Wronged Sons, The (16 page)

I checked the designer labels on hangers but there wasn’t a price tag in sight. A little matter of cost didn’t concern the kind of women lucky enough to afford to shop there. Like my mum’s dresses, the clothes in Fabien’s were always supposed to hang in someone else’s wardrobe, not mine.

“Stunning, aren’t they?” a smoky voice crackled behind me. I turned around, startled, and yanked my hand from a rail and back to my side like I’d been caught shoplifting.

Selena had asked if I could visit her mother after the Christmas holidays. I’d presumed she’d wanted some alterations doing, but when she revealed her mother owned Fabien’s, you could have knocked me down with a feather. It was one of only a handful of independent clothes shops in town selling high-end fashion imported from places like Italy and France. I’d never had the guts to go inside myself; my experience of Fabien’s was lingering glances as I walked past the window to C&A.

“I’m Selena’s mother, Margaret. You must be Catherine,” she began, extending a manicured hand towards mine. Her long, ruby red fingernails drew my eye to clusters of diamonds in her gold rings.

“Yes, nice to meet you,” I replied, ashamed of my own pin-cushioned hands.

Margaret was every inch the boutique she owned, and precisely the reason I’d never set foot in it. Hovering somewhere around her mid-fifties, she was the epitome of old school glamour - part Joan Crawford, part Rita Hayworth. Her chestnut brown hair was tied into a neat bun and lines running horizontally down her cheeks and above her lips were a giveaway that she enjoyed the sun and a cigarette. I wondered why she had a daughter who could barely make ends meet.

“Nothing like Selena, am I?” she asked rhetorically. “I’ve tried to help her, financially I mean, but she’s inherited my stubbornness and refuses to take a penny. I’m proud of her nonetheless. Anyway, please continue looking around.”

I felt even more self-conscious as Margaret’s eyes bored into me to get the measure of who I was by the clothes I was drawn to. Eventually she spoke again.

“I’ll get to the point, darling. I want you to work for me.”

“Um, I don’t know if I’d fit in here,” I stuttered, convinced I’d misheard her.

“No, no,” she laughed. “I don’t need you in the shop; assistants are ten a penny. I want you to make a range of clothes for me.”

I must have looked baffled because it was too early for an April Fool. So Margaret explained how she’d seen the clothes I’d made for Selena and her friends. And while the modern fashions teenage girls wanted weren’t to her taste, she’d been impressed by my attention to detail and the quality of my work.

“Oh, I just copy what I see in magazines,” I said, a little flattered, a little embarrassed.

“Which is a skill in itself,” Margaret interrupted. “Darling, I don’t offer praise lightly. I’ve taken a very close look at your work to the point where I’ve almost picked the bloody things apart looking for faults, much to my daughter’s annoyance. But your standard is quite exceptional. Obviously your choice of fabrics is… how can I put this without causing offence… a tad ‘high street’. But you clearly have an instinct for what suits a woman. And watching you wandering around my boutique like a kiddie in a sweet shop tells me you have greater aspirations than making school uniforms and trendy frocks for little Madonnas.”

“I don’t know,” I said, neither used to, nor entirely comfortable with, compliments. I followed her like a puppy on a lead as she walked the shop floor with a purposeful stride, sifting through rails and draping clothes over my arm

“You’re not perfect, but none of us are darling,” she continued. “A few of your clothes have room for improvement, but that’s something we can work on. I want you take a few pieces away with you and examine them closely. Look at how they’re pieced together, the use of appliqués, gross grains and the shirring… the devil is in the detail. These are the intricacies that separate clothes you’ll find on my rails from those you’ll see in a Littlewoods catalogue. Then come back to me in, let’s say a month, with three of your own creations. My customers don’t settle for anything less than the best and neither do I.”

Top quality clothes were Margaret’s main income, but small, independent labels were fast becoming popular – limited edition ranges aimed at the over thirties. Margaret’s clientele was growing older and she needed to appeal to an equally lucrative younger market with a ‘disposable income’ – whatever that meant. And I got the feeling that what Margaret wanted, Margaret got.

