‘Funeral, actually.’
‘Oh. Sorry. Maybe not so exciting.’
‘Well, kind of a wake, truth be known.’
‘Oh yeah? Piss-up, you mean. Re-insert the exciting. Who’s the lucky man?’
‘You ever meet old Snowy Truscott?’
‘Not that I can recall.’
‘Drilled a few holes for me out the Burnt Shirt. Come from over Winton way, but he’d been workin round here for years. Nice bloke. Died a few weeks ago, but we’re only getting together now. I’m heading out with some of the fellers in the morning. Play kicks off at eleven.’
‘Play?’
‘Cricket. Green Swamp versus the World. I’m captain of the World.’
‘You’re having a game of cricket for his funeral?’
‘Wake.’
‘Still seems a strange way to say goodbye to someone.’
‘Why? Very fond of his cricket, Snowy was. Figured we might make it an ongoing thing: the Snowy Truscott Memorial Cup. Went the way he would’ve wanted to, old Snow.’
‘Killed by a bouncer?’
‘Rolled his truck.’
‘Way to go…’
But Jack wasn’t altogether present himself; while we were eating I sensed that he had something else on his mind. ‘Emily,’ he began when we were sitting out on the back porch with a cup of tea. ‘There’s something I want to talk to you about.’
‘Had the feeling there might be.’
He studied me for a moment, locked onto me with those blue magnets.
‘Tom McGillivray’s told me about your little escapades.’
Ah.
‘It’s one of the reasons I come in,’ he continued. ‘Told him I’d kick his arse from here to Sunday if he so much as let you into the same desert as Blakie again. Or Marsh, for that matter. They’re as bad as each other, those two.’
‘Not exactly up to Tom, Jack. I’m a big girl now.’
‘You watch it, Emmy. Specially Blakie. Marsh I haven’t had much to do with, but I’ve seen Blakie in action. Seen him rip a feller apart for lookin at him the wrong way. For lookin like somebody who looked at him the wrong way. You’re playing with fire there, girl. Black fire. Watch it.’
‘Usually do, Jack.’
He frowned, but let the ambiguity hang in the air.
‘I miss Lincoln as much as anyone, Em,’ he continued, ‘and there’s nothing I’d rather see than his killer brought to justice. But not if it’s going to cost me my daughter.’
‘I haven’t taken too many risks so far, Jack.’
‘Crashing planes and chasing Blakie around the bush on your own isn’t taking risks?’
‘Well, there was those…’
He put his big hand on mine. ‘You’re all I’ve got, darlin. I’m not telling you how to live your life—I know you better than that. I’m just asking you to…think of me, I suppose. Be careful.’
I looked out over the yard, thought about my mother. His grief when she died. ‘Righto, Jack,’ I nodded. ‘I’ll be careful.’
He was up early the next morning, humming away to himself in the kitchen while I was still in bed. By the time I surfaced his swag was rolled up and stashed near the couch, along with his numerous boxes and bags. He’d made us a big breakfast—porridge, toast and banana smoothies—but we didn’t have time to make much of an impression on it before we were interrupted by a horn from outside.
Jack took a look out through the curtains, then checked his watch.
‘Bugger me, they’re here early.’
‘Who is?’
‘Couple of my blokes, plus a few others who wanted to come along and say goodbye to Snowy. Sorry, darlin, I better get going.’
He gathered up his gear in one almighty load and headed for the door as cautiously as a docking oil tanker.
‘You right there, Dad?’ I asked from the breakfast table.
‘Righter than summer rain!’ came the cheery reply from somewhere inside the pile. ‘It’s all a matter of balance, girlie. Balance! You could move a fuckin mountain if you had it properly balanced.’
He opened the door and edged his way out. Seconds later there came a terrible crash and a burst of unadulterated outback invective that would have had a socio-linguist scrambling for the microphone.
‘What was that about balance?’ I hollered.
I went outside. Jack was sitting amidst the wreckage, rubbing his pate and glaring at Hazel’s wind-chime. One of the blokes from the car was coming over to give him a hand as well. As he drew closer, I saw that it was Bernie Sweet, the miner who’d sold Jack the maps.
