‘You’re so full of shit,’ Steve said, putting his palms flat on the ground and stretching.
Kerry bristled. ‘You think my culture’s not valuable? Compared to oh, I dunno, pissing it up on Anzac Day and going down to Cronulla to bash the wogs?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ said Steve. ‘You’re just so fucking rude all the time. The Murries I trained with on the Coast weren’t like that. Your Mum’s not like that. Or Uncle Richard, or Chris. Uncle Richard invited me to the next Men’s Camp, actually.’
‘Huh.’ Kerry was nonplussed.
‘He said I’m doing some of the same stuff with the young blokes as he is. Plus he’s got it in his head that we’re gonna have black kids together.’ Steve stopped, embarrassed to present this startling idea to Kerry.
‘What a beautiful vision,’ Kerry said, ironic. ‘Once I’ve popped em out we could bring em up here, little Johnny and little Mary,’ she swept the horizon with an expansive arm, ‘and point out the brand new prison on the river where their ancestors used to live. We can say to them, “Kids, one day, when we’re pushing up yam daisies, absolutely fuck all of this will be yours.”’
‘Uncle Richard said it, not me,’ Steve countered. ‘Anyway, I’m invited to the camp.’
‘Yeah, go bush, deadly.’ She grinned. ‘You might even learn something about navigation.’
Steve squinted at Kerry, standing there mocking him as usual. Grabbed her and put her on the grass, tickled her ribs till her bladder began to fail and she had to quickly admit defeat.
‘Okay, so you might be stronger than me,’ she told him, sitting up and brushing grass off. ‘But I’m far more intelligent, and better looking. Black too. So it all evens out in the wash.’
‘Oh, I fucking give up,’ Steve said, causing another great cackle of laughter to erupt from Kerry.
They ran slower on the way back, Kerry’s legs heavy and her breath ragged long before they reached the outskirts of the industrial estate. Steve checked his watch as they walked upstairs past the first of the night’s customers. Just enough time to prepare for the six o’clock pump class, he declared. Kerry showered, ate, collapsed on the futon. Tried not to think about anything.
Chapter Twenty
Deep in the bush, beneath the pale disc of the moon, a dozen men gathered around a yellow-box fire. They murmured, stomping their boots against the cold. It was a long way to the nearest village, over an hour to any real town. Some of the men wore footy jumpers: the Eels, the Sharks, the Dogs. Others were protected from the chill night air by cheap jackets. At the midpoint of the semicircle, Uncle Richard, whose Akubra had been replaced with a woollen beanie, stripped off his red flannelette shirt to reveal the marks of Seniority on his chest. If the cold worried him, he hid it well.
Uncle Kev used clapsticks to bring any stragglers to the fire. Then Uncle Richard went over to where the other boss, Uncle Les, was holding a cut-down two-litre orange juice container by the handle. Without taking it from the other man’s hand, Uncle Richard grasped the container’s base. Swirled its contents against the opaque plastic sides, satisfying himself that it was the right consistency. Dipped in his right thumb and beckoned the younger men to come up in turn. They thrust their chests out: nervous, curious, proud.
‘This,’ he said a dozen times, drawing his ochred thumb across each Goorie body, ‘is a ceremony about Love.’
~
‘Does Mum know Donna’s gonna be there?’ Kerry asked incredulously.
Immediately after the horror of her birthday party, Pretty Mary had indulged in several long rants about Donna. But since Ken had dropped his bombshell, the topic of Donna’s accusations was well and truly off limits. If it was raised, Pretty Mary would retreat to her room with a slam of the door, emerging hours later with swollen eyes, refusing to answer any questions about what she’d been doing, let alone what she believed to be true about her dead father-in-law.
Black Superman wrinkled his nose.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘She knows, but she’s real twitchy on it. Don’t go giving her the third degree and buggering everything up. Just let things flow natural.’
Kerry rolled her eyes. More tiptoeing. And the main thing that was flowing naturally was cheap moselle, straight down Pretty Mary’s gullet. Ken had come back from Men’s Camp smiling and sober; a few of his uglier demons had been exorcised around the yellow-box fire. But as if a quorum of one designated drinker was required at Shitkicker Flats, Pretty Mary was hitting the turps like there was no tomorrow. Refusing to listen to sense or be dragged to any meeting. When is it my turn, Kerry had marvelled in amazement to Steve. When do I get my big chance to lose the plot and be the family fuck-up?
