#post-bereznick

[pareidoliaonthemove]

Re-Knitting the Fabric of Life

The prisoner had never thought he would be warm again. Never thought he would see the blue skies again. Never see his family again.

Scott Tracy rejoiced in the sight of the sky, blue and vast and endless. He treasured the – too short – visits from his family, their video calls and letters, the hugs and teasing. The tears – his and theirs – as they promised they’d call, write, be back again, soon.

But he couldn’t get warm.

Something of the (cold, draughty) stonework, the (icy, damp) snow seeping through (cracked) walls, the (bitter, biting) winds had gotten through the (thin, raggedy) ‘uniform’ he had been forced to wear. It had gotten through his skin (bruised and bleeding), through his flesh (cut and starved away) and into his very bones (broken and far, far too prominent); and nothing seemed to be able to dislodge it.

He had spent hours in the conservatory, surrounded by a jungle of lush green and flowering plants and humidity, basking in a sunbeam until he turned red and his clothes were sodden with sweat and humidity. Shuffling/walking/jogging/running endless circles around the gardens in the noon sun. He broiled himself alive in the long, hot, steamy showers. Wore layer upon layer of clothes, so many that he could barely move, until the rehab staff took to rationing his available clothes. Hot meals, hotter drinks, gulped down and burning his mouth and throat.

But the ice within him wouldn’t melt.

It felt like something inside him had died. Had been lost – no, not lost, torn out of him by the … people … from that … place. His mind shied away from the memories.

He liberated blankets – thick, warm and soft – from the store rooms, hiding them in his room, near the places he haunted. They were inevitably found and returned to their rightful places, with comforting words, but none of it helped.

Cold was the enemy.

It had taken Mom.

It had nearly taken him.

Scott Tracy was cold, and he couldn’t bear it.

It was a miserable, grey, stormy, rainy day. The kind of weather that had always worn him down – trapped in a house with too much pent-up up energy and four little brothers who felt the same would do that to a guy – but now it just sapped something extra from him.

The cold, the grey, the dampness in the air – it felt too much like … that place. It made him fearful, jumpy, and prone to overreacting to innocent things.

Scott took solace in wandering throughout the complex, taking a kind of defiant joy in every room he could enter and leave, every door he could open. It felt childish, like a toddler who had finally mastered door handles; but at the same time it was a heady kind of exhilaration, a confirmation that he was safe, and free.

By about the fifth circuit, the illusion was starting to come apart: the same rooms, the same doors. He was starting to feel claustrophobic, enclosed, trapped when he entered the rec room. Curled up in the comfortable chairs by the large picture window was a woman, maybe a couple of years older than him.

Scott hadn’t seen her before, but she lacked the stressed air of nervous hyper-vigilance that the other patients exhibited (that he probably had the same look about him was another of those things he was most definitely not thinking of), which meant she was probably staff.

The girl ignored the room, and ignored the view the winds and rain lashing the gardens and ground, and instead focused on a mass of woollen fabric bundled on her lap.

As he wandered closer – he had been here long enough that new was a welcome distraction – he saw that she was knitting. He recognised the hand movements easily enough – Grandma knitted prolifically, and but the size and complexity of the knitted fabric was new to him.

He stood a little way off, watching silently as the needles (needle? it seemed she was using one gigantic flexible needle with short stiff ends) flashed, as she chanted the pattern under her breath in time with the stitches.

“Knit, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and done!” The woman flopped back in the seat, before picking up a small brass coloured device about the size of the stopwatch Gordon had insisted he use to time his laps, and clicking a button.

“Are you timing how quickly you can knit a row?” Scott blurted the question without thinking.

She jumped, apparently unaware of his presence, and Scott hurried stepped back a couple of steps, palms held out to show he wasn’t a danger. “Sorry … I didn’t think … I’ll leave you …”

“It’s all right.” Scott froze partway through his turn to leave. “And no, I wasn’t timing myself.” She held out the device to him. “It’s my row counter.”

