As he neared the open gate, the boy froze. Elvis had been slung roughly across the top bar with his head pointing at the ground and his tongue grotesquely slack in the gentle light of dawn. A bullet had made a small dark cave in his temple, its meaty edges raised, the white hair blackened by gunpowder. He had been shot at point-blank range. At some time in the night, blood had trickled out of his right ear and made its way down to his upper lip, where the flow had stopped; the trickle had dried in a horrible parody of a lipsticked smile. Flies now walked this red line and crawled over it up into the dog’s nostrils. After several minutes of blank observation Donny found it in himself to move. He eased Elvis off the gate into his arms and walked down to the house, numb, unaware of the gravel biting at his cold feet or the magpies calling the day into being over at the creek. Blind, deaf, mute, Donny carried Elvis underneath the house where, with the dog held fast against his chest, he collapsed among the dusty cardboard boxes and broken furniture. He curled himself around Elvis’s limp form, closed his eyes and told himself that none of it was real.
~
‘We can’t just up sticks and bugger off to Queensland,’ Steve protested over his third coffee of the morning. ‘I mean, I get it, but you can’t just run away and pretend you don’t have a family, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Why not? Donna did.’
‘And look what’s happened. Anyway, I’ve put everything into the business, Kez. Be realistic, for fuck’s sake.’
Despite his protests, Steve wondered for one ridiculous moment if Kerry was right, if they should just bail and head north. Wave goodbye to the impossible burden of starting a business from scratch. There were opportunities in Queensland. Definitely a lot fewer crazy bloody Salters to worry about, too. But no, it was ludicrous. Behind the door of the locker room, Kerry bent over the basin to heave up the coffee she had tried to substitute for breakfast. Steve winced at her groans and retching. What a clusterfuck the party had turned out to be. Happy sixty-fifth, Pretty Mary; yeah, right. He retrieved a plastic fruit bowl and put it next to the futon.
Kerry zombied out of the locker room and back to bed, hoping to sleep for a week, or to wake with someone else’s sober head on her shoulders. But what got her up instead, an hour later, was a terse call from Ken. A family meeting had been called. Uncle Richard was on his way.
‘Gah,’ Kerry said, closing her eyes again. ‘Murggh.’ Why did her phone still have battery, today of all days?
‘Want any?’ Steve asked, showing her that he was cracking eggs into a pan.
‘You sound proper grogsick,’ Ken said, and bit his tongue. ‘Gimme Steve.’
‘Yep. Uh-huh,’ said Steve, after putting his eggs aside and taking the phone. ‘Shit. Elvis?’
‘Arrrrggh, gerh.’ Dry heaving at the idea of eggs, Kerry flung herself into the shower to become human. Family meeting. Yeah, good luck with that. Uncle Richard would want to be some kind of fucking miracle worker this time.
~
‘The island, I mean,’ Black Superman said, standing in the doorway of Donna’s motel room. ‘I wouldn’t ask ya to go back to Mum’s. I’m not myall.’
Donna sat on the unmade bed with dark rings beneath her swollen eyes, not really watching the morning television. Scrolling under images of lawyers and their clients outside a Sydney courtroom was news from the royal commission. Scores more victims of priests and sports coaches and teachers were coming forward to break their silence, to be heard at last. One cluster of faces were from out west, where a very highly paid school principal had just been revealed as a serial predator. Donna clicked the television off. People just ain’t no good. She didn’t call that news.
‘What’d be the point?’ Donna asked, finally meeting Black Superman’s eyes. ‘I’m going back home next week. Leave this,’ here she waved a furious hand at the motel, at Jim Buckley’s sleazy little empire, at her mad relations, ‘behind me, once and for all. I’ve got a shot at buying my own Sydney agency. Do you know how huge that is, for a woman? A woman like me?’
