Читать книгу Gypsy Wedding Dreams: Ten dresses. Ten Dreams. All the secrets revealed. - Thelma Madine - Страница 9

I’ve got very little to complain about at Nico, but every now and again we have a bride in who really pushes us to the limit. Lateness, disorganisation, even chaos with the finances … these, I can deal with. But some girls really are a nightmare. And for them, we have ‘The Book’. There is no actual book – it’s more of a list that we keep in the office that has on it the names of people we will never work with again: the ones who simply aren’t worth the trouble, those who have been unforgivably rude or simply wasted too much of our time.

Ashleigh Monaghan is the best example of this, as well as being the exception. Because despite her being in The Book, we still ended up making her wedding dress. It all began with her engagement dress, which we did not meet her for. Flamingo pink, it was for a July engagement. It came in two pieces: a halterneck, with leaves all the way around her neck and collar, and then a short skirt with a long train at the back. She had 3D roses all over it – wired up so that they didn’t sit flat on the dress but stood out to make a stunning dramatic statement.

But she was pressure: every day was pressure. Ashleigh wanted more and more from us, and we’d give her more, but then she didn’t want to pay for it. She would snap at her mum, she would shout at us if she didn’t like our answer and then she would be on the phone at all times of day and night. I had Ashleigh and her mum on the phone, both pleading from different angles sometimes. Even though we never met her then, she still made it into The Book. Not formally, but we had marked her as difficult from the very beginning.

That engagement dress was an absolute stunner. We had girls come into the factory while it was being made or before it was sent off to her and they actually cried when they saw it. Honestly, they were that sad it wasn’t their dress, their idea, that they burst into tears. I’d never had that before and I was glad that at least someone was getting pleasure out of the dress because by that stage Pauline had started to take all the phone calls in the factory, lying that I was either out or busy – I couldn’t take any more. Over the years she has got pretty good at those fake calls – ‘She’s just popped to the bank, love, sorry!’, ‘She’s on a trip for a wedding, love, sorry!’ – and so on. But she had never had to handle them in such volume before. When she finally got it, apparently Ashleigh did love the dress; she called me, crying on the phone because she loved it so much. She was very over-emotional, in as positive a way now as she had been with her negativity before. I was thrilled that she loved it, but after I put the phone down on that call I said to the rest of the team:

‘Well, we just have to make sure we don’t do her wedding! If she behaves like that over an engagement dress, we’ll never hear the end of the wedding.’

There had been talk of a wedding dress while we were negotiating the engagement dress. She wanted us to do it – sometimes people say they are going to use us for their wedding dress so they can get some gloves or a couple of extras thrown in on the engagement dress – but she was quite sure that she wanted to use me. But this time I stayed quiet; I just kept my mouth shut whenever there was talk of ‘the next dress’, for my sake and the rest of the team.

Some months later we received the measurements and a drawing for a wedding dress order through the mail. This wasn’t entirely unusual because sometimes travellers are literally travelling while they’re planning a wedding and can’t make it to the shop for a first fitting. If they’re very sure of their size – either because they’ve had one of my dresses before as a bridesmaid or for a party, or because they’ve been fitted in the past – and their dream design, often they just trust me with the rest. In with the usual selection of crank mail and bizarre charity requests, we’ll get a scrap of handwritten paper that is in fact an entirely serious order. If I’ve worked with a bride that the family might know and they’ve seen that I get it done how and when I’ve said I will, they don’t worry as much about meeting me.

Often I’ll get the design – sometimes just a basic drawing and lots of description – along with the measurements, and we’ll get back to them with our finished suggested design, this time drawn up properly by Leanne or me, and a quote. It’s pretty simple once you’ve done it a few times, and it can save a lot of time and drama with some brides!

In this case, the order – together with an initial sketch of the design – came from a woman whose name we had not heard before, but she seemed very organised and familiar with the process, so none of us thought to question it. There was no need to make a fuss where one wasn’t needed, we thought.

The inspiration was Barbie of Swan Lake, with diaphanous fairy wings on the upper arms and a similar design flowing down over the large underskirts beneath; it all looked very delicate, very floaty. We sent back our drawings and an estimate of the cost. At this point there were no names mentioned, apart from that on the envelope.

The deposit arrived straight away, with no problems at all. A few weeks later I was chatting to the mother, confirming price details of some alterations we were making to add to the dress, when she said: ‘That’s the thing – the engagement dress was so spectacular that we all feel under pressure to make this one even better. It has to top the engagement dress, and that’s no mean feat.’

