by Fiona Kidman
‘How much?’ says Sabrina.
‘Two thousand three hundred,’ says Jan without a flicker. ‘Will your credit cards stand it? You can go halves. It’s only for a couple of days.’
‘Hullo,’ says Elsa, on a sharp intake of breath.
‘You lay her out in it, and then you take it back after the viewing. They can pop her in something else when they close the coffin. Be sure to leave the label on when you take it back to the shop.’
‘Oh no,’ says Elsa, ‘no, you can’t do that.’ Elsa’s mother had been a corsetiere in a department store. She’d told Elsa about the way customers did dreadful things and tried to return clothes that were grubby and you could see they’d been worn. Undergarments at that. Filth, her mother used to say. We wore rubber gloves to deal with some of that stuff.
‘I’m not asking you to pay for it,’ Jan says. ‘Just treat it like a loan. Somebody in here told me how it’s done.’
‘But it’s not right,’ says Sabrina.
So Jan reminds her then, reminds both of them. How they always said they’d stick together. About the night they stayed over with those boys, and she’d told their mothers they’d been at her place, and the way Elsa’s mother had rung to check, because she didn’t really trust Jan, and besides they weren’t in the habit of staying at Jan’s place, and her daughter was such a good girl, and Jan had sweet-talked her into believing they were all asleep already, and told her what they had watched on television, only it was Jan who had sat by herself and watched that programme, not knowing where they were, or even that they had gone out with the boys, and lain awake all night worrying that she should really have told Elsa’s mother in case they’d been raped and murdered. She says all of this in a flat relentless tone, not really looking at them, just going on and on. She raises her eyes to Sabrina. ‘She liked you, you know.’
‘Did she?’
‘Yep, she wished I was like you.’
In the end, Sabrina says that, yes, it’s true they weren’t angels and they can do this thing she’s asking. ‘We could actually pay for the dress,’ she says, ‘so then Leonie can go up the chimney in it. Couldn’t we, Elsa?’
But no, Jan tells them, that’s not the plan, and haven’t they listened to a word she’s said? She wouldn’t ask them to part out with big bucks like this — that’s not her style, not with friends. It’s just a simple favour. ‘For God’s sake, Elsa,’ she says, looking at her stricken face, ‘you never used to return those lipsticks you flogged at the chemist’s.’
Elsa says, with a sudden spurt of resolution, ‘All right then. Okay, we’ll do it.’
‘They said I could see her. A couple of the guards will take me down tomorrow evening. They’ve promised me that, at least.’
Visiting hour is over, time for them to leave.
‘Over to you now,’ Jan says, standing up ‘Remember, get it in the paper. If I don’t make it to the funeral, say one for me. No hymns. She liked Julie Felix — choose something of hers. The one about going to the zoo tomorrow, she’d get a laugh out of that. Eddie might do the eulogy. He was her favourite boyfriend.’
Sabrina reaches over and gives her another quick embrace. ‘Take care, Jan,’ she whispers.
‘I’m okay,’ Jan says. ‘If you keep your head down, it’s not so bad. The food could be worse.’ She turns and leans her cheek into Elsa’s. ‘You’ll be pleased to know I’ve got a friend who works in the laundry. She makes sure I always get my own knickers back from the wash.’ She walks to the far side of the visiting room, a guard moves towards her, she waves and disappears.
The rain has cleared, and they stand in a patch of weak late morning sunlight, although the whipping wind is like pain slicing through them. Elsa begins to cry. ‘We must be crazy.’
‘She drives a hard bargain. I guess you learn that if you’re inside.’
‘Sabrina, I want us to do it in cash. No credit cards, all right?’
‘Ross?’
‘He pays my card.’
‘Well, I pay my own.’
‘All the same, it would be better if we did it all in cash. It’s like leaving a calling card otherwise.’
Sabrina pulls her coat around her more closely. ‘I’ll bring it this afternoon when we go to the funeral director’s. You can get the money all right?’
‘Of course.’ Elsa is impatient. ‘I’ve got money of my own. But you do see my point about the card?’
