Shop Girl

by Mary Portas

  I know I should get my own place but the thought of living alone fills me with dread. It took me months to get used to not having Tish on the bottom bunk every night in Windsor Road when she started her nursing course – and I had two brothers and a dad lying only a few feet away. The thought of being by myself makes me shudder.

  I can hardly afford to get somewhere of my own either on the amount I earn. I’m continually dodging fares on the Underground and buying food that’s discounted because it’s near the end of its shelf life as I try to save money. Fashion and music are the only things I want to spend anything on. I save up for weeks before going to buy a T-shirt at Rock-A-Cha in Kensington Market, Take Six on the King’s Road or PX in Covent Garden. I squirrel away any spare money I have to buy records by artists like Joy Division, Talking Heads and Dexys Midnight Runners. Working-class kids are breaking the charts with music featuring everything from synthesizers to brass and strings.

  ‘Did you see Berge this morning?’ Fiona asks. ‘I thought he was going to strangle Tracy.’

  ‘What had she done wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably missed a speck of dust when she vacuumed the window.’

  ‘Good job he didn’t catch you, Mary!’

  I smile at Fiona. ‘Never. It was a fail-safe plan.’

  A few days before, the after-effects of one too many the night before had caught me up when we were redoing a window. The blinds were down and Caroline could see that I was struggling. ‘Have a quick nap,’ she said.

  So I’d got a Frette throw – because by now I’d started to learn just how much softness money could buy you at the luxury end of linens – and lain down with the hum of shoppers passing by outside, hidden from view as Caroline screwed shut the panel giving access to the back of the window. Twenty minutes later she’d woken me up.

  ‘I’ve got us a treat!’ she says, as she comes back to the table with our mugs of tea. ‘Toast is just coming.’

  Reaching into her bag, she pulls out a packet of Sobranie. Snapping back in our seats like Pavlovian dogs, we look nonchalantly at the box. Sobranies aren’t kids’ fags. They’re for sophisticated adults, the kind of people who go to San Lorenzo every day of the week. I hardly smoke but make an exception for Sobranie.

  ‘What colour do you want?’ Caroline asks, as we gaze at the neat row of green, yellow, pink and lilac cigarettes nestling in the box.

  ‘Yellow maybe?’ says Fiona.

  ‘Green?’ I wonder.

  ‘Bags the pink one!’ Roger shrieks.

  The eyes of the queens sitting beside us slide wordlessly towards him.

  Blitz kids

  I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time getting ready for a night out. And that’s saying something.

  But Roger, Fiona and I have to look our best to get past the bloke on the door of the Blitz club. His name is Steve Strange and he’s the scariest twenty-one-year-old in London. We’ve got in the few times we’ve come, but you can never be sure with Steve. Stalking up and down outside the door, he gazes at people before either showing them inside with a nod or turning them away.

  ‘Take a look, love,’ he says to a woman in front of us. His lip curls with disgust as he holds up a mirror in front of her. ‘Would you let yourself in?’ he snaps.

  The woman, who is wearing a wetsuit and flippers, disappears into the night without another word.

  Recession, high unemployment and strikes – everything bleak about life in 1980 – is forgotten inside the Blitz as teenagers and twenty-somethings create looks that owe more to the pages of story books than real life. Art students, musicians, fashion designers, hairdressers and shop assistants parade in a whirl of fur, leather, Spandex, leopard and everything in between, faces painted like masks and hair teased into clouds.

  David Bowie is their muse and has even dropped in to see what is happening here, the buzz that Steve and DJ Rusty Egan have created with friends, including Boy George, Stephen Jones, Midge Ure and the Kemp brothers. One day soon this look will be labelled New Romantic. For now, all I know is that I will die a thousand deaths if I don’t get over the threshold of the club.

