The Midnight Dress (30 page)

She has stopped still in the middle of the open space. She’s standing beneath the moon. He knows the way Rose stands when she’s thinking. She holds her arms a certain way, fingers together, as though she’s about to recite a poem to a small audience. She’s so beautiful. That’s what he’s thinking when she seems to sense him there. Beautiful, is what he’s thinking, when she turns to him.

Gathering Stitch

This is the morning after again, so bright with sunlight you’ll have to cover your eyes.

‘Elaine,’ he says.

‘Don’t “Elaine” me,’ Elaine replies, but she has taken all his sketchbooks and paints anyway, because there’s still a chance.

Rose turns on her side, head pounding. The night swims in there, with her eyes closed: the wet lawn, the torn clouds, the jagged strip of sky. She tries to listen for their conversation outside, but they’ve gone quiet. Perhaps he’s leaning forward, touching the locket where Mrs Lamond keeps Mr Lamond close to her heart. Her father has always been a trespasser.

Rose sits up in bed. Everything she owns is in her little drawer. She’s not like Edie, who has kept everything; she only has her brush, seventy-one strokes, her black fingernail polish, her black lipstick, her black eyeliner, her bobby pins and hair ties. Her flannel shirts. Her t-shirts. One pair of black jeans. One pair of shorts. Underpants, two bras. She has her green notebook. Words, that’s all she’s ever kept. Just words.

Pearl’s dress lies across the bottom of the bed, pale in the sunlight from her little window. She reaches out to touch it. It was wrong of Pearl to not come back. To take the midnight dress and not return. Rose had waited for hours. Murray had kissed her lips, again and again, dripped the last drops of vodka onto her tongue.

‘Time to get up, Tolstoy,’ her father says, when he’s back inside.

He’s whistling. It’s his own nervous kind of happy tune that he whistles when he’s ready to get on the open road again. Leave everything behind.

She sits up. Pulls the curtain. Puts on her clothes. She empties the drawer into her backpack, stuffs the tangerine dress into a plastic bag.

‘Nearly ready, Rose?’ he asks, when she opens the curtain around her bed.

He can’t look her in the face. There’s something wrong with him. He’s blown up with the drink, his eyes puffy like he’s been crying. He looks around the caravan interior as though checking that everything is shipshape: they’re about to plunge into the open sea, let’s launch this boat, crack open champagne.

‘What’s wrong?’ she says.

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he says.

He still can’t meet her eyes.

‘I’m not coming.’

‘Oh, right,’ he says.

He reaches out and checks a window.

She has never in all her life felt her mother’s presence. Her mother has never stood beside her and made her shiver. She has never flown next to her shoulder. But right here in the caravan, Rose feels her for the first time. It starts in her toes and fills her from the bottom up. A kind of liquid spirit, that’s what it feels like. A you’ll-be-safe, don’t-turn-back resolve pouring into her. She’s sure it’s her mother. Don’t go backwards, don’t touch all the places, stand up now, pick up your bags, let me see your hair now, it’s beautiful the way it’s falling over your shoulders, you’ve grown taller and look how strong you are, one foot in front of the next, Rose, that’s right, toward the door.

There at last, there, he’s finally looked at her.

‘What have you done?’ Rose says.

‘What’re you talking about?’

‘What have you done?’ She feels sick, can hardly stand.

‘I’ve done nothing,’ he shouts, slamming his foot into the wall, then suddenly he’s crying.

She shakes her head, turns her back, goes out the door. Down the two steps. She needs to get away from him.

‘What do you think you’re going to do?’ her father sobs.

‘I don’t know,’ she says.

‘Well, that doesn’t sound like much of a plan.’

That makes her laugh. He does too. The ridiculousness of it. They’ve been driving around the country in circles for eleven years.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ he whispers.

She walks into the sunlight. Keep walking, says her mother. Not in words but in Rose’s heartbeat.

‘Rose,’ her father calls.

Keep walking.

‘Rose.’

Keep walking.

‘Rose.’

Rubbish is everywhere in the streets. Streamers and paper flowers have fallen from the awnings. Soft-drink tins, burger wrappers, straws. She finds a ten-dollar note as she walks, which is good, because she didn’t ask for any money when she left.

She pushes open the door to Crystal Corner, hears the cascade of tinkling bells. Pattie Kelly looks at the tangerine dress in the plastic bag.

‘Where’s Pearl?’ she says.

There’s something about the way she says it that scares Rose. There is a sharp edge to Pattie’s voice, she’s saying, Why isn’t Pearl inside that dress?

‘Isn’t she here?’ says Rose, and there’s a slight realisation. It’s crouching, rising, growing limbs.
She turns her back on it quickly.

‘No,’ says Pattie. ‘She didn’t come home. I thought she was with you.’

Rose thinks she probably slept in Jonah Pedersen’s car at the beach. That’s all. She doesn’t say that.

‘She’s got
my
dress,’ is what she says.

Pattie looks at her.

Afterward, for years, Rose thinks that Pattie was seeing her aura, was seeing its true colour. Black.

She looks at Rose with a kind of horror.

‘Something’s wrong,’ she says.

‘I’m sure she’s all right,’ says Rose. She knows she isn’t. She wants to fall to the ground and scream.

‘No,’ says Pattie, ‘something’s wrong.’

There’s a flurry of phone calls first, then a blizzard. Jonah Pedersen says he arranged to meet Pearl but was picked up by the police for driving unlicensed. It’s terrible; it might just ruin his professional football career. His father is still down at the police station trying to sort things out. By the time he walked to the mill yards last night, Pearl was long gone.

‘I just thought she got sick of waiting,’ he says.

