The Midnight Dress (11 page)

‘Her name is Miranda,’ says Pearl, ‘and that’s the Baron Selwyn. He rescues her from her evil stepmother, who is totally into black magic and is going to sacrifice her because she is a virgin.’

Rose takes the book and turns to a page that Pearl has dog-eared.

‘
He stared at her intently as he spoke
,’ Rose reads, ‘
and she felt his eyes burn a hole into her soul. When his lips found hers, her mouth was so soft and yielding
.’

Rose sighs for effect, gently pants.

‘
At first he was gentle but then he felt her press closer to him. He had known many women, but never had a woman’s response moved him to such ecstasy
.’

Pearl laughs, lies back on the sand, one arm flung across her eyes, listening. She’s smiling.

‘It’s a good book,’ she says, ‘Really, it is. Have you kissed anyone?’

‘Yes,’ says Rose, lying.

‘Isn’t it funny how I have no father and you have no mother. And your dad is called Patrick and my mum is Patricia.’

‘Hilarious.’

‘No, you know what I mean,’ she says. ‘I’m going to find my dad. It’ll be hard but I’m going to find him. I think I might have sisters. I dream about them sometimes. They have long hair and faces like moonlight. What happened to your mum?’

‘She died,’ says Rose.

‘How?’ says Pearl.

She has told girls before, other schools, other towns, most often to shock them. The telling is always different from any other thought she has about her mother. She doesn’t feel anything when she says the words. It’s like a tape-recording. When you hear the bell tinkle, please turn the page. She tells the story and then waits in the silence for what they have to say.

The waves tiptoe on the sand.

‘When I was five she put me to bed one night,’ says Rose. ‘And when I woke up she was gone, that’s all. No one could find her for days and days. But then she washed up on a beach that wasn’t that far away.’

‘Are you joking?’ says Pearl.

She’s just like all the others, Rose thinks.

‘Do I look like I’m joking?’ Rose replies.

‘What happened to her?’

‘She liked doing crazy things, that’s all. She said, “I’m going for a skinny dip.” She’d had some wine and some joints. She was a free soul, that’s what dad said. She painted and drew and made things all the time.’

‘God, that’s terrible,’ says Pearl.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ says Rose.

She puts her hand up and catches the first of the evening raindrops in her open palm.

After Pearl has called her mother from the phone box and been retrieved, Rose goes home. Her father is there in a fold-out chair, making excited marks in his notebooks. Broad rough marks, working fast. He doesn’t look up when Rose walks past.

‘I know her from somewhere,’ he says.

‘Who?’

‘Pearl.’

‘From where?’

‘I don’t know,’ he says

‘Main Street?’

‘No, not there,’ he says. ‘I think from a painting. She’s in a famous painting.’

‘What?’

‘Do you think she’s Millais’s
Ophelia
, no not that, it’s too obvious. She’s
La Scapigliata
. No . . . ’

He jumps up and goes to his bed and pulls out his art books from beneath and starts flipping through the pages.
Masters of the Twentieth Century
,
Renaissance Art
,
Handbook to the London Museum of Modern Art
,
The
Pre-Raphaelites
. He turns the pages quickly, stopping every so often, tracing his fingers over a woman’s face.

‘Look at this,’ he says. ‘
Jane, Countess of Harrington
.’

Rose looks at the picture. He’s really pissing her off.

‘I think you need medication,’ she says.

‘What about this one, Titian’s
Judith
, there, look at that.’

‘She has brown hair.’

‘Hair, hair, I’m not talking about hair.’

Rose goes inside, pulls the curtain, lies on her bed.

‘Did you offer her a lift home?’ he says at the caravan door.

‘She rang her mother from the phone box.’

‘Do you think she’d sit for me?’

‘Since when did you do portraits?’

‘Do you think she would?’

‘No,’ Rose says.

On Saturday they go to the John Parson Oval. At first it doesn’t seem purposeful. They start by walking to the small library beside the park on Main Street. They stand above the air-conditioner vents cooling their legs, Pearl whispering, ‘Want to know an interesting fact about Jonah Pedersen? He can’t spell. I mean I’ve seen his writing, like he’s a child. Even weirder, it made me feel really sad and really protective, like a mother. It’s confusing.’

Rose stares at her, thinking.

‘Maybe you could teach him how to read and write,’ she says, finally. ‘Kind of like Jane teaching Tarzan.’

‘Oh, Rose,’ says Pearl.

They drift back out the door again. They walk into Hommel’s Convenience Store, dark and dry, and press soft-drink tins to their faces, buy two, sarsaparilla for Rose, lemonade for Pearl, a packet of jelly beans, the blacks counted out into Rose’s open palm.

‘Do you think it’s bad to be born out of a one-night stand? Which is better, passion or boring love? If you had a choice of going somewhere, say to another planet, only you could never come home again, would you do it?’

‘What was the other choice?’

‘Never going anywhere.’

They walk through the park, in and out of the shadows of the great trees, lie on the rotunda bench seats, Pearl’s hair hanging down in a golden swathe. They go past the pool along Second Street.

‘
Where
are we going?’

‘Nowhere,’ says Pearl. ‘Just walking.’

Past the small faded fibros, overgrown lawns, agaves grown monstrous in the wet, past the fish and chip shop, across cane train tracks. Through the railway proper. Past the quiet mill, not yet crushing. They can hear the football ground before they see it.

‘I think Murray Falconer has the hots for you,’ says Pearl.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ says Rose.

‘I see him looking at you all the time in English.’

‘Marvelling at my grotesqueness,’ says Rose.

That makes Pearl laugh.

‘Ruby Heart Rose,’ she says.

