One Long Thread Page 6

  ‘You just missed Amona. She left her card for you,’ Dad said as if we had been a family of carefully synchronised timetables for some time.

  I nodded.

  ‘You’re okay with all of this? Aren’t you, Button?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, sitting down in front of the newspaper.

  ‘I mean, Amona’s great,’ Dad said. ‘And she thinks you are fabulous.’

  ‘I like her, too,’ I said. And it was true. Perhaps that was what was wrong with the whole situation. I’d have been much more comfortable if I hated her. If I could have pretended my own mother had been a much better woman. That we had all ruined a perfect family.

  ‘I’ll go shopping tonight,’ Dad said. ‘Anything you need to add to the grocery list?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Amona will be back for dinner tonight. And then she’s off to Brisbane for two weeks.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘Which,’ Dad said, rinsing his bowl in the sink, ‘means we get our Friday nights back. And just to prove I can share, you get to choose this Friday’s video.’ He waited for my reaction.

  ‘Actually, I’ve got plans this Friday night,’ I said, remembering Becky’s idea to sneak out together in the guise of staying over at her house. And even though I had been planning to get out of it, somehow, I continued. ‘We’re going to get coffee at that little place near Mr Grandy’s after work and then go back to Becky’s house for the night.’

  ‘Oh,’ Dad said and I couldn’t decide whether he was disappointed or just surprised. ‘About time you behaved like a teenager.’

  ‘What do you say, Ruby?’ Mr Grandy was really pleased with himself.

  I arrived for work the next day to find him waiting for me behind the counter. He was smiling from ear to ear, rocking on the balls of his feet.

  ‘Mrs Pratson has this friend who wants you to design her gown. It’s for an important dinner engagement for her husband’s firm.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘She was very impressed with your contribution to the wedding.’

  ‘You can design it here,’ he said, pointing to the clear end of the long laminated counter top that was closer towards the stairs leading to his office. ‘I’m prepared to give you seventy per cent of the profit, Ruby. I think it would be a nice touch for the customers to see a work in progress. What do you say?’

  ‘She wants me to sew it, too? But—’

  Mr Grandy held up his hands. ‘I took the liberty of describing your skills.’

  I stashed my backpack under the counter and folded my arms.

  ‘But . . .’ I felt my heart speed up. I was terrified at the thought of having to produce a dress on demand.

  ‘Just say, yes. Please?’

  I didn’t know how to say no and ended up nodding my head.

  ‘We get to display it in the window for two weeks. After she’s worn it, of course,’ Mr Grandy added as he climbed the stairs towards the office where the phone was ringing. I couldn’t help but smile, watching him run towards the call. ‘Hello mother,’ I heard him say.

  If it all went horribly wrong, I could always quit and move to Darwin, I thought as the first customer of the afternoon came through the door.

  That evening after my shift finished, Mr Grandy gave me an armful of old pattern books to take home. McCalls, Butterick and Vogue. I’ve yet to find the exact word to describe the enjoyment that an evening spent riffling through old pattern books can bring.

  That Friday night, what began as the first ambitious rebellion of a handful of nearly seventeen-year-old girls ended up being coffee and Hungry Jack’s, followed by a footpath tour of all the clubs we had pretended we were going to get into. We caught the tram back to Becky’s house – just like we told our parents we would – and watched something horrible on late night television before falling asleep in our pyjamas on sleeping bags in the lounge room. I waited until they were all asleep – ignoring Becky’s enthusiastic snoring – and took out my torch and sketchbook to work on the design I’d begun the first night Amona stayed over.

