‘The worst thing would be if Mum drops dead from shock when Donna arrives outta the blue,’ Kerry answered. She would never, ever forget her father lying on the kitchen floor, her mother screaming get up, Charlie, get up, don’t do this to me Charlie.
‘Well then, you need to tell her first,’ Steve began, but Kerry overrode him.
‘Second-worst, close second, I tell Mum Donna’s alive and then she doesn’t show. And we all have to go out looking for her like it’s fucking Groundhog Day …’
‘Ah.’ Steve sucked his teeth as this sank in. Not as bad as a fatal heart attack, but almost as complicated. And nearly as painful for Pretty Mary.
Kerry paused too, calculating more woe. ‘Plus, whether she turns up or not, there’s still a pretty good chance Ken’s dirty with me for giving him lip yesterday. So he might decide to lose his shit and crack me onetime.’ Too much lip, her old problem from way back. And the older she got, the harder it seemed to get to swallow her opinions. The avalanche of bullshit in the world would drown her if she let it; the least she could do was raise her voice in anger. Give the arseholes a blast, then stand and defend, or else run like hell.
Kerry frowned at Steve. Some birthday party this was gonna be if the planets didn’t align.
‘Not while I’m around he won’t.’ Steve grimaced. Kerry blinked as a delicious warm feeling spread through her chest.
‘Does that mean you’re still coming tonight?’
‘If you want me there.’
‘You’d jump in?’
‘Bloody oath I’d jump in.’ Steve crinkled his forehead at her like it was the dumbest question he’d ever heard. Kerry didn’t really know him at all if she thought he’d just sit there and let anyone … For fuck’s sake, Steve, tell her. No guts, no glory.
‘You’d wanna be sure, but,’ Kerry warned. ‘Knuckle up to Ken and the whole mob might double bank ya.’ Cousin Chris could punch on like nobody’s business, and there was no telling what the others might do under duress. A worrisome picture came into her mind of Savannah swinging a wine bottle. It was followed by a more pleasing one of Kerry taking the bottle and clocking her with it, knocking Sav sideways off the veranda into the snaky waist-high grass. That still left her and Steve knuckling up against Ken, Chris, any randoms who felt like blueing, and possibly even Pretty Mary herself. But ah, it wouldn’t come to that. Ken should have cooled off by now. Hopefully.
Steve smiled a pained smile.
‘Let’s cross that bridge later. And if that’s your big news, this is mine: you might not have signed any contract, girl,’ he said, putting his palms either side of her face, ‘but I’m fucked if I’ll stand by and watch anyone lay a finger on you, Kez. I’m crazy in love with you, babe – donchya realise that?’
Steve blushed beneath his stubble, a deep red that reached his collarbones. Kerry’s heart thumped and banged, threatening to bust out of her chest altogether. Oh God. This life of hers, this crazy fucking life. She was such a fool. They say life has to be lived forwards and understood backwards, yeah, well, whaddya know, they’re bang on the money there. Because, she now realised with a flash of blinding insight, she had comprehensively snookered herself. Had played silly buggers with Steve, acted exactly like any girlfriend would act, in the belief that his white skin would protect her heart. Had gambled that it would be enough, in the end, to let her dismiss him. No matter what they did together or how attached she might become, she could go running back to Queensland with her conscience clear. Because with whitenormalsavages there was always an escape hatch sitting there. Always an exit door marked in big black letters: only a dugai, and therefore not completely human. Certainly not to be taken seriously in anything that really mattered.
But, Kerry now understood with a blend of horror and joy, you can be wrong about these things, comprehensively wrong. Being in love with this whitefella was impossible, but there you fucking go. Because it turned out she did want to be Steve’s girlfriend. She wanted to grab him tight – his calm sanity, his eruptions of laughter, his firm belief that bad things could be made better and that survival was assured either way – and never let him go. This one’s on my side, she thought, in astonishment. For once in my damn life, I’m not kicking against the pricks alone.
‘That calls for a drink,’ she grinned, producing the vodka bottle.
Chapter Fourteen
‘Us mob need to start a revolution, dead set,’ Ken announced to the party as he basted the lamb sizzling in front of him. A mighty cheer erupted from everyone, even the strays from the pub. Encouraged, he went on. ‘A blackfella revolution from Durrongo to Darwin.’ Ken wiped his forehead, happy about his decision to go with cuzzie Chris’s homemade spit rather than dig a kup murri. Ah, nothing like it. A gathering of the mob, a charge and a bloody good feed in the great outdoors.
