Elegance and Innocence (21 page)

I wonder if the Englishwoman wouldn’t profit by replacing once in a while her penchant for quantity with a quest for quality. She might find that not only is her elegance increased, but also the enjoyment and even the confidence that she gets from her clothes
.

Colin and I have adopted a new catch phrase and a new philosophy, which is essentially this: life’s too short. Not staggeringly original, but nevertheless, it fits the bill.

I’m not sure quite when we reached this conclusion, but the pivotal moment might well have taken place on the top deck of the number 159 bus. We were riding into work together one rainy morning, jammed in with all the other rush hour commuters. Everything was wet; the windows were fogged up, the seats soaking, sopping umbrellas littered the aisles. Colin was squashed into the seat next to me. On his lap he balanced a large plastic bag filled with Patrick’s old suits to drop off at a charity shop, while simultaneously trying to keep his backpack and umbrella from rolling into the aisle with each jolt of the bus. I was sitting next to him,
my feet damp and freezing inside a pair of newly ruined suede loafers.

I opened my post to discover yet another batch of divorce papers as the bus lurched forward and then screeched to a sudden halt, pitching me into the back of a well dressed black man in the seat in front. ‘So sorry!’ I apologized, gingerly retrieving my letters from where they had landed on the floor.

‘That’s quite all right,’ he smiled amiably. ‘Not your fault.’

I smiled back.

‘If I may disturb you just a moment longer,’ he continued. ‘I’d like to tell you about the joy of living in the light of the salvation of Christ.’

And that is the exact moment I think it happened. I looked at Col and he looked at me.

‘Life’s too short,’ he said, perhaps the first full sentence he’d uttered that day, and I was inclined to agree.

‘What are we doing anyway?’ he continued, suddenly unstoppable in his indignation. ‘What are we waiting for? I’m tired of death. I’m tired of taking the bus into work. I’m tired of sitting at home in the evening, waiting for the right guy to come up and knock at my door.’

‘I’m tired of divorce!’ I chipped in. ‘And I’m tired of wet shoes!’

‘To hell with wet shoes!’ He stood up and pushed the bell. ‘I’m tired of playing it safe! Goddamit, Ouise, we’re young, we’re sexy, we’re talented! You know what, life’s
just too fucking short and I think it’s about high time we had some fun!’

‘OK.’

We got off the bus and caught a cab instead.

And that’s how it began. Suddenly being a grown up was just too difficult, so we gave up. At the same time, I decided to give the sane, sober, fashion advice of Madame Dariaux a break as well. The thought of saving all of one’s pennies for the perfect cashmere cardigan seemed too old, too responsible, and to take far, far too long. I wanted to be one of the girls with as many outfits as she had men for a change – gay, dazzling, voracious, and in the thick of life. Like Colin, I was tired of waiting for time to heal my heart and make me feel normal. And, like Col, I was ready for drastic action.

That’s when I decided that trying to be elegant wasn’t working any more. I wanted to be fashionable instead.

It’s a Thursday night and Col and I are out with twenty of our new best friends at a bar called Cube. Cube is just like Mink Bikini, only Mink Bikini was hot last month and Cube is hot now. The place is packed, heaving with spiky-haired media types dressed in grey, unisex clothing; sulking, lanky would-be models in torn Chloe style tee-shirts and spike heels, and ad men in black Armani suits with bold, neon ties – all shouting, jostling, spilling drinks on one another and tripping over the Swedish style lime green ottomans that constitute the lounge area.

The soundtrack is surreal, spacey French re-mixes of KC and the Sunshine Band, dubbed over by Vanessa Paradis. And there are loads of saucy little features to keep the customers amused, including a discreetly hidden video camera tucked away in the men’s toilet and a not so discreetly displayed video screen transmitting all the evidence in the ladies (forewarned is forearmed). There’s also a large electronic billboard above the entrance that projects different messages every time someone walks in the door. ‘Jesus loves you but he won’t leave his wife,’ it bleeps, like an automated fortune cookie. ‘Is it love or is it lust?’ it bleeps again, as a young woman ducks in out of the black rain, shaking her hair and pulling down her micro-mini. Someone calls out ‘Lust!’ across the room and we all laugh while she stands, frozen like a rabbit caught in headlights, unaware of the cartoon captions lurking just above her head.

