Goodwood (7 page)

Bart stood behind the counter in his butcher's striped apron. The collar of a canary-coloured polo shirt sat under his kind face. On the wall behind him was a cluster of framed photographs. There was Bart and Mrs Bart with Pearl, in a riding hat. There was Bart at the lake, grinning, holding a giant fish, flanked by Roy Murray on one side and Carmel Carmichael on the other. There was Bart and the Mayor and a group of men from the council. And Bart holding an Excellence in Small Business Award certificate, the photo of which hung next to an array of other laminated local business prizes, and thankyous from the school and the CWA and the Goodwood Progress Association and the Bowlo, and a poster for last year's Fishing's The Funnest parade.

‘You been worried about all the business this week?' asked Bart.

I looked at my feet and said I was.

Bart said, ‘Yeah,' sympathetically.

It was the last conversation I would have with Bart, not that I knew it at the time. Not that I'd paid much attention to any of the conversations I'd had with Bart, really. I was young and he was old. He'd say a friendly thing and I'd nod along. But he always did have time for a chat, no matter who was waiting. That was something I remember thinking during our last conversation: that Bart always seemed to have the time.

‘She'll turn up,' he said confidently. ‘Don't you worry yourself too much with all the things people are saying.' He tied a knot in the bag of bloody bones. Cartilage poked out at strange angles and red juices gathered in the plastic creases. ‘This is a safe town.'

Backflip and I walked past Woody's on the way home and, even though I half-expected to see her, Rosie wasn't there. There was just one of Terry's signs hanging in the window, next to a poster for the Clarke Show. And Derek Murray, frying chips and laughing his unpleasant face off with Trent Ross.
Ha ha ha ha
, went Trent and Derek, and I wasn't sure how Derek Murray could be laughing. The one place where Rosie's absence was most obvious was behind the counter at Woody's. She stared out from the photocopied Year Twelve picture and the memory of her hovered there—like a ghost, or a mist, or a web—reminding everyone that she was gone.

I remember thinking that day that there was nothing much worse than a missing person. Rosie had vanished and all that was left was a hole where she once was. Or in this case, all that was left was Derek Murray. I looked at him, filling the spot where Rosie should have been, emptying chips from the wire basket onto a sheet of butcher's paper on the counter, surrounded by the thick air. I thought he must've felt like he'd walked through a spider's web and got some stuck in his hair.

10

As it turned out, there was something worse than a missing person: two missing people.

Bart often fished on a Sunday. A lot of men in Goodwood fished on a Sunday. There was a cluster of boats on the lake that bobbed up and down all week waiting to be taken out. Bart's was a Savage fibreglass half-cabin cruiser in white and royal blue. Bart loved his boat. He spent many a Sunday in peaceful solitude on Grants Lake with the motor off and the anchor down, fishing and drinking beer and eating beef sandwiches.

The Sunday in question, Mrs Bart prepared Bart's sandwiches, and Bart packed his gear and popped a sixpack into his little esky from the bar fridge in the carport. The McDonalds' carport was like an aeroplane hangar and heavy with cars. Bart mostly drove a white Commodore and Mrs Bart drove a Mazda 323. Then they had a Hilux for when they did farmy
stuff and an old Corolla that once belonged to burly Joe and usually sat on the far left, next to the bar fridge and deep freezer, and was kept mainly for the use of Mrs Bart's sister Jan, who ‘never married' as Coral would say, and visited Goodwood via bus several times a year.

Bart took the Hilux out to the lake that day, with his rods in the tray. Faye Haynes, who ran the Goodwood Village Bakery, attested to the fact that Bart had stopped in briefly for a coffee scroll. Then he pulled off again, eating it out of the paper bag, and was seen waving to several people on his way down Cedar Street, including Nance, whose counter in the front window of the Goodwood Grocer was positioned so she could witness everything that happened on the main road during daylight hours. Bart wore his yellow windcheater and Nance saw it, and she saw him wave, and she saw him drive off towards the lake, and that was the last of him she ever did see.

Bart would have driven the long road out of town alongside the river, then the stretch that sidles around the base of the mountain in shadow. He would've gone past the rest stop just before the bridge, and flattened that old dead kangaroo a fraction more into the bitumen. Then over the bridge, nice and high above the lake, and eventually—after two kilometres of fast flat road—onto the wide patch of browned grass where cars park near the boat wharves.