‘Oppressed peoples must be the agents of their own liberation,’ agreed Zippo, owner of the cigarette lighter at the protest. ‘But real revolution takes in the economic struggle, too, brother.’ A weathered Metis grandfather, Zippo had taken to Ken’s haphazard political theories with intense interest. The two men had argued like cats and dogs for a week, then bonded over a shared hatred of the prison industrial complex. Between them they were in imminent danger of developing a recipe for a new Australian democracy.
‘Sovereignty’s gotta be the priority, Hairyman,’ Ken counselled. ‘Treaty first for the Goorie man. Then we can talk socialism.’
‘Oi! Goorie women too!’ Savannah joked on her way upstairs, for Uncle Neil had last night revealed a great-grandfather born on the third mission south of Rivertown. It was startling information that nobody except Pretty Mary was quite sure what to do with. You’re not Black, cousin Chris had informed Savannah furiously. It takes more than just finding an ancestor, girlfriend. Nah, one-drop rule, Pretty Mary disagreed; if their family was here before Captain Cook rocked up, then they blackfellas and that’s an end of it. Ken had scratched his head at the discovery. He’d erupted too loudly and too often about Johnny-come-latelys to agree aloud with Pretty Mary, and now when he looked at Savannah, his affection was diluted with chagrin. She and he wore matching red T-shirts that read: Protect Our Sovereign Waters. Ken, like every other Salter, knew with crystal clarity – had always known – that the waters around Ava’s Island belonged to their Bundjalung mob. Just exactly who constituted that mob, though, and who now fell outside of it, was a little less clear than it ought to be. Ken frowned and turned back to the coming revolution. Savannah might have morphed into a conundrum, but he, Kenneth Edward Salter, was bred Black, born Black and raised Black. He was as Black as the mooya of a black budigan at midnight, and he had a Black agenda to be getting on with. He wasn’t about to be distracted.
‘If the Land and Environment Court fucks us with no lube,’ he continued, ‘we go direct action. We rip that gammon fence down as often as they wanna put it up. We go camp on our country and bloody well fight for it!’ He glanced up at the house, where the kingplate hung, invisible from the road, nailed to the beam facing the rear door. The ancestors were with them again – the ragged bullet holes in the plate were simply more evidence that the Salters were indestructible when they stuck together. Ken knew in his bones there was no stopping them. All he had to do was fulfil his manifest destiny. The prison was as good as dead.
While Ken and Zippo plotted, Pretty Mary sat on the veranda with Aunty Tall Mary and gazed down on the yard. Cousin Chris had raked up eight full buckets of dried pods from under the leopard tree. The men had driven, pushed or towed all the bombs to the back corner of the yard and parked them in a neat line, just like a real car yard. Then Ken had spent the morning on Uncle Neil’s ride-on, leaping and yelling every time toads and snakes wriggled out from under the wheels. Aunty Val helped Aunty Tall Mary and Helen mop the house out; Kerry and Steve were due any tick of the clock with a couple of roast chooks and some big news (hopefully that they were getting engaged)
. Pretty Mary beamed. Not only had Kenny sold two – two! – cars yesterday, he had promptly shouted her a fresh carton of durries plus, incredibly, the lamb price that she had been planning to somehow scrape up out of the bill money. Now, after doing the Patto markets, she was just about square. And oh, she told Tall Mary, wasn’t it the best feeling in the world, getting rid of them awful bits of paper scolding her from the door of the fridge? An hour ago she had fed them with great satisfaction into the fire crackling beneath the lamb. Disconnect the power, my arse. She smiled as she sipped at the homemade finger-lime cordial Aunty Tall Mary had brung over from Casino. She wondered if it would be wise to do a reading for her, given Doris’s never-ending dramas on the ice. Best leave it, she decided.
‘Where do ya want these, Mum?’ asked Sav, coming past with potato salad and coleslaw. Behind her, Aunty Val staggered beneath a load of crockery and sauce bottles. Uncle Neil – whose rich brown tan above his Aussie-flag board shorts had taken on a brand new significance – was helping cousin Chris move the trestle table under the leopard tree.