Scott hesitated, then carefully stepped closer, examining the offered device. It was obviously very old, tarnished brass with elegant lines forming flowering vines around the face. Four dials, once white, but now yellowed with age, and old style serif font in black displayed a number. Arrayed on the top, two either side of the loop that could hold a chain … or the knitting needles, were four buttons, obviously push button types, from the sound earlier.

“It’s pretty,” he said cautiously. “An heirloom?”

She smiled. “It might have been once. I found it in an antique shop. I believe it was a doorman’s crowd counter, once upon a time.” She smiled at the device lovingly. “It was much too useful to be left on a shelf, and I do like pretty things.”

She glanced up at Scott thoughtfully. “Can I ask, why did you think I was timing how fast I could knit?”

Scott shrugged. “It was all I could think of. It looked like the stopwatch my younger brother makes us use to time his laps in the pool.”

She smiled. “He swims competitively? You brother?”

Scott smiled back. “Obsessively, more like. But yes, he’s just been accepted into the Olympic team.” The smile fell. “I hope I’ll be allowed to go watch him compete. I want to be there for him.”

Scott bit his lip. Gordon nearly hadn’t made the team, the distraction he had caused by being ‘Missing in Action’, then ‘Presumed Killed in Action’, then ‘Prisoner of War’, before finally being found (resurrected rescued) and brought here to recuperate had cost Gordon training sessions, and that had cost him seconds in the pool.

She smiled. “I’m sure you will, and I’ll bet he’ll win, too.” Scott shrugged, noncommittally, still caught on the guilty thought that he might have lost Gordon his dream, as well as his own. “Hey, can you do me a favour?”

Scott started. It had been a long time since someone had asked him for anything, even as small as ‘pass the salt’ at the table. “Uh, yeah, sure. What do you need?”

“I need to measure the length of this thing, can you just grab the bottom corner, yeah there …” Scott had pointed to a corner poking out by her leg, and carefully caught it in both hands. “Yep, and take this …” One end of a dressmakers tape was held out, and Scott took it, instinctively lining it up with what he hoped was the edge of the corner. “You’re a natural!” She stood, manoeuvring around the chair, and Scott tentatively stepped back, until they had the fabric stretched out, with the tape measure laid against one edge. “One hundred and seventy-eight centimetres.” A hesitation, “that’s … sixty-seven centimetres to go.”

Scott ran numbers in his head: about twenty-six inches to go and … “Ninety-six inches long?!” He stared at the fabric hung between them. It fell and pooled on the ground along one edge. “What on earth are you making?”

She blinked. “A blanket. Well, a king-sized blanket, to be honest. So, yeah, it’s a bit on the large side.”

Scott stared. “You’re … knitting a king-sized blanket?”

She shrugged. “Why not.”

It was Scott’s turn to blink. “Yeah. Why not.” His attention turned to the blanket in his hands. The wool was warm, and soft against his hand, a soft mauve colour, like you sometimes saw in the clouds at sunset …

He ran his fingers across the fabric, feeling the individual stitches, the tickle of the single fibres coming loose from the wool, the bumps and ridges of the pattern. A memory resurfaced. Grandma fussing over him, as she made him try on a jumper she had knitted: too big, too hot, that itched his exposed skin and he knew would make the kids at school laugh at him …

Grandma didn’t knit him jumpers any more, now she knitted for the local hospital auxiliary. Delicate little baby cardigans, booties and beanies in white and cream …

An extra-determined gust of wind rattled the glass in the window, and Scott jumped, shivering.

The woman stared at him, curious. “You alright?”

Scott laughed. “I’m in here, aren’t I?”

She shrugged. “Weather seems to have you spooked.”

Scott slumped into the chair opposite her. “Can’t get warm. Not since I got here. Everyone keeps telling me my temperature’s fine, but …”

“You still feel cold.”

He nodded, eyeing her, before sighing. “You’re a shrink, right?”

“Occupational therapist.”

Scott’s eyebrows rose. “My brother Virgil is the artist, and I really don’t need any baskets, thanks.” The rest of his body followed his eyebrows.

“How about blankets? Do you need them? Or jumpers?”

Scott froze, half standing. He stared at her. “My dad is rich. I can buy all the blankets and jumpers I want.”

