The Midnight Dress(37)

Rose sits and looks out the window. It’s raining, a fine misty rain, and the cardboard is damp and already starting to sag. Murray sits half-turned toward her, his legs stretched out on the seat. The bus floor is a mire of mud.

She doesn’t know how to look at him, not really, not since she went in his boat. Not that anything happened. It was just a boat ride, Rose tells herself, a simple boat ride. If he liked her, he would have tried something.

At the little bay where the rainforest meets the sea, Murray had opened a small esky at his feet and removed a beer can.

‘Drink?’ he said.

‘I don’t drink,’ said Rose.

‘Everyone drinks.’

‘I’ve never had a drink,’ said Rose, getting angry. ‘Not once.’

‘Curious,’ said Murray in his best mad professor voice, and he put the beer away.

On the bus Rose holds the soggy cardboard guillotine and her cheeks burn.

‘Does it ever stop raining here?’ she says; she has to, she can’t stand the silence.

‘Never,’ he says in his best foreign accent, and then he laughs a Count Dracula laugh.

Pearl wears the Little Bo Peep costume and a powdered wig that her mother once wore to a ball. She speaks what sounds like perfect French in front of the class, though Rose can’t understand a word she says. She pauses when it is Rose’s turn to reply. Rose reads from her piece of paper, pronouncing the words clumsily, then motions for Pearl to bend down. When her neck is resting in the frame she releases the cardboard guillotine blade.

‘Bravo,’ says Madame Bonnick. ‘Excellent. Fantastique.’

Pearl Kelly and Rose Lovell take a bow.

‘What if you’d taken geography,’ Pearl whispers, when they take their seats. ‘Would we still be friends? I mean what if your dad had decided to go somewhere else . . . not here. What if you’d had enough petrol and you just kept going? Do you believe in fate, like that? Even if we hadn’t met now would we have met some other time?’

‘Do you believe in fate?’ she asks again, when Rose doesn’t answer and just keeps twirling a sky-blue highlighter in her hand.

‘I don’t understand fate,’ says Rose.

‘It’s like everything is already written,’ says Pearl. ‘Everything. Everything we ever did in our lives is already set out somewhere.’

Rose thinks of it. All her baby steps, her mother with her long hair and glowing face, turning away from the bedroom door. All the roads, all the hills, all the sudden startling lines of coast, the way they followed the birds to choose their path, the way her father wept inside the car beneath a billion stars. Edie climbing the tracks, first on small feet, then on teenage feet, then on grown-up feet. The dress. The midnight dress.

Until then Rose hasn’t once thought of who that dress was made for. The original dress with the torn skirt and ripped bodice. Who had that dress belonged to?

Pearl’s still waiting for an answer.

‘I found another secret place,’ Rose says.

‘What kind of secret place?’

‘It’s a little hut built up in the trees, way up, near a waterfall, that no one knows about.’

‘How’d you find it?’

‘Edie, that lady who’s making my dress. She told me how to get there.’

‘Can I come?’

‘Do you want to?’

‘Of course I do,’ says Pearl. ‘You know how I love mysterious things.’

That afternoon Pearl begs Rose to walk down Main Street but she says no. Rose knows exactly how it will go. Pearl will examine herself in a shop window. She’ll say, How do I look? She’ll undo the top button of her uniform. She’ll let out her hair. She’ll take Ashes in the Wind from her school bag, or A Virgin in Paris, or The Alchemist’s Daughter; she’ll slip past Mrs Rendell at her counter and dip her head beneath the crappy Blue Moon Book Exchange sign.

And even inside, it will be exactly the same. Paul Rendell’s pupils will dilate, he’ll sniff the air, he’ll smile. He’ll ask perfectly ordinary questions; Pearl will make perfectly ordinary replies. He’ll put his hands behind his head, watch her. No one will dare make a move.

He’ll think, I can’t. She’ll think, He won’t. He’ll think, I want to. She’ll think, I shouldn’t. He’ll think, I won’t, I definitely won’t; I never will. She’ll smile, drop the coins into his hand, say, Well, I better be going then.

Rose goes back to Edie’s house. It’s a Monday, not a Wednesday, but somehow, as if she knows, Edie is waiting for her.

‘Come to practise your stitch, have you?’

The question makes Rose bristle, but she doesn’t say anything. Near the doorway she looks at one of the many boxes that fill the long yellow kitchen with its flock of blue birds on the wall. She sees the red leaves from the rainforest, picks one up and holds it by the stem.

‘When I was a child my mother got me a book about the leaves,’ says Edie. ‘I knew every single one. That is the bleeding-heart leaf, of course, always my mother’s favourite. Each time I went, I brought one back. The one you brought me was from the quandong. ’

‘I like them,’ says Rose, and she feels stupid. ‘I wouldn’t put them in a box, but. I think they belong where they fall.’