The Midnight Dress (15 page)

Rose doesn’t take Pearl, not the first time, which is a Sunday. She knows she’ll have to find the way first. It makes her excited, just thinking that, as though she’s an explorer. She’s up before her father, putting on her climbing clothes, her shabby Dunlop sneakers, tying down her hair with the myriad bands and bobby pins.

‘Where are you going?’ he says from behind his curtain.

‘To climb a mountain,’ she replies.

‘Don’t break your neck,’ he says.

‘I’ll try not to.’

Rose has to walk across the back paddock behind the old house but she doesn’t stop to see Edie. She hopes that the old woman won’t see her. She’d be full of instructions. Don’t touch this. Don’t touch that. Look out for snakes. She’d be talking like she owned the whole mountain range.

The gate is at the back of the paddock, just as Edie said. A decorative gate, rusted now, the fence falling down, a flimsy attempt to keep out what lies behind. When she looks down toward the house she can see an old chair, or what remains of one, sitting in the grass.

Behind the gate there’s a track, a muddy overgrown track, but a path all the same. Easy, thinks Rose: up the track until she gets to a gully and then across the gully and then climb out near a rock like a boat and then listen for the sound of water, look for the stand of rose gums, and there will be a track again. Rose looks up at the clear sky.

It’s only eight in the morning but already the sun is white hot. She feels it baking her scalp and wishes she’d brought a hat. She drinks some water from her small plastic bottle and wonders whether it will be enough.

In the open forest there are gums with skin like butter, towering bloodwoods, stringybarks. She touches these trees with her hands, takes a strip of bark from one, picks up a bright yellow seed with a fine fuzz of hair from the ground. There is a huge tree down across the track, desolate grey, riddled with the words of white ants. She isn’t sure how longs she stands there, but after that tree, as though it is the start line, the climbing grows gradually more difficult. The ground becomes more crowded with fern and lawyer vine, the forest grows denser, there is a gradual dimming of things.

The strangler figs appear, first one, its grotesque lacework, making her stop, smile, breathe a shuddering breath. The liana vines, corkscrew tight, coil themselves up trees. The buttress roots grow huge, elaborate, twisted, washed smooth by rain. A gully opens up before her, the tree canopy above it pierced by halos of light.

She’s too cocky at first. She clambers over rocks as though it’s a race and finds herself halfway down with nowhere further to go. When she has climbed back to her beginning point, she has to wipe the sweat from her eyes and is surprised to find her legs trembling.

There’s a much easier route; she spots it almost immediately and begins her second attempt. How much time has she wasted? She moves from rock to rock, descending into the gully, trying not to think too far ahead, looking for one foothold after another.

At the bottom of the gully there is a small stream dotted with huge rocks. The heat of the day disappears there; a coolness brushes her cheeks. She looks up at the canopy stretched over the place and suddenly feels as though she’s in a church. There is a hushed silence. The forest is watching her in return.

She doesn’t know the time. She could have been climbing for an hour or two, or is it less? She’s unsure. She squats and washes her face in the water. The creek croons over the rocks. She feels far from anywhere, even though she knows she could just stand up and climb back out the way she came in. She isn’t lost.

A sudden burst of birds, parrots screeching overhead, shakes away her thoughts. She sits there beside the water, looking for footholds on the other side. A rock shaped like the hull of a boat? A rock shaped like a boat? A boat?

There are many larger rocks on the opposite side of the gully, and it looks much more difficult to climb. The rocks give nothing away: she can’t see anything like a boat. What kind of boat, for godsakes? A big boat or a dinghy, the
Titanic
or a weekend runabout? She didn’t ask Edie a single question. Maybe there is no such thing. Maybe Edie made it all up.

‘No,’ whispers Rose in the dim gully, and her voice sounds foreign in that quiet place.

High up along the gully she sees a large granite boulder partially concealed by a tangle of fallen trees. It’s been many years since the old woman has been this way, Rose thinks. Things might have changed. Rose picks her way up the creek, rock hopping, until she stands beneath the boulder.

