Too Much Lip

by Melissa Lucashenko

  Donny stiffened slightly, but suffered her embrace. He even put a narrow arm around her shoulder for a second. She sipped at her beer, trying to sound casual. The kid was skeletal. Sunken cheeks. Wrists you could wrap two fingers around.

  ‘You getting up? I’m gonna go jump in Granny Ava’s waterhole, chuck a line in. Might even see The Doctor if we get lucky, eh?’

  Donny just shrugged a hopeless shrug. Kerry frowned. Donny loved the river as much as she did. Something was very wrong if he didn’t want to go there in a stinking hot December.

  ‘Come on,’ she teased. ‘Ya worried about eels, eh? Them fellas won’t eat much!’ Donny bent the corners of his mouth like he was trying to remember how to smile. Kerry stood up.

  ‘I’m not taking no for an answer, lad. I swum in that creek every day for years and look at me!’ Kerry made a mock supermodel’s pose at him before quickly checking down the hall for any movement from Ken towards her bag. But Donny was flat on the bunk again, eyes shut. At the bedroom door, Kerry twisted her mouth sideways.

  ‘You chuck the snooze button on then. But I’ll be back dreckly to haul ya skinny black mooya over there,’ she warned.

  In the kitchen Ken was washing up the frypan, sloshing its yellow beads of oil into soapy water. Kerry could have sworn her backpack sat at a faintly different angle on the table. Her stomach churned. Ah, don’t be such a gutless wonder.

  ‘You move my bag?’ she summoned the nerve to ask.

  ‘Hey?’ Her big brother seemed genuinely surprised, then immediately interested. ‘Why, what’s in it?’

  The only safe thing was to make a joke of it. Kerry sprang towards Ken, covering half the distance between them in a split second, her right hand extended claw-like towards his face. She hissed like a demon.

  ‘Debil debil business!’ she croaked at him in a witch’s voice, her eyes weird. Ken took a large step backwards and laughed uneasily.

  ‘Fuck off with that womba shit,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Kerry in her normal voice, her claw becoming a hand again. ‘It’s just some bits of scrap metal I found. Copper pipe and that.’

  ‘Scrap metal my arse.’

  ‘Ah, ya got me. It’s big fat wads of cash. And ice. All the usual goodies,’ Kerry said.

  ‘Fuck that shit, I’ve barred ice from Durrongo. The whole pub knows – they bring it here, I’ll flog em silly. Gimme Johnnie Walker any day.’

  ‘Show me where I can lift some, I will.’

  ‘Thought you promised Mum you were going straight?’ Ken said.

  ‘That’s right, I forgot. I’m a fucking angel of innocence these days, just ask Allie.’ Kerry drained her stubby and tossed it in the white swing-top bin, where it crashed onto Ken’s empties with a tinkle of breaking glass. ‘She’s doing hard time and I’m the one that gets rehabilitated – go figure.’

  ‘Whatever floats ya boat.’ Ken started wiping down the kitchen table. ‘Just don’t let Mum catch ya with a hot bike.’

  Kerry hooked her hands onto the top of the kitchen doorway and looked out at the bombs clustered beneath the leopard tree. She got it, alright. Since leaving at seventeen she’d barely darkened the family door. Unlike Pretty Mary, Ken lost no sleep about the prospect of his sister doing more time. She knew what his take on it would be: your first stretch was the worst, and Kerry was staunch. More importantly, as far as Ken was concerned, once you left Salter country, once you headed over the Margin Ranges and left Mount Monk and the Cal River behind, well, you were on ya own. If Kerry wanted to go to the city and live like there was no tomorrow then let her, big brother would have said. He had enough on his plate with a dying grandfather, an anorexic son, and a town that had always had its doubts about blackfellas from the get go. Kerry could do all manner of crime till the cows came home – all the better, in fact, if it meant she might occasionally have some cash to splash in his direction back over the border, down Mexico way. That’s what he would have said, if she’d cared enough to ask.

  ‘Well, I’m gonna go visit them Old People,’ Kerry said.

  ‘We’re outta milk,’ Ken told her, ‘and a bottle of Jack wouldn’t go astray, neither.’

