We’re halfway through a group therapy session when I lean over and poke Lawrence in the cheek. He looks tired. His eyes are slack buttonholes. I can’t resist, so I push the index and middle fingers of my right hand into his eye socket all the way up to the knuckle.

Inside him, there is nothing but cloth, as I expected. Bunched-up yards of coarse hospital linen. It makes my fingers itchy, like burying them deep in a pile of Granddad’s off-cuts. Lawrence doesn’t seem to care, just sits there, disinterested, and lets me as though nothing is really happening. Nobody else in the group appears to notice.

On the bus home, the feel of the cloth stays with me. It tells me something about Lawrence. I’m not sure what. That he’s spent his whole life medicated, in and out of one kind of hospital or another? Or that he’s sterile and uncomfortable (he’s the only boy in the group)? He’s still as much of a mystery to me as the few people here on the bus squashed up on their seats, staring out of the window, at the advertising, into their mobile phones, anywhere but at each other.

I tried to delve beneath the surface of Lawrence, and I found what I always knew would be there. But I don’t feel any closer to him than I do to these people on the bus. They have dead stares. Their eyes move around, wet, reflecting the sick, yellow bus light. Just underneath the surface lies cloth, I know that now, but who knows what they’re really seeing. Or thinking. Their cloth might tell me more than Lawrence’s. I imagine what theirs might be like, much more clearly than before. The stained silk brocade of old wedding dresses; crumpled brown overalls, greasy with engine-oil stains or the pinned-down, perfectly creased stiffness of gabardine.

Granddad used to tell me, “Every person is an island, Sylvia. And the sea in-between is treacherous to navigate.”

Yesterday I tried to imagine how he might have looked inside his bare, black coffin. Like one of his mannequins. Waxy and staring. Perhaps dressed up in a 100% wool suit--Worsted, charcoal, double-breasted--for the great bank manager in the sky. That’s the Granddad I knew, yet, with him being Jewish, he would’ve gone into the ground in nothing but a white burial shawl. No embalming. Just a good wash all over. There were plenty of people at the funeral. Distant family members, trade colleagues and old customers in varying shades of black. No-one close left anymore. Just me.

I get off the bus and consider a bag of chips, but can’t face the greasy glare of the obese man who works in there. He stares at me like I’m a fish he wants to batter. I picture him stuffed to the ears with vegetable oil-soaked aprons. The balled up cloth of his life, smelling of floured cod and covered in fat burns, constantly warm with the heavy reek of the chip shop.

Inside my flat, I stroke the old ridge on my forearm, remember the bite of the blade as it split the skin. The sting of rising blood. Granddad’s pale face. Taxi to the hospital: ‘Don’t get blood on the back seat’ was all the driver could say. The shifting in and out of consciousness, heavy one second then light as chiffon floating on the breeze.

They sewed me up with fifteen stitches. Black thread like dead insects woven into my flesh. After a day the itching drove me insane, so I unpicked the sewn-up wound, stitch by stitch, wondering if the curtains of skin on my arm would draw back to reveal secrets within. The glistening ribbons of blood made me pass out and I woke back in the hospital, the nurse sewing me up again.

I fall asleep thinking of Lawrence. Not of his dirty blonde hair like frayed rope. Or his thin, androgynous body under black T-shirts and blue denim. Instead, as I pass into dream, I recall exactly the itchy feel of linen against the pads of my fingers, and I want to know more. About him and others. Unravel the cloth and see the cut of their love and hate. Unpick their stitches and find out their secrets.

Granddad was wrong about cloth. He said there was no mystery about it. It held no secrets. But it takes on the secrets of the wearer. Cloth surrounds us throughout life, goes with us to our death, into the moist, living ground.

Lawrence waits for me in a doorway next to the chip shop. He doesn’t like waiting in the street, says it’s like being adrift in a river, naked and sinking.

“Hi, Sylvia,” he says, not looking me in the eye. His hands are thrust deep into the pockets of his grey hooded top. He stands stiff, braced against potential bad weather. “Still want to go for a walk?”

“It’s a nice day.” The sky is a vaulted ceiling of low, grey cloud. I wonder if he wants to talk about what happened in Group the other night. “It would be a shame not to.”

“You don’t fancy just going back to yours, watch a film, or something?”

“Okay.”

