Katie Curran
Knit (9 Million Hits)
The knitting pattern was on the internet, deep in a website from Northern Europe. Finnish, Swedish, maybe Danish. Some place where the language had little hoops and bloated dots like empty bellies on top of vowels. It made sense as these places were cold, knitwear a necessity.
The webpage loaded in lazy stripes, my internet connection was weak and unsecure.
I read this first as insecure and thought about what this would mean for the internet modem—low self-esteem, unable to see the positives in life, little to no interest in things once enjoyed: friends, television shows, dinners, showers, Diet Cokes.
I’d gone to the doctor and the doctor said, I can medicate you, but you need to meet me halfway. This meant, do things to fill days. The pattern appealed to me because of several user comments underneath that said: Wonderful!
It was stashed in the advanced section of the website. I wasn’t an advanced knitter but had the time to try. Time was everywhere, all over me, sometimes it throttled me, like this: Me sitting at the patio doors, looking out at the garden, watching grass and tarmac and an empty one-kilogram bucket of mayonnaise filling up with rainwater, and then a scrunch in my chest. Like tinfoil balled up tight, suddenly. Hold them, I’d think, hold onto your eyes. And the eyes would dash around, trying to soak in normal things to batter down the wave of abnormality.
Sometimes, I’d speak out loud. Stop it, stop it, stop it, you’re ok, you’re fine, it’s nearly Saturday, it’s Saturday today, it’s the weekend, stop it, don’t think that, you’re fine, you’re fine.
Other times, I’d pound around the house with my boobs bashing loose against me. Up the stairs, down the hall, into my bedroom, back down the stairs, out the door and into the front garden, round the side of the house (from the outside) and into the back garden, laps around the fenced-in perimeter, back to the front garden, in the front door, up the stairs, into my bedroom, out, bathroom, look in the mirror and see nothing, back downstairs again. After a few laps like this, everything flattened out again.
Only once I’d the house phone in my hand, 999 typed on the screen.
There was a language, a whole separate sphere of communication, only for knitting patterns. Patterns used cues like: K1, P1, sl1k, sl, st, k1B, M1p, M1rp, p2sso, I didn’t know what anything meant and read a forum on the internet titled: Knitting Abbreviations Master List.
The doctor had said, walk and talk.
Make sure you’re walking and talking with someone you trust. But what if I went out on a walk, took a new route through some quiet streets or unknown patches along the river, and something happened? I’d be so far from home, so unknown to the people in the vicinity of my walk, that I’d die and crumple on the ground and nobody would be able to identify my body.
K1 meant Knit one. P1 meant Purl one. Knitting and purling were the same stitch, only done normally or in reverse. This realization floored me, the first time I spun a patch around and found that on the back of all my knits were purls, the back of my purls were knits.
When I’d called 999, the woman who answered was chewing something. Or it sounded like she was chewing, but maybe I couldn’t understand her for other reasons. Sorry, I kept saying. Sorry, as in, I don’t understand. The woman swallowed, or seemed to swallow and said, can you please tell me where you are calling from?
I said, home, I’m at home, here at home, and in the hall and that’s where I am.
Can you please tell me where you are calling from? she said.
Home, I said, I’m at home.
Your address, she said.
I couldn’t remember my address and then it hit me.
And, she said, what is the problem?
I’m having a heart attack, I said.
When the ambulance arrived, they rang the doorbell and shook the letterbox at the same time. Then they realized the door was open and came in to where I was lying on the kitchen floor. They asked me questions. I replied with my name and the day and the place and that I was having a heart attack. One of them held my wrist in his hand and spoke to the other in code, he said: A&0 by 3. He shone a torch in my eye and asked did I take any medication. I told him the medication the doctor gave me, and he showed me how to take deep long breaths. After a few minutes, he helped me sit up. My head felt full of air after all the breathing.
I disconnected the house phone from the wall so I wouldn’t make any calls.
Sl St meant slip a stitch. Slipping a stitch meant dropping a stitch onto your needle and pulling it back, instead of directing it into the stitch you’re working, through the repetitive pattern.
The pattern was for a cardigan. I’d decided on a cardigan because the picture of it, on the website, reminded me of a movie I’d seen where a French woman and her small son are abandoned by her husband in a seedy part of LA. She spends all day working for a writer lady, typing on a typewriter by a huge window that looks onto a beach, and taking calls on an ancient, corded landline. In the evening, she traipses around with the son, looking for somewhere for them to stay. There’s a mood and it’s frightening, even though the movie is sunlit and actually nothing bad happens. While watching it I’d kept my gaze locked in on the woman’s cardigan because it looked safe and beautiful, dissolving the sense that an unspeakable event was in store for the mother and son. When the movie ended and nothing bad had happened, I decided that the cardigan had kept them safe. Then, I was hell-bent on knitting one.
