‘Yeah, I know ya not ready, neph. But it’s important to let everybody know where we stand, eh. You too, bub,’ he added to Kerry. ‘You mob need anything, need any help at all, you let me know, alright? This country’s crying out for you young ones to come home.’ He opened his arms to her and Kerry fell into them tearfully, wishing – not for the first time – that his branch of the family had been in Patto during Pretty Mary’s drinking days. Lismore was a long enough drive on winding country back roads to feel like another planet at times. When Uncle Richard and his entourage walked outside, Kerry saw him sling an arm around her cousin’s shoulder, and her throat caught fire with jealous longing.
I wish you were my Dad. I wish that arm was for me.
‘Never a dull moment with Kenny fucken Koala around,’ Black Superman murmured, smiling and waving polite acknowledgement of some scandalised Aunties from Kyogle.
‘Come and see us before you leave, bub,’ one Aunty ordered. Black Superman promised he would.
‘Christ, what a shamejob,’ Kerry muttered, glad that she was too dark to blush. She paused, still gobsmacked at the idea of a jail plonked on Aunty Ava’s river bend. ‘Not that that greedy cunt Buckley hasn’t got it coming. Of all his stupid ideas, this one just about takes the cake.’
‘I can’t see it getting up,’ Black Superman replied. ‘It’d take millions.’
‘Didn’t you read the paper? Chinese consortium’s behind it,’ Kerry told him glumly. ‘Plus the state government.’ You didn’t have to love white people to be a realist. What dugais wanted, they usually got.
‘Sorry for your loss, sis. Uncle Owen got me my apprenticeship back in the day, when I was headed down a real bad track,’ a nuggetty Githabul man told Kerry, kissing her cheek and adding to the collective germ count there. ‘I’ll always be grateful to him for that.’
‘Aw, thanks, brother. Pop was real proud of you, eh.’
The plumber clasped hands blackfella style with Black Superman and headed off, crossing paths as he did so with a familiar figure on the far side of the foyer.
‘Oh no. You have got to be bloody kidding,’ said Kerry, recognising the back of a head of light-brown curls. Black Superman drew himself up and straightened his already immaculate jacket.
‘Well, well, well,’ he murmured in his sister’s ear. ‘I spy with my littlest eye a very hot tin of meat indeed.’
Kerry put her hands on her hips.
‘At Pop’s funeral? Just how big of a slut are you?’
Black Superman ignored her disdain as puritanical and irrelevant. ‘Sex and death, baby. That’s what it’s all about. And keep right on rolling them eyes, too, ya might find the keys to the city back there.’
‘He’s straight,’ Kerry told her brother witheringly. ‘He’s white. And unless he’s completely out of his head, Ken’s little performance will have him running for the hills. Nobody’s that womba.’
‘They all straight till they ain’t, baby,’ Black Superman was insouciant. ‘And how do you know, anyway? Been there?’
Because it took that hot tin of meat less than thirty seconds to crack on to me the other day, Kerry thought. By, um, smiling and asking me if I remembered him. She wondered suddenly if it had all been in her head. Maybe Steve was just being friendly. Maybe she had tickets on herself.
‘He went to Patto High,’ Kerry said, as Steve headed in their direction, wearing a black polo shirt filled with muscle in all the right places.
Black Superman narrowed his eyes at her. Kerry sported a silver cross beneath her silky cream shirt, and two silver rings on her right hand. With her slimline black trousers and heavy biker boots, and her dark hair gleaming halfway down her back, she could very easily get in the way of his newest attraction.
‘Well, I seen him first!’ Black Superman hissed into her ear, then turned back and adjusted his tie. ‘And you’re a dyke!’
‘You’re a parent!’ she snapped indignantly. ‘Think I’m babysitting for ya while ya try and root straight white boys, think again, man-whore!’
‘What do you care? Jelly?’ Black Superman’s nostrils flared.
‘Steve! Didn’t expect to see you here.’ Kerry flashed him a smile, desperately hoping that ‘man-whore’ hadn’t carried the width of the foyer.
‘Very sorry for your loss,’ Steve said, shaking hands with Black Superman with just the right degree of friendly seriousness. Then, murmuring the same words, he leaned in and kissed Kerry. Ridiculously, her thighs trembled as his lips came oh so very close to her mouth. Right there. In church. In public. Clearly, she was losing her mind.