  A night at the Blitz takes weeks of preparation. Each time we come, Fiona, Roger and I spend hours rooting through the studio and prop cupboard looking for anything that has been written off as damaged that we might be able to customize. Tonight I’ve paired green army trousers and a white shirt with a purple felt conical hat that Roger decked with blue netting. My eyes glitter with silver and my mouth is streaked with a slash of bright red. Fiona is wearing a tutu, with black fishnets and red glitter shoes, and her hair is so backcombed she’ll have to wash it at least a dozen times to straighten it out. Roger, meanwhile, is in a shirt that we fashioned out of bubble wrap and stapled onto him. He’s also wearing a black silk tie and full make-up. Wear anything like this anywhere other than the Blitz and you might be beaten up. But here anything is possible.

  Nerves fill me as we get nearer to Steve. I wonder what we’ll find inside the Blitz tonight: wood nymphs, queens wearing crowns, priests, pirates or space cadets maybe, all dancing in a club that’s decked out with war memorabilia as past and future collide.

  ‘There is no way he’s turning us away,’ Fiona hisses, as we move up the queue. ‘No way. I haven’t eaten lunch for a week to pay for tonight.’

  And then there he is in front of us.

  Steve looks us up and down before dropping his eyes to the ground. His face is painted white and his eyes are so kohled I’m not sure he’ll be able to see a thing.

  ‘In you go,’ he says at last.

  If Roger moves any quicker, I swear the bubble wrap will rip.

  Sinclair ZX80

  Our breath trails in clouds around us. It’s a cold winter’s night and we’re standing in front of the back windows. Christmas was unveiled earlier tonight and shoppers jostled to get a glimpse of the most luxurious displays of the year. Now it’s past eleven and the street is quiet. Caroline, Elaine, Fiona, Roger and I have stopped for one last look on the way home from the pub.

  The front and side windows are full of stories – fairies, princesses and knights dressed in the latest couture and most expensive accessories. Ours are dressed with everything else the store has to offer. Food and china, furniture, luggage and textiles brought together in scenes of a fantasy home prepared for a magical Christmas. Games are at the centre of Caroline’s design, every kind that you can imagine: hand-tooled leather chess and backgammon sets stacked alongside dominoes made of walnut and elm; board games like Risk and Monopoly, with the red, blue, yellow and green lights of Simon games winking beside them. There is a fireplace stacked with logs and giant hand-painted baubles hanging from the ceiling. Striped stockings are suspended along the mantelpiece, chocolate and crystallized fruits tumble out of boxes and a Christmas tree laden with lights stands in a corner. It’s what every child dreams of waking up to find on Christmas morning.

  ‘What on earth do you do with it?’ Fiona had exclaimed, when she opened a box as we dressed the windows.

  Sitting in the bottom was a Sinclair ZX80 computer – one of the latest in electronics that would form the centrepiece of our windows. A white plastic square with a blue keyboard, the Sinclair was billed as the first affordable home computer that you connected to your TV and used to play games like Space Invaders and Pacman. Beside the ZX80 were boxes with ‘Atari’ written on them and smaller packages too: tiny plastic and glass games with a screen featuring a black stick figure that tossed around balls. They were called Game & Watches. It all looked like something out of Star Trek.

  ‘I haven’t got a clue,’ I’d said to Fiona. ‘And why anyone would want to sit at home in front of a big white box instead of going to a video arcade with their mates is beyond me.’

  I looked solemnly at her.

  ‘It’ll never catch on,’ I said.

  An unexpected visit

  I picked up the phone and dialled Mr McKittrick’s number. My hands shook slightly as I
waited to be put through to him.

  It was a few days after the Christmas windows had been unveiled and I’d gone to see Tish the night before after work. But when I’d got to her flat, I’d found Rebecca waiting outside in the dark.

  ‘Is your sister here?’ she’d asked.

  ‘She’ll be back soon.’

  ‘I need to talk to you both.’

  ‘What about?’

  Rebecca’s face crumpled in the orange glow of the streetlights. ‘Your father is dead.’

  Something swooped down inside me just as it had when Mum died. That moment of going over a cliff and plunging downwards. I did not understand. ‘What do you mean? Dad’s not ill.’

  ‘A heart attack. In his office. Can I come in and wait for your sister? I’d like to tell her the news. I’ve lost him and we’ve only been married nine months.’

