The Midnight Dress (25 page)

He thinks in frantic bursts. She isn’t dead. She can’t be. ‘Are you asleep?’ he asks her, softly. He looks into her eyes, but they look past him at the sky.

He carries her. She’s not easy to carry. She melts over his arms. He wants to scream but he doesn’t until he’s in the car with his windows rolled down, out on the beach road. He howls. That’s the word for it. He doesn’t want to leave her out in the elements. It seems wrong. He tries to shut her eyes but cannot shut them. He’s sobbing then. Oh God. Fucking Jesus Christ, oh God. His words ring through the trees. He carries her along the track in the dark.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Just wake up.’

He slides with her, tumbles down through the vines. There are two rocks close together with a dark tight space between them. He shoves her head up and into this space and tries to push her body in after. ‘Come on, come on,’ he says. It’s the dress. It’s slippery fucking stuff, whatever that dress is made of. He really didn’t mean it. Not any of it. ‘I didn’t mean it,’ he says to her, smoothing back her hair, giving up her little tomb.

He piles up sticks instead. He can see in the dark. He has slung the girl over his shoulder and carried her further through the brush. He has never felt so strong. He keeps spotting more and more branches he can use. He builds a cairn of sticks over the top of her. He wants to protect her from the light rain that has started to fall.

She’ll stay dry under the sticks until she is found. All he cares about is that she stays dry. He laughs at this absurd thought, lying on his side, then sits up. But when the sun starts to rise, he presses the balls of his hands to his eyes and cries like a little boy.

‘Hello, Tolstoy,’ says her father. He’s taken to calling Rose that. ‘What you writing?’

‘None of your business.’

This makes him laugh.

‘You’re either off sewing with your fairy godmother or writing in that little green book,’ he says. ‘Must be a good story.’

‘It’s not a story.’

‘This harvest thing sounds like a bit of a caper,’ he says. ‘They do it in all these old towns, Elaine says, floats and everything, dancing in the streets.’

‘I’ll be on the bowl of fruit float,’ Rose deadpans.

‘I’ll have to get a photo.’

They have an old Instamatic; they’ve had it for as long as Rose can remember. It sits above the fridge and occasionally spews out photos that develop slowly in their hands. Photos of the sky, of cemetery headstones, of her father, which Rose must have taken when she was small. He stands in some now indistinct place, his eyes closed against the sun. There are pictures of Rose: small Rose, red hair looping across her face, Rose in a range of school uniforms, sullen Rose, angry Rose.

‘Are you going to come then?’ she asks.

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

She narrows her eyes.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ she says

‘Why isn’t a father allowed to watch his daughter in a nice dress on a float and in a parade or whatever the hell it is?’

‘I didn’t say anything,’ she says.

Pearl gives nothing away of her plans. Pearl, who can never keep her mouth shut, Pearl, who can never keep a secret. In French she dreamily highlights whole slabs of text in aquamarine.

‘Do you want to go to the hut,’ Rose whispers, ‘tomorrow or Sunday?’

‘I can’t,’ says Pearl. ‘I have to go to Cairns for a fitting and to pick up the shoes. And then we’re staying the night.’

‘Oh,’ says Rose.

‘Promise me you won’t go without me, Rose. Swear it.’

Rose looks at her for a long time.

‘I won’t,’ she says.

‘Promise,’ says Pearl. ‘You have to promise.’

‘I promise.’

After ancient history, Murray says he’ll take Rose out in the boat again. He knows other places. He knows the islands like the back of his hand.

‘We could even go out to the reef. Do you like snorkelling? We’ll go out there on Saturday.’

‘Do I look like I like snorkelling?’ says Rose. She’s wearing a black crucifix with her uniform. Her lips are painted a deep mauve.

‘You don’t have to come,’ he says. ‘I’m just saying, that’s all.’

‘And I wouldn’t go out to the reef anyway, not in that thing. We’d drown for sure. It’s a heap of shit.’

‘God, you’re a moody bitch.’

