The Intern

He wore my face in a clumsy expression, with eyes that lingered on the floor and an intern’s meager voice that echoed off the walls built on tradition and nepotism. Their wings clipped by the room’s noise of fashion degrees and wealthy parents, his words stumbled, then fell from his tongue in my familiar way and landed squarely on the meeting table. The table’s selection of tailor’s shears and fine fabrics became macabre instruments of a post-mortem examination on those words that died the moment they left his throat. They might have buried them on the spot, another intern’s corpse beneath the corporate floorboards, had the central London, Savile Row address not been too rich for his blood.

The intern carried out the bulk of his sentence on Savile Row in this fashion. Ever building his courage to speak up in design meetings and research presentations, only to be quickly reminded with transparent smiles and every way to say ‘No’ in the English—and sometimes French—language that he was after all, only an intern. He sat at the dawn of his last week in the tailor’s, hunched over a slice of desk they’d lent to him, looking busy and doing a lot of nothing important. Perched alone on the far side of the table, he braved a glance at the four designers across from him, doing much the same as him, though far more qualified to do it. Returning his gaze, he stared through the mood board on his screen and into his reflection, wherein lied a visage much like mine. The white glow stung his eyes and stained the lines in that tired face, a face not handsome enough to be noteworthy, but not so un-noteworthy that its un-noteworthiness in itself warranted attention. His curls of dirty-blond hair caught the fluorescent light and framed in shadow a pair of sharp-ish cheeks the past week had lazily clad in patchy stubble. In each pixel of his mirror he found a new reason to stand his ground, with each mindless dragging of the mouse he slumped closer to giving his parentally appointed superiors a piece of his mind.

Entirely undeterred by the intern’s silent protest, the imperative voice of the production manager filled the air, with an ample frame that rose above the horizon of his computer as he politely demanded “Quiet please” over a room already sufficiently quiet. Drinking in the imagined applause like a small-town stage performer, he readied himself and prepared a sarcastic tone—“I’ve just received word that we are so lucky as to expect a visit from our gracious benefactor and owner at some point tomorrow”. He spat as he spoke with a voice so corrosive and a grin so laden with jealousy, his flecks of spittle might’ve burned right through the table between them. The intern was deaf to his manager’s ladder-climbing resentment, instead, his ears rang with the sound of opportunity as the beginnings of a smile rode across his face “What time is he coming?”. The words left his lips with an eagerness that surprised even himself and drew stares from all present as their manager almost choked on the dramatic pause he was drinking in.

“Well… he didn’t say. Doesn’t matter. It’s an executives meeting only.”

Ignoring all but what he needed from the manager’s response, his eyes returned to the mood boards and endless tabs of research that had imprisoned him for the past six weeks. Though now he pored through their pages with purpose while excitement brought a colour to his cheeks that fought off the clinical office lights. The passage of time was far less offensive to him that day, and by six o’clock he was on the train home to the countryside, though his mind remained at work and its traffic resembled the city. With every passing field of sheep and crops I know so well, he planned each step he’d take to shake the owner’s hand and smoothed the edges of the words he’d deliver. The manager’s stifled laugh entrenched itself in his ears and the dismissive nods of the designers marched on his mind as their contempt dug its spurs into the flanks of his determination. He’d readied the troops of his ideas and arranged them in rank and file alongside the perfect degree of flattery. To him, that moment alone would be his foot in the door, a chance to sneak through the Trojan walls of the industry with a wooden horse handshake.

As unusually welcome dawn stretched her rosy fingers across the sky come morning, the intern stumbled through the office doors like a fumbling pack-mule, his thin and pasty arms wrapped hopelessly round armfuls of binders and rolls of fabric. From beneath the mountains of Japanese silk and Sicilian linen, and in between desperate grabs at the papers slipping through his fingers, he caught a glimpse of an unfamiliar grey-haired man striding across the office towards the manager. His heart and its faltering bravado dropped as fast as his samples and research, which hit the floor with an awkward thump but seemed not to register with the owner, whom he now recognised from the website. Bundling up his goods and stacking them beside the towering clothing racks, the intern brushed off his suit and repelled the pangs of self-doubt whilst he took his seat and watched with polite discretion as the owner addressed his design team. He was enamored by the restrained authority that seeped through his well-tailored suit and the sheer ownership of the man’s movements as he passed by the great windows that stood behind the designers, attending to each in turn. He peered over the peaks of the monitors and studied the silhouette that danced subtlety before him, the chalky pinstripes and calm grey flannel somehow settling his mind as he prepared to unleash himself. The well-dressed monolith of success shook the last hand by the windows and every muscle in the intern’s body tightened, seizing his breath as a weapon. He surveyed every wrinkled finger as they disengaged with those of the last designer and immediately made to spring from his chair. Mid-flight he was met with a brief smile and nod of feigned recognition before the owner turned on his heels and disappeared just as abruptly as he’d arrived. He mustered a weak attempt at nonchalance as he sunk heavily back into his chair, stretching a pathetic smile across his face, through which escaped a soft whimper, as though the very soul of his speech had abandoned him as well. He glared into the windows across from him with the glazed eyes of defeat, cruelly examining the reflection he saw staring back with a face so rudely out of place. A face that knew it didn’t belong. A face that I finally accepted as my own.