‘Oh,’ said Kerry now to Black Superman in umbrage, ‘you got it, bro. I won’t bugger it up. Anyway, what could possibly go wrong?’ Donna and Ken and Pretty Mary, brought face to face over the corpse of Elvis to get things straightened out. Now there was a recipe for family harmony if ever she’d heard one.
‘You got a better idea, girlfriend?’ asked Black Superman sharply, feeling responsible for the expensive folly of the QC in the Land and Environment Court. ‘Buckley’s ready to start putting the dozers through any day, Zippo reckons. So if you’ve got any bright fucking ideas on how to stop him, let’s have em.’
~
‘What’s a ten-letter word starting with A, meaning a self-taught student?’ called Pretty Mary, screwing up her face over the crossword. She flexed her arthritic ankles beside the crackling firepit that Ken had just built for her between the Hills hoist and the chook pen.
‘Autodidact,’ yelled Kerry through the non-existent kitchen window. She was stirring curry on Steve’s camping stove, which was all they had till Black Superman’s child endowment came through. The ongoing house repairs had convinced her brother to take unpaid leave and stay a bit longer. In Durrongo he could live in a T-shirt and jeans; Pretty Mary was right on hand to help out with the kids. He and Josh were planning to rent a house in Patto, test out bringing the kids up on country. There was more to life, he told Kerry, than a government wage.
‘We’ll be poor but free,’ he quavered in an old pensioner’s voice, as he chucked three swags into the caravan. It was vacant again, now that Chris had moved back in with his girlfriend and kid in Mullum.
‘Spare me. Poor, while your tenants pay off your negatively geared unit in Redfern,’ mocked Kerry, playing the world’s tiniest violin. ‘With a decade’s worth of super in the bank.’
‘Well, yeah, there is that,’ Black Superman admitted, not revealing that a recent conversation had caused him to withdraw all his super.
‘Don’t you go thinking about muscling in on the Tarot Teepee,’ she told him sternly. ‘That’s woman business there, straight up.’
‘Another dream destroyed,’ he said, deadpan. ‘Another vision shattered.’
‘Boo fucken hoo,’ Kerry said. ‘Get a haircut and a real job.’
‘Never mind ’bout haircuts and jobs,’ Pretty Mary chimed in, anxious about the funeral that afternoon. ‘Is my curry ready yet? Was there enough coconut? I don’t wanna be sitting on the riverbank with me guts growling like an ol’ mission manager just cos youse mob are too damn lazy to cook up a decent feed!’
‘Aw, Mum,’ said Black Superman, hugging her tight. ‘Don’t ever change, will ya?’
‘Get orf me, ya great black fool of a thing!’ Pretty Mary pushed him away, went to the fridge for a refill of Fruity Lexia.
Some things don’t ever change, thought Kerry. And then, some things don’t change enough.
~
Kerry was lowering the lid on the simmering curry when her attention shifted to the afternoon news on the borrowed TV in the lounge. The lead story was federal politics, yada yada yada, who fucking cared. But the second segment told of a Brisbane couple who had fled a crime scene after a botched robbery.
Kerry turned the camp stove off
.
A botched Sunnybank robbery involving a stolen safe.
She ran into the lounge.
‘… the two robbers succeeded in removing the safe undetected,’ said the news anchor with barely suppressed laughter, ‘but appear to have come undone attempting to use dry ice to access the contents. When the thieves used a sledgehammer on the snap-frozen safe, both it and the approximately eighty thousand dollars inside shattered into tiny fragments. Police are still searching for clues to the identity of the women, who are both described as being of Caucasian appearance …’
Kerry could picture it perfectly. Rocky and Peanut, their mouths agape. Frozen cash exploding into confetti around them in the car park at Sunnybank Plaza. She collapsed onto the lounge, and laughed till she cried.
Chapter Twenty-One
Black Superman timed their arrival at the river down to the second. Long fingers of autumn sunshine slanted through the gums, and nobody else was there in the clearing to spoil the solitude. The scene – the water alive with diamond sparkles; the tide swirling and lapping at the dark, wet rocks as magpies carolled sweet and long from the island – could have been straight from a movie.