“If you can prove to me you’re the untapped talent I think you are, then we could do business,” she added, smiling.

One nervous handshake later and I was sat on the top deck of the number five bus, holding on to a thousand pounds worth of dresses for dear life.

January 20, 1.55am

Making clothes for children who didn’t care about fashion trends and teens that wanted designer rips in their jeans was entirely different to Margaret’s expectations.

For the first time in my life, I had the chance to turn my talent into something really profitable. But I was scared. What if she laughed my ideas out the boutique? What if it wasn’t in me to be original and I could only stretch to copying clothes that already existed?

I could have gone around in theoretical circles for days, but the only way to find out was to stop dithering and get on with it. I sat down at the dining room table with a mug of tea, and surrounded myself with Robbie’s coloured pencils, a blank sketchpad, and an image of Margaret breathing down my neck. Then I drew. And drew. And drew.

But nothing came close to matching what she’d asked for. My designs were, at best, bland and lacked oomph and if I knew it, Margaret would too.

If ever I needed a glass of wine for inspiration, it was then. And when the grandfather clock in the hallway chimed four times, I retired to bed, defeated but sober.

The following three nights were exactly the same; I’d already buckled under pressure. On day five, I tossed and turned in bed and reluctantly admitted it had all been pie in the sky. My mum was right; I’d never be as good as her. Her work was so much better than mine, yet she knew her place, and it wasn’t creating something for someone else’s approval.

I thought about the clothes in her wardrobe and how they were timeless pieces that would’ve looked fantastic on rails twenty years later. Well, maybe with a raised hem here or a belt there. Or an extra couple buttons and a zip. Actually there were a lot of her designs that could work, I told myself. Then I had an idea.

I padded down the stairs in my dressing gown and slippers; spread out the silk fabric I’d been keeping for something special and began to work from memory borrowing some of my mum’s designs for inspiration.

And I continued like that for the next two weeks with different materials until I finished my three original pieces. Then I thanked my mum and went to bed, knackered but smiling.

From Harpole’s cemetery, I swear I heard the sound of her turning in her grave.

February 4, 1pm

Silence. Fifteen long, gut-wrenching minutes of it. I was so nervous my hands were sweating.

After presenting Margaret with a business suit, a pair of stirrup pants and a silk satin dress my heart was in my throat as I watched her prod them, tug at their seams, hold them up to the light and shake them like she was trying to get the last drop out of ketchup out of a bottle. Finally, she was done.

“How quickly can you make another three?” she asked. I wanted to grab her and squeeze her till her beehive fell apart or her shoulder pads split.

With a couple of minor alterations, my outfits were on Fabien’s clothes rails by the end of the week. Every time I thought about what I’d accomplished over that fortnight, I’d break into a huge, beaming smile. I crossed my fingers and hoped at least one of them might find a buyer.

I needn’t have worried. By the time I returned with more, the first three had already been snapped up. Margaret handed me a cheque for £140 – the equivalent of two weeks’ supermarket work. If I hadn’t needed the money so badly, I’d have framed it and stuck it on the wall for the entire world to see.

However, dividing my life three ways between three jobs and three kids stressed me out. And I knew I could make so many more clothes if I had full days and not just a few snatched hours here and there. When I fell asleep at the sewing machine for a second time, I was ready to admit I wasn’t Wonder Woman. Something had to give so I took the plunge and handed my notice in at the supermarket but as I didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket, I kept ironing my neighbours’ clothes. And I saved a little money from each of Margaret’s payments to start refurnishing our home.

First I bought the children second-had bikes, then, gradually, I replaced the pieces of furniture I’d sold and started kitting out my sewing room. Soon what was once the dining room became a space crammed with clothes rails, stacks of magazines, materials, two mannequins’ torsos and boxes of coloured cotton bobbins.

I thought back to a few months earlier when I’d used that room to come up with ridiculous theories as to what could’ve happened to you. Now I was using it to leaf through library books on the modern history of clothing from classics like Christian Dior and Guccio Gucci to new stars like Giorgio Armani and Muccia Prada.