‘Don’t say that,’ she says. ‘I’m not.’

‘You’re so dark,’ he says in a vampire voice, ‘and so dangerous.’

Yet on Saturday she trails her fingers in the water as Murray steers the tinnie into the open water. The sea holds the sky, or the sky holds the sea; she can’t tell. On the water the whole world is made of glass. When they are stopped at the perfect cove she looks at her own face there, solemn, hideously freckled. After the cove he takes her to another beach, a long slice of perfect white sand.

‘They’re going to build something here,’ Murray says. ‘Some bloke’s bought all the land. A resort or something.’

‘Is there a road?’

‘Not yet, but there will be. They just have to buy a whole heap of cane farms and bulldoze some rainforest.’

Just the thought of it hurts her. All those cool, calm places she has seen. She can’t imagine these places crushed, split open, exposed to the sun.

‘What?’ he says.

‘Nothing,’ she replies.

He takes the boat into the shallows and they climb onto the stretch. It’s a white hot day; she pulls her hat down hard over her eyes. Murray is wearing a terry towelling hat; he takes it off and wipes his face with it. They climb into the shade of the palms.

‘What are you going to do after school?’ he asks.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean what do you want to be?’

‘Shit, I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Free?’

He shakes his head.

‘I’m going to do science,’ he says.

‘That’ll be fun.’

‘Shut up.’

She likes him. She really does.

‘What’s it like to have a bird in your name?’ she asks.

‘Once we were like the king’s men that kept the hunting birds,’ he says. ‘A long time ago.’

‘I’d like to have a bird in my name. I’d be Rose Blackbird.’

‘The fairest girl in all the world,’ he says.

She doesn’t say anything.

‘It was only a joke.’

Is that the sky she feels inside her? The trembling of the seasons? Would she wait all day in the heat and the rain to run away with him? She looks at Murray Falconer from the corner of her eye. He looks at her. They both smile at the sea.

Promises
, that’s what Rose writes in her green notebook as the sun comes up. It’s a stupid word: the first part round and pompous and plummy, the second half a hiss, a snake whisper. She writes the word three times, then,
Promises Are Impossible to Keep When the Day is Good for Climbing
.

Patrick Lovell is up already. She hears him rifling through his fishing stuff, then softly closing the aluminium door as he leaves. He hardly sleeps when he’s on the wagon. Last night Mrs Lamond visited and they laughed into the small hours, laughter fuelled by coffee. Rose wonders if Mrs Lamond stays in the caravan when she’s at Edie’s house. She thought she caught a whiff of her last time: her fish and chips scent mixed with floral eau de Cologne. Rose wouldn’t put it past her father. They’ve left behind others in other towns, their faces fuzzy now in her memory. Tina with her hippy handbag. Jo with her bare feet, the purple scars on her arms, her worried expression, as though she’d forgotten something. Something important, like who she was.

They’d left them all behind. Flown the coop.

She puts the notebook away. Opens the window blind beside her bed with two fingers. There isn’t a cloud in the sky. She slips out of bed, slides into her climbing shorts, sticks her feet into her Dunlops, throws a t-shirt over her head. Maybe she’ll stop to say hello to Edie and maybe she won’t. It’s perfect climbing weather, no matter what she promised Pearl. Anyway, she’ll never know. She’ll be too busy worrying about Paul Rendell’s love note, holding it close to her, pressing it to her lips.

In Edie’s back paddock she doesn’t stop. She looks at the house and the ruin of Granny Baker’s chair, which still sits in the middle of the sloping field, the newly dried-off grass waving through its frame. She wonders if Edie is watching her: Edie always seems to know if anyone is there. It’s as though she herself has roots that stretch beneath the house, up the hill, into the forest, sensing whoever comes that way.

Rose shrugs away the thought.

