Goodwood (18 page)

Evie pulled her hand away and uncrossed her arms. She leant down for her bag. Bec Kelly stuck her gum to the leg of her chair and shuffled out with Bec Fisher. Evie got up. She didn't look at me; she just put her bag on one shoulder and went straight out the double doors into the white sun.

George raised a fist. ‘To the summit,' she said as she turned towards the light. ‘I'm fizzing at the bunghole.'

She blinked and sneezed and fumbled around in her pocket for a hanky.

I could feel Evie against my arm still. My skin was covered in goosebumps. The light was so white outside. How blinding and brilliant it was. I smiled, dazzled. It looked like a faraway and much more interesting world.

•

After Davo put the plastic horse on the counter, Mack stood looking at it. They both did, the two of them—grown men—stared at the little plastic horse like children. Mack remembered the barnyard collection he had as a boy—his
menagerie lived in a plastic stable, and one year Mack swallowed a yellow tractor. His dad, Lang, bought him sheep and cows, but Mack always wanted more horses.

Mack forced himself to look up.

Sergeant Simmons from Clarke came in from the other office. He had an arm full of manila folders. He put them on the desk near the counter and rifled through them. Davo hardly noticed.

‘What's this then?' Mack asked, while Davo started at the toy horse.

‘I think Rosie did a runner,' said Davo.

‘Did the little horse tell you that?' asked Sergeant Simmons, looking up from his folders.

Davo looked pained. He was not amused. He started shaking his head as if to say
fucking pigs
; like he might turn tail and run right out of there.

Mack turned and glared at Sergeant Simmons, who looked very amused. Sergeant Simmons winked and walked back to the other office.

‘Mate. Davo,' said Mack. ‘Why don't you tell me what's going on.'

Davo looked like he might cry. He fondled the horse with two rough fingers, stroking it along its brown plastic back. Mack looked on. He had the urge to pat the horse, too. Lang's beetroot head flashed in his mind. Spilt blood and the beak of a raven. He winced and felt nauseous.

‘Why don't you come around here and have a seat,' said Mack kindly.

Davo picked up the horse and passed through the waist-high gate next to the counter. Mack sat down at his desk and gestured to the cheap black vinyl chair opposite. The cushion
whooshed
when Davo sat down.

Mack noticed that Davo was thinner. He noticed his slumped shoulders. He could see the grief coming off him like mist.

‘Why do you think she's done a runner?' asked Mack.

Davo held the horse in one hand on his knee.

‘Because she left this for me,' he said.

‘And what's that?' asked Mack.

Davo looked at him like he was dim. ‘It's a toy horse,' he said.

‘I can see that,' said Mack. ‘But why'd she leave it for you? Where'd she leave it? And how do you know it was her? How do you know it's for you?'

Davo ran the little horse along his leg, trotting. ‘Because I gave it to her,' he said.

23

Davo and Rosie had been seeing each other for almost nine months. It had started slowly. Rosie was so beautiful. She was always aloof. Davo found her impossible to figure out. He was older by eighteen months, but he'd seen her around at school for years. There was electricity when he saw her. She'd hardly have to look at him and all he could do was feel it, charging down the wires.

The other girls at Goodwood High were rough and eager. He'd had sex with them on the oval, or in the back of his car, or in the bushes at Sweetmans Park. He always went home empty. He drank a lot of beer to forget his mother; his mother had long forgotten him. He didn't want to just fix cars in the yard with his dad, and now his fucking uncle. Rosie was different. He had really wooed her. He stood out the front of Woody's until she'd smile. Then she finally smiled: and he died. He took her to the clearing to go swimming in
summer. She'd be hot and then she'd be cold. One minute, his hands were up her skirt, finding her skin wanting, finding her covered in goosebumps and pressing his hand higher. The next, she'd walk right past him, by the beer garden at the Wicko, ignoring his waving and looking the other way.

