In last week’s instalment Annie invited Reef and Noe to a disastrous meal.
Now read on . . .
The Christmas lights have been up in the centre of Ross for weeks now. I missed the ceremony because I’d forgotten about it. I’d got out of the practice of doing anything community based ever since the pandemic. Back then the town had looked deserted at times, smiles, if anyone bothered to smile, were hidden behind masks in a town where nods of the head and smiles were de rigueur. I remember the eerie quiet and how I hardly recognised the people who had braved it to the massively long queue outside of Sainsbury’s in the hope they might find flour lurking among the empty bottom shelves in the baking aisle. It all seems so long ago now and a bit like a dream until I see the odd person still sporting a mask, albeit one of those scary ones with a drawn on smile on the front.
As I pass Specsavers, Phoenix walks up to me and nuzzles the palm of my hand. His lead is dangling down beside him on the ground.
‘Hey, you. What you doing out on your own?’ He looks thinner than usual and he doesn’t yelp a greeting. His owner, Dez, walks slowly behind him and greets me with a nod. He isn’t wearing a warm hat. The top of Dez’s head is bald and his remaining hair is fully grey now, uncombed long and straggly as usual. His face is drawn, his skin has a greyish hue, the whites of his eyes look yellow. He is only in his fifties but today he looks as though he’s been around for closer to a century. The air is biting, as it has been for weeks and I want to knit him a hat. I want to tell him he should be wearing one at least but he doesn’t look as if he is connected to his surroundings today. He looks disoriented, not grounded, not part of the town for some reason.
‘Annie Oakley, how are you?’ His greeting, usually bright and cheerful, is flat and forced and all my fears about him living on the street and not getting proper health care weighs heavily on me.
‘Oh, you know, same old same old. Is everything okay, Dez?’
‘All’s good, babes. Just been doing a bit of Christmas shopping.’ He holds up a blue plastic bag from the late night grocery shop, a few bottles knock together from within it. I wonder if there is anything wholesome in there for him and for Phoenix. I so want to take him home to feed him but Dez never accepts and I’ve been close to tears at his stubbornness so I’m forced to say nothing. I can see by the way he shifts his eyes away and turns his body sideways to me that I can’t mention the taboo subject today, he’s not in the mood. I can’t be too pushy today anyway. My kitchen is not cooking friendly at the moment because of the stage Anton is at and I’ll be having dinner with Rhiannon and her husband tonight.
‘I haven’t even thought about Christmas shopping,’ I say instead but wonder if I could walk to the supermarket with him and buy him dinner.
‘Gotta go, babes,’ Dez says and picks up Phoenix’s lead. ‘Good boy.’
They leave me staring at them as they head in the direction of the library. It’ll be closed now and Dez will settle down there in the corner beside the locked glass doors and no one will ask him to move on and no one will offer to take him home for dinner. I keep looking over my shoulder at Dez’s lanky outline and Phoenix’s slow thin body as I head towards Rhiannon’s eatery for a session of knitting. I’m greeted by the smell of buttery toast and the coffee that still fills the air from the brews of earlier.
Rhiannon leaps up to greet me, as usual. What is unusual is the deathly quiet coming from the window table of the coffee house. Instead of the clacking of needles and the hum of conversation, usually lead by Bea, knitting needles are propped lifelessly on top of works in progress which sit limply on the laps of fellow knitters Bea and Judith. Judith sucks hard on an imaginary lemon and stares at Bea. Bea stares back, fake lashes unblinking and lips pursed as equally tight as Judith’s.
‘What’s happened?’ I say at the side of my mouth to Rhiannon.
‘Nothing, dear, just a little misunderstanding.’ She folds my coat over her arm and joins me, looking wide eyed at the spectacle. Green and red from the Christmas lights reflects off the coffee shop windows and tints the white and silver in the women’s hair. I wonder why Bea hasn’t already smoothed over the situation. She never leaves it long after one of their rows before offering the peace pipe, which in Bea’s case would most likely be filled with marijuana.
This is it, I think to myself. This is the big one, the unresolved history between the two women is about to be revealed. And where else but at one of the knitting circles. I don’t move, apart from stretching my mouth towards Rhiannon so I can whisper down to her.
‘What do we do?’
In a loud voice Rhiannon says, ‘Nothing, we do nothing. In fact if these two are going to carry on like children then there’ll be no knitting today. We pack up early and I’ll take you back to mine to get the supper on. I’ve got peppered salmon waiting for us in the fridge. Some baked potatoes and some broccoli. How does that sound my pet?’