  Anger snapped as I looked at Rebecca dabbing her nose with a handkerchief, lost in her own sadness, entirely unaware of ours. ‘I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘We’ll ring you tomorrow about the arrangements.’

  Unlocking the front door, I left Rebecca standing outside as I walked into the flat.

  ‘Mr McKittrick?’ I said now, as I heard him pick up the phone. ‘It’s Mary Newton. I can’t come in today. My father has died.’

  He was silent for just a moment too long, and the familiar unease of a person trying to find the right words rushed back to me.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mary,’ Mr McKittrick said. ‘That’s dreadful.’

  Dreadful. The word stuck in my mind as I put down the phone. Mr McKittrick was right. But, in so many ways, Dad had been lost to us long before.

  A funeral

  For a man who’d spent his childhood in the Protestant Church, was married and raised children in the Catholic before a late conversion to Seventh Day Adventism, my father’s funeral was an appropriately mixed affair when it came to religious influences. After a service in a nondescript non-denominational church, we went to North Watford cemetery where Dad was buried next to Mum as his very much alive second wife wept beside them.

  It had been a battle to get him there. When the five of us had gone to discuss arrangements with Rebecca, she had looked at us in surprise after Michael had mentioned the funeral at St Helen’s and burial beside Mum in our local cemetery.

  ‘But he’s my husband now,’ Rebecca had said. ‘And I want him to be buried in my church.’

  ‘He bought the plot after Mum died,’ Michael replied. ‘It’s beside hers. They were married for twenty-four years.’

  ‘I know. But that was before we met and he grew to share my faith.’

  We’d gone straight to see Father Bussey.

  ‘She can’t do this, can she?’ Joe had exclaimed. ‘It’s not what Dad would have wanted. We know it isn’t.’

  Father Bussey had agreed to go and see Rebecca with us the following day to try to reason with her. Anger had once again boiled up inside me as he gently explained how important it was for us that our parents were buried together.

  ‘I’m really not sure it’s what Sam would have wanted,’ Rebecca said.

  In the end she had reluctantly agreed to let us bury Dad beside Mum. But Rebecca had held fast to having the service in a non-denominational church. Her priest spoke and Father Bussey said a few words. It was a religious no man’s land.

  I thought of Mum as Father Bussey talked. I thought of what she would say and how she would feel if she knew what she’d worked so hard to create had disappeared. The family that Mum would have recognized was no more. It was finally being laid to rest with Dad. Sitting with Michael, Joe, Tish, Phil and Lawrence, I felt grief mix with numbness inside me. Don, Sadie, Jean, Ruth, Cathy, Harry and Sheila were there, as well as colleagues and other friends. But it felt like a pitiful affair as Rebecca cried softly on her pew and tears slid unnoticed down my cheeks.

  We’d asked Rebecca for a couple of things – photos, a few of Mum’s favourite knick-knacks and Dad’s watch because we all knew he wanted Joe to have it. None of it was worth anything. We just wanted to save a few bits of our past for the future. I kept thinking of the bedspread covered with black Scottie dogs that Mum had bought me as a child. Where was it? I didn’t know why but I ached for it. What had Dad done with it when he’d packed up the house?

  ‘The solicitor will deal with it all,’ Rebecca kept saying, in response to our questions. ‘Your father got rid of most things.’

  The solicitor told us just before the funeral that Dad had left everything to Rebecca. Money and every possession he’d ever owned. Now it was just the five of us.

  Hovis crumpets

  It is a week since I moved into my own place a couple of weeks after Dad’s funeral. It’s the silence that gets me most. When Michael walked me home a few days ago, after I’d had dinner with him and his girlfriend, Ros, who lives just around the corner, I’d sobbed as he said goodbye.

  ‘Everything will be okay,’ my brother told me, as we hugged.

  But each time I unlock the door to my bedsit in Manor House, I just want to cry. With lino on the floor and the smell of damp in the air, it has an electricity meter that needs to be repeatedly stuffed with coins that I am always either forgetting or cannot afford. The bathroom down the corridor has plugholes constantly clogged with other people’s hair and is so freezing I almost can’t bring myself to use it.