There’s a definite buzz. We’ve all made it. We survived the doorman and the two Gucci clad female bouncers, who stand poised, dripping with boredom and fatigue, ready to reject anyone too ugly, too fat, too old, or too ‘yesterday’ (retro looks not withstanding). We celebrate this fact by waving twenty pound notes furiously at the blue-haired, tattooed barmen, giggling at the drunken media men peeing (unbeknownst to them) on video and flirting with the obnoxious ad men, who in turn, flirt with the sulking models, who in turn flirt with no one.

I’m wearing a black pencil skirt from Kookai that’s
almost exactly like this season’s Prada, a tiny, sheer layered vest top like the one they’re showing at Versace (only mine’s from a stall in Brixton Market), and a pair of painfully high single strap hot pink mules from Office, which are the spitting image of the Manolo’s Kate’s wearing in this month’s
Vogue
. My hair’s blown dry into a single sheet of heavy, blond straightness, with a ‘natural’ looking centre parting that took me only fifty minutes and three different hair products to achieve. My lipstick is Mac, my toenail polish Chanel and I smell like a mixture of wild figs and French wisteria, which is meant to be both sexy and unisex at the same time. I’ve come a long, long way from the navy pinafore dress. And I’m as hot as they come.

Unfortunately, not everyone I invite is. A few of my friends almost don’t make it past the doormen. They simply just don’t understand that you need to look the part.

Darren’s a music student; he’s carrying an old smelly black gym bag and wearing a yellow Rupert Bear scarf. If this weren’t bad enough, he’s got on a bright red Gap puffa jacket that’s easily ten years old and is holding his travel card like it’s a Press Pass at a catwalk show.

The Gucci brigade salivate as he ambles unsuspectingly up to the door. I lurch into action, descending upon him like a tornado, whisking off his jacket and scarf, quickly tucking his bus pass into his breast pocket (he whimpers when I suggest we put it in his bag), and smoothing down his white boy afro rather unsuccessfully with the palm of
my hand. Then I hand the whole bundle, bag and all, to the repulsed Norwegian coat check boy, who touches the Rupert Bear scarf as if it were medical waste and insists on giving us a separate ticket for each item, as if to punish us both for Darren’s appalling lack of taste as well as his complete inability to travel light. The Gucci Girls narrow their eyes and one is about to speak, but she relents, waving us on and pursing her lips in a terse little smile as if to say, ‘You owe me one’.

I’m left with Darren, bemused and bewildered, and not a little overwhelmed, who turns to me, clutching his bouquet of coat check tags and says, ‘I didn’t know, Louie … you know, that it was
that
kind of place.’

I laugh like Cruella De Vil and shove him towards the bar. ‘Don’t be silly, darling!’ I scream above the lethargic intoning of Ms Paradis. ‘Let’s get you a drink and look! You can watch people come in and laugh at the things above their heads!’

‘Really?’ He looks up at the billboard with all the
savoir faire
of a special needs child. ‘Soooo cool! Louie, walk in so I can see what it says!’

‘No, Darren,’ I say firmly, pushing him harder in the direction of the bar and away from the Gucci danger zone. ‘You only walk in once. You have to wait for someone new to come in. Those are the rules.’

‘Wow,’ he says, reverently. ‘We’re in a place with
rules
.’

Fashion is all about rules, as are fashionable places. We
didn’t want to have drinks at the local pub across the street from work. We wanted it to be different. Rules make it different – give us something to do, something to focus on instead of one another. And it’s a success. Everyone’s thrilled to be here, shouting to one another at point blank range, spending too much money on expensive rounds of drinks, trying to dance between the tables and falling into strangers’ laps. We get drunker and drunker, run out of cash and the credit cards come out. I’m flitting between groups of people, having half conversations – catching a verb here, an adjective there and throwing out my fair share in return.

‘Fantastic!’ I shout, blowing air kisses across the room to a man I saw peeing on video.

‘Absolutely
screaming
at each other!’ I interject, stealing the punch line from Colin’s story, along with a sip of his Martini.

‘Really,
really
repulsive!’ I stage whisper behind my hand to a girlfriend as we watch one of the models ooze her way across the room to the Ladies.

Everything I utter comes with an exclamation point attached to it. I talk to no one for very long but we hug each other a lot and say things like, ‘We really must get together sometime!’ And later on in the evening, when standing upright is becoming a bit of a challenge, we grab each other, bury our faces in each other’s necks and sob, ‘I love you! I really, really do!’ And then attempt to look
each other meaningfully in the eye, which isn’t easy when you’re seeing double.

