Goodwood Read online

  First published in 2016

  Copyright © Holly Throsby 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 9781760293734

  eISBN 9781952534928

  Set by Bookhouse, Sydney

  Text design by gogoGingko

  Cover design: Sandy Cull, gogoGingko

  Cover photographs: Adrian Gardner

  www.redbubble.com/people/garts

  Holly Throsby is a songwriter, musician and novelist from Sydney, Australia. She has released four critically acclaimed solo albums, a collection of original children’s songs, and an album as part of the band, Seeker Lover Keeper. Goodwood is Holly’s debut novel.

  For Alvy

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  Acknowledgements

  1

  Goodwood was a peaceful town before the tragedies. It sat itself quietly between a mountain and a river. After a long stretch of flowing, the river became a lake. The lake was vast and brown and brimming with bream. It was a top spot for fishing and boats cut silver waves across it on the weekend.

  As any one of its long-time residents would’ve said, Goodwood was a glass-half-full kind of town, and weekends were a trusted time. People washed their cars in their driveways of a Saturday. They baked and mowed while their dogs slept in shade. Sundays were dozy and mainly for fishing. And the first one of the month meant a little market in Sweetmans Park where a few dismal stalls sold enormous pumpkins and disappointing jams.

  A green metal sign announced the township as you drove in—past the Bowlo, past the oval, under the mountain. Welcome to Goodwood, it said, with the sound of the brown river, and the smell of cows and fish. Front doors hung wide open in warm weather. The bar at the Wicko hummed with drinking. Wood-panelled television sets glowed and flickered on living room walls of an evening. Backyard swing sets creaked with children. People died of heart attacks and strokes and cancers and time, lying in their beds at twilight, or sitting in their cushioned reading chairs.

  It was generally considered a good thing that Goodwood was home to small, humble lives that didn’t bear much mention. Events that were regarded as dramatic were a minor traffic incident or a lack of rain. It was not a place where you’d expect to find corpses. There were no bodies on the forest floor, entwined like vines, hurtled from a harmless existence by rage or madness or spite. Horror did not visit Goodwood. Nor did sorrow—or not in the way we would come to know it so well.

  I was born in the city but we only lived there till I was two, which was when Mum moved us to Goodwood to be close to my Nan and Pop. They had a big brown brick house, with a rose garden out the front, and a verandah with cane furniture on it. I liked to lie on Nan’s daybed and get a good view of the street, where there were never that many people, but of what people there were, everybody knew everybody, no question.

  Mum had a lot of friends. She gardened with company and joined clubs and took minutes. Most mornings in high school I ate brown toast and Mum told me about her CWA class or the latest meeting at the hall. Mum’s cousin Mack was Goodwood’s own Constable ‘Mack’ Mackenzie. He sat on our couch commonly and drank Reschs Pilsener. Mum and Mack were very social, which was nice, because they mingled a lot and talked a lot and I liked to hear about people.

  Everybody knew everybody, no joke. Including me, including Mum and Mack; and Big Jim and Fitzy next door; and Nance who ran the Grocer; and my Nan and my Pop. A person in Goodwood was forgiven for knowing the intimate business of their neighbours and their neighbours’ neighbours, just for the sheer proximity, as well as the chatter, and the simple fact that seeing and hearing is, to some degree, knowing. There was Helen at the newsagent, having one of her panics; or Smithy at the Wicko, having deep feelings; or Coral, from two doors up, who was ancient and dragged her tartan shopping trolley past our house twice a day, the wheels singing like a baby bird.

  Everything in my memory was regular and pleasant and unremarkable before the disappearances. That was in 1992, when I was seventeen and the winter had set in, making our breath misty and our curtains drawn.

  It wasn’t just one person who went missing, it was two. Two very different people. They were there, and then they were gone, as if through a crack in the sky. After that, in a small town like Goodwood, where we had what Nan called ‘a high density of acquaintanceship’, everything stopped. Or at least it felt that way. The normal feeling of things stopped. Hope dwindled like an unstoked fire. And before too long the grief crawled in. A plague of sadness infected our shop fronts. It rested on our awnings and nested in our gardens and gnawed its way through the walls of our houses.

  First, it was Rosie White.

  She was eighteen years old when she dropped off the face of the earth, one year older than me. Years are long when you’re younger, and each one makes a marked difference. Rosie was almost a whole year clear of high school and working at Woody’s Takeaway on Cedar Street. She was older and cooler and prouder and free.

  My best friend George and I would stand by the drinks fridge, waiting for our hot chips, and try to pretend we weren’t intimidated by Rosie. But we were. We loved her; and we wished more than anything that she’d say something—anything—and preferably say it in our direction so we might feel like we belonged; like we might one day be her friends; like we were, in some way, a part of her faraway and much more interesting world.

