[Previous chapter] [The Women’s Clothes Shop: Autumn 1999–Spring 2000 (Saturdays)]
My mother said that I should get a Saturday Job, since The Garden Centre Job had come to nothing, and I’d sacked off my second paper round when they cut my wages. I was bound to want more money now I was at The Sixth Form College, and my Pocket Money had ceased now that my younger brother was off to The Posh School I’d just left, and was old enough to walk around The Cathedral City without me acting as his chaperone. So—knowing I’d a tendency toward Procrastination—my mother chose a Saturday Job for me, in The Women’s Clothes Shop in The Cathedral City. There was no question of me getting a Job in The Railway Town, although it was only a mile-and-a-half’s walk away from The Suburban Culdesac, because I’d once gone to The Shopping Centre there on a Saturday with my oldest brother (who’d recently arrived “for a visit”) and we’d been followed around and threatened with violence by a gang of local youths. My oldest brother—I confess, on his behalf—had been encouraged by the relevant authority to move back in with us in 1999 after falling foul of certain legalities while working as a salesman (of sorts) in The City of a Thousand Trades. (Let’s just say his chosen Trade fell outside of the recognized Thousand…) He lived with us and sold double-glazing in the local area for a while (using an affected Scottish accent, which he said Customers responded better to) before moving in with some friends he’d made in The Cathedral City, and embarking on a new career as a music journalist and band manager, which would soon lead him to The Great Wen.
I can’t remember the exact chronology of my oldest and older brother’s times at The Suburban Culdesac; but since this is my CV, Prospective Employer, we needn’t worry too much about them. Suffice to say I don’t think they could both have lived with us at the same time—because there wasn’t enough room in The Suburban Culdesac; and had they both been there at the same time, for longer than a week, they’d probably have killed one another. As a helpful aside, I offer an anecdote from this time, taking place on an evening when the three of us had been out in the Cathedral City (separately or together, or both). We were returning in the direction of The Suburban Culdesac from the bus stop by The Corner Shop (about which more later) on foot, when two bigger boys passed by in the opposite direction, loudly singing the chorus from the then-popular song "Tequila (Mint Royale Remix)" by the band Terrorvision, thus creating a tense, testosterone-fuelled atmosphere in the moonlit suburban alleyway. The bigger boys barked a gruff greeting, more threat than not. And my oldest brother waited until they weren't quite out of earshot before making a snide reply. A chase ensued. He ran. And he encouraged us to follow. I did; but my older brother, never one to expend energy unnecessarily, stood his ground and managed to defuse the situation with one of the bigger boys; while the other (the bigger) had continued to give chase. To summarize: I got punched in the face and knocked over. My oldest brother escaped unscathed. And my older brother too got swung at by one of the bigger boys once they had reunited and thus outnumbered him. I was left with a sore face and a sense of shame; but my two older brothers could waste no time in sympathy, being fully occupied by bickering about who had been to blame (the one who ran, or the one who hesitated) for the duration of the 15-or-so minutes over which we stalked the alleyways around The Corner Shop with improvised weapons we'd found among the hedges, looking for the dastardly bigger boys so that we might exact our revenge. I think this tells you a lot about my relationship with my older brothers. That my younger brother was safe at home in bed is largely a chronological quirk, but also somehow fitting.
As you can see, Prospective Employer, even here in my own Curriculum Vitæ, I am Living In The Shadow of my brothers! I’ll put them out of your mind, I hope, by surmizing that my older brother must have abandoned his A-levels more swiftly on that second attempt, and returned forthwith to North Wales, where he would start an internet business and get in the local newspapers; while my oldest brother hung around thereafter for a while, being A Bad Influence on me, before getting on with his own Curriculum Vitæ elsewhere. And back to the Job:
My mother saw an advert for A Saturday Girl in the window of The Women’s Clothes Shop on The High Street, and hurried home from Work that evening ready to dictate my letter of application—in which I would write that I’d noted that their Staff included no members of the male sex whatsoever, and that I could thus “add value” at no extra cost by significantly improving their diversity quota (which, at least in terms of sex, was null) merely by the fact of their having hired me.
And so, to my mother’s credit as much as to theirs, they subsequently did.
