The Midnight Dress(71)

Rose sits up in bed. Everything she owns is in her little drawer. She’s not like Edie, who has kept everything; she only has her brush, seventy-one strokes, her black fingernail polish, her black lipstick, her black eyeliner, her bobby pins and hair ties. Her flannel shirts. Her t-shirts. One pair of black jeans. One pair of shorts. Underpants, two bras. She has her green notebook. Words, that’s all she’s ever kept. Just words.

Pearl’s dress lies across the bottom of the bed, pale in the sunlight from her little window. She reaches out to touch it. It was wrong of Pearl to not come back. To take the midnight dress and not return. Rose had waited for hours. Murray had kissed her lips, again and again, dripped the last drops of vodka onto her tongue.

‘Time to get up, Tolstoy,’ her father says, when he’s back inside.

He’s whistling. It’s his own nervous kind of happy tune that he whistles when he’s ready to get on the open road again. Leave everything behind.

She sits up. Pulls the curtain. Puts on her clothes. She empties the drawer into her backpack, stuffs the tangerine dress into a plastic bag.

‘Nearly ready, Rose?’ he asks, when she opens the curtain around her bed.

He can’t look her in the face. There’s something wrong with him. He’s blown up with the drink, his eyes puffy like he’s been crying. He looks around the caravan interior as though checking that everything is shipshape: they’re about to plunge into the open sea, let’s launch this boat, crack open champagne.

‘What’s wrong?’ she says.

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ he says.

He still can’t meet her eyes.

‘I’m not coming.’

‘Oh, right,’ he says.

He reaches out and checks a window.

She has never in all her life felt her mother’s presence. Her mother has never stood beside her and made her shiver. She has never flown next to her shoulder. But right here in the caravan, Rose feels her for the first time. It starts in her toes and fills her from the bottom up. A kind of liquid spirit, that’s what it feels like. A you’ll-be-safe, don’t-turn-back resolve pouring into her. She’s sure it’s her mother. Don’t go backwards, don’t touch all the places, stand up now, pick up your bags, let me see your hair now, it’s beautiful the way it’s falling over your shoulders, you’ve grown taller and look how strong you are, one foot in front of the next, Rose, that’s right, toward the door.

There at last, there, he’s finally looked at her.

‘What have you done?’ Rose says.

‘What’re you talking about?’

‘What have you done?’ She feels sick, can hardly stand.

‘I’ve done nothing,’ he shouts, slamming his foot into the wall, then suddenly he’s crying.

She shakes her head, turns her back, goes out the door. Down the two steps. She needs to get away from him.

‘What do you think you’re going to do?’ her father sobs.

‘I don’t know,’ she says.

‘Well, that doesn’t sound like much of a plan.’

That makes her laugh. He does too. The ridiculousness of it. They’ve been driving around the country in circles for eleven years.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ he whispers.

She walks into the sunlight. Keep walking, says her mother. Not in words but in Rose’s heartbeat.

‘Rose,’ her father calls.

Keep walking.

‘Rose.’

Keep walking.

‘Rose.’





Rubbish is everywhere in the streets. Streamers and paper flowers have fallen from the awnings. Soft-drink tins, burger wrappers, straws. She finds a ten-dollar note as she walks, which is good, because she didn’t ask for any money when she left.

She pushes open the door to Crystal Corner, hears the cascade of tinkling bells. Pattie Kelly looks at the tangerine dress in the plastic bag.

‘Where’s Pearl?’ she says.

There’s something about the way she says it that scares Rose. There is a sharp edge to Pattie’s voice, she’s saying, Why isn’t Pearl inside that dress?

‘Isn’t she here?’ says Rose, and there’s a slight realisation. It’s crouching, rising, growing limbs. She turns her back on it quickly.

‘No,’ says Pattie. ‘She didn’t come home. I thought she was with you.’

Rose thinks she probably slept in Jonah Pedersen’s car at the beach. That’s all. She doesn’t say that.

‘She’s got my dress,’ is what she says.

Pattie looks at her.

Afterward, for years, Rose thinks that Pattie was seeing her aura, was seeing its true colour. Black.

She looks at Rose with a kind of horror.

‘Something’s wrong,’ she says.

‘I’m sure she’s all right,’ says Rose. She knows she isn’t. She wants to fall to the ground and scream.

‘No,’ says Pattie, ‘something’s wrong.’

There’s a flurry of phone calls first, then a blizzard. Jonah Pedersen says he arranged to meet Pearl but was picked up by the police for driving unlicensed. It’s terrible; it might just ruin his professional football career. His father is still down at the police station trying to sort things out. By the time he walked to the mill yards last night, Pearl was long gone.