  The house is on several floors and at night I hear people running up and down the stairs, laughing and joking as they come in or go out. But when I get home from Harrods, the only thing I can bring myself to do is heat up a can of soup on the Baby Belling and get into bed. It’s November, freezing cold, and as I lie in the dark because the bloody meter has usually run out, I switch on the radio and listen to anything that’s on just to hear the sound of voices filling the room. The silence is heavy. Almost like a weight. While the rest of the country has been gripped by finding out who shot JR, I’ve lain in bed listening to Radio 1. ‘Flash’ by Queen is at number one, and if I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it a thousand times.

  At least I’m warm in bed. John’s mum, Gladys, has given me some purple flowered sheets and a duvet. She’d heard that I was moving and knew I didn’t have anything. I’ve never had a duvet before. John dropped it round to me with his dad and I’d stared hopefully at him, as I always do when I see him. He’d looked at me awkwardly before leaving again. We see each other quite often now but he’s told me that we can only ever be friends. And while I have new boyfriends, they never last long because I cannot stop myself hoping that one day John will change his mind.

  My eyes filled with tears yesterday when Simon Bates played ‘Without You’ by Nilsson. Our Tune has only been on a few months but already everyone in the Harrods studio is addicted to the stories of lost and thwarted love. Years ago, I’d played ‘Without You’ over and over on a jukebox in a French youth hostel. I was on a school trip with St Joan’s and had always imagined my first time abroad would be far more exotic than forty-eight hours in a rainy town in Normandy.

  But I’d never really understood the words properly until I heard it as I ironed shirts in the studio. I didn’t dare cry at work but realized a few days later that I needn’t have worried. The day after John Lennon was murdered, I walked into the studio to find it lit by hundreds of candles and everyone sobbing as they drank wine and remembered him.

  But today I am not going to cry. Today I am going to smile and pretend everything is fine because Tish is coming to see me. She cried when she dropped me off here with my two suitcases, the kettle and the toaster she and Phil had bought me. Tish worries that I can’t cope on my own but I keep telling her that I can. I’ve been looking after other people for a long time so I must be able to do the same for myself. I can’t keep running back to her.

  It’s my first weekend in my flat and I have forced myself not to go back to Watford. So this morning I took my washing to a local launderette instead of taking it to Tish’s, then went to see Ros for brunch. Her flat is so cosy that she a
lmost has to drag me off the sofa when it’s time to leave.

  I can’t stop thinking of Dad. I pray that God will forgive him for what he did. I don’t want him to be punished for choosing Rebecca over us. I want him to be in Heaven with Mum where he should be. I want them to be together. I whisper the words of my prayers as I lie in bed.

  There is a knock on the door and I run to open it. Tish is standing outside looking pale. I gather her up in a hug. ‘Step this way,’ I say, as I usher her inside.

  Tish glances around the room. Her face falls even further.

  ‘I couldn’t bake a cake,’ I say brightly. ‘But look what I got for our tea!’ I hold up a packet of crumpets. ‘And I’ve got butter as well. Two packets.’

  Tish gives me a smile. I smile back. Later we will talk about Dad. Why he did what he did. Still not understanding it. But we know the pain will gradually soften. We have learned this before.

  Pierrot dolls and Baileys

  The weeks in the run-up to Christmas are like no other in the retail year. It starts quietly enough: people slowly browse the almost empty Christmas department and organized women tick off lists of soap, socks, jumpers, games, books and a bottle of perfume for their mothers. Then everything spirals into complete and utter chaos.

  Harassed mothers push screaming toddlers around in buggies as they fling whatever they can grab into a basket. White-faced men sprint towards the lingerie department to buy something special enough to make their wives smile for a moment before she disappears under a mountain of Brussels sprout peelings on Christmas morning. Lovers looking for a unique gift wrestle their way along miles of the store’s walkways in the search for something perfect.

  It is as if the world is preparing for a nuclear attack and the people working in retail are in charge of filling the bunkers. But then comes the magical moment around four o’clock on Christmas Eve when you realize there are just a few more hours to go. Tomorrow there will be one day of peace to savour before the madness starts again with the sales.