The Midnight Dress(46)

‘Shit,’ says Rose.

Pearl has stopped still on the track and Rose has run straight into her back.

Picking her way up the track before them is Edie.

‘Good God,’ says Edie, ‘I’m so glad to see you.’

Rose sets her face into a stone mask, crosses her arms.

‘Hi,’ says Pearl.

‘Hello,’ says Edie.

‘I’m Pearl,’ says Pearl, when Rose doesn’t introduce her.

‘Edith Baker,’ says Edie. ‘Rose has told me about you.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ says Rose. ‘I’ve never even mentioned her.

Pearl smiles. Edie smiles.

‘Look at the pair of you,’ Edie says. ‘What happened?’

‘We left it too late to come down, that’s all,’ says Rose. ‘We were never in danger.’

‘I knew it,’ says Edie. ‘But I couldn’t rest until I knew for sure. I saw you go up yesterday but not down.’

‘You shouldn’t spy,’ says Rose and immediately regrets her words because Edie flinches like she’s been slapped.

Standing there on the track, she’s so small and deflated in her sundress and gumboots. She holds a large stick in her hand. Surely she couldn’t have gone much further. Surely she wouldn’t have tried to climb down into the gully.

‘Come down and use my phone,’ says Edie. ‘Are you hungry?’

‘God, I’m starving,’ says Pearl.

Edie makes them toast and pikelets. She cuts up mango. The two girls stand in the yellow kitchen. All the windows are shut and the house is night cool. The sweat dries on their skin. They watch the blue birds on the wall, the first line of light glimmering on their wings.

‘Your dress?’ Pearl gasps.

Rose turns to where Pearl points. There by the long bank of louvres stands a dressmaker’s mannequin; pinned to it is the midnight dress. Edie must have done it last Wednesday, when Rose hadn’t come. The skirt falls in a river, the bodice is perfect, the black mourning lace sleeves are pinned into place.

‘Something felt wrong,’ says Edie, ‘so I pinned it together to make sure. I think I solved the problem. It was the way the skirt fell at the front in my mind.’

‘It’s so beautiful,’ says Pearl.

Edie looks at Rose. Rose returns her gaze. Edie’s eyes don’t ask, Will you come back? Will you make the dress with me?

She doesn’t need to ask these things.

Pattie Kelly’s eyes are swollen, and her mascara is running. She jumps out of the car and grabs Pearl into an embrace, not letting her go.

‘Jesus H. Christ,’ says Pattie. ‘I mean really, Pearl, Jesus bloody Christ.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Pearl, ‘we didn’t mean it. I mean we just went up to this place and then we were swimming in this waterfall and then we couldn’t get back down because it got so dark. I was always safe.’

‘Well, I was just about to call the police,’ Pattie says.

She thanks Edie. Edie says she’s done nothing except feed them and let them use her phone.

Rose slips into the back seat soundlessly, hoping she’ll escape Pattie’s wrath, but Pearl’s mother turns to her as well and shakes her head.

‘I went and tried to find your father but he wasn’t at the caravan and I didn’t know if that should make me more worried.’ She sobs out her last words.

Rose’s heart skips a beat, then races along at breakneck speed. Pattie Kelly puts the car into reverse and turns in a circle in Edie’s backyard. Rose watches Edie and Edie watches Rose, neither waves. Rose looks up at the shimmering mountain, the mountain looks back at her.

‘Do you girls have any idea how dangerous it is up there?’ says Pattie. ‘I mean for shit’s sake, you could have slipped on a rock and broke your neck or got washed away if a creek came down – those gullies fill up in seconds.’

Rose whispers, ‘Yes.’

Pearl says nothing but Rose sees her looking up as well.

The place they found is in both their minds, she knows it, that place where the shadows of leaves tremble on the walls and the sunlight fills up their skin to the brim and the night rolls in as huge as an ocean. That place is apart from everything and she knows, Rose Lovell knows, they will both go there again.





Ladder Stitch





Detective Glass is interested in Paul Rendell’s weeping right eye. It’s red and swollen. Tears fall from it in a steady stream.

‘I’ve been to the doctors about it,’ he says. ‘The private doctor and the hospital doctor. They can’t see anything in it at all.’

‘Someone scratch you?’ asks Glass.

They’re in the cramped little flat above the shop. Mrs Rendell’s footsteps started away down the stairs then stopped, so he knows she’s listening.

‘Someone trying to fight you off?’ he says, when Paul doesn’t answer.

‘Told you I got it at work. Ages ago. Before the parade. The light kills it, it’s driving me insane.’

It is true. Everything shines with a chandelier luminance if he closes his good eye. At home, again and again, lying in the bedroom of his childhood, he has taken Pearl’s note, ripped clear from the book, and unfolded it. He looks at her childish hand. Closes his good eye so the words read as if they’re written in diamonds.