The Woolly Hat Knitting Club

by Poppy Dolan

  The Woolly Hat Knitting Club

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedications

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Epilogue

  A Beginner’s Pattern for a Newborn Hat

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  The Woolly Hat Knitting Club

  Poppy Dolan

  In memory of my wonderful grandmother Christine: clever, kind, industrious (and so, of course, a brilliant knitter).

  And for ES and VN, some of the best women of all time. Both have supplied support and advice with the same patience and good grace with which they accept wonky knitted gifts.

  Chapter 1

  Weird. Definitely weird. There are lots of ‘weird’ things about my brother that are actually pretty normal for him – he likes to put Marmite on Pop-Tarts, he’s never seen Game of Thrones and, the thing that baffles people most, he is a knitting obsessive with his own yarn shop. But not replying to three texts and two emails in a row from me is super weird for JP. With not even seven minutes before my next meeting, I’m scratching the back of one leg with my new leopard-print loafers and firing off a quick text.

  Hey. You’re scaring me. OK?

  Other siblings might talk more on the phone rather than just batting messages back and forth like ping-pong balls, but it works for me and JP. My full-on, frantic job means that spare time is usually only found in lifts or canteen queues or during a particularly dull budget forecast. And experience has only too painfully taught me that if you get JP on the phone and onto the wrong subject, your ear could be throbbing forty minutes later and you still wouldn’t have worked out why a customer buying sock yarn for a blanket pattern was quite so hilarious.

  Nothing hits my inbox in reply. No JP is typing reassuringly whispering to me at the top of the screen. Weird. Really weird.

  ‘We’re up, Dee. Unless you’re too busy sexting your boyfriend?’ Ben Cooper appears at my office doorway. He has just as much experience in management consultancy as me – we graduated in the same year, his birthday is only a few months behind mine, for goodness’ sake (I’ve worked it out from the mandatory office cake celebrations) – but somehow he puts on the air of a total industry leader who begrudgingly gives me the time of day. And I never invited him to use my nickname – when it comes to work, I am Delilah. Only friends, family and non-nobheads get to call me Dee, thanks.

  I’m working very hard not to roll my eyes. I catch the eyes of my assistant, Clive, who nods just a tiny nod to let me know that he’s just as irked. Clive is such a lifesaver in so many ways – not just helping with the mountains of projects we tackle but making sure I don’t forget family birthdays or overdue dentist trips. He’s a legend.

  As I know Ben’s just itching to put me in an annoyed, harried mood before a big client meeting; I let out a long, calming breath. At the same level of seniority, we’re always looking to get one over on each other. Like the time he ‘offered’ to shadow me on the Shenwood project, as a ‘unique learning experience’, even though everyone knew there was nothing for him to learn there except new ways to wind me up. Not that I let that stop me working it like an absolute boss. And maybe I sent him to the wrong meeting room a few times along the way. Maybe.

  Which reminds me. A quick swipe of the screen. But still no reply from JP.

  So I plaster on my work smile – not too big as to be fake and cheesy, not too small as to seem nervous or meek. And just smug enough to show Ben he is having no effect on me whatsoever. Ha!

  ‘Born ready, Cooper. Born ready. Can’t wait to catch up with Guy from TechBank. Did you know we play squash together? He said he won’t sleep at night until he finally wins a game.’

  Ben’s sour expression tells me that my artfully placed throwaway comment has hit the mark – he doesn’t know how much overtime I’ve been putting into bonding with this huge new client. My mates, family and JP certainly know – they won’t stop grilling me for putting work first and everything else second – but I know that if I can make this client mine it will give me the most massive boost up the corporate ladder. And, not that I’m competitive at all, Ben can just scrabble around for a bottom rung in my dust.