The Role
As a Saturday Boy in The Women’s Clothes Shop my role was very much the same as it would have been had I been a Saturday Girl; with the single important distinction that under no circumstances was I to work in or near the changing rooms. This was fine by me, since of the various tasks that made up the Job of working in The Women’s Clothes Shop, that one looked the most boring: you just stood there and handed out coat-hangers. It wasn’t even likely that standing at the entrance to the changing rooms at the back of The Women’s Clothes Shop would have provided me with any realistic opportunities for peeping at nude women—besides which fact, I’d have been far too afraid to do that, in case I actually saw one—but I could understand how the presence of an unexpected male body in the changing area might have made some women or girls uncomfortable or upset. And that wasn’t something I wanted to do; least of all in a professional environment.
Having got that issue out of the way—since it was always the first question anybody, male or female, asked after I told them where I worked—it won’t take long to outline the other aspects of the Job. Most of the Job of a Saturday Boy in The Women’s Clothes Shop involved picking clothes up off the floor, putting them back on the hangers, and hanging them back in the place where they were supposed to be hanging. Sometimes this was enlivened by variations on the theme. Such as taking new clothes from The Back Room to a place on The Shop Floor chosen by my Bosswoman or another superior, and then hanging them there; or taking visibly damaged or soiled clothes off the hanger (or off the floor) and removing them from The Shop Floor to The Back Room; or—when things were a little less chaotic than usual—simply ensuring that the rows of hanging clothes looked neat and appealing, the better to tempt Customers to approach them, and shake them about, and drop them on the floor, and damage or soil them.
Of course I worked behind the till as well. The till was a till. And I’d used tills before. So I knew I’d have to learn the process all over again, because it would be slightly different this time. (And so it was.) When the tills were quiet, since The Women’s Clothes Shop was never anywhere near as quiet as The Garden Centre had been, that was the best place to be. A polite greeting, a simple process, the accompanying small-talk. If they wanted a return or a refund or anything more complicated—like paying with a card, which was still uncommon in 1999—I’d call the Bosswoman, or defer to a superior on the next till. I was rather Awkward at that time: lacking in Confidence, even more so than was typical for boys of my age; and very conscious of my Speech Impediment, caused by a slight underbite, which I thought both Unmanly and Unattractive. But I could just about manage a brief chat with some forced eye-contact, as long as I was protected by the barrier of the desk, the presence of the till, and the (admittedly limited) Authority conferred upon me by the Job and the name-badge.
The Customers were mostly okay, and usually at least slightly pleased that they were buying something. In fact, they were almost as likely to entirely ignore me at the till as they were when passing me on The Shop Floor, for which courtesy I was grateful.
There was a fair system of role-shuffling that ensured every woman, girl, or boy would not be kept in the same place for the entirety of their six-hour (with one half-hour break) Shift. We tended to “move on” once an hour, where possible. I favoured The Shop Floor when it was busy, and the tills when it was quiet. It was not the done thing to be seen standing about with nothing to do on The Shop Floor. Talking to the Customers about what they might want to buy was right out, obviously. I would have no idea about how to approach that, and thankfully nobody suggested I try it. So I had to spend quite a bit of time pretending to be doing something—picking up a blouse and walking around with it, making sure to be staring far enough in front of me that it looked like I was on a mission, only to ultimately return the garment to the exact place where I’d found it.
But The Women’s Clothes Shop was almost always busy. And by busy, I mean rammed like a cattle-market before a feast. It could be a physically demanding Job at such times. Being on your feet for the better part of six hours is never easy if you’re not used to it. And I was doing it in school shoes with hard heels, after a week of study at The Sixth Form College. Navigating between the women and girls and the multitudinous metal things we hung the clothes on (whose name I was told, but have since forgotten) was a tricky task at any but the earliest and latest hours on a Saturday. I didn’t want to be physically close to women or girls, because I didn’t want to be physically close to anyone; but I was also acutely aware (perhaps Paranoid) that I might accidentally brush against somebody, who would notice that I was both male and a member of staff, and would subsequently accuse me of molestation or similar. As a result, I probably did a mile or two more each Saturday than was strictly necessary: backtracking round the tracksuits, skirting round the skirts, and—no, I can’t think of another one.
Unexpected item?
I had Qualms upon taking this Job, Prospective Employer, that some people might be unhappy to find me there, in The Women’s Clothes Shoop. The reality was that very few people seemed to notice me at all. Customers in such places are mostly staff-blind; so unless they were looking for someone to interrogate or complain to, they barely batted an eyelid. They might have mistaken me for a Customer, shopping for his girlfriend or mother. My mother didn’t shop there, because she thought the clothes were Cheap and Bad; but girls and women of all ages (and all Classes, up to and including Lower Middle) were among our Customers—and it wasn’t unheard of for men or boys to buy things; though when they did they were usually accompanied by girls or women.
