Goodwood (5 page)

I found out from Mack, who told Mum, who was telling Nan when Coral from two doors up overheard and told most people in town, that Rosie's window had been wide open. On a cold August night. Wide open! Like all windows in town
before that night, it was never locked, so no one, Rosie or otherwise, had to unlock it. It was just as open as air when Judy came in on Monday morning to tell an empty bed that it was time to get up.

Later on the Monday, Judy White had returned home from the police station and, on Mack's advice, looked closely over Rosie's things, through eyes blurred with tears, desperate to find evidence to indicate her daughter had simply chosen to depart for a new life elsewhere. She found no such proof. The family suitcases were where they always were: in the top section of the Whites' built-in wardrobe. Rosie's toothbrush stood upright next to the three other White toothbrushes, in a Mother's Day novelty mug on the bathroom sink. And Judy could detect no obvious absence of clothing in Rosie's abandoned bedroom. What was gone, along with Rosie, were her wallet and her army disposal backpack. The backpack had been covered with badges and patches and band names, which Rosie had written all over in texta.

For George and me, the lack of Rosie's wallet and backpack was welcome news. It gave us cautious hope. It meant Rosie had most probably left of her own accord. If someone had opened her window and taken Rosie against her will in order to do terrible things to her, then she wouldn't have had time to grab her bag. She would've been struggling, a hand over her mouth stifling her screams, perhaps the effects of a chloroform-soaked rag held over her mouth and nose
rendering her unconscious, much like we'd seen in Noelene's favourite Bette Midler movie,
Ruthless People.
People in that situation don't reach for personal belongings like they're about to run an errand.

But Mack and Sergeant Simmons saw things differently. Rosie may not have been taken from her bedroom. But if she'd taken her backpack, climbed out her window and gone to meet someone in the night? That didn't mean that mystery person, or someone else she came across, didn't do terrible things to her. Because if everything was safe and well, then where was Rosie White?

•

The signs went up around town on the Wednesday. Rosie's brother Terry was seen photocopying them at the library in the morning, leaning over the machine with the lid not properly shut, so the white light escaped and rolled across his face over and over as the copies came out in an increasing pile. It lit up the tears that sat in his eyes, and illuminated the moment he blinked hard enough for them to spill onto the Xerox logo like lonely rain. Terry stared down and let them fall all over his pimples and didn't wipe them off, not even with the back of his hand. When he arrived at the counter to pay (ten cents a copy), my mum's friend Denise, the librarian, said it was on the house. As she relayed the story of their encounter, Terry stood there looking at her like he didn't understand the
notion of her charity, wordlessly holding out a blue, crumpled ten-dollar bill in front of his wet face.

He then went to the newsagent to buy Blu-Tac and tape. Helen and her husband Bill also refused his money. Helen said she'd wanted to offer Terry hopeful phrases that she'd been working on all morning in case she saw any member of the White family. When the time came, though, she panicked. ‘She'll be right, love,' she said, nodding. ‘She'll be right.'

Poor Terry.

I counted eighteen signs on Cedar Street, after he'd done his teary rounds. Faye Haynes, who ran the Goodwood Village Bakery, had allowed two signs on either side of her front windows, and one on the noticeboard inside. There was Rosie in her Year Twelve photo—but with black eyes and heavily contrasted features, due to the unkind quality of the photocopy—and MISSING written in large letters above her head.
Last seen wearing a red jumper, black skirt and black tights on Sunday night. Please help us find Rosie
. Then the number for the police and the Whites' home phone.

I didn't know what good the signs would do in Goodwood. Everyone knew Rosie, and everyone knew she was missing, and everyone knew that if they saw her, they'd tell the appropriate people. But what was Terry White to do?

On my way home, I saw Terry had stuck one on each side of the electricity box on the corner of our street. I looked to see if anyone was around before I peeled one of the signs
off, careful not to tear the edges on the Blu-Tac. I rolled the paper up into a tube, scraped the remaining blobs of Blu-Tac off the box with my fingers so there was no trace, and made them into one ball, which I pushed around in my fingers as I walked. When I got home, I stuck the soft blob to the wall above my bed, and slid Rosie's MISSING sign, folded once, inside my blue notebook.