Black Superman eased inside and sat down on a scratched plastic chair next to a cane coffee table. Fiddled with the two standard motel biscuits. Orange slice and choc chip, both soft beneath his thumbnail. Should he offer to take Donna out for breakfast? Should he tell her again that he believed her? Or jump straight to the crux of things, that despite last night’s fiasco, they still needed her help to save Granny’s island. Fat chance of that. He rubbed at his face. Some day things would be different, he told himself. Easy and straightforward. Just him and Josh, enjoying their lives. Weekends in Port Douglas. Annual leave in Japan. But that day was not today. He forced himself to sound enthusiastic about Donna’s imminent departure.
‘Yeah, I get it, sis, it’s massive. And good for you, why shouldn’t you have your agency, when you’ve worked so hard for it? But the thing is—’ he began, then came to a halt. The truth, perhaps … When in doubt, just spit it out. Be fair dinkum.
‘Thing is, you run now, after last night, and it’ll haunt you forever. You can go as far away as you like, but the past always comes along for the ride. I should know.’ He discovered that for some reason his voice wasn’t working properly. Big lump in his throat. The world blurry outside the motel glass.
He folded his arms and told the carpet his tale.
‘You asked me if he touched me. And all I can tell you is I don’t know. There’s these giant blanks. Mainly what I remember is being flogged half dead that time. I’m kind of fixated on that, I suppose, and on this one other thing. I remember seeing Ken on the kitchen floor. He was maybe ten. Lying like this—’ Black Superman curled, mimicking the fetal position, ‘and yelping like a fucking animal, scrabbling round in a circle, trying not to get kicked in the guts by Pop. I would have been three or four, I guess … And if I try to go any further, remember more than that, there’s just this awful blank hole. Nothing, no memories … and so I don’t try. But I don’t kid myself, sis. I might live in a flash Sydney unit, but some part of me is always gonna wake up sweating in the middle of the night and hear Ken screaming on the kitchen floor. Probably why I wanted to take the kids on, I suppose.’
Donna shifted uneasily where she sat, and ran her hands through her hair. Black Superman’s story made her jaw ache with the memory of her own beatings. And below that, something else stirred. Call it rage, or fear, but it was more than either of those. It thrummed in her constantly, like the waves of sound that humans can’t hear but animals can. Below consciousness. A vague hum in her muscle and bone. Alerting her to danger everywhere around her, always, unless she was drunk or high in the safety of her own locked home. It was a cool morning, but tiny beads of sweat broke out on her upper lip.
‘And you wonder why I’m going?’ she asked.
‘I just reckon it might help to go to the river one last time,’ Black Superman said quietly, seeing her react. ‘And then you could take one good memory with you, when you go, at least.’ He waited. Breathed.
Please, please.
Donna flicked the TV back on, the sound still muted. She had deliberately not returned to Ava’s Island since Jim revealed his plan with New South Wales Corrections and the Yang Corporation. The deal he described was words on paper and lines on a map, that was all. Nothing to do with Granny Ruth or with Pretty Mary or Dad Charlie. Certainly nothing to do with the place she had been happiest in her life, before Granny Ruth died. Because she was Martina Rossi and she had no past, no family, no history at all.
‘I’ve got enough memories of the island,’ she said dismissively.
‘For me, then. Please. It’ll be just us two.’ Black Superman was begging. Let her go with him, let her see what would be destroyed. Let her see that the river still knew her; that she was still a part of it, despite everything. He wheedled, he argued, he joked and cajoled. He had always been her favourite, the one who got her; he told her over and over, until, in the end, Donna reluctantl
y allowed herself to be persuaded. She would go to the river with him, but later, in a week or so, not today. Then she would pack her things, and she would drive south to Sydney and she would never come back again.
~
Black Superman stood alone beside the river. The day was glorious, but fatigue built an invisible wall between him and his surrounds. He vaguely registered the leaves of the eucalypts and the pine gleaming in the morning sunshine; he saw the river, sparkling like an avalanche of crushed diamonds as it swept down in its hurry to meet the sea. He saw these things, but had no capacity, today, to enjoy any of their beauty. He was almost spent. With his last fragment of strength Black Superman straightened, and he began to chant in the old tongue:
Grandmother, Grandfather, come to us, your blood,
Grandmother, Grandfather, show us the straight path through.
