The Midnight Dress (14 page)

‘Have you heard the legends?’ he asks.

‘No.’ she says.

‘About the rock and why it cries, even when there’s no rain?’

‘No.’

‘There’s this story that the rock is this mother and she lost her children in a flood. They got swept away, and she turned all bitter, and each year takes a child back, or an adult, whoever she can get her hands on as a revenge. Heaps of people go missing up there.’

‘Every year?’

‘Well . . . Maybe not every year.’

‘How many in your lifetime?’

‘Colin Atkinson’s father hit his head on a rock in the big falls, and this other guy, a tourist, he went off the track and never came back, that was years ago.’

‘Hardly an annual event,’ says Rose.

‘This mountain will take you,’ says Murray in a German accent.

Rose shakes her head, but this time she laughs. He runs his hand through his hair, laughs in return, infinitely pleased.

The rain starts when they’re out on the boat. It comes from the horizon, a vast bank of clouds, drenching them to the skin. Rose is embarrassed by her shirt, the way it clings to her. Murray tries not to look. She takes the hand he offers, though, when he helps her from the boat.

‘Sorry,’ he says.

She supposes he’s apologising for the rain.

‘It’s not like you control the weather,’ she says.

The rain doesn’t stop for three days.
It
falls and falls and does not end. It fills up the agaves’ rubbery throats and fills the potholes and ditches to the brim. It nullifies each and every sound.
It thunders on the caravan roof, floods the creek on Murray’s land so he can’t get to school. He is there, waving behind the water, when the bus stops at his turn-off. A wave of celebration. Rose is careful not to look at him for too long.

On Wednesday there is a clearing. The sun comes out and shines with a feverish intensity. The wet land is limp and breathless, still frosted with raindrops, the tinfoil sky repeated in countless puddles. At school, teachers sweat where they stand, delirious-eyed, the fans thump, thump, thump. The girls sit in the shade on the cool concrete, but even Vanessa, so perfect, has tiny beads of sweat along her perfect top lip, which she wipes away with distaste.

‘Are you having sequins, Rose?’ Vanessa asks, although it’s also a demand. It’ll be an unspeakable crime to say no.

‘I think I’m having antique glass beads,’ says Rose.

That shuts her up for a while. Pearl smiles at Rose with her eyes.

When Rose arrives in the afternoon, Edie is collecting the blue quandongs that have fallen to the ground. She has two full buckets beside her, and in the house she places the brilliant fruit inside two huge pickle jars. A picture of a devil riding a horse is printed on Rose’s t-shirt. She bought it at the op shop for fifty cents. She’s annoyed when Edie doesn’t even glance at it.

‘What are you going to do with those things?’ Rose asks.

‘Nothing,’ says Edie. ‘I just can’t bear to leave them out there.’

Edie puts the pickle jars on the floor and Rose guesses they’ll stay there forever. She looks at them while Edie opens up the back windows and lights the hurricane lamps and the mosquito coils.

‘Why have you got so much stuff?’

‘I like stuff, I suppose,’ Edie replies.

‘What do you like about it?’

‘I like the magic within such things, the sadness and the joy. It’s very strong,’ says Edie, very simply, then adds, ‘you’d understand what I mean.’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ says Rose.

Edie ignores that. She doesn’t say, Yes, you would. She puts part of the midnight-blue material out on the table and lays a section of the newspaper pattern on top.

‘Pinning,’ she says.

She produces the dusty echidna-shaped pincushion and hands it to Rose. She shows Rose where to pin the pattern. How far apart to space the pins. The paper feels fragile beneath her hands. While Rose is pinning, Edie sits down and begins unpicking the old black lace dress; she separates the rose lace from the yoke and from the cuffs of the sleeves and from the edge of the skirt.

‘When you’ve finished pinning, you can cut out,’ Edie says.

‘I’m not sure,’ says Rose.

‘It’s only a pair of scissors.’

‘I could make a mistake, cut somewhere I’m not supposed to.’

