She went cautiously to his side, afraid of waking him – afraid, really, that he wouldn’t ever wake again. Pop looked like Auschwitz, or Rwanda. Last Christmas he’d hauled himself up, with much ordinary pensioner complaint, and gone outside to the punching bag. Put up his dukes and shown the jahjams what a former Silver Gloves champion looked like. Now he was reduced to this pitiful remnant and Kerry realised what staying away all year had cost her. You wouldn’t call them close – Pop had little time for females and none at all for queers – but he was still the only grandfather she had ever had. When he went, a huge slice of her childhood would be carved off and fall into the void. Kerry stood and looked down at the old relic, put a hand on his arm, unsure of everything she felt. Sadness, yes. But relief, too, and something like fear. Who would they be, the Salters, without Pop around? Who would take his place?
‘Took you long enough to show ya face,’ Pretty Mary greeted her daughter acidly from the kitchen table. ‘Did ya suddenly remember that old highway to hell goes both ways, did ya?’
‘Yeah, I love you too, Mum.’ Kerry grinned. ‘Nothing like being overwhelmed with fucking love ’n affection after a year, is there?’
‘Ya after affection ya might want to show ya face round here a bit more often, my girl.’
Prone on the lounge with a longneck, Ken guffawed. He was at the stage where he wanted to be the jolly green giant. A couple more tallies and he’d begin to slur, telling incomprehensible yarns, and then getting dirty over any imagined or actual slight. But he wasn’t quite there yet.
Kerry knew from long experience that there was no winning an argument with her mother. To Pretty Mary she was and always would be the Great Abandoner. Shame enough to turn out a dyke, but her far greater sin was the empty hole she’d left behind her in the family. Even in the terrible dark shadow cast by Donna’s disappearance, Kerry had still up and left to live among whitefellas and city people. Sharper than a serpent’s tooth, blah blah de-fucken-blah.
‘I’ve had a lot on my plate, too, ya know. How is he? What’d the doctors say?’ she asked, kissing her mother’s lined cheek, and taking her empty coffee cup from her. Pretty Mary half rose and checked that Pop was indeed fast asleep. Then sank back down and wearily straightened her tarot deck.
As the kettle hissed in her ear Kerry heard the news she had expected.
‘How is he? He’s dying. The hospital give us morphine today. To inject him with.’
For a moment Kerry thought her mother was talking about killing the old man. Putting him down gently. Her second thought, hard on the heels of the first, was: just as well Ken’s drug of choice isn’t morphine. If the hospital had prescribed malt whisky to ease Pop’s last days they would have been in trouble.
‘How long?’
‘Oh, they never know. A week. Two if he’s unlucky, Dr Carlton reckons.’ Pretty Mary shook her head and stared out at the leopard tree. Two inches of pure white regrowth showed along the centre parting in her auburn hair. One of the many tiny revelations that come with death, thought Kerry: the small slow disintegrations of what is normal.
‘I drew The Tower four times yesterday. He ain’t gonna see Christmas.’
‘So that’s it then,’ Kerry said, shaken even though Ken had been blunt enough on the phone last night. Soon she would have no grandfather, no sister, no partner.
‘Is the morphine working?’
‘It knocks him out,’ Pretty Mary conceded. ‘But he’s gone back such a long way. Rivertown mish, and all the stations. Granny Ruth and Dad Charlie and even old Granny Ava all bin visiting him. He thinks I’m Donna, sometimes.’ Her eyes filled and she looked away. ‘God, it’s not easy, bub, I tell ya. I wish Granny Ruth was ere ta help …’
Kerry felt a lump in her throat that didn’t want to be swallowed. Pretty Mary’s face crumpled into her hanky.
‘Not bloody easy when he wants his winnings from a bet he never put on, for a horse that was never foaled, in a race that wasn’t run, either,’ Ken added, sitting up suddenly on the lounge. He flung himself about in imitation of a demented, bedridden Pop. ‘Where’s my bloody winnings you pack of thieving bloody black mongrels?’
Pretty Mary and Kerry began to crack up.
‘He sits there watching them races, and whatever bin cross that line first, Oh! Oh! My horse won – quick, Ken, quick – where that slip?’ Ken was choking with laughter. ‘It was right ere in me hand, boy!’
Pretty Mary flapped at Ken, trying to shush him but it was no good. Her shoulders were quaking.
