Doubleborn by Toby Forward

Author:Toby Forward [Forward, Toby]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781406342161
Publisher: Walker Books Ltd
Published: 2012-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

Shoddle was holding the cloth

close up to his face, stitching with fast strokes of the needle. He took his eyes from his work, stared for a moment at Tamrin as if to make sure it was her, then looked down and continued.

“You knew I was coming?” asked Tamrin.

“Where else could you go?”

Tamrin stepped closer to see what he was sewing. He didn’t look up.

It was a sack.

She looked at the rolls of cloth against the walls.

Except there weren’t any.

They were just piles of sacks.

“What are you doing?”

He stopped sewing and held up his work. It was a jacket, ragged and rough, not fit for a labourer in the field.

“Nice, isn’t it?” he said.

He lowered it to his lap and continued sewing. The needle was thick and long to get through the harsh cloth.

“It’s rubbish. It’s a sack.”

Shoddle’s needle jabbed and stitched. He tugged the coarse thread through the sacking.

“So you can see it? You see all the sacks?”

“Of course.”

“They can’t. The man who chose this thinks it’s the softest worsted, green flecked with red threads. He rubbed it against his face and said it was the finest cloth he’d ever seen.”

Tamrin walked round the shop, touching the sacks. They were clean and new, but rough, hard, loose-woven.

“How did I get here?” she asked, her back to Shoddle.

“Can’t you remember?”

“No.”

“Did you walk? All the way from the college?” he asked.

He was playing games.

“Not just now,” she said. “At first. How did I get here at first?”

“Oh, back then. Why didn’t you say?”

Tamrin spun round and pointed at him. He pushed the needle through the sacking and it carried on straight through the palm of his hand. He held his hand up and looked at it, the thread still connected to the sack, the point sticking through the back. Blood dripped on to the cloth and ran down and along his wrist. Tamrin could see he was in pain. He didn’t show it except for the tightness in his jaw and the set of his shoulders.

“You always were a spiteful little thing,” he said.

“I wasn’t,” she said. “I’m not.”

He held his hand out to her.

“No?” he asked.

Tamrin hesitated, caught between the need to show him that she wasn’t spiteful and the desire to hurt him more.

She reached forward, tugged the needle and drew it right through his hand, pulling the thread after it so that his hand was stitched to the sack. He grimaced as the coarse fibre passed through his flesh.

“Perhaps I am,” she said.

She held the needle at arm’s length and watched the thread pull further through his hand.

“How did I get here?” she asked.

“I stole you.”

He watched her reaction.

“You didn’t expect that, did you?”

She let go of the needle.

“Where from?”

“Oh, that’s not so easy to answer.”

Tamrin reached her hand for the needle again. Stopped. Left it alone.

“Are you going to leave me like this?” he asked.

“Where did you steal me from? Who from? Why?”

“All in good time. You’re hurting me.”

Tamrin picked up Shoddle’s scissors and snipped the thread. She pulled it from his hand.

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