The Midnight Dress (31 page)
Climbs further.
Her mother is with her still, in her limbs, in her thighs grown strong; she speaks in the pulse jumping at her throat. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. Rose climbs until she can no longer stand. Until she crumples on the forest floor. Until she is free of the forest on the upper rocky reaches, where she stands in the clouds. She calls out to Pearl. She calls out again and again. Pearl. Pearlie. Pearl Kelly. Persephone. Pearl.
‘I love her,’ says Rose, limbs exhausted, lying curled on the day bed, Edie opening the windows to the evening.
Edie doesn’t say a thing.
‘I loved her, that’s all,’ says Rose.
When she tells Detective Glass she doesn’t feel relieved. No huge weight lifts from her shoulders. She aches inside; it’s a terrible ache. When her mother died she felt the same way, she thinks, although it was too long ago to be sure.
She tells Glass about Paul Rendell, about the love letters, about his kissing Pearl up near the hut, about the fire she caused. She tells him all these things and he listens patiently.
She tells him that it’s her father. It’s her father they should be looking for.
‘Why do you think that?’ Glass asks.
‘It was his eyes,’ she says. ‘He couldn’t look at me and then, when he did, I knew. He’s always making mistakes. Terrible mistakes.’ She sobs with these last words. Aloud, it sounds stupid. She’s aware of how stupid it must sound. ‘I just know,’ she says.
Glass nods. He doesn’t look convinced. He’s losing interest. He’s going to start asking more questions about Paul Rendell. She senses them there, ready on his tongue.
‘Mrs Lamond has my dad’s sketchbooks,’ she says. ‘They’re full of his Pearl drawings. He couldn’t stop drawing her. You should go there. She’ll have kept them. She thinks Dad is coming back to her.’
Rose writes letters to Pearl, hundreds of them. She posts some up in among the trees. Leaves them between rocks in the lovely carved spaces made by the buttress roots. Throws them over the falls, one by one, her words like petals.
Others, she keeps. She’ll carry them for years. She’ll carry them with her between the places she lives. In cities, towns, across seas. The letters are written on writing paper from motel rooms and on the back of beer coasters, on cardboard torn from tissue boxes, the last pages of books and on shopping dockets. She’ll keep these words she meant for Pearl. When she is lost, and later when she finds herself again.
They find her father before she leaves town. It’s everywhere in the papers and on television. He’s on some back road to nowhere. Face grown lean and assuming his biblical air. He offers no resistance, answers every question, slowly and carefully.
She stops the traffic when she goes to town. People freeze where they stand, whisper when she passes. She sees Murray Falconer beside the park gates. She doesn’t want to stop, to harm him, to draw a dark mark across him with her presence, but he calls out. ‘Rose.’
‘Rose Blackbird,’ he says, when she is close.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says.
He shrugs. His laconic Murray Falconer smile is gone. He looks behind her to see if anyone is watching. He can’t think of anything else to say. He’s trying. He’s exasperated by it, his lack of words, almost angry; she thinks she sees the beginnings of tears. She can’t think of anything to ease his uneasiness. Finally, his father blows the car horn and he’s gone.
So she never goes again to town until she leaves.
‘Have you got money?’
Edie stands, goes down the hallway and comes back with a small yellow purse with a gold clasp.
‘Here,’ she says. The purse is full of money, stuffed full.
‘That’s insane,’ says Rose.
‘It will come in handy.’
‘Do you think I will ever see you again?’ asks Rose.
‘You know where I live.’
Rose Lovell doesn’t cry.
Edie puts her hand out and holds Rose Lovell’s wrist. An old, old hand, feather-light.
‘Maybe I’ll come back here to visit,’ Rose says.
‘Maybe you will.’
Still she doesn’t cry.
‘Bring back some fabric,’ says Edie. ‘Some buttons. Paris is a city of buttons, I’ve heard.’
‘Who said I’m going to Paris?’ says Rose.
‘I just pictured it, that’s all.’
She won’t come back. She’ll catch the bus that night from the service station at the end of town, after opening the yellow purse and counting out the notes for her fare.
She’ll lean against the window and watch the cane fields and stars, multiplied by her tears. She’ll see the mountain go. Her mountain. It will move behind her and she will crane her neck until it is gone.
Finishing Threads
He says, ‘Pearl,’ whispers it, louder then, when he grabs for the dress.
She says, ‘Mr Lovell. Don’t.’
