The Midnight Dress (18 page)

There is something about Chernobyl that excites Rose. She knows it shouldn’t. It’s wrong to be excited by a catastrophe, but it feels so much like the end of the world. She opens her green notebook and writes while she half-listens to the voices on the radio. The voices sound excited too. They speak faster, argue with each other on talkback: ‘. . . of course the nuclear cloud will drift down,’ they say, ‘it’s drifting already out of the
USSR
and into Germany. It’s only a matter of time.’

Mrs Bonnick wheels the
TV
into modern history and makes them watch the news. A building burns and people wear protective suits and everywhere in Europe they’re terrified of the fallout. They’re putting on layers of clothes and masks: everything is contaminated. It is such a dark thing, Rose thinks. With unlimited dark possibilities.

‘You see,’ says Mrs Bonnick, trembling slightly and in need of a cigarette, ‘you are watching history unfold.’

Pearlie isn’t there. She hasn’t been for three days.

‘
Où est
, Pearl Kelly?’ says Madame Bonnick in French.

Rose shrugs.

‘It isn’t like her,’ says Vanessa at lunch. ‘She comes to school even if she has a cold. She can’t bear to be away from people.’

Vanessa has been to the hairdressers to trial her Harvest Parade hairstyle. She describes it in intricate and excruciating detail while the other girls listen, enraptured. There are several pieces of hair that will be swept up and several pieces that will cross over these pieces, creating a basket effect. The basket effect of her hair will be laced with baby’s breath and diamanté pins.

‘You’re going to look so beautiful,’ shrieks Shannon.

‘Like a model,’ says Mallory.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ says Vanessa, although she’s splitting at the seams with pride. ‘Is your dress nearly finished, Rose?’

‘Not really,’ says Rose. ‘It’s only been cut out.’

Vanessa thinks for a while; it’s obvious she’s thinking up something nasty, just planning the best way to word it. The other girls wait. Rose is unprotected without Pearl, her flesh exposed. She waits too.

‘Did you know,’ says Vanessa, quite slowly, quite stealthily, like a venomous snake preparing to strike, ‘that Miss Baker collects things out of bins?’

‘Don’t tell her that,’ squeals Maxine.

The words paralyse Rose. Afterward she can’t say why. They are stupid words. And just words. All the same, a huge shame rises inside her like a mushroom cloud. It affects her limbs and her speech. She smiles along with the other girls, some laughing. No words come. A small noise buds in her throat, perhaps the beginning of tears, but she swallows it down, swallows and swallows until it is gone.

Vanessa turns away and returns to the subject of hair.

Large thoughts loom inside Rose, thoughts that don’t fit inside her head. They are monstrous and black and they bump against the ceiling of her brain. It’s a grave injustice that she has to have her dress made by someone who is so strange and lets a tree grow through her front door. But worse, it doesn’t seem fair that now she should feel so protective of Edie, all alone in that big old creaking house with her collections and clinking teapots and teaspoons and the endless dying sound of lost things.

‘I was only joking, Rosie,’ says Vanessa in line before English.

‘No, you weren’t,’ says Rose, her voice finally recovered.

‘Well, it’s just the truth,’ says Vanessa. ‘I mean Miss Baker has this . . . this reputation. There’s kind of like these rumours, that’s all.
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble
. You know?’

‘No, I don’t know,’ says Rose.

‘Anyway, she’s the last person in the world I would have got to make my dress,’ says Vanessa. ‘Even a dress from Kmart would have been better.’

Now Edie would only have been going through a rubbish bin to rescue something. Something discarded, lost, left behind. An unusual jar or an old newspaper. A piece of something without its other part. Rose knows it, but she still feels ashamed each time she thinks it. That’s the worst. She knows Edie will know it too. Edie will sense her new shame as soon as she walks through the door.

Sitting on her caravan bed, she sews small perfectly formed stitches on her pillowcase. It’s Wednesday night, but she isn’t going to the old house. She can’t. The old bike leans against the caravan, an accusation.

