Goodwood

by Holly Throsby

  He then went to the newsagent to buy Blu-Tac and tape. Helen and her husband Bill also refused his money. Helen said she’d wanted to offer Terry hopeful phrases that she’d been working on all morning in case she saw any member of the White family. When the time came, though, she panicked. ‘She’ll be right, love,’ she said, nodding. ‘She’ll be right.’

  Poor Terry.

  I counted eighteen signs on Cedar Street, after he’d done his teary rounds. Faye Haynes, who ran the Goodwood Village Bakery, had allowed two signs on either side of her front windows, and one on the noticeboard inside. There was Rosie in her Year Twelve photo—but with black eyes and heavily contrasted features, due to the unkind quality of the photocopy—and MISSING written in large letters above her head. Last seen wearing a red jumper, black skirt and black tights on Sunday night. Please help us find Rosie. Then the number for the police and the Whites’ home phone.

  I didn’t know what good the signs would do in Goodwood. Everyone knew Rosie, and everyone knew she was missing, and everyone knew that if they saw her, they’d tell the appropriate people. But what was Terry White to do?

  On my way home, I saw Terry had stuck one on each side of the electricity box on the corner of our street. I looked to see if anyone was around before I peeled one of the signs off, careful not to tear the edges on the Blu-Tac. I rolled the paper up into a tube, scraped the remaining blobs of Blu-Tac off the box with my fingers so there was no trace, and made them into one ball, which I pushed around in my fingers as I walked. When I got home, I stuck the soft blob to the wall above my bed, and slid Rosie’s MISSING sign, folded once, inside my blue notebook.

  Outside I could hear Fitzy next door, hosing the hedges like there’d never be rain.

  •

  Davo Carlstrom lived on the wrong side of the tracks, on the same street as George. His house was fibro and slumped in an overgrown lot with a crap caravan in the drive that his uncle slept in, and several shells of old cars which sat under blue tarpaulins, waiting to be tended to. Davo’s screen door was one of the first that Mack knocked on that Wednesday, since Smithy said he’d been drinking beer at the Wicko with Rosie on the day she vanished, and also because Davo and Rosie spent a lot of time together in general and most people assumed Davo was Rosie’s boyfriend.

  He confirmed this to Mack in slightly uncertain terms.

  ‘She’s kinda my girlfriend, yeah.’

  Around about the time Terry was putting up his signs, George rode her bike up and down her street in a loose figure eight while Mack and Davo talked on the front steps. Unfortunately, she found it too difficult to decipher their conversation, save for the odd phrase. But she did report that Davo looked genuinely distressed; that Mack called him ‘mate’ and patted him on the shoulder as he left; and that Davo’s creepy uncle watched the whole thing—Davo, Mack and cycling, eavesdropping George—from the steps of the caravan.

  ‘He’s a full-on pervert,’ was George’s summation of the uncle. ‘He’s been living there for three months. What does he even do all day?’

  ‘Doesn’t he fix cars?’

  ‘Davo’s dad fixes the cars, I think the bogan uncle just sits around.’

  ‘I think they’re all kind of bogans,’ I said.

  George nodded.

  Due to proximity, George, when in primary school, had the unrivalled privilege of having been inside the Carlstrom home. A privilege, because Davo was three years older than us and had grown into the most handsome, the most rebellious and, thus, the most coveted boy in town.

  He was blond, his tangled hair touched his shoulders, and he let it do what it wanted. He wore Big W flannos, open over T-shirts. He had a little beard that was lovely and casual, and he played guitar in a three-piece punk band called The Invalids, with Trent Ross from two doors down and Gary Elver, the wayward son of bald Bob at the servo. I had embarrassed myself at school once by pronouncing The Invalids like it referred to incapacitated old people. Horrible Liz Gordon said, ‘You fucken ’tard, it’s The Invalids,’ and pronounced it like Davo and his mates had intended: referring to people who were not valid; people who were somehow illegitimate or untrue.

  ‘That makes the name a bit cooler, hey,’ said George later on.

  Embarrassed, I agreed.

