‘Ya wanna frang it before ya bang it, Condoman,’ Pretty Mary advised. ‘I ain’t changing no more blooming nappies, I give ya the drum.’
‘Clean as a whistle, me,’ said Ken indignantly to Kerry, before adding with a leer, ‘and raring to go, what’s more.’
‘Oh, nigga, please!’ Kerry objected in disgust.
‘Savannah’s got more bloody sense than to get back with you,’ snorted Pretty Mary. She opened a fresh packet of peanuts and began adding shells to her ashtray. ‘And don’t you be so bloody racist, dort. Aunty Val let me bath Pop in their shower for a month when ours buggered up. You know she’s got the big C too, had both her susu off in August and not long finished her radiation. They got it all. I knew they would, there was nothing in the cards.’
‘Next door fly the bloody butcher’s rag on their gate and I’m the racist. Work that one out,’ Kerry said, with a glance at Pop, tossing and moaning in real pain now.
‘They not really racist, they nice enough. S’not their fault they got no culture,’ Pretty Mary said, magnanimous towards whitefellas as she had never been towards her daughter. ‘Oh, good on you, son.’ Small miracles. Ken had gotten up and was moistening Pop’s lips with a sliver of ice dipped in beer.
‘Everyone on the planet’s got a culture, Mum, even if it’s The Footy Show and Southern Cross tats – it’s still a culture. Just a shit one. And anyway, why do that mob any favours now?’
‘Better now than next month,’ her mother muttered, glancing across to fully meet her daughter’s eye for the first time since Kerry had walked inside. Kerry was startled at the pain she saw there. Better before there was a funeral to organise and serious grieving to be done, her mother meant. And the tarot would be a solace too. Pretty Mary always thought pretty highly of herself in front of the cards, seeing the flux and flow of the universe beneath her fingertips. Feeling like there was some plan to it all.
‘Whatever. It’s—’ She came to a screaming halt, having almost said, It’s your funeral.
‘Turn that thing back to the blooming horses!’ erupted Pretty Mary in sudden fury, as Uncle David Attenborough squatted, smiling and whispering now, beside a family of bush stone-curlews. Ken and Kerry stared, frozen, at the screen. Donny hastily leaped for the remote, and hit the off button – just too late to prevent the bird’s weird call entering the house. Pretty Mary let out a horrified whimper. Kerry felt her bladder contract. Pop groaned again, louder this time, and Ken glared at Donny like he had just invited the Grim Reaper inside and offered to sharpen his scythe for him. The kid stood with the remote in his hand, looking like a rabbit in a shooter’s spotlight.
‘It’s not his fault!’ Kerry exclaimed to the gravely silent room. But Ken gave no indication that she had even spoken. He sat utterly motionless, his arms spread to their full gigantic width over the back of the lounge. His blue eyes glittered at Donny in rage. After an unbearable seesawing moment, where they all waited to see if Ken would storm to his feet and start lashing out, he finally shook his head where he sat, and everyone breathed out a little. Kerry hated herself for breathing again. Ya weak as piss, she told herself. Stand up to him, the great overgrown bullying prick. There’s not all that much more he can do to ya that he hasn’t already done.
‘Nice one, ya fucking moron,’ Ken snarled. ‘Hope ya happy now. Fuck off outta my sight.’
‘I didn’t know he was gonna …’ the boy said weakly, before pushing the remote aside and trailing down the hall to his room. The silhouette he made as he walked the corridor was that of a stick man.
‘Yeah, you didn’t know, Donny!’ Kerry called bravely to his back. ‘It’s not your fault, bub!’
‘It’s not your fault, bub,’ Ken mimicked sarcastically. ‘Useless cunt.’ Whether he meant her, or Donny, or both of them put together, was left unspoken.
Kerry looked straight ahead at the TV, sick in her guts just like when she was a kid. Hope ya happy now, when happy was the last thing Donny was. Oh Jesus. She had to get out of this poxy dead hole. A week or two, her mother said Pop might last. A few extra days to organise the funeral, at the outside another few to see Mum back on her feet. Pretty Mary would be lonely with the old fella gone, but there was always the barrel-chested prick in front of her to be placated and fed, and his victim in the back bedroom. Cousin Chris coming and going with his girlfriend and their little baby girl. Pretty Mary would get over it. The tarot will pick right up without the stress of nursing Pop, Kerry told her conscience, and I’ll be home free by the middle of January. Three weeks, absolute max.