In the first stream she finds a pink pebble, and she reaches through the clear water to retrieve it. It’s perfectly round and smooth. She decides almost immediately that she’ll give it to Pearl. It’s a Pearl kind of stone. Pearl will hold it in her hands and say, What made it this colour? I’ll show it to Mum, it must be some kind of mineral. But how did it end up here? There aren’t really any other pink stones. I love it, Rose, it’s just so beautiful.

She will add it to her box of beautiful things: necklaces that boyfriends have given her, friendship bands and invitations, and now Paul Rendell’s love note, torn from the romance novel, folded, pressed into a perfect square.

Rose hears the voices as she carries the pink stone up through the trees. She has thirty more minutes of climbing before she will reach the hut, but already she can hear them, snatches of their conversation, a scrap of laughter drifting down. She stops still on the track. A fragment of something deeper, a man’s voice, reaches her ears.

It can’t be.

She starts to walk again. Quietly. Her heart thudding in her ears. The voices disappear and reappear: the forest playing games with her. It holds the voices then throws them down like confetti through the trees. Pearl’s clear voice, suddenly magnified. Her laughter, the echo of her laughter.

When Rose finally rounds the corner she sees them there. Paul Rendell sits on the flat rock beside the hut, where he should not be. He’s a blight on the landscape. He is shirtless, his pale skin stretched tight across his shoulders and chest. He is staring at Pearl, who stands in front of him, her hair unbound. He is dipping his head to her breast; Pearl is leaning away. Rose’s foot touches a twig. The pink pebble falls through her fingers.

‘Oh my god,’ shouts Pearl, turning. ‘What are you doing here?’

It’s a terrible question. Rose showed her the place, gave it to her like a gift. Pearl is pulling down her singlet, wrapping up her hair, crossing her arms, shaking her head in disbelief.

Paul Rendell is the calm one. He looks at Rose, smiles. He looks, Rose thinks, disappointed, unsatisfied, but also a little scared. He is calculating ahead. Fucking stupid spotty girl with the red hair; Rose can almost read his mind, the way he looks at her. Then he smiles his broadest smile and reaches for his shirt.

‘What are
you
doing here?’ whispers Rose, finally. She’s not even sure she has actually spoken.

‘It’s not just your place,’ Pearl says. ‘You don’t own the whole forest, Rose.’

She has started gathering up her things: she has brought food, and in the hut, through the door, Rose can see a sheet spread out very neatly on the floor.

‘We better go,’ Pearl says.

Paul Rendell keeps watching Rose, thinking, is she the sort to tell? Will she keep her mouth shut? He seems huge in the clearing. He slips his shirt on, slowly, as though he has all the time in the world.

‘You’ve ruined everything,’ Pearl says, when she passes Rose, who is stuck to the ground, motionless. Yet Pearl can’t meet her eyes.

‘Rose,’ Paul says, very quietly, and nods.

Flame Stitch

What if everything could be changed? What if the girl in the midnight dress could walk backward through the mill yards, backward through that night of molasses and moonlit sky? Back through the cane bins, back across the train tracks, back across the stubble of rocks, the butterflies tumbling over and over in her belly, back across the dew-wet grass, away from the end?

What if that could really happen? If there was some way?

What if Rose and Pearl could stand together beside the toilet block, laughing, listening to the band play ‘Edelweiss’ out of tune, the reflections of the swimming pool dancing on their skin? There is a red paper flower in Rose’s hair. Pearl has placed it there. What if they made a different decision right then?

What if Rose could go backward? Backward to the caravan park, backward in the car, backward through the cane fields until they dissolved, back through the moonlit scrub, back through the small nameless towns and back through the city until it too faded, all the graffiti and brick walls and train stations, houses petering out to nothing but fences and billboards and then empty land again.

She would touch each place she remembered, kneel down and touch it with her hands. She would touch the roads at every corner she and her father had turned. She would touch the doors to motels and hotels, the boom gates of van parks, and the faded signs in camp grounds. She would touch the statues and stone angels in cemeteries, the mountains and their favourite trees. She would cross the desert and cross the mountains, cross the strait. She would keep going until she arrived back at the beginning, at the place where they took their first steps away.