Bloody Fabulous: Stories of Fantasy and Fashion

Page 33

“She’s not going to be happy.”
“Too bad. It’s business,” she said with more bravado than she felt.
After Gray left, she picked up her hybrid camera. Popping open the back, she picked up a pair of tweezers, and extracted her life-saving lens.
The human eyeball had started to dry and was nicked where she had secured it inside the camera. She grabbed a glass jar filled with formaldehyde and dropped the eye in. It sank to the bottom, turning so its lifeless brown iris stared at her. Thank God Antonio still worked at the funeral home.
Despite her knowledge of photography, the solution had been simple. After all, she could see Gray.
Monday
Getting back to her routine, Evelyn felt good about the day’s work. She even handled Vee’s resignation with professional aplomb. However, her brush with Camilla taught her that there was more to life than photographing models. She planned to cut back her hours, travel more, and visit her mother.
Evelyn was in the process of cleaning up the mess from the week before, sorting equipment into boxes when Gray appeared in her studio.
She straightened as a sick feeling swirled in her stomach. “Are you here to—”
“No. Relax. Camilla’s angry, but as long as you don’t cause trouble, she’ll leave you alone.”
Not convinced, she waited.
“I called in that favor,” he said.
“Then why are you here?”
“I brought a few friends with me.”
“Friends, as in—”
“Yes.”
Not good. “What do they want?”
“They want you to take their picture.”
How Galligaskins Sloughed the Scourge
Anna Tambour
So long ago that the roads were topped with the dung of ass and ox, in a land rich in short days and mouldy shadows, in the town of Ranug-a-Folloerenvy, lived a master argufier named Werold but known as Galligaskins for his old-fashioned knee-high socks that (in the heat of argument) he was always hitching up.
In this out-of-the-way town called by the low, just plain Ranug, where the bakers sold more day-old bread than fresh, and the tailors worked all night—in this tumbly-down filth-paved town, all the men (save Galligaskins) wore long, leg-hugging fine-skein hose white and delicate as the foot of the petal of a rose. These stockings showed best in winter when the lacily laddered knit exposed a wealth of leg-skin glow—puce, blue, crimson, suet—according to the state of the wearer’s chilblains.
Galligaskins’ hose were loose and thick, and brown as feast-day pancakes for the poor. And they ended folded over just below the knee, where he tried to tie them fast but they always slid past his garter of a cord—a shocking sight but one that persevered and was accepted as something that must be; as a rainy day, which cleans the streets.
For Werold was Ranug-a-Folloerenvy’s only argufier, as necessary as the glove maker. He had much to do with the rich and would have died a slovenly but relatively wealthy ancient, if the rich hadn’t got themselves into such a muckle.
It happened this way:
One day a drab nullness of a man called Bladsteth who unnoticed, had left Ranug some time before, returned—a new man—from, he said, far Ghovenir. Or rather, that is what some people said he said, and though they knew not this mouthful-of-stones, they did not question where? but tsked and answered with an impatient nod and a quick “So? Yes, yes. Go on.” For the question wasn’t where he went, but what he wore now that he’d returned.
The ladies swooned, to be brought to life only with a clod of chicken scat up a nostril. Men secreted themselves, unbuttoned sleeves as fat and slashed and colourful as candied-fruit-stuffed pheasants, and blew their noses into the embroidered cloth. Each man was suddenly as ashamed to be seen in what he stood in, as Adam was in the garden that suddenly wasn’t Paradise. Tavern braggarts, cock-strutting swaggarts, lute-picking peach-firm swains, grandfathers with faces like empty sacks, all men alike—each man then counted out his wealth (which took not long) and matched that to his wits to find a tailor to make up, without much lucre, a suit like that which had caused the swoons. Now such a time began!
The children who just a moment ago, it seems, were little versions of their fine-clothed parents, now wandered free, undisciplined, unfed. And in what wear? Whatever rags they pleased. The town’s air shimmered with the cries of women, and their tearful honks. Their grief melted the starch in pleats that were once so proud, they could hold the women’s heads up from the strength of style alone—till that traveller, Bladsteth, blessed and cursed be he, the cause of all this wilt.
