Celebrity Shopper (16 page)

Annie looked at the buildings before her. The church was an ornate, blackened old building with twiddly stone carving and numerous stained-glass windows: very Gothic. The church hall, by contrast, had been built recently. It was a plain, rectangular building with small square windows, utterly devoid of any charm or character. Annie was no longer feeling quite as hopeful as she had been in the taxi.

The street was OK. It was quiet with several blocks of flats, a few shops and takeaways. It reminded her of parts of east London, the on-the-verge-of-hip areas, the streets and postcodes that hadn’t yet made it.

Anoush’s mother began to walk towards the door of the church hall and everyone followed her. It took several minutes for Latifah to open the door because of the two double locks and the padlock.

‘Is not so safe here,’ Anoush explained. ‘Robbers.’

Moments later, the party was standing in a stunningly boring room. With its brown lino floor, shabby cream walls and short orange curtains hanging at every window, Annie, Svetlana and Elena knew at once that it was beyond hope.

No way could forty-five fashion buyers and twenty-five members of the fashion press be invited here. How would they hold a catwalk show? Join all the wobbly Formica-topped tables together and somehow hope the models would balance on top of them?

Anyway, Annie reminded herself, there were no models. There was only Anoush and she was technically too small; the dresses in Elena’s holdall were bound to have been designed to hit 5-feet-10-inch models on the knee.

‘Oh no!’ Elena was starting up again, ‘
Oh no!
This will not work! This will not work at all. This is horrible!’

Svetlana looked at Annie. They both knew it was true.

Anoush looked horribly embarrassed. Her mother asked her a question and she answered in halting tones, obviously explaining the situation.

Although his camera was running, Rich didn’t dare to put it up on his shoulder. He felt like an undercover documentary-maker in a very dangerous situation. If he blew his cover now, they would turn on him. It had never occurred to him before that fashion could be so deadly.

Anoush’s mother relocked the hall door as they all stood about hopelessly in the courtyard.

‘Why did we let the taxi go? How will we get another one out here? Oh, it’s over,’ Elena wailed, ‘it’s all over!’

Annie looked once again at the church. It was really an incredibly pretty building. Right here in this ordinary street, in this down-at-heel corner of town. It must have been built over a hundred years ago, when maybe there was just a little village here.

‘Do you have keys for the church?’ Annie wondered out loud.

Anoush translated and her mother nodded.

‘She just clean the church, she not have any control of the church,’ Anoush added, just to make it clear.

Latifah walked them to the wooden double doors and in the few moments it took her to once again open up many heavy-duty locks, Svetlana asked Annie: ‘What are you thinking? A fashion show? In a church?’ Her tone of disbelief was obvious.

Elena snorted.

‘We’ll just have a look,’ Annie answered, ‘it might give us an idea.’ She knew it was desperate.

Elena’s BlackBerry began to ring. When she answered, they could all tell by the false cheerfulness in her voice that it was one of the many reporters she had booked for the show. ‘Hi, yes, good to hear from you, how are you?’ she gushed. ‘Well, I’m very busy … Yes … Preparations … Aha … Last-minute problems, of course.’ They could all hear her voice break with these words. ‘Call you later, OK.’

When she ended the call, she switched off her phone.

Annie followed Latifah into the vestry. Inhaling the strong scent of incense, she admired the stone font and the ornate wooden and glass panelling separating this small space off from the rest of the church.

For a moment, Annie thought fleetingly of all the brides who must have waited in here, decade after decade, smiling nervously at their fathers, adjusting their white dresses and lowering their veils, waiting in heightened expectation for the next chapter of their lives to begin.

Then Latifah opened up the connecting door and they all tiptoed reverentially into the small but unexpectedly beautiful church.

‘Oh!’ Elena was the first to gasp.

The sunlight filtered only very dimly through the many multi-coloured windows, landing in splashes of red, blue, yellow and green all over the dark wooden pews and black and white floor tiles. A wooden cross hung above the altar and the precious colours from the windows stained the snowy altar cloth.

