It came from a shuddering white face, from wagging jowls, from a slow rolling mass of flesh, fiercely corseted inside a dress of stretched black polyester: corseted into the shape of a bulbous flower vase, and the skin with the murky sheen of carnation water two days old. Reek of armpits, rattling cough; these were my colleagues. Life in the stores had destroyed them. They had chronic sniffles from the dust and bladder infections from the dirty lavatories. Their veins bulged through elastic stockings. They lived on £15 per week. They didn’t work on commission, so they never sold anything if they could help it. Their rheumy malice drove customers back to the escalators and down into the street.
The personnel officer set me to work in the department next to my mother. I was able to study her in action, wafting across the floor in whatever creation she was wearing that day; she was no longer in subfusc, but picked her garments from her own stock. She had developed a manner that was gracious, not to say condescending, combined with a tip-tilted flirtatiousness that she tried out on the wilting gays who were almost the only men in the store; she was liked by her staff – her girls, as she called them – for her prettiness and high spirits.
They didn’t seem, the girls, quite so decrepit as the ones who worked for my department, although I soon found out that they had a variety of intractable personal problems, which were meat and drink to my mother, which were in fact what she had instead of meat and drink, because now it was her role in life to stay a size 10, pretend she was a size 8, and so set an example to womankind. The girls had divorces, bad debts, vitamin deficiencies, premenstrual tension, and children with fits and deformities. Their houses were given to subsidence and collapse, floods and moulds, and it seemed to me that they specialised in obsolescent diseases such as smallpox or conditions such as scrapie that only a few morbid-minded people like me had heard of in those days. The worse off they were, the more disorderly and hopeless their lives, the more my mother doted on them. Even today, thirty years on, many of them keep in touch with her. ‘Mrs D rang,’ she will say. ‘The IRA have bombed her house again and her daughter’s been engulfed in a tidal wave, but she asked to be remembered to you.’ At Christmas, and on the occasions of her falsified birthdays, these girls would buy my mother coloured glass ornaments, and adjuncts to the good life, like soda siphons. They were inner-city women with flat Manchester voices, but my mother and the other department heads talked in peculiar purse-lipped ways designed not to let their vowels show.
I was not employed by the store itself, but by a ‘shop-in-shop’ called English Lady. There were women, tending to the elderly, who wanted what it offered: dress-and-coat ensembles that I called wedding uniforms, summer frocks and ‘separates’ in artificial fabrics and pastel shades, washable and easy-iron. In those days people still went out in April to buy a summer coat of pink showerproof poplin, or a light wool with a shadow check, and they bought blazers, boleros and blouses, and trouser ensembles with long tunic tops under which they wore stockings and suspenders, the bumps of the suspenders showing through the polyester. In winter English Lady specialised in camel coats, which their wearers dutifully renewed every few years, expecting exactly the same style and getting it. There were also – for the winter stock was coming in, long before I left for London – coats called llamas, which were an unhealthy silver-grey, and shaggy, like hair shirts turned out, but hair shirts with pockets. For the autumn also there were bristling tweeds, and lumpen stinking sheepskins which we chained to the rails, because English Lady feared for their safety. Herding them was heavy work; they exhaled with a grunt when they were touched, and jostled for Lebensraum, puffing out their bulk and testing their bonds inch by squeaky inch.
Customers were scarce that summer. Once the morning dusting was over and we had done the day’s updates on varicose veins, there was a desert of time to be got through: days of stupefying heat, thirst and boredom, with no air, no natural light, only a dim fluorescence above which gave a corpse-tint to the freshest skins. Sometimes as I stood I thought furiously about the French Revolution, which had come to preoccupy me. Sometimes my mother tripped across the carpet, fluttering her fingers at me, smiling upon her workforce.
