Goodwood (3 page)

3

When I got home, Mum was watering the ferns in the bathroom and humming along to the radio. The two of us lived in a weatherboard house with a nice lawn that Big Jim from next door mowed for us every fortnight. Everything was on one level because the houses in Goodwood weren't big on stairs. It smelt damp in our sunroom after rain, and dog hair stuck to the bottom of our socks, and Mum kept an extensive array of hanging plants. We cohabited with hundreds of books, which lived in uneven piles on our bedside tables, and spread their spines along the living room shelves. Mum owned a big cedar dining table, passed along from Nan and Pop. She waxed it every three months, like clockwork, and the smell of O'Cedar polish would settle in the curtains.

Goodwood was a wood town, historically. Red cedar used to grow thick and tall along the river, all the way from us to Cedar Valley. Toppled, stripped of its bark and
cut into smaller pieces, it was transformed into dressers and desks and chairs. Timber cutting caused the town to prosper in the 1840s, and dairy farming followed. By 1992, though, the sawmill was closed and the cedar was gone, and only the Fairley Dairy remained, with its stock of lowing cattle much diminished.

While industry had slowed, Goodwood liked to think of itself as ‘progressive' and, as such, ‘Being Progressive' was the mission statement of the Goodwood Progress Association, which met at the Community Hall once a month and discussed how the town could progress further. Mum was secretary and reported back, straight-faced, on the various initiatives. These included a proposed mural (Smithy's idea), a proposed book club (Mum's idea), a proposed native garden (our neighbour Fitzy's idea), and the expansion of social events like Fishing's The Funnest, an annual parade led by a selection of keen fisherchildren from Goodwood Primary, who marched along Cedar Street every spring wearing little cardboard fish hats and carrying class-made, hookless rods. There was always a Fish Fry at the Bowlo after and, under brown and blue fluttering streamers, everyone in town would be overcome by the spirit of the lake and the ocean. Gripped by the watery wonderment of it all—they couldn't help it—they would eat and drink and laugh and set down their empty glasses and then they would dance.

The Bowlo was one of two places Goodwood had to drink at. The Bowlo and the Wickham Hotel, which was known as the Wicko—and then a little string of shops along Cedar Street: the Goodwood Grocer, the newsagent, the Goodwood Village Bakery, Bart's Meats, Mountain Real Estate, Woody's Takeaway, a tiny one-horse police station (where Mack was the horse), and so on. Among them were two ‘artsy' establishments, as Pop called them: Bookworm, which stocked used books, and the Vinnies, where Val Sparks filled her window with local craft. This, along with the semi-isolated beauty of the landscape and flora, attracted a few artistically minded residents. There was a published novelist called Arden Cleary who lived on the mountain and wrote naturalist fiction; and a potter called Celeste Munch who'd won a ceramics prize in Sydney for her glazed bowls.

Goodwood was flat in the centre, at Cedar Street where the shops were. It was almost flat where we lived, inclining gently towards the escarpment. But our house, from the front, looked like it was wearing a huge mountain for a pirate hat. The rest of the town behind us all happened up the hill, and I often felt like the head of a snail, always under a shell.

That night, Mum and I watched TV, which entailed her yelling
Sale of the Century
answers at Glenn Ridge.

After the lamps were switched off, I dragged Backflip's bed onto the floor next to mine, and she turned in circles three times before settling in a tight ball. I put
my heater on low and wrote about the money in my blue notebook under the heading:
Found at the clearing: FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS.

Then I lay awake under my quilt and thought about it for a long time, unable to sleep, while Backflip snored and the night hung cold and still outside my unlocked window.

4

On Saturday Nan drove me to Clarke, the closest town with a shopping plaza.
Clarke Plaza: Experience the Lifestyle
. The trees whirred past like steel wool and we listened to Nan's tape of John Denver and she sang along. Just before the bridge, Nan drove gently over a dead kangaroo, which was nothing more than a bump of fur and guts for every car to flatten a little bit more until it became one with the road.

‘There're always kangaroos in this spot,' she said.

‘There's always dead kangaroos in this spot,' I said.

‘So it goes,' said Nan.

The clump of kangaroo offered a soft bumping sound as we passed over.

