The Midnight Dress (3 page)

‘But do you know what you want to be?’ says Pearl.

Rose bites her bottom lip. She thinks of climbing on the rocks at the beach, which is her favourite thing but hardly a career choice. And her green notebook where she writes her stories, her stupid embarrassing stories, as if she’d mention that.

‘God, Rose,’ says Pearl. ‘It’s just a question. Don’t look so scared.’

The caravan seems even smaller after school. Her father is sitting on the top step waiting for her. It’s the first time he’s been up. Really up. His eyes have cleared.

‘Nice beard,’ says Rose.

‘Thank you,’ he replies.

He always grows a beard. Sitting there without a shirt, it gives him a biblical air. He might stand up and proclaim something, point a stick at the water and part the sea. He is always freshly chastened when he gives up drinking. His forehead is smooth, there is none of the treacherous twinkle in his eyes.

‘How was it?’ he says.

‘How do you think?’ says Rose.

‘I made you some pancakes,’ he says.

‘That’s weird,’ says Rose.

‘Come on now,’ he says, ‘can’t I be kind?’

‘It doesn’t really suit you.’

She goes inside and sees he’s taken out his sketchbook and one pencil. Soon he’ll draw again. Hesitantly, as though he can’t remember how. He’ll start to notice the world. He’ll say, Will you look at that sky, what do you think of that, Rose? He’ll think aloud about paints.

On the bus home, lightsaber boy had sat in front of her. It was deliberate. She’d narrowed her eyes and looked out the window. He seemed newly grown tall, didn’t know what to do with his great lengths of legs and arms. He smelt. He needed to wash his shaggy brown hair. Rose ignored him as hard as she could, stared right through him when he spoke to her.

‘I was only mucking about,’ he said. ‘Today, you know. The whole
Star Wars
thing.’

‘It’s all right,’ she replied, glancing at him, not smiling.

He played the drums with his fingers on the back of the next seat. She ignored him until he turned back and put on his headphones.

‘There was this girl who never shut up,’ Rose tells her father. ‘And these other girls. They’re all going in some parade. Everyone goes in a parade here. It’s like some pagan thing. Something to do with harvesting the cane. Everyone has to buy a dress.’

Her father raises his dark eyebrows.

‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘I won’t be doing it.’

‘You can do it if you want.’

‘Have you ever seen me in a dress?’

Later she goes to the beach and draws her name in the sand.
ROSE LOVELL
. Large curved running writing with loops and petals.
ROSE LOVELL
. Rose Lovell does not wear dresses. Rose Lovell does not need friends. Yet all she can smell, even with the huge sky and the evening storm clouds brewing, is coconut and frangipani.

Oyster Stitch

On the second morning, when the girl is gone, the mountain seems to watch over the town. Skein after skein of birds unravel from the forest canopy. The air is heavy with the smell of molasses and the ground is littered with cane black. There are still paper flowers decorating the telephone poles, streamers hanging from shop windows.

The town is fidgety. School girls and women meet in restless huddles along the length of Main Street, disband, band again anew. The topic remains unchanged. Something is wrong. Something isn’t right. She’s run away. Would she run away? She’s disappeared, clean disappeared, leaving not a trace behind.

Mrs Rendell, the newsagent and post mistress, cannot sit still. She goes up and down the two aisles of her shop, nylon stockings
shishing
, straightening magazines, talking to anyone who will listen.

‘She’s gone, she is, I know it in my bones,’ she says, then whispers, ‘it’s a murder, I don’t want to say it, but I know it. I feel it.’

Her only son, Paul, comes out from behind the curtain that leads to his little Blue Moon Book Exchange. He leans against the wall, folds his arms, watches her with watercolour blue eyes.

He’ll join a shambolic search of the cane fields closest to the mill, alongside fifty or so agitated men. First they’ll search for her where the cane has been cut, a long line of them spread out, trampling down the stalks with their boots. Then later they’ll look in the fields not yet harvested, in the rows. They’ll peer through leaves that have grown tall and lush in the wet. They’ll search the ditches that run beside the fields, all the smaller streams.