As my ideas and inspirations flowed thick and fast I began to realise when you found your way home, I wouldn’t be the Kitty you used to know. I was moving in a new direction and becoming stronger off my own back. While I was getting to know, and like, the new me, I felt guilty for thinking not all change was a bad thing.

February 19, 3.50am

In my dreams, you were only ever an outline of a man; a quiet blur hiding in the corners of rooms, watching me.

But that night, I saw your face. I stood by our bedroom window in the wee hours, watching your motionless body in the fields peering back at me. Eventually, you smiled, and I felt myself blush like the first time you looked at me in English Lit class.

When you turned your back and walked away, I panicked and shouted for you, but you ignored me. I hammered on the glass with my fists, but you slipped into a speck of dust on the horizon. I screamed louder and louder until I woke myself up, then lay there, angry with you.

Suddenly Dougie’s face burst into my head with such uninvited speed, it made me jump. For two years, I’d kept him at arm’s length, but I’d have been a fool to think it was that easy. I’d always believed I could read people quite well because the only way to stop myself from being burned by my mum’s acid tongue was to judge her flavour before approaching her.

Steven and Roger were easy to pigeonhole and they hadn’t changed much as they’d grown from boys to men. But Dougie was different. When it was just you and he, you’d be a lot more serious; with the others, you were one of the lads. I nicknamed you the chameleon and quite liked that you’d change your colours to suit your environment without ever losing sight of who you were. Dougie, Steven, Roger and I were all just pieces of you.

But you were more to Dougie than just his best friend. He didn’t exactly welcome me with open arms once you’d invited me into your little gang. He wasn’t just a boy whose head hadn’t been turned by yucky girls. He genuinely couldn’t understand why his best friend had fallen for one.

And when once he caught me watching him, watching you, while you remained oblivious to the both of us, his blushes revealed what his words never said. I was a little jealous of how close you were and Dougie and I began playing childish games of one-upmanship. If I told him something you’d said to me, he’d antagonise me with a ‘yeah, I already know.’ And other times, in petty retaliation, I’d do the same. We’d compete for your attention.

I’d always regretted our first kiss. Not that it happened, but how and where. I instigated it in Dougie’s bedroom on purpose, aware that he was about to walk in and catch us. I kissed you because I wanted to, but I knew putting Dougie in his place, in his own territory, would end our rivalry.

As soon as he saw us, I wished I hadn’t been such a bitch. He looked so pitiful standing there with a tray of scones and glasses of milk on his tray. The corners of his mouth unravelled and the light in his eyes paled. I’d won your heart but trampled across his.

That marked a turning point in Dougie and my relationship. We reached an unspoken understanding, that while we could share you, I would always have the upper hand. And eventually we became unlikely friends in our own right.

Then one night, many years later, everything changed.

March 17, 1.45pm

I was exhausted defending an invisible man for so many months.

I’d abandoned chanting ‘Simon is still alive’ in the bathroom mirror, because in my heart of hearts, I’d begun to accept it might not be true. It came down to one single fact - you couldn’t have been gone for eight months without something having happened to you. And with no evidence telling me you were still alive, I reluctantly came to terms with Roger’s theory you’d most likely died in an accident the day you disappeared.

In the meantime, our children had come up with their own ideas.

“Did Daddy commit soo-side?” Robbie asked out of the blue in the garden.

“Who told you that?” I replied.

He looked anxious. In truth, he’d been looking more and more anxious of late and it was starting to worry me. He’d often take himself into your garage office and I’d hear him whispering to you about his day. I’d thought I was the only one who did that. I wasn’t sure if leaving him to chat to a memory was the best thing or not, but if it gave him the comfort his mummy obviously couldn’t, then maybe it wasn’t doing any harm.

“What’s soo-side?” asked Emily.

“My friend Melanie says that when people are sad and they want to go to heaven, they commit soo-side,” Robbie continued.

“It’s called suicide,” James chipped in before I could explain, “and it’s when people hurt themselves on purpose because they don’t want to be with their families any more.”