It could be a boat, if she uses her imagination. She tilts her head to one side. It seems the rock has slipped at some point, bringing down several great trees, one of which traverses the gully floor. The rock has a sharpish edge, now facing toward the stream. A little piece of the canopy has opened up where the trees have fallen and there is a proliferation of ferns.

She stands in front of the mess, looking for a way across and up.

She places her feet gingerly on the fallen tree that runs like a bridge over the gully, tests her weight. She begins to walk along its length as it rises toward the rocks on the other side. It’s solid. She bends down once to regain her balance and finds she can’t stand again; she looks down at the stream metres below her. The tree is rotting: already parts of it are eaten away. Through a hole she sees a coil of orange fungus so bright that she freezes in her tracks. There are colonies of pale mushrooms and a lurid green moss that looks wet, but when she touches it she finds that it’s papery, dry. She listens to her own ragged breathing.

The fallen tree takes her almost to the top of the gully, almost five metres above the stream. It’s audacious, she knows it, climbing this way. The thing could collapse or move at any moment.

Almost at the lip of the gully the tree becomes wedged between the sinking boat rock and another. Her view from the bottom was distorted: now it is a small space she finds she must press herself through. The rock beneath her hands is cool; the space smells of stone, damp stone, and earth and leaves. She presses her nose to the place and breathes: black moss and cave, the dank green breath of the mountain. She’s breathing in something intimate, something she shouldn’t have knowledge of, something secret.

When she finally clambers over the ledge, she whoops with joy and her voice sings out in the forest. She squats again to steady herself. The forest crowds in at the top, hushed, as though it has been waiting to see whether she would make it.

‘God,’ she says but doesn’t know why.

She feels herself sob in the face of it.

She stands, takes tentative steps. On this side of the gully the forest seems even dimmer. The canopy is so thick that the floor is almost empty of plant life, clear but for the mulch of fallen leaves. She listens to her feet moving through these leaves, picks some up as she walks. A red leaf. Blood red, exactly like the ones she’s seen in Edie’s house. A leaf shaped like a star. The skeleton of a leaf, perfectly preserved, as frail as a spider’s web. She puts them in her shirt pocket, runs her hands along the trees.

Which direction? She’s unsure.

A general upward direction seems right.

There’s a tree as wide as a car, its buttress roots as tall as her. Edie hasn’t mentioned it. Surely she would have mentioned it. Rose hesitates. Turns in a circle. A stand of rose gums, Edie said. A stand of rose gums? She feels her skin then, the goose flesh prickle; it falls away, prickles again. The cool tremor of fear. She doesn’t even know what a rose gum looks like.

It’s okay, she calms herself, it’s a gum and it might be the colour of a rose. Or it might have flowers like roses. It will be different from the other trees. Yes, all she has to do is walk and look for a different type of tree.

She can’t tell the time. That’s the problem. Next time she’ll have to bring a watch. Has she been gone minutes or hours? She looks up at the canopy, but there is only the same dim light. Upward, is what Rose Lovell says to herself. Upward. One foot in front of the other. She wishes there were rocks. She’s good at rocks, not these leaves, this whispering unsettling carpet of leaves. The rose gums she finds then: a stand of them, seven or eight, so giant that she forgets to breathe. They wear russet-red skirts at their bases, and their skin is the colour of quartz.

‘There you are,’ she says, looking up, unable to see where they end.

She stands for a long time there, listening to the sound of falling water.

When Rose comes down through the scrub again, the day has grown dark with clouds and the sun has dipped behind Edie’s house. She is running because a storm is settling over the mountain, a huge thunderstorm, so close that she can taste the sulphur.

It is small, the hut she found, and half-reclaimed by the rainforest. It sits cradled by the trees at the edge of a clearing. The waterfall plunges past, only metres before it. The sudden aching chasm of light made her dizzy. She bent down, held her head, felt wild. It was bright with moss, that hut, and when she stood, pushed open the front door, she found it was filled up to her knees with leaves. She ran her fingers over the coloured glass windows, dark with mould.

