The Midnight Dress (24 page)

Did he take his time deciding such things? Did he walk this way and that, searching? Does a tree stand out in these situations, present itself to despairing eyes? It must have been lower, that tree, somewhere near the first car park, perhaps one of the introduced camphor laurels in clear view of everyone.

He felt cold. That’s what he said to his mother after the splinter entered his eye. ‘What do you mean, cold?’ Mrs Rendell said. ‘I mean cold, like my bones are cold.’

‘Well that just doesn’t make any sense,’ she replied.

By the time he came home from the police station in the night, there were already several news reports that in a Far North Queensland town a man was assisting police with their investigations into the missing girl case. Outside the doors to the tiny station a crowd had gathered.

‘Get out of here, you lot,’ Officer Williams had hissed at them, while Paul hung his head.

They had not jeered or shouted, that crowd, but their whispers droned, a nest of angry hornets. Someone threw a Coke bottle that hit Paul square on the nose.

‘Jesus,’ he said.

His mother had waited up for his return. She was certain he would return. When she heard the back door open, she came huffing down the stairs, but he walked past her as though she wasn’t there at all. He put his keys on the counter. Went and sat behind his desk in the Blue Moon Book Exchange. Put his head back in his hands.

Car Park Number One can accommodate forty cars. It says that in the council brochure ‘Walks around Leonora’, although there are never that many cars. It’s always nearly empty, a desolate sort of car park, where voices seem louder than they really are. There is parking space for one bus. It was exactly seventeen days after the Harvest Parade.

The bus was from Townsville, chartered by the Twin City Rambling Society. It would have been a terrible thing for them, most of them being old, ready with their gaiters and their aluminium walking poles. Their thermoses, their lightweight backpacks. It was a tree at the edge of the car park clearing – yes, it must have been. Maybe he looked higher, walked up the tracks, that would have been more romantic, but then came back down and did what was practical. Still, the car park seemed such a tawdry choice.

He had on his Leonora Lions jersey and jeans. His sandshoes. His hands hung by his side, choice made, palms hidden. The rope, heavy-duty nylon cord, yellow, festive looking, available from any hardware shop. He swung slightly. He turned his purple face to the car park, then away again, purple face to the car park, away again, like some terrible tree ornament.

‘Lord,’ said one of the first to alight from the bus.

There was never a note. Not in his jeans pockets, not in his car, which was in the car park, a small blue second-hand Sigma, locked. Not in his bedroom in the house of his childhood, his football trophies still on the shelf, not in the small book exchange filled with the dusty romance novels. For all his words, his honey-smooth, carefully chosen words, and his radio announcer voice, in the end he had nothing to say.

It’s a summer of air, a summer of toeholds, a summer of trees. Rose knows each of them as she goes, touching them with her hands. She knows all the rocks as well, their slightest movement beneath her sandshoes: crossing the gully is like dancing, she knows each stepping stone. She thinks about Edith Emerald Baker, how many times she must have walked this way. How she must miss it now. How she must long for the singing creeks and the secrets of the trees. Was that why she collected and kept so much from the place? All the leaves rotting in boxes and white cedar flowers pressed behind paper. All the powdery remains of firewheel blossoms and climbing lilies, like dying stars, withering. The quiet vases filled to the brim with quandongs, gully walnuts, startling flashes of crimson berries.

Rose stops and looks down at her face in the water, her hair tied back in two long ponytails, without a single pin. Fire red. Pearl smiles at her own reflection. It is the second time they have been there together.

Pearl wears a feverish intense expression. Her face has been this way for the last week, permanently flushed, permanently lovesick. She flings herself back into chairs, weak-limbed, and stares right through people when they speak. Her notes as secretary of the Leonora State High Harvest Parade Float Committee have grown sloppy. At their last meeting she sat at the head of the table, but her mind kept drifting.

Weekend: working bee to paint canvas fruit?

Organise trial run on back of Mr Harvey’s truck?

Question: will fruit even fit?

