It seemed like he wasn’t going to say anything. It seemed like he’d sigh or evade or say you-know-how-it-is. But he didn’t. He stared at the road. He shook his head. ‘Ah, Ceils, bloody hell,’ he said. And quite unexpectedly he unburdened himself slowly, while we sat in the warm police car and the rain fell.
The news about Kevin Fairley had Mum and I quiet. Mack told us of his drive out to the lake; of how helpless he felt when he went there. He told us how he’d driven back to Goodwood past the Fairley Dairy and, being reminded of its proximity to the road out of town, had felt compelled to stop in. He told us about the Corolla that Kevin Fairley had reported seeing on the road next to his south paddock, just near the clearing, parked alone in the cul-de-sac of trees.
Mum stared out into the night.
‘That is weird,’ she said and thought for a time. ‘That’s definitely weird.’
‘Isn’t it,’ said Mack.
I sat in the back and said nothing, hoping they might forget I was there—which seemed to have already happened, given how unusually forthcoming Mack was being.
Mum was quiet a while longer, then she asked, ‘So it was sitting there for over a week?’
‘Nah, I said it could’ve been sitting there for over a week,’ said Mack. ‘It might’ve just been a couple of days. We don’t know. But it might well’ve been over ten.’
‘Ah,’ said Mum, and did silent calculations.
‘It’s just—it’s really funny that Bart didn’t report it,’ said Mack.
The rain got harder. Our house, with the front light on, looked sodden and heavy with grey mist.
‘I guess the obvious reason not to report a stolen car is when it wasn’t actually stolen,’ he said.
Mum turned her head to look at him. I could see from the side that her brow was furrowed. She was almost squinting.
‘You think Bart stole his own car?’ she asked, incredulous.
Mack shook his head like he didn’t want to know the answer. He kept on staring straight ahead. He was silent for a time before he spoke.
‘Honestly? I don’t know. I just think it’s pretty strange for a car thief to steal a car from someone’s house, and then leave it in that dirt road next to the clearing for however long it sat there, and then drive off in it,’ he said.
The rain pelted. The gutters ran with water. Mack turned on the windshield wipers, even though we were parked.
‘Oooh-eee,’ said Mum, and blew out a puff of air.
I thought about the Corolla, sitting on the road that goes right past the clearing. I hadn’t seen it. But you can’t see the cul-de-sac from the clearing because all the trees are in the way; and I never walked the road way. I always walked by the river so Backflip could go splashing. I thought about the money, sitting in the tree, right in the clearing. I thought about the plastic horse. I thought about Ethan West, moving cows with Kevin Fairley at dusk.
‘Ethan West works for Kevin,’ I said from the darkness of the back seat.
‘He’s Jeannie’s new boyfriend,’ said Mum.
‘He is not,’ I said.
Mack didn’t say anything. He looked at me in the rear-view mirror, and then he turned right around in his seat to meet my eyes.
‘He helps move the cows,’ I said. ‘At dusk.’
‘Does he now?’ asked Mack. Then he turned back to the road. ‘Kevin failed to mention that.’
We all sat there and wondered what it could mean, if anything at all.
Then Mack broke the silence. ‘Fuck. I don’t know,’ he said curtly, and turned his blinker on to pull out again, in a way that summarily ended the conversation.
‘Well,’ said Mum, ‘I don’t know about that either. He is very tall, though, isn’t he? Ethan. I might have to have another glass of wine.’ She fumbled with her keys, and fumbled with her bag, opening the door to let the rain in.
‘Night, Macko,’ she said.
Mum went in the gate and up on to the verandah, little raindrops catching in her hair, and stood there opening the front door under the light, not looking back.
‘Jean?’ said Mack to my reflection in the rear-view mirror, because I wasn’t getting out.
I sat there a moment longer, contemplated it, went through potential outcomes in my mind, dwelled a little on Mack’s unfavourable mood, and decided that, no, this was not the time to tell him about the money.
I unbuckled my seatbelt and got out.
Mack pulled off into the rain with his right blinker flashing.
