The Midnight Dress (17 page)

That came one morning when she handed me a length of silk satin, just to hold while she was opening up her pin box, and I told her exactly the dress that was sleeping inside. The bride-to-be who wore that dress was standing right there. Her name was Sophia Fanelli, you might go to school with some of them – they’re thick on the ground around here. They always grew big cane, good cane, the Italians, and produce hundreds of babies.

Sophia only died last year. I think she was six or seven years older than me.

She took off her day dress in our kitchen, right here, and I can still see the way her black hair fell against her cheek when she bent down to pull up her stockings. Her breast was milk-white against her yellow petticoat. Sophia Fanelli was very pretty.

I held the silk, felt its weight, closed my eyes. I could see every part of the sleeping dress.

I said, ‘It should be fitted at the bodice.’

My mother looked at me. She was going to put a finger to her lips, but stopped.

I said, ‘The bodice should join the dress here.’

I touched Sophia Fanelli’s natural waist; she was a slender thing.

‘There are two panels for the skirt, but the hip yoke is pointed here and here. The skirt will move so beautifully.’

My mother still had her hand raised in the air, halfway up to her lips.

‘There should be ribbons here,’ I said, ‘sort of floating down. The veil should be gossamer,’ I said, ‘with only two roses on the right. You’ll look a dream.’

After she was gone my mother said, ‘Edith Emerald Baker, you are my little mystery.’

We became quite renowned for her wedding dresses then. They would all come to stand in our kitchen and be measured this way. They would wait for what I had to say, so would my mother, with her long calm face and velvety mole on her cheek. Sleeping box pleats, the inserted godet, three-tuck ruching were all waiting to be released. There was never a bride who wasn’t happy. We became known far and wide in the district.

In return she taught me all the secrets of stitching, my mother. Sewing is in our blood, you see.’

‘Magpie?’ says Rose.

‘I’m getting there,’ says Edie.

‘My father started to kill trees. Did I already tell you that? He poisoned them. All along the track up to the gully – you might have seen some of them. For a while he was winning, but then the place fought back over the years. He became a master at ringbarking. “Why,” my mother asked him. “Why not,” was what he replied. He was making inroads into the forest. That was what it felt like. He’d get rid of the whole lot of it. We stared at his glass eye in the teacup.

‘Murderous,’ I suggested.

Mother shook her head.

‘Despairing,’ was what she said.

He killed animals too. Wallabies. Pademelons. Possums. Snakes. Goannas. Skinks crushed under foot, and beetles, bugs, butterflies.

He would sit on the back steps watching quietly for hours, rifle in his hands, and then fire a single shot into the trees.

We’d jump on our sewing seats, calm ourselves, proceed.

The magpie I got the year I was thirteen. My mother said it was a foolish thing and maybe it should go back to the wild – there were, no doubt, other magpies that would take it in – but secretly she was terrified my father would dispose of it. The magpie’s mother was a pile of black and white feathers in the middle of the road beside Hansen’s corner and the ditch.

Now Karl Hansen, who owned the farm nextdoor, where the Falconers are now, had taken a train to Brisbane and driven back in a Vauxhall Tourer, enthusiastically collecting wildlife on the shining front fender the whole way.

The juvenile magpie was calling out to the pile of feathers and walking back and forward across the road, and there were others about, singing in the gum trees, calling to the bird, but soon enough they left it to its own end. I found it there on my way to school, raced home to fetch something for it to eat, right in past my mother, who had pins in her mouth and was standing before a bride-to-be. I brought bread and dropped it all the way to school, and the bird hopped behind, swallowing each piece and crying out in between.

That first day in the classroom we were sweating in our seats and the teacher, Miss Collier, was fanning herself with the
Cairns Post
and the storm towers were growing out over the sea and the only sound was that magpie calling outside the classroom. She went out and clapped her hands at it.

‘Stupid bird!’

‘It’s Edie’s bird,’ they said in the class, which made the teacher angry.

Miss Collier didn’t think much of me. She didn’t like my needle-pricked fingers or my creek-washed hair. She didn’t like my knotted toes, she didn’t like my quietness. Stupid Edie, strange Edie, I could tell that was what she thought of me. Always climbing hills Edie, Edie from the falling-down house, magic wedding dress Edie. Miss Collier wasn’t married and never likely to be. She had a face all bumpy like a pickled cucumber and just as shiny.

‘Don’t bring it back tomorrow, Edith Baker,’ she said.

At lunchtime I fed the magpie my mandarins and begged Peter Hansen for half his biscuit for the trip home. He said he’d oblige if I promised to kiss him on the way home. There was much talk of what sort of kiss it would be – short or long, on the lips or on the cheek – and he made me commit to his specifications, which I did because I wanted his biscuit for a bird that was now all feathers and misery at my feet.

Peter Hansen was an oaf of a boy, a head taller than everyone else in the class and his head was bigger too, block-shaped, with a big thatch of blond hair that stood up like a scarecrow’s. He had wet his pants once, in first form, and I never forgot it. The incident didn’t make him sad, only enraged, and when the teacher tried to stand him up he clung to the edge of his table, turning the colour of uncooked sausage, and yelled through his gritted teeth. I remember it right now, like I’m there. He got his way by using his fists.

Peter Hansen was the eldest of the five Hansen brothers, all equally blond and block-headed and stupid, and all four of his brothers were present for the kiss. They stood with their arms crossed and ribbed each other with their elbows, and their faces grew bright red when Peter kissed me.

Now I kissed him beside the ditch not far from where the pile of feathers lay. His lips tasted of the grease from his dripping sandwich, and we both kept our eyes open and laughed, I remember, and he counted the seconds with his fingers, which must have taken away even more of the pleasure, and removed his lips when the time was up. He leapt back like he’d been holding his breath underwater, and he was a dusky colour – oh, the colour of him. He shouted, ‘One day I’ll be marrying you,’ and ran down the road between the cane, his younger brothers following.