‘Thanks for coming,’ answered Black Superman formally, as though the words ‘a hot tin of meat’ had never been uttered. ‘Steve, isn’t it? Did you know Pop, then?’
Steve explained that he had done a bit of boxing with the old bloke as a kid and never forgotten him. He’d been looking for something at thirteen, and like a lot of boys went to the boxing ring to find it. Black Superman nodded knowingly and invited him to the wake.
‘For sure. I might need a lift though,’ Steve turned to Kerry. ‘Did you bring a car?’
His eyes met hers and none of it – not one tiny little bit – had been in her head. Look away, she told herself, look away right now, and think about something else. Forget about those soft lips, those shoulders, ignore his narrow man hips in blue jeans and how you’d like to undo that worn leather belt and then start slipping those silver buttons through their denim holes, drawing them jeans down lower and lower still … Forget how his arm looked when he flexed it; how much you wanted him to reach for you then, and draw you in till your mouth was on his and your tongues began to oh-so-gently meet each other, and then have his hands slide up your neck to the back of your head and hold you perfectly still with both hands and then you’d kiss until—
‘Oh, I’m sure we can rustle you up a lift,’ Black Superman said matter-of-factly, beckoning Uncle Neil back inside so that a ride could be organised. ‘Damn shame Allie couldn’t be here with you, hey?’ he asked Kerry in a loud, clear voice. Kerry decided to poison Black Superman before sundown.
‘Who’s Allie?’ Steve asked, as Black Superman turned away.
‘Ah. No car here. I ride a bike,’ she said. One question at a time. And who was Allie, anyway? The love of her life, who had unceremoniously dumped her in a thirty-second phone call from BWCC. She nodded at the bike parked on the front lawn, at the epicentre of a group of admirers. Kerry had never in her life been so pleased to ride a Harley.
‘Ah, the Softail. That explains the boots. Well, who needs a car?’ Steve grinned.
‘Sorry. No spare helmet,’ Kerry said, pretending a massive indifference as to whether or not this fine-looking specimen was pressed hard up against her on the back of the bike in the next five minutes. Hands slung low around her waist. Only two thin layers of denim separating the riders as they hurtled down the highway. Steve laughed an easy laugh.
‘I’ve ridden all around South America,’ he said. ‘If I’d worried about helmets I’d still be the dumb gringo waiting at Mexico City central station.’
Steve pushed his fists into the pockets of his snug jeans. His wide shoulders curved forward just a little as he leaned in closer. Kerry could smell his aftershave, could glimpse beneath his shirt collar where the deep furrow of tanned neck muscle met his shoulder. Could almost feel that muscle beneath her fingers, imagine it meeting her mouth as she melted into him.
‘Or don’t you want to ride with me?’ he asked, nudging her shoulder and smiling, as though the question was ridiculous and the matter already settled.
Kerry felt everything slipping sideways. She was sand beneath an outgoing tide. Nobody but Allie was allowed on her bike. And she had warrants, the kind that would see her slapped in prison with no prospect of bail if the cops caught up with her. It would be an act of pure insanity to risk riding down the highway car
rying a helmetless Steve Abarco, no matter how gorgeous those brown eyes locked onto hers might be, or what they might be promising about the night to come.
Fuck it all to hell, Allie. Fuck it all to hell. Who knocks off TABs with cop cars next door?
‘Did you need me?’ Uncle Neil asked Black Superman, arriving with a memorial booklet in one hand and his car keys jingling in the other.
‘It’s not that I don’t want to,’ Kerry croaked hopelessly at Steve. ‘I just can’t.’
She bolted to the front lawn, yanked her helmet on and blasted away. Who’s Allie? She heard the question echo all the way down the highway. Who’s Allie? as she gunned it hard in the right-hand lane. Who’s Allie? My ex, the stab of the dumping still bitter to recall. Who’s Allie? The idiot who let herself be identified during the hold-up; the staunch one who didn’t dog me to the gunjies even though I copped the swag. The one with here for a good time not a long time tattooed on her arm and Thug Life Tupac-style on her belly in red, black and gold. The womba one who thinks I shoulda got arrested with her, and who dumped me when I ran. There were a thousand answers to Steve’s question, and not one of them was a cure for the heartbreak tearing her apart.
