The Midnight Dress (20 page)

‘We left it too late to come down, that’s all,’ says Rose. ‘We were never in danger.’

‘I knew it,’ says Edie. ‘But I couldn’t rest until I knew for sure. I saw you go up yesterday but not down.’

‘You shouldn’t spy,’ says Rose and immediately regrets her words because Edie flinches like she’s been slapped.

Standing there on the track, she’s so small and deflated in her sundress and gumboots. She holds a large stick in her hand. Surely she couldn’t have gone much further. Surely she wouldn’t have tried to climb down into the gully.

‘Come down and use my phone,’ says Edie. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘God, I’m starving,’ says Pearl.

Edie makes them toast and pikelets. She cuts up mango. The two girls stand in the yellow kitchen. All the windows are shut and the house is night cool. The sweat dries on their skin. They watch the blue birds on the wall, the first line of light glimmering on their wings.

‘Your dress?’ Pearl gasps.

Rose turns to where Pearl points. There by the long bank of louvres stands a dressmaker’s mannequin; pinned to it is the midnight dress. Edie must have done it last Wednesday, when Rose hadn’t come. The skirt falls in a river, the bodice is perfect, the black mourning lace sleeves are pinned into place.

‘Something felt wrong,’ says Edie, ‘so I pinned it together to make sure. I think I solved the problem. It was the way the skirt fell at the front in my mind.’

‘It’s so beautiful,’ says Pearl.

Edie looks at Rose. Rose returns her gaze. Edie’s eyes don’t ask, Will you come back? Will you make the dress with me?

She doesn’t need to ask these things.

Pattie Kelly’s eyes are swollen, and her mascara is running. She jumps out of the car and grabs Pearl into an embrace, not letting her go.

‘Jesus H. Christ,’ says Pattie. ‘I mean really, Pearl, Jesus bloody Christ.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Pearl, ‘we didn’t mean it. I mean we just went up to this place and then we were swimming in this waterfall and then we couldn’t get back down because it got so dark. I was always safe.’

‘Well, I was just about to call the police,’ Pattie says.

She thanks Edie. Edie says she’s done nothing except feed them and let them use her phone.

Rose slips into the back seat soundlessly, hoping she’ll escape Pattie’s wrath, but Pearl’s mother turns to her as well and shakes her head.

‘I went and tried to find your father but he wasn’t at the caravan and I didn’t know if that should make me more worried.’ She sobs out her last words.

Rose’s heart skips a beat, then races along at breakneck speed. Pattie Kelly puts the car into reverse and turns in a circle in Edie’s backyard. Rose watches Edie and Edie watches Rose, neither waves. Rose looks up at the shimmering mountain, the mountain looks back at her.

‘Do you girls have any idea how dangerous it is up there?’ says Pattie. ‘I mean for shit’s sake, you could have slipped on a rock and broke your neck or got washed away if a creek came down – those gullies fill up in seconds.’

Rose whispers, ‘Yes.’

Pearl says nothing but Rose sees her looking up as well.

The place they found is in both their minds, she knows it, that place where the shadows of leaves tremble on the walls and the sunlight fills up their skin to the brim and the night rolls in as huge as an ocean. That place is apart from everything and she knows, Rose Lovell knows, they will both go there again.

Ladder Stitch

Detective Glass is interested in Paul Rendell’s weeping right eye. It’s red and swollen. Tears fall from it in a steady stream.

‘I’ve been to the doctors about it,’ he says. ‘The private doctor and the hospital doctor. They can’t see anything in it at all.’

‘Someone scratch you?’ asks Glass.

They’re in the cramped little flat above the shop. Mrs Rendell’s footsteps started away down the stairs then stopped, so he knows she’s listening.

‘Someone trying to fight you off?’ he says, when Paul doesn’t answer.

‘Told you I got it at work. Ages ago. Before the parade. The light kills it, it’s driving me insane.’

