Goodwood (6 page)

Shirl piped up again. ‘I've come up to Cedar Street last Tuesday and I've seen Carl there at the bakery. I don't know if I like the look of him. Faye Haynes says she's never liked the look of him. What do you reckon, Mack?'

‘I think they're probably going through a thing or two,' said Mack and tried to eat his lamb. He then tried to change
the subject. He commented on the lack of rain and how the lake levels were sure to drop if the dry spell continued. He said Nance had recommended him a John Grisham book called
The Pelican Brief
and it was wonderfully gripping, if not really about pelicans at all. He even asked us if we all knew that Bob Elver's bony greyhound, Lady, was actually male.

But Shirl was ruthless and the rest of us weren't much kinder. As much as Mack evaded, the questions kept coming and, as the night went on, the dinner party did ascertain a few pertinent pieces of information: Carl was not Rosie's dad, but he was Terry's (I knew that already). Judy and Rosie had taken Carl's surname—White—upon the marriage, because Rosie's real dad was a deadshit who left them in the lurch when Rosie was a baby (that was new); Judy White was a mess (everyone knew that already); Davo told Mack that Rosie hadn't given him any indication she was going anywhere, and he had not arranged to meet her on Sunday night in the blanket of darkness; and Davo's bogan uncle, who lived in the crap caravan, was unemployed (I asked that question, and Mack looked at me intently when I did).

The one place Rosie might've gone, according to Mack, was her cousin Tegan's in Ballina. Tegan and Rosie were close. Judy said they sent each other things. Letters, magazines, mix tapes. Cousin Tegan was twenty-one and worked at the West Ballina Transit Centre restaurant, which sat under the Big Prawn. Mack had checked in with Tegan, as well as
her mother, who was Judy's sister Alison. Neither had heard from Rosie and both were awfully distressed.

‘Jeannie, do me a favour and tell your friend George—and her bike—to mind their own business,' Mack said to me when we were out on the verandah after.

I said I would, and we sat on the daybed in the crisp air while Backflip sniffed around Nan's rose garden. Mack drank his beer and shook his head at the night. Backflip assumed her position and made a slow deposit on Nan's lawn. The smell of it wafted across the garden towards the house and Mack winced. I blocked my nose and ventured to ask, ‘Hey, Mack, have you had any robberies recently?'

‘Robberies? What d'you mean?'

‘I don't know—like, did someone get some money stolen or something?'

‘What do you know, Jean?'

‘Nothing!'

Mack sighed and looked at me like a man who'd locked his keys in his car. I could hear Backflip rustling in the bushes. The wind had picked up and the trees above were dancing.

‘
Jean.
'

I said, ‘Well . . .' and thought hard whether to tell Mack about the money. I knew what he would say. He'd be disappointed that I hadn't told him sooner. He'd say ‘
Jean
' again, in a worse tone. He'd say, ‘That's a lot of money. What were you going to do with it? Where is it now? What have you done
with it?' And then what was I supposed to say? That someone had swapped five hundred dollars for a little plastic horse?

Just in the nick of time, we were interrupted by Shirl, who came out, tipsy, with her handbag and a piece of cake wrapped in a napkin.

‘Bye-bye, Mack. Bye-bye, love.'

The soft sound of cork-lined sandals on the verandah.

‘Bye, Shirl,' said Mack. ‘You'll let me know if you want me to come do your lawn, won't you?'

And Shirl said, ‘Oh, you dear man,' and I got up while Mack was distracted and went back inside.

•

Before going to bed that night I made sure my window was still locked. Then I wrote down all the new information I had relevant to Rosie's disappearance in my blue notebook. Carl White. Rosie's deadshit dad. Davo Carlstrom and his unemployed bogan uncle, whose name Mack had managed not to say. What was his name? I hadn't thought to ask. I wrote:
Bogan Uncle Carlstrom
and put my pen down. I thought about all those cars under their tarpaulins, and wondered what was inside that old crap caravan. I wondered if Davo was lying in his bed thinking about Rosie, too. The wind was squally now and the trees kept wailing. I could almost hear Judy White among them, howling into the night.

