Black dress, red beard,
Katherine

There are two op shops in Gilgan. They sell one black dress.

You’ll have twenty minutes while he fills the car, fifteen if he’s in a mood. Then he’ll take you, finally, to his house. On the main street, you’ll pass the sandstone war memorial submerged under browned leaves, the dusty newsagent where you could win the lotto if you were lucky (but you’ve never been lucky), the red meat dripping in the butcher’s window. You’ll go into the op shop, looking for shelter.

The bell on the door will sound sweet after three hours of AC/DC in the confines of his car. Lavender will soothe your nostrils full of his sweat. The big ceiling fan will suck away the heat from the warm autumn afternoon. You’ll hope the woman on the counter can’t see the fingerprint bruises on your throat from the honeymoon, the ones he didn’t mean, the ones you let him kiss better until you both cried.

You’ll rummage through the aisles for distraction: doormats reading “Happy Wife Happy Life”, rat killer for pest disposal, crocheted white bride toilet roll covers, net bags of chipped marbles that glint in the shop light, a teacup with the gilt worn off, stubby holders advertising Vegemite. A black cat will lie curled on a purple cushion in the window.

The colours of the dresses hanging in the corner will draw you in after the faded grey-green paddocks you passed on your long drive into Gilgan. Despite the forgiving shapes of the brighter frocks, you’ll be drawn to the slippery smoothness of the black. The cut doesn’t flatter your curves; truth be told, you’re not sure it’s a dress that’s good for any woman’s body. But you want it anyway, even if it’s bad for you. It’s the sort of thing you could wear out, the sort of thing you could be buried in. Not that you will be; after any funeral service the op shop will buy it back for a fixed price, less if the formaldehyde leaks.

Plaques around Gilgan show how the op shop sisters care for the community: the mothers’ room at the RSL, the cemetery bench. The rest of their funds go to run the other op shop, the one hidden in the back streets; someone will tell you where it is when you need to know. The door is dented, sometimes the shop will smell of bleach. The op shop sisters will mend the ripped clothes you donate, they’ll wash away the snot and the blood. They’re good at blood; there isn’t a woman alive who isn’t when push comes to shove.

The op shop sisters will tell you how to deal with a pest, a phone number to call at two in the morning for help with the body. They’ll know by then where you live and where you’re going to die. They tell this to all the women who buy that black dress; they’ve told it to all the women he’s married before. The black cat will curl up in your lap. It might scratch you or it might purr; you take your own chances. Whatever you paid for your black dress, if you call them, they’ll make it good.

The op shop sisters don’t wear the black dress anymore; their husbands are decades dead. Weathered leather skin, eyes cracked into spiderwebbed corners, they know what not to talk about. They know what to sell, and what to throw out. They know. They know you.

There are two op shops in Gilgan and a black dress is waiting for you in one of them. Nice fabric, you’ll say, and one of the sisters will take your money. She’ll be there when you need her.

Blue eyes as big as saucers,
Gretel

Under the arch of the viaduct, I shelter. The things I brought to my life — they are all here, except the marbles, which I have lost.

The first thing she asked me for was water.

There is a brown stubbled field through which I walk from Gilgan train station to the flats where I stay, and straddling the field is the red brick viaduct over which the train runs, and the viaduct forms arches, and in one of these arches she lives. One morning when I went to town to catch the train to Sydney as I do every week, there was an umbrella, and the next week a cardboard box had joined it, then a shopping trolley, then a milk crate. I walk past it as quickly as possible. I don’t like to think about how someone can construct their life out of rubbish.

“You have water, give me some,” she said, the morning I first saw her.

If she’d been a man, I would have run. She seemed harmless, mouse-brown hair in two long plaits, big blue eyes that seemed to look through me and out to the other side of it all. I was carrying a half-empty water bottle, but I’d had COVID a month ago. It didn’t seem right to give her what she wanted.

“I’ll be back,” I said.

On my return journey that evening, I brought an unopened bottle of water wedged into the side of my workbag alongside my papers. Such were the perils of being the only single RuralCo psychologist in New South Wales, posted for three years to Gilgan with weekly visits to Sydney to report back. I hadn’t expected that the job would involve quite so much paperwork, so many meetings. I’d thought my life would have had more life in it. My work papers fountained up when I pulled out the bottle.

