•
At school, the normal feeling of things had stopped and the unease had set in. The news of Rosie White was everywhere. It had travelled down telephone lines and across dinner tables and onto the pages of the Gather Region Advocate. It had taken up residence in the minds of students and teachers. It sat in the silence between sentences; in the things that people did not say. Goodwood had never been visited by such collective worry, and we were not familiar with the burden of the unknown.
Classes went on as normal but everyone seemed distracted. I walked past three girls from Year Nine in the hall and heard one of them say, ‘She has to be dead,’ as they walked past. George and I heard Mrs Gwen Hughes, strewn with crystals, say, ‘Terrible. Just terrible,’ to Mr Cooper in the playground. They saw us and lowered their voices and George swore she heard Mrs Gwen Hughes say, furtively, ‘Carl.’
George and I spent lunchtime in the library by the heater vent to avoid everyone, and the cold. We sat up against the wall and rested our feet on the bottom shelf of the section marked Australian History. We went over every memory we had of Rosie.
Most of them were set at Woody’s, and had us mainly as bystanders. Rosie saying a wry thing that we may or may not have understood, and us laughing along regardless; Rosie saying, ‘Hey, guys,’ in that way she did every now and again, as if we were her friends; Rosie offering us unsolicited schoolyard advice. That was our favourite. George and I couldn’t agree on the exact wording, but it was the time when Liz Gordon and Kiralee Davis had walked past Woody’s while we were waiting for our food and Liz had yelled something unkind to George. Rosie made a noise like ‘Pffffff’ and gave Liz the finger. Horrible Liz Gordon looked astonished and fit to fall over. Even Kiralee had a little laugh at her. We couldn’t believe our luck—having such a bodyguard as Rosie, just for that moment. Then Rosie said something like, ‘Don’t even worry about it. Those girls’ll never get out of this fucken town,’ and George and I walked out, puffed up like balloons, triumphant with hot chips.
I remembered seeing Rosie getting driving lessons with Carl White earlier that year. He looked like an impatient teacher, and as I told it to George I realised it wasn’t a nice memory. Rosie was gripping the steering wheel with both hands and he appeared to be chiding her as they crawled down our street. She looked, as I remembered it now, scared. Not of the car or the road, but of Carl. The thought of it pained me, and it pained George, and we both sat for a moment and stared off in confusion.
George had seen Rosie and Davo heading down to the clearing several times over the summer, just the two of them, which was obviously for the purpose of sex, we now concluded. George also recalled that her brother Toby asked Rosie out one time at Woody’s and Rosie said, ‘Sorry, what year are you in?’ which we deemed a brilliant rebuttal. Considering how much of a pain in the arse George found Toby, she was extremely pleased to hear of the rejection, and it only further increased our appreciation of Rosie.
We sat silent for a while after that, which was an unusual state for me and George. We sat there and tried to remember more, but that was all we could remember.
9
The house directly next to ours was wooden and gabled and in it lived Big Jim and Fitzy.
Big Jim, as his name suggested, was almost a giant. It wasn’t one of those instances where someone’s called Tiny and they’re as big as a house. Big Jim was un-ironically big. Heavy set, six feet and six inches, his head clipped the sky.
Then there was Fitzy. Big Jim’s lady. Five foot nothing, and a whole lot of something. Never did a woman of such small proportions take up so much space as Fitzy.
She enjoyed her hair large and auburn, with bright combs holding the whole thing together at the back, and a fringe that looked set to take over her face like a shrub. She wore enormous red-framed glasses in homage to the talk show host Sally Jessy Raphael, who ‘spoke’ to Fitzy across hemispheres, and who Fitzy earnestly considered ‘like a friend’. The glasses were vast and, due to the strength of Fitzy’s prescription, an awful amount of Fitzy’s visage was magnified. I found the size disparity between her eyes and the rest of her face to be very disorientating during our conversations.
Big Jim and Fitzy chose to cohabit but not to marry, allowing Fitzy to retain her maiden surname of Fitzgerald, which had been permanently shortened and, at some point, granted uncontested usage. Coral, who lived next door to them on the other side, found the situation quite peculiar, and loved to mention it disapprovingly to Val Sparks, who no doubt found it sinful, especially since both Big Jim and Fitzy had left their respective marriages in order to be together, and Big Jim didn’t seem to see his kids. Fitzy, on the other hand, had been relieved of her uterus due to ovarian cancer and was, as such, childless.