  I seem to approach each new design from a different angle. Sometimes I’m inspired by a particular fabric – the colour and texture – and I’ll start with that, sensing a shape and feel of the design. I’ll match it with other colours, other fabrics, and then sketch what I think I’ve found. Other times I’ll sketch first and find that the fabrics and embellishments emerge from that point. The dress I worked on that night was a sketch first. I could feel the shape emerging. It wasn’t like anything I’d done before, in fact, I’d describe it more in the line of costume. Pieces of stiff fabric, large leaf shapes overlapping each other in a skirt hemmed to form a diagonal line across the flat of the body. Whether inherent in the fabric itself, or added on with textures and beads after, the skirt was alive with intricate detail. I imagined Sally in footless black tights. Designer black ballet shoes tied with ribbon bows across the bridge of her foot. A formal look, expensive fabric contrasted with casual tights. Though I could not settle on how the bodice of the garment would look and rubbed out a dozen attempts that didn’t feel right. When I could no longer focus on the page properly and had rubbed the paper too thin, I switched the torch off and went to sleep, tucking my sketchbook underneath my pillow. No sooner was I dreaming when I heard Becky’s laugh, felt her arm across my body and opened my eyes to see her childishly excited eyes, her blonde hair hanging around her face.

  ‘Pancakes,’ she said, jumping from my sleeping bag and disappearing out of the door towards the kitchen, her tissue-box-sized piggy slippers scuffing on the carpet.

  11.

  Becky’s mum dropped me home and I arrived to find Dad immersed in a full-scale clean-out. He had the garage door open and boxes divided into various piles inside the house and outside on the pavement. He waved as I came in through the door, asking me to grab his cup of tea from the bench.

  I threw my duffle bag on the kitchen bench and took his tea outside. I found him, excited as a kitten, busying through one large old box beside a brown leather suitcase the likes of which you’d find in a collector’s bric-a-brac store.

  ‘I need you to go through some of these with me,’ he said taking the tea.

  I sat down on the lid of a plastic box and watched him. He ran a hand though his hair and continued rummaging through his current box. I’d rarely stopped to look at Dad before. But I suppose he was handsome. I tried looking at him like Amona might look at him. As if we’d never met before, hadn’t known each other for as long as we could each remember. He was an easy man to be around, comfortable in himself. Sandy blond hair, lines creasing their way through his face around his mouth and eyes. A man more handsome in his older years than his younger years. I’d seen a few pictures of him as a young man, and he was lanky and lean, I’d say. Nothing especially appealing about him. I kicked my foot back and forth, banging the container like a drum.

  ‘Should have done this a long time ago,’ he said, straightening up from his task to sip his tea. ‘Some things we’ve never gone through since your mum . . .’ he left the rest of the sentence unfinished. ‘I think those boxes have your baby toys and things from primary school,’ he pointed to the far corner of the garage. ‘But I think these might have been your mum’s.’

  I tried to remember what might have been stashed in each of the boxes and felt a glimmer of excitement about discovering things I’d long forgotten about. I leapt off the container to go have a look.

  Piggy and Scamper – stuffed toys I’d won at the show – were there and some of my books from primary school. Report cards and awards. Class certificates and a few ribbons from relay races and the cross-country in grade four which were actually Sally’s, though there was no name on them. I couldn’t remember how they might have got mixed up with my things, though I didn’t rule out the possibility that I’d taken them. Sally won so
many things. I remember hating her for that. Another blue ribbon, another green. They didn’t hand out ribbons for creative sketching and general fabric knowledge in primary school. At the bottom of the box was The Magic Faraway Tree.

  ‘Happy to keep it if you want, Button. But no point holding onto stuff for the sake of it.’

  I pulled out a few things I didn’t really want. Things of no sentimental value. But most of it I really wanted to hang onto for no other reason than I wasn’t ready to let go.

  ‘Think you can take a look through your mum’s things?’

  I looked over at the two boxes separated out.

  ‘We can send her what you think she might like to keep,’ he said. ‘Or you could write and tell her what’s in it and what she wants us to do with it all. Not sure how it got left here.’

