The Midnight Dress(50)

Edie stops then, places the beading in her lap. Rose looks at her face and quickly away again.

‘What kind of things?’ Rose asks.

‘Terrible things.’

‘Like what?’

‘Can you imagine?’

‘Was it because of your father going mad?’

‘Yes,’ says Edie. ‘And because he left, just walked out; they said she can’t have been a very good wife and all in all she must have been a very wicked wife, she must have done something to him, and to Granny Baker too. Everything had been good at the big house until Florence arrived.’

Rose bites her bottom lip.

‘We’ll run away,’ was what Luke Grace said to me. ‘Do you mean it?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I swear on my heart.’

We arranged the time. The bend in the road beside Hansen’s corner. I went there in the morning just after the sun came up. I left a note for my mother saying goodbye, and she must have woken, read it, felt very sorry for me, yet she didn’t come looking. She knew I’d be home.

I waited all day. First when the sun was high in the sky and baking, and later when the afternoon rains came.

Finally I went home, drenched. My little suitcase by my side. I came in through the back door, right here where my mother was, and she was sewing just the way she always did. I had the whole day inside of me.

‘Now, now,’ she said, catching me in her arms.

I was ill after that, grew very thin, coughed and coughed and coughed. Black rings appeared beneath my eyes. I could hardly sit up I was so weak. My body was almost destroyed by love.

‘Some people are built for love,’ said my mother. ‘Some people are not.’

‘They say you’re a witch,’ was what I shouted.

‘Edie,’ was all she said, but my words had hurt her terribly.

She bent down her head and began to cry.

And it was a stupid thing to say, because if she were a witch for loving the mountain then I must have been one too.’

Rose has nearly finished attaching the third panel of the skirt. The floor is littered with money beetle jewels. She opens and shuts her fingers and counts the needle pricks. The rain thunders on the roof, pauses, thunders again.

‘It’s after midnight,’ Edie says. ‘You can’t ride home in this. I’ll clear the day bed and you can lie down there. Will your father worry? Should you phone him?’

‘He won’t be worried,’ says Rose. ‘And we don’t have a phone.’

Suddenly Rose is so tired that she yawns into her hands. Edie looks at her, shakes her head kindly, and goes about removing boxes from the day bed: newspapers in piles, several toilet dolls in crocheted skirts, some cracked ceramic figurines. She motions for Rose to lie down, takes the embroidered shawl from the back of the chair and spreads it over her. The shawl smells strange to Rose, like old dried lavender, just the ghost of a scent remaining.

‘I’m sorry I took someone else there,’ says Rose. ‘It’s just Pearl is my best friend and I wanted to show her.’ She’s surprised to find her cheeks burning and the nettle of tears in her eyes.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Edie. ‘It doesn’t belong to me, that place, Rose.’

Rose is asleep before Edie leaves the room. She wakes once during the night, when the rain has paused and the sound of the mountain fills the house, the magnified whispering of trees and the creeks’ speaking in tongues. She opens her eyes and sees that a family of possums have climbed through the kitchen windows to graze on crumbs and eat the fruit left out on shelves. They stare at her brazenly with glowing eyes.

The cool air Edie speaks of? It drifts down off the mountain, unravelling itself through trees, dipping its fingers in streams. It comes in through the back door and through the windows cast open for it. The fat possums shiver and return to their meals. It lifts up the months on the calendar and leafs through the newspaper pattern on the table. It fills up the yellow kitchen and spills into the hallway.

Rose closes her eyes again and smiles.





Buttonhole Stitch





People see him being taken in. He’s beside the big detective from out of town, who’s camped at the Raindance Motel. The big detective has his hand on Paul Rendell’s back, a protective, fatherly act; he’s talking to the young man as they go in through the front door and down to the tiny interview room.

‘Sit down, Paul,’ says Glass. ‘I’m glad you’ve agreed to come and talk to us.’

One of the officers, Williams, knows Paul. They went to the same boarding school and played football together. He avoids Paul’s face.

Paul is fidgeting with his shirt. Scratching his chest. Wiping at his eye.

‘We just want to have a bit of a chat about all this,’ says Glass. ‘So we can get it right in our heads, your involvement with these girls. Okay?’

‘There isn’t any involvement,’ says Paul. ‘Am I under arrest?’

‘No, Paul, you’re not under arrest,’ says Glass.

‘Just say what you know, Paul,’ says Officer Williams, quietly. ‘And you can go home.’

‘I don’t know what you want me to say,’ says Paul. ‘I can’t say anything if I don’t know anything.’