by Kim Kelly
Whatever the day might bring, she was heading for it at an easy clip. She was calm; she was cool; she’d eaten an ordinary breakfast of vegemite toast and tea; she’d even dashed off the introduction for her Fitzgerald essay, filling in the minutes until it was time to go.
She checked her watch as she strode on: a whisker after nine – excellent. The Curiosity Shop should be open by the time she got there. Unless, of course, she’d imagined the whole thing yesterday, and the shop didn’t really exist. But she strode past this thought, too, chin high – each time it knocked on the lid of its box, she pushed it down again. Was there any better proof of just what a wonderful day this was? She was getting on top of her doubts. She was winning. Mr Olympia Café gave her a nod and a wave from his window as she strode past him as well, his spatula raised as though in confirmation.
And there it was, The Curiosity Shop, the bulb in the tiffany lamp flickering on as she crossed the road towards it, lighting up the multi-coloured diamonds of the harlequin glass and the heavy red curtain by it, draped like a sail at rest. The zebra seemed to grin, not at her, but – Yes! – the dress, her dress, was still there, exactly where she’d left it, too, on the mannequin beyond the jewellery-display case.
‘Hello again!’ she almost shouted on seeing the old woman, who was up on a stepladder, pulling the cord of another overhead light, a bronze chandelier strung with amber beads, that hung above the tall shelves in the middle of the shop.
The woman peered in the general direction of the greeting, until she found Addy there by her heart’s desire: ‘Ah! Hello, dear. You have returned.’ She smiled with her eyes, with that glint of clear blue mischief: ‘I thought you might. You have come to try on the dress?’
‘Yes, please.’ Addy almost bounced about like a child, she was so full of fizz at the want, at the thrill.
‘Very well.’ The old woman got down from the stepladder, folding it away, pushing it under the shelves with the toe of one of her patent-leather shoes, all one fluid movement; she wore the same plum wool suit, neat and trim, and she walked with such a straight back, such a precise placement of her feet, Addy wondered if she’d been a dancer or a gymnast once upon a time. At the mannequin, with care and gentle ceremony, the woman unbuckled the slim green belt at the waist, such a dark green, the colour of pine needles; the flowers, gathering and gathering below it, swished across the outer layer of tulle, floating across its pale patch of sky.
Addy held her breath, watching as her tiny note flittered to the carpet; the woman appeared too intent on the dress to notice, unzipping the side seam on the bodice. She didn’t look up as she said: ‘Another woman was interested in this one yesterday afternoon, admiring it very much. I talked her out of it. She was small, like you, but much older. She wouldn’t have liked it once she got it home, I doubt she would ever have worn it.’ The woman pulled the dress expertly up over the top of the mannequin. ‘Not like you. You,’ she looked at Addy now, raising an eyebrow somehow appraisingly, her German accent underlining her certainty, ‘you will wear this gown many, many times.’
‘Oh, I will, I will.’ Addy laughed, taking the treasure of silk upon silk upon silk in her arms for the very first time: ‘I hope she fits me.’
‘She?’ The woman laughed with her, delighted and wry. ‘Oh, but I am sure she will,’ she assured Addy, and waved her away. ‘Try it on, try it on. The change room is down at the back – the door on the left before the last of the books.’
Addy almost ran.
It is also a truth universally acknowledged that a woman in a hurry to undress finds that it takes twice as long as usual, involves laddering her tights and near removing her nose with the thick, tight collar of her skivvy, but Addy got there in the end. She shivered in the dank, dusty old broom cupboard that was the change room, and not only because she was cold: even before she’d slipped the dress over her head, even before she’d zipped the zip, she knew it fitted her. The darts at her bust, the seating of the waistline, the sleeve-caps that cupped her shoulders: it was as though it had been tailored exactly to the fine bones of her frame.
The mirror on the back of the door said so, too. Addy raised her hands to her face, to the flush of her cheeks.
‘Oh!’
Oh.
She buckled the belt and looked again.
