fiction | Marian Devitt

THE FREEDOM DRESS

SHE CALLED IT her freedom dress. It was red linen, with flecks of black through the red. The neckline was square and flattered her collarbones. She was wearing it the day she arrived. The only other time I saw it after that it was hanging on the line, a vivid splash of colour against the wild ginger plants I’ve been cultivating out near the laundry. A week after she arrived we talked for a while at the washing line. I was struggling with the weekly wash, she was pegging out her few things.
    “This dress . . . this my running away dress,” she told me when I complimented her on it. “This my freedom dress.”
    One of the first things I did notice about Margarita was that she had very few clothes. I only ever saw her wearing long cotton shorts and T-shirts during the day. The few times I saw her at night she wore a plain, seersucker house coat, an oddly feminine garment for such a severe woman. She obviously had enough underwear to last the week, a change of shorts and
T-shirt for every day, then the Saturday wash and the cycle would begin again. I thought the red dress must have been for special occasions, aside from running away. But then, special occasions aren’t much of an issue around here.
    The day I complimented her on the dress she told me she’d decided to stop using her married name. She wanted her rent receipts in her maiden name, Rodriguez. I asked her how she spelt it and she wrote it painstakingly on a piece of paper. I asked her if Rodriguez was Spanish, or Mexican. She said she was originally from Chile. Her accent was still very thick and I remembered reading once that retaining a strong accent was related to homesickness and a sense of not being able to settle in the new country. I asked if she was ever homesick and she said no, she had no reason to be homesick and there was no reason to go back to Chile. She’d run away from Chile over twenty years ago and she’d left her Australian husband, Mr McMurtrie, a good six months before she arrived here.
    “We work at the school . . . in the desert. I’m cleaner there. People say, How you can work there? but I like this desert. One day, Father Benedict going to town. He say, you want to come Margarita? and I think, why not? I should see this town. My husband, Mr McMurtrie, he not like me to see the town. He not like me away from his sight. I am tired of this . . . control. So. I change my clothes. I put my red dress. Father give me wages. I put money in my purse. I walk out the door. When we get to town, Father leave me in the truck. He go to the bank. Something . . . how you say . . . snap? There is McCafferty bus parked there. I go to bus and I say Where you going? North, he say. I ask him How much? I have enough. I buy ticket. That’s how I’m coming here. I not live with McMurtrie, so I not use that name anymore.”

