Goodwood (10 page)

‘Why would he? What's going on?' she pleaded, as Mack sat at her table making notes.

After ascertaining what Bart had said about the car, and what Bart had, or in this case, had
not
done, Mack didn't know how to pose the next question, for fear of alarming Mrs Bart further. But all he could think of was Constable Simmons's mocking face.

‘Flora, do you know—I mean, from what you gather, did Bart know Rosie White . . . well?'

And just like that Mrs Bart burst into tears.

13

According to Mrs Bart, Bart knew Rosie White as well as he knew most people who worked on Cedar Street. Woody's was two doors up from Bart's Meats. The back of both businesses exited onto the same lane, which adjoined the same car park. They shared two dumpster bins, along with their immediate neighbours: the newsagent, Bookworm, and the Goodwood Village Bakery, where Bart bought his coffee scrolls. There was a big car park where Derek Murray sometimes did burnouts to impress his very few friends; and an awning that sheltered the back doors where Rosie, and now Derek Murray, would smoke on a fold-out chair. Bart also smoked, even though he continually promised Pearl he was giving up, and he occasionally allowed himself a cheeky one under the awning too, after he'd turned off the fluorescent lights, locked the front door, and put the garbage in the dumpster bins as the light faded over the mountain.

Mrs Bart said Bart was fond of Rosie, as he was fond of everyone really, but he just hadn't spoken of her since she'd vanished, even though Mrs Bart had raised it at dinner every night that week. This—said Mrs Bart—was odd. It was something she kept coming back to in her mind. The thought of it came and hovered there—teasing her, testing her, confronting her. It was just so
unlike
him. For Bart to be uninterested in a person he knew? A person who was in some kind of trouble? A person who was
missing
?

‘He just didn't say anything about it all, which was . . .
odd
. Because everyone was talking about it.
I
wanted to talk about it,' she told Mack, sniffling, and he nodded. ‘But you know, he hated Carl, so I'm not sure. I mean, it's probably nothing. It's nothing!'

Mack did know there was bad blood between Bart and Carl. It seemed that a lot of people in town knew. For instance, when Bart was thrown a party at the Bowlo one time, just for being an all-round terrific guy, everyone knew not to invite Carl. Much like they knew that Carl never took his boat out on Sundays anymore, as of two years ago, because that was Bart's day and they tended to avoid being on the same body of water at the same time.

I'm not sure Mum or Nan knew why, they just knew that it was; and similarly, as much as Mack had an inkling of it, this was the first time he'd ever ventured to ask, ever so gently, ‘Why did Bart hate Carl?'

Mrs Bart shook her lowered head.

‘Oh,' she said, ‘it's not good.'

Mrs Bart shuffled in her chair. She pressed her fingers against her temples and Mack waited patiently until she gathered the wherewithal to explain, slowly, the dark history of her husband's ill feeling.

Bart and Carl had been cordial enough to begin with. The Whites and the McDonalds didn't socialise together as couples, but both men drank beer at the Wicko and the Bowlo, and Carl bought a good deal of topside. Judy White had attended Mrs Bart's floral art workshop at the CWA a few years back and had considered membership for a time, but never seemed to get around to it. Carl didn't seem to approve—which was odd, come to think of it. What's not to like about togetherness and craft? But in any case, Judy was busy seeing Rosie and Terry through high school and working as a nurse at Clarke Base Hospital. She was on duty the night Bart went to Emergency in the summer of 1990, after he'd suffered a mild heart attack while horseriding with Pearl. Bart had spent four days in the hospital and Judy was a nurse in his ward on two of those days. On the second occasion, she administered his medication and Bart asked her if she could please raise the blinds. She went to the window and lifted both her arms to untangle the cord, which Bart had made a mess of earlier, and Bart saw her dress hike up as she reached, and then he saw her thighs, which were black and blue and
purple and red, like someone had taken to them with a belt and not let up.

Bart thanked her kindly and did not say a word. But he did go home and tell Mrs Bart that someone was laying a hand on Judy and he had a good idea who that person was.

‘What do I do?' he had said. ‘What can I do?'

Mrs Bart had not known what could be done.