‘Our garden’s our baby,’ she said, pruning the murraya hedge.
Amid all the unease, that Saturday was a good day, because Big Jim and Fitzy brought home a new baby: a puppy. Backflip was beside herself when they carried it in, and jumped up trying to lick its face, while the tiny dog bleated like a lamb.
Big Jim was a gardener, in a professional capacity, in that his Hilux had Big Jim’s Gardening Services sprayed on the side with his phone number and a picture of a red wheelbarrow. His small talk was endlessly concerned with either fish, birds or plants, often punctuated by his favourite expression: ‘You can plant a dead stick in the ground here and it’ll grow.’ Then he would look up at the sky and say, ‘Fish are biting today I reckon,’ as if the information was bestowed upon him from the clouds.
Big Jim provided constant commentary on our gardenia or our grevillea or our lavender. ‘Nice and healthy, that is,’ as he caressed a leaf and smelt a flower. He offered unsolicited lessons in botanical names. ‘Tropaeolum majus is what that one’s called. That’s the Latin.’ Or, ‘How about the difference in the pH level in the soil from your place to ours, Jean? We’re just next-door and look at the difference of colour in the hydrangeas. That’s the alkaline.’ And my eyes would glaze over as I’d say, ‘Wow, would you look at that,’ and Mum thought it was hilarious how boring one man could be about plants, a subject she found quite interesting if anyone else was talking.
Big Jim called their new puppy Myrtle. I learnt, from Big Jim telling me all about it, that myrtle is an evergreen shrub. They’d gotten Myrtle from Big Jim’s mate Merv’s recently pregnant terrier, who was called Periwinkle. ‘And do you know what the definition of myrtle is in the dictionary, Jean? The lesser periwinkle! That’s the dictionary definition! Get it, Jean? How good is that?’
‘It’s very good,’ I said.
It was Mum’s suggestion, as we all sat in their front yard and the dogs tussled, that I should go up to Bart’s to get a bag of bones. ‘Little meaty bones,’ she said, as a welcome to Myrtle.
I was pleased to be excused, and I stood in front of the sausage display while Bart fixed some little meaty bones in a plastic bag.
‘How’ve you been, Jean, good? How’s your mum?’
‘Yeah, good. Big Jim and Fitzy got a puppy. It’s pretty cute.’
Bart stood behind the counter in his butcher’s striped apron. The collar of a canary-coloured polo shirt sat under his kind face. On the wall behind him was a cluster of framed photographs. There was Bart and Mrs Bart with Pearl, in a riding hat. There was Bart at the lake, grinning, holding a giant fish, flanked by Roy Murray on one side and Carmel Carmichael on the other. There was Bart and the Mayor and a group of men from the council. And Bart holding an Excellence in Small Business Award certificate, the photo of which hung next to an array of other laminated local business prizes, and thankyous from the school and the CWA and the Goodwood Progress Association and the Bowlo, and a poster for last year’s Fishing’s The Funnest parade.
‘You been worried about all the business this week?’ asked Bart.
I looked at my feet and said I was.
Bart said, ‘Yeah,’ sympathetically.
It was the last conversation I would have with Bart, not that
I knew it at the time. Not that I’d paid much attention to any of the conversations I’d had with Bart, really. I was young and he was old. He’d say a friendly thing and I’d nod along. But he always did have time for a chat, no matter who was waiting. That was something I remember thinking during our last conversation: that Bart always seemed to have the time.
‘She’ll turn up,’ he said confidently. ‘Don’t you worry yourself too much with all the things people are saying.’ He tied a knot in the bag of bloody bones. Cartilage poked out at strange angles and red juices gathered in the plastic creases. ‘This is a safe town.’
Backflip and I walked past Woody’s on the way home and, even though I half-expected to see her, Rosie wasn’t there. There was just one of Terry’s signs hanging in the window, next to a poster for the Clarke Show. And Derek Murray, frying chips and laughing his unpleasant face off with Trent Ross. Ha ha ha ha, went Trent and Derek, and I wasn’t sure how Derek Murray could be laughing. The one place where Rosie’s absence was most obvious was behind the counter at Woody’s. She stared out from the photocopied Year Twelve picture and the memory of her hovered there—like a ghost, or a mist, or a web—reminding everyone that she was gone.