When I went inside, Mum had put the kettle on and was under the ferns in the living room, shushing Backflip, who went around in circles, crying with excitement at the very sight of us.
‘Backflip you’re so brown,’ said Mum, ruffling Backflip’s ears. ‘Backflip Brown, Jean Brown and Celia Brown,’ she said, in a very jovial mood. Backflip was delighted. The rain was heavy still and the muffled voices of Big Jim and Fitzy floated in from their little patio. I stood in our back doorway and listened.
‘How many millimetres do you reckon, hon?’ said Fitzy’s voice from over the fence.
Mum looked at me, cracking up. Big Jim and Fitzy, watching their rain gauge, making their estimations.
I sat down on the couch and felt heavy and complex. The kettle started whistling. Mum turned on the radio in the kitchen and cellos sang. She hummed along, swaying. I wondered about Ethan. Was it some kind of secret that he worked for Kevin Fairley? What else could he see from high up on the paddocks? Why did Kevin never come into town? And then there was Bart. That was the main concern. The Bart that was emerging compared to the Bart that I knew. The Bart that Goodwood knew. Councillor, butcher, pillar of the community. Loving father to Pearl; faithful companion to Mrs Bart.
I didn’t think of him as a lying husband or a thief of his own car.
Mum sat down in our pink velvet armchair with her tea and Backflip joined us on the rug.
‘What do you think about what Mack said?’ I asked.
Mum puffed out air again. Shook her head. Sipped her tea. Stared at the wall.
‘I don’t know, baby,’ she said. ‘On the one hand, I think: it’s a big lake.’
It was a big lake. Bart could’ve been in there anywhere, dusting its silty floor, and no one would’ve been the wiser.
‘But, on the other hand, I don’t know,’ she said. She put her mug down on the side table and leant back in the big soft chair with her hands behind her head. ‘Maybe Mack feels like Bart might’ve been different to what we all thought.’
19
I sat on the bench outside the police station for close to twenty minutes after school the next day. I was determined to tell Mack about the money, and paralysed by the fear of what he might say.
Across the road, spring was sprouting flowers along the edge of Sweetmans Park, under the ancient fig tree. Burly Joe was in the window of Bart’s Meats, organising sausages into separate flavoured piles: pork, thin; pork with garlic and herbs; pork, thick; beef, thin; and so on. Bill was outside the newsagent smoking his cigarette.
Goodwood was heavier than ever. It had a different feel of an afternoon. Even with the season changing and green shoots appearing in the dewy branches, everything felt dark and heavy with grief. There was grief in the awnings, and grief in the wheels of our cars, and grief at the bottom of our glasses. Smithy, who served many a glass from behind his beer-soaked bar, told Nan it was just like Watership Down.
‘That book scared the daylights out of me when I read it to my son,’ he said, ‘but that’s how it feels around here now. Like we’re the rabbits and the field is filling with blood.’
As a former English teacher, Nan appreciated the reference, if not the sentiment. I heard her telling Mum that Smithy was prone to malaise, and that people ought to pay attention to it, even if he shrouded it in charm and poetry.
But how were people to notice Smithy’s sadness when it was so hard to differentiate between his and the rest of the sadness in town? Val Sparks knew it all too well. Her piety s
trained under such taxing circumstances. ‘It must be God’s way,’ she kept saying to my Nan, the atheist. But even Val seemed concerned about the kind of God we had, if taking people from their boats and their bedrooms was the right way to anything. When I went past the Vinnies, Val was standing in the doorway, holding her porcelain baby Jesus and staring fearfully at the Wicko next door, as if Smithy’s grief might be infectious.
‘God bless, love,’ she said to me.
‘Hi, Val,’ I said back, and walked across the road to the bench outside the police station, where I sat and deliberated. I went over my story. I decided how I was going to say it all out loud. I considered the various excuses I could proffer for not having told Mack earlier. By the time I worked up the courage to stand up it was almost four o’clock.