‘Double click,’ Sabrina says. She does see. Elsa is showing common sense. Already Sabrina has decided that this is something Daniel might be better not knowing either, although they pride themselves on the honesty of their relationship. Sabrina was a practised liar in the dying days of her first marriage, and she has sworn never to lie again. Truth is so easy when you have nothing to hide.
As she drives home she wonders if there is some crime involved. On the face of it, she can’t see that there is. It’s a lot of money to blow on a dress. Besides, they’ve made a promise. Not that Jan need know if they broke it and just paid. Like saying Le-Oh-nie in that mean schoolgirl way. Only she probably did know. And then, she thinks, why not? It’s not such a big deal, a simple enough transaction. People return things to shops all the time. As Jan pointed out, it’s the things she and Elsa haven’t returned in the past that she ought to feel bad about. She had stored away that part of her life: small wickednesses and betrayals of her friend who stayed at home and watched out for them like an anxious young mother, the kind Jan would have liked to have had for herself.
‘All right,’ she says to herself again. ‘Okay, Jan.’
The funeral director is a natty young man. He wears a brown suit with a brown button-down collared shirt and a black tie decorated with orange poppies. He knows the circumstances, he tells them, and coughs discreetly. Their friend has told him that a suitable dress is being brought in. When they hand it to him, he enthuses — the prettiest lying-in dress he has ever seen. Sabrina explains that it is not to be burnt with Leonie; they will hold it for her daughter, who wants to keep it for sentimental reasons. It’s too beautiful to be destroyed, and he says, oh yes, yes, he does understand that, entirely agrees, and it’s not unusual for people to be slipped out of their clothes once the curtain comes down. No trouble at all. Sabrina has the price tag in her wallet, still on its cord.
They retire for a short decent interval to the waiting room while he dresses Leonie. They sit in deep armchairs and read magazines about royalty and English country homes. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well,’ Elsa says. ‘You can’t imagine Leonie being one of those old ladies with talcum powder hair and clip-ons.’ Her own mother is going that way, her memory not so sharp. ‘Goodness knows what I’ll do with her. I’ve been looking after kids all my life and now it’ll be her I suppose. Not what Ross and I were planning.’ Her face softens. ‘Sorry, Sabby,’ she says. ‘I know you miss your mother. I can’t believe it’s ten years.’
‘That was the last time we were all together, do you know that?’ Sabrina says. ‘The three of us, you and me and Jan at Mum’s funeral. I’d forgotten how long it was.’
The undertaker calls them in. There is Leonie, in a satin-lined casket, her face younger than they remember it, her hair fluffed around her face. The black dress, with its silk ruffles, is settled around her, the peacock’s head made from knotted leather nestled between her breasts, the tail feathers which, except for two or three real ones, are actually little appliqués of felt sewn with sequins, fanned across her knees. Sabrina remembers a moment when a peacock illuminated her life. She and Daniel were on their honeymoon. He had elected to stay in a bush cabin, although she would have preferred something more glamorous. Daniel liked the outdoors, which sounded charming, but the camp kitchen was basic, the bed hard and the duvet had been used by others. She had woken on their second morning, and crept out of bed while her new husband still slept. But then she had lifted the curtain to see what the day was like outside. On the branch of a tree near the window she saw a peacock. He sat picking at a
berry, his splendid shining tail sweeping before her, filling the window frame with colour. In this moment of radiance, Sabrina saw a sign, a promise of happiness, and she hasn’t been disappointed.
‘You’ll be here when your friend comes to view her mother?’ the undertaker asks. ‘I understand she’ll be here about five.’
As one, Sabrina and Elsa shake their heads. They know Jan doesn’t need them here.
‘We’ll see her at the funeral,’ they say.
But Jan isn’t at the funeral, and they aren’t really surprised. Sabrina supposes that, even if she were allowed, Jan wouldn’t want her mother’s friends to see her tethered to a guard. The undertaker has told them that the viewing went very well, and that Jan’s escorts, as he described her guards, had allowed her to stay a long time. She had been able to bring a friend from the prison. They had spent some time with Leonie, then Jan stayed with her for a while by herself. She loved the dress on her mother, said it was exactly right. Sabrina thinks Jan would have said goodbye then; it would have been enough.
