Rosalie Ham - The Dressmaker

On the big, leather couch at the post office, Nancy Pickett lay with her head in the soft curve of Ruth’s thin thigh. Beside them the exchange stood quiet, an electric wall of lights and cords and plugs and earphones. Bougainvillea branches scraped hard against the window. Nancy woke, lifted her head and blinked, crinkly goose pimple white and naked, nipples erect like light switches. Ruth stretched and yawned. A branch snapped outside, as Beula crept along the wall of the post office.

‘Beula!’ hissed Nancy.

Nancy scrambled behind the exchange to dress. Ruth leapt to sit at her post, snapped on the overhead light and called, ‘Morning Beula.’

Outside, Beula dropped into a mattress of jagged thorns and broken branches. Nancy skipped the short distance down the lane and popped through loosened palings in a fence, then scrambled through her open window and landed silently on the red-rose linoleum. Her mother Lois lay in her bed scratching at the blackheads lumped over her nose, yesterday’s underwear beneath the pillow.

Nancy padded softly to the bathroom and splashed water on her face, grabbed her purse and made for the kitchen where Bobby was mixing powdered Denkovit and warm water to feed his lambs. Nancy had given him a dog for Christmas – she thought it might stop him sucking his thumb. But recently, while defending the house and all in it, his dog had been bitten by an attacking brown snake and died. In his spare time Bobby played football and rescued animals, including several tortoises, a goanna, a blue tongue lizard and some silkworms the school kids had tired of.

‘Morning sis.’

‘I’m late, Mr A will be waitin’.’

Bobby poured warm, liquid Denkovit into empty beer bottles on the sink. ‘You haven’t had breakfast. You’ve got to have something, it’s not good to start the day without breakfast.’ He stretched rubber teats over the mouths of the bottles.

‘I’ll have milk.’ She grabbed a bottle from the Kelvinator door and shook it, then raised the bottle to her lips and drank. She dumped the bottle back in the refrigerator door and inched her way through the hungry pets crowding the back porch – three lambs, two cats, a poddy calf and a joey, some pigeons, magpies, chooks and a lame wombat.

As she unlocked the chemist shop door she saw Beula Harridene advancing. Her shins were scratched and a purple petal clung to her cardigan. Nancy stepped into her path, smiled and said, ‘Morning again, Mrs Harriden .’

Beula looked directly back at Nancy and said, ‘One of these –’

Suddenly she gasped, slapped a hand over her mouth and bolted. Nancy was both pleased and puzzled. She unlocked the chemist door, stood by the mirror to run a comb through her hair and saw why Beula had run – a white milk smear rimmed her lips. She smiled.

• • •

By eight fifty on Monday morning Sergeant Farrat had bathed and dressed in his crisp navy uniform. His cap was perched gaily to one side, his navy skirt was taut across his thighs and generous buttocks, and the seams at the back of his pale nylon calves were straight as a new fence line. His new checked gingham skirt hung starched and pressed on the wardrobe doorknob behind him. He was vacuuming the last of the telltale threads into the bladder of his upright Hoover.

Beula Harridene stood on the porch, her face pressed to the window, squinting into the dimness. She banged on the door. The sergeant switched off his cleaner and wound the cord precisely up and down the handle catches. He removed his skirt and hung it with his gingham skirt in the wardrobe, then locked the door. He paused a moment to run his hands over his nylon stockings and admire his new lace panties. Then he put on his navy trousers, socks and shoes. He checked his image in the mirror and made his way to the office.

Outside, Beula hopped from one foot to the other. Sergeant Farrat glanced up at the clock and unlocked the front door. Beula fell in blabbering.

‘Those dogs barked all Saturday night, stirred up by those hoodlum footballers, and since you haven’t silenced them I’ve phoned Councillor Pettyman this morning and he’s says he’ll see to it, and I’ve written to your superiors again – this time I told them everything. What’s the point of having a law enforcer if he enforces the law according to himself, not the legal law? Your clock’s set wrong, you open up late and I know you lock up early Fridays …’

Beula Harridene had bloodshot-beige eyes that bulged. She had an undershot chin and rabbit-size buck teeth, so her bottom lip was forever blue with bruised imprints and froth gathered and dried at the corners of her unfortunate mouth. The sergeant concluded that because her bite was inefficient she was starving, therefore vicious, malnourished and mad. While Beula went on, and on, Sergeant Farrat placed a form on the counter, sharpened a pencil and wrote, ‘Nine O-one Monday 9th October …’

Beula stamped her feet. ‘… AND, that daughter of Mad Molly’s is back – the murderess! And that fancy William Beaumont’s been hanging around town too, Sergeant, neglecting his poor mother and the property, hanging about with those hoodlum footballers, well let me tell you if he’s got any queer ideas we’ll all suffer, I know what men get up to when they go away to cities, there are men dressed as women and I know –’

‘How do you know Beula?’

Beula smiled, ‘My father warned me.’

Sergeant Farrat looked directly at Beula and raised his pale eyebrows. ‘And how did he know, Beula?’

Beula blinked.

‘What is your particular problem today, Beula?’

‘I’ve been assaulted, this very morning, I’ve been assaulted by a pack of marauding children –’

‘And what did these children look like Beula?’

‘They looked like children – short and grubby.’

‘In school uniform?’

‘Yes.’

As Beula talked the sergeant wrote. ‘Sergeant Horatio Farrat, Dungatar police station, reports an official complaint made by Mrs Beula Harridene. Mrs Harridene has been the victim of marauding schoolchildren, two boys and a girl, who early this morning were seen fleeing from outside Mrs Harridene’s residence having attacked her premises. Mrs Harridene accuses the said three school-children of throwing bunches of seed pods onto her corrugated iron roof, having stolen the bunches of seed pods from the jacaranda tree located on her nature strip.’

‘It was those McSwineys! I saw them …’ She continued to screech, sweating, a sweet pungency permeating the room and small droplets of spittle flying, landing on Sergeant Farrat’s logbook. He gathered the form and his book and took a step back. Beula clutched the counter, swaying, her teeth puncturing her lower lip.

‘All right Beula. Lets go see Mae and Edward, look over a few of their kids.’

He drove Beula to her house. First they established that wind must have blown away all the bunches of seed pods from the guttering surrounding her roof. Next Sergeant Farrat drove in search of the said accused criminals. Nancy was leaning on her broom chatting while Purl hosed the footpath. Irma was at her front gate. Lois and Betty were at Pratts’ window, their arms through wicker basket handles. Miss Dimm was standing in her school yard, waist deep in a pool of children. Opposite, Ruth Dimm and Norma Pullit paused while unloading mailbags from the small red post office van.

Everyone saw Beula drive past squawking away at poor old Sergeant Farrat and everyone smiled and waved back as the sergeant tooted his way through the main street.

It was a fine sweet Monday out at the McSwineys’: there was an easterly blowing, which meant that their happy ramshackle home was downwind of the tip. Edward McSwiney sat on the car seat in the sunshine mending drum nets, threading new wire through bent and torn chicken wire and round and around rusty steel frames. Three small kids ran about cornering squawking flapping fowls, then took them to the chopping block where Barney, awkward, stood with an axe. The blade was stuck with blood-tipped feathers, Barney’s shirt was red-splattered. He was crying, so Princess Margaret handed him the poker and sent him to stoke the fire under the boiling chook-filled copper while she wielded the axe. Mae grabbed the hot floating chickens from the copper to pluck them, then Elizabeth lay them on a tree stump and tore the entrails from their pink and dimpled carcasses.