The Metro was also crowded, but I’d had a lot of experience on the Underground in London. I found the right line and the right platform with a train going in the right direction, but when I came up into the street again, I got myself turned around and I didn’t know where I was. I had to ask directions. Two people pretended they couldn’t understand my French. Three people said they couldn’t speak English. A businessman took pity on me and answered my ungrammatical question and pointed me in the right direction.
I was flushed and sweaty. I needed to calm down, so I walked slowly, stopping at a news stand to buy a postcard to send to Terry.
At last, I was walking down rue Francois-Ier. The buildings were all tall and grey and most of them were haute couture shops—Dior, Chanel and designers I hadn’t even heard of—each with one dazzling evening dress in the window. Fashionable French women swept by in long coats and high heels looking like they’d just stepped out of the pages of Vogue. I smoothed my skirt, adjusted my hat and checked my reflection.
I stood outside number forty. Five storeys of grey stone towered above me. A sign on an awning above the door read Maison de couture de Courrèges. My heart was thumping. There were André’s latest designs in the windows. Above the boutique were the upper floors with ornate iron balconies and shuttered windows, behind which André and his staff worked, where they were probably putting the finishing touches to the uniforms he was designing for the upcoming Olympic Games. There was a glass door with a big metal handle, all swirly and modern. I grabbed it with both hands. There was also a sign that said Fermé. The door was locked. I’d thought it was about four in the afternoon, but when I checked my watch, it was actually nearly eight.
“Sugar!” I said.
I never got used to the fact that in summer it didn’t get dark till late in Europe.
Three
Waiting
I took a deep breath and told myself everything would be fine. I could come back in the morning. In fact, that would be better because I’d be brighter after a good night’s sleep. In the morning I could re-style my hair, choose a different outfit and put on fresh make-up.
How was I supposed to know there was an international medical convention in Paris that weekend? I must have tried fifteen hotels, and been turned away by fifteen desk clerks who all looked down their noses at my bad French. The only hotel with a vacancy was the swanky Georges V and they only had a suite, which was a bit beyond the means of a shop assistant—even one who gets paid London loading.
It felt like a week since I’d left London, but it had actually just been one long day. It was dark and I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was lie down.
I found myself outside a big railway station, Le Gare St Lazare. There would be a waiting room. I was imagining a big, empty hall like the one at the Adelaide Railway Station—all echoey marble with polished wooden benches and about three people sitting reading newspapers.
The waiting room at Le Gare St Lazare was big, but that was the only similarity to the one in Adelaide. It was more like an all-night bar, and it was packed. There were a few people, looking confused like me, who seemed to be actually waiting for a train, but they were outnumbered by drunks and tramps and women who looked like prostitutes, all sitting at tables littered with cups and glasses or leaning against the counter. The room stank of those awful French cigarettes. It wasn’t quiet either. Glasses were clattering, people were shouting and singing. I was lucky to find a seat, let alone somewhere to lie down.
My shoes stuck to the sticky floor as I threaded my way to a table where two elderly ladies wearing flowery hats were sitting. They looked out of place, but then so did I.
The waiter kept asking me if I wanted to order something. In the end I gave in and asked for a coffee and a sandwich. There was a weird tension in the air, like when someone’s blowing up a balloon too hard and you’re just waiting for it to pop.
The sandwich was stale, the coffee too strong. I took out the postcard I’d bought. I thought I could pore over it for at least two hours so the waiter couldn’t catch my eye. I drew a border of shooting stars and rosebuds while I tried to think of something to say. I didn’t want to tell Terry what had happened, so I wrote a couple of vague lines about being in Paris for the weekend and signed my name with a long curl at the end, which I turned into a daisy chain. I drew a heart instead of a dot above the ‘i’ and finished it off with six kisses. I added a PS.
The first thing I noticed about Terry was his fabulous black suede boots.
I met him just after Colleen and I started saving to go to London. We were at the Beat Basement, which is where we went every Saturday night, and a group called the Movers and the Shakers were playing. Terry was the lead guitarist. He came up and spoke to me when they were having a break and he looked very fashionable in a red polka-dot shirt and a leather vest. He also had perfect hair.