  I appreciated the fact that Davo was quiet to the point of brooding. Just looking at him, a person could see that his eyes were deeper ponds than those of his comrades. Maybe it was because he felt illegitimate or untrue. Maybe he could see a way out of Goodwood but was, for the time being, stuck like the shell of an old car in the yard.

  As for horrible Liz Gordon, who often yelled obscenities across the playground, she was a part of a group of rough girls who smoked during lunch by the fence and drank reckless amounts of Passion Pop around the late-night bin fires in Sweetmans Park. Liz Gordon, Talia Edwards, Bec Fisher, Bec Kelly, Kiralee Davis—these were names I longed to forget. They were proudly and deliberately mean. They scratched the caps off cream bulbs and inhaled the nitrous oxide to get high. They had notorious sex with Trent Ross and Gary Elver, and physical fights with each other. My Nan referred to them, collectively, as ‘common’.

  Liz Gordon once told George she was ‘a dead scrag’ because George sneezed on her in class. It had been due to Mrs Carr’s use of an overhead projector. Mrs Carr had turned the lights off and the projector on and the bulb came alive brightly and George sneezed.

  Mucus sprayed on Liz Gordon’s milky neck.

  ‘Gross,’ said Liz. ‘You’re a fucken dead scrag.’

  But George would always have it over Liz Gordon in one small way. George after all was the one who, at age nine, was invited in to play video games with Davo, by Davo’s sloshed mother.

  ‘What was it like in there?’ I asked.

  ‘Not that nice,’ said George. ‘His mum smelt heaps like beer. I felt really germy afterwards.’

  ‘Poor Davo,’ I said, because of his drunk mum and his stinking house and the fact that Rosie was missing and she was Davo’s kind-of girlfriend.

  ‘Yeah, poor Davo—if he didn’t do it,’ said George.

  We both fell silent. I don’t think I truly thought, at that time, that Davo had done anything bad. And I don’t think George did either. But it was as if we knew, or were starting to accept, that when it came to Rosie, something—and probably something bad—had been done.

  7

  To celebrate the occasion of Nan’s seventy-fifth birthday, Mum and I went to their house for a small dinner party. Pop cooked an easy-carve lamb leg roast and made gravy in the roasting pan. Nan wore a plastic tiara and sat at the head of the table.

  Gosh I loved Nan.

  Joyce Mackenzie was probably the most forward-thinking person in Goodwood, and yet she was married to my silly old Pop who, on hearing the announcement that Australia would stop distributing one- and two-cent pieces, had begun hoarding them in jars next to his bed, in case he missed them.

  ‘One day you’re going to reach into your pocket, Jean, and there’ll be none left,’ he said. ‘How would you be?’

  ‘I think I’ll be okay, Pop.’

  ‘Twenty-six years is not enough time for a coin to be in circulation. They should let them live.’

  Nan just smiled and shook her head.

  She voted Labor; Pop voted Nationals. She read poetry and literary novels; he read instruction manuals. She liked to try new recipes, experimenting with flavours and ordering exotic spices through Nance at the Grocer; he made one meal, once a year on Nan’s birthday: easy-carve lamb leg roast with gravy, baked potatoes, pumpkin and peas, served always on the Burleigh Ware dinner set they were given by his parents on their wedding day.

  I would look around town and wonder if two married people ever had less in common than my Nan and Pop. And yet they would look at each other across the cedar table and whatever ocean lay between them was bridged, just like that. He would wink and she would nearly blush. They would tease each other and sustain each other and, if music was playing
, they would dance. How they loved to dance. Pop told me they had danced for close to five hours on their wedding day. They danced in their living room of an evening to Billie Holiday or Frank Sinatra. They danced very slowly and took it in turns to lead. They danced while everyone was watching, and no one was watching, and the sight of their graceful private universe of swaying and twirling and gliding and rocking would bring joy to the walls of an empty room.

  That night, Mack came to the dinner party with his wife, Tracy, and their small son, Jasper. So did Nan’s friend Shirl from the CWA, whose husband Clive had died the year before from heart failure, sitting in his reading chair. Old widowed Shirl arrived in Maseur Sandals, which she’d paired with thick socks.

  ‘Joyce!’ said Shirl ‘I haven’t seen you for donks! Happy birthday, love,’ and they settled in for a brief, arthritic hug.

