by Tara Moss
I didn’t understand this distinction. Weren’t fashion and style the same thing?
‘You’ll see what I mean,’ my great-aunt assured me. ‘You like these shoes, I see. What is your shoe size?’
‘Um, an eight.’
‘Ah, you are a true Lucasta. The Lucasta women, we’ve always been the same size. You can have these shoes. My gift to you.’ She handed them to me and I must have lit up like a kid at Christmas, because she smiled broadly through her veil. I held the shoes by the lip of the heel, and studied them as I would a sculpture. They were in excellent condition, but aged slightly in ways that seemed to give them more character. The leather was softly worn inside. I wondered what they’d seen. I wondered where they’d walked. They seemed to have a magical quality about them.
But this wasn’t all my great-aunt had for me. She held up a knee-length silk dress, cut on the bias. ‘And this would suit you, also,’ Celia suggested. The amber fabric shimmered in the light of the reading lamp. ‘It will bring out your beautiful, cognac eyes.’ No one had described my eyes that way before. ‘And this jacket.’ She said, and passed me a lightweight bouclé wool woven jacket. I recognised the iconic style immediately, confirmed when I saw a flash of the worn label: CHANEL. ‘You could wear this with your jeans to your next interview.’
My eyes widened once more. Chanel was perhaps the most imitated and ripped-off label in the world but this jacket was the real deal, and it had life in it. It looked like it had seen things, experienced things. I thought it was much cooler than anything the Chanel lady from Vogue had been wearing. This jacket had history. I had half a mind to go back to Vogue wearing it, just to make her jealous.
‘I’d love to wear it. Thank you,’ I said, not bothering to hide my excitement and gratitude. Maybe these outward signs of belonging would help to get me through the door of one of the magazines I so desperately wanted to work for.
‘Designed by Coco Chanel herself, not that Karl Lagerfeld fellow,’ Celia explained. ‘Coco was chief designer until 1971, and she invented the multi-layered pearls and smart jackets look that is still popular today. There is a matching skirt but I’d recommend you wear it with jeans, for a more casual look. You are only nineteen, after all. You don’t want to look like you’re wearing your great-aunt’s clothes.’
I laughed, and she flashed a wicked smile.
‘ “Vintage” they call these now,’ Celia mused. ‘But the word vintage normally refers to the time that something of quality was made, like a wine, not the thing itself. Interesting, don’t you think? We didn’t call these clothes ‘vintage’ back when they were made, but this was when clothes were made with quality, to last. Good clothes never go out of style. You just have to change the way you wear them, that’s all.’
‘So fashion is just a trend, and style is something else?’ I asked.
Celia nodded. ‘Now you are beginning to understand.’
She’d given me an idea. ‘I could write a piece on that.’
‘Why don’t you?’
I’d read an article in Mia (not that I was going to think about them anymore . . .) about how tons of unwanted newly produced clothing were unceremoniously dumped and destroyed rather than given away or marked down because a lot of designers wanted to keep their high-end brand-associated prices. Perhaps I could write a piece on vintage clothes? On the advice of a former fashion designer? On quality rather than newness?
I was so focused on the thought of what I would write that I almost forgot my questions about Celia and her identity.
Almost.
‘So, how long ago did you last see my mother?’ I asked casually, fingering the wool of the jacket she’d offered to lend me, and looking over my shoulder to watch her expression. An answer like ‘last year’ would alert me that something was amiss. I couldn’t truly believe this woman was an impostor, but what other explanation could there be for her youthful appearance?
Celia sighed and laid one hand on my shoulder. ‘Oh, darling, it is terrible what happened to them. It really is. When they died, I hadn’t seen either of them for a few years. Travel was not what it is now. I wish we’d spent more time together.’
Well, that was pretty convincing, I had to admit.
‘It must have been hard for you, foreseeing that,’ she added.
I froze. What did she mean?
Celia gave my shoulder a little squeeze. ‘You were only a little girl when I last saw you, no older than three or four, but I could tell even then that you had the gift.’
I didn’t remember the meeting. I was too young. ‘What do you mean, “the gift”?’ I asked.