I might sometimes have been mistaken for a (slightly formally dressed) Weirdo or Pervert, who was best ignored. I usually wore a white shirt, which was my old school shirt, and charcoal trousers, which were my old school trousers. Yes, I had a name-badge; but that was white too, so it could easily be missed. Especially if I was deliberately standing side-on and avoiding eye-contact—which was my default position when faced with other people and not at a till. (Whether at Work, or anywhere else.) And to briefly address the subject of Perversion, Prospective Employer, to put your mind at ease—or not, depending upon your Views on the subject: I have in fact worn women’s clothes, for as long as they’ve been made available to me. As far as I’m concerned, clothes are clothes and people are people; the latter might make the former, but the former don’t make the latter. My oldest brother introduced me when I was 12 to the idea that women’s jeans were often better than men’s jeans, because they were more comfortable. He also insisted that the women’s areas in second-hand shops could be better relied on to yield loud shirts, snazzy jackets, and interesting accessories at affordable prices. And I had found that he was quite right: the men’s sections usually resembled the cupboard-drawer-contents of poverty-stricken psychopaths or down-on-their-luck farmers who’d shot themselves. Whereas by wilfully playing fast-and-loose with the jettisoned wardrobes of the cool aunt, the teenage goth, or the ageing hippy, you could get a decent weekend outfit from the women’s section for under a fiver. I’ve never worn women’s underwear because that would be pointless. But I’m not ashamed to tell you, Prospective Employer, that I’m writing this very sentence today while comfortably clad in a pair of size-14 green elasticated M&S high-waisted corduroys; which are far more comfortable than any of the men’s trousers I own, and don’t require a belt to prevent them falling down around my arse every time I stand up. When I first started working at The Women’s Clothes Shop, my Bosswoman mentioned the 15% discount to which I was entitled, and—laughing, as though the very notion was hilarious—added: “But of course you can give that to your sister or mother.” I regret purely for the lost opportunity of having opened her mind an inch or two that I didn’t speak up at that point; but, to be quite honest, I was with my mother on this: their clothes were bad, and I would not be buying any—with or without a discount.
I can’t actually remember the Bosswoman who hired me very clearly, because she soon left. But the replacement Bosswoman, Transferred from another Branch, greeted the news that I came free with The Women’s Clothes Shop by looking at me blankly for a moment, and then completely ignoring me wherever possible for the duration of our mutual acquaintance. The other members of staff were all female and all older than me—some by only a few years, which nevertheless felt like quite a few years back then; and some by a good few years, which seemed like decades, and they—again—largely ignored me.
I got the feeling that one or two of them thought I was a bit Weird or Creepy; but I often got that feeling from people anyway, Prospective Employer, and there didn’t seem to be much I could do about it; so I can only remind you that, to the best of my knowledge, I wasn’t and I’m not. The commoner response of my co-workers was to be—usually implicitly, but sometimes explicitly—disappointed by how fabulously gay I wasn’t. Some of them assumed that I was… if not quite a “straight-acting” gay boy, then perhaps a repressed or latently homosexual boy. Again, not the first or last time that people had ventured to so speculate about my Enigmatic Nature. Of course we all make assumptions and presumptions about one another all the time. And I never bothered to tell them all that it was my mother’s idea for me to work there, and that I’d just gone along with it because of my Obedience and lack of Ingenuity (and money). I told my friends that—because I thought it was quite funny, and I was Proud of my mother’s Ingenuity. But my Colleagues weren’t my friends, Prospective Employer, so I didn’t care what they thought.
Good Job or Bad Job?
Actually, I did make one friend at The Women’s Clothes Shop. Or certainly there was one slightly older girl (technically a woman; she was about 21) who took me under her wing. Her name was Jenna, so we’ll call her Eve. I didn’t learn anything much from Eve, other than how to use that one particular till; which I’d never need to use again once I left. But from the first day she made it her Business to ensure that I had An Okay Time at Work. And given the unusual Role in which I’d been cast, and my evident dearth of the required Charisma to excel at it, that was such a lovely thing for her to do. Eve wanted nothing in return—I was far too young and dorky to be attractive to her—and she unfailingly managed to be Friendly and Supportive without any sense of Condescension or Superiority; though she was technically my Superior. If ever any of the Customers so much as implied with a look or a mutter that there was anything Odd or Undesirable about my working there, Eve managed to put me at ease, or them in their place—whichever felt most Appropriate at the time. Once a woman was really quite rude to me, when I messed up putting something through the till and, despite my immediate and profuse apology, the Customer said, without a trace of irony or good humour “ You’re a bit crap at this, aren’t you?”
