Mum’s. Yeah, it was Mum’s old trunk, sent on to him when Emmie had passed away. Stan had never opened it, never even touched the thing. How could he? It had been hard enough to believe that Emmie had died; stout, loud-voiced Em who’d bossed him all through childhood – how could such a noisy person actually be dead?
Stan didn’t know what made him do it now: abandon the glossy new mower, drag the old trunk from the wardrobe, kneel down on the cold cement floor and force the rusty catches, fling back the lid and peer inside.
He found paper. Clouds of it. Layer on layer of filmy tissue, so old the colours had turned milky, the paper gone limp and soft as cloth. ‘Twenty-six, twenty-seven,’ counted Stan, as the sheets sighed beneath his fingers, until, pinned to the last, twenty-eighth sheet he found a note on the blue lined paper Emmie had always used. ‘Mum’s Wedding Dress,’ he read. He lifted the sheet, and wisps of dried lavender and ancient rose petals floated into the air.
There it was, then.
And Stan remembered it, even though he’d seen the dress only once before, on the evening Emmie had come home and announced that she and Brian Kelloway were engaged, and Mum had brought this dress out from some secret hiding place and shown it to them, holding it up against the light. ‘My wedding dress,’ she’d said shyly, smiling at the pair of them. ‘Emmie, perhaps when you and Brian get married, you’d like to wear it.’
Emmie had baulked like a stout heifer urged to jump a fence. ‘I can’t wear that!’ she’d protested. ‘It looks like a nightie!’
‘A nightie!’ Stan had echoed, giggling wildly, jumping up and down so that the old floorboards had shivered and the pots had rattled on the stove. He’d been ten at the time, and you didn’t know what was what at that age.
And though it was all of seventy years ago he could remember how his mother’s face had gone bright red. They were all like that, he and mum and Emmie: when they were hurt or angry the skin of their faces turned a dark dull red. They couldn’t do anything about it; everyone could see how they felt. Lily was just the same.
Back then Stan hadn’t noticed how Mum was hurt because they were poking fun at her wedding dress, and neither had Emmie, though Em had been eighteen. He could only see it now, when he was eighty, and Mum and Emmie were gone; he could see Mum’s thin hands folding the dress away, hear her voice saying stiffly, ‘Well, it’s not a nightie’; even hear her heavy footsteps on the hall linoleum, bearing it away.
He’d never seen it again.
Stan lifted the dress carefully from the trunk. The soft white – silk, was it? (he didn’t know much about materials) had mellowed to a creamy colour over years and years. It was older than he was, heading on bravely into its tenth decade. There was fancy stuff along the top and down along the hem – wide bands of tiny pearly beads in the shapes of leaves and flowers. Stan thrust out a stubby finger, half expecting the beads to fall at his touch, scattering on the oily floor of the shed, but they held fast and he thought how things were made properly in those days, things were made to last. Folding the wedding dress across his arms he carried it out from the shed.
It was a gloomy morning up there in the mountains, the clouds hung low and the foggy dew drifted in fat white streamers across the yard, and yet as Stan crossed the lawn towards the back door there was such a feeling of warmth on his arms where he held the dress that he thought for a moment the sun had come out and he looked up in surprise.
There was no sun. It was the dress; it was like carrying a warm ray of sunlight folded across his arms.
‘Emmie thought it looked like a nightie,’ he told May.
‘A nightie? Nonsense!’ May took the dress from Stan’s arms and laid it gently over the back of the sofa, its soft length spilling down over the plumped cushions and ribbed blue corduroy. ‘It’s a 1920s wedding dress, anyone can see.’
‘Yeah, well, I don’t know about that – dresses and stuff.’
‘And your Emmie wouldn’t have fitted inside it, anyway,’ giggled May. ‘She was a big old thing.’ May patted her own ample hips. ‘It wouldn’t have fitted me, either, or our Marigold – she’s skinny enough, but too tall. You need to be small for this kind of dress – a chemise dress, it’s called.’ May’s voice went soft on the word
chemise
, as if she’d remembered her own mother in just such a dress, scoop-necked, sleeveless and embroidered, leaning over the cot to sweep May up in her arms. That couldn’t be, of course, because Lily’s nan had been a foundling; she’d never known her mother.
Lily was ten when she’d learned Nan had been brought up in a Home, and for a long time afterwards she’d kept waking up in the middle of the night, imagining what it might feel like to be all by yourself in the world. Not simply to be without a dad, but to have absolutely no one in your family: no Mum and Dad, no brothers and sisters or uncles and aunties and cousins, no Nan and Pop – no one except for you. And though she lay snug beneath her doona, the thought would make Lily go cold all over, from the top of her head to the tips of her tingly toes.
