One Long Thread

by Belinda Jeffrey

  The Magic Faraway Tree saw Sally and me through mumps and the chicken pox. The pages became dog-eared and yellowed. The corners of the cover became knocked and worn.

  Some afternoons, on the way home from school, Sally and I would invent our own lands for the top of that tree and I always imagined Grandma Pearl was flying between them, travelling from one mystical worldly place to another, free as a bird, alive on love and laughter. And in the case of Grandma Pearl that seemed enough for anyone to live on.

  At some stage after the arrival of The Magic Faraway Tree Sally and I were huddled together in her bed listening to our parents shout at each other beyond our closed door. We clutched our faraway book, each of us hoping the other would volunteer to read it first, but neither of us having the courage of distraction. We listened in case those words being shouted outside would change our lives forever. That night was the last time The Magic Faraway Tree seemed as real to us as the thought of growing older and growing up.

  One Sunday morning a group of women had been handing out flyers and talking after church during morning tea. I had been leaning against the brick wall at the side of the church watching the kids play with hoops on the small patch of grass at the back of the kitchen, wondering where Sally had gone. Mum was standing with the women having a cup of tea when I heard their voices lower to a whisper. I inched my way closer, my back against the bricks, alert.

  ‘Not enough discipline these days,’ Mary said.

  ‘I wouldn’t call it a breakaway. It’s not like those evangelical movements. The Aberdeen want to reclaim the light of God as a focus for good living. I’ve been reading their pamphlets and I’m convinced God is leading me there.’

  My mother didn’t say anything but I watched her sip her tea ever so carefully, I saw her place the cup on the saucer and I’m sure no one would have registered the change in her. But I’d heard those words, same as her, and I just knew what words like that could mean to my mother.

  The Monday after church Mum went shopping and came home with a bag full of crucifixes. She displayed them on shelves and table tops around the house and glued magnetic tape on the back of some to put on the fridge door. In the following weeks Sally and I would come home to find her kneeling on the floor in front of the fridge, or the sideboard, which held the largest crucifix, praying, her voice strangely silent despite the relentless movement of her lips. We began finding handwritten notes around the house, Bible verses and prayers she had scribbled on pieces of paper and Blu-tacked or sticky-taped to our mirrors and lunch boxes, Dad’s car doors and even his rear-view mirror. Some nights I would wake to hear her moving around the house removing older notes and replacing them with ones she had written that day. She had even placed a glow-in-the-dark crucifix above each of our beds so the light of Jesus Christ could shine on while we slept.

  With this change in our mother came the fighting with Dad and the absence of family drives. Sunday, said our mother, was a day for prayer and God. Nothing more.

  ‘If you would only see the truth, Brett!’ Mum shouted at Dad. ‘Come to church with us, just once. If you let God into your life we would all be happier. Don’t you see the power of Satan over you?’

  Dad stopped arguing with her after that. Mum’s voice seemed to fill the house, unless she was praying. And even then her silent mouthing of words felt loud. Dad’s voice seemed to disappear altogether.

  4.

  ‘I’ll pay for the material, Button,’ Sally said one afternoon, shortly after our thirteenth birthday, bringing her hands to her chin, palms clasped around her golden cross. ‘We don’t have to tell Mum.’

  Before I could answer her, she had opened my sketchbook and flipped through the pages until she found the dress she wanted. She turned the book around to face me, her finger tapping on the dress I had drawn last week.

  ‘Tell me what you need and I’ll get it.’

  It wasn’t my sewing that had to be kept from our mother but the reason Sally needed the dress at all. I couldn’t say ‘no’ to Sally, I didn’t want to say ‘no’. I wanted the midnight-blue satin in my hands, I wanted to pinch it at the waist, to tack the pleats in place along the fullness of the skirt, lifting the fabric up in places so that it looked like a parting curtain, revealing a rush of black tulle underneath. I wanted to fit the bodice tight around her breast and shoulder. I wanted to make that dress for someone. I wanted to make that dress for Sally; to see it alive in the world.