One delicate eyebrow rose. “And I’m sure all that money did you the world of good after you landed.”

Scott collapsed into the chair, the wind knocked out of him. A dim memory, an old woman, ancient and grey as the stone of the walls, stealing rope, and frayed fragments of cloth, teasing them apart and twisting them into a sort of twine, then …

Scott stared. “There was a woman … an old woman,” he said slowly. “Somehow …” he stared at nothing. “She survived … she made twine, used sticks to knit …” he swallowed. “She stayed warm. She lived.”

He stared at the blanket piled up in the woman’s lap. Lost to the memories.

“I can teach you.” The words were softly spoken. Secret. “I can teach you to knit. And no one can ever take that away from you. You can make yourself as many blankets, as many jumpers, as many socks as you want or need.” Scott stared blankly at her.

She shrugged. “Think about it. Let me know if you decide you want to try.” And consulting a piece of paper, picked up the needles, and settled back in the seat.

He spoke without thinking: “Do you have anything in blue?”

It turned out she had rather a lot in blue (apparently, he was predictable), enough different blues to make Virgil envious, from dark midnight blue all the way to the lightest pastel, almost white.

Scott had resorted to touch, finding the softest, most inviting feeling yarn (you work with yarn; wool is on a sheep’s back), and at Sophia’s suggestion, they selected a range of different shades of blue, allowing Scott to change colours and create an ‘ombre effect’ whatever that meant.

Slowly, he came to realise it meant the gradient of the sky, from the light blue of the horizon, to the glorious rich of the desert sky at noon. And it was slowly, for Scott Tracy was not a natural at knitting, and he often threw it down in frustration over dropped stitches, broken patterns, and lost counts. But gradually, he eased from a white-knuckled grip, with yarn biting into the flesh of his fingers, to a looser, easier grip, and yarn sliding through his fingers. Gradually, incrementally, the completed rows of blanket grew onto his lap.

As Scott got better at knitting, he griped more about the problems he could see with his work: the holes where he had dropped stitches, the wonky stitches where he had somehow knitted two at the same time, texture in the wrong place.

Sophia just laughed. By now she had finished her blanket, and had started another project, a lacy summer cardigan in a bright sunshine yellow that made Scott think of Gordon and his heart ache for his absent brother. She held up the fabric for Scott to examine. “What do you see?”

Scott squinted at the worked fabric hanging off the needle. “I see knitting without mistakes,” he grumbled.

She snorted. “Oh, they’re there, I just hide them better than you do. Look again.”

Scott glared, and re-examined the piece. “I give up. What am I supposed to see?”

She laid the piece out flat on the coffee table between them. “Holes from dropped stitches,” she ran a finger along a row of patterned ‘flowers’, the petals formed by larger gaps in the fabric. “Wonky stitches where I knitted two stitches at the same time,” she indicated the space around the flowers, where the stitches did, indeed, lean towards the ‘petals’. “And texture in the wrong place,” she pointed at the ‘vines’ supporting the flowers, where they crossed each other and crawled around the fabric.

Scott scowled. “But they’re meant to be there. It’s the pattern,” he indicated the sheet of paper she had been consulting as she knitted. “Mine is just …” He shook his head dismissively.

Sophia sighed. “You really are hell-bent on missing the point, aren’t you?” She stared at him, “Okay, let’s try it this way: We can agree that your ‘mistakes’ and my ‘pattern’ are the same processes, just in different context, yes?”

Scott nodded. “Yes.”

“So things that are desirable in one situation, aren’t desirable in another?”

Scott nodded. “Yes.” He frowned. “If this is about maladaptive behaviours …”

She shook her head. “No. No, that’s not it. When you knit, and you make a ‘mistake’, you have choices: option one, you can frog the work back to the ‘mistake’ and rework everything ‘correctly’.”

Scott nodded. “Can’t do that in real life, though. No rewind button.”

Sophia nodded. “Yep. Life doesn’t have a rewind button. What is done is done. Which brings us to our next knitting option. You can ignore the ‘mistake’ and just keep going.”

