One Long Thread

by Belinda Jeffrey

  At some point in the early hours of the morning we stopped. I heard my mother sigh and felt her release as if a tangible weight shrugged free from her shoulders. She turned on her chair to look at me. Her eyes were heavy and swollen with black rings. Her skin seemed heavy too, but underneath those surface things, she had melted from her composed determination. She was vulnerable but free and I had not felt that close to her for so long.

  ‘She did things,’ Mum said. ‘Things I can’t even begin to—’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know. Sally was who she was and we can’t change that.’

  Mum looked at a silk moth I held in my hand that I had made while she sewed. She took it from me. It was all white, stitched from the remnants of different silks and satins, its wings stiffened with visafix as if that creature were about to fly free. She held it in her hands, cupping it carefully, as if it was fragile and real.

  I took it from her and placed it on the bodice of the dress she had finished sewing. It would be the last thing Sally ever wore and I almost smiled with the thought that she would have hated that dress beyond words.

  There appeared to be nothing to distinguish it from an Aberdeen wedding dress, but Mum took it from the machine, held it up and explained the differences. The shape of the bodice was shorter, the sleeves were longer and the embroidery on the bodice formed a garland of thorns. On the back, just below the neckline, was a small embroidered circle. That, she told me, was a pearl. The pearl of great price. A funeral dress would usually be cream in colour, as opposed to the white of a wedding dress. But, in Sally’s case, she would go to heaven as the bride of Christ, being unmarried on earth. Mum said this with such certainty, as if it were force of nature, like gravity and air and water, that we needed the completion of a man to make us whole. I wanted to tell her she had it all wrong, that love was a higher value, surely, not entrapment for the sake of social standing or some atonement for being born female. I wished she had read Jane Austen and discovered what women like her had been telling us for so long. I felt that marriage, in those terms, makes a mockery of love and reduces it to nothing. I decided if it were possible I would never ever marry at all.

  Mum opened the top drawer of the sewing cabinet and took out a needle, threading it quickly with a strand of white thread she pulled from the bobbin at the top of the sewing machine. Holding the silk moth in place, she stitched it carefully to the bodice, ensuring the body was held fast to the dress but the wings remained outstretched.

  I could not bring her back or save that small life inside her. I could only leave her with a token as fleeting and as beautiful as she was. A moth that spent an entire life preparing for but a few days of magnificent flight.

  I was back at the hotel in bed before I realised what it took for my mother to have sewn my silk moth onto Sally’s funeral dress. There was no moth mentioned on the pattern or in Aberdeen custom. It must have felt right, for all the wrong reasons, for her to have stitched it to the dress. For me.

  20.

  Sally’s funeral was held at the Aberdeen church and we were bound to their rituals and rules which seemed strange, at best, and cruel, at worst. As I’d never been to a funeral before I didn’t know whether there was anything particularly unusual about the way the Aberdeen did it.

  Two rows of seats were reserved for non-Aberdeen members. A member from the council showed Dad and me where to sit and explained that we were to follow the cues from the rest of the congregation. We followed the usher inside and sat together, just Dad and me on a long pew at the back of the church. I had never felt more excluded in my life. I glimpsed Mum at the front of the church. Since our brief moment of connecting the night before, she had slipped back inside her shell. Like she was someone I could never completely reach.

  It felt like Dad and I were surrounded by clockwork, something abstract yet well timed and perfectly orchestrated. There was a lot of singing, we were all dressed in black, candles lining the front of the church were lit and their flames flickered and danced behind Sally’s coffin, which was open. Our names were not mentioned in the service, I do remember that. Only Mum’s. There were places out the front of the church that only she could go and I remember being overwhelmed with the details and deciding to stick close to Dad and stay in my spot.

  Throughout the service, the congregation stood and sat, and Dad and I never seemed to manage the routine without being either the last to stand or the last to sit down. This movement seemed to be guided by some secret knowledge that Dad and I did not have. No one attempted to explain it to us.

  Somewhere in the middle of the funeral, Brother Daniel climbed the stairs at the front of the church to stand in a box that was gilded with gold leaf, painted with Renaissance-inspired cherubs and symbols. I glanced about the rest of the church and found a similar style repeated on the walls, ceiling and even the windows. None of it looked real. All of it looked sterile and strange, as if I had been dragged back into someone else’s life, someone else’s past. I didn’t belong.

  The volume of Brother Daniel’s voice and the anger in his words scared me from my haze. He struck an imposing figure, looming over the rest of us, his hands either pointing at us, at the sky, at some symbol or painting, at the Bible he held up. Or his arms were outstretched as widening our own understanding. I don’t remember what he said after the first few words, only being aware of a poisonous feeling spreading low in my guts. The tone of his message and his voice was clear. This was a punishment, terrible and tragic, yet a clear message all the same. There was one antidote for the pain of what we all felt. That was to embrace God as he understood him to be – compassionate, all-knowing, all-wondrous. If there was a god, I hoped Sally felt him close to her in the moment of her death. I hoped that God closed her ears to all the spiteful words and thoughts and feeling around her and gave her a feeling of pure love instead.

