Their eyes locked. Both of them forgot about the phone as they suddenly realised where they were. Kerry was sitting on top of a grown man she hardly knew, and their sweating thighs were separated by little more than his flimsy nylon footy shorts. Kerry shifted her weight, shamefully aware of the heat of Steve’s hips and the fact of his groin directly below her own. Her body thrummed inside with this awareness; a long unconscious groan slipped from her. Steve heard, and a slow smile spread across his face.
‘Have dinner with me tomorrow night and I’ll surrender the contraband,’ he bargained. Kerry tested the strength of his grip on her wrists and what she discovered sent a deep shiver of anticipation down the entire length of her body. Beneath the purple costume her nipples began to grow taut.
‘Did you want to maybe get a room,’ suggested a man walking past with a burbling toddler on his shoulders, ‘or start charging for pay-per-view?’
‘Thanks for the tip,’ Steve shot back. He peered up at Kerry. Her hair spiralled wildly in all directions now, and the crystal pendant hung skewiff against her cleavage, rising and falling with her deep breaths.
‘Well, what do ya reckon?’
‘I’m doing the night markets tomorrow.’ Kerry shut her eyes. Steve had the most amazing shoulders. She could feel his ridged six-pack against her lower arms, and she was hornier than she could remember being since high school. But this had gone way beyond flirting, and was fast turning into something else. What was going on? After all these years, a white man, really?
‘And besides …’ she began awkwardly. Steve was hard underneath her, and his hips were still rocking gently from side to side. She closed her fingers around her phone.
‘Look at me,’ Steve said, releasing her wrists. He ran his hands up her trembling arms to her head, and very gently pulled her down. Kerry’s last fragments of resistance shattered. Their lips met, tentatively at first, and then they were kissing long and deep, ignoring the catcalls and whistles of passers-by. Kissing Steve, Kerry had the odd sensation that the time that had passed since the Grade Nine disco, since that night when she wanted to kiss him and hadn’t, those nineteen years hadn’t really changed anything at all. They had barely even happened. There had been a strange and tremendous pause in things, until now, that was all; and as they lay together on the grass and kissed, the huge and immobile hands of time were creaking terribly slowly into gear again, and life was starting up afresh after that long but meaningless hiatus.
‘So will you come quietly,’ Steve teased when they finally broke apart, ‘or are you going to put up a fight?’
Kerry closed her eyes again. By touch alone, she used her index finger to trace the rectangular edges of her phone until she found the off button. She pushed it, hard. With a soft gurgle, the phone shut down to a blank, anonymous screen. Then she opened her eyes, which were soft and dark with longing for more kissing, for more Steve. For new beginnings.
She didn’t answer him in words. Instead she played for time, reached out to toy with the flap of his nylon shorts, running her finger gently beneath its lowest edge where it met his upper thigh. Then she brought her finger out, this time using it to trace the Parramatta Eels logo, and now it was Steve’s turn to moan with longing. He was rising to kiss her again at the same moment that Kerry leaned forward, slid her hand down low between their hot, close bellies and she found his erection. Steve’s cock leaped at her touch, and just like that, she had gone so far that the idea of stopping became impossible. Kerry knew she would fuck this stranger no matter how wrong it was.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Chapter Eight
Steaming February inched towards humid March. Kerry gave up arguing when Pretty Mary – never a huge Allie fan – referred to Steve as ‘your Mulaga’. At their first meeting, Ken had looked daggers at Steve but by the end of the day had settled into a shallow, easy blokiness around him. To see them fixing the XD brakes together you’d have thought they were mates from the womb, Kerry mused, for all that Steve was a pure merino. He had learned a bit from the Murri and Thai fighters he’d trained alongside for years on the Coast. Had the brains to just shuttup and listen when anything Black came up. That was a plus. And he had the rare knack, too, of deferring to Ken’s alpha bullshit without becoming lesser, or losing his inner balance. There was something about him that reminded Kerry curiously of Uncle Richard. A solid way of knowing who he was in the world and accepting it, neither shame of being born a whitefella nor silly about it. Whenever Kerry put casual, mocking shit on Steve for being a dugai and a coloniser he would flummox her by agreeing. Then add, the Poms dispossessed my mob too, of course, and plonked us here on someone else’s country. To enjoy the fruits of our genocide, Kerry quickly pointed out. It’s called the Caledonian River, pal, not the Albion. And once more he just said, you’re absolutely right, your mob’s loss was my mob’s gain, then pulled her closer for more distracting kisses.