It is true. Everything shines with a chandelier luminance if he closes his good eye. At home, again and again, lying in the bedroom of his childhood, he has taken Pearl’s note, ripped clear from the book, and unfolded it. He looks at her childish hand. Closes his good eye so the words read as if they’re written in diamonds.

‘I think it must have been just a splinter, a sugar splinter – it must have blown up from the drying pans. I had to go home from work. There’ll be a record there and at the hospital.’

‘So why were you up the hill at the hut with two teenagers?’ Glass asks into the silence.

‘I wasn’t,’ Paul says.

Glass laughs.

‘She asked me,’ Paul says. ‘Pearl asked me. It was just a bit of fun. Nothing happened.’

Glass watches him. Paul Rendell wipes at the stream from his swollen eye for the first time.

‘You’d have to be twice her age, wouldn’t you?’ asks Glass.

‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ Paul says.

It isn’t a good sign. Her father still isn’t home. The caravan is tidied, the dinner cooked; hers is stored away in the fridge. The dishes have been washed and dried. She approaches his bed, opens the curtain. His bed is made up. Unslept in. She sees his sketchbook beneath the bed, his pencils beside it. When she opens the pages she sees the drawings of Pearl. She flips the pages. He has tried to draw her again and again and failed. He can’t get her right. Rose puts the sketchbook back.

He’ll be at the pub, his art having failed him. What does it matter? It was bound to happen sooner or later. It’s the way things are. No point getting upset. Steel yourself. Hold on tight. Don’t show any emotion.

She takes a towel and walks to the amenities block, showers and washes her hair. She puts on a load of washing. Sits on her little bed. Stands up again. Even washed, she can smell the mountain on her. She holds up her forearm to her nose and breathes. Not there, it’s an aura, a cloud.

When her father doesn’t drink he calls it his disease, but when he does, he says, ‘Oh, Rose, keep your wig on, it’s just a couple down at the pub with mates. There’s this great bloke called Frank, old-timer, lived here since he was a boy. He knows the sea like the back of his hand, said he could take us out fishing next Saturday.’

Once when she was eight he disappeared down the track in some town. The caravan was parked in a camping ground by a dry riverbed. ‘I’ll be back in an hour or so,’ he said, but he wasn’t. All night she lay awake in the caravan, waiting. She listened to every noise, divided them between good and bad. Someone putting their tea on, a toilet flushing, a washing machine chugging in a faraway laundry. Crickets singing in a scary tone, the crack of twig underfoot, the sudden sound of wings.

She thought, what if he didn’t come home? What if he was in a fight and punched in the head, and someone was dragging him to where he could never be found? She thought these things because these were the things that her father had told her happened: ‘Once there was this man called Pep,’ he said, ‘who got into trouble with some big men, and one night they just came into the pub and picked him up off the stool and carried him away. No one did a thing. Everyone just sat there like it was normal, and no one looked at the carrying men. That was the end of Pep.’

‘Where did they take him?’ she asked.

‘Who would know?’ he replied.

What would she do, she wondered that night when she was eight. She would have to walk into town in the morning and go up and down the streets looking for him. She would go to the hospital and then to the police station. She would have to say, Excuse me, I’m looking for Patrick John Lovell.

But she never had to do these things because her father nearly always came home. That night, late, or the next. She would hear the caravan door swing open. The crickets would lower their voices. All the bush noises would become just the normal every-night cracking and springing of twigs. His parka would rustle. A match would flare. He’d bump into the table and swear.

That morning by the dry riverbed his face was puffed up from the drinking, and he was covered in dirt and grass from where he’d slept.

Rose said, ‘I thought you weren’t coming home.’

He said, ‘Well, I did.’

She said, ‘I thought I’d have to go to the police station.’

He said, ‘If you do that we’ll be up shit’s creek – they’ll take you off me and put you in an orphanage.’

The orphanage. She imagined cold wooden floorboards, porridge at a long table, bunk beds, dirty-faced kids.