To have
no one.
It made her own small family, with all its faults and peculiarities, its bickerings and squabblings, seem rich in comparison.
It certainly seemed rich to May. In her pretty living room, she gazed tenderly at the wedding dress, dreamily running a finger along the beaded hem. ‘Look at this embroidery, Stan. The work in
that
! Think she did it herself? Your mum?’
‘Dunno.’ Stan felt a small stab of guilt, because shouldn’t he know something like that about his mum? He remembered sitting with her out on the front verandah on summer evenings, Mum passing him a needle and a length of dull grey cotton. ‘Thread this for me, will you, love? My eyes aren’t what they used to be.’ Patches on his school shorts, that had been, and beside her chair lay a dress of Emmie’s, with its skirt waiting to be let down. No embroidery though – bringing up two kids on a widow’s pension wouldn’t have left much time for fancywork. But perhaps when she was younger, before she’d married . . .
‘They’re lilies,’ said May, tracing the pattern of tiny beads. ‘Little lilies. See, Stan? If she did it herself they must have been her favourite flowers. Were they?’
‘Can’t remember.’ Stan shuffled his feet like a schoolkid, feeling guilty again.
‘And now we’ve got a Lily in the family! Your mum would have loved that, I bet.’
‘Yeah.’
May’s face lit up. ‘Stan! Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Lily could wear this dress on her wedding day!’
Stan eyed the dress and snorted. ‘More like a miracle, if you ask me.’
‘What?’ May was indignant. ‘Our Lily’s a lovely girl!’
‘Didn’t mean that.’
‘Then what did you mean?’
Stan jabbed a thumb at the dress. ‘Lil’s the wrong shape.’ May studied the dress for a moment, picturing her grand-daughter. She hated to admit it, but Stan was right: Lily wasn’t big, but she was stocky, square-shaped like Stan. The dress wouldn’t fit her either, wouldn’t sit across her shoulders for a start. A shadow of disappointment crossed May’s face; she would have loved to pass this dress on within the family, to see it worn at another wedding.
And then she brightened. ‘Lonnie!’ she exclaimed.
Stan frowned. ‘What’s he got to do with it?’
Even to hear his grandson’s name made Stan’s face turn red. Lon had done his dash with Stan.
‘When he gets married,’ explained May.
Stan glowered. ‘Wearing frocks now, is he?’
‘Of course not,’ said May. ‘And what if he was? But I meant his bride.’
‘His
bride
? Who the heck would want to marry Lonnie?’
‘Lots of girls,’ said May loyally.
‘They’d have to be a shingle short then,’ said Stan, ‘and we don’t want another loony in the family. Lon’s enough for us.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with Lonnie.’
Stan ignored this. ‘Reckon you’re behind the times, anyway. Kids don’t get married these days.’
‘Sometimes they do,’ retorted May.
Stan didn’t hear her. Turning on his heel, he stomped out of the room.
The back door banged and then creaked open again.
May went out and closed it. ‘Born in a tent!’ she observed, inclining her head a little towards the old friend she felt should be standing right beside her. Then she went back into the living room and sat down on the sofa, patting the cushion, inviting her friend to sit down too. She lifted the dress onto her lap and stroked its creamy folds.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said, turning to Sef with a smile. ‘Don’t you think so?’
‘Consider:’ wrote Lily, copying down Mr Skerrit’s Friday discussion topic from the board, ‘if Hamlet was a teenager, how would this affect your view of Shakespeare’s play?’
A lot, thought Lily, imagining Hamlet with her brother’s melancholy face, and that low, tragic voice she’d heard from her room those nights long ago when she’d been in Year 6 and Lonnie had been studying for the HSC. Lonnie muttering quotations and statistics as he paced up and down the hall, Lonnie telling Mum he was convinced he was going to fail; Mum crying, ‘No, no! Of course you won’t!’, which should have been encouraging, except for that fearful little quiver in her voice that meant she was as scared as him.
Lonnie’s HSC was long behind him. He’d passed it – by the skin of his teeth, as Pop had said. He’d gone on to TAFE and then university, dropping out of courses, and dropping in again. He was twenty-two now, no longer a teenager, and yet his habits were teenage; and Lily could easily imagine a modern-day Hamlet having such habits: lying in bed all weekend brooding about himself, using three towels to take a shower, abandoning them in a wet clump on the bathroom floor for someone else to pick up, leaving the electric heater on all night, instead of switching it off when he went to bed . . .
