‘Donny?’ she winced.
‘Named for you. And Black Superman’s been in Redfern for years. Him and his partner, Josh, just took on a couple of Uncle John’s great-grannies. But they’re struggling, and now Mum’s talking about taking them kids on, as if she hasn’t already raised enough bloody kids for other people …’
‘Did Mum remarry?’
Kerry shook her head no, and paused. ‘What about you – got any kids?’
‘He told me he thought he was gay, just before I left,’ Donna said, thinking of Black Superman. Her voice grew harder. ‘Pop flogged him till he wasn’t sure of anything much. And no, I wasn’t what you’d call the maternal type. I went to the Tweed clinic and got rid of one, but.’
She stared at Kerry, chin up, waiting for condemnation.
‘Yeah, well. You and me both.’ The two women eyed each other. No winners, no losers. Just a bit of reality finding its way in between the cracks.
‘You with anyone?’ Donna asked. Kerry gave a strangled laugh.
‘I’m gay. But it’s complicated. Just get your stuff and follow me home now.’ Kerry stood up. It was gonna be a bombshell when she brought Donna to Pretty Mary, hopefully the good kind. ‘I better ring Mum first, but. I don’t want her having a coronary too.’
Donna stayed seated on the far side of the desk. Fiddled with the lid of the Scotch bottle, tightening and then loosening it. The tinny sound of the metal lid circling around the grooved glass filled the otherwise silent office. Kerry jingled her keys.
Donna refolded her legs as she turned to half face the side wall of the office. When she spoke her voice was low, but clear.
‘I can’t.’
Kerry smiled in incomprehension. ‘What?’
‘It’s been too long.’
‘All the more fucking reason to come now. That’s the very least you owe us. You broke Mum and Dad’s hearts, Donna.’
‘You think I owe—’ Donna began to cough violently, as though her body refused any debts owing in Durrongo. When the coughing didn’t stop, Kerry fetched a cup of cold water from the office cooler. On her return she stumbled, sprinkling the blue carpet with more silver drops, which sat on the surface reflecting the fluoro lights overhead. She shoved the half-empty glass across the desk and waited with arms folded. Donna drank, wiped her face, and then wrapped both hands around the glass of Scotch, interlocking her fingers.
This time, she chose her words with the utmost care. If she got this right, nobody had to suffer any more than they already had. She could be safely back home in Sydney in a fortnight with a big bonus in her bank account. Her life didn’t have to change one iota, if she was smart enough now.
‘I can’t just go back and play happy families,’ she said, speaking slowly so there could be no misunderstanding. ‘It’s been too long and I’m not the person you think I am. I realise this must be a big shock, but Kez, it’s better that things are left the way they are. I’ll be gone in a week anyway.’
‘Better for who? Everyone thinks you’re dead.’
‘Better for everyone,’ insisted Donna.
Kerry stood, trying to process this dizzying proposal, but Ken was roaring down the stairs after her in the pouring rain, a kangaroo was flying out of her peripheral vision directly into her path, and simultaneous with these, in front of her, defiant and implacable and alive: Donna. She really needed to sit back down, for her legs were feeling strangely disconnected from her body. But sitting down would signal the beginning of some kind of defeat; it would be the first move towards accepting that Donna wasn’t about to walk out the door with her and follow her home.
On the desk, Kerry’s mobile buzzed and lit up with the word Steve. After half a dozen rings Donna grabbed the phone and handed it to her. Kerry hit End Call and shoved it in her pocket. Steve was no longer her most pressing problem. She rested her hands on the chairback, its tartan fabric rough under her palms. Mindlessly staring at it, she rotated the chair slightly to the left and then to the right. Rock-a-bye, baby, on the treetop, when the wind blows …
‘So what the fuck am I supposed to tell Mum?’ she finally said. ‘Happy birthday, and oh, by the way, Donna’s alive but she’s turned white and doesn’t want to know us?’
