The Dressmaker

by Rosalie Ham

  He covered her in her magenta gown and sat naked next to her and smoked cigarettes, pondering her disturbed sleep, with tears sliding over his cheeks. Then he woke her. He handed her a glass of champagne and said, ‘I think we should get married.’

  ‘Married?’ She laughed and cried at the same time.

  ‘It’s what they’d hate most – and besides, you’re the girl for me. There could never be anyone else now.’

  She nodded, smiling through her tears at him.

  ‘We’ll do it here. We’ll have a big wedding in Dungatar then we’ll move away to somewhere better.’

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Away from bad things, to a good place, where the Saturday night dances are better –’

  ‘And will you take my mad mother as well?’

  ‘We can even take my slow brother.’

  ‘Barney,’ she laughed again and clapped, ‘yes, Barney!’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  She didn’t reply so he said. ‘It’s the best offer you’re ever going to get ’round here.’

  ‘Where would we go?’

  ‘To the stars,’ he said, ‘I’ll take you to the stars, but first …’ She stretched out her arms to him, and he lay down with her again.

  Later they lay together on top of the silo looking up; two silhouettes on a corrugated silver roof under a velvet black sky shot with starshine and a cold, white moon. The air was chilly, but the Autumn sun had warmed the iron.

  ‘You never played with me when I was little,’ said Tilly.

  ‘You never came near us.’

  ‘I watched you play here, you and Scotty and Reg. You used binoculars to search for rockets from “out of space”. Sometimes you were cowboys scouting for conquering Indians on horseback.’

  Teddy laughed. ‘And Superman. I got into real trouble once,’ he said. ‘We’d jump into the grain trucks as they pulled out of the loading dock then stay on top of the wheat until we crossed the creek, where we’d jump in. The sarge waited one day with Mae. Boy, did she kick my bum.’

  ‘Fearless,’ said Tilly softly.

  ‘Fearless,’ he said, ‘and I still am.’

  ‘Are you?’ She sat up. ‘What about my curse?’

  ‘I don’t believe in curses. I’ll show you,’ he said and stood.

  Tilly sat up and watched him inch down the sloping roof to the edge. ‘What are you doing?’ He looked down to the grain trucks lined up beside the loading dock.

  ‘They might be empty,’ she called.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘They’re full.’

  ‘Don’t,’ she cried, ‘please don’t.’ He turned and smiled at her and blew a kiss.

  • • •

  Evan Pettyman stopped his car outside his house and helped his drunk wife inside. He lay her on her bed and was sliding her stockings from her limp feet when he heard someone in the distance, calling. He listened. It came from over at the railway line.

  ‘Help, I need your help … please.’

  He found Tilly Dunnage edging up and down the rim of a railway truck with her gown torn and electric hair flapping in the night wind as she stirred the seed in the truck with a long pole.

  ‘He’s in there …’ she called, in a voice that came from somewhere after death,

  ‘… but he won’t take hold of the pole.’

  19

  Tilly sat opposite Sergeant Farrat. He held a biro poised over paper and carbon on a clipboard. His police uniform was crumpled, soft and limp, and in places his white hair stood on end.

  ‘What happened, Tilly?’

  She spoke in that voice that came from far away, looking at the floor. ‘No,’ she said, ‘my name’s Myrtle, I’m still Myrtle …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Remember when they built the silo?’

  Sergeant Farrat nodded, ‘Yes,’ and smiled a little, remembering the excitement the new construction caused. She crumbled a little so Sergeant Farrat said softly, ‘Go on.’

  ‘The boys would climb to the top and jump …’ She stopped.

  ‘Yes Tilly,’ he whispered.

  ‘Like Superman.’

  ‘They were foolish boys,’ said Sergeant Farrat.

  She still looked at the floor. ‘Just boys. The people of Dungatar do not like us, Sergeant Farrat, me and Mad Molly and they never will forgive me for that boy’s death or my mother’s mistakes … they never forgave her and she did nothing wrong.’

  Sergeant Farrat nodded.

