The Midnight Dress (23 page)

‘Remember the house,’ they would say, ‘the magnificent house, before that dressmaker came and married Jonathan Baker and brought the whole place to ruin.’

My father, it was said, had been spotted from time to time on the roads down south; yes, Mrs Adsett, who had family in Melbourne and went there once every two years for three months, said she saw him near the turn-off to the Goodnight Scrub, thin as a whip, just standing there, swaying in the breeze, and when they stopped the car he peered in as though he’d never seen humans before. Yes, that would be my father. That was exactly how he looked. Mrs Adsett apparently squeezed five bob into his hand, quite a lot in those days, and said, ‘God bless you and keep you safe.’ This was just one of the stories. The judgement was pretty clear: why should my mother sit in the big house and make wedding dresses while her husband was off wandering the countryside, a swaggie?

My mother didn’t take her supplies at Mr Grace’s shop any more; she had to order them from away. At first there were still dresses to be made but not as many from the town. Only one wedding dress in the whole of 1934. It had a rayon underskirt, white lace with matching veil. The sweetest thing you ever saw. We thought the curse might be broken, but it wasn’t. There were confirmation dresses; I could do those myself with my eyes closed. Then they petered out too. Word spread, I suppose.

We made one yellow party dress for Miss Elizabeth Sharp at the beginning of 1935; she was the new schoolteacher from away so didn’t know the town stories yet and saw our advertisement on a card in Hommel’s window. Soon after that it was taken down. She was happy enough with the dress, but hers was the last.

My mother had taught me everything there was to know about the making of a dress. She showed me pintucks and box pleats, she taught me standard yokes and double yokes, and she taught me the many ways of sleeves. We sat all day, every day, sewing. We had a singer treadle then, and when there were no more dresses my mother took a job making ham bags for Olsson’s piggery and also patchwork, she was very good at that. And she could make curtains out of feed sack, and dresses too, so you wouldn’t even notice; she was clever that way and enough to keep us in food. All the while I practised. And all the while the forest spoke to us in the long empty silences of the afternoon.

There is a place, it said, a creek with a glittering edge, where the sun falls down off a rock in the late afternoon.

There is a waterfall, it said, that weeps into an endless pool. It’s known to very few.

Go away, we thought, can’t you see we’re busy?

The sun crossed over the house and the sideboard cast a long shadow across the floor. The sewing machine said dig, dig, dig, dig, dig and the treadle counted the endless seconds of the long minutes of the long hours. Until finally we couldn’t wait any more: we jumped up and threw whatever we were working on across the back of a chair and ran down the back stairs through the waving paddock.

‘It has a hold on us,’ I remember my mother once saying. ‘It has us.’

Which is one way to put it, I suppose.

The forest sighed high up in the canopy and cast down its leaves. We breathed in the watery air as though we had never breathed before; we listened to the barrel and thud of water on rocks, like hearing a great heart.

‘We’re coming because we choose to come,’ I said

We never walked the well-worn paths taken by the daytrippers from Cairns, with their sunhats and picnic baskets, who shouted loud and exaggerated cooees over the edges of falls; we walked the old ways, to the hut and other places. We walked on leaves and climbed over rocks and picked our way along creek beds. We followed them upward until they disappeared into stone.

We found places, sudden places, where the sun lit up the leaves like silver snow. A stand of gums with trunks like the legs of giants. Hidden valleys, solemn and hushed.

These were the things we collected, Rose. Red leaves. The topaz tamarind, the white passionfruit. The black shells of the rhinoceros beetle, the golden shells of the scarab. Feathers: the emerald green feathers of the woompoo pigeon were our prized possessions. Not the kinds of things we could speak of in polite company.

These jewels we kept without ever saying why; we didn’t talk of such things. We saw sleeping snakes as long as two men, and we saw places where sun shone straight down in a prism of light, and my mother once stood in such a place and said, ‘What if I could just disappear?’ and she was almost gone before I pulled her out.

