The Midnight Dress (7 page)

There is one dress hanging inside the cupboard. It smells like dirt, Rose thinks, dirt and rain and sky. She touches the dress hanging there on its plain wooden coathanger. It is made of the most lustrous, midnight-blue silk taffeta. It makes a soft sound, as though it is glad to be touched after all these years.

She takes it out and holds it up in front of her and immediately sees it’s damaged. There’s a long violent tear across the full skirt and it has separated in parts from the bodice. The taffeta is brittle and in places stained a shimmery brown.

‘I’m not sure about that dress,’ says Edie. ‘What about the orange organdie? We could lay it over the turquoise.’

Rose didn’t hear her come to the door to stand with her hands held together in front of her.

‘I like this colour,’ says Rose. ‘This is exactly the colour I’ve been thinking of.’

‘What about the red taffeta? Did you look at that?’

‘You said I could choose whatever I wanted,’ she says, trying to keep the anger out of her voice. ‘Is there any material left over from this dress?’

Edie hesitates. She looks at the midnight-blue dress, takes it from Rose and holds it across her arms, feels the dreadful weight of it.

‘There is a dress inside, yes,’ says Edie. ‘I can see it. There is a dress in here.’

She holds the dress across her arms, cradling it; it makes Rose feel uncomfortable.

‘We’d have to unpick what we have here, it has a lot extra in the seams, and in the hem, I remember making it that way.’

‘I don’t want to wear something that looks . . . second-hand,’ says Rose.

‘Old things can become new things,’ says Edie.

It’s late when Rose gets home, but there is Mrs Lamond sitting with her father on the fold-out chairs, her lycra-clad legs crossed daintily, her gold scuffs hanging on her leathery feet. She has make-up on, Rose can see it even in the dark.

Only three days ago Mrs Lamond had summonsed Patrick Lovell to the kiosk via Rose.

‘The thing is,’ Mrs Lamond said to Rose, ‘your father’s going to have to pay some rent in advance. I know there’s no one here now but you wait till after April, the place is packed, people will start booking soon. I get letters from all over the country wanting a space booked, it isn’t called Paradise for nothing.’

Patrick Lovell showed up, of course, bare-chested, bearded, shoeless. He leant on the counter and sorted out Mrs Lamond in a matter of minutes.

‘You’ve got a beautiful place here,’ he said. ‘It must be the best place in the world I reckon. Rose here said I’ve got to pay up-front. I’m going to walk into town this morning to get some petrol, then I can get to the dole office. Does Mr Lamond do all the handiwork around here? I’m only asking because the sign is very faded and I’m good with paints. I don’t want money.’

‘There’s no Mr Lamond,’ said Mrs Lamond, lowering her tone, trying to sound sad about it. ‘He died ten years ago, cancer it was, cancer of the stomach.’

‘No good,’ said Patrick.

‘I tell you what,’ said Mrs Lamond, taking a long drag on her Holiday cigarette, ‘why don’t I give you enough petrol for the trip to town and you can pick up some paints to do the sign. That can be our agreement for now. I’m sure there are a few other jobs around the place as well.’

Rose shook a snow dome, listening. When she looked up Mrs Lamond flashed her large yellow-toothed smile. Rose’s father whistled all the way back to the caravan.

And now, here is Mrs Lamond sitting in Rose’s chair.

‘Your father’s been worrying about you,’ she says.

‘I didn’t think you’d be doing sewing classes until midnight,’ her father says.

He can’t meet her eyes. Mrs Lamond nurses a coffee cup, holding it like it’s an alien thing; there is left-over food between them. Mrs Lamond smiles, crinkles her eyes as though she cares, her yellow teeth glow in the dark. There is something Rose would like to say but she doesn’t. She goes inside, slamming the metal screen door.

‘Teenagers,’ Rose hears her say.