Her hands, when she handed the papers back, were as pale as mine. She took the bottle. Then she let me go, back to my empty flat, with nothing to look forward to but the evening news and the dutiful reading. I unlocked my door and entered, closed the door behind me, locked it, drank a glass of water cool on my throat, and a minute later couldn’t recall whether I had locked it and checked it once more.

The next week when I went to the train station, I saw her again.

“You have food, give me some,” she said.

I sometimes have a banana, mildly squashed in transport, against the days I forget to eat lunch, although I usually forget to eat that too. That day, I had nothing.

“I’ll be back,” I said. I crunched the brittle frost-tipped grass under my feet as I left.

Gingerbread would say I see you as a woman as you see me, here is something sweet to sustain you in your life. The Gilgan baker doesn’t bake gingerbread except at Christmas, which this was not, the very opposite of it, the approach to the deep darkness of a New South Wales winter solstice. The supermarket had only milk arrowroots, which I find a lacking kind of biscuit, neither here nor there in flavour.

The op shop was the last shop open that evening. The little bell trilled pleasantly as the door opened, but the op shop lady didn’t speak. A dark blue circular tin sat on the counter, advertising ginger snaps and wreathed around with green leaves and red berries. I didn’t need to speak to buy it, a very satisfying transaction. In the corner as I left, the black cat curled itself tighter, its tail covering the tip of its nose.

Under the viaduct, the woman opened the tin and sniffed; I could smell the fire. She took a biscuit out and broke it in two and gave me one piece. Bright shocks of ginger alive in my mouth. She retreated into her cardboard. I left her alone and walked back to my flat, where I ate cereal for dinner with water because I had forgotten to buy milk. The cereal tasted as dry as a bone.

“Baby shoes,” she said, as I walked past her on my final morning to the train to the city to the office to the work.

I stopped. No noise in my cold ears that I didn’t expect, only magpies in the trees, a far-off car braking, dead ice crunching under my feet. Had she a child in there?

“I can give you baby shoes,” she said, and emerged from the shelter, the cardboard falling aside. She was alone, she had no child.

“I don’t want baby shoes,” I said, walking faster away, watching her side-on. Behind her, the viaduct rose, and behind that a white winter sun over the grey hills of Gilgan, wrinkled like elephants.

In the city, babies were everywhere, in papooses on their mother’s chests, in prams that pushed their way through the crowds like cruise ships, more babies than all of Gilgan had produced in a decade, or so the ABS records told me when I looked them up at the office; not that I care, babies are nothing to me, nor I to them. I was busy that day: I did not attend a colleague’s baby shower morning tea, I did not reapply my lipstick, I did not look at myself in the mirror to see my blue eyes blankly staring back.

On the train back to Gilgan and my silent flat, there were no babies in our carriage, each of us riding alone.

I walked down the main street and down to the op shop, one lit lamp in the corner of its window, the cat gone from its pillow. If I didn’t give her something, she would give something to me which I didn’t want.

I opened the door and looked into the darkness, but the op shop lady wasn’t there. A bag of marbles glowed in the recesses of the op shop shelves. There were green tiger eyes, blue milky spheres, translucent ones with a red swirling centre, something to distract her from the child that she didn’t have in the cardboard she’d made of her life.

I took the marbles and left money on the counter. The doorbell rang as I closed the door behind me, with a high-pitched tone that continued in my ear. I walked away from the train station, past the Gilgan houses. My shadow stretched out in front of me, long and slender with a hunched back, then shrank into a seal of black under my feet, and then out behind me again. My marbles glimmered under the streetlights.

I walked into the shadow by the viaduct, until I came to the arch where she lived. In the last light of the day, I couldn’t see if she were there, so I went as quietly and quickly as I could into the little cosy shelter: a scrap of carpet to the floor, a mat and sleeping bag, an empty water bottle, a blue biscuit tin. I couldn’t see a baby, nothing showed that a baby had been there or would ever be there, it didn’t need to be there, I didn’t want it to be there. The marbles spilled from the bag into my hand, cold at first, and then warm from my own body heat. I crouched down and shook the marbles out against the wall for her, but they rolled away where I couldn’t see them, all but one.

The cardboard was warm under me as I lay down into my home. In the last of the winter light, the last marble shone blue in my hand until it swallowed up the sky.

Porcelain white, blood red,
Rachel

Every teacup on his wife’s shelf was mismatched.

Her mother had left her the first one, pink budded plum blossoms, the last in the set. So thin you could see the tea through it, shuddering up the sides. You could almost see veins.

