Status Symbol

Kate was typing “visual hallucinations causes” into her browser when a customer stole her attention.

The woman looked like a ball of crumpled grocery bags amid the designer purses. It didn’t help that she was carrying one – a grocery bag, that was, stretched and wrinkled plastic that rustled when she walked. Kate instinctively checked to make sure its contents weren’t dripping onto the floor.

Kate winced at her classism. That wasn’t a charitable way to judge a potential customer. Not a viewpoint the store would endorse. And then she saw the woman raise a hand to stroke the white leather of one of the dangling crossbodies, her fingers stained so black she might have just been handling coal.

“Can I help you find something?” Kate mouthed, her voice so small and tinny it didn’t make it across the floor.

The woman was examining every purse with a sort of rapt fascination, as if they were precious objects d’art. Which in a way, Kate figured, they were. Opulent handbags in soft leather and shiny vinyl, shaped like flowers and exotic animals and arranged artfully on white slabs. Women who would never drop one hundred dollars on a bag, let alone five hundred, regularly came in just to look at them. The store may as well have been an art gallery. 

Except galleries have display cases. And alarms. Sirens that blare if someone was to get too close.

The woman had moved on to the Valentine’s line, arrayed at the front of the store like chocolates in a heart-shaped box. Delicate necklaces in rose gold; branded socks, notebooks, and card holders, in pale pink or white leather with red hearts – a glam but affordable gift from a new boyfriend, if one had a boyfriend. (Kate didn’t, but liked to imagine hers would buy her something from this collection). The centrepiece was a heart-shaped purse so red it seemed to drip blood. When she’d opened it to check the pulse price, Kate had been overcome by visions of lonely women having their chests cut open, gloved hands reaching to extract the beating organs within. 

The woman stared at that purse for a long time, but wouldn’t touch it. Small Blessings, Kate thought, then remembered that was the name of last season’s clutch line.

Kate liked to believe simply stepping into the store made one feel worthy of the items they sold. But that hadn’t always been true: back when she was just a window-shopper with frizzy hair and a pizza face, beautiful items had made her feel self-conscious. The first time Kate dared venture into one of these shops, she was convinced the staff would peg her as a shoplifter, even though the sales assistant’s dance recital smile and warm, Is there anything I can help you find today? betrayed no judgment. No personal opinion at all, really. Which was the ideal; you were here to represent the brand, not yourself.

Kate mimicked that long-gone shop girl’s inscrutability. Avoiding scrutiny of the grocery bag and ill-fitting winter jacket, Kate made herself a wall of pleasantries as she echoed: “Is there anything I can help you with?”

The other woman glared, eyes as grey as the bags underneath. “I work here.”

Kate didn’t recognize her. “Are you from one of our other locations…?”

“I’m here to quit,” her newfound co-worker cut in.

Kate looked over her shoulder as if hoping the manager – off that day – would materialize from the back. “Jean-Paul’s out, but I can take down your name if you’d like to give him a message.” Kate liked how that came out – professional and efficient, which was how you should appear to anyone who crossed the threshold here, whoever they may be. You never knew who might be a mystery shopper or a slovenly millionaire.

The woman dropped her sac onto the cash Kate was manning. “Just give this back to him. Tell him I gave it a shot and I don’t want it anymore.” She stalked out of the store and into the mall, tracking February slush across the tiles.

Kate was convinced there was something alive in the bag, or something that had once been. A soft-eared rabbit peeled off the highway, pink organs poking out beneath folds of silky fur. She wanted to pick it up by the handles and drop it into a garbage can – in the food court maybe, somewhere far from the store. But she’d been told to give the bag to Jean-Paul. And what was more, she really didn’t want to touch it.

But she couldn’t just leave it on the counter. This wasn’t a junk shop. Taking care not to touch the mass within, she unknotted the handles. To her surprise, inside was one of the store’s trademark silk dust bags – and inside that, an item Kate had always coveted but never laid eyes upon.

The brand’s flagship purse. 

The Jane was an icon, a status symbol for a generation of young career women. The leather was dyed a sedate but vibrant shade of pink (fun, but not too distracting for the office), the lining bright as cotton candy – a secret known only by those with access to the bag’s inner sanctum. The style was simple and chic, elegant but youthful, and the price point demarked quality without being unaffordable. It was the brand’s most popular item for three seasons, discontinued to save it from becoming cliché. They’d re-created the design as part of a Legally Blonde-inspired line a few years back, but it wasn’t an exact reproduction: the leather pink had been more garish, the lining yellow. This purse, dumped like garbage by the strange woman, looked like an original Jane.

