Too Much Lip

by Melissa Lucashenko

  ‘Aunty Kerry used to be naughty,’ Pretty Mary reassured Rosie, ‘but she isn’t naughty anymore … Are you, Aunty Kerry?’

  ‘Unfuckenbelievable,’ Kerry told the rain, then swivelled to face her mother’s judgement. ‘Yeah, bub, I used to be a little bit naughty, but I tell ya what. I never knocked me girlfriend’s teeth down her gob. I never started a stupid fight at the Durrongo pub that ended up with two people in Emergency. And I certainly never “borrowed” a shitload of funeral money off my poor old grieving mother and made out to everyone like I hadn’t.’ She put inverted commas around borrowed since Blind Freddy could see that Pretty Mary’s funeral payment – no longer mysteriously missing in the Centrelink system – would not be winging its way back into her account any time soon. It had mutated into the ruined sedans that ringed the leopard tree.

  ‘Keep yapping,’ said Ken, nodding rapidly. ‘If ya wanna start something, just keep it up with ya big fucking gob.’ Kerry’s guts squirmed, but she was determined to show no fear. The great overgrown thing, standing over their mother for every cent he could squeeze. If he got a hit in, well, she’d get up off the floor and smash him straight back, the dead dog.

  ‘It’s my bungoo!’ flared Pretty Mary. ‘I can lend it to whoever I want! So settle down, the both of ya!’

  ‘Who knocked your girlfriend’s teeth down her gob?’ Rosie asked Kerry.

  ‘Eeyah, don’t go worry about all that sorta business. Do me a drawing, bub.’ Pretty Mary distracted the kids with biros and paper. She searched for an unused teabag and flicked the kettle on.

  Kerry stomped down the hall to go jull, discovering in the dim light of the toilet that her period had just arrived. That’s where she’d gotten the nerve to stand up to Ken, then.

  It explained, too, her white-hot fury at yesterday’s Centrelink letter confirming that Pretty Mary had received Pop’s funeral money two months ago. If her bed in Trinder Park had been empty, Kerry would have wiped Durrongo and everyone in it, but the bed was long gone. Kerry had taken her impotent rage to the gym instead, and been persuaded by Steve to stick around a little longer in New South Wales.

  Another long rumble of thunder, and the TV shuddered to life. Ken turned back to the Windies. At the kitchen table, Dr No started drawing a picture of himself and Kerry riding the Harley.

  ~

  ‘Grab me gun, Donald,’ Ken ordered later that afternoon, leaning into Donny’s bedroom from the veranda. Savannah swayed gently in the hammock, just back from the hospital where the tests on Aunty Val’s heart weren’t looking too flash. Donny came out holding a small cardboard carton.

  ‘Change ya mind yet, Rambo?’ Ken asked as he took the box. Donny shrugged, hating his father for the mockery, but at the same time deeply shamed by fear. Ken and Savannah both laughed.

  Their conversation drifted into the quiet house.

  ‘Don’t be a pussy,’ Ken taunted. ‘What ya waiting for, the Second Coming?’

  Donny shrugged again.

  ‘It’s not that bad,’ Savannah told him. ‘Here.’ Donny accepted a beer.

  ‘I can’t stand to see that lubbly white skin going to waste,’ added Ken, plugging the tattoo gun into the only electrical socket on the veranda without blackened scorch marks radiating from it. ‘But I’ll put a bitta colour on ya one day, lad.’

  ‘Alright. Do it.’ Donny surprised everyone, including himself. Kerry lifted her head. From the lounge she could see Ken nodding at the chair facing the backyard wilderness. With a tea towel folded between his teeth, Donny sat while Ken went to work.

  Half an hour later, giant beads of sweat rolled down the boy’s forehead. There was no cushion of fat on his scrawny arm to ease the pain, and he could no longer hold in his moans. Flies buzzed, tantalised by the delicious coppery scent of the boy’s blood.

  ‘Take a break, bud,’ Ken said, straightening up and looking for baby wipes. Donny peered in the round mirror Sav held up. His upper arm was red and angry-looking, but visible beneath the smeared blood and inflammation was a breaching humpback whale. He glowed, turning his arm this way and that. Ken had managed to exactly replicate the picture Donny had sketched last year from an old Byron Lighthouse photo.

