A Stitch In Time
3rd Story from Runa’s Ghost Trilogy. Can be read as a stand alone piece.
Title Page
Published by sarahNet Ltd
sarahNet Ltd, Shedfield, Hampshire SO32 2JE
First Published in the United Kingdom 2014
Copyright © sarahNet Ltd
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Cover Illustration courtesy of HiFipapers
A Stitch in Time
On his way back to the café, Tim passed a sign to the hospital that stood like a sentry on a hillside above the town. Runa had seen it earlier on her journey to the café when she had had to stop to let a woman cross; a woman who was running head down in the rain, buffeted by the wind until she reached the hospital’s doors and disappeared from view as Runa drove past.
It was a brief, unexpected text that had summoned the woman to the hospital. Before its arrival the weather had kept her indoors, fretfully working on a Lakes’ tapestry, when the phone flashed its message. Hooked by its urgency, she bundled the canvass and its collection of yarns into her bag, shut up the house and ran to the hospital’s critical care unit.
She was met at the ward door by a nurse who gazed at her with glassy brown eyes as if, the woman thought, the nurse was viewing her from far off — as if the woman was a fish thrashing at the end of a corridor — a fish that needed to be reeled in and contained. The woman knew she was wet through and panicking, her raincoat flooding water onto a hygienic looking floor.
‘Abdominal aortic aneurysm — ruptured,’ the nurse explained, emphasising the alliteration as she led the woman to a private room where they sat down together. ‘Mrs…Penny, you must understand,’ the nurse informed her, ‘your husband is extremely ill. He may not last the night.’ Afterwards she showed Penny to the door of a small room. ‘You can’t come in,’ said the nurse. Through a glass panel, Penny observed her husband now patient. He lay as if frozen under ice cold sheets, surrounded by science. She put her hand to the door but the nurse forestalled her. ‘We are working on him now,’ she said, ‘wait outside.’
I too am helpless Penny thought but she sat obediently as directed and unpacked her tapestry almost automatically, the fabric cast across her knees in familiar folds.
Inside the small room the patient lay stricken. Swiftly an anaesthetist threaded a fine needle into the patient’s arm, then they scissored him open, cutting through his fibres, following a dark thread through a labyrinth to begin their repairs. The doctors laboured like mid-wives to pull him out of dark and rising floods.
Unknown to them their patient rose from his bed and made his way to a river that run through the town to the sea. Under normal conditions the river water was diverted under a road, a road so level that only an observant driver would notice the culvert beneath. Now, the Patient saw with a start, that both bridge and culvert had gone. In their place was a ford and countless thousands of people were queuing to make their way across.
There was a mistake, Penny realised, in the tapestry. The stiches were all wrong —completely unlike the template instructions. She took a sharp pair of scissors and started to tear at the delicate wool. Everything is obvious with hindsight — she realised that now. Her husband had commented on a strange vein that rose up and threaded its way under his skin, up to his chest. The intrepid vein had throbbed and pulsed with its own life. He felt well, her husband reported, and because he felt well he was well. There was no need to trouble her with this or any other affairs of the body. In the evenings, Penny realised, she had sat tranquilly sewing Each simple straight thread closed into life-like forms that grew in her stylised garden; her husband’s silence unheard alongside her own.
Now she saw that everything, even the mistake in the pattern, was standing out like a beacon but at the time it had been stitched into the design without a smallest alarm given.
The Patient stood at the ford watching the dark river run past him and studied the queue of people. They wore such curious clothes, he thought; surely that was a Roman soldier patiently toasting some bread on a brazier? The Patient jostled through the crowd to join him.
The wool was not so easy to unpick, the woman found. It had wrapped its way around the warp and weft of the canvass. It could not be undone.