There was only one way to tell.

The zipper stuck as she pulled it open. When she peered inside to inspect the lining, a sickly sweet scent breached her nostrils. Kate’s head swam, black dots floating in front of her eyes, like maybe the bag was full of rotting meat, after all, and now the flies had come. And they must be swarming both her eyeballs, because everything was dark.

When her vision returned, Kate was surrounded by glittering pink. 

Her first impression was that she was standing inside a tunnel made of candyfloss. But when she ran her hands across the wall, the material was solid and cold. A closer look revealed clusters of perfect gemstones, so delicate they looked like swirling fairy dust.

She spun around slowly, failing to identify her point of entry. The pink cave seemed endless, its corridors stretching for blocks before curving out of sight. The colouring of the stones became darker and richer as the corridor got deeper, creating an almost vaginal effect. In the distance, Kate heard tinkling, like a thousand champagne bottles clinking. She followed the sound, emerging into a quarry. 

The rockface here was a thousand shades of rose, cherry blossom, razzle dazzle and tickle me, pure and unmarred. On the ground and on scaffolds, women in red coveralls chipped at the walls, filling wheelbarrows with sparking pink powder. Wheelbarrows were emptied into oil barrels, which were in turn loaded onto trailers pulled by zebras and unicorns along a precarious ramp leading up and out of the quarry.

So this was where the magic was mined. The intangible that made the brand’s creations so enchanting. What the original Jane had been stitched from and dyed with.

Someone tapped her shoulder. “You replacing Christine?” Before Kate could answer, the forewoman handed her a pickaxe. “Helmets are in the bin. These rocks may look insubstantial, but in a cave-in, they’ll knock your block off.”

The work left Kate’s hands raw and her shoulders aching, the soft tink tink of the hammers building to a tinnitus that made her feel like her own skull was being chipped at, rather than the rock. But that was more of an Alexander McQueen aesthetic. 

In the second hour of her shift, Kate watched a woman fall to the ground after a chunk of stone came loose and struck her on the temple. She landed on her back after her knees crumpled, blue eyes fixed blankly at the ceiling. Blood dripped from her forehead to her cheek, red as the Valentine’s centrepiece. A pair of workers dragged the unconscious woman off the line as the forewoman yelled at Kate to take her place.

She’d only two hours left in her schedule at the store, but her shift in the cave felt longer. By the time she joined her colleagues in line to clock out, her back was stooped and her feet had erupted in blisters. The woman behind her smirked at Kate’s bloodied pumps. “You’ll know to wear better shoes next time,” she said. Kate gritted her teeth.

One after another, broken and weary women shuffled toward a punch-clock (fire engine red with rounded edges, similar in style to the limited edition alarm clocks rolled out in 2005), punched out, and then disappeared in plumes of pink smoke, coveralls slumping lifeless on the ground. By the time Kate reached the front of the queue, the pile of discarded uniforms was taller than she was. The sweet scent filled her nose again as she inserted her punch card, and she felt suddenly weightless, a fairy fluttering on hummingbird wings and pixie dust, shrinking smaller and smaller until the dust molecules were planets, battling over who would pull her into their orbit.

And then she was standing behind the cash, watching the desktop power down, register locked up. The Jane sat primly on the counter, waiting for her. 

Her first impulse was to flee the store and never return, leaving the bag for her replacement. Instead, she picked it up, experimented with its weight. Looking guiltily over her shoulder, like she was that underage presumed shoplifter again, she carried it over to the mirror on the east wall. Kate was shocked by how haggard she looked. But the bag somehow tied the whole look together, made her appear polished even though her feet were bleeding and her face was caked with sweat and smeared mascara. 

Kate held the purse at hip level and turned to the left and right, whispering its name like a prayer. 

The Jane. The ultimate status symbol for today’s young woman who isn’t afraid to work hard – but wants to do it in style. It was Kate’s now – and you know what? She’d earned it. She was committed to the Brand, unlike that quitter Christine. After she locked up tonight, Kate would strut out the store with that bag and know she was worthy of it. And then she’d come back to that mine tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, content knowing she played a small part in producing something beautiful.

It would be hard work, but at least they weren’t asking her to cut out her heart.