Wearing Paper Dresses

by Anne Brinsden

  They had separately and instinctively, in the still, ever-watching parts of their minds, noted the warnings from the trains. And the backup warnings from the trams. At one stage, at about the usual three-o’clock-in-the-morning time, a train whistled and they both stopped and looked at each other.

  ‘Do you remember the trains?’ asked Jesse.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right about now we would pack up and you would run off. I used to watch you,’ said Jesse. ‘Every time. I would stand there and watch until you had disappeared in the dark.’ He stopped and shrugged off the memories.

  But Marjorie could not allow any old campfire, old blue bench, peppercorn tree, Jimmy Waghorn, night-time friendship back into her life. There was no space left in her life anymore for such things. She stared at her coffee: espresso with milk. Jesse was having tea: strong and black with sugar.

  ‘Coffee always reminds me of you and your mother. She was the first person I ever knew who drank coffee. I always loved trying that coffee,’ said Jesse.

  Marjorie watched him over the rim of her cup. Do you remember that old percolator of your mother’s, popping its brown bubbles into its glass lid on that old wood stove? her coffee whispered to her. And do you still think of that time you gave Jesse a cup of Elise’s coffee? Marjorie could not free herself from the coffee percolator’s sweet reminiscences. The thoughts had escaped before Marjorie could stop them. She tried to shove them back in but they were out for good now. She sighed – she couldn’t help herself. Forgetting was such damn hard work. Her eyes gave a quick dart at Jesse’s teapot. Just to make sure that it was properly clothed. She looked back at Jesse across the gulf. Separated as she was from him by this small cafe table with its prim little teapot, perching clothed and confident within its rightly placed tea cosy. Quarantined there by an all-consuming farmhouse kitchen fire that was as insistent and as eternal as Elise’s jocund plastic flowers, even four years later.

  Marjorie shook her head to dislodge the memories. ‘I have no space left in my life anymore, Wheat Bag Boy,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ said Jesse.

  ‘That was years ago, Jesse,’ she said. ‘I have no space left.’ And she dismissed him with her cup of coffee.

  ‘Do you think you will ever go back, Marjorie?’ Jesse asked. ‘Do you ever think going back is something you should do?’

  ‘Why would it be something I should do?’

  ‘I dunno.’ Jesse shrugged. ‘Catch up with your folks? See how your mother is going? See what everybody is thinking . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Marjorie. ‘I do not think I will ever go back. And I do not have to go back. I know what’s going on. I told you. Elise writes to me all the time. They all come down to see me. Even Pa. And there is such a thing as a telephone, you know. I talk to them all on the phone.’ Her eyes flashed as she watched him over the rim of her cup.

  Marjorie’s surveillance of the teapot hadn’t escaped Jesse, but he didn’t say anything. He looked out instead at those few valiant city stars now being pushed aside by the dawn and left Marjorie to the teapot for a long while. ‘Stop calling me Wheat Bag Boy,’ he said finally. ‘I have a name.’

  Marjorie jumped. As hundreds of memories surged and broke her barriers and flooded everywhere. Unwanted memories of a much younger Marjorie taunting a stricken and secret boy. A hundred Jimmy Waghorn images followed through the breached levee of her mind. Followed by pictures of a boy who later repaid that taunting with a strange and wonderful friendship, who dared to love an angry and frightened girl.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jesse,’ said Marjorie. ‘About the leaving.’ She glared at him before turning to glare at the fading stars.

  ‘That’s it?’ said Jesse.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Jesse asked.

  Marjorie stared at the footpath. ‘What was there to tell? There was nothing to tell. It was all very clear what had happened. My mother was a raving lunatic. Ruby fell on the stove and got burnt. Because of me.’ Marjorie stopped talking. She moved her stare from the footpath back to the teapot. ‘I screamed out to Ruby for help. And she came running. And she ran right into the fire. I killed her,’ whispered Marjorie to the properly clothed teapot. A slight shudder rippled across her shoulders. Marjorie needed to stop this conversation. She had to help her eyes, which were blinking hard. ‘Ruby’s skin was falling off, like bark off a tree. Have I told you that already? Her hair was all on fire.’