When I walked in I could see the top of Mack’s head above the pinewood counter. He looked up at me, starting to stand. He looked like Roy Murray did these days, which was tired in the eyes. I felt a pound of regret in my chest and wished I’d chosen a day when Mack was refreshed and bright-eyed with adequate sleep.
‘Jean?’ said Mack.
‘Hi, Mack,’ I said.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked. ‘Something wrong?’
‘No. I don’t think so. I mean, maybe.’
So far it was going about as well as I had imagined.
Mack leant on the counter and said, ‘Why don’t you come around here and sit down.’
I walked around, through the little pinewood gate that went up to my waist and presumably kept criminals from getting Mack. We stood awkwardly for a moment before Mack gestured to a cheap, black vinyl chair. The cushion went whoosh as I sat down. Then Mack settled behind his desk again, looking like he was preparing for bad news.
‘What’s up, Jean? Is Ceils okay?’
‘Oh yeah, she’s fine.’
‘You want to have a chat?’
‘Yeah, okay. No, I do. Let’s chat.’
Mack leant back and clasped his hands behind his head.
I moved around in my chair and the vinyl squeaked. I chewed my bottom lip. Then I launched—much like Opal Jones had at the Bowlo the night before. Much like Mack had in his police car in the rain. Much like Fitzy did, apropos of absolutely nothing, all the time. Without any prompting from Mack, I unburdened myself of everything: the money and the tree-hole; the clearing and the plastic horse; my fear that I’d kept my secret too long; the amount of time I spent worrying about what might have happened to Rosie, and to Bart. I spoke quickly and nervously. I raised questions; I digressed. And then suddenly I had finished and, mercifully for both of us, I stopped talking.
The quiet was relieving.
Mack squinted at me. He had a pen in his hand, which he’d picked up sometime after I started speaking. He held it above his notepad but wrote nothing.
‘So,’ he said.
‘So yeah, that’s everything. I haven’t been back to the clearing in a while, but last time I was there it was just the same, the bag with the little horse. And no one really goes there in winter. Except maybe Ethan does. I thought I should probably tell you about the whole thing.’ I tried to stop myself talking again by breathing. Mack looked at me and made a straight line with his mouth.
‘Well, what do you think?’
‘It’s a hidey-hole,’ said Mack.
‘In the tree? Yeah. It’s up above the big branch of the willow where—’
Mack cut me off. ‘I know, Jean. It’s a hidey-hole. We used to use it when we were your age. I used to hide weed in there when I was in high school.’
‘You smoked weed?’
Mack seemed so cool all of a sudden. I couldn’t wait to tell George.
Mack went on, ‘So you found five hundred dollars in the hidey-hole on the Friday before Rosie disappeared?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Five hundred?’
‘Yeah. I counted it.’
‘In a plastic bag?’
‘In a brown paper bag, which was in a plastic bag.’
‘And then you went back . . . when?’
‘The Monday. And it was gone. But the little plastic horse was in there.’
Mack wrote the days down and tapped his pen on his desk.
‘And you didn’t think it worth telling me until now?’ he asked, in a tone that I had imagined correctly in all my pre-enactments of this conversation.
I hung my head and remained silent.
He let out a big sigh, breathing all the air out through his nostrils.
I sat while he scratched some words on his notepad and tapped his pen and had faraway thoughts.
‘Well, I guess we better go have a look then,’ he said.
•
Mack and I walked across the oval in the sun, out the gate, and along the silty bank. He was a man of few words on the way; he mainly asked me to tell him everything again, so he could get it clear in his mind.
I found the money two days before Rosie vanished. Then the day after Rosie vanished the money was gone. I hadn’t taken the money. I didn’t know who took the money. I didn’t know who left the money.
‘And you didn’t see the car?’ asked Mack as we neared the clearing.
‘No, I always walk this way along the river so Backflip can swim. I don’t ever see the road.’
Mack nodded. He looked up towards the cul-de-sac and sure enough there were far too many trees in the way to get a look at it. You’d have to walk up the hill by the cow paddock and along the road to the very end.