They will take boats out on the flat green river. Ride haphazardly without a plan. They’ll break the surface, send out a display of ripples that reaches those who have come to watch on the old bridge in town. When the ripples pass and the river grows flat again the townsfolk will see their own reflections there. They will look into the river’s mirror at each other.

They search until the sun goes down and then stand talking on the main street, bereft, their voices drowned by the wild gossipping of flying foxes settling for the night. There is nothing to say that something terrible has happened, but they know it all the same. Nothing is found. Not a trace of the girl in the midnight dress.

‘Oh my God,’ says Pearl.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Rose.

The rain pummelling on the shop roof is deafening, cascading off the awning in a fountain. There are crystals everywhere, shelves and shelves of them, lumps of amethyst, agate, amber amulets hanging in neat lines. Tiger’s eye and chalcedony, rose quartz, carnelian, citrine, jasper. Every inch of the ceiling has something hanging from it, glass beads and glittering mobiles and wind chimes and tinkling bells. There are candles burning in coloured glass candlestick holders in the windows, the flames reflected in a thousand other shiny things. It figures, Rose thinks, that Pearl would live in such a place.

Rose has been invited there to complete the French assignment. She has a drawing of a guillotine in the pocket of her black jeans, a soggy mess.

‘Come in,’ says Pearl.

‘I’ll wet your floor.’

‘Oh my goodness,’ says Pattie Kelly, Pearl’s mother. ‘You look half-drowned. Quickly, Pearlie, get a towel.’

‘Did you walk all the way?’ asks Pearl, not moving.

‘It’s not that far,’ says Rose.

‘She walked from the bay,’ says Pearl.

‘The bay,’ shouts her mother.

‘I found a short cut through the cane,’ says Rose.

‘The cane,’ cries Pattie. ‘You can’t walk through the cane, it’s full up with taipans and browns.’

‘It was kind of a road,’ says Rose, then looks down at her feet. ‘It was a bit muddy.’

Pearl’s mother is nothing like Pearl. She is short and curvy and dark-haired. She has a huge patchouli-scented bosom. She grabs Rose and presses her there and when released Rose is horrified to see the wet imprint of herself.

‘Aren’t you just gorgeous?’ says Pattie. ‘Isn’t she gorgeous, Pearlie?’

Rose’s fringe is stuck to her head and her eyeliner has run down her cheeks. Why has she come? She should have said no. Why didn’t she say no? She just keeps making these same stupid mistakes.

‘Go into the bathroom, darling, and get changed,’ says Pattie. ‘Pearlie, get Rose a kurta off the rack . . . No not the white one, that red one, yes, and we’ll put this stuff in the dryer.’

‘I didn’t know you didn’t have a lift,’ says Pearl through the bathroom door. ‘You should have said.’

Rose takes off her clothes and looks at herself in the full-length mirror. They don’t have a mirror in the caravan, so she’s shocked to see herself, so thin, really thin with tiny little breasts. She puts her freckly hands up to the outline of her rib cage. She has freckles covering her arms and face and legs but none on her stomach, which is the colour of cream. The beach has turned her arms a little pink.

‘It isn’t that bad,’ says Rose. ‘I didn’t know it was going to rain so hard.’

‘Welcome to the Big Wet,’ says Pearl, ripping off the price tag and passing the kurta through the door.

The kurta is like a kaftan that reaches her knees. It’s ruby red cotton, half-see-through and covered in sequins. Rose has never worn anything like it in her life. She has always worn black jeans and flannos, and, now that she’s in the tropics, an old black t-shirt flung over a pair of cut-off shorts. She stares at herself in the mirror for a long time.

‘Aren’t you coming out?’ asks Pearl at last. ‘We need to blow-dry your hair.’

‘I don’t think that will be necessary,’ says Rose.