‘Your name, Pandora. Your name means gifted.’
I blinked. ‘It does?’ I knew all about the mythical Pandora, but I’d never had it put that way before. ‘Gifted?’
‘Yes. You are gifted,’ she told me, and cocked her head. ‘Your mother did not discuss this with you?’
I shook my head.
Celia seemed thoughtful. ‘We have much to discuss then,’ she said finally. ‘But first, you are new to New York, so perhaps you are not familiar with the wide range of publications in the city. Did you know that there is a magazine here that shares your name?’
‘It’s called Pandora?’ Really?
‘Yes. Perhaps tomorrow you could present yourself and see if the editor will take you on.’
I laughed. She couldn’t be serious. ‘You make it sound so easy.’
‘It is, darling.’
‘You think I can just show up?’ That certainly hadn’t been my experience so far.
‘I think that’s precisely what you should do,’ Celia said firmly, and gave me a knowing look I didn’t quite understand. ‘Tomorrow. Go to Pandora magazine.’
‘A special jacket can only take you so far, you know,’ I protested. But my great-aunt was a stubborn woman, I could see. There was no point debating it.
My brain simply would not rest. On my second night in New York I lay in bed in my white nightie and stared at the ceiling, thinking, thinking, thinking . . .
How can Celia be my great-aunt and look so young?
Celia sure seemed like the glamorous 1940s designer she was supposed to be, but it seemed impossible to me that she could be over eighty, or even fifty years old. I didn’t know much about big cities, of course, but I didn’t think there was anything in the water in Manhattan that could have that kind of effect. I couldn’t ask my mother, and I sure didn’t want to share my questions with Aunt Georgia, who had been reluctant to let me go. She had only agreed because Great-Aunt Celia was my only other living blood relative, and would probably benefit from having someone to help her around the house. There was no way I could risk being summoned back to Gretchenville, even if my initial impressions of New York were a little less than fairytale. As I drifted off my increasingly tired mind wrestled with the conundrums of Celia’s appearance, my strange and exciting surrounds, and my first terrible day of rejection.
It was sometime later that I realised I had not come to bed at all.
I was still sitting up with my Great-Aunt Celia in the lounge room, bravely asking her outright if she was an impostor. ‘Are you the real Celia? Why are you so much younger than you are supposed to be?’ I probed.
Celia had her veil off again, and her exposed skin was luminous and beautiful. She was alluring in a way I had never been witness to before. I actually wanted to reach out and feel her cheekbones. The urge to touch her was almost irresistible. I couldn’t take my eyes off her face. And despite our conversation, despite my questions and this bizarre trance I was in, Celia seemed forgiving and kind and gentle. She was unruffled by my interrogation.
‘Darling . . .’ she began. Celia held my hand as we conversed, her gloves off and her hands icy cold and soft as silk. She gave my hand a little squeeze. ‘Darling, everyone’s doing it. It’s no big deal,’ she explained patiently, and when she smiled I saw she had enormous ivory fangs. As she continued to smile, her eyes began to glow red and she transfo
rmed before me – her forehead became monstrously bat-like, her hands turned to claws. ‘Come on, Pandora, give it a try,’ she growled, turning more beast-like by the minute. She snatched me by the throat with her clawed hands, and held me still. ‘Join me!’ she cackled triumphantly.
‘Nooooo!’ I screamed and struggled to break free from her grasp. ‘No, Celia! Don’t!’ I fought her off desperately, barely able to breathe.
My cries were muffled and when I opened my eyes again, predictably, I was in bed. One of my hands was clutching my own throat – both protecting it from my nightmarish vision of Celia and making it rather hard for me to breathe. My other hand was clawing my pillow quite uselessly. (I told you I have active dreams.)
‘Psssst . . . Is everything okay?’
What?
‘Do you need assistance?’ came the voice again.
I sat up and looked around.
Am I awake this time?
