Jo wished she could wrap Comet’s hooves in clothing to muffle the sound, but he would probably freak if she tried, and the smallish interior of a 1950s fibro and timber farmhouse was not the place to teach him. She suddenly envisaged salad bowls flying through the air, and the half-peeled vegies airborne, too, and Comet’s muscular neck and head smashing through the glass front of the kitchen cabinet as he tried to escape the clutching monsters that were grabbing at his feet. When you thought about it, Jo gulped, there was quite a difference, really, between a Bedouin tent surrounded by thousands of miles of sandy desert, and an Australian farmhouse with copious amounts of glass and easily-shattered fibro.
But it was literally too late to back out, for all of Comet was now filling the kitchen. And the top of his head was exactly on a level with the bare, hanging light bulb–
A few more cautious steps on hastily rearranged towels. Jo stroked the horse’s neck with a sweating hand. ‘Atta boy,’ she whispered. ‘Nothing to it. Just another sort of stable. You can do it.’
Comet peered with great interest into the lounge. Is that where the food is, his eyes and ears asked. Shaking with repressed laughter that was half terror of what would happen if the horse panicked, Jo hid herself behind the wall that divided kitchen from lounge.
‘Ellen,’ Jo said, in a Here’s Another Chore for You monotone, knowing that she would be ignored.
‘Mmm.’
‘Give us a hand getting the washing in, please.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Now, eh, before it rains.’
‘Mmm. In a minute.’
‘No, now,’ as she jabbed Comet in the rump with a forefinger, pushing him forward the last few steps to where Ellen was slaying Dark Knights. The horse lowered his nose to the feedbin that the young human was holding. A high-pitched scream. And simultaneously, a crash. Comet whirled 180 degrees in front of the TV, his tail swishing in alarm. His rear hoof stepped backward and missed the fallen laptop by a centimetre.
Outside, Athena whinnied in concern for her absent child. Comet neighed loudly, too, prancing with nerves but unclear how to return to his mother and safety. Athena screamed in relief: Here I am, my son, here, here! Come to me!
‘What the fuck!’ Ellen shouted, her hands flailing and her eyes wide. ‘What’s Comet doing in the house?’
Jo moved smoothly in and seized Comet by the halter, rocking with laughter.
‘Did he give you a fright?’ she asked innocently, before doubling over in mirth. Comet’s nostrils flared, and he swung his head around, looking for escape routes. Jo clung to his halter with difficulty. He neighed again to Athena, who was now running frantically up and down the fenceline beyond the mango.
‘You’re insane!’ Ellen screeched, moving closer to the endangered computer.
Comet raised his glossy black tail and deposited a gleaming green pile of manure onto Ellen’s bare feet. Jo lost the ability to speak.
Ellen yelped as she leapt away from the richly scented pile. Jo was staggering now, clutching her guts and gesturing weakly for her daughter to grab the horse. Oh, to have a camera. Oh. Can’t breathe. Face leaking. Guts aching ... Oh, oh...
‘Do you know–’ gasp ‘–how long it took me to teach him to do that?’
‘I’m adopted,’ Ellen announced in a deathly voice, raising and examining – but not touching – one foot and then the other.
‘Yes, yes, my adopted daughter, but your face!’
‘I can’t wait to leave home. Then you can marry your bloody horse, and be happy here, just the two of ya,’ Ellen retorted.
‘You know where the door is.’ Jo clutched at her stomach as she clung to Comet.
‘You can both live together inside in a big pile of horseshit and rusty old barbed wire and lantana. That’d be your idea of heaven, wouldn’t it? That’d be just fricken tickety-boo.’
Tears of silent laughter rolled down Jo’s face. She could tell that Ellen was thinking of picking up some steaming horseshit and hurling it at her.
‘I hate you ... Oh, I hate you So Much.’ Ellen’s lips pursed and her green eyes narrowed to slits.
‘I love you,’ Jo wheezed, ‘I’ll even pick that manure up.’
Tremendously jollified, still giggling, Jo led the horse safely out of the kitchen and through the back door. At the top of the concrete ramp, she heard Twoboy’s Redfern whistle, just as he came loping around the corner, laptop in one hand and his Uni of Melbourne backpack slung over his shoulder.
