Ken breathed hard, beginning to sweat under his T-shirt despite the cool breeze cutting across the clearing. Do a hard thing for the right reason, ah Jesus. Pretty Mary was crying into her hanky again, she had turned into a regular firehose these days, the old mother. Bawled at the drop of a hat. Kez not giving nothing away, as usual. Donna looking at him like he was a two-headed calf. Uncle right there, but, steadying him, goodways. And Donny watching, too. Yeah. Donny. Do it for the kid. Ken straightened, took his hands out of his pockets.
‘More than once, I said them things. But sis, I believe you. I’m your brother and I shoulda helped you – and I didn’t. It was like part of me believed you about Pop, but more of me hated you for saying them things out loud. It’s too bloody hard to hear, the truth. But really, deep down, I knew … I knew exactly what you knew. So there it is.’
Ken looked directly at Donna and blew his breath out hard, trying not to break open in front of everyone. Uncle Richard’s arms coming around him now, as he struggled with the desperate urge to tear away, to cut and run from the shame and weakness. Finally giving up the idea of flight as he realised that his Uncle really wouldn’t let go. The knowledge thumped Ken hard in the chest like a heavy steel blade. His ground zero, right here with this old grey man, stood beside the running water.
‘Good man,’ said Uncle Richard, clasping Ken’s head to his shoulder. ‘Good man.’ Then kissed his head and stepped back, releasing him into his new life.
‘So, Donna. You’ve heard your brother apologise. Did you wanna say anything?’
Donna blanched away from the faces that swung to her. The sharp eyes, judging her as they’d always judged. She felt a crystalline rock form in her throat. Wanted to rip that rock out and hurl it at every last one of them for bringing her here, putting her though this ordeal. She pulled away from Black Superman.
‘Sissy …’ he said.
‘Apologies are easy,’ Donna said in a hard voice. ‘I spent twenty years alone. I was a fucking child. Someone has to pay.’
‘Yes,’ said Uncle Richard, his voice grave. ‘We should have listened better. A crime was committed against a child. And someone should pay. But when the criminal’s dead and buried, it’s not always so easy, bub. Sometimes an apology is the only way.’
Another awkward pause. In the end, Donna gave a shrug, and it looked as though there could be no resolution. Then a fierce cry broke from Pretty Mary. She turned to Donna, her arms folded and her bottom lip trembling.
‘Please, dort,’ she said. ‘I threw you out that night cos I was too scared to hear it. I’m so sorry, my daughter. I wasted twenty years, lost all that time, for nothing—’
‘You were scared!’ said Donna in amazement. ‘You were scared? Do you even know what fear is? Do you know what it is to be a little kid, always listening in the night for footsteps? To be terrified to go to the bathroom, in case he’s waiting? To put up with it, year after year, so he doesn’t go after your younger sister and your little brother? While you were down the pub?’
Pretty Mary shuddered, and Uncle Richard quickly put his arm around her. It was asking too much, all happening far too fast. Donna needed more time to—
‘Yer hard as nails,’ Kerry accused her sister, swamped by sudden anger. ‘Okay – it was wrong, and it happened, we believe you. But Ken’s said he’s sorry. Mum’s said she’s sorry. What more do you want? Want us to build a time machine and go back to 1999? Rake the old bastard’s ashes up so you can spit on them, tell him how much you hate him?’ She stared at her sister.
‘History’s made us all hard, bub,’ interjected Uncle Richard swiftly. ‘We had to grow hard just to survive, had to get as hard as that ol’ rock sitting there. But the hardness that saved us, it’s gonna kill us if it goes on much longer. People ain’t rocks. Donna, bub, it was terrible wrong what was done to you. Criminal. But he’s gorn now. So all we can do is apologise for not listening. What happens next, well, that bit’s up to you.’
‘Don’t ask me to forgive him!’ she told Uncle Richard, eyes flashing with rage.
‘Nobody’s asking that of you, bub,’ he replied. ‘That’s not what today’s about.’
As Donna hesitated, Pretty Mary found the courage to speak again.
‘You weren’t the only one, dort,’ she said slowly, putting up a palm to stop Uncle Richard’s interruption. ‘I know, brother, I know she don’t care – and maybe it’s not right to ask her to care. But she deserves to know, any rate. Pop told me when he was dying, cos it was eating away at him, worse’n the cancer was, he said. Three coppers grabbed him in Brisbane as a kid. Fourteen-year-old. Locked him in the cells and took turns at him all night for winning the Silver Gloves when he was supposed to lose.’