  Mostly, though, Rosie didn’t say an awful lot. She half-smiled and kept a look of deep intensity. Then she’d turn to the bain-marie to retrieve a pie and George and I would stand back and silently admire her clothes, which were a spirited combination of the army green racks at the Clarke Disposal Store and the black and flannel racks at the Goodwood Vinnies, where Val Sparks worshipped a porcelain baby Jesus and listened to old pop songs on a silver radio.

  Many boys in Goodwood wanted Rosie—encouraged, in part, because she didn’t want them. She walked along with her headphones on, as big as earmuffs, and there was always something defiantly unapproachable about her. Of course, her remoteness attracted many a rebellious boy to the grand idea of
approaching her, but that never turned out so well. She dismissed their advances summarily, with some form of wry put-down, and it only made them, and us, love her more.

  I saw Rosie behind the counter at Woody’s every weekday when I went past on my way home from school or took Backflip for a walk along the river. Then, one day in August 1992, she was gone. And in her place were more questions than one town had ever asked about a single subject.

  •

  A week after the last sighting of Rosie—by her mother, Judy White, who saw her close her bedroom door after saying her goodnights, only to not be there the next day to say her goodmornings—Bart McDonald vanished.

  Bart ran Bart’s Meats—Pleased to Meat You! said the sign on the awning—and was tremendously popular as a member of the Gather Region Council, co-president of the Goodwood Progress Association, and the main provider of the myriad meats required for Goodwood’s long tradition of backyard barbeques. Bart was also just a terrific guy. He clinked more beer glasses than any other man in town. He fished the lake with constant enthusiasm. He had a deep hearty laugh and was fluent in good advice. Bart had time for everyone. His face was kind and his skin was weathered, like he’d fished a lot, and drank a lot, and otherwise lived in it thoroughly. If Goodwood had designated one person as the sole recipient of its unalloyed affection, that person would have been Bart McDonald.

  On the Sunday, Bart went fishing on Grants Lake and never came home. His boat was found drifting like a cloud. On it were his lures, his bucket, his scaling knife, chopping board, esky and a half-drunk beer, snug in his favourite stubby holder that said Goodwood’s Good For Wood with a picture of the old sawmill and a cartoon man superimposed on top, winking at a blushing lady.

  All that, but no Bart.

  In the days after he vanished, Mrs Bart, as everyone called her, even though her name was Flora McDonald, paced the inside of her husband’s shop window, the silver trays empty except for the green plastic trimming that made the meat look pastoral.

  Mum said maybe Mrs Bart thought the shop was the most obvious place to wait, since ordinarily Bart did seem to be there every minute of the day, six days a week. ‘Everyone grieves in their own way,’ said Mum. I said I would’ve waited at home, with the blinds drawn, so no one could have seen me pacing. But Mrs Bart was still there in the evenings, patrolling under unkind fluorescent lights, or staring at the trays where the meat should be, as if desperate for a sirloin.

  Divers dived for Bart. George and I stood on the side of the lake where a group from town had gathered and we counted four men in scuba attire. They searched all morning, snacked on the police boat at lunchtime, and then went over the side again, only to come up empty-handed at sundown.

  Some people in town thought they should’ve spent more days searching. It was just the two. But the police who attended, apart from Mack, seemed to hang a big question mark over whether Bart had drowned at all, and there was speculation among the police from Clarke that he’d done a runner. We saw one officer giggling in his flippers. The indignity of laughter in the face of such tragedy was not appreciated by the local huddle. The general consensus among the community—some of us gathered by the lake on the browned grass near the boat wharves, others sitting hopefully in the safety of their houses while Mrs Bart paced and paced—was that Bart had certainly not done a runner. How could he? And how could he leave Pearl?

  No. The people of Goodwood knew Bart McDonald. And Bart McDonald did not leave of his own accord.

  The Thursday after he vanished, the McDonalds’ son Joe arrived from Sydney. On the Friday morning, promptly at nine, he opened up Bart’s Meats again, in an attempt at familial support. The fluorescent lights flickered on. Lamb and beef were piled high on the silver trays, and price tags with smiling sheep and cows were inserted among burly Joe’s meaty display. Mrs Bart stopped pacing and started sitting, on a stool in the corner behind the counter. She did not serve customers. She just sat, staring out the window, as if Bart might materialise, covered in lakeweed, and wander into the shop asking for a towel.

  Coral, from two doors up, said that when she went in on the Friday afternoon, Joe was holding Mrs Bart against his generous chest while she wept, and he appeared teary himself when Coral asked for two lamb cutlets. Suffice to say, buying meat became a sombre affair and some people in town were subdued into reluctant vegetarianism, or drove the forty minutes to the big Woolworths in Clarke.

  In the week preceding, when it was just Rosie missing, there were no divers. There was no evidence she was in the lake. There was no evidence she was anywhere. Mack, accompanied by Sergeant Simmons from Clarke, made a formal visit to the White residence, with formal manners, to alert them that a missing persons report had been formally filed.