  At night we waited until Mum had gone to sleep, then, by torchlight, that dress was sewn by centimetres. It took a month of sleepless nights, holding the torch in my mouth while fitting the material to Sally’s body. Sewing by hand so Mum didn’t hear the Singer sewing machine, Sally and I conspiring, giggling. Sally bought a disposable camera and we laid out candles and I took pictures of her in the dress. Though we are identical I could not wear that dress like her. Even I would have believed she was older than thirteen in that dress. And so did Mathew Grayson and everyone at the Beachside High School Formal.

  What I remember most about Sally is how life never surprised her. At least on the outside. When Matthew Grayson wanted to take her to his end-of-year formal, her only thought was about how to get the money so I could make her dress. When he wanted to have sex with her in the carpark afterwards, her only condition was that he wouldn’t damage the material.

  Truly, I am nothing like Sally. Not in any way that matters.

  I don’t think Mum ever found out about that night. Because we might have been shared out differently if she’d known.

  A week after the formal Dad came into the kitchen.

  ‘I just can’t take it any longer, Jan,’ he said. ‘We can’t go on like this.’

  Mum had been washing the dishes and she just stopped, resting her soapy hands on the edge of the sink. She became so still and quiet, as if she had disappeared inside herself. I stood in the passage, my back against the kitchen wall.

  ‘There isn’t another woman,’ Dad said. ‘But the sad thing is, Jan. I wish there was.’

  It was a Sunday morning and Mum finished the dishes, untied the apron from around her waist and hung it on the hook beside the back door underneath a note saying, I am the way, the truth and the life.

  ‘Come on, girls,’ I heard her call.

  Even though I had begun hating church and finding excuses to stay home, I ran my fingers through my hair and walked to stand beside my mother in the hall. We waited there but Sally didn’t appear. I had no idea where she was.

  ‘You and me, Button,’ Mum said, opening the door and walking to the car.

  At church Mum sat so close to me I felt uncomfortable. I felt her stiffen, sitting straight and upright, raising her chin against everything she wouldn’t speak about. I had no idea what to do. During the announcements, Mary stood up to the microphone and announced that the new church, The Aberdeen, needed our support and prayers as they had started their very own faith community in Darwin. Mary was moving there and took the opportunity to thank the congregation for giving her a community to belong to. She was moving to follow God more fully. She held up a wad of newsletters. ‘I’m leaving these at the back of the church,’ she said.

  After the service I watched my mother take one of the newsletters and place it in her bag.

  All the way home she had one hand on the steering wheel and one hand worrying the cross at her neck. I don’t know where her mind was but it wasn’t in the car, with us.

  For weeks my parents could not agree on anything. Who owned the leather couch, the photographs of our first family holiday, the vase that had been a wedding present. They fought and argued about all of their material possessions until they became worn out and deflated.

  ‘I don’t want to lose my girls,’ I heard Dad say one night.

  ‘I won’t lose them,’ said Mum.

  ‘I don’t know how it came to this, Jan. But I don�
�t want us dragging the girls through court. We owe them that, at least. Take what you like. Have it all. But for the love of—’ he stopped short of bringing up God in their conversation. ‘Just promise me we will do what’s best for the girls. No court.’

  So, in the end, Mum got a job with the new Aberdeen Church in Darwin. The advertisement for that job had been in the newsletter Mum had picked up from church: Devout Christian sought for sewing job. All applications to Brother Dan of the Aberdeen Church, Malak, Darwin. She took a few of the smaller possessions, the total of their life savings and the one daughter she had named. Dad kept the house. And me.

  ‘I’m selling our dress,’ Sally said a few nights before she and Mum had planned to leave. ‘I reckon I could get a few hundred for it.’ She was quiet and I didn’t know what to say. ‘Might need some money of my own,’ she said, turning to me and smiling to hide what we were both feeling.

