Too Much Lip

by Melissa Lucashenko

  ‘That’s Pop in the middle,’ Kerry held out her mobile. ‘Between Mum and Dad.’

  ‘How did he come to lose the eye?’ coughed Ryan, made bold by the discreet passing over of an envelope containing two crisp hundred-dollar bills. Pretty Mary paused to blow out cigarette smoke, adding to the general murk.

  ‘Well.’ She hesitated, tapped her durrie against the XD’s side window, ashing the ground below. Screwed up her mouth and scratched behind her ear. Kerry and the others waited patiently, but Pretty Mary was weighing her words with great care. The crows hung intently on her answer, missing body parts being of keen professional interest to them.

  ‘Took a fall off a horse,’ Kerry finally answered as the silence stretched out awkwardly. ‘Mustering, hey Mum? His eye socket was crushed. No ambulance, course, back them days. No doctor either, if ya worked for Old Man Nunne. Just bush medicine, a few swigs of rum and a couple days’ rest if you was lucky, then back into it.’

  ‘Geez, that’s interesting,’ said Ryan. ‘I’d love to find out more about the local history around here.’

  Kerry and Pretty Mary exchanged a look.

  No, you wouldn’t, thought Kerry.

  Jasmine had sucked her breath in sharply. ‘They call them the good old days but they weren’t always, were they?’ she said.

  ‘Tough as nails, though, them old bushies,’ offered her husband with a half smile.

  ‘He had to be tough. If he couldn’t work he would have been sent back to the mission,’ Kerry answered sharply, stung by the idiot’s half smile, ‘and coulda lost his kids.’

  ‘No, bub …’ Pretty Mary said, smoothing her hair in the side-view mirror. She tucked some stray wisps back into her hairband.

  Ryan swivelled, jumping at a chance to escape Kerry’s acid.

  ‘We told you that mustering story cos youse was only little,’ Pretty Mary said, finally coming to a bold decision. Pretty Mary folded her arms tight around her handbag and leaned back against the car. She shifted around until she found exactly the right place for her hip to rest, just below the rear passenger door handle. From inside the car, Donny squinted at his grandmother’s torso blocking out the late afternoon sun.

  ‘It was Old Man Nunne cost Pop his eye.’

  A wave of disgust rippled through Kerry, and her face contorted. Of course. The Marsdens stared, baffled. The ghost of a smile still hovered around Ryan’s lips as he waited for her mother to elaborate. Pretty Mary raised her right arm and made an odd, emphatic snapping gesture, as though casting a spell. She gave a dry laugh.

  ‘Oh, he was pretty flash with a stockwhip, that old mulaga. Crack the eye outta ya head any day of the week – he was known for it. Plenty of one-eyed Goories round ere back then. Cracker Nunne, they called him.’

  Cracker Nunne, cried the crows enthusiastically. Cracker Nunne, Cracker Nunne.

  There was a moment of dawning comprehension. Then Jasmine jack-knifed, vomiting onto the ground beside the stacked timber. Stinking wet drops splashed onto the planks of the new-home-to-be.

  Two bright red patches appeared high on Ryan’s cheeks.

  ‘Why would you say that to a woman who’s thirty-eight weeks pregnant!’ he objected hotly.

  Pretty Mary held his gaze and very nearly smiled at Ryan’s masterful extraction of victimhood from her story. That took some front, that did.

  ‘You asked.’ She was unapologetic.

  ‘Jesus! It’s revolting.’ Ryan ran stiff fingers across his shaven head and grimaced. ‘And now I suppose we have to worry about a one-eyed Aboriginal ghost who—’

  Dry retching, Jasmine flapped a hand at her husband, telling him to shut up, he had said enough, and for Christ’s sake give her the inhaler.

  ‘Give her that thing. And I already told ya, Ryan. Pop won’t be bothering ya no more. You might wanna get them corner stumps out, but. They’re ready to let go any old tick of the clock, and there’s rain coming,’ Pretty Mary said, climbing into the XD and banging the door closed with two careful hands. ‘Make tracks, dort. I’ve gotta see a man about a kangaroo.’

  Kerry glanced at Ryan, who was copping a quiet diatribe from his wife in between her deep sucks from the pale blue plastic cannister.

