The Midnight Dress (26 page)

What if Pearl could start again with the letter D? Dimitri Orlov. What if he could open her letter in Russia one frosty grey morning and read with astonishment of this beautiful daughter?

What if they could stop right there, standing together in the shadows. In that moment they are nothing but their skin and breath and whispered words.

Rose has just kissed Murray Falconer, the kiss is still blazing on her lips.

‘I can feel it here,’ Rose says.

Pearl places her fingers on Rose’s mouth.

‘Was it good?’ she asks.

‘It was okay,’ says Rose.

It was sudden but not unexpected. The moment lubricated by Murray’s vodka. He was full of platitudes. His breath smelt of cigarillos, and his hair of blue food colouring.

‘He said I was beautiful,’ says Rose.

‘But you are,’ says Pearl. ‘Look at you.’

‘I think this dress is magical,’ says Rose, and it makes them both laugh so that they hold each other.

‘I think it is too.’

Rose is shaking, a real trembling in her hands. She holds them together to stop it.

She sits on the rock at the edge of the waterfall, leans right out and then back in, wishes she could fall. If Edie sees them going down, she’ll know. She’ll know the place has been desecrated. The place of love. Of refuge.

She touches her eyes to see if she’s crying.

Betrayal. That’s the word she’s looking for. She’s never understood it until right now, this very minute; it’s sharp, hot. It hurts her. She stands to vomit and finds she can’t. She crouches down on the earth, rubs her face over and over, puts her hands open-palmed on the forest floor.

She gets up again and paces like an animal around the small clearing.

Other words for betrayal?

Disloyalty, unfaithfulness, treachery. Pearl.

Her skin is burning. Her skin is burning long before she lights the fire.

Rose Lovell is not an arsonist. She doesn’t sit there, pace there, think of burning the place down. She thinks of Pearl’s honey-brown back and Paul Rendell’s cool white skin. She thinks about the letters, the handfuls of letters to Russia, and the way she got Pearl down the gully that first day. How she talked to her all the way across the fallen tree bridge when Pearl was stuck with fear. She thinks about the rock pool, where they swam, and Pearl’s finger twirled in her hair, how the night had held them in the open palm of its hand.

There is no pleasure in the burning.

She is surprised by it. Its brightness shocks her, all the golden embers and the wildness of the flames.

In the hut Pearl has left a box of matches. Rose realises she must have been planning to stay with him. They were going to have a camp fire. Girl Scout Pearl. She hasn’t taken the sheet with her, or the biscuits. Chips Ahoy! – chocolate chips. That was the best she could do. How romantic. She’s a joke. A child.

Rose stares. The four walls, the coloured casements, which listened to their quiet conversations, all their plans, and creaked and ticked with satisfaction. Rose takes Pearl’s sheet into the corner and sets it on fire. It takes two scratches of a match. It looks like it won’t burn but suddenly there is a small explosion, a flare.

She is surprised how the fire quickens and grows and has a soul. She has to stand back from it then. The windows explode one by one, the amber glass showering. The roof slumps to one side.

All the way down the mountain, the ruin smoulders inside her.

She feels rain on her face. Where has it come from? It had been such a perfect day; now there are storm towers and the sky is a deep storm blue.

She is angry until she reaches the open forest, and then a new feeling takes over, a startling fear. Her heart comes alive and she’s running. All the sounds roar back into her ears. She can hear everything: the side of the hut caving in, the rain touching her skin, the clouds moving out to sea.

Flying foxes spill in a fountain from the mango tree. Right there Rose vomits on the grass; when she looks up, the old woman is watching her from the bottom of the steps. Edie looks up at the mountain then back at Rose, an emotion spreading slowly across her face. Rose expects horror but sadness is all she sees.

She follows Edie up the steps and washes her face in the shadowy bathroom with the grumbling taps, rinses her mouth.

‘You’re as white as a ghost,’ says Edie.

The old woman takes the shawl from the day bed and wraps it around Rose’s shoulders. The midnight dress sways in the shadows, a deep, deep sorrowful blue.

‘I don’t know why I did it,’ says Rose, sobbing.

She’s never cried in front of anyone. It’s a shameful thing. Like standing naked.

‘I saw them up there.’

Edie doesn’t say anything, doesn’t touch the girl, just waits.

‘He’s disgusting. She’s doing this disgusting thing. He doesn’t even love her. He’s just tricking her. She’s so stupid. Really stupid. Like she thinks she’s not but she is and we went to that place, that was our place and he doesn’t even love her and she took him there. I know I shouldn’t have. You can call the police. It’s just it was ruined, that perfect place was ruined.’

Edie moves forward, drags her chair. She takes the hankie from her bra strap and wipes at Rose’s eyes and nose. Smoothes the girl’s hair back. Rose cries with her eyes closed.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Hush hush,’ says Edie, ‘there’s nothing to be sorry for.’

‘But I burnt it down, don’t you understand?’

‘Tell me,’ says Edie.

‘There was this sheet and these matches. And the flames, they turned the rocks orange. All the glass on the ground, was gold. It was your mother’s place.’

‘And yours,’ says Edie.

‘I’ve never had a home,’ says Rose, wiping her nose. ‘You don’t understand, I’ve never had a home.’

At first, Edie says nothing to that. She wipes Rose’s eyes again, carefully, holds the girl’s face in her hands, thinking. The storm touches the house, rattles the louvres and casements.

‘This is what my mother always said to me when I was feeling blue. Sew some chain stitch and it will cheer you up. Or some daisies. That brightens everything. If my father was going from room to room, spitting and stamping and thumping the walls because his head ached, she said, quickly, “Sit beside me and finish these buttonholes.” There is nothing as calming as buttonhole stitch, everything so neatly enclosed. Did you know, once my father grabbed me in the kitchen and said, ‘Edith, my eye was eaten by a crow, what do you think of that?’ My mother said, when he had let me go, ‘Don’t think about it, Edie. Help me with these pin tucks. Look at me. Don’t think of it. He’s lying. Don’t think of it again.’