The effect was like walking into a jewellery box full of unexpected treasures.

‘The audience sit in the pews? The girls come down the
aisle in the dresses?’ Svetlana suggested, thinking out loud. Forgetting that at present she only had one girl. Not to mention all the other hurdles.

‘We squeeze the DJ over in this corner?’ Elena added.

‘They could even wear veils,’ Annie suggested, caught up in the vision too. ‘We’ll make the veils in the same colours as the dresses.’

The beauty of the church overwhelmed them and now everyone seemed to forget the principal problems: they had no permission to use the church; they had no models; they had to redirect seventy people to Saint-Denis; they didn’t know a DJ; and, worst of all, the show was due to start in exactly seventeen hours.

‘Can we use the church for the show?’ Annie asked Anoush.

Anoush just shrugged her shoulders.

‘We pay,’ Svetlana added immediately. ‘We pay very, very good for this. Priest can buy a new … whatever a priest needs. Or he can go on holiday to Barbados.’

‘We can’t pay too much,’ Elena chipped in, ‘we have a sixteen-thousand-euro hole in the accounts!’ She treated her mother to a glare. Lest Svetlana forget.

Anoush began to speak to her mother. The exchange took several moments as Latifah frowned, gesticulated and looked very uncertain.

Finally, she headed out of the church door.

‘She go phone,’ Anoush explained.

Although it was obviously a tense moment, Rich decided he would take a chance.

‘Girls,’ he began, ‘I’m going to switch on the camera.’ He was fibbing; it had been running all this time, but he wanted it up on his shoulder to get some decent shots now. ‘I’ll film some church interior, OK? It’s gorgeous, I just want a little bit of footage. Is that all right?’

‘Now?’ Annie snapped. ‘You have to film now? While we stand here on bloody tenterhooks waiting to see if this whole thing is going to happen or not?’

Micky ready to go out:

Denim dungarees (Baby Gap)
White top (Petit Bateau)
Orange giraffe-print hat (IdaT)
Fleece outdoor suit (Osh Kosh)
Total est. cost: £90

‘Waaaaah!’

Dave the dog looked up at Ed. The mongrel cocked his head to the side and gazed at Ed with deep brown, mournful eyes. Ed knew what that look meant. Before the arrival of the twins, Ed and Dave had shared a simple but nevertheless close relationship.

Ed and Owen had rescued Dave from the dog home, even though Dave was ragged, middle-aged and hard of hearing. Although Dave loved Owen and was deeply affectionate towards him, his true devotion belonged to Ed. Ed had once walked him every single morning and evening, Ed was still the one who fed him and Ed even let Dave sit on the sofa, in a snug and comfortable
corner, just so long as no one else was watching.

Before the arrival of the twins, Dave had felt like an important element in Ed’s life. But, since the arrival of the babies, well, everything had changed. Now Dave was just a dog. A dog who had to wait his turn. A dog who had to wait for his walk to finally come round at unexpected times of the day, like 4.30 p.m. A dog who sometimes had to suffer his biscuits being carted off from his bowl by the small squawking people, a dog who had suffered the ultimate indignity, when the babies were tiny, of being tied to a lamp-post for several hours and forgotten. It didn’t matter how nice Ed had been when he’d finally returned to collect him, Dave had been tied to a lamp-post for hours and he wasn’t going to forget it. Every time Ed had tied him to a lamp-post since, Dave had whined just to remind him.

‘You poor old boy,’ Ed told the dog now, understanding the look of resigned self-pity perfectly, ‘we’ll go out. We’ll go out just as soon as Al has finished making his hole.’

Ed was strongly of the view that as the hole was definitely going to be made, he should be in the house when it happened. He and Annie had spent thousands of pounds repairing the roof with blue slate tiles specially colour-matched in Wales. There had been weeks of listening to the workmen tap-tap careful nails to fix each slate to its rafter.