‘Hello,’ she said, as though it were a living, breathing thing.

She needed a broom, that was her first coherent thought. She kicked at the leaves carefully, in case of snakes, pushed them in piles out the door. It was a single room, tiny, with not a stitch of furniture. She imagined Florence and Jonathan Baker there and Edie there later. Edie as a girl. Edie, her age. Edie climbing the same tracks she had taken.

Rose sat on the front step, drank from her water bottle, leant against the timber cladding that Jonathan Baker had cut with his bare hands, closed her eyes. She felt the friction of the sun on her skin, her muscles quivering from the exertions, sweat falling in rivulets down her neck. She felt more alive than ever before, her heart beating in her chest and in her ears, tuning out the other sounds of the day.

She explored. She searched for the base of the waterfall first, moving away from the hut, down through the trees again. She climbed over rocks, caught glimpses of the pool, which was small, circular, and appeared so precise and perfect that it could almost have been man-made. She could see the thing but not a way down.

It took her another hour at least, although she wasn’t sure, to finally find the track down and wash her face in the pool. Afterward she lay on her back, on the flat rocks, warmed by the sun, and cried openly into her hands.

The clouds began to pile up in the small jagged patch of sky above the little falls. She watched them lazily at first, through half-shut eyes, then suddenly with concern. She stood up. Listened. The day thrummed with the sounds of the forest: the rhythmical drone of cicadas, the ringing of insects, the chatter of birds. Something had changed.

She began to make her way back down the mountain through the trees, at first walking, then running. By the time she was crouching along the fallen tree over the gully, she heard the thunder, looked down and saw that some of the rocks had already been swallowed by the new swell in the creek. In the scrub the huge cool raindrops hit her face and bare arms, her hair sprung loose from its bobby pins and curled into a frenzy.

Now, in the paddock, she is running at full pelt, blinded by the heavy rain, letting out yelps of pleasure. She races up Edie Baker’s back steps and bangs on the lattice veranda door.

‘I did it,’ she shouts, when the door opens and Edie is standing before her with hands on hips.

‘Well,’ says Edie, ‘I don’t doubt it going by the state of you. Quick into the bathroom or you’ll die of cold.’

Only then does Rose realise that she’s shivering, shivering so hard that she’s shaking, and that she’s wet through, her hands are bleeding, leeches are stuck to her lower legs, sending out spider webs of stinging blood.

Edie leads her to an ancient bathroom, sits her on the edge of the bath, and picks the leeches off one by one with a pair of tweezers, throwing them into the sink. She runs warm water into the bath, taps grumbling and hiccuping, and hands two towels to Rose.

‘I’ll find you something dry to put on,’ she says, ‘and leave it outside the door.’

Rose sinks into the bath, every cut and scratch on fire, her legs aching. She sees that a vine has grown in through the louvres and stretched its way across the ceiling and, in the summer hothouse atmosphere, erupted with yellow blooms. The rain pummels the roof, a deafening downpour. Rose lies there, legs drawn up to her chin until her shivering subsides.

Edie Baker leaves a sundress hanging on the doorknob. It’s bright green with white piping and at least fifty years old. Rose shakes her head but puts it on.

The pieces of the midnight dress are still there in the kitchen, hanging over the back of the chair.

‘Can you believe I did it?’ she says to Edie, who is cooking pikelets on the stove.

Edie turns and looks at her. The slip of a girl with the angry face. She remembers what it was like in her own childhood, how when she went outside and up that path, the sun filled her to the brim. How she ran her hands over the bare limbs of trees. How she kept raindrops in glass jars and wished she could distil the power of such things.

‘My girl, of course I can,’ she says very tenderly. ‘Of course I can.’

‘Here,’ says Rose. ‘I found these for you.’