My heart was pounding pretty fast, so yes, I decided, I was very much awake if not exactly fully lucid. It was night. I was in my room in Celia’s penthouse, and the lights were out. The shades over the tall, narrow windows were not quite closed, and small shafts of streetlight illuminated the darkness. I could see Celia’s clothes hanging from the wardrobe, the fancy Chanel jacket ready for me to wear. Where had the voice come from? My eyes lit upon a white shape near the door. It resembled a man, just as I had seen the night before, and again, as my eyes adjusted his features became clear; the tailored uniform and cap, the masculine jaw and bright blue eyes. This time the man held his cap in his hands, head bowed slightly as if he were addressing someone respectfully. He was tanned and clean-shaven, and his sandy blond hair sat in glossy waves, worn a little long over the ears.
This time I didn’t bother calling for Celia.
‘Miss Pandora?’ the figure asked. He knew my name now.
‘Yes,’ I answered, more or less convinced that I was dreaming again. Still, dreaming the handsome soldier dream was an improvement on being sucked dry by Countess Celia, vampire-at-large. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked in a whisper.
‘Second Lieutenant Luke Thomas, ma’am.’
‘Second Lieutenant Luke Thomas. Of course,’ I grumbled and leaned back on my elbows. He looked young for such a rank. ‘Well, Lieutenant Luke, I’ve just been having a ridiculous nightmare, and I’m not talking to you because you don’t exist. Good night.’
I slipped back under the covers and closed my eyes. After a few beats I opened them again. He was still there.
‘Do you wish for me to take my leave?’ the young man asked, sounding a little uncertain. He still held his cap in his hands. The sight of it was sort of heartbreaking for some reason. ‘You sounded like you needed assistance. You screamed,’ he informed me.
I sat up on one elbow and frowned. ‘Am I dreaming?’ I asked the room.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Luke replied. ‘You can see me?’ This seemed to be a particular point of interest, if our last ‘conversation’ was anything to go by.
‘Yes,’ I replied. And I could. Luke was in the same uniform, the dark blue single-breasted coat – an old-style frock coat – worn almost to the knee and decorated with nine polished buttons from the high collar at the neck to the narrow, nipped waist. The uniform was neatly tailored across his broad shoulders and trim physique. His dark blue felt cap had crossed sabres embroidered on it, and was decorated with two feathers. His pants were sky blue, with a stripe up the side, and he wore handsome leather riding boots, I now noticed. The overall effect was somehow romantic. ‘I really am seeing you, aren’t I?’
‘Yes, I believe so,’ he replied, his head still bowed a little.
‘And you are a ghost?’ I ventured.
‘I am deceased.’
Goodness. I sat up fully, and rubbed my eyes. This wasn’t a dream/nightmare that was going to go away any time soon, it seemed. ‘I guess I’d better put something on,’ I decided. ‘Would you look the other way please, Lieutenant?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
I giggled a little at his formal reply – considering the circumstance of the bedroom and all – and grabbed my grey suit jacket from next to the bed. It didn’t exactly look right over my nightie – well – it didn’t look right anywhere it seemed – but I felt less exposed. ‘It’s okay. You can turn around now,’ I said.
My uniformed visitor turned back around to see that I was sitting on the end of my bed, arms crossed, wearing my polyester suit jacket over the white linen nightie. I tried to think of something intelligent to say to him, while still accepting that I was probably dreaming and would be sure in the morning that I’d been talking in my sleep.
Talking to a dead military guy in my sleep. Such a typical ‘me’ way to spend a night, really.
‘You said last night that you’ve been here for a while,’ I recalled. This felt like a variation of So, do you come here often?
‘I live here, yes. Well, I exist in the building.’
‘Do you usually “visit” the visitors, then?’
‘There aren’t many here. There haven’t been for a while,’ he told me. ‘Not, um . . .’ he hesitated. ‘Like you. Living.’
Creepy. Boy, I know how to give myself creepy dreams.
‘And my Great-Aunt Celia?’
He must have seen the question on my face. ‘Oh, no. No, not that I have any problem with Ms Celia, it’s just that we don’t . . . Um, she doesn’t see me, I don’t think. We’ve never spoken.’
This is a weird conversation. Very, very weird.
