STITCHES

Stitch in, stitch back, I sew with fear,

The needle’s eye watches me clear.

Stitch in, stitch back, I sew with blood,

A secret trapped in every thread.

Stitch in, stitch back, I sew with might,

Silence in each knot pulled tight.

Stitch in, stitch back, and now I see:

The tighter the stitch, the stronger the knot,

The sweeter the embroidery.

Stitch Chant, Pastimes, The Book of the Binders

Anna woke with something tugging at her. An ache. An urge. A feeling she couldn’t place. She tried to chase it but it was already gone. A dream? She did not dream.

She looked up at the dreambinder hanging above her, a few knots caught down its length. The Binders’ twisted take on a witch’s ladder, Aunt had put it there years ago – a long length of cord – to prevent her from dreaming. It catches each dream with a knot. As the knots began to undo themselves, the dreambinder unwinding itself back into a gnarled string, Anna yawned, exhaustion weighing heavy on her. She had not slept well. She never slept well. She did not have to look at the clock to know the time. She waited.

A knock on her door. It came every morning at half past six. The first stitch in their daily routine. Stitch in, stitch back.

‘Anna!’

‘Coming, Aunt.’

‘The early bird catches the worm but the earliest worm escapes from the bird.’

I know because you say it every – single – morning.

‘Coming,’ Anna repeated, trying to make herself sound more lively, trying to feel more alive. The book she’d been reading when she eventually fell asleep was still perched on top of her quilt – her only escape in the empty hours of the night. She moved it aside and pulled herself out of bed. She padded to the doors on the other side of her room. She threw them open and walked out onto her small balcony at the back of the house. Suburban London stretched out before her, the same as always: the sky a distant, grey wall, a patchwork of tight-knit roofs and dark brick houses threaded with tired greens. The gardens were motionless – shorn lawns and sculpted flower beds; a water feature tinkled neatly next door.

She breathed in the wind and thought, or perhaps imagined, she could smell a change in the air: a stirring of smoke, of autumn, of Selene. A smile rose to Anna’s lips before she could catch it.

Three more days.

Three more days until her birthday – until Selene arrived. Several evenings ago they’d been sitting silently in the living room, as usual, sewing embroideries, as usual, and then, as if it was nothing, Aunt had announced: We’re expecting visitors for your birthday.

Anna’s heart had jolted with fear, her thoughts swerving violently to the Binders. Were they coming? A celebratory interrogation? But then Aunt had said Selene would be visiting and that she was bringing her daughter with her. Anna had nodded quietly at the news, but it had been so unexpected and she’d been so excited she’d sewed the last part of her embroidery with untidy stitches that looped up and down as big as the beats of her heart. She’d been made to unpick it and redo it all before she’d been excused.

Selene hadn’t visited for years and the last time had hardly ended well. She was an old family friend, having gone to boarding school with Aunt and Anna’s mother. They’d all been inseparable back then – so Anna had been told – although she’d always struggled to imagine Aunt and Selene ever having been friends. During her brief and explosive visitations they had barely seemed to tolerate one another. But for Anna, Selene had been a wonderful, intoxicating interruption in the tedium of her life; a ribbon of colour amid a length of plain cord; a bright key to another world. She was everything Aunt was not: full of life, full of joy, playful and hedonistic; a temptress, a wonder, a witch. A witch like them and nothing like them at all. Certainly not a Binder.

Anna went back inside. She shook out the sheets, made the bed, put on her slippers and dressing gown and picked up her Knotted Cord from her bedside table, placing it in the pocket. She tied her hair back in the mirror. She’d always felt as if some part of her were missing and she saw it whenever she looked at her reflection – not quite there, not quite whole – the girl staring back at her dreadfully pale, eyes shadowed and faded, red hair tangled; a spot gaining slow but steady ground on her chin. What will Selene make of me now?

‘ANNA!’

‘Coming!’

She hurried down the stairs, tightening one of the knots in her Knotted Cord until she felt her excitement fade. If Aunt caught a whiff of it, she’d no doubt cancel the visit out of spite. They prepared and ate breakfast without speaking. Toast and kippers. The portion was small and Anna was still hungry. She was always hungry. Aunt flicked through the headlines on her tablet, tutting methodically.

‘UK economy slumps as PM vows “bounceback”.’

‘Are migrants robbing young Brits of jobs?’

‘Sexual harassment at work causing depression’.

