me back. She is offering me a can of Batiste dry shampoo and a brush from her own bag.
‘Look, don’t take it personally, but … after you’ve gone to all that trouble?’ It is one of those moments of one sister reaching across boundaries to connect with another.
We acknowledge one another with a silent salute and two minutes later, with my hair brushed through and a quick squirt from a tester at the Chanel counter, I am ready. It has taken over two hundred pounds and exactly twenty minutes. Ten pounds a minute. Not bad.
I am ready. So I am definitely going to meet him. In Hosiery. Now.
Hosiery?
Chapter Sixteen
As the only tall ginger-haired boy in the tights department he is easy to spot and I think I have finally found my feet in these boots by the time I reach him.
‘Hiya!’ I say and smile at him. He is holding two packs of black tights, one in each hand.
‘Hi! Wow!’ He bends and kisses me on the cheek. ‘You look really nice.’ And he goes pink. Success! He looks briefly down my top and then back at the tights. He smells of the crisp early-autumn evening and London rain.
‘What’s a denier? And what is the difference between forty and seventy?’ He has a kind of charming insouciance about the absurdity of the question he is asking.
‘Are you a teenage cross-dresser?’ I ask him. I mean, if he was it would give me another very good reason to let him down gently. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve used it.
‘No! No, man! Fuck, I’m not
gay
or anything. God!’ And he laughs a nice deep throaty uninhibited laugh. ‘No, I was up here with my mum, buying stuff for the new term and … oh fuck, that is so not cool, oh well, anyway, she forgot to get tights so I said I’d pick her some up. Opaque she said, but she never mentioned no denier shit to me.’ And he laughs again, a little dimple appearing either side of his curly grin. Well, he’s not a cross-dresser
or
gay, but he
was
just getting back-to-school gear with his mum. Keep that in mind, Jen.
‘Get her seventy denier and you can’t go wrong. Let’s get out of here, I’ve had enough of this shop for one day.’ I catch Denise’s eye as I’m leaving and see her eyebrows shoot so far up her forehead that they almost meet her improbably high gelled-back hair-line.
The first thing he does is to freak me out by taking hold of my hand. I am not sure how to react so I calculate the odds of anyone I know seeing us together, realise that they are pretty low, imagine for a second the utter mortification of running into Owen with a Titian-haired teenager in tow and pull him off Oxford street and on to a side road taking deep, panic-abating breaths as I go.
‘Have you got somewhere in mind then? I thought you might fancy walking down to Soho and going to the Coach and Horses?’ He releases my hand and drops his arm around my shoulder. I get the impression I might be letting him down a bit too gently. But it’s a bit chilly in this halter-neck and it’s nice to have the warmth of another person nearby, especially another tall person. A tall male person with nice hands.
‘No, not there, there’s this really nice place down here,’ I say on the off chance that there might be. ‘It’s called the … ummm … the …’ We turn the corner into a street I have never been down in my life. ‘Ye Olde Parson’s Nose.’
‘Oh right,’ he says as he takes in the mock Tudor frontage. ‘You’ve got a thing about scuzzy old pubs, haven’t you? Irony, nice one.’ The irony is that he’s not actually wrong. During my life of sporadic financial security I have worked behind many a bar, and most of them scuzzy just like this one. Scuzzy pubs are nicer and also no one I know goes into them, and that is definitely a plus when one is on a letting-down-gently mission. As we approach the bar I have a brief moment of panic in case he’s asked for ID. He looks older than eighteen to me. I wonder if I look older than twenty-nine?
‘I’ll
‘Look, don’t take it personally, but … after you’ve gone to all that trouble?’ It is one of those moments of one sister reaching across boundaries to connect with another.
We acknowledge one another with a silent salute and two minutes later, with my hair brushed through and a quick squirt from a tester at the Chanel counter, I am ready. It has taken over two hundred pounds and exactly twenty minutes. Ten pounds a minute. Not bad.
I am ready. So I am definitely going to meet him. In Hosiery. Now.
Hosiery?
Chapter Sixteen
As the only tall ginger-haired boy in the tights department he is easy to spot and I think I have finally found my feet in these boots by the time I reach him.
‘Hiya!’ I say and smile at him. He is holding two packs of black tights, one in each hand.
‘Hi! Wow!’ He bends and kisses me on the cheek. ‘You look really nice.’ And he goes pink. Success! He looks briefly down my top and then back at the tights. He smells of the crisp early-autumn evening and London rain.
‘What’s a denier? And what is the difference between forty and seventy?’ He has a kind of charming insouciance about the absurdity of the question he is asking.
‘Are you a teenage cross-dresser?’ I ask him. I mean, if he was it would give me another very good reason to let him down gently. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve used it.
‘No! No, man! Fuck, I’m not
gay
or anything. God!’ And he laughs a nice deep throaty uninhibited laugh. ‘No, I was up here with my mum, buying stuff for the new term and … oh fuck, that is so not cool, oh well, anyway, she forgot to get tights so I said I’d pick her some up. Opaque she said, but she never mentioned no denier shit to me.’ And he laughs again, a little dimple appearing either side of his curly grin. Well, he’s not a cross-dresser
or
gay, but he
was
just getting back-to-school gear with his mum. Keep that in mind, Jen.
‘Get her seventy denier and you can’t go wrong. Let’s get out of here, I’ve had enough of this shop for one day.’ I catch Denise’s eye as I’m leaving and see her eyebrows shoot so far up her forehead that they almost meet her improbably high gelled-back hair-line.
The first thing he does is to freak me out by taking hold of my hand. I am not sure how to react so I calculate the odds of anyone I know seeing us together, realise that they are pretty low, imagine for a second the utter mortification of running into Owen with a Titian-haired teenager in tow and pull him off Oxford street and on to a side road taking deep, panic-abating breaths as I go.
‘Have you got somewhere in mind then? I thought you might fancy walking down to Soho and going to the Coach and Horses?’ He releases my hand and drops his arm around my shoulder. I get the impression I might be letting him down a bit too gently. But it’s a bit chilly in this halter-neck and it’s nice to have the warmth of another person nearby, especially another tall person. A tall male person with nice hands.
‘No, not there, there’s this really nice place down here,’ I say on the off chance that there might be. ‘It’s called the … ummm … the …’ We turn the corner into a street I have never been down in my life. ‘Ye Olde Parson’s Nose.’
‘Oh right,’ he says as he takes in the mock Tudor frontage. ‘You’ve got a thing about scuzzy old pubs, haven’t you? Irony, nice one.’ The irony is that he’s not actually wrong. During my life of sporadic financial security I have worked behind many a bar, and most of them scuzzy just like this one. Scuzzy pubs are nicer and also no one I know goes into them, and that is definitely a plus when one is on a letting-down-gently mission. As we approach the bar I have a brief moment of panic in case he’s asked for ID. He looks older than eighteen to me. I wonder if I look older than twenty-nine?
‘I’ll
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