The Midnight Dress (4 page)

Pearl doesn’t say anything then. Rose waits. She doesn’t know why her heart is beating a little faster.

‘End of Hansen Road,’ says Pearl, eventually. She smiles and nods at Rose. See, she says with her eyes, there is a dressmaker for you. A mysterious one, who will entirely suit your needs.

‘Still not that interested,’ says Rose, expressionless.

There are long silences between them. The silences make Rose twitchy but Pearl doesn’t seem to notice them. She lies back on her bed and smiles right into them.

‘My father’s last name is Orlov. It’s very common. There are about one hundred of them living in Moscow.’ She reaches under her bed and pulls out several pieces of paper stapled together. ‘My mum got them from a man on a bus who knew someone in the embassy. The buses stop here every day – you wouldn’t believe the kinds of people we meet. She said she got the addresses because I wouldn’t shut up about trying to find him, even though it’s probably a crime or something, to have the addresses I mean. I’ve written to all the A. Orlovs.’

‘Has anyone written back?’

‘Not yet,’ says Pearl. ‘I only sent them a week ago. It takes weeks and weeks for the letters to get to Moscow.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said,
Hello, my name is Pearl Kelly and I’m looking for my father, Bear Orlov
.’

‘Bear?’

‘That was his nickname, that was all my mother knew him as. She only knew him for a night.’

Pearl rests back again, closes her eyes, leaves Rose sitting there holding the Muscovite Orlovs.

‘My mother was a dancer and he met her in the night – she says he had to bow his head to get through doorways. He was really handsome and even though he didn’t speak much English they talked and talked and talked all that night. It was love at first sight. They talked at the bar and then the cafe, they talked on the metro. They talked beneath the Eiffel Tower, and finally they talked outside her little apartment until the sun came up.

He was going back that day, he was an attaché or something, something to do with the government but she can’t remember what any more and it didn’t really matter at the time. My mother wrote down her address on the back of a serviette and he put it in his coat pocket, but it must have fallen out on the train or on the platform of the Gare du Nord, because he never wrote to her. She waited for him and everything, like the whole nine months, but he never came back, so she came home with me.’

Pearl opens her eyes, sits up.

‘I kissed Jonah Pedersen on the Friday night before he went away for rep. football,’ she says. ‘He wants to go out with me. I mean a permanent kind of thing.’

Rose bites her bottom lip.

‘I mean I like him. He’s the best-looking boy in the school and in Year Twelve but . . . Can I tell you a secret? He’s a really bad kisser. I mean it was like he was drooling or something. It didn’t . . . excite me.’

Rose listens to her own heartbeat. Still trying to think of something interesting.

‘But it’s kind of expected. Everyone says it was meant to be.’

‘Oh,’ is all Rose manages.

Pearl thinks of her other secret. It’s much bigger, and when she thinks it she feels fluttery and breathless. She won’t tell Rose now, the other secret will blow Rose away.

‘You look full of secrets,’ Pearl says. ‘You’re a real closed book.’

‘No I’m not,’ says Rose.

It’s almost dark when Rose gets dressed in the bathroom again. She folds up the kurta neatly and tries to give it back to Pearl’s mother.

‘Oh no, darling, you keep it – it’s a welcoming gift to you.’

Rose holds it in her hands and imagines it in the caravan, like a bright slash of blood. Pattie insists on driving her home and Pearl sits in the back beside Rose. The rain is so heavy that twice Pattie has to pull over.

‘Rose is getting her dress made by that old lady on Hansen Road,’ says Pearl, when they are stopped waiting for the rain to ease.

‘Edie Baker?’ says Pattie. ‘How do you know about her?’

‘They talk about her at school.’

‘Still?’

‘Still,’ says Pearl, with a sidelong smile at Rose.

‘I don’t know, is she even still alive?’ says Pattie.

Rose ignores them and stares out at the rain. She asks to be dropped off at the kiosk. She doesn’t want them to see the caravan or her father, who will be sitting on the step beneath the awning, staring at the sea.

