Authors: Tess Stimson
‘Who’s Angel?’
‘Mu-um! I told you before. He’s the Zumba instructor. He’s Brazilian,’ she added, a little too carelessly.
Zoey might be vague in many respects, but when it came to her fifteen-year-old daughter, she didn’t miss a thing. ‘Cute, is he?’ she asked, nudging Nell with a smile.
‘Maybe,’ Nell said, blushing furiously.
‘I can’t think why I agreed to this,’ Zoey complained as they dashed back out into the rain, huddling together under Nell’s umbrella.
‘Because you’re thirty-nine, not eighty-nine, and it’s time you got out a bit more and had some fun,’ Nell retorted.
‘Anyway,
if you and Richard are going
to France on that cycling holiday this summer, you need to get fit.’
She had a point, Zoey thought ruefully. In her current shape, she couldn’t cycle to the end of the road, never mind around Provence. Quite how she’d allowed Richard to talk her into
this madness she couldn’t imagine. Her recipe for the perfect holiday involved a sunlounger by a pool somewhere hot, with a cocktail in one hand and the latest Joanna Trollope in the other.
But this year Nell had pleaded to be allowed to go to Cornwall with her best friend Teri and her family, and Richard had really wanted to try something different, something
grown-up,
he’d said, since they didn’t have to put themselves through yet another child-friendly trip to Florida or the Costa Brava. France, he’d suggested, or Italy. Zoey had agreed,
envisioning something romantic and perhaps a little cultural involving good food and crusty bread and fine wine. A tour of the French vineyards, perhaps, or a trip to Rome. But a
cycling
holiday? Honestly, after eight years together you’d have thought he knew her a little better.
Exercise had never been her strongest suit. On the odd occasion she’d tried working out, she’d run out of puff before the instructor had even finished the warm-up. The last time
she’d run more than ten metres was back at school, and even then she’d spent more time tying her shoelaces than on the track. She liked to tell herself men preferred pillowy curves to
jutting hip bones, but deep down she wasn’t convinced. Especially when her jeans didn’t button up and she had to size up
again.
‘Come
on,
Mum,’ Nell teased now as Zoey hovered reluctantly at the threshold of the changing rooms. ‘You never know, you might actually
enjoy
it.’
She scuttled to the darkest corner she could find and changed into a shapeless old T-shirt of Richard’s and a pair of Nell’s baggy jogging bottoms, wishing she’d noticed before
that they had ‘booty’ written in large pink letters on the rear. Yanking down the back of her T-shirt with both hands, she sidled after her daughter into the huge mirrored gym, eyeing
the lithe, toned bodies all around her in horror. Who
were
these people with their pedometers and heart-rate monitors and water bottles and bizarre five-toed rubber shoes? More to the
point, what was
she
doing in the same room?
‘You’ll be fine,’ Nell whispered, trying not to laugh as she propelled her mother from the back of the gym. ‘Just stay close to me and copy what I do.’
By design, Zoey hadn’t properly seen herself in the mirror for years. She got dressed in the dark without opening the curtains, and put on make-up using a dim fifteen-watt bulb (resisting
Nell’s pressure to go green and buy CFLs – their harsh light was even less forgiving than that of a plane toilet). She was always the one behind the camera, taking pictures of Nell or
Richard, so it had been years since she’d even seen a photograph of herself. But there was no escape from the floor-to-ceiling horror show reflected back at her now. She looked like a cross
between a bag lady and a bouncy castle, she thought in dismay, all breasts and bottom. Her fine blonde hair had escaped from its twist and was frizzing unbecomingly around her face, her cheeks were
flushed from rushing to the gym, and even beneath the loose T-shirt she could see how lumpy and bumpy her tummy was these days. She didn’t look old, exactly; more the subject of benign
neglect. Like a once elegant house that had been allowed to fall into disrepair and could use a lick of paint and some repointing.
In the mirror beside her, a limber stranger dipped gracefully to touch her toes. It took Zoey a moment to realize it was her daughter. In contrast to her, Nell seemed the epitome of cool,
willowy beauty. She was so poised and . . .
put together,
Zoey thought suddenly. Slim as a quill, and not a hair out of place. You’d never have guessed the two of them were even
related, apart from their eyes, which were identical and marked them out instantly as mother and daughter: large and grey and ringed with thick black lashes.
