She held the screen up so he could see the ongoing absence of bars. Twoboy pursed his lips. He resented being the butt of whatever joke Jo was pulling.
‘Can we just finish the bloody fence?’ he said.
‘But don’t you want to know if he’s answered it?’ Jo taunted, waggling the phone beside her ear. ‘Isn’t he your star witness next week?’
‘If we can do it without all this fucking around, yeah.’ Twoboy folded his arms.
Jo grinned, enjoying her power. Sure we can.
‘Watch and learn, grasshopper.’
She tossed the mobile, end over end, high into the air, spinning it fast, four, five, six metres straight up, and then catching it silently in two careful hands when it fell. She repeated this, then on its third flight the phone beeped shrilly from the top of its orbit.
Airily, Jo flipped the phone back to Twoboy, who nodded in grudging admiration as he checked the inbox.
‘He’s still on for Wednesday. Ya had me going for a minute there,’ Twoboy admitted as he pocketed the phone.
‘I really am a deadly cleverwoman, but,’ Jo insisted with a grin. ‘And don’t you forget it.’
‘Yeah, and I’m the Dalai Llama’s underpants,’ Twoboy answered through a mouthful of wire ties.
Soon they had two full-length strands of wire fastened tautly to all twenty pickets.
‘You know what Amanda said to me the other day?’ Jo asked him quietly. An insect fluttered in her belly.
‘Yeah, cos I’m psychic,’ Twoboy grunted, tying more wire.
‘She goes, Are you sure that bloke isn’t just chasing after you for your farm?’
‘That’s it – she’s onto me! I wanna marry the cockie’s daughter...’
Twoboy hooted with laughter and wound his forearm around Jo’s waist, pulling her in close to him. Then he seized her by the shoulders and kissed her full and enthusiastically on the mouth.
‘Ouch, shit, careful!’ His hand had clamped on her wounded arm.
Hastily he let go, sorry, sorry, and then drew up close again, this time more careful, his hands resting each side of her head and neck. Glossy dark brown curls spilled beneath his fingers. He gently nosed her forehead. Jo felt herself melting.
‘You don’t trust me. Well, why should you?’ he murmured.
‘It’s just ... I dunno.’ Jo’s farm wasn’t Crown Land, but there was more than one way to skin a cat – Amanda’s suggestion had sent chills down her spine.
‘Newsflash, darlin – dugais don’t get it,’ Twoboy said. ‘Whitefellas always think any little gammon bitta land’s good enough for Goories. Not that it isn’t beautiful here,’ he hastily amended, seeing Jo’s face cloud over with insult. ‘But for fuck’s sake, I don’t just want a hobby farm. I want the recognition we never had growing up without two fucken cents to rub together – useless boongs. Laz n me didn’t leave our good jobs to claim your twenty acres, Jo. We moved back here for the whole bloody lot, and to live like blackfellas should – on Grandad Tommy’s country, and practising his Law.’
‘Well that’s good to hear. Cos this little black duck does want a little farm – and now I’ve finally got one,’ Jo told the man, kissing him fiercely before picking up the fencing tools. Her heart was hammering from Twoboy’s touch, and from getting up the nerve to raise Amanda’s question, too. ‘And if you fenced like you talked, Lawman, we’d be done by now,’ she added, handing him the lengths of plain wire for attaching the third strand.
‘I do fence like I talk,’ he replied, walking down the slope and gesturing at Bottlebrush with a soft upward flick of his fingers. ‘Straight and true. Cos the old people are watching us. Watching to see we get it right.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ Jo glanced around at her paddocks, which according to Twoboy were crawling with spirits: good, bad and indifferent. ‘Well, I hope them old people like looking at camphor laurels and crofton weed. That moll at the real estate told me this place had so many weeds on it cos it was close to organic certification. What a crock.’
‘Well,’ Twoboy said cheerfully, taking hold of the third strand of wire. ‘Remember what Goebbels said – if ya gonna tell a lie, make it a big one.’