  ‘I want you to make a label,’ she said, ‘like all the great designers do.’ She held the collar of the dress and pointed to the inside of the back by the opening where the label would go. ‘Your label should just be your name. “Ruby Moon” with a small embroidered silk moth underneath. What do you think?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Because it is us. Opposite, identical.’

  ‘Two wings grown from the same beginning,’ I said.

  A few days later Dad and I watched a taxi pull out of our driveway taking Mum and Sally away. Sally and I waved frantically, watching each other through the rear window until the taxi turned the corner and they were gone. Standing there, that day, I felt like Sally was being torn from my skin and there was no way I could ever fly free, without her right beside me.

  It was later that night, after they had left, I discovered an envelope on the carpet under my desk. Sally must have leant it up against my lamp and it had fallen in between the desk and the curtain. Her handwriting was unmistakable, my name scrawled quickly and without complication on the front. Inside the envelope was a newspaper clipping advertising the annual Young Designer of the Year Award. On the back of the clipping she had written, . . . and the winning label is Ruby Moon. I would like to have hung it on the refrigerator door, like we used to do with all our achievements and aspirations, but it seemed wrong at that moment. So I taped it into the back of my sketchbook. That was the last thing Sally ever gave me. And it’s the only thing I have left of her as Sally had already sold that midnight-blue dress for two hundred and fifty dollars to a friend of a friend through school.

  5.

  ‘Do you miss her, Dad?’ I asked soon after they had gone.

  ‘I love you both the same,’ he said. ‘I just don’t have the right to regret how things turned out. I’m sorry for you,’ he said. And that was something, at least.

  For our first birthday apart, Dad sent Sally a present and money for a visit but she spent the money on something else. Mum only sent me a card and that’s the way it continued. It hurt thinking that she didn’t care enough to think to send me something. I wouldn’t have minded what it was, it needn’t have been anything expensive, I just wanted something from her, to know she had been thinking of me, at least. I wrote her a letter asking why she never sent me anything and she replied,

  Birthdays indulge our egos and God only needs our hearts. If I you were a grateful daughter you would think my letters were enough. I pray for your soul every day and ask God to look after you when I cannot. I’d like you to read Luke 1:52.

  There’s nothing you can say to something like that. Except, sorry.

  With that letter came a pamphlet explaining the Aberdeen way. It was a fairly thick, professional publication complete with pictures of beautiful people smiling, happy, attempting to explain some of the more unusual rituals they observed. These included:

  * Accepting and submitting to the authority of God and the Aberdeen Council

  * Marrying within the Aberdeen community and wearing the white Aberdeen wedding dress (women, that is)

  * Renouncing all technology

  * Observing all rituals concerning Fast, Feast and Holy days.

  It wasn’t stated directly, but I was aware of an undercurrent through the literature suggesting that women were considered inferior and needed looking after by God and the Aberdeen Council. And of the twenty names listed comprising the council not one of them was a woman. It was sad to think of Mum and Sally subjecting themselves to that kind of domination. Because our dad never thought of women that way.

  ‘Do you understand it?’ I asked Dad, showing him a few of the letters Mum had sent.

  ‘Some people take their religion very seriously,’ he said. ‘She was getting that way before she left. I think.’ He started to say something but didn’t finish. He put his paper down and took his glasses from his nose. He smiled and winked at me and he looked just like the man from our childhood. ‘It’s her choice, Button.’

  I shrugged and smiled back. I liked the feeling of being close to him, sharing something together that didn’t need speaking about. He didn’t judge anyone or anything and it was one of the things I most admired about him. Dad was the ultimate pacifist. I could have brought anyone home for dinner and he’d carry on as normal while rummaging through the cutlery drawer for an extra knife and fork. He always poured me half a glass of wine for special occasions and never treated me like a child. Just a person, the same as he was and, most of the time, I loved that about him. But sometimes I wanted to feel like a child, to know that he would stand in front of me while waves crashed towards us or arrows came at us. It should have been enough that he would take my hand, equal to equal, and we would face, whatever came, together. Yet I wanted him to climb a fence and sit on it, to raise a flag, hang a banner and stand for something. Anything. Leaving Mum was one of his few defining moments; a time he chose a road for himself.