By the start of March, she seemed to be won over. They didn't see each other all that much. Davo always wanted more, but Rosie would recoil if he pushed her. She'd stay in her room with the stereo up loud. She'd sit in Sweetmans Park under the grand old fig tree, reading magazines, listening to her Walkman. He pressed her to open up to him, slowly, like a flower. He felt around for the pieces of her difficult life. But she would show him only tiny fragments. They lay in his bedroom, smoking. They lay at the clearing, in the dappled shade.

The clearing has a big willow tree and there's a hidey-hole in its trunk, up above the high branch that goes out over the water. Over summer, Davo would leave Rosie presents. He left her two cigarettes wrapped in paper. He left her nasturtium flowers. He left her a mix tape. It was always when they were going to meet there. He would leave her a present, usually on the way home from the Wicko the night before, and he loved to watch her climb up and find it. Then they'd have sex—fast and slow—under the willow tree, on his laid-down jacket, while the cows looked on and the birds sang in chorus.

Rosie wanted to leave Goodwood. She always had. Davo tried to make plans for them both, but she wouldn't hear it.
She was so independent. So brave and alone. He could never tame her or make her his own. She spoke always of her Cousin Tegan in Ballina. She was older and cooler and free. She had a good job at a restaurant and maybe she could get Rosie a job too, right there under the Big Prawn. Rosie wanted to move to Byron—Tegan had told her all about it. Rosie would say to Davo, while they lay in the clearing, ‘We're getting out of this one-horse town, one horse at a time.'

Davo wished they could ride out together, but it was always
one horse at a time
. Maybe he could catch her up, he thought. He decided on her next present.

The last time they met at the clearing to swim, before the weather got too cold, he had left his present and arrived late. When he got there, Rosie, in cut-off jean shorts and one of Davo's Big W flannos, was holding the little plastic horse. Davo had bought it at the toyshop at the Clarke Plaza and kept it in his glove box.

‘One horse at a time,' she said, properly smiling. She smiled like that and he died. She undid his jeans in a fever and he pushed himself inside her—on the dry leaves, while the sun dipped low and the dusty sky dimmed the mountain.

After, Rosie carved their initials in the trunk with her Swiss Army knife: RW 4 DC.

That was March. The weather cooled. They met a few times a week, but Rosie always put the brakes on and Davo always tried to speed things up.

Then, in April, Lafe arrived. Rosie didn't like him at all. She would not say why, no matter how much Davo asked her. She just stopped wanting to go to Davo's house altogether. She gave a wide berth to the whole delinquent street. Lafe stayed in his caravan, drinking and leering. Davo never understood what he'd done that was so wrong. But Davo couldn't go to Rosie's house either and she'd never explained why. She just said, ‘It's not a good vibe,' and wouldn't go any further. She never said one word about her stepdad, Carl White, but Davo knew there was some kind of problem. He knew that something wasn't right. One time she had little brown bruises—just one time—wrapped around both her wrists. Davo had put his fingers on them tenderly and Rosie had jerked her hand away.

It was cold on the oval. It was cold at the clearing. They met in the day and found a small patch of sun. They drank at the Wicko and sat by the fire.

Then it was August. That week before Rosie vanished. She had worked as usual at Woody's and Davo hadn't seen her at all. He'd tried, but she'd gone silent. Then, out of the blue, she called his house on the Sunday morning. Linda, already half drunk answered and slurred Davo's name. Lafe said something revolting from the doorway.

Rosie asked Davo to meet her at the Wicko, and so he had. She seemed kind of normal, but not normal at all. There was just something different about her. Maybe she was sad. He couldn't
quite tell. She laughed at his stupid jokes. She endured when he was lost for words. But there was
something
. She seemed so far away, but was smiling to reassure him, or to reassure herself. It was there in her eyes—this dark intensity—and she looked down at the table more than usual, and avoided his glances.

She'd said, ‘David. One horse at a time.'

No one ever took him seriously enough to call him David. He liked it.

They said goodbye in the beer garden. She was going home for dinner; he was staying on. She kissed him with her tongue, with all of her mouth, with her hands on his face. He got hard in his jeans—just the impossible smell of her.

And then she was gone.

•

Mack leaned back in his chair. He had a pen in his hand, but he hadn't written anything.

