January Sand in the Pocket

This morning my phone said eleven degrees and the balcony window was fogged up on the inside. In Valencia that isn't cold, it's news. Marta came out of her room wearing two jumpers, one on top of the other, with the hood of the outer one up, and announced that she wasn't going to work in these conditions. Then she went to work.

I climbed onto a kitchen chair and took down, from the top of the wardrobe, the dry-cleaner's bag where my grandmother's coat has been sleeping since March. I opened the zip and out came a smell of mothballs so strong that Marta, already in the hallway with her keys in her hand, asked if somebody had died.

Grandma Carmen

The coat belonged to my grandmother Carmen, my father's mother. We never called her iaia, the way you say granny in Valencian. She was from Albacete; she came to Valencia at twenty to sew in a workshop on Calle de la Paz and stayed for the rest of her life, but she said "iaia" was a Valencian thing and she was "grandma", full stop. She died when I was fourteen. What I have left of her is this coat, a silver thimble that doesn't fit any of my fingers, and the habit of looking at the seams on other people's clothes on the bus.

It's heavy camel-coloured wool, with shoulders a little too wide and big horn buttons. She made it herself in 1979 for a niece's wedding. Inside, on the lining, there's a hand-embroidered label with her initials, C. M., in dark red thread. When I put it on I look like a lady on her way to sign a will. I don't care. It's the warmest thing I own, and when I cycle in it the back flaps open like a cape and drivers let me through, though I'm not sure if that's respect or fear.

What it was keeping

Before putting it on I slid my hands into the pockets, out of habit, and the coat handed me back the whole of last winter.

In the right pocket there was sand. Not a little: a handful, fine and grey, packed into the seams at the bottom. Sand from Malvarrosa, from that Sunday in January when I sat on this coat fighting with my leaky flask and ended up with feet as red as prawns. Ten months inside a plastic bag on top of the wardrobe, and it was still there, waiting.

In the left one there was a glove. Just the one, from the fingerless pair Marta gave me for Epiphany. I lost the other one in February, I don't know where, and since then this one had been living here alone, like a sock on the washing line waiting for its partner to come home. There was also a ticket from the Babel cinema, from a Tuesday in February, for an Iranian film I don't remember at all, and a lemon sweet glued to its own wrapper.

And the third button, the one at stomach height, was hanging by a thread. A single, slack thread, about to give up. I remembered it had been hanging like that in March when I put the coat away, and that I'd promised myself I'd sew it on "as soon as I had a moment". The same moment as the back brake. It must be a very long moment.

A neck for the button

This afternoon, back from teaching, I sat on the kitchen floor with Marta's sewing box, which has far more thread than mine because she's a fallera and the costumes are always coming apart. Marta got home at eight, sat down opposite me, opened the tray of panellets my mother sent her and ate a pine-nut one while watching me very seriously. She knows about the potato now. She says she doesn't mind, but she looks at them differently.

My grandma Carmen used to say you never sew a button flat against the cloth; you have to leave it "a neck to breathe". You make a few loose stitches with a toothpick between the button and the coat so there's a gap, then you wind the thread around those stitches, from the bottom up, until you've made a hard little stem. She taught me in her kitchen in Patraix when I was nine, on a coat of mine from when I was little and a button shaped like a bear. I thought I'd forgotten.

I hadn't. My hands knew before I did. The loose stitches, the toothpick, six turns of thread around, the knot at the back. Marta, panellet half eaten, asked me how long I'd known how to sew like that. I told her for eighteen years, but I'd only found out today.

The button came out slightly crooked, turned to the left, as if it were listening to something. Grandma would have unpicked it and started again. I left it.

Tonight

I went to the cinema in the coat. In screen two, in my usual seat, Vicente sat down behind me in row seven, and before the lights went down he leaned forward a little and said, "Mothballs." It wasn't a question. I said yes, my grandmother's. He nodded, the way you nod at a distant relative, and started peeling his mandarin.

All through the film I kept my hands in my pockets. In the right one, deep in the seams, there was still some sand. I moved it slowly from side to side with my fingertips while, on the screen, it rained.

When I got home I tipped it carefully onto a sheet of paper and put it in the empty tin from my old rosin. I didn't leave it on the music stand. There's no room left on the music stand.