‘Jesus Christ Almighty,’ muttered Steve.
‘So you knew, then,’ Uncle Richard said to Pretty Mary, tipping his hat back.
‘Oh, I know plenty of things, brother,’ she told him, squaring her shoulders to hide the quaver in her voice. ‘And I’m proper sick and tired of being quiet about em, too. But now, if Donna don’t mind, we’ve said we’re sorry, and I’d like to put me old friend in the ground.’
‘Donna?’ Uncle Richard waited. ‘We aren’t talking about forgiveness. That’s the dugai way. But can we at least keep on going as a family?’
Everyone watched. Momentarily the world held still.
‘Please, sister,’ said Ken softly.
Donna sighed. Closed her eyes. Opened them again. Saw her blood standing around her.
‘Go on, then,’ she said wearily, and so the funeral of Elvis began.
~
The river was high and the sun was shining and the mullet were jumping fit to beat the band. Beautiful, but when Ken waded into the current he yelped with the cold, and so the green canoe was heaved off the back of Uncle Richard’s ute. After everyone had been rowed across to the island in shifts, the family clustered in the scrub behind the pine tree. Donny and Ken dug a deep round hole next to Grandad Chinky Joe’s granite boulder, and Pretty Mary kneeled there on the soft red earth. She took the wrapped kingplate out of Kerry’s schoolbag and placed it gently on top of Elvis’s small rigid body, before more paperbark was put down and the earth shovelled in on top. ‘A kingplate for my king,’ she said, smoothing the soil flat ready for the shells. ‘It’s only right.’ Uncle Richard sang, then. Pretty Mary’s clapsticks rang out over the grave while Donny danced shake-a-leg with his father for the very first time and the sight of it made everybody cry, even Kerry.
‘Getting soft there,’ Ken teased her even as he flung an arm around his son’s shoulders, hugging him side-on. ‘Turning into a girl.’
‘Kiss my black arse,’ Kerry told him. Ken laughed loudly, showing the world his broken teeth.
Everyone walked through the smoke a second time, and agreed that their bellies thought their throats were cut. Donny and Steve were sent to gather firewood. Ken heaved the heavy esky up from the water’s edge and handed a silver cookpot over the grassy lip of the island to Chris. Kerry’s guts grumbled at the sight, craving curry. Cold air always gave her an appetite, and river water too.
‘Wonder if Elvis left any pups behind anywhere,’ Kerry mused aloud.
‘I wouldn’t be surprised, dort,’ Pretty Mary smiled at the idea.
‘Want a hand with that kai, Mum?’ asked Donna roughly, as though her mother wasn’t easily capable of dishing out tucker for half a dozen people. Pretty Mary caught her breath.
‘Thanks, bub,’ she said, as though there could be nothing more ordinary than pushing a couple of steaming bowls into her daughter’s hands to pass around. Breaking bread.
~
The kookaburra on the branch above peered down at the pot, and let out a short experimental stutter. Chris glanced up, threw it a lump of gristly chook tendon, which the bird caught neatly where it sat. Tossed its beak up twice, and the snack was gone.
‘You wanna thank old Kumanjay for that,’ Kerry told the kookaburra. ‘That dog tried for many a long year to catch that speckled hen. Aw, I’m gonna miss the mad little bugger, truesgod.’ She grew teary again at the thought of no more Elvis lurking in the backyard.
‘Course you will,’ said Uncle Richard, sucking at a wingbone. ‘He was family. And you cry for him, too, bub, us mob gotta learn to cry when we’re sober, might stop us killing each other.’
Kerry told her Uncle that by some miracle she had never killed anyone yet, and barring breaking into council, she hadn’t done any crime at all for over a year. She was a reformed character, in fact. Steve immediately leaned in, rubbing his head on Kerry’s shoulder as she tried to mop up sauce with a bit of buttered bread.
‘Whaddya doing now, dickhead?’ she asked.
‘Basking,’ he told her, ‘in the reflected light from your halo.’ Everybody laughed, cynical of Kerry’s rehabilitation. She threw her bread crust at him and showed him a vertical finger.
