Things to Make and Mend

by Ruth Thomas

  Take care, when threading the needle, not to use too long a thread because it will be inclined to knot. There is no need to knot the end of the thread. An unknotted thread makes for a neater finish.

  *

  Sally used to write quickly, heedlessly, her ink-pen pressing a groove into her finger.

  ‘Put your sewing away neatly now, girls, and tidy up,’ Miss Button would shout after fifteen minutes’ dictation and an hour’s hopeless practical. And there would follow a desolate scraping of chairs, a flinging of material scraps into the scraps bucket, a lobbing of cotton reels into the haberdashery cupboard. At the back of the cupboard lurked the sequin box, which had been there for years and was hardly ever brought out. It was pretty, like a tiny treasure chest. Sally used to like that sequin box. But there was never time to apply sequins to things.

  *

  All the girls in her class that year had worn long, floating scarves. Rowena’s was turquoise and green and had a badge pinned to it that Sally had given her. It said, in tiny letters, ‘What are you staring at?’ Sally’s was blue. They used to wear them all day, even though scarves were disapproved of by the teachers. Memos had been passed around the staffroom.

  ‘Remove that unbecoming item now please, Rowena Cresswell,’ Miss Button would say as she strode past their table of gloomy pattern-cutters. And Rowena would begin to pull the scarf slowly from her neck. But then, when Miss Button had moved on, she would stop. Style, allure, was important, particularly at the end of the day when encountering boys from the school up the road. You would take your scarf off and put it back on again when the teachers were not looking. Sitting at your desk, you would wrap it several times around your neck, put your hands up to your round, moon-like face (your nails varnished apple green, your hair long and sweeping), and sigh. Sometimes you would put a Black Jack in your mouth and chew. Black Jacks were ironic. Eating Black Jacks (while sewing and wearing floating scarfs) was ironic. This was the tail-end of the dreamy Seventies. The punk look had begun to clash with that of the skulking hippy. Rowena and Sally still dressed somewhat feyly, like medieval ladies-in-waiting. They would peer at Miss Button through their long fringes and tap their green-varnished fingernails against their cheeks. Sally kept her packet of Black Jacks on her lap or behind the big Bernini sewing machine, and would take it out to share with Rowena when Miss Button was not looking. By eleven-fifteen the packet would be empty and they would feel slightly sick, mainly with themselves. Their needlework was not progressing. They had both been working on the same blouson for months. Sally had not even got as far as sewing on the neck interfacing.

  ‘Hey, Ro.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you think Miss Button’s got new eyeliner? A blue one? Not her usual lovely mud shade …’

  ‘Mm-hmm. I think it’s one of those glittery ones. You know, like those ones we looked at in Boots.’

  ‘Do you think she’s going out on a date?’

  ‘Well, who could resist? With that eyeliner on?’

  ‘I think she’s …’

  ‘Sally Tuttle,’ Miss Button’s voice snapped, interrupting her own dictation. ‘Are you with us? What was that last sentence about?’

  ‘It was about knots.’

  ‘It was not,’ Miss Button said. ‘It was not “abaht” knots. The knots sentence was two sentences back. Stop nattering and keep up.’

  Sally looked at Miss Button, sitting behind her de-luxe teacher’s sewing machine, wearing fluffy red earmuffs, like a helicopter pilot at the controls. Miss Button the rebel. As well as eyeliner and foundation, she was fond of lacy bras which she wore beneath slightly see-through cheesecloth blouses: her underwear was clearly visible in the summertime.

  ‘Say how,’ Sally,’ Miss Button said with that flattening, teacherish attempt at humour. ‘How now brown cow.’

  ‘Haah naah braahn caah,’ Sally said.

  Miss Button sighed and contemplated the top of her head for a moment.

  Sally did use to try very, very hard, like Liza Doolittle, but her vowels would slip. And sometimes she wondered if her status as ‘fortunate girl’ was slipping too. Maybe she would have her grant rescinded, or be thrown out of school before she got a chance to do her exams. Perhaps the teachers would write reports on her. Fundamentally too common for St Hilary’s and will amount to nothing. But she didn’t really care that much. Because of her secret life, secret from everyone except Rowena.

