Wonder Women (8 page)

It would be nice, he thought idly, if Jo came home tonight and there wasn't a stack of laundry and an intimidating amount of housework for her to tackle. He wriggled out from under Zach, who grumbled for a second and then settled back into the sofa, his eyes glued to the screen. Lee bounded upstairs and grabbed the laundry baskets from their bedroom and the kids' rooms. He stuck on a dark load, making sure to exclude Jo's cashmere jumper. He noticed the kitchen looked a bit grim, so he loaded the dishwasher and, popping his head round the door periodically to check on the kids, set about cleaning all the surfaces and mopping the floor. The film had finished by then so he put both kids on the sofa, told them it was a ship and made a game of hoovering around them. Then he took them both upstairs to play and get dressed, and gave the bathroom a quick once-over too. Once he had both kids ready, he did a quick sweep, tidying the bedrooms, putting toys away downstairs, moving the washing into the dryer and putting on another load. Satisfied, he loaded both kids into their car seats and headed for his parents' house.

*

Lee's parents lived in Pinner, a few miles away. They were both retired. When Lee and his sister had moved out, they
sold the family home and bought a comfortable bungalow. Lee's dad had worked for BT as an engineer for his whole working life. He was methodical and quiet, a son of Jamaican immigrants. Lee's mum was a brisk, slim blonde Yorkshire-woman who had come down to London in her early twenties to pursue a career in teaching. She joined a book club, where she met and fell in love with softly spoken Austin Hockley, and the rest, as she was fond of saying, was family history. She had risen through the ranks to become the head teacher of an all-girls' school, and when she wanted something done, her voice still had the authoritative ring of a headmistress. It took a brave person to stand up to Betty Hockley. Imogene and Zach, naturally, had no such issues with her. She was a besotted grandmother, and she was much more indulgent with them than she had ever been with Lee and his sister.

She met them at the door, kissed Lee and immediately scooped Imogene out of his arms. ‘Come through!' she said happily. ‘Grandma has the table in the conservatory set up for painting.' Sure enough, the big table was covered with a plastic tablecloth, and there was a great sheet of news-print, as big as the table. There were pots of finger paint, and home-made stamps cut out of potatoes, and she had bought two all-over plastic bibs to protect the kids' clothing. She popped Imogene into the high chair she kept for the grandchildren's visits and set about getting the kids smearing and printing. Austin wandered in and smiled at the scene. Lee gave his dad a hug and they stood watching as Zach worked his way around the table with a dinosaur stamp, printing bright green dinosaurs all over the paper,
and Imogene smeared paint on the tray of her high chair and gummed a chunk of raw potato.

‘I wish I could play too,' said Lee. ‘It looks amazing!'

‘You can, as long as you don't get paint on your shirt,' said Betty with mock sternness.

‘No dinosaur for Daddy!' said Zach possessively. ‘Mine!'

‘Any more potatoes, Mum? Can I make my own stamps?'

‘Of course!' Betty brought him a few spuds and a sharp knife. Austin showed Imogene how to dip her fingers in the paint and draw on the paper, and tried to stop her eating too much of it, and Lee sat carving an intricate abstract pattern into his potato. Wonderful smells wafted out of the kitchen, and his mum emerged to bring drinks out for everyone.

‘Beer? Wine?' she asked Lee.

‘No, thanks, Mum – I'm driving and in sole charge of two small children. Better not.'

Betty nodded approvingly and passed him a glass of juice. ‘How've you managed? Has it been hectic?'

‘It's been great. Jo's loving her course, and I've just had a brilliant time with the kids. I've missed her, of course, but it's been kind of nice to have Zach and Imi all to myself.'

‘How's the house? Bomb-struck?'

‘No! I'll have you know I did all the housework before I came here today.'

Betty raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, Jo's a lucky woman then, isn't she?'

Lunch was delicious, and afterwards both kids fell asleep on the sofa with their grandpa. Lee gently lifted Imogene and laid her in her pushchair. She snuffled and put a finger
on her mouth. He looked at her long eyelashes and perfect little apple cheeks for a long time. Zach looked perfectly happy, sprawled halfway across Grandpa's belly, his mouth slightly open and a smear of gravy on his chin. Lee tiptoed into the kitchen to offer to help, but Betty had already loaded the dishwasher and put the coffee on.

