Too Much Lip

by Melissa Lucashenko

  ‘If yer not gonna arrest me,’ Ken warned, stepping so that he stood toe to toe with the sergeant, ‘then how about ya go tell cunthooks his dog’s still on heat. And tell him from me, if he wants the bitch rooted I know just the dog for the job.’ The tall Goorie man and the ageing cop eyeballed each other with the strange intimacy of true enemies. The taser lay, hard and smooth and poisonous, beneath the fingers of Nunny’s right hand, and Ken knew it. As he stared into the sergeant’s face, noticing the deep crevices falling away from his enemy’s pale grey eyes, Ken felt the lash of Cracker Nunne’s stockwhip rippling down through the decades, snaking towards his grandfather’s face.

  ‘You pull that thing out, Nunny,’ Ken taunted the white man, as history ran boiling through his veins, ‘and let’s see how much fucken good it does ya.’

  Ken slowly stretched his arms towards the roof, towards the kingplate, and then cracked his knuckles together like rifle shots. Black Superman and Chris came up to stand on either side of him, so close that their shoulders touched. The three men made a solid wall of flesh between the uniforms and the family, who were clustered in a horrified semicircle behind them. Silently, Steve walked over and joined them. Then Uncle Neil materialised out of the shadows to find his place beside Chris. The men stared at Nunne and his offsider. Two pistols. One taser. And five brothers standing their ground.

  A muscle twitched in Nunny’s cheek.

  ‘Still filming,’ Zippo reminded the sergeant.

  Nunne’s offsider cleared his throat in terror, as his radio crackled with an indistinct blur.

  ‘Youse gunjies can clear orf of my veranda,’ ordered Pretty Mary, finding her voice and pointing to the gate. ‘Ya not wanted here. Not now, not ever!’

  Moments passed. Then, with a look of pure hatred for Ken, Nunne took his hand off the taser. Telling Pretty Mary curtly that they’d be back in the morning to follow up, the police beat an ignominious retreat down the stairs. Ken watched them go, and curled his lip in triumph as he reached down to the volume control on the CD player.

  ‘Yeah, you keep right on walking, Nunny,’ he called, then howled like a dingo when the sergeant didn’t react. As the doors of the squad car slammed shut, The Angels joined the party, ‘Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again’ blasting out shockingly loud into the night.

  The family, standing beneath the kingplate, had the chorus ready, and they roared in joyful unison at the departing cop car.

  NO WAY – GET FUCKED – FUCK OFF!

  ‘Fuck the gunjies!’ Ken shouted at the end of the song, his clenched fist high. ‘This is OUR land.’ Chris ripped the scab off a fresh beer and handed it over in tribute. Ken stepped onto the top stair and hoisted his beer up.

  ‘Here’s ta us mob,’ he boomed, sculling the stubby in one joyous hit. ‘They can send as many fucken pig cars as they want – we’ll give the gutless pricks the fight of their lives!’

  The veranda exploded with laughter, cheering and backslapping. Ken gazed around at the love shining out of everybody’s faces – love for him, their leader. He had forgotten what that felt like, how big you got inside with it. Like winning a grand final, when you did everything right on the field and so could do no wrong off it. The way life was supposed to feel – him, king of his own domain, on his own land, living by his own rules. I fought the law, and the law lost.

  In the next hour or so, the sensational victory was reworked and savoured a score of times. It was analysed by some and embellished by others. The yarn grew and grew. Glenrowan had nothing on Durrongo, the party agreed. Chris grabbed his guitar and improvised a twelve-bar blues number in celebration. Zippo told passionate stories about battling the cops on Turtle Island, making eyes at Pretty Mary while he did so. Far from ruining the party as it should have, the encounter with the gunjies was instead the making of the night. The celebrations were so raucous that nobody noticed for a full minute when a red Mazda6 arrived in the backyard and its owner stepped out onto the lawn.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Other people had children or hobbies. Donna had financial goals, goals she met with unbending hard work and pinpoint accuracy. Ambitious, yes, but those in the game who talked about her killer instinct didn’t understand shit. She wasn’t driven by the understandable anger of other top women agents, or by the competitiveness of the average prick-measuring realtor in a suit. No. She was different.

  Nobody in real estate knew she was black; there were some days she almost forgot it herself. But each morning when she woke and looked in the mirror at her Mediterranean skin and dark eyes, she remembered. And so every sale was powered by a deep vein of Aboriginal fear.