The Saturday football match is between the away Crushers and the Leonora Lions. A lazy crowd, drowsy with the heat, rests on blankets and in the half-full grandstand, watching the clash. Pearl stands against the fence first and then they go inside.

‘What are we doing here?’ asks Rose.

‘Just looking,’ says Pearl.

Rose spots Paul Rendell almost immediately. He’s taller than she imagined, having only ever seen him sitting behind the table in the Blue Moon Book Exchange. He’s sweating, his blond hair stuck against his forehead, sweating the way an English schoolboy sweats, with rosy cheeks. He has very hairy legs.

Powerful legs, pale, covered in a pelt of curled white hair.

‘Oh my god, look at his legs,’ whispers Rose.

‘Shoosh,’ says Pearl.

‘Is Jonah playing?’

‘He doesn’t play Union, silly.’

It seems they have arrived for the very end of the game: the whistle sounds minutes after they take their seats. The teams walk from the field and pass right beside where they sit. Paul sees Pearl – Rose sees him see her – but he looks away quickly, wiping sweat from his face. He laughs at something a teammate says. And when Rose looks back, Pearl is only staring up at the sky.

Stepped and Threaded Running Stitch

I’ll tell you another part of the ending. I don’t want you to look if it hurts you. Close your eyes. She says, ‘What are you doing here?’ He says, ‘It’s you.’ Just as surprised. His words come out in a breath. He smiles, sways. ‘I’m waiting for someone,’ she says. Her heel catches on a stone, she wobbles. She smiles in return. ‘Don’t,’ he says. ‘Just stay.’ Even though she hasn’t moved.

She begins to calculate briefly, distance first, if she has to run, then abandons her sums. That’s silly. He can hardly stand up. She holds the dress out, looks down at it, then puts a hand on one hip, coils a finger in her hair, laughs.

The band stops playing momentarily, mid-beat, a pause of several seconds. Something has gone wrong, there’s laughter from the crowd. They start again, a new song, a march, they’ve given up on the other.

‘We can just talk,’ he says. Like a boy.

It’s only Monday. The week, which despite herself Rose measures from Wednesday to Wednesday, drags. The days move at an infuriating tropical speed: there is a whole week inside each day.

The air is hot and breathless, fans tilt full-speed in shops, the swimming pool is so crowded after school there’s not a patch left on the thick green grass. Not that Rose goes there. She wouldn’t dream of it. When she catches the bus home she walks down to the rocks and climbs there. She’s good at it. Sure-footed. She climbs as high as she can up the point; it’s almost as though she’s sitting on the prow of a boat, looking out to sea. It’s the only place there is a breeze.

It’s a welcome relief after the classrooms, which are so crowded and stuffy with body odour they make her feel drowsy, the teachers droning on and on with all the names and bloody moments in history: Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, Gettysburg, Normandy, Waterloo. She hears the words for a while and then they drift away. She thinks of the table in Edie’s kitchen and she thinks of the mountain.

Most of her doesn’t want to go back. She doesn’t like promises or agreements. It seems stupid to promise something to someone she barely knows. In front of Edie she feels exposed, like the old lady can see right inside of her, which is stupid. Rose shakes her head, right there in modern history, at the thought of it.

‘Are you disagreeing, Rose Lovell?’

‘Pardon,’ says Rose, coming to with all the sweaty pale faces staring back at her. ‘Sorry, Mrs Bonnick.’

Yet part of her wants to go back, a tiny part, which makes her uneasy, this part of herself that is disobeying all the rules. This part feels light, flighty, like a runaway balloon.

Pearl hasn’t talked about her father since Rose told her about her mother. She hasn’t said a single word about the letters, although Rose sees her writing one in maths, and she’s gone back to writing them in English. She adds the latest to the other C. Orlovs tied together with a rubber band in her bag. Sometimes she looks at Rose and smiles kindly.

‘What?’ Rose says a little harshly.

At lunchtime Pearl takes
Ashes in the Wind
from her bag and holds it on her lap, her hands folded over it neatly. She doesn’t read it. Just holds it there, a charm.

‘What about this one?’ Paul Rendell said about that book. ‘A bewitching belle dressed as a lad, a doctor torn between love and duty, a thrilling tale of passion and promise. Let’s hope there’s some good bits in it, though. Really, Pearl, there was only kissing in
The Alchemist’s Daughter
.’

All the while Rose stared at him from her cramped aisle. He had his peasant shirt a little undone, his chest hair showing, very white. His watercolour blue eyes.

Pearl sat on the floor going through a box, her hair undone, her frangipani scent rising like a cloud. She was chewing pink bubblegum.

‘It’s the getting to the kiss that’s the good part, silly,’ she said.

She blew a bubble and let it pop. Paul Rendell laughed very loudly.

Pearl and Vanessa are back with the girls because the boys have started playing football in the lunch hour. They sit on the school oval to watch them. Jonah Pedersen takes off his shirt and easily sidesteps his opponents, scoring try after try. Pearl stifles a yawn. Murray Falconer plays as well; he’s so scrawny beside Jonah Pedersen it makes Rose want to laugh. He nearly scores a try once, before he’s put down in the wet grass. He’s trying really hard to impress someone, God knows who.

‘My dad wants to paint your portrait, Pearl,’ Rose says. ‘He thinks you look like someone from a famous painting, except he can’t remember which one.’

Pearl laughs but the news makes Vanessa swish her ponytail like a horse annoyed by a fly.

‘Is your father really a painter?’ Vanessa demands.

‘He’s been to art college but he’s not a portrait painter,’ says Rose. ‘He usually just paints weird things like washing machines with wings and fridges covered in scales.’

‘I don’t think you should get involved with it, Pearlie,’ advises Vanessa.

‘Yes, Mum,’ says Pearl.