Warm halogen strip lights buzzed above the wide birch cutting table in the backroom of Threadbare Alterations on St. Jude’s Lane, Harrowby. The small Yorkshire workshop smelled of steam-iron mist, dry French chalk, pressed worsted wool serge, and the sweet almond scent of pattern glue. Outside in the rainy lane, delivery vans hissed past the wet shopfront. Meanwhile, a small radio on the bobbin shelf murmured the shipping forecast.
Jo Saye stood at the head of the drafting board with a pair of heavy ten-inch German steel shears and a flexible spun-glass tape. Her wrists were wrapped in elastic squeezing bands to ward off wrist tunnel after a seven-hour shift altering wedding tuxedos. At sixty-one, with her wire-rimmed glasses resting on a velvet cord against her collarbone, she could look at a pair of numbers chalked on a slate in another world and see the exact curve of the living spine that carried them.
Jo had to build a garment for a body she could never physically touch, working entirely through verbal descriptions and twopenny postal cardboard. Through the open brass frame of the Courtesy Bridge in Sister Merrow’s washroom, Pella Rook and Master Tailor Dima Fen called out the tiny fraction of an inch readings from Korr Var’s bruised shoulders. Meanwhile, the twenty-four-minute countdown ticked down in clean amber numerals.
