The Midnight Dress(17)

Glass has already spoken to Edie, once, maybe twice. Each time she sits on a kitchen chair with something in her hand, a leaf say, a butterfly wing, or a broken piece of china that has lost its other parts.

Glass is confused by her house, its smell alone, which is dank and wet like a rainforest grove. All the kept things, there in the kitchen, all the paper, letters, pictures torn from magazines, patterns disintegrating in open drawers, all the fabric turned mouldy, turned to lace by silverfish, all the parts of the forest placed in boxes and pickle jars and baskets. The rain drops kept in teacups.

He thinks he hears footsteps. Faraway footsteps, deep in the house. But he can’t be sure. A shadow moves along the hallway wall. He gets up and looks down into the dimness but sees nothing.

He has picked up the brown snake in the jar.

‘That’s a beauty,’ he says.

‘My father killed it when I was girl,’ Edie replies. ‘For no other reason than he wanted to hurt it.’

She isn’t intimidated by Glass. She stands smiling in her sundress and pea-green slippers. Or maybe she is. She sits down, suddenly shocked by his presence. A man in her space. It brings back memories.

He asks her about the dress first.

‘Oh yes,’ she says, ‘I’m a dressmaker. The best there is. From a long line of dressmakers. My great-great-great-great-great grandfather was a tailor on the rue Saint-Honoré.’

Glass looks at the blue birds then, with their mended wings, flying across the kitchen wall. He thinks her house is grubby, overcrowded, falling apart, stinking. He thinks her strange and old. Harmlessly strange. Ridiculously old. She watches him coolly with her bright dark eyes.

The detective, he’s a little fat. In the Post photograph he has hair business at the front, party at the back. He’s wearing some kind of light dress shirt with the silver top of a pen glinting in his pocket; they’re not climbing clothes, office clothes. He has one hand on a tree, his side to the camera.

The photo was taken from some distance – you’ll see, the trees are huge and he is small. When the image is enlarged it looks as though he is peering into the spaces between them, which are dark. Darkness, that’s all that grainy photo shows of the rainforest. Not the red leaves that fall like blood spots. Not the sudden vaults of space that make you crouch and cry. Not the twisted architecture of the buttress roots. Not the emerald-green python sleeping in a perfect coil.





Each year the wet season brings the monsoon, a vast system of rain, continent sized. The heat at the heart of the land, the dry red centre, pulls this cloud down over the top end like a shroud. Sensing its arrival the green ants build their nests and squeeze out their eggs. The lowland forest trees burst into flower, the Leichhardt pine decorates itself with pompoms, and everywhere there is the bright aching red of the native apple. Rat-kangaroos feast on Davidson’s plums and woompoo pigeons eat the lily pilly seeds and shit them down onto the forest floor, where they will begin to grow again.

All this does not change.

It is the preordained nature of things.

And in the schoolyard at Leonora High, it is exactly the same. All through the wet season girls dream a plumage of dresses, and the prettiest girls are expected to go out with the best-looking boys, and this has never changed. Jonah Pedersen sends a message to Pearl Kelly. Pearl should sit with him at lunchtime. So Pearl Kelly does. She sits there beside Vanessa Raine, who has been summonsed by Peter Tuvalu, and Rose sees her across the concrete sea, sometimes laughing but often with a strange fixed smile on her pretty face, as though she’s wearing a mask.

The small group of girls are lost without Vanessa’s command. Mallory tries to start up a conversation about the Harvest Parade: it’s official, stop the press, she’s wearing fuchsia, one shouldered, Grecian. She explains to Rose exactly how it all works. How all the girls line up and the mayor introduces them one by one, and they go down the stage into the crowd.

‘It’s kind of like a catwalk,’ says Mallory. ‘One of the girls is chosen.’

‘And sacrificed,’ says Rose.

Mallory looks at her. She doesn’t get the joke.

‘Silly,’ says Shannon.

‘It’s the one with the best dress that is chosen, actually,’ says Mallory. ‘She gets to be Harvest Queen. There are pictures of them all in the mayor’s office. Going back for years. The queen gets to wear the crown and hold the sugarcane staff and lead the parade.’

‘Enthralling,’ says Rose.

‘What colour are you wearing, Rosie?’ asks Shannon, who is sweet but, Rose suspects, as stupid as Mallory.

‘I’m not wearing any colour,’ says Rose. She thinks of the midnight-blue dress in pieces on Edie’s kitchen table.

‘I thought Pearl said you were getting your dress made by that lady, Mrs Baker or whatever,’ says Shannon.

Rose thinks of the old black lace dress and the cloud of dust.

‘Not the Miss Baker?’ says Maxine. She widens her eyes in mock horror.

‘Pearl said you went to see her,’ says Shannon. ‘I’m sure she did.’

Rose thinks of all the creaking rooms and all the dreadful quiet whispery things.

‘Well, I didn’t,’ she says.

The conversation is exhausted. They sit in silence, listening to the thud of basketballs on the concrete. Rose looks at Pearl across the yard; Pearl rolls her eyes in return.