  ‘Deadly. You’re a fucken hectic tattooist, Dad!’

  Savannah handed him another beer. The kid had guts. Who knew?

  ‘Keep going?’ Ken asked, gun pointed to the ceiling.

  ‘Dunno. I’d like it to have a calf, down here. But it canes, eh,’ Donny replied, still admiring his arm. He was nauseated, and the beer wasn’t helping. Nor did he want Ken to bugger up what was already the perfect tat. Ken grunted. He put the gun down and pulled off his Jackie Howe, revealing a mishmash of tats. Across the top of his shoulders stretched the only piece he’d paid cash for – an elongated Goorie flag, fluttering around a grey nurse swimming up a cross-hatched river.

  ‘Try something this size if ya want to know about pain,’ Ken told him, pointing over his muscled shoulder to the black infill of the flag. ‘Four hours straight in the chair at Mullum.’ Donny was silent. All this agony and still he didn’t measure up. Something wriggled in his guts, then, something alive with anger and hurt pride.

  ‘Gorn then, Old Man,’ he said, looking Ken fair in the face. ‘Give her a baby.’ Do ya worst. Ken turned the buzzing machine back on and bent to the job.

  But at the exact second the needle met Donny’s flesh, Pretty Mary bellowed inside the house.

  Savannah jumped, and raised her eyebrows: Ken usually did all the yelling around this joint. In the kitchen, Pretty Mary’s voice grew more and more heated. Ken chuckled and shook his head.

  ‘Fuck me, what now,’ he muttered to himself.

  ‘I already lost one daughter! But nah, you mob don’t care ’bout that. Selfish!’ Pretty Mary yelled. ‘Ya can bugger off elsewhere if ya still wanna go doing crime.’ She clutched at a stick-figure drawing of her daughter wearing a scribbled black balaclava.

  ‘Selfish? I did it to save the fucking island. Black Superman didn’t just suddenly pull three grand out of his fork!’

  At the words ‘three grand’ Ken paused. The ropy muscle of his right forearm stood out while he listened, motionless, the gun pointing at the floorboards of the veranda. Donny exhaled loudly as the sharp pain stopped. Inside, Pretty Mary was still going for it at top note.

  ‘You blooming myall or what? What if the cops shot ya? What if you get locked up for five years? What then?’

  ‘Someone had to do something, specially if you’re gonna hand over all your pay to that useless fat prick outside!’

  Kerry appeared on the veranda, wild-eyed, with the red schoolbag over her shoulder and her chest heaving. She squinted at the pelting rain. Fine spray ricocheted up off the top of the back stairs, dampening the front of her jeans. Rainwater gurgled loudly through the house’s ancient guttering, and spurted horizontally from holes in the rusty downpipes.

  ‘Whaddya doing tormenting old ladies?’ Ken asked. It was the first time he’d asked her what she was doing since the day she’d returned from Queensland, Kerry reflected bitterly as she placed herself carefully for a quick getaway. Her movements, her thoughts, her feelings, none of these were normally of any consequence to Ken. He had been a mongrel ratbag of a kid, but since going to prison at twenty-one, her brother had lived in a world where what he did, and thought, and felt, was at the epicentre of all things. What Kerry did or didn’t do – that was no skin off his big black ring. But the man’s curiosity had obviously been piqued by Pretty Mary’s volume. There was also the small matter of three grand somewhere in the equation.

  ‘Ya mum’s fully cracking the shits, hey?’ joked Savannah carelessly, nursing a cold beer as she reclined in the hammock. Fuck me, boiled Kerry, we still in slavery days are we?

  ‘You arseholes are unbelievable,’ she snarled, reaching deep into the schoolbag and pulling out the kingplate.
>
  Donny gaped. Ken let out a wordless noise and lunged towards the silver crescent.

  Kerry jerked it away, then strode back inside to slam the kingplate down on the kitchen table hard enough to rattle the cutlery stand.

  ‘Granny!’ Pretty Mary cried out, her eyes fixed on the damaged kingplate. ‘Where did that come from?’ In shock, she lifted her gaze to Kerry, who stood above it fuming. Pretty Mary edged closer, examining the kingplate without daring to touch it.

