had to be about music and I was planning to paint mine with black and white lines, like a zebra crossing. A mannequin sprayed white with a single black line covering its eyes would stand in the corner next to albums suspended in a zigzag across the window.
‘How about you?’ I asked Tracy.
‘The Village People.’
I stared at her. ‘But the brief is about music and innovation. You think “Y.M.C.A.” is innovative?’
‘Yeh.’
I sighed as I looked at my new friend Danielle. The same age as me, her idol was Lauren Bacall and she wore vintage fur coats, permanently had a packet of B&H in her hand and often turned up for college wearing last night’s eyeliner. Her French mother, Suzette, was an antiques dealer, who made things like chicken livers in red wine sauce. Her dad was a cameraman and so good-looking he’d been in an Opal Fruits commercial. Her sister Michelle danced brilliantly to ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’. These were interesting people doing interesting things. Danielle and I had gone to see Midnight Express yesterday at the cinema. Tracy would have been first in line for a ticket to Watership Down.
‘The Village People aren’t innovative!’ I snorted. ‘You think a few blokes dancing around in fancy dress is new?’
‘Well, no one’s done it before.’
‘Because it’s shit. It’s not inno
vative. It’s just bad taste.’
Tracy’s hand quivered as the dinner lady handed her a cup of Maxwell House. ‘Just because it’s not your taste doesn’t mean it’s bad.’
‘And that’s yours? Seriously? The Village People? It’s not going to inspire anyone.’
‘And how do you know that?’
‘Because “Y.M.C.A.” is naff.’
‘So what do you think is good taste then, if you’re such an expert?’
‘Loads of people. Siouxsie & the Banshees. Donna Summer. Elvis Costello. Bowie.’
‘But Bowie did a comedy song! What about “Laughing Gnome”?’
‘It was a one-off!’ I roared. ‘He was being kooky.’
‘So if Bowie does it, it’s okay?’ Tracy yelled. ‘You’re just a snob.’
‘I’m not a bloody snob. I just know what’s good music and what’s not.’
‘You think you know it all but you don’t. That’s your trouble, Mary.’
And it was. Grief had found the perfect outlet in disdain for everyone and everything around me at Cassio.
Fiat 500
John and I walk into the station car park and head towards his car. We haven’t spoken much on the way back from the theatre in London.
We get into his battered car. Sitting down, I feel the familiar lurch of the passenger seat falling out of position. As usual, I’m half sitting, half lying down. I’ve spent months driving around peeping over the dashboard of his Fiat 500.
‘So what did you think?’ John says, as he looks down at me.
‘It was all right.’
‘All right?’
‘Yeh. All right.’
He probably loved it, I think. John is so clever and well read. He works as a union negotiator and keeps telling me that a woman called Margaret Thatcher might be elected next year. This is apparently bad news but I’ve got no clue what he’s on about. There are so many things I don’t understand that John does. Politics. The fact that you can eat the rind of Brie instead of cutting it off. Waiting for Godot.
But I can’t tell him that, can I? We’ve just spent three hours watching it. Thank God the drama group we’ve joined doesn’t do Beckett plays. John persuaded me to start acting again and we’ve joined the Bushey and Oxhey Amateur Dramatics Society. I’m glad he did because I’ve missed acting ever since turning down RADA. Danielle is a member, too, and we’ve made friends with Guy and Liz, Roger and Tor. Gay and Andy have even invited us for ‘supper’ around their kitchen table.
We’re doing Dick Whittington for the Christmas panto in a few weeks. It’s simple: a pussy, a principal boy and a dame.
John takes my hand. ‘I thought that play was a pile of shit,’ he says.
Warmth fills me.
Creosote
My father has started to wash his own underpants, putting them into a pot and bringing them to the boil on the cooker with a handful of Daz.
There are other changes, too. He’s bought a pair of slip-on shoes and is out so much that we can go days without seeing him properly. On weekends, he visits Rebecca and often insists that Lawrence goes with him.
‘You can keep Raymond company while we go out for a bite to eat,’ he tells Lawrence, most Friday mornings.
‘Raymond needs a babysitter, does he?’ Joe asks.
‘Rebecca doesn’t want him alone in the house.’
‘But what about Lawrence? He hates going over there.’
‘No, he doesn’t.’
‘Yes, he does, Dad. He says Raymond is a mummy’s boy and he’s got nothing in common with him. So why do you keep making him go? And why did you give his skateboard to Raymond for that matter?’
‘Ach. He’s too old for that now, Joe.’
‘He’s not. It’s his favourite thing.’
‘Lawrence is nearly sixteen. Far too old for skateboards.’
‘But why do you keep giving his stuff to Raymond? He doesn’t have much and now you’re giving it away.’
‘Enough, Joe! If I want to give Rebecca or Raymond or anyone else something from this house, then it is mine to give. Do you hear?’
After months of ignoring his birds, I had found Dad creosoting the pigeon loft last weekend. Wearing his old garden jacket with a paintbrush in his hand and a Player’s hanging out of the corner of his mouth, he looked suddenly familiar again.