‘You don’t need to tell her anything,’ Donna answered, quickly sidestepping the landmine of turned white. Fifteen years in real estate had taught her that some battles could never be won, only dodged. ‘She’s lived with me gone for nearly twenty years, she must have come to some sort of …’ Closure was such a dumb word. ‘Uh, resolution. She looks happy in that photo, so why not just let her be happy? Why stir things up?’
Kerry pulled her ponytail back with trembling hands and tightly retied it. Looking down, she slowly shook her head. The silver drops of water still lay on the carpet. Nope. It was too cruel. And it didn’t even make sense. Alright, so Donna had gone off and made a flash new life for herself with a blonde hairdo and a corner office. And good luck to her, cos at the end of the day who was she to fucking judge? But to stay away, even now? And to ask her to lie to their mother? No. That was just too cold. It was fucking bullshit. And if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed …
‘Mum’s still got a daughter. We’ve all got a sister, and Donny’s got an aunt he’s never even bloody met. You’ve got the perfect opportunity tonight. Everyone’ll be there. So if that’s all you’ve got …’
Everyone will be there. Oh, how absolutely perfect. Christ. But Donna knew this was a situation that needed careful management. Discipline. Only discipline had allowed her to survive this far. Only discipline would see her leave this nightmare far, far behind. There was a problem, though. Discipline wasn’t working as perfectly as it normally did.
The image of Pretty Mary smiling, far older, hair greyer, holding an armful of freshly cut greenery was already refusing to leave Donna. For many years she had managed to hold the woman at bay. There had been no Pretty Mary, no idea of a mother. Just smooth, painless scar tissue. Now, though, she was being tormented by two mothers at once – the bloodied one screaming at her in the kitchen in 1999, and the older one smiling on the edge of the lake – and the two were beginning, horrifically, to blur into each other. Or was that the tears?
Kerry took out her phone and looked at her sister. Well?
But Donna needed to clear her head of this. These rushing, blurring pictures of what she could no longer ever be part of. She’d do anything to be rid of the maddening images and to get back home to Sydney.
Her phone rang. Her eleven o’clock appointment.
‘Fuck, I need to take this.’
She held the phone in her hand, hesitating, mirroring Kerry. Then she let her hand drop.
‘Alright, alright, I’ll come tonight. Leave me your phone number and I’ll call you back after I see this client.’ Donna stood up, to move Kerry out of the office and out of her life. She was Martina Rossi, and Martina Rossi owed nobody in Durrongo Shire a damn thing.
Kerry gazed at her, suspicious. Short of physically knocking Donna out and kidnapping her, there was no way to force her to come home. Her sister would have to return voluntarily or not at all. Her own mobile buzzed in her hand. Steve, again.
‘Right. Well, I can see meself out. But if you don’t show tonight,’ she warned, writing her number down on the back of a real estate card and flicking it to Donna, ‘don’t be too surprised if this office is full of angry blackfellas first thing tomorrow. Mum deserves a proper fucking explanation. We all do.’
Chapter Thirteen
‘Bitch, call me. It’s urgent!’ Kerry beseeched Black Superman’s message bank. He hadn’t answered her earlier calls and texts, and if she didn’t tell somebody about Donna – right fucking now – her head was going to explode. She would go stark raving womba. Donna’s little secret was going to land like a nuclear missile on Mount Monk Road, and she had to get ready for the fallout.
> Steve could give her his perspective, she knew, yet Kerry discovered she was loath to call him. The bare fact of Donna’s disappearance was bad enough, but to not want to come home, nearly twenty years later … What the hell was so wrong with her family? Kerry sat with a bottle of Stolly at a picnic table in the Patto park, and gazed dumbstruck at the grassy slope that led down to the river. She needed help. Needed to yarn to someone who would understand this clusterfuck of a day. Allie knew how grassroots families worked, but ah where was Allie now, in her hour of need? Kerry found herself almost hating Allie for being in prison.
Her phone began to ring with ‘January 26’. Black Superman, at last.
‘Finally, fuck ya!’ Kerry answered in huge relief. ‘Listen—’
‘Sissy, it’s Josh.’
Black Superman’s fiancé. His voice was unusually fast.
