Sugarcoated by Catherine Forde

longer . That’s what Mum and Dad and Georgina would be advising.
    All of them right too. So I’m definitely going to grill Stefan over breakfast .
    That’s what I instructed myself at the start of our ride into town.
    But ten minutes later, when Stefan pulled up and parked on a double yellow outside Strut, the most expensive clothes shop in Glasgow, I could barely remember my own name let alone the topics I needed to discuss with my mystery date. Talk about blowing away the cobwebs? I think Stefan’s driving blew my sense out the back of my head.
    Far too fast. Crazy. Not even funny crazy. This guy’s reckless – I was aware of a breathless voice of reason niggling at me as Stefan came round to my passenger door and opened it. But I was too windswept to do anything but take his hand and let him steer my wobbly legs to the threshold of a non-Clod world.

15
personal shopping
    Strut was one of those shops with a bell outside. Not exactly Glasgow, that.
    ‘Needs to get over itself,’ Georgina – who only ever bought clothes from One World or Save the Children – used to say whenever we passed it. One Saturday afternoon we swanned up and rang Strut’s bell. No one let us in, although this arseless, spray-tanned blonde sneered out at us both as if she was Glaswegian aristocracy and me and Georgina were turds in matching Fair Trade T-shirts
    ‘Torn-faced tart,’ Georgina had opined in her debating club voice as the Torn-Faced Tart turned her back to attend to some essential folding. When Georgina pressed the bell again, keeping her finger on it this time, the TFT swanned over to the door and flipped the sign on it to CLOSED. Me and Georgina had mooned her then.
    I wonder if she recognises me , I gulped when same blonde was flipping the CLOSED sign on me again. This however was once I was inside Strut. And after she’d greeted Stefan with a triple kiss and not a glance in my direction.
    ‘Hi-yaaa. So fant a stic to see you. Your Versace just looks great on you,’ she shrilled at him in this Lorraine Kelly-esque voice that soooo didn’t match the filthy head-to-toe dart of scorn she threw me when Stefan said, ‘This is Clau-’
    ‘Listen: Oh. My. God, Stephen,’ without bothering to catch my name this shop assistant lunged for Stefan’s arm, whirlwinding him through the shop. Although I couldn’t see another soul in the place, she was gushing at him in a secretive whisper.
    ‘I know you spent a fortune last week but I’m telling you, Stephen, these shirts that’ve just come in, I am not joking: you have to check them out and you’ll want one in every colour because see with your white suit? They’re just so made for it and, I swear to God, you’ll be the only guy in Scotland wearing one coz they’re straight off the catwalk in Milan. Quick, quick –’
    Still just in the shop and no more, I watched this no-longer-quite-so-torn-faced stick insect hoiking Stefan through to men’s clothing as if all these shirts she was raving about were ready to fly back to Milan without him. She seemed to know Stefan better than I did, Though why d’you keep calling him Stephen, you snooty bint? I wondered while I stood abandoned near the entrance of the shop. I felt as welcome as a pimple on the tip of Angelina Jolie’s nose in the company of the various anorexic mannequins posed around the shop floor, with their cinched-in waists and their pert pointy boobs and their bored, blank faces. Oh dear, they’d be the templates for the clientele Strut expected, I sighed, wandering over to the nearest sparse rail of ladies’ clothing. As you do when you’re hanging about in normal clothes shops waiting for someone else, I began to browse, checking the price label first, of course. Holy Moley! Every single garment had a triple figure tag, and the prices seemed to rise inversely with the amount of fabric your money bought you.
    What a steal, I snorted, examining this bra-topcontraption. Looked like it was run up from one of