  ‘Happy fucken birthday. I was waiting till tomorrow to give it to ya, but if ya don’t want me here ya may’s well have it now,’ Kerry told her mother, before storming downstairs to the yard. And you can shove it up your judgemental arse, she only just managed to refrain from adding. Sitting on the growling Harley she looked up at her brother and his poxy bush pig. ‘And you can go to buggery too, pal. I’m off doing crime to save the island and all the while you bin ripping Mum off for her fucking pay. Ya the scum of the fucken earth, far as I’m concerned.’

  Ken let out a roar as he leaped for the stairs. But Kerry was fishtailing up the length of the driveway, spraying wet gravel behind her as she blasted away, bareheaded, through the sheeting rain.

  Chapter Twelve

  Next morning, Kerry lay breathless on the futon, wearing only a sweaty grin. It was a glorious day, the royal blue of the sky heralding the final gasp of summer. A gentle breeze buffeted the window blind, making it tap rhythmically against the top of the glass window.

  At the same instant, she and Steve both laughed, exultant, and rolled inward to face each other. Kerry’s dark eyes were soft and vulnerable. Enchanted, Steve reached out a finger to brush the hair off her face; she caught it neatly between her teeth and growled at him, being Elvis. Bloody Steve, making me like him so much. Grrrrr.

  ‘Bad dog,’ he teased. ‘Lie down. Roll over!’ Kerry growled louder, bit a little harder. Steve yelped in pain.

  ‘That’s the second time in twenty-four hours I’ve been called bad,’ she said wryly, releasing him and falling backwards to stare at the ceiling. ‘Am I that bad?’

  ‘My girlfriend the axe murderer,’ he said. ‘Get a grip. I wouldn’t want you here if I thought you were a psychopath.’

  ‘Oh, I dunno. I’m pretty hot,’ Kerry joked. They hadn’t had The Conversation, or pledged undying love, or any other sort of love for that matter. But last night they agreed that Kerry would grab her stuff from Pretty Mary’s and come camp at the gym. Not forever, given the risk to Steve’s business, but for the next little while, until Kerry found somewhere else to crash.

  She peered up at the cavernous ceiling where the freshly painted blue walls met rectangles of grimy foam, installed in the nineties and now stained by fly spots and water damage. There were cobwebs up there in the highest corners where Steve’s vacuum didn’t reach. Daddy-long-legs roamed the unseen beams, constructing silvery cities of sticky thread. All these secret insect lives were going on, far from human care or observation. The high corners didn’t bear looking into too closely, but then, Kerry wondered, what did? Everybody hides some things. That was just human nature.

  ‘But you’re not my boyfriend,’ she added swiftly. ‘I never signed any contract, remember.’

  Steve gazed at her, his calm exterior hiding the hurt. They slept together, hung out every weekend he was in Patto, spoke on the phone daily when he was up at Burleigh with his daughter. Kerry had all but moved in. What the hell was she, if not his girlfriend?

  ‘Yeah, okay, whatever.’ He finally shrugged, and sat up. ‘But I’m not risking all this,’ he gestured around at the gym, ‘if you’re just mucking around, having a good time before you go back up north. Is that what this is? Be honest.’

  Kerry got up too. ‘Yes, at first. Kind of. But not really, not anymore.’ She struggled to explain, and as she struggled her face told Steve everything he needed to know.

  ‘Right,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I thought this was something more, but that was my dumb mistake, I guess.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t …’ Kerry began, then stopped. Why did things always have to be so complicated?

  Steve ran his fingers through his hair and heaved a loud sigh. They’d borrowed Sav’s hairdressing clippers just after Valentine’s Day and Kerry had run them over his head, exposing the pale scalp beneath. For a week she’d teased him, called him the only skinhead in the village and never tired of telling him he looked like a lamppost. Now the cut had grown out into a short, dense halo of curls. Steve folded his beautiful arms at her and set his jaw.

  ‘I dunno if you moving in here is such a good idea,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘Christ. You remember Pretty Mary’s basically booted me out?’ Kerry asked him. Kerry M. Salter, unwanted in every State of the Union.

  ‘Hey, don’t make me the bad guy. You’re asking me to risk everything I’ve got.’