Nan bought me new sneakers: black Converse All Stars, just like the ones Rosie wore. I put them on straightaway and carried my old shoes in my bag. At every shop we went to, I noted the price of things I wanted and added them up
along the way. With five hundred dollars, I could've bought another pair of boots, a Swiss Army knife and
Great Conspiracy Theories of the Twentieth Century
in hardcover
,
and still had $323.03 left over.

Nan bought wool,
Wild Swans
, and a chocolate Paddle-Pop, which she ate while we sat on the Clarke Plaza terrace in a spot of sun.

My Nan was Joyce Mackenzie. She had been an English teacher by profession, but by 1992 she was long retired. She knitted to keep her arthritis at bay, completed the cryptic crossword in pen, and knew lots of poems by heart, including the whole of T.S. Eliot's
Old Possum's Book Of Practical Cats
and the first five verses of
The White Cliffs Of Dover
.

Nan and Pop had lived in Goodwood all their married life. Nan's family had been dairy farmers. Nan had vowed to marry a man who wasn't. ‘Farming's a chancy business,' she'd say. ‘Truman Capote wrote that and never a truer thing was said.'

My Pop was not a farmer. He did equipment maintenance for a textile company in Clarke. My Nan fell in love. They adopted my mum when she was a tiny baby.

Apparently Nan and Pop tried their darnedest to get pregnant. But, like trying to make a phone call in a thunderstorm, they had a bad connection. So after several years afflicted with either Nan or Pop's infertility, for tests in those days were inconclusive, they decided to adopt.

Nan and Pop told Mum that when they went to Clarke Base Hospital, a tall handsome doctor escorted them into a big room of cots, and each one had an adorable little baby in it. They walked through rows and rows, looking at all the delightful little faces, gurgling and smiling and perfect and, gosh, it was so hard to choose! But they had to, of course, they had to choose. There was only one baby for them. And as they came upon the cot my mum was in, there she was, all swaddled in a dear little cream jumpsuit, pink-cheeked and perfect, and they said, ‘This is the one. This is the one we want to take home and raise as our own beautiful baby girl.'

And the lovely nurses said
Blessed are the pure of heart!
; and by and by the lovely nurses made it so; and it was very good; The End.

Throughout her childhood, especially in an incidence of insomnia or a difficult day at school, Mum would ask to be told the story of how she was Chosen, for the hundredth time. She was delighted at each and every telling, and was often heard retelling the story to her friends, at which point the room of adorable babies inevitably got bigger, and the difficulty of her parents' choice therefore greater, and her ultimate desirability and perfection that much more apparent.

Unfortunately, Mum got older and at the age of fourteen she read an article in the newspaper about the adoption process. It was sobering.

There was no room full of cots. There was no painstaking selection. There was just a mountain of bureaucracy and it took ages and prospective adopters pretty much got what they were given.

Mum wasn't angry. She didn't slam a door in disillusionment. Nan said she came in with the article, and Nan saw what it was, and Pop looked at the floor. My mum did not say one word. She just stood there, and then she knelt down, for Nan and Pop were sitting side by side on the couch. Mum put her head in Nan's lap. Then Nan put her hand on Mum's back, and Pop put his hand on Nan's hand, and Nan put her other hand on Pop's hand, and so on, until it was like a slow motion game of Snap.

The three of them set themselves there like that for some time, as if meditating.

‘Eyes were moist,' as my Pop recalled.

So Mum grew up in Goodwood until she moved away for university and married a man whose surname was Brown. That made her Celia Brown. Mum soon got pregnant and then I was born in Sydney. That made me Jean Brown. Then the man whose surname was Brown left us when I was just a baby, and Mum and I moved back to Goodwood. That was how it happened and there we all were; and I was glad to grow up near a man like my Pop and a woman like my Nan.

•

On the way back from Clarke, Nan pulled up at Goodwood's only servo and mechanical repair shop, run by Bob Elver, who was very bald. Elver's Auto. I got out and patted Bob Elver's bony greyhound, Lady, who always sat by the door on a big dusty bed and never needed to be on the lead. I never questioned the fact that Lady's undercarriage revealed him to be male. I was patting and Nan was filling up the tank of her old Sigma when a shiny Subaru pulled up behind her, with the pretty girl I'd seen at the Grocer sitting in the passenger seat.

