Scarecrow

Hen still says the names.

Every morning. By the long ward window, where the light comes in first. Two hundred and sixty-eight of them, in order, in the voice she had when she was made and has kept because she says it’s the only one that doesn’t shake. She’s been saying them for years now. Since the last hall. Since she stood in front of two hundred and sixty-eight people screaming in their beds and said I promise. I’ve seen every one of you, and walked out past the Refined going the other way.

Halloway lets her. The nurses have learned to work round it. New patients ask what she’s doing and the old ones say, She’s keeping them.

On the morning Dot came to the ward with the slate, Hen was on the hundred and ninth name.

Dot waited. She’s good at waiting. She sat in the corner of the ward with her five colours low until Hen had said the last one, the way she always does, very quietly, Teo. Teo Marrin. Of Pell’s Reach. And then stopped. And stood with her hand on the window.

“Query,” said Dot. “Would you like to go and get them?”

Velle’s forty were never the only ones under Velle. That’s the thing we’d all been carrying, and not saying. The forty women from the sisters’ houses, asleep in the rock under the blind houses, with Bess the ninth, dreaming about shoes. And in the last hall, above the rock, on the ground, in a long white room with the beds facing the wrong way, two hundred and sixty-eight people who wouldn’t wake up when Hen called them because they were dreaming so hard they’d forgotten there was anywhere to wake up to.

Two problems. One world. Okafor had drawn it nine times and torn it up nine times. The houses listen. They’re blind, since the ring fell, but they listen harder than anything in the Reach, and every time anybody so much as thought about Velle, Dot said, the houses turned their heads.

What Dot had on her slate was a way through.

“Roots,” she said, at the long table. “The forty have roots. Grey ones. Like Senn. Like all the halls. Going up out of the rock, to Refined somewhere, carrying their gifts.” A pause. “This one has been listening to them for a year. This one knows every one. And this one has found where they go into the rock.”

“Where?”

“Under the houses,” said Dot. “Straight down. Through them.” Her colours went very low. “The houses don’t know. The roots were put there by the scientists, before the ring fell, when the houses could see. Now the houses are blind, and the roots go through them in the dark, and they can’t feel them. They’re too thin. Like hair.”

“So?” said Okafor.

“So a root is a path,” said Dot. “If Lucas can ask a root to come home, he can ask it the other way. To take him down. One thread at a time. Through the houses. Without the houses feeling a thing.”

Nobody said anything.

“It’s very thin,” said Dot. “He’d have to be very thin.”

I can be very thin.

Scattering is just that. Being atoms instead of a man. I’ve done it up the eldest’s thread, and the Sallow thread, and across half the Reach. I’ve never done it down a root the width of a hair, through a living thing that would wake if it felt me.

“What about the two hundred and sixty-eight?” said Hen. She’d come up with Dot. She stood at the end of the long table in her grey coat with her hands folded, the way the made stand, which she can’t stop doing. “They’re not in the rock. They’re in the hall. On the ground. With Refined at the door.”

Okafor looked at her sheets. All nine of them. Torn and taped back together.

“Two things at once,” she said. “The houses listen for one. We give them one. Loud. On the ground. While Lucas goes down the root with nothing listening at all.”

“Give them what?”

Corvan, at the end of the bench, put his cup down.

“Me,” he said.

He’d been waiting for it. I think he’d been waiting since Carrow. Since the forty went up the white ship with the square sitting on its broken hands. Since he sat on the floor of the narrow house in the dark for three days and Mother went down and wouldn’t say what she’d said.

“The houses want me,” said Corvan. “They’ve always wanted me. Father promised them something and never delivered. They know my voice from the band. They’ll turn to it. All of them.” He looked at Okafor. “Put me on the ground on Velle, in the gardens, by the last hall, with the band open, and let me talk. They’ll listen so hard they won’t hear anything else.”

“And the Refined at the hall?”

“Will come for me,” said Corvan. “Every one. And the scientists. And Pale, if he’s near.” He almost smiled. “They’ve been trying to get me for years. I’ll stand still for once.”

“No,” said Lio.

Everybody looked at her.

“Not on your own,” said Lio. “You stand still on your own and they’ll take you. Sefa and I stand next to you. And Gilgamesh. And the Drenn queen, unseen, with every one of her young, round you in a ring, so when they come for you they walk into her.” She folded her arms. “Then you can stand still.”

