It should be mentioned that Mrs Bart was an attractive and charismatic woman. She wasn’t Secretary of the CWA for nothing. When the McDonalds moved to Goodwood, she turned heads. And so did Bart, in his rugged, handsome way. Mrs Bart had the face of a morning television presenter, or a pageant winner grown up. She injected a youthful energy into her secretarial duties, encouraging a younger membership than the association had ever enjoyed before. Nan always said she was a ‘good girl’.
She was also quite strong, as it turned out, as she struck Carl White across the face so hard he fell all the way over. She stepped around him, saying nothing about it to her friends, and went home to tell Bart.
Bart was beyond recognition in his rage. ‘Mortally angry’ was how Mrs Bart described it. She spent the first part of the evening angry herself, and the second part trying to calm Bart down. But wild horses couldn’t stop Bart. He backed the Hilux out of the drive (choosing the biggest car at his disposal), and drove to the White residence. That was where he found Judy doing one of her puzzles in front of the television, and Rosie and Terry somewhere off in their rooms, and Carl out back in his shed.
Mrs Bart didn’t know what happened. All she knew was that Bart came home without a scratch on him, and that Carl White—as reported by Opal Jones next door—looked like someone had run him over with a trailer. Unwilling to explain his injuries to anyone, Carl simply avoided town for the most part, and made Judy buy him cases of beer and nurse him at home.
When he got home that night, after smashing Carl, Bart had spooned Mrs Bart closer than ever, and while he didn’t shudder or move at all, she felt his tears fall onto the back of her neck and roll down the inside of her nightie.
14
In the third week after Bart vanished, Mum’s need to be active in the face of anxiety took her beyond organising the pantry, and she began sorting through the back sunroom where she stored most of her ‘secondary’ books.
Much like Nan, Mum had always been a big reader. She told me she spent all her time at Goodwood High reading and dreaming of her life in the big city. She’d considered Melbourne but chose Sydney. It was much closer and, when it came time, she could fit all her things in one carload.
Nan and Pop knew she’d be leaving. Nan wanted Mum to have a tertiary education—an arts degree to be specific—and Mum was happy to oblige. She was so very fond of all the books and she walked through the sandstone buildings at Sydney University and felt like she was in Paris. She found a sandstone house near the harbour and drank at the Forth and Clyde Hotel. She smoked roll-your-own cigarettes and was enamoured with Gough Whitlam.
Mum was eight months pregnant with me when she left her job as a proofreader. After that she caught the ferry to Circular Quay and back, just to be on the water. I grew into a toddler and caused her much delight. Then my dad left. He walked out the door one day, leaving five hundred dollars on the table, and never came back. Five hundred dollars didn’t last long, even in those days. I was two years old and she had to make a decision. She moved back to Goodwood to be near Nan and Pop. She missed them and they wanted to help raise their granddaughter. But Mum felt like a failure. She’d returned to the town that she spent her whole youth desperate to escape from.
At first, Mum’s involvement in town events was ironic. She was depressed, but she had a great sense of humour. She wrote long letters to her friends in Sydney, mocking the craft, mocking the meetings, mocking the mentality. But over the years she settled. Her mood lifted. She enjoyed having the time to read. She stopped fighting it. She made friends. Her interest became genuine. She loved walking Backflip in the foothills of the mountain. She loved living close to Nan and Pop and Mack. At some point it occurred to her that she truly enjoyed taking minutes for the Goodwood Progress Association and attending CWA dinners at the Community Hall.
Mum said, ‘Growing up’s working out what makes you happy, Jean. Not what you think might, or what you think should, but what actually does.’
In 1992 Mum worked as a proofreader at the Gather Region Advocate, three and then four days a week. She always had a pile of books on her bedside table, lining the shelves in the living room, and then overflowing into the sunroom. She’d been saying for ages that we could set up a desk there and, one day, get a computer.
For days she fussed over piles of paperbacks and had sneezing fits with the dust.
Next door, Big Jim and Fitzy seemed equally eager to get on with things, especially Fitzy, who didn’t like to dwell on sadness. I felt bad for Big Jim, because he was sad. Bart was his mate and during the previous week when he’d been going off to the lake with Merv every day, looking for him—any glimmer or glimpse of Bart—he’d trudged out to his car as if he was going off to war.
