Goodwood (19 page)

‘I was told of its existence,' said Mack.

‘Who found it?' Davo asked. He seemed very intent on knowing the answer.

‘Just a kid,' said Mack, much to my disappointment.

‘I was protecting you, Jean,' he told me a long time later. ‘Well you could've protected me with more respect,' I said.

Davo kept on at Mack to tell him, but Mack refused. Davo gave up and trotted the horse along his leg.

‘Would Rosie have that kind of money?' asked Mack.

‘No,' said Davo. ‘How would she? She was always talking about saving up to go, but she wasn't talking about right now. She meant in the future, when she'd saved up enough.'

Mack had talked to Roy Murray. He knew Rosie's wages. He'd spoken to Judy White. He knew Rosie's expenses. The year before, as a graduating present, Rosie had bought herself a stereo with her own money. A Sony CFD-770 Boombox. She loved music. She loved playing it loud. She'd saved up for many months. She also kept herself in cigarettes, beer and clothes. But that was about it and she bought at op shops mainly. Judy White didn't have money. Rosie got the job at
Woody's because there was none. Carl White liked to put it all in the pokies at the Bowlo. There were no nice steak dinners.

Judy White said, ‘Rosie didn't have any money. You can check her bank balance I'm sure. But she didn't use the bank. She got paid and she spent it on whatever she needed, just week to week. The last money she actually saved she used to buy the Boombox.'

Mack had checked Rosie's bank balance. She had $7.43. No recent transactions. No credits since February, when she'd deposited a cheque for a hundred dollars that Aunt Alison had sent her on her eighteenth birthday.

‘Do you know who might've given her that kind of money?' asked Mack.

‘No,' said Davo. ‘Do you?'

Mack stared at him, looked away. ‘No,' he said. ‘I don't know.'

Mack changed tack. ‘What about that Corolla that I asked you about a couple of weeks ago? The one that went missing from Bart McDonald's carport?'

Davo leaned back in the cheap vinyl chair and looked at Mack. He almost smiled. ‘You think Rosie stole Bart's car?' he asked, incredulous.

Mack looked back at Davo, trying to get a handle on the situation. ‘I don't know. What do you think?'

‘Are you fucken serious?' asked Davo.

Mack
was
serious, but he quickly felt foolish. ‘I'm just pursuing all avenues,' he said.

‘Trust me. Rosie would not know how to hot-wire a car,' said Davo. He held on to the horse. ‘Carl taught her to drive and all, and she got her licence. But she was pretty wobbly at it. She didn't know shit about cars.'

‘It's just that, mate, if she did a runner, how did she run?' asked Mack.

Davo looked at the floor, thinking. There was only a freight train. No passengers, no stop. Mack had checked with the bus lines. He'd spoken to the drivers. No one had seen Rosie.

‘I guess she would've hitched,' said Davo after a time. ‘Tegan said people hitch up north all the time. Rosie told me. She said Tegan hitched to Byron heaps.' Davo stared off into space. He looked like a man deserted. As if he'd suddenly remembered again that he'd been left.

‘And what were you and Lafe fighting about the other day?' asked Mack.

Davo shook his head. He wouldn't look Mack in the eye. He just said quietly, ‘I didn't like the way he was talking about her.'

Mack went in fast. What way was that? What did he say? How well did he know Rosie? Why didn't she like him?

Davo put his hand in his hair. He scrunched up his face. He pulled his hand back and hit himself in the forehead, as if to stop his eyes, which had filled with tears. He shook
his head, hot, embarrassed, in pain. A sound came from his throat like a yelp, his cheeks flushed with blood. The noise he made was that of an injured animal.

‘Fuuuuuck,' he said. He looked at Mack. He was blurry-eyed and ashamed.

‘Calm down, mate,' said Mack.

Davo couldn't say any more. He couldn't think any more. He took his horse and pushed the chair back, slamming the little waist-high gate on his way past the counter.

Mack sat back in his chair. He tapped his pen on his pinewood desk. He stared through the wall opposite. He burnt a hole with his eyes, searching for some kind of vision. Sergeant Simmons came out from the office and said, uncaring: ‘Did you get anything? Is that kid a fucker or what?'

All Mack could see was Rosie. He saw her plain as day on a Sunday night in August: black tights, red jumper, standing on the side of the road. Maybe she'd walked just out of town, past the Bowlo. Maybe she'd made it all the way to the highway. She was escaping her difficult life. It was the only way she knew how. Her thumb was out in the cold air. She was hoping for a passing car. She was hoping for anything or anyone who could take her to a faraway and much more interesting world.

24

Nance drove Judy White home from the hospital first thing in the morning. The Goodwood Grocer was supposed to open at eight am, but Nance put a sign on the door that said:
Opening late today—Sorry for inconvenience. I should be back by 10.

They drove out of Clarke carefully in Nance's silver Laser. Nance wasn't great at manual and she shifted the gears with lots of revs so they left the traffic lights near the Plaza with a little jump. Judy was jumpy enough already. She quivered. The seatbelt hurt her ribs. The seat, even covered in soft sheepskin, hurt her thighs. Nance had insisted. She'd beat Opal Jones to the punch. Judy was relieved it wasn't Opal, but she'd hoped for Mrs Bart.

They drove south out of Clarke through the thick trees and along the straight road. Nance sat at eighty kilometres an
hour, even though the speed limit was a hundred. The closer they inched to Goodwood the more Judy's chest collapsed in on itself at the thought of Rosie.

They left the trees, and the lake opened out on their right, massive and brown. Judy thought of the water. Litres, megalitres, gigalitres of water. Nance put her foot down as they went past the browned grass near the boat wharves.

‘Gives me the shivers,' Nance said.

They went over the high bridge, where the water was at its deepest. Judy White hadn't known Bart that well. She only knew how he felt about Carl. Why Bart had beat up Carl that day two years ago, Judy didn't know. Carl snarled at her when she'd made the mistake of asking one night after he'd been drinking. Why was she so stupid as to ask him anything when he'd been drinking?

But Bart—he was a good man. He was gentle when he had that heart attack and she tended to him at the hospital. His wife was such a good woman, too. Coming to visit her like that. If she hadn't married Carl White she might've had friends like the McDonalds. But what would she do without Carl? He could still change. And there was no Bart now, in any case. There was only brown water under the high bridge and a gaping gorge of a hole in her heart where Rosie used to be.
My baby, my baby, my baby
, thought Judy White, with her swollen eyes shut tight.

They drove into town past the Bowlo. Nance went around the long way to avoid Woody's. Judy thought only of Rosie as they pulled up outside the empty White house.

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?'