The Midnight Dress

  Karen Foxlee was born in Mount Isa in 1971 and began writing at a young age. She started a Bachelor of Arts after high school but finished a nursing degree, never giving up her secret dream to become a writer. She finally completed her arts degree a decade later and began her first novel,
The Anatomy of Wings
, which went on to win the Dobbie Literary Award and regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award.
The Midnight Dress
is Karen’s second novel. She lives in Gympie, Queensland, and continues to nurse and write.

For Doris Winifred Foxlee

Anchor Stitch

Will you forgive me if I tell you the ending? There’s a girl. She’s standing where the park outgrows itself and the manicured lawn gives way to longer grass and the stubble of rocks. She is standing in no-man’s-land, between the park and the place where the mill yards begin.

It’s night and the cane trains are still.

It is unbearably humid and she feels the sweat sliding down her back and she presses her hands there into the fabric to stop the sensation that is ticklishly unpleasant. She lifts up the midnight dress to fan her legs. It’s true, the dress is a magical thing, it makes her look so heavenly.

The shoes she’s wearing are too big. She’s tripped once already walking in them, across the park, away from the town. She drank some wine earlier, cheap wine, behind the rotunda. She can still hear the harvest festival now. A voice over a microphone proclaiming what a wonderful night it is, then music, a slow out-of-time waltz. She can hear the crowd too, the deep rumble of voices and the sudden shrieks of laughter.

She feels excited. The girl doesn’t think she has ever felt so excited. It’s been building in her for weeks, this breathless rushing sensation. She feels the goose flesh rise on her arms just thinking of it. She’s exactly where she is meant to be, that’s what it is, it’s like a homecoming. It’s like her dreams. She puts a hand on her stomach because she has butterflies and, with the other, adjusts the coronet in her hair.

She doesn’t know how she should stand when he arrives. She doesn’t know whether she should have one leg in front of the other like a beauty queen, or legs side by side. Should she lean her back against something as though she isn’t so excited, standing in that place, clutching the little black purse in her hands? What will she do with the purse? When he goes to hold her, how will she put it down, will she just drop it? She’s trying to sort these things out in her mind.

What should she say? Her mind is perfectly blank when it comes to that. Usually she can think of words, but now she can’t think of anything. Maybe something will come when he arrives. Something funny maybe, or seductive, or both.

When she hears footsteps her heart nearly jumps out her mouth.

She laughs.

‘Where are you?’ she whispers, because she can’t see him yet.

It’s dark. Suddenly it feels darker, as though a cloud has passed over the moon. She looks up to check but there is the moon, newly struck, white hot. When she looks back he’s there. He looks as shocked as her but then he smiles.

‘What are you doing here?’ she says.

Rose arrives one night in January when the barometers are dipping and there is not a breath of air in the wide empty streets. The palm trees along the main drag hang their despondent heads and women fan themselves in open doorways hoping for something, some little breeze. Old ladies watch the evening news, take hankies from their bra straps and wipe their top lips; in public bars the sweat drips from chins. And already in countless darkened bedrooms, on beds beneath ceiling fans that thump and whir, girls lie dreaming of dresses.

The rain comes in sudden exhausted sighs and spontaneous shuddering downpours but does nothing to ease the discomfort. They drive down the deserted main street and Rose thinks it looks like a shitty little place. She’s an expert on such things. They could keep driving except there isn’t enough petrol left. The service station is closed. That alone sums up the town. They turn across the train tracks, where they see a sign proclaiming
PARADISE JUST 7 KMS AHEAD
.

Paradise is a caravan park. Her father kills the engine and sits still, gripping the wheel. Rose can hear the ocean, the sudden intake of its breath, as though it has remembered something, something terrible, but finding there is nothing it can do, it breathes out again. The night is dark and starless.

‘It’s as good a place as any,’ he finally says.

She gets out and slams the door.

‘Shit.’

Toads leap before every step.

The kiosk is shut too. There’s a bell for after-hours arrivals, which she rings but no one comes.

When she gets back to the car her father is still sitting at the wheel. She reaches in and takes the keys from the ignition. He doesn’t flinch. Typical. She knows exactly what will happen next. He will stay there all night thinking. He’ll try to solve the problem as though it is a huge and complicated theorem, but in the morning he’ll realise it is all very simple. He’ll stumble from the car and into the caravan, pull the little curtain around his bed and his shaking will begin.

