Page 22 of Wrapped Up at the Vintage Dress Shop
Then there was the housework. Phoebe tried to keep the boat tidy (there was a reason why shipshape was an actual word) but on Sunday evenings, she made sure that absolutely everything was in its correct place. Clothes hung up or neatly folded. She swapped out Coco Chanel’s stinky blankets for freshly laundered ones and deep-cleaned her waterbowl, food bowl and beloved Chuckit! ball. Then she wiped down all the surfaces, hoovered and mopped the floors. It was a habit that Mildred had instilled in Phoebe.
‘If you start the week in a mess, then you’ll end the week in a worse mess,’ she’d always said as she’d shown Phoebe how to keep a tidy house. The best way to clean glasses so they didn’t go smeary. To keep your dusters separate from your dishcloths and how most household problems could be solved with bicarbonate of soda, white vinegar and a hell of a lot of elbow grease.
So when Phoebe woke up on Monday morning to a calm and clean atmosphere, she felt calm and cleansed herself.
What had happened on Saturday at the shop was in the past. It was a new week. A fresh start. A do-over.
As she and Coco Chanel walked to work, she really was full of resolve and a better attitude. After all, what was it that Mildred had also always said?‘Kill people with kindness.’
When Cress and Sophy turned up ten minutes late, Phoebe didn’t want to kill them at all. Maybe lightly maim them. Neither of them had backed her up on Saturday. Cress had been keeping secrets and it was Sophy who’d brought that influencing, dress-ripping monster to the shop in the first place.
But no! Phoebe was going to be the bigger person. So she managed a smile. A very, very small smile but at least the corners of her lips were in an upward position.
Not that either of them seemed to notice. Cress wasn’t even looking at Phoebe but was staring down at her shoes as if she suspected that she’d tracked something awful in, and Sophy had her phone in her hand, no surprise there, but then she suddenly thrust it in Phoebe’s face.
‘Oh my God, Pheebs, what have you done?’ she exclaimed.
‘I haven’t done anything,’ Phoebe said hotly, taking the phone from Sophy or risk getting a black eye from it.
It was open on TikTok and Phoebe wasn’t quite sure what she was watching. Or rather she hoped that actually she was still asleep and this was all a very bad dream.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
Cress looked up, despair etched into every millimetre of her face. ‘You’ve gone viral,’ she said. ‘And not in a good way either.’
Chapter Nine
It wasn’t just TikTok, there was an Instagram reel too. Both started with Rosie Roberts looking sad, and brushing away an imaginary tear. Even though she hadn’t cried at all in the shop. Not one single tear.
That wasn’t important though. Not when Rosie was choking back more imaginary sobs as she said that she supported small businesses ‘but I don’t support bullying and assaulting people’.
Then there was a clip of Phoebe brandishing the torn dress in Rosie’s face and shouting at her but you couldn’t actually hear what Phoebe was saying at the top of her vocal register because Rosie had replaced that with Taylor Swift singing, ‘This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things’.
Still, it didn’t look good. It looked very bad. And of course, Rosie Ratchet Roberts had tagged the shop on all her socials. Thank goodness Phoebe had her Instagram set to private and didn’t do TikTok because she wasn’t a gigantic show-off.
Then when Bea arrived for work, breathless, and Anita, full of barely suppressed glee, it was to announce that all the latest posts, Reels and videos on The Vintage Dress Shop’s social media had been inundated with many hateful comments. There were even calls for Phoebe to be not just sacked but arrested too.
As Phoebe remembered it during theincident, she’d made several very important points about respecting the shop stock, sustainable fashion and the advantages of wearing vintage clothes.
But still, she was horrified by the video. Even though it was only Rosie Roberts’s extremely biased side of the story and the clip was shown without any context and also, there had been very extenuating circumstances, this was an absolute disaster. Both professionally and personally. Phoebe had always prided herself on being the perfect ambassador for the shop. A champion of vintage fashion. A custodian of pre-loved frocks. But all those years of hard work had been destroyed by a three-minute video in which, to the average viewer, she looked like a demented hell witch.
Phoebe didn’t even have the emotional bandwidth to explain, yet again, about the fake tan and the ripping noise. Instead, she sat in the back office where they’d all congregated – the shop not even open though it was past ten thirty now – with her head in her hands.
‘What should we do?’ Bea asked. ‘Or should we not do anything and hope it all blows over?’
‘The royal family have that motto, don’t they? Never complain, never explain,’ Cress offered, which made Anita snort in a very unbecoming manner.
‘Yeah, because that’s worked out so well for the royal family. Also, Phoebe was doing a lot of complaining in that video. That’s what got us into this mess in the first place.’
Phoebe wasn’t surprised that Anita was enjoying herself immensely, but she was surprised when Sophy patted her shoulder. ‘But Phoebe didn’t assault Rosie,’ she said indignantly. ‘Yes, she was all up in her face but that wasn’t assault. And to say that Rosie was bullied, is a huge stretch. If anyone was being bullied it was us with her constant demands for bubble tea and champagne.’
‘I appreciate the support, Sophy,’ Phoebe managed to say though the words almost choked her.
But when she looked up at Sophy, her face didn’t look very supportive at all. ‘The thing is, Pheebs, the way you handledthings on Saturday was absolutely wrong, but what Rosie has done is also bang out of order.’
‘Forgive me for caring,’ Phoebe snapped but before she could plead her case, they heard a loud tapping on the door. ‘That’s going to be our first customer of the day. Can we all just act like it’s business as normal and we’ll talk about this later?’
Bea hurried off to open the door and Phoebe stood up and brushed down her skirt. This was what Mildred would call a storm in a teacup. It would pass soon enough but before it could, Bea came back with Freddy.