‘Not sewing tonight?’ asks her father.

‘Shut up.’

He laughs, whistles under his breath.

‘I can buy you a dress, you know,’ he says. ‘Now we’ve got money. Elaine says she’ll come with us, help look for one.’

Elaine. That’s what he calls Mrs Lamond now.

‘I’d rather jump from the Leap,’ says Rose.

‘Bit dramatic.’

‘Will we be going soon?’ Rose asks.

They’ve been in Leonora for two months. It’s a record of sorts.

‘Don’t you like it here?’ he says. ‘In paradise.’

She closes her eyes. What will Edie think if she never goes back? What will she do with the dress? Will she fold up all the pieces and place them in a box? The rustling midnight-blue taffeta. All the thread. The mourning rose lace. Will she hold the black glass beads in her old hands? Will she wait each Wednesday on the back steps, looking up at the mountain?

‘I’m going to see Pearl,’ says Rose to her father.

‘Is she feeling any better?’

‘She hasn’t been back at school.’

‘Give her my warmest regards.’

Rose stares at him.

‘What?’ he says.

Rose pushes open the door of the crystal shop and Pattie Kelly looks up from where she is making a charm bracelet. Her eyes are puffy, as though she’s been crying.

‘Oh, Ruby Heart Rose, I am so glad you’re here,’ Pattie says.

She gets up and envelops Rose in a patchouli-scented hug.

‘You’re like a plank of wood,’ Pattie says, shaking Rose a little and hugging her again. ‘There. You need a hundred more of them. Now come and knock on this little bugger’s door and see what you can do to cheer her up. Honestly, she is beside herself.’

‘Okay,’ says Rose, even though she doesn’t consider Cheering Up to be in her repertoire.

Pattie does the knocking.

‘Pearlie,’ she whispers. ‘Ruby Heart Rose is here.’

She opens the door when there’s no answer, and Rose goes in. It’s dim in the room, the curtains are pulled and the fluorescent stars glimmer on the ceiling. Rose looks at the walls, at all the maps and poems and models with their pouting sultry faces. Pearl is curled up on the bed, facing the wall.

‘Hi,’ says Rose.

Pearl says nothing.

‘Sorry about Chernobyl,’ Rose says.

Pearl lets out a wail and begins to sob.

‘Shit,’ says Rose.

Pearl scrunches her legs up higher and wraps her head in her arms. She cries like a wild thing. It makes Rose’s heart stampede, her mouth dry. It isn’t right, Pearl, source of all light, weeping in a bed. Rose sits tentatively beside her and touches her arm. Pearl doesn’t pull away.

‘The thing is, Pearl,’ Rose says, looking at the map of the
USSR
, ‘you have to remember what Mrs Bonnick said. The sun rises on one part of Russia while it sets on another – it’s
that
big. There’s nothing to say he’s anywhere near Chernobyl, he could be thousands and thousands of miles away, say in Murmansk.’

She looks at the map, strains her eyes in the gloomy room.

‘Or Vladivostok.’

Pearl says nothing, shudders on the bed.

‘The acid rain or snow or whatever, it isn’t even heading that way, its going down over the Ukraine, Belarus, and heading toward Germany.’

Rose hopes Pearl’s father isn’t in Belarus.

‘It’s not about that,’ whispers Pearl.

‘What then?’ says Rose.

Pearl cries very loud then, for a good five minutes. Each time she tries to speak her voice dissolves into a high-pitched warble. She sits up, holds her face. Rose looks around for tissues, finds a t-shirt. Pearl dries her face on it.

‘Try and say it,’ says Rose.

‘It’s just . . . It’s just I knew today that I was never ever going to find him. And I only got up to the Cs.’

Pearl falls forward then, slumps into Rose’s arms. She cries onto Rose’s shoulderblade, which is pointy and uncomfortable. Rose feels Pearl’s tears pooling there. She doesn’t know what to do. What should she do? She puts her arms around Pearl and touches her hair.

‘It’s all right, Pearl,’ she says. ‘Everything will be all right.’