As Nell straightened, Zoey realized with a slight pang that her daughter was actually taller than she was now by at least two inches. Her baby was growing up. In a few short years she’d be
leaving home and going off to university. She’d miss her more than she wanted to think about.
It had been tough raising Nell alone, but she’d never for an instant regretted her decision to have her baby by herself. When Patrick had left her, she’d had no one to turn to. The
only child of two only children, she’d been born to parents already in their forties by the time she’d made her surprise appearance. Her father had been a handyman at a local school on
the outskirts of Oxford, her mother a seamstress at a small dry-cleaner’s in town. When Zoey was eight, her father had collapsed in agony from a perforated bowel as he sat in the school
boiler room eating his lunch – Ploughman’s and pickled onions, the same as every other working day of his life – and had died two days later without ever regaining consciousness.
Her mother’s death ten years afterwards had been more lingering. It had taken her eighteen months to succumb to leukaemia – eighteen months of blood tests and chemo and vomiting and
sheer, unrelenting misery. When she’d finally died in her daughter’s arms, Zoey had simply been relieved that it was over. There had been no aunts or uncles, no cousins – no
support network to call on. At just eighteen, she’d been on her own.
It was her art teacher at school who’d suggested she apply to Saint Martins to study fashion. Brought up to make-do-and-mend, and deft with a needle thanks to her mother, Zoey had
showcased her creative flair and instinctive understanding of design during her A-level fashion show. With nothing to lose, she’d done as her teacher suggested; and to her lasting surprise,
had been not only accepted, but awarded a full scholarship. Four years later, she’d graduated as one of the stars of her year, a bright future apparently assured.
But winning accolades for your avant-garde college collection was one thing; making a living at it quite another. She’d ended up working in numerous gruelling dead-end jobs as she
struggled to get her fledgling fashion career off the ground, often too exhausted by the time she got home to her studio in Camden to even pick up her sketch pad. Two years after graduating, she
still hadn’t finished her first collection.
She’d met Patrick while waitressing at a wine bar on Fleet Street. She’d known he was married from the start: he’d worn a gold wedding band and made no effort to hide it. Or
the fact that he was seriously attracted to her and didn’t consider his wedding vows important.
She really hadn’t been the sort of girl who dated married men. She wasn’t a virgin, but only just – a few brief fumbles with other students at Saint Martins (two of whom turned
out to be gay), and a short-lived fling with a doped-up musician were the total sum of her sexual experience. She’d been no match for a player like Patrick James.
Thirty-seven to her twenty-four, a news cameraman with INN, he’d been shot twice (in Beirut and Sarajevo), arrested (in Kuwait and Soweto) and beaten up in London (a pub fight over a
married girlfriend; nothing to do with his job). In other words, he was a real man in the macho, gung-ho, alpha male sense of the word. Surrounded by floppy-haired, arty metrosexuals too terrified
to open a door for her in case she took it the wrong way, Zoey had found his testosterone-fuelled sex appeal irresistible.
For six blissful, agonizing months, she’d lived in a state of suspended animation, scared to go out in case he called, sobbing into her pillow when he didn’t. When she’d missed
her period she’d been petrified but at the same time secretly thrilled: he’d
have
to leave his wife now.
The day after she’d got two positive lines on a home pregnancy test, she dressed up in her sexiest underwear, cooked him his favourite shepherd’s pie, put Roberta Flack on the CD
player and broke the news that she was pregnant. At which point Patrick broke the news that so was his wife.
There was never really any question of her not having the baby, even after Patrick abandoned her without a backward glance. She’d been on her own far too long for that; this tiny new life
growing inside her was all the family she had. So she gave up the studio in Camden – and with it the last of her dreams of becoming the new Stella McCartney – took out a crippling
business mortgage, and moved into the tiny run-down flat above Born-Again Vintage, a failing secondhand thrift shop where she’d been working afternoons and whose owner was only too happy to
sell up, take the money and run.
She had been certain that as soon as he saw Nell, Patrick would come back to her. His wife had given him a son just two months after Zoey had announced her own pregnancy, but weren’t men
supposed to dote on their little girls? She didn’t want to be the one to rip his family apart, but she had her own child to consider now. As far as she was concerned, Nell was just as
important as his son, and Patrick just as much her father.