Scott frowned. “And going back to your painfully obvious ‘life as knitting’ metaphor,” he broke off, frown intensifying as Sophia smiled, at his expression she rearranged her expression and gestured for him to continue, miming exaggerated interest in his words. “And going back to innumerous hours spent with the resident shrinks, that is also not an option. I’m not allowed to go ‘oops, well that happened, oh well, what’s for dinner?’.”

She tilted her head. “Why not?”

Scott blinked. “Huh?”

“Why can’t you continue on? ‘Cause, unless I missed a memo, getting you out of here and off living your life is kinda the whole point of you being here.”

Scott frowned. He examined his error-ridden blanket while he thought. He shook his head. “Can I have time to think about it?”

Sophia nodded. “Sure.”

They both went back to their knitting.

It was a week before Scott had an answer. “It’s because the pattern’s too disrupted,” he said.

Sophia raised an eyebrow. “I’m sorry?”

“The life as knitting metaphor. I can’t just leave and go on with my life because the pattern is too disrupted. There were too many dropped stitches, too many new stitches in the wrong place. The pattern is all wrong. It won’t work anymore.”

He gestured to his blanket. “Like this. I had to reduce the number of stitches on this side,” he pointed to a section of blanket, “and add more to this side,” he indicated the other side. “Otherwise the centre part would be out of place and it would all be unbalanced.”

Sophia nodded. “That’s right.”

He frowned at the disrupted section of knitting, and sighed. “It’s full of holes, and all wonky and ugly. I should have just unravelled it and started again.”

Sophia shrugged. “But life doesn’t have a rewind button. So what can you do?”

Scott frowned. “I made corrections, brought it back into balance …”

A raised eyebrow. “Is it all in balance? You just said it was ugly. What can you do?”

Scott stared at his blanket. The he stared at her cardigan. “The lace pattern. You said my mistakes in the right place make your pattern.” He stared, then shook his head. “How the hell am I supposed to incorporate everything from there into my life to make a pattern?”

Sophia’s hand rested gently on his shoulder. “You’re doing it now, Scott.” He frowned. “When I met you, you were cold, yes?” Scott nodded. “Are you cold now?”

He frowned, went to answer …

… and closed his mouth, as he really listened to his body.

“No …” he said tentatively. “At least, not like I was …” He frowned. “When did I get warm?”

She smiled, leaning back. “You were always warm, physically. It was your mind that was cold. Part of you was still expecting to be there, or to be taken back. You weren’t feeling settled in your environment. So you felt cold, because that was what you had focused on to cope with everything else.”

Scott frowned. “And so by teaching me to knit …”

She smiled. “You had something new to focus on. A new skill, a way to combat the feeling cold.” Her smile turned sad. “Like that old lady, you now have a way to survive, and nobody can take that away from you.”

A short month later, Scott was borne away by his jubilant family, back home. Back to his grandmother’s cooking, his warm bed, and the safety of happy memories, and new laughter.

And tucked away in his bags, in a hidden corner of his room, was a blanket the gradient of the sky. It was wonky, with holes and misshapen patterns, but it was warm, and soft, and his.

And hidden under that, was a collection of yarns, knitting needles, and patterns. Because you never did know when you were going to need a nice, warm blanket. Or jumper. Or socks.

Or when someone you loved needed them.

Notes:

Somehow I found myself ‘justifying’ the fact that I knit to a total stranger. I still don’t know where my answer of “When the apocalypse comes, I’ll still have warm clothes and blankets” came from, but it got me thinking.

After all, adequate clothing is a fundamental human right.

And knitting is good therapy.

And I just loved the idea of Mr Adrenaline-and-AvGas knitting blankets and jumpers and socks.

Not 100% happy with this one, but it got to the point where I had to either delete the file, or post it. I chose post it, cause, well, why the hell not? This is one of those ‘mistakes’ that I can live with!

The standard disclaimers, I do not own Thunderbirds, either the Original Series, the Movies (both Supermarionation and Live Action), or the Thunderbirds Are Go Series. (Although I do own copies on DVD.)

I do not do this for money, but for my own (in)sanity and entertainment.