Goodwood

by Holly Throsby

Roy stood in the doorway and looked at Derek, who was involuntarily sitting now, doubled over on the tiles against the wall, gasping; and Derek said, ‘What a fucken bitch,’ and spat onto the tiles of the shop that Roy had grown and fostered and loved and dedicated himself to.

  Roy looked at his son, Derek, who he had grown and fostered and loved and dedicated himself to. He could smell a brewery in the hallway. Above the meat smoke and fat and onions all he could smell was the beer mats that lay on the counter at the Wicko, and the bottoms of a hundred schooner glasses, and the end of a spent keg.

  Derek got up and put himself back in his jeans, and zipped, and smiled at his dad. ‘She was into it,’ he said, and his teeth looked revolting in his mouth; and the air was filled with his stench; and Roy didn’t know who on earth this vile person was that he was looking at.

  •

  Backflip and I had left the house to walk to the clearing that Monday morning. We walked along Cedar Street in the clear day, right past Woody’s, and I saw that the roller door was up but the glass door was closed, which was very unusual. I looked in as we went past and there was white-haired Roy Murray slumped on the back booth table, and Mack looking on at him blankly. I stopped for a moment and gazed in, thought better of myself for prying, and continued on down towards the oval.

  When we got to the river, it flowed brown with the silt and white with the sky. The lack of rain had caused it to shrink its sides. Where it once was wide and cavernous, now it was not even enough for Backflip to properly swim, not unless she was all the way in the centre.

  It’d been ages since I’d been there. Not since Mack and I had gone looking for the plastic horse and found it to be missing.

  Backflip ran ahead towards the willow and up along the alluvial bank to sniff, and to check if there were cows in the paddock to bark at. I stopped dead still when I saw there was someone sitting in the tree.

  For a minute, it was Ethan. Tall, blond Ethan, who had come there to look at the cows. He seemed to be sitting in the tree and meditating on them, watching the river run. What would we talk about? We hadn’t been alone since the night in my garden.

  But as I got closer, it wasn’t Ethan. I knew the shape of the shoulders and the colour of the flanno and the rough golden hair. It was Davo Carlstrom sitting up there on the branch, his feet dangling over the water. Even there at the clearing the river was lower than I’d ever seen it. His legs were long and he was nowhere near touching the current. The river itself seemed sunken into the sand, like the earth had opened its thirsty mouth and drunk it.

  Unfortunately, Davo was facing my direction. If he’d had his back to me, I could’ve turned around without him knowing, but he was looking right at me and I was just a solitary figure on a long riverbank and Backflip had started barking at the cows and there was no way around hearing it.

  Even from where I stood, far away, I could see his heavy sadness. He was stooped in it with his whole body, like a weeping willow, and just below was the trunk where all the initials were and Rosie had carved hers next to his.

  I yelled to Backflip, embarrassed, and she barked and strutted about with her back up, and barked again before galloping towards me looking triumphant.

  Davo held up one hand.

  The handsome, rebellious, older boy—who I had perhaps not said even one word to in my life—held up his hand to me. I saw that he was holding a brown paper bag with a bottle in it. He held up his hand, with the bottle. So I held up one hand too, and the two of us stood facing each other, a long way apart, with our hands up.

  After a while I took mine down, and he took his down, and with an unfamiliar feeling of solidarity I turned and walked back towards town and left him to be by himself in the tree.

  39

  Mack went straight from Woody’s, with Roy, to see Derek Murray. The two men did not speak on the short drive in Mack’s police car. They arrived at the weatherboard house where Doe Murray sat on the brown couch and looked like she’d seen two apparitions when the men entered.

  Roy said gently, ‘Don’t worry, angel, Mack’s just here to have a chat with Derek,’ and Doe Murray did not acknowledge Mack at all as he headed towards the closed door with the plastic STOP sign on it.

  Mack knocked. Derek didn’t answer. Computerised sounds of kicks and punches came from inside the room. Derek was beating the shit out of someone on his screen and Mack could hear the damp blows over and over again.

  He knocked once more. Derek snarled, ‘Fuck off, Doe,’ and Mack couldn’t stop himself from thrusting the door open so hard that it slammed against the wall behind and shook the entire sunken house to its very frame.

