Rosalie Ham - The Dressmaker

Muriel crossed her arms. ‘I’m no stickybeak.’

Alvin came out from his office. His wife kept her eyes on Beula and said flatly, ‘Beula says that Sergeant Farrat said if we went to the funeral we’d only be ghoulish and that we never had any patience or respect for Molly so we’d just be stickybeaking.’

‘We should by rights shut the door when a hearse and procession goes past, but I doubt there’ll be one,’ said Alvin, and picked up the docket book.

Lois Pickett lumbered in through the front door and up to the counter saying, ‘I fink we should go to the funeral, don’t youse?’

‘Why?’ said Muriel, ‘are you Tilly’s friend or are you just going to go for a “stickybeak” as Sergeant Farrat says?’

‘She’s still got mendin’ of mine see –’

‘It would be insincere to go, Lois,’ said Beula.

‘Ghoulish, according to Sergeant Farrat,’ said Muriel.

‘Well I suppose …’ said Lois and scratched her head. ‘Do youse fink there’s somethink going on between the sarge and Tilly?’

‘What do you mean?’ shot Muriel.

‘An affair,’ said Beula, ‘I always suspected it.’

‘Nothing would surprise me,’ said Muriel.

Alvin rolled his eyes and walked back to his office.

• • •

Sergeant Farrat arrived to collect Tilly wearing a black knee-length wool-crepe frock with a draped neck, a stylish lampshade overskirt cut assymetrically, black stockings and sensible black pumps with a discreet leather flower stitched to the heel. ‘Molly would disapprove,’ he smiled, ‘can’t you just see her expression?’

‘Your dress will be ruined in this rain.’

‘I can always make another one and besides, I have a nice blue cape and umbrella in the car.’

She looked at him and frowned.

‘I don’t care, Tilly,’ he said, ‘I’m beyond caring what those people think or say anymore. I’m sure everyone’s seen what’s on my clothes line over the years, and I’m just about due to retire anyway.’ He offered her his elbow.

‘The rain will keep the crowds away,’ said Tilly and they stepped from the veranda to the police car.

Reginald drove Molly to her resting place in Pratts’ grocery van, then leaned on it to watch the two mourners, their hair plastered to their foreheads and their faces screwed in the rain. Sergeant Farrat clasped his hands together under his cape and raised his voice above the grey din. ‘Molly Dunnage came to Dungatar with a babe-in-arms to start a new life. She hoped to leave behind her troubles, but hers was a life lived with trouble travelling alongside and so Molly lived as discreetly as she possibly could in the full glare of scrutiny and torment. Her heart will rest easier knowing Myrtle again before she died.

‘We bid Molly farewell and in our sadness, our anger and our disbelief we beg for Molly a better life hereafter, a life of love and acceptance and we wish for her everlasting peace – for I suspect that is all she ever wished for herself. That is what, in her heart, she would have wanted for anyone.’

Councillor Evan Pettyman, on behalf of the Dun-gatar Shire Council, had sent a wreath. Tilly scooped it from the top of the coffin with the shovel then dropped it on the sodden clay at her feet and sliced it into tiny wedges. Reginald stepped forward to help them lower Molly to rest. Flat raindrops plopped, smacked a rat ta tat tat at the coffin top, as Tilly dropped the first clod of earth onto her mother’s final bed.

The men stood respectfully in the rain either side of the thin girl in the big wet hat. She leaned on the shovel, shuddering in a grey crying sky, mud stuck to her boots and caked to the cuffs of her trousers. ‘I will miss you,’ she cried, ‘I will just go on missing you as I always have.’

Reginald handed Sergeant Farrat the bill for the cost of the casket and hire of Alvin’s van. The sergeant put it in his pocket, took the shovel from Tilly and said, ‘Let’s tuck Molly in, then go and drink laced tea until we feel some understanding has been reached on behalf of Molly Dunnage and the life she was given.’

Tilly held the umbrella over the sergeant as he shovelled, the blue cape stuck in folds about him, his black pumps sinking in the clay. The rain trickled down, darkening his stockings.

Much later Beula heard them singing as she crept up The Hill. She crouched at the back window and saw Tilly Dunnage leaning with Sergeant Horatio Farrat, who was wearing a frock. The kitchen table was littered with empty bottles, discarded clothing and old photograph albums, and the Holy Bible lay open, its pages stabbed and ripped – they’d found no understanding in it, so had killed it. The two mourners swayed together with their heads back singing, ‘ You made me love you, I didn’t want to do it –’

‘No no no, not that one. That’s exactly what happened!’ said Tilly.

So Sergeant Farrat sang, ‘ Ma, he’s making eyes at me, Ma he’s awful nice to me –’

‘NO, definitely not that one either.’

‘ Who were you with last night? Out in the –’

‘No.’

‘I’ve got one Til, howbout When I grow too old to dream -–’

‘Yes Yes, that’s one she’d’ve liked. Lesgo, onetwo-tree …’

They steepled together again and sang, ‘ When I grow too old to dream, I’ll have you to remember, when I grow too old to dream, your love will live in my heart –’

‘Oh shit,’ said Tilly, ‘she would have hated that one. All those songs are corruptive, pornographic.’

‘No wonder she got into trouble.’

‘That’s exactly right. That’s it!’ said Tilly and took the tea cosy from her head and threw it in the air.

‘What?’

‘It’s all the fault of persuasive popular song, and a lecher.’

‘Solved,’ said the sergeant and sat down at the table. He poured them a glass of champagne and they toasted.

‘Lessing Loch Lomon’ again.’

‘No more singing,’ said Tilly, ‘it’s corruptive!’ She went to the lounge room and toppled back through the kitchen with the radiogram in her arms.

Beula jumped away from the window light and lay flat in the dark on the grass. Tilly braked on the veranda and with a grunt slung her radiogram out into the black night. There was a sickening uugghh sound and a muffled thud as Tilly went back inside. She grabbed her records and ran back out with them, stacked them beside her on the veranda, then stood in the oblong yellow light from the doorway, flinging them one by one to the wind.

• • •

When the edge of the flying radiogram hit Beula it dented her forehead, broke her nose and gave her mild concussion. She felt her way home along the worn tracks, along the fences she knew so well, and lay down. Her wound started to seep, and a black and green bruise swelled from the raw fleshy cavity in the middle of her face all the way down to her undershot chin and over the creased brow to her hairline.

On Monday morning Sergeant Farrat took his preparatory bath and waited for Beula. He waited again on Tuesday morning until half past nine, then went looking. There was no response to his knock so he opened the door to Beula’s grease-and-dust-caked kitchen, immediately dancing backwards, coughing. He rushed back to the police car, took a bottle of eucalyptus oil from the glove box and poured it onto his handkerchief. Back at the kitchen door he pressed the scented cloth against his nostrils and entered. He found her, a stiff, black-stained tea towel draped over her head, lifting and sucking back in the middle where a nose should have peaked the material. ‘Beula?’ he breathed. There was a noise like rattling drops in a drinking straw and her arms raised a little. He pinched the edge of the towel and jumped back quickly, dropping it onto the floor. Beula’s eyes were bulging purple-red slits and there was a crusty, blackened hole in the middle of her face. Two brown stumps jutted where her eye teeth had snapped off at the gums.