Too Much Lip

by Melissa Lucashenko

‘Old Owen Addison. Remember Kenny Salter, that blackfella who coached the under-fourteens a while back? His grandad. Apparently the tribe used to squat out on Settlement Road for years, so I’d better show me face before they slap a land rights claim over it.’

  ‘Fuck me sideways,’ swore Martina at her screen.

  ‘What?’ Kylie asked.

  ‘Average house auction clearance on the North Shore: eighty-nine per cent!’ she told Kylie as she got up and slammed her office door shut. She returned to her desk and sat staring at her Sydney to Hobart desk calendar. Coming to a strange agency in Patterson was without question one of her worst decisions of recent times. And why hadn’t Will returned her texts from last night? She sat stewing for several minutes, then went and rinsed her face in the bathroom and reapplied her makeup. She might be a lot of things – she was a lot of things – but she was no quitter. And now, on the way back to her office, she could see two window shoppers hovering on the footpath. He had Calvin Klein sunnies and a bemused expression. The wife was doing the talking though, and that diamond ring was a full carat.

  ‘Watch and learn, grasshopper,’ Martina said to Kylie, heading outside with her hand extended.

  ‘Martina Rossi. Looking to invest? Great. Now, I expect you probably already know,’ she told them, carefully standing to block their line of sight to an invalid pensioner heading inside the grog shop on his motorised scooter, ‘that this area’s really changing. Byron Shire buyers are definitely coming to Patterson these days. Hey – great ring!’

  ~

  Ken was nursing his fourth UDL of the day when the XD pulled in late at St Michael’s. He was a long way past driving, but not too far gone to register that the crowd was on the small side. The realisation fanned the embers of his resentment into a roaring blaze. ‘Every cunt’s right there when they want something,’ he slurred to Pretty Mary as she reapplied her lipstick, ‘but they can’t be arsed turning up for his funeral, can they? Pack of mongrel dogs.’

  ‘Settle down, son,’ she urged. ‘It’s too close to Christmas for a lot of people. And the heat would kill a horse.’ She patted at her sweating neck with a hanky. ‘Look, Uncle Richard mob ere.’ Pretty Mary was faint from lack of sleep and the heat, but she kept it to herself. ‘Pass me them tissues, Donny.’ She stashed the box inside her handbag and opened the car door. ‘And grab them gum leaves and the didge outta the boot too, bub.’ She wiped her eyes and redoubled her determination to do things just right.

  Kerry was already waiting outside the church. Like Ken, she’d been surprised to see several vacant parking spaces in the street. Pop had been one of ten central figures to set up the Patterson Aboriginal Co-op in the eighties. ‘You’d think more mob would make an effort,’ she told Donny, who simply shrugged. Donny had very low expectations of the world.

  ‘Chill, bruz,’ Black Superman reassured Ken, walking him towards the church. ‘Them ones that matter are all here, ’cept for sissy of course. So fuck the rest of em, eh?’

  Ken’s complaints stopped, but his bad mood hung over the family as they made their way through the crowd. Donny kept to the rear, well away from his father’s derision, and when they got inside the high-ceilinged church, he hung back while Pretty Mary argued with Ken.

  ‘No bloody way! I’m the oldest, it’s my responsibility,’ spat Ken. ‘I spent all last night on the fucken eulogy!’ He thrust an illegible page of scrawl at his mother as proof. Always big, Ken seemed to double in size when rage took hold of him, as though his anger had physical mass and bulk to it.

  ‘I know, but I want you with me, Kenny Koala,’ Pretty Mary lied, the church swirling around her. ‘I need my eldest son beside me on a day like today.’ As though to illustrate the point further, she lurched down the aisle and sank, exhausted, into the front pew. Ken remained on his feet, arms folded and jaw set.

  ‘Ya think I can’t do it? Gotta get a little gay boy from the city to talk for us mob!’

  ‘It’s not about you and him,’ Kerry interjected. ‘It’s about Pop. And Mum. Look at her! She’s crook!’

  ‘You keep ya nose out of it,’ Ken slurred, shaking the last drops from his UDL into his mouth. ‘Show up after ten years and start telling us mob what to fucken do …’ He crumpled the can and threw it twenty metres into a metal rubbish bin in the foyer, the loud clang attracting the attention of the small crowd.

  ‘Three pointer,’ Ken crowed. ‘Still got it!’

