The Midnight Dress(56)
Did he take his time deciding such things? Did he walk this way and that, searching? Does a tree stand out in these situations, present itself to despairing eyes? It must have been lower, that tree, somewhere near the first car park, perhaps one of the introduced camphor laurels in clear view of everyone.
He felt cold. That’s what he said to his mother after the splinter entered his eye. ‘What do you mean, cold?’ Mrs Rendell said. ‘I mean cold, like my bones are cold.’
‘Well that just doesn’t make any sense,’ she replied.
By the time he came home from the police station in the night, there were already several news reports that in a Far North Queensland town a man was assisting police with their investigations into the missing girl case. Outside the doors to the tiny station a crowd had gathered.
‘Get out of here, you lot,’ Officer Williams had hissed at them, while Paul hung his head.
They had not jeered or shouted, that crowd, but their whispers droned, a nest of angry hornets. Someone threw a Coke bottle that hit Paul square on the nose.
‘Jesus,’ he said.
His mother had waited up for his return. She was certain he would return. When she heard the back door open, she came huffing down the stairs, but he walked past her as though she wasn’t there at all. He put his keys on the counter. Went and sat behind his desk in the Blue Moon Book Exchange. Put his head back in his hands.
Car Park Number One can accommodate forty cars. It says that in the council brochure ‘Walks around Leonora’, although there are never that many cars. It’s always nearly empty, a desolate sort of car park, where voices seem louder than they really are. There is parking space for one bus. It was exactly seventeen days after the Harvest Parade.
The bus was from Townsville, chartered by the Twin City Rambling Society. It would have been a terrible thing for them, most of them being old, ready with their gaiters and their aluminium walking poles. Their thermoses, their lightweight backpacks. It was a tree at the edge of the car park clearing – yes, it must have been. Maybe he looked higher, walked up the tracks, that would have been more romantic, but then came back down and did what was practical. Still, the car park seemed such a tawdry choice.
He had on his Leonora Lions jersey and jeans. His sandshoes. His hands hung by his side, choice made, palms hidden. The rope, heavy-duty nylon cord, yellow, festive looking, available from any hardware shop. He swung slightly. He turned his purple face to the car park, then away again, purple face to the car park, away again, like some terrible tree ornament.
‘Lord,’ said one of the first to alight from the bus.
There was never a note. Not in his jeans pockets, not in his car, which was in the car park, a small blue second-hand Sigma, locked. Not in his bedroom in the house of his childhood, his football trophies still on the shelf, not in the small book exchange filled with the dusty romance novels. For all his words, his honey-smooth, carefully chosen words, and his radio announcer voice, in the end he had nothing to say.
It’s a summer of air, a summer of toeholds, a summer of trees. Rose knows each of them as she goes, touching them with her hands. She knows all the rocks as well, their slightest movement beneath her sandshoes: crossing the gully is like dancing, she knows each stepping stone. She thinks about Edith Emerald Baker, how many times she must have walked this way. How she must miss it now. How she must long for the singing creeks and the secrets of the trees. Was that why she collected and kept so much from the place? All the leaves rotting in boxes and white cedar flowers pressed behind paper. All the powdery remains of firewheel blossoms and climbing lilies, like dying stars, withering. The quiet vases filled to the brim with quandongs, gully walnuts, startling flashes of crimson berries.
Rose stops and looks down at her face in the water, her hair tied back in two long ponytails, without a single pin. Fire red. Pearl smiles at her own reflection. It is the second time they have been there together.
Pearl wears a feverish intense expression. Her face has been this way for the last week, permanently flushed, permanently lovesick. She flings herself back into chairs, weak-limbed, and stares right through people when they speak. Her notes as secretary of the Leonora State High Harvest Parade Float Committee have grown sloppy. At their last meeting she sat at the head of the table, but her mind kept drifting.
Weekend: working bee to paint canvas fruit?
Organise trial run on back of Mr Harvey’s truck?
Question: will fruit even fit?
Everything was unsolved. Everything unsolvable.
She seems puzzled by her own actions. ‘I can’t believe I did it,’ she says. ‘Put that note in the book, handed it to him. Stared at him right in the eyes. He knew, I know he knew. He mightn’t find it. Of course he’ll find it. He would find it. He mightn’t find it. He would find it. What if some else found it?’
Her name, Pearlie, signed in fluoro highlighter, lemon sorbet.
‘What the hell did you write to him?’ Rose asks, after they’ve navigated the fallen tree. She really doesn’t want to know.
‘I wrote him a poem,’ says Pearl.
‘Oh God.’
Pearl is good at lots of things – netball, softball, cross-country, doing her hair in a way that looks like she hasn’t done it at all, peeling Mintie wrappers into tiny ribbons, shading eye make-up, making large fibreglass fruit – but Rose doesn’t think poetry is one of them.