‘Good Lord,’ says Edie. ‘You’d think I was asking you to perform surgery. You know where the scissors are.’

The scissors feel even more dangerous this time. Rose places the blade to the fabric and begins. The silk taffeta makes a satisfying noise as she cuts out the shapes of the skirt. A sighing, releasing sound. She lays the pieces pinned to the pattern over the back of a chair. She cuts out the small delicate parts of the bodice.

‘Where’s the rest of it?’ Rose asks. ‘I mean the back of the top and the sleeves?’

Those pieces of newspaper pattern still lie unused on the edge of the table.

Edie holds up the unpicked tatters of the old black lace dress.

‘Mourning lace,’ she says.

A smile breaks out on Rose’s face.

‘Now I think we should practise our stitching,’ says Edie. She threads a needle, lightning-fast, with a damp tongue, a flick of her fingers.

She hands Rose the thread and another needle.

‘Go on,’ she says.

It takes Rose five attempts. Edie says nothing, waits patiently.

‘Which bit do I sew first?’

‘We won’t touch the dress yet,’ says Edie. ‘Not until you have a fine even stitch.’

She hands Rose an old pillowcase.

‘You can practise on this, I’ll show you. Know which side of the fabric is the back and which is the front – there is a right side and wrong side to every piece of material. Now go in like this—’

‘I have sewed before, you know,’ Rose says. ‘I mean mending things.’

‘It’s not the same as a perfect dressmaker’s stitch,’ says Edie. ‘You must learn to sew a straight line. In dressmaking that’s everything. And you’ll find that there is nothing better or more calming than a straight and proper line stitched by hand. Every stitch matters. When you’re hand-stitching you must never think ahead: worry only about the needle coming up and going down again. My mother taught me how to sew, and her father taught her, and so on and so on all the way back into the past . . . and this is how it goes.’

Blah, blah, blah, says Rose in her head, while she makes her first stitch.

‘Too big,’ says Edie. ‘Try this, this is what my mother taught me when I was a girl: give thanks with each stitch. Thank you for this old house, thank you for the roof that doesn’t leak, thank you for the creek, thank you for the possums, thank you for the fat mangos on the trees. You try that.’

‘I don’t really feel like it.’

‘Go on, just do it inside your head.’

Thank you for the rocks, thinks Rose. The big ones and the ones with places for my hands. Thanks for the footholds. That’s stupid. Thank you for . . . Pearl. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Thank you for that turtle that swam under the boat.

‘Too fast,’ says Edie. ‘Or each stitch can be a memory. Try that. Here, this is me when I’m a girl. This is my pink floral bedspread. Here’s my father’s glass eye in the teacup on the second shelf of the kitchen cupboard. Here is me walking up to the trees. Go on, you try.’

Rose sighs and picks up the pillowcase again.

Here is me, lying in my bed. Stitch. Faraway house. Stitch. Way back in the beginning. Stitch. Here is my mother singing in the kitchen. Stitch. Here is my mother saying something, I can’t hear what it is. Stitch. Do you want to draw while I make dinner? Here is some paper. Stitch. Did she ever say that? Stitch. Here is my mother putting me to bed. Stitch. She’s kissing me on the head. Stitch.

‘You’re doing well,’ says Edie. ‘You’re a fast learner. Keep trying.’

‘This pillowcase is made from some kind of stupid slippery stuff.’

‘All the same.’

Rose pricks her finger. She examines her bright blood.

‘I’m bleeding,’ she says, holding up her finger.

‘Exactly why we couldn’t start on the dress.’

‘I thought you’d have a sewing machine or something,’ says Rose, sullenly.

‘I did have once,’ says Edie, ‘but for this kind of dress, we must make it with our hands.’

Rose sighs dramatically.

‘You never said Jonathan Baker had a glass eye,’ she says.

‘He didn’t,’ says Edie, ‘not in the beginning. But then he went away to the war and came back and nothing was ever the same again.’

Edie holds the mourning lace in her hands.

Rose closes up her face, keeps very still.

More story is about to tumble from the old woman. Rose won’t let it show she’s waiting.