  ‘Yeah, no worries. I’ll wave me magic wand and pick up a few ounces while I’m at it,’ Kerry said, heavily sarcastic. Let Ken think she was cashed up and that’d be it. She grabbed her backpack, well aware of his gaze following her all the way down the hall into the bathroom. She sat on the toilet lid and looked at the bag’s light blue nylon panels and tight-stretched seams. The ancestors stored their most precious things in secret tree trunks and on distant cave ledges. Was there a hollow log anywhere in Durrongo that she could trust? Kerry weighed the bag in her left hand. There was no simple answer. For now, wherever she went, the bag would have to follow.

  Chapter Two

  Martina glanced over from the steering wheel and instinctively knew to ignore the call flashing on her iPhone. A client who was almost ready to sign was a pretty damn delicate animal, but if she knew anything about real estate after fifteen years in the game – and she most certainly did – it was when to pick up a call, and when to keep the buyer waiting just that little bit longer. It was a gift. Some agents had it and some didn’t. She’d definitely call the Marsdens back – in a half hour. Long enough to get their juices really stirred up about buying on the fabled north coast of New South Wales. Long enough that they could convince themselves just that tiny bit more that the crumbling weatherboard house at the base of Mount Monk, well over an hour from the nearest beach, was exactly the sea change they so desperately wanted it to be. She’d seen it all. Ex-husbands lying to ex-wives. Current wives lying to current husbands. Adult children selling parental homes out from under frail bewildered pensioners who had no idea what was happening. In comparison, this deal was a straightforward caveat emptor. If the Marsdens didn’t have the common sense to realise that a country creek was a force of nature that rose and fell with the seasons, well. Not her circus, not her monkeys. Oh, she’d satisfy the law, technically, murmur something non-threatening about the way the creek – ‘of course you realise’ – came up from time to time. But not until they were well fastened on the gleaming silver hook of the Far North Coast, and far too in love with the half-rotted ruin to back away from the deal. Which was now approximately twenty-five minutes away, in her estimation.

  ‘You just hold your horses, my friends,’ she told the flashing screen. ‘Martina will decide who comes to Durrongo Shire and the circumstances in which they come.’ There was no need to exert herself too much. The Marsdens – him a sparky, she a teacher aide about to deliver a bawling sprog any tick of the clock – were schmucks from Gloucester with a battered HiLux and a dream. She would make less than four grand on the house they were buying, as she had explained at length to Jim Buckley last week. Martina was doing Jim a giant favour even listing the bloody dump, considering he couldn’t sell it himself without ICAC sniffing around. That’s one house signed already out of five – I told you they’d get snapped up, and anyway, you’re not in Newport now, the mayor had retorted. More’s the pity, she thought but didn’t come out and say, since technically being given temporary management of the Patterson district office was a promotion. Technically. Two months and she’d be back on Sydney Harbour with a corner office and never have to risk looking at another bloody Brangus again. She might have started out country but those days were far behind her and she had the Prada sunnies to prove it.

  Martina drew hard on her cigarette and wound down the window a crack to blow smoke outside. The white swirl was gone in an instant, and as it cleared she noticed a young hitchhiker on the far side of the two-lane highway. She noted the shape of the man’s wide shoulders beneath a camo rucksack, and the way his thighs curved below his yellow and blue footy shorts. Young and built for action. If she’d been going the other way she might well have made an exception to her rule – no hitchhikers and no freeloader
s – and stopped. The man had a gym body, high cheekbones, a mass of light brown curls spilling from beneath one of those silly straw cowboy hats they sold at music festivals. The basic Aussie spunk, before screaming kids, middle-aged spread and general disillusion with life set in. She liked the red straw hat, too, that light touch. Oh, we could make beautiful love, my friend, she laughed at the man in her rear-view mirror. You know we could. You can leave your hat on, cowboy. Yee hah!

  Her phone flashed again. It was Will. The next three seconds were consumed by an unfavourable mental comparison of Will v. The Hitchhiker. Blond and English had never really been her style. And the Essex accent that had at first amused her was now beginning to seriously irritate.

  ‘Hey baby,’ Martina purred.

  ‘Hey, what’s happening in the boondocks? You still the only wog in the village?’ Will asked.

  ‘The only Homo sapiens in the fucking village, more like. I miss you, honey, I need my man beside me.’ Martina laid it on with a trowel. ‘When are you coming up?’