Rose brushes her teeth, sits on her bed and brushes out her hair, seventy-one strokes, presses her eyes until they burn. She lies down, tries to build her dream house inside her mind. It’s a game she plays to fall asleep. It isn’t a grand house, a cottage really, all slanted ceilings and wooden floors. There is only one bedroom. Her bed is a four-poster with dark velvet drapes; it’s so soft, like sleeping on a wave. There’s a round porthole window that looks out to sea. The house is filled with all her black things. Black nail polishes. Black lipsticks. Black jeans. Black shirts. Black notebooks filled with black words. She has a black cat called Blackie.

Mrs Lamond is laughing at something hilarious. Rose covers her head with a pillow. She has to start building the place again now, one interruption and it all falls apart.

Edie.

She thinks of the woman’s creaking house, even though she tries not to.

That night Edie had cleared the table and lit four hurricane lamps. She took the jar with the snake and the cat-shaped salt and pepper shakers and the piles of newspapers and the vase filled with plum pips and placed them all on the floor beside the old day bed in the far corner of the kitchen. On the bare table she laid out the strange collection: the midnight-blue dress, the embroidered shawl, the old black dress with the rose-lace sleeves, the lampshade with the black glass beads.

‘We’ll need black tulle, of course,’ said Edie. ‘Did you see tulle in the sewing room?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Rose. ‘What’s tulle?’

‘Don’t worry,’ Edie said, ‘I’ll find some. I think there are some old confirmation dresses with petticoats somewhere, we can unpick them.’

Rose bit her bottom lip.

‘I can see it again,’ said Edie, her hands hovering over the table in a way that made Rose feel uncomfortable.

‘What does it look like?’

‘It looks like a creek tumbling over falls, with the beads falling across the bodice and down here, through the skirt. It’s like a dark sky.’

Rose looked at the dress, the jagged tear across its skirt.

Edie sat down at the table, she patted the chair beside her. Rose sat down cautiously.

‘Do you want to hear a story?’ Edie said, holding up a seam ripper.

‘Not really,’ said Rose.

‘I come from a long line of tailors and dressmakers,’ said Edie. ‘My great-great-great-great-great grandfather on my mother’s side was a tailor on the rue Saint-Honoré. Now his name was Jean-Claude Mercier and he was trying to make ends meet with six sons and his wife dead with the last. He made thread buttons, which many other tailors did, but it was illegal thanks to the button makers’ guild, and one night when he was closing up his shop and putting down milk for the alley cats at the back door a man lunged out of the darkness shouting ‘
viva la bouton
’, and stabbed him in the neck. This is how seriously the French took buttons in that time. This was almost three hundred years ago.

‘He was sliced here, all the way from the ear down to the collarbone, but didn’t die. Somewhere a nerve must have been badly damaged though, because, when he recovered against all odds, very strange things began to happen.

‘For starters, every noise became huge. A pin dropping, crash, like a cymbal, and he could hear the dreadful passage of his thread through the cloth, his sons’ voices were so loud and full of breath that he covered his ears with his hands and later took to wrapping his head in scarves.

‘And even stranger, he could hear, miles away, the coal being unloaded at the Place de Grève, the bellringer climbing the stairs at Saint-Gervais. He could hear, on a very still day, the Fair of the Holy Ghost, the clatter of feet and poor girls’ fingers rifling through second-hand clothes. He could hear roses bending in the breeze at the gardens of the Palais-Royal, and a mother whispering to her sick child on the rue de l’Arbre, and, in the dead of night, lovers everywhere whispering into each other’s ears.’

Rose tapped her fingernails lightly, looking as uninterested as she could. She picked up the hem of the deep blue dress, examined it.

‘Have you unpicked before?’ said Edie.

‘No,’ said Rose.

‘Here, I’ll show you.’

She took the midnight-blue dress and turned it inside out. She ran her fingers over the boning in the bodice and then the waist seam.

‘We’ll take off the skirt and start with that,’ said Edie.

She unpicked the skirt from the bodice, showing Rose how to break each stitch with the little hook: the skirt loosened from its large box pleats, the turned and hidden fabric was unturned. It shone with a magical lustre in the yellow kitchen.