After twenty minutes, Kerry dropped into third and turned left into Main Street. Allie might be a Pandora’s box too painful to contemplate, but at least Kerry knew who she herself was: a Salter and a blackfella, and a woman too fucking smart to fall for the first handsome dugai who smiled at her. So, when she discovered herself a fly suspended in a sticky web, the general store on her left, the pub and the wake and all its attendant dangers looming on her right, she took a very deep breath, dropped her wrist, and with a wild roar of anguish kept on riding towards the T-junction, and Mount Monk, and home.
Chapter Six
Pretty Mary paused in her wrapping of the Christmas presents.
‘I keep telling ya there’s not gonna be any prison, bub. Why would they put a prison on our beautiful river?’
‘Same reason they do anything. Shit for brains was on the news the other day, saying how there’s jobs in locking up criminal blacks. He’s got a fucking nerve. If I’d had me phone to film him at the river that day it’d be a different story. Coulda sent it to ICAC …’
‘Lotta cash in nigger farming,’ Ken chimed in, washing down his antidepressant with a slug of coffee. He and Kerry had found common ground lately through a shared loathing of the mayor. Kerry had even contemplated asking him for help retrieving her backpack.
‘Oh, don’t, bub, please. I hate that word.’ Pretty Mary looked raw and weary, as she had all week. Her blood was tired; her bones were tired. Her hair was tired. She picked up a few Watchtowers off the floor and stacked them with the others on the kitchen table, trying to neaten the pile with both hands, only to have it slump into disorder again the instant she stopped.
‘Me too. But not as much as I hate that prick,’ Kerry told her. To her fury, Pretty Mary shook her head.
‘The cards don’t lie, my girl.’
Kerry swore energetically under her breath as she stomped downstairs to wash the bike. Nothing, absolutely nothing, would convince her mother that the threat was real. According to Black Superman, lofty with the three units of psychology he’d done at teachers’ college a decade ago, it was a classic case of denial. Same as the crippling gut ache their mother had suffered since the funeral. It’s just stress and grief playing out, and it takes time, that’s all, he told Kerry from where he sat on the back stairs.
‘Time’s exactly what we ain’t got,’ Ken said, leaning out the kitchen window, blowing out a white cloud, for he had taken up smoking again after being appeased at the wake with durries as well as grog. ‘We gotta act, bruz, not just bloody talk, talk, talk.’ Action was his new catchcry; Ken’s self-image had shifted from Retired-Footy-Hero-cum-Sex-God to Activist and Culture Man. So far his activism had consisted of vague threats of revolution down the pub, and of dragging an ancient land rights shirt from the bottom of the hall cupboard.
‘Oppressed peoples must be the agents of their own liberation,’ Ken quoted, then turned to Pretty Mary in the kitchen. ‘Mum, you gonna heat up them party pies or what? Me stomach thinks me throat’s cut.’
Kerry soaped her bike wheels, seeing the white bubbles on her sponge turn into a stream of red suds dribbling over the ground beneath the house and onto the lawn. The red dust had begun life deep in the volcano to the east. Then with the big eruption millions of years ago it had been pushed sky high to form the Great Dividing Range. Which then eroded over thousands of centuries to end up in the clearing opposite Ava’s Island. Now the dirt was entering another incarnation, destined to spend a decade or three in the backyard at Durrongo before washing down to Stockmans Creek and, eventually, out to sea on the far side of Patto. Human lives are nothing compared to the land. We are so tiny, so insignificant, Kerry thought, mesmerised by the red bubbles. And yet at the same time, our lives matter, too.
She looked up. What was Ken mansplaining now?
‘Good point,’ said Black Superman. ‘I know a QC through work. I’ll find out if there’s an injunction or anything we can bring against it. Get onto the Land Council, too.’
‘Land Council’s flat out with native title,’ Ken said dismissively. ‘They won’t give a shit, anyway, not with Warren running the show.’