When we came back down it was always dusk, and the house would be in shadows and filled with atlas moths that burst from the walls and flapped madly when we arrived. We would light the hurricane lamps and open up the windows to hear the mountain, as though we couldn’t bear to be apart from it. We would sit and wait for the full breadth of darkness to come.

We smelt of green, the spiky scent of sap, the tickle of flowers. My mother put the kettle on and combed the leaves from her hair. I washed myself, standing naked beneath the tank stand.

Rose, we were already turned half-wild.

‘Do you want to try something a little more exciting,’ Edie asks, holding up the black mourning lace sleeves.

‘What do I have to do?’

‘Sewing lace is difficult, but I’m sure you can do it. I’ll show you how.’

The lace is patterned with roses and heavy in her hands, lustrous even, after all the years. Edie shows Rose how to match the pieces, allowing a seam. She must follow the motif, and then they will trim the excess.

‘Do you understand?’

‘Not really.’

‘Wait, we’ll practise on some old lace curtains first.’

At one time Rose would have argued. She would have touched her hair angrily, checking pins. Tonight she feels an escaped tendril tickling her cheek and blows at it absently, while Edie disappears down the hall.

‘Joining lace always makes me think of spiders spinning webs,’ says Edie, when she returns.

Rose is starting to see the dress now. Edie pins the skirt panels back onto the mannequin, while Rose practises. She attaches the front and back of the boned bodice. The dress shines by the light of the hurricane lamp, coming alive. It swings dangerously dark against the night, against the window. It hushes against the floor.

Edie looks at the girl looking at the dress.

Rose looks softer. Her eyes are not so huge or sorrowful. She’s not so skinny, her cheekbones have filled out. Climbing has been good for her, Edie thinks. She knew it would be.

‘What?’ says Rose, catching the old woman’s gaze.

‘What?’ says Edie in return.

‘You were staring at me.’

‘I was just thinking, that’s all, how healthy you look. You’ve put on condition.’

Rose shrugs.

‘You’ll be the belle of the ball,’ says Edie.

‘Unlikely,’ says Rose.

‘Do you know that when I first held this taffeta, all those years ago, yours was the dress I saw inside of it, but I didn’t make it.’

Rose shivers.

‘You still never told me about the dress you made, how it got so ripped.’

‘Well, we’re nearly up to that bit.’

Rose joins the two pieces of lace curtain. It’s a mess. A horrible mess.

‘You’re not following the petals,’ says Edie. ‘Start again.’

‘Tell me the story,’ says Rose.

‘One day a telegram came,’ says Edie into the quiet. ‘It was from the police in Brisbane, asking for what to do with my father’s remains. My mother went to the exchange and made a phone call to find out the conditions of his death, which were reported as “exposure”. They gave the number of the funeral parlour where he was lying, and she phoned them to arrange the costs of his burial and to ask if a suit was needed. She asked for his measurements. He was thin, terribly thin, nothing but skin and bones: less than thirty inches at the waist and thirty-six at the chest, despite his height. That was my father, who I never knew, who never held me in his arms, not once. And all the while the telephonist sat in her corner pretending not to listen.

She didn’t cry a tear, the old witch, I can imagine she said, or something to that effect: Not a single tear.

But she didn’t see how my mother made that suit. How she spent all day patternmaking and cutting then sewed the whole night. She wouldn’t let me do anything; I just waited, and when it was sent in the parcel at the post office, the word had already spread that the man of the old Baker house had died, been found dead in a park, and that his wife had only asked for his measurements. The women turned away from her on the street. She was served in shops without a single word.

‘Perhaps you should go now?’ is what my mother said to me. ‘Go to a bigger town and learn things your own way. You could get a job as a seamstress anywhere.’

‘I don’t want to leave you,’ is what I said.