Pattie Kelly gets the hair dryer and sits Rose down on a chair in the middle of shop. Pearl turns over the
OPEN
sign to
CLOSED
. They go to work removing all the bobby pins and elastic bands that Rose has used to tether down her hair, placing them one by one into her open palm. They’re both laughing as though it’s the most fun they’ve ever had. Rose can see where Pearl has got it from, all her words. Pattie Kelly never stops talking either. They interrupt each other and argue and laugh constantly.

‘Do it straight, with a round brush,’ says Pearl.

‘No, I’m scrunching it,’ says her mother. ‘I want curls.’

‘Go and put some music on.’

‘No, you go and put some music on.’

Rose is not used to being touched. She cuts her own hair with the scissors that live in the drawer beside her bed. Now Pearl’s mother is massaging her head. She would like to get up and run out of the shop, only she’s wearing a small see-through dress. She tries to slow her breathing. Pearl has put a record on. It’s someone singing in sighs. Rose closes her eyes. She doesn’t know what she should do. She wishes she knew where they put her clothes. Will she have to pay for the red shirt? She doesn’t have any money. Not a cent. Plus the drawing of the guillotine is in the dryer now too.

‘You think too much, young lady,’ says Pattie, when she turns off the hair dryer.

‘Come on, Rose,’ says Pearl, and Rose follows her to Pearl’s bedroom, already tying down her hair as she goes, feeling with her fingers for curls, slicing through them, anchoring them with her pins.

Pearl’s bedroom is as small as a cupboard, with a slanting roof and every section of wall covered in something, pictures of models and famous paintings and fragments of poems and constellations of stars and photocopies of stone statues and maps of countries like Brazil and cities like Paris and even a diagram of the Moscow underground. Rose doesn’t know where to look.
Do not go quietly into the night
, she reads on a scrap of paper, tacked down, then looks quickly away because it seems a private thing. She looks at the Moscow Metro instead. Pearl sits on her bed with legs crossed, waiting.

‘I’m not very good at French,’ says Rose. ‘I actually haven’t done it since, well, not ever.’

‘I’ll make it up,’ says Pearl. ‘Don’t worry. Let’s do it quickly, so we can talk about other things.’

She hands Rose the French–English dictionary and asks her to find the words. Pearl cobbles them together on a piece of paper. Rose isn’t sure if they make sense but Pearl says them with such conviction that they sound truthful enough. Pearl holds her heart and kneels down on the floor in her spangly, incense-scented bedroom and lowers her neck onto the footstool.

‘I’d hate to get beheaded,’ she says, when she stands up. ‘Or eaten by a tiger. But maybe it would be more exciting than just getting a disease.’

Rose tries to think of something interesting to say but can’t.

‘I think you should do the whole dress thing,’ says Pearl. ‘The Harvest Parade thing I mean. It’s really fun. I’m the secretary of the Leonora State High Harvest Parade Float Committee. We’re going to make a really big fibreglass fruit bowl with fruit, and all the girls will be standing inside. I mean next to really big bananas and apples and everything.’

‘I’m not really a fibreglass fruit sort of person,’ says Rose.

‘There’s heaps of time,’ says Pearl, ignoring her. ‘You could buy a dress or get one made. There’s a couple of dressmakers in town. Or lots of the girls go to Cairns. It’s bigger than formal night. No kidding. And you can probably get to be a princess, the queen is nearly always in Year Twelve, but you never know. But a princess is just as good.’

‘I don’t have . . . ’ says Rose. ‘We mightn’t stay in town that long.’

‘I know someone who could make you a dress,’ shouts Pearl. ‘Of course. Of course. Of course. There’s this old lady who is a dressmaker, she lives right at the end of Hansen Road.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘No you’ll love her. There’s all these stories about her, Rose. She made all these dresses with her mother when she was small and the dresses were amazingly beautiful and kind of magical or something, well, I don’t know about the magical actually, but she’s really unusual, weird-like, and she lives in this really crazy house full of stuff. And she doesn’t even have electricity or something. And quite possibly she’s . . . you know.’

‘What?’