Corvan looked at her for a long time.

“All right,” he said.

Sefa didn’t say anything. She never does, at the long table. She’s very small and very old and bent nearly double, and she goes where Lio goes, and nobody has ever once managed to stop her. She went to Carrow. She went to Senn. She sat on the floor of the narrow house in the dark for three days with Corvan and Lio and Mother and didn’t say a word.

She looked at Corvan now across the long table. For a long time. Then she nodded. Once. And went back to her knot.

Corvan went to the garden that night. Not Velle’s. Ours.

The Drenn queen was there, the way she is most evenings now since she came back changed, standing among the beans at the end of the garden with her young in rows, very still, black against the dark. He walked down the path to her and stopped. She bent her head down. Down and down.

“I’d like to ask you something,” said Corvan. “Properly. I don’t know how. Nobody taught me.”

Ask, said the Drenn queen.

“When they come for me,” said Corvan. “In the garden. On Velle. They’ll walk into you. I know what you can do to them. I’ve seen the pieces.” He stopped. “I don’t want anybody to die for me in my father’s garden. Not even them. Not for me. I’ve had enough people die because of me.”

The Drenn queen looked at him for a long time with her head level with his.

Then they’ll sleep, she said. My young know where the collar holds. They can put a blade there and take it away again. It’s very quick. It doesn’t kill. A pause. They’ll wake up in a day and not know what happened. Is that enough?

“Yes,” said Corvan. “Thank you.”

You asked, said the Drenn queen. That’s all anybody has to do here.

She straightened up. Corvan stood in the garden a long time after. Dory says she felt him, from her window. She says he felt like somebody who’d just been told he was allowed.

Okafor drew it. On a tenth set of sheets.

The ground: Corvan in Velle’s gardens, by the last hall, with Lio and Sefa and Gilgamesh and Hesper Daine, and the Drenn queen and her nine hundred round them, unseen. Hen and Dovi and the forty-one who came back, in grey coats, going into the hall behind the Refined when the Refined came out for Corvan. Ash with them, for the collars. Halloway behind Ash, with blankets. Elin’s door at the back of the hall.

The rock: me, down a root. Dot on my back, in the pack, listening, to tell me which thread. Dory above, on the ground, in the net, holding every root and every sleeper and me. And Joss.

“Joss?” said Hen.

“The houses listen,” said Okafor. “Corvan gives them something to listen to on the ground. But under the ground, in the rock, there’s nothing. Silence. And the houses have been in silence since the ring fell. They know what silence sounds like. If it changes, they’ll know.” She looked at Joss, who’d come up the hill road from Brannock that morning without being asked. “So it mustn’t change.”

“You want me to sing,” said Joss. “Under Velle.”

“I want you to sing the high part,” said Okafor. “The one the bells leaned to. In the rock. Very quietly. The whole time Lucas is down there.” She put her chalk down. “The houses have never heard a queen sing in that rock. Not one. Not ever. They’ll listen to that. Not to the thread.”

Joss didn’t say anything for a long time.

“She died on a frame,” he said. “Brannock’s small one. I sing her part because there’s a gap.” He looked at the slate. “And you want me to sing it to the things that made the frames.”

“Yes,” said Okafor.

Joss looked at Mother. Mother looked back.

“Then I’ll sing it to Bess,” said Joss. “Not to them. To her. She’s the ninth. She’ll hear it.” He swallowed. “They can listen if they want. I’m not singing to them.”

We went on the ninth night.

Velle’s very beautiful. I’d forgotten. Hen told us, and the others, but you forget. Gardens. Warm. Flowers nobody planted, growing wild through streets with nobody in them, three million people gone to nobody knows where, and the long white halls on the ground where the scientists kept what they took. And under all of it, in the rock, the houses. Blind. Listening.

You could feel them. Even I could. Like being in a room with somebody who’s put their ear to the wall.

Corvan stood in the garden by the last hall with his coat open and the band open and his hands at his sides. Lio on his left, Sefa on his right. Gilgamesh behind him with his axe. Hesper Daine beside Gilgamesh with her cable.

And round them, nothing. Nine hundred and one nothings. The Drenn queen and her young, unseen, in a ring, among the flowers.

Corvan opened his mouth.

