Josefa McCord’s Dandelion Yellow Boiler Suit

Josefa McCord’s Dandelion Yellow Boiler Suit: Object Post 117

From Sam and the Sylvan, Sunshower and I Promise

Source? Josefa probably got it at a staff discount from Recycled Sally’s

Significance? It attracted Tab’s attention

Fate? In I Promise, Skye Bakewell instructed Josefa to bin it, but she probably didn’t

Author’s inspiration? Josefa is a sunshiny person with eccentric taste, so why not?

He stepped out of the spiral door without his usual care, and he bumped straight into a woman with a yellow striped towel over her head. He supposed she was young because he saw smooth feet with gold-painted nails sticking out of the bottom of a pair of pants with the cuffs rolled up. Boilersuit, he thought. The yellow one, and sort of familiar.

Josefa McCord was a cheerful and somewhat feckless young woman of twenty-two when Tab Merriweather first took notice of her. He’d seen her around, because she was friends with his cousin’s girlfriend. She was difficult to miss; tall and lanky with dark eyes, hair dyed buttercup yellow and an energetic way of moving.

Josefa worked at a vintage boutique called Recycled Sally’s, which was probably were she’d got the 1980s-inspired suit. It was stout and well-made, and certainly not fragile, for when she wanted to undo it she …

…pulled it open in a fusillade of popping studs.

This startled Tab in more ways than one.

A couple of years later, Promise Grene met Josefa at the foot of the spiral stairs leading up to the spa suite at Peckerdale Grene Tower.

She was an exotic-looking young woman with a slightly oriental cast to her features. She wore a yellow boiler suit, so bright it was closer to dandelion than to daffodil in shade, and she smelled of lemons.

The suit was obviously a favourite of Josefa’s though by now she’d let her hair return to its natural dark shade. Since she was heading for a dress fitting, she might have chosen the boiler suite because it was easy to get in and out of.

She may have had another motive. Skye, the dressmaker, asked her whether she wanted the dress short or long. Josefa said she usually covered her legs. She spent some of the time before her fitting riding herd on a pair of twins belonging to another of Skye’s clients. They were splashing in the pool next door to the fitting area. When Josefa returned, Skye, who was in a somewhat waspish mood, took a dislike to the boiler suit.

Get out of that boiler suit. Bin it. It’s see-through. Blerkh.”

Josefa widened her eyes at Prom and peeled off the suit. “It’s see-through because it’s wet after my adventures with the twins,” she said.

It’s doubtful that Josefa would bin the suit on Skye’s say-so. After all, Tab liked it, and it held interesting (or maybe alarming) memories of the day they met on the stairs.

ABOUT THE BLOG

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, anthologist and reader. You can find you way into her maze of websites and blogs via the portal here.(Sally is me, by the way.)

The goal for 2017 was to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. 2017 is well behind us, but I ran out of year before running out of books. As of June 2018 I STILL hadn't run out of books, but many of those still to come are MIA by which I mean I don't have copies and remember little about them. There are more new books in the pipeline, and I'm certainly showcasing those, but in between times, I'm profiling some of my characters, places, objects and themes. Thank you so much to everyone who's come along on this journey so far!