I used to have a career; a nine to five in the city. I used to wear suits, heels and carry briefcases down the streets of London like I owned the damn tarmac. Now I wake up at five am to a screaming baby and a toddler smashing a two day old banana he found under the couch into the walls like he’s Basquiat. Now i’m lucky if I have time to brush my hair and I swear if I have to listen to baby shark one more time I’ll end up with soup for brains.
I am an ok mum. I swear. It’s just - it’s not for me. If I could go back in time I’d probably still have the little gremlins but it’d be a damn hard decision. One day it’ll be over, they’ll be eighteen and I’ll set them free. That’s what gets me through. That and arts and crafts group.
I found out about the class in one of those awful mum’s groups on facebook. I swear every mum has joined one of those: awful dark places full of frantic pictures of rashes and endless vitriolic debates over co-sleeping and breastfeeding. I first joined to share my own rather worried post regarding my son’s very green poop. It turned out the little shit had eaten a crayon, but that’s getting off-topic. The post was welcoming, warm, and a pleasant distraction from the orchestra of hypochondria the group had otherwise become.
Hi there!
Just a little heads up to all you mumma’s out there in the big city! We are hosting a lovely arts and crafts club at the Grantham community centre. All are welcome for tea, coffee and refuge from our little angels. There is on-site childcare for a small added fee. Let’s get crafting!
Love and kisses,
Sharon
It was a little much, very live laugh love, but they had me at “small fee” and “childcare”. I turned up for my first session with my toddler on my hip and my newborn squalling for no discernable reason. I all but chucked them at the sixteen year old crèche worker.
The group was congregating on the upper floor in a disgustingly gaudy room. There were origami flowers for wallpaper and IKEA bookcases full to bursting with arts and craft tomes the length of war and peace. The group were huddled around a large oval table and appeared to be making macrame coasters. I felt all the eyes in the room turn to face me, and I nervously lifted my hand to offer a small wave of greeting.
“Little late my dear, you must be… Lucy, yes that’s it.” A woman with a purple bandana looked down at her notes. Her tone was disturbingly sweet. “I’m Sharon, the group leader. In future if you could show up a little earlier that would be great as there is a lot of crafting to fit into our very limited time slot here in the Grantham Community Centre.”
I’d worked for high end law firms that were less strict than Sharon. In another life she would have made a great prison officer, but fate had transpired to place her here, at a women’s craft group on the wrong side of South London.
“So as we have a new member, we ought to introduce ourselves my lovelies.” Sharon chirped.
It was as you’d expect: a group of stay at home mothers so stir-crazy that sitting around a table with Sharon turning bog roll tubes into bird feeders was a welcome refuge. Everyone introduced themselves to me in quick succession. There was Natasha who would become a dear friend to me, she had triplet sons, yikes. Then there was Shabnab who somehow managed to juggle parenting, crafting and a small online business selling homemade jams. She would say in her disgusting boastful way, “If there’s time left in the day I’m not doing it right”.
There was also Serena and Evelyn, Cassidy and Summer and the very quiet but articulate Jane who had been a lawyer like me in her past life. Sharon’s introduction came last. Rather dramatically, she stood to her feet like a politician at a hustings.
“As the rest of you know I’m Sharon. I’m mum to five little girls, Mckinleigh, Brinleigh, Farleigh, Marileigh and Samileigh.” She regurgitated a top five worst names list. “I know you might have noticed my bandana.”
She pointed at her head. She was indeed wearing a bandana. The flatness with which the gaudy fabric clung to her round and puffy face suggested to me she had no hair.
“I have stage four cancer. A very rare type and there’s no cure. This time next year I won’t be here.” Sharon’s voice quivered but she regained control of it. “Crafting is my refuge and I’m so happy to have you ladies to share my last year with. I’m very sure Lucy that you and I are going to be good friends and I welcome you to our little group with love and warmth!”
It was a bit of a mood dampener but I felt for her, I really did. Something about Sharon made me feel uneasy though. There was disingenuity laced into her voice: the sickly sweet of a candle pretending to smell like cupcakes.
As uncomfy as Sharon made me feel, the Arts and Crafts club was great. I’d dump the kids at the crèche and have actual adult conversations with other women as disenfranchised with the whole mothering schtick as me. Sharon of course was an outlier. She loved being a mother, and oh how she liked to remind us.