‘All right, Dad?’ I said, as I walked outside.
‘I’m getting the loft ready. I’m selling up.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s all going to go. I’ve had enough. I’m getting it ready and then I’ll put an ad in the Watford Observer.’
‘But why? You love your birds, Dad.’
‘Not any more. I’ve had my fun with them but now it’s over.’
I thought of Rebecca: the cream suit and perfect hair; the shoes that matched the outfit and the plastic runners that probably covered her carpets at home.
Then I thought of my mother.
‘Close the door,’ she would call, if one of us left it open on a cold day. ‘It’s icy, that wind. Stepmother’s breath, that is. You’ll catch your death.’
Brillo pads
I have filled my Friday windows with tins of Campbell’s soup, bottles of Brut and cases of Liebfraumilch, hung six-foot lengths of fuchsia, red and orange paper from the ceiling and torn rips in it through which peep china products. I have woven strands of wool like a giant cat’s cradle and suspended bottles of perfume in them like baubles on a Christmas tree. I have dreamed up ideas for kitchenware and sports clothing, bathroom accessories and lighting, baking products, soap and back-to-school stationery.
The rest of the week passes me by. Walking into college in the morning, I wait for the moment when I can leave again. I sit in lectures on retail commerce and art history, thinking about what jobs I need to do at home or seeing John. I worry about Lawrence as teachers talk. I have no interest in learning skills like prop-making and handwriting signage. I’m never going to work in a shop. I’m just biding my time.
Some days I don’t even turn up for college at all. Usually I go over to Danielle’s house and we smoke cigarettes as we go through the bottles in her parents’ drinks cabinet: sherry and dry martini, Advocaat and whisky, vodka, gin and Bacardi. I live for life outside college when I am with John, my brothers, Tish and Phil, Danielle, and a new friend we’ve made at Cassio called Suzanne. These are the moments when the anger whirling inside me is stilled.
We go up to London to look at buckled boots in Shelly’s, hunt in second-hand shops for old men’s work jackets to wear with ripped jeans, or drive out to country pubs for a drink. We visit clubs like Global Village on Embankment or eat the Sunday roasts that I cook with Tish while everyone piles into the living room just like they did when Mum was alive. Punk has segued into New Wave and Vivienne Westwood is selling bondage trousers at Seditionaries on the King’s Road. Compared to this colourful world of music, fashion and colour, Cassio feels like it will kill me with grey.
Dora Reeve, the woman in charge of the course, knows it. She is proud of the work she does at Cassio and the students she turns out. She likes the girls from Abbots Langley and St Albans, who diligently make notes in class and write essays. Having worked in luxury before starting to teach at Cassio, she still carries it with her in a spritz of L’Air du Temps and the Cacharel cardigans she wears. Dora knows that retail is a world of hard work and attention to detail. You will never succeed if you don’t fully apply yourself.
‘Have you cleaned up the studio?’ she asks me, one Friday afternoon.
I have spent hours spray-painting old pairs of shoes that I got from second-hand shops all over Watford. Stacking them in my window, I suspended Joe’s lipstick-red loafers in the middle of the pile: the red shoes standing livid against a backdrop of acid green.
‘Yes, Ms Dora,’ I reply. ‘Everything’s clean.’
Five minutes later, Dora hauls me back into the studio where she looks sternly at a workbench covered with vivid paint. ‘So
what is this, Mary?’ she asks.
‘Dunno,’ I say.
‘I think you do. Now please clear it up.’
Sighing to myself, I start to scrub at the paint with a Brillo pad. Dora watches me silently as she clears up the last bits and pieces lying around the studio. She will leave it neat as a pin for the still weekend hours.
‘Do you know what will stop you making a career in this business, Mary?’ she asks quietly, when I finish.
I don’t want to hear Dora’s opinion or talk to her. I don’t care what she thinks. I don’t care what anyone thinks.
‘Your attitude. You have some talent but it won’t go very far if you carry on like this.’
I glare at her, sling my bag over my shoulder and walk out.
Habitat
It’s amazing how little you can get by on when you have to. I walked rather than took the bus, made sandwiches instead of going to the college canteen, and either rooted through second-hand shops or lived for the sales. Michael and Tish topped up my Boots money but Joe in particular was always bailing me out because he was earning a good wage, thanks to his hairdressing.
After working at some upmarket salons and building up a good client base, he’d been approached by a friend called Terry Calvert, whose father was going to help him open a salon in Watford.
‘Will you be the manager?’ Terry asked.
‘Yes,’ said Joe. ‘But I’ll need to give my sister a job.’
I became a Saturday girl and worked on Reception in between washing every strand of hair I could in the hope of getting a tip. Clipso – along with other shops on Queens Road – was the place to be because it had brought a bit of central London to the suburbs. Next door, the men’s designer place, Lui, had opened a sister shop called Elle to cater to Watford’s most fashionable, who poured in to rifle through the rails before coming to Clipso for a cut.
Chic, the Patti Smith Group and Donna Summer played on the salon speakers that were permanently set to almost club level.