  I opened the lid of the first box and inhaled a dusty smell of age. I removed the books that sat on top, two photograph albums, to see what was at the bottom. I pulled out packets of fabric and patterns and placed them all around the box until I reached the bottom and there was nothing left. I glanced over to Dad, but he was busy with his own things.

  I left it all there, moving onto the next box. The first thing I pulled out was a large, woollen red coat. Underneath that was a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings, pictures cut from magazines. Scribblings in a child’s writing, hand-drawn pictures. At the bottom of the box was an old hardback book. The History of Silk.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked Dad, showing him the red coat.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know we had that. Belongs to your Grandmother Pearl, I think.’

  Becky has her grandparents come to dinner once a month on a Sunday evening and she was most surprised to find that our circle of friends didn’t observe the same habit relating to family.

  ‘But don’t you have family get-togethers?’

  Rachel’s family got together over birthdays and Melissa lived with her grandparents so they were there all the time.

  ‘Don’t you find it strange that your mother would leave you?’ Becky said. ‘I can’t imagine my mother leaving me.’

  I’d never thought of it like that before. ‘I don’t think she knew what else to do.’

  ‘Well, my mother, if it ever came to that, would never let my father keep either of us. She just wouldn’t.’

  I didn’t know any other girl who only lived with her father. There were boys who lived with their single mothers, but that was relatively normal. Men were always leaving their families. Most men were, in our experience, most likely to be Casanovas. And Casanovas were always ready to move on to another woman. Perhaps there was something safe about honing our teenage senses towards identifying decent boys at fifty paces. If there was some way of knowing which boys were likely to turn out to be decent men, boys that could love us back as passionately as we felt we could love them, then we could banish the likelihood of divorce and unhappiness to a statistically unlikely outcome. It occurred to me, then, that I’d never heard my mother talk about her father. Only about Pearl. Mum talked of her mother in disappointing tones, and we knew she had done many things wrong or was the kind of woman we shouldn’t approve of. Though, on that day, I realised my mother had never told us anything tangible. There were no actual stories, or incidents, just her attitude and judgment.

  I remember taking a walk with Pearl through the Botanic Gardens, having high tea somewhere in the city, followed by a tram trip home. Mum had to take Sally to the bathroom to remove the markings of strawberry jam that had slid, like one complete mass, from the top of her scone onto her white blouse. My mother made audible ‘tut-tuts’ while she attempted to remove the jam with her handkerchief. When this failed she took Sally by the hand to the bathroom. All the while my grandmother laughed. She had large brown eyes and there were deep lines in her skin when she smiled.

  ‘What do you know about Pearl, Dad?’ I asked, putting the red coat back in the box and sitting down amid the fabric and patterns with the scrapbook. ‘Mum never liked her much.’

  ‘True enough. I’d say their relationship had been strained for a long time. Your mother moved around a lot as a child. She could never make many friends. Her childhood wasn’t very settled.’

  ‘Why?’

  Dad stopped what he was doing, picked up his tea and looked over at me. ‘I’m not exactly sure. I think Pearl followed a trail of casual jobs. There was a lot of pressure on her to give your mum up, you know,’ he sipped his tea. ‘Pearl was young when your mum was born. Not the done thing back then, Button.’

  I couldn’t believe I hadn’t asked Dad about this before. I was fascinated about all there was to know about Pearl and my mother. ‘What about Mum’s father?’

  Dad sighed. ‘To tell you the truth we didn’t talk a lot about it, your mum and I. I don’t suppose I was ever the supportive shoulder your mum needed.’

  ‘But do you know who he is?’

  ‘Your mum knows.’

  ‘But she’s never said anything before. I mean, I don’t really even know if I have a grandfather at all. On Mum’s side,’ I added, thinking about Dad’s father whom we saw occasionally.

  ‘Pearl’s a good woman,’ Dad said. ‘Though don’t tell your mum I said that.’ He winked.