‘Really, love, who did the engagement dress then?’ I asked, confused why she was putting me under so much pressure.

‘You did, Thelma,’ came the reply.

My blood went cold and I completely froze as I realised who I was talking to. There was no question about it. It was that girl – the one we had sworn we would never work with again.

Once the conversation had ended I turned back to the rest of the team, my head in my hands.

‘How the hell have we taken this order?’ I asked.

The girls said it couldn’t be her, but I knew it was. We all sat round and tried to work it out.

‘It can’t be her,’ said Leanne. ‘It’s not her name on the order.’

‘It’s her,’ I said. I was annoyed, we were in too deep: she had paid her deposit and it was a dress we knew we could do a good job with. We had to do the dress. How had we not known it was her?

It was only later that I spotted in the files that the mother had used her name to place the wedding dress order rather than use Ashleigh’s name, which would have been usual. None of us had remembered the mum’s name from the engagement order as she was very mild mannered, and so many travellers have the same surname that we really only refer to brides by their first name and the design of the dress – for example, ‘Cherry girl’ or ‘Shell girl’. That’s all we write on the files until we’ve got to know the bride and her family a bit better.

We really would have said a flat-out no, had we had realised it was Ashleigh. Not because we disliked her but because she was so relentless. But we’d made an agreement, and we’d taken the money, so before long we were busy making the dress. And, as I’d feared, we were quickly doing five times more work for that one gown than for any other customer. The phone calls, the negotiations, the questions, it felt all-consuming, and it made me protective of the rest of our customers – it wasn’t fair that their experience was being infringed upon because of one girl making a huge fuss. Even bearing in mind the years I have spent dealing with the traveller community and all their quirks, this was way beyond anything we could cope with at Nico. It wasn’t a tradition I didn’t understand, it was pure mayhem.

Part of the reason why it became such a huge saga was that Ashleigh wouldn’t talk to me directly. She would call – several times a day – but put her mother on the phone while she was in the background, yelling. I could have had a straight conversation with her and got it out of her what she wanted a bit faster, but that wasn’t how Ashleigh wanted to do things. So I had to deal with her mother trying to ‘translate’ what she wanted. It was never, ever a simple conversation.

They’d always start in the same way: ‘Ooh, Thelma,’ her mother’s now-familiar soft voice would say, ‘What she’d like is this, love.’

I would start to reply when I’d hear her shouting in the background; she thought we didn’t understand her, we were trying to make her unhappy, we were ganging up on her.

All the while she kept adding things onto the dress. The mum would phone up and say, ‘She wants these 3D Hawaiian flowers on here, here and here.’ It was as if Ashleigh would go to a wedding, see someone with something on their dress and then she would decide she wanted to have a bit of that on her dress too. Every time she went to another wedding, she’d want to add something from it as well. She wanted to outdo all of the other girls’ dresses by having something of theirs on her dress.

She went to one wedding we did a dress for – a beautiful-looking kid, a completely different dress to anything we’ve done before – and first thing in the morning she was barking instructions down the phone.

‘She’s seen Melissa’s dress,’ her mum said. ‘It was out of this world, outstanding, so handsome. Is our dress going to be better than that?’

‘Well, she paid more than you,’ was my answer. I was at the end of my tether – I take pride in my work and the work of the team here. We really didn’t like being doubted so it was as much as I could offer.

Having said that, Mrs Monaghan was always charming to me, no matter how Ashleigh was behaving in the background. She would always ask how I was; despite the demands, she was lovely to deal with.

And Ashleigh herself was a sweetheart – when I got her direct. It was only with going through the parents that things got silly. The first half of every phone call I’d be thinking, she’s OK, really, I shouldn’t have been so hard on her. But then she’d turn and the pressure would start.

She was just a 17-year-old girl and I was infuriated by how she’d get a rise out of me. At one stage she decided that she would like an extra 29 3D flowers added to her dress. Those flowers use almost an entire bag of crystals each – they are expensive but, more importantly, they are heavy. And she wanted them attached to the most lightweight of the sheer pieces of fabric that she had flowing down the top of the skirts.

Pauline called her and started explaining to her mum that there was no way we could do that for her unless we went seriously over the budget we’d been given and it would also put the delicate fabric at great risk of ripping under their weight. We were sure they’d just rip off – the whole point of that part of the dress was that it looked flyaway, like a fairy’s dress, not for holding bloody great crystal flowers on!

‘We can have them maybe dotted around other areas on the dress,’ she explained, ‘but not on the ends of those petals like that – they’ll just pull off.’