Tut, tut, tut, like the tick of a metronome, her long, regal face remaining neutral as she read. Aunt was adept at arranging the lines of it, placid and polite, suitable for addressing the world, but Anna knew how tightly the lines were pulled, how, stretched too far, they could snap at any moment.

‘Can you please locate the clock for me?’ Aunt said without looking up.

Anna looked towards the clock hung on the kitchen wall.

‘Ah! There you go.’ Aunt switched the tablet off and locked eyes with her. ‘You are aware of its location. Why then are you still sitting at the table when it is almost half past seven? Are your chores completing themselves this morning?’ Aunt was always difficult, but she’d been particularly irritable the last few days, as restless as Anna herself.

‘Sorry, Aunt.’ Anna stood up quickly and began clearing away breakfast. ‘On it.’

Aunt made a displeased noise. ‘I need to go to the supermarket to get some things for this weekend’s visit.’ She laced the word with her particular brand of acid. ‘I expect every room sparkling by the time I’m back. I won’t be long.’ She stood up, tucking the stray wisps of her red hair into her bun and pulling her scarf tighter. Aunt always kept her neck covered, like the other Binders. ‘And, Anna,’ she added sharply, ‘don’t forget the leaves. They’re beginning to fall on the path – we’ll be the talk of the square.’

God forbid! Anna waited to hear the front door slam shut and then looked around despairingly at the ordered cupboards and white surfaces of their kitchen. Everything was already sparkling. Perhaps sparkling was the wrong word. Stale, silent, still. All the rooms of the house were the same: cream walls, floral curtains, antique furniture, sparsely and specifically ornamented. If she’d taken a vase and moved it to another table the house would not have looked right. There was an order here; things had their place. Even the potted roses in the corner of every room: dark leaves shiny as tongues and tightly sealed rose buds that never opened.

Even me.

Anna went to the fridge and stole a few strawberries, sweet on her tongue – one, two, three – not enough to notice; then she pulled up her sleeves and got to work. Carpets needed hoovering, surfaces dusting, bathrooms bleaching, leaves sweeping, all signs of life scrubbing away. If one’s house is in disarray one’s mind will follow suit, Anna. Every day of the summer holidays had been the same: chores, studies, piano practice, evenings of sewing, Binders’ training, back to chores – on and on in an endless, inescapable loop. Stitch in, stitch back, three … more … days.

During Selene’s last visit three years ago, Aunt had caught her trying to teach Anna magic – love magic – a language certainly not tolerated by the Binders. They’d argued and seemingly cleared the air but then Selene had thrown a dinner party …

Anna remembered coming down the next morning to find their perfect house in disarray: people passed out on the sofas, glasses everywhere, wine stains on the carpet, what appeared to be whipped cream all over one of Aunt’s still-life paintings in the hallway and their barbecue set releasing ten-foot-high purple flames in the garden. Sent to her room, Anna had tried to listen to the ensuing shouting match. She thought she’d heard Selene scream, We wanted marshmallows! Aunt hissing, What if the neighbours had seen! and repeating the words abominable behaviour! over and over, but then their tones had grown hushed, if not harsher. She hadn’t been able to make out any more before the front door had slammed shut. Anna had never expected to see her again.

Why would Aunt allow her to visit now? After all this time? Then again, Selene had a way of getting exactly what she wanted, and even Aunt wasn’t impervious to her persuasions. She’d never brought her daughter before. Anna vaguely recalled seeing a picture once: a skinny girl her age with black hair and a scowl. Effie. She remembered feeling only an uncomfortable jealousy for the girl lucky enough to have Selene for a mother. She hadn’t wanted to meet her then and she still didn’t now. Effie would no doubt be as charming and magical and overflowing with life as Selene: everything Anna was not.

She fetched the broom and went outside, glad to clear the stench of detergent from her nose. The clouds had loosened, the day brightening, etched with a fine wind, a feeble scattering of leaves on the ground – summer was almost over. The houses of Cressey Square stared back at her shrewdly, every one identical, front doors closed like disapproving mouths. Anna gathered the leaves together from the front garden and threw them in the bin but one sprang free, landing back on the path. Reaching down, she picked it up and turned it over in her hands; this one was already dry and brown. Lifeless.

Without thinking, she dashed back into the house, discarded the broom and grabbed one of the keys off the key rack. She ran across the road to the garden in the centre of the square: ‘Private Garden – Residents Only’. She unlocked the iron gate and swung it open with a shriek of metal. Aunt would be home soon. She wouldn’t have long.