  Derek went white when he saw Mack, livid, in the doorway and his father, Roy, standing right behind him, as grave as a deep hole. Unlike Roy—who had flushed as red as blood back at Woody’s—Derek quickly drained of everything. He was all milk in his snowy Y-fronts. A ghost boy, blank and unpleasant.

  Derek shot up from his swivel chair and then popped back down again on the edge of his bed, trying to appear unmoved. Mack stared at him. He put on his poker face. He narrowed his eyes and tried the same technique as he had with Roy. But unlike Roy, Derek didn’t have a heavy conscience. There was no burden of guilt on his sloped and pallid shoulders.

  Mack sat down on the swivel chair and requested that Derek cover up his chalky body in more than just underwear. Derek pulled on a T-shirt and dusty jeans.

  He was uncooperative at first. Unresponsive. He looked at the ground and smiled. He ran his tongue slowly along his top teeth. Derek insisted he’d done nothing wrong. He said his dad had seen two people who were totally into it. He said Rosie looked at him just right.

  Mack, for the first time since winter, finally broke. He slammed his fist down on Derek’s desk so hard that the joystick fell off and hung by its cord and a mug of water hit the carpet and made a slow dark impression shaped like a rain cloud. He slammed his fist down again and it made a small trough and the wood splintered. The underside of Mack’s hand was nicked with blood. Derek’s eyes went wide and his smile went away.

  Through clenched teeth, Mack said, ‘Roy, would you leave us alone?’

  Roy, who looked disgusted, complied. He closed the door and his footsteps bled away in the hall.

  Derek became cooperative and scared. Rosie was a tease, though, Mack had to understand that. What did she expect? She didn’t say no and she teased him, like, all the time. It wasn’t even that serious what happened. But yeah, okay—okay, maybe he’d tried his luck a bit too hard. But she was not not into it, hey.

  ‘A bit too hard?’ Mack repeated, incredulous.

  A bit too hard.

  Mack never went into more detail of his long conversation with Derek Murray. His expression was always too disgusted, and his skin looked fit to crawl right off. When it came to Rosie, Mack could hardly bear it. And he could not bear the pitiful excuse for a young man that Derek was, and his view of the world, which Mack found to be both belligerent and grotesque.

  He couldn’t even be bothered to take him to the station. He knew he couldn’t charge him—not yet. Derek swore blind he didn’t know where Rosie was; and he swore blind he didn’t assault her. He certainly didn’t rape her, because he hadn’t got to have her that way anyhow. He’d just tried his luck a bit too hard maybe, that’s all. It was just Roy’s word against Derek’s. And after it all happened, Derek hadn’t set foot in the shop again until after Rosie went missing. And now Rosie was missing, and Mack couldn’t ask her a thing about it. It was Roy’s word against Derek’s unpleasant face; and Roy had said, right opposite Mack in the booth that morning, that he couldn’t testify against his own and only son.

  ‘Rosie left town anyway, Mack,’ said Roy. ‘Can’t we just move on? Please?’

  Mack sat in Derek’s sweaty swivel chair and wondered what to do as Derek stared at the wet carpet, tonguing his teeth. Mack had grilled and pushed and bored holes with his questions, and Derek just kept on swearing, as if his hand were on a Bible
, and as if a Bible would mean anything in his sodden, godless world. He didn’t know where Rosie was, and he was home all night when she went missing. Roy said that was true, as far as he could tell. Roy saw Derek go to bed. Derek’s window didn’t open wide enough for the cat to crawl out. Roy was up late in the lounge room, busying himself while Doe slept. Derek hadn’t come out. Mack just shuddered at all of it.

  ‘So you didn’t see her again even one time after you assaulted her?’

  ‘I didn’t fucken assault her,’ said Derek, again.

  Mack had to stop himself from erupting entirely and putting damp kicks and punches into Derek’s pasty frame, over and over, until he seeped into the carpet and down into the depths of the sunken house.

  Mack took a deep breath and continued, with his calm police voice. ‘You didn’t see her again, not one time?’

  ‘Nah. Or yeah—I saw her one time,’ said Derek. His bottom lip trembled.

  ‘When was that?’ asked Mack.

  ‘The next night.’

  Mack waited. Derek licked at his teeth, and then his mouth curled inwards and unexpected whimpers came from somewhere in his throat.

  ‘I seen her out the back of Woody’s from my car. I just went to, like, I dunno, I was just there in my car. And I seen her. She was smoking out the back on that folding chair there. But Bart was with her.’