  Black Superman narrowed his eyes and made a low warning sound, somewhere between a growl and an exhalation.

  ‘Kenny, please! I can’t take much more of this.’ Pretty Mary’s voice rose to a tearful quaver. Aunty Val went over, two of Savannah’s curly blonde jahjams clustered about her legs like day-old chicks. The normally snotty urchins had been scrubbed and shampooed and plaited within an inch of their lives. Hmmph, thought Kerry, nodding a tight hello. That shows some respect, at least. When Val sat down and put a fat white arm around Pretty Mary’s shoulders, tears began to trickle down her mother’s cheeks. Pretty Mary dabbed at her face some more and leaned into Val’s shoulder, shuddering with grief.

  ‘That’s it, darl,’ said Aunty Val, who was cagey enough not to tackle the problem of Ken head on. ‘Don’t hold it in, that won’t do anyone any good. Have a good cry, love.’ She put both plump arms around Pretty Mary and held her tight. To Kerry’s shock, her mother began to cry loudly and wetly against Val’s prosthetic breasts.

  ‘Mum needs ya next to her, bruz,’ Black Superman said in a hard voice. ‘And Pop woulda wanted us to look after her today, of all days.’

  ‘Christ All-fucking-mighty. Have it your way then,’ Ken said, with a glare at the crowd for general consumption. ‘Ya always do.’ He folded his scrawled page one-handed, and stuffed it back in his pocket. Donny, who had been hovering cautiously on the other side of the church, slid in at the end of the pew next to Kerry, pleased to be separated from Ken by his Aunty, both neighbours, and a three- and five-year-old in pink satin flower-girl’s dresses.

  Black Superman’s charcoal suit put those of the undertakers to shame. Clean-shaven and sombre, he murmured in the ears of those who wanted tactful murmurs. He joked with those who needed to laugh. He made sure oversized egos were flattered and that myriad minor community fissures stayed underground. And mostly, it worked. After Chris played his didge low and sad to bring the casket inside for the smoking, Black Superman gave an improvised address, which most present took to be the eulogy. Then he invited up Uncle Richard, a local legend whose offspring and hangers-on made up a good quarter of the crowd.

  Uncle Richard faced the congregation, his handsome face lopsided now from Bell’s palsy, and told yarns he’d heard about Pop growing up near Rivertown, a long way to the south. He spoke about Pop’s service to the local community, and followed with a pointed suggestion that Black Superman could do worse than work for his mob closer to home, like his Pop had. Just as Kerry was interpreting this as a rebuke, Uncle Richard floored her by observing that Black Superman had the same guts as his grandfather, and the same intelligence to know just what the Goorie community needed and how to get it. Kerry nearly fell off her chair. An openly gay man was being anointed as Pop’s successor in a dusty country town run by corrupt rednecks. She looked around and saw some old people nodding in enthusiastic agreement. It’s 2018 and Patterson finally gets over a bit of its homophobia, she thought warily. Wonders would never bloody cease.

  Forced to sit and watch Uncle Richard bestow this status on his younger brother, Ken looked daggers. He sighed loudly and jiggled his right foot on the white-tiled floor. Waves of aggravation came off him. Don’t blow, Kerry silently prayed. Mum can’t cope with much more.

  ‘And I’m not forgetting all you’ve done for our family, Kenny,’ Uncle Richard added from the podium, turning to face Ken square on. ‘We all know you were there for your Pop, just like you’ll be there for your Mum and everyone else, nephew. Sometim
es the hardest and most important jobs are the ones done behind closed doors, the work that nobody else sees. That’s the real Goorie culture, that is. Respect you for it, my nephew.’

  Shrewd old bugger, thought Kerry. Ken nodded, mollified just enough to sit and swallow the insult of Black Superman’s elevation.

  A battered old boxing mate got up then, and waxed lyrical about Pop’s Silver Gloves glory, the actual gloves sitting right there in pride of place on top of the coffin above a replica of King Bobby Saltwater’s precious kingplate, which had long been lost to history. The replica was only brought out by Pretty Mary for special occasions, in this case over the objections of Black Superman, who had argued that not being a King Bobby descendant, Pop didn’t deserve the honour. The boxing mate lionised Pop, repeating the words ‘warrior’ and ‘fighter’ ad nauseam, to general approval. Then, doing her best to ignore Ken’s agitation, Kerry got up and read a poem about absent friends and those who’d gone before, which made Pretty Mary sob and cry out for both Donna and Pop in the same breath.

