The Midnight Dress(64)

‘Paul Rendell,’ she says, more loudly, the way a bailiff reads out the name of the accused.

‘Hello?’ he says.

He isn’t going to stop; he’s going to walk right past.

‘Don’t go near her again,’ says Rose.

Much more loudly now.

‘What?’ he says and laughs, looking back at her. He pretends he doesn’t understand.

‘You heard me,’ says Rose. ‘Don’t touch her again.’

‘Beg your pardon?’

‘Don’t touch her again,’ shouts Rose.

Paul Rendell shakes his head, looks at the man next to him, and shrugs.

‘Do you know her?’ the man asks, as they turn into Rendell’s News.

‘Never seen her in my life.’

‘Was that the girl, the redhead?’ Rose hears Mrs Rendell ask. ‘She was just in here looking to pocket something. I’ve got a bad feeling about her.’

Rose feels tears then, shakes her head, rubs her eyes. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

When she turns to go she sees that Pearl has come out of Crystal Corner and is standing on the step. Her hair is undone, she’s shoeless, she has anger in her dark eyes, as though she might stride across the seven metres that separates them and slap Rose across the face, but she doesn’t. She just shakes her head and goes back inside.

She feels deflated then, Rose Lovell, like a hot air balloon crumpling, plummeting through the blue. The problem is that the sky is inside Rose when it comes to Pearl.

Rose dreams of black tulle petticoats. She’s attaching them to a skirt in just the way that dream Edie has shown her, only the stuff has a life of its own. It’s slipping out of her hands, lifting, floating. She grabs it, fistfuls, but it keeps escaping. As soon as she gets one layer down, another wafts free until she gives up, lets the whole dark mass of it rise, trembling slightly, propelling itself like a jellyfish toward Edie’s casements. When Rose wakes she keeps her eyes closed. She doesn’t want to let that dream go.

She’s waited longer than the week and isn’t sure if she’ll go back to Edie. It’s only three nights until the parade. What’s the point of the dress? She doesn’t want to sit on a bowl-of-fruit float. They mightn’t let her, anyway. They might ban her because she hasn’t been back to school. There are probably rules to these pagan rights. Pearl might make use of her secretarial powers. She doesn’t want to think about Pearl.

Patrick Lovell is edgy, she writes that word in her green notebook. Not Edgy Cool, but On Edge. It’s exactly the kind of word she hates: blunt, thick around the middle. It grates against her nerves. She wants a better word to describe him. To the untrained eye he looks just the same, but she knows better.

He trembles faintly. He laughs too loudly.

He has painted the boom gates for Mrs Lamond, a mural; it took him the whole week, every afternoon when work was over. He covered it in fish and coral and something that is meant to be the rainforest, although to Rose it is just a green smudge. It’s tacky, the whole thing. She doesn’t want to comment on it.

‘What do you think?’ he asks.

‘You’ve sold your soul,’ she replies, which makes him laugh all the more.

Everything they say to each other is like a script they’re reading from, and everything unsaid simmers.

Simmering, that’s the word she needs to describe to her father. He’s simmering away to nothing. Soon he’ll be dry, just a dehydrated skin, like a five-day-dead blue-tongue squished on the road. He’s nothing but bluster. He’s nothing but hot wind. He can’t exist much longer this way.

Not long to go now, she thinks.

Edie is glad to see her. She’s sitting on the back steps in the cobalt evening. She smiles when Rose comes around the corner.

‘I knew it would be today,’ she says.

‘Have we still got time?’

‘Of course, of course,’ says Edie, standing up.

They open the windows along the back of the house. The louvres creak, the casements protest: Rose knows the sound of each and every one.

‘Have you made up with your good friend?’ asks Edie.

‘She’s no friend of mine,’ says Rose.

Edie hums her disapproving hum.

They sit at either end of the kitchen table and sew. Edie shows Rose how to attach a band to the tulle, stitching two lines so the whole thing can be gathered up. Rose goes to tell Edie about the dream but stops herself. She can’t say why. She knows Edie will only nod and hum. But she’s frightened she might say something else, something about the dress, its true nature, something about dark clouds.

Sewing black tulle is like wrestling with a cloud. Rose puts on the petticoats and Edie checks the length.

‘Did it burn right to the ground?’ she asks.

Rose can’t answer.

‘I want to know, that’s all,’ Edie says.

‘Almost.’

‘It’s just as well.’

Edie kneels at Rose’s feet and begins to pin where she needs to trim the tulle.

‘Sometimes when we went there, my mother and I, we never wanted to come back.’

I know, says Rose, only she doesn’t speak.

‘My mother, she was buried in her wedding dress, although she’d lost so much weight that she swam in it. She had sewn leaves into the lining: satin ash and sandpaper figs and, of course, the bleeding hearts. The green billygoat plums and the porcelain fruit. Into the coffin I put blue quandongs and the black bean pods. It raised eyebrows at the funeral parlour. But I didn’t care. I remember how young she looked, unlined. I brushed out her hair.’