“My name is Corvan,” he said. On the band. On every band. The old one, the thin one, the grey one that Dot taught Ilka to open. “I’m standing in your garden. I’m not hiding. Come and look.”

And the houses turned.

Dot says they didn’t just turn. She says they reached. Every one of them, blind, from the rock, towards the garden, the way a plant reaches for a window. She says the whole of Velle leaned.

Dot heard it. From my back. The whole of Velle’s rock turning its blind head towards one voice in a garden. Like a crowd turning in a square. She said she’d never heard anything so loud that made no sound.

“Now,” said Dot. “Lucas. Now. The ninth root. Go.”

I went.

I don’t know how to put it down. Scattering is being atoms. Going down a root is being atoms in a line. One after another. Through something the width of a hair, that’s alive, that’s grey, that’s carrying a woman’s gift up out of the dark to a Refined on some world I’ll never see.

I asked it. The way I always ask. May I come down? And it said yes, because it was Bess’s, and Bess mends shoes, and anything of Bess’s would say yes to somebody asking politely at the door.

Down. Through the garden soil. Through the stone under the garden. Through the first of the houses.

I felt it. The house. All round me. Blind and old and listening somewhere else, turned towards a garden where a man was saying his name. I went through it the way a thread goes through cloth. It didn’t feel me. Dot was right. I was too thin.

And under me, very faint, coming up through the rock from far below, a voice. High and clear, like a wet finger round the rim of a glass.

Joss. Singing to Bess.

He was in the rock. Elin had put him there, in a hollow Kwame opened at the very edge of Velle, a mile from the houses, deep, alone, with a lamp. He sat on the floor of the hollow with his back to the stone and sang the high part. Very quietly. The way he sings it under Brannock’s second hill. To the gap.

And the houses heard it. Dot says they went very still. All of them. Corvan was talking in the garden and the houses had turned to him, and then under them, in the rock, a queen started singing. A dead queen’s part. In a boy’s voice. And the houses didn’t know what to do.

They’d never heard it. Not in the rock. Not from below. They listened to Corvan with one ear and the singing with the other, and between the two, Dot says, there wasn’t a single thought left over for a thread the width of a hair.

The forty were in a long room cut in the rock, under the deepest house. Beds. The same as every hall. Roots going up out of the backs of their necks into the dark. Asleep.

I came down the ninth root into the ninth bed and was a man again, in the dark, kneeling on cold stone, with Dot in the pack on my back.

Bess was asleep under me. On the bed. In the nightdress they’d taken her in. With her hands folded on her chest the way she folds them, Corvan says, when she’s waiting for glue to dry.

She was dreaming about shoes. I could feel it. Rows of them, on a bench, in a window in the old quarter of Carrow, waiting to be mended.

“Query,” said Dot, very quietly. “All forty. This one hears every root. Thirty-six are strong.”

“And four?”

Dot didn’t answer for a long time.

“Four are very thin,” she said.

I did Bess first.

I shouldn’t have. I should have done the four thin ones first, in case there was time. But Bess was under my hands, and the singing was coming up through the rock, and Dot had said to Bess, and I put my hand on the back of her neck where the root went in and asked it, very gently, to let go of the far end.

It let go.

And Bess opened her eyes.

She looked up at me. In the dark. With the lamp of Dot’s colours on my face.

“You’re the son,” she said. “The one from the soup. Her boy.”

“Yes.”

She looked past me. Up. Into the dark where the root had gone, and where, somewhere far above, through the rock and the houses, a boy was singing a dead queen’s part to her.

“That’s the one who sang in the square,” said Bess. “The one with the fountain. They took him on the first morning.”

“Yes. He’s back. He’s singing to you.”

Bess listened for a long time.

“He’s got better,” she said.

Thirty-six.

I went down the beds. Dot said this one, this one, this one. Hand on the back of the neck, ask, let go. Thirty-six roots letting go of their far ends, thirty-six Refined on thirty-six worlds waking in the dark with a hole in them. Thirty-six women opening their eyes under Velle.

And four I sat with.

Dot had their names. The oldest ones. The first the scientists took from the sisters’ houses, on the night of the forty, who’d been asleep the longest, whose roots had gone so thin that when I asked them to let go there was nothing left to let go of. An old aunt. Two grandmothers. A cousin who’d made Corvan soup on his third night.

