The Midnight Dress (19 page)

She’s glad when the house disappears from view; when it’s gone Rose feels free. The land falls away sharply, and the trees lay out their huge buttress roots. There’s the hushing sound of water below, still unseen. The gully yawns into view.

‘Now what?’ says Pearl.

‘We have to climb down,’ says Rose. ‘It’s okay, I know the way.’

Rose shows her where to squat, where to put her feet, where to turn, where to place her hands.

‘This is ridiculous,’ says Pearl, suspended on a large boulder.

Rose feels momentarily panicked then, as well. By herself it’s different; she never doubts. She judges the distance between two rocks without stopping to think. She leaps into air. She can tell whether a rock is steady or not through her foot: she leans in and the rock releases itself to her.

Pearl is no good at it.

‘Just stay calm,’ says Rose. ‘All you have to do is move your foot about five centimetres to the left.’

‘There’s nothing there,’ says Pearl.

‘You’re moving it to the right.’

Pearl inches her way down with Rose’s help until they both stand beside the creek. Pearl is breathing hard.

‘Maybe we should go back,’ says Rose. ‘The next bit is harder.’

Pearl sits down on a rock. She wets her face in the clear running stream.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ she says. ‘Isn’t it?’

The trees rise up over the gully and the air is rarefied.

‘Almost magical,’ says Rose. She looks at the already-torn hem of Pearl’s white dress.

‘I think we should keep going,’ Pearl says.

She shows her the fallen tree bridge, and Pearl laughs as though Rose is joking. She touches the iridescent moss with one finger. Rose shows her how to begin.

‘This is a red quandong leaf,’ says Rose on the other side, as they walk off through the great trees. ‘And its fruit is blue.’

Pearl holds the leaf in her hand.

‘Okay,’ she says.

‘Here,’ says Rose, ‘look.’

She plucks the blue fruit from the ground, pours a handful into Pearl’s hand. She dips again, this time to pick up two perfectly pink nuts. She gives one to Pearl, puts the other in her shorts pocket, hopes Pearl didn’t see.

‘Pink,’ says Pearl, raising her eyebrows. ‘That’s not like you.’

‘There’s a vine in here and if you touch it you just about die from itching,’ says Rose.

‘How do you know all this stuff?’

‘I just know it.’

They stop in a space where a tree has fallen and the canopy is broken. They step into a single shaft of light and laugh. Above them a blue Ulysses hovers.

‘Look at your freckles,’ says Pearl.

‘You mean they’re terrible,’ says Rose.

‘I mean they’re beautiful,’ says Pearl.

At the hut the mist from the falls hangs in the air and wets their red faces. Pearl walks to the edge, covers her eyes to the sunlight, looks out over the view.

‘I feel like I’ve been here before,’ says Pearl and then shivers.

She shows Rose the goose flesh on her arms.

‘I felt it too,’ says Rose. ‘The first time I came.’

Rose pushes open the little door of the house and Pearl walks inside. She looks in awe at the little space with the pitched roof, at the shadows of trees moving on the walls. The light from the casements, which Rose cleaned on her second trip, fills the room like water.

‘I love it,’ she says.

‘I could almost touch those clouds,’ Pearl says, lying on her back on the rocks beside the falls. ‘Look how they’re hanging down, almost in the trees. I can’t believe you found this place. It’s exactly like in a dream. You can write about this, Rose. You should write a story about you and me, or some other girls that are like us, and we run away here to live.’

Rose thinks of her green notebook, of Pearl’s name hidden by black ink.

They lie on the rocks beside the falls, the clouds passing right over them, lacing the trees, raining on them, misty rain that cools their skin. Rose and Pearl hang their legs over the rocks and watch the water fall away beneath them. Between clouds there are sudden bright gaps of sunlight that burn into the clearing.

‘Do you want to swim?’ says Rose.

The climb to the base of the falls had been difficult: the creek splits a seam through the forest allowing in the sun. They will have to move through a tangle of ferns and lawyer vines, she tells Pearl.

