Slave to Fashion

by Rebecca Campbell

  I asked the taxi driver to hang on while I went to ring. After a minute a youth with long hair and bare feet came to the door. I took this to be the cretin. He was actually reasonably good-looking in a scruffy, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape kind of way. He pushed the hair out of his eyes and said, “Oh, hi. You Katie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Malan,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Er . . . I’m Alan, I mean.”

  “Look, Alan, or Malan, or whoever you are,” I said in a strict, but flirty way, “I’ve got a couple of bags. Could you give me a hand?”

  He looked down at his feet, and you could sense him weighing up the options—schlep back upstairs for some shoes? Or slap out on the path with nothing but his verrucas between him and the slug trails? Barefoot, he followed.

  It took five minutes of heaving to transfer all my worldlies from the taxi to the hall. I think the driver realized that this was not the best day of my life, and he very sweetly helped out.

  The youth looked at my sad heap of bin liners, my two cheap, pre-Ludo cardboard suitcases, and some more recent Louis Vuitton.

  “Where d’yer want this stuff? I mean, are you, like, moving in?”

  “I’ll be in Veronica’s room, for a while.”

  It took six journeys, two for me and four for Malan, to get me settled in Veronica’s room. It had not changed over the past two years. Still bead curtains hanging around aimlessly. Still the stumps of a thousand scented candles. Still the racks of self-help books: Eat Yourself to a Better Job; Feng Shui on a Plate; Ditch the Guru: How to Wean Yourself off Self-Help Books. Still the ethnic rugs, handwoven from yak pelts. Still the old acoustic typewriter, on which she’d hammer out those interminable, unread letters about her inner torment. I emptied out one of my bin liners and started to fill it with some of her rubbish. I didn’t know how long I would be staying, but some order and discipline would have to be imposed if it was going to be tolerable.

  My next job was to elbow some room in her hopelessly inadequate hold-your-breath-and-walk-in wardrobe for my clothes. A number of Veronica’s voracious jumpers joined the rubbish in the bin liner. And only then, semisettled, the horror of homelessness and crumpled clothes temporarily, at least, receding, did I lie back on Veronica’s bed and light a cigarette.

  As ever, it brought a clarity and objectivity to my thought. I replayed the morning. I then rewound further and played everything from the ill-omened meeting with Liam in the Loading Bay of Doom. I saw all of my mistakes and miscalculations, my errors of judgment, and my bad luck. And there I saw the key moment, the hinge on which my history turned. It was my handling of Liam when he’d called to ask me on a second date. What I should have done was to come across as clingy and desperate. He then would have felt for me little but pity and contempt, and I would have been in the clear. My aloofness and disdain could only have had two results: made his yearning for me all the sharper, or triggered the revenge response.

  For some reason, the full audit of my catastrophe calmed me. I had managed, through logic and reason, to erect a dam between the horror and me. I could see it boiling and bubbling like lava behind the wall, but for now it was safely contained.

  I was just lighting my third Silk Cut (two stubs bobbed in the half cup of cold coffee left by Veronica beside her bed) when the door was thrown back and Veronica burst in.

  “Katie, how lovely,” she said, her eyes watering with the smoke. “But what are you doing here? What are all these bags and things?” And then more urgently: “Katie, what’s happened?”

  “I’ve left Ludo.”

  “Oh, Katie,” she said, sympathy adding to the chemically induced tears, “please, please tell me what’s happened.”

  “I suppose you’ll find out sooner or later. Some man, a driver, made up a story about me. Ludo believed it, and he’s thrown me out. Or rather Penny has. Veronica, I’ve nowhere to go, no one to turn to except you. Can I please stay here until I find somewhere else?”

  “Katie, of course you can,” she said, and flung her heavy arms around me. “It’ll be fun. We’ll have to share the bed, though, just like when we were little.” I had no recollection whatsoever of having spent time in the same bed as Veronica, however little we may have been. I hadn’t fully thought through the sleeping arrangements. Still, in a time of crisis one must make sacrifices. “But,” Veronica continued, “I’ll have to run it past the house council tonight. It should be a formality. And I have to tell you, Katie, and I know it’s only the stress that has made you do it, but this is a strictly nonsmoking household. If you want to smoke, you’ll have to go outside, onto the patio.”

