The Midnight Dress(39)

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.