My heart beat faster as I peered over at the dark places in the bush. I knew there was nothing ordinary about finding five hundred dollars hidden in a tree, especially in a place like Goodwood. It was not ordinary and nor did it seem right. I could not imagine there was an innocent explanation. I began to wonder if it was stolen. Everything under the high sun on that cold day seemed suddenly untoward. Then Backflip dragged herself out of the river and shook herself so hard I almost fell right out of the tree. She stood, oblivious, dripping into the dry leaves. A cow snorted loudly behind us in the paddock and broke the air with sound.
If I’m honest with myself, I know the decision I made was not noble. It was not a good deed done to honour the rightful owner of the money. I did what I did out of fear. I folded the wad of bills, and wrapped the elastic band around them. Then I stood up and put it all back just how I had found it.
I would wait.
I would leave it there, go home, and wait. For how long, I was not sure—a few days, maybe. And then I would come back again, and see if the money was still there. I had always mocked Mrs Gwen Hughes, who worked in the front office at school; she wore amethyst crystals and spoke earnestly of their power. But, much like Mrs Gwen Hughes, on that day I was sure I could sense something. Animal, wind, or human—there was something in the bush across that wide water, and I was not going to be chased from that clearing by anything or anyone, not even for five hundred dollars.
I climbed down from the tree and called Backflip and we ran flat out back along the bank, up the sandy hill, and through the metal gate to the oval. I was out of breath by the time I got to the bright grass. There, out in the open, with the goalposts all set for a weekend game of football, we fell back to walking. Beyond the gate that we left behind, on the silty bank of the river, no one materialised. Over my shoulder, no one followed.
•
Up on Cedar Street, everything was normal. There was no portent of things to come, no eerie feeling. I went past Woody’s and there was Rosie, salting a pile of chips laid out on butcher’s paper while Emily Ross and Terry White looked on. Terry—covered in pimples—and Emily, taking asthmatic puffs from her inhaler.
If I’d have known that was the last time I’d see Rosie I would’ve stopped and looked properly. At Rosie White salting the chips. At beautiful Rosie White in her navy apron, her face inscrutable.
Instead, I went straight on by and didn’t even think to notice her at all. No one in Goodwood thought to on that day—no more than usual. Terry White looked on blankly and Emily Ross gently wheezed and everything carried on under the deep green mountain as Backflip and I went across to the Grocer.
Established by Nance Hagan long before I was born, the Goodwood Grocer was the only store of its kind in the vicinity and was thus visited, with great frequency, by every person in town. Men, women, children—everyone went in and out like the tide. As such, Nance’s counter was the site of many a conversation. Nance liked to know, which was something I could relate to, although I didn’t much like the way Nance dispersed her knowledge. Many people came out of the Grocer grasping more than they had bargained for, given all they’d wanted was milk and eggs. Nance dispensed playground gossip, health reports on the sick and elderly, sports scores, implications of impropriety, uncharitable opinions regarding driving skills, her own personal crime book reviews. Nance Hagan had an opinion about everything; and Mum said there was a reason it said Mixed Business on the awning—Nance liked to mix everyone’s business with her own, and with everyone else’s in town.
But the curious thing at the Grocer that day was nothing to do with Nance. It was a girl standing out front who I’d never seen before. She was pale-skinned and willowy and had no expression. I walked past her to tie Backflip to the telegraph pole. The girl looked up at me—she did not smile, she did not frown, she just looked—and then she went back to the book she was reading as she leant up against the glass. Faded signs for confectionery hung in Nance’s windows. The community noticeboard was covered with handwritten advertisements for trailers, lawnmowers, bantam versions of Australorp chickens. The girl read her book and ignored everything around her completely.
There weren’t often strangers in Goodwood. It wasn’t a town in between anywhere good and anywhere else. Cedar Valley was to the south, and Clarke was to the north, but there was a more direct highway between the two and Goodwood was, on the map, like a vein off the main artery that pulsed gently without the larger organs even knowing it was there.
I went inside and Nance was serving a man my mum’s age. She was ascertaining all she could from him with a hail of questions.
