If tailors were like Elite engineers
03 Sep 2021Marchogion
I pull up outside the shop and rev the engine on my car just once to hear the whine of its turbocharger. It still puts a smile on my face.With one hand holding my backpack I get out and walk up to the shop’s door.
Jackrabbit Tailoring, it says in large letters that stretch across the two blacked-out windows and the central entrance. I lay a hand on the door and push my way inside.
“Hey,” comes a drowsy sounding female voice as soon as I enter the dingy space beyond. The air smells of old cloth and sharp chemicals. “I think you’re in the wrong place.”
“I don’t think so,” I say and stroll over to the counter where a young woman in red overalls is slumped over a pile of textiles cut into pattern shapes and marked with chalk outlines, a curtain of dark hair hiding her face.
I pull a slip of paper from my wallet and flatten it down in front of her. “Receipt from Merricabs showing that I took a trip to Inverness and back in a taxi. One thousand, one hundred and eight miles exactly.”
She perks up at this and squints at the receipt. She looks up into my eyes.
“Duuude,” she says slowly, a grin growing on her lips. “How was it? Did you get to really appreciate the journey, see the sights, expand your horizons? You can’t get proper tailoring done if you don’t have the right perspective on the world.”
“Well,” I say, rubbing my brow with one hand. “Fascinating as every service station on the A1 is, I can’t say it really showed me anything new. The driver didn’t have much conversation and he crashed straight into four roundabouts and just acted like nothing had happened.”
She nods as if this is the precise wisdom she expected me to earn on the trip. “And?”
“And?”
“And what else?”
I heft my backpack and dump it on the counter. I unzip the top and unload five heavy brick-like objects wrapped tightly in brown packing tape.
“And five kilos of uncut Columbian cocaine.”
She cackles gleefully and produces a terrifyingly large combat knife from beneath the counter. She slits the side of one of the packages with the tip, releasing a cascade of snowy-white powder onto the counter.
“Niiice,” she coos, shaping the pile into a rough line and then inhaling the whole lot with a sound like a Hoover sucking up wet ham. She slaps her free hand twice on the table then stabs the tip of the knife into the surface, leaving it stuck and quivering, and stares at me, her eyelids flickering erratically. “Thaaaaat’s the stuff!”
“Glad you like it,” I say. “Do you know what it took to get hold of that? You can’t just buy that much uncut in a supermarket. I’ve had to become the cocaine kingpin of southern England and forge links with the Medellin Cartel. I’m wanted by Interpol and the Yardies have put a hit out on me!”
“All worth it in the end, though,” she says, drawing the rest of the bricks into a hug. “Now I can work!”
“Good.” I reach into my backpack again and pull out a rather crumpled pair of jeans. “I’d like some extra pockets sewn into these,” I say, laying them down in front of her.
“Right! Right,” she says, bustling out from behind the counter and assaulting my legs with a tape measure. “Thirty nine...thirty two...six...no problem, squire! I’ll just need a few things from you.”
“Oh, here we go,” I mutter.
She stands back up and fixes me with a manic stare, her whole body seeming to quiver in place.
“I’m going to need three tubes of Araldite, a RAM upgrade for a Macbook Pro,” she says, glaring at me. “You getting all this?” she asks, ticking items off on her fingers.
I nod with resignation.
“OK, the glue, the memory, CAD files detailing the designs of at least three different airliners, a list of everything stored at the local pharmacy and, finally, a complete inventory of all post-1947 firearms in the Royal Armouries collection.”
“Alright,” I say, groaning inwardly. I had expected as much. “That’s all you need?”
She picks up my trousers, flicks her wrists to unfold them and regards them critically. “Well...what level are these trousers?”
“Level?”
She looks at me as if I’m an idiot. “Yeah, you can’t put extra pockets on level one trousers. Everyone knows that!”
I close my eyes for a moment, gathering strength. “How much will you need to...I don’t know, train my trousers to level two?”
“Oh, nothing,” she says brightly. “Any old trouser-monger can upgrade them. You’ll only need a sewing pattern, a blood pressure monitor, a transformer from a thirty kilowatt power station, some titanium and about ten thousand pounds worth of graphene.”
I take a deep, calming breath and take the trousers back from her. “I guess I’ll just need to get it done,” I say. “I need to carry the extra ammo now the Yardies are after me.”
“Oh!” she exclaims, looking mournful. “You can’t carry bullets in my pockets!”
“What? Why not?”
She looks at me in disbelief. “Wrong kind of pocket. You really don’t know anything about tailoring, do you?”
“Apparently not,” I grate out. “So who can I see about getting pockets I can keep extra ammunition in?”
She gives me her manic grin again, eyes disturbingly wide. “I’ll introduce you to my friend! He can make bullet pockets. In fact you can only put bullets in his pockets.”
“Fine, fff...fine,” I say through gritted teeth, “and what does he want before he’ll talk to me?”
“Opinion polls. Lots and lots of opinion polls. More opinion polls than is reasonable or sane.”
“Well, at least that shouldn’t be a problem. I can just get them from the Ipsos Mori website.”
She sighs and shakes her head, covering her eyes with one delicate hand. “No, no, no, no, not that kind of opinion poll. You need the kind you get when you break into someone’s holiday cabin, murder them and then steal any they have from their personal computer, obviously.”
I pause for a moment then give in. “Obviously,” I say, turning to go. “Obviously I need to become a resort serial killer like Jason Voorhees to get some pockets sewn into my jeans. If only he’d thought to capitalise on all his hard work and get some tailoring done he might have calmed down a bit.”
“Good! I’ll tell him you’re coming, then,” she says brightly, one hand rubbing vigorously at her nose.
“This is bullshit,” I say, one hand on the door. “There’s one opinion poll for him.”