‘Michael asked me to call and ask can it wait till tonight cos we’re in a big blue with FACS. Brandon’s fucked up and they’re talking about taking him. We’ve gotta try and sort it the hell out before we head to the airport.’
‘What’s going on?’ Kerry asked, lowering her head to the grimy timber of the picnic table. Black Superman had stepped up last year to try and yank Brandon off that well-worn path to FACS. But maybe he had stepped too late.
‘The neighbours reckon he tried to kill their cat,’ said Josh in a defeated voice. ‘Half drowned it.’
‘Christ! He wouldn’t do that, would he?’
‘I dunno, the psych reckons he’s done stuff to animals before, apparently, so—’
‘Ya neighbours blackfellas or what?’
‘Coconuts. They’ll prosecute him, the gammon uptown cunts.’ Josh spat. A tortured cat was a tortured cat, and he was proper sorry for it, yeah, but a Koori kid stolen away was something else altogether. Brandon ripped away by FACS was a picture that solved exactly nothing.
‘Oh Jesus, Josh, I’m so sorry.’ Kerry was gutted. Everyone knew Brandon was troubled, but they thought they’d got him in time. Eleven was young enough, just young enough, if you put a lotta love into a hard-headed kid. Maybe.
‘Youse still coming up?’
‘Yeah, yeah, ya brother’s hell bent on making it,’ Josh said tiredly. ‘I gotta go, sis, they want me inside.’
Kerry hung up and thought wretchedly about throwing herself into the swollen brown serpent of the river. It was wide, it was wet, it was constant. It would carry her through town and down to the saltwater at Bruns if she floated long enough. She could make herself into a fallen branch and close her eyes, just drift. The bliss of it. Surrender to everything except the power of the water. Let all the bullshit of Donna alive, and whitefellas-who-weren’t-boyfriends-but-suddenly-wanted-to-be-boyfriends, and foster nephews headed for short violent lives in jail – let it all just fall away. She would melt into the water and everything hard would melt with her … The river was immeasurably older than she was. It was the Elder. Let it decide whether she lived or died. Maybe she’d sink like history. The pull of the current felt irresistible. The idea of surrender filled her mind, till she could feel the wetness on her skin, the change in temperature as she slowly submerged …
Yet in the end Kerry found she lacked the will to chuck herself away. Her legs were trembling and her heart hurt like a bitch, but she wasn’t quite defeated, not yet. She took a large swig of vodka and rang Steve.
‘I need to talk to you, if you’re talking to me,’ she told him, taking another mouthful of fiery medicine. ‘Something huge just happened.’
‘Same,’ said Steve. ‘I’ll be here waiting.’
~
‘That was local trio The Butcher Birds with their single “Nobody Saw Me”,’ announced the ABC presenter. ‘Now, Mayor Buckley, I believe you’ve got an update for us on the Ava’s Island development?’ Anna smiled as she said this, not from any malice towards council, but in relief that the mayor was phoning in his weekly chat. Fond of letting his gaze linger on her cleavage, and far too prone to brush up against her in the doorway of her radio booth, today Buckley would have to harass her over the airwaves instead. She and Gary, her producer, had spontaneously high-fived when Buckley’s PA let them know the mayor was working from home, suffering a touch of the flu. Flu my arse, Gary told Anna, he was sinking piss like there was no tomorrow at the game last night.
On the back deck of his riverside home, Jim Buckley lifted his bare feet onto the railings and reached beneath his dressing gown to scratch himself. A glass of Berocca fizzed on the table next to him.
‘Absolutely correct, Anna,’ he answered in a voice oily with spin. ‘The proposal’s well on track to provide around two hundred new jobs over the next few years. The sad fact is that Grafton prison simply can’t cope with increasing demand, and we are very well placed in Durrongo to meet the need once the appeals have been overturned.’
