Anjali's Red Scarf Ch. 05

"Hey there," I said, turning to the doorway, "how does my - oh, fuck me."

That was the moment when I saw what she was wearing. The tailoring was superb, but it was the colours that first caught my eye.

Her dress was ivory, a lightly textured brocade that complemented her skin... or at least, it started as ivory, at her shoulders and chest. But below that she'd begun to cut slits in the brocade, and sewn in inserts of bright blood-red silk to fill the gaps.

The first ones were no longer than her thumb, no wider than a knife-blade's thickness. But down her body they grew longer, wider, and somewhere around her waist the red slashes spilled out far enough to meet one another and merge. The crimson-streaked ivory dress became an ivory-patched crimson dress, one pattern evolving into another, until just above her knees the last of the white was lost. Below that, the crimson in turn gave way to a deep maroon creeping out from deep in the pleats of her skirt, and by the hem only the dark colour remained. Down her arms, she'd executed the same effect in miniature.

All in all, it looked like the fruit of a collaboration between M.C. Escher and Lady Macbeth.

"Will this do?" she asked demurely.

"Will it do?" I rolled my eyes. "Don't pretend you don't know. Bloody hell, Anjali. And I thought you said goth wasn't your thing."

"I also said I liked the outfits."

"Yeah. Apparently."

She did her makeup—nothing fancy, it didn't need to be with that dress—and tied her scarf back on, and then it was time for us to go.

In the taxi, I asked Anjali about her tailoring. I didn't really have the technical knowledge to follow most of what she said, but I had enough to see she'd pulled out the stops for this one, and I knew she'd enjoy talking about it.

"The way these pieces fit together. That looks really complex and precise."

"It was a bit." I suspected she'd have said the same if she'd built the Space Shuttle single-handed. "I sketched it out, but then I adapted my modelling software to make sure I got the measurements right. I only finished it last night."

"Wait. You wrote a program to model neutron stars and then you used it to... design a dress?"

"I just needed something that does meshing to represent a curved surface, and it does that." She frowned. "Though I had to make a couple of changes. Obviously I don't warp space-time enough to need a relativistic correction."

"You're amazing, you know that?" I squeezed her hand, and then she was off again talking about the technique she'd used for the pleating, and I nodded and smiled until we got to the venue.

The concert... well, it wasn't good, but it was memorable.

Smoke machines are pretty much mandatory at a goth concert, but I maintain that running four at once, in a fairly small venue, is overkill. I'm still not sure if I can claim that I've seen the Sisters of Mercy live, because the smoke was so thick that they were barely more than shadows in the haze.

As for the music, well, I could recognise all the songs? Let's be kind and leave it there. But I didn't regret going. Teenage goth Sarah would never have forgiven her future self if I'd passed up our one and only chance to catch the Sisters, even with only one person left from the original lineup.

Plus, even if the performance itself was a disappointment, the audience was not. Within a couple of minutes of our arrival I had ticked off everything on the Peter Steele memorial checklist: sweaty Velcro, latex, fur, and feathers. I was glad I'd made the effort to dress up. There were some fantastic outfits on display, so many that I suspected I wasn't the only one who'd come out of goth retirement for this show.

It's not often that I'm comfortable in the middle of a crowd, but I was comfortable in this one. Even if I didn't know them personally, I was among my people, bonding on a wave of nostalgia.

I found the nerve to dance with Anjali. I'm not a great dancer, too self-conscious about the way I move, but goth dancing is undemanding. You don't have to move your feet at all, just stand in one spot and sway. Anjali swayed with me, and dozens of goths swayed with us, like a kelp forest in a storm. I even got daring enough to get into more advanced moves like "casting spells at the ceiling, casting spells at the floor".

For her part, Anjali seemed to be having fun. It didn't hurt that half a dozen people had stopped to compliment her on her dress and ask where she got it. All the same, it was perhaps a kindness that it was not a long concert.

It was barely eleven when the second encore wrapped up with "Vision Thing" and the lights came up. In no particular rush, we propped ourselves against the back wall and waited for the crowd to thin before we made our exit.

"Hi Sarah!"

Caught unawares, I turned. It took a moment for me to remember the face: an old friend, more Edgar's than mine.