I sat with them. In the dark. With Bess holding one of their hands, because she’d got up off her bed and come down the row and sat down on the stone next to me without being asked.

“Halloway’s rule,” I said.

“I don’t know Halloway,” said Bess. “But you sit with people. Everybody knows that.”

She told me who they were. While we sat. In the dark, with Joss’s voice coming up through the stone very faint, and Dot’s colours low, and thirty-five women waking one after another along the row behind us and sitting up and not knowing where they were.

The cousin was Mira. She’d made Corvan soup on his third night in the old quarter, when he was still frightened of everything and wouldn’t eat. She’d put it in front of him and said, eat it or wear it, and he’d eaten it. Bess said it was the first thing anybody on Carrow ever saw him laugh at.

The two grandmothers were sisters. They’d shared a house for sixty years and argued every single day of it, about the weather, about shoes, about whose turn it was to sit at the front of the square. They’d gone to the square together every morning since the first sitting and sat side by side and argued the whole time, very quietly, with their hands folded.

The old aunt had hidden Corvan the first night. Before anybody. Before Bess. She’d opened her door at midnight to a tall frightened boy in a white coat and said, well, you’d better come in, then, and that was all.

“They were the first ones they took,” said Bess. “Because they’d been the first to help. The scientists knew. Somebody told them.” She held Mira’s hand. “They were the oldest. They’d been asleep longest. Of course it was them.”

I didn’t say anything.

“He’ll want to know,” said Bess. “Who. You’ll have to tell him.”

“Yes.”

“Tell him Mira said eat it or wear it,” said Bess. “He’ll know what it means.”

Above us, on the ground, it went the way Okafor drew it.

The Refined came out of the last hall for Corvan. All of them. Nineteen. And the scientists behind them, four small pale ones with slates, and Dot says Pale wasn’t among them, which is a thing we’ll have to think about later.

They walked into the garden towards a man standing still with his hands at his sides, and a girl on each side of him, and a very large man behind him with an axe.

And walked into the Drenn queen.

She didn’t kill them. Corvan asked her not to. He asked her in the kitchen the night before, very formally, the way you’d ask a Holder. He said he didn’t want anybody dying in his father’s garden for his sake. She looked at him for a long time and said, Then they’ll sleep, and that’s what they did. Nineteen Refined and four scientists went down in the flowers one after another as they reached the ring, with her young’s blades under their collars and then away, and lay there with their eyes open, very confused, not dead, not moving.

Corvan stood in the middle of it and didn’t stop talking. On the band. To the houses.

“You wanted my father,” he said. “You’ve got him. There’s nothing left in him that isn’t you. I hope you’re pleased.” He stopped. “I’m not his. I never was. I’m hers. The one who pours.”

Dot says the houses made a sound. Under the rock. Under me. Under the four women I was sitting with and the singing coming up from below.

She says it was the sound a very old thing makes when it’s been told something it already knew.

And behind the Refined, while they walked into the flowers, Hen went into the last hall.

With Dovi. And the forty-one. In grey coats. In rows. Eyes on the ground. The way the made walk. Nobody looks at the made.

Two hundred and sixty-eight beds. Facing the wrong way. Two hundred and sixty-eight people dreaming so hard they’d forgotten.

Hen went to the first bed. The same first bed. The one she’d stood at years ago and said I promise.

“Teo,” she said. “Teo Marrin. Of Pell’s Reach. I said I’d come back.”

He didn’t wake. He screamed, the way they’d screamed before, with his eyes shut, fighting the air.

And Ash walked up the row behind Hen, very small in a grey coat that was too big for her, and put her hand on Teo Marrin’s chest.

It took Ash nine hours.

Not the collars. The collars were nothing; she undid every one in the room in the first hour, the way she did the sixty on Isselt, the way she did the nine on Sable. The dreaming was the hard part. The made had been put so far down into whatever the scientists had told them that there wasn’t a way back up they could find on their own. Ash had to find it for them. One at a time. The way she undoes a knot. Very carefully. One strand.

She didn’t stop. Halloway tried to make her, at the sixth hour, when her nose started bleeding, and Ash said no in a voice Sera says she’s never heard her use, and went on to the next bed.

Her eyes went black at the hundred and fourth bed.

