17. Seventeen #3
I got up before I could talk myself round and found my pants.
The flat was quiet. Nikolai had left a note that he'd gone out to do something or other.
In the dining room, the light was coming up grey through the big windows, and there it all was on the sideboard where I'd left it the morning before everything lined up the way my granddad had drilled into me before I could read.
Awl. Wax. Two pricking irons. The good thread.
The half-built notebook cover I'd been making out of an offcut.
I'd walked past it every day since I'd been back on my feet, coming around the long way to the kitchen so I wouldn't have to pass close.
I'd told myself I wasn't ready. The truth was I was a coward about the one thing I'd never been a coward about.
This morning I'd woken up wanting to live.
You don't get to want that and keep walking the long way round.
Aleksi'd had Gregori source them off a list I'd written one bored afternoon, the best of everything, no questions, and I'd been a brat about the brand of wax just to see if he'd get it right.
He'd got it right.
I sat and set the offcut in the clam, leather pinched upright between the jaws so both hands were free to work. I threaded the needle on the good hand. Two needles, two ends, the saddle stitch my granddad swore was the only honest stitch a man could make.
Start with what ye can see, lad.
I could see fine. It was the feeling that was the trouble.
The saddle stitch wants both hands pulling against each other.
The right hand sends the needle through, left hand catches and draws.
The two hands hold the tension between them like a rope in a tug, even, tight, stitch after stitch.
The evenness lives in the left as much as the right.
The left holds the line. The grain comes up under the thread into the left and tells you when to ease, when to pull.
I sent the first needle through. Good. Clean. The iron had marked the holes before, and the awl found the first one true.
I caught it on the left and went to draw, but the hand closed wrong.
I'd made a thousand of these. Ten thousand.
The draw was nothing, the breath between the breaths.
Your fingers do it while your head's elsewhere.
My fingers went to do it, the ring finger gone, the whole grip rolling toward the gap.
The thread slid where it shouldn't. The tension I'd held in that hand my whole life ran out through a hole.
The stitch came up slack. Crooked. A child's seam.
I stared at it.
Then I pulled it out and did it again, slower this time, telling the hand what I wanted the way you'd talk a drunk down a stair.
I sent the needle, caught it, drew. My own hand betrayed me, a stitch at a time.
The waxed thread bit into the side of the wound where the gauze had ridden up.
The pain went white and clean up the arm.
The needle skipped the hole and went into the meat of my thumb instead.
I dropped the work, fighting tears.
I couldn't do it.
Fuck.
I crossed my arms over the table, put my head down, and for the first time since they'd taken my finger, I let myself cry over it.
I don't know how long I stayed like that. Long enough for the tears to dry tight on my face. Long enough for my arm to go dead under my head.
When I sat up, the offcut was still there in the clam. The seam was still crooked. The awl was where I'd dropped it, point-up, my granddad turning in his grave.
I wiped my face on my shoulder and looked at the mess of it. And somewhere under the wet and the snot and the self-pity, a meaner voice came up, the one that had got me through the van and the warehouse and six months of being a line in a ledger.
Ye miserable bastard. Ye've conquered worse than a finger.
Aye. I had. I'd lost my da. I'd sewn for a man who'd have put me in the ground the day I stopped being useful. I'd had a needle in my leg and a chair under me and a blade at my hand, and I was still here, still breathing.
And if those fuckers thought they could break me by taking my finger, they had another thing coming.
I picked the awl back up and set it point-down where it belonged. Then I pulled the slack stitch out for the second time and threaded the needle on the good hand, and this time when I went to draw, I didn't ask the left to do what it used to do. I let it do what it could.
I held the line differently and pinched the thread against the side of my hand where the finger wasn't, finding a new way to take the tension, clumsy as a bairn's first try.
The stitch came up wrong again. But less wrong.
I pulled it and did it again.
Less wrong.
I'd be slow for a long while. I'd be ugly at it longer. I might never be the best in any room again. But I could do it. I could fucking do it.
Let somebody else be the best. The best was nothing but trouble, anyway.
"No' done," I told the empty room. "No' fucking done."
I pulled the next stitch through, and it held.