The week she told him that they would be parents, he found her a foxglove-patterned cup in the city, dark violet bells, little green heart-shaped leaves. On his lunch break, he’d walked through the rain to a department store close to the courts to look at the tiny baby clothes, blues, pinks and greens. He’d imagined them in their home, on a child with her dark brown skin, his blond flat hair, or his fair skin, her sharp nose. He’d thought about the six-word story everyone knows. He’d bought her that teacup instead.

It still looked beautiful in the op shop window where she took the cup on her way to crunch numbers at the RuralCo branch office, purple flowers in silver winter rain.

Six weeks, she was throwing up so much he didn’t want to go to work. An hour on the train, he said. Plenty of people in Gilgan, I don’t need you, she said.

The department store calmed him at lunch: the teacups and saucers all belonging to one another ab initio. Lily of the valley, light green stems, delicate spots on the white. He bought the cup.

She drank chamomile tea in it. Too heavy, she said, and took it to the op shop. He passed the rejected offerings every morning on the way to the train to his legal practice, and every evening on his way home to her. The green sat well next to the purple in the window.

Ten weeks, and by her first midwife appointment she’d stopped throwing up. He’d taken the day off to be with her. As much use as a flat plate in a soup shop, she said, and sent him to the city anyway. He brought her home a beef stew, she’d said the midwife said things about iron. He bought another teacup: deep red azaleas, dark green leaves. The stew went in the outside bin, the smell of it made her stomach revolt.

The teacup sat on their coffee table for a week. Then she made it a third in the op shop window.

Fourteen weeks, she went to the ultrasound scan by herself; he only found out when he saw the image on the fridge under a magnet of the Big Banana. The relevant part was ringed in red, everything else amorphous grey and alien. He called his parents in England, they were suitably but not too excited, they had grandchildren already. He brought her home a novelty cup shaped like a daffodil, the saucer green leaves.

She put it by the curb for rubbish collection where it glowed a vibrant yellow against the new spring green grass. He took it to the op shop himself, and then looked at it every morning and every evening — yellow and green daffodils, purple violets  and dark red azaleas, the colours of a bruise.

Twenty weeks, scan booked. After a stormy night, the bed sheet was stained brown, copper-smelling in the steamy spring heat like something dead. She wouldn’t stop rubbing at her belly, a lattice of blue veins and red showing through. It’s fine, she said. I would know if there was anything wrong. He called in sick.

In the afternoon, he found her blood-stained knickers in the bath. She didn’t want to go to the clinic. He made her the special herbal tea from the midwife, thin fruity smell of raspberry leaves in the fine porcelain by the bed. She was hot, but she didn’t want to go for a drive for the aircon. He brought her ice-cubes to cool the tea down. She didn’t want him to ask her any more questions, she’d stay put, she was cramping, and she had a headache. He should go, she said, get another batch of the tea, it was almost out.

The midwife’s place felt far away. Storm clouds trapped the heat down on him and the bitumen radiated it back up. It might not be all over, keep her blood pressure down, the midwife said. Broken leaves in fragile plastic smelt medicinally sharp crushed in his hand.

On the way back, he stopped at the op shop and bought the only cup he hadn’t contributed, bright raspberries with remnants of a gilt rim. The op shop woman shook her head but took his money, and the black cat scratched his hand. The cup would be back to the op shop, he knew, but she might smile for the moment she looked at it.

Around his house the air shimmered, and she didn’t answer him when he called out. Inside, the rust smell was stronger. In their room, two bodies on the bed: one big, and between her legs, one very small. Neither one moving. He put the cup down next to the bed before he touched her on the shoulder, although he already knew everything was broken.

After the ambulance had taken the bodies away, he burnt the mattress in the back yard. It burnt for a long time, black smoke and sickening meat taste in the back of his throat. The spring grass burnt with it.

He called his parents, who told him to come back to England, nothing left for him in the colonies; he cracked his phone putting it down. He would have called hers, but they’d been gone for years. He called her work. He called his practice manager, who said she would approve his compassionate leave, find another solicitor to babysit his matters. The Gilgan grapevine would take care of the rest.

The neighbours brought their platitudes: Rachel, such a shame, and the baby too, so sorry for your loss, but you’re young, you can marry again. They brought chrysanthemums, which she would have hated. They brought, one by one, all the rejected teacups from the op shop.

