Goodwood (11 page)

On top of her tendency to ruin things, Fitzy was a taxing conversationalist. She was as boring about jam, and hedging, and the weather, as Big Jim was about plants. Man, could Fitzy kill the weather. It'd be the nicest day of the year—sun shining, perfect clear skies—and I would wake up feeling inspired for a day of swimming at the river, but having Fitzy talk to me about it for ten minutes, after she'd caught me off-guard as I was leaving, I'd wish for rain.

Then it'd rain, and Fitzy would pop up behind a hedge in a raincoat and rain hat, just doing a spot of weeding in the downpour, and there I'd be for the next eternity, listening to her bang on.

That's what happened that day, while Mum was sorting through the secondary books. Up popped Fitzy, just after the rain had started and I was standing on the front verandah.

‘Oh Jean, there you are', she said, and then without drawing breath, ‘You're going to love this. I'm trying to put together a rainfall map for Goodwood. Which is difficult because the Bureau of Meteorology—they are quite private
about their procedures—did you know that of all the three thousand rainfall measuring sites in Australia, Goodwood doesn't have one?'

She looked incredulous, water dripping off her hat. Her eyes enormous behind her thick glasses.

‘I have written and written. Because it would be so good for Jim to have proper analysis for work. And for you kids to know for school. But “our” (air quotes with four fingers) rainfall is really just Clarke's rainfall, because that's the closest site.' She did a little disbelieving headshake and flipped raindrops left and right. ‘But you know as well as I do that sometimes you drive to Clarke, and it's raining there when it's not raining here! Or vice versa. Even last week when I went up there to go to the RTA, the ground was wet! And we hadn't had a drop since the 12th. So it's not accurate for Goodwood. And I told them that. It's just not accurate. So I don't know what to do to make it official, because the Bureau won't budge. But to make it unofficial we're going to get our own! A rain gauge! Jim's such a honey, he's been at the library looking up pictures. I think it's a good way for him to get his mind off things. We're gonna mount it out back and go from there.'

‘That's a very good idea,' I said, just as Myrtle rushed out of their front door and rolled in a puddle, and Fitzy started high-pitch yelling while Myrtle flipped around, and I made my escape.

Out of our front gate, saying my hasty goodbye to Fitzy and swampy Myrtle, I went left towards town. And that's how I ended up on Cedar St in the rain on the same day Derek Murray had a big fight with his father, Roy.

15

Roy and Derek Murray lived a short drive from Cedar Street, on the mountain side, with Roy's wife Doe. Doe Murray was never seen in town, as she suffered from what Nan called ‘a terrible affliction of nerves'. Nan said she was as nervous about the cracks in the pavement as she was about the cracks in the sky. I'm not sure if she was scared of lightning, or falling meteors, or acid rain, or noxious weeds—but whatever it was that might befall Doe, from above or below, left her little room to get out of the house.

Doe Murray's birth name was Josephine Mae. She met Roy at a mixer in the mid-seventies, a couple of years after Roy's first wife had died from killing herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. Poor baby Derek Murray was only three months old when his mother shuffled off, suffering as she was from acute postnatal depression, coupled with a life-long bout of chronic low-grade sadness.

When Roy brought his new lady friend home to meet his infant, half-orphaned son, Derek couldn't say ‘Josephine'. So he called her ‘Doe-pheen', which was soon shortened to ‘Doe', and that's how she was known forever more, to everyone in Goodwood.

Nan knew a little bit of Doe from yesteryear, before my memories began. Apparently, Doe hadn't always been so nervous. When she first started appearing on the arm of Roy, drinking white wine at the Wicko of a weekend, she was talkative and sweet. Her Korean heritage was interesting in a white-bread town like Goodwood, and she offered Nan a delicious recipe for kimchi. She was well liked for her dry sense of humour, even if she could be a little too timid at times. But over the years, as Derek grew into a young man, Doe sunk into their weatherboard home, and ventured out less and less. I had only seen her once—at Woody's, sitting in the far back booth, where no one else ever sat. Mum had said, ‘Wow, there's Doe Murray,' as we walked past. ‘It's like seeing a ghost.'

