The Truth & Addy Loest

by Kim Kelly

  Once again, Addy looked left and right and back down the road at the Olympia, to check that this was in fact King Street. It was. Ali’s Lebanese lay directly across the road: she’d had a felafel roll there last Saturday night. This shop must be new, she thought, following the woman through the open door. She placed the bags beside a glass display case here – one that was filled with brooches and bangles and beads, all glittering. The woman stood over the other side of it, pulling out frocks from the bags she’d brought in, shaking out a chiffon skirt speckled with soft gold sequins. This was a slice of heaven as far as Addy was concerned.

  She asked the woman: ‘Are you just setting up shop?’

  ‘Setting up?’ The woman was intent on smoothing frock-froth onto a padded-satin hanger. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Have you only recently moved in here?’ Addy asked, still taking it in – embroidered corsets, lace-up boots, paste-jewel clutch purses – and calculating how much she could spend; the zebra seemed to smile approvingly, papier mache gatekeeper of all good things. ‘Have you just opened?’

  The woman chuckled, pulling out another frock, one of deep turquoise taffeta: ‘No, dear. I have been here for eleven years. Twelve years in June.’

  ‘How can I have not seen this shop before?’ Addy couldn’t keep the childlike wonder from her voice, as though she’d been flummoxed by a conjurer’s trick.

  The woman shrugged, not looking away from her work, continuing to plump out the bow on the back of the taffeta; she said: ‘When we are young, there is so much to see, but we see what we must eventually, when we are ready to open our eyes to it.’

  Addy’s skin tingled at this cryptic crumb of wisdom, and at the beautiful sentence that delivered it. She asked, more to signal her respect than from necessity: ‘May I look around?’

  ‘Of course!’ The woman chuckled again. ‘Enjoy yourself.’

  ‘I will.’ All thoughts of getting to the library fell away. Addy glanced at her watch: subtracting walking time, she had an hour and a half to enjoy herself here.

  The shop was narrow, perhaps no more than three metres wide, but it seemed to go on for the best part of forever. An hour and a half, Addy realised within moments, could only provide a mere reconnoitre ahead of many, many visits to come. There was too much she wanted to buy, everywhere she looked: a cut-crystal perfume bottle with a lilac tassel; a wall mirror etched all around with rambling pansies; a red net petticoat spotted with flock polka dots; a super-cute polyester shirt of purple cartoon petunias – Only two dollars? So said the tiny paper tag pinned by a thread to the wide collar. And rack after rack of amazing pre-adored frocks that appeared to be sorted by both colour and style. All of their prices were reasonable, too, it seemed, but Addy only had about fifteen dollars left until payday, two days away, and most of that would have to go on general sustenance. She had to buy something, though – a souvenir of first experience.

  Hmmm. She entered what seemed to be the final section, a cul-de-sac of books, floor to ceiling. She could die here – happily. Young woman found expired under a pile of barely scuffed near-new-release paperbacks, after suffering fatal attack of indecision at what to read next. Some of the spines of the books hadn’t even been cracked. And here, right at nose level, was what looked like a pristine copy of the latest great Australian blockbuster, Kathleen McAllister’s The Fire Flight. Addy hadn’t read it yet, nor had she seen the television mini-series it had recently spawned. Perhaps it was time. She opened the cover to check the pencilled price: Fifty cents! That was it, decision made.

  She began making her way back to the front of the shop, book in hand.

  And the purple petunia shirt as well – why not? She grabbed it from its rack on her way through.

  ‘Success?’ The old woman asked, adjusting a dress on a mannequin by the jewellery-display case.

  ‘Success?’ Addy repeated the question, all other words having left her at the vision of loveliness that met her here.

  The dress – on the mannequin – she had to have it. Her heart pounded now with instant and unshakable desire.

  This dress. It was made of pale-sky tulle over charmeuse, full-skirted, with a wide, round neckline and capped sleeves – the complete bundle of Addy’s favourite shapes. But more than this, so much more, the tulle was appliqued all over with a shower of blooms – ruby-hued poppies mostly, true-blue cornflowers, too, tumbling among their leaves and stems – all of them falling into a garden that settled at the hem.

