One Long Thread (2 page)

3.

I don't remember a time when church wasn't a part of my mother's life, and I don't remember a time when it was ever a part of my father's, and perhaps in searching for simple explanations that was the problem.

Sundays were my mother's favourite day of the week, days we two girls wore small golden crosses around our necks. Mum would fuss over our dresses and hair, spitting on a hanky to wipe some speck or smear from our faces before marching us to the car at eight-thirty in the morning in order to be seated and ready for the opening hymn at nine. I remember the priest talking about the light of God but I couldn't muster the same fascination for the light of God that I had for the moth light outside our kitchen. Sally tugged on my dress or pinched my arm when Mum was praying and had her eyes closed. And, when she'd finished praying, while everyone was saying ‘Amen', Mum would pinch my other arm for making noise during prayer. Dad never came with us.

Yet every so often, I would wake up on a Sunday morning and hear our mother laughing. I'd watch her washing the breakfast dishes, humming, the sun shining in through the window and the breeze fluttering the hem of her dress. I remember the smell of wildflowers on those Sundays, she would turn to us as we ate our breakfast and say, ‘Want to take a drive, girls?'

Sally and I would nod and, instead of going to church, Mum would laugh before leaving the kitchen to find Dad and I'd hear her say ‘Come on Moonlight, get dressed and take us girls for a drive.'

We would sit, side by side, Sally and I, in the back seat while Dad drove and Mum wound the window halfway down and rested the bend of her elbow on the ledge. There would be wind in her hair and a lazy look to her body. Like the breeze had unpicked the stitches holding her bones so tight. Sally would fall asleep on the way home, in the afternoon when the sun was going down. Dad would be humming by then, Mum would be colder. We would have spent too much on ice-cream and coffee and the gourmet cheese Dad would insist on taking home.

At night, on those kind of Sundays, I could fill two whole pages with sketches of dress designs I knew I would make one day. And Sally would pretend to wear each one of them, patting down imaginary box pleats, spinning on the spot to test the flow of frills. Those nights, unlike so many others, Sally and I were twins, each one needing the other, the world was a forever place, and the only light we needed was our all being together. Those were the Sundays I thought God was alive.

Not long after Grandma Pearl stayed with us, that one time, a parcel came for Sally and me in the post. We fought over who was going to open it and ended up tearing the yellow package to pieces from either end. Grandma Pearl was always roaming the world, sending us letters with stamps and postmarks from exotic places like Paris and Rome. We weren't interested in reading the letter that slipped out of the package onto the floor, just in discovering what present lay inside. But in our excitement to see what it was, it slipped free of both our hands and landed on the floor with a thud. A small, hardcover book by Enid Blyton.
The Magic Faraway Tree.

Somehow the arrival of this book marked the end of our kitchen gatherings because, by the time the characters, Saucepan Man and Bessy and Fanny and Silky and Toffee Pops, became as familiar to me as my own Sally, I could not remember one more night gathered in the kitchen with our mother, or a family drive together. It seemed as though one light had gone out and another was turned on inside the pages of that book.

The Magic Faraway Tree
saw Sally and me through mumps and the chicken pox. The pages became dog-eared and yellowed. The corners of the cover became knocked and worn.

Some afternoons, on the way home from school, Sally and I would invent our own lands for the top of that tree and I always imagined Grandma Pearl was flying between them, travelling from one mystical worldly place to another, free as a bird, alive on love and laughter. And in the case of Grandma Pearl that seemed enough for anyone to live on.

At some stage after the arrival of
The Magic Faraway Tree
Sally and I were huddled together in her bed listening to our parents shout at each other beyond our closed door. We clutched our faraway book, each of us hoping the other would volunteer to read it first, but neither of us having the courage of distraction. We listened in case those words being shouted outside would change our lives forever. That night was the last time
The Magic Faraway Tree
seemed as real to us as the thought of growing older and growing up.