‘Tell yer QC mate we’re making pipe bombs,’ said Kerry, polishing her petrol tank with a chamois. ‘And some of them IEDs, or whatever they call em. Invade my Granny’s fucking land, good go.’ She drifted off into a fantasy of the entire family standing in the middle of Settlement Road. Buckley faced them, revving his LandCruiser from a hundred metres away, his pigger bitch growling in the cabin beside him. A shotgun pointed across the dash; they could see its two deathly eyes looking straight at them. Kerry, in the centre of the Salter mob, took her hands off her hips and taunted Buckley, showing him two emphatic middle fingers. Cross this line, motherfucka, and see what ya get. And as the mayor drove forward onto the IED – KABOOM! Bits of Establishment blown sky high from arsehole to breakfast time.
‘Molotov cocktails, too,’ added Ken, sending off a text in the hope of winning a new washing machine he could flog on eBay.
‘Ah, Molotov cocktail so last century, bruz,’ Kerry told him scornfully. ‘Get with the program!’
Inside the house Pretty Mary burst into song. The loud strains of ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’ radiated from every open window, chastising her children for their apostasy and faithlessness.
‘Natural born Christian,’ said Ken, shaking his head.
‘I better grab them little street rats,’ said Black Superman, heaving himself off the stairs. ‘Aunty Val’ll have em fulla red cordial.’
‘I’ll go,’ offered Ken, heading next door. Kerry frowned suspiciously, wondering aloud if Val had grog on offer. Black Superman snorted and gave her a pitying glance. Ken was sniffing next door for a scrape, he told her. Ken and Savannah had hooked up again over the Black & Gold sausage rolls at the wake. Hadn’t she noticed what a good mood he’d been in since the funeral?
Kerry groaned. It wasn’t just the antidepressants kicking in, then. She could see it now, Pretty Mary’s next grandchild, plonked on Aunty Val’s hip with a rebel flag waving in its little white hand.
‘You’re just bloody racist,’ Black Superman laughed.
‘I wish Ken fucking was,’ she retorted. ‘If he’s gonna make more fairskin kids they could at least be bloody Black.’
‘You saying Donny’s not Black?’
‘Course he’s Black. But we growed him up, not a pack of dopey fucken bogans listening to Alan Jones and voting for One Notion.’
Black Superman grinned and went inside to tell Pretty Mary to hide the presents. There was no arguing with Kerry about dugais. Of the four Salter kids, she was the only one who had never gone with a whitefella, never even looked like she might. They’re
so full of themselves, she would always say with a curled lip, look at em. The whitenormalsavages, could ya even wanna.
~
Christmas passed with the usual quota of street brawls, fierce hangovers and car accidents up and down the Far North Coast. Ken punched out the wrong redneck and got himself barred from the pub for a month. New Year exploded in a brief scattering of fireworks over the Patto showground and, as January creaked on, Pretty Mary retrieved the Tarot Teepee from the back shed, despite the persistent pain in her stomach.
After Black Superman took the kids home to Sydney, Kerry and Donny went to the river daily. Kerry was determined to swim with him there, and fish, and yarn her nephew real good ways, never understanding the cruelty in what she was doing. She drew the lad out of his room, took him from his safe fantasy world on the computer, and handed the river to him on a plate, in all its complex glory, its dangers and beauty and wholeness. She drew Nature Boy out of long hibernation, poked and prodded him to life, blinking and yawning, and hurled him back, literally, into the stream of life. Into the river that was about to be stolen away again, as it always had been since Captain James Nunne Esq. first rode up with his troopers, one two three, crying I’ll have that, and that, oh, and that too, while I’m at it.
Kerry did this each morning, thinking she was doing Donny a service by remaining in Durrongo. Then lay sweating buckets on the veranda every afternoon, until the shade of the leopard tree shifted onto the rusting roof, and the air grew cool enough to move again. She rode past Jim Buckley’s mansion a half dozen times, her plans for revenge constantly stymied by its high fence and swivelling cameras. She took tarot lessons from Pretty Mary to pass the time, not believing a single word of it.
What she didn’t ever do was run in the early morning past the cattle farms at the base of Mount Monk; that, or let anyone realise how often she looked out the window around dawn, hoping – and yet not hoping – to glimpse the passing figure of Steve Abarco. Instead, she focused on her nephew, and on the profoundly corrupt mysteries of the council’s decision-making process, and never let herself forget the oily smile on Jim Buckley’s face as she squatted in the lantana that day, watching him flog off her Granny’s country to a stranger in a John Deere cap.
Too Much Lip Page 10