Goodwood (15 page)

‘What's up, Jean? Is Ceils okay?'

‘Oh yeah, she's fine.'

‘You want to have a chat?'

‘Yeah, okay. No, I do. Let's chat.'

Mack leant back and clasped his hands behind his head.

I moved around in my chair and the vinyl squeaked. I chewed my bottom lip. Then I launched—much like Opal
Jones had at the Bowlo the night before. Much like Mack had in his police car in the rain. Much like Fitzy did, apropos of absolutely nothing, all the time. Without any prompting from Mack, I unburdened myself of everything: the money and the tree-hole; the clearing and the plastic horse; my fear that I'd kept my secret too long; the amount of time I spent worrying about what might have happened to Rosie, and to Bart. I spoke quickly and nervously. I raised questions; I digressed. And then suddenly I had finished and, mercifully for both of us, I stopped talking.

The quiet was relieving.

Mack squinted at me. He had a pen in his hand, which he'd picked up sometime after I started speaking. He held it above his notepad but wrote nothing.

‘So,' he said.

‘So yeah, that's everything. I haven't been back to the clearing in a while, but last time I was there it was just the same, the bag with the little horse. And no one really goes there in winter. Except maybe Ethan does. I thought I should probably tell you about the whole thing.' I tried to stop myself talking again by breathing. Mack looked at me and made a straight line with his mouth.

‘Well, what do you think?'

‘It's a hidey-hole,' said Mack.

‘In the tree? Yeah. It's up above the big branch of the willow where—'

Mack cut me off. ‘I know, Jean. It's a hidey-hole. We used to use it when we were your age. I used to hide weed in there when I was in high school.'

‘You smoked weed?'

Mack seemed so cool all of a sudden. I couldn't wait to tell George.

Mack went on, ‘So you found five hundred dollars in the hidey-hole on the Friday before Rosie disappeared?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Five hundred?'

‘Yeah. I counted it.'

‘In a plastic bag?'

‘In a brown paper bag, which was in a plastic bag.'

‘And then you went back . . . when?'

‘The Monday. And it was gone. But the little plastic horse was in there.'

Mack wrote the days down and tapped his pen on his desk.

‘And you didn't think it worth telling me until now?' he asked, in a tone that I had imagined correctly in all my pre-enactments of this conversation.

I hung my head and remained silent.

He let out a big sigh, breathing all the air out through his nostrils.

I sat while he scratched some words on his notepad and tapped his pen and had faraway thoughts.

‘Well, I guess we better go have a look then,' he said.

•

Mack and I walked across the oval in the sun, out the gate, and along the silty bank. He was a man of few words on the way; he mainly asked me to tell him everything again, so he could get it clear in his mind.

I found the money two days before Rosie vanished. Then the day after Rosie vanished the money was gone. I hadn't taken the money. I didn't know who took the money. I didn't know who left the money.

‘And you didn't see the car?' asked Mack as we neared the clearing.

‘No, I always walk this way along the river so Backflip can swim. I don't ever see the road.'

Mack nodded. He looked up towards the cul-de-sac and sure enough there were far too many trees in the way to get a look at it. You'd have to walk up the hill by the cow paddock and along the road to the very end.

‘Do you think they're connected?' I asked. ‘The money and the Corolla?'

‘I think your head's connected to your arse, Jean,' said Mack.

I tripped over a stick, just managing not to fall all the way over, and corrected my footing, feeling ridiculous about myself. We got to the clearing and the cows looked on, chewing with their mouths open, their big bodies attracting flies and birds.

‘Hello, ladies,' Mack said to them kindly.

I always knew Mack to be a kind and gentle man.

He stood on the bank and raised a hand to his brow, squinting up to the tree-hole.

‘You better go up, Jean, I can't see it from here. The branch bends.'

I climbed up the willow, onto the big branch, heard Mack telling me to be careful. I wavered and balanced, and looked up at the hole.

I saw no fraction of white plastic.

There was nothing there.

I put my hand up and felt inside the hole as best I could.

Crumbling bark, gritty dirt, rough hollowed edges.

I looked down at Mack, staring up at me, his face full of sun. I felt all the wind go from my sails.