Outside I could hear Fitzy next door, hosing the hedges like there'd never be rain.

•

Davo Carlstrom lived on the wrong side of the tracks, on the same street as George. His house was fibro and slumped in an overgrown lot with a crap caravan in the drive that his uncle slept in, and several shells of old cars which sat under blue tarpaulins, waiting to be tended to. Davo's screen door was one of the first that Mack knocked on that Wednesday, since Smithy said he'd been drinking beer at the Wicko with Rosie on the day she vanished, and also because Davo and Rosie spent a lot of time together in general and most people assumed Davo was Rosie's boyfriend.

He confirmed this to Mack in slightly uncertain terms.

‘She's kinda my girlfriend, yeah.'

Around about the time Terry was putting up his signs, George rode her bike up and down her street in a loose figure eight while Mack and Davo talked on the front steps.
Unfortunately, she found it too difficult to decipher their conversation, save for the odd phrase. But she did report that Davo looked genuinely distressed; that Mack called him ‘mate' and patted him on the shoulder as he left; and that Davo's creepy uncle watched the whole thing—Davo, Mack and cycling, eavesdropping George—from the steps of the caravan.

‘He's a full-on pervert,' was George's summation of the uncle. ‘He's been living there for three months. What does he even do all day?'

‘Doesn't he fix cars?'

‘Davo's dad fixes the cars, I think the bogan uncle just sits around.'

‘I think they're all kind of bogans,' I said.

George nodded.

Due to proximity, George, when in primary school, had the unrivalled privilege of having been inside the Carlstrom home. A privilege, because Davo was three years older than us and had grown into the most handsome, the most rebellious and, thus, the most coveted boy in town.

He was blond, his tangled hair touched his shoulders, and he let it do what it wanted. He wore Big W flannos, open over T-shirts. He had a little beard that was lovely and casual, and he played guitar in a three-piece punk band called The Invalids, with Trent Ross from two doors down and Gary Elver, the wayward son of bald Bob at the servo.
I had embarrassed myself at school once by pronouncing The Invalids like it referred to incapacitated old people. Horrible Liz Gordon said, ‘You fucken 'tard, it's The
Invalids
,' and pronounced it like Davo and his mates had intended: referring to people who were not valid; people who were somehow illegitimate or untrue.

‘That makes the name a bit cooler, hey,' said George later on.

Embarrassed, I agreed.

I appreciated the fact that Davo was quiet to the point of brooding. Just looking at him, a person could see that his eyes were deeper ponds than those of his comrades. Maybe it was because he felt illegitimate or untrue. Maybe he could see a way out of Goodwood but was, for the time being, stuck like the shell of an old car in the yard.

As for horrible Liz Gordon, who often yelled obscenities across the playground, she was a part of a group of rough girls who smoked during lunch by the fence and drank reckless amounts of Passion Pop around the late-night bin fires in Sweetmans Park. Liz Gordon, Talia Edwards, Bec Fisher, Bec Kelly, Kiralee Davis—these were names I longed to forget. They were proudly and deliberately mean. They scratched the caps off cream bulbs and inhaled the nitrous oxide to get high. They had notorious sex with Trent Ross and Gary Elver, and physical fights with each other. My Nan referred to them, collectively, as ‘common'.

Liz Gordon once told George she was ‘a dead scrag' because George sneezed on her in class. It had been due to Mrs Carr's use of an overhead projector. Mrs Carr had turned the lights off and the projector on and the bulb came alive brightly and George sneezed.

Mucus sprayed on Liz Gordon's milky neck.

‘
Gross
,' said Liz. ‘You're a fucken dead scrag.'

But George would always have it over Liz Gordon in one small way. George after all was the one who, at age nine, was invited in to play video games with Davo, by Davo's sloshed mother.

‘What was it like in there?' I asked.

‘Not that nice,' said George. ‘His mum smelt heaps like beer. I felt really germy afterwards.'

‘Poor Davo,' I said, because of his drunk mum and his stinking house and the fact that Rosie was missing and she was Davo's kind-of girlfriend.

‘Yeah, poor Davo—if he didn't do it,' said George.

We both fell silent. I don't think I truly thought, at that time, that Davo had done anything bad. And I don't think George did either. But it was as if we knew, or were starting to accept, that when it came to Rosie, something—and probably something bad—had been done.

