The Midnight Dress(47)

‘I think it must have been just a splinter, a sugar splinter – it must have blown up from the drying pans. I had to go home from work. There’ll be a record there and at the hospital.’

‘So why were you up the hill at the hut with two teenagers?’ Glass asks into the silence.

‘I wasn’t,’ Paul says.

Glass laughs.

‘She asked me,’ Paul says. ‘Pearl asked me. It was just a bit of fun. Nothing happened.’

Glass watches him. Paul Rendell wipes at the stream from his swollen eye for the first time.

‘You’d have to be twice her age, wouldn’t you?’ asks Glass.

‘You’ve got it all wrong,’ Paul says.





It isn’t a good sign. Her father still isn’t home. The caravan is tidied, the dinner cooked; hers is stored away in the fridge. The dishes have been washed and dried. She approaches his bed, opens the curtain. His bed is made up. Unslept in. She sees his sketchbook beneath the bed, his pencils beside it. When she opens the pages she sees the drawings of Pearl. She flips the pages. He has tried to draw her again and again and failed. He can’t get her right. Rose puts the sketchbook back.

He’ll be at the pub, his art having failed him. What does it matter? It was bound to happen sooner or later. It’s the way things are. No point getting upset. Steel yourself. Hold on tight. Don’t show any emotion.

She takes a towel and walks to the amenities block, showers and washes her hair. She puts on a load of washing. Sits on her little bed. Stands up again. Even washed, she can smell the mountain on her. She holds up her forearm to her nose and breathes. Not there, it’s an aura, a cloud.

When her father doesn’t drink he calls it his disease, but when he does, he says, ‘Oh, Rose, keep your wig on, it’s just a couple down at the pub with mates. There’s this great bloke called Frank, old-timer, lived here since he was a boy. He knows the sea like the back of his hand, said he could take us out fishing next Saturday.’

Once when she was eight he disappeared down the track in some town. The caravan was parked in a camping ground by a dry riverbed. ‘I’ll be back in an hour or so,’ he said, but he wasn’t. All night she lay awake in the caravan, waiting. She listened to every noise, divided them between good and bad. Someone putting their tea on, a toilet flushing, a washing machine chugging in a faraway laundry. Crickets singing in a scary tone, the crack of twig underfoot, the sudden sound of wings.

She thought, what if he didn’t come home? What if he was in a fight and punched in the head, and someone was dragging him to where he could never be found? She thought these things because these were the things that her father had told her happened: ‘Once there was this man called Pep,’ he said, ‘who got into trouble with some big men, and one night they just came into the pub and picked him up off the stool and carried him away. No one did a thing. Everyone just sat there like it was normal, and no one looked at the carrying men. That was the end of Pep.’

‘Where did they take him?’ she asked.

‘Who would know?’ he replied.

What would she do, she wondered that night when she was eight. She would have to walk into town in the morning and go up and down the streets looking for him. She would go to the hospital and then to the police station. She would have to say, Excuse me, I’m looking for Patrick John Lovell.

But she never had to do these things because her father nearly always came home. That night, late, or the next. She would hear the caravan door swing open. The crickets would lower their voices. All the bush noises would become just the normal every-night cracking and springing of twigs. His parka would rustle. A match would flare. He’d bump into the table and swear.

That morning by the dry riverbed his face was puffed up from the drinking, and he was covered in dirt and grass from where he’d slept.

Rose said, ‘I thought you weren’t coming home.’

He said, ‘Well, I did.’

She said, ‘I thought I’d have to go to the police station.’

He said, ‘If you do that we’ll be up shit’s creek – they’ll take you off me and put you in an orphanage.’

The orphanage. She imagined cold wooden floorboards, porridge at a long table, bunk beds, dirty-faced kids.

Now, in a caravan in paradise, she hears her father come home late in the night. He smells of the sea, sweaty, briny; she squeezes her eyes closed in the dark. He smells huge. He fills up the caravan with his odour. She hears him singing softly, a low lilting tune. She waits for him to stumble, but he doesn’t. She waits for the bloody beer-sodden stench of his clothes to reach her, but it doesn’t.

She sits up when he opens her curtain a fraction.

‘Where have you been?’ she says.

‘Where have you been, more to the point? Elaine reckons Pearl’s mother was here last night looking for you both.’

‘We got stuck on the mountain in the dark.’

He raises his eyebrows approvingly, her excuse accepted.

‘I’ve been fishing,’ he says. ‘That bloke called Frank. Night fishing. What a crack. Caught fifteen.’

‘They stink.’

‘But they’ll taste good,’ he says and smiles in the dark like a little boy.

After he has finished in the kitchen, after she hears him shed his clothes and climb into his bed, she pulls her curtain shut. She turns on her bedside light, opens the bedside drawer, brushes out her hair to calm herself. Seventy-one strokes. Seventy-one strokes. She presses her fingers to her eyes. What did her mother look like? It’s such a simple thing to remember your mother’s face, yet there is nothing there in her mind but a clean blank space.