  ‘Cheerio, neighbourinos,’ said Kerry brightly, stuffing the folded envelope of cash into her bra. She drove away, shaking her head at Pretty Mary’s transformation into a straight-up history warrior. Amazed, too, that she had lived her whole life not putting two and two together. Every Goorie knew what sorts of things happened on them old pastoral stations, yet she had spent thirty-three years accepting a pretty childhood fable. Pretty Mary’s words rode a dizzying roundabout in her mind. Cracker Nunne, they called him. He was known for it. Cracker Nunne, they called him. He was known for it. Cracker Nunne … Until, driving past Mount Monk, she saw the wallaby mob grazing in the slanting afternoon light. Their quiet peacefulness was a mercy, and sparked the memory of that long-ago day when Pop had taken her to the foot of the mountain and told her to beware the savages.

  By Christ, ’e was a hard man, Bob Buckley …

  It seemed there had been a lot of hard men in Pop’s life. Hard men with stone hearts, bent on turning the country into their own clenched fists.

  ‘You give them something to think about, anyway,’ Kerry said to her mother with a shout of laughter, wishing she had a cold beer to wash away the lingering scent of Jasmine’s vomit.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Pretty Mary chuckled. ‘I was gammon, really. But it’s good to jar em up while they’re new. Make better neighbours outta them.’

  ‘Hey?’ Kerry’s brow wrinkled and she slowed despite her raging thirst. ‘Do ya mean it wasn’t Cracker Nunne?’

  ‘Oh, naw, that part’s true alright. Pop went to work for him straight after he won his Silver Gloves, and Pop wouldn’t back down for any mulaga them days, stockwhip or no stockwhip. But maybe he shoulda backed down. Ya can’t box with one eye, can ya?’

  Nunne had finished Pop’s career with one stroke of his whip, then. Ended his dreams of the Golden Gloves, and what might have followed.

  ‘As for Pop hanging around – didn’t we smoke him at the river, proper way? Didn’t we lay him to rest where he wanted? Didn’t we sing him into the ground?’ Pretty Mary interrogated Kerry, index finger hovering in admonition. Yes, Kerry agreed warily. Everything had been done the right way at the river for the cantankerous old bugger, to keep him from hovering about the place.

  ‘I’m not following ya,’ Kerry said, still puzzled.

  ‘Seen them house stumps?’ Donny leaned in unexpectedly from the back seat. ‘White-anted to buggery?’

  Kerry gazed at Donny in the rear-view mirror. Why was her nephew grinning from ear to ear? She had been distracted by the ceremony and the smoke and hadn’t paid that much attention to the old house.

  ‘Why would Pop wanna come over this side and annoy dugai people for?’ Pretty Mary asked, grinning along with Donny. ‘Ain’t no mooki been near that house.’

  ‘Are you telling me they’re not even haunted?’ The corners of Kerry’s mouth twitched. Pretty Mary, up to her old games again.

  ‘Course they ain’t haunted – they just bin hearing the termites chewing that old place to the ground in the dead of the night!’ Pretty Mary gave a sly giggle.

  ‘That’s their poltergeist?’ Kerry guffawed. ‘White ants?’

  ‘Proper scary, them ants,’ said Donny, deadpan.

  ‘Oh, they be frightened for Pop all hours now,’ Pretty Mary laughed, screwing one eye closed and peering around. ‘Waiting to see old one-eye Goorie looking in the window!’

  Kerry dragged the envelope out of her bra and waved it at her mother in delight.

  ‘Two hundred bucks,’ she hooted, ‘to exorcise termites!’

  ‘Ssshh,’ Pretty Mary said, wobbling a palm at her daughter and only holding it together long enough
to get the words out. ‘Careful, bub. If they don’t get them stumps out, Pop might come back!’ She raised both arms, making high, wailing ghost noises, then exploded into raucous cackles. Kerry pulled onto the footpath and crumpled against the car door, crying with laughter and begging Pretty Mary to shut up before her bladder let go.

  Pretty Mary recovered first. She wiped her eyes. Then she put the envelope of cash into her handbag, where it nestled between her smooth wooden clapsticks and her bottle of Gaviscon.

  ‘That’ll square us with Telstra, and still leave twenty dollars towards the party,’ she said, blowing her nose and clipping the handbag shut with satisfaction. ‘I call that a good afternoon’s work.’

  ‘If Scummerlink’d do their job, you could buy yourself something for a change,’ Kerry said.

  In the back seat, Donny had tuned out of the conversation. He put his head out the window, resting his temple on his folded hands so that the breeze blew back his bleached locks. All of Donny was yearning for the blue Pacific.