One Sunday morning a group of women had been handing out flyers and talking after church during morning tea. I had been leaning against the brick wall at the side of the church watching the kids play with hoops on the small patch of grass at the back of the kitchen, wondering where Sally had gone. Mum was standing with the women having a cup of tea when I heard their voices lower to a whisper. I inched my way closer, my back against the bricks, alert.

‘Not enough discipline these days,' Mary said.

‘I wouldn't call it a breakaway. It's not like those evangelical movements. The Aberdeen want to reclaim the light of God as a focus for good living. I've been reading their pamphlets and I'm convinced God is leading me there.'

My mother didn't say anything but I watched her sip her tea ever so carefully, I saw her place the cup on the saucer and I'm sure no one would have registered the change in her. But I'd heard those words, same as her, and I just knew what words like that could mean to my mother.

The Monday after church Mum went shopping and came home with a bag full of crucifixes. She displayed them on shelves and table tops around the house and glued magnetic tape on the back of some to put on the fridge door. In the following weeks Sally and I would come home to find her kneeling on the floor in front of the fridge, or the sideboard, which held the largest crucifix, praying, her voice strangely silent despite the relentless movement of her lips. We began finding handwritten notes around the house, Bible verses and prayers she had scribbled on pieces of paper and Blu-tacked or sticky-taped to our mirrors and lunch boxes, Dad's car doors and even his rear-view mirror. Some nights I would wake to hear her moving around the house removing older notes and replacing them with ones she had written that day. She had even placed a glow-in-the-dark crucifix above each of our beds so the light of Jesus Christ could shine on while we slept.

With this change in our mother came the fighting with Dad and the absence of family drives. Sunday, said our mother, was a day for prayer and God. Nothing more.

‘If you would only see the truth, Brett!' Mum shouted at Dad. ‘Come to church with us, just once. If you let God into your life we would all be happier. Don't you see the power of Satan over you?'

Dad stopped arguing with her after that. Mum's voice seemed to fill the house, unless she was praying. And even then her silent mouthing of words felt loud. Dad's voice seemed to disappear altogether.

4.

‘I'll pay for the material, Button,' Sally said one afternoon, shortly after our thirteenth birthday, bringing her hands to her chin, palms clasped around her golden cross. ‘We don't have to tell Mum.'

Before I could answer her, she had opened my sketchbook and flipped through the pages until she found the dress she wanted. She turned the book around to face me, her finger tapping on the dress I had drawn last week.

‘Tell me what you need and I'll get it.'

It wasn't my sewing that had to be kept from our mother but the reason Sally needed the dress at all. I couldn't say ‘no' to Sally, I didn't want to say ‘no'. I wanted the midnight-blue satin in my hands, I wanted to pinch it at the waist, to tack the pleats in place along the fullness of the skirt, lifting the fabric up in places so that it looked like a parting curtain, revealing a rush of black tulle underneath. I wanted to fit the bodice tight around her breast and shoulder. I wanted to make that dress for someone. I wanted to make that dress for Sally; to see it alive in the world.

At night we waited until Mum had gone to sleep, then, by torchlight, that dress was sewn by centimetres. It took a month of sleepless nights, holding the torch in my mouth while fitting the material to Sally's body. Sewing by hand so Mum didn't hear the Singer sewing machine, Sally and I conspiring, giggling. Sally bought a disposable camera and we laid out candles and I took pictures of her in the dress. Though we are identical I could not wear that dress like her. Even I would have believed she was older than thirteen in that dress. And so did Mathew Grayson and everyone at the Beachside High School Formal.

What I remember most about Sally is how life never surprised her. At least on the outside. When Matthew Grayson wanted to take her to his end-of-year formal, her only thought was about how to get the money so I could make her dress. When he wanted to have sex with her in the carpark afterwards, her only condition was that he wouldn't damage the material.

Truly, I am nothing like Sally. Not in any way that matters.

I don't think Mum ever found out about that night. Because we might have been shared out differently if she'd known.

A week after the formal Dad came into the kitchen.

‘I just can't take it any longer, Jan,' he said. ‘We can't go on like this.'

