Rebecca Campbell - The Favours and Fortunes of Katie Castle

But despite the love, and despite the need, I was still tingling with that faint, unpleasant dissatisfaction that comes when you know you have to do something, and you know that it is for the best, but it means not being able to do lots of other things that you’d really rather like to do. Yes, I was desperate to get married, and frustrated about his dallying over the date. But equally, if I was going to do something naughty, and on balance I thought I probably was, then time was running out.

chapter three

cavafy, angel, and the loading bay of doom

The tube was full of the usual freaks, psychopaths, and mutants. It really annoyed me that Penny would never pay for a taxi out to Mile End. She always said, ‘but Katie, darling, the tube’s so much quicker. And think of the environment, you know, the hole in the rain forest, and whatever it is that’s wrong with the ozone layer. Save the whale, and the pandas and things.’ She hasn’t set foot on public transport since they put the electronic gates in the tube stations, the operation of which proved to be completely beyond her mechanical capabilities.

I say the usual freaks and psychos, but there were actually two rather good ones. One was a woman, normal looking, prim even, but about once a minute her face would convulse and contort into a hideous grimace, as though she’d just found half a worm in her apple. The awful thing is that she obviously knew it was going to happen, and she would try to cover her face with a newspaper, but she was always a split second too late. It was impossible not to stare, not to wait, breath held, trembling with expectancy, for the next fit.

Because of the convulsion lady, I didn’t notice Rasputin until a few moments before my stop. Everything about him was long and filthy: his hair, his nails, his smock, his teeth. He had a big rubber torch in his hand, that he kept switching on and off. And he was staring at me. He’d been staring, I guessed, for the whole journey. I felt myself blushing. ‘Please God, let him not speak to me,’ I prayed. You see, nutters on the tube are bearable until they speak to you. If they speak to you, you enter a whole new world of pain.

‘He’s dead. We’ve killed him.’

That was enough. I got up and walked down to the other end of the carriage. Mercifully we were just coming into the station. I’d never been so pleased to reach Mile End. As I hurried along the platform I glanced back. Rasputin was staring at me through the window, his face pressed to the glass. Over his shoulder I saw, for one last time, the woman’s face contort.

It’s only a ten minute walk up the Mile End Road to the depot, but it always manages to get me down. People outside fashion think it’s all about Milan and catwalks and supermodels. It’s only when you find yourself on the inside that you see the sweatshops and the depots, and the dodgy deals, and Mile End.

I hate Mile End. I hate its dreary streets, its horrid little houses, its crappy shops. I hate the people with their cheap clothes and bad hair. I hate the buses in the high street, and the fish and chip shops offering special deals for pensioners. I hate the way it always rains. I hate it because it reminds me of home. I hate it because I know it wants me back.

It’s okay – I’ve stopped now. I promise no more whining about Mile End, which I don’t doubt is a fine and noble place, beloved of its denizens, admired by urban historians for its fascinatingly derelict music halls and art deco cinemas, and seen as Mecca by those who worship the Great White Transit Van. The Mile End I rage against is a Mile End of the mind, a metaphor, a symbol. And what is it a symbol for? Well, you’ll know when we get to East Grinstead in, oh, I don’t know, about another hundred pages.

Back to the depot. The depot is where we store our cloth. ‘Depot’, believe it or not, is actually too grand a word for what we have. Who would have thought that depot could be too grand a word for anything ? And what we have is a room, about the size of your average two-bedroom London flat, stuck onto the side of Cavafy’s Couture. Cavafy’s is a big shed, in which toil four rows of six machinists, middle-aged women with fat ankles and furious fingers. I always make a point of chatting to the machinists as I walk through to our depot. They make jokes about me being a princess, and I suppose I must look like some exotic bird of paradise dropped down into a suburban back garden. I always pause by the woman who sits nearest the door that leads off into our depot. She’s probably the last woman in the country to have been called Doris. She must have been born right on the boundary between ‘Doris’ signifying something sophisticated and classy, cigarette holders and champagne flutes, and it meaning ‘look at me, I clean other people’s houses for a living, and I wear special stockings to support my varicose veins, and my hair will always smell of chip fat, and I will never be happy, or fulfilled, or loved’.

‘How’s that chap of yours then, my love?’ she said, her fingers never pausing as she worked her way along a seam.

‘Oh, you know men,’ I replied, smiling and shrugging.

Doris shrieked with laughter, as if I’d just come out with the joke of the century. As she laughed her fibrous hair, the texture of asbestos, moved as a piece. Her dress, a grey-white polyester, sprayed with pink flowers of no particular species, picked up I guessed from the local market, having failed C&A quality control, would have looked almost fashionable draped over a girl half her age and weight.

‘Men! Oooo men!’ she cooed, as if she’d sampled them all, from lord to serf, and not just the abusive, hunchbacked railway engineer who’d stolen away her, in truth rather easy, virtue, twenty-six long years ago, and left her with the baby and no teeth. ‘But you’ve a good un there you know. And I says when you’ve a good un, you ang on in there.’

I blushed a little and looked around. Cavafy was in his office – a glass-fronted lean-to affair at the other end of the factory. Angel was there too. Angel was, is, Cavafy’s son. He loves me.

Everybody loved Cavafy. He’s one of those tiny old men you just want to hug. I’d never seen him without his brown lab coat, with at least six pens crammed into the breast pocket. I think he rather hoped something would happen between Angel and me. He’d invite me into the office for a coffee, and embarrass the poor boy by listing his many accomplishments ‘… and the high jump … only a small one, but the jumping, the jumping he could do.… And the running. And the GCSEs, look, we have them all on the wall, see, in frames: geographia, historia, mathematica, only a D, but a D is a pass.’

But Angel, Angel. Years ago, when I was still in the shop, I’d come up here to the depot to help schlep stuff around. Angel had just started working for his father. He’d trained as an accountant, without quite passing his exams. I shouldn’t really have called him Cavafy’s idiot son. That was ungracious and unnecessary. In fact we used to have a bit of a laugh together: he’d make fun of Cavafy, and I’d make fun of Penny. Tight curly hair, fleshy lips, really rather good-looking, except for the height thing. Angel, you see, was a good three inches shorter than me. And that really wouldn’t do.

It all came to a head one afternoon when I was sorting through some rolls of linen for a remake on that season’s bestselling outfit: an oyster duster coat that would fall open to reveal a tight sheath in a pale pearly grey to match the coat’s luscious silk-satin lining. Even doughy-fleshed, big-boned County girls became simpering Audrey Hep-burns (such was the Penny Moss magic recipe). Suddenly I felt a presence. I turned round and Angel was close enough for me to smell the oil in his hair and pick out individual flecks of dandruff. He didn’t say anything: he just had a look of utter determination in his eyes, and I could see his jaw was rigid with fear or anxiety or lust.