‘Sounds great,’ I say finding it hard to drag my eyes away from the staring contest heating up at the coffee table.
‘Well ladies,’ Rhiannon bellows, still holding my coat over her arm. ‘What’s it to be? Am I locking up or are we knitting?’
Bea and Judith speak simultaneously. One says ‘locking up’ the other says ‘knitting’ but I’m not sure who says what.
‘I have a good mind to dissolve this knitting club altogether.’ Rhiannon, who never speaks much louder than her dulcet Welsh tones will allow, is quite out of breath from raising her voice. But she continues to. ‘You can settle this like grown ups or you’re both barred from the group.’
Bea and Judith stop sucking lemons and look at her in indignation. Now they are playing three way eye ping-pong and I become dizzy trying to work out who is out staring whom and how they can keep this up without blinking.
‘Okay,’ I say and sit down. Rhiannon sits, too, with my coat on her lap. ‘I’m sure whatever has happened between you both can’t be so bad it should end in this … in this sort of animosity. If one of you could just apologise.’ I look at Bea.
‘Why are you staring at me? I’m not the inflexible one.’
‘No one said –’
Before I can finish Judith and Bea begin a quarrel about holding too tightly to things and choking the life out of everything. The truth is about to land and I don’t know if my mediator skills are up to much. What if I learn something I don’t want to hear? What if I secretly take sides? I wish so much that Rhiannon wasn’t part of the fracas. She’d know what to say.
‘Please,’ I say. ‘One at a time.’ I point to Rhiannon. ‘Go.’
‘Okay,’ she says and clears her throat. ‘Bea wants to change the name of our knitting circle and Judith doesn’t like the new name.’
What? I think to myself. Is that really all this is about or is it a metaphor for something worse?
‘Why do you want to change the name?’ I dare to ask.
‘Because it’s old and it’s fuddy duddy like some of the members in it.’
‘I’m only a year older than you,’ hisses Judith. ‘And I’m as hip as the best of them.’
‘Hip?’ exclaims Bea. ‘No one says hip these days. What do people say now, Annie?’ They all stare at me.
‘I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue.’ They each sigh or puff in exasperation and lean back in their seats. Surely they must have noticed I’m not “hip”, “street”, “chill” or “calm”. Just a dork who wants her seventy year old friends to kiss and make up.
‘What is the new name by the way?’ I think I might regret asking but it’s out now.
‘Well, I thought,’ Bea says and dramatically picks up her knitting needles, ‘that we should call ourselves Spool and The Gang.’ She looks at me brightly, urging me to concur.
‘Um, like the band?’
‘Yes, like the band but obviously not exactly like the band because it’s Spool instead of Cool.’
Admittedly I do like the name but I can’t admit that I do because Judith will be upset the longest. And, look, they’ve made me take sides.
‘Well you know, if you’ve been going all these years with one name, why change now? The Monday Afternoon Knitters is a great name. I think.’
‘There,’ Judith says proudly. ‘If it ain’t broke …’
‘Oh whatever.’ Bea’s knitting needles click rapidly and she huffs every time she wraps the wool around the needle for the next stitch. ‘You’d know all about broken things, wouldn’t you?’
‘Well I’ve put up with you all this time,’ Judith huffs and proceeds to knit with vigour.
‘Is that it?’ asks Rhiannon. ‘Are we okay again, ladies?’
Bea and Judith look at each other just briefly and something passes between them, the unknown truth behind their occasional tiffs and spats. I don’t suppose I’ll ever find it out but I can feel stories of their past playing out between them via their extra sensory link. I have to hold my breath because it really is a lot, the silent exchanges between them. I steal a look at Rhiannon but she rises quickly from where she is perched on the edge of her chair.
‘I’ll get you some tea, pet,’ she says not looking at me once. ‘You must be gasping.’
I open my mouth to speak but nothing comes out. Before I leave the circle after knitting another three rows of my beanie hat, I am still none the wiser but I know three things: Whatever they are harbouring it is big, they definitely don’t want me to know and I’d do anything I could to help them resolve the problem.