This dress, this joyful garden that she wore, was perfect. Simply and intricately perfect. She stood there for some time in spellbound awe, taking in detail upon detail she hadn’t quite seen before: the tiny black filaments ringing the stigmas of the poppies were crafted with such individual artistry it was as though the flowers were truly blooming there, somehow infused with life, each poppy unlike the next; the fluted pompom petals of the cornflowers strewn among them were each distinctly beautiful as well; and hiding in the clustering bunches of leaves around the hem, she found the delicate stars of camomile daisies here and there, golden centres smiling like specks of sun.
Yes, she would want to wear this dress many, many times. But could she dare? Would she dare? Where? Whatever, she didn’t want to take it off right now. She’d have to, though: she had a tutorial for Australian History at half-past ten, and a lay-by to organise yet. She slipped back out of heaven and returned herself to ordinary. She tidied her hair and straightened her pinafore, preparing to make the biggest frock investment of her life. She checked the price tag again, dangling on its little safety pin: Yep, still twenty-eight dollars and seventy-five cents. A hundred disastrous scenarios swooped and squawked around her head, with all the possible ways she’d be prevented from paying off the lay-by, thereby losing dough and dress: she’d get fired from her job; she’d break a leg; she’d be abducted by aliens who’d wipe her memory; she’d be abducted by ASIO and accused of being a Soviet spy; Town Hall Variety would go broke after a devastating corporate embezzlement scandal and not meet the Thursday wages bill. But it would be worth all that and more for the chance to have this dress.
Yes.
Back at the front of the shop, the old woman was sitting on a stool behind the jewellery counter, reading a magazine. Addy could just see the cover: it was a German women’s magazine, Frau something or other, with a photograph of Princess Di on it, wearing a silly hat and looking terrified. Addy wouldn’t be seen dead reading any such gossip rag, but she’d have given anything to know all the words on the cover of this one. Or maybe not anything – she wouldn’t forgo this dress for hell or high water now.
The old woman looked up from her magazine: ‘So, you are happy with this gown?’
‘I am, thank you.’ Addy laid it down across the glass countertop and touched one of the poppies, smiling so wholly her cheeks stung with happiness. ‘I’d like to arrange a lay-by, if I may, please,’ she began, as though she arranged lay-bys all over town. ‘I get paid tomorrow,’ she explained, ‘every Thursday evening, and I’d like to pay it off within the month, if that’s all right. I have four dollars and seventy-five cents for the deposit, if that’s enough, and then from tomorrow, I’d like to make four lots of six-dollar payments, if that would be acceptable to you.’
The old woman gave her a fond chuckle, light and kind: ‘You are very organised. I would not be surprised if you paid it off sooner. Your suggestion is acceptable, of course, and very sensible.’ She turned and reached for a small black ledger book that sat atop a narrow chest of drawers behind her. ‘Now,’ she said, taking up a pretty pen, its barrel enamelled with a crosshatch pattern in white and gold, ‘what is your name, dear?’
‘Adrianna Loest,’ she told her, and spelled out her last name, as she always did: ‘L.O.E.S.T.’
The woman stopped still, pen to page, name as yet unwritten; she looked up at Addy with a frown; a querying and somehow wary frown: ‘I beg your pardon, could you please spell that again?’
Addy did, and with a near audible sigh: ‘L.O.E.S.T. Loest.’ Why was this always so difficult? Loest was not a common name, this was true; it wasn’t even a common German name – she, her dad and Nick were the only L
oests she knew – but it wasn’t as though she was called Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh or Myfanwy Worcestershire, or even Kieran Keveney. It didn’t deserve a frown – no one’s name did.
The woman’s frown only deepened, though, the furrow between her brows holding a story Addy wanted to know. Time stretched and spun around the globe, as the woman stared and stared.
Why is she staring at me like this?
The woman blinked then, cleared her throat and wrote Addy’s name in her lay-by ledger book; she said, not quite meeting Addy’s eye: ‘You would like to make a deposit of four dollars and seventy-five cents, is that right?’
