The Midnight Dress (8 page)

He thinks he hears footsteps. Faraway footsteps, deep in the house. But he can’t be sure. A shadow moves along the hallway wall. He gets up and looks down into the dimness but sees nothing.

He has picked up the brown snake in the jar.

‘That’s a beauty,’ he says.

‘My father killed it when I was girl,’ Edie replies. ‘For no other reason than he wanted to hurt it.’

She isn’t intimidated by Glass. She stands smiling in her sundress and pea-green slippers. Or maybe she is. She sits down, suddenly shocked by his presence. A man in her space. It brings back memories.

He asks her about the dress first.

‘Oh yes,’ she says, ‘I’m a dressmaker. The best there is. From a long line of dressmakers. My great-great-great-great-great grandfather was a tailor on the rue Saint-Honoré.’

Glass looks at the blue birds then, with their mended wings, flying across the kitchen wall. He thinks her house is grubby, overcrowded, falling apart, stinking. He thinks her strange and old. Harmlessly strange. Ridiculously old. She watches him coolly with her bright dark eyes.

The detective, he’s a little fat. In the
Post
photograph he has hair business at the front, party at the back. He’s wearing some kind of light dress shirt with the silver top of a pen glinting in his pocket; they’re not climbing clothes, office clothes. He has one hand on a tree, his side to the camera.

The photo was taken from some distance – you’ll see, the trees are huge and he is small. When the image is enlarged it looks as though he is peering into the spaces between them, which are dark. Darkness, that’s all that grainy photo shows of the rainforest. Not the red leaves that fall like blood spots. Not the sudden vaults of space that make you crouch and cry. Not the twisted architecture of the buttress roots. Not the emerald-green python sleeping in a perfect coil.

Each year the wet season brings the monsoon, a vast system of rain, continent sized. The heat at the heart of the land, the dry red centre, pulls this cloud down over the top end like a shroud. Sensing its arrival the green ants build their nests and squeeze out their eggs. The lowland forest trees burst into flower, the Leichhardt pine decorates itself with pompoms, and everywhere there is the bright aching red of the native apple. Rat-kangaroos feast on Davidson’s plums and woompoo pigeons eat the lily pilly seeds and shit them down onto the forest floor, where they will begin to grow again.

All this does not change.

It is the preordained nature of things.

And in the schoolyard at Leonora High, it is exactly the same. All through the wet season girls dream a plumage of dresses, and the prettiest girls are expected to go out with the best-looking boys, and this has never changed. Jonah Pedersen sends a message to Pearl Kelly. Pearl should sit with him at lunchtime. So Pearl Kelly does. She sits there beside Vanessa Raine, who has been summonsed by Peter Tuvalu, and Rose sees her across the concrete sea, sometimes laughing but often with a strange fixed smile on her pretty face, as though she’s wearing a mask.

The small group of girls are lost without Vanessa’s command. Mallory tries to start up a conversation about the Harvest Parade: it’s official, stop the press, she’s wearing fuchsia, one shouldered, Grecian. She explains to Rose exactly how it all works. How all the girls line up and the mayor introduces them one by one, and they go down the stage into the crowd.

‘It’s kind of like a catwalk,’ says Mallory. ‘One of the girls is chosen.’

‘And sacrificed,’ says Rose.

Mallory looks at her. She doesn’t get the joke.

‘Silly,’ says Shannon.

‘It’s the one with the best dress that is chosen, actually,’ says Mallory. ‘She gets to be Harvest Queen. There are pictures of them all in the mayor’s office. Going back for years. The queen gets to wear the crown and hold the sugarcane staff and lead the parade.’

‘Enthralling,’ says Rose.

‘What colour are you wearing, Rosie?’ asks Shannon, who is sweet but, Rose suspects, as stupid as Mallory.

‘I’m not wearing any colour,’ says Rose. She thinks of the midnight-blue dress in pieces on Edie’s kitchen table.

‘I thought Pearl said you were getting your dress made by that lady, Mrs Baker or whatever,’ says Shannon.

Rose thinks of the old black lace dress and the cloud of dust.

‘Not
the
Miss Baker?’ says Maxine. She widens her eyes in mock horror.

‘Pearl said you went to see her,’ says Shannon. ‘I’m sure she did.’

Rose thinks of all the creaking rooms and all the dreadful quiet whispery things.

‘Well, I didn’t,’ she says.

The conversation is exhausted. They sit in silence, listening to the thud of basketballs on the concrete. Rose looks at Pearl across the yard; Pearl rolls her eyes in return.

‘It’s so boring there with Jonah,’ Pearl says on Main Street after school. ‘I mean, honestly. Football and more football. I’m trying to act interested.’

‘Why?’ says Rose ‘If it’s boring it’s boring.’

‘You don’t understand,’ says Pearl.

‘Yes, I do,’ says Rose. ‘I understand exactly.’

Her fingers go up to check that no curls have escaped. She looks at Pearl with her perfect skin and her perfect hair, not a single freckle, completely unblemished, not a scrap of make-up. She looks at Pearl, daring her to keep arguing.

‘Don’t go on the bus,’ says Pearl, changing the subject. ‘Come with me to the post office.’

She pulls her B. Orlov letters from her school bag. There are about fifteen of them, Rose guesses. She’s written the addresses in rainbow-coloured highlighter. God knows what the Soviet officials will think of that.

‘They probably have some law,’ says Rose. ‘About colours.’

‘I wanted them to stand out.’

‘Oh, they stand out,’ says Rose.

‘How do I look?’ asks Pearl, outside the newsagency.

Sweaty old Mrs Rendell is waving her mould-speckled Japanese fan when they enter. She looks at Pearl and makes a face.

‘Here’s trouble,’ she says.