  First life: schoolgirl.

  Second life: girlfriend.

  And she used to think about the ‘half life’ of carbon dating that they had discussed in History. The older something was, the less of a half-life it had. It was infinitesimally reduced. Or increased. Or something. Actually Sally was rather baffled by carbon dating. Half lives. Half a life. Second lives. A lot of people seemed to lead them though.

  *

  She has had to tell Sue and Linda about winning the award. There was no way to avoid it: it was all over the newspapers. I am the local woman made good, she thinks, the blood rushing to her face. I am the needleworker plucked from obscurity.

  ‘Good on you,’ says Sue. ‘I’m bloody jealous. I could do with nine thousand squid.’

  ‘So I suppose you’re going to leave us now?’ Linda asks, going to the overlocker to rattle up a seam.

  ‘No,’ Sally replies, like someone who has just won Who Wants to be a Millionaire? ‘My life is going to go on as normal.’

  ‘Pull the other one,’ says Sue. ‘Just go, girl, while the going’s good.’

  ‘I’m quite happy here really. I’d miss it, actually.’

  ‘You’ve become institutionalised,’ says Linda. ‘Like those prisoners who can’t face leaving prison.’

  ‘No I haven’t. I probably will hand my notice in.’

  ‘Hark at her. Lady Muck.’

  And Sally laughs, slightly thrown by the mixture of praise and envy. The push and pull of their affection.

  ‘You’re always going on about how hot it is,’ Linda points out, ‘and the customers being rude.’

  ‘And you’re always getting burned by Evil Edna.’

  ‘You should set up an embroidery business,’ Sue suggests, leaning back in her chair, licking a tiny bead of blood from her finger.

  ‘Come off it,’ Sally mumbles. ‘People don’t need embroiderers like you need … plumbers. Or dentists.’

  ‘Who needs dentists?’ Linda says. ‘I just had a filling which lasted two days. Cracked on a walnut. Had to get it done all over again.’

  ‘Who needs plumbers?’ says Sue, and their conversation drifts from embroidery to U-bends.

  Sally sits and thinks about the clunky headlines in the national and, even worse, local papers.

  SALLY TUTTLE’S HIDDEN GEMS

  FITTING A CAMEL THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE

  ‘IT’S A STITCH-UP’ FOR LOCAL WOMAN

  A STITCH IN TIME MAKES NINE THOUSAND POUNDS

  What is the reason for this stitching of pictures, people ask, this pulling of wools through cloth? Sally’s embroideries have grown over the years – in number and scale. Now they fill up the small house she shares with Pearl like exotic, slightly frightening plants. They lean in their frames against the walls, the threads on the unworked side like mad, multicoloured spaghetti. Picture after picture. It is a compulsion. And she has been doing it for years. Her daughter has grown up thinking it is totally normal.

  What does your mummy do?

  My mummy sews pictures.

  What is she working on at the moment?

  A peacock, a tower block and a big grey elephant.

  Her embroidered figures have the sort of faces that an arts magazine recently described as ‘Tuttle faces’.

  ‘Tuttle faces,’ pontificated the writer – someone with a double-barrelled name, Anthony Blahdy-Blah – ‘have a charming naivety, a childishness, with, of course, their ever-present trademark sequins …’

  Trademark sequins? Ever-present trademark sequins?

  She won
ders how she became the sort of person about whose hobby the word ‘trademark’ could be applied. Or the sort of person who sits at home in the evenings, embroidering characters from the New Testament.

  ‘I probably will leave,’ she says to her In Stitches colleagues, ‘when I’ve got my head round it’.

  Sue breaks off from her plumbing anecdote. She picks up the broken waistband of somebody’s trousers.

  ‘Who wouldn’t leave?’ she says.

  French Knot

  I was knocked down by a taxi a couple of years ago – a small, quite insignificant knock – and for a few days I suffered short-term memory loss. For a week or so I forgot various aspects of my life. I forgot to turn up to two French tutorials, prompting wailing, overbearing emails from my eighteen-year-old students (re: where are you??!). I spent £103 at Sainsbury’s and left half my shopping bags in the car park. I left my new, small and stylish mobile phone on top of a parking meter. I forgot that my parents-in-law had come to stay and locked them out of the house (I discovered them when I got home, sitting like gnomes on a pile of rocks in the front garden).

