Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

“Could you please face away from me,” the tailor said quietly.

The wall to which she turned was covered with designers’ drawings of costumes from different dramatic productions; Othello, La Bohème, Troilus and Cressida, La Traviata. Various certificates lined the wall, including one from the Royal Academy of Tailors’ Association, which said on it “Award of Excellence.” To the right of these, beside the chestnut cabinet, there were spools of thread on small shelves, wound and waiting, colors as varied and rich as ripe fruit — purple, blue, damson. These spools, side by side, were already a tapestry. Boxes of buttons were stacked along a higher shelf, numbered randomly in black ink. Some of the boxes had been torn open, revealing tiny landslides of navy satin circles and round nut-colored shapes. One box revealed a spill of checkered red buttons, each one with a painted cornflower on its surface, the blue delicately and exquisitely speckled with pink and maroon. They were like drops of meadow in a tweed red prairie.

Then sweeping back her hair a little, and revealing to the world her pale, undiscovered skin, the tailor measured her from the base of her neck to the center of her back. She felt the nub of pressure from his fingers against her spine. His touch was as light as a barely spoken prayer. But the more still she was, the more intense it felt. In response, her breath released itself in a loud sigh — she could not help it. Out of her embarrassment, she quickly turned her head to look somewhere else, anywhere else in the room. Over the chestnut cabinet there was a framed newspaper clipping containing a photograph of Princess Elizabeth on her visit to Northern Ireland in 1946. The princess was shaking the hand of a woman in a bonnet, a bonnet so simple that it was just a black-and-white arc around her face, its black ribbon elegantly tied under her chin. The princess had an uncertain smile. The woman in the bonnet looked at the camera with a soft intent. The woman in the bonnet seemed to be looking straight at Katherine. Katherine concentrated hard on each and every detail of the newspaper clipping as she felt the tailor’s hand move once again across her neck. She slowly became aware that her arms were still held upward and outward, as if waiting for him to return to her waist, as if offering herself. She lowered both arms, but no sooner had she done so than he raised both of her arms up again, gently placing his thumb and index finger on each side of her wrists. This time as she held her arms out, they began to tremble a little. She stayed as still as she could, staring at the picture of the woman in the bonnet.

“Who is the lady in the photograph?” she asked quickly, her own voice startling her a little in the quiet room. “The lady shaking the princess’s hand?”

“I’ve no idea,” the tailor said simply. “I put the clipping up there because I like her hat. That’s a great hat she’s wearing, don’t you think?”

Katherine stared at the clipping again but felt too flustered to determine whether it was a great hat or not. As she stared at the photograph, the tailor walked around in front of her and circled the tape measure around her back and under the swell of her upper arms; the slick of the tape grazed her left breast. His face was very close to hers. The smell of cedarwood, almonds.

“I would have called that a bonnet,” Katherine said, not looking at him.

“Pardon me?”

“Her hat — I would have called her hat a bonnet.” Katherine glanced up at the tailor. He smiled at her.

“Would you now?” he said.

She turned her head away from him and looked over again at the spools of thread, feeling a small pulse of adrenaline course through her. The clock ticked and the tailor continued to gather her piece by piece, placing one end of his tape measure in the center of her lower back and pulling it down to the floor, then measuring her from her waist down to her knee. He stood in front of her and stretched the measuring tape from her right shoulder to her left. Then as he moved behind her to measure the full width of her back, he put his lips very close to her ear and said almost in a whisper, “By the way, Miss Fallon, you woke me from a very deep sleep.”

A week later, she was running up the stairs of Mr. Boyne’s premises, flushed and breathless. Window-shopping on her way to rehearsals, she had lost track of time and was now late. The clack of her heels echoed around the empty stairwell. Everyone else, she assumed, was already in the rehearsal room. Just as she approached the third return, she looked up and saw the tailor coming down the stairs toward her. She did not think of stopping but could feel her heart suddenly banging in her chest. It was all the running, she thought to herself, and climbing all the stairs so quickly; it was all the running and climbing that had made her heart beat so fast.

She went to squeeze past him and was willing to offer him a perfunctory “Good evening” when she realized that she could not move, for the tailor had blocked her way. One of his hands rested on the balustrade; the other hand’s palm was spread flat against the wall. His body was angled a little, as though to let her past, but he was not giving her enough room to do so.

“Miss Fallon,” he said softly. She lifted her eyes to look at him. “I’m sorry,” he continued. He was staring at her intently. “I’m Thomas McKinley. . Tom. . I should have introduced myself at our first fitting.” He reached out to shake her hand in a gauche, almost childlike manner. She automatically responded, shaking his hand and feeling the warm, wide expanse of his palm. Wondering how such hands, such large hands did such precise and delicate work, pinning, threading, sewing.

“Tom,” she repeated quietly, her heart still thudding in her chest, “I’m Katherine.”

“Yes, I know your name. I have it written down in my black notebook under ‘ Carmen .’ ”

Despite only staggered pools of light on the stairwell, she held Tom McKinley’s gaze more firmly now than when they had first met in the tailors’ rooms. Now, his fair hair was neater, his eyes a brighter blue, his complexion fresher. Katherine noticed how his smile widened his features with a keen grace. She pulled her hand from his; in the strange configuration their bodies had created on the stairs, their handshake felt to her both puerile and slightly desperate.

Tom McKinley placed the hand he had just offered to her back on the wall beside him and spread it slowly. He did not move otherwise. Was it the air in the stairwell that felt tense and thick with heat, she wondered, or just the air within her lungs? She felt her cheeks reddening as her thoughts raced. In the ghostly light, his body cast a broad, featureless shadow of swollen blues on the wall behind him. As she stood close to and a little below him, her shadow was completely immersed in his, so that she could no longer see what mark she made on the world. What made him stay so long and so close to her?

She looked up at Tom. The way he looked back at her, she felt, was as though he was already well familiar with her and perhaps, having stolen her every measurement at their first meeting, he was. And perhaps, for all she knew, he reassembled her over and over again in the privacy of the tailors’ rooms, when the starless evenings had sent all the junior tailors home and the world had become a quiet black.

“It’s bad luck to cross on the stairs.” Tom smiled at her as he spoke.

“Oh really, is it? I didn’t know.”

Noises could be heard coming from the rehearsal room above them, the sound of chairs scraping along the wooden floor, the rumble of a baritone, the occasional high piping, dissenting sound of a female voice, but not enough to disturb this curious encounter.