Fitzy waved him off, with a big forced smile, and welcomed him home with the same one every evening. Big Jim was a patient man, in my estimation.
It’s not that Fitzy wasn’t nice. Fitzy was catastrophically nice—even if she did have far too much hair for one person and a confusingly strong prescription. But to put it plainly, Fitzy had such bad luck with her coordination that she could have caused an accident by standing still and waiting for one to find her.
The previous Christmas, when Fitzy was hanging coloured lights along the front of their house while balancing on the top step of Big Jim’s ladder—the step everyone knows not to balance on—the ladder got sick of Fitzy and made a dash for the ground. She dangled from the awning making the sound of a cat fight while Big Jim, who had rushed out in terror, yelled ‘Let go hon, I’ve got you!’ from below. When Fitzy’s arms finally relented, which happened fairly quickly, the weight of her fall, on top of Big Jim, ruined a generous section of their murraya hedging. Big Jim sprained his lower back and was forced to pass himself back and forth on a foam roller in their sunroom for ten minutes a day until it healed.
The year before, Fitzy slipped out of the Wicko, as if on a sheet of ice, and collected Val Sparks from the Vinnies next door as she was on her way inside for a glass of port. The two women lay mangled on the pavement in front of the doorway, with Val moaning ‘For Christsake, my knee’ and Fitzy yelling, ‘Val, can you hear me? Val!’
Unfortunately, Val could hear Fitzy loud and clear. She was practically wearing her like a throw. Poor Val. She was the most pious person in Goodwood. A little porcelain nativity scene adorned the wooden shelf behind her counter all year round. And yet, entwined with Fitzy, as her knee swelled quickly towards a chronic case of bursitis, she was forced to take the Lord’s name in vain.
Most recently, in June, Fitzy went to meet her work friends at Panda Garden, the Chinese restaurant in Clarke. She drove down the long road that heads out of town by the river, while bugs ended themselves on her windshield, dazzled in the glory of her high beam lights. Fitzy was singing along to her favourite tape, Wilson Phillips by Wilson Phillips, and looking forward to a plate of pineapple pork, when a kangaroo pronked out of the tree line, a blur of fur in Fitzy’s headlights. She swerved, clipping the kangaroo and continued off the road, over the dirt and leaves towards the metal guardrail that stops cars from hurtling off the high bank, just before the bridge. Thankfully Fitzy hadn’t been travelling at too great a speed, and thankfully the silver wattle she ploughed through slowed her down further. She came to a stop on the guardrail, which bent forward and over, under the weight of her Honda Accord.
‘Any faster and I would’ve been up to my neck in the lake,’ she said to everyone in her retellings.
Fitzy had cried a river on the side of the road that night, imagining herself prone in the lake, and waited for a passing motorist. It turned out to be Kevin Fairley on his way home from a big shop at Woolworths and a meat pie in the Clarke Plaza food court. Kevin drove Fitzy home, comforting her and smelling like pie. Then bald Bob Elver towed Fitzy’s car back to Goodwood the next day. It needed a new radiator, a new bumper, and a new bonnet. The guardrail and the silver wattle, however, could not be saved. They were removed pending replacement. Fitzy champi
oned a stronger, doubly reinforced rail at the next council meeting and this met with agreement from Bart. But much like the proposed new picnic tables in Sweetmans Park, the proposed restoration of the Community Hall, and the proposed resealing of Woodland and Pioneer Streets, Goodwood was still waiting.
On top of her tendency to ruin things, Fitzy was a taxing conversationalist. She was as boring about jam, and hedging, and the weather, as Big Jim was about plants. Man, could Fitzy kill the weather. It’d be the nicest day of the year—sun shining, perfect clear skies—and I would wake up feeling inspired for a day of swimming at the river, but having Fitzy talk to me about it for ten minutes, after she’d caught me off-guard as I was leaving, I’d wish for rain.
Then it’d rain, and Fitzy would pop up behind a hedge in a raincoat and rain hat, just doing a spot of weeding in the downpour, and there I’d be for the next eternity, listening to her bang on.