Mum had been washing the dishes and she just stopped, resting her soapy hands on the edge of the sink. She became so still and quiet, as if she had disappeared inside herself. I stood in the passage, my back against the kitchen wall.

‘There isn't another woman,' Dad said. ‘But the sad thing is, Jan. I wish there was.'

It was a Sunday morning and Mum finished the dishes, untied the apron from around her waist and hung it on the hook beside the back door underneath a note saying,
I am the way, the truth and the life
.

‘Come on, girls,' I heard her call.

Even though I had begun hating church and finding excuses to stay home, I ran my fingers through my hair and walked to stand beside my mother in the hall. We waited there but Sally didn't appear. I had no idea where she was.

‘You and me, Button,' Mum said, opening the door and walking to the car.

At church Mum sat so close to me I felt uncomfortable. I felt her stiffen, sitting straight and upright, raising her chin against everything she wouldn't speak about. I had no idea what to do. During the announcements, Mary stood up to the microphone and announced that the new church, The Aberdeen, needed our support and prayers as they had started their very own faith community in Darwin. Mary was moving there and took the opportunity to thank the congregation for giving her a community to belong to. She was moving to follow God more fully. She held up a wad of newsletters. ‘I'm leaving these at the back of the church,' she said.

After the service I watched my mother take one of the newsletters and place it in her bag.

All the way home she had one hand on the steering wheel and one hand worrying the cross at her neck. I don't know where her mind was but it wasn't in the car, with us.

For weeks my parents could not agree on anything. Who owned the leather couch, the photographs of our first family holiday, the vase that had been a wedding present. They fought and argued about all of their material possessions until they became worn out and deflated.

‘I don't want to lose my girls,' I heard Dad say one night.

‘I won't lose them,' said Mum.

‘I don't know how it came to this, Jan. But I don't want us dragging the girls through court. We owe them that, at least. Take what you like. Have it all. But for the love of—' he stopped short of bringing up God in their conversation. ‘Just promise me we will do what's best for the girls. No court.'

So, in the end, Mum got a job with the new Aberdeen Church in Darwin. The advertisement for that job had been in the newsletter Mum had picked up from church:
Devout Christian sought for sewing job. All applications to Brother Dan of the Aberdeen Church, Malak, Darwin.
She took a few of the smaller possessions, the total of their life savings and the one daughter she had named. Dad kept the house. And me.

‘I'm selling our dress,' Sally said a few nights before she and Mum had planned to leave. ‘I reckon I could get a few hundred for it.' She was quiet and I didn't know what to say. ‘Might need some money of my own,' she said, turning to me and smiling to hide what we were both feeling.

‘I want you to make a label,' she said, ‘like all the great designers do.' She held the collar of the dress and pointed to the inside of the back by the opening where the label would go. ‘Your label should just be your name. “Ruby Moon” with a small embroidered silk moth underneath. What do you think?'

I nodded.

‘Because it is us. Opposite, identical.'

‘Two wings grown from the same beginning,' I said.

A few days later Dad and I watched a taxi pull out of our driveway taking Mum and Sally away. Sally and I waved frantically, watching each other through the rear window until the taxi turned the corner and they were gone. Standing there, that day, I felt like Sally was being torn from my skin and there was no way I could ever fly free, without her right beside me.

It was later that night, after they had left, I discovered an envelope on the carpet under my desk. Sally must have leant it up against my lamp and it had fallen in between the desk and the curtain. Her handwriting was unmistakable, my name scrawled quickly and without complication on the front. Inside the envelope was a newspaper clipping advertising the annual
Young Designer of the Year Award
. On the back of the clipping she had written, . . .
and the winning label is Ruby Moon.
I would like to have hung it on the refrigerator door, like we used to do with all our achievements and aspirations, but it seemed wrong at that moment. So I taped it into the back of my sketchbook. That was the last thing Sally ever gave me. And it's the only thing I have left of her as Sally had already sold that midnight-blue dress for two hundred and fifty dollars to a friend of a friend through school.