‘That’s right. Thank you.’ Addy wondered what had happened, what was wrong. Had she been rude? Sometimes her oddness could be misinterpreted, she knew that. She took her purse from her satchel and the money from her purse, placing it on the glass between the book and the softly shimmering folds of the dress.
The woman took it, and without counting it, she opened the top drawer behind her and tossed it in a cash tin there, distractedly. She then pulled out a receipt book and scratched down the amount and lay-by terms upon it, firm strokes for the carbon copy beneath; she carefully tore the top page along its perforated edge, and offered it to Addy: ‘Your next payment will be expected in one week from today.’
‘Oh, I’ll be in before then. I can’t wait to return,’ Addy was quick to say, and as sweetly as she could, taking the receipt delicately, trying to make up for how she might have offended the woman; she couldn’t think what she’d said or done.
‘Very well.’ The woman nodded, gathering up the dress. ‘I shall take your gown to the storeroom now, where it will be quite safe.’ And with that, she left, disappearing into the depths of the shop.
Leaving Addy there at the display case, all alone.
I’m just being paranoid, aren’t I.
She’s an old woman – she’s allowed to be inexplicably strange.
She’s not even thinking of you. Do you have to be so self-obsessed even when you’re happy?
Shut up.
Addy wasn’t sure what to do. Time was ticking on – she had to make tracks now for that Aus History tute, but she didn’t want to leave the shop unattended. Anyone could have walked in off the street and pinched the cash tin – pinched anything. There were plenty of dregs and druggies lurking about for Addy to know that was not a paranoid thought. She had another one of those nevertheless, sensing eyes on her; she turned, expecting a fellow customer. It was only the zebra, though, seeming to frown at her as well, as if to say: ‘And who are you?’
On aimless reflex, Addy looked down at the receipt in her hand, searching for her name there, but found instead:
‘ANNA LÖST’
Anna? Ö?
Oh. Addy felt the thought like a dull thud in her stomach: the woman was probably only getting doddery or didn’t hear the ‘Adri’ before the ‘Anna’, going a little deaf. She looked at her watch again: she couldn’t wait to find out – she really had to go.
Should she leave a note? A thankyou? She couldn’t decide if that might compound the offence, if any were taken. If she signed it ‘Addy Loest’, that could appear as though she were correcting the woman; and if she didn’t sign it at all, that would just be weird and useless. She could sign it ‘Miss Loest’ – or should that be ‘Ms’?
You don’t have to leave a fricken note everywhere you go. How about you try to keep that under control for the rest of the day.
Fair call. Good idea. I don’t need to leave a note at all.
For fuck’s sake, get on with it – get out of here!
She flicked the lock on the front door before she closed it behind her – that would have to do. Stepping back out onto the now brightly shouting, honking, growling street, she folded all these thoughts into the inside pocket of her purse, with the receipt; she’d be back again the day after tomorrow.
In the meantime, there was nothing like an Australian History tutorial to knock the gloss off the rest of the morning. The topic for this study unit was supposed to have explored the idea of this nation as the ‘most peaceful democracy on earth’.
‘Most lazy and complacent,’ one of the boys in the tute-group dozen remarked five minutes in, and not without some factual basis, but the gloves were off in this contest of ideas from that point on.
There was the smelly guy with dreadlocks whose father was a merchant banker: ‘Why don’t you ask some Aboriginal people how peaceful this country is, hey, mate! Ask them about the massacres and poisoned waterholes that built this fine democracy.’
The first guy responded by leaning forward, knees splayed wide as they would go to show he was really an ape beneath his preppy crewneck: ‘Why don’t you ask some Aboriginal people if they’d like to return to life in the Stone —’
‘No!’ One of the girls, a high-pitched member of the drama society, joined in, straight from rehearsals for Extreme Outrage: ‘You racist! Colonialism is murder. State-devised murder —’
‘Go and take a cold shower, lovey,’ young Mr Crewneck Crotch Display drawled, and gave her a scoffy, toffy tone of dismissal. ‘You’d prefer a pre-Enlightenment existence, would you? Hand me the keys to your car, then. Walk home and put an axe through your TV.’