7

To celebrate the occasion of Nan's seventy-fifth birthday, Mum and I went to their house for a small dinner party. Pop cooked an easy-carve lamb leg roast and made gravy in the roasting pan. Nan wore a plastic tiara and sat at the head of the table.

Gosh I loved Nan.

Joyce Mackenzie was probably the most forward-thinking person in Goodwood, and yet she was married to my silly old Pop who, on hearing the announcement that Australia would stop distributing one- and two-cent pieces, had begun hoarding them in jars next to his bed, in case he missed them.

‘One day you're going to reach into your pocket, Jean, and there'll be none left,' he said. ‘How would you be?'

‘I think I'll be okay, Pop.'

‘Twenty-six years is not enough time for a coin to be in circulation. They should let them live.'

Nan just smiled and shook her head.

She voted Labor; Pop voted Nationals. She read poetry and literary novels; he read instruction manuals. She liked to try new recipes, experimenting with flavours and ordering exotic spices through Nance at the Grocer; he made one meal, once a year on Nan's birthday: easy-carve lamb leg roast with gravy, baked potatoes, pumpkin and peas, served always on the Burleigh Ware dinner set they were given by his parents on their wedding day.

I would look around town and wonder if two married people ever had less in common than my Nan and Pop. And yet they would look at each other across the cedar table and whatever ocean lay between them was bridged, just like that. He would wink and she would nearly blush. They would tease each other and sustain each other and, if music was playing, they would dance. How they loved to dance. Pop told me they had danced for close to five hours on their wedding day. They danced in their living room of an evening to Billie Holiday or Frank Sinatra. They danced very slowly and took it in turns to lead. They danced while everyone was watching, and no one was watching, and the sight of their graceful private universe of swaying and twirling and gliding and rocking would bring joy to the walls of an empty room.

That night, Mack came to the dinner party with his wife, Tracy, and their small son, Jasper. So did Nan's friend Shirl from the CWA, whose husband Clive had died the year before
from heart failure, sitting in his reading chair. Old widowed Shirl arrived in Maseur Sandals, which she'd paired with thick socks.

‘Joyce!' said Shirl ‘I haven't seen you for donks! Happy birthday, love,' and they settled in for a brief, arthritic hug.

Shirl bore a gift basket of scones. Tracy popped a bottle of sparkling. Mack and Pop drank Reschs Dinner Ale because it was a special occasion. Backflip sat patiently under the table, waiting for someone to drop food. Everyone wanted to talk about Rosie.

‘It's weird seeing Roy Murray at Woody's all afternoon,' said Mum. ‘And Derek Murray—did you see he's been working there this week? It feels funny for them to be open at all.'

‘I didn't know Derek Murray had the intellect to fry a bag of chips,' said Mack.

Derek Murray. Roy's son. As my Pop would say, ‘Fell out of the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down.'

‘I am not a fan of Derek's face,' I announced to the table.

I wasn't. Derek's face was a big old mess of a thing, and it mainly looked that way because an unpleasant expression had settled in some time ago and had remained there, even if Derek was trying to smile at the time.

Mack had a little laugh.

Mum said, ‘Jeannie, honey, don't be uncharitable.'

‘What about that bloke Carl? Isn't he her stepdad, not her real one?' asked Shirl.

‘Yeah, but he's been around a long time,' said Mack. ‘And, you know, I don't really want to talk about the case.'

‘So it's a real “case”?' asked Nan. ‘You don't think she ran off?'

‘Come on, Nan, you know what I mean.'

Mack called Nan ‘Nan' even though she was his aunt. Mack was the son of Nan's brother, Lang, who died after the Vietnam War, sitting on his back verandah, cleaning his gun. I only realised in recent years that ‘cleaning his gun' was a euphemism. I don't suppose it was dirty at all. I suppose he was though, from the war, and all the horrible things he'd seen and done.

Mack, who was fifteen at the time, found Lang with his beetroot head barely hanging together and a raven standing by his ear, nipping at the wooden boards. Mack was catatonic for two weeks straight. But in the years that followed, he mended and grew into a police officer. By 1992 he was gentle and kind, he loved his family, and could not stand the sight of ravens.