Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
Don't Pull the Thread
A retired tram conductress keeps a diary of the woman next door, who found a thread at the hem of her cardigan and has been growing shorter ever since.
- dated: October 1991
- narrator: Nan Whitlock, retired tram conductress
- reliability: reliable
TUESDAY, 8TH OCTOBER
Ruth from two doors down was at the stop in her blue cardigan, and one sleeve was shorter than the other. I said so. She said sleeves ride up, you know how it is. I do not know how it is. Then the tram came and she lifted her arm to hail it, and I saw it: a single thread off the hem, running away behind her across the wet grass and over the wall toward the Rec. I lost it in the rain. It was not lying slack in the grass, the way a snagged thread lies. It was straight, the way a washing line is straight.
WEDNESDAY, 9TH
I went in with a game pie and we sat in her kitchen, and there it was, coming in at the window over the sill, across the lino, and up into the hem where she sat. She keeps a basket by the sink with what has been spun off her, wound into balls the colour of weak tea. She said: don't cut it, Nan. Not ever. It isn't mine only — I've lost the start of it, and if I cut the length I lose the length, if you follow me. She said it kindly, but in the voice of a woman reciting something learned by heart off a form.
FRIDAY, 11TH
Her husband used to mark the boys' heights on the doorframe with a pencil, and Ruth's marks went up that doorframe after he died. She came up short of the last one today. Half a mark short. She watched me see it and said then, would I like to keep her tape measure, in case. I did not ask in case of what. Counted back on my fingers: she was a different height at Christmas, and I have written down what I am nearly sure of and stopped there.
MONDAY, 14TH
The thread is dry in the rain. That is what I will put down, because it is the only thing left I am sure of. Murrow rain is stair-rod rain, it comes down like the city being filed under water, and not one drop sat on that thread at the window. It was warm where it crossed the sill; at nine warm, at ten cooler, and this is a thing I checked, with the back of my hand, twice. The paper boy says the thread over the Rec went slack in the night at about half past three, hung off the ground a minute like a wire when something far away lets out a long breath, and tightened again.
SUNDAY, 20TH
Ruth told me today it is not only the hem. There is a second thread started at the cuff, and she has set a second basket going. She began to cry, very tidily, and wound through it, and said she doesn't mind. Then she said she doesn't mind again, in the same words at the same pace, and I did not ask who taught her to say it like that, because I was afraid the answer would have a form number.
She never asks anyone to hold it for her. Every evening she carries it herself to the end of the garden and stands with her hand on it, facing the dark beyond the wall, waiting for whatever time it is the thread wants. Waiting politely, the way you wait outside an office.
I don't know whether she is being unwound or being let out. I know her smile, and I know the warmth of the thread, and I did not put the two together until tonight. If the pull slackens at half past three and tightens again before half past four, then somebody somewhere is at the other end of my neighbour, working regular hours. And of the two of us, she is the one who answers when it tugs.