Rosalie Ham - The Dressmaker

‘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?