Most boys who grow their hair think they don’t need to go to the hairdresser any more. Terry never did. His sister was a hairdresser. He showed her a picture of Jeff Beck (his guitar idol) and told her to cut his hair in exactly the same style. Once we started to go out together, I made all Terry’s clothes and he looked even groovier.
When Terry found out that Colleen and I were planning to go to London, he wanted to come too, so he could break into the English music scene, but he couldn’t afford it. I would have waited for him to save up, but Colleen was impatient to go. Terry said he’d come over to England as soon as he’d paid off his guitar. So I was having my little European adventure without him.
The noise level in the waiting room was getting louder and sharper. The cigarette smoke was thicker. The balloon burst. The two old ladies started to argue at the top of their voices. And then the barman threw a glass of water in the face of a customer. A skinny man wearing a green chiffon dress and a feather boa started a fight with a bald man in flared jeans.
Then, as quick as it flared up, things settled down again. The two old women sorted out their differences and left arm in arm. The barman mopped up. Someone gave the guy in the dress a Band-aid for the cut on his face.
I rested my head on my arms among the crumpled serviettes, the spilt sugar and cake crumbs. I closed my eyes. My head was buzzing. I shouldn’t have had coffee.
It took Colleen and me more than three weeks to travel from Adelaide to London. Getting to Europe isn’t as easy now that the Suez Canal has closed and you can’t sail direct. We took a ship from Adelaide to a place called Djibouti on the east coast of Africa. From there we flew to Athens (my first ever plane trip). Then there was a ferry to Italy, a train to Ostende, the Channel ferry to Dover and another train to Victoria Station in London.
We were going to stay with Colleen’s auntie who lives in Tottenham, and we decided to be brave and tackle the Tube on our own to get to her place. We had no trouble finding the right platform on the Victoria Line and we hardly had to wait at all for the train, but before we had time to pick up our luggage, the doors had closed and the train was gone. The train doors only stay open for twenty seconds. We missed two trains before we were quick enough to get on.
It was October when we arrived, which wasn’t the best timing as it was already quite cold, but we didn’t let that stop us. We went to the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral and Madame Tussaud’s. We saw Catch My Soul (the Rock Othello starring P.J. Proby) at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Coventry Street. Colleen’s aunt helped us get a bed-sit in the same building as a friend of hers. It was a basement room in Maida Vale, but it had a fireplace with art nouveau tiles, a huge antique sideboard and French windows opening onto a garden. In one corner there was a sink, a gas ring and a wobbly card table. We loved it, even though we did have to share a bathroom with five other people.
London was a lot more expensive than we’d expected, so we looked for work straight away. Colleen got a job in the staff canteen at Marks & Spencer’s. I found a job as a shop assistant at a place in Piccadilly Circus called I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet. Back in the 1
960s I’d read about it in magazines. It had been a very fashionable shop that sold old military uniforms and jackets made out of Union Jacks. Pop stars used to shop there. In 1971, when I worked there, it sold cheap souvenir T-shirts and was full of shivering tourists with no money trying to steal Tower of London snow domes.
In my first week in London, I saw Donovan coming out of a picture theatre in the West End and Colleen saw Maggie Smith hailing a taxi in Oxford Street. We walked to Abbey Road, which wasn’t far from our bed-sit, and Colleen asked a German tourist to take our photo walking across the crossing. Fame and fortune were everywhere, but for me the best thing about being in London was the fashion. I had to work on Saturdays, but I had Wednesday afternoons off and that’s when I went to all the famous boutiques—Biba, Bus Stop, Bazaar. I spent all my wages on clothes—a Stirling Cooper top made of cream crepe, a maroon zipped maxi-coat with a hood, a blue Biba dress with loops at the end of the sleeves that went over the middle finger. I walked along the racks, touching the clothes, hoping that some of the fame and flair would seep in through my fingertips. I made sketches of things I couldn’t afford so that I could make my own versions. I went to Portobello Road and Kensington Market where they sold mostly Indian clothes and second-hand stuff, but there were some stalls with interesting designs. I also picked up a couple of 1940s moiré silk dresses that I cut up and made into a fabulous skirt.
