Between My Father and the King by Janet Frame

can’t I?
    Dad’s answer to that was always,
    â€˜If I put my hand in the fire do I expect you to put your hand in too?’
    But Dad had never put his hand in the fire. He was careful not to when he was shovelling on the coal.
    â€˜I would any other time,’ Joan said obediently to Emily Gull. ‘But there’s the dance dress all ready to wear. I might have to wait years if I don’t go on Friday night. I might even die before I can wear it. And that will serve Mum and Dad right!’
    Emily Gull said nothing. We knew she was thinking hard, on our side.
    â€˜I’m flummoxed, stumped, bamboozled.’
    We were, too.
    â€˜He said he’d lock me in the bedroom to stop me from going.’
    â€˜Where’s your dress?’
    â€˜He can’t get that from me. I’ve hidden it.’
    â€˜Where?’
    Joan burst into tears, though why she should cry now I didn’t know, and when she spoke she sounded small and strange as if she lived in a fairytale.
    â€˜I’ve hidden it in a . . . a . . . a hollow tree!’
    Surely there were no hollow trees in real life! I’d spent years searching for them and had never found one. The way Joan said ‘hollow tree’ you would have thought she’d hidden something precious there when it was only a purple, lacy, pretty holey too, mind you, dance dress.
    â€˜You mean down in the branches of the pear tree?’ I said smartly. ‘They’re not hollow.’
    Joan looked bewildered. ‘It’s sort of hollow. I had to hide it somewhere.’
    I was practical.
    â€˜What if it gets wet?’
    Emily Gull was practical too. She nodded approval at my question.
    â€˜Well where else could I have hidden it?’
    â€˜In the wardrobe?’
    â€˜Dad would find it.’
    â€˜What about the dance shoes?’
    (These had been a gift with the dress.)
    â€˜Everything’s there, in the pear tree.’
    I was beginning to feel strange, for I remembered the story where the silver and gold dress had been hidden in the pear tree(or was it a hazel tree) at the bottom of the garden, and though our pear tree was only halfway down the garden it was near enough to make me shiver, with all the stories I knew coming into the shiver, for in fairy stories fathers, and mothers too, roasted their children alive, cut out their tongues, changed them into wild creatures of the woods or — worse — into stones that could not move. Imagine if you were a stone trying to drag your heavy body even a fraction of an inch! The earth would cling to you to prevent you from moving, and the grass growing up near and sometimes through you would bind you with knots that you could not untie; you would have to squat your life there, heavy, the colour of thunder, with your thoughts packed into you, unable to get out, and no ripples going over your grey skin because you were set in the same shape forever!
    I woke up.
    â€˜What if it rains?’ I asked.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ Joan said. ‘All I know is I want to go to the dance.’
    She looked hopefully at Emily Gull.
    â€˜I could run away from home and live at your place?’
    â€˜And I’d be had up for chicken-stealing,’ Emily said, considering the risk and translating it into her own language, as a gypsy would.
    After a while when we gave up trying to find a solution we had a slice of Emily Gull’s cake. It had a frothy top, like soapsuds, and it tasted like sweet snow, the kind that crusts the houses — walls and roofs — in stories, and that you could eat at anytime, just break off a piece of windowsill and eat it if you felt hungry; and that was the way, with stories, for if you were in peril of having your tongue cut out or of being left in the woods for the wild beasts to eat, you also had the pleasure of eating sweet windows and walls and shaking from the very tree where you hid your dance dress a heavenly fruit that you never tasted