‘I’m going to bed, Dad,’ she says.

‘Okay,’ he says, staring out at the dark.

She can’t attach the power until the kiosk is open, so she moves through the dark inside the caravan until she reaches her own small bed. She opens the drawer beside her pillow, feels for her brush, undoes her hair. She brushes it out, seventy-one strokes, and ties it in a plait. She remembers her mother doing exactly the same thing. The memory is hazy, pale, like an overexposed photo. She presses her eyes until the image burns and is replaced by tears.

Stupid. It’s stupid to cry.

‘Stupid,’ she says aloud.

It’s raining lightly. It patters softly on the caravan roof. When she was small her father said that was God drumming his fingertips. She can hear the sea very clearly, its sharp breaths and exhalations, the whole night around her, thinking. She lies down, presses her eyes again.

If she had a light she’d write something in the little green notebook she keeps. The words would be clumsy as bricks, she knew it, and later she’d tear out the paper, ashamed. In the book she keeps a column of words she hates. First is the word grief. She hates the sound of it. It reminds her of a small wound, half-healed. The word doesn’t encompass at all the emotion that has no edges. The feeling rises like a giant cumulus cloud. It surrounds her, dark and magical. At night when she presses her eyes she feels she could quite easily levitate, held up by that cloud, float out the little window above her bed. It would take her over the town, the truck stop, the highway, the cane fields, the paddocks, the bush. That is how she would like to describe grief. She wishes there was a word as powerful as all that.

She goes nowhere. Stays pressing her eyes. She listens to the rain until she falls asleep.

Pearl Kelly half listens to the others talking in the seniors’ toilet block about the new girl. She sits on the bench with her legs stretched out, while the others are huddled around the dull metal mirror staring at their smudgy reflections. She is half-thinking about the kiss too, Jonah Pedersen’s kiss, which was cool and wet and not at all what she was expecting. It was different from Tom Coyne’s. His kisses had always been small and tight and dry. They had been rhythmical, as though he was beating out a tune with his lips. Tom Coyne had known how to kiss, even in Year Seven.

It’s disappointing, all of it, because she had waited so long for the Jonah Pedersen kiss, when she needn’t have. Everyone had been waiting. And now it’s there, all messy on her lips, and she just wants to forget it. Worse than that, she could tell afterward that he was embarrassed. That he knew he was bad at it, when everyone thought he was so perfect. It’s an ugly secret.

She drifts back to the girls’ conversation.

‘She’s really unusual,’ says Maxine Singh.

‘Ugly unusual?’ asks Vanessa Raine, who is the most beautiful girl in the school and likes to keep track of such things. ‘Or odd unusual?’

‘I saw her in Mrs D’s office,’ says Shannon Fanelli, ‘I mean just the side of her. I think she might have really bad skin or maybe they were moles.’

‘Or warts?’ says Mallory Johnson.

‘I saw her from the front,’ says Maxine. ‘She’s actually kind of an unusual pretty.’

‘Except for her hair,’ says Shannon, ‘She has this crazy hair in two buns tied up with about one thousand bobby pins.’

‘Hello,’ says Rose, entering the toilet block.

She doesn’t have a bag. She’s carrying just one pencil. Her uniform is way too big. She looks at their hem lengths, their hair, the way they stare back at her with their lip-glossed mouths just a little open, and calculates immediately, in a fraction of a second, that she will never fit in.

‘Hi,’ they say in unison.

‘Hi,’ Rose says again. She can tell she’ll hate it; she always does. She touches her hair to make sure no stray curls have escaped.

Then Pearl jumps off the bench, smiling.

‘Geography or French?’ she asks.

The truth is she should say geography because Rose has never taken French. Rose looks at Pearl and tries to think. The girl is of perfectly normal height, with perfectly proportioned limbs and perfectly pretty in a golden-haired, sun-kissed kind of way. Exactly the kind of girl that Rose likes the least. But is she a geography or French kind of girl? She doesn’t look exotic. Exotic is not the word for Pearl Kelly. She looks like she might like colouring in the layers of the earth. She’d take great pride in it. She looks like a girl who would feel quite at home with vile words like tectonic and magma. She would understand map scale.