  ~

  Extravagant flashes of lightning brightened the kitchen. Long chords of thunder rumbled across the sky; big rain was coming off the Margin Ranges into Durrongo. Pretty Mary’s lounge room curtains, bunched together with blue bailing twine since the hot weather arrived, billowed like yacht sails as the wind gusted violently over the creek flats.

  ‘Hope the roof holds.’ Even as a kid Kerry expected the rusty tin panels to catapult down Mount Monk Road every summer. The louvres rattled in their frame, the one made from rough-sawn plywood adding a discordant lower note.

  ‘How much should I put for exorcisms, Nan?’ Donny sat cross-legged on the lounge room floor, creating a website from pirated software. Pretty Mary’s attention was split between him, Savannah’s kids and the cards in her hand.

  ‘Oh, I dunno, two-fifty, I spose. Leave that, bub! Put it up in the sink for me, darling, he can’t have it, it’s got chilli in it—’ Dr No had been about to taste-test some leftover hamper. ‘Go play with your toys, you sod of a kid. Ken, drag that toy box outta the back room for them, willya?’ But Ken was asleep in front of the cricket. Dr No tried to climb into Pretty Mary’s lap, reaching for her playing cards with sticky fingers. Seeing Pretty Mary’s growing irritation, five-year-old Rosie hauled her brother away and plonked him in the middle of the lino. His mouth trembled, threatening a tantrum.

  ‘Charge what the market can bear,’ Kerry advised. She had been schooled in business homilies from the drug dealers in Brisbane Women’s: buy low, sell high, ha ha. Be clear on your target market and differentiate your product. And so on.

  ‘Just put by wossername. Negotiation,’ Pretty Mary told Donny, rearranging her hand as Kerry went to drag out the toy box. ‘That way we can yarn em up, see. Gotta suss out if they got bungoo or if they on the bones of their mooya. And listen, bub,’ she told Kerry, casually fanning a royal flush onto the table, ‘the Gift isn’t for making some huge profit off of. I just want to cover me bills and have a little bit left over.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ Kerry shot back. ‘We wouldn’t want to go exploiting the Gift and becoming millionaires, would we?’

  ‘Bills including back rent for 214 years, Mum,’ Ken suggested, springing to consciousness. ‘We’re not gonna save anything by acting all Mother Teresa.’

  ‘Ya got that right, bruz,’ Kerry agreed, as she recalled sliding headfirst over broken glass into the pitch black of the council bathroom three days ago. The story of the break-in had led the news the next morning, and Pretty Mary had narrowed her eyes at the TV, declaring that the local kids responsible needed a good flogging.

  ‘Ya don’t mind me being Mother Teresa when it comes to shouting you grog price, though, do ya son?’ Pretty Mary said pointedly. Black Superman was the one in her good books today, along with Donny for helping her on his computer. Ken had been relegated. He grunted a non-committal grunt and turned to the Windies, who shimmered on the TV screen with a violent flaring as the power surged.

  Then the house dimmed.

  ‘Oh, no way!’ cried Donny, who, lacking a computer battery, had just lost all his work. He slammed the laptop shut and glared ferociously at the bare lightbulb that swung above the kitchen table. Dr No stomped joyfully on a tower of Duplo, sending primary-coloured plastic shooting into every corner of the kitchen. He giggled with satisfaction as his older sister painstakingly went to pick them up again.

  ‘That’s Mother Nature for ya,’ said Kerry cheerfully, throwing in her lousy hand. ‘The cranky old cunt. Whoops,’ she added, remembering the kids. Not that they hadn’t heard it all before. Pretty Mary joked that they could set the clock by Sav’s screaming at the kids at seven-thirty every morning, as she tried to get them to daycare and herself off to work.

  ‘Wet weekend and a house full of bloody jahjams,’ complained Ken. It was pissing down, his petrol tank was empty, and he had no bungoo for the pub. He began to scroll on his phone. ‘Toyota Camry, black, electric windows, 190 000 clicks, VGC, three grand. Could flip that, make a kay easy. Anyone got three grand lying around under the bed? Hey? Didn’t think so, ya pack a tightarses.’

  Everybody laughed merrily. Three grand, good one, Ken.