  ‘You know I booked Watego’s for Boxing Day. It’s going off down here!’

  ‘A fortnight’s way too long, babe.’ Martina pouted. As Will began to argue, her phone showed a second call interrupting. The Marsdens, yet again. Martina paused, and stubbed her cigarette out before tossing it. She rewound the window, and made a fast decision. It was time to reel these suckers in.

  ‘Gotta go sell a house, babe. Call me in ten to congratulate me.’

  She hung up. Will wasn’t going anywhere. Neither were the Marsdens, for that matter, but four grand was four grand and she wasn’t in Patterson for the good of her health.

  ~

  Kerry floated on her back in the Caledonian River, looking skyward through the limbs of Granny Ava’s hoop pine. The oldest tree on Ava’s Island was a giant, throwing shade across the entire width of the river. All the years Kerry had been away, this place was where her mind had flown to. Many a night at Trinder Park or at Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre had really been spent beneath Granny Ava’s pine. Not dozens, or hundreds, but thousands of times she had come in her imagination to this spot on the island where the fruit bats nested and where cormorants perched on fallen logs, their wings high, surrendering to invisible enemies. The family had practically lived here when Granny Ruth was still around. In and out of the river all day long. Cooking snags on little fires; yabbying and fishing the summer away. Taking fallen blossoms and pretty shells to Granny Ava’s grave, hidden in the forest alongside where her husband, Grandad Chinky Joe, lay with only a plain piece of granite to mark his passing. And none of them knowing, back then, that Granny Ruth would be lost to the Richmond River in ’91, and would never lie here beside her parents the way she should have.

  Kerry gazed up at the geometric shapes made by the crossed branches of the hoop pine and the neighbouring gums. Around her she could hear the swirling fresh water brushing against the river stones before it spiralled away downstream, and the pock pock of native frogs deep in philosophy. If anywhere had healed her, it was this place; the Salter holy water flowed past Mount Monk and Durrongo, on down the flood plain through Patterson and then across to the ocean at faraway Brunswick Heads. Her native church was built right here of rock and sand and feather and bark and moss. Bless me Father, she thought as the water lapped her temples, for I have gone to the city and sinned there, and then sinned some more by not returning home. Not that she believed in sin. Not really, not like Pretty Mary did. People did what they needed to to survive, that’s all. Or what they thought they had to. Sometimes it was good, and sometimes it wasn’t. And sometimes the planets went berserk and a little blue backpack sailed over a hedge into your waiting arms, and everything went to the shithouse, real fast.

  On the bank opposite, Donny squatted on a boulder, throwing twigs into the water and watching them bob on the current that would turn in another hour and begin drifting back downstream to the distant coast. Kerry could clearly see each of her neph’s individual ribs where they met his jutting vertebrae. Squatting there blond-headed with his knees under his chin, looking into the water and shadowed dark by the eucalypts, he looked like a photo of some skinny old-time desert blackfella. But Donny wasn’t gaunt from desert genetics and drought. He was just an innocent bag of Goorie bones looking for a reason to exist. Kerry felt a surge of something like hatred for Ken. But you can’t make somebody love their kids. Can’t grab a forty-year-old thug and shake paternal feeling into him. And the thinner and weaker Donny got, the more harshly Ken would judge him. If the lad was a tattooed car thief with a smart mouth and a police record, Ken might take him to the pub, show him off with an arm slung around his neck. But Donny was a social liability in Durrongo: too quiet, too gentle. Too interested in insects and birds, until the time Ken had thrown all his ornithology CDs on the fire one June morning in a rage, calling him a piss-weak little white cunt who needed to get a life. After that, Donny shrank into his computer, where he was safe, and where Ken couldn’t reach him with his sarcasm. A computer was a coffin you crawled into to wait for death, Kerry thought, consumed with guilt that she had not been around, even after Pretty Mary rang in a state and told her about the CDs. But she was here now. She would make the kid come swimming and fishing, and for long rides on the Harley, force him to be in the world. Hug him and love him up until he remembered who he really was. Until he somehow found somewhere it was safe to be Donny.

  Untroubled by any such human angst, a magpie carolled from the next bend, and was answered by its mate standing on the grassy bank, watching Kerry turn with the current.

  ‘Donster!’

  The boy looked up at her.