Switching it off – all at once a disturbing thought struck Lily: had she turned off the electric jug before she left home this morning? She pictured the dark little kitchen at 22 Roslyn Avenue; the wooden bench beside the sink and the big electric jug which sat square in the middle of it – a jug so ancient that it didn’t switch off automatically and you had to turn it off at the wall. And Lily couldn’t remember if she’d done that this morning. She remembered putting the jug on after Mum had left for work, thinking she’d have a second cup of tea, and then realising she simply didn’t have the time.
But had she turned it off then?
Lily screwed her eyes shut, trying to remember.
‘Something wrong, Lily?’ asked Mr Skerrit jovially. ‘Sight of a bit of homework too much for you?’
‘Oh no,’ said Lily. ‘It wasn’t that.’ Jolted so abruptly from her anxious reverie she almost added, ‘I can’t remember if I turned the jug off,’ but stopped herself just in time. How ridiculous she would have sounded! How stodgy, how middle-aged! A warm tide of colour flooded her cheeks as she imagined the giggles and whispers rippling round the class.
Lily took up her pen again and tried industriously to make notes. ‘Can a person always be a teenager?’ she scribbled. ‘Or always middle-aged? (Like me?) If Hamlet . . .’
But it was no good; the dark little kitchen came sliding into her mind again. What would happen if she’d left the jug turned on? First it would boil dry. Then what? The coils inside the jug would grow red hot, and then the jug itself; the old wooden bench would blacken, begin to smoke, to flare; the curtains at the window would catch, and then the wall . . . Their poor old house would burn down to the ground. How pleased Pop would be! How triumphant! ‘Now you can buy a place that’s fit for human habitation!’ he’d roar at them delightedly.
The bell rang for the end of first period. Second period was Library, easy to skip because Ms Esterhazy hardly ever bothered with the roll. Lily’s house (if it was still there) was three short streets away; she could be home and back before anyone even noticed she had gone.
The jug sat on the bench, stone cold. She’d run home for nothing, and now she felt a fool. She felt stupid and – middle-aged.
Sitting with Tracy Gilman and the other girls at lunch and recess, Lily could take part in their conversations; she could
sound
like them, she knew the words – goss and glam and fave and juicy – yet inside, where it mattered, Lily felt a fraud. When Tracy went on about some boy she fancied, or poor Lizzie Banks wondered aloud if that dimply skin on her thighs could possibly be cellulite, what Lily really felt like saying was: ‘Tsk,’ the little sound her nan made when the milk boiled over or Pop left a trail of muddy footprints on the newly polished floor. And ‘tsk!’ was worse than middle-aged, it was
old
. Even her mother never said it.
What’s
happening
to me? panicked Lily, her stricken gaze travelling round the kitchen, over the grotty old bench and down the cupboard doors, and then very slowly across the ancient linoleum, as if the answer to her question might lie inscribed in those mysteriously faded patterns she and Lonnie had never been able to work out. Were they leaves and flowers? Baskets? Clouds and unicorns?
Oh! Lily gave a small startled jump. In the dark corner by the sink, beneath that big hole in the skirting board, she saw something small and pale and lifeless, something pudgy, huddled . . .
‘Seely?’ she whispered.
Seely was the name of a hamster Lonnie had owned, way back when he was in Year 6 and Lily had just been starting school. Seely had disappeared and Lonnie had claimed (
still
claimed, even now) that those mysterious scuttlings in their walls at night were made by his lost pet; an old, old Seely, perhaps with a wife and children, grandchildren . . .
Lily took a cautious step towards the hole in the skirting board. Could Lonnie have actually been right? Could this huddled shape be Seely then? Perhaps come out to die? Seely had been that exact shade of dirty, brownish grey. Seal-grey. How long did hamsters live?
‘Seely?’ Lily whispered again, prodding the small still shape gently with her shoe. How creepily it sort of
gave.
Changed shape, became long and limp and raggy, so she saw at once it was nothing more than the wet dishcloth that Mum, in a hurry to get to work, must have lobbed at the sink, missed, and then, fecklessly (like Lonnie and possibly Hamlet) couldn’t be bothered to pick up. Lily snatched it from the floor and hung it where it should be, on the hook above the sink. The tap was dripping sullenly, it needed a new washer; she’d have to remember to buy one from the hardware store. ‘Tsk,’ she muttered irritably.