8

I woke up early to Backflip's faithful snores, floating up from her bed, and the sound of Mum out in the kitchen, fussing. Backflip got up when I got up. She stretched her front legs out, and then her back legs out, and then she shook all over like she'd just got out of a pond. I filled her bowl with biscuits and made my brown toast. Mum was on all fours on the kitchen floor this whole time, surrounded by the entire contents of the pantry, which she was sorting into piles of either keeping or getting rid of. There was a small third section for odd sauces, the fate of which was uncertain.

‘Some of these jams look a bit iffy,' she said and pushed three jars to one side for disposal. ‘Remind me not to buy any more from the park market. I just feel bad if Mary Bell's selling them. Does her face make you feel bad or is it just me?'

‘Yeah, I feel pretty bad about her face,' I said. Poor Mary Bell. First she was toppled from her position of Secretary of
the CWA by Mrs Bart, and now she had to suffer the indignity of selling their iffy jams at the Sweetmans Park Market.

‘I just can't imagine what Judy must be going through,' said Mum to the jars and cans. ‘I'm going to take her some flowers. Or, no, some food. I think a casserole.'

‘I didn't think canned goods went off,' I said.

Mum examined some white beans for a use-by date. She rolled the can around in her hand and looked up as a new thought struck her.

‘There's a new girl at your school?' she said, out of nowhere.

‘Oh, yeah. There is,' I said, and for some reason I felt startled.

‘Evie?' she said.

‘Evie,' I repeated. ‘Is that her name?'

What a lovely name, I thought.
Evie
.

‘Bart said they just moved here. The man was in there yesterday when I picked up the lamb for Pop. Nice-looking guy. Evie's a lovely name, don't you think?'

‘Yeah, I guess.'

Then Mum corralled the pile of cans and jars deemed to be unexpired and began putting them back in the pantry with the labels facing out neatly. I ate my brown toast and watched Backflip through the kitchen window: she peed under the flowering gum and then dug a small pointless hole.

•

At school, the normal feeling of things had stopped and the unease had set in. The news of Rosie White was everywhere. It had travelled down telephone lines and across dinner tables and onto the pages of the
Gather Region Advocate
. It had taken up residence in the minds of students and teachers. It sat in the silence between sentences; in the things that people did not say. Goodwood had never been visited by such collective worry, and we were not familiar with the burden of the unknown.

Classes went on as normal but everyone seemed distracted. I walked past three girls from Year Nine in the hall and heard one of them say, ‘She has to be dead,' as they walked past. George and I heard Mrs Gwen Hughes, strewn with crystals, say, ‘Terrible. Just terrible,' to Mr Cooper in the playground. They saw us and lowered their voices and George swore she heard Mrs Gwen Hughes say, furtively, ‘
Carl
.'

George and I spent lunchtime in the library by the heater vent to avoid everyone, and the cold. We sat up against the wall and rested our feet on the bottom shelf of the section marked
Australian History
. We went over every memory we had of Rosie.

Most of them were set at Woody's, and had us mainly as bystanders. Rosie saying a wry thing that we may or may not have understood, and us laughing along regardless; Rosie
saying, ‘Hey, guys,' in that way she did every now and again, as if we were her friends; Rosie offering us unsolicited schoolyard advice. That was our favourite. George and I couldn't agree on the exact wording, but it was the time when Liz Gordon and Kiralee Davis had walked past Woody's while we were waiting for our food and Liz had yelled something unkind to George. Rosie made a noise like ‘
Pffffff
' and gave Liz the finger. Horrible Liz Gordon looked astonished and fit to fall over. Even Kiralee had a little laugh at her. We couldn't believe our luck—having such a bodyguard as Rosie, just for that moment. Then Rosie said something like, ‘Don't even worry about it. Those girls'll never get out of this fucken town,' and George and I walked out, puffed up like balloons, triumphant with hot chips.

I remembered seeing Rosie getting driving lessons with Carl White earlier that year. He looked like an impatient teacher, and as I told it to George I realised it wasn't a nice memory. Rosie was gripping the steering wheel with both hands and he appeared to be chiding her as they crawled down our street. She looked, as I remembered it now, scared. Not of the car or the road, but of Carl. The thought of it pained me, and it pained George, and we both sat for a moment and stared off in confusion.

