LITMIR.BIZ

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       ‘Three and a half.’

      ‘And what about Beeching Place?’

      ‘Just one and a half.’

      ‘Oh. Still, that’s … six thousand for the two shops.’

      ‘Five.’

      ‘You know I’m no good at fractions. What did you say you did?’

      The miracle is that I managed to stay sane for so long.

      I suppose when I first went to work for Penny she was pretty good. After all, she’d built Penny Moss up from not much more than a market stall into a perfectly respectable business, a business that people had almost heard of, even if they sometimes got us mixed up with Ronit Zilkha, or Caroline Charles or, heaven forfend, Paul Costelloe. Two shops and a wholesale side that had taken off, and was cruising at a comfortable altitude. People had worn our clothes on daytime telly. Penny, conspicuously without Hugh had been in Hello!. Well, okay, OK!. But, as Penny pointed out to anyone who’d listen, it’s got a bigger circulation anyway. A cabinet minister wore one of our suits at the party conference (a coffee tussah silk affair, like a funked-up Chanel) and, for the first time, looked more feminine than her male colleagues. Professional women who want to look chic and chic women who want to look professional wear our clothes. The next time you’re at a wedding look around you. There, amongst the neuralgic pink and monkey-puke yellow, you’ll see our clothes: subtle, perfectly tailored, elegant.

      Where were we? Yes, just as we were beginning to make some real money, Penny started to get battier. She’d always had tendencies. Odd flights of fancy, a fondness for viscose. But now she was forgetting things. Losing things. The usual signposts in the foothills of senility. If I sound callous it’s because she’s not my mum. She’s Ludo’s. O God! It’s all getting complicated already. I’ll have to set it out straight, or you’ll never catch up.

      My name is Katie Castle, and this is the story of how I had everything, lost it all, and then found it again, but not quite all of it, and not in the same form, and, if I’m perfectly frank (which, I have to confess, doesn’t come naturally) not, in every single particular, quite so good. The story’s mainly about me, but it also involves, in no special order:

       Penny, my employer, the wife of Hugh;

       Hugh, the husband of Penny;

       Liam, my Big Mistake;

       Jonah, who was nearly an even bigger mistake, but who turned out to be a Good Thing;

       Veronica, my loyal and faithful servant, up to a point; and

       Ludo, who is the adored child of Penny and Hugh and who was, at the very beginning, the point at which you came in, my beloved, my betrothed.

      There’re lots of other people as well, friends and hangers-on, but you’ll meet them when you meet them. I’ve decided to be honest, so you might find yourself thinking me a madam or a minx, but even if I do some bad things, and some silly things, you must try to stay on my side, because in the end I turn out to be quite good, I promise.

      In the beginning. Like everybody else I live in London. Like almost everybody else, I live in Primrose Hill, the bit of London where Camden stops being horrid and Regent’s Park stops being boring. Like not quite everybody else, but like an awful-lot-of-body-else, I work in fashion. So I’m not really a designer, but anyone who works in fashion will tell you that the most important person in any fashion company is the production manager. We all know that. What’s a designer anyway? A tricky East End nonce who knows what to steal and who to screw. Or who to be screwed by. Not even an original thief, but a parasite on parasites. A magpie collecting bits of tinsel other magpies have thieved. Art-school losers too good at drawing to make it as artists, too vain to be teachers, too thick to be anything else. I love them, but I wouldn’t want to be one. And anyway, we don’t really have designers in our company. We have Penny. And Penny has me.

      I started in the shop. There was a card in the window: ‘Help Wanted. Experience preferred.’ Well, I had experience. Penny and Hugh interviewed me. I did my trick of being girlie and grown-up at the same time: girlie to Hugh and grown-up to Penny. The shop’s on a little lane just off Regent Street. It looks quite small from the front, but it goes on up for ever, stairs winding into the sky. I should say that it starts out as a shop, and then it becomes a studio, where the samples are made, and then at the top it turns into an office. I spend most of my time at the top, with Penny, who goes home at four o’clock every day except Friday, when she goes home at three. That’s why she always phones me at five past six to find out how we’ve done.

      The girls in the shop don’t like me very much. We all chatter away whenever I drop down to see how things are going, but I know they bitch about me when I’m gone. That’s just the way shops are – there’s nothing else to do. If it’s not the fat bums and flabby tits of the customers, then it’s the stupidity and meanness of the bosses, and that sort of includes me. They don’t like the way that I skipped upstairs, leaving them behind. They think I think I’m too good for them now, which I do, and I am. But our warfare is cold, and mainly takes the form of sulks and obstinacy over rotas.

      Things are different with the studio. The problem there is that I have to tell them when things go wrong. I have to make them do things they don’t want to do, and then I have to make them do them again. I have to tell them off. Penny is too grand to concern herself with such matters as stretched necks, lumpy zips, badly distributed ease on the sleeve head, sloppy felling, and wavering seams. And that means, of course, that it’s me who has to stand there as Tony, our unreliable, temperamental, irascible, but entirely essential sample machinist, throws one of his tantrums, spitting out curses in Maltese and rending pieces of calico to frayed white ribbon. It’s me that has to endure the open enmity of Mandy, with her leopardskin pants, and tongue to match.

      But I didn’t care. And why didn’t I care? Because my life was perfect.

      A poet died in my square. I read her poems once, but they were all me me me. The flat isn’t mine, of course. It’s Ludo’s. But it felt like mine. I’d made it mine. Everything apart from the brick and slate had been chosen by me. Out had gone Ludo’s schoolboy clutter – his saggy old armchair; his disgusting family-heirloom curtains; pictures of dead people. So now we had clean lines, a gleaming wood floor, blinds that seemed to make the rooms lighter, rather than darker when they were down. There were always flowers. Ludo hates flowers. ‘I’d see the point if you could eat them,’ he’d say. His horrible old books were confined to his study – the Smelly Room, I called it.

      Ludo. Everybody loved Ludo. He was so helpless. He looked like a completely random pile of clothes, hair, shoes and beer bottles somehow come to life. I tried to do for him what I’d done for the flat, but it didn’t take. It was like trying to polish suede. At least I managed to get him to cut his hair, which was something, even if he resented it in that slow-burning way of his.

      The really funny thing about Ludo is that he was a teacher. And he didn’t even have to be. He could have done all sorts of things, he was so clever. But instead of all sorts of things, he taught English at a school in Lambeth – the kind of school where even the teachers carry knives. I suppose it was some kind of reaction against his parents. Or rather against Penny. He’d spend all night marking in the Smelly Room. He had views about the National Curriculum, but none of our friends ever listened.

      Seducing Ludo was easy. I could tell that he liked me because he blushed the first time he met me. I was still in the shop then, and he came in to see Penny. Although it was August he wore a hairy tweed jacket, like a cowpat with arms.

      ‘Mum in?’ he said to Zuleika, the Lebanese girl who’d been there for years without doing very much, unless you count having lovely skin as doing something. Before she had the chance to answer I carpe diemed.

      ‘She’s lunching with Vogue. You must be the genius. I’m Katie Castle.’ Before he knew what was happening I had him out of there and into Slackers winebar. During the first bottle of Pouilly

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