My own boss was called Daphne. She wore gogglesized fashion specs with coloured rims, behind which swam void pale eyes. In theory she and my mother were friends, but I soon realised, with a sense of shock, that among her peers my mother was a target for envy, and would have been secretly sabotaged if the other bosses had been bright enough to think how to do it. Daphne worked me relentlessly during those summer weeks, finding for me tasks that no one had done in years: cleaning in the stockrooms that were miceridden and thick with dust, boxing up great consignments of wire hangers which leapt from their bundles to claw at my arms like rats breaking out of a pet shop. The north-west was filthy in those days, and the rooms behind the scenes at Affleck & Brown were a dark and secret aspect of the filth. The feet-drawing carpets, the thick polythene in which the clothes came swathed, the neglected warp and weft of those garments that failed to sell and were bastilled in distant stockrooms: all these attracted a nap of sticky fluff which magnetised the particles of the Manchester atmosphere, which coated the hands and streaked the face, so that I must often have looked less like a ‘junior sales’ than a scab in a pit strike, my eyes travelling suspiciously when I surfaced, my hands contaminated, held away from my body in a gesture designed both to placate and ward off.
Sometimes, behind some packed rail draped in yellowing calico, behind some pile of boxes whose labels were faded to illegibility, I could sense a movement, a kind of shifting of feet, a murmur: ‘Mrs Solomons?’ I would call. ‘Mrs Segal?’ No answer: just the whispered exhalation of worsted and mohair: the deep intestinal creak of suede and leather: the faint squeal of unoiled metal wheels. Perhaps it was Daphne, spying on me? But sometimes at five thirty when the fitting rooms had to be cleared, I would come across a closed curtain at the end of a row, and I would turn and walk away without pulling it back, afflicted by sudden shyness or by fear of seeing something that I shouldn’t see. It is easy to imagine that hanging fabric is bulked out by flesh, or that stitch and seam rehearse, after hours, a human shape without bones.
My colleagues, breathing over me the faint minted aroma of their indigestion remedies, received me with unbounded kindness. My pallor attracted their tuttutting sanction, and caused them to recommend the red meat that never passed their own lips. Perhaps my remoteness alarmed them, as I stood entranced among the edge-to-edge jackets; and then I would snap back and sell something, which alarmed them too. I liked the challenge of suiting the garments to the women who wanted them, of making a fit, of gratifying harmless desire. I liked tearing off the tickets from the frocks as they were sold, and looping a carrier bag considerately around an arthritic wrist. Sometimes the elderly customers would try to give me tips, which upset me. ‘I don’t come often now,’ said one twisted, gracious old person. ‘But when I do come, I always give.’
At the end of each working day my mother and I winced arm in arm to Piccadilly station, up the hill from Market Street, past the hot cafes stewing with grease and the NHS clinic that was always advertising for people to step in and donate blood. (I stepped in as soon as I was eighteen, but they turned me around and stepped me straight back out again.) It seemed to me that my job amounted to standing up for a living, and that no one should have to do it: standing hour after hour, standing when there was no customer in sight, standing in the fuggy heat from nine in the morning till five thirty at night with an hour for lunch in which you sprang out of the building and walked, gulping in the air. You stood long after your feet throbbed and your calves ached, and the ache wasn’t gone by next morning when the standing started again. Maybe my mother was better off than me, because she had a tiny shelf of an office to sit in, a chair to perch on. But then she had her shoes, much more pernicious than my small suede sandals; her whole existence was much more high.
Some nights, maybe twice in the week, there were problem
s with the trains. Once there was an hour’s delay. Hunger made us buoyant: talking gaily of the many catastrophes that had beset my mother’s girls that day, we nibbled at a green apple she had produced from her bag, turn and turn about. We were not angry or guilty about being late because there was nothing we could do, and our mood was innocent, blithe, until we found ourselves penned up in the hall of our little house with my stepfather snarling. Our giggling stopped: what I have often remarked as brutal is the side of the human hand, tensed, wedge-like, ready to strike like an axe. Something then occurred. I’m not clear what it was. It isn’t true that if you’re very angry it gives you strength. If you’re very angry it gives you a swimming head and limbs weak at the joints, but you do it anyway, a thing you’ve never done before, you speak the curse, you move, you pin against the wall, you say a certain death formula and what you say you mean; the effect is in proportion to the shock, as if the Meek had got out from the Sermon on the Mount and raked the crossroads with machine-gun fire.