“I just love my babies. Samileigh has never cried once in her entire life.” She beamed one day as she gently embroidered little daisies into a baby onesie.
“Well Tommy ate his own booger today and started crying because it was the last one.” I grumbled, flinching as I stabbed my finger with the needle. My embroidery wasn’t very good. I was trying to make a dog but it looked more like a gerbil that had been hit by a car.
“Adorable.” Sharon made intense and judgemental eye contact with me as if challenging me to express dissatisfaction. Natasha snorted. Sharon kept staring at me. “Some kids just develop a little slower.”
As the weeks went by Sharon grew thinner. She was going through one last round of chemotherapy to try and prolong what little life she had left. The group had arranged a little fundraiser for a Bowel Cancer Charity to take her mind off it. I personally thought a trip to the cinema would have worked out better but I was outvoted.
Sat outside our little stall selling macrame wall hangings, crocheted hats and air-dry clay monstrosities that were supposed to be trinket trays, was when I realised there was something exceedingly wrong with Sharon.
“I was thinking next week I could bring in some of my hair to class. I’ve been saving it and I want to make something for my girls to remember me by.” It was a bit weird, but I could understand her motive. “Paintbrushes. I want to turn my hair into paint brushes for them.”
I screamed internally.
“Or you could uhm, put it into a… ugh I dunno, a locket? You can get them at H. Samuels. We could all chip in.” I suggested, unable to hide the disgust on my face.
“No, I want to be practical. I want to be used, I want my hair to be a tool, you know?” She said as if the urge was a natural one. “That way I’ll be useful to my girls, you understand?”
“I don’t no.” I replied curtly.
“She’s got cancer, you dingbat, we do whatever she wants.” Serena hissed at me when Sharon went for a loo break. Maybe she was right. Who was I to judge how a terminally ill woman processed her denouement? A very nihilistic and awful part of me questioned whether having cancer awarded you the sort of diplomatic immunity that Serena seemed to suggest Sharon was entitled to, but that’s a debate for the philosophers.
I know what you’re thinking, why keep going back? It’s a good question. I’ve asked myself about forty times. I liked it there, even as all the nonsense was going on, I liked it more than I liked my life at home and that’s possibly a conversation I need to have with a therapist.
Over the weeks of Arts and Crafts Club, there was an unsteady oscillation between strange and mundane, reliably however, each week Sharon grew sicker and skinnier. Her skin had turned translucent blue and it clung over her bones like a deflated latex balloon. One week we’d be knitting body-warmers and gloves to keep her increasingly bony frame warm, by the next we’d be drilling holes into teeth that had rotted out of her gums to turn them into little beads for her daughters to wear as bracelets, possibly in anticipation for auditions for the Hills Have Eyes Four.
“This is getting ridiculous.” Shabnab whispered to me one day as Sharon handed around small vials of oddly pink milk that she had informed us had been freshly pumped as Samileigh had missed her morning feed. “I’m all for breastfeeding, you could whip your tit out under my face and I wouldn’t give a damn, but I’m not bloody crafting with it.”
“You go ahead Shabnab, tell the terminally ill woman that you think she’s disgusting, you go girl.” I gritted my teeth, feeling oddly satisfied that I wasn’t the only one disillusioned with Sharon’s nonsense. Shabnab narrowed her eyes.
“How can she breastfeed anyway when she’s on all that medication.” Jane mused, being careful to limit her voice to a low whisper. A brilliant question I only wished we had pondered further.
“You all have a vial of my breast milk, we shall be pouring it into the resin moulds, and then, when the moulds are half full we can all proceed with adding the contents of the provided sachets.” Sharon stood shakily out of her wheelchair. She pointed to a small bowl of ziplock bag.
I was the first to take one from the centre of the table. If I lived in a pleasant multiverse where Sharon was just a harmless lady selling gym wear in a pyramid scheme I would have assumed that what those little bags of fun contained was simply dried fruit. However, I knew that reality would be much worse.
“Umbilical cords, these are my babies’ umbilical cords, also included are little chunks from their placentas. There’s also some of my uterine lining from my last period. I popped them through my dehydrator. This craft is all about the sanctity of motherhood. We shall be preserving my femininity for eternity.”
“She’s so weird. I can’t take it anymore.” Shabnab whispered to me. She thrust backwards and her chair screeched across the floor. “I’m going to say something.”
“I know right, who has space in their kitchen for a dehydrator.” I muttered.