‘I was born while he was away, of course, if you wondered when I would turn up in the picture, Jonathan and Florence being my parents, of course. My grandmother raged all day, apparently. She was fury in a black dress. Perhaps I was not the child of my father but some other man was what Granny Baker said: my mother was common as mud, she wouldn’t put it past her. My grandmother wouldn’t hold me, not even for a second. All my years she sat in the lilac-covered chair and leapt out of it from time to time to hiss and howl at people like a cat with a stepped on tail. She was terrible to us. And my father, he came back from the war with all the poetry and gentleness banged right out of him.’

Rose takes another needle, threads it, pricks herself again.

‘Shit,’ she says.

‘Yes, shit exactly,’ says Edie.

Edie touches the black mourning lace, tracing the old flowers.

‘He wouldn’t wear his glass eye they’d made for him – it’s still in the teacup up there, but I haven’t looked at it for a very long time. My mother and I, we used to divine his mood by looking at the eye. Sometimes it looked angry and sometimes forlorn. Sometimes it looked defiant from the bottom of the cup.

‘Gloomy,’ my mother might say.

‘Miserable,’ I might suggest.

‘Vicious,’ we would agree.

No one mentioned the sunken crater where his eye had been, nor the pale pink slit like a rubbery lip. Not the neighbours, not visitors, not my mother, not Granny Baker. When he first came home he was like a man underwater. People spoke to him and he looked at them for a long time, as though he couldn’t understand. He’d turn his right ear toward them, shake his head. He was hearing other things. If a pan was dropped in the kitchen, he leapt up in the air.

Then he began to wake angry, which was a new development: he banged my nursery door and swore at the dogs and cursed the weather and spat off the back steps. Most days he was coiled whip-tight, and we stepped carefully around him. If my mother asked me to take him a cup of tea, my hands shook. I had to decide whether to look at him and speak, or place the cup down quietly and retreat. It was a difficult decision: sometimes a cup placed down without a word enraged him, sometimes to engage him in conversation was even worse.

‘What would you know about good mornings?’ he would shout. I was only very small. Other mornings he woke sad. He wouldn’t put on a shirt and drifted from room to room in only his trousers. He had a scar on his chest, a bullet hole like a closed eye, and another beneath his armpit. He touched the scar on his chest, you know. All the time. Sometimes he lay for hours on the settee in the front room and didn’t move at all. The only sign of life would be the small tremor of a pulse at his neck. He was not biscuity brown any more, he was blue-white, like a corpse. It was my mother and I who went then, up into the trees.

Any moment away from this place was like a small miracle.

I grew up climbing there. First tied to my mother the way the black women did with their babies. Then later, taking steps by myself. The sky was so huge, and when we were inside the forest the trees towered over us and the cool air evaporated our tears. My mother’s toes had curled and hardened from climbing, and by the time I went to school I was already the same. Of course, my mother combed my hair and washed my face and I had shoes, but on the inside, Rose, I was . . . untamed.’

Rose looks up at Edie. Her grey hair shines in the light and she looks back at Rose with a half-smile on her lips.

‘Do you understand?’ Edie asks.

Rose looks at her own stitching. It staggers and sways across the pillowcase. She doesn’t know what to say. What can she say?

‘It must be getting late,’ she says.

Fly Stitch

‘The car’s behind the mill yard,’ he says, slurring. Like she’s going to go with him. They’re reading from two different scripts. She’s trying to dazzle him with all her words. She’s talking about the moon now. How everyone in the world tonight can see it. ‘Well, maybe not everyone, I mean for some people it’s daylight. God, that’s amazing, isn’t it?’ she says. He drags his eyes from her, looks at the moon. ‘You’re so beautiful,’ he says. ‘Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?’ Even by moonlight she sees him colour at his own words. Things he shouldn’t say. She knows it, he knows it. It excites her, but there’s a little prickle of fear too. It looks like he might cry. ‘Well, I better go,’ she says. ‘Don’t,’ he says. ‘No, don’t.’