Grants was a big, meandering lake. So big that if you stood at its widest point and looked to the other side, a person standing there would appear as small as a fleck of sand. The lake turned corners around the foothills of the mountain and had several secluded horseshoes that bent into the shore like giant private pools. Pop took me out lots when I was younger, or when he was younger, but his age meant that his boat was more patient than most, and I doubt it'd been taken out in nearly five years. Not like Bart's much-used cruiser, which was found later that afternoon by Big Jim and Merv, who were doing some fishing of their own when they noticed the unusual sight of Bart's boat nodding sideways in the wind.

As they approached, they wondered if Bart was tricking.

‘Bart?' they yelled.

No reply.

They came up on his cruiser, cut their engine and bumped his boat with theirs as they peered over.

There was Bart's gear, and Bart's beer, but no sign nor sight nor smell of Bart.

Merv boarded Bart's boat while Big Jim kept theirs steady. As Big Jim later recalled, Merv looked at him dead serious, shaking his head, saying, ‘Mate.
Fuck
. He's gone.'

They surveyed the water for a further few minutes or so. Brown and choppy, it offered no glimpse of anything human. Merv wanted to tow the boat back with them, but Big Jim
insisted on dropping Bart's anchor so whoever was going to come looking would know where to look.

‘Good thinking, BJ,' said Merv as they headed back full throttle to the wharf and their car, their faces flushed with worry.

There were no phone booths between the lake and Goodwood, so they sped back to town in Merv's ute and called Mack from Merv's house to tell him what they'd found.

Mack said that as soon as he got the call he knew how bad it was. Bart was an experienced boatman—one of Goodwood's finest. He knew Grants Lake like the back of his hand. He'd been out there every week for the past eight years. He was known to be a stickler for safety rules and regulations. A man like that didn't usually end up, on a relatively calm day, relieved of his boat.

By the time Mack got the call it was almost six and winter dark. It put him in the awful position of having to knock on Mrs Bart's door with bad news and no ability to make it any better until the sun rose the next morning. Mrs Bart, on answering the door, crumpled. Mack told Mum and me the next day that it was the hardest door knock he'd ever done, and that no matter how much he rubbed them, he could still feel the difficulty of it there, on his knuckles.

On the Sunday evening, though, Mum and I were blissfully unaware. We heard Big Jim arrive home next door, but he didn't come over to tell us the news. Fitzy said later that
he came inside—wordless, most unusual—and got down on all fours on the living room floor. The big man just crouched there like a table while Fitzy asked the table over and over again what was wrong.

•

The following day, Bart's Meats was closed and Mrs Bart was pacing. Everyone on Cedar Street knew the bad news by mid-morning. It filtered through the school gates and into our classrooms, while Mr Cooper and Ms Carr and Mr Davies and Mrs King huddled in the doorways and corridors to discuss possibilities and ramifications and how-could-it-bes.

George said, ‘Two people. What are the odds?'

I did not know the odds.

All I knew was that I'd just seen Bart two days ago, tying up a bag of bloody bones, and now he was gone.

Bart and Flora McDonald had only been in Goodwood for eight years. They weren't lifers like most of the other shopkeepers on Cedar Street. They had their son, Joe, who was grown up and lived in Sydney and a daughter, Pearl, whose mind sat somewhere on the rainbow spectrum of autism and who found solace only in horses. When she was younger, Pearl had festooned her bedroom with horseshoes and bridles and her full set of My Little Ponies. The latter gave the entire room the effect of a pastel equine kaleidoscope. By the age of nine, Pearl could name the gross and microscopic anatomies
of horses, as well as donkeys and zebras: external, digestive, reproductive, skeletal and so on. She was a walking encyclopaedia of equestrian terms and trivia. And Pearl watched a horse movie every night before bed:
The Black Stallion
,
The Man From Snowy River
,
National Velvet
,
Phar Lap
,
Black Beauty.
Nan told me there was a very specific movie roster at the McDonald house that no man or mountain could disturb.

As she grew, Bart and Mrs Bart bought Pearl a horse—an Appaloosa with a snowflake coat—which Pearl called Oyster.

When they'd lived in Sydney, the McDonalds drove Pearl out to the stable lot they rented, a fifty-minute drive, three times a week.

It wasn't enough. Pearl became difficult to manage on the remaining four days, and more and more despondent when she wasn't with Oyster.