‘Thank you, Mrs Kelly,’ says Rose.

‘You call me Pattie,’ says Pattie.

‘Okay,’ says Rose, although she knows she won’t.

‘And I’ll call you Ruby Heart Rose,’ says Pattie. ‘Because your aura is such a beautiful red. That’s why I chose that kurta.’

‘Oh,’ says Rose.

‘Mum reads auras,’ says Pearl. ‘Mine’s yellow.’

‘Really, Rose,’ says Pattie. ‘Yours is just the colour of a Ceylon ruby.’

‘Thanks,’ says Rose.

But after the car has driven away she feels angry because she knows Mrs Kelly can’t see anything at all. She’s just making it up. If she could really see inside her she’d know her aura is black. Onyx black. Tar black. Black as the burnt-out insides of a scorched tree.

Catch Stitch

On the third day they find the blue diamanté shoes in the mill yards, lying on the tracks beneath a cane bin, the coronet as well. An officer raises his hand and calls, then a silence quickly settles as he goes down on his hands and knees. He treats the objects with reverence, holds the small crown in his gloved hand as though it were the real thing, something precious, not tin foil. The shoes are bagged.

The big wigs have arrived from Cairns, the Detective Glass himself, who caught the killer of the girl up on the range and solved the baby in the backyard case. The crush is stopped. The mill exclaims its anger, snorts steam as the tippler and the crushers and the centrifuges grind to a halt. The last of the stack smoke dissipates in the cloudless sky.

Glass emerges creased and frowning from the patrol car, sees where the yards have been trampled, where the mill workers have walked across the tracks and taken up a vigil in the park, and he sighs. The yards are searched again under his direction. Each cane bin, each cane train, each holding barrel, the vacuum pans, the sugar driers, the boiler rooms, each demountable, the toilet blocks.

In the park people sit on the grass or in the rotunda. Clumps of crying schoolgirls form. The sun burns their faces. On Main Street some shopkeepers shut their shops and join the crowd. They stay in the park until late in the afternoon when the sky turns the colour of a lightning opal. They stay and do not seem to want to leave.

A rumour grows, there in the first evening shadows, and gathers speed. A patchy, slippery, taffeta rumour. She was wearing a dress. A dark blue dress. And this dress was made by a witch.

The strange thing is that Rose doesn’t need to knock at Edie Baker’s back door; Edie Baker is waiting for her. Or that’s how it seems. She’s standing with her arms crossed at the top of her back steps, looking at the mountain, the foot of which begins in her far back paddock. She smiles when she sees Rose come round the corner.

‘Hello,’ she says.

Rose looked at the front steps first and decided against it on account of the great fig tree growing through them. The fig has lifted the steps and the house from its stumps a little too. The tree brazenly embraces the front of the house with its dark limbs and peers inside.

It’s a huge house, rambling, uneven. It’s a house of tiltings and leanings. It’s holding itself together through sheer determination. Beneath the house a row of battens have slumped to one side and, as if to correct the situation, clusters of stumps have braced themselves knock-kneed. The verandas are boarded over with cheap wood that has swelled and rotted in the rain. Through gaps, Rose glimpses rusted garlands and fretwork vines. There are banks of filthy louvres, and rows of coloured casements, all shut, all cracked and crazed.

‘Are you Miss Baker?’ says Rose at the bottom of the steps.

‘Edie will do.’

‘Someone said you make dresses,’ says Rose.

‘I do,’ says Edie. ‘You better come inside.’

Rose still isn’t sure why she’s come. The normal Rose would have refused to entertain the idea of a dress, a parade, fibreglass fruit. The sensible certain angry Rose would have said, I’m not wearing a dress. I’m not. You can take your Harvest Parade and stick it right where it fits.

But this is another Rose. A coconut frangipani enchanted Rose, who keeps imagining a dress no matter how hard she tries not to. It’s a solemn dress, a seriously gothic dress, dangerously blue-black. She has imagined it at night in the caravan dark. She has imagined it on her way to school, Murray Falconer playing air drums with his fingertips beside her. She has imagined it even though she has tried to erase the imaginings each and every time.