  I opened the scrapbook and flipped through the first few pages. Snippets of newspapers, haphazardly sticky-taped down, covered each page. The sticky tape had yellowed and obscured some of the newsprint. I turned the page and a few clippings slipped free and floated down around my feet. Strips of tape fell out next, all the stickiness destroyed with time. Some of the clippings didn’t seem to mean much at all. Other clippings detailed dates and articles about bull riding and rodeos. I turned a few more pages to find swatches of fabric stapled to them. The edges had frayed and my fingers came away from the page coated in dust. I closed the book and turned it over. On the bottom right corner was written Property of Pearl Stafford.

  ‘What do you make of this?’ I said to Dad, taking the History of Silk book and holding it up for him to see.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, stepping over a pile of discarded belongings, turfed out from different boxes. ‘Pearl left this box with us years ago. Last time we saw her before she decided to stay in Tonga. She started up a business of some kind . . . had this thing about silkworms and silk,’ he said, taking the book from my hands. He chuckled. ‘Your mother thought she had completely lost the plot.’

  I had my homework piled up on my desk. Textbooks one on top of each other: maths, To Kill a Mockingbird, Biology of Life, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. I opened my diary to check which assignments absolutely had to be completed that weekend and was relieved to discover I could get through the weekend with only doing a book report on To Kill a Mockingbird. That wouldn’t be hard. Dad and I planned to watch the movie that evening anyway. I took out a clean sheet of writing paper that Dad had bought me and began my letter to Mum.

  Dear Mum . . .

  I was suddenly angry I had to write by hand. What kind of mother didn’t have a phone or computer or internet? At first she couldn’t afford the monthly fees, but after that she refused to participate in communications she referred to as ‘the breakdown of decent society’. The Aberdeen believed that the internet and all associated electronic devices divided people from what was really important. It was too easy, so they said, to hide away in one’s home and avoid human contact altogether. I was tempted to point out how much more Mum and I could communicate if we had access to those evils but I said nothing. There was so much about Mum’s religion that bothered me but I could never really articulate – either to myself or anyone else – why it seemed wrong. I just felt this uncomfortable throb, like the feeling you get when someone is dangerous or creepy. And, by comparison, the Aberdeen always had a ready answer and explanation for everything. They never stumbled, like I did. And I could see how that kind of a
ssurance would seem convincing.

  Dear Mum,

  How are you? I hope everything is fine up north and your sewing is going well. I haven’t really told you very much but I’ve been doing a lot of sewing, too. We are the same like that, I think. I like to think I’m like you. I’ve made quite a few dresses with my sewing machine and Mr Grandy was so impressed with my sketching and advice with . . .

  I was about to write about Mrs Pratson and Mabel and their wedding and I couldn’t. There was no way to write about that without seeming like I was comparing myself to her.

  . . . customers he’s increased the amount of money I earn for some services. Dad was cleaning out the garage today and we found a couple of boxes that weren’t ours. One box contained patterns and fabric and the other one had a red coat, a scrapbook and a book called The History of Silk. Dad thinks the coat and books belong to Grandma Pearl and the other box is yours. What would you like me to do with them? I could send them up to you if you like. Just let me know.

  Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to sew in the Darwin heat and I don’t know how you do it. Please tell Sally I said hello. I’ll write to her soon.

  Love

  Button

  I flopped on my bed and opened The History of Silk. It was a heavy book and I had to rest it against my knees as I started reading.

  The origins of silk were a mystery for thousands of years and, for a time, silk was so highly prized a commodity, ounce for ounce, it equalled the value of gold.

  When the western world finally discovered China, they stumbled upon an ancient and mysterious culture rich with customs, laws and history, like nothing they had ever seen before. Apart from the myriad of new sensations – small women with bound feet, a new mystical religion, rice paddies and exotic foods – people of the West saw the most splendid fashion intricately embroidered and embellished. This fabric emanated a sheen and lustre like no other. The fabric was silk and its secret belonged to a small, white worm, born of a tiny egg.