Eve had a right go at her: “You can’t talk to him like that! Don’t be so rude. How dare you?!” The Customer—a middle aged woman—muttered her way gruffly through the rest of the transaction, and Eve said nothing further as she fixed my error on my till, and curtly handed over the bag with the woman’s chosen garment inside. I did wonder later that day whether perhaps Eve thought I had Special Needs or something. That might explain a few things... But whether or not she did (and whether or not I did) it was a marvellous display of Solidarity for which I was, and remain, eternally Grateful.
More generally, I didn’t find the Job to be quite so Undignified and Dispiriting as my older brother had found his (I think) relatively similar Job at The Sports Clothing Shop in The Oldest City in North Wales all those years ago. I strongly suspected that women and girls made easier Customers, on the whole, than boys and men. Less likely to create conflict, perhaps. I remember one day, one of the very least posh boys from The Posh School came into the shop with some of his female friends; and I can recall quite clearly the dreaded moment he clocked me. He wasn’t a bully (at least, not to me) but he was one of the rougher kids from one of the poorer estates that existed among The Cathedral City’s well-concealed suburbs. And he was widely regarded to be A Hard Nut.
“Must be a bit embarrassing working here, mate?” he smirked as he walked by.
I suppose it was, sometimes. But there was no inherent reason it ought to have been, and I suspect it was only My Nature that ever really made it so. Anyway, Eve sidled over and asked me to keep an eye on him and his friends because they were known shoplifters. Tempted as I was to tell him that his being a school-leaver and a known shoplifter at The Women’s Clothing Shop was surely more Embarrassing than my Working there on weekends while simultaneously studying for A-levels, I had anxieties about the implied Class prejudices that sentiment might carry, and I didn’t want him to punch me. So I didn’t say anything.
There was as much surface Dignity in that shop Job as there was in any of my other shop Jobs. It was Hard, and not entirely Fulfilling or Enriching Work. And I was positively haunted by the utterly unbearable “[The Women’s Clothing Shop] FM” radio station, actually a single 45-minute-long track on a CD—riddled with generic DJ-voice product adverts and mostly low-grade RnB chart music, not at all to my taste, played on repeat, all-day, every-day—and only updated once in the many months I worked there. But things were sold. And that is, after all, the purpose of a Shop. The things in question may have been poor quality. They may have often broken under the most rudimentary stress-tests, and have had to be returned. They may have almost entirely been composed of man-made fibres, which do not allow the skin to breathe. They may mostly if not entirely have been made in third-world sweatshops. And they may mostly have been dyed to the most lurid and unpleasant hues of candy-floss pink, and (then-fashionable) lilac. But sell them we did—by the cartload. And that constitutes an inherently Productive environment.
The ideal situation of The Women’s Clothing Shop, right in the middle of the high-street, directly opposite the town Buttercross, ensured, at least in the economic climate at that time, the Productivity of our Enterprise, the resulting Dignity conferred upon us by our Labour—and also that it was invariably very hot in The Women's Clothing Shop, even over the busier parts of the winter; mostly due to inadequate ventilation in the retrofitted old building. I recall finishing my six-hour shift on Christmas Eve, 1999, at 4pm, and emerging exhausted and sweating into the bustle of the festive high-street like I was climbing out of a coal-mine. But no blackened duds bedecked my weary bones, Prospective Employer: I wore my old school shirt and trousers, my old school shoes, and the second-hand leather suit-jacket I’d recently bought (along with a CD copy of The KLF’s “The White Room” album) from a covered market during a family trip to The City of a Thousand Trades—the alien city of my birth. And I was greeted as I emerged by the cheers and applause of a small group of waiting sixth-form friends, and my dear oldest brother and his new girlfriend—newly arrived by train from The Great Wen.
We quaffed red wine and guzzled pasties, and made merry there on the Buttercross, as surely folk had done for centuries; and by the time Eve could be seen gleefully vacuuming the floor of The Women’s Clothes Shop in preparation for closing, my oldest brother and I, and my new best friend Wayne—(not his real name): a paperboy where and when I’d been a paperboy, though we never met at that time—were belting out “Between The Wars” by Billy Bragg to a bemused procession of The Cathedral City’s well-to-do, last-minute-Christmas-shopping, red-trousered gentlemen:
“I was a miner, I was a docker, I was a railway man…”
A Good Job.
[Next chapter, November Payday...]
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