Pretty Mary joked that the Salter family had two whitefellas in it now: Elvis and Steve. I wouldn’t go that bloody far, Kerry retorted. There was a big difference between having a bit of fun and outright owning a dugai. Let alone – perish the thought – being owned by one. No, Steve was strictly kept around for a laugh and she wasn’t about to let him forget it. When he had suggested dinner in Byron on Valentine’s Day, Kerry told him to buy hot chooks that the whole family could enjoy. Everyone except Donny, that was. Her nephew was still refusing anything other than lollies and two-minute noodles.
~
A week before the council was due to meet, a pow-wow was called. Pop’s plastic urn had been on top of the cupboard for weeks and a decision had to be made: would they take him to the river early? At least a year rightly should have passed before he was put back in the earth.
‘I know, I know, but this is the whiteman world we’re living in,’ argued Black Superman on FaceTime. ‘Better that he goes onto country now, cos if that jail gets built, there’s no telling if we’ll ever see Granny’s island again without being locked up next to it—’
‘The jail’s not gonna be built,’ said Ken implacably, as if that was an end to it. His word the law. You wish, thought Kerry. Snap back to reality, brother, it’s been waiting for you a while.
‘I need more time to think,’ complained Pretty Mary, sorting the washing faster and faster in an effort to quell her nerves. ‘Spirit don’t like it. And I can’t be put on the spot like this!’ A tower of threadbare towels wobbled in front of her.
‘Well don’t think too bloody hard,’ said Ken, scrubbing at his stubbled face with both palms, ‘or a piece of goonah might fall out ya ear.’
‘I reckon we do it now,’ said Kerry with a stroke of sudden genius. ‘Cos maybe this is why the cards are saying no. Maybe it’ll help stop the jail.’ In truth Kerry simply wanted to get the whole damn business sorted. Draw a line under the old man’s death and move on. Maybe then Pretty Mary’s guts would stop paining her. Maybe then the sobbing from the next bedroom would ease off, and she could think clearly about retrieving her backpack and making tracks away from Durrongo, where she seemed to have somehow gotten hopelessly mired for the second time in her life.
‘Hmm …’ Pretty Mary’s resistance was weakening, and when Black Superman promised to fly home for the ceremony, it crumbled altogether. The prospect of seeing her favourite child overrode Pretty Mary’s guilt about protocol.
But in the end Black Superman had to attend by FaceTime after a massive storm cell cancelled every flight out of Sydney. Aunty Tall Mary and Uncle Richard likewise sent their apologies from the big Treaty meeting in Canberra. Pretty Mary moaned and wept, but there was no alternative. It was better that most of the family put Pop to rest than none of them at all.
~
‘Slow down!’ screeched Donny as Ken took the gravelled turn into Settlement Road at sixty, sending Kerry sliding into Steve’s lap. In the front, Pretty Mary clutched Pop in his beautifully woven basket and prayed aloud.
Ken whooped, and drummed on the roof with his right hand. He hadn’t meant to make the car fishtail but he was high on adrenaline and loving every seat-clutching, dot-squeezing moment. In Donny’s lap, Elvis yipped as he came ever closer to flying out the window. Kerry seized his back leg as a precaution.
‘Slow down, ya stupid prick!’ she echoed Donny, to no avail.
‘Imma give the old fella a proper sendoff! Bunch of pussies!’ Ken yelled, as the XD straightened up. He planted his foot and hurtled down the dirt track running parallel to the river, the big crack in the windscreen giving the passengers the illusion that they were watching an action movie on multiple screens.
‘What’s going on? Youse there yet?’ Black Superman crackled, his face blurring to a smeary brown jigsaw as the reception on Pretty Mary’s iPhone faded in and out.
‘Ken’s driving like a maniac!’ Kerry told him. ‘Cos, you know, we all immortal, us mob.’
‘Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou among women—’
Ken was still laughing when Accadacca came on the radio. ‘Aw, deadly!’ He turned the dial as far as it would go.
‘Jailbreak!’ he sang, becoming Malcolm Young. ‘Jaaaaiiiilllbreak!’