  ‘You should have told me.’

  Marjorie looked at Jesse. She so wanted to be tough. She so wanted not to crumple and cry like a city girl would. ‘There was no time,’ she said. ‘I had to get the train.’

  ‘You left me there. I waited for you for nights and nights and nights at Jimmy Waghorn’s place, Marjorie,’ he said. ‘Just me there, Marjorie. Waiting for you to come back.’

  Marjorie didn’t answer that. Her eyes moved back to watch the retreating stars. ‘I told them they should put Ruby out of her misery,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have any time to tell you that. I didn’t have any time to tell you I suggested they get the gun and shoot her. I had more important things to attend to.’

  Jesse sat for some time, watching her turned-away face. ‘All the locals know about the tea cosy hat,’ he said.

  Marjorie winced.

  ‘You know how it was,’ he said. ‘After the concert and everybody roundabout saying Elise was a local treasure, and them all pitching in to help Bill. Well – after Ruby died – when your mother came back from the mental hospital – the locals organised a working bee at your place.’

  Another good reason to be scared of bees, she thought. ‘Do they hate me?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Nobody hates you. Do you think the locals blame you for what happened?’

  Yes! thought Marjorie.

  ‘Sorry, Marjorie,’ Jesse said, not quite knowing what he was apologising for. ‘But no one blamed you. It turns out that they all had a fair idea about what might have been going on. And everybody knew it was an accident. Nobody blamed your mother, or you. Everybody knew it was just a terrible accident.’

  Marjorie stared into her coffee cup.

  ‘If you have so successfully forgotten the kindness of the locals, I wonder what else you might have forgotten over these last few years, Marjorie?’ Jesse went on. ‘Have you forgotten the campfire nights at Jimmy Waghorn’s place?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t forgotten,’ said Marjorie. But the effort of all this remembering was taking its toll. Her face slipped and tripped under the impact. She fought to keep the wobble away from her mouth and the water out of her eyes.

  ‘Do you remember the plasticine statues she made?’ he asked.

  ‘How could I forget them?’

  ‘I stole one of them.’

  ‘I know you did. They all got ruined in the end, don’t you remember? I was glad you took one. I sometimes dream that it might still exist – that you saved it from death by madness.’

  It was Jesse’s turn to be taken aback. He wasn’t sure what to say, so he said nothing. But he wanted to say this: What else have you dreamt of over these past years, Marjorie? Did you ever dream of you and me?

  Marjorie looked at him. She was inscrutable. Non-committal. She might just as well have been one of those Mallee stars in her inscrutable non-committance.

  ‘What about paper?’ asked Jesse. ‘Can you make a paper dress?’

  Marjorie swallowed to stop the sigh that had filled her throat and was trying to make a run for her mouth. Her eyes didn’t move from Jesse’s face. She could have said any number of things to that. Things that would have made Jesse nod and smile. She could have said things like:

  Yes. I am a dab hand on the Singer sewing machine now, as a matter of fact. I could make a paper dress now if I wanted to.

  Or: What about that soggy tomato sandwich you gave to Ruby and me
in the school library that day? Do you remember that?

  Or she could have said: Paper is nothing to be afraid of. It is not plastic. She for sure could have said that.

  But she didn’t say one word. Her face was a still-life portrait of obscurity. As Marjorie watched herself standing at the dangerous edge of a salt lake, she could see the sand underneath – smooth, perfect, glazed by the unmoving water and the sun. And she was afraid because she knew too well what was underneath. ‘It’s late. I had better be getting home,’ was what she did say.

  ‘What’s the hurry? You don’t have to work tomorrow?’

  Marjorie ignored Jesse. ‘You can walk me to my tram stop if you like.’ And she surged up from her chair and walked away.

  *

  ‘Do you think about Ruby much?’ Jesse asked. It seemed to the night that this man had waited all night to find the right place to ask this question. But no places had really offered him any help. They were at Marjorie’s tram stop now, waiting for her tram. So the night could see that this looked like the last place Jesse had left.

