Things to Make and Mend Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 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.

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