CTS Writes

The following short story was short-listed for the 2023 Parracombe Prize and was published in their third anthology which is available to buy here (as modelled by Miss Mabel Muffintop). It was also later short-listed for the London Independent Story Prize under the title “Everyday Magic” but was ineligible for publication since Parracombe published it first.

The Colours of Magic by Claire Travers Smith

Loreen reaches to the back of the wardrobe, fumbling around blindly. It will make its presence known the moment she touches it. Sleek chenille sweater? Smooth poplin smock? The burgundy velour jacket still missing the button that’s lived in a jar on the hall table for years? None of you. Not today.

Suddenly it stings her hand as if a magician’s flash paper has ignited. Loreen pulls the item out and holds it at arm’s length, horrified at how the crisp spring light clings to and accentuates the minutiae of its awful glory. The fibres suck up pinkish pimples from Loreen’s delicate flesh as if cactus-scratched. She flings the hook of the hanger onto the doorframe and stands back. Levitating in the air is the ugliest jumper Loreen has ever seen. The abominable pullover. A veritable menace in technicolour. Magenta clashing with emerald smashing into ochre assaulting mauve. It was as if the designer had spent years mastering the fine art of colour-matching, meticulously studying the nuances of tone and ombre with the specific goal of creating one item of clothing as the ultimate act of rebellion. The jumper is, Loreen deduces, the most unflattering piece of knitwear to have ever escaped a set of needles. Unintentionally over-sized, she knows its miraculous shape-shifting properties: the ability to dwarf the wearer almost into nothingness and yet simultaneously inflate them with a darts player’s girth. The chunky crew neck gapes too much, its hem stretched to the point of frilling. It hangs on the padded peach satin hanger like a deflated ogre, its arrogant swagger morphing into sad disappointment, probably because fashion police have yet to put it out of its misery, Loreen considers. Or maybe because its empty. At first glance, it’s an effective deterrent against anyone with sensitive skin, vision, or disposition: the ugly, one-eyed mongrel left behind in the kennels, a mutt that only one person could love. But of one person, it was the perfect guard dog, a protective forcefield against dark forces.

Loreen sighs deeply, her breath nudging wiry wisps of its silhouette into life, a yeti in a zephyr. As far as clothing goes, this sweater is less garment, more the punchline to a joke as yet unspoken. But it had been adored to within a thread of its life, its fibres putting up a brave fight against an onslaught of rogue washes, narrowly escaping unravelling at the behest of the nail head protruding from the back of the kitchen door which had seen off many a lesser fabric. It was even too much for the resident moths to stomach, which, considering the mess they’d made of the brown Persian rub that covered a multitude of spilled sins in the hallway, Loreen thought was saying something.

“You’ll never wear it,” Loreen had mocked, watching her mum shrink underneath bags of yarn as if she’d purloined Alice’s Drink Me potion. Still, it was a happier prospect than the small phials that were slowing the process of disappearing.

“Course I will!” Maggie protested, elbowing her way out of the pile, flapping about the pattern that would be her magnum opus. She had decided, at fifty-two, that her future untapped skills lay in the world of knitting.  Surviving serious illness does that to people sometimes, foisting a shiny new purpose into their willing, cupped hands which, in Maggie’s case, was a pair of 8mm grey plastic knitting needles that she waved aloft to proudly cast on her first spell.

Despite arthritis gnawing at her crookening fingers, Maggie had already rustled up, in the loosest possible sense, a bobble hat – minus the bobble – and a scarf she’d tired of long before it achieved the requisite length to classify as such. A conveniently dropped stitch in the fifth or maybe the seventh row, however, and a button stolen from something Maggie called her coatigan salvaged the effort into a sort of neck wrap. Maggie was delighted with her own ingenuity. The theatrical display of gratitude from her daughter as she unwrapped her new violently chartreuse winter garments was surely proof enough of Maggie’s new-found calling. Then came the pledge. Buoyed with her success with accessories, she would now conjure the jumper-to-end-all-jumpers from her favourite things: her hopes, her dreams, and every colour under the Sun – a tone that would eventually accent the armpits. Loreen, however, begged to differ, but the gravity of her mother’s illness had softened her tactlessness. Trivial gripes would from now on be relegated in favour of minor victories. For someone who, until her last birthday, didn’t know her purl from her elbow this was tantamount to conquering another round of chemo.  Loreen hadn’t inherited her mother’s appreciation for Richard of York and his colourful exploits on the battlefield. Other than the aggressive accents of her latest cold weather accoutrements, Loreen’s wardrobe was a comforting melange of muted hues: soft taupes, velveteen ecrus or warm doves, like a thermos of slippery thick mushroom soup on an autumn day. It was a sartorial affront to her mother whose approach to the rainbow was to wear all of it, all at once.

