Things to Make and Mend (3 page)

When you’re fifteen, of course, you don’t quite believe that things will change, alter, end. You can’t imagine that you might not always go
down town
on Friday nights; that you might not one day possess cheap dangling earrings as heavy as gobstoppers, or silver-blue eyeliner, or a pair of woven-soled espadrilles. You can’t foresee this. Sally, for instance, did not know that she would one day be the mother of her own fifteen-year-old girl. And that she would be a Needlewoman.
Needlewoman,
homelier sister of Wonderwoman. An award-winning Needlewoman, even. Who’d have thought it?

Sally and Rowena had first met him, this boy, this young man who had sent the message about the dentist, at Razzles nightclub. His name was Colin Rafferty. It was a Friday evening, August 1979.

Razzles was a dank, Italianate establishment near East Grinstead station. Long-since closed and turned into a garden centre with sofas, fibreglass gnomes and scented candles. But at the time it was the place to be on Friday nights. Rowena and Sally used to go with unquestioning resolve. They slunk nonchalantly past the bouncer who knew – but overlooked – their age. They hurried to the dismally yellow cloakroom, hung up their coats and checked their reflections in the wonky mirror. Then they wove their way back to the main room, to the edge of the dance floor and spent the rest of the evening rooted to the spot, clutching glasses of Fanta – the only drink the bartender would allow them. They
listened
to the records the DJ put on the turntable. ‘Boogie
Wonderland’, 
‘My Sharona’, ‘Bright Eyes’. They both held their heads at a slight angle, their long hair mysteriously flicked to one side, and regarded the boys from beneath it. Bands of coloured light zoomed and flickered around the room and when it brushed across their faces they were convinced that it made them look intriguing – mysterious, knowing, slightly
triste.
They wore baggy tops, swishing skirts and suede pixie boots. The music was always too loud, and Sally was always shouting ‘What? What?’ into Rowena’s ear.

Rowena had been the first one to spot Colin Rafferty, under the strobe lighting. It was Rowena who, beneath the over-
amplified
words of ‘When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman’, had moved her hand up to her ear and shouted the words
dishy
and
he fancies you.

Sally did not believe her. She did not picture herself as a girl who was fancied by men in nightclubs.

‘Look,’ Rowena yelled. ‘He’s coming over.’ And Sally turned and felt her heart blanch. She noticed the way the boy walked beneath the light-scattering mirror-balls: a kind of off-kilter but determined walk, accompanied by a sweetly intense gaze. He smiled, and when he got closer she noticed his amused eyes, his neat chin, the charming creases at the edges of his mouth.

‘I hate this song,’ he opined, leaning one arm casually against a silvery pillar.

Colin Rafferty. It was Sally he wanted. Sally, not Rowena. She was so shocked she could hardly breathe.

In a couple of days Sally Tuttle will be giving a talk in Edinburgh, entitled (rather pompously, she fears now) ‘The Secret Art of Embroidery’. But what to say, when talking about embroidery stitches? About moss stitch and Pekin knot? And how to say it? How to seem? How to
be
? Embroidery has always been
something
she just
does
, and the idea of talking about it frightens her.

Preparation is all, she reminds herself. Like a properly
pinned-down
dress pattern, all the tailor’s tacks in place.

She is not a particularly tidy person but she does keep her workroom neat. She has a pine shelving unit containing all the things she needs. It is labelled, ordered, organised. There has to be a little area in everyone’s life that is organised. On the top shelf she has two baskets of cotton reels and three of embroidery threads, stranded cottons, wools, tapisserie silks. On the bottom shelf she has her old hand-operated sewing machine, her new foot-operated sewing machine, her goffering iron and her
patterns.
In the middle she keeps a small red filing-cabinet which has six drawers. These drawers contain, in descending order: 

In other areas of her life she is not tidy. She often leaves washing-up until the next day, and does not reprimand her daughter
for leaving dirty plates and schoolbooks lying around the
living-room
floor. Embroidery, though, needlework, requires neatness. Cleanliness. Respect. Her trays and drawers at work are neat too. If they became a mess – a knot of threads, loose buttons, hooks and eyes – she feels she might as well call it a day.