Days pass slowly here. The little boarding house I manage is the last of its kind in a city obsessed with development. All the old tropical houses are almost gone. We can’t afford to run air-conditioners here, which keeps the guests away in the Build Up and Wet Season, so I’m always glad to have regular tenants, although there’s never that many of them. The tariff here is cheap but even backpackers won’t tolerate this heat without air-conditioning. So the Dry Season’s my busiest time. Apart from that, business can be very slow.
    I never imagined I’d end up running a boarding house in the tropics but the manager’s flat is free and there’s a modest wage I can just live on. I approach the cleaning as exercise. The boarding house is on the edge of town, so I don’t really need a car. I walk or catch minibuses. If I do walk anywhere I make sure it’s either early or late to avoid the worst of the heat. I need to be here most of the time, so I don’t go out much anyway. It’s a job I can do without thinking too hard. I direct guests to their rooms and the limited attractions of the town. I change coins for the phone and call cabs to the airport and when the guests go, I wipe the rooms clean of them and wait for the next contingent. The interstate owners leave me to do things my way and in the late afternoon and evening I try to write. Nothing much comes of that, but it seems to be something I need to keep doing.
    When Margarita arrived I thought she was just like any other traveller, except for this tiny bag. She kept up a ferocious itinerary of sightseeing that first week, then the week turned into two and two weeks turned into a month with her heading off every day like a real tourist. I remember wondering where can she be going? There’s nothing left to see.
    I was caught off guard when she said she wanted to stay on. The boarding house has its charms in a run down sort of way, but the single women’s section, the cheapest section, reminds me of a 1950s boarding school. It’s not somewhere I’d want to stay for very long. I worried she wouldn’t tolerate sharing the kitchen and lounge and bathroom with the turnover of guests, because it soon became obvious Margarita wasn’t a tolerant woman. She was often scathing about the young women travellers who came through. I think she might have been jealous of their youth. She certainly didn’t like sharing her personal space with them.
    It wasn’t long before she found herself a cleaning job in the mornings at an office complex in town. As soon as she’d saved some money, she bought herself a bar fridge for her room and a small television and that was it. You never saw her in the lounge room. She never mixed with anyone, never rang anyone, never, as far as I can remember, received any mail.
    She eventually applied for the better-paid afternoon shift. I saw even less of her. When she wasn’t working, she was usually sleeping or just sitting in her room. Sometimes she’d go out and come back with a small bag of shopping. Just a few things, but hardly anything that seemed like real food. I could never work out where she ate. She rarely used the kitchen and I never did find out where she went on her days off.
    I went into her room once. She’d said to me, “Please . . . don’t clean my room. I clean it. You have too much to clean.”
    “So do you,” I laughed. “I don’t mind. It’s part of my job.”
    “No. Please. Don’t clean my room. I clean my own room thank you.”
    But I did go into her room. I’m not even sure why. I think it was this sense that she was paranoid about something and I wanted to work out what that was. The minute I went in there, I knew I shouldn’t have done it. The force field of her privacy was so strong the hairs stood up on my arms. It felt like some kind of booby trap. I didn’t touch a thing. I just stood there, rooted to the floor, trying to glean something from the way she’d left it, but there was nothing to tell me who she was, or what she liked, or what she might do in there except watch television. There wasn’t even a television program to be seen. The bed was made with military tautness. Her terry towelling scuffs were under a chair, very faintly soiled, with just the slightest imprint of her feet. She’d bought a bedside lamp. The fan was on low, stirring the hot, damp air. I almost turned it off, but then she would’ve known I’d been in there. I felt she’d know I was in there anyway; she’d feel the quality of the air was different. Disturbed. Transgressed. I felt so guilty I avoided her, which wasn’t hard, until she came to pay her rent. She didn’t seem to be harbouring any malice, so I relaxed.
    She’d been here about eight months when the cleaning company gave her an award. She brought home a framed photo of herself the company had organised as part of the award. The small gold plaque was engraved: Cleaner of the Month. She seemed so proud of it, which didn’t seem like her somehow. She said she was going to put it in her room. I gave her a little lace doily. I said, “Here . . . this will look nice under it”. After that she seemed to treat me a little differently, as though we’d become better friends, or were somehow closer than before.
    Margarita never mentioned children. She never spoke about her family or friends and once she’d blotted out her husband’s name from the guest register, she never spoke about him again either. But when my friend Estelle turned up with her three rampaging children, Margarita surprised me again. She always made such a fuss of the kids and her attention to the children made it easier for me and Estelle to talk. She was very tender with them. She’d push them on the swing in the garden for hours and of course, the kids would let her. They didn’t seem to find her hard or strange or frightening. Maybe it was only me who thought that about her and now, I think that had something to do with my suspicion that some hard, crystalline thing I perceived in Margarita would be my fate too, if I wasn’t careful. I don’t really understand what I mean by that. It’s possibly something that could exist in all of us, something obsidian and dark and impenetrable. The children, being children, found a different centre in her, but I just kept building up this picture of her that now seems hopelessly incomplete.
    It took me a few days to realise she’d gone. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, except for a couple of incidents a few weeks before at the office block, that made her very angry.
    A female office worker complained that a valuable pen set was missing from her desk. The afternoon it went missing, it was Margarita’s shift. The woman made a fuss. The police were called in. They even came to the boarding house to check her room. I found out later this was at Margarita’s insistence but it was as though their incursion into her room ruptured that private cocoon she’d spun for herself. She said she was insulted by the accusations. The police seemed almost embarrassed by her spartan room. It revealed nothing.
    After that, she spent even less time around the place. When she wasn’t sleeping or at work she was out walking. I couldn’t understand how she could walk so much in the incredible stifling heat that pulses off these streets.
    I did notice, not long after this incident, that she’d bought a small, expensive mobile phone. I saw her once, sitting on a bench in the park across from the big supermarket in town. I was inside in the checkout queue. I watched her dialling numbers, listening, ending the calls. Never speaking. There were never any bills for the phone in the letterbox.
    Then a week or so later, something else happened at the office block. There was another accusation of theft, although this time, no one came to check her room. She almost cried telling me about it. Accused! The best cleaner in the place!
