Nance walked her to the door and helped her inside. She opened windows and threw out dead flowers. The musty smell of sorrow hung in all the curtains. Nance put the kettle on. Judy said, ‘You go open the shop, Nance. I’m fine.’
Nance went reluctantly. She left Judy with bread and eggs and milk in a picnic freezer bag. Judy White sat on her couch and put her large-print puzzle book on her lap like a blanket. A short while later she heard Opal Jones knocking.
‘Jude? Knock knock,’ said Opal. She kept on banging and yelling—‘Yoo hoo, Juu-ude’—for what seemed like ages.
Judy White just sat there on her couch and tears went everywhere on her face and dripped down her blouse and onto her jeans and over her puzzle book and even the floor.
•
That afternoon I went to George’s. Backflip and I had walked from our house, along Cedar Street under the mountain, across the train tracks and along the delinquent street, where sinks and whitegoods grew like broken flowers in the weeds. George’s house was cold, even in spring. The interior was lino, and fake wood, and cheap venetian blinds that were always tangled. There was a deep crack in the glass coffee table and no art and not many books. Just remote controls and TV Weeks and scattered blocks of Lego.
George’s oldest brother, Vinnie, was in the backyard with Toby, who was throwing a basketball at a crooked hoop. It was not so much a yard, just a concrete slab with a Hills Hoist in the middle and several struggling pot plants. Vinnie was sitting in a lawn chair, drinking a Carlton Draught.
‘Oi, Jean,’ he said. ‘My little mate.’
Gosh, I loved Vinnie. We all did. I beamed when he greeted me warmly.
Vinnie had been in Rosie’s year at Goodwood High. He was a skinny redheaded kid when we were younger, but over the years he’d grown to be six foot tall, which made him comparable to Ethan, if not Big Jim himself—the tallest man in town. Vinnie excelled at Design and Technology. He had giant freckled hands. At school he made pencil boxes and cheese boards and spoons. Now he was making an outdoor table for his new house in Clarke. And before he’d started the table he’d made his own workbench, so he could start the table. He told us all about it proudly from his lawn chair. He did the whole thing with two-by-fours and it had a face vice and a tail vice and joinery that was heaps good. It was so fluky because he got all the wood for free on account of a construction site that ran out of money and a very disgruntled foreman. Vinnie could charm a disgruntled anyone.
Vinnie had enrolled in TAFE over the summer: a certificate in carpentry. He always said he wanted to give it a crack. He’d moved out of home and was studying and living in a share house with two other guys near the Clarke Plaza. George said they’d had a party with a whole keg of beer and the police came. But Vinnie, apart from his drinking, was a good and quiet man. His giant freckled hands were gentle. He could wrap them all the way around Toby’s clenched fist, down to the wrist. And he was much stronger than George’s dad. He was, at nineteen, the man of the house.
‘What the fuck about Rosie?’ he asked, drinking. His beer cooler said Goodwood’s Good For Wood, with the sawmill and the blushing lady.
‘She’s disappeared,’ said George. ‘No one knows anything.’
Vinnie looked at the concrete.
‘It’s so full on,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Rosie White.’
Toby got the ball through the slanted hoop. Vinnie leant forward in his flimsy chair.
‘This calls for beer, hey,’ he said. ‘You can get them, Georgie.’
George sprinted off to the fridge and came back with a sixpack, not entirely cold, and we sat on the concrete and drank them while Vinnie spoke of Rosie.
He’d liked her. He had really liked her. She was such a funny girl. Funny weird, not funny ha-ha. Toby, who was half listening, ribbed him. ‘She turned you down, but,’ he said, passing the ball from one hand to the other.
‘She turned you down, too,’ said George. She rolled her eyes.
Toby closed his mouth and turned back to the hoop.
Vinnie had asked Rosie out, it was true. She had turned him down though, that was true also. She seemed pretty into Davo Carlstrom. She was such a strange girl but, hey. Hard to figure out. Never really got her. But fully good-looking. Just heaps more interesting than the other girls. Now it’s fucken Derek Murray working at Woody’s. How fucked is that? No one used to wanna go there if he was hanging around—like a full-on weirdo—and now he’s actually making the chips and shit. Cannot handle that guy. He’s like a twenty-year-old virgin.