  * * *

  With the meeting under way, posh coffees and pastries laid out by the brilliant Clive in our slick Canary Wharf office, I can feel myself leading more and more of the discussion points, and it feels good. There is a problem at TechBank’s Brussels branch – no worries I already have a flight booked for Monday morning. Staff in the investment teams in head office are unhappy that consultants have been coming in and telling them what to do – I’ve already engaged a party-planning firm to throw a top-of-the-line Vegas theme night at the end of the month. You can always distract the investment bankers with a good gamble… My boss Devon nods sagely as I talk the client through my action plan, as if he’s personally helped me devise the whole thing. Well, he personally held the door open for me this morning and that’s about as useful as he gets. I can’t hate Devon if I want to be Devon, I remind my inner grump, challenging the positive mantra of the business book on my bedside table.

  Just as I’m expanding on how we’ll implement the next round of employment cuts, my phone vibrates on the glass table, sending a grumble of noise into the meeting. If it was my work phone I would ignore it, never wanting to show a client they are anything other than my every waking thought, but it’s my personal iPhone – and a cold twist in my stomach makes me turn it over and unlock the screen.

  JP:

  Can’t move. Arms. Not. Worry here. Come.

  The breath catches in my throat as I grab at my things with clammy hands. ‘I’m so sorry, personal emergency, my brother… I have to go. Sorry!’ I call over my shoulder as I leg it for the door, Devon’s weary head shake and Ben’s wide eyes are the last things I see as the doors slam behind me.

  Chapter 2

  Fifty-seven sweaty minutes later, and so much poorer for paying the first cab driver I could find £100 to get me to Liverpool Street station faster than is strictly legal, I leap out of the train in Fenwild, a little village outside our home town. All my calls to JP have gone straight through to voicemail; his chirpy recording, telling people to, ‘Go on, leave me a message – I’m a millennial, I never check them!’ hasn’t broken through the cold clutching feeling around my heart. Not again, not again… I’m tempted to call Mum but seeing as she and Dad are on the other side of the world, visiting Uncle Dave in Australia, and I’d only be passing on the panic in the wrong time zone, I shelve that idea. Better get to JP first and assess just how bad it is. But I do bash out a quick IM to Clive: Cover for me?!?!

  Pelting down the gravel track behind the tiny station, I take the short cut through the copse, which in five minutes will spit me out at the bottom of the high street. Sorry, new loafers, you’ve got to take the hit right now. If mud is good for facials it can’t be all that bad for shoes.

  The chilly air is really rasping in my lungs as I turn on to the small row of shops. Just a few more to go and there it is – the Blackthorn Family Haberdashery. With that kind of name you’d think the shop was set up in the t
ime of Victorian lace cuffs and brown paper bags, but in fact JP opened four years ago and seeing as I gave him the investment capital and we’re fifty-fifty owners, he insisted it should have our family name.

  Wheezing a little at the side door, I don’t bother knocking. I just fish out the spare key from underneath the hedgehog boot scraper and barge the wonky wooden door open.

  ‘Julian! Julian! Where are you?’

  A deep groan comes from the living room. Oh God, please, not again…

  But there’s no crumpled figure on the sofa, no detritus of beer cans and old newspapers. JP is sitting up, dead straight, on a dining chair. Two wrists in plaster laid awkwardly on the little table in front of him.

  ‘When you call me Julian, I know I’m in trouble.’

  He winces. ‘Christ, what are you doing away from work? Has Canary Wharf sunk?’

  I gulp some breath back into my system, my heart rate coming down from hummingbird to anxious 31-year-old. ‘You… texted me to come. You said you couldn’t move and you were worried! What the hell have you done to yourself?’

  I flop down on the brown cord sofa, feeling it flatten under me.

  JP tries to move some of his sandy hair out of his eyes with a head tilt. It doesn’t work and he huffs. ‘Actually, I was trying to tell you not to come. And the arms… you’re only going to laugh.’

  ‘After sprinting out of work and catching my best coat in the train doors, all the while thinking… thinking the worst, I could do with a laugh. Spill it.’