Halloway saw it. She was holding Ash’s elbow at the time. She says the colour went out of them the way it went out of Trevor’s on Varrel, from the edges in, and Ash didn’t notice, and went on to the hundred and fifth, and did it faster.

Hen walked beside her the whole nine hours. Saying the names. Every one. Not from the window. From the bed. With her hand on each person’s forehead as Ash woke them.

“Teo Marrin. You’re awake. I said I’d come back.”

“Alla Senn. You’re awake. I said I’d come back.”

Two hundred and fifty-one.

Seventeen didn’t wake. Ash sat with every one of them. Hen said their names anyway. Halloway says Hen will say them tomorrow morning at the window, and every morning after, with the two hundred and fifty-one left off, because they’re home now, and the seventeen kept on, because somebody has to.

I came up out of the rock the slow way. Not the root. Elin opened a door in the floor of the long room, the way Corin did on Senn, and we brought the thirty-six up through it, and the four, with their hands folded, and Bess came last with her arm through mine because she said she’d been lying down for years and her legs had forgotten.

The plateau was already full. Two hundred and fifty-one people in blankets. Hen going between them. Halloway’s nine thousand. Mother with the pot.

Bess came up out of the door onto the red glass in her nightdress and stood there in the dawn and looked at all of it.

Then she looked at Mother.

Mother had stopped pouring. She was standing very still with the pot in both hands.

“You’re her,” said Bess. “The soup. The one he shells beans for.”

“Yes, love,” said Mother.

Bess looked at her for a long time. At the small woman with the pot. Then she looked down at her own feet. Bare. On the red glass.

“I haven’t got any shoes,” she said. “They took me without them.” She looked back up. “Have you got any that want mending? I’d like something to do with my hands.”

Mother put the pot down. She came across the red glass. She took Bess’s face in her hands, the way she does.

“I’ve got a whole house full,” she said. “Nobody’s mended a shoe properly on this hill in thirty years.”

Corvan came through Elin’s door last of all. With Lio and Sefa. Grey with tiredness, and not hurt, which Lio says is the first time he’s come back from anything with the Collective not hurt.

He saw Bess. Standing on the red glass with Mother’s hands on her face.

He stopped.

Bess saw him over Mother’s shoulder. She stepped back. She looked at him. The way she must have looked at him across her kitchen table on Carrow with a bowl of beans between them. The way you look at somebody who’s been in your back room for nine nights and said thank you every time you put a plate down.

“You look terrible,” she said.

Corvan sat down on the red glass very suddenly. Like Maelis Orr in the film. And put his face in his hands.

Bess went and sat down next to him. In her nightdress. On the glass. And put her arm round him. And he leaned on her the way he leans on nobody, and she patted his back and said, there, there, you silly boy, you’ve been eating badly, I can tell, and the whole plateau, two hundred and fifty-one people in blankets and nine thousand doctors and all of us, pretended very hard not to be looking.

I told Corvan on the plateau. Before he sat down. Before Bess. In the first light, by Elin’s door, with Lio holding one of his arms.

I said the four names. And then I said what Bess said to say.

He stood very still for a long time.

“Eat it or wear it,” he said.

“Yes.”

He didn’t cry. Not then. He said, very quietly, “I wore it. The first time. I didn’t understand. She laughed so hard she had to hold on to the table.” And then he looked at the door, and saw Bess coming up through it with her arm through mine, and that’s when he stopped.

Ash slept for three days.

In the end room at the top of the house, with the curtains shut and Pebble across her feet, because Pebble goes where Ash goes when Ash needs him, and Dory sends him without being asked.

Sera sat with her. All three days. On the floor by the bed. She didn’t say anything about the eyes. She’d seen them on the plateau when Halloway brought Ash through, black and wide and not seeing anything, and she’d put her hands over her own mouth and then taken them away and said, right, bed, and that was all.

On the third day Ash woke up. She looked at the ceiling with her black eyes. Then at her mother on the floor.

“Mum,” she said. “I can see the knots. In everything. All the way down. I don’t have to look for them any more.”

Sera took her hand.

“I know, love,” she said. “Your dad said the same thing. About the atoms. The morning after the gas.” She squeezed. “Does it hurt?”

Ash thought about it.

“No,” she said. “It’s quieter. Like somebody turned the lamp up.”

Sera put her head down on the edge of the bed and cried, finally, and Ash let her, and Pebble chirred.