‘It’s worth it. You’ll see.’

The sunlight on the rock at the bottom of the falls renders them luminous. They hold hands over their eyes. It is a perfect deep pool, the water roaring into it, the creek flowing away, down through the trees. Pearl is already bending down, unbuckling her sandals. She throws off her dress and picks her way over the stones into the water.

‘It’s freezing,’ she screams.

Rose laughs, flicks off her Dunlops, slips down her shorts, and wades out too. The stones are smooth beneath their feet. They are so close to the falls they can’t hear each other speak.

‘I love it,’ she thinks she hears Pearl say again.

‘What?’ Rose asks.

But Pearl only smiles at her and closes her eyes against the sun.

Later they explore. The boulders are bluish grey and pockmarked. Each crater fills up with rain, like a cup. They walk among the boulders and dip their fingers into these places, which collect many other things: leaves, vividly green, just newly caught, or others almost blanched of colour; pods and seeds and pebbles; the tiny fragile skeleton of a baby bird, the perfect drowned body of a lizard, both lying protected behind the clear water glass.

They lie on the sun-warmed rocks and watch the clouds drift past, the alternating shadows and dazzling light making them drowsy.

‘I’m burning,’ says Rose, looking at the pale skin on her legs that is turning pink.

They head back up through the trees. The forest is full of chatter, the babbling creek, the talking birds, but in the hut it is quiet, a sudden silence that makes their ears ring.

‘I’m so tired,’ says Pearl.

‘We shouldn’t sleep,’ says Rose.

But they do.

They lie curled on the floor, side by side, smelling of the mountain and the creek. Rose’s unbound hair has curled in the sun. Pearl winds a strand around her finger in amazement, closes her eyes.

They wake that way, the strand of hair still coiled around Pearl’s finger, but the sun has almost gone.

‘Shit,’ says Rose, sitting up. ‘We should have gone earlier.’

At night it will be the darkest place in the world.

She knows it’s too late. They’ll never make it down. Not through the gully, where the hard climbing is, and not in the dark.

‘Are we going to have to stay here?’ asks Pearl.

‘I think so,’ says Rose. ‘I don’t know what else to do. It’s my fault.’

‘My mum will go crazy. She’ll call the police.’

‘Shit,’ says Rose.

‘We’ll need a fire,’ says Pearl.

‘I don’t have any matches.’

‘Can’t we rub sticks together?’ says Pearl. ‘Or something.’

They try, but when nothing happens they give up almost immediately and find themselves laughing. The light is draining from the jagged strip of sky above the falls; everything has become indistinct and blurred at the edges. A soft rain has begun to fall.

‘We shouldn’t get wet again,’ says Rose, ‘or we’ll get cold.’

They go back inside the little hut, where it’s even darker. They sit close together, knees drawn up to their chins. The smell of the creek on their skin is very strong. Pearl’s stomach growls in the darkness and it makes them both laugh again.

‘Mum will go out looking for me’, she says. ‘She’ll probably go and see your dad.’

‘Dad will tell her not to worry.’

‘Won’t your dad worry?’

‘I don’t think so,’ says Rose. ‘He’s not much of a worrier.’

‘Mum will be having kittens.’

‘Did she know we were going bushwalking?’

‘I’m not sure, did you tell her?’

‘I didn’t tell her anything, I just said hello.’

‘Anyway,’ says Pearl, she offers a chewing gum stick.

In the dark there is nothing to do but rest. The darkness is like a tide; it rushes into the clearing and leaves them breathless. Again they lie curled, side by side, and don’t speak. They listen to the forest, its scraping, snapping, moving sounds. Once, they hear the footsteps of a larger creature, a rock wallaby perhaps. Pearl’s fingers wrap hard around Rose’s wrist. Rose sits up, the floorboards move, and whatever it is crashes off through the undergrowth.