We go back to my flat, sit on the bed in my room, and watch a DVD of some horror film. White-teethed, pert American teenagers getting eviscerated. Once it finishes, Lawrence turns to me and takes my hand. His palm is dry, a little swollen from the humid weather. I should feel something. Excited, happy, scared. All I feel is his heartbeat chirping away in his wrist, and I want to know what’s beneath. Not just beneath his clothes, but deep inside, who he is, what he sees, how he thinks. Why is that not possible?

“It’s ironic,” he says. “That we should meet at a group for social anxiety.”

“What did you think of the session last night?” I ask, hoping he’ll understand what I really mean.

“It’s difficult. Nice to know others feel the same, though, you know?”

“But how do you know they feel the same?”

“I’m sure you feel the same.”

Every sound in the flat is magnified in the moment he looks me right in the eyes. The tick of Granddad’s old mantle clock, the creak of the pipes as someone turns a tap on somewhere, our expectant breaths. What is he seeing in there? Can he see more than I do? He’s this close to me, so close that I can see the gauzy light from the curtains behind me reflected in his eyes. I hope I haven’t got bad breath or smell odd. He looks away suddenly.

“I can’t look people in the eye,” he says. “Not normally. It’s like I know what people are thinking about me.”

“What are they thinking?”

“They’re judging me. My clothes. The way I walk.” He looks up again. His eyes search mine, pupils flitting back and forth. “Not you, though, Sylvia. You’re the only one I can stand looking at me.”

He says he knows what people are thinking, but I doubt it. His eyes are like doors to me. I want to see him as something more, but I have to go deeper.

I reach forward and slide my fingers into his right eye socket. The cloth is there, just at my fingertips, so I tease it towards me. His other eye glances around the room nonchalantly, flicking up to look at me for a second. He gives me a nervous, thin smile. I pinch the cloth between my index and middle fingers and pull. The linen is the same coarse, thick hospital bed sheet. There is so much of it in there. Yards of it. Years of it: white-tiled wards and waiting rooms with plastic chairs; last year’s dog-eared fashion magazines on the table; tick-box medical history forms. Bottles of pills on the bedside table.

Before I pull the cloth out into the open, my chest tightens. Guilt, raw and humbling. I pull my fingers back and realise I’m only doing what he thinks everyone else is doing. Judging him.

“Are you going to kiss me or not?” he asks.

This morning, after it’s all done, I desperately want to visit Granddad’s grave, but there won’t be a stone yet. Not for almost another year. It’ll just be a mound of freshly dug earth. I yearn for the dark corners of his tailor’s shop where I used to hide, downstairs, underneath the table he worked on, scratching my elbows on the unsanded wooden beams that supported the shop floor above. The walls were racked with rolls of cloth from floor to ceiling. The cloth smelled sharp, acidic, new. I spent most of the time down there when I wasn’t at school. Granddad had looked after me as long as I can remember. I would watch him from the dusty stone floor, my fingers picking threads out of the old carpet runners. He used discs of tailor’s chalk and serrated pinking shears. A tape measure was permanently draped around his neck; pins in his waistband, glasses perched on his bulbous nose. He taught me to hand-sew, but I was useless at it. Kept stabbing myself with the needle. His sewing was that of a gentleman tailor, precise and functional, occasionally decorative. If only Mum had been alive long enough to teach me then perhaps I would be better at it now. Instead I was afraid of getting it wrong. I remember the electrifying pin-pricks more keenly than anything else. Pain shapes the memory.

Lawrence asked me about my arm last night, after we had kissed. He felt the ridge of scar tissue and momentarily recoiled. I told him about the stitches.

“But why did you cut it in the first place?” he asked.

Why did I cut it in the first place? Like the stabbing of needles, it shaped things for me. When I gave up trying to learn to sew the way Granddad wanted me to, I think he noticed. A couple of days later he presented me with a doll he’d made from offcuts--patches of tweed and fawn serge comprised its legs and arms--all sewn together perfectly with pearlescent shirt buttons for eyes.

“For when I can’t help you, Sylvia,” he said, and I thought, who’s around to help Granddad? He spoke to customers and tradespeople, but he rarely left the shop or the house.

For years I kept that doll. The stitches began to fray and I couldn’t help myself, picking at them until the arm opened up along the seam, the cloth peeling apart. Inside, the arm was stuffed with bright shredded tie silk; fractal, Paisley patterns of gold and wine and silvered blue. All those years the doll held its secrets inside, and then the stitches came apart.

How could I explain that to Lawrence? I was only twelve when I cut myself with the knife to see if my arm was the same. That moment is a deep slice. It’s a torn yard of satin. The edges will always be frayed.