‘I can’t remember my mother,’ says Rose.

‘At all?’ says Edie.

‘Only pieces,’ says Rose.

‘You can collect up all the pieces,’ says Edie, as though it’s that simple. Like collecting blue quandongs. Or red leaves. Or passionfruit flowers.

‘How can you miss someone you don’t even remember?’ says Rose, spilling fresh tears.

‘I missed my old father,’ says Edie. ‘The one I never knew. The one before the war.’

‘My mother had freckles,’ says Rose. ‘And small hands.’

‘That’s a beginning.’

‘She had long hair, crinkled, I don’t know. I know that just from a photo, I think. She put me to bed.’

Edie waits.

‘She put me to bed.’

‘Yes,’ says Edie.

‘She shouldn’t have put me to bed. Just like that.’

Dogs barking in the street, the smell of wet grass. Dishes. The sound of dishes. The clink of glass.

‘I fell asleep. She had a sad mouth. She had a sad mouth even when she was happy. That’s how I remember it. She drew eyes. She was really good at drawing eyes. She hated doing the washing up. Someone took me down to the beach afterward, I don’t even know who it was, and put me down on the sand. People had left flowers there. The flowers were all wrong. They were like cake icing flowers. Artificial. My mother wouldn’t have liked them. I knew that. Even if I was small.’

‘What would she have liked?’

‘I don’t know. Nothing. Just the sky. Not flowers. I’d like to see her again. Even just for one minute. Even one minute would be enough. I’d take anything.’

‘Yes,’ says Edie; she finds the hankie again and gives it to Rose.

She stands up, knees creaking, goes to the kitchen dresser and takes a teacup from the top shelf. She puts it down in front of Rose.

‘While we’re putting ghosts to rest, what do you think I should do with this?’ says Edie.

Rose looks into the crazed teacup at the haunted glass eye.

‘Smash it,’ says Rose. ‘With a hammer.’

Edie laughs. The laugh makes Rose laugh.

Rose carries the teacup outside and Edie finds the hammer beneath the house. The first hit and the thing jumps away into the grass, which makes them laugh even more, Edie bending over to catch her breath when she’s finished.

‘Here, I’ll hold it.’

‘But I’ll hit your fingers,’ says Rose.

The blue eye looks up at them wildly.

‘I’ll let it go just in time.’

Rose swings the hammer, smashes the thing into a thousand pieces, a small colourful pile on the bottom step.

‘What should we do with it?’ asks Rose.

‘What do you think?’

‘Maybe just scatter it,’ says Rose. ‘Somewhere nice. He deserves that.’

They bend down on the grass then and pick up the pieces, placing them into Edie’s cupped palm.

‘It’s lighter. I feel better. Maybe one day you could take the pieces back up to the hut,’ says Edie, looking up at the mountain, and again Rose sees the sadness spread across her face. ‘I’ll keep them until then.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Rose.

Edie shakes her head. ‘I know.’

Plain Running Stitch

Here’s the morning after the Harvest Parade and Patrick Lovell is packing up. He’s moving, moving, moving. He folds up the deckchairs and shoves them under the corner lounge. He puts the plates and cutlery away, locks the drawers for the trip. His cigarette drops clods of ash on the floor. He pulls down the kitchen venetians. Stores the kettle, the frying pan. The gas stove is folded and placed under his bed. The sketchbooks, he flips through, sobbing, the way he wept against the caravan in the first light.

He stinks of drink. It’s oozing from his pores. It’s in his tears.

There are his banana-picking clothes. His very own knife. His snake gaiters. He saw a brown, two and half metres long, just a few days ago. It was passing, unhurried, through the field, then it coiled itself tight in a space at the base of a banana palm. It filled the space like a ribbon, squeezed itself in, squeezed and squeezed until all that showed was a finger-sized glint of copper. Holding his sketchbooks and his cutting stuff, this is what he thinks about.

‘Big night?’ asks Mrs Lamond, when he is outside taking down the clothes line.

He doesn’t answer.

‘Leaving just like that?’ she says.

‘Just for a week or so, might as well see the top end while it’s dry. Can you keep some stuff here for me?’

‘You’re already six weeks behind,’ says Mrs Lamond. She’s speaking quietly, but there’s a tremor in her voice, like she might explode. If she builds up speed with her words, she’ll disintegrate.

‘You know I’ll make it up,’ he says, knowing this.

He leans forward, touches the locket at her throat.

‘I thought,’ she says.

‘What did you think?’ he says, gently.

It takes her a while to answer. She’s like a schoolgirl now, embarrassed, tears in her eyes.

‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ she says.

He gives her the sketchbooks. A pile of art books, his paints.

‘Stuff that’s important to me,’ he says.

‘Don’t want to lose any of it’, he says.

‘Elaine.’

Rose doesn’t confront Paul Rendell on the day she burns down the hut. She does exactly as Edie says and goes home to the caravan. Her father isn’t there. His fishing gear is still gone. Everything is the same as she left it that morning, the beautiful morning for climbing, only the day is now ruined. She pulls the curtain around her little bed. The flames jump inside her. She can’t smell the mountain on her skin, only ash. She closes her eyes and covers her face with her hands until she sleeps.

‘Tolstoy,’ says her father at half past six.

She doesn’t answer him.

‘What’s up? You sick?’

‘I’m okay,’ she says.

She doesn’t confront Paul Rendell the next day either, the Monday; she doesn’t leave her bed. She lies, curled in a ball, blazing.