‘The jewel in the crown,’ Black Superman said to Donna as they pulled up.
‘My island home,’ Donna murmured, aiming for irony, only to discover that she meant it. She took a deep breath and climbed out of the car, dazed by the oddity of being back at Ava’s Island with someone who knew it the same way she did. Her and Black Superman back after how long? Well over two decades since they’d swum here together, bombed off the rope-swing still hanging, tattered, from the high gum branch, cooked their catch side by side over glowing coals on the tiny beach opposite. Where had those years gone, and the versions of themselves who inhabited them? Unanswerable questions. But her clever, persuasive brother had been right about one thing: the river bend was still itself, still as beautiful as it had ever been. You thought you remembered it, had long ago nailed it firmly in the place of childhood memory, when you were off in Sydney, or Hong Kong, or Ubud. Then you came back, and realised yet again that you’d been wrong – it was impossible to hold it all properly in your mind’s eye. The perfection of the river stunned Donna now, just as it had on both of the secret visits home that she’d made since leaving. She breathed in the scent of the gum leaves and the wattle blossom washing across the narrow channel that separated them from the Old People. That faint fishy tang she knew so well, mixed with the earth smell rising off the mossy rocks. The bright couch grass growing down to the very edges of the island. The prettiest place of all, the place where she’d had a childhood while Granny Ruth still lived to show it to her. Donna sucked it all in for one delicious moment, her eyes pricking with tears, before turning back to Black Superman.
‘These came,’ she said brusquely, handing him a wad of legal documents. She turned up the collar of her jacket against the cold breeze coming off the river. Shook her head at him and spoke drily. ‘You should be in sales, brother.’ Black Superman grinned and folded the papers into the pocket of his Driza-Bone, his heart hammering with what they were both about to do.
‘It’s gonna be awesome,’ he told her, adrenaline flooding through every cell, as alive as he’d ever felt. ‘You know we’re doing the right thing.’
Donna, rather less convinced, looked around at the bushland, the river twinkling at her like some favourite uncle who was always pleased to see her but who always had somewhere else to be hurrying off to as well. At the edge of the clearing stood an enormous yellow bulldozer. It pointed, silent and ugly, at the trees it was set to mow down. Switch it on and all this glory – everything their family had once held so dear – would be smashed to smithereens in two hours flat. Nothing was simpler than wanton destruction. Nothing more fragile than earliest memory. Donna turned away, ignoring the machine.
‘Lovely day for a funeral,’ she said, wondering which lucky Salter had scored the job of bringing the frozen remains of Elvis to the river.
~
‘I dunno if I can do this, Uncle,’ Ken confessed. A muscle flickered on the good side of Uncle Richard’s face, and the old man glanced in the rear-view mirror. Chris, Steve and Donny bunched together in the back seat. Men in the making, and good ones too, but none of them his peers. He steered out of Pretty Mary’s gravel drive in silence, passed through Durrongo and continued on over the highway. Was part way down Settlement Road before he responded, gruff with displeasure.
‘We talked about this.’
‘I know,’ said Ken. ‘But it’s—’
‘I’m not setting foot on the island till this other business is sorted,’ Uncle Richard interrupted him. ‘And you know why, neph.’
Ken was silent in the passenger seat, looking down at his jeans. He pushed sulkily at the denim with his palm heels, trying to buy more time. Trying to find the magic words that would release him from his unwelcome duty. Uncle Richard sighed, pulled the ute over to the side of the track. He sat still, looking at the damaged weldmesh fence that lay buckled on the ground ahead of them. Then he turned to Ken.
‘You wanna come to the Law, you come to it clean, son. No grog, no drugs. And no debts left unsettled, either. Too many blokes are gammon, always looking for shortcuts, but there ain’t any shortcuts, see. Most times ya just gotta do a hard thing for the right reasons, before ya ready.’
Uncle Richard rubbed at his nose, and then unzipped his nylon jacket. Unbuttoned his flannelette shirt a little to reveal the broad scars that ran across his chest, as though some enormous paw had raked at his flesh there. Those shining brown highways where no hair would ever grow.