    When she came to pay her rent a few days later she said, “I leaving on Wednesday”.
    “Leaving for where? Where are you going?”
    I don’t know how to explain how important Margarita’s difficult, impersonal presence had become to me. I think her presence meant some strange stability in this place of impermanence. With the weather so hot again and so few guests, I felt I needed someone else around. Someone familiar. Maybe part of it was a conviction I’d developed that she needed to belong somewhere and that I was part of the reason she could stay. I never considered at that stage, it might be my need to belong to someone. I can remember what she said quite clearly:
    “I go to Father Benedict. He need me. No-one work for him. No-one stay out there.” Her normally thick accent was even thicker now with emotion.
    “If the school needs you, that’s great, but . . . I’ll miss you Margarita.” I really meant it. Margarita looked shocked.
    I stammered, “I know . . . I’ve never asked you this before . . . I won’t mind if you say no . . . but come to dinner? Have a meal with me?”
    Margarita looked at me, a distant hollow look, so hard to fathom.
    “Thank you. No. I am very busy. I will pack my bag.”
    “Of course,” I said, “of course . . . but if you change your mind . . . any night . . . just knock.”
    I didn’t see her after that, except for one moment when the minibus drove past the cathedral late the following afternoon. It was almost dusk. She was wearing her red dress and the colour of the dress glowed in that afternoon light, the deep green of the palm garden beside her such a contrast. It was impossible to tell, before the bus sped on, if she was going in or out of the cathedral, or just standing outside.
    It took me a while to work out the reason for the quick prickle of unease I felt. She’d told me she would finish work the following Tuesday, and this was only Thursday; she should have been at work. So why was she walking past the cathedral in her red dress?
    It was Sunday before I checked her room. Her tiny suitcase lay on the bed. It held three bras, six pairs of underpants, the house coat, seven pairs of shorts and seven T-shirts. All that was missing was a set of underwear, the red dress and her slip-on sandals. The frame for her photo was packed in amongst the soft folds of her T-shirts, but the photo itself was gone. Her mobile phone lay on the bed. I checked it for recorded calls, for numbers. Nothing. I found her disposable terry towelling scuffs upended in the garbage bin like abandoned feet.
    Wednesday came, the day of her planned leaving. I hadn’t seen her for five days. The suitcase was still in the room. I knew I had to do something, despite her ferocious privacy.
    The hospital could at least tell me she wasn’t there, under either name, but the bus company wouldn’t say whether she’d bought a ticket or not. For privacy reasons. The cleaning company said she’d resigned three weeks before, which I figured was just after the last accusation. The police were reluctant to start a Missing Person’s file because I just didn’t seem sure enough she was actually missing. It was hard to convince them someone who was leaving anyway was really missing. They said there was a lot of paperwork. I’d have to be very sure. They seemed to suggest she’d maybe just skipped out on her rent. I had to admit there was no particular reason she’d say goodbye to me. We were nothing special to each other.
    Eventually I thought of my own guest register and the name of the community she’d given when she first signed in. I checked the number of the school in the directory and rang. A man with a familiar, thick accent answered.
    No, Margarita wasn’t back at the school, Father Benedict said. He’d had no contact with her since she ran away, although they would have taken her back, of course. She was a good worker. Her husband had long gone, at first in search of her, but as far as the Father knew, Mr McMurtrie had never found her. She’d never rung the school. The last time he’d seen her was the day he left her waiting in the truck outside the bank. I gave him my phone number, just in case she turned up. So I could send on her things.
    I had to be persistent, but eventually the police decided to take me seriously. Little came of their investigations, except that Margarita had bought a bus ticket down south under her old married name. I couldn’t understand why she’d do that. When it came to detail, I found I couldn’t tell the police much about her. I didn’t really know how old she was, I didn’t know Mr McMurtrie’s first name, I didn’t know how much she weighed or how tall she was. The description I gave of her could have been any middle-aged woman with an accent.
    Two months later, Father Benedict rang. It was late at night and there was a storm. I was reluctant to answer the phone because of the lightning but it rang so persistently I eventually picked it up.
    He had no news of Margarita, as such. It was just that a strange thing had caught itself like a burr inside his memory. An article in the regional newspaper. A newspaper that was already a month old by the time it made it out to him in the community. The article was about a woman who went missing from a bus heading west towards the coast. The bus company alerted authorities at the time, but no-one had seen her since. She’d just disappeared into the night. The driver didn’t have her name on the manifest. She’d bought a ticket just moments before the bus departed. The Father thought little of it.
    But then he’d just received another month-old newspaper and there was another article, which was why he was ringing now. Three desert kids had found a dress, hanging from the branch of a tree, way out in saltbush country on the way towards the coast. The children said the wind was blowing inside the dress and from a distance it looked like there was a person in it, hanging from the tree. But when they got close, there was no-one in the dress. The children took the dress down and gave it to their big sister, who eventually told the local police aide the story. It was a red linen dress with a square neckline. The linen was flecked through with black.
    “Didn’t Margarita have a dress like that?” asked the Father. “I seem to remember, the day she ran away, I just can’t be sure, it was so long ago. I thought you might have seen her wearing that dress?”
    I rang the police. They agreed there should be a search.
    When the storm was over, I sat out in the yard and watched the lightning, the darkness cut through again and again by the forked white runnels from heaven down to the dark dark sea.
    I thought about attachments and the twin fears that can grip us all. The fear of going. The fear of staying. Are they the same thing in the end? Is it the same impulse? Can we survive, not being attached to anyone? How often is it we’re blind to people because we’re blind to something in ourselves? How can a woman just walk off into the desert and not be found? How does something like that happen, that sort of abandonment? How does someone achieve that kind of deliberate cutting away of oneself from anyone else?
    I could see Margarita’s red dress, filled with wind, billowing on the low branch of a tree and what she’d said that day about running away came back to me.
    “Is easy . . . you just leave. You learn. Nothing matter. See this dress? Is special for me. This my running away dress. I always keep this dress with me. This dress . . . this my freedom dress.”

Overland 181–summer 2005, p.83

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