‘Aaay, Goorie,’ Jo greeted him with a wide smile, walking Comet down the ramp. As the decrepit Mooney string gave way and the back door slammed behind them, she led the horse across to the small side paddock.
Rain finally began to fall and – what’s that? of course the horse had been inside, he liked to watch that ‘Letters and Numbers’ show on SBS in the afternoons, what about it?
‘So tell me something,’ Jo said to Twoboy, who was lying beside her, with the roast vegies all consumed and Ellen disappeared into her room. She was using her right index finger to trace an intricate pattern on Twoboy’s almost hairless dark chest, and remembering the waitress at the cafe. ‘Tell me how come a good-looking–’ she lightly kissed his left nipple – ‘and hejimicated–’ his right nipple – ‘and occasionally even charming–’ the point on his stomach equidistant from both nipples – ‘blackfella like yerself manages to stay single?’ She leaned back onto her left elbow, and waited to see what his response would be.
Outside the bedroom window, the storm had arrived in earnest. Rain cascaded over the top of the drooping gutter and formed a room-length silver curtain between the lovers and the rest of the world. An enormous green tree frog, resident in the downpipe closest to the bed, was making a helluva racket reporting on the weather, while Jo and Twoboy lay enclosed by water and sound. At that moment, neither of them cared one iota about what lay outside.
‘Hard to believe, I know,’ Twoboy responded cheerfully to the bedroom ceiling, both hands folded behind his head and his skinny black ankles crossed. Just yesterday, the Tribunal had accepted the Jacksons’ application to be counterclaimants over a substantial northern slab of the greater Brunswick valley. Like Mum Jackson, Laz, Rhonda, and Uncles Cheezel and Rory, Twoboy was in an exceptionally buoyant mood.
‘And yet?’ Jo slapped him lightly on his delightfully S-shaped upper arm.
‘Well, truth be told, you snagged me in the five-second gap between supermodels.’
Jo groaned and rolled her eyes, though the uncomfortable truth was that, in public, a female commotion followed, apparently permanently, in his wake. And it wasn’t like he was unaware of it, either, she warned herself. Good-looking men. Trouble. You do the math, Jo.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what happened to the last supermodel?’
‘The last one ... well, the last one that meant anything is my kids’ mum, in Melbourne,’ he said. ‘Sam.’
‘That was years ago, wasn’t it?’ Jo was suspicious of this lengthy gap.
‘Four years. Justice was six and Yabra had just turned five, the poor little darlin.’ He’d shown Jo the photos of his kids on his phone and in his wallet. Cuties, the both of them, curly-haired and cocoa-coloured; their mother Sam was a Wurundjeri woman burdened and blessed with skin as milky-pale as any whitefella.
‘Four years is a helluva long time between drinks,’ Jo probed.
‘Oh, there’ve been women.’ Twoboy laughed a little awkwardly. ‘I’m not a monk. But I went a bit beserk as a young bloke, as Laz and Mum will no doubt delight in telling you. Christ knows why I haven’t got twenty kids instead of two. So when we split, I made a decision to slow down. I hooked up with a Tamil activist for a bit down in Melbourne. And when I moved back up here there was a proppa womba one in Ipswich, but she was a fucken nightmare, and so here I am, girlfriend. Ripe for the picking.’ He spread his arms wide, inviting Jo to get the goodies on offer.
‘Ah, you got tickets on yaself or what?’ Jo scoffed, noting carefully at the same tim
e that Twoboy expected her to be talking with his mother. And there was also that phrase that had popped out: ‘you snagged me’. What did that mean?
‘I could ask you the same question, anyways,’ he said, rolling onto his own elbow so that their eyes and mouths were level and yet not quite touching. Twoboy took Jo’s tracing index finger and bit it gently, nibbling down her forearm until the hair on the back of her neck stiffened and she goosepimpled down both arms. Twoboy laughed and warned her that he just might be a cannibal like his father’s ancestors in the north.
‘Whether I got tickets on myself?’ Jo asked, noticing absently that her legs were toned right up from all the extra farm work and riding she’d done lately. Her quads and hamstrings were clearly defined hillocks of muscle beneath golden skin. Pity about the farm-fixing marks and bruises that dotted every limb. On her upper right arm the horizontal scar from the broken vase was barely healed, the stitches not yet out.