‘Chuck everything on the table next to Pop,’ Pretty Mary instructed Sav. ‘And keep that bloody warrigal chained up or he’ll be into it before we can blink.’ Elvis lay disconsolate at the far stretch of his chain, which manacled him halfway between the lamb’s glorious aroma and the house. He put his nose between his front paws and brooded on the severe injustice of his situation.
‘Next to Pop?’ Sav wrinkled her nose.
Pretty Mary looked at her blankly.
‘You said next to Pop …’
‘Oh! I mean next to Ken,’ Pretty Mary laughed, realising her mistake. ‘Pop always used to cook when we had a kup murri.’
~
Kerry sat in front of the shop, checking her phone. No texts. No missed calls. She should have insisted on getting Donna’s number rather than just handing over her own like some kind of simple cunt. Their sister always had been a cunning bitch and consummate liar, according to Ken, and it was starting to look like he was right. Maybe Donna had already made tracks, left the clan high and dry a second time. Another bloody good reason to say nothing to Pretty Mary, Kerry decided, as Steve emerged with a hot chook clutched in either hand, claiming to be the wind beneath her wings.
He lifted each chicken shoulder-high, swaying side to side on the footpath and doing his best Bette Midler.
‘Can you shuttup and get on?’ Kerry asked. Steve simply sang louder, hamming it up for the locals gossiping in front of the noticeboard. A couple of the young women began laughing at his antics. Kerry wondered how she would go arriving at the party alone. Caruso and his chickens could walk.
Steve came closer and yodelled louder.
Kerry rolled her eyes. Steve had showered and shaved and pulled out the black polo shirt she’d last seen at the funeral, but he obviously hadn’t registered how bloody tricky the party was going to be if Donna showed. And if she didn’t. Kerry had lain in bed all afternoon racking her brain for a good way to tell Pretty Mary that her other daughter was alive. Steve advised her to just spit it out. Knowing better, Kerry wavered in an agony of indecision. Depending on Ken’s mood, the simple fact of keeping quiet about Donna for an afternoon could be considered treachery. Everybody knew that information was power. And she – his younger sibling and a female to boot – had knowledge of something that he – the oldest and a grown man – had been left ignorant of. That’s how Kenny Koala would likely view her revelation. As a crime against nature. But unless she was willing to risk seeing Pretty Mary’s world crumble for nothing – and she wasn’t willing, the thought was just too cruel – she would have to gamble on Donna not showing her face.
‘You okay, babe?’ Steve said, finally chucking his leg over the bike. He rested his chin on her left shoulder and their helmets knocked together with a soft clunk. Kerry shrugged.
‘I can’t risk telling her. Not on her birthday.’
Steve was quiet for a moment.
‘Well, you know I got your back.’
‘Yeah. Just wish you didn’t have to.’
This decision still nagged at Kerry as she rode down the drive, where Mick Jagger was howling in dissatisfaction from the caravan. It wormed away in her brain as she gave stiff-necked Ken and his lamb a wide berth and went upstairs, and the news sat on the very tip of her tongue as she grudgingly apologised for doing crime while living under her mother’s roof.
‘Apology accepted,’ said Pretty Mary primly, demanding a kiss on the cheek from Steve. To Kerry’s amazement, no gruelling lecture followed. No enumeration of the many ancestors on high rotation at her bad behaviour. It was astonishing what a mown lawn and a carton of smokes could do, she reflected. Maybe it really was as Pretty Mary said – with the kingplate finally returned to the family, where it belonged, the powerful blessing of Granny Ava was radiating out into every tiny nook and cranny.
Her mother was as happy as she’d been in years. Steve was now officially Kerry’s boyfriend. Kenny – unbelievably – had just sold two cars to a Lismore punter whose brother was interested in a third. Uncle Neil and Sav and Sav’s kids had turned out to be another long-lost distant piece of the upended Goorie jigsaw. And Pretty Mary’s favourite son was on his way to see them any moment now with an update on how his QC was gonna outsmart Jiminy Cricket and save Granny’s island. All this good fortune came through the mystical agency of the kingplate, according to her mother, and since it was Kerry who had – albeit nefariously – delivered the kingplate back to the mob, Kerry was to be forgiven her other transgressions and misdemeanours.
It was like some kind of ancestral miracle.
With a dozen shots of vodka in her, Kerry heard Donna’s voice echoing from that morning: She looks happy. Why not just let her be happy?
