Chapter 2
The early April afternoon light shone in through the glass wall at the far end of the big repair barn where Peaches McDowell held her threaded needle poised between her fingertips to make the final stitch of her fashion collection.
Willie, Peaches’ fellow fashion student, was filming the moment on his phone. Surrounding her were gathered the Cairn Dhu Community Repair Shop restoration experts, as well as the Gifford sisters who ran the café, and Sachin Roy, who manned the repair triage desk.
Roz McIntyre sat by Peaches’ side, pride glowing in her eyes, as her husband, Charlie McIntyre, teased the cork from a prosecco bottle. Cary Anderson, the shed’s always-nattily-dressed carpenter, held two glasses ready to catch the fizz.
‘Aaand…’
Peaches’ audience craned their necks to watch the neon-yellow thread pass through slubby cotton. With a practised hand she buried the last stitch and snipped away the remainder. ‘…it’s done!’
Her supporters erupted into applause, accompanied by the sound of the cork popping.
‘Well done, darling!’ Peaches’ mother had to raise her voice over the excitement as she stooped to kiss her daughter on the cheek just below the dyed pink bangs which she didn’t really approve of, but she had realised long ago that her daughter’s devotion to an ever-changing spectrum of dyed hair colours was, like her design talents, a safe way of practising her self-expression.
McIntyre pressed a bubbling glass into Peaches’ hand as Roz whisked away the garment that, at last, completed the student’s end-of-degree showcase collection, taking it out of reach of any spilled bubbly.
‘Thirteen custom outfits,’ Willie narrated as he recorded the scene.
An ominous voice tolled, ‘Unlucky for some!’
All eyes snapped to Senga Gifford, boss of the repair shed’s café nook, and not usually a superstitious woman, but a woman gleefully dedicated to living up to her reputation as the shed’s resident aggravating busybody.
Everyone always forgave her because she made the best shortbread and scones this side of the Pennines and she had a heart as big as her famed chocolate-dipped rock buns.
‘How does it feel?’ asked Willie, pointedly refusing to entertain Senga.
‘Surreal!’ Peaches looked down his phone’s camera lens. ‘I can’t believe we got the whole collection finished.’
‘You did it all by yourself,’ Roz corrected, accepting her own glass of bubbly from her husband.
‘With help from all of you.’
‘The repair shop’s tools and sewing machines helped,’ Willie threw in.
It was true. Peaches had made herself thoroughly at home here in the shed this last couple of months, her presence extending way beyond her regular Saturday sewing repair stints; she’d practically set up a night-time fashion workshop.
The repair shop community had got used to finding her sewing and snipping, cutting and hot glue-gunning at all hours.
‘Credit where it’s due,’ Carenza McDowell threw in, fizzing with maternal pride. ‘You’ve pulled it off. Designing and delivering an entire sustainable fashion collection single-handedly in less than eight months.’
Carenza wasn’t keen on anything that detracted from her daughter’s achievements.
She wasn’t simply proud; she was fiercely protective of her child, and the McDowell reputation, and she knew better than anyone how Peaches’ upcoming assessed Master’s degree showcase would represent the culmination of years of hard graft by her talented child.
‘All those late nights. All that sacrifice. And now it’s coming to fruition!’ Carenza’s usually stern and steady voice wobbled.
Not one person assembled in the repair shop on that fresh and sunny Saturday afternoon could be in doubt that many of the ‘sacrifices’ Carenza referred to were her own.
She’d channelled everything she had into supporting her daughter through her studies, expanding her property rental empire so it now covered vast swathes of the Cairngorms, and all so that Peaches could have the best of everything.
She’d offered it all up to her precious child with an unmatched motherly zeal: fine fabrics imported from anywhere in the world that her daughter might desire, research trips and plane tickets (with Carenza in tow, of course), any number of expensive coffee table books about the great designers and their fashion houses, vintage ‘look books’ from collectors’ archives, even the very best sewing machinery imported from Japan.
Not that Peaches had accepted any of it, turning down every opportunity flung in her path in favour of what Carenza referred to as ‘slumming it with borrowed machinery’ here at the repair shed, where in recent days she’d put in many more hours than in the aesthetic white studio conversion her mum had made for her at great expense in the high attics of their Cairn Dhu townhouse.
‘I still can’t say I understand the need for all of this…’ Carenza paused, searching for a more neutral word than the one currently on the tip of her tongue (‘trash’). Instead, she plumped for, ‘Thrifted stuff as the basis for your collection.’