  “Patio! Yuck. I didn’t realize that people had patios anymore. I thought it was all decking. But of course I shall respect your rules. Thank you so much, Veronica, I shall never forget this. I’ve already unpacked a few things. . . .”

  And so we spent quite a pleasant afternoon, considering my life was ruined. For once Veronica’s close attendance was exactly what I needed. She comforted and praised, and lamented, and cursed in all the right places. I needed some unconditional love, and Veronica had plenty and nowhere else to put it. She made me coffee with hot milk and later brought me a bacon sandwich, despite her fervent vegetarianism. I hadn’t eaten all day, and I inhaled it in three big gasps.

  Late in the afternoon she said, “You’ve come on the right day: we always have Sunday dinner together—it’s a house thing. I’m doing a buckwheat pilaf. Let’s go and meet the gang, they should be around by now. You know most of them: Colin’s still here, you know, the VAT person; so is Roxanne, the jewelry girl. And little Tracy, with her trampoline, and leotard, and things. But Otto has gone.”

  “Replaced by Malan.”

  “Who?”

  “You know, zombie boy, ‘I’mmmalan.’ ”

  “Oh yes, Katie, you’re so funny. No, he goes out with Roxanne, but he spends most of his time here because he hasn’t anywhere else to go. A bit like you, really.” Before I had time to lash out, Veronica carried on, “No, no, Roddy’s moved into Otto’s room.”

  I sensed that a change had occurred. Veronica had gone all dreamy and was squirming on her bottom in a repellently animal way.

  “Roddy, I see. And what does Roddy do?”

  “Roddy’s an actor,” she said reverently.

  “And would I be wrong to say that just maybe perhaps Veronica has a tiny weenie soft spot for this handsome actor?”

  “Silly!” said Veronica, blushing and giggling and looking away.

  “Well, let’s go and meet them, then, before this beanbag swallows me whole.”

  Veronica’s house was on three floors, and her bedroom was at the top. The house certainly had potential, with its huge rooms and high ceilings and big windows and wide stairs. But the faraway owner, old Mrs. Alzheimer, who’d inherited the place in 1906, was mindful now only of her colostomy bag and Stannah stair lift, and was never going to put anything into it, so it was left on its knees, begging for a lick of paint, and some new carpets and furniture, and perhaps for a UN helicopter airlift out of Finsbury Park.

  The living room had two 1970s sofas, slashed at some period by a sword-wielding samurai, exposing their discolored viscera to the buttocks of an uncaring world. The rough floorboards were randomly covered or exposed by a network of old mats and rugs, assembled from charity shops, car boot sales, and prison workshops. There was also a weird-looking orthopedic rocking chair, designed, Veronica told me, to help correct curvature of the spine. About a third of the room was taken up with a dining table fashioned from roughly hewn planks, in the crevices between which lurked earwigs, and wood lice, and other writhing things.

  The sofas were occupied by Tracy, Malan, Roxanne, and Colin. They turned and stared as I came in. I had the impression that the gormless one had been trying to tell them about the new arrival, in which case they were probably expecting a bearded Ethiopian carrying a blunderbuss and a camel harness.

  “Oh, it’
s you, Katie,” Roxanne said neutrally.

  “Hi, everyone,” said Veronica. “If nobody objects or anything, Katie’s going to stay for a couple of days until she sorts out her life. Is that okay?”

  There was a noncommittal murmur, which could just about be interpreted as consent.

  “Is . . . em . . . Roddy around?” Veronica said wistfully. “We should check with him as well.” Roxanne and Tracy performed a synchronized eye roll.

  “He’s fiddling with his taxi. Be in soon,” said Colin. His face still had the same blue tinge that I remembered. He looked like the ghost of a Victorian child, blown up to man size and dressed in cheap casuals. Deeply creepy.

  Veronica beamed at me. “He drives an old black cab instead of a car. He’s soooo eccentric.”

  I sat in the rocking chair. Big mistake. The top half grabbed me and twisted one way, while the bottom half twisted the other, as if I were a dishcloth and it were wringing me out. At the same time it punched me in the kidneys and felt up my skirt. Every nerve begged me to leap out, but as the alternative was squeezing in next to Colin, I stayed where I was.