  ‘Bart was there?’ asked Mack.

  ‘Yeah, he was there. She was talking to him, all upset,’ said Derek, who was properly crying now, grizzly and pathetic.

  ‘Bart was there listening to her?’ asked Mack. ‘What, was he consoling her?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Derek, sobbing, wiping his eyes with his forearm. ‘He was standing there with her. Consoling her, I guess, yeah.’

  •

  As I walked back along the riverbank, away from Davo, the rain started. It came in fast and hard. The sky had been blue when I left home. I hadn’t considered my raincoat. But as I had neared the riverbank a mass of darkness appeared low beyond the mountain. And then the wind picked up as I turned from Davo and it licked the top of the river like teeth. Choppy waves sprang up as flowers do. Branches flapped like the wings of giant birds. The wall of inky cloud from beyond the mountain coloured the whole sky and covered the sun; and the oval glowed ahead, luminous white. It was the swiftest storm Goodwood had seen in many months.

  Backflip and I started running up the bank as hailstones began to fall: handfuls of them thrown across the water. The rain was spliced among it—sharp stinging lines—but mostly it was hail. It bounced off the metal fence of the oval as we ran through the gate. It bleached the grass and gathered in the gutters of the toilet block. I thought of Mrs Gwen Hughes and her myriad crystals as the frozen ice fell and fell, and made a brief glacier of our town.

  Backflip and I waited it out under the edge of the toilet block. I wondered about Davo Carlstrom. I imagined him sitting in the branch still, welcoming the flood, turning his face up to the deluge. I imagined he wouldn’t mind if it pelted and stung him. Do your worst, he would have said to the opened sky.

  And then it was over.

  Just as quickly as it had come in, the dark mass rolled away, and steam rose off the concrete. The ice pellets lay scattered widely, spent and defrosting. The heavens broke with light again; the beams and rays were brilliant from behind the receding clouds. Backflip stood next to me, wet and panting. I sat down against the toilet block wall and turned my face up to the sun. Then I sat and admired the field of thick hailstones for as long as it took for the sound of sirens to arrive from somewhere in the distance.

  It was not often that we heard sirens. Goodwood was not much of a place for an emergency. I listened to them and wondered what kind they were: police car, fire truck, ambulance. I put Backflip on her lead and we walked back towards town, slowly and then faster as the noise got louder.

  We rounded the Goodwood Grocer and went along Cedar Street. The sirens bent in pitch as they neared us. I couldn’t tell which direction they were coming from—for a minute it was back beyond the oval, and then it was straight ahead near the Wicko, and after it was left towards the train tracks and the school. Backflip pulled on the lead, excited.

  There was Helen, up ahead, standing outside the newsagent, trying to work out the direction of the noise. She kept turning back and yelling at a person inside who I guessed was Bill, because it was always Bill: ‘No, I said not fire! I think it’s the ambulance!’

  And there was Bill as I walked past the door, hovering on the landing with his arms folded and his head down, shaking it as if disagreeing with the universe in general. Burly Joe was peering out from the doorway of Bart’s Meats. Robin Clunes was standing just inside Bookworm, paralysed. Goodwood couldn’t take another tragedy. It wasn’t ready for the sound of sirens—of fire, or sickness, or crime. Not with everything.

  Helen looked at me with her mouth closed as I rushed past.

  ‘I think it’s the ambulance,’ she said.

  I started to worry, too, as I got closer to our street, and the sirens stopped at what sounded like a close distance. When I rounded our corner past the Wicko, Val Sparks was standing in the doorway of the Vinnies, crossing herself, and Smithy had his hands on his hips next to Costa Karras and Mal West, who were all looking down our street. I saw the flashing lights. Blue and red. They were spinning off the houses around our house, but mostly off our house, which the ambulance was parked directly in front of.

  My heart: it pounded.

  Mum.

  Her heart.

  I started running, and Backflip, thinking it was a game, took the lead in her mouth and pulled sideways and forward with her ears back, gleefully. I felt sick in my stomach as I approached the handful of people gathered near our front fence.

  Mum was nowhere.

  There was just Con and Althea, and Frankie Dodds from across the road, and Coral, who was clutching Myrtle.