Nan and Mum had read several books on psychology and had a theory on almost everyone, including Doe, who they declared to be the most panicked person in Goodwood, apart from Helen at the newsagent. One time, when I was little, Mum had encountered Doe in a full-blown attack near the corner of Cedar and Pioneer streets. Doe had come up to Woody's to look in on Roy, and wound up in the gutter
around the corner, shaking like a tail, with her head between her legs. Mum bent down and asked, ‘Are you feeling faint, Doe?' and Doe accused the sky of sinking, and the sun of malevolence, and the air of being too thin for her lungs to find it. Mum sat down on the kerb and put her arm around Doe's shoulders, emptied four potatoes from a paper bag in her shopping, and said, ‘Well, there's not much I can do about that, but why don't you try breathing into this?'

They sat there for some time until Bart, of all people, walked past and saw their predicament. He went to fetch Roy Murray. When Roy relieved Mum, he hoisted Doe up like she was a sack of potatoes, gave her a Valium (which she expertly swallowed without water), and hobbled her into his waiting car. Mum collected her own potatoes off the ground and went home.

Nan said of the incident that agoraphobia often knocks on the door when a person's in their thirties. Doe had been in her thirties at the time. Mum said that, usually, something unpleasant triggers it off, but neither of them had any opinion as to what that might've been. Derek Murray was, by all accounts, a bit of a shit. But Roy Murray loved Derek blindly, so one might assume that he loved Doe in the same way. Then again, no one had much of a handle on their relationship, given her constant absence from town. The only thing you could really tell about Roy Murray was that he ran Woody's well enough for it to be the busiest culinary establishment in
Goodwood; he held the town fishing record for Biggest Catch (for an eighty-seven-centimetre dusky flathead he caught in '89); and that I saw him get into an awful fight with Derek on that rainy day in August.

If we'd had a rain gauge, it would have certainly declared that a lot of water fell on Goodwood that day. The cracks in the sky had opened, and the gutters were rushing like brown rivers when I got to Cedar Street under an inky sky. My shoes were sopping, so I went into the newsagent for some shelter, and flipped through
Rolling Stone
while Helen stood in the doorway and worried about the deluge.

‘It's a wonder we don't all wash away,' she said pointedly to no one.

Under the awning in the front of Bart's Meats, waiting for the worst of it to pass, I tried not to look at Joe as he gazed out from behind the steamed glass. I tried not to notice how much he looked like his dad, Bart. I tried to ignore how wet Terry White's signs were getting—the ones he'd wrapped around the telegraph poles on the street. Rosie's black-and-white face was frozen in time, and missing, and now getting drenched. A gust of wind had peeled one almost off its pole and it flapped like a sail. Everything felt cold and bleak as Helen frowned from beside the Lotto signs and Faye Haynes, in the bakery window, stared into an arrangement of coffee scrolls.

As I went past Woody's, I almost didn't look in. I didn't want to see the terrible absence of Rosie. But something
caught my eye at the back of the shop near the rear door. That was when I saw them: old white-haired Roy Murray and his son, Derek, looking fit to kill each other good and proper.

Derek had his head down and was shaking it angrily, left and right, like a horse trying to buck off its rider. Roy Murray's face was right up close to Derek's, hot and aggressive, and he held up a quivering finger, right under Derek's nose. Derek stared back with an expression even more vulgar than usual. He spat out some words and his bottom lip curled under. Then Roy's mouth moved, too, and spittle escaped onto Derek's disagreeable face. The rain was so loud on the tin awning that I couldn't hear anything they were saying. It was like a silent movie overdubbed with gunfire. But I did see Derek shove his father with both hands to Roy's chest, and I saw Roy fly backwards into the wall. He looked stunned at the might of his son. Then Derek pushed the back door open hard and disappeared out of it, slamming it behind him. And Roy Murray appeared to be winded as he whacked the straw dispenser off the counter in frustration, so all the straws dispensed themselves on the lino like a game of pick-up sticks.

My eyes must've been very wide when Roy saw me there on the street looking in. I decided it best to pretend nothing had happened, so I smiled at him. He did not offer a smile in return. He just looked down ruefully at the big blue mess of straws. Then he bent over, with great difficulty, and slowly began the tiresome task of picking them all up.