The cardigan looked cozy. When my Mam had been alive, she used to watch news on the television at night. Whenever there was Moscow, or Reykjavik, or Calgary on the screen—for shootings or protests or general unrest—she’d say, no wonder, the cold addles them. I’d say that wasn’t something you could really argue and, to be fair, temperature didn’t usually factor into social uprising, if we were looking at it historically. She’d ignore me and just say, no wonder, imagine, that cold.
When my Mam died, I was always cold, unnaturally iced. I couldn’t get warm. The central heating would blast all day with the windows open.
I ordered wool online and it arrived on my doorstep a few days later. It was a deep green that reminded me of mushed peas piled up beside a hunk of fish. This was a nice thought, something to remember, how we used to eat fish and chips down the pub on Saturday nights. My Mam sipping a glass of beer and me glugging from a pint.
The doctor had told me to remember that walking and talking and remembering were all good things to fill days with. He’d given me the number of a woman psychologist who specializes in grief, but I’d never called her, after looking her up online and seeing a photo of a woman so elderly the bio page looked like a nursing home advertisement. I knew that was a mean thought, but I let it fatten up in my head anyway, and after a week of looking at her page once a day, to confirm her oldness and obvious inability to help me, I knew there would never be time to call the lady psychologist who specializes in grief. This all came back to me when the wool arrived and it made me sad, but not panic.
The real problem was that I’d forgotten to order needles with the wool. I could have ordered the needles online, then and there, and waited another few days for them to arrive, but I was aching to begin—my hands kept fingering the wool and stroking the velveteen threads. There hadn’t been anything like this inside me for a long time: a need, a want to do something, and annoyance that it couldn’t be done right away.
There was a shop in town called Bits and Bobs. Some young lad and his friends had added an extra ‘o’ in above Bobs. The shop was run by a little old lady not unlike the psychologist who specializes in grief. She looked like powder that was clumped at the bottom of a tin, about to evaporate. When I was younger, I’d visit the shop on Saturday mornings with a wodge of coins in my palm. The lady sold tiny gems and buttons that I’d collected and clustered around the base of my bedside lamp.
Leaving the house took four hours. I checked and rechecked the pattern to make sure of the needle size. Eight-millimeter steel needles.
Eight-millimeter.
Steel.
I wrote “8mm steel” on the palm of my left hand with a biro. I put my shoes on and sat in the hall.
You have to go, you have to go, you have to go, I told myself.
Panic now and you don’t have to go to Bits and Bobs, I told myself.
Nothing happened and I left for town.
The walk into town was half an hour. While heading down our road, my calculations clacked around: when had I last left the house for a reason? It must have been, maybe it was, a year. Maybe more. I got groceries delivered and anything else you could order on the internet. Sometimes deliveries piled up on the step because I was far away and never heard the doorbell. Once I’d opened the door and two delivery men were standing on the step, talking shop.
The day was empty and gray like the inside of a saucepan and my breath clotted on the air. In town, everything looked spaced apart and smaller than usual. The old shopping center was so quiet that my feet plopped against the floor and this sound bounced around and inside me.
A cleaner waved at me and said, how’s things? I didn’t reply.
Bits and Bobs was closed. I stood and watched the shutter. There was a sellotaped sign on A4 paper that said: lunch till four. After an hour, or more, a man arrived. He was wearing low jeans that dragged around on the ground and a polo shirt. His wrists jangled with golden chains and there was a ball of used tissue bulging in his pocket. He knelt to crunch at the lock with a set of keys and looked up at me.
Well, he said.
Yeah, I replied.
We entered Bits and Bobs together. I didn’t ask where the old lady was. The man disappeared in the back, after flicking the radio on—dance music bounced around—and I examined the wool. They had wicker baskets full of it: chunky, super chunky, DK, worsted, Aran. He was standing hunched over the counter, one ankle cuffed around the other.
You alright? he said.
My head opened like a claw and dropped its belly out.
Mmmm, I said.
He came out and stood in the shop floor. Wool you want? he asked.
No, I replied.
The radio presenter said, more heavy beats and deep cuts, with you all afternoon here on BEAT. Somebody in the shopping center, outside Bits and Bobs, was singing. I had both hands stashed deep in my coat pockets and had been scraping nails into the sponge of my palms. The singing voice suddenly stretched and rose a pitch. My chest dipped. The wool merged and tunneled further away from me. Stop, I thought. Stop, stop. My breathing sluiced inside my ears like lava. I pulled both hands out in front of me and flexed them, to stop the fingers numbing up. Steel, eight-millimeter. The biro had melted into the wrinkles of skin.
Steel, I said, eight-millimeter.
The man winked and said, right you are!
I chose a packet with needles like stripes nestled into blue cardboard and when paying, the man winked again.
Enjoy, he said, take it easy.
Back at home I was ravaged, exhausted, and couldn’t make my head or hands work in the direction they needed to open the laptop. The wool had to be looped onto the needles in a starter line of stitches, this much had been deciphered from a YouTube video. Instead, I lay on the couch in my hat, scarf, and boots, and looked at the ceiling. I woke up to dawn, sun slouching into the room in fat stripes. The shapes of kitchen table, chairs, sink were gloomy in the patterned light—it looked like somebody else’s home. I emptied the bag of wool on the living room carpet, puckered the needles out from their plastic sheath, pulled off my boots and hat, and cracked open the laptop.