  ‘Exquisite, yes?’ The old woman pinned its price tag to the lining at the back of the bodice.

  ‘Mmm,’ Addy managed to reply, mesmerised. This was the pinnacle of womanly joy frockified.

  ‘It is so small at the waist,’ the woman sighed, patting it at hip height. ‘It will not be easy to sell. But it is very pretty. Many will come to look.’

  Addy nodded, placing the book and the shirt on the glass top of the display case.

  The woman took them up to check their prices. ‘Ah good, good,’ she said, and smiled her broad, jaunty smile at Addy: ‘Two dollars and fifty cents, please.’

  Addy rummaged in her purse, taking out two scrunched-up dollar notes and some coins, but she could hardly drag her eyes from the dress.

  ‘Why don’t you try it on, dear?’ the woman said, her gaze lively and knowing. ‘You are a little thing underneath that boy’s shirt, are you not?’

  ‘I’m sure I can’t afford it,’ Addy mumbled, suddenly embarrassed at her flannelette checks and black jeans. She didn’t like to draw attention to herself in the light, in the staring glare of day. It was only at night that her frocks came out to dance, only after a wine or a beer or three, and that now embarrassed her, too.

  ‘It is twenty-eight dollars and seventy-five cents,’ the woman informed her with Teutonic exactitude. ‘A lay-by purchase may be arranged, should it be required.’ The woman took up a feather duster, adding, ‘I will leave you to think about it,’ and she turned away to dust the shoe shelves behind her.

  Twenty-eight dollars and seventy-five cents … It was a bargain for a dress like that. Even if it was no doubt older than Addy was; 1950s, probably. At any age, this dress was one of a kind – absolutely priceless. Panic fluttered through her: I have to have this dress. For it wasn’t just a dress. It was a story. A hundred stories she had to know; stories that could only be known by wearing them. She glanced at her watch: almost quarter to eleven. Where had the last fifteen minutes gone? She had to go or she’d be late for her lecture; she’d arrive a few minutes late now as it was.

  She said to the woman: ‘I don’t have time to try it on. I …’ She was also reluctant to lay-by anything. She’d witnessed something of the perils of the system at the toy department of Town Hall Variety: women who’d get halfway through repayments for Christmas or birthday gifts they’d bought for their children, only to unexpectedly lose a job or a husband and – whoosh – money and toys would disappear entirely, no correspondence entered into. Interest-free but rough justice indeed – no consumer protections once you signed that kind of contract.

  ‘I understand, dear.’ The woman smiled over a pair of silver-spangled stilettos – Oh dear God, I want them, too. ‘When you return, if the dress is still here, then it must be yours, hm?’

  ‘Hm.’ More wisdom. But when would Addy be able to return? Today, after English, there was lunch with Luke – I can’t stand him up again – then there was Ancient History, then that Gatsby American Lit tute. She wouldn’t leave campus until four-thirty today at the earliest. ‘What time do you close?’

  ‘Four o’clock.’

  Of course you do.

  The woman and her feather duster disappeared around a bank of tall shelves in the centre of the room.

  Addy scribbled a note, surreptitiously, she hoped, tearing off a corner of The Fire Flight’s title page with the wish:

  Wait for me. Please.

  Addy X

  Leaving her name as though they were already friends. She folded this scrap of
frock-longing so that, to the untrained eye, it might have seemed less than nothing, a bus ticket discarded, a shopping docket lodged somewhere unlikely, waiting to be swept away, and she tucked it into the slim belt, a dark green band, buckled at the waist.

  Please.

  ‘Addy?’

  That was the voice of a man, a deep voice promising authority, and she turned as if caught in the act of some petty crime.

  It was the boy from last night, the singer in the band, last seen under pink paisley bedspread on the brown couch. Her stomach turned around hamburger and seventeen flavours of inexpressible shame. Now that she was giving it a moment’s further thought, had they had some sort of argument about student fees over Trivial Pointlessness at some early hour of this morning? Had she really called him a ‘frayed-denim fascist’? Or had she only thought it? She couldn’t be sure. And for all that she didn’t actually care, her heart had started thrashing about again. He was standing at the rack of men’s jackets at the arse-end of the zebra. What the frick is he doing here?