  ‘I didn’t stay at the ball. Teddy found me and we went to his caravan and stayed until … well, for a long time but we ended up at the silos … we wanted to watch the sun come up on a new day …’

  Sergeant Farrat nodded again.

  ‘I told him my secrets and he promised he didn’t care. “I am Morgan Le Fay,” I said, “a banshee”. We were happy – he said it was going to be all right …’

  She crumbled a little bit more but wrenched herself back again. ‘It was as if I had made the right decision after all. That to come home was right because when I got here, I found something golden – an ally. He took more champagne and we climbed up on the silo roof.’

  She stopped, and stared at the floor a very long time. Sergeant Farrat let her, because she was turning to liquid inside and he needed her to hold on, he needed to be able to understand.

  Finally, ‘There was of course the boy …’

  ‘When you were ten,’ said Sergeant Farrat in a soft teary voice.

  ‘Yes. You sent me away to that school.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They were very good to me. They helped me, told me it wasn’t really my fault.’ She caught her breath, ‘But then there was another … everyone I’ve touched is hurt, or dead.’ And she folded in half on the wooden police station chair and shook and sobbed until she was weak and aching all over. Sergeant Farrat put her to bed in his four-poster and sat beside her, crying.

  Edward McSwiney had seen what happened to Stewart Pettyman. He had watched what had gone on between him and Myrtle Dunnage from the top of the silo twenty years before. Edward was mending the roof. Kids had been playing up there and they’d broken the guttering. Edward McSwiney heard the school bell and he stopped working to watch the little figures in the distance leave school and head home. He saw Myrtle cornered and he watched the boy assault her, but by the time he got there the girl was standing frozen, terrified, against the wall. ‘He was running at me like a bull …’ she said in a high-whistle voice and put her fingers either side of her ears to make horns, ‘… like this.’

  Edward McSwiney reached out for her then because she started to shake, but she shrank away and hid her face, and Edward saw what she had done. She had stepped aside and the boy had run head-first into the library wall, and now lay with his neck broken and his round podgy body at right angles to his head.

  Later that day Edward had stood with Molly and Evan Pettyman in the police station and Sergeant Farrat said, ‘Tell Mr Pettyman what you saw, Edward.’

  ‘They used to follow her and tease her,’ he said to Evan, ‘call her a bastard. I caught them many times. Your Stewart had the poor little thing cornered beside the library, she was just trying to save herself –’

  Evan turned away. He looked to Molly. ‘My son, my son has been killed by your daughter –’

  ‘Your daughter!’ called Molly.

  Edward always remembered the look on Evan’s face at that moment … when he realised fully what it all meant, what it had come to.

  Molly read his face too. ‘Yes. How I wish you’d just left me alone – you followed me here, tormented me and kept me as your mistress … you ruined our life. We would have had a chance, at least a chance, Myrtle and I could have had some sort of life …’ Molly had covered
her face with her hands and cried, ‘Poor Marigold, poor stupid Marigold, you’ll send her mad,’ then she flew at him with bared fingernails and kicking feet.

  And Sergeant Farrat had grabbed her and held her and said, ‘Stewart Pettyman is dead. We will have to take Myrtle away.’

  And now the sergeant had to stand by while Edward said to his own family, ‘We have lost our hero, Teddy.’

  They crashed before him like sugar lace. He wasn’t able to offer any sense of anything from his own heart to them, no comfort, and he understood perfectly how Molly Dunnage and Marigold Pettyman could go mad and drown in the grief and disgust that hung like cobwebs between the streets and buildings in Dungatar when everywhere they looked they would see what they once had. See where someone they could no longer hold had walked and always be reminded that they had empty arms. And everywhere they looked, they could see that everyone saw them, knowing.

  Sergeant Farrat asked God many questions as he sat by Tilly but he received no answers.

  When finally he wrote his report he did not write about the champagne or the two twined beneath the close stars or that they had made love over and over again and were made one person in their intentions and that they should be sharing a life now, not just have shared a few hours. He did not say that she knew she was a cursed woman who caused boys to die with the sound of her cry and he did not say Teddy was trying to prove to her no harm would come to him when he jumped, even though she begged him not to tempt fate.

