The Midnight Dress(35)

The fallen tree takes her almost to the top of the gully, almost five metres above the stream. It’s audacious, she knows it, climbing this way. The thing could collapse or move at any moment.

Almost at the lip of the gully the tree becomes wedged between the sinking boat rock and another. Her view from the bottom was distorted: now it is a small space she finds she must press herself through. The rock beneath her hands is cool; the space smells of stone, damp stone, and earth and leaves. She presses her nose to the place and breathes: black moss and cave, the dank green breath of the mountain. She’s breathing in something intimate, something she shouldn’t have knowledge of, something secret.

When she finally clambers over the ledge, she whoops with joy and her voice sings out in the forest. She squats again to steady herself. The forest crowds in at the top, hushed, as though it has been waiting to see whether she would make it.

‘God,’ she says but doesn’t know why.

She feels herself sob in the face of it.

She stands, takes tentative steps. On this side of the gully the forest seems even dimmer. The canopy is so thick that the floor is almost empty of plant life, clear but for the mulch of fallen leaves. She listens to her feet moving through these leaves, picks some up as she walks. A red leaf. Blood red, exactly like the ones she’s seen in Edie’s house. A leaf shaped like a star. The skeleton of a leaf, perfectly preserved, as frail as a spider’s web. She puts them in her shirt pocket, runs her hands along the trees.

Which direction? She’s unsure.

A general upward direction seems right.

There’s a tree as wide as a car, its buttress roots as tall as her. Edie hasn’t mentioned it. Surely she would have mentioned it. Rose hesitates. Turns in a circle. A stand of rose gums, Edie said. A stand of rose gums? She feels her skin then, the goose flesh prickle; it falls away, prickles again. The cool tremor of fear. She doesn’t even know what a rose gum looks like.

It’s okay, she calms herself, it’s a gum and it might be the colour of a rose. Or it might have flowers like roses. It will be different from the other trees. Yes, all she has to do is walk and look for a different type of tree.

She can’t tell the time. That’s the problem. Next time she’ll have to bring a watch. Has she been gone minutes or hours? She looks up at the canopy, but there is only the same dim light. Upward, is what Rose Lovell says to herself. Upward. One foot in front of the other. She wishes there were rocks. She’s good at rocks, not these leaves, this whispering unsettling carpet of leaves. The rose gums she finds then: a stand of them, seven or eight, so giant that she forgets to breathe. They wear russet-red skirts at their bases, and their skin is the colour of quartz.

‘There you are,’ she says, looking up, unable to see where they end.

She stands for a long time there, listening to the sound of falling water.

When Rose comes down through the scrub again, the day has grown dark with clouds and the sun has dipped behind Edie’s house. She is running because a storm is settling over the mountain, a huge thunderstorm, so close that she can taste the sulphur.

It is small, the hut she found, and half-reclaimed by the rainforest. It sits cradled by the trees at the edge of a clearing. The waterfall plunges past, only metres before it. The sudden aching chasm of light made her dizzy. She bent down, held her head, felt wild. It was bright with moss, that hut, and when she stood, pushed open the front door, she found it was filled up to her knees with leaves. She ran her fingers over the coloured glass windows, dark with mould.

‘Hello,’ she said, as though it were a living, breathing thing.

She needed a broom, that was her first coherent thought. She kicked at the leaves carefully, in case of snakes, pushed them in piles out the door. It was a single room, tiny, with not a stitch of furniture. She imagined Florence and Jonathan Baker there and Edie there later. Edie as a girl. Edie, her age. Edie climbing the same tracks she had taken.

Rose sat on the front step, drank from her water bottle, leant against the timber cladding that Jonathan Baker had cut with his bare hands, closed her eyes. She felt the friction of the sun on her skin, her muscles quivering from the exertions, sweat falling in rivulets down her neck. She felt more alive than ever before, her heart beating in her chest and in her ears, tuning out the other sounds of the day.

She explored. She searched for the base of the waterfall first, moving away from the hut, down through the trees again. She climbed over rocks, caught glimpses of the pool, which was small, circular, and appeared so precise and perfect that it could almost have been man-made. She could see the thing but not a way down.

It took her another hour at least, although she wasn’t sure, to finally find the track down and wash her face in the pool. Afterward she lay on her back, on the flat rocks, warmed by the sun, and cried openly into her hands.

The clouds began to pile up in the small jagged patch of sky above the little falls. She watched them lazily at first, through half-shut eyes, then suddenly with concern. She stood up. Listened. The day thrummed with the sounds of the forest: the rhythmical drone of cicadas, the ringing of insects, the chatter of birds. Something had changed.

She began to make her way back down the mountain through the trees, at first walking, then running. By the time she was crouching along the fallen tree over the gully, she heard the thunder, looked down and saw that some of the rocks had already been swallowed by the new swell in the creek. In the scrub the huge cool raindrops hit her face and bare arms, her hair sprung loose from its bobby pins and curled into a frenzy.