Everything was unsolved. Everything unsolvable.

She seems puzzled by her own actions. ‘I can’t believe I did it,’ she says. ‘Put that note in the book, handed it to him. Stared at him right in the eyes. He knew, I know he knew. He mightn’t find it. Of course he’ll find it. He would find it. He mightn’t find it. He would find it. What if some else found it?’

Her name, Pearlie, signed in fluoro highlighter, lemon sorbet.

‘What the hell did you write to him?’ Rose asks, after they’ve navigated the fallen tree. She really doesn’t want to know.

‘I wrote him a poem,’ says Pearl.

‘Oh God.’

Pearl is good at lots of things – netball, softball, cross-country, doing her hair in a way that looks like she hasn’t done it at all, peeling Mintie wrappers into tiny ribbons, shading eye make-up, making large fibreglass fruit – but Rose doesn’t think poetry is one of them.

‘I didn’t write it,’ says Pearl. ‘Don’t worry. I copied it out of a book.’

‘Okay,’ says Rose, wondering which one she might have chosen. Hoping she didn’t dot each ‘i’ with a love heart.

At the hut Pearl takes a small dustpan and brush from her backpack and sweeps out the new leaves. She holds up a Jif bottle and sets about recleaning the glass windows. Rose shakes her head and goes to sit at the edge of the falls.

‘You know how I like things to be,’ Pearl says later, when they’re sitting on a blanket.

‘Just perfect,’ says Rose.

They sit on the blanket and the shadows of the trees move over the walls. The water barrels over the waterfall.

‘I think we’ll be leaving soon,’ says Rose.

‘Don’t say that,’ says Pearl.

‘I know it, it’s the way Dad gets. He’s wound up.’

‘But you said you wouldn’t go with him,’ says Pearl. ‘That night we stayed up here.’

‘I can’t believe you were awake but not answering me.’

‘I just wanted to hear you talk. You never talk.’

Rose doesn’t know what to say to that.

‘Why doesn’t he just go and you stay?’ says Pearl. ‘You could live with us till the end of the school year, and then he could come back and pick you up.’

Rose tries to imagine herself living in Pearl and Pattie’s little house behind the shop. All the tinkling of crystals and wind chimes and the cane trains shunting all night in and out of the mill yards.

‘We could make up the trundle next to my bed,’ says Pearl. ‘You can’t go, Rose.’

‘I’m only saying, that’s all,’ says Rose. ‘It’s just a feeling.’

‘You said it yourself you didn’t want to stay with him.’

‘I can’t imagine my dad on his own.’

‘He’ll have to be one day,’ says Pearl. ‘I mean you won’t live with him forever, will you, going round and round the country?’

‘I guess not,’ says Rose.

‘Rose,’ Pearl says, breathlessly.

‘What?’

‘I need you to do something for me. You have to go to the book exchange and see what he does. See if he asks where I am.’

‘I have to?’

‘Please,’ says Pearl. ‘You know I’d do anything for you.’

Rose can’t think of anything worse. Mr Rendell’s book exchange by herself. Walking past old Mrs Rendell with her Japanese fan, pushing open the bamboo-print curtain, entering that sticky, lonely little space.

‘I couldn’t,’ says Rose. ‘Really, I just couldn’t stand going there by myself.’

Pearl is silent for some time, and when she finally speaks it’s the angriest Rose has ever heard her: ‘You don’t understand anything, Rose. You’ve never even kissed a boy!’

‘Fuck off, I have,’ says Rose.

Pearl ignores her. She puts the dustpan and brush back in her backpack, grabs the bottle of Jif. She undoes her hair and twirls it in a loop on top of her head then looks out at the falls.

‘You haven’t,’ she says.

There is nothing left to say; they sit in silence. Finally Pearl smiles.

‘I’ll do it,’ says Rose.

‘Promise me,’ says Pearl. ‘Promise me, I’m dying.’