  With each new commission Donna was fleeing a little further from Durrongo, still running from the troopers, hurtling through the scrub with her barefoot great-grandmother towards Ava’s Island. With each sale she managed to push down a little further her terror of ever again having to rely on another human being for safety. Donna owned three houses and a unit, and no white man was ever going to lock her inside any of them.

  ~

  Forewarned is forearmed. Of all the mob, only Kerry kept her cool when Donna made her way over to the house, bearing an elaborately wrapped birthday present and an unreadable expression. Now there’s a gifting challenge, thought Kerry. Buying for the woman who has nothing after letting her think you’re dead for twenty years.

  Seeing Donna standing alone at the foot of the stairs, the entire family gaping at her first in confusion and then in shock, Kerry felt a bizarre stab of sympathy. Her poor, stupid sister, thinking she could buy forgiveness with an enormous pink and gold beribboned gift box. Donna’s present was fancy but her eyes were wild, cornered, the pupils shrunken black pinpoints. The last time Kerry saw eyes like that was in Brisbane Women’s. But Donna had arrived here tonight purely of her own free will. She’s that much of a Salter, at least. Ten outta ten for guts.

  ‘Mum,’ yelled Kerry. ‘Come out, quick! Donna’s here!’

  ‘Come up in the light where I can get a good look at ya, girl,’ ordered Aunty Tall Mary, not trusting what her eyes told her.

  ‘What? Who?’ Pretty Mary emerged from the kitchen, and promptly fainted on top of Elvis.

  When the yelping stopped, Pretty Mary got to her feet and started crying on Donna’s neck that she was sorry, so sorry. Donna burst into tears too, echoing her mother’s words.

  Kerry realised right then that she had completely misread the situation.

  There would be no recriminations for this prodigal daughter, none of the accusations of abandonment or treachery she herself now took for granted every Christmas. If you went AWOL for a year, it seemed, that was a criminal offence against Salterdom. But bugger off altogether for decades and become a ghost? Well, all is forgiven, sister, come home.

  Kerry stood beside a perplexed Donny who had emerged, blinking, from World of Warcraft to find out what all the fuss was about. What he discovered was halfway between a wake and a birth. Pretty Mary bawled with helpless joy, as the others reeled around the house like stunned mullets. Through her frowning silence Kerry did her best to tell Donna that she hadn’t spilled the beans. For Christ’s sake, don’t put me in it, she thought. Though that problem seemed to have been overtaken by events.

  Nobody had a single thought for anything other than the sister miraculously alive on the veranda.

  ‘Why are you here?’ Donna gaped at Steve, as though his arm curled around Kerry’s waist wasn’t explanation enough.

  ‘He’s with me,’ Kerry said.

  Donna’s face crinkled in confusion and Kerry remembered telling her she was a dyke. Ah well.

  ‘Siddown, tidda, siddown,’ urged Black Superman, his eyes and nose streaming with emotion. He gestured to the most respectable of the folding chairs.

  ‘Do ya drink?’ Kerry asked meaningfully, thumping a couple of cold UDLs onto the table. Haven’t seen you for years, sis. Wouldn’t know
ya from a bar of soap.

  ‘Only on days ending in Y,’ Donna answered, giving Kerry a tiny conspiratorial nod. She accepted the UDL but remained standing. Folded her arms and hugged the cold can against her chest to hide the tremor in her hand. She wiped at her eyes. The reality of what she had just done was beginning to dawn on her.

  No going back now.

  Pretty Mary was a mess, and so the others took it on themselves to piece together Donna’s missing decades. Dad Charlie was finished, Black Superman told her, and so was Pop. Only two months ago, you just missed him. But Uncle Richard and his mob are still going strong, and the Westville crew are mostly okay too, all bar Doris running amok, cracking out on the ice and chucking her kids at Aunty Short Mary to raise. But had she heard the bad news about Granny’s island, this terrible prison business? Yes?

  Finally Tall Mary, standing in the doorway with her arms folded tight, lost patience. Enough beating around the bush. She voiced the question throbbing on Kerry’s tongue: where on earth had Donna been all this time? Was she married, or divorced, or what? Were there kids and grandkids? And the sixty-million-dollar question: why hadn’t she ever, even once in twenty years, made a simple phone call, let them know she was alright?