‘You want these?’ he asked Ken, taking his nephew’s hand and placing it over his heart, ignoring the sudden stares from the back seat. ‘They don’t come for free, my nephew. You gotta earn em.’
~
Ken sat alone in the ute, arguing with himself. He lit a fresh durrie off the stub of his old one, and then smoked it down to the stub as well.
The other men had joined the family and were circling the bulldozer in fascinated horror. ‘I wanna stab them tyres,’ said Kerry savagely. Chris pointed out that bulldozer tyres were, unfortunately, built to cope with that sort of thing. ‘Drop a lit match in the tank, then,’ said Kerry. But the fuel tank was locked.
Donny was the first to notice the key. Sitting right there, high up in the machine’s ignition. Rage rose in him; he ripped the silver key ring out and hurled it into the river with a splash, his throw almost reaching the muddy margin of the island. Kerry blinked in surprise.
‘That’ll slow em down a bit,’ she cried in approval, only realising thirty seconds too late that they could have driven the dozer into the river and left it there to rust.
‘Good lad,’ Chris told Donny with a squeeze of the neck. In the tree above, the smashed camera sat, gazing down uselessly at them.
Off to one side, Uncle Richard and Pretty Mary were deep in conversation with Donna, a conversation that had been going for a good twenty minutes. They formed a secret triad, heads close, and the others couldn’t hear what was being said. There was more back and forth between them, until finally the two women embraced. Donna turned away, wiped at her face when she thought nobody else was watching. Once she nodded that she was ready, Uncle Richard brought the two women back to the rest of the family.
‘Kenny boy,’ he called. The door of the ute reluctantly creaked open. There was a very long pause before Ken got out and limped over. It’s like part of him’s gone missing, Kerry thought. Or, no, not that, not exactly. More as though something that had been covering him up for years had been peeled away on Men’s Camp, and chucked away into the bushes. Fidgeting in front of her now was the real Ken.
‘Here,’ said Uncle Richard, pointing at the ground. ‘Next to me.’ Ken took his place, stony-faced. Black Superman walked around the outside of the semicircle then, and stood next to Pretty Mary and Donna. He p
ut his hand on Donna’s shoulder. To his surprise, she left it there.
Silence fell. Nobody knew quite what to expect.
‘You all know Ken and the lads have been out bush,’ Uncle Richard said, tipping his hat to the back of his head, the way he did whenever he was thinking particularly hard, or had been put on the spot. ‘So we’s here to do coupla things today. We got old Kumanjay to put on the island, of course,’ with a nod to the body of Elvis, wrapped in a stripy nylon bag and waiting for his interment, ‘but before we do that, we got some business to sort out. Can’t be at a Law Place when there’s still bad blood between anyone. So I wanna bring sissy back in like she should have been welcomed back in the first place.’
He addressed Donna directly. ‘You been a long time gone, my niece. A real long time. We’ve missed you. We never forgot you, and this place,’ Uncle Richard indicated the river, the island, ‘the Old People, nobody ere ever forgot you, neither. This punyarra jagan, the river, Granny and Grandad’s island – everything here owns you, you know? This river your goomera, this jagan your body. I’m just sorry you had to be away so long from your blood’s country where you belong. And I’m especially sorry I wasn’t there the other week to welcome you home the right way, too, and to tell you I believe your story. So it’s deadly to see you back at last, bub.’
Donna nodded gravely, twice. Didn’t smile. Didn’t let on she’d come back to the river twice, over the years. And certainly didn’t jump for joy at finally being made welcome. She could forgive Pretty Mary, it turned out. And Black Superman hadn’t needed forgiving. As for the rest of em, that remained to be seen.
‘Alright then, nephew,’ said Uncle Richard. ‘Say your piece.’
Ken cleared his throat. Shoved his fists deep in the pockets of his jeans. Face your demons. Do a hard thing for the right reasons.
‘I wanted to say. I, ah, wanted to apologise to ya.’ Meeting Donna’s eyes for the first time and seeing the ripples of shock beginning there. ‘When ya turned up outta the blue, it was a kind of a huge deal, and I said things I shouldn’t have ever said.’
Too Much Lip Page 29