Goodwood (32 page)

Backflip and I started running up the bank as hailstones began to fall: handfuls of them thrown across the water. The rain was spliced among it—sharp stinging lines—but mostly it was hail. It bounced off the metal fence of the oval as we ran through the gate. It bleached the grass and gathered in the gutters of the toilet block. I thought of Mrs Gwen Hughes and her myriad crystals as the frozen ice fell and fell, and made a brief glacier of our town.

Backflip and I waited it out under the edge of the toilet block. I wondered about Davo Carlstrom. I imagined him sitting in the branch still, welcoming the flood, turning his face up to the deluge. I imagined he wouldn't mind if it pelted
and stung him.
Do your worst
, he would have said to the opened sky.

And then it was over.

Just as quickly as it had come in, the dark mass rolled away, and steam rose off the concrete. The ice pellets lay scattered widely, spent and defrosting. The heavens broke with light again; the beams and rays were brilliant from behind the receding clouds. Backflip stood next to me, wet and panting. I sat down against the toilet block wall and turned my face up to the sun. Then I sat and admired the field of thick hailstones for as long as it took for the sound of sirens to arrive from somewhere in the distance.

It was not often that we heard sirens. Goodwood was not much of a place for an emergency. I listened to them and wondered what kind they were: police car, fire truck, ambulance. I put Backflip on her lead and we walked back towards town, slowly and then faster as the noise got louder.

We rounded the Goodwood Grocer and went along Cedar Street. The sirens bent in pitch as they neared us. I couldn't tell which direction they were coming from—for a minute it was back beyond the oval, and then it was straight ahead near the Wicko, and after it was left towards the train tracks and the school. Backflip pulled on the lead, excited.

There was Helen, up ahead, standing outside the newsagent, trying to work out the direction of the noise. She kept turning back and yelling at a person inside who I guessed was
Bill, because it was always Bill: ‘No, I said
not
fire! I think it's the ambulance!'

And there was Bill as I walked past the door, hovering on the landing with his arms folded and his head down, shaking it as if disagreeing with the universe in general. Burly Joe was peering out from the doorway of Bart's Meats. Robin Clunes was standing just inside Bookworm, paralysed. Goodwood couldn't take another tragedy. It wasn't ready for the sound of sirens—of fire, or sickness, or crime. Not with
everything
.

Helen looked at me with her mouth closed as I rushed past.

‘I think it's the ambulance,' she said.

I started to worry, too, as I got closer to our street, and the sirens stopped at what sounded like a close distance. When I rounded our corner past the Wicko, Val Sparks was standing in the doorway of the Vinnies, crossing herself, and Smithy had his hands on his hips next to Costa Karras and Mal West, who were all looking down our street. I saw the flashing lights. Blue and red. They were spinning off the houses around our house, but mostly off our house, which the ambulance was parked directly in front of.

My heart: it pounded.

Mum.

Her heart.

I started running, and Backflip, thinking it was a game, took the lead in her mouth and pulled sideways and forward with her ears back, gleefully. I felt sick in my stomach as
I approached the handful of people gathered near our front fence.

Mum was nowhere.

There was just Con and Althea, and Frankie Dodds from across the road, and Coral, who was clutching Myrtle.

Backflip took one look at Myrtle and jumped up to lick her face and Myrtle was absolutely delighted to see Backflip and made a whinny like a tiny horse. Coral squealed and turned her back on us, and I yanked Backflip down to the ground, apologising, and forgetting everything for a second. Forgetting where Mum was, or wasn't, and why our front door was still closed and it appeared so quiet.

I couldn't see Mum lying prone through the windows. I couldn't hear anyone yelling ‘Clear!' before applying a defibrillator to her silent chest. Squinting, I could not make out the outline of a respirator lying useless on our living room carpet.

Then Big Jim came out from his house and the ambulance men followed, carrying a stretcher.

That's when I saw that Big Jim's ute was parked outside their house, since he'd been using his carport to build a new wooden compost box. That was why the ambulance had had to park outside our house. And Mum's car wasn't anywhere, come to think of it, except that it was, just at that moment, coming down the street with Mum in it, rolling down her window as she approached with a look of true terror on her face—terror which turned to relief when she saw me and
Backflip standing there safely, watching Fitzy on the stretcher, crumpled and blood-soaked.