The garden was empty, but it was always empty; after all, it was not meant to be enjoyed but merely admired from lounge windows. She ran down the path, past overgrown flower beds and the drying-out water fountain, to where the trees gathered and shadowed her from the eyes of nosy neighbours. Anna sat down, her back against the familiar curve of the old oak tree, breathing in her moment of freedom. She’d dreamt of escape often when she’d been young. It had become a kind of hobby: imagining herself in the books she read, making up stories in her head, playing songs on the piano that made her feel somewhere else, like someone else. She’d given up on most of that by now. But the garden still felt like a kind of escape. Only metres from the dark shadow of the house, but its own world, nothing but the wind and the clean slice of sky above her. No one to see her, judge her, punish her …

Anna placed the leaf on her lap and selected two fresh cords from the bundle in her pocket. She quickly tied them together with a loop in the middle, like a heart, three pieces of cord falling away from it like veins: the Ankh Knot, Life Knot. She focused on the leaf and let the energy build beneath her fingers. She envisioned it bursting back to life, uncurling, growing strong, the green reclaiming its brightness. The knot in her hand quivered with energy. She pulled it free, feeling a release. The leaf twitched, a pulse of green appearing by the stem, and then … nothing.

Lifeless, still.

The cords dangled limply in her hands, the veins drained. Anna picked up the leaf and crushed it, trying to ignore the familiar feelings of frustration and shame. It was the hope that hurt the most, thin and fine as a needle into her heart. A witch who can’t cast spells. Am I the world’s biggest joke? The garden might be her last escape but it couldn’t help her. She was a failure and – at the end of the year – any last hopes of magic would be extinguished. Escape would no longer be possible. She’d become a Binder herself.

A dog barked in the distance, startling her. She shoved the cords into her pockets and looked around, fear quickly replacing her burst of eagerness. If Aunt caught her casting … Anna didn’t want to contemplate what she’d do.

Magic is the first sin; we must bear it silently.

She hurried back towards the house, glancing nervously at the surrounding windows but the neighbours’ houses were still. No one was around. Anna stared up at their house. The top floor was built into the gable roof – a window at the front. It was dark, the curtains drawn as always. The third-floor room. Anna had never been inside it. Aunt claimed it was used for storage and Binders’ documents and that she didn’t want her poking through it all and Anna had been forced to accept the explanation, accept – as always – what she was told.

She let herself back in and stopped at the key rack hung on the wall. It was heavy with the keys of their life. House keys. Car keys. Work keys … Anna put the key for Cressey Square garden back among the others, but her hand hovered in the air – moved towards the key on the final ninth hook. It did not look particularly out of place – a little smaller, a knotted iron head – but it was different from the others. Quieter, stiller. It gave nothing away. Aunt’s key. The key to the room on the third floor.

She’d tried to steal it once, when she was little. Aunt had been in the bath and Anna had sneaked downstairs and removed it from the hook. The moment it was in her hands its blade had begun to move, the pattern of it altering continuously, folding and unfolding, shifting and reshaping, as if it was changing gears. Anna had studied it with hypnotic wonder when she’d felt the shadow loom over her. She’d spun round to find Aunt, every line in her face snapped in anger, but when she’d spoken it had been with cold authority: Only in my hands will the key find its true form.

Aunt had made a knotting motion in the air with her hands. Anna remembered with a shudder the feeling of the bone in her finger breaking. The key had dropped to the floor. She’d learnt the hard way never to try to take it again.

Anna dropped her hand and reached into her pocket, finding her Knotted Cord. She tightened one of its knots, tying away her curiosity. It was not welcome in this house. She turned from the hook and went upstairs to wash her hands and comb the wind out of her hair.

‘Red cord?’

‘Strength.’

‘Orange cord, two knots?’

‘Bind two opposites.’

The last of the day’s light receded from the living-room window. The room was cold. The TV off. The piano closed – the buds of the rose bush upon it small and shivery as goose pimples. Aunt was typing up hospital reports from her armchair, testing Anna on her correspondences without looking up, Anna reeling off her answers dutifully while her fingers worked on an embroidery. The whisper sound of thread did not break the silence of the room between Aunt’s questions; instead it pulled it tighter.

Stitch in. Stitch back. Stitch in. Stitch back.

‘Yellow cord, Knit Knot, Monday?’

‘To heal an injury.’

‘Brown cord, six Mute Knots?’

‘To banish unwanted thoughts.’

