Goodwood

by Holly Throsby

  The cows mooed behind him, and Kevin mooed back. He felt better now that he’d been taking these long walks. He’d been having troubles with some off-flavours in his milk. It was a tasting a little cowy and a tad barny. He walked, lost in deep thoughts, trying to figure out a solution to the problem, and Remington trotted in the tall grasses and Paterson’s curse, that terrible weed that grew outside the paddock fences and all the way to the water.

  •

  Backflip and I turned the corner at the Grocer and the oval fell out before us. On the grassy hill, near the gate towards the clearing, with a skip of my heart I saw someone sitting.

  I let Backflip off the lead. She ran off in a sideways gallop with her nose down.

  The figure on the hill was facing the other direction. I saw the golden hair and, as I got closer, the headphones as big as earmuffs.

  Evie.

  •

  Kevin Fairley got to the edge of the tall grasses and let himself over the low wire fence, and Remington let himself under it. They walked along the side of the road that hugs the base of the mountain. They’d popped out near the rest stop, not far from the bridge. Not far from the lake.

  Up ahead, ravens pecked at the ground where the kangaroos lay flattened. There was a small group of them, clawing the bitumen. But Remington was an old dog and not one for playing chasings. Kevin didn’t worry about him plodding along without being on the lead. He was a good old faithful cattle dog.

  •

  Evie and I walked from the oval along the side of the river without much talking. She looked at me sideways and smiled and looked down again and I looked at her sideways and smiled and was nervous.

  Backflip ran ahead to see the cows, and the birds were louder than ever overhead, alive with spring, alive with the bright day.

  We got to the clearing and Backflip rolled around on her back, having found no cows, and Evie traced her fingers around the initials on the trunk of the willow, and I lay my towel down beside it, in the shade. Finally we both sat down next to each other and I felt like all the birds in the trees were in my chest: fluttering and beating and singing.

  •

  Kevin saw up ahead, on the side of the bridge, two men looking over into the water. They’d pulled their ute up on the shoulder on the other side of the road. The tray was full of fishing gear: rods and buckets and a big blue esky. One man was pointing and the other man had his hands on his hips, and then he moved them up to the back of his head. They didn’t see Kevin as he came up behind them; and the ravens didn’t move from their pecking and scraping at the innards on the road.

  ‘What’s up, fellas?’ said Kevin, and the two men turned around. They appeared out of breath. They had no reason to be breathless. Their car was just across the road, so they hadn’t come far. But they were very excited by something, and not making much sense.

  ‘It’s a car!’ said one man.

  ‘What car?’ asked Kevin.

  ‘In the lake,’ said the other man.

  Kevin Fairley looked down to where they were pointing. Into the brown water.

  It was the back of a car. Its front end was submerged completely; there was no bonnet or front doors or back doors to see. There was only an exhaust pipe, and a number plate, and a bumper. It was all bronzed and silty. Except it hadn’t been brown to begin with. In some places an off-white paint colour came through, and Kevin thought of the off-flavour in his milk.

  He looked back at where the car would’ve come from.

  Goodwood.

  Then he looked at the place where the guardrail should’ve been, before poor old Fitzy had knocked it over. There was nothing there to stop a car from flying over into the lake. How was anyone ever going to have the heart to tell Fitzy?

  The ravens caaawed at Remington, who watched them from his sedentary position with elderly bemusement. The two men were beside themselves.

  ‘It’s a fucken car!’ the first man kept saying. ‘There must be someone in there! What should we do? Where’s a phone?’ Kevin Fairley looked at the ravens and imagined the kangaroos that always pronked out of the bush there and scared the daylights out of passing cars. He thought of a car swerving to miss one, and how that might turn out. Looking down at the back of the car in the lake, he could see how that had turned out.

  ‘I don’t think there’s any hurry, boys,’ he said to the two men. ‘That car’s been there a long time.’

  One of the men started striding back to the ute.

  ‘Let’s find a phone,’ he said to his friend, and the other man followed. He yelled back at Kevin, almost hysterical, ‘We’re gonna find a phone!’ And they sped off towards Goodwood.

  Kevin stood and Remington sat and they looked down at the brown water, which was lower than it had ever been in all the records. Low enough to reveal this car, which had swerved and flown and crashed and sunk. Kevin felt a misery rising from the very depths of him. He couldn’t help but think of his dear Susan, ailing and passing; and of Bart, coughed up by the marshes. And of Bart’s missing Corolla, which he could see now, sticking out of the low water.