George had seen Rosie and Davo heading down to the clearing several times over the summer, just the two of them, which was obviously for the purpose of sex, we
now concluded. George also recalled that her brother Toby asked Rosie out one time at Woody's and Rosie said, ‘Sorry,
what
year are you in?' which we deemed a brilliant rebuttal. Considering how much of a pain in the arse George found Toby, she was extremely pleased to hear of the rejection, and it only further increased our appreciation of Rosie.

We sat silent for a while after that, which was an unusual state for me and George. We sat there and tried to remember more, but that was all we could remember.

9

The house directly next to ours was wooden and gabled and in it lived Big Jim and Fitzy.

Big Jim, as his name suggested, was almost a giant. It wasn't one of those instances where someone's called Tiny and they're as big as a house. Big Jim was un-ironically big. Heavy set, six feet and six inches, his head clipped the sky.

Then there was Fitzy. Big Jim's lady. Five foot nothing, and a whole lot of something. Never did a woman of such small proportions take up so much space as Fitzy.

She enjoyed her hair large and auburn, with bright combs holding the whole thing together at the back, and a fringe that looked set to take over her face like a shrub. She wore enormous red-framed glasses in homage to the talk show host Sally Jessy Raphael, who ‘spoke' to Fitzy across hemispheres, and who Fitzy earnestly considered ‘like a friend'. The glasses were vast and, due to the strength of Fitzy's prescription, an
awful amount of Fitzy's visage was magnified. I found the size disparity between her eyes and the rest of her face to be very disorientating during our conversations.

Big Jim and Fitzy chose to cohabit but not to marry, allowing Fitzy to retain her maiden surname of Fitzgerald, which had been permanently shortened and, at some point, granted uncontested usage. Coral, who lived next door to them on the other side, found the situation quite peculiar, and loved to mention it disapprovingly to Val Sparks, who no doubt found it sinful, especially since both Big Jim and Fitzy had left their respective marriages in order to be together, and Big Jim didn't seem to see his kids. Fitzy, on the other hand, had been relieved of her uterus due to ovarian cancer and was, as such, childless.

‘Our garden's our baby,' she said, pruning the murraya hedge.

Amid all the unease, that Saturday was a good day, because Big Jim and Fitzy brought home a new baby: a puppy. Backflip was beside herself when they carried it in, and jumped up trying to lick its face, while the tiny dog bleated like a lamb.

Big Jim was a gardener, in a professional capacity, in that his Hilux had
Big Jim's Gardening Services
sprayed on the side with his phone number and a picture of a red wheelbarrow. His small talk was endlessly concerned with either fish, birds or plants, often punctuated by his favourite expression: ‘You can plant a dead stick in the ground here and it'll grow.' Then he would look up at the sky and say, ‘Fish are biting today I reckon,' as if the information was bestowed upon him from the clouds.

Big Jim provided constant commentary on our gardenia or our grevillea or our lavender. ‘Nice and healthy, that is,' as he caressed a leaf and smelt a flower. He offered unsolicited lessons in botanical names. ‘
Tropaeolum majus
is what that one's called. That's the Latin.' Or, ‘How about the difference in the pH level in the soil from your place to ours, Jean? We're just next-door and look at the difference of colour in the hydrangeas. That's the alkaline.' And my eyes would glaze over as I'd say, ‘Wow, would you look at that,' and Mum thought it was hilarious how boring one man could be about plants, a subject she found quite interesting if anyone else was talking.

Big Jim called their new puppy Myrtle. I learnt, from Big Jim telling me all about it, that myrtle is an evergreen shrub. They'd gotten Myrtle from Big Jim's mate Merv's recently pregnant terrier, who was called Periwinkle. ‘And do you know what the definition of myrtle is in the dictionary, Jean? The lesser periwinkle! That's the dictionary definition! Get it, Jean? How good is that?'

‘It's very good,' I said.

It was Mum's suggestion, as we all sat in their front yard and the dogs tussled, that I should go up to Bart's to get a bag of bones. ‘Little meaty bones,' she said, as a welcome to Myrtle.

I was pleased to be excused, and I stood in front of the sausage display while Bart fixed some little meaty bones in a plastic bag.

‘How've you been, Jean, good? How's your mum?'

‘Yeah, good. Big Jim and Fitzy got a puppy. It's pretty cute.'