The Midnight Dress(41)

Suffering.

He should have a shower but he just can’t get up. The motel room is almost completely beige. Beige carpet. Beige curtains. Beige bedspread. Mustard-coloured walls. There’s a faded print of a rainforest, a homogenous misty creek, all gentle water and mossy rocks. He knows it’s nothing like that. Getting there would be a nightmare: that much itchy vine and slippery rock, it could kill a man.

‘Okay,’ he says aloud into the room. ‘Think.’

The phone rings instead. He can just reach it without rolling over.

‘What you got?’ he asks.

He takes his notebook from his pocket, his pen. Closes his eyes to listen: ‘There’s a good fingerprint on the back of the biscuit wrapper, somehow survived the rain. Belongs to a young man who was once done for possession of cannabis as a twenty-two-year-old in Cairns. Nothing since. No other record. Address is in the town.’

‘Say the name again,’ says Glass. He knows it from somewhere.

He puts down the phone and goes through the file. Someone said that name. Right back in the beginning, at first interviews. First day. Before he arrived. He’s seen that name or heard it; he doesn’t know which.

He flicks through the pages, swearing softly under his breath. There it is. Paul Rendell. ‘You should ask Paul Rendell.’

Paul Rendell, he writes. 18 Main Street, Leonora.

Relief. It soothes his aching muscles. He circles the name. Circles it again. He doesn’t stop until the page is awash with pond ripples.





There is something about Chernobyl that excites Rose. She knows it shouldn’t. It’s wrong to be excited by a catastrophe, but it feels so much like the end of the world. She opens her green notebook and writes while she half-listens to the voices on the radio. The voices sound excited too. They speak faster, argue with each other on talkback: ‘. . . of course the nuclear cloud will drift down,’ they say, ‘it’s drifting already out of the USSR and into Germany. It’s only a matter of time.’

Mrs Bonnick wheels the TV into modern history and makes them watch the news. A building burns and people wear protective suits and everywhere in Europe they’re terrified of the fallout. They’re putting on layers of clothes and masks: everything is contaminated. It is such a dark thing, Rose thinks. With unlimited dark possibilities.

‘You see,’ says Mrs Bonnick, trembling slightly and in need of a cigarette, ‘you are watching history unfold.’

Pearlie isn’t there. She hasn’t been for three days.

‘Où est, Pearl Kelly?’ says Madame Bonnick in French.

Rose shrugs.

‘It isn’t like her,’ says Vanessa at lunch. ‘She comes to school even if she has a cold. She can’t bear to be away from people.’

Vanessa has been to the hairdressers to trial her Harvest Parade hairstyle. She describes it in intricate and excruciating detail while the other girls listen, enraptured. There are several pieces of hair that will be swept up and several pieces that will cross over these pieces, creating a basket effect. The basket effect of her hair will be laced with baby’s breath and diamanté pins.

‘You’re going to look so beautiful,’ shrieks Shannon.

‘Like a model,’ says Mallory.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ says Vanessa, although she’s splitting at the seams with pride. ‘Is your dress nearly finished, Rose?’

‘Not really,’ says Rose. ‘It’s only been cut out.’

Vanessa thinks for a while; it’s obvious she’s thinking up something nasty, just planning the best way to word it. The other girls wait. Rose is unprotected without Pearl, her flesh exposed. She waits too.

‘Did you know,’ says Vanessa, quite slowly, quite stealthily, like a venomous snake preparing to strike, ‘that Miss Baker collects things out of bins?’

‘Don’t tell her that,’ squeals Maxine.

The words paralyse Rose. Afterward she can’t say why. They are stupid words. And just words. All the same, a huge shame rises inside her like a mushroom cloud. It affects her limbs and her speech. She smiles along with the other girls, some laughing. No words come. A small noise buds in her throat, perhaps the beginning of tears, but she swallows it down, swallows and swallows until it is gone.

Vanessa turns away and returns to the subject of hair.

Large thoughts loom inside Rose, thoughts that don’t fit inside her head. They are monstrous and black and they bump against the ceiling of her brain. It’s a grave injustice that she has to have her dress made by someone who is so strange and lets a tree grow through her front door. But worse, it doesn’t seem fair that now she should feel so protective of Edie, all alone in that big old creaking house with her collections and clinking teapots and teaspoons and the endless dying sound of lost things.

‘I was only joking, Rosie,’ says Vanessa in line before English.

‘No, you weren’t,’ says Rose, her voice finally recovered.

‘Well, it’s just the truth,’ says Vanessa. ‘I mean Miss Baker has this . . . this reputation. There’s kind of like these rumours, that’s all. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. You know?’

‘No, I don’t know,’ says Rose.

‘Anyway, she’s the last person in the world I would have got to make my dress,’ says Vanessa. ‘Even a dress from Kmart would have been better.’