Fitzy.

Big Jim was sallow. His eyes shone with fear. There were sweat beads on his upper lip and forehead and a mess of blood smeared all over his singlet and King Gees. One of the paramedics was making hand gestures to Big Jim, as if arguing, as he closed the ambulance doors with Fitzy tucked inside. But Big Jim wasn't going to have a bar of following in his ute, because a moment later the paramedic relented and opened the doors and Big Jim hopped in, taking Fitzy's hand in his own, and drawing it up to his mouth, kissing the back of it, as he crouched beside her gurney.

That was my enduring image of the two of them—with Fitzy's aliveness in doubt—as the doors closed again and the ambulance departed, lights flashing. It went around the corner, and a few moments later the siren went on again and warbled off into the distance towards Clarke.

Mum had parked facing the wrong way. She got out of the car and rushed towards us, taking me in a desperate hug, saying, ‘Jeannie, what happened? Was that Fitzy?'

I told her that, yes, it was Fitzy.

‘Oh God, Jean. For a minute I thought it was you. Is she okay?' The last bit she addressed not so much to me but to the gathered crowd.

Coral, by this time, had raised her voice above the murmurings and, with damp Myrtle still grasped against her daffodil cardigan, assured us that Fitzy was, at least, alive.

‘She's alive. She left here alive.'

It was declared as if at royal court.

She was alive. Good old Fitzy.

Backflip panted, oblivious, smiling lovingly at Myrtle.

Mum—who had just popped up to the Bowlo to pick up a cardigan she'd left behind at the Fish Fry—held me in an awkward bear hug out on the street for a long time.

‘Can you let go?' I said.

‘Don't rush me,' she said. ‘I'm not to be rushed.'

40

As it turned out, Fitzy had been taking measurements from the rain gauge. As soon as the storm had passed she couldn't contain herself. It was mostly hail, but there was rain, too. Sharp stinging drops of it. It was the only precipitation Goodwood had had in weeks. What would the rain gauge say?

At the store in Clarke, when they'd bought the thing, they'd had the choice of perspex or glass and Big Jim chose glass. It looked better, and had the feel of the beakers in science class when he was a boy.

He and Fitzy had mounted their rain gauge—a cylindrical glass tube with a glass funnel at the top that directed precipitation into a smaller central tube—on a small post at the back corner of their yard.

That afternoon, when the skies had cleared after the short storm, Fitzy trudged across the sodden grass and Myrtle
followed delicately, as if not wanting to get her paws wet. So excited was she by the sudden advent of rain, and the prospect of a measurement, Fitzy forgot her helmet.

She approached the rain gauge and crouched down with her little writing pad in one hand and pencil in the other. She took her time and took her measurement—0 mm—and then, devastated, stood up to go back inside. But Fitzy stood up too fast, and a galaxy of silver stars swam in front of her eyes, as if someone had thrown a handful of sparkly sand at her face in slow motion. According to Coral, who dined out on the story, being the only one apart from Big Jim to hear the screams, Fitzy was head-spun and dazed when the birds swooped, one from each direction, the bigger magpie clipping her ear as she screamed and put her hands over her head in her own defence. Unbalanced, she fell, and there was momentary silence, and then the sound of breaking glass and Myrtle barking.

The magpies settled, one on the fence, and the other on the tree, and Fitzy, who had fallen against the rain gauge and knocked it off its post, continued to fall on top of it thoroughly, smashing the outer tube against the inner tube and conjuring a particularly sharp, knife-like shard from within which—as Fitzy's lower body landed—triumphed upwards into her popliteal artery.

Then came the screaming.

Big Jim, just home and enjoying a Toohey's New in front of
Wheel of Fortune
, ran out to find Fitzy in a soggy pool of blood and rain, and Myrtle yapping with terror.

Coral, who loved a drama much more than a calm day, heard the screams from her couch, where she was also watching
Wheel of Fortune
, and dialled 000.

Fitzy went as white as hail and responded with whimpers to the makeshift tourniquet Big Jim fashioned from his work shirt.

The magpies continued to swoop as he held her damply.

