He had a little hollow in mind, a place created by a fallen sycamore behind a tomb and between two gravestones. There, Interesting Developments could occur. But he was too much the schemer to head to the hollow straightaway. He started off with a bit of hand-in-hand statue gazing—“Oooh, dead sad that little angel looks, eh?”—and went on from there to a hand on the back of the neck, a caress—“Dave, that makes me go all tingly!”—and the kind of kiss that suggested but nothing more.
Josette was a little slower than most girls, probably as a result of her upbringing. Unlike other girls of fifteen, she was something of an innocent who’d never even been out on a date—“Mum and Dad say not yet”—and therefore she didn’t pick up on the signs as well as she might have done. But he was patient, and when at last she was pressing against him of her own volition and clearly wanting more of his kisses and at greater length, he suggested they get off the path and “see if there’s somewhere …you know what I mean” with a wink.
Who would have bloody thought that the hollow, his own particular Site of Seduction, would be flaming occupied? It was an outrage, it was, but there you have it. Dave heard the moaning and groaning as he and Josette approached and there was no mistaking the arms and legs all a’tangle in the undergrowth, especially since there were four of each and none of them had a stitch of clothing on. There was also the naked arse of the bloke pumping madly away, his head turned toward them and a grimace on his face …Cor, do we all look like that? Dave wondered.
Josette giggled when she saw, and this was a good thing. Anything else would have suggested either fear or prurience, and while Dave certainly didn’t expect her to be some sort of shrinking Puritan in this day and age, one never knew. He backed away from the hollow, Josette’s hand in his, and he gave some thought to where he might take her. There were nooks and hollows aplenty, to be sure, but he wanted a location close to this one, Josette being on the boil.
And then he thought, Of course. They were not far from the chapel at the centre of the cemetery. They couldn’t get inside the building, but right next to it—indeed, built into it—was a shelter that they could easily use. It offered a roof and walls and that was better than the hollow, come to think of it.
He inclined his head in the direction of the coupling couple in the bushes and winked at Josette. “Mmmm, not bad, eh?” he said.
“Dave!” She gave a little gasp of faux horror. How could you mention such a thing!
“Well?” he said. “You saying you don’t … ?”
“Didn’t say that,” was how she replied.
As good as an invitation, that was. It was off to the chapel they went. Hand in hand and in a bit of a hurry. Josette, Dave decided, was definitely a flower ready to be plucked.
They reached the grassy clearing where the chapel stood. “Just round here, luv,” Dave murmured.
He took her beyond the chapel entrance and around its far corner. And there his plans ground themselves to a sudden halt.
For a teenage boy with a barrel for a bum was stumbling out of Dave’s trysting place. He had such a look on his face that one almost didn’t notice he was holding up his obviously unzipped trousers. He dashed across the clearing and then was gone.
All this at first caused David Emery to think the boy had relieved himself inside the trysting place. This cheesed Dave off, as he could hardly expect Josette to want to roll round in a spot reeking of piss. But as she was ready and as he was ready and as there was the slightest possibility that the boy had not used the shelter as a public convenience, Dave shrugged and urged Josette forward, saying, “Just in there, luv,” as he followed her.
He was so much thinking of Just One Thing that he nearly jumped out of his skin, he did, when Josette went into the shelter and started screaming.
“NO, NO, NO, Barbara,” Hadiyyah said. “We can’t just go shopping. Not without a plan. That would be far too overwhelming. First we got to make a list, but before we do that we got to consider what we want. And to do that we got to decide on the type of body you have. It’s how these things are done. One sees it on telly all the time.”
Barbara Havers eyed her companion doubtfully. She wondered whether she should be seeking sartorial advice from a nine-year-old girl. But aside from Hadiyyah, there was only Dorothea Harriman to turn to if she was to take Isabelle Ardery’s “advice” to heart, and Barbara wasn’t about to throw herself upon the mercy of Scotland Yard’s foremost style icon. With Dorothea at the helm, the ship of shopping was likely to sail straight down the King’s Road or—worse—into Knightsbridge, where in a boutique operated by rail-thin shop assistants with sculptured hair and similar fingernails, she would be forced to lay out a week’s pay on a pair of knickers. At least with Hadiyyah there was a slight chance that what had to be done could be done in Marks & Spencer.
