The Midnight Dress (16 page)

The red leaf is wet, glossy, the skeleton leaf a pulpy mess. She places the strip of bark on the table between them. Edie’s hands tremble over them. She picks up the red leaf and places it against her cheek.

‘The gully?’ she says, eventually. ‘Did you find the rock?’

‘I think it’s fallen down. There was a rock but it was like a sinking ship, the point facing down.’

‘It’s slipped?’

‘I climbed along a log, it was the only way I could see across the gully.’

‘That could be a risky business.’

‘It was hard to tell the time. I didn’t know how long I’d been.’

‘I can teach you that.’

‘But I just kept walking. Until I found the hut.’

Edie’s eyes are dark, expectant; she hunches forward on her chair.

‘It’s still there,’ says Rose. ‘It’s filled up with leaves but still there.’

Slip Stitch

Near the burnt-out hut, Glass finds a singed water bottle and the wrapper from a packet of biscuits. He bags them. He lifts up part of the roof then lets it go again. The sound echoes in the silence. It’s quiet, too quiet. The hairs rise on his neck. He has an uncomfortable ache in his chest, feels suddenly nauseated. He lifts another part of the roof, then another. There’s nothing underneath. He can’t smell death. The only smell is ash and forest.

He should have brought more officers.

He senses someone watching. He wants to turn quickly, catch them out, but he resists the urge and turns slowly, three-sixty, peering into the trees and vine. Even after he has checked, the feeling stays.

‘Can you tell if she’s been here lately? I mean what can you tell?’ he says to Waldron, who is squatting beside a rift.

‘A week ago maybe, maybe less,’ says Waldron. ‘Sandshoe girl, she came last. Sandal girl, she doesn’t climb good, she came only a few times. Once with the man. He only came once.’

‘Who’s the man?’ thinks Glass aloud.

‘Big fella,’ says Waldron.

‘Big fella?’ says Glass. Well, that narrows it down, he thinks. Sandshoe girl, sandal girl, big fella.

Juvenile? Man? Check the boyfriends again: past, present. Love triangle? Never underestimate the power of a love triangle. Potent shit. He mentally notes these things. Touches the drawing of the dress in his pocket. The water courses over the falls, into the sunlight.

‘What do you think?’ he asks Waldron.

‘No good. I reckon not here but somewhere here. You gotta search the whole place. Take you years . . . ’ says Waldron. He motions toward the trees and means the whole of the rainforest, the entire mountain range.

Which makes Glass laugh. At the hopelessness of it all.

Glass realises that he still has the pink stone in his left hand. He looks at it then shoots it up at the sky above the falls, over the edge into the abyss.

What the hell is that thing?’ says Murray, sitting slumped in the bus.

‘It’s a guillotine, you moron,’ says Rose.

‘Fatal,’ he replies.

Rose sits and looks out the window. It’s raining, a fine misty rain, and the cardboard is damp and already starting to sag. Murray sits half-turned toward her, his legs stretched out on the seat. The bus floor is a mire of mud.

She doesn’t know how to look at him, not really, not since she went in his boat. Not that anything happened. It was just a boat ride, Rose tells herself, a simple boat ride. If he liked her, he would have tried something.

At the little bay where the rainforest meets the sea, Murray had opened a small esky at his feet and removed a beer can.

‘Drink?’ he said.

‘I don’t drink,’ said Rose.

‘Everyone drinks.’

‘I’ve never had a drink,’ said Rose, getting angry. ‘Not once.’

‘Curious,’ said Murray in his best mad professor voice, and he put the beer away.

On the bus Rose holds the soggy cardboard guillotine and her cheeks burn.

‘Does it ever stop raining here?’ she says; she has to, she can’t stand the silence.

‘Never,’ he says in his best foreign accent, and then he laughs a Count Dracula laugh.