Kerry got to her feet, grabbed Pretty Mary’s lighter and went to spark up a spliff in the backyard. She leaned against the chook shed and gazed at the shadows lengthening to long fingers in the bull paddock. If Allie could do five years cold inside BWCC, and if Pretty Mary could happily spend a lifetime in Durrongo, then she could surely put up with Ken’s bullshit for a few more weeks. If, if, if. Fingers crossed, on all three counts.
~
Kerry’s mobile rang. It was Rocky, fresh out of Numinbah, speeding off her dial, and wanting to con her into a job. Kerry shot a sideways glance at the Harley, took a deep breath. Feel the fear, girlfriend, and say, fuck to the no, no fucking way.
‘Nah, not interested. Plus I’m down New South Wales, anyway, bunji.’
‘Yeah, I know. But we got a fucking awesome score, sis. This sparkie that me sister’s rooting told us about this safe in Sunnybank, Chinaman house. No dogs, one alarm. Thirty grand minimum, between the three of us. And Peanut’s got dry ice.’
‘Whaddya mean, ya got dry ice?’
Rocky explained her fail-proof plan. The sides of Kerry’s mouth twitched. Rocky had really gone round the corner this time.
‘Like I said. Not interested, sorry.’
‘But we gotta …’
‘Sister – I said no.’
Kerry was about to explain why dry ice was a bad idea, when Rocky hung up. Kerry shook her head, laughing uproariously. Dry ice. Yeah, okay, dickheads. That’s gonna end well.
~
Four thousand dollars richer than she had been at breakfast, Martina shook hands with the Marsdens and assured them that waiving the prescribed cooling-off period was definitely a smart move under the circumstances. She pointed Jasmine Marsden in the direction of the Patterson hardware shop, congratulated her yet again on her foresight and energy, then merrily sent the young couple out the door and off into the Divorce Zone. But then you just never knew. Hubby Ryan was a tradie. He might actually be able to do something with the shotgun shack that Martina had glimpsed in her single lightning visit to Durrongo since she arrived. And if the usual thing happened, if Jasmine appeared in the doorway in a couple of years on the verge of tears, wanting to take any reasonable offer to get the hell out fast, it would be just one more commission in the great roundabout that was real estate. Death, divorce, promotions or lotto wins. All of life’s vagaries had one common denominator: fresh listings. A smart realtor could flog off a property at both ends of a marriage and still come out friendly with both husband and wife. Martina smirked down at the countersigned contract on her desk. There were days she wondered if she wasn’t simply a very highly paid psychologist.
As she updated her files, and noticed a text from Jim requesting to meet asap to discuss the riverfront development, Martina was restless. She was four grand closer to her own agency but still a million miles from civilisation. And she was never going to feel at ease in Patterson – another six weeks would feel more like six years. At Newport she and Will could have hit Antonelli’s for a slap-up celebration dinner, maybe gone on to the casino or a yacht party where someone would surely have had some speed or coke. Lived a little. Patterson held nothing beyond its two hotels and a passable Thai restaurant, and there’s only so much Asian takeaway one woman can eat, Martina told herself. The idea of coke nagged at her, but she was hardly about to go and buy drugs from a t
oothless bikie at the Top Pub. She gazed out at the street in frustration. The Sugarloaf Bakery (leasehold: $2400 per calendar month) nestled between Mickelo’s Fruit Barn (freehold: $400K give or take) and the Patterson branch of the Bendigo Bank. It’s like being on Survivor, she muttered darkly under her breath.
‘Pardon?’ asked Kylie, the office manager, halfway out the door to collect her granddaughters from netball practice.
‘Oh, nothing. Just missing the big smoke.’ Martina sighed loudly. ‘And my so-called partner, who can’t be bothered to get on a plane until Boxing Day. Serve him right if I get a roving eye.’
‘Touch footy finals this Saturday,’ Kylie offered. ‘Them Grafton boys are a bunch of hot spunks!’