‘Will you take it easy, for fuck’s sake!’ Kerry insisted, hauling herself up out of Steve’s lap. ‘We nearly lost Elvis that time!’
Steve held the phone out the window in a futile search for better reception.
Ken was speeding into the final left-hand turn when, appearing to finally hear their pleas, he hit the skids hard. But they didn’t have long to feel relieved. The Falcon slewed around the bend in a shower of red dirt and shuddered as it came to a long, sliding halt. With the car at a standstill, and dust blowing in all directions, everyone gaped. The Falcon’s faded blue bonnet had stopped hard up against a brand new weldmesh fence blocking the width of the entire road. There were no workmen in fluoro vests. No orange witches caps. No road-working equipment. Just the river glinting in the distance, and the silver barrier of the fence, right there smack bang in front of them. Wired to the fence was a red and white Patterson Real Estate sign. FOR SALE.
And plastered across it was a large diagonal sticker that read: UNDER CONTRACT.
Half a minute passed before anyone could talk, and then they all spoke at once.
‘Be fucked,’ said Donny.
‘I’ll sing that fucken dog!’ erupted Ken. ‘He wants a bullet in the brain, truesgod.’
‘No, it can’t be right,’ Pretty Mary protested, waving her hanky hard against the sign. ‘Can’t be right …’
‘I’m gonna fucken kill Buckley,’ threatened Kerry, punching the back of Ken’s seat over and over, until Steve grabbed her arm. He held her and she burst into hot tears. Donny sat, stunned, looking as though their trip to lay Pop to rest had been hijacked by little green aliens.
Pretty Mary stumbled out, grey-faced, onto the gravel. Donny unfolded his skinny legs and went to stand with ten fingers latched through the diamond mesh of the fence, gazing dumbly at the promised land beyond. Ken thrashed around the scrub, discovering that the weldmesh fence stretched to the riverbank in one direction and deep into thick bush on the other, where the XD had no hope of going. The fence was seven feet high and its posts were concreted into the ground: there was no way Pretty Mary, or probably even Ken, could get over it so they could scatter Pop’s remains as a family. He joined the others, who stood in a mute semicircle, facing the terrible sign.
‘Knock the cunt of a thing down,’ offered Donny with a hard kick at the real estate sign to demonstrate his seriousness. ‘We can just drive straight through it, eh.’ Kerry looked at the boy in surprise. His father glanced sideways at him, nodding. The shitheap XD was already old and scratched up; the weldmesh would probably come away from the uprights if they had any kind of speed up at all. Donny was on the money.
‘We have to get there,’ urged Pretty Mary. ‘I promised Pop I’d put him at the river with Granny and Grandad and your father. I promised.’ So breaking the law’s okay sometimes, is it, Kerry thought with a sharp flash of resentment.
‘Or could we get a tinnie, come up the river …’ Steve mused.
‘Show them dogs a thing or two,’ Ken nodded, but he was agreeing with Donny, not Steve. ‘Why should we have to sneak onto our own land to keep a pack of Captain Cook cunts happy? I should set fire to the whole bloody lot.’ Ken angrily lit a durrie, then with a wide-flung arm described an arc at the bush they stood in – five hundred acres of State Forest surrounded the dozen freehold acreage blocks that fronted the river. Kerry heaved a great sigh. Little wonder that her older brother had done not one, or two, but three stints in Grafton jail. Ken was the smartest fucking moron around, truesgod.
‘You mob all blind or what?’ she asked, pointing with her lips to the security camera stuck high in a gum tree five metres above the fence. Ken swore, put his smoke in his mouth and then jerked two fingers at the tree. Steve stared at the camera for a long minute. The group sagged. Then Elvis trotted over and casually lifted his leg against the fence. A pungent yellow stream formed a puddle beneath it, and everyone cheered.
Kerry looked behind her. Pretty Mary was back in the car, rocking back and forth, keening, with Pop’s woven basket clutched to her chest. Ken said, ‘Ah fuck this fer a joke,’ and returned to the XD as well. He started up the engine with a loud, clattering roar.
