The Midnight Dress(43)

He’s reaching out, she’s moving out of his reach. There’s no way to slow it down now it has begun.





In the Ukraine they are going to give the forest around Chernobyl a burial. They will dig trenches and bulldoze the trees into them, cover them up again. Pearl tells Rose about it on her bed, while brushing out her blond hair. ‘It’s all dead,’ she says. ‘Everything died. The trees turned red.’

‘Can you imagine it? Just nothing. Everything dying for miles and miles and miles,’ she says. She speaks of the forest as though she knows it, as though she’s been there, has witnessed the flash. It’s her own personal apocalypse.

She doesn’t know that years later birds, huge birds, barn owls and eagles, will roost inside the reactor to lay their young. That the spruce trees, newly confused, will forget to grow upward, but will sprout pine cones the size of footballs. That the forest alleys will thunder with magnificent wild boar, that the stags, muscles brimming with strontium, will leap across the streams through light and into shadow.

‘I’m going to change my name,’ Pearl says. ‘Soon.’

‘What will you be?’

‘I told you, Persephone.’

‘I like Pearl better,’ says Rose.

But it’s as though Pearl is already shedding part of herself, Rose thinks; she’s slipping out of the casing of her name, splitting it like a husk from the seed.

Now when Jonah Pedersen sends the message that Pearl should sit with him at lunchtime, she doesn’t go; she looks at her nails, shrugs, flinches but doesn’t look up when he kicks the wall.

‘What’s going on?’ Jonah Pedersen asked after school, near the bus stop, two days ago.

He was standing too close to her. He stunk in his rep tracksuit jumper. She didn’t want to hurt him. He was all bravado and bad dance moves there on the footpath, but his eyes gave him away.

‘Your loss, baby,’ he said. She hadn’t spoken.

‘Jonah,’ she said, as he walked away.

In the bedroom Pearl brushes out her hair and stares at herself in the mirror. She looks at herself in wonder sometimes, as though she’s never seen herself before.

‘I felt it again, so protective of him. It hurts my heart. Maybe we are meant to be?’ But she changes the subject almost immediately. ‘What should I wear? I don’t really have any bushwalking clothes.’

‘It’s late,’ says Rose. ‘We really have to get going if we’re going to do this.’

Pearl goes through her drawers, holds clothes against herself, tries on a pair of boots. When she’s finally dressed – an impractical white dress with bone-coloured sandals and a denim vest – Rose is lying on the bed staring at the ceiling.

‘How do I look?’ she asks.

‘It’s a hard climb,’ says Rose. ‘I mean are you sure you want to do it?’

‘Of course I want to do it,’ says Pearl.

‘You have to promise not to tell anyone,’ says Rose.

‘It’ll be our little secret,’ says Pearl.

They climb through the gums, Pearl talking endlessly. Rose is aware of the dark house watching them through the trees. She hopes that Edie won’t see them and come rushing out, calling. But the old woman doesn’t emerge. The house hunkers down beneath its vast dark roof and stares. A frantic bird calls out: it sings again and again, a warning cry that makes the skin on Rose’s forearms prickle. She shrugs off the half-formed thought. The sun is already high in the sky.

She can see Jonathan Baker’s poisoned trees now, there on the slope. How could she have not seen them before? Their bases, jagged crowns, leafless, leaning, are all that is left. They are ghosts there, among the other trees. Yet in places the forest has used these carcasses: tree ferns sprout from inside one, others are colonised by moss, vines use some as scaffolding in a vain attempt to reach the sun.

She’s glad when the house disappears from view; when it’s gone Rose feels free. The land falls away sharply, and the trees lay out their huge buttress roots. There’s the hushing sound of water below, still unseen. The gully yawns into view.

‘Now what?’ says Pearl.

‘We have to climb down,’ says Rose. ‘It’s okay, I know the way.’

Rose shows her where to squat, where to put her feet, where to turn, where to place her hands.

‘This is ridiculous,’ says Pearl, suspended on a large boulder.

Rose feels momentarily panicked then, as well. By herself it’s different; she never doubts. She judges the distance between two rocks without stopping to think. She leaps into air. She can tell whether a rock is steady or not through her foot: she leans in and the rock releases itself to her.

Pearl is no good at it.

‘Just stay calm,’ says Rose. ‘All you have to do is move your foot about five centimetres to the left.’

‘There’s nothing there,’ says Pearl.

‘You’re moving it to the right.’

Pearl inches her way down with Rose’s help until they both stand beside the creek. Pearl is breathing hard.

‘Maybe we should go back,’ says Rose. ‘The next bit is harder.’

Pearl sits down on a rock. She wets her face in the clear running stream.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ she says. ‘Isn’t it?’