‘See?’ said Edie.

‘I suppose,’ said Rose.

Edie handed Rose the emancipated skirt. Rose took her little hook and began to unpick. She opened up the hem and then the panel seams. The blue stitches fell to the floor. Each time she moved the dress, it sighed.

‘Don’t go too fast, it isn’t a race,’ Edie said.

They didn’t speak much then. Rose folded up each panel as instructed and laid them on the table between them. Money beetles crashed against the hurricane lamps. Frogs sang between showers that came and went. In between, when the humidity built, Edie took a handkerchief from her sundress pocket and wiped her forehead.

‘Good,’ said Edie from time to time. ‘You’re doing good.’

The mango trees rubbed their fat wet leaves together and touched the house in an intimate way, creaking and sighing and breathing their rotten mango breath through the windows. Edie detached the sleeves and unpicked them open. She sectioned and split open the fabric from the bones of the bodice. She undid the darts and released the zipper.

‘There,’ the old lady said when it was done.

‘What happened to that crazy man?’ Rose asked.

‘He was taken away to an asylum, locked away. He’d taken to walking the streets with his head wrapped in bandages and telling anyone who’d listen about the things he heard whispered in heaven.’

‘Oh.’

‘Luckily he’d already apprenticed and taught his oldest son, so his fine needle skills were passed down. Everything I’ll teach you, Jean-Claude Mercier taught his son.’

Edie looked at Rose expectantly. Rose stared right through her at the windows and, for effect, put her hand up to suppress an imaginary yawn.

‘Is it late?’ she asked.

‘Nearly eleven,’ said Edie. ‘You should go home. Will you come again on Wednesday?’

‘Yep,’ said Rose. She didn’t know whether she was telling the truth, even with the old dress dismantled between them.

‘Do you promise?’ said Edie, which changed things.

She heard the steady steps of a possum making its way across the roof. The first of the evening breezes came down off the mountain. It was damp and cool against her burning skin.

‘Yes,’ Rose said.

Stupid bloody promises is what she thinks then, lying on her bed in the caravan. She can hear Mrs Lamond cackling, right outside her window. Stupid bloody, stupid bloody, stupid bloody promises. She turns over, hugs the pillow to her head. She presses her eyes again.

Sometimes, if she’s lucky, she gets to see her mother when she does that, just the outline of her in molten gold, briefly, a sudden flash. She’s done that since she was very small. She presses her eyes until the tears come. She reprimands herself, Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, you stupid thing. But there is something soothing once those tears have arrived, almost pleasurable, like a secret river inside her, down deep, released. She’s so weak, that’s what she thinks. She turns herself over on the bed and sobs into the sheets.

Spider Web Stitch

You can see a small photo of the offending rainforest in the
Cairns
Post
. All the other photos are of the girl, but the forest, it only features once. It’s lost in acres of microfilm already, easily passed. The headlines are smaller now, a week after the girl has gone. News marches on.

In the photo, Detective Glass is standing on the track that leads up through the trees behind Edie Baker’s house. It’s unmistakably the Baker back paddock. There is the carcass of a chair, an old chair, sitting like a slumped throne in the long grass. The fence that runs at the very back perimeter is Edie’s fence – rusted ornate gate, wooden pickets and sagging barbed wire – an altogether pathetic attempt to keep the bush out. Some of it has stepped inside already. There are lilly pilly saplings and a young bloodwood, already three metres high, standing boldly like a boy with his hands on his hips.

Glass has already spoken to Edie, once, maybe twice. Each time she sits on a kitchen chair with something in her hand, a leaf say, a butterfly wing, or a broken piece of china that has lost its other parts.

Glass is confused by her house, its smell alone, which is dank and wet like a rainforest grove. All the kept things, there in the kitchen, all the paper, letters, pictures torn from magazines, patterns disintegrating in open drawers, all the fabric turned mouldy, turned to lace by silverfish, all the parts of the forest placed in boxes and pickle jars and baskets. The rain drops kept in teacups.