The Midnight Dress(7)

Pearl’s bedroom is as small as a cupboard, with a slanting roof and every section of wall covered in something, pictures of models and famous paintings and fragments of poems and constellations of stars and photocopies of stone statues and maps of countries like Brazil and cities like Paris and even a diagram of the Moscow underground. Rose doesn’t know where to look. Do not go quietly into the night, she reads on a scrap of paper, tacked down, then looks quickly away because it seems a private thing. She looks at the Moscow Metro instead. Pearl sits on her bed with legs crossed, waiting.

‘I’m not very good at French,’ says Rose. ‘I actually haven’t done it since, well, not ever.’

‘I’ll make it up,’ says Pearl. ‘Don’t worry. Let’s do it quickly, so we can talk about other things.’

She hands Rose the French–English dictionary and asks her to find the words. Pearl cobbles them together on a piece of paper. Rose isn’t sure if they make sense but Pearl says them with such conviction that they sound truthful enough. Pearl holds her heart and kneels down on the floor in her spangly, incense-scented bedroom and lowers her neck onto the footstool.

‘I’d hate to get beheaded,’ she says, when she stands up. ‘Or eaten by a tiger. But maybe it would be more exciting than just getting a disease.’

Rose tries to think of something interesting to say but can’t.

‘I think you should do the whole dress thing,’ says Pearl. ‘The Harvest Parade thing I mean. It’s really fun. I’m the secretary of the Leonora State High Harvest Parade Float Committee. We’re going to make a really big fibreglass fruit bowl with fruit, and all the girls will be standing inside. I mean next to really big bananas and apples and everything.’

‘I’m not really a fibreglass fruit sort of person,’ says Rose.

‘There’s heaps of time,’ says Pearl, ignoring her. ‘You could buy a dress or get one made. There’s a couple of dressmakers in town. Or lots of the girls go to Cairns. It’s bigger than formal night. No kidding. And you can probably get to be a princess, the queen is nearly always in Year Twelve, but you never know. But a princess is just as good.’

‘I don’t have . . . ’ says Rose. ‘We mightn’t stay in town that long.’

‘I know someone who could make you a dress,’ shouts Pearl. ‘Of course. Of course. Of course. There’s this old lady who is a dressmaker, she lives right at the end of Hansen Road.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘No you’ll love her. There’s all these stories about her, Rose. She made all these dresses with her mother when she was small and the dresses were amazingly beautiful and kind of magical or something, well, I don’t know about the magical actually, but she’s really unusual, weird-like, and she lives in this really crazy house full of stuff. And she doesn’t even have electricity or something. And quite possibly she’s . . . you know.’

‘What?’

Pearl doesn’t say anything then. Rose waits. She doesn’t know why her heart is beating a little faster.

‘End of Hansen Road,’ says Pearl, eventually. She smiles and nods at Rose. See, she says with her eyes, there is a dressmaker for you. A mysterious one, who will entirely suit your needs.

‘Still not that interested,’ says Rose, expressionless.

There are long silences between them. The silences make Rose twitchy but Pearl doesn’t seem to notice them. She lies back on her bed and smiles right into them.

‘My father’s last name is Orlov. It’s very common. There are about one hundred of them living in Moscow.’ She reaches under her bed and pulls out several pieces of paper stapled together. ‘My mum got them from a man on a bus who knew someone in the embassy. The buses stop here every day – you wouldn’t believe the kinds of people we meet. She said she got the addresses because I wouldn’t shut up about trying to find him, even though it’s probably a crime or something, to have the addresses I mean. I’ve written to all the A. Orlovs.’

‘Has anyone written back?’

‘Not yet,’ says Pearl. ‘I only sent them a week ago. It takes weeks and weeks for the letters to get to Moscow.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said, Hello, my name is Pearl Kelly and I’m looking for my father, Bear Orlov.’

‘Bear?’

‘That was his nickname, that was all my mother knew him as. She only knew him for a night.’

Pearl rests back again, closes her eyes, leaves Rose sitting there holding the Muscovite Orlovs.

‘My mother was a dancer and he met her in the night – she says he had to bow his head to get through doorways. He was really handsome and even though he didn’t speak much English they talked and talked and talked all that night. It was love at first sight. They talked at the bar and then the cafe, they talked on the metro. They talked beneath the Eiffel Tower, and finally they talked outside her little apartment until the sun came up.

He was going back that day, he was an attaché or something, something to do with the government but she can’t remember what any more and it didn’t really matter at the time. My mother wrote down her address on the back of a serviette and he put it in his coat pocket, but it must have fallen out on the train or on the platform of the Gare du Nord, because he never wrote to her. She waited for him and everything, like the whole nine months, but he never came back, so she came home with me.’