  About half an hour of desultory conversation followed, ebbing over and around the buzzing from the black-and-white telly in the corner. Carefully dissecting the house mood, I found that Roxanne and Tracy were clearly on the hostile side of neutral, counterbalanced by Malan and Colin.

  I gave them a carefully edited version of the week’s events: I’d had enough of victimhood, so I milked it for a few laughs, while trying to retain their sympathy. My line was roughly: There but for the grace of God go you, so don’t even think about calling me a slag, but yes, I was a bit naughty.

  I thought it best to make polite inquiries about their lives, but just as Colin was about to tell me of a particularly interesting VAT case involving bird food, Roddy came in. He was startlingly handsome, tall, broad, with wavy strawberry-blond hair. He was wearing old and oily clothes, but you could see that they had once cost a country gentleman a lot of money.

  “Well well well, we’ve a visitor. I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Roddy.”

  “Katie Castle,” I said, struggling to get out of the torture chair.

  “No, for God’s sake, don’t get up. After a while you’ll find you adapt to it, and the pain dies down. But then for the rest of your life your arse precedes you round corners by a full three seconds.”

  Veronica made her gulping laugh. “Ughh ughh ughh, stop it, Roddy.”

  Perhaps it was adversity, but I felt a real surge of pity for Veronica. Poor, poor thing, I thought, what chance do you stand with your tearstained hair, and your hourglass legs, and your uncared-for cheese-grater skin? Why couldn’t you have picked on Colin? He’d have you. Be like making love to a cold fried egg.

  From then on the evening rather improved. Roddy had a way of infecting others with his energy and good humor. The girls all clearly adored him, and the boys were disarmed by what appeared to be his self-deprecating humor, which mainly concerned theatrical mishaps. I say “appeared” because when you thought about the stories a little more carefully, he always seemed to come out of them well. “Look,” they all said, “others in the acting profession may be pompous and self-important, but I am different: I can laugh at myself.” This pose was premised, of course, on the understanding that we all thought he was marvelous, and within that safe haven he could caper and fool as much as he liked. How long would it survive a challenge? I wondered.

  An opportunity to find out came when I asked him if he’d been in anything I might have seen. We were sitting round the dinner table, each struggling in his or her own way with the pilaf—a struggle not helped by the absence of wine. Roddy strained manfully to swallow the coarse vegetative matter, then mumbled the names of plays and theaters entirely unfamiliar to me, but which smacked strongly of rooms over pubs. But I was a guest here, so I smiled sweetly and tried to look quietly impressed.

  “Any telly?” I asked.

  “Yes, actually. You may have seen my Crunchie?” I had to concentrate hard not to laugh.

  “Your Crunchie?”

  “Yes, you know,” he said, talking a little too quickly, “that ‘Friday feeling’ campaign. I was in an office, and I bite the Crunchie and turn into a Claymation thing, you know, like Wallace and Gromit, and I surf out of there on a wave of chocolate. You must have seen it? They modeled the clay figure on me very closely. It got an award.”

  “I love Crunchies,” said Veronica. If Roddy had been in an advert for pig slurry, she’d have loved that, too.

  “And of course, I’m a bit of a regular on Casualty,” Roddy continued after tossing Veronica a quick smile of acknowledgment.

  “Wow,” I said. “I haven’t watched it for a while. What are you, a doctor or one of the gay male nurses, or perhaps you’re one of the nasty administrators telling them to cut back on bandages and plasters and things?”

  “Well, no, none of those. I’ve played lots of different characters. I’m on the rota for patients, you know, for big road crashes, and that sort of thing.” Some of his ebullience had drained away. I was sorry, I really hadn’t meant to expose him. I tried being silly.

  “Oh, I see, you’re a serial victim: appendix one week, scrotum caught on barbed-wire fence the next. Must be a bit depressing always dying on stage.”

  Harmless though it was, Tracy gasped and Veronica swooned. I’d gone too far—how could I mention the young god’s scrotum in a way so lacking in proper reverence? But Roddy gallantly came to my rescue, cheerfully detailing more TV failures: the Teletubbies audition where he’d fluffed his lines, the coffee advert where he’d choked and fired a fine spray of coffee and mucus out of his nose into Joanna Lumley’s face. It was all very endearing, and I made a point of being endeared.