  As we left the church I saw Barry seated on the very back pew behind us. I felt our eyes lock, there was a feeling of strength in that moment, like we had been forever known to each other. I smiled but I was caught in the river of people pushing us through the small aisle of the church, out into the sunshine, away from Sally, away from Barry.

  We did not see Sally’s coffin lowered into the ground. We had been warned the previous evening that, in the way of the Aberdeen, only those sanctified by faith could be present as a body was laid to final rest. Dad and I just nodded, feeling powerless and small against their authority. The bonds of a father for his daughter, a sister for her blood were a small matter compared with a sinner and her god. It bothered me to think what was said at her final moments. What could the Aberdeen possibly have to share or say to someone we loved, that we could not be present to hear? My only consolation was in knowing that Sally had spent her last years building an immunity to such talk. I’d like to think God might have been there to block her spiritual ears.

  Dad and I watched from a distance as her coffin was carried from the church – only the elders were allowed to bear the coffin – and placed in the back of the hearse. The Aberdeen filed into their cars and followed the procession from the church to the cemetery with as much precision as they stood and sat throughout the ceremony. We were mute and empty, Dad and I, as though we were watching a movie play out before us.

  ‘Who is that?’ Dad pointed to Barry, standing at the far end of the carpark, as most of the cars had left.

  ‘Barry,’ I said.

  ‘I want to meet him.’

  Dad walked over towards Barry and I followed. Dad held out his hand and he and Barry shook.

  ‘I want to thank you, Barry.’

  ‘No need—’

  ‘No. I want to thank you for what you meant to her.’

  I felt awkward standing there beside them, knowing there was no easy fit between us all. Being reminded that Barry was Sally’s boy.

  ‘I say we go get a beer,’ Dad said.

 
; I had never heard Dad talk so much in one sitting to another person. Especially someone he had never met before. Barry sat and listened, you got the feeling he was used to listening. He did it so well.

  I sipped my coke while Dad and Barry had a beer. I felt quite forgotten and excused myself to find the ladies bathroom. I felt Barry’s eyes stray from his beer towards me, saw his hands fumble against his glass before tuning back into Dad and his chatter about Sally and Amona and our life in Melbourne. I wondered how long I could politely absent myself before causing them to worry. I locked the toilet door and felt myself breathe out long and slow. I began thinking that there wasn’t a lot of crying at Sally’s funeral. Mum cried. But Dad and I didn’t. It felt like tears were held back behind a wall of sadness and the heavy reality of life.

  When I returned, Dad turned to me and smiled. I sat down beside him, Barry on the other side. The silence felt uncomfortable, like I’d interrupted a conversation neither of them knew how to return to in my presence.

  ‘Thing is. A father always dreams he’ll meet the most significant man in his daughter’s life.’ He sipped his beer. ‘I get the feeling I’d have liked you, Barry. I’d have liked you a lot.’

  I didn’t know what Barry had explained of their relationship to Dad, whether Barry had embellished what they had for his own benefit or Dad had just assumed a storyline of their being together.

  ‘Thanks for helping Button,’ he added. It felt wrong and ill-timed to bring me into the conversation.

  ‘It was no problems Mr Moon. Really.’

  ‘Call me Brett.’

  Barry nodded.

  ‘I want to ask you something, Barry. I’m her father. You loved her, right?’

  Barry took a while to respond and I could hear Dad letting out his breath.

  ‘Yes,’ Barry said quietly. ‘I did love her.’

  I couldn’t help but look at Barry and found him looking at me, too, before lowering his eyes.

  ‘Bloody hard thing to take. Losing her, hey?’ Dad continued.

  I could feel their grief as if it were a beast holding us down.

  Barry nodded again. He drank the remainder of his beer and raised his hand to Dad’s shoulder. He gripped my father firmly and the affection of that gesture made Dad cry.

  Barry looked at me again and I knew I had made a mistake. It wasn’t any feeling of love for me that I felt from him. It was an apology. There would never be, could never be, anything between us. He belonged to Sally. Even more because she wasn’t here.

  21.

  The days and weeks that followed Sally’s funeral were a blur. There was never any further mention of me moving to Darwin and Dad and I stepped forward, we opened doors, we ate. But part of us was removed from ourselves, from each other, from the world. And, yet, strangely, we were drawn closer to each other in our silence and grief. Dad and I would be together, without talking, without moving.

  I was plagued by nightmares. They would come suddenly, violently, and then leave without explanation. I would go many nights without one, then they would return, worse than before. When I woke drenched with sweat, my heart hammering under my ribs, I would bring to the surface of my mind every memory of Sally that I could. We would be eating at the table, kicking each other’s ankles. We would be lying together in bed talking about babies and birth and devouring an entire packet of chocolate biscuits. She would be wearing each of my dresses, twirling and posing, and in each of those memories she was perfect. Too perfect. But the nightmares didn’t end.

  No matter how much I tried to visualise Sally dressed in that white dress with my silk moth stitched to her bodice in the casket the morning of her funeral, I couldn’t.

