The Midnight Dress(58)

‘Yes,’ whispers Rose.

‘What?’ says Mrs Rendell.

‘Yes,’ says Rose.

Pearl is lying back on her bed when Rose enters. She has flung herself there and cried into her hands. Now she can’t move.

‘Oh God,’ she says, when she sees the book in Rose’s hands. ‘Oh God, oh God, oh God.’

Rose hands her the book. Pearl holds it like it could easily shatter into a million pieces, like it isn’t just The Captive Heart, which looks old, tattered, as if it should be trashed. Rose turns to go.

‘Don’t,’ says Pearl.

She goes through the pages one by one. Slowly. When she finds the message she gasps and falls back on the bed, holding the book over her face, kicking her legs.

‘What does it say?’

Pearl reads, Come to me in my dreams, and then by day I shall be well again! For so the night will more than pay the hopeless longing of the day.

Rose takes the novel and looks at the words printed in pencil in the margin of page two hundred and one. He has very plain handwriting: for all his suave words, his handwriting is like simple wooden furniture. He hasn’t signed his name. There’s no Paul written after the poem. He isn’t game to sign his name. There’s nothing else.

‘Maybe he didn’t write it,’ says Rose.

‘Oh, he did.’

‘I think you have to stop this now,’ says Rose.

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s freaking me out.’

Pearl laughs.

This time she doesn’t say it’s a game.

‘I can’t,’ she says.





Double Cross-stitch





Afterward he crouches beside her, black. It’s impossible that she’s dead. Impossible. He has only pulled her back as she tries to leave. That’s all. Once. She’s so light. That’s what surprises him, like she’s made of nothing. The dress slips through his fingers, and she starts to turn again. She’s laughing.

Then again. He’s laughing as well but he’s angry too. Not surface anger. A towline suddenly snapped taut inside him. If she’d just stop still he could explain it to her. Who he is. What he means. But none of it makes sense. She’s moving faster now, starting to run, he’s grabbed a handful of her dress and she’s falling. Heavily to earth, head to stones. Not moving. The dress settles around her, a dark cloud. That’s all it takes.

He thinks in frantic bursts. She isn’t dead. She can’t be. ‘Are you asleep?’ he asks her, softly. He looks into her eyes, but they look past him at the sky.

He carries her. She’s not easy to carry. She melts over his arms. He wants to scream but he doesn’t until he’s in the car with his windows rolled down, out on the beach road. He howls. That’s the word for it. He doesn’t want to leave her out in the elements. It seems wrong. He tries to shut her eyes but cannot shut them. He’s sobbing then. Oh God. Fucking Jesus Christ, oh God. His words ring through the trees. He carries her along the track in the dark.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Just wake up.’

He slides with her, tumbles down through the vines. There are two rocks close together with a dark tight space between them. He shoves her head up and into this space and tries to push her body in after. ‘Come on, come on,’ he says. It’s the dress. It’s slippery f*cking stuff, whatever that dress is made of. He really didn’t mean it. Not any of it. ‘I didn’t mean it,’ he says to her, smoothing back her hair, giving up her little tomb.

He piles up sticks instead. He can see in the dark. He has slung the girl over his shoulder and carried her further through the brush. He has never felt so strong. He keeps spotting more and more branches he can use. He builds a cairn of sticks over the top of her. He wants to protect her from the light rain that has started to fall.

She’ll stay dry under the sticks until she is found. All he cares about is that she stays dry. He laughs at this absurd thought, lying on his side, then sits up. But when the sun starts to rise, he presses the balls of his hands to his eyes and cries like a little boy.





‘Hello, Tolstoy,’ says her father. He’s taken to calling Rose that. ‘What you writing?’

‘None of your business.’

This makes him laugh.

‘You’re either off sewing with your fairy godmother or writing in that little green book,’ he says. ‘Must be a good story.’

‘It’s not a story.’

‘This harvest thing sounds like a bit of a caper,’ he says. ‘They do it in all these old towns, Elaine says, floats and everything, dancing in the streets.’

‘I’ll be on the bowl of fruit float,’ Rose deadpans.

‘I’ll have to get a photo.’

They have an old Instamatic; they’ve had it for as long as Rose can remember. It sits above the fridge and occasionally spews out photos that develop slowly in their hands. Photos of the sky, of cemetery headstones, of her father, which Rose must have taken when she was small. He stands in some now indistinct place, his eyes closed against the sun. There are pictures of Rose: small Rose, red hair looping across her face, Rose in a range of school uniforms, sullen Rose, angry Rose.

‘Are you going to come then?’ she asks.