The forest breathes around them. There is the rhythmical chanting of insects and the myriad small rustlings and chimings. Owls sing their hunting tunes. Rain falls on the old tin roof, sometimes a tiny whisper, suddenly a drumbeat. The sound of the waterfall grows huge, filling up the hut and Rose’s mind; other times it recedes, leaving smaller sounds and Pearl’s breathing.

Pearl’s fingers relax around Rose’s wrist.

Up close, Rose can smell her chewing-gum breath, the dried-out sweat on her white dress.

‘Pearl?’ Rose whispers.

Pearl doesn’t answer. It’s just like her, to be so terrified and then suddenly just fall asleep.

Rose wants to talk. She, Rose Lovell, wants to talk about herself.

‘Pearlie,’ she whispers.

The wild bickering of flying foxes.

‘I’m thinking I’m going to run away after this. When my dad wants to leave, which he will. I’m old enough now; there’s nothing keeping me here. When I climb I feel really free. I mean it, I mean it like the word sounds. Do you understand? Like I’m made of air. I feel like I understand it, and it’s the only thing I’ll ever be any good at.

The house groans and tut-tuts.

‘I mean I don’t mean I’m going to be a mountain climber, I don’t mean that. I don’t know what I mean. When I was on the boat with Murray Falconer, I think he wanted to kiss me. He kept looking at my lips. I don’t know, maybe I had a pimple there.’

Pearl shifts against her.

‘My mum didn’t mean to die. It was an accident. She really loved the sea. She was an Aquarian. I never got to see her, like in her coffin or anything. I know it sounds like she was terrible for putting me to bed and then doing something like that, getting drunk and going swimming. Do you know what I mean? But it wasn’t like that. It was just a spur of the moment thing. My dad, he used to say, “She loved you, Rose. She loved you, Rose. You were her everything.” That was when I was smaller. I can only just remember it. He doesn’t say it any more.’

The night inches by with its thousand scratchings and rufflings. Rose thinks she hears footsteps but it’s only the rain. Sometimes the sounds of the night join together to make one mass of noise, a violent thrumming heartbeat, other times she can separate them: raindrops, bird’s wings, something moving through the leaves.

‘This hut was built by Jonathan Baker,’ whispers Rose. ‘He loved this lady called Florence, who was a dressmaker. She sewed a secret love letter into a suit she made for him. It said,
Meet me at the fountain
.’

She thinks about them then, Jonathan and Florence. The many times they must have walked up into the forest, swum at the base of the falls, kissed right here, lying on the very same floor. How Edie was conceived right here.

‘I can come with you to Russia if you like,’ Rose whispers.

Is she asleep? Rose dreams she’s awake, lying there, listening.

A slight change in the light arrives, a change in the darkness to a grey, a glistening grey, a grey filled with stars. She reaches out to touch it.

Pearl turns further onto her side, and Rose watches her dim outline.

Sometime before dawn they sit up in the gloom. They go into the forest through the gauzy mist and without speaking begin the long walk home. They go down through the trees, clamber into the gully, where this time Pearl doesn’t complain. She listens carefully instead, for where to put her feet, where to put her hands. They rock hop across the creek, its water higher, flowing faster, and scramble up the other side. The sun is just up, the first glimmer of it, when they make their way through the open sclerophyll and into the stand of butter-coloured gum trees.

‘Shit,’ says Rose.

Pearl has stopped still on the track and Rose has run straight into her back.

Picking her way up the track before them is Edie.

‘Good God,’ says Edie, ‘I’m so glad to see you.’

Rose sets her face into a stone mask, crosses her arms.

‘Hi,’ says Pearl.

‘Hello,’ says Edie.

‘I’m Pearl,’ says Pearl, when Rose doesn’t introduce her.

‘Edith Baker,’ says Edie. ‘Rose has told me about you.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ says Rose. ‘I’ve never even mentioned her.

Pearl smiles. Edie smiles.

‘Look at the pair of you,’ Edie says. ‘What happened?’