Jack rose to his feet, slowly and awkwardly.
‘Emily! Why the fuck have you got a lump o’ fuckin’—Jack paused, then took a closer look—‘what have you got a fuckin lump of hangin off your front door, anyway?’
‘Actually, I was going to ask you about that. What do you reckon it is?’
He took it down, pulled a lens out of his shirt pocket and raised it to his eye. ‘Brown stuff’s…hmmm, yep, one of the peridotites. Olivine, probably. Pretty lively, but…darker’n what you normally get round here.’ He licked it. ‘More sugary, too.’
‘It’s sweet?’
‘Grainy.’
‘And the beautiful blue?’
He turned it over, raised his eyebrows as a spectrum of colour rippled across its cleavage planes. ‘Not quite sure. What do you reckon, Bernie?’
He passed it over to Sweet, who gave it a cursory glance, frowned and gave it back. ‘Not quite sure myself.’
‘If I had to make a stab at it,’ said Jack, ‘I’d say labradorite.’
‘Thought it might have been,’ I said. ‘Seen anything like it before?’
He thought for a while. ‘Round here? Can’t say I have. Found some years ago, over near Winton.’
‘Worth anything?’
‘Find yourself a bigger bit and you might be able to knock up a pretty necklace. But no, not really. Gets in the way of the gold. You still haven’t told me what it’s doin danglin in your doorway.’
‘It’s a wind-chime, Jack.’
He rattled the stones, put a hand to his ear, listened in mock rapture as they clunked together.
‘Scuse my ignorance, Emmy, but I’d a thought a wind-chime was meant to, aah…chime?’
‘It’s a present from Hazel.’
Sweet grinned at Jack and asked, ‘Who’s Hazel?’
‘Friend of mine from Moonlight Downs.’ I turned to Jack, who was loading himself up again. ‘And its chime is more for the eye than for the ear.’
Jack didn’t look convinced. I don’t know that I was myself. Five minutes later they were heading out for Green Swamp.
The Sandhill Gong woz her
I CAME home that afternoon to find the neighbours standing in little clusters out on the footpath, talking at each other in an animatedly un-Territorian manner and gesticulating at their apartments. There were about twenty of them, most of them blokes, none of them happy.
I got out of the car, wondering whether this was a party I should be crashing.
Two of those at the back of the crowd turned around and gave me the evil eye: Ernie Ratzavic—Ratsarse to his friends—and his drinking buddy, the globular Slim Timms, who dressed like an extra in a Clint Eastwood movie but was in fact manager of the town laundromat.
I walked over, curiosity outweighing my instinctive caution.
‘Evening fellers,’ I said. ‘What’s going on? Bit of neighbourhood bonding?’
Aside from a little shared sneer, they ignored me and returned their attention to Rex Griffiths, who seemed to be in charge of the proceedings.
Rex was in mufti, or as close to mufti as your off-duty Bluebush copper could get—in his case this meant stubbies, thongs and a T-shirt with the slogan ‘Great Aussie Bloke’—but he was still playing the cop. He had the tongue and the notebook out, the pen in the hand, the frown on the forehead, and was assiduously scribbling notes as the crowd called out to him.
; ‘Then there was my set of Micro Trend Diamond Steel knives,’ growled Ernie.
‘And a slab of beer,’ Slim put in hopefully.
‘CD player,’ said Hardy Stein.
‘A meat axe,’ spat some swivel-eyed blue singlet who looked as mad as one.
‘Shit,’ said Griffo, ‘what did they have, a road train? How many of em were there?’
‘And a money jar,’ said Charlie Cleland. ‘Must have had forty bucks in it.’
‘Forty bucks!’ retorted his flatmate, Mal Hanson. ‘You wouldn’t have forty bucks in the bank!’
Charlie looked offended. ‘The money jar is my bank. What about the chainsaw? I had a Stihl chainsaw, perfect workin order.’
‘Perfect fuckin workin order my arse,’ muttered Mal. ‘You left it out the Blue Moon months ago.’
During a momentary lull in the proceedings Ernie pointed in my direction. ‘Why don’t we ask our little black lady if she knows anything about it?’