  ‘It’s just a formality,’ said Mack. ‘She’ll show up.’

  Judy White, clad in blue denim, sobbed on the front steps. Later, Opal Jones from next door, leaning out her living-room window with both ears cocked, heard Judy wailing somewhere indoors, a sound that continued well into the night.

  The day after Rosie vanished, I rerouted my walk to school to take me past the Whites’ house, with clouds for breath and my face stinging with cold, hoping for a glimpse of something. A clue? A lonesome light on? A suggestive silhouette at Rosie’s window?

  All I saw was Terry, Rosie’s brother, sitting in the passenger seat of Judy’s car in the drive, behind a frosted windshield, wearing Rosie’s cardigan. He just sat there, covered in pimples, with no destination or driver, for as long as it took me to get to the end of the road, and who knows for how long after.

  •

  That’s how it all started.

  First Rosie, and then Bart. Two people from Goodwood—two very different people—inexplicably gone. And the rest of town holding its breath.

  After that, a lot of things happened. There was a mess of conjecture, and a great many theories and stoushes. Dozens of beer glasses were set down in misery, precious hopes were forsaken, and blood spilled from the most unlikely. All the while, gallons of brown water ran along the river, filled with fish, and surged under the bridge into the lake.

  It was not until later that we finally found some answers, and Goodwood was given the slow and elusive gift of a conclusion. But before going on to everything that happened next, it’s best to go back a fraction. It makes sense to start two days before Rosie vanished, which was nine days before Bart did. That was when Goodwood was still peaceful: a modest town under a mountain and beside a river.

  That was the day I found the money.

  2

  Backflip and I were walking along the bank of the river on a Friday afternoon after school while birds sang in the branches overhead. Goodwood was about a half-hour drive inland from the coast, and the Gather River, flowing generally south and then sharply north, was imponded near Goodwood by the lake and eventually relieved itself into the Tasman Sea.

  The clearing was half a kilometre from the back fence of the oval. It was a nice walk and Backflip and I made it often. I would go on the pebbles and sand and she would splash along beside me with the water up to her furry belly. She was a Labrador and always wanted to be in the river. The clearing lay ahead as if waiting: an open area with a natural pool that was perfect for swimming, where the bank fanned out, and the river widened like a snake that’s eaten a cow.

  Everyone from school used the clearing in summer. You could drive a car right up near the tree line and park under a grove of eucalypts, or in the cul-de-sac at the end of the road. If self-confidence allowed, you could sun yourself on the sparse lawn that hugged the bank. The weeping willow had a low-hanging branch that hovered over the water and was popular to sit on. The drooping leaves parted there and allowed a good view back up the bank. After a lot of rain, you could dip your feet in the current, and see all the way back to the goalposts on the oval. Lots of kids, from times past and present, had carved their initials in the trunk.

  I had never seen one other person at the clearing in winter.
In hot weather there were always kids from school in the deep water, on weekday afternoons and all weekend long, but when it was cold it was ours, mine and Backflip’s, and sometimes we’d meet George. It was peaceful and private. Only the cows looked on, when they wandered close enough in the adjacent paddock.

  That day, the cold wind chopped at the shining water. Backflip roamed the bank, sniffing, and I climbed up to sit on the branch of the willow, and watch the river run underneath. The birds were loud in the canopy above. I looked up at them, squinting in the dappled light. Just below, where the trunk bent inwards among the branches, something was glinting. It was a bag: white, plastic, poking out just a fraction from a hollowed-out hole in the trunk.

  I stood up carefully, holding onto the trunk, and pulled the bag out of the tree-hole. It had a knot tied in the top and something bundled inside in a brown paper bag. I tore the plastic and reached inside the paper, pulling out the contents. There, folded over in a wad and held together with an elastic band, was more money than I’d ever seen. Five hundred dollars. Ten fifty-dollar notes. I counted them, after pulling the band off and spreading them out like a lucky hand of cards.

  I looked around the clearing. There was no one. Just Backflip and the birds and the cows. Some ducks near the bank opposite. I sat down on the branch again and stared at the water.

  Wow.

  How thrilling it was to find a small fortune—and for it to be mine. I began smiling—beaming—on the verge of laughing, sitting in the weeping willow. It was more money than I’d ever had in my life. I was exhilarated as I laughed aloud into the clear day.

  But where had it come from and who had hidden it there?

  Backflip waded into the water and swam out to the middle where a branch was drifting, half sunken. Her body made little ripples in the water and I looked down at her and then across to the other side of the river. The trees were dense there: thick bush that grew close together and made good spots for hiding. The cold wind that chopped the water was moving through the branches. There was rustling here, and stillness there, and sounds that could be animal or human or wind.