The Midnight Dress(45)

‘Are we going to have to stay here?’ asks Pearl.

‘I think so,’ says Rose. ‘I don’t know what else to do. It’s my fault.’

‘My mum will go crazy. She’ll call the police.’

‘Shit,’ says Rose.

‘We’ll need a fire,’ says Pearl.

‘I don’t have any matches.’

‘Can’t we rub sticks together?’ says Pearl. ‘Or something.’

They try, but when nothing happens they give up almost immediately and find themselves laughing. The light is draining from the jagged strip of sky above the falls; everything has become indistinct and blurred at the edges. A soft rain has begun to fall.

‘We shouldn’t get wet again,’ says Rose, ‘or we’ll get cold.’

They go back inside the little hut, where it’s even darker. They sit close together, knees drawn up to their chins. The smell of the creek on their skin is very strong. Pearl’s stomach growls in the darkness and it makes them both laugh again.

‘Mum will go out looking for me’, she says. ‘She’ll probably go and see your dad.’

‘Dad will tell her not to worry.’

‘Won’t your dad worry?’

‘I don’t think so,’ says Rose. ‘He’s not much of a worrier.’

‘Mum will be having kittens.’

‘Did she know we were going bushwalking?’

‘I’m not sure, did you tell her?’

‘I didn’t tell her anything, I just said hello.’

‘Anyway,’ says Pearl, she offers a chewing gum stick.

In the dark there is nothing to do but rest. The darkness is like a tide; it rushes into the clearing and leaves them breathless. Again they lie curled, side by side, and don’t speak. They listen to the forest, its scraping, snapping, moving sounds. Once, they hear the footsteps of a larger creature, a rock wallaby perhaps. Pearl’s fingers wrap hard around Rose’s wrist. Rose sits up, the floorboards move, and whatever it is crashes off through the undergrowth.

The forest breathes around them. There is the rhythmical chanting of insects and the myriad small rustlings and chimings. Owls sing their hunting tunes. Rain falls on the old tin roof, sometimes a tiny whisper, suddenly a drumbeat. The sound of the waterfall grows huge, filling up the hut and Rose’s mind; other times it recedes, leaving smaller sounds and Pearl’s breathing.

Pearl’s fingers relax around Rose’s wrist.

Up close, Rose can smell her chewing-gum breath, the dried-out sweat on her white dress.

‘Pearl?’ Rose whispers.

Pearl doesn’t answer. It’s just like her, to be so terrified and then suddenly just fall asleep.

Rose wants to talk. She, Rose Lovell, wants to talk about herself.

‘Pearlie,’ she whispers.

The wild bickering of flying foxes.

‘I’m thinking I’m going to run away after this. When my dad wants to leave, which he will. I’m old enough now; there’s nothing keeping me here. When I climb I feel really free. I mean it, I mean it like the word sounds. Do you understand? Like I’m made of air. I feel like I understand it, and it’s the only thing I’ll ever be any good at.

The house groans and tut-tuts.

‘I mean I don’t mean I’m going to be a mountain climber, I don’t mean that. I don’t know what I mean. When I was on the boat with Murray Falconer, I think he wanted to kiss me. He kept looking at my lips. I don’t know, maybe I had a pimple there.’

Pearl shifts against her.

‘My mum didn’t mean to die. It was an accident. She really loved the sea. She was an Aquarian. I never got to see her, like in her coffin or anything. I know it sounds like she was terrible for putting me to bed and then doing something like that, getting drunk and going swimming. Do you know what I mean? But it wasn’t like that. It was just a spur of the moment thing. My dad, he used to say, “She loved you, Rose. She loved you, Rose. You were her everything.” That was when I was smaller. I can only just remember it. He doesn’t say it any more.’

The night inches by with its thousand scratchings and rufflings. Rose thinks she hears footsteps but it’s only the rain. Sometimes the sounds of the night join together to make one mass of noise, a violent thrumming heartbeat, other times she can separate them: raindrops, bird’s wings, something moving through the leaves.

‘This hut was built by Jonathan Baker,’ whispers Rose. ‘He loved this lady called Florence, who was a dressmaker. She sewed a secret love letter into a suit she made for him. It said, Meet me at the fountain.’

She thinks about them then, Jonathan and Florence. The many times they must have walked up into the forest, swum at the base of the falls, kissed right here, lying on the very same floor. How Edie was conceived right here.

‘I can come with you to Russia if you like,’ Rose whispers.

Is she asleep? Rose dreams she’s awake, lying there, listening.

A slight change in the light arrives, a change in the darkness to a grey, a glistening grey, a grey filled with stars. She reaches out to touch it.

Pearl turns further onto her side, and Rose watches her dim outline.

Sometime before dawn they sit up in the gloom. They go into the forest through the gauzy mist and without speaking begin the long walk home. They go down through the trees, clamber into the gully, where this time Pearl doesn’t complain. She listens carefully instead, for where to put her feet, where to put her hands. They rock hop across the creek, its water higher, flowing faster, and scramble up the other side. The sun is just up, the first glimmer of it, when they make their way through the open sclerophyll and into the stand of butter-coloured gum trees.