From an unseen tree on the island came the sound of crows. Then the swish of the breeze picking up and changing to a strong steady wind against his face. The hoop pine began to tremble and sway. Black Superman noticed this, and sang even harder. The wind strengthened. It buffeted the top of the trees, flinging the crown of the pine from side to side, its massive trunk creaking with the effort of resisting the forces at play on it. A small dust spiral formed on the dirt track, lifting leaf litter and twigs high into the air before dropping them on the rocky edge of the current, near the boulder where Pop’s ashes had been scattered. Okay. So you can hear me, but Granny Ava, Grandad Chinky Joe, Granny Ruth, that’s not enough, not today. Tell us what to do, what to believe … and help us to protect our country, please.
The wind gave one last violent gust, and Black Superman flinched, half expecting a branch of the pine to come plummeting down on top of him. But the tree remained intact, and then the wind gradually eased. The sun shone even brighter, casting his shadow onto the surface of the water. Around him, the birds of the forest went about their business as usual, chirping and hopping from branch to branch in search of bugs. A small family of wallabies on the island had heard his song and paused in their grazing, alert to strange sounds they had only heard talk of from their grandparents. Now they bent to the ground once again, but anxious this time, their ears flicking nervously back and forth as they began to nip at the grass with their sharp front teeth. Something was awry. Something was going to happen here soon to upset the order of the universe.
Black Superman waited for a further sign, but no sign came.
Slicing through the Pacific Ocean, far out to sea beyond the Brunswick heads, The Doctor had the sudden tug of an idea from nowhere at all. The idea was that she should turn, and head upriver again to the distant waters around Ava’s Island. Something there required her presence. The shark nosed her way around and instinctively began heading towards land, finding herself eventually working against the powerful outgoing tide. The swaying of the huge fish beat a rhythm into the ocean, as though she was playing a watery instrument, her entire body the bow. Stroke, stroke, stroke. Silver flashes streaked away from her path everywhere she travelled. When The Doctor reached the river mouth, spoonbills and herons developed a wary watchfulness as she passed them by. The grasses on the riverbanks swayed and tossed in the easterly breeze, but below the surface of the water, all was calm. There was no hurry to the shark’s pace. Just the slow steady metronome of her pointed tail, drumming its way upriver to keep an appointment with a very old friend.
~
‘I still can’t believe you left my keys with him,’ Kerry complained, gingerly swallowing her last bite of vegemite toast as she and Steve hammered down the highway in the XD. Tiny black fragments of burnt cane swirled past the car and those that didn’t landed on the ever-expanding spider-crack in the windscreen. Steve flicked a lever, tried to wash them off, but there was no water in the XD’s reservoir. All he succeeded in doing was smearing the specks across the windscreen in long grey semicircles. They drove on, seeing the world through ashes.
‘What if he’s taken it up the Goldie and flogged it?’ Kerry had a horrifying vision of Ken walking into Jupiters Casino with a fat roll of green hundred-dollar bills. And a blank space under the house where she had parked the Harley yesterday arvo.
‘Doubt it. And anyway, if you weren’t legless on Stolly I wouldn’t have needed to leave them with anyone,’ Steve pointed out, irritated. Kerry made a low sound. She was too sick to deal with this. With her head resting on the glass of the passenger window, she closed her eyes against Steve’s indisputable logic, then opened them again as nausea bit hard. She kept them open this time, watching the cane fields blur. Someone on the radio was going on about the royal commission into child abuse. Beaudesert BoysTown topping some national fucking table for sex crimes against kids. A school principal out west, just as bad. Kerry stabbed the radio off with a rigid forefinger. Do yer fucken head in.
‘I was listening to that,’ Steve said.
‘I just hope it’s still in one piece,’ said Kerry. Anxiety sat in her gut like a toad.
‘I’d be more worried about your sister being in one piece,’ Steve muttered, wondering what a family meeting entailed, and what his own role in it might be. ‘She was pretty upset when she left last night.’
