The Midnight Dress (5 page)

Glass thinks it’s a waste of time. She’s a missing person, simple as that. There’s no body. He’s seen people in small towns like this before, working themselves up into a froth over a pair of shoes and a plastic crown. Girls are good at running away. It’s a fact.

They have interviewed Maxine Singh, Shannon Fanelli and Mallory Johnson. They have all been asked the same questions. They all return again and again to the dress.

‘It was deep blue, so blue it was almost black,’ said Mallory, ‘and it had all this lace in it and all these bits of glass. Do you want me to draw you a picture?’

‘It was magical,’ said Maxine. ‘I mean it must have been.’

‘It hurt your eyes to look at it,’ said Shannon. ‘I mean it made whoever wore it turn completely beautiful. But . . . ’

She paused. Bit her bottom lip.

Glass raised his rumpled face to wait. Only she said nothing. She buried her head in her hands and began to cry.

Murray Falconer has size-twelve feet. Rose looks at his muddy footprints on the bus floor and marvels at how small hers are in comparison. He has dyed his hair blue and it’s caused a commotion with all the younger boys. They’re shouting with glee, ‘Now you’re going to get expelled, Falco.’ He takes his position in front of Rose and jiggles his leg nervously. He’s done a bad job. There’s still a lot of dark hair along his neckline. She can tell he wants her to say something, but she sighs and looks away from him instead.

Murray lives just after the turn-off to the bay, through the cane. There’s a creek that runs across his land and sometimes, when it’s running high, he can’t get to school. Rose tries to see his house, but all she can see is the roof behind the crop. She has a strange fascination with how other people live, even though she wouldn’t admit it. Has he always lived there? Ever since he was just a baby in a cot? Does he know every part of that house, all the cracks in the walls and the way shadows fall at windows?

‘I like your nails,’ he says.

Rose ignores him.

‘What’s it like having the word
love
in your last name?’ he asks, pronouncing love in a stupid voice.

‘Shut up,’ says Rose.

‘I’m only making conversation.’

‘Well, don’t.’ She touches her hair to make sure no curls have escaped.

‘I went fishing with my old man at the bay on Saturday,’ he says. ‘I saw you there on the rocks.’

‘So,’ she says. There were boats everywhere on Saturday.

‘You looked like a mermaid.’

Wildfire breaks out on her cheeks.

‘Do you like fishing?’ he asks.

‘No.’

‘Do you like long walks on the beach?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want to go out with me?’

‘Shut up, Murray.’

‘I’m only joking,’ he says.

Murray’s reception at school is rowdy. He tries to appear like he doesn’t care, walks with his hands in his pockets, pretending not to hear, but he looks at his hair in all the glass windows. He smiles happily when Mrs Bonnick suggests that he accompany her on a little visit to Mrs D.

The hullabaloo is only outclassed by the arrival of Jonah Pedersen, who is home from a rep football tour of New South Wales. He strides into the school flanked by the lesser demigods Peter Tuvalu and Ronnie Cartwright. Jonah Pedersen is still wearing his rep tracksuit jumper, even though it’s high summer. He is tall and muscular, it’s true, good-looking in a homogenous toothpaste-ad way. He has impossibly smooth brown skin, walks as though he’s about to break into a sprint, walks as though he’s about to score a try, all tensed up and vibrating. People can’t help but look at him.

Rose sees Pearl grow quiet. She shrinks back inside herself. She bends down outside the science block and pretends to be very interested in finding something in her bag. Jonah Pedersen passes like visiting royalty.

After he’s gone Vanessa whispers in Pearl’s ear.

‘He looked at you,’ she says, which makes Pearl smile.

‘I’ve started learning Russian,’ Pearl says to Rose in modern history while Mrs Bonnick sorts her handouts. Her alter ego, Madame Bonnick, has been put away. She is no-nonsense in modern history, Mrs Bonnick.

‘It’s for when I meet my father,’ says Pearl.

She takes a pocket Russian dictionary from her backpack.

‘I’m going to write to the B. Orlovs in Russian. Do you think that’s a good idea? I mean I wrote to all the As but maybe they couldn’t read English.’

‘What if he doesn’t live in Moscow?’ says Rose, which seems a more practical question.

Pearl ignores her.

‘I think the Bs are going to be lucky,’ she says. ‘I’m translating this little book. I think it’s about two brothers.’

She holds up a Russian novel. Rose isn’t sure about Pearl Kelly. Sometimes she seems really, really dumb, then the next minute she starts reciting the names of Russian Metro stations, writing them at the same time in pink highlighter pen. It’s strange that she is so pretty and weird at the same time.

‘In Russia you can get your legs stretched if you like,’ adds Pearl. ‘They take extra bits of bone from your ribs and put them in your legs and then all these metal screws and stuff. A lot of the models get it done. It’s very gruesome. Sometimes it goes wrong and they can never walk again.’

‘Now you’re talking,’ says Rose.

A type of dark fairytale story is lurking there. She’ll write it down in her notebook when she gets home.

‘I knew you’d like that,’ says Pearl.

‘Listen up,’ says Mrs Bonnick. ‘I don’t want a peep out of any of you.’

She starts talking about Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich. Adolph Hitler is Mrs Bonnick’s favourite topic. She could talk about Adolph Hitler for a year.

‘She totally gets off on Adolph,’ whispers Pearl. ‘It’s so boring. Have you been to see Miss Baker about a dress?’

‘No,’ says Rose.

‘Sure you haven’t,’ Pearl whispers, laughing.

She takes a lavender fluoro and writes on Rose’s arm. Rose keeps her arm still, doesn’t want to look down, breath catches in her throat.

I WANT TO SHOW YOU SOMETHING.
It takes up her whole fore-arm.

‘What?’ says Rose.

