The Midnight Dress (27 page)

‘I’m getting worried now,’ her father says.

Truth be told she’s not afraid of walking up to Paul Rendell and punching him in the face; it’s not about that. She doesn’t want to go into town in case she sees Pearl. The newsagency and Crystal Corner are only three doors apart. Rose doesn’t know what she’ll do if she sees Pearl. Her true emotions might be unleashed: she might spontaneously combust, right there and then, or there might be a tsunami of tears. She’s not sure which. It’s safer to stay on the bed.

But by Tuesday the smouldering ruin of the house has cooled inside her. She sits up, plaits her hair. She paints on her eyes, her lips, puts on her crucifix, her shirt with the devil riding a horse. She takes an apple to eat on the way.

She rides the bike into town, against the afternoon sun, to the Blue Moon Book Exchange, even though she knows he won’t be there. Old Mrs Rendell watches her walk up and down the aisles of the newsagency. The bamboo-print curtain to the exchange is pinned back, so that Mrs Rendell can see inside, and there’s a new sign:
PLEASE LEAVE ALL BAGS AT DOOR
.

‘Back again,’ says Mrs Rendell, when she catches Rose’s eye.

Rose tries to think of something to say. She looks at Mrs Rendell, who raises her eyebrows.

‘How’s your dress coming along, then?’ says Mrs Rendell.

‘It’s good.’

‘How’s Miss Baker?’

‘Good,’ says Rose.

‘Funny old thing that she is,’ says Mrs Rendell. ‘Harmless enough, I suppose. She had one of the Hansen boys wanting to marry her when she was well past marrying age, but she turned him down, you know, and then he went and died with the war.’

Rose sees the ripped dress, the magpie, the sky.

‘My mother always said beggars can’t be choosers. I was fortunate, of course, lucky when I found Mr Rendell Senior, there never was anyone else. Did you know there was also once a story that Edie’s old mother, Florence, was a dabbler.’

‘What’s a dabbler?’

‘A dabbler in the dark arts,’ says Mrs Rendell.

Dark arts sounds stupid when Mrs Rendell says it. It almost makes Rose laugh.

‘I thought she made wedding dresses,’ says Rose.

‘Oh, she did, all right, but all the while she was up to other stuff, running around the rainforest half-naked.’

That does make Rose laugh. Mrs Rendell looks shocked; she fans herself a little harder.

‘Anyway, were you looking for something, love?’

‘No,’ says Rose. ‘I was just . . .’

Old Mrs Rendell raises her eyebrows again: she has her proof the girl is there to nick something.

Rose walks back onto Main Street and stands in the sun; she looks across to the park. Perhaps she’ll sit in the shade there and see if he passes that way, coming home from a shift perhaps; she isn’t sure of those times. Her stomach growls and she places a hand there. She’s about to step off the footpath when a cane train grumbles past, wheels wailing, in a diagonal across the street. She counts forty bins raining stalk. The street is full of the stuff. She bends down to pick up a piece that has landed near her foot, and when she stands again he’s there.

He is with another man, older, bearded; they’re talking.

‘Paul,’ she says. It’s a foreign word. Like a stone in her mouth.

Paul Rendell laughs. He is going to ignore her.

‘Paul Rendell,’ she says, more loudly, the way a bailiff reads out the name of the accused.

‘Hello?’ he says.

He isn’t going to stop; he’s going to walk right past.

‘Don’t go near her again,’ says Rose.

Much more loudly now.

‘What?’ he says and laughs, looking back at her. He pretends he doesn’t understand.

‘You heard me,’ says Rose. ‘Don’t touch her again.’

‘Beg your pardon?’

‘Don’t touch her again,’ shouts Rose.

Paul Rendell shakes his head, looks at the man next to him, and shrugs.

‘Do you know her?’ the man asks, as they turn into Rendell’s News.

‘Never seen her in my life.’

‘Was that the girl, the redhead?’ Rose hears Mrs Rendell ask. ‘She was just in here looking to pocket something. I’ve got a bad feeling about her.’