But Hadiyyah was having none of that. “Topshop,” she said. “We got to go to Topshop, Barbara. Or Jigsaw. Or maybe H and M but just maybe.”
“I don’t want to look trendy,” Barbara told her. “It’s got to be professional. Nothing with ruffles. Or spikes sprouting from it. Nothing with chains.”
Hadiyyah rolled her eyes. “Barbara,” she said. “Really. Do you think I’d wear spikes and chains?”
Her father would have had something to say about that, Barbara thought. Taymullah Azhar kept his daughter on what had to be called a very short lead. Even now in her summer holidays she wasn’t allowed to run about with other children her age. Instead, she was studying Urdu and cookery and when she wasn’t studying Urdu or cookery, she was being minded by Sheila Silver, an elderly pensioner whose brief period of glory—endlessly recounted—had occurred singing backup for a Cliff Richard wannabe on the Isle of Wight. Mrs. Silver lived in a flat in the Big House, as they called it, an elaborate yellow Edwardian structure in Eton Villas; Barbara lived behind this building on the same property in a hobbit-size bungalow. Hadiyyah and her father were neighbours, domiciled in the ground-floor flat of the Big House with an area in front of it that served as its terrace. This was where Barbara and Hadiyyah were conferring, each with a Ribena in front of her, both of them bent over a wrinkled section of the Daily Mail, which Hadiyyah had apparently been saving for an occasion precisely like this one.
She’d fetched the newspaper from her bedroom once Barbara had explained her wardrobe quest. “I have just the thing,” she’d announced happily and, her long plaits flying, she’d disappeared into the flat and returned with the article in question. She laid this open on the wicker table to reveal a story about clothing and body types. Spread across two pages were models who supposedly demonstrated all possibilities of build, excluding anorexia and obesity, of course, as the Daily Mail did not wish to encourage extremes.
Hadiyyah had informed Barbara that they had to begin with body type and they couldn’t exactly work out Barbara’s body type if she didn’t change into something …well, something that would allow them to see what they were working with? She dismissed Barbara back to her bungalow to change her clothes—“It’s awfully hot for corduroy and wool jumpers anyway,” she noted helpfully—and she bent over the paper to scrutinize the models. Barbara did her bidding and returned, although Hadiyyah sighed when she saw the drawstring trousers and T-shirt.
“What?” Barbara said.
“Oh, well. Never mind,” Hadiyyah told her airily. “We’ll do our best.”
Their best consisted of Barbara standing on a chair—feeling like a perfect fool—while Hadiyyah crossed the grass “to get a bit of distance so I c’n compare you to the ladies in the pictures.” This she did by holding up the newspaper and crinkling her nose as she switched her gaze from it to Barbara to it to Barbara before announcing, “Pear, I think. Short waisted as well. C’n you lift your trousers? …Barbara, you have lovely ankles! Whyever don’t you show them? Girls should always emphasise their best features, you know.”
“And I’d do that by … ?”
Hadiyyah considered this. “High heels. You have to wear hi
gh heels. Do you have high heels, Barbara?”
“Oh yeah,” Barbara said. “I find them just the thing for my line of work, crime scenes being otherwise rather grim.”
“You’re making fun. You can’t make fun if we’re to do this properly.” Hadiyyah bounced across the lawn back to her, trailing the Daily Mail article from her fingers. She spread this out on the wicker table once again and perused it for a moment, after which she announced, “A-line skirt. The staple of all wardrobes. Your jacket has to be a length that doesn’t draw attention to your hips and as your face is roundish—”
“Still working to lose the baby fat,” Barbara said.
“—the neckline of your blouse should be soft, not angular. Blouse necklines, you see, should mirror the face. Well, the chin, really. I mean the whole line from the ears to the chin, which includes the jaw.”
“Ah. Got it.”
“We want the skirt midknee and the shoes to have straps. That’s because of your lovely ankles.”
“Straps?”