Aunt had picked out a verse from her Bible for the centre of Anna’s embroidery: ‘Keep me safe, Lord, from the hands of the wicked; protect me from the violent, who devise ways to trip my feet.’ The Bible verses were a good stand-in; Aunt could hardly have verses from the Book of the Binders up on the wall. That’s where her embroidery would go once it was finished. The wall behind them was covered with them, devouring every inch of space, encasing colourful images and fearful verses in dark frames. Spells of silence and protection, as Aunt referred to them, for out there and in here, touching her heart.

‘Black cord, seven Shackle Knots, Wednesday.’

‘To restrain another from speaking.’

‘Wrong.’

Aunt made a small movement with her hand; the needle slipped into Anna’s finger. She didn’t cry out. She was careful not to let the small well of blood drop onto her embroidery. It had ruined many before that way.

‘To restrain another from spreading secrets,’ Anna corrected quickly.

‘White cord, Servant Knot?’

The questions continued relentlessly. Anna had never been a gifted seamstress but she’d been forced to sew for so many years the stitches came to her easily. She responded without thinking, longing to go over to the piano and play. Let the confusion of her thoughts free. Instead, she’d become accustomed to making up songs in her head as she sewed – stitch in, stitch back – fusing together the notes of the thread, the rhythm of the stitches, the melody of their patterns. To her the embroideries were not spells of protection, they were songs of longing.

But this evening, even her music would not come. She could not stop thinking of the leaf in the garden, berating herself for her magical ineptitude. Why must her Binders’ training be so mind-numbing, so torturous? Reeling off correspondences, reciting the Book of the Binders, tying knots, unrelenting emotional tests, stitches, stitches, stitches … She rarely got to do any actual magic.

‘Grey cord, Lover’s Knot, Friday?’

‘To protect – protect yourself from sexual desire—’

‘Wrong again!’

The needle slipped into Anna’s flesh a second time, a drop of blood dissolving into the canvas. Perhaps I can cover it with a rose …

‘Sorry, to suppress sexual desire.’

‘Focus, Anna! What has got into you?’

Nothing! Nothing is inside me, that’s the whole problem. Would Selene be able to tell she was a failure now? A witch without magic? But the leaf had pulsed – hadn’t it? Perhaps there was hope, somewhere a little hope that had not yet been stifled.

When Aunt finally announced they had finished, Anna put her embroidery down. ‘Aunt,’ she said tentatively.

‘Yes, Anna.’ Anna could hear the impatience in her voice already. Aunt always seemed to sense what she was going to say before she had said it.

‘We – er – haven’t tried casting all summer. I wondered if it was time we did some practice?’ Anna said the words quickly, desperately, wanting to get them out before the more sensible part of her brain could hold them back.

Aunt closed her laptop and fell silent. Anna knew her silences well. There was silence of her questions: narrow and pointed, full of dead ends and sheer falls. The silence of her disapproval, tight and unforgiving as pursed lips. The silence of her anger, which was like lightning without thunder – you know it is there but the rumble is too distant, too deep to hear, and hearing it would somehow make it better, less frightening—

‘What is the Binders’ third tenet, Anna?’

‘We shall not cast unless it is our duty.’

‘And yet you suddenly believe it is your duty to do so?’

‘No, I—’

‘What does it mean to become a Binder?’

Anna knew all too well what it meant. One year left until her Knotting. ‘My magic will be bound.’

Stitch in, stitch back, snip the thread and tie the knot.

Anna gripped the Knotted Cord in her pocket. ‘I just thought that—’

Aunt made a knot in the air and Anna’s mouth snapped shut. Aunt had been bound once too, but now she was a Senior Binder her magic had been released for her to carry out her duties.

‘You don’t think, Anna. You just feel. That’s your problem. Do you feel magic’s pull?’

‘No.’ Anna’s fingers twisted around her Knotted Cord.

Aunt came and sat on the sofa next to her. ‘Your mother felt its pull, did she not?’ She spoke gently.

‘Yes.’

‘And where did that lead her?’

‘To her death.’

‘Magic killed her.’ Aunt’s voice was hollow with despair. ‘You’re not a Binder yet, you do not carry the true weight of magic around your neck. It is still all fun and games to you.’

‘No.’ Anna shook her head, regretting ever having spoken at all.

‘No?’ Aunt flicked her laptop back open. ‘You have requested casting practice and tomorrow we shall do so. I think we shall continue with the correspondences after all.’

Anna nodded and returned to her embroidery.

‘Choke Knot?’

Stitch in, stitch back.