When Ed’s mother had lived in the house, the roof had been so leaky that the attic rooms were out of bounds, the rooms below them had murky brown stains on the ceilings, and throughout the winter, the house had resounded with the
plink plonk
of water dripping into buckets.

Ed could now hear Al tapping at the ceiling. In Ed’s relieved opinion, the tapping sounding slow and careful. Tap … tap … as if Al was gingerly and cautiously
removing pieces of plaster with his sledgehammer.

Ed had been further relieved to see that for the first time since the bulldozer was around, Al was wearing a hard hat. Surely if you were taking down a section of roof that made sense? Plus, Al had Janucek with him, holding his ladder and passing up tools.

‘We’ll go for a walk,’ Ed told the dog, ‘as soon as Al’s finished.’

The word ‘walk’ set Dave’s tail in frantic motion.

Just as Ed looked back from the dog to the babies, he saw Minnie take hold of a chunky wooden block and, without the slightest intent, fling her hand backwards, smacking Micky hard in the face with the block.

His sharp ‘Waaaaaaah’ of pain surprised Minnie so much that she joined in the wailing too and once again Ed had his arms full of two screaming babies. He sometimes worried about the damage being done to his eardrums as two babies cried at top volume, one against each side of his head.

He soothed the twins both with his voice and by jiggling them gently.

Maybe a walk right now wouldn’t hurt. Maybe he would wrap them both up in the buggy, put Dave on his lead and head out to the park.

Al sounded as if he was getting on fine. At this slow and careful rate, Ed could easily go out for half an hour or so and still not miss the grand opening of the roof.

‘Are you going to be OK there?’ Ed shouted up the stairs, just before he put the babies into the pram.

‘Yeah, no worries,’ Al shouted down from his ladder outside the attic rooms on the second floor. ‘Slow progress, mate,’ he added. ‘I’m taking the plaster out piece by piece just to make sure the hole doesn’t get too big.’

‘Good stuff,’ Ed called back. He buckled in the babies,
clipped Dave’s lead on to his collar and headed out of the front door.

Al breathed a sigh of relief. Now that Ed had finally left, he was going to take a proper swing at this ceiling. He couldn’t understand what the bloody hell was the matter with it. He had been chipping and chipping at it for ages and just tiny pieces of plaster were coming away.

‘Now, Janu,’ he told his workman, ‘let’s take a proper crack at this.’ Al leaned slightly away from the ladder and swung his hammer hard.

The head of the hammer struck first the plaster and then the very old, very brittle rafter lying right behind it.

The second hammer blow split the rafter, softened by years of leaks, but the third blow was fatal. The rafter broke, splintered off in all different directions and loosened a whole cascade of tiles.

The heavy slate tiles, specially colour-matched in Wales, slid at speed through the large hole in the ceiling.

Al, clutching at his ladder but still flailing with his hammer, barely had time to say: ‘What the …?’ before eight sharp-edged tiles rained down into his face, plaster dust flew into his eyes and he felt himself wobble and overbalance.

Janucek, despite the tiles that had fallen on to his own head and shoulders, was holding the ladder firm, but although he shot out a hand, he wasn’t able to save his boss. Al fell backwards and landed with an ominous crunch.

DJ Paul:

Oversized promo T-shirt (freebie)
Baggy black tracksuit trousers (Adidas)
Red and white sneakers (Vans)
Bowler hat (Jerry’s, New York)
Sunglasses (Versace)
Gold earring (Tiffany)
Total est. cost:
€
390

‘Quoi?’

When Anoush’s mother walked back into the church, she had enough of a smile on her face for Annie, Svetlana, Lana and Anoush to feel a surge of hope.

‘Did he say yes?’ Annie asked Anoush.

As soon as Anoush’s hurried conversation with Latifah was over, she turned to them and said: ‘He say yes. One thousand euros. You can have church today and tomorrow morning. At two p.m. there is … mmm, for baby …
baptême
… ?’ she ended hesitantly.