He wandered back out to the conservatory, where the detritus of the painting was still spread all over the table. He tidied up and then idly picked up a potato and a sharp knife. With the tip of the knife, he scored a curve in the potato, and then carefully marked out the shape of a sleeping woman. He cut away the bits around his outline, dipped it in royal-blue paint and tried it out. It was a little uneven, so he dried the stamp, corrected the shape with the knife and tried again. Then he took another potato and carved a lithe and slippery fish and made a number of prints with the bright yellow paint. He was on a roll, and he started carving lots of different shapes, human and animal. Some didn't work at all – the octopus was too intricate and made a huge, messy blob, but some were interesting and primitive. Tired of the bright primary colours, he started to mix more subtle shades. Once he'd covered a large area of the paper with stamps, he hunted around for a brush and started to paint a vibrant sky with clouds and a crimson sunset, and bits of landscape between the printed animals. He'd been going for about an hour before he was aware of Betty sitting quietly near the kitchen door and watching him. He smiled, a little embarrassed. ‘Just playing, Mum. I'll clear up after, promise.'

‘It's lovely to see you paint again. Knock yourself out.'

‘Zach's going to be furious when he sees what I've done to his dinosaurs.'

‘You haven't painted over them. You've incorporated them. It's wonderful, darling.'

Betty wasn't one for fake or unearned praise, and Lee stepped back to look; it was kind of wonderful, a mad, colourful Garden of Eden craziness, with sea creatures in the mountains and elephants frolicking in the waves. Amazing what you could do with finger paints and a few potatoes.

‘Can I keep it, Mum? Jo might like to see it for ideas for her shop.'

‘Now, tell me about this shop,' said Betty. ‘I know she's gone on this business course, but you've both been pretty cagey about what sort of shop it is.'

Lee described it, with the rails of kids' clothing high on the walls and the play area down below. Betty listened seriously without interrupting.

‘It would need to be tremendously safe, that goes without saying.'

‘I'm sure Jo will be getting advice on that.'

‘And there might be potential to extend it … perhaps add a little coffee-and-cake area where mums could sit down for a cuppa after shopping? Maybe a bookshop corner?'

‘Great ideas, Mum. Maybe for stage two, but great ideas.'

‘But if anyone can make it happen, Jo can. She's a go-getter, that girl.'

*

Jo, sitting opposite a health-and-safety expert in the hotel in Kingston, was inclined to feel that her get-up-and-go had got up and left. Between them, the experts she had met with
had sucked all the joy out of her idea. The financial expert had been gloomy at best, saying that considering the current financial crisis, it was a terrible time to start a luxury store. Jo protested and said that she wasn't planning on selling premium-priced goods, but he raised his eyebrows as if he didn't believe her and kept punching numbers into his calculator and shaking his head. The insurance woman told her she would end up paying a king's ransom in publicliability insurance, and the health-and-safety man's endless list of problems and potential hitches was making her lose the will to live. Did it have to be this hard? she wondered, but then she glanced around the room, and every one of the potential business owners had a face full of doom and gloom. At least she wasn't alone.

At the coffee break, she found herself next to Daniel and Chris, the two teenage guys. ‘Maybe we should just go home,' Daniel was saying. ‘This is bloody useless.'

‘My mum paid for us to come,' said Chris. ‘We can't bail out now. And anyway, what do these guys know about starting an online business? They're all like a hundred and three.'

‘What kind of business?' Jo found herself saying. Damn. Louise had told them not to discuss their actual intended business. She didn't want the boys to think she was trying to poach their ideas.

They didn't seem bothered though. ‘T-shirts,' said Daniel. ‘I design them; Chris screen-prints them. We've built a pretty good following through friends, but it's time to take it to the next level.'

Jo didn't know what to say. She was probably as old as
both of them put together, and they already had a successful small business.