‘No, how come you’re single, doofus? Gorgeous thing like you...’ Now he was kissing her neck, working his way down to her left breast, bringing his spare hand to her hip, and–
‘Who sez I’m single?’ Jo joked, as desire flared. ‘My man gets back next Wednesday.’
‘I knew it was too good to be true,’ Twoboy murmured.
‘Gammon. We split two years ago. I’m only just recovering. Ah. Ooh.’
‘Want some help with that recovery process?’ Twoboy asked, smoothly rolling over so that Jo was beneath him. She could feel her nipples hardening, the weight of the man pressing onto her hips and thighs. He wore the sun in his eyes, the surging strength of the ocean in his body. Jo caught hold of a handful of dreads and brought Twoboy’s face down to hers, let her lips and tongue answer him in that old, old language that has no need of words.
Next morning, Bottlebrush Hill was shrouded in mist and cloud. Both of the dogs had helpfully left trails of muddy paw prints all over the veranda, in their canine version of a weather report.
‘More rain coming,’ declaimed Jo as she put three hot cups on the kitchen table, ‘how bout we make fences while the sun shines, people?’
‘I don’t roll on Shabbos!’ Twoboy called from the bathroom.
‘Pass,’ added Ellen hastily through a mouthful of toast and Vegemite, ‘I’ve got an assignment to finish and then I’m going up to Holly’s.’
‘But who shall help me eat the loaf of bread, cried the little red hen?’ Jo pouted as she sipped her first coffee of the day.
Twoboy looked at Jo’s large brown eyes, and at her sculpted mouth, which he had not yet done with kissing.
‘Okay, I’m in,’ he said, winning a huge smile from the other side of the table. ‘But how about we ring up for reinforcements?’
‘More the merrier,’ Jo said, ‘but we’ve only got an hour clear I reckon by the look of that sky. It’s gonna piss down by the time anyone gets here.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Twoboy, ‘and hey, whose guitar’s that in the spare room?’
From beneath her fringe Ellen shot her mother a look that spoke volumes.
‘Oh, Ellen mucks around with it a bit,’ said Jo, giving the look back to her daughter with interest. She told Twoboy she didn’t mind if he had a play with it, hoping this didn’t mean a morning spent playing music and no work done on the fence. The man came back to the kitchen and eased himself down with the Maton comfortably positioned against his broad chest like a ukelele. A few chords to test the tuning, a bit of finger picking.
‘This isn’t a cheap guitar,’ he noted with approval.
‘Ellen’s dad bought it,’ Jo said, allowing him to think it was a gift from father to daughter. Technically, Paul had bought it – when she was still married to him.
‘I woulda killed for a Maton when I was thirteen,’ Twoboy told Ellen, his eyebrows raised at how easy she had it.
‘Don’t put ideas into her head,’ joked Jo. ‘She’s already sallying forth and taking up the neighbour’s bloodstock.’
Twoboy lowered the guitar into a normal playing position and began to sing ‘Redemption Song’.
His voice was strong, and he played pretty well for an amateur, Jo assessed. Good song, too. Oh pirates, yes, they rob us mob, alright. But the likelihood of Ellen outing her as a muso made her uneasy. She headed to the veranda the instant the song was over.
Jo didn’t know why it mattered that this part of her remained private. There was no easy answer, except perhaps that the bloke was already very much at home here. Some part of her needed to remain off limits. To her intense annoyance, Jo was thinking about Twoboy at odd hours of the day and night; dreaming about him; smiling goofy smiles as she remembered moments they had spent together. Wondering, even, how long it was going to last, for Chrissake.
Twoboy looked at Jo through the window, as she unceremoniously pulled her dirty gumboots on.
‘So, I guess the show’s over then,’ he said. ‘You’re a hard one to impress, Jo Breen.’
‘The way to my heart is through a kilometre of fencing wire,’ she answered, ‘and if I want music I can turn on the radio.’
‘And here’s me thinking I found the way to your heart last night,’ Twoboy smirked.
‘Oh, way way too much information,’ wailed Ellen, jamming her fingers into her ears and fleeing, both from Twoboy and from the imminent danger of being asked to wash up, ‘lalalalalalalala!’
‘Do you have to?’ Jo asked, pretending parental concern to banish any lingering idea that Twoboy had ever had – or would ever have – anything to do with her heart. Perish the thought.