I remember thinking that day that there was nothing much worse than a missing person. Rosie had vanished and all that was left was a hole where she once was. Or in this case, all that was left was Derek Murray. I looked at him, filling the spot where Rosie should have been, emptying chips from the wire basket onto a sheet of butcher’s paper on the counter, surrounded by the thick air. I thought he must’ve felt like he’d walked through a spider’s web and got some stuck in his hair.
10
As it turned out, there was something worse than a missing person: two missing people.
Bart often fished on a Sunday. A lot of men in Goodwood fished on a Sunday. There was a cluster of boats on the lake that bobbed up and down all week waiting to be taken out. Bart’s was a Savage fibreglass half-cabin cruiser in white and royal blue. Bart loved his boat. He spent many a Sunday in peaceful solitude on Grants Lake with the motor off and the anchor down, fishing and drinking beer and eating beef sandwiches.
The Sunday in question, Mrs Bart prepared Bart’s sandwiches, and Bart packed his gear and popped a sixpack into his little esky from the bar fridge in the carport. The McDonalds’ carport was like an aeroplane hangar and heavy with cars. Bart mostly drove a white Commodore and Mrs Bart drove a Mazda 323. Then they had a Hilux for when they did farmy stuff and an old Corolla that once belonged to burly Joe and usually sat on the far left, next to the bar fridge and deep freezer, and was kept mainly for the use of Mrs Bart’s sister Jan, who ‘never married’ as Coral would say, and visited Goodwood via bus several times a year.
Bart took the Hilux out to the lake that day, with his rods in the tray. Faye Haynes, who ran the Goodwood Village Bakery, attested to the fact that Bart had stopped in briefly for a coffee scroll. Then he pulled off again, eating it out of the paper bag, and was seen waving to several people on his way down Cedar Street, including Nance, whose counter in the front window of the Goodwood Grocer was positioned so she could witness everything that happened on the main road during daylight hours. Bart wore his yellow windcheater and Nance saw it, and she saw him wave, and she saw him drive off towards the lake, and that was the last of him she ever did see.
Bart would have driven the long road out of town alongside the river, then the stretch that sidles around the base of the mountain in shadow. He would’ve gone past the rest stop just before the bridge, and flattened that old dead kangaroo a fraction more into the bitumen. Then over the bridge, nice and high above the lake, and eventually—after two kilometres of fast flat road—onto the wide patch of browned grass where cars park near the boat wharves.
Grants was a big, meandering lake. So big that if you stood at its widest point and looked to the other side, a person standing there would appear as small as a fleck of sand. The lake turned corners around the foothills of the mountain and had several secluded horseshoes that bent into the shore like giant private pools. Pop took me out lots when I was younger, or when he was younger, but his age meant that his boat was more patient than most, and I doubt it’d been taken out in nearly five years. Not like Bart’s much-used cruiser, which was found later that afternoon by Big Jim and Merv, who were doing some fishing of their own when they noticed the unusual sight of Bart’s boat nodding sideways in the wind.
As they approached, they wondered if Bart was tricking.
‘Bart?’ they yelled.
No reply.
They came up on his cruiser, cut their engine and bumped his boat with theirs as they peered over.
There was Bart’s gear, and Bart’s beer, but no sign nor sight nor smell of Bart.
Merv boarded Bart’s boat while Big Jim kept theirs steady. As Big Jim later recalled, Merv looked at him dead serious, shaking his head, saying, ‘Mate. Fuck. He’s gone.’
They surveyed the water for a further few minutes or so. Brown and choppy, it offered no glimpse of anything human. Merv wanted to tow the boat back with them, but Big Jim insisted on dropping Bart’s anchor so whoever was going to come looking would know where to look.
‘Good thinking, BJ,’ said Merv as they headed back full throttle to the wharf and their car, their faces flushed with worry.
There were no phone booths between the lake and Goodwood, so they sped back to town in Merv’s ute and called Mack from Merv’s house to tell him what they’d found.
