The Midnight Dress(11)

‘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.