The world was nothing but water in the air and water in the streams, water in the swelling dams, and the narrow black snake that was Tin Wagon Road awash with a thin transparent skin of water feeding into the brown, churning, rising creek. The harsh roar of rain hammered on the tin roof, drowning out all other sound except for the thunder of the frogs. It rains here, thought Jo, entranced by the spectacle, as if the gods are trying to wash away some terrible story, wash away the blood in the rivers, wash away the names of the true owners of this place. Maybe that’s why our connections are so weak, so tenuous, me and Kym and Stevo. They took our ancestors away, and it’s pissed down so hard ever since then that the floods have washed away all their footsteps, washed away half our belonging. That’s me – a washed-up blackfella. She stared at her sodden paddocks. It was one thing – and a bloody big thing – to buy your country back off the landgrabbers. But how do you buy back a tribe? Where do you shop for a mob to call your own?
‘Gotta cruise,’ said Twoboy over Jo’s shoulder, frowning at the downpour and making an unhappy mouth. ‘I can’t get stuck here, my darlin. That judge’ll be giving me country away to Oscar Bullockhead, to anyone with a black face and a lovely yarn to spin em, if I’m not there with Mum and Laz on Wednesday.’
‘Off you go then.’ Jo was shivering on the veranda in wet clothes. She had just returned from fixing the water pump which delivered her water out of Stoney Creek across the road. The neighbour’s cattle regularly knocked the cover off, exposing the pump to the elements. No cover, no working pump. No pump, no water in the tanks for showers or washing. And so every time rain threatened it was a sprint across the road to undo the Brahmins’ endless mischief. And that would continue to be the story until Jo found time to move the pump and hook its black plastic pipes up to her own top dam instead of to the cleaner running water of Stoney Creek. It was just another of the many tasks that seemed to multiply while she was at work, and only got remembered in the early hours before dawn when Jo would lie awake in the dark, worrying about them.
She unceremoniously shooed Twoboy away. On ya bike.
‘You think I want to go, eh?’ Twoboy raised his eyebrows in amusement, feet planted squarely on the boards of the veranda.
‘How the fuck would I know what you want?’ Jo put one hand on her hip as the wind whipped the rain in under the roof, making the dogs cower against the kitchen wall, daw, poorfellas. ‘Just go if ya going. No need to make a song and dance about it, is there?’ And what a dugai expression that is, Jo realised, even as her shooing hand flicked him towards Tin Wagon Road and the tribunal in Brisbane that would decide his family’s future.
‘What I want–’ Twoboy grabbed Jo’s dismissive rain-wet hand and held it pressed hard up against his heart – ‘is to stay here with you for a very, very long time. But if I’m not there for the hearing it’ll put us about three years behind the bloody eight ball. And you know how these creeks come up.’
Jo didn’t, in fact, know the nature of ‘these creeks’, having grown up in the shady backwater of South Golden Beach, where the sludgy canal was a lot slower to react to storms than the streams that fed off Bottlebrush and Chincogan.
‘Well, I’m learning.’
But it was no good, words were no good. Par for the course, once they were touching each other – even just rain-cold hands – nothing but their touching mattered. Twoboy was in her orbit again and she was kissing him, wrapping herself in him, lost in a universe of his dreads, and his mouth, and his warm chest, a universe of mutual desire and urgency. He reached lower and lifted her up onto him, both of them fully clothed and neither of them dry; rain pummelling the ground just beyond the veranda and the spray off the outside boards reaching them as fine mist. She clasped her heels into his wet back, kissing him and smiling at the same time, wanting this
never to end.
‘Why would I want to leave,’ Twoboy whispered, ‘are you insane?’
‘My ex-husband thinks so. Told me on a regular basis.’
‘He’s a prize fuckwit.’
‘Mm-hmm.’
Jo slid back down to earth and they stumbled inside, half-running to the bedroom, as the rain hammered even more heavily on the tin roof. Jo kicked the door shut, knowing that Ellen would hardly hear it bang over the torrents flooding down. When Twoboy lifted her wet shirt off and began to kiss her belly, she tilted his chin up with one finger.
‘Hey – you have to go, remember? Very important tribunal business in Brisbane? And the creeks all coming up like there’s no tomorrow?’
‘I’m gone.’ Kissing her smooth golden belly. ‘I’m not here. Must be someone else doing this.’ Twoboy smiled.
Jo closed her eyes as he moved his kisses slowly, oh so slowly towards her hips, her thighs, her junoo.