Five of them now. Dory and Trevor and Kwame and Ash. And Queenie, who was born that way, and sits at the end of the long table every morning and looks at each of her brothers and sisters as they come in, one at a time, all the way down, and says nothing, and goes back to her porridge.

Halloway has stopped looking surprised. She writes it on her list. She says the list is getting long.

Mother says it’s the same list Father would have been on, if anybody had been keeping one on the ridge. She says somebody should have been.

On the second evening, Bess shelled beans.

At the long table. After supper. With a bowl. Corvan came up the hill road the way he does, and stopped in the kitchen doorway, and saw her there with the bowl and the pods, and didn’t move.

Bess didn’t look up.

“Well?” she said. “Are you going to stand there? Sit down. You still can’t do this properly, I’ll bet.”

He sat down. Across from her. He picked up a pod. He opened it with his thumb, along the seam, the way Lio showed him in Bess’s kitchen on the night they brought him out, which Mother showed Lio, which Mother showed me.

The beans fell into the bowl.

Bess watched him do it. She didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Somebody’s been teaching you,” she said.

“Lio,” said Corvan. “And her grandmother. And Mother.”

“Her,” said Bess. She nodded at Mother, at the stove, who was pretending not to listen. “She wrote to you. In my kitchen. She said she’d be your grandmother too if you wanted.”

“Yes.”

Bess picked up another pod.

“Then you’ve got two now,” she said. “Don’t waste either of us.”

The leagues, for Toby, who came up the hill road the next morning for them and then forgot to ask because he’d seen Bess at the long table with a shoe:

In Stile, the Hill won their last three. They play Caul’s Haze for the top of the long table next week. Hanne Brisk has sent nine letters. Sigmund has answered none of them. Tovi says he practises throwing at the orchard wall every evening, and the birds have moved to the far trees.

In Ring, the Commonhold Gales lost by one. Again. To the Wanderers. Again. Kesh says she’s going to Myre to learn how it rains indoors there, so she can stop it.

In Ridge, the Ridge-Ends won. Kyrie scored three. Okafor wrote all three.

In the Long Way, the Kethri beat the Lumi twice in a row. Halvane says he’s found the problem. He won’t say what. Ilas says he’s been in the Workshop for nine days and the problem is that he hasn’t slept.

In the Run, Liam finished fourth again. He says the racer has found its level. Aoife set fire to nothing. Everyone was very surprised.

And the Fours: nine months. Caul says nine million seats. Hanne Brisk says the Hazy Field has never had nine million anything on it and she has no idea what it’ll sound like when they all breathe in. Toby says he does. He says he’s been hearing it in his sleep.

Bess has the small room at the top of the stairs. The one Oona had, before Oona moved into Mother’s room to be between Rue and the window. She’s got a bench under the window, that Rory made in an afternoon, and nine pairs of shoes on it, and a lamp.

She mends in the evenings. The whole house brings her shoes. Konrad’s that he’s had resoled four times and won’t give up. The General’s boots. Rue’s, which are very small and which Bess mends very slowly, with Rue watching from Mother’s lap, holding the apron, saying nothing.

On the third evening Rue let go of the apron and went and stood by the bench. Not close. By the end of it.

Bess didn’t look up. She kept sewing.

“You can hold the thread,” she said. “If you like. I need somebody to hold the thread while I pull.”

Rue looked at the thread for a long time.

Then she held it.

She’s held it every evening since. Without fail. Bess says she’s the best thread-holder she’s had in forty years of mending. She says most people pull. Rue just holds.

The stars said Not yet this morning. A thousand and forty.

Wren wrote the count. And under it:

Velle: thirty-six home. Four sat with.

The last hall: two hundred and fifty-one. Seventeen.

Bess: shoes.

Days 13117–13170. Shoes.

Dot found that the forty’s roots ran straight down through the blind houses, so Corvan stood still in Velle’s garden and talked to the houses while the Drenn queen put nineteen Refined to sleep in the flowers, Joss sang the dead queen’s part to Bess from the rock, and I went down a root the width of a hair. Thirty-six of the forty came home and I sat with four; Ash woke two hundred and fifty-one of the last hall’s two hundred and sixty-eight and her eyes went black doing it. Bess came up onto the red glass in her nightdress and asked for shoes to mend.