The Dress (Everyday Magic Trilogy: Book 1)

by Nicholls, Sophie

  ‘But then the rich man told her that he was returning to the lands he came from. His father had ordered him to make a marriage of convenience which would secure the family’s fortunes for generations to come.

  ‘ “I’ll take the girls with me, “ he said. “They’ll be cared for and they’ll have every opportunity that they do not have here. I’ll make fine marriages for them and they’ll grow up to be fine women, not the wives of fishermen or farmers.”

  ‘The young woman tore at her hair and ran her fingernails down her cheeks. She begged him and shrieked at him. She went mad with the thought that she would lose her cherished daughters.

  ‘She felt as if her heart was a water-snail’s shell, pulled out of her chest and dashed against the river stones by this man she’d so foolishly allowed herself to love.

  ‘That night, in a craze of grief, she tucked a daughter beneath each arm and ran to the river and dived deep into the middle of the current. The children drowned and the young woman drowned with them and their bodies sank to the bottom of the river where the hungry fish picked their bones clean.

  ‘The rich man returned to his family and married the woman who’d been chosen for him. He was secretly very relieved that his father would never now need to know anything about his secret family.

  ‘For seven days and seven nights, the soul of the young woman sat on the bottom of the river. On the eighth day, it flew from the cool dark of the river up into the light again. It shimmered in a haze of purest white over the surface of the water. It tried to shape itself into a body - into arms and legs and a mouth and fingers - but gradually, as the sun rose, it faded away.

  ‘And they say that now, on any night of the year, you can see the young woman walking the banks of the river. Her hair flows down her back like weeds and her clothes are soaked with tears. She crouches on the riverbank and stirs the water with her long white fingers. She’s looking for the shapes of her dead daughters’ souls.

  ‘When the river is full and ready to burst its banks, they say that the river woman must be wailing and crying for her daughters and that the river can no longer hold all her tears.

  ‘And this is why young girls must never go near the river after dark, for the river woman may mistake them for her own children and tuck them in the folds of her watery cloak and carry them away with her forever.

  *

  ‘I don’t want you going there, Ella. Basta. That’s final,’ said Mamma. ‘What will people think of me? That I’m a no-good mother with a daughter running wild all over the place?’

  Ella folded her arms across her chest.

  ‘Mum, why are you listening to what one of your stuck-up customers says? What do they know? Everyone else goes there.’

  Fabbia raised her eyebrow. ‘My customers are stuck-up now, are they? Well, if it’s alright with you, young lady, I need my customers, every one of them… Have you ever stopped to think that without my customers we wouldn’t have food on the table or this roof over our heads? Hm?’ Then she sighed. ‘And, anyway, Ella. There are some things… some things… You know, it’s far, far too easy to get a reputation when you’re a girl.’

  ‘A reputation?’

  Fabbia saw the anger flash in Ella’s eyes. Despite herself, she felt a strange kind of relief. Hadn’t she been waiting for Ella to push against her a little? Hadn’t she wanted her to start being less of a good girl?

  ‘We’re not living in one of your 1950s fantasies, Mum,’ Ella was saying. ‘Well, you can if you want, but I don’t see why I have to. And anyway, I don’t understand you. You’re always saying yourself that women can do everything men can, only better….’

  Fabbia sighed. She picked up a string of green glass beads and wound them around her finger.

  ‘You know, tesora,’ she said, slowly, ‘actually, you are right. You are so, so right. But I also know another thing, something I have learnt myself, the hard way. It’s different for boys. It’s different for Billy. And that’s just how it is. Infuriating, yes. Unfair, oh yes. But it’s how things are… So we have to be a little bit clever. And if you hang around in a swimming costume down by the river, on your own with a boy, people like Mrs Moffat will see you. And they’ll talk. They’ll come in here and make their little jokes, their little comments to me. All very careful, all very by the way... But is that really what you want?’

  She reached out to touch Ella’s arm but Ella shook her away.

  ‘Anyway, David says that you can catch all kinds of disease from river water… There are rats down there, rats with germs. And green slimy stuff…. How do you say?’

