Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

Boyne & Son, Men’s Tailors and Outfitters, occupied part of what had at one time been a large Edwardian house on High Street in Belfast. The building had been acquired by Mr. Boyne, whose tailoring business now occupied two of its four floors — the cutting and fitting rooms on the second floor, his own office on the first. The third floor he sublet as a rehearsal room throughout the year and that was where Katherine had been rehearsing Carmen with the Rutherford Musical and Dramatic Society, which next month they were to present at St. Anne’s Church Hall for four performances only. On the ground floor at the back of the building was an accountancy firm and at the front was a photographer’s studio.

Katherine made her way down the stairs from the rehearsal room to the tailors’ rooms. As she rapped the ribbed glass panel of the door with her knuckles, it shuddered with a loose twanging sound. The door was opened almost immediately by a gray-haired, powdery stick of a woman, whom Katherine assumed to be Mr. Boyne’s secretary. The woman indicated a door on the other side of the room to Katherine and then turned to the large record book at her desk without a word.

Katherine made her way through the line of young tailors as they worked fastidiously at their sewing and loosening and cutting. At the end of the room, she passed a young woman, barely in her twenties, sitting with her back to the tailors, her hair clipped, tucked, and netted. The hard chair on which the young woman sat was either too low to allow her to work comfortably at her table or the table was too high, for she was perched on top of four large leather-bound ledgers. The young woman wore a biscuit-colored blouse with an ivy pattern on it and sat so still in her dedicated accounting and leather-warming duties that it seemed that the ivy had grown on her while she sat. As though it had wound its way along the barren floors, creeping up the walls, where years of pulverous submission could be found nesting in every tongue and groove, and had wrapped itself around her. The stillness of her body belied the furious activity of her hand, which moved with such speed and evenness across the page that Katherine wondered what on earth the young woman could be writing. Was she documenting every single move that every tailor made at every moment in the room? A stenographer mother hen upon her roost? Assimilating each detail without her even having to lift her head? Was the young woman’s intent to do the right thing and at the end of every day to take the ledgers to Mr. Boyne for his inspection? To allow him to see — as he ran his sweat-tipped fingers over the recently vacated surface of each leather-bound ledger — that everyone was working as they should be, that all was present and correct, that he was right to look so satisfied with his business?

Katherine reached the door that the gray-haired woman had indicated to her and pushed it open, moving to stand just inside the door frame. It was darker in this anteroom than the room from which she had come, but her eyes adjusted quickly.

A tailor was sitting at the worktable at the far end of the room. His head was bowed over a logbook and his shoulders were slouched. His right arm was bent, his elbow placed on the table, his head resting on his softly folded fist, his shortish fair hair sticking up untidily. His other arm was hanging loosely by his side. His table lamp was the only source of light, casting rich coppery shadows around the room.

Katherine coughed in an attempt to distract him from his work. When that failed to get his attention, she offered a cautious “Excuse me,” but still he did not move to address her. She stood in the doorway of the room for at least thirty or forty seconds before he eventually lifted his head up off his hand. He looked at her with a curious, solemn intensity, as if he were concentrating on something else entirely, as if he were trying to retrieve the detail of something lost. His eyes wandered lazily from her and moved slowly to the space behind her.

Moments passed before the tailor visibly roused himself and turned his head to look around him, to where a clue might lurk as to the nature and purpose of this woman who had appeared in the room. Katherine noticed how his hair was disheveled only on one side of his head. His hair on the other side was perfectly neat. There was also a deep red mark across his cheekbone, stretching down to the cusp of his jaw. It dawned on her then that he had been sleeping — his head on his hand — and that she had woken him by her presence in the room.

With a quick intake of breath he said, “Yes,” not as a question as to why she should be standing there in front of him but as confirmation that he was remembering his appointment, gradually. He stood up from his worktable and made his way over to a chestnut cabinet on which were stacked boxes of ribbons and rolls of lining and fabric. His shoelaces were untied, as though he had intended to slip off his shoes before sleep had overtaken him. His trousers were creased around his calves. He pulled open the top drawer of the cabinet and took out a small black notebook that had two long black ribbons attached to its spine. Katherine chanced conversation,

“I’m Katherine Fallon. I’m here for the fitting.”

“You are,” he said simply. He turned to her. His movements toward her were full of the effort of efficiency now that she had woken him from his sleep. His disorientation had made a boy of him.

“If it’s a bad time, I can always come back,” she said.

“No, that won’t be necessary.”

The tailor didn’t wear his measuring tape around his neck, as seemed customary with the other tailors, but instead took out of his trouser pocket a small tan leather case. He bent his knees and knelt at her feet. Without measuring anything for a moment, he opened his small black notebook, which he then placed on the floor beside him, and glanced at his notes. Quietly, he stretched out his tape measure in front of her as though she were a foreign visitor to his country and he were offering her a welcome garland.

“Rehearsals going well?” He looked up. He appeared almost doleful to her from where he sat hunkered, still like a boy, still wearing the asymmetry of his sleep on his face, in his eyes, in his hair. He smiled tentatively at her. It was difficult for Katherine to judge exactly what age he was. She guessed that he was perhaps in his late twenties, but that youthful, boyish quality of his could well be making him appear younger than he was — she was not sure. He gently raised the tape measure to her waist. She automatically lifted both her arms upward and outward a little.

“Oh fine.” She felt her initial flush of giddiness wane, and the very brief conversation between them came to a halt.

The clock in the far corner of the room ticked. The tailor stretched his hand around her waist to catch the tape measure in his left hand. He pulled the tape measure gently, teasing it from the small tan box that housed it. The back of his left hand brushed ever so lightly against her hip. The tailor conveyed, she thought, none of the impatience that some of the seamstresses in the past had shown her at similar fittings for other shows, nor none of the rudeness that one particular senior tailor had displayed to her by merely looking at her coldly over the top of his pinze-nez and flicking scant figures into the large book spread out before him like a dissected animal on a laboratory slab.

The tailor checked the markings on the tape and, releasing it, sat back and noted the measurements in his small black notebook with his left hand, so that as he wrote, his hand slowly swallowed the ciphers of her shape. He rose from his sitting position and, lifting the tape measure, encircled her hips, taking particular care not to pull the tape too tightly. He then measured her waist to her hip and jotted both measurements down in the black notebook.