And to tell you the truth, I began to cry. It might have been the kiss, because suddenly my cheeks burnt, but it was also the way that baby magpie walked right by the pile of feathers on the road and didn’t recognise its own mother any more. Each day after, it would pass that place and never stop again. And that place remained until the rains came, filling up the streams until they roared on the mountain and made Weeping Rock weep. That place remained until the rain washed away the last traces of the mother and wiped the road clean.

But that magpie stayed with me for three whole years.

It’s strange how life turns out. That day is threaded all the way to here and me sitting with you. If I pulled that thread, right now, I would see the places that day has touched my life, gathered up in folds. You won’t understand it now.’

‘Who did this blue dress belong to?’ asks Rose.

‘It belonged to me – I sewed it a long time ago.’

‘Why was it so ripped?’

Edie doesn’t reply, she picks up the jar and looks at her collected beads.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you take one of the bicycles from under the house? You could ride then, and the trip here wouldn’t be so far.’

She’s up before Rose can say anything. Rose follows her, stuffing the pillowcase and thread inside her schoolbag. Under the house Edie feels for a switch and sighs, as though satisfied, when a new and altogether rustier sea of junk is revealed. There are casements in piles and several wooden doors, a perambulator, very old, minus its wheels, saddles resting on wooden saw horses, umbrellas hanging in lines from hooks, bed frames, chair frames, wooden crates containing milk bottles, a guitar hanging enigmatically from a piece of string. There are at least five bike carcasses.

Edie points out a bike without a scrap of its original colour. Despite the rust, its two tyres are pumped up and in working order.

‘I used to ride it until not that long ago,’ Edie says.

Rose bites her bottom lip.

‘It isn’t a gift,’ says Edie. ‘I want it back. I just thought it’d make it easier for you.’

‘Okay,’ Rose says. The bike squeaks as she wheels it out from under the house. ‘But you still never told me what happened to that dress.’

‘I’ve already started to,’ says Edie.

It’s just getting dark when she arrives home.

‘Nice bike,’ says her father by the camp fire.

‘Shut up,’ says Rose.

‘I’m just saying,’ he says.

‘Well, don’t.’

‘Pearl came here today looking for you.’

‘Did she?’

‘She was in a bit of a state.’

‘What kind of state?’

‘Well, she looked like she’d been crying. I offered her a cup of tea.’

‘Did she stay?’

‘We sat for a while out on the deckchairs, but she didn’t want any tea. She’s very upset about this Chernobyl thing.’

‘What’s a Chernobyl thing?’

‘There’s been a nuclear meltdown in Russia somewhere, some place called Chernobyl.’

‘Oh,’ says Rose.

‘She was really upset about it. I said I’d drive her home but she said she’d be all right.’

Rose goes inside to get changed and sees her father’s sketchbook on the kitchenette bench. She opens up the first page. She’s expecting to see his usual fare, a spectacular invasion of flying vacuum cleaners, but instead there’s a pencil drawing of Pearl. Unmistakably Pearl. Pensive Pearl. Beautiful Pearl. Pearl looking down, hair falling across her cheek.

‘Did you do this today?’ she asks him from the caravan door.

‘I did,’ he says.

‘While she was here?’

‘No, after she left; I still had her in my mind.’

She hates the way he says that.

‘Don’t draw my fucking friends,’ she says, very slowly.

‘I don’t like your fucking language,’ he replies.

‘I hate you,’ she says.

She does. This new him. The other him is much better. The larrikin him. The drunk him. The drunk him just blusters, breaks, barges; the drunk him just up and leaves. This new him terrifies her. He’s too quiet, too controlled. He’s always thinking.

‘Don’t be like that Rose,’ he’s shouting, but she’s already pushed past him, she’s already halfway across the sand, walking into the night.

Twisted Stitch

Glass is in his motel room. He’s lying flat on the bed, arms outstretched, fully clothed. His legs are still aching from yesterday’s climb. He thinks about mountains, how they’re formed by cataclysmic events. Every single one of them. Earthquakes and volcanos, huge, shuddering, earth-wrenching moments. Tectonic plates, or whatever they’re called, crushing blindly against each other, lifting, splitting, crumbling.

Suffering.

He should have a shower but he just can’t get up. The motel room is almost completely beige. Beige carpet. Beige curtains. Beige bedspread. Mustard-coloured walls. There’s a faded print of a rainforest, a homogenous misty creek, all gentle water and mossy rocks. He knows it’s nothing like that. Getting there would be a nightmare: that much itchy vine and slippery rock, it could kill a man.

‘Okay,’ he says aloud into the room. ‘Think.’

The phone rings instead. He can just reach it without rolling over.

‘What you got?’ he asks.

He takes his notebook from his pocket, his pen. Closes his eyes to listen: ‘There’s a good fingerprint on the back of the biscuit wrapper, somehow survived the rain. Belongs to a young man who was once done for possession of cannabis as a twenty-two-year-old in Cairns. Nothing since. No other record. Address is in the town.’

‘Say the name again,’ says Glass. He knows it from somewhere.

He puts down the phone and goes through the file. Someone said that name. Right back in the beginning, at first interviews. First day. Before he arrived. He’s seen that name or heard it; he doesn’t know which.

He flicks through the pages, swearing softly under his breath. There it is.
Paul Rendell. ‘You should ask Paul Rendell.’

Paul Rendell
, he writes.
18 Main Street, Leonora.

Relief. It soothes his aching muscles. He circles the name. Circles it again. He doesn’t stop until the page is awash with pond ripples.