For, after all, it’s not such a great occasion. Twenty or so people attend, hard-bitten older reporters for the most part, and some union people. Eddie makes a lugubrious speech to the effect that Leonie was a great laugh and tough as old boots with a heart of gold and his very good mate. All the old clichés, and bit of cover-up too. His wife, standing in the front pew, is a tiny woman with a nut of a face and knowing eyes.
The undertaker hands them the dress, wrapped up in tissue paper, and they shake hands with him.
Back at Elsa’s house, Sabrina gives Elsa the tag and Elsa, who is more adept at folding things, reattaches it. She is wearing her kitchen gloves. ‘You can’t be too sure,’ she says. It’s Sabrina’s job to return the dress. Elsa had picked it up; now her part is over, as she says. Done and dusted.
The shop’s manager is indignant, although she tries to be polite. She studies the dress from every angle and finds it perfect. She asks if she can give Sabrina a cheque, given that she ‘doesn’t appear to have a credit card’, and when Sabrina says no, her friend paid for it with cash and that’s what she wants back, she has to wait for a long time while the woman goes to the bank along the street. The notes are counted out with crisp fury.
In the days that follow, Sabrina frets about the dress. Perhaps it has been sold and now some other woman might be wearing it. There seems something deeply unpleasant about this possibility. In her lunch-hour she slopes up the street to the shop and takes a quick look round to see whether the manager is at the counter. When she sees the coast is clear, she ducks in and looks on the rack, but the dress has gone. An attendant at the other end of the shop looks up and sees her. ‘If you’ve changed your mind, that dress is sold,’ she says.
So Sabrina knows it’s not as easy as that: everyone in the shop knows who she is and remembers. She and Elsa meet so that Sabrina can give her her money back. She tells Elsa about her second trip to the shop. Elsa blanches a little, says they must forget it now, because there’s nothing they can do about it, and they don’t need to draw attention to themselves. Who knows, they might be on security cameras. Really, it’s not a crime. ‘You have to let it go, Sabby,’ she tells her. ‘Click click?’
They talk about going to see Jan. Both of them have written to her and described the funeral. Sabrina has even tried to make her account a little comical, describing the way Eddie’s toupee had slid over his ear while he was giving the eulogy.
Weeks pass and neither of them hears from her. They wonder about going to see, her again, but it turns out to be complicated. They have to get permission to visit, and be on Jan’s list of people she wants to see, and when they enquire it seems that Jan hasn’t asked for them again. Elsa is annoyed that after all the trouble they’ve been to, Jan hasn’t bothered to write.
There is a dinner party. There are dinner parties all over this city every night: diplomacy, solid silver cutlery and crystal; business, private rooms in restaurants, some talk, a deal cut and home by ten o’clock; culture, artists or writers or film dudes (but rarely a combination of the three) take over the whole restaurant and shout their way through a main and several bottles of wine. And there are the weekend dinner parties in old houses that have been elegantly refurbished, with dark wood panels and high ceilings, shelves full of books and a handful of good pictures on the walls, wine glasses that don’t always match, dress casual, six or eight people gathered round a table, gossip. Always gossip. These are the ones Sabrina and Daniel like most. They go to a dinner party given by an architect called Mark with whom Daniel often works in the construction business. Mark’s business partner is recently separated from his wife. He’s brought his new girlfriend, a tall rakish woman with tousled red curls, who works in television make-up. Mark’s wife doesn’t approve of Hortense, the make-up artiste (this is how she describes herself), and the atmosphere is cool until the third bottle of wine, when Daniel and Sabrina catch each other’s eye and they’re both thinking that they need to cut this woman some slack.
‘Tell us about your job,’ says Sabrina. ‘It sounds really interesting.’
Hortense is a little drunk by then, and glad to have their attention. She tells them about some politicians she’s made up, and who has had work done on their faces. You’d be really surprised at some of the men who’ve had the cut, she tells them, and names a couple. Mind you, men are easier than the women. Some of the women she gets through are real bitches. Power bitches, she calls them, talking on their cellphones while she’s trying to do their blusher. How the hell do they expect her to keep it even? And then it’s all her fault. Unless they’re having a bad day and then they want all her attention, expect her to be Mother Teresa. Holy shit, she says, and Mark’s wife begins clearing away dishes, with a bit of a rattle and clatter, but Hortense doesn’t notice.
