BY LINDZ MCLEOD
My house doesn’t even have curtains. It has blinds, which is a whole different kind of symbolism, but I’ll leave that untouched for now because this isn’t really my story. Not exactly.
When my great-grandmother married, my great-grandfather wasn’t a drunk. He gambled, however, on many things. On my great-grandmother not falling pregnant too soon (a fail), on the families being happy to merge (a fail), and on bettering his situation (kind of a pattern here, Grandpa).
He worked on the mineshaft while she stayed home with the baby. Soon, a second arrived. She had eleven siblings, so she knew how to raise kids, but she was new to raising men. At the end of the week, he’d bring home a paypacket, and by Tuesday it would be gone. Gambled away down the pub; cards, dice, dogs, horses. She started to sew money into the moss-green velvet curtains, on the basis that it was the one place he’d never think to check. She’d send the children out of the room, occupy them with toy soldiers and wooden cars painted in primary colours, and then she’d unpick the hem of the curtain, slide the slim bundle of notes inside, and re-stitch it.
Every damn week.
He’d rage—it was his money, after all. He’d earned it, sweating deep in the earth, shirtless and filthy, shoveling something he could only see in the flicker of a shared candle. Regardless of his threats, she never confessed. The children’s needs came first, saved beyond her own skin. Simple as that. He would go through her things, raking through jewelry, through the small fridge, through packets of stale crackers. Listening for the dry crackle of paper on paper. Rummaging through the coal store, the rattle of the rubble as familiar as his own bedsheets; maybe more so.
My great-grandmother never told me this story directly. It came to me in bits and pieces; from my mother, from my aunt, from the whispers passed down through generations. From the things we learn to keep quiet about. I watched and listened and tucked my own secret under my tongue like a live ember. They told me not to confess who I was or who I loved to my great-grandmother. She was born when the Titanic sank, they said. Things were different in those days, they said. The icebergs were women, doing their best to keep afloat, not flames consuming all the air in the room. Stay silent. Stay still. Don't break a heart already broken.
Instead of money, I started sewing information into the hems of the curtains. On visits to my great-grandmother, I'd sit implacably under scrutiny while she searched my face for anything of value. Any boyfriends yet? Not thinking about marriage? she'd ask. The curtain trick, I believed, was to save people from themselves. At least, that's how it was presented to me.
I tell my girlfriend this story and at first she doesn’t say anything. Watches me, head tilted, with eyes like unspooled thread, dark and taut. She knows me too well, knows I start a parable far too early. I need time to wind up to something. Room to lift-off. They say still waters run deep, so I guess my lineage came from oceanic trenches. Pale fish with lamps attached to their foreheads, streaked with what diamonds could have been, had they been born later.
My great-grandfather died in the mines, I say. Wasn’t even that old. At the funeral, the minister asked my great-grandmother if she wanted a certain wording on the gravestone—something like bound together forever or until we meet again in heaven—and she gave the guy a funny look. No, she said, my husband and I weren’t like that. What might have happened, I wonder, if she'd met someone who burned brightly instead—someone for whom shadows were a thing to be shunned, not consumed. Someone for whom every open door was an answer, not an invitation. Could we have unpicked all our stitches together—entwined our bloody, needle-pricked fingers? Could we have rolled the bones, laid all our cards on the worn wooden table?
I turn away, fingers trailing over the coarse fabric of our roller blinds. I always wondered what my great-grandmother buried with her husband. Whether she thought, even for a moment, about unpicking a few stitches on his clothes. For old times’ sake. Too late to ask her now.
Sweetheart, do you want curtains? My girlfriend asks. Just in case?
Nah, I say, pulling the cord, letting the sunlight stream into our living room. I spent my life picking secrets out of my skin, I say. I’m not about to start sewing them back in.
Lindz McLeod is a queer, working-class, Scottish writer who dabbles in the surreal. Her prose has been published by/is forthcoming in Hobart, Flash Fiction Online, the New Guard, Cossmass Infinities, and more. She is a member of the SFWA and is represented by Headwater Literary Management. She lives in Edinburgh with her girlfriend and their cat, Dane deHaan.