The Roman soldier watched the Patient’s approach. ‘Coming to join up?’ he asked with a smile; jovial and confident. The Patient felt optimistic suddenly — he was fit enough after all this pain. ‘The Roman army is it then? Sunshine and olive groves — sounds good to me.’ The putative recruiting sergeant regarded him steadily as though reading his thoughts; ‘Fighting fit, I’d say — come with us — regular pay, good rations, travel - not a bad life in the scheme of things.’ He poured honey over the toasted bread and offered it to the Patient. ‘Once we ford the river we will be on to pastures new.’
Penny looked up as the nurse approached and saw at once there was no news. She waved away the nurse’s proffered tea and biscuit. ‘But you need to keep your strength up too,’ said the nurse coaxingly. ‘I cannot eat,’ Penny replied loudly — too loudly. The words scattering and splintering into surprising shapes — jagged and harsh. The words beat in and out of adjoining cubicles like trapped birds. Other hospital visitors heard her and looked up in surprise. It was true she realised - she could live on nothing in this timeless space. The thought of food was sickening. The nurse continued her rounds and Penny was left holding the tapestry, staring at its pattern and colours that were so wrong she could not see how to rescue it. She started to pull at the wool, forcing her scissor blades through the stitching.
A blackbird called out an alarm as it flew up into a tree near the crowd. The Patient reached out for the proffered toast and then paused and looked back the way he had come. He could just make out the road thronging with people. ‘Don’t you miss them?’ he asked the soldier. ‘Miss who?’ said the soldier steadily. ‘Your family, your friends, your belonging?’ the Patient replied and waited as steadily for an answer. He refused the food abruptly. The soldier studied the toast and honey that melted onto his fingers. He licked them and said ‘Reminds me of home, the farm, my children, can’t remember the last time I saw them. Two summers back maybe.’ He looked again at the Patient, his face sentimental and lost. ‘Sweet memories,’ he said running his tongue around his lips. ‘But can’t live on them eh. Wouldn’t give up the soldiering now if my life depended on it. Nor should you neither.’
‘I would miss them too much,’ replied the Patient. He was sure of it once he said it.
The nurse returned with abrupt, bad news. ‘Your husband has lost a lot of blood — Penny, we have to tell you — we don’t know how he will do.’ Penny stared at her. Somehow she understood the hospital had consulted with consultants and were phoning for additional advice. They could try this and they will try that but the truth was no-one had answers. All she could do was wait in this small corridor that served, she dimly was aware, as a bridge between this world and the next.
She turned back to her tapestry. To her horror Penny saw she had had ripped the warp threads of the canvass. There was now a gaping hole in the fabric which her blades had torn through.
‘Leave the man alone,’ a voice called across the crowd to the soldier. ‘He can do better than a foot soldier to your commanding officers. I can see from here he is strong enough to follow my trade and earn a living in the new world. Aye and be rich enough too. Live well and eat well — without having to lay waste to stranger countries like a lost soul.’
The soldier spat and walked away while the Patient waited for the speaker to join him. The man was huge but limped slightly as he walked. ‘Join me,’ he said once he had reached the patient, ‘I’m a blacksmith by trade. Come with me and you will see what I do.’ Together they made their way to through the thronging crowd into an old brick warehouse that the Patient remembered as a chic antique centre favoured by his wife. The hours he had spent there, he thought, kicking his heels while she picked through piles of faded chintz; he himself favoured more modern, cutting edge designs – not that Penny paid any attention.
Now the building had changed hands again. It appeared to be a working museum. The Patient pondered the great instruments of the past, an anvil and a number of bellows stood close to a glowing forge. He picked up a set of hammer and tongs and the mechanic within him started to fire up. ‘It’s amazing what you can make with such simple tools,’ he remarked to the Blacksmith who was watching him with a keen eye. ‘We are not so far away from the past! I remember my Granddad using these — in the days when horses were more common every street had a smithy — if I remember rightly’
The Patient put the tongs down and picked up what remained of ancient bill-hook. Its fine wooden handle had parted company from the blade. ‘I suppose you can rivet that if you needed to, but it’s just a prop isn’t it? This must be a working museum — new to me though — don’t remember it changing hands.’