He took the teacups. He put them on her shelf. He thanked them, with his sharp lawyer tongue trapped behind his teeth.

Then, when everyone had left, he smashed them all into bright sharp shards crimson with his own blood.

Nothing gold,
Nan

You’ve never seen a woman enjoy a summer like Nan did her last, she was golden. Every kitchen in Gilgan’s got a fruitcake from that summer, every family’s got a story to tell. But if you weren’t from Gilgan, you’d never have known she was dying, not until the moment that she was dead.

How old was she? She’d never own up to a number. The mob of the land, they didn’t claim her, even if people said she had a touch of the tar. She’d been in that shack on the flat by the river as long as anyone could remember, with the half-broken dock that looked like teeth, the dead lawn that never greened. She’d always been there in the op shop, chin whiskered, blue eyeshadow, quick-dry shirts and tracksuit pants, smelling of rot and mushrooms, with eczema on her arms that reddened and peeled with the weather. She wouldn’t complain, just sell you what you needed. After hours, she’d be on her deck with a brown bottle in her hand, sitting up on her big wicker chair like some queen receiving a rotating set of visitors: the health service with drugs and painkillers that kept her half-alive, the Catholic priest, the Proddie minister. Everyone knew she was on her last legs.

That was until the big floods of ’22. We were lucky in Gilgan, we didn’t lose a single house, mostly the paddocks just got a soak and a dump of topsoil from those poor bastards up-river, the debris of other folks’ lives lodged under our porches. We had the guilts about it a bit, the do-gooders went out for weeks to lend a hand. Dead carcasses went to landfill, junk went to the op shop.

That last summer, Nan went everywhere, beer scabbarded in that yellow and red stubby holder she’d got from the op shop post the clean-up, proudly bearing the brand of that most Aussie sandwich spread, the one that lasts forever. A bit of fun, she said, more than what that health care mob can give me. She’s stopping the drugs, we said to each other, her choice.

Post the flood, you went into the op shop, she’d sing out a greeting before that bell stopped ringing. Before you knew it, you’d be telling her your problems, and you’d be listening to her give you what for, op shop door would somehow be stuck until she’d done with you. We all got our backbones stiffened while she made us tea; we all found jobs, got off the grog, left ratbag significant others as advised. Last chance to ask, last chance to listen, she said. Won’t be here forever.

At the town hall she’d be at you to sign petitions about road safety, protection of rock carvings high above the hills about the town, saving micro-bats, and the like. Then she’d be bending her bones with the Pilates class. You’ve got to protect what’s yours, she said. It won’t be here forever.

At the dock, she’d have a line dripping down into the murky brown catching fish for tea and the slick eels that would twist themselves around and about the rod, trying to unknot themselves free. She’d show the young ones how to do it, send them home with a feed. They’d be back next day, come to play on her lawn all greened-up after the flood, half-baked games of no one’s ever out cricket. Up on her throne, she’d hold the babies of the young mums and sing them asleep. The teens who fancied themselves golden-tongued would strum their guitars for her until twilight faded and bats were swooping in the fig trees. Live your life when you’re young enough to live it, she’d say, you won’t be young forever.

She supervised us in the making of a proper Gilgan fruitcake that’d last. If it wasn’t too humid, she’d help you whip up a pav, that most holy of grails. Her stubby would never run dry while you baked. If you really looked, you’d see through the golden haze that haloed her movements, the smell of honey she carried with her. You’d see her face falling thin and how she didn’t pick her feet up anymore, that she wasn’t eating and how she’d wince if she turned too quick. She’d cut up if you asked her if she needed a hand, and so we didn’t let on that we saw it, it was better to let her think she was gold, that the rest was hidden. Make this cake for your friends, she’d say, eat it when I’m not here to make it with you.

The Gilgan Probus club bought her a ticket to see the Riverdance show in the big smoke at the end of daylight savings time. You don’t need to do that, she said, I’m happy here. Happy doesn’t last forever, we said, enjoy your life while you’ve got it.

We saw her off at the train station in golden hour in the nicest frock the op shop could give her, little grey collar to it with a neat blue hat. Her op shop sister took her on the train, the black cat watching from under the wooden bench of the waiting room. Blue rinse was set into her grey curls, her brown shoes shined up, touch of blush, a wipe of a reddy brown lipstick. She looked the business. She looked half her age.

The last we saw of her, she looked like she was never going to die.