“This is vile Sharon, I’m not taking part in this disgusting craft. I’m at the end of my terror, each week you concoct some obscenity for us to construct. I’m going to need therapy from this and we all make excuses for you as you have cancer. Well boo-fucking-hoo.” Shabnab sputtered out. Summer gasped and Jane’s eyes widened as if a train was hurtling towards her. All the air in the room was sucked out instantaneously and replaced with hot, uncomfortable steam. “I’m finished here. Ladies, next Tuesday night you are much welcome at my house instead of craft club, perhaps I shall start a little jam-making club of my own. Bodily fluids not included.”
With that she left. Sharon’s teeth began to scrape together and her anger was so palpable I was surprised it didn’t split off and become a second Sharon. After a pregnant pause crafting commenced. Sharon told me my resin heart was the best as I had laid out the little nuggets of placenta in the shape of an S for Sharon in an achievement I compare to collecting my masters degree.
Shabnab was serious about her jam-making club; she had even made little posters that she spread all around the Grantham Community Centre. The time of the club, rather decisively I expected, conflicted with crafting club. Rather suspiciously a few of these posters were vandalised with perfectly pastel pens of a similar hue to Sharon’s carefully colour-coded collection.
“I might go.” Summer whispered to me. “To Shabnab’s, instead of here next week.”
“I would, but I’m just here for the babysitting, unless Shabnab opens a creche I’m out.” I said to her, “I’m going to ride this crazy train right to the end.”
One by one everyone began to defect to Shabnab’s Jam-Making Bonanza. First It was Summer, then Jane, then Evelyn. Eventually it was only me, Natasha and Cassidy left to keep Sharon company who with each defection she grew more and more foul-tempered.
“Her jam’s taste awful ladies. I bought a marmalade for Brinleigh and she spat it out. She prefers mine. I buy it from the store in a jar, but I add my own little special sauce to it. I think Shabnab is a bad influence on you girls, I heard a rumour about her you know…” Sharon told us and she leant across the table secretly as if she was about to tell us where Jimmy Hoffa was buried. “She doesn’t wash her hands before she makes her jams.”
“Scandalous.” I mouthed and Sharon put her hand to her heart.
“She’ll have to come back one day, she left her crafting knife and it cost her a pretty penny. It’s a cricut one. But you girls let me handle her, I don’t want her to indoctrinate anymore of you.” Sharon said. “I’ve lost enough, without losing you lovelies too.”
Shabnab did in fact come to retrieve her cricut crafting knife. She came at the end of class when everyone was leaving holding a passive-aggressive jam basket for Sharon. I waved at her before the door shut behind her and Sharon.
Crafting club started to get a little more normal in the coming weeks. Sharon was still ill and she was growing weaker and weaker, but we were actually making useful things. Instead of macrame wall hangings made out of Sharon’s hair we were learning book-binding with pig-leather Sharon had purchased on etsy. Gone were body-fluids sealed in resin paperweights and here to stay were carved ivory statuettes. I figured Sharon had run out of ideas and/or bodily secretions.
“I have to get off early my lovelies, it’s Samileigh’s birthday.” Sharon said gently, “I do hope you all stay and finish rendering your pig fat for next week’s candle-making session.”
The scent of over-cooked bacon hung in the air and I must admit to being dubious how the culmination of this would be a peony-scented candle, but I intended to trust the process, just as Sharon had suggested. I turned my little slab of cooking bacon, slightly dubious as to it’s faintly yellow hue. Sharon said she bought it at the butcher’s, it was probably grass-fed or something, I was used to the cheap crap from Aldi.
“Oh, she’s left her little blood sugar testing kit.” Cassidy grimaced, picking up a small little beaded bag. “Oh… these are the beads we made from her… oh… ew.”
She dropped the bag with a grimace and a thud.
“Oh no! she’ll need that, does anyone have her number?” Natasha looked around, everyone shook their heads and slowly they all turned to face me. “You have a car… why don’t you drop it off, her address is on the fire register at the front desk, she stays at Queen’s Crescent I think, it’s basically on your way home.”
“Fine.” I grunted. I grabbed the little bag and stuffed it into my car. I only had the toddler today as the baby was with my mother for a weekend. I bounced him on my hip.