In the end, none of it mattered. Six weeks after Nell was born, Patrick was killed by a stray bullet in Bosnia without ever acknowledging his daughter.
For the first seven years, it had been just Zoey and Nell. She’d sworn off men after Patrick, not quite sure if it was Nell she was protecting or herself. And then eight years ago
she’d met Richard – sweet, safe, paper-pushing Richard – in the hallway of her accountant’s office. Thoughtful, sensitive Richard, who’d treated her as kindly and
patiently as if she were a baby bird, never once trying to push her, waiting for her to come to him. Steadfast, loyal Richard, who adored Nell, and she him; he’d become her father in every
sense that mattered. He wanted to marry Zoey – he’d made that clear often enough – but somehow she’d never quite been able to bring herself to say yes. She loved Richard,
but there was no
passion,
never had been; and even though she told herself that passion didn’t last, indeed had brought her nothing but grief, she still couldn’t quite turn her
back on it. Not entirely. Not yet.
She was jolted out of her reverie as a deafening Latin American beat suddenly filled the gym, so loud that the floor actually shook beneath her feet. Giving a final futile tug on the hem of her
T-shirt, she took a deep breath as a handsome boy in his early twenties, dressed in baggy olive fatigues and a backward-facing baseball cap, moved to the front of the room, his feet already
tracking the beat. She might look fat and ridiculous, but Nell wanted her here, so she’d put up with any amount of public humiliation. It was all about Nell. It always had been.
A skinny girl in hot-pink cargo pants sashayed forward, briefly pushing her out of the way. Instantly Zoey blocked her with a hip swing of her own.
No one ever came between Zoey and her daughter.
This time, Nell thought crossly, her mother had better say yes. Richard was a nice man, even if he was a tiny bit boring. He had a nice job in the civil service –
something to do with historic preservation – and a pension and everything. He drove a nice Honda Civic. He wore nice clothes:
dad
clothes, not the hipster gear sad middle-aged blokes
usually wore when they were trying to look younger. And he had a nice house in a really nice tree-lined street in the nice part of Islington, near Waitrose, not a tiny two-bedroom flat over a shop
in the dodgiest end of the dodgiest part of the borough. He even had a nice dog.
Most importantly, he was nice to Mum. As far as Nell was concerned, that was worth any amount of boring.
She shifted her backpack to the other shoulder and unlocked the kitchen door, shoving it open against the usual jumble of cardboard boxes that had yet to be sorted into saleable items, donations
to the Sally Army, or things heading straight for the bin. Mum never said no to anything, even though most of the stuff people donated was crap you wouldn’t send a Turkish earthquake victim.
Saggy grey bras, horrible old long-johns, single trainers, shirts that were ripped or stained or missing all their buttons. Who did they think actually
wanted
this shit? Half the time it
wasn’t even
clean.
‘You have to kiss a lot of toads to find your handsome prince,’ Mum said elliptically whenever Nell had had enough of the mess and hit the roof; usually around the same time as the
cardboard boxes.
The annoying thing was, she was right. Once in every fifty boxes, she’d find a vintage Chanel tweed suit, or an original Mary Quant dress. Those were the clothes that made it to the shop
window, the bait that lured customers in.
But what really kept them coming back to Born-Again Vintage weren’t those rare classic finds, gorgeous though they were, but the clothes Mum made, the incredible pieces – and they
were
pieces;
the word ‘clothes’ didn’t do them justice – she upcycled from other people’s cast-offs. She was like Molly Ringwald in
Pretty in Pink
when she took two old pink party dresses and combined them to create a new knockout outfit to wear to her high-school prom. Only what Mum did was far more beautiful and extraordinary.
As Richard pointed out, Mum’s clothes weren’t clothes at all, they were
Art.
With a capital A.
A long time ago, before Nell was born, Mum had had her own design studio. If it wasn’t for Nell, she’d probably have a wicked fashion label by now, like Stella McCartney or Vivienne
Westwood. Instead, she was turning army greatcoats and worn-out tutus into one-off ball gowns for spoilt fashionistas, and Nell knew damn well she was getting paid a fraction of what they were
worth. If only Mum would just
market
herself properly.