The Blacksmith put a steel rod into the fire, seized a pair of bellows and began to arouse the flames. ‘Museum! Are you blind? I have the most modern tools available — and had new ones designed too. Indeed — Museum! Here in my forge I create the finest work. The world cries out for it.’ In frustration he broke off from his exertions in order to reach for a garment that was hanging up beside him. He held it out for closer inspection. To his astonishment the Patient saw it was a mesh made up of fine metal chains, the links so supple it behaved like cloth. ‘See what I can do sir and with such skill and such tools that gods as well as men marvel at it. I catch slippery creatures in my nets to be sure. Those who touch my things find themselves swiftly in my coils, I can tell you.’ The Blacksmith folded up his material and continued more calmly, ‘But I could do with an assistant and when I spotted you I knew at once you were my man. I am a good judge. Here help with this.’ He reached out for the damaged bill hook and began to counter-sink holes into the handle.
Next the Blacksmith plucked the steel from out of the furnace and hammered the glowing metal into a delicate drawn out point which he then cut, placed into a vice and set to with the hammer again. ‘I am upsetting my metal,’ he laughed to the Patient. ‘If you were held fast and your head beaten into shape, you would be upset as well!’ The Blacksmith plunged his reformed metal into a bucket of water.
The Patient felt his temperature rise, the fiery heat trapped by the walls was closing around him.
Once done, the Blacksmith picked up his newly made rivets and handed them to the Patient with the instructions ‘Look alive man! Fix them in place. Whet the blade. Finish this off.’ Thus challenged, the Patient took up the handle and struck the steel home, then he filed and smoothed the rivet heads until both blade and handle were a seamless instrument once more. It balanced well, the Patient realised with pleasure, a precision tool. He ran the newly sharpened steel over his thumb.
Penny winced as pain seared up from her hand. She had crumpled her tapestry in misery and the needle struck into her palm. Her husband was surely dying. Now his newly summoned relatives were flocking round her, trying to make it better, trying to pretend that everything would be alright when clearly it would not and could not be for otherwise they would not be there; trying to keep everything normal. Trying for some mysterious reason to keep going when the awfulness of the situation meant that keeping going was a ridiculous idea and the only rational thing to do was fold up, rent, in pieces - but a calm voice said very clearly ‘Please go away’ — and she realised it was her voice and his relatives knowing her will, retreated and returned to their plastic seats where they sat motionless and unable to move, as if restrained by her knowledge of them.
The nurse came down the corridor again. ‘You need to drink Penny,’ she urged but Penny shook her head, gazing only at the torn fabric in her hand that had absorbed a tiny drop of blood onto the wool. She picked up the needle and threaded it once more with wool. She looped a stich and drew the broken strands through it and repeated it until the warp was repaired and tied back into the main canvass.
‘Please’, said the nurse, ‘please eat something — a sandwich?’ She looked at the relatives who shrugged. ‘She needs to eat’, the nurse repeated, ‘why not try the café. They bake their own bread there, it’s not half bad?’ Nevertheless, the relatives sunk deeper into their chairs defeated by Penny’s stubborn stitching.
‘Good job,’ said the Blacksmith. ‘Very neat — don’t want to see you go. Why not sit down and have a bite.’ He went out to a nearby well and pulled up some meat that was cooling in the water. Unwrapping a portion of steak he put it on a grill above the forge. The flesh sizzled and shrunk on the heat. The Blacksmith poured out some wine into two stoneware mugs and handed one to the Patient. ‘This will put the colour back into your cheeks. Sit, why don’t you?’
‘I can’t eat,’ Penny said again to the nurse who still loomed before her. ‘Please l leave me alone’, but the nurse was not as easily commanded away as the relatives had been. She stood in front of Penny holding out a soft drink. ‘I don’t want to be nursing you as well — come along.’ Penny stood up and confronted her. ‘Please — I just need to know how he is.’ The nurse sighed and said ‘I’ll find out and then you must eat’. She set the drink down on a window sill and walked away. Overwhelmed, Penny sat down. She had a sudden, sharp pain in her side. The thought of food sickened her. It would kill her. She was sure of it.