That’s what happened that day, while Mum was sorting through the secondary books. Up popped Fitzy, just after the rain had started and I was standing on the front verandah.
‘Oh Jean, there you are’, she said, and then without drawing breath, ‘You’re going to love this. I’m trying to put together a rainfall map for Goodwood. Which is difficult because the Bureau of Meteorology—they are quite private about their procedures—did you know that of all the three thousand rainfall measuring sites in Australia, Goodwood doesn’t have one?’
She looked incredulous, water dripping off her hat. Her eyes enormous behind her thick glasses.
‘I have written and written. Because it would be so good for Jim to have proper analysis for work. And for you kids to know for school. But “our” (air quotes with four fingers) rainfall is really just Clarke’s rainfall, because that’s the closest site.’ She did a little disbelieving headshake and flipped raindrops left and right. ‘But you know as well as I do that sometimes you drive to Clarke, and it’s raining there when it’s not raining here! Or vice versa. Even last week when I went up there to go to the RTA, the ground was wet! And we hadn’t had a drop since the 12th. So it’s not accurate for Goodwood. And I told them that. It’s just not accurate. So I don’t know what to do to make it official, because the Bureau won’t budge. But to make it unofficial we’re going to get our own! A rain gauge! Jim’s such a honey, he’s been at the library looking up pictures. I think it’s a good way for him to get his mind off things. We’re gonna mount it out back and go from there.’
‘That’s a very good idea,’ I said, just as Myrtle rushed out of their front door and rolled in a puddle, and Fitzy started high-pitch yelling while Myrtle flipped around, and I made my escape.
Out of our front gate, saying my hasty goodbye to Fitzy and swampy Myrtle, I went left towards town. And that’s how I ended up on Cedar St in the rain on the same day Derek Murray had a big fight with his father, Roy.
15
Roy and Derek Murray lived a short drive from Cedar Street, on the mountain side, with Roy’s wife Doe. Doe Murray was never seen in town, as she suffered from what Nan called ‘a terrible affliction of nerves’. Nan said she was as nervous about the cracks in the pavement as she was about the cracks in the sky. I’m not sure if she was scared of lightning, or falling meteors, or acid rain, or noxious weeds—but whatever it was that might befall Doe, from above or below, left her little room to get out of the house.
Doe Murray’s birth name was Josephine Mae. She met Roy at a mixer in the mid-seventies, a couple of years after Roy’s first wife had died from killing herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. Poor baby Derek Murray was only three months old when his mother shuffled off, suffering as she was from acute postnatal depression, coupled with a life-long bout of chronic low-grade sadness.
When Roy brought his new lady friend home to meet his infant, half-orphaned son, Derek couldn’t say ‘Josephine’. So he called her ‘Doe-pheen’, which was soon shortened to ‘Doe’, and that’s how she was known forever more, to everyone in Goodwood.
Nan knew a little bit of Doe from yesteryear, before my memories began. Apparently, Doe hadn’t always been so nervous. When she first started appearing on the arm of Roy, drinking white wine at the Wicko of a weekend, she was talkative and sweet. Her Korean heritage was interesting in a white-bread town like Goodwood, and she offered Nan a delicious recipe for kimchi. She was well liked for her dry sense of humour, even if she could be a little too timid at times. But over the years, as Derek grew into a young man, Doe sunk into their weatherboard home, and ventured out less and less. I had only seen her once—at Woody’s, sitting in the far back booth, where no one else ever sat. Mum had said, ‘Wow, there’s Doe Murray,’ as we walked past. ‘It’s like seeing a ghost.’
Nan and Mum had read several books on psychology and had a theory on almost everyone, including Doe, who they declared to be the most panicked person in Goodwood, apart from Helen at the newsagent. One time, when I was little, Mum had encountered Doe in a full-blown attack near the corner of Cedar and Pioneer streets. Doe had come up to Woody’s to look in on Roy, and wound up in the gutter around the corner, shaking like a tail, with her head between her legs. Mum bent down and asked, ‘Are you feeling faint, Doe?’ and Doe accused the sky of sinking, and the sun of malevolence, and the air of being too thin for her lungs to find it. Mum sat down on the kerb and put her arm around Doe’s shoulders, emptied four potatoes from a paper bag in her shopping, and said, ‘Well, there’s not much I can do about that, but why don’t you try breathing into this?’