  Bed, which I had been dreading, turned out to be quite easy. Veronica and I giggled as we slipped into our nightdresses. The sheets were clean, and the smell of candles wasn’t too overpowering. Veronica snuggled up to me, gave me a kiss on the cheek, turned over, and was snoring gently within five minutes. I had every intention of lying awake, tormenting myself with images from the day, but the candles, and the snoring, and the susurrus from the passing cars lulled me, and I slept, thus ending the worst day of my life. So far.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Second

  Time as Farce

  What an odd week that was. I know I should have been grieving for the life that I had lost, but somehow I never quite got round to it. Perhaps I was still in post-traumatic stress mode, still too numb and shocked to face the horrid reality. Objectively, my world had crumbled, but some combination of that numbness and the old faith in my own ability to rise through quickness of thought and ruthlessness of action insulated me from the fact. Things just didn’t seem too bad.

  I awoke on the Monday morning to the sound of Veronica heavily entering her tights. She reminded me of a kind of animal that I couldn’t remember the name of. Something large, and slow, and harmless, but also deeply strange.

  “Oh, you’re awake,” she said cheerily. “I have to go to work. I’ve left some keys out for you—just treat this as your home.”

  “Tapir,” I said blearily.

  “Pardon?”

  “I said thank you.”

  I quickly showered and coffeed and then set to work. I had some serious calling to do. I thought it was at least worth one more try to see if Penny had calmed down and realized that she couldn’t get by without me. A familiar but subtly changed voice answered. It was Sukie.

  “Can I speak to Penny?”

  “Is that Katie?”

  “You know it is. Just please put me through.”

  “She’s very busy. I’m screening her calls.”

  “Not from me.”

  “Particularly from you.”

  “Look, Sukie, I know that Penny has given you my job . . . temporarily, but we both know you haven’t the experience or the balls for it. In two weeks Penny will realize that she can’t manage, and then I’ll
be back. If I were you, I really wouldn’t antagonize me.” I didn’t want to sound like a bitch, but I had to take a hard line. I expected meek submission. This was a girl, after all, who a mere three days before had to do whatever I told her to, whether it was making my coffee, calling my hairdresser, or polishing buttons.

  What I got was laughter.

  “Katie, you poor, poor thing. Don’t you understand what’s happened? You’ve been purged. You don’t exist anymore. Penny won’t speak to you because she can’t even pick up the frequency of your thin, common little voice. Katie, you don’t register. And Penny’s said that she’s always wanted someone more like me to help represent the company. Someone with more . . . panache . . . elegance.”

  She meant, of course, money, class.

  “Listen to me, you humpy-backed dwarf, either you put me through right now or—” Click.

  Be cool, be calm, I told myself; it’s immature to rage impotently when someone hangs up. I spent two minutes raging impotently, pulling leaves off the weeping fig by the phone. The cretin appeared briefly at the top of the stairs in his T-shirt and boxers. He looked baffled for a moment, then retreated.

  On the off chance, I tried Ludo at the flat—I didn’t entirely swallow the eagle egg. No answer. I tried his school. I was put through to the deputy head, a limp-voiced moaner with, I pictured, a polyester tie and terminal dandruff and cum-stained trousers and receding gums. No, they didn’t know where he was. He’d resigned, no notice, nothing. They were furious. Children’s education put at risk, blah blah blah. It was my turn to slam the phone down.

  Rethink. Job gone. Boy gone. First thing to do: Get new job. Second: Get new boy. Number two could wait. The job, surely, must be easy. Good production managers are few and far between. I had three solid years behind me. I had contacts everywhere—and Hugh had been silly enough to put my red contacts book in the box with my things (or was that perhaps another deliberate act of generosity?).

  I called four companies, all around the same size as Penny Moss. In each I spoke to someone at about my level. Three of them were friends of mine, not that we liked each other much. All were charm personified. None was prepared to put me through to the boss. I said that I was looking for production work. There wasn’t any going. Each suggested I send in my CV.