‘There are some bones of contention, though, aren’t there, Mr Mayor?’ probed Anna. ‘The Greens are questioning how many permanent jobs are actually going to be created, and locals are appealing the development on both cultural and environmental grounds—’
‘Look, I’m very confident that the Land and Environment Court will see the clear benefit of hundreds of skilled jobs,’ Buckley quickly butted in. ‘Our legal advice says there isn’t a snowball’s chance in Hades of it being stopped. And at least five per cent of jobs at the new facility will be earmarked as Indigenous. So I hardly think frivolous concerns about so-called “sacred land”, land that has been used for primary production for well over a century I might add, can be taken as anything but stirring by professional rent-a-crowds, Anna. Those people who are taking us through this expensive and drawn-out appeals process are simply wasting everybody’s time. They’d be better off thinking about the local jobs they’re putting at risk.’
‘Strong words there from Patterson mayor Jim Buckley,’ commented Anna, wrapping up the interview, ‘who appears very confident that the proposed prison will get past increasing community objections. And now for the latest report on the traffic in the lead-up to the school holidays …’
Anna muted her mike and turned to Gary.
‘Buckley could sleep on a corkscrew.’ She shook her head. ‘It’ll get up. But if there’s two hundred jobs in it, I’m Oprah Winfrey.’
‘What’s got me buggered is why ICAC isn’t sniffing around,’ Gary agreed, cueing in the next song. ‘He leads a charmed life, our Fearless Leader.’
~
At her desk in the real estate office, Donna flicked off the radio. Went to the bathroom and wet her face. She stood in front of the mirror, shaking. So her father had been dead for nineteen years. Of the men she’d grown up among, only her two brothers remained. And now there was this unknown nephew named for her.
Donna began to fight for breath. Rushed back inside the office to grab her keys before light-headedness overcame her. Safely in the Mazda, she leaned onto the steering wheel. The grief of loss ripped through her for the first time in decades. She bent over and began silently sobbing, her mouth making ugly twisted shapes behind her hands.
She couldn’t lose the images. The photo of her smiling mother. Ken that last afternoon, the things he’d called her. Her, sobbing in the back bedroom, going to Pop for comfort when he arrived home from work when she would have been better off asking the cat for help, or the chickens. Dad Charlie, dishing up the leftover birthday cake later that afternoon. The scissors in her hand, appearing out of nowhere, and Pop, flailing backwards, his mouth opening wide as bright red flowers appeared on his business shirt.
And Pretty Mary’s high, hysterical accusations.
‘I don’t know how I could have produced a poisonous little bitch like you. Fuck off, nobody wants ya! You don’t belong here!’
And now, nineteen years later, her sister thought she had stayed away for money, for what was on offer in the white world. And maybe that was a part of i
t. Moneyed and passing for white was protection. Moneyed and white meant a life with doors that locked out the evil bastards who delighted in destroying women. Girls. But she’d also stayed away in terror that it wasn’t the grog talking that night. The terrible question at the centre of her life. Had her mother really meant it, and would she say it again to her face the first chance she got? Would she, Donna, be instantly sixteen again, with a world of pain inside her head and absolutely nowhere safe to go? She sat tormented by the smiling picture of Pretty Mary and torn by an urge she couldn’t understand to turn the key in the ignition, to head down the highway to Durrongo and find out the answer, once and for all. Asked, Donna would not have been able to say which she was looking for: welcome or revenge. Perhaps in some mad way she was hoping for both.
~
‘You first.’ Steve spat out his mouthguard and gnawed at the plaster strapping on his hands. His singlet was soaked through. Sweat dripped from his chin and made dark spots on the lino. Kerry gestured to let her rip the tape off, and Steve stuck out both fists as though he was wearing invisible handcuffs. His teenage boxing students ogled Kerry and commented to each other beneath their breath.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked them acidly.
‘Knock that off, you lot,’ Steve chipped the boys, who giggled and ran to the change room.
Kerry let it go. Silly moogle kids. But any adult who gave her shit would be seriously trying their fucking luck, cos she was close to the edge. Grandmaster Flash had nothing on her today.
Kerry described what she had uncovered at the real estate, as Steve leaned back onto the ropes of the ring. When she was done, he let out a whistle.
‘Fucken hell. Whaddya reckon’ll happen? Tonight, I mean. What’s the worst thing that could happen?’ He worried, rubbing at the adhesive left on his hands.
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