The Midnight Dress(8)

Pearl opens her eyes, sits up.

‘I kissed Jonah Pedersen on the Friday night before he went away for rep. football,’ she says. ‘He wants to go out with me. I mean a permanent kind of thing.’

Rose bites her bottom lip.

‘I mean I like him. He’s the best-looking boy in the school and in Year Twelve but . . . Can I tell you a secret? He’s a really bad kisser. I mean it was like he was drooling or something. It didn’t . . . excite me.’

Rose listens to her own heartbeat. Still trying to think of something interesting.

‘But it’s kind of expected. Everyone says it was meant to be.’

‘Oh,’ is all Rose manages.

Pearl thinks of her other secret. It’s much bigger, and when she thinks it she feels fluttery and breathless. She won’t tell Rose now, the other secret will blow Rose away.

‘You look full of secrets,’ Pearl says. ‘You’re a real closed book.’

‘No I’m not,’ says Rose.

It’s almost dark when Rose gets dressed in the bathroom again. She folds up the kurta neatly and tries to give it back to Pearl’s mother.

‘Oh no, darling, you keep it – it’s a welcoming gift to you.’

Rose holds it in her hands and imagines it in the caravan, like a bright slash of blood. Pattie insists on driving her home and Pearl sits in the back beside Rose. The rain is so heavy that twice Pattie has to pull over.

‘Rose is getting her dress made by that old lady on Hansen Road,’ says Pearl, when they are stopped waiting for the rain to ease.

‘Edie Baker?’ says Pattie. ‘How do you know about her?’

‘They talk about her at school.’

‘Still?’

‘Still,’ says Pearl, with a sidelong smile at Rose.

‘I don’t know, is she even still alive?’ says Pattie.

Rose ignores them and stares out at the rain. She asks to be dropped off at the kiosk. She doesn’t want them to see the caravan or her father, who will be sitting on the step beneath the awning, staring at the sea.

‘Thank you, Mrs Kelly,’ says Rose.

‘You call me Pattie,’ says Pattie.

‘Okay,’ says Rose, although she knows she won’t.

‘And I’ll call you Ruby Heart Rose,’ says Pattie. ‘Because your aura is such a beautiful red. That’s why I chose that kurta.’

‘Oh,’ says Rose.

‘Mum reads auras,’ says Pearl. ‘Mine’s yellow.’

‘Really, Rose,’ says Pattie. ‘Yours is just the colour of a Ceylon ruby.’

‘Thanks,’ says Rose.

But after the car has driven away she feels angry because she knows Mrs Kelly can’t see anything at all. She’s just making it up. If she could really see inside her she’d know her aura is black. Onyx black. Tar black. Black as the burnt-out insides of a scorched tree.





Catch Stitch





On the third day they find the blue diamanté shoes in the mill yards, lying on the tracks beneath a cane bin, the coronet as well. An officer raises his hand and calls, then a silence quickly settles as he goes down on his hands and knees. He treats the objects with reverence, holds the small crown in his gloved hand as though it were the real thing, something precious, not tin foil. The shoes are bagged.

The big wigs have arrived from Cairns, the Detective Glass himself, who caught the killer of the girl up on the range and solved the baby in the backyard case. The crush is stopped. The mill exclaims its anger, snorts steam as the tippler and the crushers and the centrifuges grind to a halt. The last of the stack smoke dissipates in the cloudless sky.

Glass emerges creased and frowning from the patrol car, sees where the yards have been trampled, where the mill workers have walked across the tracks and taken up a vigil in the park, and he sighs. The yards are searched again under his direction. Each cane bin, each cane train, each holding barrel, the vacuum pans, the sugar driers, the boiler rooms, each demountable, the toilet blocks.

In the park people sit on the grass or in the rotunda. Clumps of crying schoolgirls form. The sun burns their faces. On Main Street some shopkeepers shut their shops and join the crowd. They stay in the park until late in the afternoon when the sky turns the colour of a lightning opal. They stay and do not seem to want to leave.

A rumour grows, there in the first evening shadows, and gathers speed. A patchy, slippery, taffeta rumour. She was wearing a dress. A dark blue dress. And this dress was made by a witch.





The strange thing is that Rose doesn’t need to knock at Edie Baker’s back door; Edie Baker is waiting for her. Or that’s how it seems. She’s standing with her arms crossed at the top of her back steps, looking at the mountain, the foot of which begins in her far back paddock. She smiles when she sees Rose come round the corner.

‘Hello,’ she says.

Rose looked at the front steps first and decided against it on account of the great fig tree growing through them. The fig has lifted the steps and the house from its stumps a little too. The tree brazenly embraces the front of the house with its dark limbs and peers inside.

It’s a huge house, rambling, uneven. It’s a house of tiltings and leanings. It’s holding itself together through sheer determination. Beneath the house a row of battens have slumped to one side and, as if to correct the situation, clusters of stumps have braced themselves knock-kneed. The verandas are boarded over with cheap wood that has swelled and rotted in the rain. Through gaps, Rose glimpses rusted garlands and fretwork vines. There are banks of filthy louvres, and rows of coloured casements, all shut, all cracked and crazed.