The Midnight Dress (2 page)

‘French,’ Rose says aloud.

‘Excellent,’ says Pearl.

Rose’s heart sinks.

The truth is, she wasn’t even going to go to school except that Mrs Lamond, who runs the caravan park, vaguely threatened to go to the authorities. Mrs Lamond is small and leathery. Sometimes she paints her eyebrows on and sometimes she forgets.

‘Will you be here for long, then?’ Mrs Lamond asked.

Mrs Lamond can tell holiday makers from drifters. This father and daughter outfit were drifters. Another sorry affair.

‘Probably,’ Rose said.

‘Better enrol in school, then.’

‘I’m fifteen, nearly sixteen,’ Rose informed her. ‘I don’t have to go to school.’

‘School would be the best place for you.’

Mrs Lamond doesn’t like the scrawny girl with the sad eyes who comes into the kiosk and thumbs through the magazines but never buys.

‘And while we’re at it, this isn’t a library.’

Rose put down the article ‘Seven Sexy Ways to Wear Your Hair’, touched her pinned-down curls.

The truth is, on the first morning she had discovered that the beach was, in fact, a paradise, a little cup-shaped bay fringed by rainforest. She had stepped out the caravan door and stared at it, rubbing her eyes. She had walked past the car where her father still slept, all the way to the soft white sand. When she dipped her toes in the sea that morning, she broke its smooth olive-green skin. Then when she turned she saw the mountain looming behind her, sitting sage in its skirt of clouds.

‘Shit,’ she said.

Her father stumbled from the car into the caravan. He pulled the curtain to his own corner, stripped off, lay beneath his sheets. Over the next days the caravan filled up with the smell of his sweat. He was oblivious. She wrote that word in her notebook.
OBLIVIOUS
. He was oblivious to the sea, which changed colour through the day, green to blue to turquoise; oblivious to the huge clouds that raked shadows across its surface and then flung them onto the mountain face; oblivious to the waterfalls she could see, high up on the rocks, and to the startling eruptions of rainbow-coloured birds.

Rose did exactly what she always did. She performed her ministrations. She made him toast, let it cool on the bench; it was all he could eat. She bought two-litre bottles of coke from the kiosk, which seemed to soothe him. She wet a towel and he laid it over his body like a shroud.

She brought these things to him soundlessly, went on bare feet, sand still patterned on her legs, said nothing.

‘Thanks,’ he said once.

Once, ‘I’m sorry.’

Rose spent the rest of her time exploring. She climbed over the rocks at the right side of the bay and found another beach, exactly as perfect and completely deserted. She thought about moving her stuff there. A few items of clothing, her green notebook: she could empty out her little drawer into her black plastic bag. She could build a shelter out of palm fronds. All she’d need was matches and a blanket. She’d find water somewhere. She fantasised about these things at length, sitting on the beach or floating on her back in the sea. The clouds built all day and each night they burst and the rain that fell obliterated all other sounds, the sea, her breathing, her father’s restless turnings.

‘What’s up with your dad, then?’ Mrs Lamond asked. ‘Is he sick or something?’

‘A bit,’ said Rose, running her fingers along the snow domes containing plastic reef scenes. ‘But he’s getting better.’

‘I like your hair,’ says Pearl in first period, French.

Rose had used a black rinse. She’d walked all the way to town to buy the stuff and hitchhiked back with a man in a truck full of watermelons. It had cost her nearly twelve dollars on account of all her hair, money which could have been spent on food or petrol.

The rinse made her hair more coarse and wiry than ever.

‘Serves you right,’ her father said, sitting on the edge of his bed, tentatively, watching her with his long thin sorrowful face.

Today, her first morning of school, she tied her hair in two buns on either side of her head. It made her look like she was wearing headphones, which made her laugh. She walked to the caravan park showers and outlined her eyes in thick black eyeliner. There was nothing she could do about her thousand freckles. She examined herself in the mirrors.

‘Ugly bitch,’ she said, then went to wait at the place that Mrs Lamond said the bus would pass.

