The Midnight Dress(34)

Rose doesn’t take Pearl, not the first time, which is a Sunday. She knows she’ll have to find the way first. It makes her excited, just thinking that, as though she’s an explorer. She’s up before her father, putting on her climbing clothes, her shabby Dunlop sneakers, tying down her hair with the myriad bands and bobby pins.

‘Where are you going?’ he says from behind his curtain.

‘To climb a mountain,’ she replies.

‘Don’t break your neck,’ he says.

‘I’ll try not to.’

Rose has to walk across the back paddock behind the old house but she doesn’t stop to see Edie. She hopes that the old woman won’t see her. She’d be full of instructions. Don’t touch this. Don’t touch that. Look out for snakes. She’d be talking like she owned the whole mountain range.

The gate is at the back of the paddock, just as Edie said. A decorative gate, rusted now, the fence falling down, a flimsy attempt to keep out what lies behind. When she looks down toward the house she can see an old chair, or what remains of one, sitting in the grass.

Behind the gate there’s a track, a muddy overgrown track, but a path all the same. Easy, thinks Rose: up the track until she gets to a gully and then across the gully and then climb out near a rock like a boat and then listen for the sound of water, look for the stand of rose gums, and there will be a track again. Rose looks up at the clear sky.

It’s only eight in the morning but already the sun is white hot. She feels it baking her scalp and wishes she’d brought a hat. She drinks some water from her small plastic bottle and wonders whether it will be enough.

In the open forest there are gums with skin like butter, towering bloodwoods, stringybarks. She touches these trees with her hands, takes a strip of bark from one, picks up a bright yellow seed with a fine fuzz of hair from the ground. There is a huge tree down across the track, desolate grey, riddled with the words of white ants. She isn’t sure how longs she stands there, but after that tree, as though it is the start line, the climbing grows gradually more difficult. The ground becomes more crowded with fern and lawyer vine, the forest grows denser, there is a gradual dimming of things.

The strangler figs appear, first one, its grotesque lacework, making her stop, smile, breathe a shuddering breath. The liana vines, corkscrew tight, coil themselves up trees. The buttress roots grow huge, elaborate, twisted, washed smooth by rain. A gully opens up before her, the tree canopy above it pierced by halos of light.

She’s too cocky at first. She clambers over rocks as though it’s a race and finds herself halfway down with nowhere further to go. When she has climbed back to her beginning point, she has to wipe the sweat from her eyes and is surprised to find her legs trembling.

There’s a much easier route; she spots it almost immediately and begins her second attempt. How much time has she wasted? She moves from rock to rock, descending into the gully, trying not to think too far ahead, looking for one foothold after another.

At the bottom of the gully there is a small stream dotted with huge rocks. The heat of the day disappears there; a coolness brushes her cheeks. She looks up at the canopy stretched over the place and suddenly feels as though she’s in a church. There is a hushed silence. The forest is watching her in return.

She doesn’t know the time. She could have been climbing for an hour or two, or is it less? She’s unsure. She squats and washes her face in the water. The creek croons over the rocks. She feels far from anywhere, even though she knows she could just stand up and climb back out the way she came in. She isn’t lost.

A sudden burst of birds, parrots screeching overhead, shakes away her thoughts. She sits there beside the water, looking for footholds on the other side. A rock shaped like the hull of a boat? A rock shaped like a boat? A boat?

There are many larger rocks on the opposite side of the gully, and it looks much more difficult to climb. The rocks give nothing away: she can’t see anything like a boat. What kind of boat, for godsakes? A big boat or a dinghy, the Titanic or a weekend runabout? She didn’t ask Edie a single question. Maybe there is no such thing. Maybe Edie made it all up.

‘No,’ whispers Rose in the dim gully, and her voice sounds foreign in that quiet place.

High up along the gully she sees a large granite boulder partially concealed by a tangle of fallen trees. It’s been many years since the old woman has been this way, Rose thinks. Things might have changed. Rose picks her way up the creek, rock hopping, until she stands beneath the boulder.

It could be a boat, if she uses her imagination. She tilts her head to one side. It seems the rock has slipped at some point, bringing down several great trees, one of which traverses the gully floor. The rock has a sharpish edge, now facing toward the stream. A little piece of the canopy has opened up where the trees have fallen and there is a proliferation of ferns.

She stands in front of the mess, looking for a way across and up.

She places her feet gingerly on the fallen tree that runs like a bridge over the gully, tests her weight. She begins to walk along its length as it rises toward the rocks on the other side. It’s solid. She bends down once to regain her balance and finds she can’t stand again; she looks down at the stream metres below her. The tree is rotting: already parts of it are eaten away. Through a hole she sees a coil of orange fungus so bright that she freezes in her tracks. There are colonies of pale mushrooms and a lurid green moss that looks wet, but when she touches it she finds that it’s papery, dry. She listens to her own ragged breathing.