The Midnight Dress(60)

In Edie’s back paddock she doesn’t stop. She looks at the house and the ruin of Granny Baker’s chair, which still sits in the middle of the sloping field, the newly dried-off grass waving through its frame. She wonders if Edie is watching her: Edie always seems to know if anyone is there. It’s as though she herself has roots that stretch beneath the house, up the hill, into the forest, sensing whoever comes that way.

Rose shrugs away the thought.

In the first stream she finds a pink pebble, and she reaches through the clear water to retrieve it. It’s perfectly round and smooth. She decides almost immediately that she’ll give it to Pearl. It’s a Pearl kind of stone. Pearl will hold it in her hands and say, What made it this colour? I’ll show it to Mum, it must be some kind of mineral. But how did it end up here? There aren’t really any other pink stones. I love it, Rose, it’s just so beautiful.

She will add it to her box of beautiful things: necklaces that boyfriends have given her, friendship bands and invitations, and now Paul Rendell’s love note, torn from the romance novel, folded, pressed into a perfect square.

Rose hears the voices as she carries the pink stone up through the trees. She has thirty more minutes of climbing before she will reach the hut, but already she can hear them, snatches of their conversation, a scrap of laughter drifting down. She stops still on the track. A fragment of something deeper, a man’s voice, reaches her ears.

It can’t be.

She starts to walk again. Quietly. Her heart thudding in her ears. The voices disappear and reappear: the forest playing games with her. It holds the voices then throws them down like confetti through the trees. Pearl’s clear voice, suddenly magnified. Her laughter, the echo of her laughter.

When Rose finally rounds the corner she sees them there. Paul Rendell sits on the flat rock beside the hut, where he should not be. He’s a blight on the landscape. He is shirtless, his pale skin stretched tight across his shoulders and chest. He is staring at Pearl, who stands in front of him, her hair unbound. He is dipping his head to her breast; Pearl is leaning away. Rose’s foot touches a twig. The pink pebble falls through her fingers.

‘Oh my god,’ shouts Pearl, turning. ‘What are you doing here?’

It’s a terrible question. Rose showed her the place, gave it to her like a gift. Pearl is pulling down her singlet, wrapping up her hair, crossing her arms, shaking her head in disbelief.

Paul Rendell is the calm one. He looks at Rose, smiles. He looks, Rose thinks, disappointed, unsatisfied, but also a little scared. He is calculating ahead. Fucking stupid spotty girl with the red hair; Rose can almost read his mind, the way he looks at her. Then he smiles his broadest smile and reaches for his shirt.

‘What are you doing here?’ whispers Rose, finally. She’s not even sure she has actually spoken.

‘It’s not just your place,’ Pearl says. ‘You don’t own the whole forest, Rose.’

She has started gathering up her things: she has brought food, and in the hut, through the door, Rose can see a sheet spread out very neatly on the floor.

‘We better go,’ Pearl says.

Paul Rendell keeps watching Rose, thinking, is she the sort to tell? Will she keep her mouth shut? He seems huge in the clearing. He slips his shirt on, slowly, as though he has all the time in the world.

‘You’ve ruined everything,’ Pearl says, when she passes Rose, who is stuck to the ground, motionless. Yet Pearl can’t meet her eyes.

‘Rose,’ Paul says, very quietly, and nods.





Flame Stitch





What if everything could be changed? What if the girl in the midnight dress could walk backward through the mill yards, backward through that night of molasses and moonlit sky? Back through the cane bins, back across the train tracks, back across the stubble of rocks, the butterflies tumbling over and over in her belly, back across the dew-wet grass, away from the end?

What if that could really happen? If there was some way?

What if Rose and Pearl could stand together beside the toilet block, laughing, listening to the band play ‘Edelweiss’ out of tune, the reflections of the swimming pool dancing on their skin? There is a red paper flower in Rose’s hair. Pearl has placed it there. What if they made a different decision right then?

What if Rose could go backward? Backward to the caravan park, backward in the car, backward through the cane fields until they dissolved, back through the moonlit scrub, back through the small nameless towns and back through the city until it too faded, all the graffiti and brick walls and train stations, houses petering out to nothing but fences and billboards and then empty land again.

She would touch each place she remembered, kneel down and touch it with her hands. She would touch the roads at every corner she and her father had turned. She would touch the doors to motels and hotels, the boom gates of van parks, and the faded signs in camp grounds. She would touch the statues and stone angels in cemeteries, the mountains and their favourite trees. She would cross the desert and cross the mountains, cross the strait. She would keep going until she arrived back at the beginning, at the place where they took their first steps away.

What if Pearl could start again with the letter D? Dimitri Orlov. What if he could open her letter in Russia one frosty grey morning and read with astonishment of this beautiful daughter?

What if they could stop right there, standing together in the shadows. In that moment they are nothing but their skin and breath and whispered words.