  ‘It’s OK,’ my seventy-eight-year-old mother-in-law said, heaving herself up from the rocks. They had come all the way from Canada to stay with us. Nice people, civilised.

  *

  I have always forgotten appointments. Coffee dates. Dental check-ups. I mislay my glasses and my keys. But this was something new. These were disconcerting gaps in my memory. ‘My name is Rowena Cresswell,’ I said in Accident and Emergency, a couple of hours after the accident. I had, distressingly, forgotten my married name.

  Fortunately the important facts of my life returned quickly – I remembered that I have a job as a French lecturer and translator; that I have a new Canadian husband and a quite old English son. That I live in North London, walk every day beneath the pretty shadows cast by London plane trees; that I spend a lot of time at either Stansted or Heathrow airports. But there were still occasions when I would completely overlook something. It was as if there was a tiny gap in my brain, caused by the accident, down which pieces of information got lost. It was, I said, describing my condition to Wilma McHale, the departmental secretary, like losing things down the back of a sofa. Little, valuable things that you might not even know were missing. And then, when you were in the middle of looking for something else, they would suddenly surface.

  *

  ‘I’ve gone blank. What’s the French for needle?’ I asked my husband the other evening, hunched, too late at night, over a translation. I had to be up at six to catch a plane, and I was trying to finish an essay on the nineteenth-century manufacture of Persian carpets. Camels were involved – in the context of their urine being used to bleach the wool. Le blanchissage du tapis à l’urine de chameau … and tapped my pen against my bottom lip. I thought of the quote from the Bible about camels and eyes of needles. I thought of needles in haystacks.

  ‘A needle …,’ Kenneth mused, not looking up from the fiercely spot-lit book he was reading. ‘L’aiguille,’ he said after a moment. ‘Masculine.’

  ‘Oh yes. I was thinking it was “clou” for some reason.’

  ‘That’s a nail.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You couldn’t get much sewing done with a nail.’

  ‘I know.’

  I looked back at the page I was working on: … and the intricacy with which the brightly-threaded needle was used …

  I worry about my forgetfulness a little. But I know it’s probably just due to tiredness and that little knock I had. I remember most things eventually. Important things, like words, phrases, turns of phrase. I love words; have always had a fear of misinterpretation. Which, I suppose, being a translator, is just as well.

  Long-legged Cross

  Sally Tuttle walks to East Grinstead station carrying her handbag, a plastic bag from Harrods and a floral umbrella. The sky is a brightish grey. She is a professional woman, her heart calm, her mind uncluttered.

  She gets on an ancient, door-slamming train to Victoria. It is early afternoon but the train is busy. She sits beside a woman who glances up, smiles, then returns her attention to her magazine. She is filling in a word puzzle, slowly circling around words that she has located in the jumble of letters. She works horizontally, vertically, diagonally. The words, Sally notices, are all to do with medicine. STETHOSCOPE. ASPIRIN. WAITING ROOM. The woman is gripped, as if there is nothing more important in the world than to locate the word SCAPULA. Sally sits beside her, her plastic bag on her knee.

  She has come up to London to visit haberdashery departments. She likes to empty her mind at times of stress by gazing at the ranks of colours.

  In John Lewis people are collapsing their umbrellas, folding their raincoats over their arms, walking purposefully towards their prospective acquisitions. It is three o’clock on a slow, pale afternoon, but there is nothing like a large department store to make you feel there is a purpose to life. You just have to glance at the Storage Solutions to know there is an answer to everything. Bras in a muddle? There are bra organisers! Cat hair on your coat? There are pet-hair de-fluffers!