‘Yeah, her and everybody else! Ah, she makes me weak,’ Kerry said heatedly, wild with the disruption Donna had brought and the unknowable consequences everyone would now have to bear. ‘It was easier when we thought she was dead.’
‘Nice.’
‘Well, Jesus, what the fuck? Turns up out of the blue and then half an hour later dumps that steaming pile of shit in all our laps! And for what? What did she think was gonna happen?’
‘Maybe she’s been wanting to get it off her chest for twenty years,’ Steve said feelingly.
‘So why not wait a bit bloody longer then? But no. She had to run her mouth at Mum’s birthday, onetime. Right in the middle of our fight about the prison, too. It’s all a bit fucking suss.’
‘Babe, you’re forgetting one thing – she didn’t come to you looking to cause trouble,’ Steve contradicted. ‘If you hadn’t stumbled across her at the real estate yesterday, she’d still be missing and nobody’d be any the wiser. Unless you somehow think she engineered that, as well.’
Kerry fell silent. That was true enough. Twenty-four hours ago Donna was still dead. It was she who had resurrected her, by going into the real estate in the first place. So – looked at in one cockeyed way – it could be Kerry who was responsible for last night’s catastrophe. She gritted her teeth. If only she’d stayed on the bloody footpath yesterday morning. Ah. Woulda, shoulda, coulda.
‘You sound like you believe her,’ she accused. Steve shrugged awkwardly. He could say so many things in response, and struggled to find the one that would do no harm.
‘Why would she lie?’ he finally asked.
‘You didn’t know Pop. He was an alcoholic, and he could be violent, but he wasn’t a fucking pedo.’ Kerry’s voice rose in protest, but before Steve could remind her that he had met Pop, he was drowned out by the wail of a fire engine overtaking at high speed. Steve eased the XD to the edge of the road, and the engine quickly overtook, disappearing down the highway in front of them.
‘Cane fire’s gotten away.’ Steve squinted at the large plume of dark smoke rising a kilometre to their left. A constellation of hawks had gathered above the fire, black shapes hovering high above the flames. Seconds later they passed the pub billboard – Old-Fashioned Country Fun – and Steve slowed for the turn into Durrongo.
‘At this time of day?’ said Kerry, sitting up and forgetting to be hungover. ‘And that’s not cane smoke.’
Chapter Eighteen
Kerry knew that her entire family, barring Ken, would have perished in the fire. Donny, Pretty Mary, Chris, Tall Mary, Elvis. All gone. The Harley too, parked beneath the house, would have exploded fast into ugly twisted metal, burnt beyond recognition. She pressed her hands flat onto the dash a
nd leaned forward as Steve sped down the gravel towards the terrible column of smoke and ash. She needed to get the first lacerating look over and done with, get it behind her. This, then, was the ‘lots to talk about’ that Ken had alluded to on the phone – carnage on an unimaginable scale. Buckley had sent more than cops this time round. He had sent murder.
But the truth at the other end of the driveway was less catastrophic. Steve pulled up under the charred leopard tree, rising now like a blackened and admonishing finger from the singed lawn. They emerged from the car to an odd tableau. Not only Ken and Sav, but Uncle Richard, and Aunty Val, and Donny and Chris too, were standing on the lawn, dishevelled but unharmed. The Harley was parked safely on the far side of the chicken coop. A ten-year-old fire alarm was emitting an anaemic beeping from the lounge. Dr No had been up at the crack, said Sav, and this time his howling had saved lives. Pretty Mary was there, fully alive and unhurt, her face loose in a way that was horribly familiar. Laughing at the joke that was her life. Not even trying to hide the bottle in her hand.
‘Gimme that shit,’ Kerry said, snatching at the grog. Pretty Mary swung the bottle away, got loud. Protested her rights.
‘You can’t bloody talk. You was rotten yerself last night, didn’t know yer arse from yer elbow. Coming round ere, acting like bloody Mother Teresa … good go.’ She lifted the bottle and took a long, defiant slug.
Kerry swore under her breath. Trinder Park was three hours away. So was the moon, so was Mars.
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