Mack said that as soon as he got the call he knew how bad it was. Bart was an experienced boatman—one of Goodwood’s finest. He knew Grants Lake like the back of his hand. He’d been out there every week for the past eight years. He was known to be a stickler for safety rules and regulations. A man like that didn’t usually end up, on a relatively calm day, relieved of his boat.
By the time Mack got the call it was almost six and winter dark. It put him in the awful position of having to knock on Mrs Bart’s door with bad news and no ability to make it any better until the sun rose the next morning. Mrs Bart, on answering the door, crumpled. Mack told Mum and me the next day that it was the hardest door knock he’d ever done, and that no matter how much he rubbed them, he could still feel the difficulty of it there, on his knuckles.
On the Sunday evening, though, Mum and I were blissfully unaware. We heard Big Jim arrive home next door, but he didn’t come over to tell us the news. Fitzy said later that he came inside—wordless, most unusual—and got down on all fours on the living room floor. The big man just crouched there like a table while Fitzy asked the table over and over again what was wrong.
•
The following day, Bart’s Meats was closed and Mrs Bart was pacing. Everyone on Cedar Street knew the bad news by mid-morning. It filtered through the school gates and into our classrooms, while Mr Cooper and Ms Carr and Mr Davies and Mrs King huddled in the doorways and corridors to discuss possibilities and ramifications and how-could-it-bes.
George said, ‘Two people. What are the odds?’
I did not know the odds.
All I knew was that I’d just seen Bart two days ago, tying up a bag of bloody bones, and now he was gone.
Bart and Flora McDonald had only been in Goodwood for eight years. They weren’t lifers like most of the other shopkeepers on Cedar Street. They had their son, Joe, who was grown up and lived in Sydney and a daughter, Pearl, whose mind sat somewhere on the rainbow spectrum of autism and who found solace only in horses. When she was younger, Pearl had festooned her bedroom with horseshoes and bridles and her full set of My Little Ponies. The latter gave the entire room the effect of a pastel equine kaleidoscope. By the age of nine, Pearl could name the gross and microscopic anatomies of horses, as well as donkeys and zebras: external, digestive, reproductive, skeletal and so on. She was a walking encyclopaedia of equestrian terms and trivia. And Pearl watched a horse movie every night before bed: The Black Stallion, The Man From Snowy River, National Velvet, Ph
ar Lap, Black Beauty. Nan told me there was a very specific movie roster at the McDonald house that no man or mountain could disturb.
As she grew, Bart and Mrs Bart bought Pearl a horse—an Appaloosa with a snowflake coat—which Pearl called Oyster.
When they’d lived in Sydney, the McDonalds drove Pearl out to the stable lot they rented, a fifty-minute drive, three times a week.
It wasn’t enough. Pearl became difficult to manage on the remaining four days, and more and more despondent when she wasn’t with Oyster.
So, after many long evening discussions over chardonnay and crackers, the McDonalds decided to leave the city and move to Goodwood. Bart opened Bart’s Meats, a rural version of his store in the northern suburbs of Sydney, and Mrs Bart experimented with new glazes for her pottered crockery, made jam, and ascended with lightening quickness to the position of Secretary of the Goodwood branch of the Country Women’s Association. Meanwhile, Pearl, at twenty-two, spent all her days with Oyster, along with Apples and Pears, the two pintos they had since acquired.
Bart was good at gifts. He was an intuitive and imaginative giver. Not only had he sated Pearl with horses, he expressed himself lovingly through his generosity to Mrs Bart, too, and had done so throughout their long marriage. For one Christmas: a star. Mrs Bart was very fond of stars. She enjoyed gazing into the sky over Goodwood, where they shone so brightly. ‘There’s nothing brighter than country stars,’ she would say. So Bart bought her one, from the Sydney Observatory, and he named it Flora—verified by a certificate that arrived in the mail. Flora the star was in the Phoenix constellation, and flickered away endlessly. Flora the woman—or Mrs Bart, as we all knew her—was so thrilled she cried.
For Mrs Bart’s forty-fifth: a piano. Mrs Bart had always wanted to learn, and longed for the kind her mother had owned: a Richard Lipp. There wasn’t one to buy in Goodwood, or Clarke, or Cedar Valley, or even Sydney for that matter. So Bart had one driven by truck from Melbourne and it arrived on the morning of Mrs Bart’s birthday and she was so thrilled, she cried.
Goodwood Page 5