Lawrence has confessed so much about himself in Group. About his fear of people, and what they think about him. So I told him what I thought he’d want to hear.

“To understand people,” I said. “Or... know that they’re real and not just...” Like Granddad’s mannequins, upstairs on the shop floor. Amongst the faded carpeting and varnished wood panels. I’d sit on a tall wooden stool and peer over the counter at the men being measured for their suits. Their dead eyes staring through me, no more alive than the mannequins.

Granddad said not to be scared of them, but they were always there, haunting the shop floor like static ghosts, and so was I. Drifting around in the shadows, lost in my immediate world of pins and thread and strips of cut cloth, mostly downstairs. All those hours and days in the half-light of the basement, with the scrape of cloth beneath my knees and against my neck. It was all I could feel. It’s always been there.

The doctor Granddad took me to see said I was only trying to understand myself when I wanted to know what others were thinking. I could’ve worked that out on my own. He wanted to prescribe me pills, but as always I refused. They make me feel like a sponge, soaking up the grit and noise of the world. Feeling nothing but wet and heavy inside.

When Lawrence’s fingers stroked my arm last night, lingering on the scar tissue, it made my heart dance. Even through the numbness of the old wound, I felt some kind of connection with him. Perhaps it was just physical. The functional semaphore of body chemistry. But he must have felt it as well, because after that we kissed again and stripped each other’s clothes off, exploring the creases and folds of our bodies. The patterned leather of life, complete with scars and bruises.

I was already asking myself what it meant. Did I love him? What was he thinking?

Who are you Lawrence?

I’m still asking myself, this morning, kneeling on the floor and gathering up all the yards of linen. It’s starched, and rougher than it looks, and the further along I go, the more stains there are, and the sheets feel threadbare.

I drag out my shoebox of Granddad’s stuff. Some of the scraps and oddments I stole from the shop. In the occasional fit of emotion he would cuddle me and call me his ‘little magpie’, as I sat there playing with needles and reels of thread. It didn’t happen often. As I got older we became the islands that he told me about, vast impassable waters between us. If I’d been better at sewing, and he’d taught me how to tailor a suit, I could have been his ‘little apprentice’ instead. Perhaps he thought I’d be more interested in dresses. “It’s complicated,” he’d say, and turn back to his work.

In the shoebox, amongst broken pieces of tailor’s chalk, crumpled alteration slips, and swatches of cavalry twill and blue herringbone, are reels of strangled thread, wound and rewound. Deep underneath everything else, sliding around on the base of the box, elusive as deep sea creatures, are the last few needles I managed to scavenge from the shop before it closed down.

I pinch the thread, sucking the end to a point and try to thread the needle. It has a large eye, but my hand is shivering.

After we had sex, Lawrence lay there for a long time without speaking, just looking into my eyes. I had to turn away, scared about what I might do next. My heart had been thrashing in my chest. Tingling and pulsing between my legs. But the compulsion to know what lay beneath those eyes, to see it spread out before me, was overwhelming after such an intimate act. So I turned away. Surely such intimacy should bring two people closer?

“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Didn’t you enjoy it?”

“Yes,” I said, as we lay there, sweat turning cold, breathing hard next to each other, knowing that I must have been able to let go during it, even for just a moment, but almost instantly my mind had gone somewhere else. “It’s not that.”

His hand clasped my shoulder, pulling me gently back.

“What do you think has been happening?” I asked him, hoping he would confess and tell me he’d been fully aware of what I’ve been doing. Perhaps if he’d told me that, it would complete the connection. I’d understand him. And maybe others, too.

“When?” he said. I touched his cheek, slid the tips of my fingers towards his eye socket.

“When I do this.” I slipped them in, buried them deep and moved them around, searching. The cloth wound around my fingers and I held tight. He didn’t say anything. Just stared around the room, smiling, oblivious. So I pulled.

The tip of the cloth poked out of his eye socket, like the white handkerchief Granddad used to have poking out of his suit breast pocket when he dressed up. He always dressed up like that for my birthday, took me for a meal at some posh restaurant in town where I was scared to even touch the cutlery.

I tugged at the twisted corner emerging from his eye and dragged it out, yard after yard, it kept on coming. In my head I kept telling myself, it’s like a birthday party magician’s trick. Soon there’ll be multi-coloured crepe scarves and I’ll make them dance in the air, and Lawrence’ll laugh. But there was no colour, not like the bright silk of Granddad’s doll, and it just kept coming, unfolding all over me until the world was just drab, crinkled, itchy cotton and smelled of hospitals.