The Midnight Dress(29)

Edie smiles at her, waiting.

‘What?’ says Rose.

‘No law against smiling, is there?’ says Edie. Her hand moves toward the pincushion shaped like an echidna, then stops. ‘I think we’ll call it quits for tonight. Start pinning out next Wednesday.’

‘The parade is the end of May.’

‘We’ve got plenty of time.’

‘But it’s only early . . . ,’ says Rose, motioning to the room, the night, the breeze lifting the pattern paper.

Edie ignores her, starts walking toward the door.

‘So how do you get to that place?’ says Rose from the top of the back stairs.

‘I told you,’ says Edie. ‘You mustn’t have been listening.’

‘No, you didn’t, not really. I mean you told me part but not in detail. Wouldn’t I need a map or something?’

‘I never needed one,’ says Edie.

Sometimes the woman is infuriating. Standing there in her shapeless sundress and green slippers, Rose can hardly believe she has climbed anywhere at all. If truth be told, she probably doesn’t even know how to sew.

‘If you’re going to try to find it, you have to promise to be careful in the gully,’ says Edie. ‘When it rains a lot that creek really comes down and the thing gets swamped. You can’t even see the rocks. I got stuck on the other side many times. And you’ll have to leave early or you can’t get back in time before the dark. It’s not the best time of the year to climb, but I know when you want to do it, you can’t help it, you just have to. It has a special pull, that mountain, a sort of gravity.’

Rose doesn’t like that the woman seems to understand these things about her.

‘Do you really think it’s still there?’ asks Rose.

‘I hope with all my heart it is.’





Fern Stitch





So here’s Detective Glass again standing on the track that leads up through the trees. I could show you him on the fallen tree too, the one that traverses the gully; that’s a real crack. He isn’t a bushwalker, he hates bushwalking, but this is even worse. ‘Fuck’, is what he says at every single rock. ‘Fuck’.

He has a picture of the midnight dress inside his trouser pocket. The one that Mallory Johnson drew for him and insisted he have. He’s kept it like a talisman. That’s what it feels like. If he keeps it he’ll find the girl. He’ll find her body. That’s what he thinks. He’s never been superstitious like this before. It leaves him feeling uncomfortable, itchy; the picture burns inside his pocket. In the car he’s felt compelled to take it out occasionally, smooth out the creases gently, rest his hands over it. The shithole backwater town is getting to him.

He has employed an Aboriginal tracker, well-known, by the name of Waldron. When Waldron alights from the police car in Miss Baker’s backyard, he looks too old to climb anything. He stands for a long time, his cowboy shirt tucked into his too-short trousers. But when he starts, Glass is amazed to see that Waldron is like a wallaby, springing across the rocks in the creeks, cupping them with his bare feet. He can see a nest fallen from a tree and the shallow twisted valley left by a snake.

‘Don’t like the bush?’ Waldron asks.

‘No, mate, don’t like the bush,’ Glass replies.

He likes a flat patch of mowed lawn, a neatly trimmed hedge. He doesn’t like the way the rainforest crowds in along the track, nothing holding it back but the thin strip of mud. It’s all too messy, without edges: one minute quiet, the next igniting with birdsong. He hates that he can’t see the end of it. Standing here on a rock in the gully, a wave of hopelessness rolls over him. He sways.

The tracker can see everyone who has come and gone this way. The sandshoe girl and the sandal girl and the man. Even the old lady, once, with a stick as far as the word tree. On the track, in places, the rain has washed away their presence, but here through the leaves, leading away in front of him, they are obvious. As glaring as a set of train tracks.

There are the marks of a startled pademelon, a small ant nest caved in by a careless foot. This makes him drop to his haunches, cigarette dangling from his mouth.

He already smells the ash of the ruin.

Glass follows the tracker, tries to imitate his footsteps but the rocks close up their faces to him and he stumbles and swears. Somewhere, further away, there is the tremulous rushing of water.

‘Is there another creek?’

‘There are creeks everywhere up here,’ says Waldron. ‘Magic water. Comes right out of the rocks.’

Glass thinks it possible that he will have a heart attack. He’s always prided himself on his level-headedness. He’s seen terrible things. Sorted out terrible business. But up here he feels momentarily lost. It takes his breath away.

Waldron shows him where the fallen tree has been used many times as a passage out of the gully.

‘You’ve got to be shitting me,’ Glass says.

Waldron laughs around his smoke, crinkles up his eyes.

Fat old bastard copper, he thinks.

In the end, when they have climbed until he thinks his legs will crumple beneath him, Glass feels the land curve away. He doesn’t like it; it feels as though it’s slipping away, dropping off into nothing. The trees begin to thin. There is a jumble of great rocks, iron-coloured, patterned with moss, and when Glass looks up from his feet he sees that the earth gives way to a small gorge where a waterfall roars. The sunlight is dazzling in the rift; the land laid out before them is startling in the white glow. Glass shields his eyes.