It’s late in the afternoon and the day is pulsing with the shrill chant of cicadas and the first strains of the frog’s evening choir. It is impossibly, insufferably humid. Rose wipes at the sweat that keeps forming at her hairline.

‘I wondered if someone would want a dress this year,’ says Edie. ‘I had a feeling. I had a feeling you’d come.’

Rose follows the old woman up the stairs and across a veranda cluttered up with old chairs and old beds and piles of stones, neatly heaped, and sheets hanging on a sagging line and large boxes filled with leaves. They enter a long kitchen, painted yellow, its walls covered with ceramic blue birds, whole flocks of them, twenty, thirty maybe, flying in formation toward the closed windows. As soon as they’re inside the rain begins.

It is a monumental downpour, dulling the sounds of Edie putting on the kettle, their footsteps on the wooden floor, the scrape of the chair that Edie pulls out for Rose. When it passes the day is left speechless until finally the frogs start up again.

‘I haven’t made a dress for many years,’ says Edie, moving a pile of newspapers from a chair so she can sit down. ‘There are other women now I hear, and big shops where the dresses come from China.’

Edie is small and old but Rose can’t tell how old, not really. Her silver hair is worn short, roughly cut, like a little skullcap, and the skin on her face is very fair and remarkably unlined. Her arms look ancient, though; they are speckled with age spots and her feet puff up over her slippers like rising dough. She wears a simple cotton sundress, straight up and down with two large pockets at the front. A revolting green. The material sags, empty, in the space where her breasts should be. Rose looks quickly away.

The table is covered in envelopes and jars of pins and two cat-shaped ceramic salt and pepper shakers in the process of being repaired, and a huge caterer-sized pickle jar containing a dead brown snake suspended in fluid. There are boxes filled with letters and pages of magazines tied together with ribbons and Tupperware containers filled with what looks like plum pips. Edie slides a scalding hot cup of tea toward Rose, gestures to a sugar bowl riddled with ants.

‘I just want a dark dress,’ says Rose. ‘Maybe black. I like dark things.’

‘When I was young,’ says Edie, ignoring her, ‘all the girls made their own dresses. What do you think of that?’

Rose shrugs, bites her bottom lip.

‘Girls sewed for weeks before a big dance. We imagined our dresses right out of our heads.’

Rose taps her black fingernails very lightly on the table.

‘I have rules,’ says Edie. ‘The thing is, if a girl asks me to make a dress I always ask the girl to help me with it. I think it’s only fair, as I don’t charge a fee.’

‘I could get money,’ says Rose. ‘I mean a bit. How much do you need?’

‘I don’t want money,’ says Edie. ‘I want you to look a great beauty.’

Rose wipes the sweat from her forehead again and tries to take a sip of scalding tea. The sun has come out after the shower and the room is suddenly struck aglow.

‘If you’re prepared to help, then we will make this dress. It will be a magnificent thing. I only work at night after six, because of the heat. I’ll let you think about it and, if you decide yes, you can come back next week on Wednesday and we can begin.’

‘But I don’t know how to sew,’ says Rose.

‘I will teach you everything.’

Straight Stitch

The paper flowers and the streamers have been taken down in the street, but the offerings on the front steps of the Catholic church remain. The flowers have wilted, the pumpkins’ insides have grown mouldy, and the banana skins have shrivelled and turned black. The Harvest Queen’s crown has been placed back inside its box in the mayor’s office. All the princess coronets too, bar one.

Detective Glass, with his weary crumpled face, has commandeered the school gymnasium. All day long he and his officers interview girls who have waited in line on wooden chairs. For hours at a time there is nothing but the solemn steadiness of words like rain then suddenly a salvo of tears. The sobs echo in that place. The detective and the officers look uncomfortable, write down their useless notes, run fingers through their hair.