‘Look, I got this for her . . .’ He takes a little box from his pocket and shows the police officer a sparkling ring. ‘It’s cubic zirconia,’ he says. ‘One day it’ll be diamond.’

She’s missing.
Missing
. Now there’s a good word. It’s a lamenting sort of word. She was meant to be somewhere, but instead she vanished off the face of the earth.

‘Why did she have your dress on, and why have you got hers?’ the same officer asks Rose. It’s the only time she’ll speak to them before she herself disappears. Before the search starts. Before the interviews. Before the bigwig detective comes down from Cairns. Before the mountain tracks grow crowded with feet.

‘It seems strange, that’s all,’ he says, ‘to go to all that trouble to buy a dress and then just give it to someone else.’

‘I didn’t buy mine, I made it,’ Rose says.

‘Where was she going?’

‘To meet Jonah Pedersen. I told you. She said she’d be back in half an hour.’

‘What do you think happened to her? Where do you think she went?’

‘I don’t know, maybe she ran away. Maybe she got sick of this town.’

It’s a stupid thing to say.

‘I’m sick of this town,’ she says. ‘A girl can’t even not turn up for a day and everyone’s asking questions. Maybe she just went for a walk.’

She’s on a roll now, she’s remembering Paul Rendell in the crowd.

‘Maybe you should ask Mr Rendell Junior, he has a thing for young girls.’

‘What makes you say that?’ says the officer, offended; he plays Union with Paul.

‘Trust me I know.’

‘What’s your address?’ says the officer. ‘We’ll need to speak to you again.’

She says Paradise and wonders if her father has already gone. Her stomach sinks; she thinks of his eyes, his howling against the caravan in the night.

‘Anything else you can think of, Rose Lovell?’

‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘She’ll be back soon.’

But afterward, when she’s out in the street, she looks up at the sky. It’s filled with cloud writing, delicate swept-up cursive: it’s all written there, everything that ever happened, everything that was ever going to be.

She’s crying. She’s crying as she starts to run. She knows that what she said isn’t true. Pearl has gone and she’s never coming back.

Upright Cross-stitch

I’ll show you how her body lies. The sun is just coming up, the bush blushing rose-gold. She’s on her side, curled; she might be sleeping except for her eyes. There are ants on her arm. A long thin procession. Dew drops are on her eyelashes. She has been rained on. The sun has dried her.

The place is beneath the Leap, on the seaboard side of the mountain, low down. The tracks there are well maintained. There is a curtain fig, quite renowned, with a raised boardwalk, and a circuit route to several lookouts that afford glimpses of the sea.

It’s exactly the kind of place that Edie Baker would have shunned, full of her daytrippers with their echoing cooees.

A star pin winks in her hair in the first light.

The dress. The dress is the colour of a dark sea. It hasn’t faded, even with the exposure, although the fabric has grown limp. There is the black mourning lace. The cairn of sticks has flattened out, the leaves he piled on top of her have blown away. There is sunshine. The earth, holding her tenderly, is waiting.

These are the things that Edie has taught her: how to fly, how to leap out across a swollen creek, all the praying in your feet, knowing that you can make it to the wet rock. How to listen for the falling of the sun. ‘It’s a sound, Rose, if you listen you’ll hear it.’ The leaves follow it all the way down, then relax, turn inward. The solitaire palm folds up its fronds. A different kind of scurrying begins: quicker, louder, more urgent.

Edie has taught her how to sit still. How to breathe.

How to sew a straight line. How to pin a pattern. How to double stitch a seam, how to make tulle petticoats, how to work lace at a cuff.

Edie is waiting for her at the top of the back steps. Exactly the way she always has. The house is shadowy cool.

‘Something happened,’ Rose cries. ‘Something terrible has happened.’

Edie waits.

‘Pearl put my dress on last night and then she disappeared.’

The old woman’s face changes, pales. ‘Come inside,’ she says.

She can’t stop crying, Rose Lovell; she feels she’ll never stop crying. They sit at the kitchen table, knee to knee. Rose sobs into her hands.

‘Was it a magical dress? Was it the dress?’

‘What do you think, Rose? You made the dress.’

She looks smaller, thinner, Edie. Her hands tremble to her throat.

‘Oh God,’ says Rose. She’s seeing her father’s face. His obsidian eyes. The way he was in the night. The way he looked at her in the sunlight.

She’s clutching Edie’s hands. She’s sliding off her seat onto the floor. She’s saying this cannot be happening. ‘This cannot be happening, Edie. What have we done? What have we done? What have we done?’

She rests her head on the old woman’s lap. Closes her eyes, but the tears keep coming.

‘You know,’ says Edie. ‘You know what has happened.’

And she does.

Rose doesn’t leave. Not then. Not for a while. She is weighted down by the truth, which is a dead weight, an anchor, holding her there. She sleeps in a long-forgotten bedroom on a dusty-smelling mattress under a dusty-smelling sheet. There is a mirror in a huge mahogany dresser in that room, and each morning and night she looks at her face there. The blood is still moving in her veins. Her cheeks are turned dusky-red each afternoon when she returns from climbing.

She goes up at dawn. First to the hut. She sees the policemen there once, crouches like a wild thing, watches them through the trees. The place is split open now, touched by too many hands. It needs to be left alone. Given over to the forest. Already things have changed there. A bird examining a sliver of amber glass has left behind the seed of a satin ash. A tiny sapling has sprouted. The forest is already taking a step forward into that clearing. The crumpled timber frame will rot. The orange fungi will bloom along its length. A carpet snake will curl itself amid the old blackened floorboards. If only it can be left alone. These are things she wishes for.

She leaves there and climbs higher.