The next morning I’m trying to recover from my hangover, drinking coffee and munching on piles of toast with Ria. She couldn’t make it last night. I went round to the gallery where she works to meet her, but she cried off at the last minute; said she wasn’t in the mood for all those people, all that noise.

‘You’re never going to meet anyone if all you do is hang around the house,’ I lecture, waggling a finger at her across the kitchen.

She turns another page of the magazine she’s reading. ‘And who did you meet?’

I have a hazy recollection of a loud agent pulling at my arm, a married photographer who wanted to do some ‘art shots’ of me and another girl, a bisexual ex-army man …

‘That’s not the point,’ I snap, finding it difficult to butter my toast without shaking too much. ‘I’m out there; I’m in the game. You’ve gotta be in the game, Ria. Take it from me, I know.’

‘Aha,’ she murmurs, turning another page and smiling like the Mona Lisa.

She’s looking at
Vogue
and as I sit down, I note, with considerable irritation, that they’ve dumped the whole seventies retro look and are now pushing a bouffant debutante meets punk rock chick story that renders all my carefully researched knock offs completely useless. The models
are photographed skulking around in
£
700 Pucci shifts with torn fishnets and fat, absolutely enormous hair. It’s not just a new look but a whole new ethos. I feel unnerved. How can they do this? I’ve only just learnt how to blow-dry my hair flat.

‘I don’t know why anyone would even bother to spend that much money on designer pieces!’ I fume, wondering if I still have any fishnets lurking in my lingerie drawer. ‘In another few months, that look will be dead anyway. What’s the point of spending seven hundred quid on something you can get from Top Shop for
£
35 in two weeks’ time? Pass the sugar, please.’

Ria pushes it across the table without looking up.

‘I’m serious. What’s the point?’ I continue, furiously filling my coffee with spoonfuls of sugar. ‘Who would bother to spend that sort of money just to stay in fashion?’

‘Well,’ she says quietly, sipping her tea, ‘first off, fashion is not the same as style. Secondly, a person might easily spend
£
700 on something that was the real thing.’

The real thing? Is she being condescending?

‘And what exactly is the real thing?’ I ask. I can feel myself just picking a fight; someone has to pay for all the time I’ve wasted in Miss Selfridge.

‘The real thing is what remains when fashion is gone,’ she continues, pouring herself a second cup of tea. ‘It has staying power, character. It’s a pair of well tailored trousers, a perfectly fitted suit, a black cashmere polo neck …’

‘Oh, right! You mean
boring
clothes!’ I correct her, frustrated beyond belief that my new red snakeskin ankle boots are already passé and she’s talking to me about black polo necks as if they were the Zen of fashion.

‘Classics,’ she parries.

I glare at her. Has she been reading my book? Either that or she’s actually channelling for Madame Dariaux. ‘Classics are for when you’ve given up,’ I point out. ‘Given up going out, given up dancing, given up being fashionable. If you want to be sexy and young, you have to be fashionable.’

‘Or perhaps,’ she says, eyeing me slyly, ‘they’re the kinds of things that appeal to you only when you’ve grown up.’

A weighty silence descends between us. I hate her. And I despise black polo neck jumpers.

‘So, how was it last night?’ she asks, quickly changing the subject.

I let her score her point; after all, I reason, she’s obviously one of those people who’s already given up and it would be rude to continue.

‘It was great last night. Really, really good. Everyone was there – Colin, Sanam, Nelson, Darren.’ I have a flash of inspiration. ‘You should come next time. I think you and Darren would really get along.’

She wrinkles her nose at me. ‘We’ll see.’

I shrug my shoulders. ‘Sure. Maybe next time.’

And I think about how staid she is with her home-cooked
dinners and her piles of art catalogues, bless her. Doesn’t she know the clock is ticking? I pat her affectionately on the head before I disappear down to Brixton Market in search of something vaguely Pucci that I can wear next Friday night.

Then, one Sunday, I find myself alone in the house with Ria. I’m suffering from a particularly irritating and persistent cold and have reluctantly cancelled all my weekend plans in favour of sleeping, face down on top of my duvet all afternoon. I linger in a coma-like state most of the day until the afternoon wanes and the sun sets. When I finally pad into the kitchen to make some dinner, I run into Ria, who’s emerging for the same purpose after an afternoon of reading. We move effortlessly around the narrow galley together, ducking out of each other’s way, sharing utensils, talking when we want to and comfortable in our silence when we don’t. I’m struck by the easy calmness that I’m enjoying in her company.