Why not, indeed.
Kerry kissed Aunty Tall Mary, briefly gave some cheek to cuzzie Helen, then made tracks to sit in the darkest corner of the veranda. To tell or not to tell, that was the question. She waited for Donna’s text for twenty long and fruitless minutes. Then Kerry heaved a sigh, took the Stolly and silently toasted Helen, who was four months pregnant and off the grog.
Bottoms up, cuz.
~
‘The city slickers are ere,’ Ken shouted with a grin some time later. ‘Lock up ya sons!’ Kerry emerged from the house to see Black Superman and Josh pulling in. Both kids in the back. Thank fucking Christ. Brandon hadn’t been hauled away to juvey. And since a problem shared was a problem halved, she could now unburden herself. Black Superman would listen and not go ballistic or make things worse by instantly spilling his guts to Pretty Mary. As she waited for her brother, Kerry noticed Donny hauling next door’s blow-up pool into the yard. Still half full, the rectangular pool sloshed and jerked over the grass. Was it her imagination, she wondered, or was her neph putting on a tiny bit of weight? She had spied a stringy muscle lurking beneath the skin of his left forearm.
‘Uncle Richard here yet?’ she heard Black Superman ask.
‘On his way from Grafton,’ Ken told him. ‘He had that funeral.’
‘Eh, which way you mob!’ Kerry called out in relief. ‘Here’s trouble!’ Brandon and Lub Lub were racing to join the other kids clustering around the pool.
‘Oi, Donny, empty that out! You’ll bust the seams,’ ordered Ken. He went over and made Donny tip out half the water he had just hauled all the way from next door.
‘Come on, tip er again,’ Ken insisted. ‘You can easy refill it with the hose.’
‘Nuh. S’here now,’ Donny panted, with a final heave that delivered the sloshing pool to the edge of the leopard tree’s shade. As he hauled, his T-shirt sleeve rode up, exposing the humpback newly etched below his shoulder. That arm was definitely a millimetre wider.
‘Nice whale there, lad,’ Kerry observed, coming downstairs to check it out. Ken had long urged her to put Ned Kelly on her abs but she was sceptical of his t
alent; she wanted Ned Kelly there, not Marge Simpson. But Donny’s whale was impressively realistic. The lad glowed as he explained what he wanted the full sleeve to look like in time, taking in all his totems. Whales cruising across the top, flames below, and then maybe Granny Ava’s hoop pine growing up through it all from his hand. Donny was keen for the tree, but Ken had insisted he wasn’t near ready for shit like that, the kid reported ruefully.
‘How about a Dell lappie instead, with the mouse cord coming down, wrapped around yer forearm?’ yelled Ken, with a wink at Sav. ‘And a big Google symbol over the top?’ Sav pursed her lips and slapped at Ken. Leave off tormenting the poor lad.
‘Ya think ya fucking hilarious,’ Donny replied, going to grab the ice from beneath the house, ‘but ya not, eh.’ Kerry smiled wryly. Donny, putting on weight, talking up to his father – wonders would never cease. Ken laughed the laugh of a man who had sold two cars at a tidy cash profit, and turned back to basting the lamb. Donny upended the bags of ice into the pool, then began ripping open beer cartons and putting the cans into the water. The kids took this as a signal to strip off and plunge in too, pushing and shoving against the clinking cans and each other for territory, and soon enough shivering while vehemently denying that they were in the least little bit cold.
‘Watch Dr No, won’t ya bub,’ Aunty Val called out to Rosie from her chair on the other side of the spit.
‘She knows,’ said Savannah, organising the salads. ‘She’s an awesome big sissy, aren’t ya, beautiful?’
~
The sun hovered close to the horizon for what seemed like hours as the lamb was carved and enjoyed. Steve put his fatty meat aside. Kerry, who by now was neither drunk nor sober, happily scoffed it as well as her own. Then she undid the top button of her jeans, groaning, and resolved to begin a twenty-four-hour fast first thing in the morning. When everyone else was happily complaining that they, too, had eaten too much good tucker, Black Superman stood up looking exhausted but hopeful. He cleared his throat and reported that the QC was optimistic about their chances in court. He thought there might be enough dodgy paperwork in Buckley’s council to bring the prison proposal tumbling down.
Too Much Lip Page 21