In Brisbane I had trouble with my hearing. I was dizzy with all the commotion, the scrape and screaming of the trams and the ferries’ slicing up of the river. I had a little room above a draper’s and each time the trains passed through Central Station the walls shook and the bed rattled. I stayed there for two months and then went to work at the munitions factory at Rocklea. It was boring work, but the women there were good and they took me under their wing. I went to the dances at Cloudland to keep them happy, and I danced with the soldiers. I wrote letters to my mother, but she didn’t often write back. It was as she said it would be.

‘Edith Emerald Baker,’ she said, ‘we have started something here that needs undoing,’ and she pointed to the house that was falling down around us, then she pointed out the window at the mountain. She meant a spell, a spell that place had cast over us, that was what she wanted broken by turning me away.

But these things aren’t easily undone, Rose.

I didn’t marry, although I was asked again, by Peter Hansen himself, who was serving in the navy and actually didn’t look too bad in his sailor suit. Now it was him who ripped my dress. It’s a strange way for someone to ask you to marry them, I know.

I made the dress at Lowood House, which was a hostel for country girls, and there was one old machine on the second floor. I made all the girls’ dresses there. They brought me the fabric and the patterns.

I held the stuff in my hands. The daisy-print voile, the green poplin, which was very popular in those years; I think there must have been whole warehouses, somewhere, filled with it. I held the fabric in my hands and saw other dresses, magnificent dresses, but I didn’t mention them. I followed the patterns and made the dresses they wanted.

I found your material, Rose, in a small shop in Ipswich; I touched it and saw your dress shimmering there. ‘Navy,’ said the girls, raising their eyebrows, when I arrived home. ‘Indigo,’ I said. ‘Unusual choice,’ they said. ‘There’s something about it, that’s all,’ I replied.

I used Vogue pattern number 6601, with the cape collar, of course. Ignored the dress I saw.

I borrowed another girl’s black heels.

Peter Hansen danced with me half the night. He had desperate eyes. He was due to leave in two days. He said, ‘Come outside with me, I need to talk to you.’ So I did.

‘We’ll get married,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow. The chaplain can do it.’

I said, ‘I don’t want to get married.’

He said, ‘Don’t be stupid.’ He couldn’t believe his ears. I went to leave, but he grabbed me by the skirt. That was the first rip, right there. He was always very strong. It’s quite hard to rip silk taffeta, you know. ‘Look what you’ve done,’ I said.

‘Marry me.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said.

‘Who else is going to marry you?’

I went to go inside then, but he caught me and I fell on the grass, which was wet, so that was the top separated from the skirt. Two other men came running when I screamed. I had to go home like that. He drowned, you know, went down with a ship, which I’m sorry for. No one deserves that type of death.

Edie didn’t say that after the war they danced in the streets. She was over thirty by then. She took the Sunshine Express from Roma Street to Leonora, and with each degree of latitude the land unfurled, the moon was stamped low on the giant sky, the towns raced past and disappeared.

In the house there was only silence. Moths flew from the cupboards, shadows the size of birds. Her mother was so small and faded, Edie barely knew her. Florence didn’t have very long to live.

She touched Edie’s face with her trembling hands. ‘Yes,’ is what she said. All she could say was yes.

Cross-stitch

I can’t show you the tree where Paul Rendell hanged himself. There are no pictures of it, not in the
Cairns Post
or anywhere else. It’s not the sort of thing they display. In the articles, the tree is only mentioned in passing, an extra in the drama, a bit player.
A thirty-two-year-old Leonora man was found hanging from a tree branch on the main track to Weeping Rock,
it read. The headline was
MAN IN MISSING GIRL CASE DIES
.

There would be certain criteria for choosing a tree for such a job. It couldn’t be just any tree: it needed to be climbable, it needed the right sort of limbs. In the rainforest, trees stretch themselves all the way to the canopy, thirty, forty, fifty metres, more, before laying out branches. Paul Rendell needed a reachable limb, something sturdy and straight.