  Shirl bore a gift basket of scones. Tracy popped a bottle of sparkling. Mack and Pop drank Reschs Dinner Ale because it was a special occasion. Backflip sat patiently under the table, waiting for someone to drop food. Everyone wanted to talk about Rosie.

  ‘It’s weird seeing Roy Murray at Woody’s all afternoon,’ said Mum. ‘And Derek Murray—did you see he’s been working there this week? It feels funny for them to be open at all.’

  ‘I didn’t know Derek Murray had the intellect to fry a bag of chips,’ said Mack.

  Derek Murray. Roy’s son. As my Pop would say, ‘Fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down.’

  ‘I am not a fan of Derek’s face,’ I announced to the table.

  I wasn’t. Derek’s face was a big old mess of a thing, and it mainly looked that way because an unpleasant expression had settled in some time ago and had remained there, even if Derek was trying to smile at the time.

  Mack had a little laugh.

  Mum said, ‘Jeannie, honey, don’t be uncharitable.’

  ‘What about that bloke Carl? Isn’t he her stepdad, not her real one?’ asked Shirl.

  ‘Yeah, but he’s been around a long time,’ said Mack. ‘And, you know, I don’t really want to talk about the case.’

  ‘So it’s a real “case”?’ asked Nan. ‘You don’t think she ran off?’

  ‘Come on, Nan, you know what I mean.’

  Mack called Nan ‘Nan’ even though she was his aunt. Mack was the son of Nan’s brother, Lang, who died after the Vietnam War, sitting on his back verandah, cleaning his gun. I only realised in recent years that ‘cleaning his gun’ was a euphemism. I don’t suppose it was dirty at all. I suppose he was though, from the war, and all the horrible things he’d seen and done.

  Mack, who was fifteen at the time, found Lang with his beetroot head barely hanging together and a raven standing by his ear, nipping at the wooden boards. Mack was catatonic for two weeks straight. But in the years that followed, he mended and grew into a police officer. By 1992 he was gentle and kind, he loved his family, and could not stand the sight of ravens.

  Shirl piped up again. ‘I’ve come up to Cedar Street last Tuesday and I’ve seen Carl there at the bakery. I don’t know if I like the look of him. Faye Haynes says she’s never liked the look of him. What do you reckon, Mack?’

  ‘I think they’re probably going through a thing or two,’ said Mack and tried to eat his lamb. He then tried to change the subject. He commented on the lack of rain and how the lake levels were sure to drop if the dry spell continued. He said Nance had recommended him a John Grisham book called The Pelican Brief and it was wonderfully gripping, if not really about pelicans at all. He even asked us if we all knew that Bob Elver’s bony greyhound, Lady, was actually male.

  But Shirl was ruthless and the rest of us weren’t much kinder. As much as Mack evaded, the questions kept coming and, as the night went on, the dinner party did ascertain a few pertinent pieces of information: Carl was not Rosie’s dad, but he was Terry’s (I knew that already). Judy and Rosie had taken Carl’s surname—White—upon the marriage, because Rosie’s real dad was a deadshit who left them in the lurch when Rosie was a baby (that was new); Judy White was a mess (everyone knew that already); Davo told Mack that Rosie hadn’t given him any indication she was going anywhere, and he had not arranged to meet her on Sunday night in the blanket of darkness; and Davo’s bogan uncle, who lived in the crap caravan, was unemployed (I asked that question, and Mack looked at me intently when I did).

  The one place Rosie might’ve gone, according to Mack, was her cousin Tegan’s in Ballina. Tegan and Rosie were close. Judy said they sent each other things. Letters, magazines, mix tapes. Cousin Tegan was twenty-one and worked at the West Ballina Transit Centre restaurant, which sat under the Big Prawn. Mack had checked in with Tegan, as well as her mother, who was Judy’s sister Alison. Neither had heard from Rosie and both were awfully distressed.

  ‘Jeannie, do me a favour and tell your friend George—and her bike—to mind their own business,’ Mack said to me when we were out on the verandah after.