I arrived at Queen’s crescent rather promptly, I was desperate to get home and I had a half a mind to just leave the bag on her doorstep and run. Last thing I needed was to get caught up in a conversation with Sharon, or worse yet, meet her children. I approached her gaudy yellow door, and ignored the incessant buzzing I felt in my pocket. I chapped the little rose-shaped knocker once, then twice before finally it opened.
“Oh.. Hi, um… You left your um… delightfully decorated bag.” I held up the little duffel bag. Sharon yanked it from my hand and nervously looked behind me to the street below. She seemed to ponder shutting the door on me, but a devilish glint touched her eye. “Do you want to come in for a tea?”
No, was my immediate reaction. She glanced at my toddler whom sagged against me, his eyes heavy and black from sleep-deprivation. The little shit only slept once every four weeks. Before I could concoct some half-true excuse about having to pick up the baby and put the toddler to his bed, Sharon prodded me inside.
Her house was…. Gaudy. The walls were a sickening yellow and every bit of space was covered with intermediate paintings of flowers and beaches. Sharon pushed her way through the piles of bric-a-brac and guided me into her kitchen. Every inch of the surface was covered. Kettles, portable stove-tops, and the fabled dehydrator. There were no bottle-prep stations nor any sterilisers. For a woman with five children her house felt quiet, eerily so.
“Two sugars and a milk?” Sharon put her kettle on. She pulled out a hand-made mug from her overfull cupboard. “I have some breast milk spare for your boy… put him right to sleep. I have magical teats.”
I didn’t doubt it.
“No. He’s fine. I’m trying to wean him.” I said carefully. I wanted out. Something felt wrong. The hairs on my arm were standing upright and my toddler was pulling at my hair. My phone was buzzing in my pocket but I held the button to switch it off. “Where’s the kids Sharon?”
“Watching television in the living room. Why don’t you go say hello whilst I get these cookies out the oven. I made them with my own butter that I churned from my own supply of milk.”
Spiffing.
I trudged through to her living room. My footsteps felt like drum beats as I walked through her silent house. She was right. A line of children and toddlers sat along the floor in front of her flat-screen. The youngest looked nearly two. My toddler broke free of my gasp and went to join them. His little hand reached out for the five-year old. Brinleigh. He tugged on her arm, yet she did not move, she was still, her skin pale and tough. He tugged again and a large ripping sound filled the room. Her arm… her arm had come off.
Oh no.
Her skin was taut leather and her fat was worn stuffing. Clouds of white cotton-candy fluff spewed out across the floor. I moved forward to pick my kid up, goose pimples forming a rash on my arm. Sharon was crazy, crazier than we all thought. Then I saw it, glimmering silver and white with finishing touches of teal-blue, a cricut knife tinged red. Shabnab’s.
Brinleigh was made of leather and her teeth looked real too, but sharp, as if they were all canines. Her eyes were glass yet seemed to move as I crossed the room to retrieve my frantic toddler, who moved down the rows of children trying to wake them from their endless slumber. I had to get out. I had to get out.
Sharon was coming, I could hear her in the hallway. I grabbed his arm and struggled free and when I turned to flee she was there, grinning like Cheshire cat with a tray full of tea and oddly sickening scented cookies. She glanced at the pools of stuffing and worn leather, at the solitary glass eye that rolled chaotically across the living room floor. I rebounded backwards and screamed, yet she did not move. Her head jerked to the side. I had never felt such terror. It coursed through me turning my veins into hot, scourging fire.
My head hit into a wind chime. It rattled and shook and when I turned to look at it I saw that it was made of ribs; long and elegant.
“Beautiful aren’t they? Such a pretty sound, puts Samileigh right to sleep.” Sharon said, numbly picking up the stuffing and setting the tray of teas down onto the coffee table.
“I’m…. I have to go…. I have to go…” I said as my toddler clung to me, quiet for a change.
“Oh I don’t think so.” She picked up the cricut knife and tossed it around her fingers. “I need more lard for the candles and more leather for the notebooks and a fresh lot of intestines to make sausages with. My girls do love sausages…”
She moved fast. I collapsed and sagged against the front door as she chased me with her cricut knife. I managed to get down the stairs with her at my back. I fled out in the cold refuge of the outdoors and by some miracle I made it to my car. Only when I was half a street away did I think to call the police and when I popped the phone open a slew of messages told me what I already knew.
Shabnab is missing. The police are on the way. It was Sharon. Don’t go.
It looks like I’ll need to find a new craft club.