The Midnight Dress (6 page)

‘Hi,’ says Rose, looking very closely at the books in front of her. She feels a droplet of sweat escape from the nape of her neck and travel the length of her back. She would like to get out of this cruel little space.

‘What book are you looking for now then, Pearl?’ he asks.

‘I want more . . . romance,’ says Pearl.

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Well, you know you’ve come to the right place.’

Pearl laughs, a little breathy nervous laugh. She pulls a book from the shelf, studies it for an eternity.

‘Can we go now?’ whispers Rose.

Pearl shooshes her.

‘
A Virgin in Paris
,’ he says, very slowly, when Pearl hands him the book. ‘My, my.’

Pearl runs a hand through her hair. Paul Rendell leans back on his chair, arms behind his head, smiling. Rose thinks he has too many teeth.

‘How much is it?’ Pearl asks.

‘For you, fifty cents,’ he says.

Pearl looks nervous now, once she’s in front of him. She looks only at the book. She takes fifty cents from her uniform pocket and drops it into his outstretched hand without touching him.

‘Well,’ she says, ‘I guess we better be going.’

Paul smiles but doesn’t say anything.

Outside they walk along the street without speaking, Pearl looking at the book, half-smiling, barely breathing.

‘What were you showing me?’ asks Rose.

‘
Him
,’ whispers Pearl. ‘Him.’

Binding Stitch

Will I show you Vanessa Raine’s face, crumpled up with crying? It isn’t a pretty sight. She’s pulling at her renowned golden hair and forgetting to wipe her nose. Detective Glass is interviewing her.

‘What about this place?’ he’s asked her. ‘This place the two girls went to, Rose Lovell and Pearl Kelly. Do you know about that? A hideout it was. This secret place up in the trees?’

He’s not losing his patience. He lets her cry. He needs a smoke, is what he thinks, he’s sick of crying teenage girls who won’t tell the truth. He’s sick of teenage girls in general, he’s interviewed ten of them this morning. He’s sick of their scrawny little bodies and their oversized heads. He’s sick of trying to get to the bottom of it.

‘It isn’t about that,’ says Vanessa Raine. She’s sobbing when there’s no need to sob. It’s only a question, he thinks. Only a question. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. I don’t even think that place was true. They talked about this hidden hut up on the mountain but they were always talking like that, making things up.’

‘It’s just I’ve heard it from a few other people. Parents, you see. It could be important. If you can think of anything you heard Pearl or Rose say about this place—’

Vanessa’s mother, Mrs Raine, the colour psychic, Harvest Queen 1969, interrupts then. She looks like an older version of Vanessa, preserved in formalin. Her hair is bottle-blond and her tanned skin is beginning to crease. She stretches open her painted pink lips and explodes.

‘I think we’ve had just about enough,’ she says, getting up. Her hot pink heels clicking on the gymnasium floor. ‘Vanessa has said what she knows and I think we’ll leave it at that. Come on, Vanessa, stand up. We all know where you should really be looking – you want some answers, you just need to go down Hansen Road and pay a visit to that woman because we all know, and I’m telling you this right now, if you don’t, you’re idiots. She had something to do with this.’

The dress again.

‘Right,’ he says, picking up his pencil. ‘Tell me about this woman.’

‘The house at the end of Hansen Road,’ says Mrs Raine. ‘Very end, old house up against the mountain, looks like a rubbish tip. Her name is Miss Edith Baker.’

‘And how is she related to all this?’

‘She made the dress,’ wails Vanessa. ‘She made the dress.’

The same creek that runs through the Falconer cane bends backward on itself then, up toward the mountain from where it sprang. It crosses some way behind Edie’s strange house, where the back paddock gives way to bush. Rose can hear its rushing up behind the trees. She stares up at the mountain that fills the sky from the old woman’s back steps.

‘It’s a beauty, isn’t it?’ says Edie.