She thought that at the school office they’d make her wash off her make-up, but the headmistress, Mrs D’addazio, didn’t even seem to notice.

‘Lovely,’ she said, looking at Rose. ‘The girls will be so excited to have a new friend. We’re a small school, very small, and how old are you? Here, you’re fifteen, so that’s just lovely, you’ll be able to take part in the Harvest Parade, that is on at the end of May, we have our very own float at Leonora High and all the girls are on it, you’ll have to find a dress. All the girls have dresses made. We call it dress season here. It’s a tradition, I guess you could call it that. Can your mother sew?’

‘I don’t have a mother,’ said Rose.

‘Oh darling,’ said Mrs D’addazio, ‘I’m so sorry, of course you don’t. Well, don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll find someone who can help you.’

Rose kept her face implacable.

‘I mean it’s a really nice colour, your hair,’ Pearl adds in French.

Pearl’s fluoro highlighters have tumbled out of her pink pencil case and rolled across to Rose’s side of the table. Pearl leans to retrieve them. She has no idea about the rules of personal space, Rose decides. Pearl Kelly smells of coconut and frangipani.

‘I have a highlighter dependency,’ says Pearl.

Rose looks at her and away.

Pearl writes in the highlighters, mixing all the colours, big letters, tangerine and lime and lemon and cherry pink. She adds huge exclamation marks and instead of dots there are love hearts above each and every letter i. It makes Rose feel faintly queasy. She taps her black nails on the desk so that Pearl can see them.

‘I think you’re going to really love it here,’ says Pearl.

They have to form pairs so Madame Bonnick can hand out their group assignments.

‘Just stay with me,’ whispers Pearl, which is
très
annoying.

She has arranged her highlighters
très
neatly.

‘Good idea,’ says Madame Bonnick. She speaks French with a terribly nasal accent. ‘
Bonne idée
. Pearl will look after Rose. These are the roles that you will play for the assignment, you will pick them from the hat, and there will be no negotiation. For each role you will prepare two minutes of dialogue and the more impressive you are with your roles, the more imaginative, the better. I am talking props, mesdemoiselles and messieurs. I am talking costumes.’

Pearl picks a piece of paper from Madame Bonnick’s hat.

‘Oh goody,’ she says.

‘No way,’ says Vanessa across the room, because she has picked the Hunchback of Notre Dame. She flicks her long blond ponytail and starts to argue for a redraw.

At recess Pearl insists that Rose sit with them.

‘Honestly, where else are you going to sit?’ Pearl says. ‘What are you eating?’

‘Nothing,’ says Rose.

‘Are you anorexic?’ asks Shannon with a hint of excitement.

‘Here, eat my apple,’ says Pearl. She hands it to Rose.

There are six girls in all: Vanessa, Pearl, Maxine, Mallory, Shannon, and now Rose. They begin to talk of dresses.

‘Have you picked your colour yet, Pearlie?’ asks Vanessa. ‘The colour of the year is aquamarine or hot pink or anything metallic. I’m not telling you what I’m having but it’s along those lines. It’s going to be the biggest surprise. I’m having sequins all across the bodice. My mother did my colours. She is totally psychic with colours. She can do yours if you want, but I think you’d be an autumn. People who are autumn should never wear gold. There are lots of other colours that you can choose from.’

‘Are you going to eat that apple or just look it at?’ Pearl asks Rose.

Pearl Kelly has brown eyes, very dark. She’s been nodding at Vanessa but her eyes are laughing. She winds up her hair on top of her head and sticks a pencil in it.

A boy comes over to the group. He’s tall but slouches his shoulders. He peers out from beneath his shaggy fringe, and talks very slowly.

‘Hey, correct me if I’m wrong but I didn’t know there was a
Star Wars
convention on,’ he says, looking straight at Rose’s hair buns. ‘Lucky I brung my lightsaber.’

He gropes his crotch for effect.

‘Fuck off, Murray,’ says Pearl. ‘Your lightsaber is the size of a peanut.’

