The Midnight Dress(2)

If she had a light she’d write something in the little green notebook she keeps. The words would be clumsy as bricks, she knew it, and later she’d tear out the paper, ashamed. In the book she keeps a column of words she hates. First is the word grief. She hates the sound of it. It reminds her of a small wound, half-healed. The word doesn’t encompass at all the emotion that has no edges. The feeling rises like a giant cumulus cloud. It surrounds her, dark and magical. At night when she presses her eyes she feels she could quite easily levitate, held up by that cloud, float out the little window above her bed. It would take her over the town, the truck stop, the highway, the cane fields, the paddocks, the bush. That is how she would like to describe grief. She wishes there was a word as powerful as all that.

She goes nowhere. Stays pressing her eyes. She listens to the rain until she falls asleep.

Pearl Kelly half listens to the others talking in the seniors’ toilet block about the new girl. She sits on the bench with her legs stretched out, while the others are huddled around the dull metal mirror staring at their smudgy reflections. She is half-thinking about the kiss too, Jonah Pedersen’s kiss, which was cool and wet and not at all what she was expecting. It was different from Tom Coyne’s. His kisses had always been small and tight and dry. They had been rhythmical, as though he was beating out a tune with his lips. Tom Coyne had known how to kiss, even in Year Seven.

It’s disappointing, all of it, because she had waited so long for the Jonah Pedersen kiss, when she needn’t have. Everyone had been waiting. And now it’s there, all messy on her lips, and she just wants to forget it. Worse than that, she could tell afterward that he was embarrassed. That he knew he was bad at it, when everyone thought he was so perfect. It’s an ugly secret.

She drifts back to the girls’ conversation.

‘She’s really unusual,’ says Maxine Singh.

‘Ugly unusual?’ asks Vanessa Raine, who is the most beautiful girl in the school and likes to keep track of such things. ‘Or odd unusual?’

‘I saw her in Mrs D’s office,’ says Shannon Fanelli, ‘I mean just the side of her. I think she might have really bad skin or maybe they were moles.’

‘Or warts?’ says Mallory Johnson.

‘I saw her from the front,’ says Maxine. ‘She’s actually kind of an unusual pretty.’

‘Except for her hair,’ says Shannon, ‘She has this crazy hair in two buns tied up with about one thousand bobby pins.’

‘Hello,’ says Rose, entering the toilet block.

She doesn’t have a bag. She’s carrying just one pencil. Her uniform is way too big. She looks at their hem lengths, their hair, the way they stare back at her with their lip-glossed mouths just a little open, and calculates immediately, in a fraction of a second, that she will never fit in.

‘Hi,’ they say in unison.

‘Hi,’ Rose says again. She can tell she’ll hate it; she always does. She touches her hair to make sure no stray curls have escaped.

Then Pearl jumps off the bench, smiling.

‘Geography or French?’ she asks.

The truth is she should say geography because Rose has never taken French. Rose looks at Pearl and tries to think. The girl is of perfectly normal height, with perfectly proportioned limbs and perfectly pretty in a golden-haired, sun-kissed kind of way. Exactly the kind of girl that Rose likes the least. But is she a geography or French kind of girl? She doesn’t look exotic. Exotic is not the word for Pearl Kelly. She looks like she might like colouring in the layers of the earth. She’d take great pride in it. She looks like a girl who would feel quite at home with vile words like tectonic and magma. She would understand map scale.

‘French,’ Rose says aloud.

‘Excellent,’ says Pearl.

Rose’s heart sinks.

The truth is, she wasn’t even going to go to school except that Mrs Lamond, who runs the caravan park, vaguely threatened to go to the authorities. Mrs Lamond is small and leathery. Sometimes she paints her eyebrows on and sometimes she forgets.

‘Will you be here for long, then?’ Mrs Lamond asked.

Mrs Lamond can tell holiday makers from drifters. This father and daughter outfit were drifters. Another sorry affair.

‘Probably,’ Rose said.

‘Better enrol in school, then.’

‘I’m fifteen, nearly sixteen,’ Rose informed her. ‘I don’t have to go to school.’

‘School would be the best place for you.’

Mrs Lamond doesn’t like the scrawny girl with the sad eyes who comes into the kiosk and thumbs through the magazines but never buys.

‘And while we’re at it, this isn’t a library.’

Rose put down the article ‘Seven Sexy Ways to Wear Your Hair’, touched her pinned-down curls.

The truth is, on the first morning she had discovered that the beach was, in fact, a paradise, a little cup-shaped bay fringed by rainforest. She had stepped out the caravan door and stared at it, rubbing her eyes. She had walked past the car where her father still slept, all the way to the soft white sand. When she dipped her toes in the sea that morning, she broke its smooth olive-green skin. Then when she turned she saw the mountain looming behind her, sitting sage in its skirt of clouds.

‘Shit,’ she said.

Her father stumbled from the car into the caravan. He pulled the curtain to his own corner, stripped off, lay beneath his sheets. Over the next days the caravan filled up with the smell of his sweat. He was oblivious. She wrote that word in her notebook. OBLIVIOUS. He was oblivious to the sea, which changed colour through the day, green to blue to turquoise; oblivious to the huge clouds that raked shadows across its surface and then flung them onto the mountain face; oblivious to the waterfalls she could see, high up on the rocks, and to the startling eruptions of rainbow-coloured birds.