  Kerry put her face in her hands. Typical. She should have just lied, told him she was madly in love, ready to make babies – all that shit that men want to hear. Given the arse from two houses in twenty-four hours, that’s some kinda record. There were flop places she could crash for a day or a week, but they weren’t exactly safe. And she wasn’t up for the kind of crap addicts always had going on anyway – the lying, the violence, the madness. Uncle Richard’s place, an hour away outside Lismore, maybe, but his maddening stepson who never shut up about his university crap was there, oh God, no, she’d end up stabbing him, truesgod. Girl, Kerry told herself, you’ve fucked things up well and good this time. Could it have been only last October that she was shopping at Logan Central Plaza with Allie, and talking about buying tickets to Mardi Gras? Jesus. That was another century, another life. Another fucking dimension. Kerry drained her coffee cup, put it down on the floor by the mattress and watched the last brown drops slide smoothly to the bottom, pooling there. Down, down, down.

  ‘I feel like a fucking idiot, Kez,’ Steve told her, his bottom lip dragging there, la. Oh Christ. A wave of guilt crashed over Kerry and she touched his shoulder.

  ‘Well, don’t. I think you’re great. But—’

  ‘Oh, right. “But”,’ Steve interrupted sarcastically, putting inverted commas around the word with his fingers. Kerry soldiered on.

  ‘Let me finish. Growing up, I didn’t worry that much about colour. Us Durrongo kids just stuck together. Then I hit Patto High. That was bad enough—’

  ‘I know,’ Steve interrupted. ‘I was there, remember?’

  ‘Yeah, but you weren’t there long, and you weren’t the target, were ya? Anyway, then Donna went missing in Year Nine and no white cunt in Durrongo Shire gave a shit. Think about that for a second. The Patto cops laughed at us, reckoned she’d just gone walkabout with some bloke in a Mitsubishi Magna. The dugais she was drinking with that day didn’t give a rat’s arse. I had to lie in bed at fourteen and hear Mum cry herself to sleep, and wonder where in the hell my big sis had gone, if she was alive or dead. And then when Dad had his heart attack a few months later, I thought: fuck em all, stick to your own kind. And till now, I always have. So …’

  Kerry spread her arms wide: so, here we are. Nothing’s simple, or easy.

  She pulled on her jeans as Steve watched, the ground beneath his feet turning to a quagmire as the truth dawned.

  ‘So after everything, I’m still some kind of enemy?’ Steve was incredulous, then angry. ‘All those jokes you like to make about whitefellas – they aren’t jokes at all, are they?’

  Kerry shrugged and looked away. Dugais had no idea. No fucken clue what was at stake when you walked out into the world wrapped in dark skin. And if you told them the truth it was always boo hoo, poor me.

  ‘I’m going for a ride,’ Kerry told him, picking up her keys. Any doubt, clear the fuck out.

  ~

  Kerry rode through the cane fields and the low foothills of the Margin Ranges. She leaned the bike into the long s
weeping curves that fell off the sides of the mountains, using instinct and muscle memory to ride as she contemplated the mess of her life.

  It was her mother’s birthday and to have any chance of staying on at Shitkicker Flats, she’d definitely need to show up at the party. Would Steve still want to come? Did she want him to? How dirty was her mother going to be after yesterday? And above all, would Ken still want to kill her for giving him lip? She still felt like flogging him, the prick. All them old heaps in the yard – useless, rusting evidence that her mother’s funeral money was gone, gone, gone. She dwelt unhappily on the idea of fronting up at the party solo. In the past weeks she’d grown used to having Steve around for backup. Her brother put joking shit on kickboxing as a faggot sport, but Kerry knew that he was wary of her fella. Nice guy or not, you only had to meet Steve to see that he could do you some serious damage. There was no telling if Ken’s caution would disappear when she walked into his territory alone after—

  FUCKING HELL YOU MOTHERFUCKING—

  A big kangaroo was directly in her path.

  There was no time. No time to react, to make things better or different. Kerry heard the long, loud scrape of the animal’s hind claws skidding on the tar beside her. It was the sound of a life drawing back from the edge of the abyss as the roo shifted course, jerking away to leap parallel to the bike. She felt the brush of the animal’s taut haunch against her leg, touching her jeans, softly softly. And then: nothing. Just the roo’s ears and back and tail rising and falling, the most natural sight in the world, as it bounded back towards the paddocks.