‘Fifty shades of mud,’ said Martina, doubtfully. She hadn’t stepped outside her room at the Scrub Turkey Motel since she arrived in Patterson, except to go to work and to distant Byron, far enough away to feel like she was in another, shinier world. ‘I’ll bear it in mind.’
Boyfriend. She needed a new boyfriend; that was the problem. It was weeks since she’d had anything approaching good sex. And eligible men were as thin on the ground in Patterson as talking dogs. Oh, the offers were there, there was never any shortage of offers. She had been confidentially informed by Kylie within forty-eight hours of hitting town that, direct quote, all the boys in the office want to chuck one in ya, unquote. Her skin had crawled. God save me from rural realtors. No, that hitchhiker in the hat was the first bloke she’d noticed having any kind of style in Durrongo, the first man she’d seen without either a ragged Bintang singlet or a non-ironic Akubra. God, was she reduced to cruising nameless hitchhikers now? That was a truly depressing thought. She glanced up at the calendar. All she had to do, really, was flog off the remaining shacks in Durrongo, seal the deal on the Patto petrol station, and then warm Jim’s seat until it was time to piss off back to Sydney after Christmas.
With Kylie gone, Martina was alone in the building. It was six-forty. The shutters were down on the shopfronts, and a few of the cars driving past on Nunne Street had their lights on. She got up and lowered the office blinds. Then she opened her phone and began to swipe left.
Chapter Four
Kerry woke in the top bunk bed. She lay staring at the ceiling two feet from her face. The world outside was dim and cool; the house was unusually silent. Not even the roosters were awake yet. It had been a night of tossing and turning, hearing muffled cries from wildlife in the creek and the scrub beyond. Nightmares of childhood and the BWCC had pressed in on her, locked doors and shaven-headed white men with guns. Now, sleep-deprived, she could hear Donny’s steady breathing in the bunk below, and the very sound of him put her tired nerves on edge. Oh sweet Lord give me coffee, give me yarndi, give me some fucking space. She could have happily put a fist through the fibro beside her and not even blinked. But this would be her life from now on. Waking up in single beds, or alone in double beds, with no gorgeous Allie naked beside her. And every bastard in the world always wanting something, taking from her like Jim Buckley had taken, waltzing into her orbit and helping himself to whatever took his fancy, just like whitefellas had always done from the year dot. Well. She was gonna do something about old Jiminy Cricket just the minute she figured out how to not get caught.
Donny began a light erratic snoring, and Kerry gritted her teeth. She bunched her right hand into a solid mass, drew it back ready to smash the fucken—
She let her arm fall back onto the bed.
Waking up wanting to punch holes in the wall is not a good sign, she told herself, breathing deeply. Time to take your medicine, girlfriend. She swung her bony legs out and down, slid noiselessly onto the cracked grey lino of adolescence. Three minutes later she jogged up the grassy strip at the centre of the gravel drive, Donny’s yellow Nikes on her feet.
Out on the road in the dim light, Kerry ran straight over the tarry mark that was all that remained of yesterday’s brown snake. She ran strongly, knees aligned, head up, elbows tucked, the way the coaches all said. It came naturally to her. When other kids had sweated and whinged about the cross-country course, she had been the one looking for the finish line, powering up heartbreak hill, loving every minute. Genetically gifted, the coaches all agreed. Black, skinny, driven, she was a trainer’s wet dream. Had they realised at all that running was a bulwark against the taunts slung about so casually at Patto High? Nigger, nigger, pull the trigger. Kerry would sneer at the white faces mouthing the words – Abo, black bitch, boong – and picture their owners wheezing on the edge of the track as she floated past triumphant, her giant banner reading: Whatever, maggots. And her indifference – part pretence, part real – meant the insults quickly found their targets elsewhere, in the small handful of other Goories who usually decided to fight back, and who were quickly expelled for expecting a bit of common decency in their lives. The black kids of Patterson High who were there one day and gone the next had drifted off to Brisbane or Sydney or the Gold Coast. You heard their names around the district for a few years, then nothing much more. Locked up, knocked up, or finished up, was her guess. Kerry had met girls in BWCC who knew the whereabouts of some. Not that she was looking. Durrongo was best left on the backburner, it and all that had happened there.