How to start knitting had nearly 9 million hits.
Casting on meant putting the first stitches onto a bare needle. Cast on right, and the tension would hold for the whole project. The video women called their knitting: project, Work in Progress. I flicked into five videos until one resonated with me.
An American woman wore a purple crocheted shawl pinned back with an elaborate dragonfly brooch of green and blue stones. Her nails were coated in polish like blood, and she said, in a honey-smooth accent, thank you y’all for being here with me today. There was a quasi-religious shade to the tutorial (drop the yarn behind your left hand, don’t worry, honey, our Lord will catch it) but the reverent tone felt right to me.
After watching the video fifteen times, I cast on my first row.
You’re doing amazing sweetie, the dragonfly woman told me.
I thanked her for the support.
The pattern took over. I hadn’t done recreational drugs in a long time, but immediately felt their distant pulse. When knitting, time seeped away. I’d be sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor, or on the couch in the living room, lying flat on my bed, or sitting on the chair in the hall, and the only place I actually existed was in the pattern. In the knitting, the clickety clack of my needles rubbing against each other, the coarse drag of wool against fingertips, and in the repeated movements, the exact same click and clack every time, as a chunk of fabric birthed out underneath my wrists. I melted. After knitting for hours, I’d look up at the room and everything glowed with safety. Here I was, knitting, and here I would always be. It became hard to imagine doing anything else. If I made a mistake, I’d pop up the dragonfly woman on my laptop screen. Thank you for being here today y’all. Thank you, I’d say, for having me.
The pattern grew. It allegedly took twenty-two hours to complete The Back: four to six hours. Two Fronts: three hours each. Sleeves: four hours each. Finishing: two hours. I knitted all day long, but my speed wasn’t up to high notch. When watching the dragonfly woman on YouTube, I often turned the playback speed down to 0.5 to see her fingers move.
After two months, the back and fronts were finished. Another month got me halfway down one sleeve, until I realized a mistake and ripped it up. There was a thrill to destroying the neat stitches. I ripped until my fingertips numbed and fat stinging tears racked down my face. I hadn’t cried in a year, maybe more. The garden—when my eyeballs cleared of salt—was bright with frost, crawling to spring.
One morning, I threw down my needles onto the kitchen floor with a clatter. Bluebells were shimmying in dark patches of the garden. The mayonnaise logo had rubbed off the one-kilogram tub and a postman had just left a supermarket magazine through the front door that had glossed photos of Easter eggs between its covers. The cardigan was in chunks. A back, two fronts, two sleeves. Back to dragonfly woman.
Ok y’all, she said, finishing is the most important part of your project, if y’all want to have a gorgeous piece to wear out and show your friends, and who doesn’t want that!
I needed a sewing needle and thread, there was nothing else for it.
My Mam’s room still had the heavy and cloistered smell of the dead. Her bed was still made in the purple striped sheets she’d last slept in, and an empty jar of body lotion sat on the windowsill, with the slogan Silken Smooth on its side and fingerprints still indented in the white gloop inside. I moved around as if she was sleeping, pushed up on my toes, clamping my breath into me. The sensation of her was so strong that after I’d scrabbled in her first aid box and found both a needle and a spool of thread, I faced the bed expecting to see her asleep in it.
The room was cold, and the bed was empty. Outside, a dog was barking, and somebody shouted at it to give over.
I worked straight for two days and two nights to sew my cardigan together. I didn’t want to try it on. It looked thick and soft and comforting, and I was afraid that it wouldn’t feel that way on my body. I held it to my face and rubbed the softness on the tip of my nose, instead. The thought came winging to me: I had to watch the movie.
It took me an hour or so to find it on the internet, because I couldn’t remember the name. I typed in a string of words: woman son LA French movie old 90s lost alone sunny. Finally, it appeared, and I got set up: living room couch with a cup of instant chicken soup and the cardigan folded in my lap. The opening scene flashed. The woman was wearing a jumper. I watched the movie in a haze and the cup of soup fattened with skin in the mug.
A jumper.
The credits rolled. My cardigan now looked hideous, like a scratchy monster that had lurched out of a pothole in the road to come into the house and kill me. I threw it away from me, across the room, but it caught on the arm of the sofa and flopped there, like a small dog that had been drowned. The silence in the house felt like a hand pressed down on my face.
You’re ok, you’re fine, you’re ok, I told myself.
But the panic didn’t come. The fridge buzzed in the kitchen. A car with a screeching fan belt passed on the road outside and my laptop screen slipped to saver mode. Its bouncing banner floated around the screen, changing color each time it hit against the side. I sat in the dark and listened to the bump of blood inside my forehead.
Then, I picked up the cardigan and put it on. It fit.