Peaches knew better than to roll her eyes, even if this was her one-hundredth time hearing this.
Behind her, on an old mannequin, hung the signature garment of her entire collection.
A white leather jacket she’d found in an online vintage shop and managed to wangle for twenty-five quid due to its being very worn indeed, and she’d deconstructed the entire thing down to its constituent panels, re-cutting them to her own pattern, forming a wrap-around corset that tied at the back, before stiffening the old leather by soaking, shaping and then baking it, stitching in a lining of white cotton (which she’d found as deadstock in the Cairn Dhu charity shop), before reinforcing the cut leather edges with heavy white and silver hand embroidery (Willie had referred to this part of Peaches’ process as ‘upholstery’).
Then she’d elevated the entire thing with her signature stiffened paper patches, rag fragments, tiny Indian mirrors and metal charms (all reclaimed, found, borrowed, or repurposed) as well as some highly pigmented brushstrokes of metallic paint, so that the whole thing had a scrappy, crafty, highly embellished, utterly unique finish, emphasising the slow, planet-conscious ethos that characterised Peaches’ collection.
‘But… I’m sure you know what you’re doing,’ Carenza finished, resorting to pride once more, before taking the glass offered by McIntyre. ‘A toast,’ she announced, like a theatrical queen. ‘To Peaches McDowell!’
‘Here to revolutionise the fashion industry!’ Willie added.
‘One sustainable, repaired and redesigned garment at a time!’ Roz put in, before everyone’s glasses met in the middle.
‘Slàinte Mhath!’ they all said at once.
Peaches wasn’t the type to make speeches, being only twenty-three and still very much in the shadow of her domineering mother, but she thanked everyone and thirstily downed her drink as talk turned to the runway rehearsal Peaches was planning to stage here in the big shed in a week’s time; a dress rehearsal to see how the garments moved when walked in (and to identify if any bits stretched or weakened when being used), before making the very final modifications.
‘And you’re sure you don’t need more models for your showcase runway?
’ asked Rhona Gifford, now pink-cheeked from half a glass of bubbly, pulling at the leg of her corduroys to show off an orthopaedic sandal and a glimpse of American Tan pop sock.
‘Senga and me were quite the fashion plates in the seventies, you ken?’
Senga tutted at this and gave her younger sister a playful knock on the arm.
‘Fashion plates?’ Willie mouthed at a grinning Peaches who, trying not to laugh, shrugged back at her friend.
Willie and Peaches were as thick as thieves, even if Willie was a tiny bit sorry not to be completing his own fashion runway this summer.
A winter bout of glandular fever had put paid to his studies this year and he’d sensibly deferred his showcase until next year.
Still, Peaches knew it must sting a bit seeing her so close to graduating, even if she hadn’t heard him complain once.
‘Cary here would make a braw model,’ Sachin put in helpfully. ‘Every day’s a catwalk for him.’
All eyes turned to the handsome Cary, who pretended to flick a speck of dust from his shirt cuff.
He was wearing yet another variation on his classic vintage waistcoat and baggy tailored trousers signature look, set off by his beautifully pomaded dark waves.
He’d always been quietly confident, but since falling for the new doctor earlier this year (and after a fair bit of patience and pining found his love returned tenfold by the devoted Dr Alice Hargreave), he’d carried himself with an even greater poise and self-assurance.
The truth was Peaches had asked Cary to be her model right at the beginning of the semester, but he’d replied, quite rightly, that he was ‘a fair bit older than your collection’s target audience, am I no’?’
‘I’ll be fine with Willie’s modelling, thanks,’ Peaches told the sisters. ‘And you’re only allowed two models anyway.’
‘Sticking with just yerself and Willie, then?’ Rhona confirmed, still jolly. ‘Fair dos.’
‘But thanks for the offer,’ the young designer added.
‘And thanks, all of you, for letting me use the repair shop in the evenings, and your machines. There’s nothing better than these classic old overlockers.
’ She gestured to the machines set up in Roz’s sewing station under the purple velvet ‘Make do and Mend’ banner that had the look of something the Suffragettes might have marched under.
Carenza’s face soured considerably at this.
‘Nae bother,’ McIntyre told the student as he topped up her glass, since this was, technically, his repair shed.
‘The light’s just so good in here,’ Peaches added. ‘And there was always someone around to keep me company.’