Suit fitting

Look, me and suits go like penis and blenders. It seems foolish and feels worse.

Suits, they’re for real men – men running for trains with cummerbunds flapping behind like some kind of heterosexual vapour trail.

Half the problem is they’re far too hard to get right. You see all these men in suits and you know they’re in the club. They’re the bonus you wear – a massive cotton-rich condom, designed to sheath six feet of dick. And like the rank banana jonnies you bought that time, lobbing sweaty quids in the machine and praying nobody came in the bogs behind you, they never fit right.

In the city centre, a suit equals value-added homogeneity. You accessorise a suit with a job in recruitment and a pair of tan brothel-creepers. Wear a suit and you’ll notice your forefingers start to point in the direction of anything good. Wear a suit, and you’ve suddenly got chalky lines appearing places you’d normally keep a pen.

Suits, they make your shadow broader; sharpen your shoulders. But really you’re only wearing a suit because you think rapists don’t.

And yet it’s Saturday morning, and I’m travelling up a long, ponderous escalator to try one.

It’s the longest escalator. I’m thinking, the suit I really want comes with a lance, not a brolly. I’m into a fortress of real men, thinking, they’re bastard everywhere and nobody wears a good one.

The suit shop is a foppish sort of hell. The walls were sewn on Savile Row. I’m wearing a hat, but the trilbys are smiling back at me. Boots and boots and brothel-creepers. Socks, with every day of the week stitched into them. Mannequins – totems of strange alabaster muscle. I might as well be inside Hugh Grant, rubbing my crotch, snorting Lynx deodorant and watching Die Hard films, back to back.

I do what you do when you don’t have a clue, and that is stand on the spot, turning circles.

A man spots me from a distance and snaps a tape measure shut.

I think he says, Tryen a suit!

I think so, I tell him, but I don’t have the first clue about suits.

He says other things, his voice thickly Scots. He turns a mean phrase, Captain Suit. It was a kind face once – you can tell that much – but it’s misshapen by the long pursuit of commission. You’re a suit salesman in a suit shop, fella. You didn’t even make the car lot.

Then his suity pal strolls over, another balding pleb; another indecipherable beady-eyed Scot. This one walks like a sad pigeon, scaffolding his belly with his belt. He says hello. I go red.

It’s the weirdest thing being measured on sight. I say I might prefer a slim-fitting one. That’s what the press-ups are for. Already they’re talking to each other about my tits and shoulders and noodly legs. Then, one of them, the fattest of the two, says, try the thirty-six.

Well I’m many things, but a thirty-six inch chest I’m not. How hard do you have to fall on a tape measure’s edge to draw blood? Look at my hair, Captain Suit. Look at my orange hair, you rotund, rolly savage. We’re lumps from the same gravy. Help a brother out.

I take my jacket off and pick out some flash grey number. He nods. When you’re ginger you accept from an early age that no colours look good. It’s grey, or it’s navy, or it’s turn the light off and pretend you haven’t noticed. Green for the rest. And black is far too severe – with skin this pale you’re nothing if not a photocopy.

I put the suit jacket on, shuffling the collar like dads do. It’s crushing my chest together and I can’t move my arms. Captain Suit and his pal are smiling and cooing and wanting for sausages, and I stand there looking back at myself from a mirror, all sharp lines and weird creases. I’m growing redder.

I’m a cross between Kate Bush and a dying flower. I’m going home.