‘I mean shit,’ she says, ‘I had one in the other day, who’d got this new dress. She was a mess, had a rash on the back of her neck that she was trying to cover up. I said don’t worry, they can’t see your back on telly. She started to bawl. The rash was right around her neck and on her arms, and other bits of her, too, that she’d rather not mention. She told me she had a new dress that she paid major money for, and every time she wears it, the same thing happens, and she gets a fever as well. At first she thinks it’s all in her head, but the night before I saw her, she’d passed out at a dinner party at one of the embassies, face down in the dessert, and you know what everyone was thinking. Pissed. She said she’d never live it down.’
‘It must be in her head,’ says Mark’s wife. ‘How could a dress do that to you?’
‘Well, it seems it’s got feathers on it so she wondered if it was some kind of bird sickness.’
‘What sort of feathers were they?’ Sabrina asks carefully.
‘Oh, I don’t know. She was just one of those silly cows who get hysterical over nothing, I reckon. Who knows whether it was her dress.’ Hortense is looking for her glass to be refilled.
‘Like tui feathers? Or peacock’s or something?’ Sabrina is trying to keep her voice casual, even indifferent.
‘Oh, I’m blowed if I know,’ Hortense says. ‘I never thought to ask.’
‘So who was she?’ Sabrina persists.
Hortense pulls up short, as if her head has cleared. ‘I can’t tell you things like that. It’d be more than my job’s worth.’
‘She sobered up fast enough when it suited her,’ Sabrina says on the way home.
‘Well, she’s right, she can’t talk about her clients.’
‘She mentioned those cabinet ministers.’
‘That’s different,’ Daniel says.
‘I don’t see that it is.’
‘How would you like it if it was you?’
‘She probably made up the part about doing that woman’s make-up,’ Sabrina says. ‘She probably just heard about her. I mean, she would have told us if she knew. You could tell she would.’
‘You’re making too much of it,’ he s
ays in an injured way, as if she has just spoilt the evening. Of course it already is spoilt.
Only, the next week he dines at a restaurant with some businessmen who are going to put money into a project he hopes to get involved in, and when he comes home he tells her he’s heard the story again. ‘Remember, the one about the woman who passed out with her face in the lemon meringue.’
‘I don’t remember that it was lemon meringue.’
‘Whatever.’
‘Did they say who it was?’
‘I missed that.’
‘Daniel.’
Somebody tells her the story over the water distiller at work. ‘Do you know who it was?’ Sabrina asks. She is desperate to know.
The woman telling the story rolls her eyes. ‘Somebody well known, she goes on television. Well, that’s what I heard. She’s quite high up.’ Though what she is high up in is still not clear. The story has become more about the woman passing out than about the dress and the rashes, which Sabrina thinks is just as well.
‘I have to tell the shop,’ Sabrina says to Elsa on the phone. They have been in touch more often than in years.
And Elsa says no, Sabby, don’t do it, or if she must, just leave her out. Sabrina says: ‘We could write the shop a note.’ Because by now she has looked up embalming fluid and knows that it contains formaldehyde, ethanol, ether — a proper cocktail of solvents. Leonie had been preserved in toxins.
‘Look,’ says Elsa, ‘the woman won’t wear the dress again. She’d be a fool to.’
‘You don’t know that for sure. She might think it was a coincidence.’
‘A dress like that? Well, you wouldn’t want to wear it too often anyway. It’s not one you’d forget.’
But Sabrina can’t let it rest. At night she lies awake, flooded with what she supposes is deep moral panic. When she was a child she used to have sleepless nights, thinking, Please God, let me off this time and I’ll never do it again. She is thinking exactly the same thing now, with a variation that goes something like, Give me another chance, and I’ll grow up. She has decided she will go in and tell the shop manager, although first she must tell Daniel, and then goodness knows who else. Her lawyer, perhaps. It could be a crime, after all. Inflicting a noxious substance on an unsuspecting victim. She must tell, because at heart she doesn’t think she’s a bad person.