‘It’s okay,’ says Rose, even though there is something about it that makes her feel dizzy. She wonders what it would be like beneath its mysterious green pelt, which grows dark with the shadows of clouds and silvery in the sunshine, which releases startling sprays of parrots, which veils and unveils itself all day long. She imagines all the mossy groves and caves and hidden things.

‘Full of secret places,’ says Edie, which makes Rose look at her and cross her arms.

‘Has it got a name?’

‘Well, that rock there, the big bluff, is of course called Weeping Rock, because it always weeps, even in the dry season. And the middle part, where the mountain dips, was always called the Saddleback. There’s a lookout there and on the other side of that, the seaboard side, you can’t see it from here but from the bay, that bluff is called the Leap. They’re all easy to get to from the town side, big tracks, but really only places for visitors. Daytrippers, we used to call them. See above those trees? I would climb all the way to there when I was a child, with just the old paths that have been here a thousand years. I didn’t know if you’d come back. You must really want a dress, which is a good thing – dresses are the best medicine for young girls.’

Rose keeps her face very still.

‘I can already see it,’ says Edie, turning up the stairs.

Rose isn’t so sure. She’s argued with herself the whole way. She doesn’t know whether she likes the old woman with the small dark eyes and skullcap of hair. The house is falling apart. There’s a tree growing though the front stairs. Everywhere there’s the detritus of the forest. The leaves drying in small piles in the corners of rooms and seed pods jammed in the floorboards. The curtains are dappled with mildew and festooned with spider webs.

‘Is Miss Baker as strange as they say?’ Pearl asked her, painting her nails in lavender highlighter.

‘Yes,’ Rose said, and she hadn’t lied.

‘Tell me?’

‘Where should I start?’

In Edie Baker’s house it’s almost six o’clock. Outside there are hours of sunshine left but inside is already filling up with shadows.

‘I open the windows along the back now,’ says Edie. ‘At night a breeze comes down off the mountain and it’s good to catch it. I close all the windows again in the morning and it stays cool all day. When I was a girl my mother called it the mountain’s breath.’

She goes about opening up all the coloured glass casements and the louvres in the long back kitchen, and the afternoon light dances on the blue birds. She wears a sleeveless sundress and her pale arms are the colour of pastry and when she raises them, to release the catches, two little wings of skin hang down.

She walks with a limp, as though one hip hurts, and she makes a small humming noise in her throat. Rose stands, watching, there’s still time to leave.

‘Now,’ says Edie, ‘what dress will we make?’

‘A lot of girls are having strapless or one-shoulder,’ says Rose.

‘Strapless is for hussies,’ says Edie, fixing her with her bright dark eyes, then she waves for Rose to follow and they go down the hallway into the gloom.

The house is as vast and creaking as a museum and each room they pass through is filled to the brim with dusty collections of things. Tallboys and faded settees and velvet chaises gone lumpy. Boxes filled with bits of paper and others crowded with leaves, large crystal vases sitting on the floor overflowing with twigs, dressmaker busts lying on beds, hat boxes stacked in towers. In corners there are sudden surprising piles of stones. And in every room there is paint peeling from the walls, emerald green or turquoise or scarlet, and immense constellations of mould spreading across the ceilings.

Edie turns lights on in each room and huge blank-faced wardrobes loom. She opens their doors and rifles through their musty interiors, holds up old clothes, opens trunks, pulls suitcases out from beneath beds. She gathers up an embroidered shawl and an armful of men’s coats.

‘Oh yes, this is good lace,’ Edie says, when she comes upon a small black dress, a deflated thing, with black rose-lace sleeves. When she lifts it, a shower of dust tumbles from the ancient petticoats.

In another room she approaches a small black lamp with a glass-beaded shade.

‘What do you think of this?’ she asks.

But before Rose can answer Edie has unplugged it from the wall and tucked it under her left arm. They go down a narrow corridor, where the house drops away beneath their feet and the floorboards plink and plonk like piano keys. Edie opens a stiff wooden door.