  •

  By the time the sun had set that night, the authorities had pulled the Corolla out of the lake and found Rosie inside it. They didn’t know it was Rosie right away, but Mack did. She had to travel all the way to the city and spend a day with the forensic pathologist before she was formally declared as herself.

  When the authorities went through the car they found a few things, sodden. What was left of Rosie’s bag, what was left of Rosie’s army coat, which had slithered off her and seemed by then to be made of green pulp. In her disposal store backpack was a plastic zipped compartment—and in that, drowned and decomposing, was five hundred dollars.

  Ballina was generally agreed to be Rosie’s planned destination. There were not many diverging theories on that. The contention was that Rosie was heading towards her cousin Tegan, who she was so fond of. She could’ve got a job under the Big Prawn, far away from the Derek Murrays and Carl Whites that repulsed her.

  By nightfall, Mrs Bart understood why Bart had lied to her about the Corolla. Mack went around expressly to tell her. Pearl was watering the horses and Mrs Bart sat down and stared and Jan said, ‘God. Bart. He really was something, wasn’t he, Flora? Imagine! And that’s why he said the car would probably turn up again. He probably just loaned it to her so she could leave, and then—oh, goodness me. That poor girl.’

  Mrs Bart—Flora—just stared. She didn’t seem pleased or displeased. She didn’t seem surprised or unsurprised. She just said blankly, ‘I need to see Judy White. I feel compelled.’

  Flora reversed the Mazda out of the drive and Mack reversed the police car and followed her for a part of the way down the hill. Then he pulled over and stopped on the side of the road. The mountain towered above him and he felt hot and sick. He rolled down his window and the blessed breeze flowed in, like water. It was almost as if he had been in the lake this whole time himself. He felt drenched and boggy and gulped at the air with his lungs. Then he opened the door of the police car and vomited a river into the loose gravel.

  •

  I didn’t know any of it yet, when I was sitting on my beach towel next to Evie. I didn’t know that the next morning I would be sitting on my bed, holding Rosie’s MISSING sign for most of the day, and on many other days after. Her inscrutable face: black and white, and stuck in time. Please help us find Rosie, said Terry’s sign, next to the relevant phone numbers that nobody ever called. I did not know all the things I would feel, or all the feelings Goodwood would endure, or how the brown water would’ve felt to Rosie as it seeped in through the seals of the Corolla and into her hollow lungs. On the beach towel, with Evie, there was just the sound of the river, running ceaselessly towards the lake, and the silty earth in it, along with the fish; and the birds above us, all singing.

  Evie reached out her arm and put her hand on the top of my knee.

  I breathed in and looked at her, so relieved that she was touchi
ng me.

  She looked back at me and I died.

  I put my hand on top of her hand.

  Evie paused and seemed to think for a moment, and then, without any expression, she drew me forward, and lay back as she did. I was above her. And without thinking, I did what I wanted. I kissed her. On her mouth, and her neck—and when I kissed her neck she shivered and smiled.

  I thought of diamonds as I took off her clothes. In the dappled shade, I thought of the little lamp twinkling in her hallway and the mirror ball at the Bowlo, spinning slow stars around the walls.

  Evie unbuttoned her jeans and pulled her old T-shirt over her head. The skin at the top of her leg had goosebumps when I kissed her there, and more when I put my mouth higher. Later, when I found her with my fingers, and felt all there was of her, I was full in my chest with a luminous light; and it swelled with the birds and the wings and the heat at the top of my throat and down to my lungs in a blaze. And Evie—in front of all the trees and all the day—buried her face in my neck and breathed loud and heavy against my ear, and I closed my eyes and moved with her, and behind my eyelids was a single flash, glowing, and everything else in the whole world fell quiet for her breathing.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Annette Barlow, Siobhán Cantrill, Ali Lavau, Andy Palmer—and to all the good people at Allen & Unwin who worked so hard and well at bringing this book into the world.

  Thank you to my mum and my amazingly supportive friends. For some particular inspiration on the subject of adoption, I thank Elizabeth Elliott; and for some particular inspiration on dogs, I thank my dog, Jones.

  Thank you to Zoë Bell.

  Most of all I give thanks to Richard Walsh—for friendship, guidance, and the gift of encouragement.