I raised my hands, palms upwards, tried to make myself a smaller target. ‘Will somebody tell me what’s going on?’
‘We’ve had a break-in,’ Griffiths responded. ‘Lot of break-ins. Half the flats have had their back doors reefed open. They would have done the other half if Bones here hadn’t been asleep on the couch when they tried his place.’
Bones, named either for his occupation as a meatworker or his skeletal physique, gave his audience a modest wave of acknowledgment and a flash of yellow teeth that may have been intended as a smile.
‘Bunch of coon kids,’ he said. ‘Give em a hell of a fright.’
‘Bones’d give Freddy Krueger a hell of a fright,’ somebody threw in, but I wasn’t hanging around. I stomped over to my own place and unlocked the front door.
Sure enough, the back door had been forced open, the flat ransacked. The saving grace was that there hadn’t been much worth stealing. As far as I could tell, all I’d lost was a couple of beers from the fridge, a bit of cash from the bedside table and a CD by my favourite ragged-arsed blackfeller band, the Warumpis. My books, I was grateful to see, were untouched; books were never a hot item on the Bluebush black market.
I went back outside and reported my losses to Griffiths.
‘So what are you going to do about it?’ pressed one of the mob.
Griffiths didn’t look comfortable. ‘Mate. There’s what, six, seven hundred black kids in this town. You expect me to round em all up and shake em down?’
‘Hey!’ yelled Bones, looking like he’d just risen out of a grave, ‘there’s one of em now!’
I followed his outstretched finger and saw Lenny Coulter strolling towards us from the bush end of the court, his eyes half closed, his mouth moving. He was wearing low-rider jeans, a Bombers baseball cap and a discman. Scratchy rap music hissed out of his headphones.
‘Oi!’ called Griffo, advancing towards him. ‘You!’
Lenny seemed oblivious to the threat until he opened his eyes and saw a mountain of Bluebush constabulary rumbling towards him, upon which he did what any other camp kid would have done: turned on his heels and ran. Griffo gave chase, but he was no match for Lenny, who moved with an astonishing speed considering the pants. He wove his way around the pack, cleared a fence, galloped down the yards and headed for the highway.
Several younger members of the mob tried to cut him off but he spotted the move and changed direction. One eye on his back, he hared off on a course which, I realised with horror, led straight into the path of the four wheel drive that had just come cruising round the corner.
The driver was fortunately on the ball. The vehicle slammed to a halt centimetres from the fleeing Lenny, who grasped the bull-bar, gave a brief wave of acknowledgment, then disappeared into the bush across the road.
The driver emerged from the cabin. Another cop, I thought. Then I spotted the red beanie.
‘Hang on, fellers,’ Jojo said as the mob reached him. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Little fucker just broke into our houses,’ gasped Bones.
‘Lenny?’ Jojo glanced into the bush. ‘Not his usual style.’
‘Him and his mates. Flogged everythin they could lay their hands on.’
I joined them. ‘We don’t know that it was Lenny at all,’ I said. ‘I think he might have just chosen the wrong moment to take a short-cut through the court.’
‘Emily Tempest! Don’t tell me they hit you too?’
‘Afraid so.’
‘Surprised they had the nerve. Let’s have a look.’
As he parked his car, Griffo muttered something about the CIB and drove off. The rest of the crowd slowly dispersed.
Jojo and I walked back into the court. I led him into my flat, showed him the broken door, told him what was missing.
‘Oh no, not the Warumpis! Which one?’
‘Big Name No Blankets.’
‘Oh man, the classic.’
He went out into the little piece of scorched earth that passed for a yard, crouched on his haunches, then leaned forward and made a close examination of the dirt. He glanced at my own feet, then looked back at the scuff-marks on the ground. He scratched the surface, scooped up a tiny amount of sand between thumb and forefinger, studied it, let it drift away. He walked in the direction of the back fence, slowly and carefully, his brow crumpled, his eyes never leaving the ground. He stood on a railing and looked out into the alley.
I watched with interest.
‘What do you reckon?’ I asked when he came back.