  He looks down at the off-white plaster keeping his forearms and thumbs locked in place. ‘I fell off a ladder. While trying to put up some bunting. Broke my sodding wrists.’

  I bite my lip. ‘Blimey, JP. How long will you be in casts for?’

  JP stands up and stretches his back, wriggling his shoulders. ‘Six weeks. Hopefully. They weren’t bad breaks, just… embarrassing.’ He manages a shrug but yelps straight after. ‘When you said you were thinking the worst, you didn’t think…?’

  It’s my turn to shrug now. ‘You get a message like this, and you tell me you wouldn’t go into a major tailspin?’ I hold up my phone screen.

  ‘Ah. Well, I guess that’s no workable thumbs and some pretty mental painkillers for you. Sorry. But I am fine, now, Dee. You don’t need to worry about another… you know. That’s the old me. Not the real me.’ He smiles his impish smile, the same one that used to ask for my last penny sweet, and I can feel my heart finally wriggle free of that death grip that followed me all the way from the office to his front door.

  After a brief, awkward hug around his stiff arms, I dig out my work phone from my handbag.

  ‘Well, that lasted all of two minutes. A new record for you.’ JP walks awkwardly into the small kitchen, his arms held in front gingerly like a nervous zombie. ‘Still, two minutes of Dee time these days is a rarity, so I count myself lucky. How long do I get if I break both legs as well?’

  My eyes scan over the 30-ish emails that have come in during the last hour. Nothing too catastrophic… Until I see:

  From: Ben Cooper

  Subject: That was weird

  Can’t say the client took it well. What’s going on with you, Blackthorn? Do you want to talk it over?

  Balls. I bet Ben is worming his way in right now, probably making innocent-sounding comments about how I have so much to juggle and how it must be really stressful. The implication being, it’s all too much for me and he’s a safer pair of hands. Show me one man who’s ever been described as ‘juggling’ at work. I swallow down the ball of anger squashed against my windpipe. Actions, not emotions. That’s the way. As soon as I get home tonight, I’ll jump back on it and totally smooth this over. It’s one tiny blip in my faultless record.

  ‘… so that’s neither, then? Or do you want to crack the whisky out?’ I tune back in to my little brother’s voice.

  ‘Sorry, sorry. Tea, if you have it. Wait, can you even make tea?’

  In the doorway, JP surveys the taps, kettle and cupboard doors of his galley kitchen. The Formica is peeling off the green kitchen doors but that’s the least of his problems right now. Without easily flexible thumbs it’s going take him as long to wrangle a cup of tea as it would just to wait for a bus down the road to Cheeky’s Greasy Spoon.

  ‘Come to think of it, no. Er… would you?’

  I leap into gear, and run some hot water to wash up a few plates while I’m at it. ‘What’s the plan, JP? If you can’t make tea, how are you going to cook for yourself? Take the bins out? Open the shop? Oh my God!’ I spin round to face him, suds dripping off his baggy Marigold gloves. ‘You can’t knit!’

  ‘I know,’ he grumbles into the crew neck of his grey T-shirt. ‘That was literally my first thought as I lay on the pavement. Well, after “Shitting hell, this hurts.” I haven’t gone six weeks without knitting in years!’

  I stack a chintzy plate on the drainer and start brainstorming helpful suggestions as I tackle a few egg cups with concreted-on yolk dribbles.

  * * *

  As an older sister, I’ve been helping JP his whole life. I used a plastic dinosaur to tease him into taking his first steps and from then I don’t think I’ve ever stopped. It’s not that he’s a useless man in the way that he’s lazy or thinks domestic tasks are beneath him or – God forbid – women’s work. More that he’s just always been the dreamy one, the one who forgets you need to pay for parking, and I’m the practical one, the one who finds the parking fine notice tucked down the back of the sofa just in time, before the figure doubles. Maybe being the oldest put me in this position, but I can’t deny my naturally bossy side really quite enjoys it.