‘Aw, very funny. Old Grandad Joe come to me that night at council, ya know.’ Kerry changed the subject to show how little she cared about anything Steve might do or say. ‘Showed me where the kingplate was, or else I woulda missed it completely.’ She paused. ‘Which might not have been such a bad thing.’ A lot had happened since the kingplate reappeared in their lives, and not much of it good.
‘Was ya scared?’ asked Ken. ‘I woulda filled me daks, truesgod.’
‘Shittin meself,’ Kerry confessed. ‘Too scared to even run.’
‘Oh, the old fella wouldn’t wish any harm on us mob,’ smiled Pretty Mary. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Granny Ava, now. She mighta flogged ya up …’
Uncle Richard frowned as he drew a hand across his stubbled chin, searching for chicken fragments. No matter how kind Grandad Joe had been to Kerry, the damaged kingplate was not any sort of thing for a childless young woman to handle. It just wasn’t proper; you didn’t summon the moon that way.
‘I wondered if all this trouble might be cos I stole it,’ Kerry admitted to Pretty Mary. ‘Even if it was stealing from old Jiminy Cricket, and ours in the first place …’
‘Run us through what happened,’ Uncle Richard said, blowing on a pannikin of tea, and so Kerry told him the story of breaking into council chambers that night. How she’d found only cash and the statue of Cracker Nunne before Grandad Chinky Joe appeared and insisted on leading her to the cabinet in the backroom.
‘I went in looking for a big heap of bungoo, enough to save this place,’ Kerry explained, keeping to herself the exact contents of her missing backpack, which she hadn’t quite given up hope of retrieving. ‘But instead I ended up with the kingplate, and some other bits and pieces from Jiminy’s office. I’ve still got em,’ she indicated the red schoolbag. ‘Quartz crystals and artefacts and whatnot. I had to grab anything I could and bolt when the—’
‘Quartz crystals?’ interrupted Pretty Mary and Uncle Richard in loud unison.
‘Show me,’ said Uncle Richard, putting down his tea so fast half of it splashed onto the picnic blanket.
‘Granny’s clever stones,’ Pretty Mary whispered, her eyes wide, and a sudden thrill shot up Kerry’s spine.
Kerry fossicked in the schoolbag, pulling out and putting to one side the brass statue of Nunne that she had kept to sell. Then she produced a plastic Aldi shopping bag. Two grey heads knocked in their rush to discover what she had brought away from the council.
‘These ain’t nothing much,’ said Uncle Richard in disappointment after a minute or two. ‘Not clever stones, anyway. And I dunno what that is, but it ain’t ochre.’ He pushed the nondescript objects back into the Aldi bag and handed it to Kerry with a glum twitch of his eyebrows. She stashed them away. Some gammon thief she’d turned out to be.
‘Aw, ya had me going for a minute there,’ she said morosely, wishing she had saved that morning’s spliff for now. A feeling of sharp dissatisfaction lodged in her chest. With Elvis buried and no joy from the court, there was only more hard and hopeless battle ahead. They held no cards in the saving of the island.
Pretty Mary picked up the brass statue, weighed it in her hand with a thoughtful expression.
‘I know a bloke in Murbah who’ll pay good money for that,’ advised Chris, and Kerry brightened.
‘So ya made it onto the island after all, Grandfather,’ Pretty Mary said. ‘Ya murdering old bugger.’
Ken frowned. Donna paused, her spoon halfway to her mouth.
‘Whaddya mean, grandfather?’ Kerry said indignantly. ‘Grandad Chinky Joe’s your grandfather.’
Pretty Mary let out a peal of laughter. She stroked at her pecan-brown arm with long elegant fingers.
‘With me this colour? I called Grandad Joe grandfather, cos he was married to Granny Ava for nigh on thirty years. But Granny Ruth and a score of other jahjams besides her had Cracker Nunne for a father. Who do ya think was chasing Granny Ava, that day?’
‘Granny Ava ran to save her life—’ blurted Kerry. ‘You said! It was to save her life, the bastards shot at her when they were stealing our land!’