It’s clumsy, disorganised; he wants only to turn her, to face him, reaching out like that, his hands full of night, the dress, then night again. He’s lunging, has got her, she’s falling, he’s falling with her. A trillion stars glittering in a swathe.
‘How do I look?’ she says to Rose.
Tell me I’m here, is what she means.
They’re playing ‘Edelweiss’ again. I won’t show you more, except maybe this, the part where she’s running, see her feet, the way they are hitting the newly dried-off grass, thudding down, toward the park again, the way they are touching the earth, touching the earth, touching the earth and then lifting off. She’s running but the ground has fallen away beneath her, she’s running but her feet are only touching air. She can see all the girls, all the rainbow-coloured girls, snake lines of them, dancing in the streets, she’s calling them but it’s nothing, just a breath. She’s opening up her arms like wings, the midnight dress, it’s floating out behind her as she goes above the trees.
It’s another wet season when the man finally arrives. The gutters are filled to overflowing, the creek riding high across the Falconer land, its brown back visible through the cane. The main street is almost empty when the bus stops and he steps down, water up to the ankle of his huge sandshoe, filling his brand-new Singaporean socks. He has the letter she wrote to him in his pocket.
Pattie Kelly still has Crystal Corner. She does a roaring trade with the tourists, who step into her shop from the buses, right next door to the takeaway. It’s perfect, they say, magical. And there
is
something special about the place. It’s not so shiny now, not glitzy, the way it used to be. It’s dustier, crammed full; she just can’t stop ordering saris, jade elephants, wrought-iron candlestick holders. But it’s not really the merchandise, it’s something about the way it feels in there. It encloses you, it holds you, sings you a lullaby.
Pattie welcomes everyone: ‘Hello, darling,’ she says softly, as though you are entering a church. It’s the same to everyone, even the sort that don’t look like they would like that type of endearment applied to them. The sort that bristles. She works harder on them, fusses over them, reads their aura: ‘You, sir, have an aura the colour of an azure sea. Now, don’t look at me like that, I can see these things, always have, always will. Did you think you were something different, did you? Something darker, or was it something lighter perhaps?’
When the letter first arrived he was married with three daughters of his own. They lived in a small apartment, two bedrooms, off Spiridonovka. There was no picture of the Eiffel Tower. The letter was such a strange thing, infinitely mysterious, the way it dropped through the letter slot and changed his life. It was written in rainbow-coloured letters, and it was so joyous a thing that sometimes, in the years that followed, he took it out and held it and cried openly.
It said,
My name is Pearl Kelly and I live in Australia. If your name is Bear Orlov I think my mother might have met you in Paris on the night of July the 23rd, 1970. She was dancing at the Crazy Horse. She would have been small, dark-haired, very pretty, you said she looked like an Arabian princess. You would have known her as Pattie or Patricia. I am enclosing my address and my phone number. If you are my father I would love more than anything to meet you one day. Love Pearlie xxx
In Crystal Corner there isn’t a shrine to Pearl, the way you might expect. There is just one photo, behind the counter, of her in the tangerine dress, the way the night began. Not a single flower adorns her hair, only the star pins. She’s not laughing, or even smiling; it’s like she’s thinking, thinking about something. She has that dreamy Pearl look. Not many people comment on the photo. It isn’t large, it doesn’t stand out, it’s just a photo of a pretty girl.
Bear Orlov wipes his feet on the mat provided, and the shop door opens to a cascade of tinkling bells. He fills the door, the sheer size of him. Pattie Kelly begins to say hello, darling . . . stops. And so it begins.
Acknowledgements
My thanks especially to Catherine Drayton for her much needed words of encouragement along the way. Thanks also to Madonna Duffy, Erin Clarke and Rebecca Roberts for their insightful suggestions, support, passion and patience. And, of course, gratefulness and thanks to everyone who helped mind the baby.
First published 2013 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
Copyright © 2013 Karen Foxlee
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research,
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Copyright Act
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no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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Cover design by Kirby Armstrong
Cover photographs © Getty Images; Shutterstock
Author photograph © Sonya Coe
Typeset in 12/16 pt Bembo by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
National Library of Australia cataloguing-in-publication data
is available at http://
catalogue.nla.gov.au
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The Midnight Dress / Karen Foxlee
ISBN: 978 0 7022 4964 8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978 0 7022 5089 7 (epdf)
ISBN: 978 0 7022 5090 3 (epub)
ISBN: 978 0 7022 5091 0 (kindle)
University of Queensland Press uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.
Contents
Stepped and Threaded Running Stitch