  Donna took a deep breath. Stepped onto the tightrope of her life story.

  ‘Because I wasn’t alright, for a long time,’ she told her drink. ‘I went to Sydney, hit the drugs, then ended up living with a psycho prick for four years. Never allowed to leave the house except for work. GPS tracker on the car. All my phone calls recorded. He vetted my friends – no men, no mob, nobody he hadn’t met. They had to be girls, preferably ones married to his mates. And even then …’ She unconsciously rubbed at the hinge in her jawline. It was the same movement Kerry had seen Steve do when his false teeth bothered him. It came to her in a blinding flash that her sister’s new nose wasn’t about vanity.

  ‘It wasn’t pretty,’ Donna summarised.

  ‘No kids?’ asked Pretty Mary through a sodden tissue.

  ‘Nah. I lost a couple from being bashed. After the second time, I told the doctors: fix me up.’

  ‘Was he Goorie or white?’ asked Black Superman, his mouth a grim cave.

  ‘Oh, white.’ Donna gave a short bitter laugh. ‘A white man in a suit. I escaped when the house next door caught fire,’ she continued. ‘I thought if I don’t take me chances now, I’ll be leaving in a coffin. So I bolted. The firies got me to a refuge on the other side of the harbour … The year after, I got my real estate licence and started selling houses in Wollongong.’ She gestured at the Mazda gleaming on the lawn beneath the moonlight. ‘The franchise asked me to come up and be stand-in manager at Patto Real Estate for a few weeks. Then I’m planning on going back to Sydney to buy my own agency.’ There was a flash of the old proud Donna as she said this. Chin up, ready for anything. Lookout, world.

  The family took a second to digest this. Then, as the rags-to-riches story sank in, they slowly began to chuckle, and then the chuckles grew into gales of laughter. A black Goorie woman, in charge of white people’s housing! Telling dugais where they could and couldn’t live! And, best of all, making good money off the back of it, too – driving a red sports car. You wouldn’t read about it.

  Watching the hilarity unfold, Donna smiled a tightly stretched smile. In fifteen years she had sold enough houses to make two or three Durrongos, and now, heading towards forty, this was simply who she was. She lived and breathed real estate, and often she dreamed it, too.

  Right then the phone rang. There had been unexpected delays, and Uncle Richard wouldn’t make it till the morning. Black Superman told him who was sitting on the veranda, and grinned as he handed the phone to Pretty Mary, who burst into a fresh round of tears. Uncle Richard had a few brief, astonished words with her, and then with Donna, making Donna dab at her nose and sniff.

  ‘Are you actually working in Patto?’ Black Superman frowned. Trying to sound matter-of-fact, Donna revealed that she had been staying at the Scrub Turkey Motel while she looked after Jim Buckley’s office.

  Pretty Mary looked up, horrified.

  ‘Just temporary, like?’ she asked quickly, from among a mountain of discarded tissues. ‘Nothing more than that?’ No, Donna reassured her, she was only doing it for two or three more weeks and then she would be off. Pretty Mary breathed a silent sigh of relief, let her unspoken terror subside.

  ‘We could’ve run into you at reception.’ Black Superman goggled, for he and Josh were staying at the Turkey as well. Kerry wondered if he was going to put two and two together any time soon. Her and her ‘big news’.

  ‘Well, it took ya long enough to come and see your mother.’ Tall Mary sniffed in aggravation.

  ‘She’s here now, that’s all that matters,’ Pretty Mary said, leaping to Donna’s defence. ‘But you sure you got no jahjams? None at all?’

  Donna shook her head, pausing as she wondered whether, or how, to explain.

  ‘Half ya bloody luck,’ interrupted Aunty Val, getting a sharp slap on the arm from Sav and loud peals of laughter from everybody else.

  ‘Sorry Savvie,’ Aunty Val said. ‘But when you get knocked up at fifteen in the back of a Holden panel van, it don’t give you a lot of time to enjoy your youth.’

  ‘Gee, thanks Mum,’ Sav shot back. ‘Sorry for ruining your life and everything.’

  ‘I never said that,’ Val soothed unconvincingly.

  ‘Fifteen,’ joked Uncle Neil. ‘Val was the oldest virgin in Murwillumbah High in 1977.’