‘Oh, they shot her alright,’ agreed Pretty Mary calmly, scraping the last of the curry into a plastic container, ready to take back to the car. She pressed the hard plastic lid down with her thumbs, clicking it shut, then looked up. ‘And she run for her life, yeah. But the land was long gorn by then. Use ya brain, girl! Nunne’s mob bin here two generations already by 1899. It was all stations, and villages. Granny bolted so they wouldn’t take bubby off of her, see. She already lost four of Cracker’s kids to the gunjies. She told me she’d rather have drowned that day than lose another one. And it worked.’ Pretty Mary looked about her at the island, nodding with grim satisfaction. ‘She put up a humpy and scraped a living doing what she had to. Raised baby Ruth while Grandad Joe come and went from the stations … till they took Mum later, course. But Mum was twelve by then, she knew who she was and where she belonged, eh, brother?’
Uncle Richard nodded agreement.
Kerry sat stunned. Imagined the life of her great-grandmother, hidden away on the island, far enough from civilisation, so-called, to be left in peace with the only child she ever got to raise. And Granny Ruth, stolen from paradise at twelve, only to run back to the island years later with a head full of the catechism and a disease gifted to her by the son of her most recent employer.
Kerry watched the flames of the campfire lick around the dry eucalyptus branches, and briefly turn pine needles into bright orange skeletons of themselves. She looked for faces in the rising smoke, and didn’t know who she was anymore. The family had always been proud of their Chinese blood, and Kerry had long assumed a bit of white convict was floating around somewhere in the family tree. But to descend from the very first land-grabbers, the murdering pioneers?
Half of white Patterson would be their cousins.
Kerry curled her lip. Hell would freeze over before she claimed that lot as kin.
‘So we’d have family down south, then?’ she finally asked. ‘Them other four kids?’
Uncle Richard nodded. ‘If they lived. Well, we know Uncle John lived, cos of finding Aunty Alice mob. We’d have rellos in Sydney, I reckon, probably out west and up in Queensland, too, by now. They took them stolen kids anywhere and everywhere … so you wanna be proper careful, any time ya go with a blackfella.’
‘I was always glad Kenny had his kids with an Island woman,’ Pretty Mary confessed. ‘Ya just never know who ya related to.’
Everybody fell silent then, reflecting on what had been said.
Pretty Mary put the curry in the esky, rinsed out the pannikins and handed a bag of frozen peas to Ken to whack on his aching leg. Then got to her feet, stretched, and suggested to her daughters that they might like to come with her to the woman place on the far side of the
island.
‘Woman place?’
‘Why ya think Granny run all the way ere to have that jahjam?’ Pretty Mary arched her eyebrows at her daughters. ‘When she coulda just hidden in the bush anywhere, eh?’
Pretty Mary led Kerry and Donna away through a low pall of the funeral smoke that was clinging to the scrub behind them. As they walked, three pairs of feet and three heads could be seen emerging from a broad belt of grey around the women’s collective middle. Seeing this, Ken brayed with laughter.
‘Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble,’ he said, winking at Chris, Donny and Steve. ‘The witches are on the march!’
‘Woman business,’ said Uncle Richard, lying down with his hat over his face to catch some shut-eye. ‘Not ours. Leave em be.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
Four o’clock came and went. The shadow of the pine tree slanted lower and lower over the water till it reached the cars parked in the clearing opposite. The canoe was packed with gear, and one final billy of tea set to boil on the coals. Then the family slowly mustered without speaking by the side of the newly dug grave. Behind them, a mob of waark began making a terrible racket in Granny’s pine. Kerry shot an irritated glance in their direction. Why did the birds with the most hideous voices always have the most to say? Cark cark fucking cark at top note, the bastards, worse than the rednecks at the pub. Her schoolbag twitched in her right hand. If she could chuck it hard enough she could clean the lot up in one fell swoop. The brass statue alone would stun a Brahman bull. But Pretty Mary wouldn’t have a bar of hurting a crow. Waark was one of her totems and so the birds, noisy fuckers, had to be tolerated by everyone in earshot.
‘Goodbye, my old friend,’ said Pretty Mary, waving and blowing kisses at the grave. ‘Lub you! Ya can forget about my hens now, and going julabai on everybody’s blooming jinung. You go enjoy yerself, mustering up them bullocks with Grandad and Granny. And mind them blue dogs don’t rip ya, the rotten sods.’ Then she leaned over, seizing something from the top of the grave.
Too Much Lip Page 30