They had just moved to town, apparently. Just settling in. Oh yes, that funny-coloured house on Sooning Street. A very long drive—lots of boxes—but a big truck’s coming tomorrow with the rest of it.
‘We don’t get many new people moving here,’ said Nance. ‘But most people are dead set on staying. It’s a lovely little town.’
Nods from the man. He fumbled with his money.
‘Have you had a look at the lake? We sell live bait—prawns, pilchards, worms; they generally come in on a Monday. You’ll find the soft plastics are best for flathead though.’ Nance indicated a revolving rack near the counter hung with tiny coloured lures.
‘Ah yes, very good,’ said the man, who looked like he wouldn’t know the first thing about what to do with them.
The girl out the front kept reading her book like she could’ve been anywhere. I could see her through the glass. She had a duffel coat on that was a bit too big, and gloves without the fingers. Black nail polish covered her nails and was chipped off in parts. She looked like a little hobo, except her hair was so golden at the ends it glowed white in the sun. She was the prettiest girl I had ever seen in real life.
The man went out and the girl bent her page down and followed him off down the street.
‘G’day, Jean. How’s your Nan?’ said Nance, as I stood before the stacked shelves, trying to remember what Mum had asked me to get. My heart had calmed down after my running. I looked at the rows of cans, thinking about what was waiting back in the tree-hole. Thinking of all the books and tapes that I could buy with five hundred dollars.
3
When I got home, Mum was watering the ferns in the bathroom and humming along to the radio. The two of us lived in a weatherboard house with a nice lawn that Big Jim from next door mowed for us every fortnight. Everything was on one level because the houses in Goodwood weren’t big on stairs. It smelt damp in our sunroom after rain, and dog hair stuck to the bottom of our socks, and Mum kept an extensive array of hanging plants. We cohabited with hundreds of books, which lived in uneven piles on our bedside tables, and spread their spines along the living room shelves. Mum owned a big cedar dining table, passed along from Nan and Pop. She waxed it every three months, like clockwork, and the smell of O’Cedar polish would settle in the curtains.
Goodwood was a wood town, historically. Red cedar used to grow thick and tall along the river, all the way from us to Cedar Valley. Toppled, stripped of its bark and cut into smaller pieces, it was transformed into dressers and desks and chairs. Timber cutting caused the town to prosper in the 1840s, and dairy farming followed. By 1992, though, the sawmill was closed and the cedar was gone, and only the Fairley Dairy remained, with its stock of lowing cattle much diminished.
While industry had slowed, Goodwood liked to think of itself as ‘progressive’ and, as such, ‘Being Progressive’ was the mission statement of the Goodwood Progress Association, which met at the Community Hall once a month and discussed how the town could progress further. Mum was secretary and reported back, straight-faced, on the various initiatives. These included a proposed mural (Smithy’s idea), a proposed book club (Mum’s idea), a proposed native garden (our neighbour Fitzy’s idea), and the expansion of social events like Fishing’s The Funnest, an annual parade led by a selection of keen fisherchildren from Goodwood Primary, who marched along Cedar Street every spring wearing little
cardboard fish hats and carrying class-made, hookless rods. There was always a Fish Fry at the Bowlo after and, under brown and blue fluttering streamers, everyone in town would be overcome by the spirit of the lake and the ocean. Gripped by the watery wonderment of it all—they couldn’t help it—they would eat and drink and laugh and set down their empty glasses and then they would dance.
The Bowlo was one of two places Goodwood had to drink at. The Bowlo and the Wickham Hotel, which was known as the Wicko—and then a little string of shops along Cedar Street: the Goodwood Grocer, the newsagent, the Goodwood Village Bakery, Bart’s Meats, Mountain Real Estate, Woody’s Takeaway, a tiny one-horse police station (where Mack was the horse), and so on. Among them were two ‘artsy’ establishments, as Pop called them: Bookworm, which stocked used books, and the Vinnies, where Val Sparks filled her window with local craft. This, along with the semi-isolated beauty of the landscape and flora, attracted a few artistically minded residents. There was a published novelist called Arden Cleary who lived on the mountain and wrote naturalist fiction; and a potter called Celeste Munch who’d won a ceramics prize in Sydney for her glazed bowls.