  At first I wondered whether he missed Sally the way I did and whether Sally missed me. But I tucked those thoughts down, worked hard at school and filled my sketchbook with dress designs and matching accessories. Drawing by torchlight under the covers late into the night. Hiding my habit for no other reason than it felt good to do it.

  ‘At least I have you, though,’ Dad said, placing his glasses back on his nose and adjusting the paper. ‘How ’bout you make us a cup of tea, Button?’ he said and I thought the warmth of an Earl Grey with lemon might just make me feel better. For a while.

  6.

  At first I imagined the kinds of wedding dresses my mum was sewing in Darwin. I’d flip through Beautiful Brides or Vogue or Woman’s Day and cut out photographs of wedding gowns and stick them inside my scrapbook. I imagined these were the creations Mum laboured over. I conjured up the sound of her sewing machine grinding as she sped the needle through the cloth. She’d sew silk flowers – I’d been studying how to make these myself – and stitch them to bodices and hemlines. For the groom she would stitch a miniature flower for the edge of his pocket handkerchief and it would only be the likes of us – seamstresses – that would appreciate the detail. I imagined us sitting in the back row of churches watching brides walk down the aisle in our gowns. Mum would catch sight of a tiny flaw beside the back seam near the zipper – it would have happened after delivery – and we’d whisper what a shame it was we weren’t called to the vestry before the service. What possibilities existed in us being together.

  Mum had always been handy with a sewing machine and fabric, though she was more suited towards practical, no nonsense projects. On occasion she’d make us matching smocked frocks or dressing gowns but more often than not she resorted to the sewing machine for the purposes of mending skirts or shirts, pants or socks that were otherwise perfectly adequate. She would sew costumes for school plays and Sally’s ballet recitals – primary school only – though she always used a pattern and followed each and every instruction. Including tacking seams before sewing.

  When I was old enough to use t
he sewing machine I found patterns and tacking – even pinning, sometimes – a waste of time and creative energy. I preferred to work a garment from an idea, pinning and tucking, so to speak, in my mind as I went along. Mum couldn’t stand this way of sewing and it was all she could do not to rip the project from my hands and finish it herself.

  ‘You’ll only waste good fabric that way,’ she’d say. ‘You’ll save yourself time in the long run.’

  And she was right. I did waste fabric. I ruined as many outfits as I finished. But those that made it through from first cut to final fit were worth it all.

  ‘It doesn’t look like anything like this,’ Mum would say, looking at the pattern picture and then my sketches. ‘It doesn’t even look like anything I’ve seen before.’

  But that was precisely the point.

  By the time I had my first visit with Mum and Sally I had almost convinced myself that my fantasy was true. When I discovered the kinds of wedding dresses Mum made – and for what purpose – I wanted to catch the first plane back home to Melbourne. Every bride in the Aberdeen wore the same style; white A-line dress; neck-to-floor.

  Sally told me not to be so melodramatic. ‘Get a life and grow up, kid.’

  It seemed like a decade since we’d turned thirteen. Together in Melbourne with a complete family. Twins with dreams. A silk moth with two wings.

  The Sunday before I flew back home we went to an Aberdeen wedding. Mum said she didn’t understand everything about this new religion yet but she wanted to. She said she’d discovered what it meant to be happy, since coming there. That, for the first time in her life, she thought she might actually have found the place she belonged. I was happy for her.

  It helped that the Aberdeen pastor, Brother Daniel, said, ‘Girls, God has blessed us by sending us your mother. One door closes and a better one opens. We think of her as one of the family already.’