Bob Elver said ‘G'day Jean', and his head shone in the sun as he had a chat with Nan by the bowser. ‘Nice day for it. How's Don going, Joyce?'

Lady rolled onto his back and exposed his belly.

The pretty girl looked at me through the car window. She did not smile, she did not frown, she just looked. I stared back at her for a few seconds, but something about her made me turn away. I felt embarrassed. The girl kept her eyes on me for a long moment, like I was a great curiosity. Then she was reading her book again, and her mum was filling up their tank. Nan honked at bald Bob Elver as we drove out and turned off towards home. We left the shiny Subaru sitting in the servo in the sun.

•

The next day was Sunday. Rosie White and her brother Terry went with their parents to the Joneses next door for a
barbeque lunch. Opal and Ken Jones hadn't had the Whites over in a long time, and Opal went to extra effort with the salads. The occasion was Terry's birthday, which had been the Tuesday preceding—sixteen candles on a Victoria sponge cake that came in a packet from the Goodwood Grocer. Nance had sold it to Judy White, and then said to Mum later that sugar isn't good for kids with skin problems. Mum said, ‘Oh, Nance. Let him eat cake.'

The Joneses had a son the same age as Terry (Jake Jones, a name like a superhero). But Rosie, the oldest at eighteen, was bored and left early to return to her room where she listened to her new tape of Nirvana's
Nevermind
so loud that Judy ducked home momentarily to ask Rosie to turn it down.

Later in the afternoon, Rosie left with her Walkman on—her giant headphones dwarfing her face—and met Davo Carlstrom at the Wicko, where they reportedly drank three schooners and chain-smoked in the beer garden. Smithy, who owned the Wicko and offered gentle musings in a faintly Irish accent, told Mack later that Rosie laughed every now and again, sure, but not as much as usual and that, in his opinion, she seemed sad.

Mack said, ‘Smithy, would you have thought her sad if she hadn't disappeared that evening?'

And Smithy, who was often prone to lyricism, said, ‘Well, it's hard to distinguish between my sadness and the rest of the sadness in town.'

At that point, Mack, an empathic man, decided to set himself down for a Reschs and a chat, and they ended up drinking past close, even though Mack was supposed to be on duty.

After Rosie had left the pub that Sunday, possibly looking sad, she went home. The Whites ate chops and mashed potatoes and Rosie's stepdad, Carl, went to his shed after dinner and worked with the light on, attracting moths, till after ten. Terry applied his medicated acne cream, finished his homework, and played
Alex Kidd in Miracle World
on his Sega Master System II. Judy washed up and pottered around, watching television and doing puzzles from the large-print puzzle book that always sat on the arm of their couch.

Rosie went to her room, taking the time to say a nice goodnight to her mum and her brother, which she did sometimes, but not that often. Then she closed the door behind her and vanished into thin air.

5

The next morning, around the time that I was arriving at school, Judy White was in the Goodwood Police Station, fretting to Mack, beside herself with panic, while Terry waited outside in the car.

The news was yet to spread to the rest of town.

I had woken in the dark, walked Backflip around the block as the sun yellowed the clouds, eaten my brown toast, and walked to school. In the misty morning, everything felt altogether normal.

Just before the bell rang, I waited by the lunch tables for George, who was coming through the front gates with two of her brothers. She had four in total: Toby was her twin and he went to our school, along with runty Daniel; Vinnie had graduated with the rest of Rosie's year; and Lego Pat was seven and made endless abstract constructions with the three
incomplete sets of Lego that George's parents—Noelene and Fred Sharkey—could not afford to replace.

Four of the five Sharkey children, including George, were redheaded, even though both Noelene and Fred were not. George would offer a lesson in recessive genes to anyone who would listen. Spittle would relieve itself from her mouth when she got excited. Then she'd say something droll or self-deprecating; or she'd laugh inappropriately. When George's grandmother, Belle, had died in 1985, a devastated Noelene had ushered George along in front of the open casket. George looked down at Belle, who she was very fond of, and laughed hysterically at her resting face. Poor George. She was dragged out of the church and reprimanded and could not stop laughing for days.