The Midnight Dress Read Online Free Page A

and put some music on.’
    Rose is not used to being touched. She cuts her own hair with the scissors that live in the drawer beside her bed. Now Pearl’s mother is massaging her head. She would like to get up and run out of the shop, only she’s wearing a small see-through dress. She tries to slow her breathing. Pearl has put a record on. It’s someone singing in sighs. Rose closes her eyes. She doesn’t know what she should do. She wishes she knew where they put her clothes. Will she have to pay for the red shirt? She doesn’t have any money. Not a cent. Plus the drawing of the guillotine is in the dryer now too.
    ‘You think too much, young lady,’ says Pattie, when she turns off the hair dryer.
    ‘Come on, Rose,’ says Pearl, and Rose follows her to Pearl’s bedroom, already tying down her hair as she goes, feeling with her fingers for curls, slicing through them, anchoring them with her pins.
    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