‘Here's our card,' said Chris. ‘My dad made us get cards, even though they're archaic. Still, Dan did a pretty good job on the design, and they're fun to give out.'

The card was bright orange and cut in the shape of a old-fashioned TV screen with rounded corners, and there was a brilliantly wobbly cartoon face peering in from the edge, pointing impishly at their company name: ‘Outtake'. Their names were on the back of the card, with their email address, website, Skype details and Facebook page. Now Jo felt doubly depressed. They were so far ahead of her she didn't even know where to begin. She'd been naive, thinking she could do this. Her after-coffee session was with a PR expert, and she, like the boys, was tempted to cut and run. However, she reasoned, she may know next to nothing about insurance or finance, but she really knew PR. Maybe the meeting would offer a little confidence boost.

The PR expert was a bright young thing in her late twenties, with smooth blond hair and a way of using jargon that sounded as if she was beginning each term with a capital letter.

Jo outlined her business idea to the woman, who listened intently.

‘You're going to want to Leverage Regional Capital,' she announced seriously.

‘I'm going to … what ?'

‘You'll need to build a degree of Neighbourhood Traction, so you can Generate Word-of-Mouth Momentum.'

‘So, get local people talking about it?'

‘Exactly!' said the blonde woman enthusiastically. ‘It's what we call School-Gate Collateral. It's worth its weight in gold.'

‘I'm so glad there's an industry term for chatting to my mates,' said Jo, smiling, but the Blonde seemed to have had her sense of humour removed at marketing college.

‘If you Grease your Local Customer Funnel, there's a good chance you can generate a Meaningful Hook to entice Local Press or Influential Mummy Bloggers … that way you have more of a chance of Landing the Big Fish.'

‘The Big Fish?'

‘National Press,' breathed the Blonde reverently.

‘Well, as it's only going to be a small local shop, I don't think national press interest is terribly likely. It would be wonderful of course, but very unlikely.'

‘We should
always
aim for National Press Coverage,' stated the Blonde, as if this was a universal truth. And with that, the interview was over. She was the only dud in the panel of experts, and Jo made a note to mention it gently to Louise. It had been a laugh though, and made her feel a bit better.

She already had a raft of ideas to publicise the shop. That was, of course, if she ever found the money to fund it, the premises to house it, someone to insure the whole bloody thing and the stock to fill it. This last was her biggest concern. There was no point in a clothing store without clothes. Most people launched a clothing business by designing the garments and then worried about how to sell them. She had the greatest how, but no actual clothes to sell. The more she thought about it, the more certain she was that she didn't want to sell one-of-a-kind couture items that most
parents wouldn't be able to afford and kids would only wear once or twice. The market for that would be tiny, and anyway, she wanted the shop to appeal to ordinary stressed and busy mums like herself. She wanted someone who could produce reasonably priced, hard-wearing and attractive kids' clothes, with a few extra fun and funky items. But where to find such a person? And how was she even to start looking?

At lunch, she found herself sitting on her own, glumly eating a sandwich without tasting it, and glancing through the notes she'd made in her meeting with Mr Health and Safety. She was going to have to learn about non-toxic materials and paints, it seemed. And then there was the issue of finding Criminal Records Bureau-checked staff, not to mention investigating stock-control software and till systems. She let out a big sigh, just as Louise slipped into the seat opposite her.

‘I know that sigh. That's the “I can't do this, it's too hard” sigh.'

‘You've seen people sigh that sigh before?'

‘Every time we do this course. I know it looks like there are more problems than solutions, and it is going to be hard, but, Jo, I do think you have what it takes.'

Jo smiled weakly. ‘I bet you say that to all the girls. And boys.'

‘I don't. I think you have the drive and the organisation, and the courage. And you're a mum, so you know how to multitask and make the most of every little fragment of time. I don't even know what your idea is, but I still think you can make it as an entrepreneur.'

‘Do you want to know my idea?'

‘Do you want to tell me?'

‘Only if you lie and tell me it's brilliant. Kidding. Only if you're honest and you tell me if you think it could work.'

Louise leant back in her chair, folded her arms over her little pregnancy bump and said, ‘Okay, tell me.'