Ha ha ha ha. Toby was laughing.
Vinnie laughed too, a big man’s laugh. He made Toby seem so small. The two brothers shared an unkind moment against Derek Murray. Then Vinnie stopped laughing and looked very stern. His expression went stony and he sipped at his beer. Cross-legged on the concrete, we looked up at him.
Vinnie was rueful. ‘Fucken Derek,’ he said, and stared. ‘Get this though, hey.’ And then he told us a story we had never heard before.
The previous year, when Derek Murray stole runty Daniel’s football and left him with a bloody nose, Daniel came home and told the whole family all about it. He was crying. He was so short. He loved that football. He was only in Year Seven and Derek Murray was six years older and a whole foot taller. It just wasn’t cricket.
Vinnie was incensed. He couldn’t believe it. What kind of arsehole steals a little kid’s football and hits him in the face? Overcome by the injustice of it, he punched the pleather couch cushion. Fred Sharkey told him to leave it. ‘Just leave it, Vin. Derek Murray is dumb as a box of hair.’
Vinnie couldn’t leave it. Daniel was his little brother and he had to restore his honour. He left on his bike. He rode across the railway tracks and along Cedar Street and down to the Murrays’ sunken weatherboard house. Vinnie knocked on the door. No one came. He knocked louder. Soft footsteps sounded from inside. The door finally opened and a face peeked out from behind it. It was Doe Murray.
Doe Murray! A sighting! No one ever saw Doe Murray.
Vinnie asked if Derek was home. Doe looked terribly nervous. She looked out past him and up to the sky, her brow furrowed at the cheerful white clouds. ‘He’s in his room,’ she whispered. Her mind was absent.
Vinnie said, ‘I’m a mate—can I say a quick hello?’
Doe Murray opened the door and let him through, ignoring him completely. She stood in the doorway like an unjoined person and looked up to the perfect sky.
Vinnie walked in—he didn’t know where he was going—and went down the hall. He saw a closed door. It had a plastic STOP sign on it. He took a punt and opened it to find Derek Murray, sitting in his underwear, playing Street Fighter. Derek looked stunned. He said ‘Hey. What?’
Vinnie closed the door behind him softly. He got Derek by the neck and pulled him up so he was standing. Derek was an older boy, but not a bigger one. Vinnie punched him in the stomach, hard. Derek went whoosh as the wind came out. Vinnie held him by the neck as he wheezed and spluttered. Spittle went down his chin. He was plainly winded. Vinnie stared him in the eyes, very close. He squeezed his neck, tighter and tighter with his giant freckled hand, and Derek coughed and choked and tears came out.
Then Vinnie let go, and Derek fell back on the bed in his briefs. Vinnie stood tall and looked at him, disgusted. Satisfaction was his, but he didn’t feel satisfied. He just saw the stains on the carpet, and the dropped joystick, and Derek’s wretched pile of pornography.
Then Vinnie let himself out of Derek’s room and said a nice goodbye to Doe Murray. She closed the front door behind him and that was that. Vinnie didn’t know if anyone in town knew he’d done it. That he’d gone in and winded Derek Murray, choked him in his own house, and left him rasping in his awful bedroom. He had never told a soul.
We looked up at Vinnie like he was the sun.
George beamed and shone in reflected glory.
Toby had stopped playing with his ball and was leaning up by the Hills Hoist listening, visibly impresse
d. Backflip panted. Vinnie leant back in his chair and rested his empty bottle on the concrete. His hands were freckled and rough with woodwork and big enough to go all the way around a person’s neck.
•
I left the Sharkey house with my head full of Vinnie’s story. George’s street was wide and had overgrown grass in all the cracks in the pavement. Backflip wanted to sniff every one of them. Edna Field was standing in her carport, waiting for an outrage. Emily and Trent Ross’s alcoholic father was slumped on a deck chair, asleep on his own shoulder.
As I went past the Carlstroms’ front yard, Dennis was walking inside, the screen door shutting behind him. The Torana had its bonnet open. Lafe was leaning up against the crap caravan. His row of empty beer cans had been removed from the fence. There were just a few in the grass now, resting on their sides among the dandelions.