The day is airy, blustery; a big south-easter rattles the shop fronts. The streets are busy, busier than Rose has ever seen them, with the arrival of workers for the crush. The barracks have been opened, the rooms swept out, the mill has grumbled to life and belched a dark plume into the sky. Cane ash spins in eddies on Main Street.

Rose doesn’t want to go in. To leave such a bright day and go down the aisles in the newsagency, past scowling Mrs Rendell, through the bamboo-print curtain. It’s like climbing into a snake hole.

Paul Rendell is perfectly respectable to look at, perfectly clean, with his shining white teeth, but inside, Rose thinks, he is the colour of a toad. Everything he says is perfectly measured, teaspoon after teaspoon of perfect words, not a single um or a single ah.

Rose doesn’t look at any magazines. Old Mrs Rendell watches her as she goes past. Rose feels her eyes. She goes into the book exchange and straight to a row of books, not looking around, concentrating on the spines: breathe, breathe, breathe.

Something has changed.

There is something different in the old mould-speckled romance novel air.

‘You’re Pearl’s friend, aren’t you?’ says Mrs Rendell, right behind her.

‘God, you scared the life out of me,’ says Rose.

‘You didn’t hear me say the exchange isn’t manned now,’ says Mrs Rendell. ‘Paul’s gone to work at the mill. It’s that time of year. Everyone works there. I said it, but you just kept walking right past me.’

‘Sorry,’ says Rose. ‘I didn’t hear you.

‘You young girls can’t hear anything nowadays. No, there’s no one running the place. Paul started at the mill on Monday. His father wouldn’t believe it – he’ll be jumping up and down in the grave. Paul, who said he’d never do a crush, too below him. He hurt his eye, he got a splinter in it, but the doctor wouldn’t give him a certificate. Anyways, that’s why I have to ask you to leave your bag at the front if you’re coming in here. You’d be surprised how much gets stolen. Oh, nearly forgot, he left something at the front with me in case Pearl came in, says it’s one she’ll probably like. Will you be seeing her?’

‘Yes,’ whispers Rose.

‘What?’ says Mrs Rendell.

‘Yes,’ says Rose.

Pearl is lying back on her bed when Rose enters. She has flung herself there and cried into her hands. Now she can’t move.

‘Oh God,’ she says, when she sees the book in Rose’s hands. ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God.’

Rose hands her the book. Pearl holds it like it could easily shatter into a million pieces, like it isn’t just
The Captive Heart
, which looks old, tattered, as if it should be trashed. Rose turns to go.

‘Don’t,’ says Pearl.

She goes through the pages one by one. Slowly. When she finds the message she gasps and falls back on the bed, holding the book over her face, kicking her legs.

‘What does it say?’

Pearl reads,
Come to me in my dreams, and then by day I shall be well again! For so the night will more than pay the hopeless longing of the day.

Rose takes the novel and looks at the words printed in pencil in the margin of page two hundred and one. He has very plain handwriting: for all his suave words, his handwriting is like simple wooden furniture. He hasn’t signed his name. There’s no
Paul
written after the poem. He isn’t game to sign his name. There’s nothing else.

‘Maybe he didn’t write it,’ says Rose.

‘Oh, he did.’

‘I think you have to stop this now,’ says Rose.

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s freaking me out.’

Pearl laughs.

This time she doesn’t say it’s a game.

‘I can’t,’ she says.

Double Cross-stitch

Afterward he crouches beside her, black. It’s impossible that she’s dead. Impossible. He has only pulled her back as she tries to leave. That’s all. Once. She’s so light. That’s what surprises him, like she’s made of nothing. The dress slips through his fingers, and she starts to turn again. She’s laughing.

Then again. He’s laughing as well but he’s angry too. Not surface anger. A towline suddenly snapped taut inside him. If she’d just stop still he could explain it to her. Who he is. What he means. But none of it makes sense. She’s moving faster now, starting to run, he’s grabbed a handful of her dress and she’s falling. Heavily to earth, head to stones. Not moving. The dress settles around her, a dark cloud. That’s all it takes.