‘Half a dozen of em,’ he replied with a surprising confidence. ‘Eleven, maybe twelve years old. Two in bare feet, two in trainers, one in thongs, another in scruffy boots. One’s wearing a white sweatshirt, another’s in a green baseball cap and a moth-eaten red singlet. Biggest boy’s got a limp. Little feller’s got a runny nose and a bung eye.’
I almost fell off the porch. ‘That’s the most amazing piece of tracking I’ve ever seen. You got all that from just looking around the yard?’
‘More or less.’
‘That’s better than Pepper and Arch could have done.’
He smiled modestly. ‘Dunno if I’d go that far.’
‘I mean, I can see how you could work out their footwear, limps and whatnot, but how the hell do you know about the bung eyes and baseball caps?’
‘Trade secret,’ he said as he headed for the back door. ‘But you might want to have a look at the alley.’
I walked out through the gate. The neighbour’s Alsatian put on its usual performance, but I was getting used to it. There was a message sprayed onto the back fence in bright red paint and letters two foot high: SANDHILL GONG WOZ HER.
‘Russell Kutuju and his cousins,’ Jojo called from inside the flat. ‘Known to everybody in town as the Sandhill Gang. I saw them sneaking back into camp five minutes ago.’
While I scouted around for something to throw at him, he made his way to the front door. ‘Love to stay and enjoy your hospitality, Ms Tempest, but I better go and have a word with them before they get rid of the loot. Back in an hour or so.’
I followed him out onto the veranda, watched as he got into his Toyota and drove away.
I went inside and showered. Found myself scanning the meagre contents of my wardrobe, feeling suddenly skittish. Pulled myself up. Knock it off, I said to myself. You’re acting like a girl, and a bloody white girl at that. I brought myself back down to earth by knocking up a batch of scones.
An hour later the Landcruiser came rattling back up the drive. Jojo emerged from the cabin, went round and began speaking to the occupants, many of whom immediately jumped into their vehicles and disappeared. By the time he’d made it to the fourth flat most of the neighbourhood had assembled on the lawn.
‘A few of you already know,’ he called out, ‘but to save wear and tear on the tonsils, I’ll tell you en masse. The cops have recovered a number of items which they believe were stolen this afternoon. If you make your way down to the police station, you’ll be able to claim what’s yours…�
�
Most of them were gone before he finished the sentence.
I was sitting on the veranda, watching with amusement.
‘Hey, Jojo!’
He ambled over towards me.
‘Emily.’
‘Who’s on the desk down at the station? He’s going to need the wisdom of Solomon to sort that lot out.’
‘Rex was there a few minutes ago.’
‘Bloody hell.’
His smile faded. ‘You wouldn’t be taking the piss out of our thin khaki line, would you?’
‘Pretty fat fuckin thin line in his case. Oh well, I don’t suppose there’ll be much competition for my Warumpis.’
‘Shouldn’t be any,’ he said, reaching into his pocket, pulling out a CD and dropping it into my lap.
‘Big Name No Blankets! How the hell did you manage that?’
‘I know those boys. Wasn’t that long ago I was leading a similar sort of life myself. Limited number of places you could hide a stash like that between here and the camp. Took me about five minutes to find it. Big beefwood on the edge of the mulga, west of the camp.’
‘Well, thanks very much. I suppose the least I could do is offer you a beer. And I would if the boys hadn’t flogged it all. How about a cup of tea?’
‘Won’t say no.’
‘And a scone?’
‘Now you’re talking.’
‘Pull up a slab of concrete.’
I went inside and loaded up the tea-tray. When I came back out he was sitting down, his back against a post, his legs fully stretched, his eyes closed. He casually waved away a blowie which settled on his knee, then opened his eyes.
‘Strewth,’ he exclaimed when he spotted the scones. ‘You didn’t tell me they were fresh out of the oven.’ He took a bite, followed up with a swig of tea. ‘Mmmm. Have to see if I can get you burgled more often.’
‘So did you catch the culprits?’
‘Not my job. But I did have a word with Ditch Williams. You know him?’
‘Know the name.’
‘He’s their uncle; asked me to take em out to Kupulyu Creek. Figures a spell out bush’ll do em good.’
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