The Midnight Dress(9)

‘Are you Miss Baker?’ says Rose at the bottom of the steps.

‘Edie will do.’

‘Someone said you make dresses,’ says Rose.

‘I do,’ says Edie. ‘You better come inside.’

Rose still isn’t sure why she’s come. The normal Rose would have refused to entertain the idea of a dress, a parade, fibreglass fruit. The sensible certain angry Rose would have said, I’m not wearing a dress. I’m not. You can take your Harvest Parade and stick it right where it fits.

But this is another Rose. A coconut frangipani enchanted Rose, who keeps imagining a dress no matter how hard she tries not to. It’s a solemn dress, a seriously gothic dress, dangerously blue-black. She has imagined it at night in the caravan dark. She has imagined it on her way to school, Murray Falconer playing air drums with his fingertips beside her. She has imagined it even though she has tried to erase the imaginings each and every time.

It’s late in the afternoon and the day is pulsing with the shrill chant of cicadas and the first strains of the frog’s evening choir. It is impossibly, insufferably humid. Rose wipes at the sweat that keeps forming at her hairline.

‘I wondered if someone would want a dress this year,’ says Edie. ‘I had a feeling. I had a feeling you’d come.’

Rose follows the old woman up the stairs and across a veranda cluttered up with old chairs and old beds and piles of stones, neatly heaped, and sheets hanging on a sagging line and large boxes filled with leaves. They enter a long kitchen, painted yellow, its walls covered with ceramic blue birds, whole flocks of them, twenty, thirty maybe, flying in formation toward the closed windows. As soon as they’re inside the rain begins.

It is a monumental downpour, dulling the sounds of Edie putting on the kettle, their footsteps on the wooden floor, the scrape of the chair that Edie pulls out for Rose. When it passes the day is left speechless until finally the frogs start up again.

‘I haven’t made a dress for many years,’ says Edie, moving a pile of newspapers from a chair so she can sit down. ‘There are other women now I hear, and big shops where the dresses come from China.’

Edie is small and old but Rose can’t tell how old, not really. Her silver hair is worn short, roughly cut, like a little skullcap, and the skin on her face is very fair and remarkably unlined. Her arms look ancient, though; they are speckled with age spots and her feet puff up over her slippers like rising dough. She wears a simple cotton sundress, straight up and down with two large pockets at the front. A revolting green. The material sags, empty, in the space where her breasts should be. Rose looks quickly away.

The table is covered in envelopes and jars of pins and two cat-shaped ceramic salt and pepper shakers in the process of being repaired, and a huge caterer-sized pickle jar containing a dead brown snake suspended in fluid. There are boxes filled with letters and pages of magazines tied together with ribbons and Tupperware containers filled with what looks like plum pips. Edie slides a scalding hot cup of tea toward Rose, gestures to a sugar bowl riddled with ants.

‘I just want a dark dress,’ says Rose. ‘Maybe black. I like dark things.’

‘When I was young,’ says Edie, ignoring her, ‘all the girls made their own dresses. What do you think of that?’

Rose shrugs, bites her bottom lip.

‘Girls sewed for weeks before a big dance. We imagined our dresses right out of our heads.’

Rose taps her black fingernails very lightly on the table.

‘I have rules,’ says Edie. ‘The thing is, if a girl asks me to make a dress I always ask the girl to help me with it. I think it’s only fair, as I don’t charge a fee.’

‘I could get money,’ says Rose. ‘I mean a bit. How much do you need?’

‘I don’t want money,’ says Edie. ‘I want you to look a great beauty.’

Rose wipes the sweat from her forehead again and tries to take a sip of scalding tea. The sun has come out after the shower and the room is suddenly struck aglow.

‘If you’re prepared to help, then we will make this dress. It will be a magnificent thing. I only work at night after six, because of the heat. I’ll let you think about it and, if you decide yes, you can come back next week on Wednesday and we can begin.’

‘But I don’t know how to sew,’ says Rose.

‘I will teach you everything.’





Straight Stitch





The paper flowers and the streamers have been taken down in the street, but the offerings on the front steps of the Catholic church remain. The flowers have wilted, the pumpkins’ insides have grown mouldy, and the banana skins have shrivelled and turned black. The Harvest Queen’s crown has been placed back inside its box in the mayor’s office. All the princess coronets too, bar one.

Detective Glass, with his weary crumpled face, has commandeered the school gymnasium. All day long he and his officers interview girls who have waited in line on wooden chairs. For hours at a time there is nothing but the solemn steadiness of words like rain then suddenly a salvo of tears. The sobs echo in that place. The detective and the officers look uncomfortable, write down their useless notes, run fingers through their hair.

Glass thinks it’s a waste of time. She’s a missing person, simple as that. There’s no body. He’s seen people in small towns like this before, working themselves up into a froth over a pair of shoes and a plastic crown. Girls are good at running away. It’s a fact.