A few months later, after Bart had fully recovered, Mrs Bart met with Nance and Helen and Faye at the Bowlo for a chardonnay. Carmel Carmichael had brought out a delightful surf and turf platter and they'd had a lovely time. They sat at the table inside looking out the big window onto the green. Carl White was also drinking there that day, heavily, with Roy Murray and Mal West.

As she was getting ready to leave, Mrs Bart excused herself to use the ladies room, which was at the end of the carpeted hall past the pokies. Roy and Mal had left, and Carl was having a flutter on his favourite machine closest to the toilets. Mrs Bart said, ‘G'day Carl,' as she walked past, and he hopped up and followed her to the bathroom door, which she only realised when she felt a hand on the back of her thigh, at which point she shrieked and turned to find Carl, hungry, smiling at her with glazed eyes, saying, ‘Come on, baby,' and groping for the small of her back.

It should be mentioned that Mrs Bart was an attractive and charismatic woman. She wasn't Secretary of the CWA
for nothing. When the McDonalds moved to Goodwood, she turned heads. And so did Bart, in his rugged, handsome way. Mrs Bart had the face of a morning television presenter, or a pageant winner grown up. She injected a youthful energy into her secretarial duties, encouraging a younger membership than the association had ever enjoyed before. Nan always said she was a ‘good girl'.

She was also quite strong, as it turned out, as she struck Carl White across the face so hard he fell all the way over. She stepped around him, saying nothing about it to her friends, and went home to tell Bart.

Bart was beyond recognition in his rage. ‘Mortally angry' was how Mrs Bart described it. She spent the first part of the evening angry herself, and the second part trying to calm Bart down. But wild horses couldn't stop Bart. He backed the Hilux out of the drive (choosing the biggest car at his disposal), and drove to the White residence. That was where he found Judy doing one of her puzzles in front of the television, and Rosie and Terry somewhere off in their rooms, and Carl out back in his shed.

Mrs Bart didn't know what happened. All she knew was that Bart came home without a scratch on him, and that Carl White—as reported by Opal Jones next door—looked like someone had run him over with a trailer. Unwilling to explain his injuries to anyone, Carl simply avoided town
for the most part, and made Judy buy him cases of beer and nurse him at home.

When he got home that night, after smashing Carl, Bart had spooned Mrs Bart closer than ever, and while he didn't shudder or move at all, she felt his tears fall onto the back of her neck and roll down the inside of her nightie.

14

In the third week after Bart vanished, Mum's need to be active in the face of anxiety took her beyond organising the pantry, and she began sorting through the back sunroom where she stored most of her ‘secondary' books.

Much like Nan, Mum had always been a big reader. She told me she spent all her time at Goodwood High reading and dreaming of her life in the big city. She'd considered Melbourne but chose Sydney. It was much closer and, when it came time, she could fit all her things in one carload.

Nan and Pop knew she'd be leaving. Nan wanted Mum to have a tertiary education—an arts degree to be specific—and Mum was happy to oblige. She was so very fond of all the books and she walked through the sandstone buildings at Sydney University and felt like she was in Paris. She found a sandstone house near the harbour and drank at the Forth
and Clyde Hotel. She smoked roll-your-own cigarettes and was enamoured with Gough Whitlam.

Mum was eight months pregnant with me when she left her job as a proofreader. After that she caught the ferry to Circular Quay and back, just to be on the water. I grew into a toddler and caused her much delight. Then my dad left. He walked out the door one day, leaving five hundred dollars on the table, and never came back. Five hundred dollars didn't last long, even in those days. I was two years old and she had to make a decision. She moved back to Goodwood to be near Nan and Pop. She missed them and they wanted to help raise their granddaughter. But Mum felt like a failure. She'd returned to the town that she spent her whole youth desperate to escape from.

At first, Mum's involvement in town events was ironic. She was depressed, but she had a great sense of humour. She wrote long letters to her friends in Sydney, mocking the craft, mocking the meetings, mocking the mentality. But over the years she settled. Her mood lifted. She enjoyed having the time to read. She stopped fighting it. She made friends. Her interest became genuine. She loved walking Backflip in the foothills of the mountain. She loved living close to Nan and Pop and Mack. At some point it occurred to her that she truly enjoyed taking minutes for the Goodwood Progress Association and attending CWA dinners at the Community Hall.

