The Midnight Dress(5)

‘Shit,’ says Rose. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Sorry,’ says Pearl. ‘I talk too much.’

Pearl shows Rose the way to art. The day has heated up, the afternoon clouds crowding the sky. It will rain soon. Already Rose can tell from the way everything has grown breathless and still, the air is right up close and personal, it’s like walking through honey.

‘But do you know what you want to be?’ says Pearl.

Rose bites her bottom lip. She thinks of climbing on the rocks at the beach, which is her favourite thing but hardly a career choice. And her green notebook where she writes her stories, her stupid embarrassing stories, as if she’d mention that.

‘God, Rose,’ says Pearl. ‘It’s just a question. Don’t look so scared.’

The caravan seems even smaller after school. Her father is sitting on the top step waiting for her. It’s the first time he’s been up. Really up. His eyes have cleared.

‘Nice beard,’ says Rose.

‘Thank you,’ he replies.

He always grows a beard. Sitting there without a shirt, it gives him a biblical air. He might stand up and proclaim something, point a stick at the water and part the sea. He is always freshly chastened when he gives up drinking. His forehead is smooth, there is none of the treacherous twinkle in his eyes.

‘How was it?’ he says.

‘How do you think?’ says Rose.

‘I made you some pancakes,’ he says.

‘That’s weird,’ says Rose.

‘Come on now,’ he says, ‘can’t I be kind?’

‘It doesn’t really suit you.’

She goes inside and sees he’s taken out his sketchbook and one pencil. Soon he’ll draw again. Hesitantly, as though he can’t remember how. He’ll start to notice the world. He’ll say, Will you look at that sky, what do you think of that, Rose? He’ll think aloud about paints.

On the bus home, lightsaber boy had sat in front of her. It was deliberate. She’d narrowed her eyes and looked out the window. He seemed newly grown tall, didn’t know what to do with his great lengths of legs and arms. He smelt. He needed to wash his shaggy brown hair. Rose ignored him as hard as she could, stared right through him when he spoke to her.

‘I was only mucking about,’ he said. ‘Today, you know. The whole Star Wars thing.’

‘It’s all right,’ she replied, glancing at him, not smiling.

He played the drums with his fingers on the back of the next seat. She ignored him until he turned back and put on his headphones.

‘There was this girl who never shut up,’ Rose tells her father. ‘And these other girls. They’re all going in some parade. Everyone goes in a parade here. It’s like some pagan thing. Something to do with harvesting the cane. Everyone has to buy a dress.’

Her father raises his dark eyebrows.

‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘I won’t be doing it.’

‘You can do it if you want.’

‘Have you ever seen me in a dress?’

Later she goes to the beach and draws her name in the sand. ROSE LOVELL. Large curved running writing with loops and petals. ROSE LOVELL. Rose Lovell does not wear dresses. Rose Lovell does not need friends. Yet all she can smell, even with the huge sky and the evening storm clouds brewing, is coconut and frangipani.





Oyster Stitch





On the second morning, when the girl is gone, the mountain seems to watch over the town. Skein after skein of birds unravel from the forest canopy. The air is heavy with the smell of molasses and the ground is littered with cane black. There are still paper flowers decorating the telephone poles, streamers hanging from shop windows.

The town is fidgety. School girls and women meet in restless huddles along the length of Main Street, disband, band again anew. The topic remains unchanged. Something is wrong. Something isn’t right. She’s run away. Would she run away? She’s disappeared, clean disappeared, leaving not a trace behind.

Mrs Rendell, the newsagent and post mistress, cannot sit still. She goes up and down the two aisles of her shop, nylon stockings shishing, straightening magazines, talking to anyone who will listen.

‘She’s gone, she is, I know it in my bones,’ she says, then whispers, ‘it’s a murder, I don’t want to say it, but I know it. I feel it.’

Her only son, Paul, comes out from behind the curtain that leads to his little Blue Moon Book Exchange. He leans against the wall, folds his arms, watches her with watercolour blue eyes.

He’ll join a shambolic search of the cane fields closest to the mill, alongside fifty or so agitated men. First they’ll search for her where the cane has been cut, a long line of them spread out, trampling down the stalks with their boots. Then later they’ll look in the fields not yet harvested, in the rows. They’ll peer through leaves that have grown tall and lush in the wet. They’ll search the ditches that run beside the fields, all the smaller streams.

They will take boats out on the flat green river. Ride haphazardly without a plan. They’ll break the surface, send out a display of ripples that reaches those who have come to watch on the old bridge in town. When the ripples pass and the river grows flat again the townsfolk will see their own reflections there. They will look into the river’s mirror at each other.