  Behind her, on cue, the shop door jangled cheerfully to David, swinging his doctor’s bag.

  ‘Algae,’ he said. ‘Green slimy stuff. Sorry to be a party pooper, Ella. It’s just that I treated a young man, friend of Billy’s I believe, just the other week for a particularly nasty skin condition. Told me he’d been playing down on that platform they’ve rigged up down there…’

  Ella sighed. ‘I don’t know anyone else who’s been ill…’

  ‘Well,’ David pressed on. ‘I’ve been thinking, you know, since your mum mentioned it to me, and I’ve had an idea.’ He turned to Fabbia, beaming. ‘I might have come up with a solution.’

  There was something about David that refused to be sulked at, thought Fabbia. She watched Ella try to hold on to the tight little ball of her anger but David just smiled and smiled. His face shone with a sense of his own usefulness. ‘I’ve a surprise for you. I think you’ll like it.’

  *

  It was typical. Just typical, Jean Cushworth grumbled to herself. These ridiculous communal changing-rooms. They were everywhere now. And you were just expected to fit in, to do away with your decorum. She was going to have a word with the manager, make her feelings known.

  It wasn’t that she was ashamed of her body. Not exactly. But there was always that awkward moment when you had to let the towel drop. You had to fiddle with your bra behind your back and your skin was still damp so that everything took more time but you tried to do it all as quickly as you could because perhaps you didn’t exactly want to show your breasts and your bare backside to all and sundry.

  She’d been balancing on one leg, stepping into her knickers, at the precise moment when the Morenos appeared.

  Fabbia hadn’t missed a beat, of course. Jean noticed that she didn’t do that thing that so many other women do of surreptitiously looking you up and down, comparing.

  No, she’d kept her eyes on Jean’s face and smiled that sickeningly beautiful smile.

  ‘How lovely to see you,’ Jean said, reaching for her bra, pulling her shirt over her head as quickly as she could. ‘I didn’t know you were members here.’

  The girl hung back a little, looking nervously around the changing-room.

  ‘We’re just guests at the moment,’ Fabbia explained. ‘David very kindly arranged it for us. Well, for Ella, really.’

  She was wearing a kaftan covered in enormous swirls of colour – pink and turquoise and yellow – that stopped at the top of her tanned thighs. She’s lucky she has that kind of skin, thought Jean. Olive. Always has colour. She was suddenly even more self-conscious of her own unsunned flesh.

  Fabbia adjusted the strap of the beachbag on her shoulder. Her arms clacked with thick Perspex bangles.

  ‘That’s quite an outfit!’ Jean said, realising that she was staring, her gaze travelling all the way down Fabbia’s legs to her feet in a pair of turquoise wedges with cork platform heels.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ smiled Fabbia, apparently unfazed. ‘I’m doing the 60s thing today. The smallest hint of sunshine always brings it out in me. Anyway, how are you, Jean? How are the preparations for the party? You must be so busy.’

  And that was what she did, thought Jean. She was good at it too. Always interested. Knew what to say and when to say it. Remembered every detail. But it meant that you never learned anything about her. She didn’t give anything away.

  And the girl. There wa
s just something about her that was quite unnerving. She was a pretty little thing, Jean thought. No denying that. But she seemed so awkward, so uncomfortable in her own skin. Jean noticed that she’d disappeared into another bay of lockers to get changed, tucking herself carefully away from view.

  When she appeared again she was wearing possibly the most ugly swimsuit that Jean could imagine. One of those black sports Speedo things, for goodness’ sake, with the high neck and ugly flashes down the side.

  She’d clutched her towel to her front, self-consciously. Really, she couldn’t be any more different from her mother.

  What was it about that girl? Jean couldn’t put her finger on it. The way she looked at you with those enormous eyes. Were they green or blue? She couldn’t quite remember. You felt it go straight through you.

  *

  Ella dives deeper. Fingers, elbows, feet. Flickers of white in the turquoise water.

  At the bottom of the pool, everything recedes. There’s only the faint hum of the filters, the fresh scent of cleaned water.