Knot Stitch

I don’t know whether you can guess how fast it happened. That whole night moved languidly, drifted, yet now their actions tumbled from them.

She won’t listen to him. All he wants is for her to listen to him. He wants to say it: Listen to me. But what will he say? What does he know? He staggers. She’s turning away, one hand on her hip, looking back over her shoulder. Still smiling. ‘Silly,’ she’s saying. He’s reaching out, he’s going to take her by the arm. He’s going to touch her once. Just once. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s like she’s made of sky, of stars; she’s so beautiful she’s shining.

He’s reaching out, she’s moving out of his reach. There’s no way to slow it down now it has begun.

In the Ukraine they are going to give the forest around Chernobyl a burial. They will dig trenches and bulldoze the trees into them, cover them up again. Pearl tells Rose about it on her bed, while brushing out her blond hair. ‘It’s all dead,’ she says. ‘Everything died. The trees turned red.’

‘Can you imagine it? Just nothing. Everything dying for miles and miles and miles,’ she says. She speaks of the forest as though she knows it, as though she’s been there, has witnessed the flash. It’s her own personal apocalypse.

She doesn’t know that years later birds, huge birds, barn owls and eagles, will roost inside the reactor to lay their young. That the spruce trees, newly confused, will forget to grow upward, but will sprout pine cones the size of footballs. That the forest alleys will thunder with magnificent wild boar, that the stags, muscles brimming with strontium, will leap across the streams through light and into shadow.

‘I’m going to change my name,’ Pearl says. ‘Soon.’

‘What will you be?’

‘I told you, Persephone.’

‘I like Pearl better,’ says Rose.

But it’s as though Pearl is already shedding part of herself, Rose thinks; she’s slipping out of the casing of her name, splitting it like a husk from the seed.

Now when Jonah Pedersen sends the message that Pearl should sit with him at lunchtime, she doesn’t go; she looks at her nails, shrugs, flinches but doesn’t look up when he kicks the wall.

‘What’s going on?’ Jonah Pedersen asked after school, near the bus stop, two days ago.

He was standing too close to her. He stunk in his rep tracksuit jumper. She didn’t want to hurt him. He was all bravado and bad dance moves there on the footpath, but his eyes gave him away.

‘Your loss, baby,’ he said. She hadn’t spoken.

‘Jonah,’ she said, as he walked away.

In the bedroom Pearl brushes out her hair and stares at herself in the mirror. She looks at herself in wonder sometimes, as though she’s never seen herself before.

‘I felt it again, so protective of him. It hurts my heart. Maybe we are meant to be?’ But she changes the subject almost immediately. ‘What should I wear? I don’t really have any bushwalking clothes.’

‘It’s late,’ says Rose. ‘We really have to get going if we’re going to do this.’

Pearl goes through her drawers, holds clothes against herself, tries on a pair of boots. When she’s finally dressed – an impractical white dress with bone-coloured sandals and a denim vest – Rose is lying on the bed staring at the ceiling.

‘How do I look?’ she asks.

‘It’s a hard climb,’ says Rose. ‘I mean are you sure you want to do it?’

‘Of course I want to do it,’ says Pearl.

‘You have to promise not to tell anyone,’ says Rose.

‘It’ll be our little secret,’ says Pearl.

They climb through the gums, Pearl talking endlessly. Rose is aware of the dark house watching them through the trees. She hopes that Edie won’t see them and come rushing out, calling. But the old woman doesn’t emerge. The house hunkers down beneath its vast dark roof and stares. A frantic bird calls out: it sings again and again, a warning cry that makes the skin on Rose’s forearms prickle. She shrugs off the half-formed thought. The sun is already high in the sky.

She can see Jonathan Baker’s poisoned trees now, there on the slope. How could she have not seen them before? Their bases, jagged crowns, leafless, leaning, are all that is left. They are ghosts there, among the other trees. Yet in places the forest has used these carcasses: tree ferns sprout from inside one, others are colonised by moss, vines use some as scaffolding in a vain attempt to reach the sun.