‘He ain’t lost a single bet since the Melbourne Cup!’ Ken roared.
‘He genius punter or what!’ Pretty Mary cried, giving in.
‘Pop reckon ’e proper millionaire now!’ Ken howled, tears streaming.
Kerry leaned forward onto the table, quivering with the effort to hold in the laughter. Each time one of them found some composure a loud snort from someone would set everybody going again. She was gulping for air, having all sorts of trouble breathing. And then, of course, Pretty Mary’s laughter turned to torrential tears, and Kerry was somehow all of a sudden squatting down beside her. She rubbed her mother’s narrow back awkwardly.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. Mum was the rock, the backbone, the shock absorber for them all. The bad-alcoholic-turned-teetotaller, never flummoxed by disaster because there was always a precedent somewhere in her vast memory bank from her drinking days. Someone, somewhere, had always been through it before, whatever ‘it’ was. And when you lose a kid, she was fond of saying at least once a week, you know nothing can ever be any harder. You know the world has chucked what it’s got to chuck at you when you’ve lost your little girl.
But now Pop was dying slow and hard and they had no precedent for that. It was a time for plain unvarnished sorrow, and for remembering, and for crying out to the world that Donna should have been there to say goodbye to her grandfather too. Her absence was a sorrow doubled, and so Pretty Mary cried in Kerry’s arms twice over, while Kerry looked past her mother’s head at the gleaming horses on the television, going round and round forever in that distant, greener world. Was this who they would be without Pop around? she asked herself, shuddering. Was this who she would have to become? Her mother’s keeper?
~
‘Here we go. This is the three-bedder plus study I was telling you about,’ Martina announced, pulling up in front of an ugly brick bungalow on the undesirable southern edge of Patterson. ‘Brick, very low maintenance. You’ll have no problem at all renting it out in this street—’
She pointed at the nicest of the neighbouring houses, expertly directing attention away from the rusting gutters of the bungalow, and from the dead-end road that was legendary for Friday night burnouts. The clients, three sisters from Ballina with middle-class aspirations and a deposit, looked dubiously at the rusting mesh fence and the thin bottlebrush trees in the front yard.
‘Come inside!’ encouraged Martina, striding up the driveway and not batting an eyelid as she stepped over a six-foot brown snake that chose that very moment to slither over the cracked concrete and into the long grass next door. ‘The carpet’s dated, but the floorboards would polish up beautifully. And the bathroom isn’t too—’
She gave absolutely nothing away. Her patter didn’t waver, her gaze didn’t shift towards the long grass, nothing. The snake had never existed. There was no such thing on the planet as a brown snake. Mesmerised, the women followed her inside.
~
Pretty Mary had finished crying. She straightened up and retrieved a hanky from the pocket of her homemade dress. She blew her nose hard before homing in on Kerry. ‘We was hoping you mighta made it down for Pop’s birthday. For a change. In the circumstances.’
And heeeeere comes the guilt trip. The Pretty Mary Special, hello old friend, long time no see, just not long e-fucken-nough. Out the back door Kerry caught the late afternoon sun glinting o
ff the perfect curves of the Softail. Her mother was right. That old highway to hell was a two-way street. She could chuck her leg over and gun it back to Queensland, warrants or no warrants. Be home in just under three hours, easy. But no. She had her blue backpack to retrieve from Jim Cunting Buckley first.
‘I’m such a bloody bitch of a daughter. I don’t know what I was thinking, going to see Allie at court,’ she agreed sarcastically. Then, to divert her mother’s attention: ‘Where’s Black Superman? I thought he was flying up.’ Black Superman was her best ally. He’d listen to her about Allie, and have good advice on the kleptomaniac mayor, too.
‘Here by tea, he said,’ Ken answered. ‘He took them jahjams to Sandy Beach. Hire car. Must be nice to have that big gubment dollar, eh.’
‘Well there ya go, the three of us all be here tonight then,’ Kerry reassured Pretty Mary, careful not to make the unforgivable mistake of saying that all of them would be here. The phrases ‘all of us’ and ‘everyone’ had been instantly banished in Grade Nine. A small constellation of friends and rellos circled constantly about the shack – and by the sound of Troy Cassar-Daley blasting from the caravan, cousin Chris was back with them again – but the absence of Donna Zoe Salter must never, never be allowed to be far from anyone’s mind, or there was hell to pay. Lest we forget, insisted the gold writing beneath Donna’s fridge photo, when forgetting was all Kerry ever dreamed of.