These flowers were the size of a saucer each; they were a serious amount of extra material and work. As I suspected, later that day Mrs Monaghan called about the costs: ‘Oh no, we can’t afford it.’

Away went another entire day of extra work we’d spent on the dress and now we were just met with not getting paid for the cancelled work and yet more of Ashleigh’s shouting from behind her mother. Each time we’d had one of these conversations it took up the best part of a working morning or afternoon. One minute she wanted a belly top with huge skirts. Usually, if a girl’s having a belly top, her skirts are lower on the hip and slim-fitting, creating a bit of a slinky line. And if they’re having big skirts, they tend to have a corset which covers where the skirts are fastened. My skirts are so heavy that they really need to sit up on the waist, with the girl’s hips for the lower skirts to rest on. So a belly top with big skirts really doesn’t work – it’ll either sit on the hips and slide down under their own weight, or look a fright up round her waist. But whichever way we tried to explain this to Ashleigh, she still didn’t understand why large skirts wouldn’t physically hold up on a dress like that; she would not have it.

The next minute there would be another quibble about the underskirts. Then there would be a panic about revised costs. And inevitably there would be more upsets, which often ended with the mother handing the phone over.

‘Here, you speak to Thelma,’ Mrs Monaghan would say to her daughter and then turn back to me: ‘It’s only you she listens to anyway.’

It had reached the point in the factory where it would get to about 11am – the machines would be whirring, we’d have cups of tea on the go, the banter was good – and someone would always look up and say, ‘Has Ash called yet?’

We were all waiting for it, the whole time, because we knew that once she called the mood would change and we’d be running around, trying to sort out the latest drama. It was a horrible tension to be working with by the end.

Sometimes it would be eight or nine o’clock at night and there’d be no one there but me and the phone would still be going. If I didn’t pick up it would ring again – and again, and again. It was merciless.

I couldn’t just sit there and work on a dress or catch up on paperwork. Oh no! She would carry on leaving messages.

‘It’s very important, Thelma …’

‘It’s Ashleigh’s mummy here …’

‘Thelma, we really do need to talk to you before bed …’

Eventually I would relent and it would be something silly, like, ‘Ash is wondering, have you started the flowers yet?’

I liked the woman – she was polite and kind, but a bit of a pushover. One evening when I pointed out that perhaps the fourth query of the day could have waited, she replied, ‘Ooh, you know what they’re like!’

‘Well, I know what yours is like,’ I said, ‘but if mine spoke to me like that she’d get a smack in the gob.’

I knew this woman didn’t have any more money to spend but she so wanted to make her daughter happy and give her a dream day. But Ashleigh wanted constant reassurance; the more she nagged, the more she got.

Girls that call in a lot are not uncommon, and I don’t really have a problem with it. I understand what a big deal these dresses are, for the mother and the bride. But there was only one other time we had a girl who rang as much as Ashleigh and she wasn’t nearly as much pressure. Don’t get me wrong, the constant chatting was not ideal, but this girl was a real sweetheart. She was from Belfast and we did her engagement dress, and then her wedding dress. She kept changing her mind about the engagement dress as every time she saw something she’d want it added: after many, many extra drawings the finished garment had feathers, diamonds, flowing arms and all sorts. In shocking pink too!

She’d call in for what seemed like days on end and sometimes for no real reason. She never had complaints, she didn’t seem too fussed about how the timings were coming along, and the finances were all agreed, but she’d ask for a few details of what we were up to, check on who else was getting dresses done at the time, or anything else she might think of.

At Nico, we’re open on a Saturday and often we’re there working on a dress on a Sunday too, but it took a while before Leanne realised that she was calling all weekend – from Friday night for almost 48 hours non-stop. It was starting to feel so personal.

Lovely though she was, the situation was stopping us from getting any actual work done. And after what was nearly two years, what with the engagement dress and then the wedding dress, I felt enough was enough.

In the end I had to say to her, ‘Love, this is a lot of phone calls – I’m worried that you’re not leaving us with enough time for dressmaking while you’ve been busying yourself with these chats. How can we get on with making this dress if you keep on at us like this?’

‘I just like talking to you, it’s so nice keeping in touch,’ she said.

‘It’s great, but we need to get back to the job in hand …’

‘Oh sorry, Thelma, love,’ she replied. ‘It’s just that I get my free minutes at the weekend so I like to call round whoever I can and you’re on the list.’

When I put the phone down and told the girls why she’d been ringing so much, they couldn’t believe it. We nearly died laughing when we realised we’d been being so polite all because this girl had some free minutes on her mobile contract!