After this, for a while, I left home. My mother and I parted every evening at the end of our road. She was more in sorrow than in anger, but sometimes she was in anger; I realise now that my intervention had interrupted some marital game of hers. When we drew near the end of our day’s journey she’d stop chattering about the girls, and she’d move – reluctantly, I often felt – into some remote sniffy territory, putting deliberate distance between us. I would labour on up the hill to where I’d moved in with Anne Terese. She was now alone in the family house. Her parents had parted that summer, and perhaps they hadn’t got the hang of it; instead of one going and one staying, both of them had walked out. We didn’t compare our families much; we tried on the clothes in the wardrobes, and rearranged the furniture. The house was a peculiar one, prefabricated, contingent but homely, with a stove in the sitting room, and a deep enamel sink, and none of the appliances, like fridges, that people took for granted in the year 1970.
Anne Terese was working for the summer at a factory that made rubber-soled slippers. The work was hard, but every part of her body was hard and efficient too. In the evening, while I sagged feebly on a kitchen chair, she breaded cutlets, and sliced tomato and cucumber on to a glass dish. She made a Polish cake that was heavy with eggs and ripe cherries. At dusk we sat on the porch, in the faint blown scent of old rose. Hope, fine as cobwebs, draped our bare arms and floated across our shoulders, each strand shivering with twilit blue. When the moon rose we moved indoors to our beds, still sleepily murmuring. Anne Terese thought six children would suit her. I thought it would be good if I could stop vomiting.
Sometimes, as I wandered the floor at English Lady, I’d pretend that I was a supervisor at a refugee camp and that the frocks were the inhabitants. When I packed one and threw its ticket into a box I said to myself that I’d resettled it.
Each day began and ended with the count. You took a piece of paper and ruled it into columns for the different types of stock, so that you didn’t get the two-pieces mixed up with the dress and jackets, even though they were two pieces also. You had to make categories for the garments that had no name, like the bifurcated items that head office had sent several seasons ago; made of hairy grey-blue tweed, they were some kind of flying suit perhaps, of a kind to be worn by Biggles’s nanny. When the sales came around, Daphne would always reduce them, but they remained on the rails, their stiff arms thrust out and their legs wrapped around their necks to keep them from trailing on the carpet.
When you had made your categories you went between the rails and counted, and it was always wrong. You would then patrol the floor looking for English Ladies that had tucked themselves in among the Eastex or Windsmoor. You would haul them back by their necks and thrust them on the rails. But, while it was easy to see why the count should be wrong after the working day, it was less easy to understand why the stock should move around at night. ‘Spooks,’ I said robustly. I thought they must come down from the third-floor bedding (the sheeted dead) and try on our garments, hissing with spooky excitement, and sliding their phantom limbs into legs and sleeves.
I passed the summer so, in talking to tramps in Piccadilly Gardens; in buying ripe strawberries from the barrows for my lunch; in cooling my forehead against the gunmetal grille of the door of the goods lift. When Daphne castigated me for this failing and that, I would sigh will-do-better, but later I would aim secret kicks at the flying suits, and torture them by wrapping their legs more tightly around their necks and knotting them behind the hanger. To Daphne’s face, I was compliance itself. I didn’t want my mother to incur even more rancid female hatred, that would snarl invisible about her trim ankles, snag her kitten heels when I was long gone, and marching through London streets.
But then, as September approached, I found that the whole subject of the count was making me restless. Each evening we could only square it with the stock sheets by writing ‘15 in back’ at the end of the dresses and jackets column, and it occurred to me that in all my grovelling and delving I’d never run across these oddments. ‘You know,’ I said to Daphne, ‘where we always write “15 in back”? Where are they?’
‘In back,’ said Daphne. We were in her office, a scant wedge-shape partitioned off from the sales floor.
‘But where?’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen them.’
