‘I know, riiight?’ I reply ruefully.
‘Dave looks as if he’s doing all right, though.’ Dayve, not David. ‘So this is what you do now?’ she asks, looking up at my diminished stock. ‘Have you sold everything?’
Looking at the stall through her eyes I feel a shiver of panic. I don’t want to think about it. When I’d been saving my clothes from the fire, I’d obviously saved the most expensive, but maybe that hadn’t been my best idea. I should have kept some of the cheaper things, the kind of thing that a person would buy on impulse, just because she liked it, without having to think about it and come back later. ‘My upstairs neighbour had a fire in her flat.’
‘Fern! You’re kidding!’ Gigi covers her mouth with her hand. ‘And all your clothes got burnt?’
‘No, they got wet. This is the stuff I rescued.’
‘Oh, Fern! You’re insured though, right?’ She unhooks a flowing pink fit-and-flare dress and holds it against herself, looking down. ‘What waist is this?’ she asks.
‘Sixty-six centimetres.’
‘It’s beautiful. Seventies?’
‘Yes, mid-Seventies, I’d say.’
‘Hey, Dave?’ she calls. ‘What do you think?’
My neighbour in black emerges from his parallel universe. He grins at Gigi and glances at the dress. ‘Very nice.’
‘“Very nice.”’ She laughs and holds the pink dress up to look at it. ‘That’s all he ever says, Fern – very nice.’
He looks from Gigi to me. ‘Do you two know each other?’
‘We were at Camden School for Girls together, briefly. You were a shy little thing, weren’t you, Fern? Always drawing stuff in this little black book of hers. He’s the same.’ She jerks her thumb at my neighbour. ‘You’re always drawing, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘Always.’
The way Gigi is talking implies it’s some weird quirk that we share, but David doesn’t seem bothered.
She’s still holding the pink dress.
‘Do you want to try it on?’ I ask hopefully. I’ve devised a way of closing the stall off with a muslin drape and crocodile clips.
She gives David a quick look. ‘Yes, why not. But I’ll have to be quick, though; I’ve got Pilates.’
I’m glad she’s said yes. I want to see it on her. This is one of those dresses where the genius lies in the cut of the fabric and the way it hangs. It counterbalanced the androgyny of the styles of the Sixties.
Gigi pulls the dress on over her jeans, but it looks lovely on her with its plunging neckline and the fluid curve of the skirt. The pink is the same shade as her hair. She undoes a couple of the little covered buttons down the front to show her cleavage and she poses for us both with a hand on her hip. It was made for her.
‘Gigi, you look gorgeous,’ I say sincerely, my hand on my heart.
‘Dave? What do you think?’
‘You look like a stick of candyfloss.’ His face softens. ‘Yeah. Gorgeous.’
She turns the label over to look at the price. ‘You take cards?’
‘I do.’
As I reach for the machine, she touches some other dresses and looks at them briefly but puts them back. She pouts at him, ducks back under the curtain and takes the dress off. She’s satisfied.
Once she’s paid, she bundles the dress into her bag. ‘Guys, I’ve got to go; I’ll be late for class,’ she says, kissing David enthusiastically on the mouth. ‘I’ll see you later.’
We watch her leave – I can see her pink hair bobbing above the crowds.
When she’s lost from view, David turns to me. ‘How many light boxes has that just cost me?’
‘Ha ha!’ Hopefully, he means it as a joke.
He gazes down the alley for a moment as if he thinks she might come back. Then he asks, ‘What was she like at school?’
I smile. ‘The same! She was such a laugh. She put my new jacket on a friend’s dog once and it ran off and …’ I cut the story short, because he doesn’t need to know I was too scared to go after it and I never saw the jacket again. ‘I never wanted to sit by her in class, though.’
‘Why not?’
‘She never stopped talking. I couldn’t concentrate. I used to get yelled at on account of her.’
‘Fern – you were a geek!’
‘I know.’ I grin at the thought and add truthfully, ‘She was way too cool to hang out with me.’
‘Small world,’ he says.
‘Yeah.’ I give him a sideways glance. ‘You’re the astrologer, you’d know.’
The flow of people through the market has ebbed suddenly. Times like this, I wonder what the hell happens, where they all go. The place is like a huge maze, with certain crucial landmarks like giant sculpted horses, blacksmiths, ATMs. Even so, I still get lost. So do they.
‘Is it always this quiet?’ David asks.
He sounds anxious and I try to reassure him. ‘In the week it’s mostly tourists. And the kind of tourists who come to Camden Lock … well, let’s just say you can’t get a lot in a backpack. But at weekends, it’s brilliant. The place is absolutely heaving. You’ll be amazed.’
‘Yeah.’ He shifts restlessly, looking at the empty stalls on either side of us.
His mood has changed since he saw Gigi and I don’t really know why. Maybe he, like me, is suddenly seeing his stall through her eyes; not as a dream but in cold reality.
As though he’s read my mind, he says, ‘I’m not sure about this alley, Fern. If somebody wants to come back to buy something, they might never find me again. I need a bigger unit. Somewhere with storage.’
I nod. As I’d been the one to tell him about the stall going free, I feel a certain amount of responsibility for the location. ‘Maybe it suits my needs better than yours,’ I tell him apologetically. I don’t add the main reason that it suits my needs is that it’s cheap.
He looks at my feeble display of dresses and gives me a quick smile. ‘I guess it does. Gigi’s been away for the weekend with more stuff than that.’
The smile softens it and he doesn’t say it in a mean way, but my doubts come flooding back. As my parents pointed out, I’m not a businesswoman, I’m a market trader. I’ve got little stock and even fewer customers and I’m running out of funds.
Feeling a bit sick about it, I say, ‘David, you know that day that we first met? And you said no good deed ever goes unpunished? Is that something you really believe?’
He looks amused. ‘Touch wood, I’ve been all right so far.’
I haven’t, though.
David goes back to his side of the canvas and sits down, stretches his legs and opens the book on astrology.
Without him, I’m at a loose end. I sit down, too, and write a list in my client book to distract me from my self-doubts:
Cato Hamilton
Church sale
Car boot sale
Tabletop sale
This list will be the foundation of my new strategy to get more stock.
It’s