Goodwood was flat in the centre, at Cedar Street where the shops were. It was almost flat where we lived, inclining gently towards the escarpment. But our house, from the front, looked like it was wearing a huge mountain for a pirate hat. The rest of the town behind us all happened up the hill, and I often felt like the head of a snail, always under a shell.
That night, Mum and I watched TV, which entailed her yelling Sale of the Century answers at Glenn Ridge.
After the lamps were switched off, I dragged Backflip’s bed onto the floor next to mine, and she turned in circles three times before settling in a tight ball. I put my heater on low and wrote about the money in my blue notebook under the heading: Found at the clearing: FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS.
Then I lay awake under my quilt and thought about it for a long time, unable to sleep, while Backflip snored and the night hung cold and still outside my unlocked window.
4
On Saturday Nan drove me to Clarke, the closest town with a shopping plaza. Clarke Plaza: Experience the Lifestyle. The trees whirred past like steel wool and we listened to Nan’s tape of John Denver and she sang along. Just before the bridge, Nan drove gently over a dead kangaroo, which was nothing more than a bump of fur and guts for every car to flatten a little bit more until it became one with the road.
‘There’re always kangaroos in this spot,’ she said.
‘There’s always dead kangaroos in this spot,’ I said.
‘So it goes,’ said Nan.
The clump of kangaroo offered a soft bumping sound as we passed over.
Nan bought me new sneakers: black Converse All Stars, just like the ones Rosie wore. I put them on straightaway and carried my old shoes in my bag. At every shop we went to, I noted the price of things I wanted and added them up along the way. With five hundred dollars, I could’ve bought another pair of boots, a Swiss Army knife and Great Conspiracy Theories of the Twentieth Century in hardcover, and still had $323.03 left over.
Nan bought wool, Wild Swans, and a chocolate Paddle-Pop, which she ate while we sat on the Clarke Plaza terrace in a spot of sun.
My Nan was Joyce Mackenzie. She had been an English teacher by profession, but by 1992 she was long retired. She knitted to keep her arthritis at bay, completed the cryptic crossword in pen, and knew lots of poems by heart, including the whole of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats and the first five verses of The White Cliffs Of Dover.
Nan and Pop had lived in Goodwood all their married life. Nan’s family had been dairy farmers. Nan had vowed to marry a man who wasn’t. ‘Farming’s a chancy business,’ she’d say. ‘Truman Capote wrote that and never a truer thing was said.’
My Pop was not a farmer. He did equipment maintenance for a textile company in Clarke. My Nan fell in love. They adopted my mum when she was a tiny baby.
Apparently Nan and Pop tried their darnedest to get pregnant. But, like trying to make a phone call in a thunderstorm, they had a bad connection. So after several years afflicted with either Nan or Pop’s infertility, for tests in those days were inconclusive, they decided to adopt.
Nan and Pop told Mum that when they went to Clarke Base Hospital, a tall handsome doctor escorted them into a big room of cots, and each one had an adorable little baby in it. They walked through rows and rows, looking at all the delightful little faces, gurgling and smiling and perfect and, gosh, it was so hard to choose! But they had to, of course, they had to choose. There was only one baby for them. And as they came upon the cot my mum was in, there she was, all swaddled in a dear little cream jumpsuit, pink-cheeked and perfect, and they said, ‘This is the one. This is the one we want to take home and raise as our own beautiful baby girl.’
And the lovely nurses said Blessed are the pure of heart!; and by and by the lovely nurses made it so; and it was very good; The End.
Throughout her childhood, especially in an incidence of insomnia or a difficult day at school, Mum would ask to be told the story of how she was Chosen, for the hundredth time. She was delighted at each and every telling, and was often heard retelling the story to her friends, at which point the room of adorable babies inevitably got bigger, and the difficulty of her parents’ choice therefore greater, and her ultimate desirability and perfection that much more apparent.
Unfortunately, Mum got older and at the age of fourteen she read an article in the newspaper about the adoption process. It was sobering.
There was no room full of cots. There was no painstaking selection. There was just a mountain of bureaucracy and it took ages and prospective adopters pretty much got what they were given.