  Down here, she’s no longer a girl but a woman with long hair that flows out all around her. Sometimes she’s a bird flying across the blue bottom. Red beak and green tail feathers. Wake of pink petals. Fish-bird, bird-fish. Swimming above her shadow.

  Again and again, she returns here, hanging her jeans and T-shirt in the locker, balling her socks in her shoes, putting on the blue water.

  Sometimes she floats motionless for long minutes on her back. Clouds float too over the sky’s curve, making a map like the world photographed from space. Another part of her, the deeper part, the part of her mind that goes quiet and then quieter, that can shrink to its own still centre, looks out from her eyes, unspools itself, floats out over the surface of the water.

  The sky rolls above her, a gigantic eyeball veined with white. What does the sky see?

  This. She. Lick of salt and roar of water.

  If only she could stay here forever.

  *

  I wonder, Ella scribbled in her notebook, what it feels like to wake up in the morning and remember that today is the day that you marry a prince? Katrina says that she’d Rather Kill Herself. No one would dare to talk to you any more or tell you Anything Interesting.

  Billy says that the Royal Family was invented by the toffs to keep other people in their places. Chase the lot of ‘em out of Buckingham Palace and turn it into something useful. Like what, for instance? Oh, a hospital or a university. Something like that. Yes, he’d like to think of all those oil paintings of stuffy old blokes in ruffs and pantaloons tossed on a gigantic bonfire. Mrs Queen stacking shelves or sitting at a checkout. Mr Queen doing people’s gardens.

  Billy, of course, hadn’t been invited to Katrina’s party. Instead, he was going to a Not The Royal Wedding Party in the pub at the end of his road, which sounded like a lot more fun.

  Mamma had been up half the night for weeks with all the orders. There were so many parties and dinners and fêtes and none of her ladies could be seen wearing anything the slightest bit similar. But everyone wanted the same. Very full skirt or very, very fitted skirt, absolutely nothing in between.

  ‘How will they walk in that?’ Billy said, staring in disbelief at a tight sheath dress in red silk.

  ‘I know. And it’s shorter, always shorter, can you make it shorter?’ laughed Mamma.

  ‘All this fuss, ‘ Billy said, ‘and it’s going to rain royal cats and dogs, anyway.’

  It had rained all week. The shop in the courtyard groaned and creaked as the floorboards and rafters expanded, contracted.

  Between downpours, the cobbles shimmered under clouds of midges. The wood in the window frames swelled until they couldn’t be opened and the bathroom taps ran brown with river water, streaking the towels with rusty marks. There was a kind of clammy vapour to everything, even inside the shop, so that Mamma began to worry about the fabrics.

  ‘It reminds me of home,’ she said. ‘The rainy season. Everything warm and wet for weeks.’

  Ella was surprised to hear Mamma talk of ‘home’ in that way. For as long as she could remember, she’d avoided it, expertly brushing off Ella’s questions.

  Most people presumed she was Italian. Some guessed she was Middle Eastern, born in France. By now, Mamma’s real story had been lost somewhere in the layers and layers of all the other stories she told so that even Ella didn’t know where it really began.

  And yet, in recent weeks, there had been changes.

  Just little things, but Ella noticed them.

  The letters in blue airmail envelopes that had always seemed to find their way to wherever they were living, seemed to be coming with more regularity. Ella had picked them up from Mamma’s dressing-table and tried, a few times now, to decipher the thin pages but, of course, they were written by Madaar-Bozorg and so she couldn’t understand a word.

  But also the things that Mamma didn’t say. She wasn’t using Italian words quite so much any more and her mind seemed to be returning, with regularity, to her childhood, the Old Country.

  Just yesterday, flicking through a magazine, she’d said, ‘Oh, my aunt used to make this for me. This cake with honey and almonds and rosewater. It was my absolute favourite.’ And she’d said the name of the cake in the Old Language, sounding it out for Ella. She’d seemed genuinely pleased at the memory.