‘Definitely not here.’
‘Ah.’
‘Or here.’
‘Ah.’
‘Or here.’
‘I don’t care where you are. Just keep doing what you’re – ah – doing.’
‘Nice way to talk.’
‘I’m single, I can talk how I like. Oh, yeah, do that.’
‘You sure about that?’
‘Very.’
‘I don’t just want to stay a bit longer today – I want to be with you,’ Twoboy told Jo when she was lying floppily against him beneath the blanket, rain thrumming on the roof. ‘And I don’t want to share. Very greedy I am. I want everything all to myself, no exceptions.’
‘Well, you do have a penis,’ Jo teased, ‘so that kind of goes without saying.’
Twoboy looked out the window. The wind was lashing the white cedar tree in the paddock.
‘Be serious. I want to be with you,’ he whispered beneath the pounding rain. ‘The goddamm paterfamilias.’
‘You are with me,’ Jo protested, avoiding his meaning.
‘Not just like this, I mean really with you. I mean I’ve–’
Jo pulled the blanket higher, covering her heart. ‘Don’t say it,’ she cut in, tightly. ‘Not unless you mean it. Actually, don’t even say it if you do mean it.’
A cool silence ensued.
‘I don’t like that rule much,’ Twoboy told her then. There was genuine hurt in his dark eyes.
‘My house, my rules. And anyway, didn’t you have to be gone half an hour ago?’
‘Yep. Yep, I did.’ Twoboy got up and dressed faster than usual. There was a new wound in him now. The man didn’t so much as glance at Jo as he searched the room for his runners.
She lay and grimaced at the ceiling. It was never easy. Nothing was allowed to be easy. You had to be building granite fortress walls to protect yourself – that, or be the one getting boiling oil poured on your head from above.
‘Don’t rush me,’ she told Twoboy as he brusquely kissed her goodbye. ‘I’ve heard how much men love me too many times in my life, that’s all. And I have to think of Ellen, too.’
‘Believe it or don’t believe it,’ he told her without the usual smile lighting up his face. ‘It’s the truth.’
Six
Jo pulled the ripcord, and the whipper snipper roared satisfactorily into life first go, sending vibrations coursing up her forearms and into her braced elbows. She reefed her earmuffs down – as if she wasn’t half binung goonj already from the band days – and headed over towards the cemetery’s memorial wall. Lowering the machine head, she began to tidy up the only signs on this earth that various Mullumites had ever existed. Mullumites? Mullumbimbians? Mullumbimbos – yeah, she decided with a grin. Mullumbimbos. As the sweeping motion of the work gradually took hold, her mind drifted away from the cemetery. Grass spewed sideways from the spinning head with its lashing plastic string, but in her daydreams Jo saw only Twoboy’s smile, Twoboy’s mesmerising black eyes, Twoboy’s dark arms reaching for her in bed yesterday. And that was okay, no problemo. What she saw was fine. It was what she then remembered coming out of his mouth that troubled her.
I want to be with you, really with you. And: I don’t want to share.
Jo felt a deep primal alarm in her gut as she remembered these words. She’d thought she could make marriage work with Ellen’s father, of course, but that illusion had been disastrous. During her divorce, Jo had decided that she was too damaged to love anyone except Ellen. Mum and Dad had done their best, but flogging her and Kym and Stevo into compliance was all they could think of to protect their coffee-skinned kids from the dangerous world of dugai power and dugai hypocrisy. Hide from trouble, don’t fight it. Be Quiet. Be Obedient. Be White. At thirteen, when the car accident killed her parents and took her world away, Jo had already had it with their strategy for living. She’d fled South Golden and, despite the hard yakka put in by Aunty Barb, it didn’t take long for trouble to find her. She’d had to climb a long way up from the floor of the pub toilet since then.
And here I am now, a parent myself, Jo thought, with me and Ellen all on our lonesome ownsome – except then Twoboy arrives chucking declarations of love around like confetti. Coming in to fuck everything up, just when I’ve got my freedom, a job I can tolerate, the best horse I could ever hope to breed, and the farm I always dreamed about. Sweet Christ Jesus.