•

That night was dinner at Nan and Pop's, with us, Mack and Tracy and Jasper, and Nan's friend Shirl, who had been having a hard time with her loneliness and closed-angle glaucoma.

Nan roasted a chicken because no one wanted red meat since the discovery of Bart, and Nan thought everyone would be sick of fish. Mack, who had spent much of the day with Roy and Derek Murray, didn't mention any of it at the time. I recall him sitting next to Tracy and appearing lost in thought every so often, but no one was the wiser on any new developments, and everyone was beside themselves with what had happened to Fitzy.

By dinnertime, Fitzy was at Clarke Base Hospital and was—according to the latest update from Big Jim, who had called Mum—receiving a much-needed blood transfusion.

‘Big Jim says she's O positive, which is the common one,' said Mum.

‘That's very fortunate,' said Nan.

‘Unbelievable,' said Mack. ‘The woman's a walking time bomb.'

‘And she has far too much hair for one person,' said Pop.

There followed a brief and comic history of Fitzy's numerous misadventures, including the flattening of the guardrail next to the bridge and the toppling of the pole outside the Vinnies as the most recent and dramatic examples.

Poor Fitzy. All she wanted was a bit of rain.

Talk moved along to the Fishing's The Funnest parade and everyone agreed it was the best one yet, and the best Fish Fry, too. Tracy said Jasper had not stopped parading around the house, and every time she asked him to stop—to rest or eat—he protested that he ‘wasn't finished yet', and marched on in circles around the living room, dragging his toy platypus and requesting applause.

‘Everyone needs a little applause on occasion,' said Nan, and proceeded to tell us of her visit to Mrs Bart, and how she and Jan were thinking of keeping the shop open and becoming butchers.

‘Good on her,' said Mum, and Shirl whooped like it was the craziest thing anyone had ever heard.

‘She could just put a “Mrs” in front of the sign and they wouldn't really have to change anything,' said Mum.

‘I think she should call it “Flora's”', said Nan.

There were murmurs of agreement, which gave way to murmurs of resignation, and then Nan looked sad. Mack didn't say a thing about it. He ate his chicken and potatoes and drank more than he usually did in Reschs Pilsener.

‘It's her birthday tomorrow,' said Nan. ‘It's Mrs Bart's fiftieth.'

No one spoke, and the air felt uncomfortable and blue.

‘And the awful thing is that she's terrified something's going to arrive for her—like a big present—from Bart. Or that she's going to find something if she looks around properly in the cupboards. She thinks he might've organised something for her. You know,
before.
'

‘How awful,' said Mum.

‘From beyond the grave,' said Shirl, quite spookily, like the host of a haunted house.

Mack looked up at Nan, curious.

‘Why does she think he organised something?' he asked.

‘Well, for her forty-fifth he had that wonderful piano delivered—right on the day. It came all the way from Victoria on a truck. And then there was the rose garden. He was so good at presents. And Mrs Bart's been going through the books and she says there's money missing from the takings tin in the office. Bart kept a good log of it and her and Jan are going through everything. There was five hundred dollars
taken out a week or so before he drowned, and Bart had written “gift” in the ledger.'

‘Oh, the dear sweet man,' said Shirl.

I looked at my plate.

‘Five hundred dollars?' asked Mack.

I couldn't tell if he was looking at me or not. I didn't meet his eyes.

‘He was such a generous man,' said Nan.

‘Oh wow,' said Mum, ‘that's very hard.'

‘He had time for everyone,' said Shirl.

41

Mum and I went home that night and I wrote down in my blue notebook everything Nan had said at dinner. If Mack had said something pertinent I would've written that down, too. But he hadn't. And some things I didn't know until much later. He didn't mention Doe Murray and her trembling visit. He didn't mention Judy White, and the fight about money. None of us knew until much later that Terry White, on his way to Ballina, where he eventually moved, buried the metal tin with roses on it near the banks of the Bellinger River and left in it a photo of Rosie and a fistful of petals.

Mack didn't mention Roy or Derek Murray either. He didn't say how Derek had wept like a dreadful child. He didn't say how Roy had gone as red as blood and unburdened himself of everything he had been holding in since winter. And he didn't say how, without even having to think much about it,
as Roy talked and talked in the back booth of Woody's, all of it made terrible and unnecessary sense to Mack as soon as he heard it.