She rang her sister on Tuesdays, because Tuesday was the night Farah's husband did the mosque run and there was an hour in that house where nobody was shouting.
"How's Mum's machine?"
"Still going."
"You haven't oiled it."
"I got Amir to oil it," said Farah Rahimi. "He put too much on and it went on the carpet and I have not told you that."
Mahnaz Rahimi's Singer is a 1974 model with a black body and gold lettering, and it is in the back bedroom of a terraced house in Bradford under a sheet, and it has been there since the March of 2019.
Both her daughters ask about it every week.
Neither of them has ever taken the sheet off, and neither of them has ever said out loud that this is what the question is for.
"There's a thing at work," said Noor.
"Go on."
"There isn't. That's the thing. There is genuinely nothing." She had her feet up on the radiator and the phone on her chest. "I've done four years and about eleven hundred pieces and today the première told me I'm the best hand in the building.
"And then she told me nobody is ever going to write that down anywhere. And Farah — the horrible part is that she wasn't being cruel. She was being kind. That is what kind looks like in that room."
There was a pause on the line from Bradford.
"Come home for a weekend," said Farah.
"I can't, we're eight weeks out."
"Noor."
"I can't. There's the pre-collection and then there's Paris and then there's the July, and I have not had a Saturday since the September and I have stopped noticing, which I am aware is worse."
Later, in bed, she did the thing she had done perhaps four hundred times since 2019, which is to open the photographs on her phone and go back to the March of that year.
There are eleven of them and they are all bad. Somebody's thumb. A hospital blanket. Her mother's hands on a bedspread, out of focus, taken from about four feet away because Noor had not been able to make herself go closer.
And one from 2016, in the shop on Oak Lane, of a woman of fifty-four at a machine with a tape measure round her neck, looking up, annoyed, mid-sentence.
That is the one she looks at. It is not a good photograph either. It is the only one where her mother is doing the thing she did.