After ten minutes of jogging she upped the pace, arms pumping and her upper legs beginning to feel the burn. She ran past a familiar wooden cottage with a For Sale sign plastered hopefully on its rotting veranda, and then saw the triple peak of Mount Monk looming in front of her. She would run to its base, no more than four kays, and look up at the creased sides of the rock cliffs she knew so well. It marked you as a true local, the feeling of comfort you got when you saw that familiar outline against the sky and something nameless in you was fulfilled by it. Pop used to love to look at the mountain from the veranda or the paddock. He would examine it in all kinds of light, talk to it, ask it questions and take guidance from it, somehow. It was a kind of old friend, he used to say, for all that his family came from somewhere unknown beyond Rivertown, and he was hardly Bundjalung at all. The mountain had never steered him wrong yet.
As a kid Kerry had noticed that some old white farmers liked to talk about Mount Monk in a hopelessly over-familiar way. They seemed to need that edge of faint contempt in their speech where nature was concerned. The mountain had always been there on the outer edge of their consciousness, and so they considered it held no mysteries. Pop felt different. He was adamant that a mountain could never be really fully known, any more than a person could be. Oh, when dugais asked him in the right way he might amuse himself, spin them some bullshit about the snake that travelled from the coast and made the mountain, or how it was a black woman on her back or a dingo’s skull turned to stone in the Dreaming. Kerry had heard these various stories. She made a point of never asking, though. Asking questions was the worst way to find something out, where Pop was concerned.
One Saturday, she remembered as she ran around a bend that brought the mountain into full view, the family had been shorter than usual of both money and tucker. Tempers were fraying. Pretty Mary was cultivating a migraine and intent on sharing the misery around. Come, said Pop, picking up his round tin of tobacco and his Tally-Ho papers. Not for her company, Kerry surmised, and not to further her education either, but to help him carry the catch while the boys were off at footy in Ballina. Nudging thirteen, she must have been. Scrap of a kid, a brown tomboy still looking much like her brothers. After a half hour of fruitless searching through Scruffy McCarthy’s back paddocks, Kerry heard the shot. Pop cooeed, Akubra pushed back and the .22 hanging loose in his right hand. A wallaby kicking and seeping red a few steps away. Pop went over and shot it in the head, no mucking about. Kerry hung back from the peppery smell of the gunpowder and the blood mixed together. The awful wonder of the rifle, delivering death to anything Pop chose. She felt a bit sick from it. Why had he even brought her? He never had before; hunting meat was men’s work, not that of a girl, a les
ser being.
He glanced at where she stood hesitating.
‘C’mere, I won’t shoot ya.’
She stepped closer. Not because she wanted to. The animal lay with its body slack, one ragged bullet hole in the neck and the coup de grâce smaller and neater in the head. Flies already buzzing. The single visible eye had glazed over and the mouth was slightly open, showing a row of tiny snow-white teeth. Her stomach made a noise. I’m sorry, she told the animal silently, knowing full well that it had to die in order for them to eat. With dinner secure, Pop was happy. He turned Kerry by the shoulder to face the mountain and flapped a hand at the ground. They sat side by side, flicking flies away while he rolled a smoke. In the distance Kerry noticed the rest of the wallaby family on the slope of the mountain, standing upright with their ears pricked in her direction. When she asked Pop if they were going after another one he said no, no need to be greedy, and anyway he thought he had some work coming later that week from young Matt Nunne. Castrating and branding calves.
It was healthy pasture they sat on. Thick grass. A scatter of thistles. Here and there a eucalyptus sucker trying to claim back the open ground. McCarthy was a good farmer, Pop said. He knew about overgrazing and so this paddock was empty other than for a few dry cows mooching around the creek. The paspalum blades they had walked over were mostly intact, green leaves with near-invisible lines of teeny tiny veins running the length of them, delivering food and water, same as veins did for a person. Or a wallaby. But just here where they had stopped was an obviously nibbled clump, freshly nipped in the last hour or two, likely by the animal Pop had just shot. The grass that had been grown for McCarthy’s cows lay undigested in the stomach of the jiraman her family would consume that night. It goes on and on and on in a dizzying loop, Kerry thought. It never ends. The beginnings which are endings which are beginnings again. Was that what Granny Ruth had meant when she said: everything is connected up, bub, always, whether you can see it or not.
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