Her elderly mother comes to visit her at In Stitches occasionally, stoically, often bringing something to eat – an individual muffin wrapped in cellophane, a slice of carrot cake. ‘Something to keep you going, darling,’ she says, glancing around the shop. It is not the career she hoped for her.

Sometimes after school her daughter Pearl comes to see her too but seems to have no comprehension of what her job involves: the careful measuring and pinning, the necessary ironing, the patient tacking and hemming. Careful work, Sally finds herself thinking, is lost on her daughter’s generation. Then she
remembers
Miss Button’s admonishments and sessions with the
Kwik-unpick.
She remembers how careless she was at Pearl’s age.

‘Good day at school, sweetheart?’

‘Hmm,’ Pearl replies, looking down and pressing the tiny
silver
buttons on her mobile phone. The buttons are so small that she has to use her fingernail.

‘Did you …?’

‘Yeah, hang on, Mum,’ Pearl says, bringing the phone up to her ear.

Since Sally left school, disastrously, at the age of fifteen-and-a-half, her career has been a series of nine-to-five jobs.

The first job she ever had was as a waitress in a café called The Country Kitchen. There was a uniform: a brown nylon dress with short puffed sleeves, a white, ineffectively small apron and, most mortifying of all, a nylon mob cap. She was supposed to look like a country wench; a pretty serving girl. Looking back,
she thinks perhaps she did look pretty: she certainly got leers and comments from the middle-aged men who came into the café at lunchtimes. Or perhaps it was just that she was young. Youth was all that was necessary to attract middle-aged men.
Hello there, Maid Marion,
they used to say. Or:
It’s Nell Gwynne.
Or:
I’ll have a bowl of porridge, Goldilocks.

They were supposed to serve wholesome things. Wholesome, late-Seventies style. Lumpy lentil soup. Big dry brown rolls. Hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes cut into water lilies. And Sally was supposed to smile, to giggle and sigh over the steaming soup bowls in a pretty, girlish way. She did not manage the giggling often, though, because her life had recently collapsed around her. So she stomped about in her big shoes, sweeping crumbs off the tables into people’s laps, scalding herself against the
stainless-steel
serving dishes, dropping boxes of loose tea and having to clatter around the too-small kitchen, sweeping up with a plastic dustpan and brush.

She put on weight and her apron became too tight. She dropped a tray, breaking five smoked-glass ashtrays, three cups and a soup bowl. She swore at one of the middle-aged men, telling him, in a not very Goldilocks way, to ‘get out of my face’. She was not having a very good time. She had become coarse and jaded.

The next job she got was in the accounts department of a plumber’s merchants. She sat in an open-plan office full of smoke, investigating the company’s dozens of unpaid bills, which appeared as tiny account numbers on a microfiche. She sat opposite a woman called Brenda Bright who always wore red and smoked one high-tar cigarette after another, pausing only to take swigs of ink-black Maxwell House from a mug that said ‘I’m a Mug’.

‘Get out while you bloody well can,’ Brenda Bright used to advise her, as if she was Andromeda chained to the rocks.

The accounts office of the plumber’s yard was a terrible shock after her school’s wholesome classrooms –
which I left willingly,
Sally began to realise,
of my own free will.
Now she remembered St Hilary’s School for Girls with something approaching grief. She even thought of Miss Button with a kind of fondness.
I was supposed to do A-levels! I was supposed to go to university and study French!
And then catastrophe had intervened and she had done the only thing she could think of doing. She legged it. She ran.

She used to run from the plumber’s yard in the evenings, on to the wet, sparrow-chirping pavements, and not be able to make out the numbers of the buses home. ‘Three?’ she wondered, squinting, as they hove into view at the top of the hill. ‘Or eight?’ She can trace her short sight from her month-and-a-half at Capel’s Plumbers.

Now, peering at her hemming in the back of the shop she sometimes has a fleeting vision of that desk at the plumber’s yard, and that mug and that smoke, and Brenda Bright in the most enormous pair of glasses. What a vision, that vision of Brenda Bright.

Wise people are in the minority, she has found, over the years. Despite the owl on her school badge, she herself has not made wise decisions. Practicality has little to do with wisdom.

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.

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.

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 wonders 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.