The Smallest Thread
By Patrick Holloway
On the train from Belfast to Dublin, Jane decides that life is made up of not just experiences, relationships, and moments, but of what we choose to notice, of how we record the passing of a day. She is fascinated with the two young women opposite her knitting. They are cyclists, she thinks, because of the backpacks, Lycra, and thick, unfashionable shoes. Knitting cyclists, and not unpretty, but peculiar in a way. Memories, too, she thinks, how we recall them, what we decide to remember. The four needles tit tat in synchronisation, like a metronome.
Her daughters are waiting for her but it’ll be a while before she’s back, having to change stations in Dublin before the train to Cork. She has had room to think, away from the kids, and her in-laws, and work and the pick-up of so many activities – tennis, gymnastics, piano. Difficult to find the time or the patience to then play outside with them, throw a ball into a basket, seek to find what’s hidden. It’s the little things that bring joy. She realises that now. The women are eating nuts from a bag, wide mouthed and smiling. One helping the other with some pattern, weaving some form of a future.
It is true that Jane’s life has been complicated. Difficult to outrun a troubled beginning -- it has that craftiness of catching up, of appearing when you least expect it. Like finding something in the back of a wardrobe you’ve long forgotten, holding it in your hands and being brought elsewhere. Jane waded through the muddied waters of her life. Her mother, she knew, could have been somebody else entirely. It is what we notice, she thinks. What we choose to collect, to recollect. Her mother, for as magnanimous and strong-willed as she was, had ways of bringing darkness into a sun-filled room.
She thinks of telling Paul about the young, knitting women. Impossible for someone else to understand the effect of something so intimate, so uncommunicable. She wants him to, though. Wants to just talk about the young women knitting and for him to get it without explanation. The memory of her mother trying to teach her, her grandmother who Jane does not know if she remembers or has stolen stories and memories of others, the vague, unformed thoughts of history, of generations, of how everything and nothing is passed down, of how we can never be who we think we are in our minds. She also wants for him to have an answer for her. You’re right, she wants him to say, there is happiness there, in the clicking of the needles, in the unravelling of yarn. And yes, it’s all connected but by the smallest thread, by the one you might cut away to make something exact. And what is she knitting anyway, a doily? Somebody loves us all, she thinks, a memory from school, Elizabeth Bishop, perhaps.
The other woman is counting the little holes at the top of the knitting and puts clips in counted circles. Jane watches her tight mouth move, counting thirty three, thirty four, a whisper. They are probably lovers, girlfriends, wives. Jane is unsure why she didn’t realise this before, or why she would still presume they are only friends. She can see it now, quite clearly, the closeness of the legs, the ease in each other’s company. Unconscious prejudice, or implicit bias, is that it? Is that even what it’s called? She spoke on the topic with authority after wine with friends because she was just after reading an article about it so had a handle on the complexities, but now she’s not sure she understood it at all. She catches herself at some thoughts, defending herself, thinking these thoughts make her more prejudiced, but she doesn’t feel she is. But isn’t that the thing, nobody thinks they are.
She’s not sure how to change it. Wants to reach out to them, to tell them that she is joyful just because they are across from her, knitting. Why is that, she does not know. Cannot comprehend it. I have chosen, she thinks, to notice this. There is the elderly couple on the other side of the train too, the lady who asked for hot milk and touched the woman lightly on her elbow to thank her when it arrived. Something quite beautiful in that. She wants to be the woman who was touched so delicately on the elbow. Wants the elderly lady to be her mother, if just for a minute.
It was easy to bury her mother. The face in the coffin held nothing of her. The one thing she still thinks is that her mother would have hated how she looked in death. So drawn out and sagging. She too would have asked for hot milk but wouldn’t have noticed when it came, steaming to the table. Jane did not know if her mother expected all these things, the niceties, so therefore did not appreciate them, or if she felt that she deserved these things because other parts of her life were so catastrophic. Would she have noticed the women knitting? And if she did, would it have irritated her, would it have brought distress? Jane can picture her mother, tutting maybe, looking out the window, rolling her eyes.
There is a moment when Jane tries to reposition her book in front of her and knocks one of the women’s closed coffee cup. How quick the woman’s hand is to catch it, steady it, and with the other get a napkin to absorb the small amount that spilled.
‘Sorry, it didn’t spill on you did it?’
‘Just a little, but it’s fine, I’m a mess anyway.’
Both women smiled at Jane.
‘Oh, don’t say that. You look lovely.’
The woman goes back to her knitting. It is not exactly what Jane wanted to say and then wonders if the woman meant she was a mess as in a klutz, presumably like Jane, and she was just bringing their shared clumsiness side by side. And now does the woman think that Jane was trying to make her feel better about her appearance, that the word lovely could be a little condescending. That is the problem, it is so hard to say what you mean, for someone to understand it in all its shape and colour. So much of life is misjudgement, misunderstanding, misgivings. Jane thinks of trying to clarify but worries she will make it worse. She opens a bag of crisps and offers them to the women, who shake their heads.
The women get off one stop before Heuston and say goodbye. Jane wonders if they’ll remember her in any abstract way, if in years to come the woman might think to herself, you know what, that woman on the train, I think she actually just meant I looked nice, and maybe it would make her smile. Jane thinks of her girls, of how they’ll run to meet her. Of how a weekend is still a terribly long time when you are five and seven, how we only have a fraction of time to live and we wish it to speed up, wish it away. The sun is low, streaks of peach paint the sky. Cows blur by in fields. The crisps are delicious and she enjoys picking the remains out of her teeth with her tongue, feeling very much alive.
Patrick Holloway is an Irish novelist, short-story writer and poet. His debut novel, The Language of Remembering, was published by Epoque Press in 2025, and his second novel, Interlude, will be published by Ériu in January 2027. His work has won the Bath Short Story Award and the Molly Keane Creative Writing Award, and has been recognised by the Raymond Carver Short Story Contest and the Hennessy New Irish Writing awards. He is the 2026 Arts Council Writer in Residence at Maynooth University and a founding editor of the literary journal The Four Faced Liar. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from PUCRS in Brazil and lives in Cork with his wife and two daughters.