The Dressmaker

‘You can't keep anything secret here,’ said the old woman. ‘Everybody knows everything about everyone but no one ever tittle-tattles because then someone else'll tell on them. But you don't matter—it's open slather on outcasts.’

Tilly Dunnage had maintained her industrious battle until the house was scrubbed and shiny and the cupboards bare, all the tinned food eaten, and now Molly sat in the dappled sunlight at the end of the veranda in her wheelchair, the wisteria behind her just beginning to bud.

‘Your husband's mighty slow these days. How did you manage that?’ Tilly placed an apologetic hand, lighter than pollen, on Mrs. Almanac's cold, stony shoulder. Irma smiled. 'Percival says God is responsible for everything.' She used to have a lot of falls, which left her with a black eye or a cut lip. Over the years, as her husband ground to a stiff and shuffling old man, her injuries ceased.

She eats birdseed and fruit and other things she has sent from the city. She gets things from overseas too, from places I've never heard of. She mixes things up—potions—says they're herbs, "remedial", and she pretends to be an arty type, so why would she want to stay here?

Couples stood aside and stared at Tilly, draped in a striking green gown that was sculpted, crafted about her svelte frame. It curved with her hips, stretched over her breasts and clung to her thighs. And the material—georgette, two-and-six a yard from the sale stand at Pratts. The girls in their short frocks with pinched waists, their hair stiff in neat circles, opened their pink lips wide and tugged self-consciously at their frothy skirts.

Every female seated in the War Memorial Hall that afternoon had listened hard, waited with bated breath for the name of a seamstress or dressmaker. She wasn't mentioned.

Gertrude stepped out of her wedding gown and hung it on a coat hanger. She caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror an unremarkable brunette with quiver-thighs and unbeautiful breasts. She let the tea-colored silk negligee slide over her chilly nipples and looked in the mirror again. 'I am Mrs. William Beaumont of Windswept Crest,' she said.

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 wheat will become flour or perhaps it will sail to overseas lands. The famous Winyerp sorghum will become stock fodder. The town will be quiet again and the children will go back to the creek to play. The adults will wait for football season. The cycle was familiar to Tilly, a map.

'They've grown airs, think they're classy. You're not doing them any good.'

'They think I'm not doing you any good.' Tilly handed Teddy her smoke. 'Everyone likes to have someone to hate,' she said.

'But you want them to like you,' said Molly. 'They're all liars, sinners and hypocrites.'

'lt's not that—it's what I've done. Sometimes I forget about it and just when I'm…it's guilt, and the evil inside me—I carry it around with me, in me, all the time. It's like a black thing—a weight…it makes itself invisible then creeps back when I feel safest…that boy is dead. And there's more.'

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 cob-webs 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.

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 rip. The McSwineys kept at a distance but tragedy includes everyone, and anyway, wasn't everyone else in the town different, yet included?

Sergeant Farrat said love was as strong as hate and that as much as they themselves could hate someone, they could also love an outcast. Teddy was an outcast until he proved himself an asset and he'd loved an outcast—little Myrtle Dunnage.

The people of Dungatar gravitated to each other. They shook their heads, held their jaws, sighed and talked in hateful tones. Sergeant Farrat moved amongst his flock, monitoring them, listening. They had salvaged nothing of his sermon, only their continuing hatred.

Tilly feared football defeat would send the people to her, that they would spill enraged and dripping from the gateway of the oval to stream up The Hill with clenched fists for revenge blood.

'Plays are such fun to put on. They bring out the best and worst in people, don't you think?'

'I realized I still had something here. I thought I could live back here, I thought that here I could do no more harm and so I would do good.' She looked at the flames. 'lt isn't fair.'

'Then when he couldn't have his son anymore, I couldn't have you.' Molly wiped tears from her eyes and looked directly at Tilly. 'I went mad with loneliness for you, I'd lost the only friend I had, the only thing I had, but over the years I came to hope you wouldn't come back to this awful place.' She looked at her hands in her lap. 'Sometimes things just don't seem fair.'

'Pain will no longer be our curse, Molly,' she said. 'It will be our revenge and our reason. I have made it my catalyst and my propeller. It seems only fair, don't you think?'

'Anyone can go, Beula, but only good people with respectful intentions should attend, don't you think? Without Tilly's tolerance and generosity, her patience and skills, our lives—mine especially—would not have been enriched. Since you are not sincere about her feelings or about her dear mother and only want to go to stickybeak—well it's just plain ghoulish, isn't it?'

'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.

‘l used to be sick, Evan, you used to make me sick, but Tilly Dunnage has cured me.’

Then her round soft babe was still and blue and wrapped in cotton-flannel and Molly, pained and cold in her rain-soaked coffin turned stiffly to her, and Teddy, sorghum-coated and gaping, clawing, a chocolate seed-dipped cadaver. Evan and Percival Almanac stood shaking their fingers at her and behind them the citizens of Dungatar crawled up The Hill in the dark, armed with firewood and flames, stakes and chains, but she just walked out to her veranda and smiled down at them and they turned and fled.

Trudy circled them, her seventeenth-century Baroque cast of the evil sixteenth-century Shakespeare play about murder and ambition. They queued on the tiny stage like extras from a Hollywood film waiting for their lunch at the studio canteen.

They all started to cry, first slowly and quietly then increasing in volume. They groaned and rocked, bawled and howled, their faces red and screwed and their mouths agape, like terrified children lost in a crowd. They were homeless and heartbroken, gazing at the smouldering trail splayed like fingers on a black glove.