“Hmm. It says so right here. And we must accessorise as well. The mistake so many women make is failure to accessorise appropriately or—what’s worse—failure to accessorise at all.”
“Bloody hell. We don’t want that,” Barbara said fervently. “What’s it mean, exactly?”
Hadiyyah folded up the newspaper neatly, running her fingers lovingly along each crease. “Oh, scarves and hats and belts and lapel pins and necklaces and bracelets and earrings and handbags. Gloves as well, but that would be only in winter.”
“God,” Barbara said. “Won’t I be a bit overdone with all that?”
“You don’t use it all at once.” Hadiyyah sounded like patience itself. “Honestly, Barbara, it’s not really that difficult. Well, maybe it’s a bit difficult, but I’ll help you with it. It’ll be such fun.”
Barbara doubted this, but off they went. They phoned her father first at the university, where they managed to catch him between a lecture and a meeting with a postgraduate student. Early in her relationship with Taymullah Azhar and his daughter, Barbara had learned that one did not make off with Hadiyyah without bringing her father fully into the picture. She hated having to admit why she wanted to take Hadiyyah with her on a shopping excursion, so she made do with, “Got to buy some bits and bobs for work and I thought Hadiyyah might like to come along. Give her something of an outing and all that. Thought we’d stop for an ice somewhere when we’re finished.”
“Has she completed her studies for the day?” Azhar asked.
“Her studies?” Barbara gave Hadiyyah the eye. The little girl nodded vigorously although Barbara had her doubts about the cookery end of things. Hadiyyah had not been enthusiastic about standing in someone’s kitchen in the summer heat. “Thumb’s-up on that,” she told Azhar.
“Very well,” Azhar said. “But not in Camden Market, Barbara.”
“Last place on earth, I guarantee,” Barbara told him.
The nearest Topshop turned out to be in Oxford Street, a fact that delighted Hadiyyah and horrified Barbara. The shopping mecca of London, it was always an undulating mass of humanity on any day save Christmas; in high summer, with schools on holiday and the capital city packed with visitors from around the globe, it was an undulating mass of humanity squared. Cubed. To the tenth. Whatever. Once they arrived, it took them forty minutes to find a car park with space for Barbara’s Mini and another thirty to work their way to Topshop, elbowing through the crowds on the pavement like salmon going home. When they finally arrived at the shop, Barbara glanced inside and wanted to run away at once. It was crammed with adolescent girls, their mothers, their aunts, their grans, their neighbours…They were shoulder to shoulder, they were in queues at the tills, they were jostling from racks to counters to displays, they were shouting into mobiles over the pounding music, they were trying on jewellery: earrings to ears, necklaces to necks, bracelets on wrists. It was Barbara’s worst nightmare come to life.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” Hadiyyah enthused. “I always want Dad to bring me here, but he says Oxford Street’s mad. He says nothing would drag him to Oxford Street. He says wild horses couldn’t bring him here. He says Oxford Street’s London’s version of …I can’t remember, but it’s not good.”
Dante’s Inferno, no doubt, Barbara thought. Some circle of hell into which women like herself—loathing fashion trends, indifferent about apparel in general, and looking dreadful no matter what she wore—were thrust for their fashion sins.
“But I love it,” Hadiyyah said. “I knew I would. Oh, I just knew it.”
She zipped inside. There was nothing for Barbara to do but follow.
THEY SPENT A grueling ninety minutes in Topshop, where lack of air-conditioning—this was London, after all, where people still believed that there were only “four or five hot days each year”—and what seemed like a thousand teenagers in search of bargains made Barbara feel as if she’d definitely paid for every earthly sin she’d ever committed, far beyond those that she’d committed against the name of haute couture. They went from there to Jigsaw, and from Jigsaw to H & M, where they repeated the Topshop experience with the addition of small children howling for their mothers, ice cream, lollies, pet dogs, sausage rolls, pizza, fish and chips, and whatever else came into their feverish minds. At Hadiyyah’s insistence—“Barbara, just look at the name of the shop, please!”—they followed these experiences with a period of time in Accessorize, and finally they found themselves in Marks & Spencer, although not without Hadiyyah’s sigh of disapproval. She said, “This is where Mrs. Silver buys her knickers, Barbara,” as if that information would stop Barbara cold and dead in her tracks. “Do you want to look like Mrs. Silver?”