  In Sally’s plastic bag are a large number of unwanted clothes. She has it with her simply because, this morning, she opened her wardrobe and decided to have a clear-out. She was in a purging mood, sifting through her ranks of swinging clothes: a collection of blues and greys. That has to go, that has to go. Her daughter has often commented upon her less successful garments (‘Mum, what is this?’). And so she had cast things off ruthlessly, sticking yellow Post-it notes to all the things she no longer wears:

  two linen jackets with shoulder-pads donated by Sue

  one grey tunic with a snag in the hem

  one turquoise blouse with strange épaulettes that she used to

  wear during an unfortunate, structured phase

  three pairs of stonewashed jeans

  one blue woven hat with plastic fruit attached to the brim.

  (God knows why I bought that hat: a wedding? I have no recollection of ever wearing that hat.)

  And then there was the dress, her green silk dress, with its sequins and tassles. With its sweetheart neckline. With all its haberdashery. She loved it once, that dress – it was given to her, in fact, by Rowena Cresswell – but now it was much too small for her. And much too girlish. It was already old, a hippy thing, in 1979. What was the point, Sally wondered, in hanging on to that?

  Brightness: she had this vision of brightness. Bright, good-quality clothes that would reveal a new, cheerful professionalism.

  *

  So this morning, quickly, she had stuffed all her old, half-liked or inherited clothes into the large Harrods bag (chosen for its connotations of grandeur although it actually came from Oxfam), and left the house. She had walked, in her green home-made coat and her summer-sale boots, up the street to the main road and then on to a shop called A Second Glance. A dress agency. It was the only dress agency, probably, within a twenty-mile radius of their house, located in a tiny row of boutiques and gift shops, all struggling to pretend they were not in East Grinstead at all but somewhere fashionable, like Brighton or Chelsea.

  A small bell tinkled as she stepped inside. Playing on an overhead speaker was some indeterminate piece of classical music: something noble and slightly tragic, with a lot of violins harmonising in thirds.

  She stood on the soft carpet with the plastic bag. The interior of A Second Glance was warm and painted a sombre olive-green. There were lone twigs jutting out of vases at strategic points. A floral curtain concealed a small dressing room.

  For a moment she couldn’t locate the shop assistant, and then she spotted her, sitting on a low chair by the till, reading the Daily Telegraph. She was camouflaged, wearing olive-green: a polo-neck jumper and matching woollen skirt. Over her jumper she wore a string of large green stones. They looked like gobstoppers. Sally advanced and the woman looked up. She glanced down at Sally’s bag: a second glance? She did not say hello.

  ‘
Hello,’ Sally said, the word falling out of her mouth and clanging around the shop.

  The woman lowered her newspaper, smiled and then lowered her eyelids.

  ‘I was wondering if you might be interested in looking at these,’ Sally said. Something, some restrained, stomach-plunging atmosphere about the shop, reminded her of her old school. Her politeness, her deference bounced off the walls, making her feel belligerently humble, like a knife grinder or someone going round the houses selling dusters and polish.

  The shop woman carried on smiling, her eyes still closed. Then she opened them. ‘We’re not really taking things at the moment. But I’ll have a look. Seeing as you’ve brought them.’

  ‘Right.’

  And Sally put the bag on to the floor beside the counter. She wondered if she should do some sort of sales-pitch. Was that what you were supposed to do in dress agencies?

  ‘This is linen,’ she began, pulling out one of the jackets, ‘It’s …’

  ‘No,’ said the woman.

  ‘Oh,’ Sally said. ‘OK.’ And she put the jacket to one side and pulled out the next linen jacket.

  ‘How about this one?’

  ‘That looks almost identical.’

  Sally didn’t reply. She put the second linen jacket on top of the first and dragged out the grey top.

  The woman put on a pair of half-moon glasses. She advanced a maroon-nailed hand and fingered the sleeve. ‘No,’ she said.

  Please take your hands off my blouse, Sally thought. She was suddenly feeling very defensive about these clothes, very protective. They were a part of her history. What do you know about these clothes? You wouldn’t know good clothes if they slapped you.

  ‘OK. Are you interested in hats?’

  ‘We don’t usually take hats,’ said the woman, smiling. ‘Particularly if they don’t arrive in a hat box.’

  Sally glared at her. She felt like doing something melodramatic: taking out an enormous pair of scissors and slicing her way through all the shop’s dreary, self-satisfied clothes.