‘Wait, Kenny!’ cried Pretty Mary, who had dropped the basket in fright, spilling a few grains of Pop’s ashes onto the rusted car floor. Pop didn’t belong on the road for workmen to drive their machinery over; it was the riverbank itself they needed to reach, that hallowed ground where Grandad Chinky Joe had sung his songs, and where Granny Ava had plunged into the river, saved her own life to give it to all the clan.
‘I’m gonna show these dugais who they fucking with,’ Ken told his mother, revving the engine harder. He stuck his head out the window and gave the security camera an earful of abuse.
‘Just WAIT!’ Pretty Mary ordered him in distress. ‘Wait, son, till I get this – him – this up off the … ow, Christ!’ She gestured at the spilt ash. A drop of blood hovered from her index finger, about to fall and christen the basket.
‘Put ya seatbelt on,’ Ken said.
Kerry ran to Pretty Mary’s open door, yelling at Ken that they needed to come back at night when they couldn’t be identified. He ignored her and put the car in gear.
As Ken began a wild zigzagging in reverse, Pretty Mary still groping at the car floor with her good hand, Steve came swiftly and unexpectedly from behind everyone. He sprinted straight at the shining silver panels of mesh. In his right hand he held a thin dead eucalypt branch. Kerry had only enough time to wonder if he was going to somehow pole vault over the fence, and to decide that the branch was far too slight for that, when Steve hurled his lance at the camera with deadly accuracy. It landed square in the centre of the lens with a satisfyingly loud smash, followed by several moments of tinkling glass. As an angry electronic buzz issued from the camera, the spear stayed jammed in the middle of the broken lens, poking out at the world like a great, long, white tongue.
‘Bugger me roan,’ Kerry exclaimed in astonishment.
‘Not just high jump,’ Steve panted. ‘Javelin, too.’
Donny burst into laughter at the spear stuck fast in the camera, the funniest thing he’d seen in ages. The XD roared, as Pretty Mary yanked her seatbelt on.
‘Love ya work!’ murmured Kerry in approval. Ken planted his foot and ploughed through the fence.
The car continued forward with a hideous shriek as the diamond mesh caught against the bonnet and sides, and tore away from the posts. Then, from the far side, Ken leaned on his horn to announce victory.
Cheering, Kerry, Steve and Donny all galloped through the gaping, ragged hole, AFL players bursting into a game, to pile into the car and take Pop down to the ancestors.
‘Close the gap!’ laughed Kerry, scrambling into the back seat with a yipping Elvis.
Ken squinted in the rear-view mirror at Steve.
‘You sure you’re white, brah?’ Ken asked.
‘Full-blood Scot, me. Irn-Bru running in me veins,’ Steve answered, one arm around a beaming Kerry and the other clutching Elvis’s collar. ‘Except for a little bit of Spanish.’
Pretty Mary smiled sceptically.
‘Spanish, yeah, right,’ muttered Kerry. ‘Musta been more Spaniards in Australia than there was in Spain, back in the day.’
‘But don’t hold my colour against me,’ Steve said, not understanding.
‘Wouldn’t dream of it, brah,’ Ken answered, before adding drily, ‘Ya might spear me.’
‘You always wanted a full-blood man, eh, Kerry?’ Pretty Mary asked, having a sly dig as she got out to light the fire for Pop’s ceremony in the clearing by the river.
‘Oi,’ said Ken sharply, hating the word that had dogged him and his only-just-dark-enough-skin all his life.
‘We was all full of blood, last time I looked,’ Kerry said, before adding, ‘We swimming Pop over to the island, or what?’
‘Not on ya life,’ answered Pretty Mary, aghast, passing the woven basket to her son. ‘Kenny’ll have to do it. Put him there under the pine, son. I’ll sing him from this side …’
Pretty Mary blew hard into her metal bucket. Everyone walked through the clouds of billowing eucalypt smoke so that Pretty Mary could paint an ochre crucifix on the nearest boulder, and cry, and sing Pop back into the ground.
An hour later, when the ashes had been scattered and Ken had swum back over to the clearing, he surprised everyone by upending a full UDL over a boulder in Pop’s honour. When Kerry asked why he’d used the entire can, Ken shook the last drops onto the summer-dry earth, where ants and flies were already swarming to the sugar.
‘Rest in power, Old Man,’ he gestured to the island. ‘Go well.’ Then he turned to Kerry and began to laugh at her question, real silly way.
Too Much Lip Page 13