Chapter 4 #4
‘And there’s a loose thread on the right shoulder needs snipping,’ noted Roz.
After what seemed a long time, he made it back to Peaches’ side. ‘Sorry, I… I’m an electrician, not a model. Obviously.’
Peaches’ insistence that he’d done a great job almost convinced him she wasn’t regretting her choices.
At that moment McIntyre’s mobile rang and he excused himself from the shed, saying he’d ‘better take this, whoever it is’.
No one noticed Roz’s look of silent surprise turning to dismay as she watched her husband sneaking furtively from the shed, not answering the ringing phone until he was outside in the twilight.
‘All right. Next two?’ Peaches said, and Euan could do nothing but dutifully follow her back to the rail.
Alone with her once more, he wanted to talk, to say any old thing, just so he could coax more from her about her life and her designs, but Carenza was putting paid to that with her shouting.
‘That’s forty seconds… Fifty! Pick up the pace back there!’
Euan found himself undressing and carefully re-dressing while Peaches fiddled with the coat hangers and handed him things to put on, layering up this next outfit.
It seemed to be made from lots of separate parts – a neck cowl, sleeves connected only by fabric across his shoulders, a wide, tight thing wrapped round his stomach.
It was mind boggling, but he let it happen, feeling like a living art installation.
As she worked, she told him that this wasn’t a ‘ready to wear’ kind of collection, but one that forced people to pay attention to each piece.
‘I want people to remember that everything we put on our bodies has a story. It was made by someone. Every thread was manufactured somewhere. Ethical consumerism begins with being curious about the people and processes that bring us our clothes, you see?’
‘I think so,’ Euan told her, though he hadn’t really thought about what he wore all that much before.
‘I’ve been wearing the same six t-shirts on rotation since I left school.
’ He’d never once thought about where their cotton might have been grown or what kind of dyes had been used in turning them black or grey.
‘But my bike leathers,’ he said, inspiration striking him.
‘They were a moving-in present from Grandad. I love them. They were all hand cut, padded and stitched, bespoke for me, somewhere in England. Grandad said once you have a good set, they’ll last decades.
I wouldn’t be without them now.’ A second, thicker skin, he thought.
They’d moulded to fit him already, and when he pulled them on, he felt more like himself than he ever had before.
‘They have a heritage,’ Peaches told him. ‘You understand their construction and their purpose. You own those leathers in a way you don’t own your other clothes.’
He wasn’t completely sure he understood what she meant, but he appreciated the way her whole face became animated as she said it.
She tugged and yanked and tightened the clothing around him and neither of them spoke.
He’d never been more aware of his breathing than when she had her hands on him.
It was funny how until this moment his lungs had just done their job and his heart just knew to beat on its own, but now, here he was having to force them to work for him.
It was dizzying. He’d never felt more alive within his body.
‘Thank you for this. I really mean it,’ Peaches said as she stepped back, taking away the sensation of her brisk touches.
‘My pleasure,’ he tried to say, but no sound carried on his out breath.
For a moment they only looked at one another, before Carenza shattered the frozen seconds by yelling that they’d passed the three-minute mark and what on earth were they dawdling over?
When the rehearsal was all done, Roz and the McDowells (McIntyre had never come back after that phone call) gathered at the open doors of the shed to wave him off.
Euan was content to climb aboard the bike and turn her over with a kick of his boot.
He was achingly aware of Peaches watching him astride the machine in his leathers, biker boots and black helmet.
He fastened the leather gloves at his wrists thinking how much they felt like the fabric strips Peaches had pulled tight around his torso, the memory of that sensation still making a hard flame glow within him. He snapped down his visor.
From behind the protective polycarbonate shade, and with the engine sending vibrations thrumming through his body, he couldn’t hear what Carenza McDowell was saying into her daughter’s ear, but he hoped it was some remark about what a nice young man he was, how heroic he’d been, stepping into the breach like that.
He revved the engine, feeling ten feet tall, and finger-saluted from his visor, moving off and out of the driveway, hoping he looked as dangerous and intriguing as Jimmy Dean or Marlon Brando in the old movies his grandad made him watch.
The truth was, he had to concentrate to stop himself falling, and he didn’t dare risk a glimpse in his mirror to see if Peaches was watching after him, but as he hit Cairn Dhu high street and the moonlight revealed only a dark suggestion of the granite mass of Mount Cairn Dhu against a starry sky, he found himself burning with gladness that he’d moved back here.
Maybe now, finally, he was getting started on his new life in the town, and maybe next Saturday, he’d see Peaches again.