Backflip stopped to sniff and I yanked her lead. She was strong, though, and I was stuck for a moment, right near the Carlstroms’ fence. I tried to ignore Lafe, who was leaning just a few metres away. Music was blaring out of their kitchen window. There was no sign of Davo. Lafe’s khaki coveralls were unbuttoned just under his navel. There was a gaping hole there, full of darkness. He leant, standing, with his hands behind his head and smiled at me, vacant. He pushed his tongue out of his mouth a fraction. I looked right at him, just for a second. His eyes were like corpses. They had no life in them at all, just blankness, like Carl White feeding money into the pokies and drinking. Lafe leered at me and grinned, his vile tongue moving in and out of his mouth while he thrust his hips forward real easy in one foul motion.
I yanked Backflip’s lead hard and walked fast towards the train tracks. My face burnt with humiliation all the way home.
25
The tireless members of the New South Wales Country Women’s Association were a unified and resourceful group, and the Goodwood branch was no exception. Due to the unexpected and tragic events that had befallen Mrs Bart, Mary Bell had convened an urgent meeting of branch participants. Good old Mary Bell. First she had been toppled by Mrs Bart in the vote for Secretary; now she had risen—a phoenix in a pleated skirt—and put aside her petty grievances, organising a fundraising dinner in honour of Goodwood’s own much-admired Flora McDonald, as well as Goodwood’s other, far-less-celebrated woman in mourning, Judy White. Mum and Nan and Fitzy were to attend the dinner together at the Goodwood Community Hall; George and I were to watch videos at my house while they were gone.
Judy White was having a terrible time of it. She had no husband and no daughter and, for the moment, while Terry was still in Ballina, not even a son. Her ribs and thighs and eyes were dented. She had refused to leave the house and didn’t like a fuss, but Opal Jones, who Judy had finally let in for a quivering cup of tea, said Jude would gratefully accept anything to help with the bills while she convalesced. Jude was a wreck, said Opal. A remnant of a person. And she was back in that same old dressing-gown, wandering from room to room. Gazing out a window. Hovering near a curtain. How a woman could spend all spring in nothing but terry towelling was beyond anything that Opal Jones could bear to imagine.
Mrs Bart wasn’t as much in need of funding, but she was deep as a dell in grieving and had no idea what to do with the business. Her son Joe continued to provide friendly service to the people of Goodwood as the new face of Bart’s Meats, but there were murmurs that Joe’s wife in Sydney was growing tired of his generosity, mainly since it was taking place somewhere other than their marital home. Nan said Joe would have to go back soon, at which point the future of Bart’s Meats was in doubt. Mrs Bart seemed altogether unequipped to take it on by herself—she was no butcher—and her sister Jan, who some suggested might have been a good candidate to move to Goodwood permanently and help out with the chopping and carving, was both squeamish and vegetarian.
Nan dressed up for the dinner and looked a picture in peach when she arrived at our house an hour early on the Saturday evening, so she and Mum could have a glass of wine and a catch-up. Fitzy wasn’t invited to the prelude, given her propensity for being annoying, and was picked up after. The three of them went off on foot to the hall.
George and I had long been deemed responsible enough to be left alone. The official plan, as we told Mum, was videos and a sleepover. The actual plan, as organised by George, was that Lucas and Ethan were coming over to drink whisky and Coke in the yard.
Lucas and Ethan arrived at dusk—the same time Kevin Fairley would’ve been moving his cows from one paddock to the other. Lucas had a bottle of Jim Beam secreted in his backpack. George had bought a two-litre bottle of Coke from the Goodwood Grocer and four bags of salt and vinegar chips. We mixed the Coke and Jim Beam together in Mum’s glass tumblers and sat at the outdoor setting drinking.
Lucas was in a particularly confident mood, on account of twenty-five dollars’ worth of weed that he’d purchased from Trent Ross earlier that afternoon. Trent and wayward Gary Elver were jamming in the shed behind Elver’s Auto and Lucas felt very good about himself for having been with them for fifteen whole minutes; and for smoking a cone there on the shed couch while Lady lay on a dirty bed against his feet. Gary, stoned as a boulder, had demonstrated various types of drum rolls. Trent had sat silently on the concrete floor with a small bowl and a pair of scissors.