"Hi Thomas! What are you doing down this end of the world?"

"Moved to Melbourne two years ago." He was not alone; a group of four others was with him, waiting on our conversation. "You?"

"Same."

The woman beside him looked familiar, but I couldn't place her, and she must have sensed it. "I think we met a few years back? I'm Heather." She pointed to their friends. "Lucy, Imogen, Alex, this is Sarah."

I nodded, and turned to indicate my companion, and said "Anjali," at the same moment that she said "Lily". That threw me for a moment, but nobody else seemed to have noticed.

"Love your dress, Anjali," said Heather, and the others nodded agreement.

"Hey," said Thomas, "we were going to get a bite to eat, do you want to come along?"

So we ended up eating pancakes at a late-night restaurant nearby. We got some odd looks from the other patrons, but there were enough of us that I wasn't bothered by it. I told them how I knew Anjali, leaving out the circumstances of our current arrangement, and we chatted about mutual friends and shook our heads about the show we'd just seen.

"Still," I said, "it's been way too long since I've been out to something like this. I really should go more often."

Alex replied (or maybe it was Imogen): "There's a goth night at Paladin, second Friday each month. You should come!"

Then Heather turned to Anjali. "So, tonight aside, are you a Sisters fan?"

She chuckled and shook her head. "It's not really my kind of music. But Sarah didn't have anybody to go with. I still had a good time."

I was hoping nobody would ask awkward questions, and they almost didn't, but just as I was about to change the topic Imogen-or-Alex interrupted. "Wait, you made that just to keep your friend company?"

She shrugged. "I like sewing."

"Well, if you ever need another job, you could probably get a few commissions for work like that."

Anjali grinned. "That's very kind. But I have a PhD and a job on the side. For now I think I want to keep sewing as just a hobby."

I frowned, trying to remember what her side job was. The conversation had moved on to other topics before I realised that she meant me.

Soon after, she yawned. "Excuse me. I probably should get home soon. Sarah, if you want to stay—"

"Nah, I'll come with you." Suddenly I felt drained myself. We said our goodbyes, left something for the bill, and stepped outside for a taxi.

"You okay, Anjali? Not like you to fade this early. I'm the old one."

"Oh, I'm all right. Just up a little bit late finishing this." She plucked at the dress.

"When you say a little bit late... what time did you get to bed?"

"Um, it's possible that I didn't?"

"Ah. Right. That would explain it." I hugged her, and then our cab pulled up.

I was still feeling out of sorts, and it took me a little while to trace the feeling back to its source: insecurity, neediness. I leant over and whispered.

"Anjali? When you said it was a job—"

But she'd fallen asleep, leaving me with only my thoughts for company. It was quite true, it was a job, and she'd said it with no malice. Still, it had caught me unawares, and I didn't like how I felt about it.

I stewed on it for most of the way home, and it was only as we pulled in to my building that I thought of another side to it. True I'd paid for her company, and for her materials, but it wasn't on my dollar that she'd spent weeks working on that dress and pulled an all-nighter to finish it. Nor did I believe that it was solely for the sake of fitting in; she could have made something perfectly adequate for that in a few hours.

No, she'd gone above and beyond... for what? At least partly, I thought, for me.

Having paid the taxi, I woke her gently, and she murmured. "Are we there?"

"We are. Time to get out." I helped her to her feet. "Come on in. Time for bed."

It wasn't quite, though. I needed her help to take my boots off, and we were so tired that we both fell over backwards, in opposite directions, when the second came off. And then we had to get our makeup off, and I had to do my contacts.

When we finally made it into bed - me with my arm around her, a little possessively - she yawned and said, "Sarah, do you know what sort of birds always stick together?"

"No?"

"Velcrows. Good night, Sarah."

To absent friends: LS, HS, SM. Miss ya.

To readers: thanks for your patience with my glacially slow updates. I'd hoped to post more regularly, but life got busy and I needed to take time out for other things. The good news is that if you're seeing this, it means Chapter 6 is already written; the bad news is that I won't be posting #6 until #7 is ready.

In the meantime, if you've been enjoying this story, you may also like my fantasy/romance "Riddle of the Copper Coin".