To the best of my memory and to the best of my knowledge I hadn’t spoken to any ghosts since I was little, and those ‘imagined friends’ had got me in a lot of trouble. My mother, who was quite big on total honesty in parenting, had calmly explained to me that the ‘Butcher Incident’ nearly ended up with her and my dad getting divorced. My father was apparently stuck on the idea of having a normal child, and of course science and reason were all he had room for. My mother was more accepting, I think, and she had subtle ways of letting me know that it was okay if I was different. Over the years she decorated my room with ancient masks from all the countries she travelled to, and she explained that we could be anything we desired, depending on our will. Many nights I drifted off to sleep under the hollow eyes of the noble Sumatran chieftain mask, the Kwakiutl wild woman, and the African Pende mask for communicating with spirits, wondering who I would be.
Now, at age nineteen, I was a woman, not a child, and this conversation I was having with a dead man named ‘Lieutenant Luke’ might not be happening, but at least it was harmless. My father couldn’t be offended. It wasn’t going to break anyone up. And at least I’d dreamed up a handsome ghost, even if he appeared to have died some decades before I was born and probably wouldn’t be a wealth of knowledge on pop culture or the things I needed to learn about fashion. (Fortunately I had a freakishly young great-aunt for that.)
‘So, just to clarify, my great-aunt can’t see you, but I can. And you are deceased,’ I said.
Luke nodded. ‘Yes. Since the Civil War,’ he confirmed, quite deadpan, so to speak.
The Civil War. Of course.
I was no expert on the Civil War, but I knew that it had to do with the North and the South fighting, and it had to do largely with a dispute over slavery. It lasted for a few bloody years in the 1860s and the Confederate Southern states were eventually overcome, and slavery was abolished. I’d seen lousy re-enactments in video presentations at school when I was very young. But the subject was not exactly at the forefront of my mind, so I couldn’t imagine why I would conjure a soldier from the war here, now, in New York. Why couldn’t I imagine Alexander McQueen, or Gianni Versace, or someone else more helpful to my current predicament?
‘And what have you been up to since the Civil War?’ I asked casually.
He clutched his felt cap, his tone turning serious. ‘I was a second lieutenant in the Lincoln Cavalry,’ he said. Well, that explained the riding boots, and the froc
k coat. Abraham Lincoln was the President at the time, so I guessed that the Lincoln Calvary would have consisted of soldiers on horseback fighting for the Union army, against the Southern Confederate slave states. The Union colours were blue. ‘I was in the Army of the Potomac in the Eastern Theatre,’ Lieutenant Luke went on, but when he saw my blank expression he paused. ‘I forget that was a long time ago. I am sorry. There have been other wars since. There are other wars now. These things would not interest you.’
‘Please go on,’ I encouraged him. ‘Don’t you be sorry. I’m sorry for my ignorance.’ I should have paid more attention in history class. But then how could I have known I’d have a conversation like this in a dream so many years later?
‘The Civil War broke out shortly after my wedding, and I was called to battle. My wife Edna was with child,’ he said. ‘A daughter, she believed.’
At that I got a little shiver. The smile was wiped from my face.
‘It was bloody. Much bloodier than we had anticipated, and we were ill prepared.’ The regret in his voice was palpable. I saw the pain flicker behind his eyes and wondered what horrors he was recalling. The men who volunteered would have been especially young and inexperienced. I recalled stories of unprepared troops. Starvation. Lack of organisation. ‘I’ve always thought that was the reason I did not pass over – because I did not get to meet our daughter while I was alive. Somehow, after the pain of dying, I just ended up here wearing my dress uniform. I don’t know what happened to the other men, or where my body was taken. I don’t know what this building is. I don’t know what happened to my family . . . my child.’
Gulp.
I realised my eyes had welled up. I kept them open so tears wouldn’t cascade down my cheeks. I believed this could possibly be the saddest story I had ever heard. This was not what I wanted of hunky soldier dreams. Hunky soldier dreams were not supposed to involve sad stories. Hunky soldier dreams were supposed to involve the kind of lovemaking I read about in my novels – the kind of lovemaking I hoped to one day experience.
