The Midnight Dress(33)

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.’