Page 32 of Wrapped Up at the Vintage Dress Shop
Phoebe snorted like a furious little dragon. ‘I doubt that.’
‘Now, now, Pheebs,’ Johnno said mildly. In all the time that Phoebe had known him, which was some sixteen odd (very odd) years, she’d never once seen him angry, or even heard him raise his voice. Not even when he was confronted by shoplifters, bailiffs or once the husband of a woman he’d been seeing who ‘swore blind that they were separated’. ‘How are you doing, kid?’
Johnno was also the only person who could call Phoebe ‘kid’ and not have their head bitten off. ‘I’ve been better. Freddy says he’s going to sack me.’
‘Not exactly what he said, Pheebs,’ Johnno corrected her in the same mild tone. ‘But you can’t get so aerated about a frock. It’s just a frock at the end of the day. Not worth all this heartache and aggravation, is it?’
When Johnno put it like that, it wasn’t. But then, Phoebe knew where she was with the frocks. It was the people who were an unknown quantity.
‘He’s been horrible to me,’ she said because she had very few secrets from Johnno. Before she’d finally agreed to go on a date with Freddy, he’d always been bending her ear about how she should give him a chance.
‘Kid, he’s a good kid,’ he’d say every time she turned Freddy down. ‘You could do a lot worse.’
‘The video doesn’t look great though, does it, and between you and me, the shop could be doing better,’ Johnno said and the unpleasant feeling in Phoebe’s chest spread out to her neck and, when she looked down, she could see her skin was mottled and red.
‘But we’re always busy. We’re especially busy right now.’ Maybe she should have been keeping a better eye on the business side of things rather than just the frocky side of things. ‘Are our takings down?’
‘It’s not that the takings are down. The problem is that our rent and our rates and the water bill and even the price of the fancy carrier bags have gone up,’ Johnno said. The mottled rash now extended to Phoebe’s arms and legs.
‘You’re going to have to close the shop!’ Where would she be without the shop? What would happen to the dresses? What would happen to her and Coco?
‘Nobody’s closing the shop,’ Johnno said firmly. ‘But Freddy has been talking my ear off about overheads and growing our revenue streams and whatnot. So . . .’
‘So . . . me reacting a littlefiercelywhen some influencer ruined shop stock hasn’t helped matters,’ Phoebe supplied. ‘Though I really don’t understand how she was going to help Sophy shift a lot of rental dresses. Oh God, I’m going to have to just grin and bear it when people come in with coffee and burgers and get their greasy hands everywhere, just in case they decide to buy something. Bite my tongue! Even though we’ll actually lose money if . . .’
‘Hey, kid, do I sound like I’m in a panic?’ Johnno asked gently.
‘Well, no . . .’ Phoebe admitted. ‘But, quite frankly, Johnno, you could have one arm hanging by a thread and you still wouldn’t sound like you were in a panic.’
Johnno chuckled. Such a rich, deep sound and, although Phoebe knew you couldn’t rely on people and especially you couldn’t rely on Johnno, who’d disappeared to the other side of the world with just a day’s notice, she missed him so much. ‘True that. But you only need to panic when I start panicking. Can you do that?’
Phoebe thought about it. ‘Well, I cantry.’
‘Good enough, and be nice to Freddy.’
She didn’t need to think about that at all. ‘Well, Freddy hasn’t been nice to me.’ She flailed her legs just thinking about it. ‘He’s banned me from the shop floor. Threatened tosack me if I don’t turn into some simpering, smiling fool who lets customers walk all over me and walk all over the dresses. Literally! It’s like he doesn’t know me at all.’
‘Oh, I think sometimes he knows you better than you know yourself,’ Johnno said and, before Phoebe could protest that in the strongest possible terms, he said he had to go. ‘Got to see a man about a dog,’ he insisted though it was half ten at night where he was.
She and Coco were walking along the canal path when her phone pinged once more. Again, her first thought was that it was Freddy because that was what happened when you reluctantly let someone in your life against your better judgement.
But it wasn’t Freddy. It was a message from her friend Marianne, who had her own tiny little vintage shop just down the road in Kentish Town.
Darling! You’re all over TikTok. What’s the story? Would rather hear it from you than believe some random and quite basic influencer. Charles and Sophy have invited us to their Halloween party tomorrow night, so I’ll see you and Coco there. And Freddy of course!
It was a reminder that although The Vintage Dress Shop was a huge part of Phoebe’s life, it wasn’t all she had in her life. She had Coco and she did have friends. Friends who even knew about her and Freddy because what happened outside the shop, stayed outside the shop.
Me and Coco can’t wait to see you, Phoebe messaged back and although she still felt heavy in her heart the feeling had definitely lightened a little bit by the time she arrived at the shop.
She was still trying to come to terms with the entirely new worry that the shop might not exist this time next year, another victim of the cost of living crisis and late-stage capitalism, but for the moment, it was there in all of its glory.
Freddy was nowhere to be seen that morning. Clearly, he’d got bored with issuing edicts and decrees and new punishments. Phoebe still headed down to the basement to slave away or rather to persuade Bea that instead of shooting all the dresses for the website as flat lays, they should shoot them on real people. It was an idea she’d had last night when she was still too cross about everything to sleep.
‘You and Anita,’ she clarified. ‘Cress would never agree to it and Sophy’ – she lowered her voice – ‘she doesn’t have the right look.’
‘I’m not very photogenic,’ Bea protested, which was a lie. Bea’s vintage aesthetic was very much 1950s pin-up girl. In summer, she could even wear a sarong-style halter-neck dress (they’d been very popular in the 1950s) whereas when Phoebe had tried one on, it made her shoulders look like a pair of coat hangers. Very bony, very knobbly coat hangers.
‘I have never once seen you take a bad selfie,’ Phoebe insisted.