My big break came in February when I applied for a job at Konundrum, a very trendy boutique in Kensington High Street. It was a lovely spring day when the letter arrived to say I’d got the job and could I start on Monday. I never went back to Lord Kitchener’s, even though it meant I lost two day’s pay. It was longer hours and less money at Konundrum, but I didn’t care. It was a famous fashion house. Konundrum clothes were in all the magazines and I loved them—the hats, the feather boas, the sequined dresses. Not that I had any occasion to wear that sort of thing.
The owner of Konundrum was a woman called Serena who wore maroon eye shadow, blue lipstick, two-inch platform shoes and about three pounds of jewellery. She designed all the clothes for the shop and I thought that if I showed her some of my designs, she’d give me a job off the shop floor. I was willing to start at the bottom, to sketch her ideas, to cut and pin, to learn from the experts. I did everything I could think of to impress her—I worked late, cleaned the toilets, picked up her dry cleaning, fed her parking meter—waiting for a chance to talk to her in private. Serena never remembered my name.
Four
Zap
If I hadn’t read my horoscope, I would never have gone to Paris.
It was a Saturday. I’d been in London about nine months and I’d had a bad day at work. Saturdays were always busy, but that day had been frantic as we were two girls short for the roster. Konundrum is a big shop with three floors and no lifts. I don’t know how many times I ran up and down those stairs. I must have re-hung a thousand items, reorganised the piles of jumpers hundreds of times. Serena doesn’t usually come in on Saturdays, but she was there that day wearing a silver sequined dress and purple tights. I was sure she’d be impressed by the way I’d taken charge of the re-order list and the fact that I hadn’t had a break all day.
The other shop assistants at Konundrum were snooty English girls who all wanted to be models. They were flat chested and only ever ate boiled eggs and lettuce. They were always taking toilet breaks or doing their nails, and they thought they were too superior to serve ordinary people, especially tourists—Australians in particular. If there was a customer who couldn’t speak English, they’d toss garments at her to try on without a word.
I could always tell when someone famous came into the shop, because the other girls would suddenly come alive. They smiled and flattered, and nothing was too much trouble. That Saturday, Julie Christie came in. (I recognised her because I’d seen her in The Go Between.) They let her change in Serena’s office, so she didn’t have to strip to her undies in the communal change room. I was sent to make her a cup of tea (no milk, two sugars).
It wasn’t my fault that she left her shoes right where someone could trip over them. The tea went all over her. Her arm blistered and there was a huge stain on the most expensive evening dress in the shop.
Serena learned my name that day.
After work I went to the Praed Street Classic, as I did every Saturday night. It’s a nice old cinema, with the ticket box out on the street, and it’s a lot cheaper than the cinemas in the West End. I went to see The Poseidon Adventure. Shelley Winters had just done her underwater swim when the screen went blank, the lights came on and a voice over the PA system said, “There has been a bomb threat. Please make your way to the nearest exit and evacuate the theatre in an orderly fashion.” Needless to say, people started screaming and running. My heart was pounding, but I did walk (very quickly) to the side exit and out into the street. I later found out that the bomb threat was a hoax. The girls at Konundrum only go to see films with subtitles, so I still don’t know if Gene Hackman got the surviving passengers out of that upside-down ship.
I walked home and just as I got to my door, Millie, the old Irish lady who lived in the bed-sit next to mine, popped her head into the hallway. She was always asking me in for a cup of tea, and I usually made an excuse (her room smells of cats and mothballs). There was one big attraction though—Millie’s colour TV, and that particular night I didn’t want to be by myself. I’d been living alone since Colleen disappeared into the wilds of Scotland with a boy with shoulder-length red hair who said he was a Druid. We’d only been in London for eight weeks. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone, not even Terry, in case Colleen’s mum found out she was living with a boy.