Mum said, ‘Growing up's working out what makes you happy, Jean. Not what you think might, or what you think should, but what actually does.'

In 1992 Mum worked as a proofreader at the
Gather Region Advocate
, three and then four days a week. She always had a pile of books on her bedside table, lining the shelves in the living room, and then overflowing into the sunroom. She'd been saying for ages that we could set up a desk there and, one day, get a computer.

For days she fussed over piles of paperbacks and had sneezing fits with the dust.

Next door, Big Jim and Fitzy seemed equally eager to get on with things, especially Fitzy, who didn't like to dwell on sadness. I felt bad for Big Jim, because he
was
sad. Bart was his mate and during the previous week when he'd been going off to the lake with Merv every day, looking for him—any glimmer or glimpse of Bart—he'd trudged out to his car as if he was going off to war.

Fitzy waved him off, with a big forced smile, and welcomed him home with the same one every evening. Big Jim was a patient man, in my estimation.

It's not that Fitzy wasn't nice. Fitzy was catastrophically nice—even if she did have far too much hair for one person and a confusingly strong prescription. But to put it plainly, Fitzy had such bad luck with her coordination that she could have caused an accident by standing still and waiting for one to find her.

The previous Christmas, when Fitzy was hanging coloured lights along the front of their house while balancing on the top step of Big Jim's ladder—the step everyone knows not to balance on—the ladder got sick of Fitzy and made a dash for the ground. She dangled from the awning making the sound of a cat fight while Big Jim, who had rushed out in terror, yelled ‘Let go hon, I've got you!' from below. When Fitzy's arms finally relented, which happened fairly quickly, the weight of her fall, on top of Big Jim, ruined a generous section of their murraya hedging. Big Jim sprained his lower back and was forced to pass himself back and forth on a foam roller in their sunroom for ten minutes a day until it healed.

The year before, Fitzy slipped out of the Wicko, as if on a sheet of ice, and collected Val Sparks from the Vinnies next door as she was on her way inside for a glass of port. The two women lay mangled on the pavement in front of the doorway, with Val moaning ‘For Christsake, my knee' and Fitzy yelling, ‘Val, can you hear me? Val!'

Unfortunately, Val could hear Fitzy loud and clear. She was practically wearing her like a throw. Poor Val. She was the most pious person in Goodwood. A little porcelain nativity scene adorned the wooden shelf behind her counter all year round. And yet, entwined with Fitzy, as her knee swelled quickly towards a chronic case of bursitis, she was forced to take the Lord's name in vain.

Most recently, in June, Fitzy went to meet her work friends at Panda Garden, the Chinese restaurant in Clarke. She drove down the long road that heads out of town by the river, while bugs ended themselves on her windshield, dazzled in the glory of her high beam lights. Fitzy was singing along to her favourite tape,
Wilson Phillips
by Wilson Phillips, and looking forward to a plate of pineapple pork, when a kangaroo pronked out of the tree line, a blur of fur in Fitzy's headlights. She swerved, clipping the kangaroo and continued off the road, over the dirt and leaves towards the metal guardrail that stops cars from hurtling off the high bank, just before the bridge. Thankfully Fitzy hadn't been travelling at too great a speed, and thankfully the silver wattle she ploughed through slowed her down further. She came to a stop on the guardrail, which bent forward and over, under the weight of her Honda Accord.

‘Any faster and I would've been up to my neck in the lake,' she said to everyone in her retellings.

Fitzy had cried a river on the side of the road that night, imagining herself prone in the lake, and waited for a passing motorist. It turned out to be Kevin Fairley on his way home from a big shop at Woolworths and a meat pie in the Clarke Plaza food court. Kevin drove Fitzy home, comforting her and smelling like pie. Then bald Bob Elver towed Fitzy's car back to Goodwood the next day. It needed a new radiator, a new bumper, and a new bonnet. The guardrail and the silver
wattle, however, could not be saved. They were removed pending replacement. Fitzy championed a stronger, doubly reinforced rail at the next council meeting and this met with agreement from Bart. But much like the proposed new picnic tables in Sweetmans Park, the proposed restoration of the Community Hall, and the proposed resealing of Woodland and Pioneer Streets, Goodwood was still waiting.