  ‘That magpie – male or female?’

  Donny didn’t need to look.

  ‘Daughter to the other one.’

  Kerry laughed in genuine delight. ‘You da man, Donny. You da man!’

  A faint change in expression; something in the vicinity of a smile.

  ‘Real pretty here, eh, punyarra jagan? Don’t ya reckon?’

  Donny shrugged, then changed his mind, nodded. ‘Yeah. It’s nice. Peaceful.’

  ‘Them Old People’s looking out for us, I can feel Granny Ava watching. I’d be here every day if I was you, growing gills.’

  Silence. Kerry waited a few moments, then rolled face down to hold her breath as long as she could, watching the blurry wet world go by beneath her.

  The bend on the river was the most sacred place the Salters knew. Right there, she thought, where the shadow of the hoop pine is blackening the water and the sand. That’s where Granny Ava swam to save two lives, and made it, and now here we all are. If there had been no hoop pine root there to pull herself out of the river by. Had the resident bull sharks been less agreeable that day. Had the horses of the dugai been more willing to enter the cold August water. Any of these, and there would be no Kerry floating in the sun, gazing down at the silver flashes of school mullet beneath her. No Granny Ruth, no Pretty Mary, no Ken, no Black Superman, no Donny, no nobody. There’s a pretty simple lesson then: when the men with guns come after you, you go and you go fucking hard and you don’t look back. Kerry remembered the moment she first heard her great-grandmother’s legend. Nine years old, in the corner of the front veranda, forgotten with her head in a comic book. Aunty Tall Mary, who was helping to shell peas on the front steps, had been talking about the Yugambeh massacres further north. How the mob feasted by invitation on poisoned flour at Mudgeeraba, and how these days butter wouldn’t melt in the white descendants’ mouths.

  They shot Granny Ava, Pretty Mary had cried out bitterly. Used their muskets on her and made the river run red, but she kept going, oh she was a strong old girl that one, truesgod, and lucky too. Her Dad knew, see. Old King Bobby. He looked after her. Sung that necklace they give him and made it a weapon. Take more’n muskets to stop that clever old fella. Granny climbed out alive on the island with his song around her neck.
Picked up a big rock and chucked it over the water, telling them dugais to go to buggery. Stood there bleeding onto her own dirt, swearing em proper, trying to make em swim across to her. She always said that if she was gonna finish up she’d finish up on her own country facing the dugai square on. She wanted em to see her face at the end, see. But they give up before she did. Scared of a bitta cold river water. And lucky for them they was. Lucky for us too, maybe.

  Lucky, both women had agreed over the shelling of the peas. And Kerry sat puzzled in the corner, thinking: how is that luck? To be hunted down, and shot. To face certain death armed with no more than a rock and a charmed necklace. Where does luck come into that?

  There was more.

  Them dugais took off but they left their mark that day, see, Pretty Mary whispered. She ceased her shelling to grip the steel bowl tight in two hands, rocking back and forth with it clasped between her knees. Cos Granny Ava was big belly with Mum that day, ready to pop, and when Mum was born that night, the bullet marks on Granny come out on the baby. Come out in the pattern of the Union Jack. Mum wore the mark all her life. And now us Salters are scarred by that musket forever, Pretty Mary said sorrowfully. She let go of the bowl and used her index finger to mark the dust of the window glass beside her. Dab. Dab. Dab. Twelve small smudges to imitate the Queen’s flag.

  True? asked Tall Mary, astonished.

  Truesgod, Pretty Mary confirmed.

  It’s not right, said Tall Mary fiercely. They never ever paid for it! Never! Somebody gotta pay!

  Branded like bullocks, was all Pretty Mary said.

  In the corner, Kerry had stared into her comic as she tried and failed to grasp this new story. She’d always understood that Granny Ava hadn’t really died. She was the bend in the river. She was the grave lying deep in the forest behind the giant pine. Was the tree itself. She was the presence constantly invoked whenever an example was required of discipline, courage, tenacity, culture. Granny Ava would have. Granny Ava never. Granny Ava would be rolling in her. Now, suddenly, this shocking picture of Granny Ava being shot by dugais expanded to fill the pages of Kerry’s book, the air around her, the veranda. It tangled in her head, until she had to push it away and make it a lie, or else explode with the knowledge.