Mum wasn’t angry. She didn’t slam a door in disillusionment. Nan said she came in with the article, and Nan saw what it was, and Pop looked at the floor. My mum did not say one word. She just stood there, and then she knelt down, for Nan and Pop were sitting side by side on the couch. Mum put her head in Nan’s lap. Then Nan put her hand on Mum’s back, and Pop put his hand on Nan’s hand, and Nan put her other hand on Pop’s hand, and so on, until it was like a slow motion game of Snap.
The three of them set themselves there like that for some time, as if meditating.
‘Eyes were moist,’ as my Pop recalled.
So Mum grew up in Goodwood until she moved away for university and married a man whose surname was Brown. That made her Celia Brown. Mum soon got pregnant and then I was born in Sydney. That made me Jean Brown. Then the man whose surname was Brown left us when I was just a baby, and Mum and I moved back to Goodwood. That was how it happened and there we all were; and I was glad to grow up near a man like my Pop and a woman like my Nan.
•
On the way back from Clarke, Nan pulled up at Goodwood’s only servo and mechanical repair shop, run by Bob Elver, who was very bald. Elver’s Auto. I got out and patted Bob Elver’s bony greyhound, Lady, who always sat by the door on a big dusty bed and never needed to be on the lead. I never questioned the fact that Lady’s undercarriage revealed him to be male. I was patting and Nan was filling up the tank of her old Sigma when a shiny Subaru pulled up behind her, with the pretty girl I’d seen at the Grocer sitting in the passenger seat.
Bob Elver said ‘G’day Jean’, and his head shone in the sun as he had a chat with Nan by the bowser. ‘Nice day for it. How’s Don going, Joyce?’
Lady rolled onto his back and exposed his belly.
The pretty girl looked at me through the car window. She did not smile, she did not frown, she just looked. I stared back at her for a few seconds, but something about her made me turn away. I felt embarrassed. The girl kept her eyes on me for a long moment, like I was a great curiosity. Then she was reading her book again, and her mum was filling up their tank. Nan honked at bald Bob Elver as we drove out and turned off towards home. We left the shiny Subaru sitting in the servo in the sun.
•
The next day
was Sunday. Rosie White and her brother Terry went with their parents to the Joneses next door for a barbeque lunch. Opal and Ken Jones hadn’t had the Whites over in a long time, and Opal went to extra effort with the salads. The occasion was Terry’s birthday, which had been the Tuesday preceding—sixteen candles on a Victoria sponge cake that came in a packet from the Goodwood Grocer. Nance had sold it to Judy White, and then said to Mum later that sugar isn’t good for kids with skin problems. Mum said, ‘Oh, Nance. Let him eat cake.’
The Joneses had a son the same age as Terry (Jake Jones, a name like a superhero). But Rosie, the oldest at eighteen, was bored and left early to return to her room where she listened to her new tape of Nirvana’s Nevermind so loud that Judy ducked home momentarily to ask Rosie to turn it down.
Later in the afternoon, Rosie left with her Walkman on—her giant headphones dwarfing her face—and met Davo Carlstrom at the Wicko, where they reportedly drank three schooners and chain-smoked in the beer garden. Smithy, who owned the Wicko and offered gentle musings in a faintly Irish accent, told Mack later that Rosie laughed every now and again, sure, but not as much as usual and that, in his opinion, she seemed sad.
Mack said, ‘Smithy, would you have thought her sad if she hadn’t disappeared that evening?’
And Smithy, who was often prone to lyricism, said, ‘Well, it’s hard to distinguish between my sadness and the rest of the sadness in town.’
At that point, Mack, an empathic man, decided to set himself down for a Reschs and a chat, and they ended up drinking past close, even though Mack was supposed to be on duty.
After Rosie had left the pub that Sunday, possibly looking sad, she went home. The Whites ate chops and mashed potatoes and Rosie’s stepdad, Carl, went to his shed after dinner and worked with the light on, attracting moths, till after ten. Terry applied his medicated acne cream, finished his homework, and played Alex Kidd in Miracle World on his Sega Master System II. Judy washed up and pottered around, watching television and doing puzzles from the large-print puzzle book that always sat on the arm of their couch.
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