In theatre, a surgeon folds his nylon graft into a lost artery. He begins to stitch.
The Patient took the mug and set it down. ‘I need some air,’ he told the blacksmith. ‘It’s so hot, I can hardly breathe in here.’ Somehow he stumbled out in the direction of the ford and wondered if he would ever feel well again.
Behind him he heard the Blacksmith’s laughter. It zig-zagged about him zipping in between in the Patient’s staggering steps, darting between his feet, adding to his sudden exhaustion.
The queue at the ford had lessened slightly and the Patient felt irresistibly drawn towards its tranquil and compelling waters. He could just wade through it, he thought to himself, cool his feet and refresh himself. He would rest on the other side and all would be well. He started to push his way through the people and sat down on the roadside to take off his shoes, almost boyishly excited at the idea of paddling. He jumped up clasping his footwear and moved determinedly down the shallow incline that led to the ford.
Penny picked up her needle again and with a stubborn optimism began to rework her pattern over the repaired canvass. She abandoned her original plan and started to embroider silk pansies randomly into the canvas. Every delicate stitch a seed that grew in a meadowed foreground. Penny lost herself in her design, the needle breathing in and out of the tapestry, up and down, forming flowers in a regular rhythmic fashion. Only once did she pause to hold out the fabric at arm’s length to look at the sutures that now crossed and formed the repair. They marched along the altered pattern she had set. It would hold, Penny thought and continued her stitching.
At the very water’s edge a woman pushed herself in front of the Patient. ‘I’ve been looking for you,’ she said — ‘or someone like you.’ She took his arm and pulled him away from the ford. Staggered, the Patient looked at his interrupter. She made no apology or explanation, she led the way and he followed, hardly knowing what he was doing or where he was going. They had to weave their way through the crowd and walked for some distance until she led him into an open field where wearied he sat down.
The woman stood with her back to the crowd before a landscape that fell away into rich agricultural ground. It was patterned with green, corn filled plots and flowery meadows. Sunlight threaded through the fields, tinting the streams that run to the ford with gold. In contrast dark yew woods cast black shadows across the hills above the river valley. Beneath billowing hedge lines, Heartsease and Heal-all competed for space in fragrant grass verges.
The woman looked over it all and sighed, wrapping her coat more tightly around her shoulders. When she turned back to the Patient he saw she had picked some stalks of corn that grew almost into her hand. Then she helped the Patient to stand. She has a kind of beauty, the Patient observed with his experienced eye, if you looked closely. Men would be drawn to her. He waited impatiently for her to speak but she remained silent for some time, threading the corn stalks between her fingers. Suddenly she held the twisted plants out to him. ‘You can stay if you wish,’ she said, ‘it’s perfectly possible to build a new life here.’ Astonished, the Patient took the newly created corn dolly from her, the plaits like bread rose under his fingers. ‘It is only I,’ she said, ‘who cannot find my way home. I live six months here and six months there’ She pointed to the dark woods that hung on the side of the valley. ‘A temporary lodger wherever I am.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘You, however, can return. You can stay or you can cross. The choice is yours — or so I am sent to tell you.’
The Patient looked away across the rich and shimmering landscape. Are all things real he asked himself and turned to ask the stranger but she had gone; only the corn in his hand remained to remind him of the other.
He longed suddenly for the muted, mundane nature of home and the green world around him turned red.
.At the watchful hospital, the patient stirs in his warm bed and tries to rise. He sees a tall, remote figure of a nurse who appraises him coolly, he reaches up to clutch her arm as she continues to gaze down, her hard brown eyes staring and she not speaking and —
‘Am I alive!’ He asks her and again. ‘Am I alive?’