slack fingers acknowledge that this isn’t a request. I wonder what Pauline is going to do. As she pulls the needle free of its thread she briefly admires the embroidery, which is much better than the lumpy cross-stitch we occasionally produce at school.
‘You can sew your dress,’ she points out to me, and then to Cynthia, ‘Got any more cotton?’
Cynthia shakes her head. Unbothered, Pauline hands me the needle and begins to tug at the woven yellow thread attached to the buttercup petal Cynthia is stitching. The surrounding fabric buckles and bunches, but the embroidery silk doesn’t give, even when Pauline uses her teeth. It’ll be hard to smooth out what she’s done. I stand there, holding the needle, as Pauline glares at Cynthia, ready to blame her for thwarting her brainwave.
‘Nig-nog,’ she says.
I know it’s hopeless, really. I know Mum will find the hole beneath the sleeve, if not tonight, when I’ll be in enough trouble for being out so late, then another day, dealing me a double portion for my attempts at deception. But the force of Pauline’s determination blunts this knowledge. She chucks the soft booklet at Cynthia’s face, making her flinch.
‘It’s no good!’
Taking the sewing on to her lap, Cynthia’s fingers attempt to smooth the clotted stitches. ‘Sorry,’ she says, keeping her remote eyes in their bottle lenses turned away from us. She’s saying it to make us leave her alone.
‘We just need to get some cotton,’ I reassure Pauline. And then for Cynthia, in the same spirit in which I give her big portions at school dinners, ‘Embroidery stuff’s probably too thick anyway.’
But Pauline isn’t about to let go. ‘Was that yer mam?’ she demands. Cynthia nods. Suddenly, Pauline shunts forward hard on both legs so that she rams Cynthia’s shins with her own, making her slam back in her chair. Pauline’s face denies what she’s just done. ‘When’s she coming back?’
Cynthia attempts to shrug, but it isn’t good enough, and Pauline rams her again so that she gestures at the machines and says, ‘When it’s dry,’ in her almost voiceless voice.
‘Fucking nig-nog!’ Pauline grabs the sewing from her and chucks it across the row of chairs. I go to rescue it. It’s probably a present for someone, like a grandma. I wonder if I’ll ever make a present again for my grandma, since she belongs to Dad. I feel sick and tired and excited. No one comes from the back room where the radio chunters on, playing ‘The Most Beautiful Girl in the World’ by Charlie Rich. No one comes in to do their washing. Cynthia is crying, which she sometimes does at school, the type of hopeless crying you usually cry only at the end, when you’ve been crying a long time, the way Pauline was crying in her sleep.
When I pick up the needle case, I start unpicking the petal Cynthia was working on, reversing the smooth official stitches to decode the back of the felt square where the connecting lines are chaotic and random, in search of a starting knot.
‘We can just undo this bit,’ I reassure them both. Pauline is interested. She wants to do it, but I won’t let her. Her filthy hands have already greyed the white pages meant for the future needles. Once I’ve started, it’s enjoyable to undo Cynthia’s embroidery. I’m being nice to her really. It could be much worse. After all, I only need one bit of cotton to repair the hole in my dress.
As I thread the needle with the wrinkled, freed cotton, Pauline gets my dress out from the drier. It’s puckered around its seams and I realize it might have shrunk from the heat. I try to smooth it, panicked again. Everything gets worse, whatever you do. Looking up from the mess I’ve made, I see Cynthia staring out of the window, probably wondering where her mum is, and I realize that’s another mess. She might be a blackie but Cynthia’s mum is still a grown-up, and if she gets back before we’ve gone, Cynthia will dob us in. Her mum’s anger will be another route to my own mum and the final reckoning of my crimes, which now includes conclusively ruining my clothes.
‘We’ll get done if her mum comes back,’ I tell Pauline, and hoist the dress back over my head. Sure enough, it feels newly snug and comes further up my legs than before. Pauline doesn’t notice, though, so maybe it’s not as bad as I think. And at