Pearl turns Rose’s hand over and writes on her palm.

A SECRET
.

‘What?’

IT’S A SURPRISE
, on the other palm.

‘I don’t like surprises,’ says Rose.

Rose and Pearl walk down Main Street after school. Rose knows her father won’t be worried, not really, he never is. He might wonder where she is briefly and then go back to thinking about his drawings. He’ll light his cigarettes back-to-back, staring out to sea, drink coffee after coffee until by night he’s wired, arguing with himself under his breath.

‘I can’t believe the main street is called Main Street,’ says Rose.

‘I know, isn’t it
très
boring here?’

The main street is wide, ridiculously wide, as though when it was built the town was expecting something amazing to arrive, a thousand people to stake their claim on a patch of soggy green land, a huge boat, titanic-size, on the back of a truck. Instead there’s nothing, a few parked cars, four pubs, a handful of shops. Rendell’s News, Crystal Corner, A Hint of Class Hair Salon, Hommel’s Convenience Store, where all the packets look as though they’ve been on the shelves for years and Mr Hommel still makes and sells his own soft drinks and frozen cordials in containers shaped like kangaroos.

‘I’m so glad you came to town,’ says Pearl. ‘I can’t wait till I leave home. I feel like I can’t breathe in this town. I’m going to leave and only come back like once in a blue moon. Where are you from? I feel like you’re from everywhere. You know where I want to live? I want to live in Paris. Mum says it’s the best city in all the world that she ever went to. I would definitely live on the Rive Gauche because that’s where all the artists live. You could live there too. You look like a poet or something. Do you write poetry? I could work in fashion and you could be a poet. We could have an apartment.’

Rose thinks of the words she keeps in her notebook. She loves them and hates them at exactly the same time. They aren’t exactly poems, she’s not sure what they are. She has no control over the words. Those words control her. She imagines herself in the Paris apartment, but it’s like looking into a coin-operated telescope, all tunnel vision.

‘I don’t write poetry,’ Rose says.

‘Sure you don’t,’ says Pearl in a disbelieving voice, standing before a shop window examining her hair. ‘How do I look?’

‘Where are we going?

‘I’m just showing you something.’

They go into the newsagency, which is also the post office and the book exchange. Mrs Rendell looks up from her chair behind the front counter.

‘Hello, girls,’ she says, tilting her head so she can see over her reading glasses. Mrs Rendell is sweating. Her hair is damp and she has a wet tea towel slung around her neck. She fans herself with an old mould-speckled Japanese fan.

‘Hi,’ says Pearl.

Pearl stops to look at the pens. She looks at the packets of highlighters and the Post-it notes and the rulers with reef-scene holograms. She moves to the magazines.

‘Is this it?’ says Rose.

‘No,’ whispers Pearl.

Cleo
and
Cosmopolitan
. Pearl flashes the male centrefold at Rose, who rolls her eyes.
Women’s Weekly
.
Dolly
. Some very dusty issues of
Vogue
and
Vanity Fair
, almost two years old. Pearl opens the magazines and shuts them one by one. Sighs dramatically.

‘Not at all what I’m looking for,’ she says.

At the back of the shop, through a low-arched door, there is the book exchange. The words above it are painted in an eastern style –
THE BLUE MOON BOOK EXCHANGE
– but the word ‘exchange’ doesn’t fit very well. Whoever painted it had to cram the letters of that word together. Pearl motions for Rose to follow her through the bamboo-print curtained door. She smiles back over her shoulder.

It’s a tiny room, The Blue Moon Book Exchange, cramped and hot. It’s a tight space, shelves everywhere, floor to ceiling around the perimeters, and three stand-alones down the middle of the room. The spaces between these shelves are narrow. Pearl rests her back against one shelf, brings one leg up and puts her foot on a shelf in front, starts trailing her finger along the titles.

Rose has never been claustrophobic but in this place she feels her chest constrict. She doesn’t know why. It feels like a cave or a snake hole. It smells of yellow pages, mildewy spines, rarely opened old books that once opened are pungent, ripe, shockingly sweet. Between the shelves there are more books spilling out from boxes or stacked in piles.

There in the vee formed by Pearl’s body and her arm, her finger still moving languidly along the line of books, Rose catches a glimpse of Paul Rendell. He’s sitting at a desk at the very back of the room, a pedestal fan nodding its head slowly back and forward in front of him, ruffling the collar of his white peasant shirt with each turn.

Paul Rendell likes peasant shirts. He wears them very white. He favours faded blue jeans. Sometimes, to his mother’s disgust, he doesn’t wear shoes. If he’s feeling particularly bohemian he puts on his ankh charm leather necklace, which means everlasting life. It makes him feel powerful that necklace, but he would never wear it in front of his mother. He has a book open in front of him and one hand resting up on his cheek.

‘Hello, Pearlie,’ he says, without looking up.

‘Hello, Paulie,’ she says, still examining books.

Rose reads the names on the spines in front of her, she reads them fast:
Sky Pirates of Callisto
,
The Space Vampires
,
By the Light of the Green Star
,
Children of Tomorrow
,
The End of the Matter
,
The Unsleeping Eye
,
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang
.

Pearl removes her hair tie and shakes out her hair. The smell of frangipani fills the little room. Paul Rendell closes his book.

‘Blossomy as ever,’ he says.

He’s handsome in a way, although old, as old as her father easily, thinks Rose. He has a pale face and his hair falls in a foppish way. He could be an English explorer, or a visiting missionary, Rose isn’t sure which; whichever, he doesn’t look like he belongs in Leonora. She watches him drum his fingers on the table watching Pearl looking at books.

‘This is my friend Rose,’ says Pearl, not looking at him.

‘Pleased to meet you, Rose,’ says Paul, not looking at Rose.