Now, in a caravan in paradise, she hears her father come home late in the night. He smells of the sea, sweaty, briny; she squeezes her eyes closed in the dark. He smells huge. He fills up the caravan with his odour. She hears him singing softly, a low lilting tune. She waits for him to stumble, but he doesn’t. She waits for the bloody beer-sodden stench of his clothes to reach her, but it doesn’t.

She sits up when he opens her curtain a fraction.

‘Where have you been?’ she says.

‘Where have you been, more to the point? Elaine reckons Pearl’s mother was here last night looking for you both.’

‘We got stuck on the mountain in the dark.’

He raises his eyebrows approvingly, her excuse accepted.

‘I’ve been fishing,’ he says. ‘That bloke called Frank. Night fishing. What a crack. Caught fifteen.’

‘They stink.’

‘But they’ll taste good,’ he says and smiles in the dark like a little boy.

After he has finished in the kitchen, after she hears him shed his clothes and climb into his bed, she pulls her curtain shut. She turns on her bedside light, opens the bedside drawer, brushes out her hair to calm herself. Seventy-one strokes. Seventy-one strokes. She presses her fingers to her eyes. What did her mother look like? It’s such a simple thing to remember your mother’s face, yet there is nothing there in her mind but a clean blank space.

She takes the pillowcase sampler from the drawer, holds it on her lap for a long time, and then slowly, carefully begins to sew.

Each stitch for a memory. Here’s the stand of gums, here are the leaning turpentines, here’s the space where the gully begins, here’s the hut among the trees. She sews the small neat stitches, a whole line of them, until she feels her eyes begin to close. Here’s the dress, the midnight dress, the beautiful midnight dress, then she turns on her side and sleeps.

Rose leans the rusted bike against the railing and takes the pillowcase sampler from her bag. She holds it out to show Edie in the late afternoon light; she holds it up without saying anything, as though it will settle something between them.

‘You’ve improved,’ says Edie.

Inside, Edie begins the window-opening ritual, and Rose helps. The midnight dress rustles ever so slightly on the mannequin.

‘Do you think you’re ready then?’ Edie asks.

She doesn’t ask Rose where she’s been. Or why she’s stayed away. She unpins two panels from the skirt and hands them to Rose. She searches through the sewing basket for the blue thread. Chooses a needle from the needle box. She shows Rose the seam width. She sits down herself and begins beading the bodice, intricate work, tiny stitches for each little black bead.

Rose picks up her needle, threads it, begins to sew. She sews with her new hand stitch. Stitch after endless stitch. Will she ever make it to the end of the row? Edie glances at her work from time to time, and Rose lays it on her lap so the old woman can see. Nothing, just a nod, keep going. The thread makes a soft noise in the taffeta. Ah, yes, it says, again and again. Edie takes the hanky from her bra strap and wipes her forehead; the night is close. No rain yet.

‘We’re having a late wet, you know,’ says Edie. ‘It’s usually drying up by now. Have you seen any rose walnuts on the ground up there?’

‘What do they look like?’

‘Small, long shape, like this –’ Edie holds up a black bead – ‘lovely, shiny.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What about the porcelain fruit? That’s bright pink or white, you can’t miss it, it’s the most beautiful thing.’

Rose takes the pink nut from her pocket. She’s carried it there for a week.

‘Is this it?’ she asks.

Edie holds it on her palm, a prize.

‘I only saw two of them,’ says Rose.

‘We’ve still got some rain to go then,’ says Edie.

‘You can have it,’ says Rose.

‘Well, thank you.’

When Rose finishes sewing the first two panels she slumps back in her chair, and Edie laughs. She shows Rose how to finish off the piece, the knot inside the knot inside the knot. An elephant beetle flies in through the open window and crashes against the lamp. The old woman heaves herself up and throws it back out the window.

‘Silly bloody thing,’ she says.

Edie unpins another panel from the mannequin and hands it to Rose. Rose doesn’t know the time, but it feels late. Her fingers ache.