Half an hour later, Twoboy gestured to Jo, who was standing a hundred metres uphill holding a piece of string. A few spots of rain dotted her hoodie, but the full onslaught of the low black clouds was yet to hit.
‘Left! No, back the other way a bit. Bit more. That’s it.’ Twoboy gave her the thumbs up and Jo used the head of the sledgehammer, grasped sideways, to bash the tall star picket easily into the soft ground. A long row of pickets now guarded the hill, from the house to up near the big tallowwood, passing the top dam on their way.
‘What’s the idea here, anyway?’ Twoboy wanted to know. Jo explained that this line was the first of four sides of a horse paddock, replacing the damp Small Paddock where Comet was being held isolated from his mother and the steers. Once it was built, he’d be visible to Jo from the back door of the house, and dryer as well, less prone to footrot and greasy heel disease.
‘He’s stuck in solitary, poorfella,’ Twoboy observed.
‘Well, he’ll be out on good behaviour dreckly,’ Jo answered. ‘But for now he needs to be away from his mother, to bond with me.’
‘We done a good job here. It must be just about smoko time, eh?’ suggested Twoboy, looking at the blur that was the sun and then clapping Jo firmly on the arse. She ignored both provocations and began methodically snipping foot-long lengths of plain wire to attach the barbed wire to the pickets.
‘Nope, not even close.’
‘Shit, speaking of smoko.’ Twoboy thrust a hand into his black-and-grey camo trouser pocket, and checked for mobile coverage. A relentlessly blank screen looked back. He shook his head.
‘Not even a bar. How do you like living in the Pleistocene era?’
‘I like it very bloody much,’ Jo grunted as she picked up the heavy roll of barbed wire by its protruding wooden handles. ‘It’s a–’ gasp – ‘piece of–’ gasp – ‘piss. And–’ gasp – ‘if you was a real–’ gasp – ‘black–’ gasp – ‘fella, you wouldn’t even worry about–’ gasp – ‘shit like that.’ She carried the awkward wire to the top of their fenceline, and then fed the loose end downhill so it passed each of the twenty stakes they’d just banged in.
Twoboy pretended affront.
‘The reason I need coverage, madam,’ he retorted, ‘is so I can get onto Uncle Cheezel and get him down to town to testify for us next week. Otherwise Oscar Bullockhead and his pack of lying black dog southern cunt rellos are gonna do me out of my land. Our la
nd.’
His and Laz’s land, Jo knew he meant, and Mum Jackson’s, and that of Justice and Yabra in Melbourne, and the small horde of nieces and nephews and cousins who were scattered the length and breadth of the east coast. Jo couldn’t prove a damn thing about her family, which meant that she – and Stevo, and Ellen – would find no place in any Native Title tribunal in the land. The Breens were, and would likely remain, the acknowledged traditional owners of three-quarters of nine-tenths of sweet fuck all.
‘Give it here,’ Jo said, heaving for breath, her hand outstretched. ‘No, put the message in first–’
‘What’s the point?’
Jo swivelled her hand and made an impatient face, until Twoboy, sighing, entered the text and passed the phone over. She then instructed him to turn and face the house. The man folded his arms, tilted his head and gave her a deeply sceptical glance. Now come on.
‘Humour me,’ Jo insisted.
Twoboy rolled his eyes, but reluctantly obeyed.
‘Can I turn around yet?’ he nagged after ten seconds.
‘Not yet. Wait ... Okay – now.’
‘And?’ he said.
‘I’ve sent it.’ Jo told him. ‘It’s gone to Uncle Cheezel.’
‘Bull shit.’
Twoboy scrolled down to Sent Items and discovered that Jo was telling the truth. Yet there were still no bars showing. He squinted and carefully tightened the rubber band holding his dreads back. Then he rubbed his mouth slowly with the back of his hand, torn between a strict cultural imperative never to betray surprise, and an overwhelming urge to know how she’d done it.
Jo cracked up at his quandary.
‘Did I forget to mention I’m a cleverwoman?’ she teased.
Twoboy stared at her in deep alarm, as though she really might be, and then what would he have gotten himself into?
Jo laughed even harder, and held her hand out again for the phone.
‘Better see if he’s answered, eh. Oh look – no bars. So sad.’
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