“You’ll be all right, Jackie,” she said. “Terry’ll be here soon.”
That Saturday was my birthday. I’d just turned eighteen, but I hadn’t told anyone. It was the first time in my life I hadn’t had so much as a card to acknowledge my birthday. There would be a card in the post from Mum and Dad (with a picture of flowers tied with a ribbon and a verse about having a wonderful day), but it hadn’t arrived yet because of a postal strike. I hadn’t had a letter from Terry for more than a month. I was feeling very sorry for myself.
Millie’s bed-sit is at the front of the house, which means her window has a lovely view of the coal cellar and the feet of pedestrians walking along the street above. (I never worked out how we could both be in the basement, but her room is below street level while mine opens onto the garden.) She was just about to watch the Saturday Night Movie on the BBC. The film was An American in Paris. I’d always thought it was a black and white film, because I’d only ever seen it on Australian TV. But when the film started I realised it was in colour. Some singing, Gene Kelly dancing and colourful 1950s outfits were just what I needed to perk me up.
When the film finished, I was flicking through the Daily Mirror while Millie put the kettle on. It was just the usual stuff about strikes and IRA bomb threats. I was day-dreaming about one day having my own fashion label called Jacki M, trying to think of a trademark symbol. It had to be something Australian, but nothing as obvious as a kangaroo or a gum leaf. In the sports pages, there was a picture of someone waving an Australian flag at the cricket. It gave me an idea. I could use the Southern Cross as my trademark, only with colorful groovy-looking stars. I drew it in the margin of the newspaper with the bottom star as the dot above the ‘i’. It looked good.
I’d drawn the five stars next to the horoscopes, so I read mine. I’m a Gemini.
If you want to achieve your goals, you must further your horizons. Do it now. Your time has come.
Millie was making tea and some supper. She maked a good pot of tea, but I usually made a point of never eating anything that she offered me. She’d lived in that basement since a bomb destroyed her family’s home in 1944. Twenty-eight years in that one dingy room! There was a big cupboard full of tinned food that she’d hoarded during the War. I watched her select a tin of Spam. The label was brown and the tin was r
usty. I politely refused the Spam sandwiches. I wasn’t game to eat something that had been dead for a quarter of a century.
Millie changed the channel and on BBC2 there was a documentary about André Courrèges. I had one of Colleen’s mind zaps. I knew exactly where my further horizon should be; I’ve never been surer about anything in my life. London wasn’t where I’d make my big break, Paris was! Why hadn’t I realised that before? After all, it was André who had inspired me to become a fashion designer in the first place. I could see myself living in an airy garret overlooking the Seine and having coffee and croissants for breakfast in an open-air cafe, just like Gene Kelly in An American in Paris.
I was so confident that things were going to turn out right, I even ate one of Millie’s biscuits and a small bowl of tinned fruit.
The next week, I started making plans for my trip to Paris. The senior shop girl at Konundrum wasn’t very impressed when I asked for a week’s holiday, but she said if I worked six of her late-shopping nights she’d allow me to have two days off. I worked like crazy on my design folio creating new designs and redrawing the old ones all in pastel crayon. I was very proud of it.
The noise in the waiting room was starting to quieten down. I was almost dozing off when a thought entered my brain like an electric shock. Another mind zap—only not the good sort like I’d had in Millie’s bed-sit. I sat up, wide awake. Through the fog of cigarette smoke I could see a girl sitting opposite wearing a very grubby wedding dress and staring at the wall. She looked like someone in an out-of-focus photo. In my head I had a picture that wasn’t foggy. It was clear and sharp-edged.
I could see two hands putting my paisley-patterned folder behind one of the fold-down seats in the London taxi. They were my hands. I’d put the folder there for safety when I got out and stretched my legs while the girls bought vegetables. After I’d got them lost in central Paris, Veronica had stopped in a no-parking zone to let me out. I’d grabbed my suitcase, jumped out, and then the taxi was gone. So was my folder, though at the time I didn’t realise it.