  Teddy was determined, so he jumped into the full waiting grain bin sitting in the dark, the wheat bin that would be pulled away in the morning to empty its load onto a ship bound over high seas to distant continents.

  But it wasn’t a bin brimming with wheat. It was a bin filled with sorghum. Fine, shiny, light, brown sorghum. It wasn’t bound for other continents. It was fodder. And Teddy vanished like a bolt dropped into a tub of sump oil and slid to suffocate at the bottom of that huge bin in a pond of slippery brown seeds like polished liquid sand.

  Instead he wrote that Teddy McSwiney had slipped and that it was his own terrible mistake, and that the witness, Myrtle Evangeline Dunnage, had indeed warned him against it and was innocent.

  Sergeant Farrat found Molly by the fire, quiet and pondering. He stepped inside the door and she did not look at him, but said, ‘What is it?’

  He told her and she wheeled herself to her bed in the corner and pulled the blanket over her head.

  Tilly knew she must stay in Dungatar for a kind of penance. If she went anywhere else the same thing would happen. She was bankrupted in all ways and all that was left for her was her frail, infirm mother.

  Sergeant Farrat knew that he had to step forward and embrace his flock – to save them from themselves, and to try and make them see something to salvage in it all. He asked if she would go to the funeral and she looked at him, her soul empty and said, ‘What have I done?’

  ‘It will be better if you face them,’ he said, ‘show you have nothing to hide. We will go together.’

  It was a severe, cruel burial that trembled with things no words could describe. It was a black and shocking time and grief sickened the air. The people failed to find the strength to sing, so Reginald accompanied Hamish on bagpipes and they played a dirge by Dvorák called ‘Goin’ Home’, which took the congregation’s breath away and voiced their grief. Then Sergeant Farrat left Tilly’s side to stand and deliver a sermon of sorts. He spoke of love and hate and the power of both and he reminded them how much they loved Teddy McSwiney. He said that Teddy McSwiney was, by the natural order of the town, an outcast who lived by the tip. His good mother Mae did what was expected of her from the people of Dungatar, she kept to herself, raised her children with truth and her husband Edward worked hard and fixed people’s pipes and trimmed their trees and delivered their waste to the tip. The McSwineys kept at a distance but tragedy includes everyone, and anyway, wasn’t everyone else in the town different, yet included?

  Sergeant Farrat said love was as strong as hate and that as much as they themselves could hate someone, they could also love an outcast. Teddy was an outcast until he proved himself an asset and he’d loved an outcast-– little Myrtle Dunnage. He loved her so much he asked her to marry him.

  Sergeant Farrat walked now, back and forth in front of the mourners, speaking sternly, ‘He wanted you to love her, forgive her, and if she had been loved on that night … but of course you couldn’t love her, you are not as large as he in heart, nor will you ever be, and that is the sad fact. Teddy thought it unforgivable – so unforgivable that he was going to leave with Myrtle and you would have lost him. If you had included her, Teddy would have always been with us, instead of trying to prove the might of his love that night. He made a terrible mistake, and we need to forgive him for that mistake. He loved Tilly Dunnage as strongly as you hate her, please imagine that – she said that she would marry him and I know that without exception all of you, along with your secrets and mistakes and prejudices and flaws, would have been invited to witness the occasion. It would have been a soothing occasion, a right and true union. In fact, it was …’

  A sound came from deep inside Mae. It was a sound only a mother can make.

  Tilly heard all of this but it was as though she were watching through a motion picture camera. She saw that the coffin was white and covered by a mountain of wreaths and that there was row after row of neat backs shuddering and bunches of tearful faces turning away from her – the Almanacs crippled together, the Beaumonts all stiff and severe and held, fat Lois blotched and scabbed and blowing her nose, her big baby Bobby crying and Nancy and Ruth clutching him. Marigold sipped from a flask of something and there was Evan, red with anger but not looking at anyone. The footballers stood in a line with their backs rigid, holding their jaws high and tight, their eyes red and brimming.