  Ken’s foot-tapping grew more compulsive during the reading of the poem. He drummed his fingers silently on the end of the pew, too, until, as Kerry returned to her seat, relieved that the program was nearly done and she would soon be able to escape, he rocketed to his feet and brushed Black Superman aside to get to the podium. It had been an age since Ken had binned the UDL can. Didn’t your body process one alcoholic drink per hour? Kerry prayed that he had sobered just enough to fake it. Prayed that he might not slur, or stagger sideways, or say anything too outrageous to those white townsfolk who had shown up at Pop’s funeral for mysterious reasons of their own. And to her huge relief, up on the podium Ken came across not as charged up, but wobbly with grief. He talked of how hard it had been to lose Donna back in ’99, but how they had all managed to pull together through the horror. About Pop’s popularity as a one-term ATSIC commissioner, and how his teenage boxing had kept his family mostly free of the Rivertown mission, buying them the chance to eventually come north to Durrongo, where the grip of the church and the Welfare was slightly less tyrannical.

  He told of a middle-aged Pop outwitting a state minister for housing with free booze and strippers, an outwitting that had meant, in the end, another black house purchased for the Co-op. In the second row, Jim Buckley, who belonged to the same political party as the member in question, grinned as widely as anyone at this yarn. Kerry noticed Buckley discreetly checking the time on his phone, and shot laser death-rays from her eyes. Peeyow. Peeyow. Time to go rip someone else off, must be. Time for another dodgy deal. Kerry fought back an impulse to run from the church immediately, and ride straight out to Jim’s acreage mansion on the river. Break in and ransack the joint, till she was holding her backpack in her own black mitts once again. But it was probably already too late, she thought in silent fury. Buckley would have opened it in the past few days for sure, and her precious swag would be history.

  On the podium, Ken reflected on the time Pop had bought a flash Chevrolet with a windfall from Jupiters Casino, only to have the car break down the very next week a hundred kays outside Coffs.

  ‘Pop was so wild at being taken for a mug by that car dealer, he just got out and walked away on the spot!’ Ken told the assembled crowd. ‘It was easy come, easy go with him. He was a real traditional blackfella like that … yeah, yeah, yeah.’ Ken waved Black Superman’s entreaties away breezily. He wasn’t finished yet by a long shot. He was the oldest. He owned the story of Pop’s life, nobody else. Black Superman could kiss his date, the little faggot.

  ‘And look, Pop had his faults. But I don’t think anybody here’s in a position to cast the first stone, we ain’t none of us perfect,’ Ken went on. ‘He had a temper on him. I know more than one whitefella regretted running his mouth to Pop. You didn’t want to cross him unless you could knuckle on, that’s for sure. But you know, he was always there, at the head of the family. And you know what else? He learned how to fight from the mish mob down in Rivertown, and from our deadly Elders here too. Them Elders who came before us, who had to really fight the dugai who wanted them gone so they could steal our land.’

  Here Ken glared at the scattering of white faces in the pews. He spied Jim Buckley, and gave him a particularly ferocious scowl. Although a few ancient Aunties looked disapproving, plenty of the Goorie men and women nodded vigorously, giving Ken fresh impetus.

  ‘Pop grew up doing it hard, on and off the mish! He copped some savage floggings in his time, you better believe it. And he fell in love with this ere country when his son Charlie married a Durrongo girl. Ava’s Island’s where he wanted to be put, and Ava’s Island’s where he’s going to be.’

  More nodding, and several cries of loud agreement from the crowd. Jim Buckley narrowed his eyes at the mention of Ava’s Island. Ken’s eyebrows drew down low. He leaned forward. His voice changed from grieving-but-genial to something close to apocalyptic. He loomed over the crowd like a thundercloud about to burst. One or two white people shivered.

  ‘And because he was a leader. And because he came from a line of fighters. Fighters the same breed as Grandad Chinky Joe, and Granny Ava, and Granny Ruth. That’s why this—’

  And here Ken produced that morning’s copy of the Patterson Herald from beneath his coat. He held it aloft, his arm trembling. Kerry suddenly saw that Ken was shaking, not with alcohol, or with sorrow, but with sheer unadulterated rage. With his free hand, he began to thump the podium, hard.