‘I want to send these to Moscow, Russia, please,’ Pearl says.

‘Do you just?’ says Mrs Rendell. She leafs through the letters, scowling. ‘What are you doing, anyway, writing all these letters? Penpals?’

‘Kind of,’ says Pearl.

‘Kind of,’ huffs Mrs Rendell, and she takes out her stamp book and starts breaking off stamps. ‘Can’t guarantee they’ll get there. The Soviet Union is a damned difficult place. And they can’t stand anything fancy.’

‘Told you,’ whispers Rose.

When they’ve finished fixing the stamps Pearl announces that she has to return her book. She says it in a loud voice, as though she nearly forgot; Mrs Rendell pays her no attention.

‘Come on,’ says Pearl.

‘You go,’ says Rose. ‘I’ll wait outside.’

‘Oh please,’ says Pearl. ‘Please, Ruby Heart Rose.’

Passion’s Fury
,
Love’s Tender Fury
,
Savage Surrender
,
Bold Breathless Love. Wayward Hearts
,
Sweet Savage Love. Love’s Avenging Heart
,
Breathless Love
,
Captive Passions
,
Desire Me
,
Burned Fingers
,
The Men in Her Life
,
Rehearsal for Love
.

‘Why is love always savage?’ whispers Rose. Pearl giggles. ‘Why is love always breathless?’

It’s so quiet in that room, Rose thinks she can almost hear Paul Rendell breathing. Pearl undoes her hair; she studies the titles in front of her as though her life depends upon it.

‘So, Pearlie,’ comes Paul’s voice, ‘how was
A Virgin in Paris
?’

‘I was up all night reading it,’ says Pearl, a little too quickly, Rose thinks.

‘Of course,’ he says.

Pearl is standing in the safety of an aisle but she’s dipping her school shoe into the tiny spit of linoleum that separates her from him. Rose moves away, looking for something else.

There are some old books at the very top of one shelf, brown spines crumbling, their fibrous innards escaping. She slips one from the shelf and is surprised to find it’s called
The Art of Dressmaking
. She holds it up to her nose and inhales its tart vinegary scent. She thinks of her little green notebook then. What it will look like in a hundred years’ time. All her words there, her single words and groups of words that were meant to be sentences but that led nowhere.

Pain. Chandelier. Black. Dark. Dying. Cooling. Crying. Ugliness
.

What will I do?
she has written.

Pearl
, she has written.

She’s been going to describe Pearl, but even writing her name seems wrong. Like tacking down a live butterfly. She has crossed out the name, first with a pencil and then with an ink pen. Blacker and blacker and blacker until none of it remained.

Rose turns the pages of
The Art of Dressmaking
.

Large girls should never wear orange or stripes.

Tall, thin girls should not wear patterns.

‘And what was the story,’ Paul asks, ‘that kept you up all night?’

Pearl doesn’t answer at first; she’s gathering her thoughts.

‘Well, there’s this girl called Gardenia who goes to live with her aunt in Paris because her mother has died. Her aunt has really wild parties. And there’s this baron, who’s the aunt’s lover, and he’s really bad and there’s Lord Harcourt, who’s really haughty and arrogant, and she really doesn’t like either of them but she especially doesn’t like Lord Harcourt because he’s so, you know, arrogant. But in the end she falls in love with him.’

‘Ah, the arrogant man,’ says Paul.

‘Gardenia was a good-enough heroine, although I don’t really know what she saw in Lord Harcourt. I think I liked the baron better. He was kind of funny and sexy. And French.’

Redheads should never wear warm colours.

There is nothing to fear when making a pocket.

Anyone can make a dress given time and patience.

A long pause. Paul laughs softly into the silence.

‘Pearlie,’ he says. It’s not a question. He’s just saying her name. Rose is surprised at the tenderness in his voice.

Pearl steps into the little space before him. Rose senses it more than hears it. She moves along the aisle,
The Art of Dressmaking
in her hands. She would like to buy it, could show it to Edie. That’s a strange thought, she thinks. As though Edie is a friend. She shakes her head.

Paul is leaning back in his office chair, arms slung behind his head. There are two large sweat stains beneath his armpits that look like matching maps of Africa. His hair is not really blond but dyed, brassy, going dark at the roots. His hairy feet are planted on the floor. The middle of him is hidden by the table, which is just as well, Rose thinks, because without a doubt he’d have a hard-on. He’s like a spider. Exactly like a spider, sitting there in his strange web of books.

Pearl seems lost for words now. She’s holding
The Alchemist’s Daughter
in her hands, trying to think of something to say.

‘How much is this one?’ Rose interrupts. Pearl jumps a little. Rose’s voice seems loud in the cramped little shop. ‘There’s no price on it.’

Paul Rendell leans forward in his chair, retracts his spider arms, puts away his glistening teeth and his shining eyes.

‘
The Art of Dressmaking
,’ he says, holding the book. ‘This is a first edition and quite expensive, you can have it for seven dollars.’

Rose doesn’t have seven dollars. He looks her up and down, the way someone might glance at a statue in a museum and then move on.

‘Now, what have we got here?’ he says, holding out his hand for Pearl’s book. ‘
The Alchemist’s Daughter
.’

He flips the book over, reads the back, smiles.

‘How much is it?’ asks Pearl; she seems flustered now that Rose is beside her.

Paul waves his hand.

‘A gift,’ he says.

For the first time ever, Rose sees Pearl blush.

Outside, the day has grown dark and oppressive. The palm trees that line Main Street are violently green against the storm clouds.

‘He reminds me of a spider,’ says Rose.

‘Oh, Rose, don’t say that,’ Pearl says, laughing. ‘That’s so mean.’

‘No really, it’s so weird, this whole old man in a shop thing.’