“At this point, I’ll settle for looking like Dame Edna.” Barbara ducked inside. Hadiyyah trailed her. “Thank God for small mercies,” Barbara noted over her shoulder. “Not only knickers but air-conditioning as well.”
All they’d managed to accomplish so far was a necklace from Accessorize that Barbara thought she wouldn’t feel too daft wearing and a purchase of makeup from Boots. The makeup consisted of whatever Hadiyyah told her to buy although Barbara sincerely doubted she’d ever wear it. She’d only given in to the idea of makeup at all because the little girl had been utterly heroic in facing Barbara’s consistent refusals to purchase anything Hadiyyah had fished out of the racks of clothing they’d seen so far. Thus it seemed only fair to give in on something, and makeup appeared to be the ticket. So she’d loaded her basket with foundation, blusher, eye shadow, eye liner, mascara, several frightening shades of lipstick, four different kinds of brushes, and a container of loose powder that was supposed to “fix it all in place,” Hadiyyah told her. Apparently, the purchases Hadiyyah directed Barbara to make were heavily dependent upon her observation of her mother’s daily morning rituals, which themselves seemed to be heavily dependent upon “pots of this and that …She always looks brilliant, Barbara, wait till you see her.” Seeing Hadiyyah’s mother was something that had not happened in the fourteen months of Barbara’s acquaintance with the little girl and her father, and the euphemism she’s gone to Canada on holiday was beginning to take on a significance difficult for Barbara to continue to ignore.
Barbara groused about the excessive expense, saying, “Can’t I make do with blusher by itself?” To this, Hadiyyah scoffed most heartily. “Really, Barbara,” she said, and she left it at that.
Once in Marks & Spencer, Hadiyyah wouldn’t hear of Barbara’s trailing off towards racks of anything the child deemed “suitable for Mrs. Silver …you know.” She had in mind that staple of all wardrobes—the aforementioned A-line skirt—and declared herself content with the fact that at least as it was high summer, the autumn clothing had just been brought in. Thus, she explained, what was on offer hadn’t yet been picked over by countless “working mums who wear this sort of thing, Barbara. They’ll be on holiday with their kids just now, so we don’t have to worry about having only the pickings left.”
/> “Thank God for that,” Barbara said. She was drifting towards twin sets in plum and olive green. Hadiyyah took her arm firmly and steered her elsewhere. She declared herself content when they found “separates, Barbara, which we can put together to make suits. Oh, and look, they’ve blouses with pussy bows. These’re rather sweet, aren’t they?” She lifted one for Barbara’s inspection.
Barbara couldn’t imagine herself in a blouse at all, let alone one with a voluminous bow at the neck. She said, “Don’t think that’s suitable for my jawline, do you? What about this?” and she pulled a jumper off a neatly folded pile.
“No jumpers,” Hadiyyah told her. She replaced the blouse on the rack with, “Oh, all right. I s’pose the bow’s a bit much.”
Barbara praised the Almighty for that declaration. She began to browse through the rack of skirts. Hadiyyah did likewise, and they ultimately came up with five upon which they could agree although they’d had to compromise each step of the way, with Hadiyyah firmly returning to the rack anything she considered Mrs. Silverish and Barbara shuddering at anything that might draw attention to itself.
Off they went to the changing rooms, then, where Hadiyyah insisted upon acting the part of Barbara’s dresser, which exposed her to Barbara’s undergarments, which she declared, “Shocking, Barbara. You got to get those string-back kind.” Barbara wasn’t willing to wander even for a moment in the land of knickers, so she directed Hadiyyah to dwell on the skirts they’d chosen. To these the little girl flicked her hand in dismissal of anything “unsuitable, Barbara,” declaring this one to be rucked round the hips, that one to be tight across the bum, another to be a bit nasty looking, and a fourth something that even someone’s gran wouldn’t wear.