  It’s probably why I threw myself into helping JP apply to the big law firms when he graduated and I coached him in interview technique and CV buffing. I even went with him to a networking drinks event, just to get him started. I was so happy when he got his coveted, kick-ass job and started working all the hours. He worked hard and he played hard, taking up squash and urban golf with his new work buddies. He got a fancy one-bed in Islington, not all that far from where I live in Crouch End. It was all going perfectly.

  Except it wasn’t. Three years into his career, I had a call from his HR manager on a random Tuesday. They hadn’t heard from JP since the Saturday (he’d been working through the weekend with his colleagues, as usual) and they were concerned – he wasn’t picking up his mobile or checking emails immediately, as was his norm. In that moment I felt my heart shrink to a third of its size and rattle around my chest. Just like today, I rushed over to his place and used my spare key. But unlike today, there was nothing funny about what I found.

  JP was lying on his sofa, staring at the ceiling, not moving. The flat was like an upturned bin – kebab wrappers and beer cans and old newspapers crumpled into balls. And JP just didn’t move. I kept talking to him, shaking him, I even threw a glass of stale beer in his face to try and shock him into action. But he was broken. He had broken down. So I called my parents, started cleaning up the place and then just sat and held his clammy hand until they got there.

  After a lot of talking and listening back at Mum and Dad’s, JP eventually confessed that he hated being a lawyer. A colleague had said, ‘See you tomorrow,’ as they’d left the office that Saturday night and something in him had snapped. He hated working Sundays. He hated working all the time. He felt so alone. All four of us cried when he said that. Him, because it was the truth he’d been afraid to admit, and us because it was the truth we’d completely failed to see. I vowed to myself right there and then, forcing down burning tea just to stop the tears, that I’d never let him be alone again.

  As part of his therapy, JP tried art classes, then some sculpture. Using his hands made his head shut up, he said. No evil inner critic could tell him he was a failure when he was being active, making something. He helped Dad wallpaper a room, he scoured their garage for unfinished DIY projects. When every last plug was changed in the house, he re-insulated the loft. And then he kicked
over a stack of Gran’s old knitting magazines at the back of one of the eaves.

  He now admits his first thought was how much a vintage knitting pattern might fetch on eBay, but as he flicked through them, laughing at the mohair and Fair Isle balaclavas, he began to think that maybe knitting would be a lot more comfortable than painting another Artex ceiling or mending bike punctures. He could make something for Mum, for her birthday. That navy, lumpy scarf still hangs with pride of place in her hall, on the coat stand. He’d never felt a real affinity with corporate law, but the needles quite literally clicked for JP.

  * * *

  ‘I’m a bit worried about the shop…’ JP looks through the frosted glass, into the shopfront that backs on to his living room. ‘I think I could work the till, sort of. And knock down any yarns from the top shelves for customers with a big stick. But if someone comes in with a buttonhole query or they’re scared of cabling on a purl row… How can I help them if I can’t demonstrate?’ He lets out a puff of breath and slumps back against the wall.

  Stacking the last mug in the drainer, I hang the gloves over the tap and fold my arms. ‘Well, you have your great tutorial videos, on the website. People love those – you get amazing click-through, right?’ As I invested in the shop, JP has always been really good at sending me updates, not just on the sales numbers but also how the online shop and his blog perform. I have to say, I wasn’t quite sure who’d want to see video clips of a hulking pair of male hands showing you the best way to knit, but they really do. About a (Knitting) Boy is a great blog – I just wish he’d let me get him into some ads so it could bring him in a bit more cash.

  He colours a little at the tops of his ears. ‘Yeah. The crafting community is pretty supportive. But if you don’t post every week, you lose your appeal. And fulfilling online orders for the shop is going to be tricky for a while. Not sure I could work a roll of Sellotape without breaking something else.’ His forehead creases with worry.