The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike, est. 2007) Part 2466 by Angharad Copyright© 2014 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

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The week rolled on. I spent my time doing some chores at home and professorial ones in work. The pay for home is zilch, the pay in work is adequate to good—I’m not complaining, even if it is temporary. The satisfaction is different and quite variable.

At home, I have a million kids to organise—okay, it’s only a dozen, which nearly twice as many as Snow White and I ended up being adopted by Grumpy whilst marrying Dopey. That’s not fair, Simon isn’t as daft as he appears, he runs a bank for goodness sake, and he married me—so he’s clever and has wonderful taste—right. I suspect the old woman who lived in a shoe would be a better analogy, except I’m neither old nor reside in a piece of footwear, and sometimes it appears I do know what to do, unlike the unfortunate female in the nursery rhyme.

On the Monday evening I wondered where Phoebe was. She’d had her dinner and was supposed to be trying on the outfit she’d bought for the presentation. An hour later she hadn’t reappeared. I’d been busy wrestling with budget figures—the joys of heading a department. I’d shown them to Simon and with his accountant’s eye, in minutes he spotted something. He went off with my papers so I decided to make a cuppa, my head was splitting from trying to balance things on the accounts which just wouldn’t work.

Julie was watching telly and I asked her where Phoebe was. She just shrugged, ‘hadn’t seen her.’ It seemed no one had. I went up to her room and on knocking entered. She was curled up on her bed sobbing. A garment I didn’t recognise was lying on the floor.

Sitting on the bed beside her, I spoke and gently rubbed her shoulder. “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

“My dress, it’s ruined,” she sobbed back to me.

“Ruined?”

“The zip jammed and I forced it—it broke and I tore the material getting it off.”

“Why didn’t you come and get me?”

“You were busy, Mummy.”

“Yes, but I’m never too busy to help you.”

“I got in such a knot trying to get the zipper undone, I was hot and bothered and so angry.”

“We’ll get you another dress.”

“We don’t have time, Mummy.”

“We have a couple of days.”

“I spent weeks looking for it, there isn’t another one and now it’s ruined.”

“Mind if I look at it?”

“Why, it’s ruined.”

“In which case I can’t make it worse can I?”

“I wish I was dead,” she groaned from behind me.”

“Please don’t make such wishes, having had Sammi at death’s door, I don’t want you there.”

“Sorry, Mummy, but my life is ruined.”

“That’s poor logic, sweetheart, only the dress is ruined not your life.”

“It might as well be.”

I had the dress in my hands, the zip was broken and in my experience they can’t be repaired. The tear was in a seam which ran into another one under the arm. It was going to be fiddly, but not impossible to repair, and the zip could be replaced. Some of the dry cleaning places do replacement zips and repairs. I’d ring around some tomorrow, see what they could do.

“What’re you doing?” she asked from her bed noticing me examining the damage.

“Assessing what needs to be done.”

“But it’s ruined.”

“Not irretrievably .”

“But it’s torn.”

“I think it’s repairable.”

“Is it?”

“Yes look, most of the tear is along the seam...”

“So?”

“That’s fairly straightforward to sew up, and the little bit where the material actually tore is under the arm, I reckon that could be patched.”

“I’m not wearing a dress with a patch.”

“The patch would be on the inside and invisible. It would be just a small piece of similar coloured material to sew the torn edges to, because I don’t think this material could just be sewn together, it would tear again.”

“You really think it could work?”

“Yes, just a question of finding somewhere who can do the repair and replace the zip by Thursday afternoon.”

“D’you think someone could?”

“We’ll see tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Mummy.” She gave me a hug and a kiss to reinforce her message, “You’re a brill mother.” I assumed she meant the slang for brilliant rather than a reference to brill as in flatfish, at least I hoped that was what she meant, the alternative was unimaginable.

The next morning, armed with a list of places that did repairs, we traipsed around them, each time they shook their heads—too busy, or you can’t sew that stuff on a tear. Phoebe was growing more upset at each refusal, I was getting angrier. At the second, ‘you can’t sew that stuff,’ I asked incredulously, “Why can’t you sew the tear over a patch to reinforce it?”

“Can’t guarantee it will work.”

“But you could try?”

“Yeah, but no guarantees.”

I glanced at Phoebe who was looking apprehensive but hopeful. “We need it for Thursday lunchtime.”

“You gotta be jokin’?”

“No, I’m deadly serious.”

“No way.”

“I’ll happily pay extra.”

“Sorry, we’re just too busy to even look at it until next week sometime.”

“It’s not that difficult, just a patch and replacement zip.”

“If it’s that easy, why don’t you do it?”

“Because she’s too busy,” said Phoebe who now looked close to tears.

“Yeah, well what d’ya think we are?”

Before Phoebe could answer her question, possibly with profanities I whisked her from the shop and we dashed along to the nearest haberdashery department. There I bought some material which almost matched the dress for colour and a zip—a quality one.

“What are you doing?” asked Phoebe.

“What I should have done in the first place.”

“You’re going to mend it?” the astonishment in her voice meant she didn’t have much faith in my seamstress abilities. She must have seen one of my mutant dormice.

“Exactly that.”

“Can you?”

“Watch me.” Of course I just had the little matter of the budget meeting to deal with first, and where was I going to make the savings?

It was an interesting meeting to say the least. The smug accountant from the university accounts department came and read through his report and then asked what provision I had to save the required overspend.

My answer was short. “Sack you.”

“What?” he gasped.

“Your accounting is in error, the overspend is a mistake and when corrected shows a healthy profit. I won’t be making any cuts nor will I be bailing out any other department. This department requires every penny we get to refurbish or replace equipment. Under Prof Agnew, this department created a reputation which is only challenged by much bigger universities like Cambridge or Sussex who have specialist mammal units. I know because I was an undergrad at Sussex.

“With the help of the team he put together and funding from High St Bank and the European Union, we took the lead in the British and European Mammal Survey. We are now running bigger courses in mammalian biology and ecology than even Sussex. We are now the leader and I’m not prepared to sacrifice that lead to balance the university’s books because some dimwit accountant can’t count. Go back and re-examine your figures, here, this might help.” I handed him the recalculation Simon had done. It was an easy mistake but had been missed by several people, me included, Simon had spotted it in seconds.

I closed the meeting told Delia I was working from home and went to my study where I began to try and repair the dress. I got Jacquie to collect the girls while I struggled with the dress. I couldn’t do the zip until I’d fixed the seam, boy was that a fiddle, the material was so fine I ended up using the piece I’d bought like bias binding to stop the dress fraying at the edges of the tear. Then I managed to re-sew the hem taking it up through the patch. It took me four hours and I felt like a surgeon who’d just done an open heart operation.

I did stop for dinner but returned to my task immediately afterwards. I got the zip replaced after removing the old one and tacking in the new one, then doing it on the sewing machine—my mum’s old one—at one o’clock the next morning.

The repair wasn’t invisible, but it wasn’t highly visible. Phoebe tried it on at breakfast and while she was disappointed that I had to show the patch under the arm, it would only be visible close to if she raised her arms over her head—not a regular movement for most of us.

I took the girls to school, yawning while they grumbled about Phoebe’s ingratitude and how they’d missed me being about last night. I was crabby all day at work snapping at all and sundry, including the accounts manager who came to apologise.

However, when I got home Phoebe presented me with a bunch of chrysanthemums and thanked me for saving her dress. She’d realised how difficult the job had been when she really examined what I’d done. She hugged and kissed me and told me I was the best mum in the world.

As I said before, the pay is better from the university but the satisfaction is better by far at home.