Pearl wears the Little Bo Peep costume and a powdered wig that her mother once wore to a ball. She speaks what sounds like perfect French in front of the class, though Rose can’t understand a word she says. She pauses when it is Rose’s turn to reply. Rose reads from her piece of paper, pronouncing the words clumsily, then motions for Pearl to bend down. When her neck is resting in the frame she releases the cardboard guillotine blade.

‘Bravo,’ says Madame Bonnick. ‘Excellent.
Fantastique
.’

Pearl Kelly and Rose Lovell take a bow.

‘What if you’d taken geography,’ Pearl whispers, when they take their seats. ‘Would we still be friends? I mean what if your dad had decided to go somewhere else . . . not here. What if you’d had enough petrol and you just kept going? Do you believe in fate, like that? Even if we hadn’t met now would we have met some other time?’

‘Do you believe in fate?’ she asks again, when Rose doesn’t answer and just keeps twirling a sky-blue highlighter in her hand.

‘I don’t understand fate,’ says Rose.

‘It’s like everything is already written,’ says Pearl. ‘
Everything
. Everything we ever did in our lives is already set out somewhere.’

Rose thinks of it. All her baby steps, her mother with her long hair and glowing face, turning away from the bedroom door. All the roads, all the hills, all the sudden startling lines of coast, the way they followed the birds to choose their path, the way her father wept inside the car beneath a billion stars. Edie climbing the tracks, first on small feet, then on teenage feet, then on grown-up feet. The dress. The midnight dress.

Until then Rose hasn’t once thought of who that dress was made for. The original dress with the torn skirt and ripped bodice. Who had that dress belonged to?

Pearl’s still waiting for an answer.

‘I found another secret place,’ Rose says.

‘What kind of secret place?’

‘It’s a little hut built up in the trees, way up, near a waterfall, that no one knows about.’

‘How’d you find it?’

‘Edie, that lady who’s making my dress. She told me how to get there.’

‘Can I come?’

‘Do you want to?’

‘Of course I do,’ says Pearl. ‘You know how I love mysterious things.’

That afternoon Pearl begs Rose to walk down Main Street but she says no. Rose knows exactly how it will go. Pearl will examine herself in a shop window. She’ll say, How do I look? She’ll undo the top button of her uniform. She’ll let out her hair. She’ll take
Ashes in the Wind
from her school bag, or
A Virgin in Paris
, or
The Alchemist’s Daughter
; she’ll slip past Mrs Rendell at her counter and dip her head beneath the crappy Blue Moon Book Exchange sign.

And even inside, it will be exactly the same. Paul Rendell’s pupils will dilate, he’ll sniff the air, he’ll smile. He’ll ask perfectly ordinary questions; Pearl will make perfectly ordinary replies. He’ll put his hands behind his head, watch her. No one will dare make a move.

He’ll think, I can’t. She’ll think, He won’t. He’ll think, I want to. She’ll think, I shouldn’t. He’ll think, I won’t, I definitely won’t; I never will. She’ll smile, drop the coins into his hand, say, Well, I better be going then.

Rose goes back to Edie’s house. It’s a Monday, not a Wednesday, but somehow, as if she knows, Edie is waiting for her.

‘Come to practise your stitch, have you?’

The question makes Rose bristle, but she doesn’t say anything. Near the doorway she looks at one of the many boxes that fill the long yellow kitchen with its flock of blue birds on the wall. She sees the red leaves from the rainforest, picks one up and holds it by the stem.

‘When I was a child my mother got me a book about the leaves,’ says Edie. ‘I knew every single one. That is the bleeding-heart leaf, of course, always my mother’s favourite. Each time I went, I brought one back. The one you brought me was from the quandong. ’

‘I like them,’ says Rose, and she feels stupid. ‘I wouldn’t put them in a box, but. I think they belong where they fall.’

‘Do you?’ says Edie. ‘You might be right.’

They sit at the table, and Rose threads her needle and begins practising on her pillowcase. Edie hums beneath her breath. She hasn’t performed her opening of the windows because it’s not yet six o’clock. The house is shadowy, closed-up like that.