So, after many long evening discussions over chardonnay and crackers, the McDonalds decided to leave the city and move to Goodwood. Bart opened Bart's Meats, a rural version of his store in the northern suburbs of Sydney, and Mrs Bart experimented with new glazes for her pottered crockery, made jam, and ascended with lightening quickness to the position of Secretary of the Goodwood branch of the Country Women's Association. Meanwhile, Pearl, at twenty-two, spent all her days with Oyster, along with Apples and Pears, the two pintos they had since acquired.

Bart was good at gifts. He was an intuitive and imaginative giver. Not only had he sated Pearl with horses, he expressed himself lovingly through his generosity to Mrs Bart, too, and had done so throughout their long marriage. For one Christmas: a star. Mrs Bart was very fond of stars. She enjoyed gazing into the sky over Goodwood, where they shone so brightly. ‘There's nothing brighter than country stars,' she would say. So Bart bought her one, from the Sydney Observatory, and he named it Flora—verified by a certificate that arrived in the mail. Flora the star was in the Phoenix constellation, and flickered away endlessly. Flora the woman—or Mrs Bart, as we all knew her—was so thrilled she cried.

For Mrs Bart's forty-fifth: a piano. Mrs Bart had always wanted to learn, and longed for the kind her mother had owned: a Richard Lipp. There wasn't one to buy in Goodwood, or Clarke, or Cedar Valley, or even Sydney for that matter. So Bart had one driven by truck from Melbourne and it arrived on the morning of Mrs Bart's birthday and she was so thrilled, she cried.

Three years later, for Mrs Bart's forty-eighth, Bart gave his wife a rose garden. Full of flora, as it were.
I never promised you a rose garden, but I got you one anyway
, said the card, which also contained a map and directions that led into the foothills of the mountain. Mrs Bart followed the map on horseback. She arrived at a clearing, which was filled with a
rose garden that Big Jim had planted especially at the direction of Bart. She dismounted and knelt and—the thrill of it!—all those fragrant coloured flowers. The very special thrill of the map and the ride and the clearing and the roses. Mrs Bart cried and cried and cried.

But on the day after Bart went missing, Mrs Bart did not cry. She paced. And in the days that Mrs Bart spent pacing, her sister, Jan, stayed with Pearl. Jan loved her niece, and happened to be in Goodwood at the time Bart went on his fishing trip of no return. Jan and Pearl rode all day, the horses' hooves mimicking Mrs Bart's own feet, as they paced around the paddock, along the river trail, and into the foothills of the mountain.

Pearl struggled to express her sorrow about the absence of her father—and that of her mother, who was gone for five days in the shop, unable to show her grief to Pearl, and hoping always that Bart would be the next one to cause the bell above the shop door to ring.

Jan knew that Pearl, in her own words, ‘didn't do feelings'. So Jan kept Pearl busy doing what she always did: riding, grooming, pitching straw, bucketing manure, feeding, watering and hanging up her saddle at the end of the day. Of an evening, Jan would hear Pearl out in the stables talking to Oyster, whispering at times—saying in her strange monotone, ‘It's alright. It's alright, gentle Oyster'—and Oyster responding every so often with snorts and whinnies.

•

After the divers dived, and nothing was recovered, a simple drowning was still the most popular theory. Mum was convinced of it. He'd tripped and fallen, maybe hit his head on the way over. Or he'd had another heart attack. That was not unlikely. Bart's heart was known to be weaker than most—he'd already had an episode a couple of years earlier, on the riding trail with Pearl. So maybe he'd had another, this time on his boat, and gone over and under. There was a wind; maybe they didn't dive in the right spot. Maybe, said Big Jim, the boat had drifted for a long time before he and Merv had found it. Bart could've been anywhere down there, for who knew what varied paths him and his boat might've floated along.

That was the thing for Mack, though: Bart's lack of floating. He was known to wear a life vest. He was a councillor, an elected man, a pillar of the community. He had completed a First Aid and Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation course through St John's Ambulance. He drove safely, and offered well wishes, and gave great gifts, and every now and again he'd take a mate fishing with him. Roy Murray sometimes, or Irene Oakman, who also ‘never married', wore much purple, and was known to prefer the company of women. Irene Oakman said that on the three occasions she fished with Bart, he wore his life vest and had provided one for her also.