The calls calmed down after that, bless her heart, but she was a very different kettle of fish to Ashleigh.

Ashleigh was her parents’ eldest, and it was beyond me how she managed to secure this much power over her mother. What we didn’t know, until the day she came to collect the dress, was that she had even more power over her dad.

I was pleasantly surprised by how pretty Ashleigh was when she eventually turned up at the factory. She had very dark hair and fine features. When she came in – on time – she had a real sparkle and I thought that finally, everything was going to be OK.

She walked into the room where her dress stood on a mannequin and gasped. There was tension throughout the factory as we all looked at each other, waiting for her reaction. Her hands flew to her mouth and she took a deep breath.

‘I love it!’ she screeched.

We all smiled and let out a heavy sigh of relief.

‘It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before – oh my God!’

She really was thrilled, and so was I. We left her to it so that she could start getting out of her clothes to try it on, and waited next door. Then, all of a sudden, almighty screams were coming from the room. I ran in, completely panicked by what could have gone wrong.

‘What’s happened?’

‘There should be 29 flowers on here!’ she shrieked.

‘Yes, love, we had this conversation – a few times. They would have ripped this fairy wing fabric,’ I explained, stroking the petals to show what I meant.

She was crying so much that she couldn’t actually get any words out. She literally wasn’t making sense. I had heard this down the telephone before, but I had never witnessed it in the flesh.

‘Ashleigh, love,’ I said. ‘Look at the dress – go through it from top to bottom – then you tell us specifically what is not right and we can fix it. Start at the top and we’ll work down. Make a list. Right? Every point of the dress! Standing there crying is not going to do you any good. Stand there, take this pen, and work your way down.’

But she was still crying and her mum was just standing there, consoling her. ‘Ashleigh, Ashleigh,’ she kept repeating. Her dad had his head in his hands.

‘Do you want a cup of coffee, love?’ I asked the mum, just looking at her.

‘Yes please, Thelma,’ she replied in the world-weary voice that I’d heard so many times before.

So I went into the kitchen, made her a coffee, put it on the table in front of her and closed the door for her.

‘I love the dress so much, Thelma,’ she said, sadly. ‘I’m really pleased. And I know Ash is too – she’s always like this, though.’

We could still hear her sobs in the kitchen. It was as if she had no way of expressing any extreme of emotion other than this. Crying was the only way she knew to get what she wanted. She’d worked herself up into such a state.

The thing is, you have to remember, this was the day Ashleigh had been dreaming of for years. It’s the same for all my young traveller brides, so while it’s hard to deal with at the time, you have to bear in mind what a big day it is. The trying-on day is when all their dreams are realised – it is their princess moment. But poor Ashleigh was out of control.

Pauline was in the other room trying to deal with it, trying to persuade her to at least try the dress on and see what it looked like on her. She got out the book with the sketch in it and showed Ashleigh that we had done exactly as we were asked. We were at a loss as to how or where we had gone wrong.

‘I know, I know! But it hasn’t got this on, or these flowers!’ she belted out. Her hands were flailing about, pointing at vague areas where she knew that we had not really made any mistakes.

‘But your mum’s only got a certain amount of money, love,’ I heard Pauline say, trying to placate her. I felt that I must step in at this point: ‘Apart from it looking ridiculous if we’d added all the extras you wanted, your mum only has a certain amount that she can pay for,’ I told her.

‘I won’t wear it like that, I won’t wear it like that!’ she kept saying.

‘You’ve already got nine flowers on there for nothing, love – we just did it to try and keep you happy.’

This was true. Despite my instincts, I had actually given her a huge amount of free work and detail, just to try and make everyone’s lives easier. I left her with her pen and paper, trying to make the list of specific problems. Her mum was at the kitchen table, staring down at her mug.

‘I could do with you on the day of the wedding,’ she told me, ‘just to calm her down.’

A little while later Ash came to the door of the kitchen and her face was completely streaked in black from her make-up running, where she’d been crying. Pauline had failed to persuade her to try the dress on so she could see how great it was. So we tried to get her to wipe her face and go and enjoy her moment but we were met with more tears.

‘You know me! You know me …’

And then the crying began in earnest. Ashleigh got up and ran out into the street, where her dad was waiting in the car.

Five minutes later, Marta – one of the girls from the factory – came in from having a cigarette.

‘That girl is still crying out there,’ she told us. ‘She’s just pacing up and down the road.’

Marta was right, but I don’t know whose attention she hoped to get out there because it’s a quiet road by some industrial buildings. It’s not a fancy area, so I was glad that Pauline’s mission to get her into those skirts had failed or she would have been at risk of mucking up her skirts.