They sat there for some time until Bart, of all people, walked past and saw their predicament. He went to fetch Roy Murray. When Roy relieved Mum, he hoisted Doe up like she was a sack of potatoes, gave her a Valium (which she expertly swallowed without water), and hobbled her into his waiting car. Mum collected her own potatoes off the ground and went home.
Nan said of the incident that agoraphobia often knocks on the door when a person’s in their thirties. Doe had been in her thirties at the time. Mum said that, usually, something unpleasant triggers it off, but neither of them had any opinion as to what that might’ve been. Derek Murray was, by all accounts, a bit of a shit. But Roy Murray loved Derek blindly, so one might assume that he loved Doe in the same way. Then again, no one had much of a handle on their relationship, given her constant absence from town. The only thing you could really tell about Roy Murray was that he ran Woody’s well enough for it to be the busiest culinary establishment in Goodwood; he held the town fishing record for Biggest Catch (for an eighty-seven-centimetre dusky flathead he caught in ’89); and that I saw him get into an awful fight with Derek on that rainy day in August.
If we’d had a rain gauge, it would have certainly declared that a lot of water fell on Goodwood that day. The cracks in the sky had opened, and the gutters were rushing like brown rivers when I got to Cedar Street under an inky sky. My shoes were sopping, so I went into the newsagent for some shelter, and flipped through Rolling Stone while Helen stood in the doorway and worried about the deluge.
‘It’s a wonder we don’t all wash away,’ she said pointedly to no one.
Under the awning in the front of Bart’s Meats, waiting for the worst of it to pass, I tried not to look at Joe as he gazed out from behind the steamed glass. I tried not to notice how much he looked like his dad, Bart. I tried to ignore how wet Terry White’s signs were getting—the ones he’d wrapped around the telegraph poles on the street. Rosie’s black-and-white face was frozen in time, and missing, and now getting drenched. A gust of wind had peeled one almost off its pole and it flapped like a sail. Everything felt cold and bleak as Helen frowned from beside the Lotto signs and Faye Haynes, in the bakery window, stared into an arrangement of coffee scrolls.
As I went past Woody’s, I almost didn’t look in. I didn’t want to see the terrible absence of Rosie. But something caught my eye at the back of the shop near the rear door. That was when I saw them: old white-haired Roy Murray and his son, Derek, looking fit to kill each other good and prop
er.
Derek had his head down and was shaking it angrily, left and right, like a horse trying to buck off its rider. Roy Murray’s face was right up close to Derek’s, hot and aggressive, and he held up a quivering finger, right under Derek’s nose. Derek stared back with an expression even more vulgar than usual. He spat out some words and his bottom lip curled under. Then Roy’s mouth moved, too, and spittle escaped onto Derek’s disagreeable face. The rain was so loud on the tin awning that I couldn’t hear anything they were saying. It was like a silent movie overdubbed with gunfire. But I did see Derek shove his father with both hands to Roy’s chest, and I saw Roy fly backwards into the wall. He looked stunned at the might of his son. Then Derek pushed the back door open hard and disappeared out of it, slamming it behind him. And Roy Murray appeared to be winded as he whacked the straw dispenser off the counter in frustration, so all the straws dispensed themselves on the lino like a game of pick-up sticks.
My eyes must’ve been very wide when Roy saw me there on the street looking in. I decided it best to pretend nothing had happened, so I smiled at him. He did not offer a smile in return. He just looked down ruefully at the big blue mess of straws. Then he bent over, with great difficulty, and slowly began the tiresome task of picking them all up.
16
George and I spent most of the next week, at recess and lunch, lying on the carpet in the library next to the heater vent.
I told her about Roy and Derek. She didn’t seem surprised. She said Derek had got into a fight with her youngest brother, runty Daniel, on the oval the year before. Daniel came home with a bleeding nose and without his favourite football. The worst bit was Derek was six years older than Daniel and a full foot taller. George and I agreed that it just wasn’t cricket.
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