‘It's gone,' I said.

•

On that same afternoon, about the time I was arriving home, deflated and confused, Goodwood erupted in violence.

George went to the oval after school to meet Lucas Karras, where he planned to kick a football and she was expected to watch. She watched for a little while, expecting him to stop kicking at some point and come sit by her on the hill. That point never seemed to arrive.

‘How long are you going to kick that for?' yelled George.

‘What's wrong with it?' yelled Lucas.

‘Fuck this,' yelled George, and walked towards the railway tracks that cut the town from her delinquent street. Lucas fetched his ball and followed, only to be deterred by the swiftness of George's pace. He yelled her name twice, gave up, and headed off home.

Mack and I would've just missed them on our way across the oval in the other direction, towards the clearing.

When George got to the corner of her street she could see the kerfuffle outside the Carlstroms' house. Davo's immediate neighbours were standing behind their screen door looking on. They were an elderly couple, Edna and Gus Field, who were often quoted in the
Gather Region Advocate
as describing any change to Goodwood (mainly those initiated by the Goodwood Progress Association) as ‘an outrage'. George said later, ‘If Edna Field really wanted an outrage, she finally got one.'

As George got closer, she crossed to the other side of the street to give the shouting a wide berth. She admitted to me later that she was genuinely scared. The sound of tools hitting the shell of a car clanged in her ears. Male voices became louder and more aggressive. It was Davo, yelling at his bogan uncle, Lafe.

‘It was about Rosie,' said George. ‘Davo was really losing it.'

‘Like what kind of stuff?' I asked.

George struggled to be specific. All George heard, which she claimed she could testify in court with a fair degree of certainty, if the need arose, which she hoped it did, was Davo was yelling something like, ‘You have no fucken idea,' followed at some point by, ‘You're a fucken dog.'

Evidently, given what transpired, Lafe did not take kindly to being equated to a canine.

As George got to the pavement opposite the Carlstrom house, Lafe took Davo around the shoulders, grabbing his shirt and shaking him about. George caught something like, ‘If you fucken . . .
something
,' from Lafe. Again, she could not be more specific as to the content. ‘It was very rough and tumble,' she said later in her own defence.

Davo swung his arms and clipped Lafe around the ears. Lafe held him tighter and shook harder. There were grunting noises. Davo went red in the face. Then he got his knee up and boofed Lafe in the stomach, and Lafe went over onto the weed-infested, overgrown grass.

The crap caravan stood over them and made the whole scene look even more depressing.

Rearing back and catching his breath, Davo kicked Lafe in the torso, but Lafe grabbed Davo's shoe and twisted, which brought Davo to the grass too, flailing in the dandelions. Then the Carlstroms' screen door was flung open and Davo's dad Dennis stormed the lawn.

He picked up Davo by the arm and dragged him, blood now running from his nostrils, into the house.

Lafe was left in the weeds by himself.

He just lay there and said, ‘
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck
'—a word George heard quite clearly given its deliberate elongation. One of Lafe's empty beer cans took the opportunity to fall off the fence.

George watched Lafe for a minute, wondering if there was anything she should do.

Edna Field went inside, presumably to call the
Gather Region Advocate
.

Eventually George went home and took a long shower, and Lafe may well have lain in the grass all night.

•

On the right side of the tracks, Opal Jones was reading aloud to Ken from the
Women's Weekly Oriental Dinner Party Cookbook
. They were thinking of having Denise and Brian over some time, because although Brian was boring, Opal liked the way Denise listened. Ken Jones told Mack he would've rather heard the phone book read aloud than one of Opal's cookbooks, but Opal got annoyed when he resisted, so he'd learnt not to resist. Mack had shaken his head and said, ‘Maaate.'

Opal Jones heard the noises before Ken. She says Ken was so interested in her recipe recitation that he might not
have noticed if she hadn't cocked her ears to the disturbance and stopped reading. She turned down the volume on the TV news.

