The Midnight Dress(44)

The trees rise up over the gully and the air is rarefied.

‘Almost magical,’ says Rose. She looks at the already-torn hem of Pearl’s white dress.

‘I think we should keep going,’ Pearl says.

She shows her the fallen tree bridge, and Pearl laughs as though Rose is joking. She touches the iridescent moss with one finger. Rose shows her how to begin.

‘This is a red quandong leaf,’ says Rose on the other side, as they walk off through the great trees. ‘And its fruit is blue.’

Pearl holds the leaf in her hand.

‘Okay,’ she says.

‘Here,’ says Rose, ‘look.’

She plucks the blue fruit from the ground, pours a handful into Pearl’s hand. She dips again, this time to pick up two perfectly pink nuts. She gives one to Pearl, puts the other in her shorts pocket, hopes Pearl didn’t see.

‘Pink,’ says Pearl, raising her eyebrows. ‘That’s not like you.’

‘There’s a vine in here and if you touch it you just about die from itching,’ says Rose.

‘How do you know all this stuff?’

‘I just know it.’

They stop in a space where a tree has fallen and the canopy is broken. They step into a single shaft of light and laugh. Above them a blue Ulysses hovers.

‘Look at your freckles,’ says Pearl.

‘You mean they’re terrible,’ says Rose.

‘I mean they’re beautiful,’ says Pearl.

At the hut the mist from the falls hangs in the air and wets their red faces. Pearl walks to the edge, covers her eyes to the sunlight, looks out over the view.

‘I feel like I’ve been here before,’ says Pearl and then shivers.

She shows Rose the goose flesh on her arms.

‘I felt it too,’ says Rose. ‘The first time I came.’

Rose pushes open the little door of the house and Pearl walks inside. She looks in awe at the little space with the pitched roof, at the shadows of trees moving on the walls. The light from the casements, which Rose cleaned on her second trip, fills the room like water.

‘I love it,’ she says.

‘I could almost touch those clouds,’ Pearl says, lying on her back on the rocks beside the falls. ‘Look how they’re hanging down, almost in the trees. I can’t believe you found this place. It’s exactly like in a dream. You can write about this, Rose. You should write a story about you and me, or some other girls that are like us, and we run away here to live.’

Rose thinks of her green notebook, of Pearl’s name hidden by black ink.

They lie on the rocks beside the falls, the clouds passing right over them, lacing the trees, raining on them, misty rain that cools their skin. Rose and Pearl hang their legs over the rocks and watch the water fall away beneath them. Between clouds there are sudden bright gaps of sunlight that burn into the clearing.

‘Do you want to swim?’ says Rose.

The climb to the base of the falls had been difficult: the creek splits a seam through the forest allowing in the sun. They will have to move through a tangle of ferns and lawyer vines, she tells Pearl.

‘It’s worth it. You’ll see.’

The sunlight on the rock at the bottom of the falls renders them luminous. They hold hands over their eyes. It is a perfect deep pool, the water roaring into it, the creek flowing away, down through the trees. Pearl is already bending down, unbuckling her sandals. She throws off her dress and picks her way over the stones into the water.

‘It’s freezing,’ she screams.

Rose laughs, flicks off her Dunlops, slips down her shorts, and wades out too. The stones are smooth beneath their feet. They are so close to the falls they can’t hear each other speak.

‘I love it,’ she thinks she hears Pearl say again.

‘What?’ Rose asks.

But Pearl only smiles at her and closes her eyes against the sun.

Later they explore. The boulders are bluish grey and pockmarked. Each crater fills up with rain, like a cup. They walk among the boulders and dip their fingers into these places, which collect many other things: leaves, vividly green, just newly caught, or others almost blanched of colour; pods and seeds and pebbles; the tiny fragile skeleton of a baby bird, the perfect drowned body of a lizard, both lying protected behind the clear water glass.

They lie on the sun-warmed rocks and watch the clouds drift past, the alternating shadows and dazzling light making them drowsy.

‘I’m burning,’ says Rose, looking at the pale skin on her legs that is turning pink.

They head back up through the trees. The forest is full of chatter, the babbling creek, the talking birds, but in the hut it is quiet, a sudden silence that makes their ears ring.

‘I’m so tired,’ says Pearl.

‘We shouldn’t sleep,’ says Rose.

But they do.

They lie curled on the floor, side by side, smelling of the mountain and the creek. Rose’s unbound hair has curled in the sun. Pearl winds a strand around her finger in amazement, closes her eyes.

They wake that way, the strand of hair still coiled around Pearl’s finger, but the sun has almost gone.

‘Shit,’ says Rose, sitting up. ‘We should have gone earlier.’

At night it will be the darkest place in the world.

She knows it’s too late. They’ll never make it down. Not through the gully, where the hard climbing is, and not in the dark.