  I said I would, and we sat on the daybed in the crisp air while Backflip sniffed around Nan’s rose garden. Mack drank his beer and shook his head at the night. Backflip assumed her position and made a slow deposit on Nan’s lawn. The smell of it wafted across the garden towards the house and Mack winced. I blocked my nose and ventured to ask, ‘Hey, Mack, have you had any robberies recently?’

  ‘Robberies? What d’you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know—like, did someone get some money stolen or something?’

  ‘What do you know, Jean?’

  ‘Nothing!’

  Mack sighed and looked at me like a man who’d locked his keys in his car. I could hear Backflip rustling in the bushes. The wind had picked up and the trees above were dancing.

  ‘Jean.’

  I said, ‘Well . . .’ and thought hard whether to tell Mack about the money. I knew what he would say. He’d be disappointed that I hadn’t told him sooner. He’d say ‘Jean’ again, in a worse tone. He’d say, ‘That’s a lot of money. What were you going to do with it? Where is it now? What have you done with it?’ And then what was I supposed to say? That someone had swapped five hundred dollars for a little plastic horse?

  Just in the nick of time, we were interrupted by Shirl, who came out, tipsy, with her handbag and a piece of cake wrapped in a napkin.

  ‘Bye-bye, Mack. Bye-bye, love.’

  The soft sound of cork-lined sandals on the verandah.

  ‘Bye, Shirl,’ said Mack. ‘You’ll let me know if you want me to come do your lawn, won’t you?’

  And Shirl said, ‘Oh, you dear man,’ and I got up while Mack was distracted and went back inside.

  •

  Before going to bed that night I made sure my window was still locked. Then I wrote down all the new information I had relevant to Rosie’s disappearance in my blue notebook. Carl White. Rosie’s deadshit dad. Davo Carlstrom and his unemployed bogan uncle, whose name Mack had managed not to say. What was his name? I hadn’t thought to ask. I wrote: Bogan Uncle Carlstrom and put my pen down. I thought about all those cars under their tarpaulins, and wondered what was inside that old crap caravan. I wondered if Davo was lying in his bed thinking about Rosie, too. The wind was squally now and the trees kept wailing. I could almost hear Judy White among them, howling into the night.

  8

  I woke up early to Backflip’s faithful snores, floating up from her bed, and the sound of Mum out in the kitchen, fussing. Backflip got up when I got up. She stretched her front legs out, and then her back legs out, and then she shook all over like she’d just got out of a pond. I filled her bowl with biscuits and made my brown toast. Mum was on all fours on the kitchen floor this whole time, surrounded by the entire contents of the pantry, which she was sorting into piles of either keeping or getting rid of. There was a small third section for odd sauces, the fate of which was uncertain.

  ‘Some of these jams look a bit iffy,’ she said and pushed three jars to one side for disposal. ‘Remind me not to buy any more from the park market. I just
feel bad if Mary Bell’s selling them. Does her face make you feel bad or is it just me?’

  ‘Yeah, I feel pretty bad about her face,’ I said. Poor Mary Bell. First she was toppled from her position of Secretary of the CWA by Mrs Bart, and now she had to suffer the indignity of selling their iffy jams at the Sweetmans Park Market.

  ‘I just can’t imagine what Judy must be going through,’ said Mum to the jars and cans. ‘I’m going to take her some flowers. Or, no, some food. I think a casserole.’

  ‘I didn’t think canned goods went off,’ I said.

  Mum examined some white beans for a use-by date. She rolled the can around in her hand and looked up as a new thought struck her.

  ‘There’s a new girl at your school?’ she said, out of nowhere.

  ‘Oh, yeah. There is,’ I said, and for some reason I felt startled.

  ‘Evie?’ she said.

  ‘Evie,’ I repeated. ‘Is that her name?’

  What a lovely name, I thought. Evie.

  ‘Bart said they just moved here. The man was in there yesterday when I picked up the lamb for Pop. Nice-looking guy. Evie’s a lovely name, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess.’

  Then Mum corralled the pile of cans and jars deemed to be unexpired and began putting them back in the pantry with the labels facing out neatly. I ate my brown toast and watched Backflip through the kitchen window: she peed under the flowering gum and then dug a small pointless hole.