Rhiannon and I drive in silence back to her house. She swallows loudly, blinking through the large glasses she wears for driving but leaning close to the windscreen as if the glasses are not helping at all. I look at her periodically, expecting her to say something about earlier. For a woman who is generally so chatty, it must pain her not to be able to make a single comment about the history between Bea and Judith but she’s obviously been sworn to secrecy. I’ve yet to earn my place of trust and be allowed to know what on earth has happened. Mum swears blind she has no idea what I’m talking about. In the years she’d been a member of the knitting group she never once cottoned on that something was awry about their set up. I put that down to Mum having so many secret worries of her own that she couldn’t have noticed what I’d sensed not long after joining the Monday Afternoon Knitters.
Rhiannon parks in front of her garage door and leads me straight to her large kitchen at the back of the house. She calls something out in Welsh to her husband, William, who answers in Welsh. I hear them mention my name and Rhiannon’s husband calls noswaith dda to me, which I understand so I call ‘Good evening!’ back to him.
‘Right,’ says Rhiannon. ‘Peppered salmon here we come. I’ll microwave the jacket potato if that’s okay. It’s fast and I’m guessing you must be hungry, not being able to get much cooking done.’
‘Well, you know me, it’s not as if I’ve been starving.’
I watch Rhiannon whiz around her kitchen in an apron with hundreds of apples printed on it that I didn’t notice her put on. She moves her cuddly form in a fast and efficient whir of white curls and apples. I go to ask if I can help set the table but before I can finish the question Rhiannon has set three places as if she’d whipped out a magic table cloth already laid for a party of three. The broccoli is on the boil and before I know it she’s calling William in to join us at the table.
‘You sit yourself down my pet. You need food down you. You look thin.’
‘I’m hardly thin,’ I say but I do as I’m told.
‘I told your mother that I’d make sure you ate well and looked after yourself. It wouldn’t harm you to put on a few pounds.’
I’m pretty sure Bea would have something to say about gaining extra pounds before Becs’ engagement party. I’d made a date for our shopping trip this coming Saturday, the actual day of the party. Rhiannon places a plate of peppered salmon, broccoli and a massive jacket potato dripping with butter, without having asked if I wanted butter, in front of me. She has halved another potato to share with William who doesn’t stand on ceremony but tucks in straight away. For pudding there is apple crumble and custard. Hello size 16.
It isn’t until I’m helping Rhiannon with the dishes after dinner and I can hear William snoring in the living room that I dare to ask her about Bea and Judith.
‘I know you don’t want to mention what happened earlier Rhi, but I wondered if perhaps some mediation could help them move forward. There’s obviously something going on behind all the smiles and jokes we share on Monday nights. And I know they both meet up regularly during the week. They’ve been best friends since they were what? Seventeen? Eighteen? It would be a shame if they were to fall out now.’
‘I do my best to keep out of it,’ Rhiannon says handing me a dripping wet dinner plate. ‘They’re old enough to keep a good lid on things to stop it all blowing up.’
‘Maybe, but tonight things got so heated I didn’t know what to do with myself.’
‘You did just fine.’
‘Sure,’ I say, drying the forks. ‘But that lid can’t stay closed on top of a boiling pot.’
‘Seriously, my pet.’ Rhiannon stops washing up and turns to face me. ‘There’s a lot under that lid and you’re best off out of it. Only know it’s to do with a man. It goes back a long ways and the women say they’ve made peace with it.’
‘Well, that’s not true.’
Rhiannon puts a wet Marigold finger to her lips. ‘You know I can’t say a word and it kills me to know what passed between those two. Do yourself a favour and don’t bring it up. If they want you to know, it’s up to them to tell. All right my lovely?’
‘All right.’ I put a finger to my lips and smile. I need to back off. It isn’t any of my business and I should respect their privacy.
Rhiannon chats merrily as she drives me home. She has packed a Tupperware container with a portion of apple crumble in it. I’ve sat with it on my knee and Rhiannon has told me of several ways I can enjoy it the following evening after dinner. I nod as if I’m listening but my mind is still on Judith and Bea.
It’s cold and quiet as I let myself in. Anton would have left ages ago. There’s a familiar smell of dust and the house has an air of a place that’s lived in rather than a quiet cavern I come home to each night. It’s as if he’s still here, Anton, and I can hear him in the kitchen. Him being here during the day, the sub-contractors coming and going, makes the place seem lived in again stops me feeling so lonely. I’ll miss them when the house is finished.
At two in the morning when I can’t sleep for thinking about my knitting buddies and their secret, I eat apple crumble out of the Tupperware container with a large spoon and picture Rhiannon’s finger over her mouth. It’s none of your business, Annie, just get some sleep.