An imperious series of beeps from her pocket almost made her drop the cup. She plucked out her phone.James mobile. After a bit of fumbling, she opened the text.Tamzin @ NatÕs. Need dinner companion 2nite. How u fixed?
Thoughtfully, she laid the phone on the table and returned to her coffee, staring out at mothers with buggies, lads in jeans that swung like satchels from skinny backsides. The planters that decorated the street were filled with the kind of geraniums you’re supposed to call pelargoniums, as jolly and scarlet as Bryony’s favourite nail varnish.
The phone beeped again. Diane wondered if she’d ever be the nonchalant phone user that everyone else above the age of six seemed to be.I promise 2 behave. Strictly no pouncing. Will pick u [email protected] grinned and ordered another cappuccino. She always considered herself a strong woman but she discovered herself quite powerless to resist the idea of dinner with James, with his dark grey eyes and lightning smiles.
When Tamzin’s phone rang, the next morning,Dadshowed on the screen. Tamzin rolled herself a little more tightly in the covers of Nat’s spare bed before she answered.
James sounded as if he’d been up for hours. Which he probably had. ‘I can drive you to Diane’s today, as it’s Saturday.’
Unfairly, she snapped, ‘Oh,Dad, I can drive myself. It’s a good day. You can’t be in control all the time.’ And she pressed ‘end call’ on her phone.
Then she felt mean. She wasn’t fair to him. She knew that. On bad days she wanted him to be the man with the answers even while she resented him for having them. But, on good days, she’d shoo him away.
Still, half-an-hour later, she was parking beside the hedge outside Diane’s redbrick house. She knew, now, to knock on the side door. It seemed better manners to go to the front door but it was swollen shut and if you rattled the pitted brass knocker Diane had to come out of the side door and find you, or shout directions through the letterbox.
‘Great to see you, Tamzin.’ Diane beamed as she opened the door. She glanced over Tamzin’s shoulder.
Tamzin giggled and gestured to the empty space behind her. ‘Look! No Dad.’
Diane’s eyes returned to Tamzin and she smiled. ‘So I see. It’s great you could make it. Let’s take some tea up to the workroom with us and we can start decorating your jeans.’
Tamzin whisked a bag from behind her back and flourished a pair of soft grey Levis. ‘I’m all ready.’
‘Wonderful – and don’t you look good, today? Your hair looks great with that pretty dress.’
Diane’s approval puffed Tamzin up. The blue cotton dress was one Alice had bought in an optimistic moment. The ruching that had given her an elephantine bum suited Tamzin’s snakey hips.
‘Oh. My. God.’ Tamzin paused on the threshold to Diane’s workroom. It was more of an Aladdin’s Cave than even on her last visit. ‘Diane, I want bling-bling buttons like those.’ She pointed at six bright, glass-encrusted buttons knotted together with wool and hooked over a nail in the wooden shelves that could have been the store of a giant magpie. Folded fabric, funny felty white stuff, braid in twenty colours, sequins, buttons, beads, buckles … It was a treasure trove.
‘You have those, if you want. Don’t think they’re right for either of the tops I’ve fitted you for, though. Maybe something darker?’ Diane looked at Tamzin with her head on one side. ‘Dusky red? That would suit you. Do you like zips? Or, I know!’ Diane seized a pad and scrabbled for a pencil. ‘How about, instead of a normal seam we have a run of clear circlets up the outside of the sleeve? They’ll go well with the buttons.’ She sketched rapidly, then turned the pad to Tamzin.
‘Oh, yay, that’ll look so cool!’ Tamzin paused. She checked her sleeves were rolled down. ‘You’ll see my arms between the circlets –’
‘Only on the outside, here, from your shoulder. That’ll be all right. And we could make this a bib neck, three buttons either side running vertically.’ She sketched again.
‘Brilliant. You’re so kind.’ Tamzin gazed at the drawing. Her throat was suddenly tight with tears.
Diane took the cream shirt from its hanger. ‘Kind! This is my business, Tamz. I send bills to Daddy. Now, you rootle through those shelves. There are catalogues on the bottom shelf, look through them, too.’
Willing the tears to subside, Tamzin examined tubes labelledbugle beadsandseed beads, silver, gold, scarlet, black and some blue that shone purple depending which way you looked at them. Depression was shitty. Sometimes she was so sad that she couldn’t cry, descending instead into a bleak and frozen landscape where tears might’ve been a relief. But make her happy and she cried? Er, right …
She picked up a big black buckle that fastened with three circular plates like her old school belt, stroking the satin matt finish.
Behind her, the sewing machine began to chatter. She glanced around. Diane was absorbed, pale head bent over the cream shirt as it passed smoothly under the machine’s foot.
Hooks and eyes, poppers, Velcro dots, rings the colours of brass, pewter, silver, gold. Thin cord. Tamzin popped open an old circular biscuit tin and found a feast of embroidery silks, a hundred colours from the subtlest silvery blue to flaming scarlet and lime green. Broad black ribbon gleamed dully at her, and she put it aside with the buckle.
‘Got some stuff that appeals to you?’ Diane snapped off the threads and examined the stitching on the cuff.
‘These?’ Tamzin showed her the black buckle and the ribbon.
‘OK.’ Diane put the two things together on her work table. ‘Can you pass me that red tin? It’s filled with buckles.’ She flipped the top off and shook the contents. ‘What else do you like?’
Tamzin peered in, her reflection slithering around in the battered silver interior. ‘This … and this.’ A silver S buckle, a black one without a prong but with serrations at the sides, a buckle that looked like a flower with six petals and one with two prongs.
Diane picked up the original black buckle. ‘The obvious thing to do with this is to make a belt. Let me look for some webbing of some kind. The rest of the buckles can be threaded with ribbon and then fixed all over the jeans. The S should go in the small of your back, I think, and then down the side – Oh – here’s George.’
Tamzin followed her gaze out of the window to where a tall lad with a baseball cap was locking up a deep blue car outside. The cap hid his face. He turned, took two strides, hurdled the hedge and loped up the path.