  Sergeant Farrat took Tilly home after the burial and Molly rose to sit in her chair by her daughter.

  The wake was an awful affair that stayed soaked in stunned rage and wretchedness. Fred and Purl stood at the bar like orphans at a bus stop, since no one felt much like drinking and the sandwiches would not go down. The McSwineys sat as one, grey-faced and stiff and shocked in their chairs. Behind them on the wall hung photographs of their cheeky boy along with the Grand Final victory flag. The team said time and time again, ‘He won it single-handed for us,’ and tried to press the flag into Edward’s crossed arms.

  • • •

  Barney laboured up The Hill the next day with the galah on his shoulder, the cow at his heels and the chooks pecking along behind him. He tied the cow to the fence and put the galah on the post then stood in front of her with his hat crushed in his hands. He tried to raise his head to look at her, but he couldn’t get his eyes to meet hers.

  She felt sick – bile rose in the back of her throat and her body ached from crying. She was exhausted, but her mind raced with venom and hate for herself and the people of Dungatar. She’d prayed to a God she didn’t believe in to come and take her away. She looked at Barney and wished he would hurt her, or embrace her, but he just pointed at the animals and said in a high, thin voice, ‘Dad said you’ll need ’em and they need a home.’ She stood unsteadily and held out a hand to him but his mouth screwed open and he turned and stumbled away, yowling, holding his arms across his chest. Tilly felt her heart turn and squeeze in her chest and she sat down heavily on the step, her face twisted and crying.

  Graham stood harnessed and waiting, the cart behind him loaded with boxes and bundles and small brown and white dogs. Edward and Mae, Elizabeth, Margaret and Mary, Barney, George, Victoria, Charles, Henry, Mary, and Charlotte holding the baby, just stood close together, like sad rag dolls leaning each other upright. They watched the caravans and railway carriages burning. First there was smoke, then flames burst with a roar and a low wall of spitting red and
orange rolled through the winter grass to the edge of the tip. The fire truck wailed from behind the shire offices and drove to park at the edge of the burning pyre. Some men got out of the truck and went to stand by the McSwiney family, then shook their heads and drove away.

  When Edward was satisfied he’d rendered their happy family home a crumpled shrouded black heap, the family left. They followed Graham, the first rays of morning sun on their backs. They didn’t look back, just stumbled away slow and bent to find a new place to start, their faint moans to reach at her forever.

  The afternoon grew bitterly cold but still she couldn’t go back inside. The place was full of material – coloured bolts and rags, loose threads and cotton reels, needles and frayed edges, mannequins shaped like snobby old Elsbeth and canvas water-bag Gertrude, and puny Mona or putrid gossiping Lois, leathery old sticky-beak Ruth, venomous Beula. The floor was a mattress of pins, like dead pine needles under a dark plantation. She lit another cigarette and drank the last watermelon fire-water from a bottle. Her face was puffy, her eyes purple and swollen from crying. Her hair stuck out in clumps about her shoulders like strands of aloe vera leaf, and her legs and feet were bruised with cold. Deathly pale and shuddering in the smoke rising from the tip, she stared down. The town was dormant, the eye closed.

  She remembered Stewart Pettyman’s eyes staring up and the sound, crack, the groan then another sound like a cow falling on hay. When she opened her eyes Stewart Pettyman lay in the hot summer grass with his head all twisted to the side, very suddenly. There was a smell, and blood came from between his red, sloppy lips. Liquid poo filled his shorts and crept out under his thighs.

  Sergeant Farrat said to her, ‘His neck is broken. He is dead now and gone to heaven.’

  Tilly shifted her gaze to the square dark silo that sat like a giant coffin beside the railway line.

  20

  The people of Dungatar gravitated to each other. They shook their heads, held their jaws, sighed and talked in hateful tones. Sergeant Farrat moved amongst his flock, monitoring them, listening. They had salvaged nothing of his sermon, only their continuing hatred.