‘You lay off ya brother!’ Pretty Mary rounded on Ken. ‘He helps me out plenty without making a big song and dance about it. And he’s got them kids to worry about now too, poor little buggers.’
‘Never said he didn’t,’ Ken was implacable, reaching for a handful of Homebrand salted peanuts. ‘Just said it must be sweet to have bungoo to chuck around, that’s all. Trip to Bali last year, gym membership. Hire car whenever ya want.’
Must be sweet to sit on your mooya getting free rent, too, thought Kerry in silent amusement. Ken was forever resenting Black Superman, the miracle of his education, his state government job, his fly-in-fly-out relationship with Mum and Pop. The way he got to be the good guy with the presents and the bungoo. Ken’s own advantages in life – his status as oldest son, the free rent, Mum’s endless help with Donny, his sickness benefit for the acquired brain injury that meant he never had to talk to a job provider again – all these were magically rendered invisible by Black Superman’s govvie job. To Ken, his younger brother was and would forever be the Spoilt One, the one who had it good and didn’t even realise how lucky his black fork was.
‘How is Allie?’ Pretty Mary asked severely, as her phone began buzzing and spinning on the table in front of her. ‘Ken told me she went and got herself blooming locked up again. She’s a one-woman crime wave, that girl, truesgod!’
‘She’s ’right,’ Kerry hedged. ‘Her cuz Rihanne’s in B block with her, so she’s all good. Well, not all good,’ she added, catching Ken’s expression. ‘But she’s getting on with it.’
‘Christmas inside,’ said Ken, shaking his head and crunching peanuts. ‘That’s the pits, that is.’
Kerry agreed, trying not to think of the many empty Christmases ahead. In the week after Allie’s arrest, Kerry had fantasised about getting herself locked up too, but there was no guarantee with her warrants she wouldn’t be shanghaied to New South Wales, and then where would she be? And just as well she hadn’t martyred herself. Allie’s phone call had been lacerating. I don’t wanna hear any more fucken sob stories, all bets are off. Move on.
Kerry stared at the peanut shells on the sink, blanking out.
‘Maybe now you’ll think about changing ya wild ways, and I’ll tell ya why,’ Pretty Mary lectured as she pressed the buzzing phone to her chest. ‘Breaking the law’s not all some big joke, my girl. Steal the eyes out of a blind cockie’s head, you lot would.’ She put the phone to her ear. ‘Durrigan the Wise, hello. Yes, oh that’s right, darling. I remember you, love, two Moons in Aquarius. We do the Palm Valley night market, and Patto – not the farmers’ market – and Lismore every fourth Sunday. Otherwise by appointment. Okay, lovely. See you then.’
‘I did change my ways,’ Kerry retorted, coming to life and putting fresh coffees on the table. ‘That’s why I’m down here and not in Brisbane Women’s.’ She shook her head, wondering in what possible universe her mother might not have reams of useless, generic free advice to dish out. Every day, every waking hour, never telling you when you’d done right, only where you were going wrong, and when to pull your socks up quick smart. The only person she ever refused to judge was Pop, ironically enough, since if anybody in the history of the Salter clan ever needed judging it was the old one-eyed bastard dying in the next room.
‘I bin hunting this customer mob away with boondies lately,’ Pretty Mary announced with satisfaction as she added an appointment to the Koori Knockout calendar on the wall. ‘Just as well too. Pop’s funeral insurance ain’t gonna stretch far.’
‘Centrelink should cough up towards that,’ Kerry told her, wondering if Ken had gotten in their mother’s ear about his suspicion she was in on an armed rob. Nah. He’d be keeping valuable information like that close to his chest, where it would do him, Kenneth Edward Salter, the most possible good. She ground her teeth at the stabbing memory of Jim Buckley lifting her bag into his ute tray. She’d get the fucking thing back if she had to waltz into council chambers and strangle him with the shoulder straps.
‘Is this Pop?’ she asked, turning her attention to the tarot. The cards were laid out on the table as though for a private reading, but Pretty Mary wore no purple veil with silver moon and stars; no long dark wig or red velvet cloak or kohl eyeliner. Today she was the Tarot Reader au naturel, a stringy brown pensioner with her feet in grubby two-dollar thongs and a joint stuck behind her right ear. She wore the same homemade orange dress Kerry had last seen her in on the previous Boxing Day, giving the illusion that she hadn’t changed her clothes in almost a year.