‘There was a really big tree, giant – you could fit a whole car through it,’ says Rose.

‘Oh yes, the big tree, the red cedar, there’s hardly any of those left in this part of the world. They came looking for them, specifically, the loggers. That one is a beauty. There are bigger, though.’

Rose looks up from her work.

‘Another place. I’ll tell you about it one day.’

Rose pricks her finger, sticks the tip in her mouth to taste the blood.

‘Shall I tell you the story of my magpie?’ says Edie.

Rose looks at the closed windows and, as if sensing the time, stands with the old woman, who has already begun to tell the magpie story. They open the casements, the cracked and crazed louvres, throw open the door to the coming night

‘Now I was twelve the year Granny Baker died. The house was already falling apart then. My father was never the same after the war, I told you that, you might have heard of such things but to live with it, each day, it was like walking through a minefield. Still. I’m sure there are worse things. The farm fell apart, you see, because he refused to work it, and the more he refused to work it the more Granny Baker blamed my mother. It was all her fault: the ruin of the farm, the ruin of the house, the war, everything. The cane was cut down and not planted again but still grew wild; the big fields filled up with weeds.

The tree that grows through the front steps, well, it was just a sapling then. A big blow came one year and lifted up a part of the roof and carried it away, so we had canvas there instead, waiting for the new tin which my father now couldn’t afford. Sometimes we’d be sitting there, eating our lunch, say, and the canvas would lift with a big wind and let in such sunshine that we all shone like angels, and the clouds rolled over us.

A lot of the weather came in. There were other parts of the roof that had started to leak, you see. The paintings buckled in their frames, and the settees grew mouldy, and sometimes, sitting at the table, you’d feel a little rain, just a sprinkle on your head.

It wasn’t the Depression yet, but already there was a steady procession of men that went past the front gate – swaggies, we called them. Some stopped here, asked for just a little tea. I’d run back up the drive and ask, and mother would measure out spoonfuls into a tin, and some flour, and wrap up biscuits in newspaper. These men always took off their hats to say thanks. Some said little, others more; they told you just where they’d been. Easy country, hard country, wet country, dry country. Country with work, country without.

The year I was twelve Granny Baker had a cough that wouldn’t go away: all night it echoed through the house, she coughed and hawked and choked and gasped. She turned the colour of old paper. Even when she was dying she was full of spite. Sometimes I had to help my mother turn Granny Baker in her bed. She was as small as a child; I could feel the bones beneath her skin. My mother was gentle with her. Always gentle with her in return. She combed back Granny Baker’s hair and made it rest on the pillow like a grey cloud.

Her old chair, the lilac-covered one, well, it was put outside when Granny Baker departed, by Mother herself, and it was the only thing my mother ever did that seemed in defiance. She put it out in the grass, which had grown long by now, as though she were putting out Granny Baker herself from the house. My father didn’t say a thing. He never said a thing any more.

She sat down at the table and wrote a list. She read it out to me: We’ll need this many yards of duchesse satin and this many spools of thread and so much bias binding and so many packets of pearl buttons and this amount of soft tulle . . .

‘That first list is still here somewhere,’ Edie says to Rose. ‘My mother counted the money into my hand and folded the note in half, and I walked into town to buy these things.’

‘I thought you were going to tell me about a magpie,’ says Rose.

‘I am,’ says Edie. ‘Show me how you’re doing there.’

Rose holds up her pillowcase.

‘Not too bad,’ says Edie. ‘Well, I brought home all those yards of satin and those pearl buttons and the makings of veils. My mother went to work sewing wedding dresses. The first were very plain: straight up and down, drop-waisted, which was the style then. Not even any lace at first, but later more: lace she found in the house, along the edges of pillowcases and on the good curtains, which, I might add, had come all the way from France. She made them and I knew she could do better; I knew she could, but I didn’t say anything then, and I didn’t know my talent yet.