Rose feels tears then, shakes her head, rubs her eyes. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

When she turns to go she sees that Pearl has come out of Crystal Corner and is standing on the step. Her hair is undone, she’s shoeless, she has anger in her dark eyes, as though she might stride across the seven metres that separates them and slap Rose across the face, but she doesn’t. She just shakes her head and goes back inside.

She feels deflated then, Rose Lovell, like a hot air balloon crumpling, plummeting through the blue. The problem is that the sky is inside Rose when it comes to Pearl.

Rose dreams of black tulle petticoats. She’s attaching them to a skirt in just the way that dream Edie has shown her, only the stuff has a life of its own. It’s slipping out of her hands, lifting, floating. She grabs it, fistfuls, but it keeps escaping. As soon as she gets one layer down, another wafts free until she gives up, lets the whole dark mass of it rise, trembling slightly, propelling itself like a jellyfish toward Edie’s casements. When Rose wakes she keeps her eyes closed. She doesn’t want to let that dream go.

She’s waited longer than the week and isn’t sure if she’ll go back to Edie. It’s only three nights until the parade. What’s the point of the dress? She doesn’t want to sit on a bowl-of-fruit float. They mightn’t let her, anyway. They might ban her because she hasn’t been back to school. There are probably rules to these pagan rights. Pearl might make use of her secretarial powers. She doesn’t want to think about Pearl.

Patrick Lovell is
edgy
, she writes that word in her green notebook. Not Edgy Cool, but On Edge. It’s exactly the kind of word she hates: blunt, thick around the middle. It grates against her nerves. She wants a better word to describe him. To the untrained eye he looks just the same, but she knows better.

He trembles faintly. He laughs too loudly.

He has painted the boom gates for Mrs Lamond, a mural; it took him the whole week, every afternoon when work was over. He covered it in fish and coral and something that is meant to be the rainforest, although to Rose it is just a green smudge. It’s tacky, the whole thing. She doesn’t want to comment on it.

‘What do you think?’ he asks.

‘You’ve sold your soul,’ she replies, which makes him laugh all the more.

Everything they say to each other is like a script they’re reading from, and everything unsaid simmers.

Simmering
, that’s the word she needs to describe to her father. He’s simmering away to nothing. Soon he’ll be dry, just a dehydrated skin, like a five-day-dead blue-tongue squished on the road. He’s nothing but bluster. He’s nothing but hot wind. He can’t exist much longer this way.

Not long to go now, she thinks.

Edie is glad to see her. She’s sitting on the back steps in the cobalt evening. She smiles when Rose comes around the corner.

‘I knew it would be today,’ she says.

‘Have we still got time?’

‘Of course, of course,’ says Edie, standing up.

They open the windows along the back of the house. The louvres creak, the casements protest: Rose knows the sound of each and every one.

‘Have you made up with your good friend?’ asks Edie.

‘She’s no friend of mine,’ says Rose.

Edie hums her disapproving hum.

They sit at either end of the kitchen table and sew. Edie shows Rose how to attach a band to the tulle, stitching two lines so the whole thing can be gathered up. Rose goes to tell Edie about the dream but stops herself. She can’t say why. She knows Edie will only nod and hum. But she’s frightened she might say something else, something about the dress, its true nature, something about dark clouds.

Sewing black tulle
is
like wrestling with a cloud. Rose puts on the petticoats and Edie checks the length.

‘Did it burn right to the ground?’ she asks.

Rose can’t answer.

‘I want to know, that’s all,’ Edie says.

‘Almost.’

‘It’s just as well.’

Edie kneels at Rose’s feet and begins to pin where she needs to trim the tulle.

‘Sometimes when we went there, my mother and I, we never wanted to come back.’

I know, says Rose, only she doesn’t speak.