‘Here,’ she says.

There is natural light in the room and Rose realises they must have travelled from the back of the house to the front. A grimy sash window displays the overgrown yard and a small patch of cloudy sky.

In that room there is material, cupboards with opened doors filled with material, boxes filled with material, bolts tilting in piles. Taffetas, failles, velvets, satins. Gingham haphazardly folded, summer cottons stuffed into boxes, rolls of organdie leaning. Tartans, brocades, damasks, satin crepe, voile, crepe de Chine.

The room smells nasty. Old. Fusty. It smells like the bottom of an old lady’s handbag, perfumed, powdery, dusty. When Rose looks closer she sees that much of the material is spotted with mildew and the bolts have gone black along the edges.

Her heart sinks.

There are dresses there too. Some hang on dressmaker mannequins and others on coathangers. Beautiful dresses: an ivory satin dress with an organza skirt crumbling at the hem, a red gown eaten away by moths, a wedding dress turned yellow slung across the back of a chair.

Rose chews the end of a black fingernail.

‘Do you see any colours that you like?’ asks the old woman.

‘Not really,’ says Rose. She’s looking for black and she can tell Edie knows it.

‘What about this turquoise?’ Edie says instead. ‘Turquoise was the colour worn by Cretan princesses. Or this pink? This pink organza is always very popular with girls.’

‘It’s got holes in it,’ says Rose

‘We would use something else as well, to go with it,’ says Edie. ‘Or what about this yellow? Queens in England wore yellow to their coronations.’

‘No one would ever wear yellow to a dance,’ says Rose.

‘It probably wouldn’t suit your colouring, anyway. Redheads are best in emeralds and deep blues and, of course, the darker shades of red. But you’re young and these colours aren’t really for girls but women.’

‘I’m nearly sixteen,’ says Rose. ‘And I’m not a redhead.’

Edie makes the small humming noise in her throat.

‘I don’t think you understand,’ says Rose.

‘I understand perfectly well,’ says Edie.

‘There is something here for you, Rose, it’s only a matter of finding it,’ Edie says as she leaves the room. ‘You can use anything you like.’

Rose hears the house creaking away beneath the old woman’s feet, stands still in the room, thinking. She could climb out the sash window and run away. She pushes a dusty dress, gold brocade, out of the way and tries the window but it’s jammed. She reaches her hand up to smooth down her hair; a pin is removed and replaced.

She moves slowly from pile to pile, pulls down boxes from the cupboards, opens up suitcases on the ground. She touches speckled linen, stiff lawn, gaberdine disintegrating where it has been folded. She holds up tattered tweed, ragged serge, shabby shalloon. Georgette shredded by silverfish. Threadbare velvet. She touches dimity, gingham, chintz and Holland silk. She knows none of the names, of course, only that all is ruined.

It’s a joke. Why has she listened to Pearl Kelly? Pearl bloody frangipani Kelly, who knows everything and nothing, going through her Moscow addresses, how has she persuaded Rose to have a dress made? Pearl bloody Kelly is probably getting a brand-new dress from a brand-new shop on a brand-new street in a brand-new town. She’ll shine like one of the baubles in her mother’s crystal shop.

Rose Lovell will have a dress made out of rags.

Now she’s crying. It’s unexpected.

I don’t care about the stupid dress, she tells herself. But she does. It’s dark and beautiful. It’s a mystery inside herself. She can’t work it out.

They’re painful tears, the sort that swell in the throat. She feels enraged. She’s going to march out of that room, march over the plinking plonking floorboards, the house will rattle with her steps. She’s going to march past Edie. She’ll tell her to fuck off if she has to.

But there’s one more wardrobe. A tall narrow one with laughing kookaburras painted on the doors. Rose wipes her eyes. Afterward, in dreams, she’ll open that door again and again, return again and again to that moment, turn that little dark key.

She leans forward, there’s a sudden applause of rain on the roof.

‘Oh,’ she says.