The Midnight Dress(16)

‘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.