16

George and I spent most of the next week, at recess and lunch, lying on the carpet in the library next to the heater vent.

I told her about Roy and Derek. She didn't seem surprised. She said Derek had got into a fight with her youngest brother, runty Daniel, on the oval the year before. Daniel came home with a bleeding nose and without his favourite football. The worst bit was Derek was six years older than Daniel and a full foot taller. George and I agreed that it just wasn't cricket.

‘What did your parents say?' I asked.

‘Dad said Derek Murray is dumb as a box of hair,' said George.

Due to our newfound interest, we uncovered the following facts: Derek Murray repeated Year Nine and dropped out in Year Ten; he spent a lot of time smoking bongs and playing video games; he did burnouts in the car park behind Woody's;
he did donuts at the cul-de-sac of trees near the clearing; he had, up until Rosie vanished, always rejected Roy Murray's requests that he work at Woody's, even though he hung around there like an unpleasant smell; and he never seemed to have a girlfriend. The last part was gleaned from Toby, who George went to for information relating to boys. Toby had said, ‘Fucken Derek Murray? What a toolbox. When we're there with girls? He clears the clearing.'

‘Toby made a little pun?' I asked.

‘I was also surprised,' said George.

Toby had apparently made another whole sentence, too, as if Derek Murray's detestability inspired him to communicate.

‘As if girls give a shit about Derek's Kingswood,' he had said. And, as girls, George and I had to agree.

The heater vent in the library rattled. I rolled my cold hands around in front of it as if it were a fire. Miss Lopez, our librarian, wheeled around a trolley full of books, carefully choosing the right spots on the shelves to put them. George was flipping through
The Pictorial History of Australian Prime Ministers
and stopped at Harold Holt.

‘You are just like Bart,' she said to Harold's picture.

George held the book up so I could see it. ‘See? Look at his kind face.'

Harold Holt was posing in his spearfishing outfit on a beach in black and white. He looked very happy to be near the ocean. On the opposite page he was more prime ministerial,
in a suit and tie; no snorkel. He did look a bit like Bart, just ever so slightly. I stared at Harold while George held the book up and nodded, and then just beyond the book I saw Evie come in the doors of the library and wander up to the counter with an armful of paperbacks. She put her pile on the counter and waited there for Miss Lopez to wheel the trolley back to her station.

‘There's that new girl,' said George, turning her head.

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘Evie.'

‘Have you spoken to her?'

‘No,' I said.

Evie looked down at her book pile, examining the back of her hands.

‘She's really pretty, hey?' said George, and rolled over onto her back, putting aside
The Pictorial History of Australian Prime Ministers
and using her bag as a pillow.

The fluorescent light above flickered. George looked up as the globe twitched and came on suddenly and compelled her to sneeze three times in quick succession. George and I started cracking up—just as Evie handed over her books to Miss Lopez and turned to leave. She must've heard us, because Evie looked right at me as she walked out and she smiled, with a brave and proper smile. The gap between her teeth was magnificent. Her smile filled her whole face and flooded it over with joy. It gave me the strangest feeling—like pins and needles. Evie walked out and George was lying on
her back, laughing and blowing her nose into one of Noelene Sharkey's handmade hankies.

‘Ah, fuck,' she said, and sighed.

I kept on looking at the spot where Evie had been.

I felt like there were many lit sparklers, tingling across my face.

•

After school that day, George wanted me to go with her to meet Ethan West and Lucas Karras on the oval, where they were planning to kick a football while we were to sit there and watch.

It was unestablished at that point as to whether Lucas was George's official boyfriend, because she was very odd about the subject and seemed able to constantly dodge my inquiries without giving a straight answer. All I knew for certain was that they'd had unsatisfactory sex, at least once, on the oval that autumn; and who knew what else had happened thereafter. Georgina Sharkey was always talking, and yet no one was better at evading an unwanted inquisition.

On the particular night in question, I was present with a group from school and I'd spent much of the evening wishing I was home with Backflip. George had got drunk. And Lucas had not even had to be that charming. He was merely pleasant enough, and as George told me after, there had to be a first time for everything. So she'd left me with the others by the
goalposts, and given herself over under the moonlight near the river, while I drank warm beer.