An army of sewing machines chatters inside the school gymnasium. If she closes her eyes, Mrs. O’Hare can pretend she’s sitting alone in a greenhouse, listening to the rain drive against the clear corrugated walls, unable to get in. She can reach out and touch the leaves. But the smoke is in her throat, the heat of bodies and work has her brow all wet. And it isn’t rain, it’s machinery.

And there is much more work to be done.

A pile of fabric sits wedged between Mrs. O’Hare’s legs. On the table next to the sewing machine sits a small wooden box full of names. Harmless rectangles of fabric that turn these jackets from warm clothing into uniforms. She doesn’t read them anymore. She lays them underneath the breast pocket and stitches them in—long side, then short side, other short, other long—and pretends they don’t say anything at all.

She used to be better than this. Calmer than this. She could shut the world out and relax whenever she pleased. She could sit on a bench by the cliffs and listen to the waves down below, isolate every sound and listen to them each on their own. A squirrel battling against a chestnut. The breath in her nose, and out her mouth. The waves. And, if she concentrated hard enough on one thing, she could hear a pin drop when no-one else could.

“Are you alright?” beside her, Sharan asks.

“Yes,” Mrs. O’Hare says, though what she wants to say is, [i]Never talk to me. Don’t remind me I’m here.[/i] She takes a drag of the cigarette smoke in the air and relaxes second-hand.

She turns her sewing machine back on so it can chatter with the rest of them. Taking a new sheet of fabric, she feeds it into the machine to give it broad shoulders.

An idea hits her, to simply shove her hand into the machine. Stitch a gash into her ring finger and be escorted out like a wounded soldier. Better to leave clutching a bleeding hand than her own crying face. But what was there for her at home? Only Francis in his whining wheelchair, and Xavier cooped up in his bedroom, only coming out to check the mailbox for letters from his friends.

Friends who had lied about their age.

And what good was [i]she[/i] at home? All she did there was trap Xavier in hour-long hugs. All she did was fail to convince a fourteen-year-old boy that war wasn’t the adventure his teachers said it was. And his father was right there, in the kitchen, in his wheelchair, with his missing leg and his empty eye-socket. If that didn’t convince him, how could she?

Or maybe she would go to her bookshelf again, to pretend she has the stomach for some fiction. Pretend she could sit down with a nice cup of tea and her favourite Jules Verne.

As she cuts the ends of the shirt and stitches the edges closed, her mind catches on the idea of books, like a fish caught on a line and dragged upstream. She once read a story where a book saved a young man’s life. In fact, she’s read several. It’s almost a cliché. Novels lining pockets, journals stopping a bullet from entering a kidney, a bible protecting the heart from inside the breast pocket.

And she wonders how many books she would need to save them all. She wonders how many books she would need to line every uniform from the shoulders, down the torso, and along the sleeves, so that every square inch of them is protected by a wall of words and paper. She wonders if there are enough books in the world.

“Are you alright?”

Mrs. O’Hare doesn’t answer. She holds the finished uniform up for inspection. It’s brown, already stained with lantern oil. Dreadful thing to wear just because you were told to. Dreadful thing to die in.

Just the name, now.

She reaches out, but her arm goes numb, and she swipes the basket of names onto the floor. They spill out, and she sees one. 

[b][smcaps]A. Ginty[/smcaps][/b]

“No!”

She gets to her knees and turns them over. 

[smcaps][b]M. Morrison[/b],[b] B. Kilkenny[/b],[b] E. Monk[/b][/smcaps]

“No-no-no.”

She stops. Her eyes find a name. The chattering army of sewing machines continues marching all around her. She picks up the harmless rectangle of fabric and sits back on her heels.

[b][smcaps]X. O’Hare[/smcaps][/b]

And she could hear a pin drop.