Daphne slotted a cigarette into her mouth. With one hand she flipped a page of a stocklist, in the other hovered a dribbling ballpoint pen. A thin plume of smoke leaked from her lips. ‘Don’t you smoke yet?’ she said. ‘Aren’t you tempted?’
I had wondered, a time or two, why people try to trap you into new vices. Ours was a home that was militantly anti-tobacco. ‘I haven’t thought about it really…I don’t suppose…Well, if your parents don’t smoke…I couldn’t at home anyway, it would be very bad for my brother.’
Daphne stared at me. A little hoot issued from her, like a hiccup, and then a derisive shout of laughter. ‘What! Your mother smokes like a chimney! Every break! Every lunchtime! Haven’t you seen her? You must have seen her!’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I have never.’ I was the more deceived.
A gobbet of ink dropped from Daphne’s pen. ‘Have I spoken out of turn?’
‘That’s all right,’ I said.
I told myself I welcomed information, information from any source.
Daphne looked at me glassily. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘why should it be bad for your brother?’
I looked at my watch. ‘Mrs Segal’s lunch,’ I smiled. I headed back to the sales floor. I said to myself, it can’t matter. Tiny household lies. Pragmatic lies. Amusing, probably: given time. Trivial: like a needlepoint snapped under the skin.
But later that afternoon, I sought the 15 in back. I tunnelled my way into lightless holes, where my toes were stubbed by bulging rotten boxes of unknown provenance. The cartons I had made myself, and bound with twine, had never been dispatched by Daphne, but left to squat in collapsing stacks. Now the wire hangers nipped at my calves as they worked their way out. Levering aside the bulky winter stock, thwacking the llamas away from me, I burrowed my way to the farthest corner. Give me that mattock and the wrenching iron.
Nothing. I named every garment I saw, scrabbling inside their shrouds: lifting them by their collars to peep at their labels, or, if I could not lift them, shredding their plastic frills into ruffs around their throats. I saw labels and I saw things that might have been Dress & Jackets but I did not see Dress & Jackets with the label I wanted. The 15 were nowhere to be found. I fought my way back to the air. I never looked back. I scratched it on my pad: zero, nix, nought. Diddly-squat, as the men said. Dress & Jackets, nil. If they had ever been known to exist, they didn’t now. I saw how it was; they were to be conjured into being, the 15, to cover a mighty embarrassment, some awesome negligence or theft that had knocked the count to its knees gibbering. They were a fiction, perhaps an antique one; perhaps even older than Daphne. They were an adjustment to reality. They were a tale told by an idiot: to which I had added a
phrase or two.
I re-emerged on to the floor. It was three o’clock. One of those dead afternoons, adumbrated, slumberous: not a customer in view. Limp from lack of regard, the stock hung like rags. A long mirror showed a dark smudge across my cheek. My sandals were coated with poisoned grime. I limped to the battered bureau where we kept our duplicate books and spare buttons, and took a duster out of the drawer. I rolled it up and brushed myself down, then moved out on to the floor, between the rails, and dusted between the garments: parting the hangers and polishing the steel spaces between. Somehow the afternoon passed. That night I declined to write ‘15 in back’ at the end of the count: until my colleagues became too upset to bear, and one showed signs of hyperventilating. So in the end I did consent to write the phrase, but I wrote it quite faintly in pencil, with a question mark after it that was fainter still.
When the new school term began, it emerged that there was nothing wrong with my brother any more. He was eleven now, quite fit enough to go to high school. We digested this surprising fact, but no one was quite as glad about it as they should have been. Within months my mother was headhunted, her services sought by mackintosh purveyors and knitwear concessions; she had her pick of jobs, and moved to bigger stores, becoming blonder year by year, rising like a champagne bubble, to command larger numbers of girls and bigger counts and attract even more animosity and spite. At home she pursued her impromptu housekeeping, scouring the bath with powder meant for the washing machine and, when the washing machine broke down, throwing a tablecloth over it and using it as a sort of sideboard while she trained my siblings to go to the launderette.