How did that Dylan song go? I gave you my heart but you wanted my soul. Jo had never really understood the difference. Giving her heart away felt exactly the same as giving up her soul. She wasn’t ready to gamble on Twoboy, wasn’t nearly ready to sign up for the swings and roundabouts of being only the half of something. No, she was already the whole of something else – something completely different. And there was Ellen to think of, too.
As Jo worked her way around the edge of the memorial wall, digesting these problems beneath the comforting, muffled, white noise of the whipper snipper, a sharp quartz pebble rocketed up, flung by the plastic string of the machine. It pinged loudly against a metal name plate before ricocheting back onto her shin.
Jo took her finger off the trigger. Silence fell.
Her shoulders and forearms ached from the effort of keeping everything looking nice, and she became aware that she’d been frowning as she worked. She read the bronze memorial plaque on the wall while she rubbed her stinging leg:
Anne-Maree Gascoigne. 09-05-1958–10-03-1984. Sadly Missed By Her Husband and Daughters. RIP.
Rolling up her jeans Jo discovered a small boomerang of a bruise already decorating her shin. Should she, she wondered, take this stinging quartz pebble, this tiny attack of the universe upon her person, as evidence that life was short, that any love is good love, and a clear enough indication that she should dive headlong into the deep, dangerous territory of Twoboy Jackson and his unreliable professions of fidelity? Or should it rather be read as a message that real love is worth waiting for – that husbands and daughters who will grieve for you are not thick upon the ground, and that she should look long and hard before she leapt?
As she considered this concept – sorrowful husbands and daughters – everything, suddenly, was too much for Jo. Her eyes welled up, surprising her with tears for her lost marriage; for her tightly held dream of a family. The dream she had fucked up all on her own with her cold anger and her rages and her disappearing to gigs; her refusal to let Paul in; her immense self-loathing that told her constantly that whatever she had was never, never enough. That she was bad, and if anyone dared to love her, it was simply evidence that they, too, were deeply and irrevocably flawed.
Frustrated at her welling tears, Jo smacked the side of her head so hard that she floated momentarily, located somewhere between the pain in her shin and the stinging of her reddened right ear.
Ellen’s dad wasn’t coming back. She didn’t want him to. They were so badly matched she must have been insane to ever conceive a child with him. So why this ache, this never-ending burden she carried in her gut? The craving for the dream of a real family, a
Mob. Belonging. A couple of dozen people who hung together and shared and laughed, who were all on the same team. Her team.
Terrifyingly, this was what Twoboy had whispered the possibility of, beneath the pounding Bundjalung rain. This was his implicit offer, his solution to her desperate, unspoken, unacknowledged loneliness. But Jo wasn’t sure she was brave enough. She felt hollowed out by life, feared that she was useless for anybody who wanted a complete human being to love. Ellen had the best of her, and there was bugger all left over. Twoboy thought there was enough for him to love as well, but Twoboy was just plain wrong.
Jo started the whipper snipper up again with a savage yank, and laid into the setaria threatening the appearance of the dead all over the hillside. She massacred the clumps of lime-green grass, flayed them, ground them so low that Basho would beam with pleasure at her meticulousness, unaware that really Jo was killing the past. Murdering the final lacerating months of her marriage. Assassinating the pain of Paul finally walking away, having had enough. And not least, flaying the dugais for what they’d done long before Paul came along to try and live with the half-crazed consequences.
After an hour of this frenzied attack Jo halted, sweating and defeated. The cemetery was immaculate, but she was a mess. And worse, far worse, she was just playing silly buggers, going round and round in circles in her own mind. There was no way she could say no to Twoboy. She knew she was already in too deep with that dreadlocked fella, and no matter what he was selling with his handsomeness and his smiling declarations of fidelity, the price could never be too high.
‘You gotta come over right now!’ Therese insisted down the phone on Friday afternoon, knock-off time or near enough. Jo’s lip curled automatically at being told what to do, even by her best friend.
‘Why do I gotta? What’s up?’
‘Just get your arse here straight away – I got something you and Ellen need to see.’ There was an excited burbling in Therese’s tone, a lightness and a promise of good times that did the trick. Jo scratched her scalp, and decided that it wouldn’t kill the horses to be fed after dark for once.
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