  ‘—this, this bullshit isn’t about to happen (thump). It says here council wants to sell off a hundred acres on Settlement Road and let a joint consortium build a correctional facility on the bend there right near Ava’s Island. Yeah, I can see you sitting there, Jim Buckley, yeah, that’s right! (thump) Well I fucken got news for you, pal!’ Ken hurled the newspaper towards Buckley in violent disgust. His aim was off and it scattered, instead, over the top of the coffin, ending up on the floor. Buckley flinched as the crowd gasped.

  Ken pointed directly at Jim Buckley with his right index finger. If looks could kill, thought Kerry, amazed at how far Ken would actually go. In a church. At their grandfather’s funeral.

  ‘I’m here to tell you, Jim Buckley, that over my dead Bundjalung body will our land ever see a jail on it. That’s a sacred site, right there (thump). Our grandmothers are buried there (thump), our great-grandfather is buried there (thump) and our Pop’s gonna be buried there too! (an extra loud thump) So I suggest that anyone who thinks otherwise had better stand up and clear off, right fucking now. Keep ya stinking jails off our land! You want a fight? I’ll give ya a fight alright, a fight you’ll never bloody forget!’

  Ken reached down and seized the replica kingplate from the top of Pop’s coffin. He glared at the assembly and raised it high as he let out an enraged yell.

  The blackfellas in the church cheered loud and long. A show, a bit of excitement for once in the sleepy country town that was Patterson! This was a lot more like it! Pretty Mary cried out in wild agreement, and waved her sodden hanky enthusiastically in the air, unfortunately seeming to signal surrender, but everyone knew what she meant. Sitting immediately behind her, Jim Buckley was trapped. He couldn’t stand and leave as Ken had challenged him to. He couldn’t argue back – it was a funeral, for Christ’s sake, despite all the unbelievable carryings-on around him. He had to sit tight, retain the dignity of the mayor’s office, and hold fast to the comforting thought that Ava’s Island might well be protected State Forest, but the land on the riverbank opposite was freehold for kilometres on either side. Kenny Salter could threaten him with grandmothers and sacred fucking sites till the cows came home. He hadn’t a leg to stand on.

  At the precise minute the loud cheering was beginning to fade, Black Superman stepped up to Ken’s side. He made a brief power salute in solidarity, then dropped his arm around Ken’s shoulders and skilfully relieved him of the kingplate with the other. Ken somehow found himself offstage
and delivered into the practised custody of the undertakers. Kerry collected the scattered pages of the Herald as Black Superman urgently signalled for the final song. Then Chris began to drone on his didge once again and the coffin bearers stood, ready to carry Pop out. They were four when they should have been six – Ken was outside with Uncle Richard in the rose garden – and Black Superman bit his bottom lip. He frowned, deep in thought, before tapping both Donny and Val’s husband, Neil, on the shoulder to take their vacant places. Donny looked in terror at Kerry. ‘You can do it,’ she whispered fiercely. And so, with his narrow wrists and bony shoulders, Donny took his place among five grown men, and bravely helped carry the weight of his great-grandfather away.

  ~

  Black Superman and Kerry stood at the front door as the crowd thinned and drifted towards the car park. Ken had been whisked off to the wake, away from further troublesome speechifying. Mayor Buckley had gladhanded a few voters, and deflected their pointed questions. Understandable emotion, he said. Difficult time for the family. All the proper processes sure to be followed. Then he signed the guest book and, with a tight-lipped nod towards Black Superman, fled down the rear stairs and back to council chambers as fast as his LandCruiser could take him. Only a sprinkling of mourners remained chin-wagging in the foyer, where the Christmas tree had been tactfully pushed to the back corner, lest it shed too festive an air on the afternoon’s proceedings. Uncle Richard came to the door alongside his wife, Trish, the beloved couple trailing jahjams like the Pied Piper. Uncle Richard smiled ruefully at Kerry and Black Superman.

  ‘You know I can’t stay here, Uncle, eh, my job’s in Sydney …’ Black Superman said, hugging the old man tight. Like most of the rellos, Uncle Richard was long and lanky with a medium-brown complexion. Tall, dark and oh so handsome, as the Salter men liked to chant, or at least he had been, before the palsy dropped one half of his face a good two inches below the other. But Uncle Richard’s brown eyes had remained deep wells of kindness, beneath a fringe of silver curls.