  She remembered his name now, too, half of it, anyway: Dan. Or ‘Dolly’, as his drummer-boy mate called him.

  Dolly? Because his shoulder bones poke at his sleeve-seams as though his shirt is still on its hanger, and his thick dark hair curls at the hinges of his jaw, a frame for the blush of his cheeks.

  Hers were scorching.

  He looked like John Donne – that portrait of the poet as a young law student, or whatever that painting on the cover of her text was called.

  She said, ‘Yep. Hm. Hello. I’m late for English Lit.’

  And she darted out into the street, into the rain.

  ENGLISH LITERATURE & OTHER FORMS OF MIDDLE-CLASS INDULGENCE

  Past the last of the shop awnings there was no cover from the rain whatsoever, all the way along the iron fence of the university grounds and across campus.

  Shit. Addy said that quite a lot as she did her best to keep a steady pace, clutching her satchel to her chest and hunching her shoulders, in an attempt to keep her books from being soaked. Shit. Shit. Shit. The back of her shirt was completely saturated and she was shivering with cold as she skittered in through the entrance doors of the building where English Lit lived. Down the corridor, dripping and squelching her way towards the lecture theatre, she could already hear Professor Westbourne poshly droning into the microphone: ‘Raight, then, where arhhh we …’

  Inside, she could see Professor Westbourne shuffling papers at the lectern. Ha! It appeared he’d only just arrived himself.

  Addy’s knees juddered with relief as she slipped into the nearest aisle seat, puddling everywhere, unbuckling her satchel to find that, while The Fire Flight had been spared, wrapped as it was in polyester petunia shirt, Alexander Pope: Selected Poetry and Prose was near to pulped with soddenness.

  ‘Oh shitty, shitty shit.’

  While her other books had soaked up a share, the one she needed most right now had sat at the front of her satchel, collecting the rain like a sponge. It trickled excess as she drew it out, making its own puddle on the bench before her.

  ‘Don’t let me interrupt your fiddling about up there,’ Professor Westbourne glared over half-moon spectacles at her.

  Heads turned; hers bowed quickly, trying to open the book-sponge to the poem they’d be reading today, but the pages tore like tissue as she did, her fingers clumsy, shaking with the chill at her back, with the faint remains of alcohol poisoning, and with humiliation.

  She might have cried, if Professor Westbourne hadn’t ploughed on.

  ‘Now, “The Rape of the Lock”, one of Pope’s most studied works …’

  The word ‘rape’ scraped at all her nerves as she sat staring at the woodgrains in the bench, varnish worn and scratched. She knew from her own reading that Pope did not mean rape in the modern sense, but an older definition, meaning theft – the poem was about a fellow stealing a lock of hair from a woman called Belinda, a trivial scandal blown up into epic proportions, meant to be funny, or something like that. She hadn’t understood much of the poem – which was why she was here. She needed to know.

  ‘In this special unit, I will attempt to illuminate for you some of the complexity of Pope’s satirical genius,’ the professor went on. ‘What I will not do is bother to explain the many Homeric and other classical allusions and metaphors in the work, as they are too numerous for this brief study, and it is unlikely that many of you will be sincerely interested in any event. Do not waste my time or yours with questions on these. Most of you in this room won’t even finish your degrees …’

  Addy seemed to lose sight of all meaning at that; the edges of her vision dimmed; within a heartbeat, the sound of her own breath seemed to epically amplify. She was sure Professor Westbourne could hear that as well, just as he had apparently peered straight into her soul.

  Adrianna Loest was a waste of space and time.

  You’re a nobody from nowhere – you’re an idiot. How can you think you might know anything about stories, anyone’s story? You don’t even know your own. You don’t even know who you are.

  ‘Are you okay?’ someone whispered beside her. A boy, sitting in her row, shifting closer.

