Rosalie Ham - The Dressmaker

A rubber cricket ball bounced and rolled past her. Stewart Pettyman called, ‘Get it Dunnybum, get it!’

Another boy called, ‘No no, she’ll take it into the girls’ toilet again!’

‘Yeah, then we can get her again!’

They all started shouting, ‘Get the ball Dunnybum and we’ll get you, get the ball Dunnybum and we’ll fill your mouth with poo.’ The girls joined in. Myrtle ran inside.

After school Myrtle ran, but he was waiting, blocking her way at the library corner. He grabbed her around the neck, dragged her down beside the library, held her by the throat against the wall and rubbed her fanny hard under her panties. Myrtle couldn’t breathe and vomit rose. It burned in her nose.

When he finished he looked into her eyes, like a red devil. He was wet and smelled hot, like wee. He said, ‘Stand really really still Dunnybum or I’ll come around to your house tonight and I’ll kill your mother the slut, and when she’s dead I’ll get you.’

Myrtle stood still, up against the wall. He walked backwards looking at her with his devil eyes. Myrtle knew what he was going to do, it was his favourite. He put his head down like a bull and ran ran ran at her as fast as he could, head first at her tummy, like a bull charging. Myrtle sucked in her tummy and closed her eyes – he could just kill her.

She decided to die.

Then she changed her mind.

She stepped sideways.

The boy ran head first, full pelt into the red brick library wall. He crumpled and fell onto the hot dry grass.

• • •

Molly wheeled in. She’d grown fond of her chair and had decorated it. As she sat by the fire or in the sun on the veranda, she tied bits of wool thread and plaited ribbons over the armrests, wove climbing geraniums through the spokes, and shoved several small square knitted rugs about the seat-cushion. When the whim took her she would abandon her colourful wheelchair for her walking stick and wander around the house prodding about in crockery cupboards, dislodging curtain rails or scraping objects onto the floor from bench tops. She parked at the hearth next to the girl who was staring into the fire. ‘How was the ball, Cinderella?’ she asked.

‘The gowns were wonderful.’ She told herself she couldn’t expect anything from this town. ‘It was a wedding.’

‘Shame.’

• • •

Gertrude stepped out of her wedding gown and hung it on a coathanger. She caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror – an unremarkable brunette with quiver-thighs and unbeautiful breasts. She let the tea-coloured silk negligee slide over her chilly nipples and looked in the mirror again.

‘I am Mrs William Beaumont of Windswept Crest,’ she said.

William was nonchalantly reading a book in bed, his striped flannel pyjamas unbuttoned down his chest. She slid in next to her husband and he said, ‘Well,’ then rolled over to switch off the light. She took a piece of towelling from her feminine sponge bag and manoeuvred it beneath her buttocks.

William found her in the dark. They embraced, kissed. His body felt hard yet flannel-soft. She felt spongy and slippery.

William lay on top of Gertrude and she opened her legs. Something warm and hard poked out from his pyjamas and nudged about her inner thighs. He started humping and puffing in her ear, so she shifted around under him until his penis found a damp patch in her pubic hair and he pushed.

He lay beside her. ‘Did I hurt you, dear?’

‘A little,’ she said. It wasn’t like it was described in Married Life at all. The discomfort was only momentary and localised, a rude and uncomfortable sensation. Once, when she was young, she’d shoved her hand down a hollow log for a dare. Her fingers got covered in something warm, runny-wet, sticky, prickly and gooey; broken eggs. A bird’s nest in the log. That sensation had made her feel strangely affronted too.

‘Well,’ said William and kissed her cheek. He felt it had been quite satisfying and all had gone well. He’d approached his prone bride as he’d approached the one small chocolate egg he received after eleven o’clock church each Easter Sunday. He’d peel the tin foil back gently exposing a small area of chocolate. Then he’d break off one section to suck, savouring it. But William was always overcome and would shove the entire egg into his mouth quickly, gorging himself, and be left both satisfied, and strangely not.

‘Are you happy?’ asked William.

His wife replied, ‘I’m happy now.’ William found her hand and held it.

Gertrude kept the small towel in place beneath her bottom for the rest of the night. In the morning she inspected the red and flaky smears closely, sniffed them then wrapped the towelling in brown paper and put it aside to drop in the bin at a discreet moment. When she stepped under the shower she was humming. The new Mrs Beaumont refused the offer of a breakfast tray in bed and arrived at the table immaculately groomed and beaming. Elsbeth and Mona found something serious to look at in their eggs and William splashed a newspaper about in front of him, but Gertrude was not blushing.

‘Good morning all,’ she said.

‘Good morning,’ they chorused.

There followed an awkward silence.

‘Gosh,’ said Mona, ‘one person at each side of the table now.’

‘When will harvest be over?’ asked Gertrude.

‘As I said, dear, it depends on the weather.’ He looked to his mother for support. Elsbeth was staring out the window.

‘Can’t you get a man to oversee it?’

‘Well, dear, there’s Edward McSwiney but I –’

‘Oh William, that wretched man again!’ Elsbeth banged her teacup in its saucer and crossed her arms.

Gertrude smiled sweetly. ‘I really don’t mind so much about our honeymoon William, really I don’t, it’s just … an urgent trip to Melbourne is necessary . I need to purchase some new materials for curtains in our room –’

‘They were perfectly adequate for me,’ said Elsbeth.

‘Anyone for more tea?’ said Mona turning the pot.

‘Stop turning the pot – you’ll wear a ring in the table,’ snapped Elsbeth.

‘New linen is needed and I need a few things to complete my trousseau, to start my new life properly.’ Gertrude bit into her toast and poured salt onto the plate beside her egg. Elsbeth sent William a filthy squint-eye look and William sunk behind his newspaper again.

Mrs William Beaumont continued, ‘There’s Dad’s account at Myers and he gave me a blank cheque.’

William turned crimson. The colour completely drained from Elsbeth’s face and Mona cried, ‘Oh, lets go! It’s been years since we’ve been shopping!’

Gertrude frowned at the tarnished teaspoon, then whipped the top off her soft-boiled egg.

Tilly sat in the shade of the thickening wisteria watching a long freight train move slowly away from the silo and crawl around to the south, disappearing behind The Hill. It rumbled away to the west, into a watery horizon. It was summer again, hot, that time of the year when Christmas and shearing season have come and gone, and the sun has ripened the crops. The sound of rolling steel, bumping, metal on metal, carries over Dungatar from the railway lines, as giant engines arrive to shunt grain trucks together beside the square, corrugated silo.

When the engines arrive children come to watch and play at the silo. Trains roll up pulling empty trucks to be filled with wheat, while others come from Winyerp and are already filled with sorghum. Winyerp sits smugly to the north of Dungatar in the middle of an undulating brown blanket of acres and acres of sorghum. The farms around Dungatar are golden seas of wheat, which are stripped, the header spewing the grain into semitrailers. The semis transport the grain and pour it into the silo. When the mountains of wheat are dry, a huge auger is plunged into their hearts and grain is spiralled up, then spilled onto a conveyor belt which takes it to the loading dock where it’s poured into an empty rail truck, filling it to the top with the yellow grain. In the heat of the day, suffocating wheat dust clouds the silo. The grain trucks are left standing close by, waiting, until the engines roll into place and they are coupled and herded and attached to the end of the line of sorghum-filled trucks. Eventually the engines tow them away, brimming with dusty gold and brown seed, away from the vast grain belt where the sun shines most of the year and rain is too often scarce. The engines will stop again and again at silos and sidings to take on fuel or more grain trucks, dragging them to a distant port. Passengers in cars stopped at railway crossings count up to fifty trucks rumbling past.