George did her best to be unimpressed by Lucas’s story, and all she said was, ‘Well I hope you brought it with you,’ and, right on cue, Lucas triumphantly produced a fat and badly fashioned joint, which was smoked over the course of the evening, compelling George at one point to emit a small vomit under the grevillea.
‘I’m fine, it’s just like sneezing,’, she slurred, returning to the table looking pale and unfazed. Lucas laughed with his head all the way back.
We were all drunk by then. George kept topping up our tumblers with whisky, forgetting to add the Coke. By nine, the outdoor setting was like a ship on a rough sea. We clung to it and it spun and at one point Lucas fell out onto the grass. Backflip was up immediately, licking his face. I shushed everyone in case we woke the magpies, who had taken to viciously swooping the garden during daylight hours and making Backflip’s life a misery.
‘Magpies don’t swoop at night,’ said Ethan, with a reassuring tone and a tender look, and George elbowed me under the table.
I was surprised, especially in the rowdiness of our conversation that we managed most of the night without much mention of Rosie or Bart. George talked mostly, and Lucas Karras. Ethan was quieter than usual and appeared to be distant. He was like a cow in a paddock, privately ruminating. He seemed sad somehow, in a way I could not determine; and he sat upright in his chair the whole night, not once reclining back against the frame. He looked poised to fall forward, hunched over like a much older man.
I drank and my eyes became warm in their sockets. The night breeze drew tears from them every so often. I could feel my cheeks were shining. At one point I lay on my back on the grass next to Lucas and Backflip lay her whole furry body across us like we were a raft and I laughed and laughed.
A little later, George and Lucas disappeared inside. Ethan and I heard them giggling. Then we saw the door to the spare room close behind them and I didn’t care.
‘What’s in there?’ asked Ethan.
‘A daybed. Mum’s quilt squares,’ I said.
He smiled and shook his head. It was calm and still in the almost-darkness. Backflip wandered out from inside and settled down on her outdoor mat, letting out a tired sigh. And then Ethan got up from his chair and lay down on his side on the grass beside me, shooing away the mosquitoes, saying, ‘Oh Jeannie,’ as he settled in close by my arm. I remember him putting his hand in my hand and tracing the inside of my palm with his rough fingers. I felt my heart quicken and I knew his intention. Then he looked right in my eyes and put his lips against my neck, and I turned towards him, too, and we lay kissing on the damp grass while he fumbled at my clothes. Before long he was above me, and his dull weight felt nice on my body. He put hot bre
ath in my ear and I liked it when he kissed me. He put his hands in my jeans and I shut my eyes tightly. ‘Jeannie,’ he said again, all soupy, like he knew me very well; even though I felt more and more—as he moved above me—that I did not know him at all. Regardless, outside of myself, I felt for his long back under his shirt, finding his skin uneven there. I half noticed him wincing. He tasted like whisky and for a short time we moved together in the garden, under the stars and branches, and the cold ground felt damp below me in the warm evening.
But after a while of it, I abandoned the idea of pulling Ethan’s shirt off over his head. I shuffled out from under him and sat up.
The night spun. I felt giddy.
Ethan seemed sheepish and quickly deflated. He lay on his side and stared up at me, expectant. I sat next to him and was still. All of a sudden I didn’t want to be kissing Ethan West at all.
I wasn’t sure what to do next. I didn’t know how I was supposed to act in such a moment. Ethan propped himself up on his elbows, looking very disappointed. After a long and awkward silence he sat up and turned towards the back fence, away from me, and fumbled at his shirt, pulling it down where I had lifted it almost off. That was when I saw the dim impression of his welted back in the soft light that spilled out from the living room and onto our patch of grass. His lovely, well-proportioned back—which had thick weals across it, surrounded by deep dark bruises, the colour of oil slicks and mud.
It was the whisky that made me reach out and touch them. I was loose of my inhibitions and my sense of propriety, and I put my fingers right against his injuries tenderly and Ethan flinched and jerked away.
‘Don’t touch it,’ he said.
I drew my hand back and was surprised to have felt it, and horrified at what had been done to him.
‘What happened? Who did that?’
He was crouching now. He looked at his knees, holding them with his spear-arms. Backflip, sensing unease, had hopped up and come over to nuzzle him. ‘Good dog,’ said Ethan. ‘Good dog.’
Goodwood Page 15