Hatty Greenway > Recent Status Updates

‘Listen to your heart, he told himself: keep thinking, planning, speculating - everything is possible.’

He’d asked Eileen about it once. ‘It’s the echo from the hollows inside the wood,’ she’d said. ‘I like that you notice - there’s not many who do.’’

but still at the top of the pillow an intricate web of lacework grow, held in place by a by a raised bed of stainless-steel pins. Sometimes in school, he takes a clutch of pencils from the box and lays them on his desk, although when he moves them against one another, they don’t make the same satisfying noise.

to keep the tension of Eileen’s lace just right.
Up at the table, Eileen works with the bobbins he’s completed on previous visits, which make a subtle click-clacking sound as she throws them gently across the green domed pillow. It looks to Julian as though her movements are random, as though she is shuffling the bobbins between her fingers, without order or care,…

He likes Eileen; he’s known her ever since they arrived in Ireland, two years ago. She’s their nearest neighbour and the person he’s left with if his grandmother has errands to run. They mostly sit in silence, neither feeling the need to fill the space with chatter. His job is to assemble loops of beads; a decorative weight that dangles from the end of each bobbin…

‘Julian crouches over the bead tin, hunting for a crystal the same colour as the wine his grandmother drinks once he and Maia are in bed at night. He lets them spill through his fingers like a soft rain of tiny treasures until he sees what he’s looking for, ‘Got it.’
‘Ah, good,’ Eileen says from the table.