The Midnight Dress(19)

Pearl steps into the little space before him. Rose senses it more than hears it. She moves along the aisle, The Art of Dressmaking in her hands. She would like to buy it, could show it to Edie. That’s a strange thought, she thinks. As though Edie is a friend. She shakes her head.

Paul is leaning back in his office chair, arms slung behind his head. There are two large sweat stains beneath his armpits that look like matching maps of Africa. His hair is not really blond but dyed, brassy, going dark at the roots. His hairy feet are planted on the floor. The middle of him is hidden by the table, which is just as well, Rose thinks, because without a doubt he’d have a hard-on. He’s like a spider. Exactly like a spider, sitting there in his strange web of books.

Pearl seems lost for words now. She’s holding The Alchemist’s Daughter in her hands, trying to think of something to say.

‘How much is this one?’ Rose interrupts. Pearl jumps a little. Rose’s voice seems loud in the cramped little shop. ‘There’s no price on it.’

Paul Rendell leans forward in his chair, retracts his spider arms, puts away his glistening teeth and his shining eyes.

‘The Art of Dressmaking,’ he says, holding the book. ‘This is a first edition and quite expensive, you can have it for seven dollars.’

Rose doesn’t have seven dollars. He looks her up and down, the way someone might glance at a statue in a museum and then move on.

‘Now, what have we got here?’ he says, holding out his hand for Pearl’s book. ‘The Alchemist’s Daughter.’

He flips the book over, reads the back, smiles.

‘How much is it?’ asks Pearl; she seems flustered now that Rose is beside her.

Paul waves his hand.

‘A gift,’ he says.

For the first time ever, Rose sees Pearl blush.

Outside, the day has grown dark and oppressive. The palm trees that line Main Street are violently green against the storm clouds.

‘He reminds me of a spider,’ says Rose.

‘Oh, Rose, don’t say that,’ Pearl says, laughing. ‘That’s so mean.’

‘No really, it’s so weird, this whole old man in a shop thing.’

‘He’s not old,’ says Pearl. ‘He’s only thirty.’

‘How do you know that?’ Rose raises her eyebrows.

‘I read it in the newspaper. He plays for the Leonora Lions. He’s been to university. He studied literature. No one ever goes anywhere in this town. He knows so many different things.’

Rose shakes her head.

‘Oh, it’s only a game, anyway,’ says Pearl, exasperated. ‘He’s only here till the end of the crush. He’s just helping out his mother. His father died. It’s so boring in this town. So boring I could die.’

The first of the cold droplets hits their faces. Pearl closes her eyes and tilts her head skyward.

‘I’m going home,’ says Rose.

She has drawn her eyeliner très thick and painted black lipstick immaculately on her bow mouth. She has tried to powder over her freckles. She wants the effect to be startling, frightening even, although she doesn’t know why she wants to scare Edie, of all people, who rescues ceramic blue birds and keeps them in a flock on her kitchen wall. There’s a box of them too, beneath the table, all their wings in pieces, waiting to be repaired.

Looking into that box now makes Rose feel fidgety.

‘You wouldn’t believe how many of those birds are out there,’ says Edie. ‘You’d be surprised how many people own the things then throw them out at the dump or hand them in to Lifeline or sell them at garage sales. I don’t go out much any more, of course, so I think my flock is nearly done.’

Rose sits sullenly. Edie has not made one mention of her make-up.

‘Did you come through the cane?’

‘Yes,’ says Rose.

‘You have to be careful of snakes,’ says Edie.

Everyone’s always going on about snakes. Rose hasn’t seen a single one. Leaving the caravan park, she started on the road but then cut through a cane field along a row, and then a vacant paddock rife with milk thistle. It cut almost fifteen minutes off the forty-minute walk. The afternoon clouds hang motionless in the sky and when they move they’re like huge ships unmoored, dragging their shadows behind them.

In the fields she’s closer to the mountain, she realised, almost in its shade. She can see the places where the mountain pleats and the open scrub turns to rainforest. When she leaves home she can see the Leap, on the sea side, and as she walks Weeping Rock comes into view. That rock makes her shiver, stirs something in her like a half-forgotten dream.

Edie hands Rose a pile of old confirmation dresses, once white, now yellow, heavily rust-stained. Rose sits staring at them on her lap until Edie lifts up one of the skirts.

‘It’s the tulle petticoats we want,’ says Edie, holding up the hook again.

Rose opens up the dress carefully and looks for the seam.

‘Shall I tell you a love story?’ says Edie.

‘I hate love stories,’ says Rose.

‘It involves the great-great-great-great granddaughter of Jean-Claude Mercier, remember him, and a Mr Jonathan Baker, who was born right here in this very house in the very first room down the hallway. He nearly killed his mother coming out. She was very small, Lillian Baker, even smaller than me.’