  ‘I reckon I was the only bloody virgin in Murwillumbah High in 1977.’ Val corrected him with a gravelly laugh. ‘And then, just my luck, the first bloody time and I hafta get pregnant.’

  ‘I was twenty when I met Dad Charlie,’ Pretty Mary reminisced. ‘The best looking man at the Lismore woodchop by a country mile, and I seen him and said I’m gonna marry me that Goorie fella. And that’s just what I done. Chaperoned all the way, mind. No try before you buy for Charlie boy. Granny Ruth woulda knocked him into the middle of next week if he as much as thought about it.’

  ‘Bet that didn’t stop you thinking about it, but,’ said Val, grin- ning coarsely.

  ‘I didn’t think of nothing else!’ confessed Pretty Mary with a toss of her head. ‘Wedding night couldn’t come quick enough for this little black duck.’ Pretty Mary and Aunty Val both laughed. Chris looked at his feet.

  ‘How about you, Kenny? You’re being pretty quiet.’ Val seized on his transparent embarrassment. ‘When was your first time? Come on, spill the beans!’ But Ken was silent and scowling, and Val was forced to turn to the girls instead.

  ‘Oh no, bugger the third degree, I forget,’ Donna protested in real horror. Kerry had to rescue the moment by inventing a liaison with a Chilean athlete at the Sydney Olympics.

  ‘You’re so full of shit,’ Black Superman scoffed. ‘I remember standing next to ya down the bloody pub watching Cathy win gold.’

  ‘After the closing ceremony, I mean,’ Kerry claimed, unfazed. ‘Juan was in Byron on holiday.’

  ‘Which way? He any good in the sack?’ Tall Mary asked, interested. Kerry began heaping praise on her fantasy lover.

  ‘I’m gonna go whack the kettle on,’ Chris blurted, fleeing from the terrible frankness of the women. He headed inside for tea he didn’t want. The family gradually drifted in after him, making a cheerful circle around the laminex table.

  Donna looked around.

  ‘There’s not much changed in here, Mum,’ she said, picking up a familiar brown dinner plate and running a finger around the rim. The fridge magnets – Zero to Bitch in Ten Seconds, Support our NORCO Farmers – were different, and the calendar. One of the glass louvres had been replaced with plywood, and the mould speckles on the ceiling had expanded into billowing clouds. But otherwise she was looking at the same yellow cupboards, the same net curtains, the same cracked grey lino
beneath her feet as the night she left.

  ‘Yer father’s gone,’ corrected Pretty Mary. ‘And yer Pop. That’s what’s changed.’ She thrust the funeral booklet at Donna, who hesitated before taking it from her mother. The man on the front was old, really old, Donna marvelled. A relic of another time, almost of another world. This worn-out pensioner was a far cry from the man she’d stabbed at sixteen.

  Well. Ashes to ashes. And what’s done is done. Donna handed the booklet back to Pretty Mary, and let her think her daughter’s silence was the silence of grief. Which in a way it was.

  ‘We need a photo of us mob all together again,’ cried Black Superman, still astonished about the motel. The cry went up for photos all round. Donna nodded at the pictures on top of the TV cabinet.

  ‘Have I changed that much?’ she joked. What a night that had been, a night to live to forget. Sweet sixteen and kicked to the kerb.

  ‘I never ever gave up, dort. Never lost hope. I knew you’d come back,’ said Pretty Mary, hauling herself to her feet to clasp Donna around the waist, and grip her hand tight, breathe her in. The incredible fact of her daughter – her daughter alive – finally home, where she belonged. The comment was as close as Pretty Mary had come all night to any kind of accusation, Kerry thought. Very strange. It didn’t fit at all with her idea of her mother, a woman to whom judgement was the breath of life. They say every child grows up in a different version of the same family. Perhaps it was Donna’s disappearance that had tainted her own childhood. Maybe before Donna left, Pretty Mary had been happy to live and let live, a veritable little ray of sunshine like the one now gazing adoringly at her eldest daughter. But no, that wasn’t what she remembered of Pretty Mary’s drinking years, those times before Donna went away. There had been laughter, yes, but plenty else too. Take them memories out and the picture would be Swiss cheese. The transformation in her mother each day as the piss went steadily down. The resentment and the arguments of the adults, spiking and blurring into each other, the very same arguments month in and month out, bedded down by periods of sobriety and then reliably resurrected by yet more grog.