  Three grand, mused Kerry, try three hundred. Not even, since she had left herself the princely sum of two hundred bucks out of the cash she’d retrieved from council. The rest had been deposited in Black Superman’s Ubet account yesterday, and a text sent: For the QC, love K. Black Superman had sent her two texts in reponse – an open-mouthed emoji, and a long string of question marks. Her response was three words long: Silence is Golden. All day she had been forced to bite her lip and listen to Pretty Mary praising him up. Black Superman’s commitment to the family. The way he had gone the extra mile to borrow thousands of dollars from Ezy-Cash Payday Lenders, hiring the QC, giving them all fresh hope. Ken was making out like, yeah, no biggie, he had always expected his brother to come through. But Pretty Mary’s ecstasy was boundless. Once again, her youngest son was the Golden Child. Kerry’s ribs still ached from scraping across the sharp aluminium sill of that toilet window but she couldn’t say a damn word about it. Such is life, she told herself severely, suck it up, but her mood remained dark.

  ‘Aw here we go, here we go!’ Ken leaped up. ‘Nissan Pulsar, 2001, 230 000 kays, minor hail damage, seven hundred and fifty!’ Pretty Mary pursed her lips, hoping that Ken wouldn’t humbug her too hard in front of Kerry.

  ‘Oh, gimme a break! Any idiot can buy cars. But how many have ya sold?’ Kerry snapped, not much caring if her brother blew a gasket just because she, a female, had the fucking temerity to question him about the bombs multiplying in the yard. It wouldn’t be so bad if he’d mow the lawn but it was like Jurassic Park out there. Ken’s ancient rust-buckets grazed among the hip-high paspalum, providing free housing for brown snakes, bush rats and giant huntsman spiders, none of which cared to distinguish the inside of the house from the outside. Kerry had been forced to shift a coiled night tiger from the laundry tub only last week, and she was well and truly over the fantasy that was Gunnagunna Motors.

  Ken’s fingers twitched as he stared at his sister. Whatever was rising in his body – adrenaline, testosterone, some other cellular transformation – was palpable. Every fibre of him screamed instant antagonism. Muscle memory in his right arm and fist told Ken exactly what it would feel like to smash Kerry and her big mouth to the floor. Male and female, they all fall the same, ya hit em right. He hung by his fingertips onto the ragged ends of his self-control.

  ‘Oh, you’re the fucking expert now, are ya? Then how about ya sell one thing? Hey? Like a bike. Or else get off my case, ya smart-mouthed bitch! Think I haven’t got enough problems without listening to you yap on all the fucking time?’

  ‘Settle down, Kenny,’ Pretty Mary said in alarm. ‘She didn’t mean nothing—’

  ‘You been hitting the crack pipe, bro? Nobody’s gonna buy a fuck
en Pulsar with hail damage. And as for me selling …’ Then, as Dr No tried to climb Kerry to sit on her lap, ‘Can you bloody not! Jesus Christ, these fucken kids.’

  She rose abruptly, tumbling Dr No harmlessly onto his plump little arse, and went to stare out the front door, as far away from Ken as she could get. Slanted rain was sweeping through the veranda, driven by howling gusts coming off the mountain. A few miserable cattle in Scruffy McCarthy’s paddock stood with their heads lowered, their rumps to the tempest.

  Inside, among the scattered toys, Dr No began to sob with rejection. Kerry scowled over her shoulder at him, and then at her brother, who had volunteered Pretty Mary for babysitting duty while Savannah and Aunty Val went to Tweed for tests on Val’s bad heart.

  ‘Eeyah, look now. Youse two wanna knock orf!’ said Pretty Mary, annoyed, as she righted the howling Dr No with a swift upward haul of his arm. Rosie ran to build her brother another Duplo tower in consolation.

  ‘Nan,’ Rosie asked Pretty Mary in a cautious whisper, ‘is Aunty Kerry a baddie?’

  ‘Bloody oath she is,’ said Ken sourly, lighting one of his mother’s smokes. Pretty Mary laughed and asked Rosie what she meant. The story came out: Uncle Neil had warned Rosie away from Kerry, saying she was a Bad Lady and that she shouldn’t talk to her. Aunty Kerry had been to jail and everything. Kerry shook her head in faint amazement. Like Ken hadn’t? And Pop? Even Black Superman had seen the inside of a watch house. And since when did going to jail make somebody a villain, for Christ’s sake? But that was dugai logic for ya. Steal a million acres and you’re a pioneer hero with a brass statue in the council chambers, but pinch a car or a mobile phone and you’re some kind of fucking monster.