Davo held the horse. Mack chewed at the inside of his lip. The two men sat in silence. Sergeant Simmons's voice said, ‘Ah, fuck's sake,' muffled from the other office, with the sound of rustling paper. Davo looked at Mack starkly.

‘I went down the clearing last weekend,' said Davo. ‘First time since summer. I dunno why.'

Mack nodded.

‘I just went to sit in our spot I guess. Just be there a bit, even without her. And this was there. In our hidey-hole.' He
held the horse up in case Mack hadn't seen it enough already. ‘I can't believe it. She left it for me,' he said. He was quiet for a time. He looked like he might crumple. ‘She
left.
'

Mack said, ‘Okay. Okay.' Nodding, thinking.

He wrote some words on his pad.
Last weekend—horse. The clearing
.

Then he looked Davo straight in the eye and asked him plainly, ‘Mate, what about the money?'

Davo looked back, his brow furrowed. ‘What money?'

•

After school I stopped at Vinnies and asked Val Sparks if she had any army coats or fingerless gloves.

‘But Jean Brown, it's spring,' she said.

I looked at her blankly.

‘Oh. Yeah,' I said. ‘But I get cold.'

Ray Charles was singing out of Val's little silver radio.

‘That's because you're too thin,' said Val as she showed me to the coats.

She rifled through the small array of knits and jackets. She held up a mauve cardigan with white lace flowers embroidered on it and glass buttons cut like diamonds.

‘How about this?' she asked.

I looked at Val and at the glass buttons. That was what Evie was like, I thought. She was like diamonds. The light in her and the way it sparkled and the way she made me feel different.

I had spent the whole afternoon remembering Evie's fingers and how she ran them against my arm in assembly. She pressed them, up and down, on the outside of my jumper, and every time I thought of it I got the shivers.

‘That's okay,' I said, and Val went into the back room to sift for gloves.

The view of the street was sliced at an angle by the pole that Fitzy had run into with her car. It had still not been straightened. Ray Charles and Val sang together now, Val warbling high from the back room.

The nativity scene behind the counter bore no dust. Next to it, Val had put together a small shrine. Prayer beads were draped casually next to a cedar crucifix. Two white candles burned, and Val had propped up name cards in front of them, as if they were guests at a dinner party. One name card said
Bart
in Val's wobbly cursive. The other said
Rosie.

‘I've only got these ones with the fingers,' said Val, who had reappeared holding a dreadful pair of black leather ladies gloves.

‘That's okay,' I said.

The sun had caught the bent-over pole and reflected silver light at Val's window. Her new display did look very fresh, just as Nan had reported. Val went back to dusting grief off all the hard surfaces. Her phone rang.

I was standing in the doorway when I saw Davo Carlstrom walk out of the Goodwood Police Station and cross the street.
He looked exhausted. His shoulders were slumped. He'd lost weight. His bootlaces strayed behind him. I saw him avert his eyes as he passed Woody's, so he didn't have to see the hole where Rosie should have been. He pushed one hand through his hair to brush it off his face and his eyes were as red as blood. He looked like he'd been crying.

‘Oh yes, I'm praying,' Val was saying into the receiver. ‘It's everywhere.
Everywhere
. I know you don't like it when I say it, but it feels like the end times.'

It didn't occur to me to wonder what Davo was doing at the police station. It didn't occur to me to think what he might have said, or what he might have done. I was just struck by the sight of him, so shrunken, pushing his hair off his tired face. And his other hand: gripping a little plastic horse and holding on to it for dear life.

•

All up, Mack and Davo had sat in the police station for two hours that afternoon. This, Mack thought, was the best information he'd had so far. This was a picture of Rosie that no one else could draw: a troubled, solitary figure; someone who pushed love away; a girl who was lost at home and all at sea. The whole thing was like an awakening.

Davo didn't know anything about the money. He swore it to Mack and Mack believed him. Davo said, ‘What money?' and so Mack told him.

Someone in town, he said—not revealing any names—had found money in the hidey-hole. That someone had left it there, in good faith and honesty. Then that someone had gone back and found the plastic horse. They had left that there too, and eventually come forward with the information.

‘You knew about the horse?' asked Davo.