‘Do you think they’re connected?’ I asked. ‘The money and the Corolla?’
‘I think your head’s connected to your arse, Jean,’ said Mack.
I tripped over a stick, just managing not to fall all the way over, and corrected my footing, feeling ridiculous about myself. We got to the clearing and the cows looked on, chewing with their mouths open, their big bodies attracting flies and birds.
‘Hello, ladies,’ Mack said to them kindly.
I always knew Mack to be a kind and gentle man.
He stood on the bank and raised a hand to his brow, squinting up to the tree-hole.
‘You better go up, Jean, I can’t see it from here. The branch bends.’
I climbed up the willow, onto the big branch, heard Mack telling me to be careful. I wavered and balanced, and looked up at the hole.
I saw no fraction of white plastic.
There was nothing there.
I put my hand up and felt inside the hole as best I could.
Crumbling bark, gritty dirt, rough hollowed edges.
I looked down at Mack, staring up at me, his face full of sun. I felt all the wind go from my sails.
‘It’s gone,’ I said.
•
On that same afternoon, about the time I was arriving home, deflated and confused, Goodwood erupted in violence.
George went to the oval after school to meet Lucas Karras, where he planned to kick a football and she was expected to watch. She watched for a little while, expecting him to stop kicking at some point and come sit by her on the hill. That point never seemed to arrive.
‘How long are you going to kick that for?’ yelled George.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ yelled Lucas.
‘Fuck this,’ yelled George, and walked towards the railway tracks that cut the town from her delinquent street. Lucas fetched his ball and followed, only to be deterred by the swiftness of George’s pace. He yelled her name twice, gave up, and headed off home.
Mack and I would’ve just missed them on our way across the oval in the other direction, towards the clearing.
When George got to the corner of her street she could see the kerfuffle outside the Carlstroms’ house. Davo’s immediate neighbours were standing behind their screen door looking on. They were an elderly couple, Edna and Gus Field, who were often quoted in the Gather Region Advocate as describing any change to Goodwood (mainly those initiated by the Goodwood Progress Association) as ‘an outrage’. George said later, ‘If Edn
a Field really wanted an outrage, she finally got one.’
As George got closer, she crossed to the other side of the street to give the shouting a wide berth. She admitted to me later that she was genuinely scared. The sound of tools hitting the shell of a car clanged in her ears. Male voices became louder and more aggressive. It was Davo, yelling at his bogan uncle, Lafe.
‘It was about Rosie,’ said George. ‘Davo was really losing it.’
‘Like what kind of stuff?’ I asked.
George struggled to be specific. All George heard, which she claimed she could testify in court with a fair degree of certainty, if the need arose, which she hoped it did, was Davo was yelling something like, ‘You have no fucken idea,’ followed at some point by, ‘You’re a fucken dog.’
Evidently, given what transpired, Lafe did not take kindly to being equated to a canine.
As George got to the pavement opposite the Carlstrom house, Lafe took Davo around the shoulders, grabbing his shirt and shaking him about. George caught something like, ‘If you fucken . . . something,’ from Lafe. Again, she could not be more specific as to the content. ‘It was very rough and tumble,’ she said later in her own defence.
Davo swung his arms and clipped Lafe around the ears. Lafe held him tighter and shook harder. There were grunting noises. Davo went red in the face. Then he got his knee up and boofed Lafe in the stomach, and Lafe went over onto the weed-infested, overgrown grass.
The crap caravan stood over them and made the whole scene look even more depressing.
Rearing back and catching his breath, Davo kicked Lafe in the torso, but Lafe grabbed Davo’s shoe and twisted, which brought Davo to the grass too, flailing in the dandelions. Then the Carlstroms’ screen door was flung open and Davo’s dad Dennis stormed the lawn.
He picked up Davo by the arm and dragged him, blood now running from his nostrils, into the house.
Lafe was left in the weeds by himself.
He just lay there and said, ‘Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck’—a word George heard quite clearly given its deliberate elongation. One of Lafe’s empty beer cans took the opportunity to fall off the fence.
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