  Another time she’d said, ‘Do you know, Ella, that our family own a house in the mountains, north of Tehran? It is such a beautiful place. The air so fresh. The pomegranate trees. I want to take you there one day…’

  Ella found her mind drifting to this every time she swam. In the swimming pool, things cooled again. She could feel the blurred edges of her body being recast into firmer shapes.

  She lay on her back under a lid of grey cloud, the rain prickling her face. She let herself hang there, in the pool’s centre, and watch the steam rising from the water.

  The surface was perfectly still.

  The chestnut trees at the edge of the pool were thickening under the heavy air, drinking the stickiness into their green folds, growing darker, more brooding.

  *

  ‘Want to see something?’

  Katrina looked up from the maths problem they were supposed to be solving and grinned conspiratorially.

  ‘What sort of thing?’ said Ella carefully. She had good reason to be wary of Katrina’s show-and-tells.

  ‘Something a bit creepy. Something I’ve never shown anyone else…’

  She wiggled her eyebrows. ‘So do you? Simple yes or no.’

  Ella sighed and laid down her pen. She knew that she wasn’t going to get any more homework done.

  ‘OK, but no funny business, alright?’

  Katrina rolled her eyes and crossed her heart with fake solemnity. She grabbed Ella’s hand and pulled her out of the chair.

  ‘Come on. But we’ve got to be Quiet As The Grave,’ she said in her stage whisper.

  They stood on the large landing, Katrina straining for the slightest sound. The clattering of pans in the kitchen and the faint hum of Leonora’s radio programme drifted up from far below them.

  They crept past the door to Katrina’s parents’ bedroom, Katrina wincing as a floorboard creaked under Ella’s feet. Mrs Cushworth usually took one of her naps at this time in the afternoon and didn’t emerge from her bedroom until dinnertime.

  They reached the far side of the staircase and Katrina slipped a key from the back pocket of her jeans and inserted it in a door that looked like all the others on the second floor.

  She gestured for Ella to follow.

  Ella realised that she was standing in a teenage boy’s bedroom. It was a smaller room than Katrina’s. There was a single bed with a duvet cover patterned with the Leeds United Football Club logo and a framed football strip on the wall above. Lined up on the windowsill at precise intervals were various bits of what looked like mechanical parts – cogs, pulleys, levers.

  There was a large oak desk stacked with books and a she
lf lined with more bits of machinery and large chunks of what looked like rock.

  It was as if the occupant of the room had just stepped out for a moment – except that the bed was neatly made, the pillowcases smoothed.

  Ella realised that Katrina was scrutinising her face for reactions.

  ‘Whose room is this?’ she whispered.

  ‘My dead brother’s,’ said Katrina. ‘Told you it was creepy. Weird, isn’t it? Mum keeps it like this. She doesn’t even let Leonora clean it. She spends hours in here on her own, dusting his bits of engine, his mouldy old books, his stupid fossil collection…’

  Ella didn’t know what to say. She remembered what Billy had told her about Katrina’s brother.

  ‘What was his name?’ she said.

  ‘Laurence. Poncey name or what? I called him Potato Head. Always had his head in a book. He was like my dad. You know, brainy but absolutely no common sense. Always inventing useless things…’

  She picked up a piece of engine and fondled the outline of it with her thumb.

  ‘Mum’s never got over it. He was her favourite, you see. Her darling little boy. Her genius.’

  ‘How did he die?’ said Ella, softly.

  ‘Kidney failure,’ said Katrina. ‘He was waiting for a transplant. Mum and Dad were just getting checked out to see if they could give him one of theirs… but then he got really sick…’

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  Ella pulled her cardigan closer around her body. The Signals were strong in here. It reminded her of the first day that she’d stepped into Katrina’s hallway, of the colours she’d felt plucking at her throat, her elbows.

  Here in this room, she could feel the air stirring around her, making little eddies of cold. It was like what happened when you dropped a pebble in a still pond and the ripples spread out endlessly across the surface of the water. It was as if, just by being here, she’d somehow disturbed the surfaces of the room and now concentric circles of silver and blue were spreading out all around her body.