  Dad said I had stood beside her, looking down for a long time, though I didn’t remember it at all. I could create a picture of it, I could impose my notion of what it would have looked like, but that memory didn’t come from inside. I believed that it happened but it was like my body just wouldn’t accept the experience. Dad told me not to worry, but somehow I knew I had to be able to remember her that morning. That without it, my memory of her was incomplete.

  22.

  ‘What do you think, Ruby? Hmm?’ Mr Grandy said, showing me the latest delivery of fabrics. I took the end of the chiffon and ran it through my fingers, watching the way it slid, dream-like, floating free from my fingers.

  Mr Grandy took his glasses from his nose and rested a finger on his chin as he looked around his shop. ‘Yes,’ he said more to himself. He turned back to me and clasped his hands together. ‘We should make a display of red over there,’ he pointed to the entrance row of fabrics just behind the window display. ‘Today I feel very Valentino,’ he said, exaggerating an accent and flamboyantly waving his hands.

  I laughed and remembered how I used to feel before the accident.

  He clicked his fingers and I followed him, assisting him in removing bolts of drill and cotton, patterned satins and polyesters. We placed those bolts on the counter while we carried each of the red bolts to that display. There were plain silks and satins, embroidered silks and brocades. Every shade of red, from cherry to maroon and, of course, the colour made famous by the Italian designer himself, ‘Valentino Red’.

  ‘Have you changed your mind?’ Mr Grandy said awkwardly, his mouth full of pins which he took out, one at a time, to fasten each end of fabric back on itself.

  ‘I just can’t do it,’ I said, bending to help him with the last of the pins.

  ‘It’s just such a shame, my dear girl. Your formal is a once in a lifetime occasion. You only get one chance.’

  I shrugged. I’d already made up my mind. Dad and Amona tried a thousand ways and quiet conversations to encourage me to reconsider, but I just didn’t want to go to the formal. I was adamant. They didn’t want me regretting it later on; they knew Sally would have wanted me to go. And while they may have been right, I knew I just couldn’t. I didn’t want to dress up, I didn’t want any boy pretending to like me for an occasion that only reminded me of Sally for reasons I couldn’t discuss with anyone. It was hard settling back into my normal routine when Dad and I came back home after Sally’s funeral.

  On the plane coming home I felt a longing for my old life, for everything familiar. But once I returned it didn’t feel that way at all. I felt awkward and out of touch with everything and everyone.

  I returned to school amid the excitement and anxiety of the imminent end to our school days. The end of high school and the beginning of the rest of our lives had almost arrived. Everyone seemed to be cramming study notes or finishing assignments, filling out application forms and making appointments with the guidance officer and career counsellors.

  Becky and Rachel were both applying for courses in hospitality with dreams of touring the island resorts up north where, they assured me, there were bound to be good-looking men. It was as though they’d planned the rest of their lives in the short space without me. They were so excited about the opportunities they could see in their immediate future, they quickly lost interest in Sally and me running away to Tonga. I hadn’t told them about Barry.

  They were good to me at first and I found their company comforting. They wanted all the details and it felt good to talk about it with them. Sally had once been their friend, too, and we’d shared some tears together. But I couldn’t account or explain for why I still felt trapped in the events of those weeks so long after I returned. It only took a few weeks before they seemed to have forgotten that Sally had died, while I could not let it go. I found myself making excuses for why I couldn’t spend lunchtimes with them.

  By the time the end of the year came rushing towards us in a blur of exams and parties and university applications, it wasn’t so easy to lose myself. I took to finding quiet corners and shady spaces in the far corner of the school grounds. I longed for quiet and darkness and space. Strangely, once I was tucked away in som
e forgotten corner for more than a few minutes, I felt an overwhelming gratitude for what I had, all the people who were in my life and I would dissolve into tears. I felt like a see-saw that had no fulcrum for balance.

  Becky came over one afternoon about a month before the formal and, after watching something mindless on TV and finishing an entire bag of Cheezels, she asked me if I would make her dress. She began by describing the design in intimate detail – she had it all worked out – she had even been down to see Mr Grandy about material, which I knew must have been on one of my afternoons off because I hadn’t seen her and Mr Grandy had never said a word. From the moment she asked I felt a bitter taste rise up in my throat and all I could think of was how I could get out of it and refuse without ruining what little of the friendship remained between us. Her excitement was palpable, she grabbed my hand and squealed when she described it to me. I realised she absolutely expected me to say I’d do it. But I hadn’t touched my fabrics or sewing machine since I’d returned. Every time I thought about it I grew heavy and tired, it just felt too hard.

  Dad and Amona had been tiptoeing around that subject. I’d heard them talking about it one night but I was glad they kept their distance and never confronted me directly. If it was meant to return, then it would. At that point I honestly didn’t care if I never picked up another piece of fabric in my life. To sew, that is. I was perfectly happy working with Mr Grandy, in fact, on those afternoons and occasional Saturday, I felt better than at any time during the week. Mr Grandy seemed to understand that you couldn’t spring back from something like that too quickly. I’d noticed he’d quietly removed any sign suggesting my design services and he’ll probably never know how much that small gesture meant to me. Of course the other reason I felt so comfortable around Mr Grandy was in knowing we shared a certain kind of mother. And he knew about Barry.