The Midnight Dress(54)

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.