He lopes away, his work done. Rose ticks him off in her head as someone to hate passionately.

‘Honestly, don’t worry about him,’ says Pearl. ‘You’ll get to know him, he just thinks he’s really funny.’

‘Where were we?’ says Vanessa.

‘I don’t know what colour I’m going to wear,’ says Pearl. ‘I don’t know what season I am. Maybe one of those weird seasons that isn’t really a season, like an Indian summer.’

Vanessa flicks her fringe back with an angry twitch. ‘This is serious,’ she says.

‘What colour are you going to wear, Rose?’ asks Pearl.

‘I don’t even know what you’re all talking about,’ says Rose, and her voice is husky from disuse and weeks of her own company, clambering over rocks and pretending to be shipwrecked.

‘It’s the Harvest Parade,’ says Maxine, ‘and it’s been going on for one hundred years or something. They burn the cane and then there’s this big parade and all these floats and all the girls have to wear a dress and one of them gets to be the queen and some get to be a princess and then everyone kind of dances in the street.’

‘Weird,’ says Rose.

‘It’s not weird,’ says Vanessa.

‘If you were a meteorological phenomenon, Rose, which would you be?’ asks Pearl to annoy Vanessa even more.

‘A summer hail storm,’ says Rose quietly.

She takes a bite of the apple.

They saw one, she and her father, phosphorescent green, coming across the downs. Her father stopped the car and they stood watching it approach, lazily at first then suddenly racing, whipping up the earth and bending trees until they were scrambling for cover on the floor of the car.

Vanessa smooths down the already mirror-smooth surface of her blond hair.

‘Are you saying you’re going to wear green?’ she asks.

‘I’m not wearing any crummy dress,’ says Rose.

‘Good,’ says Vanessa, ‘because girls with red hair and freckles should never ever wear green.’

‘I’d love to be shipwrecked,’ says Pearl after biology.

Rose has offered her the tiniest morsel of herself, told her about the hidden bay. She can’t believe she has – it goes against all her ground rules – it is only half past one on the first day. She’s been to too many schools to remember. She knows exactly how it all works. But Pearl has worn her down with all her kindness.

Damn, she kicks herself. Pearl is unstoppable.

‘I know exactly which bay you mean. It is exactly like a place you would get shipwrecked on, like in a movie. Like
Robinson Crusoe
. Do you remember that show? I’d love to be marooned and just drink coconut milk and wear a grass skirt. I can’t wait to travel. I’m going to go away as soon as school is over. That’s exactly what my mum did. I’m going to Russia, first stop, that’s where my father came from. No kidding. I never met him. Not yet. I’m the result of a brief love affair. My father, he’ll recognise me straightaway. We’ll be in this crowded station. He’ll put out his arms to me. He’ll smell like snow and pine cones. I do care about school but I can’t wait till it’s finished. I don’t know what I’m going to be. Do you know what you’re going to be? How are we meant to know what we’re going to be? My mother says life is the greatest educator. She danced in a chorus line in Paris when she was eighteen. And she was in the circus too. She could eat fire. I mean she still can. She says love is the only thing in the world that really matters. Now, for this French assignment, I have this old froofy costume thing, I mean I think it was from when I was Little Bo Peep in ballet but it might still fit me, and I probably have a crown. So what I’m saying is I think I should be Marie Antoinette. And maybe you could be the executioner and you could make the guillotine. Do you ever have recurring dreams? I dream about this place. It’s this big piece of sky over this town I don’t know – I mean a trillion stars. I don’t know where it is and I’ve never been there before but it must be somewhere I’m meant to be. I’m always arriving there from somewhere else and I’ve been on a great journey. Do you believe in that sort of stuff?’

‘Shit,’ says Rose. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Sorry,’ says Pearl. ‘I talk too much.’

Pearl shows Rose the way to art. The day has heated up, the afternoon clouds crowding the sky. It will rain soon. Already Rose can tell from the way everything has grown breathless and still, the air is right up close and personal, it’s like walking through honey.