  She looked at him: a pleasant face, concerned eyes behind dark-rimmed glasses. She looked at his hand, there on the bench: long fingers, olive skin, somehow southern European, neatly trimmed nails, an outsider-ally of some kind. But even he seemed terrifying.

  She said: ‘I’m fine. Thank you.’

  She pulled out her copy of The Fire Flight and began to read, to calm herself, to focus her mind around the shapes and sensations of the words.

  ‘There is a legend of a bird that flies but once in its life …’ the enigmatic prologue began. ‘A beautiful bird that soars on one, lone magnificent flight before it bursts into glorious flame. For the height of freedom is only bought at the cost of great sacrifice …’

  Wow. Here was some fantastically muscular melodrama unfolding bold, golden wings from its opening paragraph. The professor’s contemptuous drone disappeared to some place far away from these pages, taking time with it. By lecture’s end, she’d read Part One.

  ‘Next Tuesday, by which time you should have read “Eloise and Abelard”, we will discuss …’

  Guilt jabbed at the intrusion of his voice, and she closed The Fire Flight under the bench, smuggling it back into her damp bag. She’d essentially missed this lecture, anyway; she’d catch up without any problem, especially as there was to be no Homeric curiosity permitted; she studied past papers as a matter of course for all courses. But still … Guilt met a flash of resentment – and asked it out to lunch. As everyone around her lidded pens and folded notebooks away, she took out hers and wrote:

  Dear Prof. Westbourne Wanker,

  You are a pompous and utterly uninspiring bore. I spent this whole lecture reading The Fire Flight, rather than listen to you. Did you know, Kathleen McAllister is an astrobiologist when she’s not writing bestselling novels? (Or so Addy recalled from some television interview with the author she’d seen at home, at Port, watching the box with her dad.) You, on the other hand, don’t appear to want to give anything good or amazing to anyone. And I bet the old Joe at the Olympia Café knows more about Homer than you do, too.

  Most sincerely,

  X

  ‘Excuse me, please.’ The boy with the neatly trimmed fingernails was standing above her, wanting to get past.

  Addy’s face flushed through several shades of red – ‘Oh, sorry’ – she held her notebook close and swung her knees around to make room for him to get out, determined nevertheless to leave the note, this trace of her feeling, behind in the theatre. She carefully tore the soft, still slightly soggy page, the blue ink bleeding a little and somehow emphasising the sentiment; she stood up then and laid it boldly on the seat, for all to see – or at least for the next person to sit here. For a second, she wondered who that might be; she imagined them picking it up and nodding in agreement; she imagined herself, at that l
ittle window of her dreams, writing and writing some vast sprawling novel she hadn’t yet seen.

  You’re going to stand Luke up again at this rate, you self-obsessed, screwy noodle.

  Oh yes, she would; she checked her watch: it was nearing half-past twelve.

  Her dread at seeing Luke was a slightly soggy bleakness all its own. She shouldn’t feel this way about him – he didn’t deserve her weirdness, her distance, her reserve. But it seemed she couldn’t give him much of anything else.

  Luke Neilson was such a nice boy, such a good boy, he was sitting by the big box heater in the campus cafeteria as though he knew she’d be in need of warmth.

  ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said, weaving through the plastic tables towards him.

  ‘Late?’ He smiled and stood up on seeing her. He was so clean-cut handsome he looked like he’d stepped off the cover of a knitting-pattern book, blow-waved and air-brushed. Nice fair hair, nice clear skin, faultlessly nice all round, he was a walking sportswear advertisement, a cricketer and competitive cyclist; he was in his final year of vet science. He loved animals. He lived in a nice, semi-renovated terrace in Glebe but hailed from the nice, leafy North Shore, where his parents and two sisters worshipped him, not unreasonably, alongside their picture of the Queen on the lounge-room wall. Why he was interested in her, Addy could not fathom. He said: ‘Don’t worry, I haven’t been waiting long.’ He touched her on the arm in greeting, knowing better than to attempt a kiss; and with that touch, he added: ‘You’re freezing – did you get caught in the rain?’