Every woman of any worth cursed Bladsteth’s cheek, for he’d returned alone. No lady did he bring with him, nor key, nor word to what a lady’s wear would be to mate the splendour of his cockscomb finery. Not only that, but the menfolk’s wear would beggar a dromedary caravan. And the most foudroyantly furbelowed dames, instead of crying, screamed. If only a she had come to town, a Desidora instead of he. For no Ranug man in normal times would risk his health ignoring the gentler sex’s cry, lady to lady: Be mode as me, you wish! On my own man’s worth, you shall not be. Be modish, you who challenge me, as an old dried pea.
And so, what with the men consumed by fashion with no time to think of else—and the women consumed, first with grief and then with hunger (for when his tailor took the whole of each man’s all, what man had time to notice women, children, or even his stomach’s need?) whatwith all this, there came to Galligaskins such a drying-up of arguments that finally, he had None.
Though the town resounded with grief, Galligaskins’ sniffs could pick out not one rumour that added up to a dispute that he could eat from—not even one petty snivel of an accusation that the greatest troublemaking miser in the town would have normally ordered, to be paid for with a promise. As Ranug-a-Folloerenvy’s only guilded disputationist, the doubly-good sums he was accustomed to taking from both sides of any case were now, many times over, doubly lost and missed. Starved, his leather inkpot shrivelled till its sides met, skint as gentle ox’s cut-purse. The worthy citizens were too busy. For the master argufier: a ruinous state.
So Galligaskins spent a coin on a pair of boots so practical, they must have been pawned by a traveller. Wearing the best (least torn) of his two mangy shirts, a once-fashionable jerkin that was now a chest-warmer with one button, and something he considered a cape but no self-respecting ass would bear tossed over its shoulders, he left the place he had been born. His hobnails rang on the cobbles in a mockery of a fare-thee-well.
By mid-day he was so hungry that when he came upon a stunted medlar tree at the top of a hill, he braved it—a rash action. Being winter, the tree was bare of leaves. Every fruit that had met the wind had fallen, and had been eaten in the snow by creatures who knew not that the fashion for these fruits had ended generations past.
The tree had one stolid trunk and many arms, their elbows hooked together like a poor man and wife in front of the landlord. But the arms of a medlar sport sword-sharp thorns. Galligaskins bared himself, and wielding his body like a key, he stuck his arm in. Thorns raked his flesh and pricked his wrist as he stretched his fingers forth . . . and plucked the last remaining fruits.
Eleven medlars did he glean, a handful. Burnished and dry-pimpled as Winter’s cheeks, as ripe as weeping boils, they smelled of musty spice. Famished, he sucked them dry, spitting skin and stones till just after the tenth medlar when his shrunken belly, delicate from starvation, whined at this rotting richness. Galligaskins, mad with rage at this contrariness, madder still with hunger, regarded the last suppurating medlar, the most dangerously swollen of them all. Then he ravished it, swallowing every bit—its weeping tear, its tannic skin, its gassy flesh, its five rock-hard, rough-edged stones.
Now the last medlar was gone. His tongue tingled from the dry sharpness of that skin. He breathed into his hands to catch the last wisps of smell from that rank, sopped, scented flesh. Oh, he regretted his haste. His stomach turned, but as he dressed himself, he paid it not the slightest heed. He was just pulling up his right galligaskin when his gut growled a most unfamiliar note.
And with no ado, the eleventh medlar spoke.
“Walk fifty-and-seven steps,” it said, and though its voice was rusty, each syllable was quite precisely paced, “with the sun warming the right side of your face. Then cut across the field till you come to a place where there are five rocks that you can see poking from the soil at the base of the barley stalks. And,” said the medlar from deep within Galligaskins, “If you see no rocks because they have walked away or because they lie, then continue as you please until you need to stop and eat.
“Continue on, and one day you will come to another kingdom. You will know this because of the clothing—keep still! Mind my counsel.”
Galligaskins rubbed his stomach. If the medlar only knew the stab of clothing.
“As I was saying,” said the medlar, pausing frustratingly, so like a master argufier when interrupted that Werold held his breath in awe.
The medlar must have felt Werold’s admiration. “Mind you,” it said, chatty as if they were feasting at juicy gossip. “The people in the kingdom I speak of wear jerkins, surcoats, cloaks, skirts, mantles, codpieces, wimples, bodices, great pumpkin sleeves, guimpes as crisp as toasted eggwhite froth—clothing from top to toe, including galligaskins white as icing—all bought fresh every morning, and served with the morning cup by the serving class. Thems that serve wears the yesterday’s, or the day before’s,” the medlar sing-songed as if it had heard that rhyme ever since it was a bud.