  Marjorie stilled. It was a question of only six words – not a very big question. But even so, it swamped her with memories: of a Ruby who had always been there for her, of a Ruby who constantly saved her, of a Ruby who eventually died for her. Of a lock of sweet red hair preserved between the pages of a stolen sketchbook. She shrugged and fixed her eyes on the tram tracks. ‘I don’t see much point in thinking about Ruby anymore,’ Marjorie lied. ‘What’s done is done.’

  The tram tracks didn’t notice, and if they had they wouldn’t have cared. They heard much worse than that pitiful lie every day. They just kept humming to themselves and ignored the sad and angry young lady on the platform. Beautiful and ossified at once. Jesse though, as a rule, didn’t tend to lose things, so that imperceptible stiffening of the shoulders and the ever-so-slight hesitation before the reply was not lost on Jesse. He filed it away with the swallowed sigh he had spotted earlier. He could see a sigh, or a lie, on a person’s shoulders – day or night.

  I talk to her every day, Jesse, was what Marjorie would have said if she was able to. I see her from time to time, Jesse. I see Ruby. ‘What’s done is done, Jesse,’ was what she said instead.

  ‘You know there’s a drought up home?’ Jesse said.

  ‘What? Of course I know that.’

  ‘A lot of folks roundabout are worried they are going to lose their farms.’

  Marjorie swung around to face Jesse. She hesitated. Then she shook her head. She was dismissive. ‘How can you lose a farm, Jesse?’ she said. ‘It’s a permanent bit of land. It’s not a screwdriver or a spanner that you can just throw down somewhere and then forget where you put it. You don’t see ex-farmers wandering around confused and vague, squinting and frowning, work hats pushed back on the backs of their heads as they scratch absent-mindedly, saying, I used to have a farm somewhere hereabouts, but I must have put it down someplace. Can’t for the life of me remember where I put it . . . By the cripes, now I seem to have lost it . . . Any of you kids seen that farm?’

  Jesse ignored her. ‘Blokes are talking about having to walk off,’ he said.

  ‘And how can you walk off?’ said Marjorie, shaking her head at Jesse. ‘No one really walks off, do they? They go under. That’s a fact. But they don’t walk off. Most Mallee farms, if I recollect, are a long way from anywhere, and where are they going to walk to? No. It would be plain stupid to walk and Mallee farmers are generally not stupid. They won’t walk off. They’ll drive off.’ Marjorie folded her arms and turned back to watch the tram track. But she wasn’t finished. ‘The Mallee has lots of ways to make people lose,’ she said softly to the tracks. ‘There are lots of other things besides a farm that you can lose. You can always get another farm. But there are some things you can never get back. And some things the Mallee will never let you forget.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Jesse. ‘Without ever meaning to, and without ever forgetting you, somehow I lost you. But you seem to have done a fine job of forgetting me.’

  Marjorie stopped looking at the tracks. She looked at Jesse now and shook her head. What did Jesse Mitchell know of anything? He only knew half of this. He was only half right. Because she had no trouble forgetting Wheat Bag Boy; but she knew full well she would never be able to forget Jesse. Despite her best effort.

  ‘I’ve done fair enough without you, though, over the last couple of years,’ Jesse said. ‘I’ve lived. I’ve managed.’ He nodded at her. ‘Thank you for asking, Marjorie.’

  Marjorie froze.

  Jesse watched her: her eyes staring at him, her body – so familiar, and yet not – lit by the soft glow of the streetlamp. She turned back to watch the approaching tram. It was slowing as it came down the line – waving its antenna at them, hissing and screeching as it stopped. One elegant shoe was placed on the second step, one gloved hand on the railing before Marjorie turned to look at Jesse. ‘Goodbye, Jesse. Thank you for the visit,’ she said, holding out a hand.

  ‘I heard your mother is singing again,’ said Jesse.

  ‘Yes, she is,’ said Marjorie. ‘She started singing again before she left the mental hospital. It’s doing her good. She’s been talking to me about her singing all the time lately. My mother’s singing has generally been a good thing.’

  ‘They’re putting on a concert back home, I heard. It’s for the drought relief.’

  Marjorie’s eyes narrowed. ‘I know that. Mother talks to me about that all the time as well,’ she said. ‘But why would that be of any concern of yours, Jesse?’ Her voice floated down from the tram step, soft and suspicious.