  Backflip took one look at Myrtle and jumped up to lick her face and Myrtle was absolutely delighted to see Backflip and made a whinny like a tiny horse. Coral squealed and turned her back on us, and I yanked Backflip down to the ground, apologising, and forgetting everything for a second. Forgetting where Mum was, or wasn’t, and why our front door was still closed and it appeared so quiet.

  I couldn’t see Mum lying prone through the windows. I couldn’t hear anyone yelling ‘Clear!’ before applying a defibrillator to her silent chest. Squinting, I could not make out the outline of a respirator lying useless on our living room carpet.

  Then Big Jim came out from his house and the ambulance men followed, carrying a stretcher.

  That’s when I saw that Big Jim’s ute was parked outside their house, since he’d been using his carport to build a new wooden compost box. That was why the ambulance had had to park outside our house. And Mum’s car wasn’t anywhere, come to think of it, except that it was, just at that moment, coming down the street with Mum in it, rolling down her window as she approached with a look of true terror on her face—terror which turned to relief when she saw me and Backflip standing there safely, watching Fitzy on the stretcher, crumpled and blood-soaked.

  Fitzy.

  Big Jim was sallow. His eyes shone with fear. There were sweat beads on his upper lip and forehead and a mess of blood smeared all over his singlet and King Gees. One of the paramedics was making hand gestures to Big Jim, as if arguing, as he closed the ambulance doors with Fitzy tucked inside. But Big Jim wasn’t going to have a bar of following in his ute, because a moment later the paramedic relented and opened the doors and Big Jim hopped in, taking Fitzy’s hand in his own, and drawing it up to his mouth, kissing the back of it, as he crouched beside her gurney.

  That was my enduring image of the two of them—with Fitzy’s aliveness in doubt—as the doors closed again and the ambulance departed, lights flashing. It went around the corner, and a few moments later the siren went on again and warbled off into the distance towards Clarke.

  Mum had parked facing the wro
ng way. She got out of the car and rushed towards us, taking me in a desperate hug, saying, ‘Jeannie, what happened? Was that Fitzy?’

  I told her that, yes, it was Fitzy.

  ‘Oh God, Jean. For a minute I thought it was you. Is she okay?’ The last bit she addressed not so much to me but to the gathered crowd.

  Coral, by this time, had raised her voice above the murmurings and, with damp Myrtle still grasped against her daffodil cardigan, assured us that Fitzy was, at least, alive.

  ‘She’s alive. She left here alive.’

  It was declared as if at royal court.

  She was alive. Good old Fitzy.

  Backflip panted, oblivious, smiling lovingly at Myrtle.

  Mum—who had just popped up to the Bowlo to pick up a cardigan she’d left behind at the Fish Fry—held me in an awkward bear hug out on the street for a long time.

  ‘Can you let go?’ I said.

  ‘Don’t rush me,’ she said. ‘I’m not to be rushed.’

  40

  As it turned out, Fitzy had been taking measurements from the rain gauge. As soon as the storm had passed she couldn’t contain herself. It was mostly hail, but there was rain, too. Sharp stinging drops of it. It was the only precipitation Goodwood had had in weeks. What would the rain gauge say?

  At the store in Clarke, when they’d bought the thing, they’d had the choice of perspex or glass and Big Jim chose glass. It looked better, and had the feel of the beakers in science class when he was a boy.

  He and Fitzy had mounted their rain gauge—a cylindrical glass tube with a glass funnel at the top that directed precipitation into a smaller central tube—on a small post at the back corner of their yard.

  That afternoon, when the skies had cleared after the short storm, Fitzy trudged across the sodden grass and Myrtle followed delicately, as if not wanting to get her paws wet. So excited was she by the sudden advent of rain, and the prospect of a measurement, Fitzy forgot her helmet.

  She approached the rain gauge and crouched down with her little writing pad in one hand and pencil in the other. She took her time and took her measurement—0 mm—and then, devastated, stood up to go back inside. But Fitzy stood up too fast, and a galaxy of silver stars swam in front of her eyes, as if someone had thrown a handful of sparkly sand at her face in slow motion. According to Coral, who dined out on the story, being the only one apart from Big Jim to hear the screams, Fitzy was head-spun and dazed when the birds swooped, one from each direction, the bigger magpie clipping her ear as she screamed and put her hands over her head in her own defence. Unbalanced, she fell, and there was momentary silence, and then the sound of breaking glass and Myrtle barking.