‘My mother, she was buried in her wedding dress, although she’d lost so much weight that she swam in it. She had sewn leaves into the lining: satin ash and sandpaper figs and, of course, the bleeding hearts. The green billygoat plums and the porcelain fruit. Into the coffin I put blue quandongs and the black bean pods. It raised eyebrows at the funeral parlour. But I didn’t care. I remember how young she looked, unlined. I brushed out her hair.’

‘I wear mine very short,’ she continues. ‘There’ll be no one to brush out mine when I’m gone.’

She explains how to attach the petticoats, which stitch to use, then pins the sleeves to the bodice and sews black pearl buttons at the neck.

The night creaks slowly past. Rose, hands numb, gives thanks for every stitch. Here’s my mother painting. Here’s my mother showing me rock pools; here’s my mother brushing out my hair, seventy-one strokes.

‘Edie,’ says Rose.

‘Yes?’

‘Thank you.’

‘It’s all right, my dear.’

‘Will we finish it tonight?’ says Rose.

‘Tonight?’ says Edie. ‘You’re too tired. Way too tired.’

‘No, I’m not,’ says Rose.

‘Yes, you are,’ says Edie. ‘Look at you. You’re swaying there like a tree about to fall.’

Rose pricks her finger then, places it in her mouth, closes her eyes.

‘Look at you,’ says Edie. ‘You’re going to fall asleep where you’re sitting.’

‘I know,’ says Rose. ‘I am tired, I’ve never been so tired.’

She lies on the day bed and Edie covers her with the shawl. The hurricane lamps are turned off. Rose hears the old woman’s footsteps disappearing down the hallway. The house sighs.

She sleeps and does not wake. Not when Edie leaves in the morning for her walk, not through the morning, as the sun crosses over the house, not when the velvety shadows begin to fall. She wakes in the evening, and Edie gives her food, damper and hot butter, which she gobbles, licking her fingers, not speaking, before lying down and sleeping again.

She sleeps the way a girl should sleep, a girl preparing herself for a ball.

Beautiful and Easy Rose Stitch

Glass isn’t expecting the man to top himself. It floors him. He wobbles for a while like a planet thrown from its axis. He was about to go round to the newsagency to pick him up again for another little chat, when it was called in. A man hanging up on one of the walking tracks. Main suspect. All he had to go on. ‘Stupid bloody prick,’ is what he says. ‘Stupid bloody prick. Why’d you go and do a stupid thing like that?’

The two officers stare at Glass from across their tables. We’re not getting anywhere, is what their eyes say. We’d like to get back to Cairns soon. Why’d you let him go home? Do you know what you’re doing?

‘What are you fools looking at?’ he shouts. ‘It wasn’t him, anyway.’

Stupid bloody prick. He’ll have to talk up the line now. Explain.

‘Go on, go and do something useful,’ he shouts. ‘Go up and see where he is. Find the confession.’

They grab their hats and shuffle from the room, unsure. When they’re gone Glass rests back in his office chair, puts his hands behind his head. He lets the thoughts come and go.

Of course he’ll have to go up there too. He’ll have to go up and see the body taken down. He hates these things, the dismantling of suicide scenes. The tidying up, the zip of the chord spinning free, the crackling body bag laid out on leaves. The way the birds will go on singing the whole while. The way nothing will be left behind afterward. Such a loud and theatrical act, leaving not the faintest echo.

Mrs Edith Baker, the witch, glides through his thoughts. He’s not expecting her. She’s holding something in her hands. He can’t see what. She’s gone just as quick. He sits up in his chair, shakes his head, touches the drawing of the dress in his pocket.

While Rose sleeps, Pearl comes to the back door. The kitchen is funeral-parlour quiet, not a sound except Miss Baker’s needle and thread running through lace. She stands there, watching Miss Baker sewing, and then sees the crumpled silhouette of Rose asleep on the day bed against the louvres.

It’s afternoon, and the sun casts a slant of light over the reclining figure, cuts her neatly in two: the bottom half of Rose is in shadow, the top half in light. Her flame hair blazes.

‘I haven’t had it in me to wake her,’ says Edie.

‘How long has she been sleeping?’

‘This is the second day.’