  Jesse ignored it. ‘Your mother is organising it, apparently. It’s a big deal.’

  Marjorie’s eyes were guarding hard now. ‘How would you know, Wheat Bag Boy? You don’t even live there anymore.’

  Jesse didn’t seem to hear. ‘I heard it’s going to be just like the concert where she won the plastic flowers. You might have very successfully forgotten quite a few things about the Mallee, but I can bet you won’t have forgotten those plastic bloody flowers, Marjorie. Have you?’ said Jesse.

  His words had been quiet until now. But, though he didn’t mean them to, now these words of his were rushing and trampling at Marjorie. She swung around. She staggered on that tram step, her arms held out against those words with their mad talk of plastic. She wanted so much to say, Is my mother alright, do you know? I worry! She wanted so much for Jesse to comfort her like he used to do. But she was afraid. Not just for her mother, but because she could see that this odd sort of a Jesse standing in front of her was afraid too. But why should he be afraid? So all she could do was repeat herself. ‘How do you know all that? You don’t even live there anymore. Why don’t you live there anymore, Jesse?’ she asked.

  It was Jesse’s turn to shrug shoulders. He turned away from Marjorie.

  ‘We haven’t finished this, have we, Jesse?’ Marjorie said. She watched as Jesse stepped back, tucked his hands underneath his folded arms and leant against the light pole. Marjorie looked down at him. And now she had to choose. But she didn’t really have a choice. ‘You can’t just turn up after all these months of lurking around out there in the crowds and then think you can simply disappear off into the crowd again. We need to finish this, Jesse,’ she said.

  Jesse looked up at her. He nodded. ‘We sure do. I’ll come over to your place,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t know where I live.’

  ‘Of course I bloody do,’ he said.

  A look, washed over with all sorts of sadness and regret, fled from Marjorie’s eyes at that. She tried to grab it. But it was too late. It was out. Of course my Jesse Mitchell would know that, she thought as she watched this particular, peculiar Jesse Mitchell lumping his strange and secret yoke across his shoulders. ‘Why have you been sneaking around the city these past few years, Jesse? I’ve seen you. You know I
have seen you. Why have you been spying on me all this time?’ she asked.

  Trams are not as forbearing as wheat trains and this tram was getting a bit impatient. It clanged at Marjorie to get a move on, so Marjorie decided not to wait for Jesse to answer. She turned instead to obey the tram. The tram took hold of Marjorie and the doors slapped shut.

  Jesse watched Marjorie. He chose not to let the tram know the answer to Marjorie’s question. ‘I waited for her for nights and nights at Jimmy Waghorn’s place,’ said Jesse instead to the side of the tram. ‘She left me. Just left me there at Jimmy Waghorn’s place.’ Marjorie walked to the centre of the tram. Jesse gave her a small smile. His arms were still folded across his chest, and his hands were grabbing hard at his elbows. But they still managed to give Marjorie a finger wave. And his head gave her a nod.

  But Marjorie was creating a nuisance of herself with the tram and the tram had had enough. So it took off, hissing and clacking and clicking. Marjorie watched that Jesse Mitchell through the tram window as the tram, gathering speed, dragged her away.

  Jesse stood in the space created by the tram stop light, watching Marjorie and the tram disappearing into the dark. Jesse stood and watched. Until the safety of the still-dim street swallowed the tram with Marjorie and her cargo of questions. He stood. Just like he used to do at Jimmy Waghorn’s place. Before he turned and walked in the other direction. Until the next time. Just like he used to do at Jimmy Waghorn’s place.

  Chapter 18

  It was an indolent city summer day. A lazy and soft afternoon – not like summer in the Mallee. But there was nothing lazy and soft about these two. They were like the dust cloud running and churning and choking behind the harvester – trying to keep up as the harvester raced to get the wheat off before the chasing rain. They were, once more, carefully not touching. Sitting opposite each other under the apple tree in Aunty Agnes’s backyard. But they were talking. ‘I don’t dwell in the past, Jesse,’ Marjorie said.

  ‘So you say, Marjorie,’ said Jesse.