She kept going, though. It was like a physical release, like she had to get something out of herself: she was wailing and grabbing at her hair as if she was a mad person in ancient Greece. Even the seagulls were going mad at the noise! It was the kind of crying that always, always gives you a headache when you’re the one doing it. How she hadn’t worn herself out yet …

I watched her for a bit. In the end it was all of us on the street in silence, just watching her run up and down, pulling at her hair. We must have looked as if we were at Wimbledon: heads turning left, heads turning right …

Just leave her, I said. Let her run up and down – she’ll burn it off; she needs to learn to calm herself down. So we went inside and had a cup of coffee.

Eventually we got the dad in and offered him a coffee. He was thrilled to be out of the firing line and before long, Ashleigh had found her way back inside too.

‘I’ve never seen a dress like this in my life,’ her dad said, nodding at the mannequin. ‘It’s something else. But I knew she’d be like this – she’s like this wherever we go.’

She was sobbing and stammering, big wracking sobs that went through her whole body.

The drama was non-stop. You’ve never seen anything like it in all your life. I mean we’ve had reactions in our time – this place is no stranger to a tantrum. But I have never, ever seen a girl react like that – about anything. It was un-believeable! Especially as she couldn’t even specify what was actually upsetting her.

‘What is it?’ I said for the umpteenth time. ‘What is actually wrong?’

It was time for me to put my foot down, as it looked as if no one else was going to. ‘Stop screaming or I’m not going to let you have the dress at all – I’ve had enough! You tell me now: what is it that you want?’

‘Well,’ she began, her shoulders still juddering. ‘Do you think, um, well … What do you think, so what can I do about …?’

Sheepishly she pointed at some areas that she felt weren’t up to scratch. She really was pulling at straws now …

‘Right! You want some of those flowers filled in. I have told you now that your mum does not have the money for any more.’

‘But I want a bigger flower here!’ Her bottom lip wobbled.

In the end we agreed to shuffle some stuff around, to create a different, fuller look. We moved flowers to create different effects.

But then when she tried the dress on, the problems started all over again. ‘I want it tighter,’ she demanded. ‘I want it tighter!’

‘Well, if you want it even tighter than this then we’re going to have to take an inch off each side because the corset is overlapping now.’ Seconds later she’d be gasping: ‘Ooh, I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! Why, Thelma, why?’

‘You’re saying you can’t breathe and you want it tighter?’

‘Yes, but I still want it tighter.’

‘But if you can’t breathe now, and you have it tighter, think what it’s going to be like then.’

‘Oh, I think I’m going to faint – I just can’t breathe, I can’t breathe!’

In the end, I just said: ‘Yes, we’ll do that,’ just to make her think she’d had it her own way.

It was still another day’s work, though, and we’d put a ridiculous amount of effort into that dress already, and we all knew that she’d just been saying things because she needed to justify the fuss that she’d made – there was no other explanation.

The next morning she returned to see the finished dress with its amendments. Every single girl in the company had worked extra to get that dress how she wanted it: extra flowers, taking in the corset, all of it. In this instance crying really did get her what she wanted, despite everything I’ve always told Katrina, my youngest. I hate to say it, but we just wanted shot of her.

She couldn’t hide the smile on her face when she came in, though – she absolutely loved the dress, and we knew it.

When she put it on, she looked a dream and she could not have been more charming – you’d never have known she could be such a terror and she even laughed about her behaviour with us.

I told her that she’d made such a fuss that I’d put her in this book but she just grinned and looked thrilled that her attention-seeking mission had proved such a success.

But in time, when I had had a bit of a think about the drama, I came to the conclusion that she really wasn’t worried about the line of diamonds running across her cleavage that she had mentioned – she was panicking that she was about to lose control over her parents because she was soon to become a married woman. She didn’t know if her husband would be as quick to bend to her will, even though her dad told me he was very laid back!

I think that if she’d had those 29 flowers ripping the fabric to shreds as she’d requested, she would still have done the same thing. It was her transition to womanhood that she was crying about, not the dress. She just wanted to keep her mum and dad to hand to keep sorting things out for her, even though on this occasion there wasn’t anything to sort out. It was kind of checking, to keep up her skills as best she could. I never went to that wedding, though. When she left the shop, I leant against the door and slid down it in relief.

A week later I phoned to see how it had gone and she said the wedding wasn’t for another month. She had lied about the date to get the dress there with enough extra for a little tantrum time!