‘Oh!’ she gasped and mouthed the word: ‘Arsehole.’
Behold the great brains of the future, Addy thought. Who were these people, so full of confidence in their own opinions, and seemingly so shy of questions, like they hadn’t quite left their high-school debating teams behind? How do they know so much? They talk like they know this stuff in their bones. Addy hadn’t read a lot of philosophy, only bits of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, who didn’t enlighten her with much more than the idea that the only thing that truly distinguishes us from the animals is our awareness of how terrible we are, but she wondered now if these philosophers’ university tutorials might have been much the same, albeit without the present presence of 41.2% females. She wondered for a moment what the world might really be like if it hadn’t been for the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, that burst out of Europe in the seventeenth century, purportedly giving birth to Newton’s laws of physics, modern democracy and, possibly, the harpsichord. Would there have been any less war or murder? Would colonialism have taken another form? Would we have continued to bludgeon and betray each other by some different means? Would rampant capitalism have manifested in a global desire for something other than Rubik’s cubes? Would there have been no discovery of radium, no treatment for cancer, no nuclear bombs? No French Revolution, no Karl Marx, no Les Miserables, the novel or the musical, no International Workers’ Day to be apparently entirely ignored by late-twentieth-century university students who’ll never know real work or ever really need to struggle for anything in their lives? She decided only that she didn’t know the answers to any of these questions, but that she could guess an alternative history would probably not have included Beethoven or Einstein, or cut-price paperbacks. Or chocolate. She was most certain that chocolate as we know it would not exist if it had not been for the Enlightenment – not the worldwide distribution of this human necessity, nor the technological means of its production. And where would we be without chocolate?
‘What?’ The dreadlocked merchant banker winced at her. ‘Chocolate? What are you talking about?’
Addy felt the rush of blood to her face on realising she’d said that last thought aloud; she looked down at the yellow flowers on her too-loud, too-orange pinafore: Why did I wear this today? She needn’t have worried about responding, though: no one was listening to anyone, anyway.
‘Australia is starting to edge beyond its colonial beginnings,’ another of the guys began an attempt at some kind of reason, but he had to raise his voice over the top of Dreadlocks. ‘We’re leading the way to the twenty-first century, as one of the most politically advanced nations in the world. Look at the industrial relations accord, entrenching goodwill between business and workers, and then there’s universal healthcare. The Labor Part
y is —’
‘The Labor Party?’ Drama Queen shrieked. ‘The Labor Party? There’s no other party more steeped in racism – jobs for whites only. Jobs for the boys. Jobs for white scum.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Crewneck Monkey Crotch bellowed back at her: ‘What shade of white are you, then? White saviour?’ And the room completely erupted at that: half falling about laughing; half protesting in dismay.
Addy didn’t know where to look. She thought all the ideas that had been raised were worth discussing, worth unpicking sense from ignorance, but there was no discussion going on here. No one was really saying anything. It was all just noise. White noise; very white.
Round and round it went, until someone inevitably mentioned God – God in this context being the greatest, whitest Aussiest Labor hope of socialistic civilisation known to man, former Prime Minister Saint Gough Whitlam – which then prompted someone else to point out that he was a silver-spooned egomaniac who’d lately spent four hours at the United Nations being grilled for turning a blind eye to Indonesia’s bloodthirsty invasion of East Timor: ‘There’s neo-colonialism for you – get a Third World nation to do your dirty work.’ Then someone had to mention university fees – someone always had to mention university fees – in this instance, that Comrade Gough had abolished them and now his Labor successors Hawke and Keating were bringing them back in: ‘Like the wolves in sheep’s clothing they really are.’
‘But I do love Paul Keating,’ Drama Queen said, like a starstruck groupie. ‘He’s drop-dead gorgeous.’
And Addy ceased to hear much after that.