The sound of glass breaking. The sound of a thrown plate smashing against a wall. A woman screaming. A man, in thunderous tones, booming something Opal Jones couldn't decipher. The sound of the front door slamming and Terry White running out of the White house and off towards town. Opal Jones was practically hanging out the window by then and she saw him go. Then more smashing—glass, crockery, it was hard to tell—and muffled whopping sounds.
Whop, whop, whop
. It went on and on, followed by some thuds. Dull, brutal thuds. Someone falling. Then silence, except the sound of Opal asking Ken if they should call Mack.

After a few more minutes, Terry White ran back along their street and back into the White house, and the door slammed behind him.

Opal called Mack.

When Mack arrived, it'd been about fifteen minutes since the last smashed glass. He knocked on the Whites' door and Terry answered, in tears. Carl White, Opal attested, had reversed his car out from under the jacaranda and departed just minutes prior, with the look of a man possessed. That's how Opal described him:
possessed
. Carl White was haunted; he was bedevilled; and no one could argue that any of this was an improvement on blank and unfeeling.

The last thing Opal saw was Mack leading Judy White down to his police car, with Terry following a few metres behind. Judy had refused an ambulance, but she had trouble walking the short distance, and appeared to wince as Mack put his arm around her middle in an attempt to help her along. Her face did not resemble the woman Opal knew: it was entirely different colours.

Mack drove Terry and Judy the familiar forty-minute drive to Judy's own workplace. Her eyes had been beaten back into their sockets, so she didn't see much of the journey, but she knew the way with her eyes closed. Terry helped her out of the car. Another nurse, one of Judy's friends who was on duty, admitted Judy White. After twenty-five years of working there—apart from her brief stints in the labour ward with Rosie and Terry—it was Judy's first time as a patient at Clarke Base Hospital.

20

The Goodwood Progress Association met the following evening in the Community Hall and was grossly down in numbers. Bart McDonald, the co-president, was missing. Judy White, who had been absent the last meeting also, was in the hospital. Helen, who only ever came to the meetings to panic, was too distressed by recent events and had taken ill with a cold compress and a Valium. And Fitzy, upon hearing about Judy, had driven her car into the parking sign pole outside the Vinnies, much to Val Sparks's horror, and was at home wearing a neck brace and waiting for rain.

Smithy, the remaining co-president, who was both present and accounted for, ran the proceedings.

Spirits were low.

Without Fitzy, the movements towards lobbying council for an official Goodwood Monthly Rainfall Map, a native garden, and a reinforced guardrail for the bridge, were
hereby postponed. Without Bart, any preparations towards the Fishing's The Funnest parade seemed gauche. And without Helen, whose newsagency's wall would bear Smithy's proposed mural, since it was the end building and faced the picnic tables at Sweetmans Park, there could be no progression with designs or a painting schedule.

The only thing left to discuss, thankfully without Judy, was unofficial business: Carl and Judy White, and whatever it was that had transpired between Lafe and Davo in the Carlstroms' front yard the day before.

Mum reported back when she got home.

Apparently, Davo Carlstrom sustained a bleeding nose, no actual break, and red rosy bruising to his cheeks and clavicle. Lafe—who was a prick of a thing, according to Smithy—drank five schooners at the Wicko some time later. He was speckled with grass and had a split lip and some roughing to the forehead. He was bigger, older and stronger, and had clearly got the better of Davo in the scuffle.

Smithy had inquired politely as to the cause of the dispute.

Lafe said, ‘Ah, you know how it is. Davo's not over his fucken girlfriend.'

‘You mean Rosie?' said Smithy, gently correcting what he considered to be Lafe's lack of respect for the missing.

‘Whatever,' said Lafe, and left.

Smithy, who was often prone to say something profound,
told the meeting, ‘Many a time a man's mouth broke his nose', and everyone agreed.

Meanwhile, Judy White had three broken ribs, two beaten-closed eyes, and severe lacerations to the backs of her thighs. A belt had been utilised. The buckle had caused the most damage.

While Judy was being treated for her injuries, Terry White was staying with the Joneses, waiting to be picked up by his Aunt Alison who would take him to stay with her in Ballina while Judy recovered. Alison told Mack that the further Terry could get from Carl the better. Cousin Tegan had taken a week off from the restaurant under the Big Prawn to hang out with Terry. She was to take him to the Richmond River, because everyone in the White family knew of Terry's fondness for rivers.