‘Nah, it’s Aunty Val,’ she said, still focused on the calendar. She rubbed the dying pen quickly between her palms and then shook it, trying to restore it to life. Kerry rolled her eyes. Who the hell among her one billion rellos was Aunty Val?
‘Aunty Val there, la. Savannah’s mum,’ said Pretty Mary. She flicked five fingertips impatiently towards the old Hanlon place next door, as though her daughter was simple, running on copper wire instead of fibre optic. Kerry’s face hardened. Oh, them. The bogans with the Aussie flag on the gate, the rebel flag of slavery on their F100. Whitefellas. Red sunburn over ugly old tats. Blue eyes like boiled fish staring blind up at a dead sky. Dumb to everything not them or theirs. But normal too. Super, super normal. Whitefellas were everywhere in the shire, everywhere she went. This wasn’t Logan, this was Durrongo, where dark skins were few and far between and whitenormalsavages ruled.
‘Oh, the White Pride Brigade,’ Kerry said in contempt. ‘For fuck’s sake, Mum.’
Pop let out a low groan, coming back to consciousness as his morphine level dropped. Pretty Mary checked her phone. Half an hour to go. The hospital had been very clear about how much to inject and when.
‘Five minutes yet, Pop,’ she ordered. ‘Turn that TV up, eh, Kenny.’
Bored, Ken flicked between channels so fast that Kerry’s head began to spin, until he finally settled on a nature program. The sound of whale song prompted Donny to come inside from the veranda, where he had been observing Elvis plotting a fresh attack on the hen coop. Kerry glanced at her nephew.
‘Wanna watch Uncle David, my neph?’ Kerry urged. Come close. Be part of the family for once.
‘Yeah,’ teased Ken. ‘Check it out. They reckon there’s jobs in whaling.’
Donny didn’t answer, but to Kerry’s pleasure and surprise he plonked down, as far from Ken as he could manage. David Attenborough began explaining the impact of past whaling on humpback numbers with the enthusiasm of someone a quarter his age.
‘
The industry expanded so rapidly because the worth of a whale carcass in the late nineteenth century was the equivalent, in today’s money, of a quarter of a million dollars. The meat, the oil, the blubber, all was hugely valuable.The ambergris, or intestinal slurry,’ Attenborough went on pleasantly as Kerry made a face, ‘was used in the manufacture of perfume, and could make a millionaire of a seaman in a day. The rendered whale oil found its way into lamps all over the globe, and the butchered meat—’
Donny blanched, yet he couldn’t look away. Whale was his personal totem, and so he was obliged to discover everything he could about the animal, no matter how disgusting or distressing he found it. If Granny Ava was still alive he might have learned to call them in off some coastal headland, Kerry reflected. Mighta been taught them special songs, and all them special whale ways, but Uncle Richard in Lismore had only passed on the fact of the totem, and the lingo name for the animal. It was up to Donny what he did with that in the twenty-first century. Uncle Richard would know more, though, Kerry suddenly realised. He’d be the one to ask for help. Maybe with Uncle Richard’s intervention that whale business would be strong enough to drag Donny off his computer and into the world. She’d have a think about that, once she’d gotten her backpack back.
‘If they’re White Pride someone musta forgot to tell Savannah,’ Ken boasted, heading past Donny into the kitchen and replacing his longneck with a fresh stubby. ‘She keeps coming over ere like I’ve got something to give her. I reckon I might, too.’ He collapsed back onto the centre of the lounge with a grin, arms and legs spread wide to assert his sovereignty. King Kenny, monarch of all he surveyed. A scattering of peanut shells bounced on the brown velour as he did so, and he made a half-hearted show of gathering them up, ignoring those that fell into the cracks between the cushions, or onto the floor.
Kerry blew a loud raspberry.
‘What’s that – the clap? Oh yeah, baby, give me some of that hot sweaty STI action!’ she said, moaning and writhing in mock ecstasy from the far side of the kitchen table. Or maybe he fancied giving Savannah a smack in the chops – but she didn’t say that part. Nobody knew that she’d run into Ken’s ex-before-last at Beenleigh Cash Converters a couple of years back. Turned out hell hath no fury like a Kiwi chick with a missing incisor and no Medicare.
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