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By Root 848 0

with a man named Gebbs, and of a time when they both lived in the Tailoring District in sector five, and of how Gebbs, who was also a tailor, had promised that he would one day marry (though he never actually specified whom he would marry—but then Miss Stott never thought there was any need to specify). She remembered Gebbs had told her how he was able to make an ugly man beautiful, just by providing him with the right suit. He told her how he chose the correct patterns for his clients and transformed them, because of the excellence of their new suits, from shy, awkward beings into successful businessmen. But once Gebbs realised that Miss Stott’s belly was stretching her dresses and that a new tailor was even then beginning to imagine new patterns and suits inside the belly of Miss Stott, he hurriedly abandoned her. Miss Stott, when she discovered that Gebbs was to marry one of the daughters of a distinguished tailor on Saclinn Street, had broken into Gebbs’s shop in the middle of the night and with a pair of sharp tailoring scissors had carefully cut all his suits in half. She left a note for Gebbs, saying: ‘These suits are called broken promises suits, or half-truths suits.’

Soon afterwards Miss Stott moved to our district and set up her own tailor’s shop and kept her son in a playpen behind the counter, until, after a while, he grew up and grew away from her, he grew up and grew away to such an extent that he went off to live in another city altogether, a city so distant from Entralla that he saw his mother only twice every year. From Miss Stott we learnt the great new words ‘warp’, ‘weft’, ‘worsted’, ‘polyester’, ‘multiple plain weave’, ‘lightweight cotton’ and also the precious word ‘corduroy’, which was the name of a material originally worn by the kings of France. How that one word suggested a world and a time so far away. ‘Corduroy’ I would often whisper to myself as if it were a secret, ‘corduroy, corduroy’. Sometimes we dressed each other up in old dead people’s suits which Miss Stott kept at the back of her shop, reserved for the poorest of her customers. Or Miss Stott would arrange our black hair in the styles of her youth, and sometimes she would let us wear some of her old dresses (or occasionally two new ones), and we would dance to old records made by old dead people, and how we felt alive then. At the end of our joyful afternoons, the pair of us, wearing nothing but voluminous dress shirts, would calm ourselves down in Miss Stott’s sitting room, sipping the orangeade she bought for us. Miss Stott would tell us the complete history of Veber Street, from when it was part of the countryside many, many years ago, right up to the latest news of the week. She was the self-appointed historian of our street. She knew all its characters, all its crimes and sorrows. She told us of the family who used to live in our house and had all gone to live in Melbourne, Australia; she told us that the Plints used to have a son as well as a daughter, but that the son had died in a car accident; she told us that Mr Fiff, the baker, beat his wife; she told us that she’d seen Mr Plint, the butcher, and Mrs Misons, the toy shop owner’s wife, in one of the side streets kissing with tongues, with Mr Plint’s hands on Mrs Misons’ breasts, and that, she supposed, might be the reason that Mrs Misons’ youngest child had blonde hair like Mr Plint rather than the ginger it ought to have, like Mr Misons. She was a very knowledgeable woman. She’d often sit on the doorstep of the tailor’s shop just watching the street, gathering its little histories. Some people, we would notice over the years, would yell at Miss Stott as she sat there—‘Stop staring at us! Quit your nosing!’ But Miss Stott would go on staring, always fascinated. In those days we wanted nothing more than to listen to the commonplace histories of Veber Street.

But all this time Mother was not happy; she was jealous of the old woman. When we returned home with gifts of old dresses and trinkets from the indulgent Miss Stott, she would hide the trinkets and bleach the dresses.