Zero History

pale Scandinavian wood, emerging into the first of two very large bright rooms,
chandeliers glittering above carefully arranged racks of clothing, glass-topped display
tables and pieces of period furniture.
This year’s iteration of the Salon du Vintage was devoted to the Eighties, she knew
from having Googled it. She always found it peculiar to encounter a time she had actually
lived through rendered as a period. It made her wonder whether she was living through
another one, and if so, what it would be called. The first decades of the current century
hadn’t yet acquired any very solid nomenclature, it seemed to her. Seeing relatively recent
period clothing, particularly, gave her an odd feeling. She guessed that she unconsciously
revised the fashion of her own past, turning it into something more contemporary. It was
never quite as she remembered it. Shoulders tended to be peculiar, hems and waistlines
not where she expected them to be.
Not that her own Eighties had been anything like Gaultier, Mugler, Alaïa and Montana,
which she was now gathering was the version mainly being presented here.
She checked the handwritten price tag on a mulberry wool Mugler jacket. If Heidi were
here, she decided, and were into this sort of thing, which she wasn’t, fuckstick’s
remaining credit cards could probably be flatlined in an hour, with the resulting swag still
fitting easily in a single cab.
She looked up, then, and winced at herself, in Anton Corbijn’s 1996 portrait, enlarged
and dry-mounted, suspended with transparent fishing line above the rack of Mugler.
Anachronism, she thought. Not even her era.
Eager to escape the portrait, she declined an offer to try the Mugler on. Turning away,
she brought out her iPhone. Bigend seemed to pick up before his phone had had a chance
to ring.
“Do you have someone else here, Hubertus?”
“No,” he said. “Should I?”
“You didn’t have someone watching us, in Selfridges?”
“No.”
“Milgrim thinks he’s seen someone, someone he saw there.”
“Always a possibility, I suppose. Paris office hasn’t been told you’re there. Would you
like some company?”
“No. Just checking.”
“Do you have anything for me?”
“Not yet. Just got here. Thanks.” She hung up before he could say goodbye. Stood
there with her arm cocked, phone at ear-level, suddenly aware of the iconic nature of her
unconscious pose. Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places,
that had once belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones. Human figures, a block
down the street, in postures utterly familiar, were no longer smoking. The woman in
Corbijn’s portrait had never seen that.
The number Clammy had given her the night before rang several times before it was