“I do wish you’d be a bit more adventurous,” Maggie would say to her daughter, tugging on her electric aubergine cardigan hand-picked to offset her embroidered lime green corduroy smock dress, puce tights and the blue knock off Chanel silk she’d relocated from favourite neckerchief to headscarf the day her hair started to fall out. “You can’t not feel happier in colour!”

“It gives me vertigo,” Loreen would retort, fastening the gaudy pendant of an apotropaic eye around her mother’s waning neck, and Maggie would hoot whatever breath she had left until she caved in on herself.

In the months following the all clear, Maggie threw herself back into her life with gusto, as if the hours on drips of sickening drugs that waged internal war had happened to someone else. Hers hadn’t been the days watching oozy dressings and drains swapped out by exhausted nurses, nor stolen moments hiding fistfuls of hair under potato peelings in the kitchen bin. But physically Maggie never fully regained her form. Sure, her spunk had returned, but in the same way Loreen would become more amenable to favours the hour after her morning espresso, it was only ever short-lived and with a bitter aftertaste. Recent wrinkles kept their crevices, her waxen skin clinging onto the colour of warm sand. Maggie was a husk full of good intentions and hollow promises. Still, at least she was happy, Loreen thought, oh so very happy, living each day on her one-woman quest to revolutionise fashion with the most spectacular sweater to ever have graced God’s green earth, the shade that would later adorn one sagging shoulder. Maggie’s days were spent purposefully sat spinning yarn and clacking plastic by the bedroom window, occasionally looking up from her industry whenever a flicker on the bird feeder caught her attention – a flash of butcher bird blue, maybe, later picked out in an oblong panel along the hem – but for Maggie there was nothing more important than the act of creation: summoning something out of nothing, plucking joy out of thin air, weaving her multicolour magic.

“It’s a bit on the big side, don’t you think, Mum?”

Loreen had to stifle a laugh as she squinted at her diminutive mother, stood in the kitchen holding up an item of clothing she was convinced only a prop for the Harlequins could fill.

“Nonsense,” Maggie protested, wrestling the giant woven grotesquery over her head and standing with her arms outstretched to show it off to maximum effect. The hem grazed her sparrow knees, with neck agape and one sleeve hanging longer than the other because its creator’s free-spirited attitude towards colour also extended to sizing. But there Maggie was, suddenly larger than life in her “spirit attire” as she called it, beaming as brightly as the day Loreen carved her first pumpkin for Halloween, the same orange that cameos as a rhomboidal panel above where the tumour grew.

It is a jumper only her mother could love, Loreen thought.

Loreen clutches the abrasive garment to her face, lids clenched tight to preserve her eyesight. The last time she braved this level of proximity was the day of the turn, when cruel winds whipped the weathervane one eighty along with Maggie’s prognosis. An escapee fibre leeched itself to Loreen’s eyeball requiring a cotton bud and some DIY optometry to remove it. Her eyes swelled shut for days, weeks, months even. Only recently did they begin to open properly, the pain almost bearable in small bursts. Now, it’s a risk worth taking.

Holding her breath, Loreen slips the offending article over her head, arms rummaging for where the sleeves should be but aren’t quite. In her collaged suit of woollen armour she turns to face the hungry maws of cardboard boxes waiting patiently on the floor. Loreen stares through them, beige-blind and motionless. She’s not ready to feed them she yet. She allows herself to feel each individual prickle, every itch and scratch, from her fingertips up to a ring of thorns around her neck. Slowly she moves to the bedroom window, her focus resting on her own muted multicolour chimera and then shifting outwards to the seasonal explosion of fuchsias and violets, grasses and mosses in the back garden. A handful of black birds spatter and smudge across the heavens before disappearing like invisible ink. Left behind are pink powderpuff clouds that softly dust the sky’s baby blue cheeks. The vicious sting on her skin dulls into warmth, assault becoming embrace, and with it each breath feeling fuller, lighter. Loreen wraps her arms around herself, inhaling the gently fading sandalwood and rose, and her eyes start to leak, the whites turning the colour of the left cuff. So this was what was up her mother’s sleeve all along, she thinks, a true magician revealing their mastery.