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 dead here now and the time is dragging. I need an energy boost, a sugar hit. ‘David, please could you watch my stall while I get myself something to eat?’
He looks up from his book. ‘Sure.’
‘Do you want anything?’
‘That’s okay, thanks, I’ve got a flask.’
‘Oh, fine.’ Obviously, he’s a practical guy with his dovetail joints and stuff. Of course he’s going to have a flask. ‘Won’t be long,’ I tell him and I make my way along the maze of cobbled lanes past the vaults, winding through the steamy stalls selling sizzling street food. It’s exciting, like being transplanted to another continent. Here, with the profusion of smells and multitude of languages, it feels like anywhere but England.
I cross Camden Lock Place and call in at Chin Chin Labs for a liquid nitrogen ice cream. I like the process, watching the chilly vapour freeze the cream, choosing the flavours and sprinkles.
Cutting through the West Yard, I lean on the humped black-and-white Roving Bridge to eat the ice cream. It’s a sunny day and the place is busy. Beneath me, clumps of green weed undulate gently on the surface of the sluggish canal.
By the time I finish off my cone I start to feel more optimistic. I’ll get new stock. I’ll message everyone on my mailing list. I’ll begin a new push for sales. I’ll make a name for myself.
David has started to pack up when I get back. It’s early, just gone five, and the market doesn’t close until seven.
‘How did you get on today?’ I ask him.
He looks at me blankly, as if he’s distracted. ‘It’s all relative, isn’t it?’ he says after a moment. His eyes are tired, but he smiles. ‘There’s no pressure, that’s the main thing. You can’t put a price on that, right?’
The way he says it makes me wonder what’s been going on in his life, because he doesn’t sound that convincing. I want to ask him, but before I can he’s gone back to packing away his stall.
The following evening I pick up the Camden New Journal from the doormat, where it lies surrounded by Pizza flyers and taxis offering trips to airports, to find Lucy and me on the front page, standing outside our house. She with her black towel wrapped around her looking amazing in a cloud of the photographer’s apple-scented billowing smoke and me looking shocked and enigmatic in my trench coat, my hair falling over my right eye, holding my beautiful dresses like a wartime heroine.
Compared with me, Lucy looks terribly underdressed. Compared with her, I look ridiculously overdressed. I’m not sure what prompted me to grab my raincoat, apart from it being Burberry. I had some vague notion of it being appropriate for an emergency, I think.
The important thing is, we look good and neither of us looks particularly traumatised, despite the headline: ‘Actress and Fashion Curator in Sauna Trauma’. I like my low chin-tilt. I don’t remember adopting it at all, but then I realise I was trying to keep the clothes from falling.
I go back outside, hurry up the steps and ring Lucy’s doorbell.
Lucy flings her door open. ‘Hey, Fern! Come in,’ she says cheerfully, picking up her copy of the Journal from the mat. The word ‘Welcome’ is really faded. It’s literally outworn its welcome.
‘We’re on the front page,’ I say, unfurling my paper to show her.
