‘Okay, seeya in ten.’
She turned to Ellen, and gave her the news. Ellen moaned a familiar mantra: the world against her; powerless; trapped into going home with her mother instead of catching the long and winding bus down Main Arm Road. And now it would be an extra hour, probably, until she was safely inside the cocoon of her own locked room with the adult world kept at bay for another night. A spasm of irritation shot through Jo at these complaints, but she contained herself. Show some self-discipline, she thought, and have a bit of patience with the child. For she is just a child, though where last year’s joyful twelve-year-old had gone was one of life’s little mysteries. Maybe Ellen was getting her first period? Lordy, that was gonna be fun. Not.
‘What’s she want?’ Ellen asked, texting somebody her misery.
‘Got good news, she reckons. She wouldn’t say what.’
Ellen stopped texting, closed her eyes, and let her head rest briefly against the glass of the passenger window. Did she already know what good news was coming?
‘What’s up?’
‘Noth-ing.’ Ellen sighed. Like she didn’t want to spoil the surprise.
Jo shuffled left-handed among scores of CDs, and picked a Spearhead track to bounce them down the Tunnel Road to the beach. She cranked it up and sang loudly to Ellen, to the birds, the camphors and the banyan trees. Oh yeah, baby. Music was the solution, nine times out of ten, to any of life’s littler woes and trifling problems ... and that was definitely worth making a song and dance about, truegod.
Pulling in at Therese and Amanda’s place, Jo found Trinity’s RAV4 was also parked on the footpath. Even Chris’s last-legs Econovan was putting in an appearance. Jo raised her eyebrows. A part-ay, it looked like. But why, and why unheralded till an hour ago?
They drew close, and Kasey Chambers pounded out of the kitchen window, along with shrieks of laughter and the sound of bottles being uncorked. The kettle was screaming its whistle along for good measure. Fat-bellied Buddha sat on his wooden stand beside the stairs, wearing a new plastic hibiscus lei. ‘Bit bloody noisy round here,’ Jo told him, but Buddha simply smiled serenely back at her. Must like Kasey, old fat belly. And why wouldn’t he? Buddha was cool, even if he was two thousand years old.
Jo saluted the statue, then slid open the glass door to Therese’s lounge – where a motley assortment of family and friends were clustered together having their photo taken. As she stepped inside everybody erupted into laughter and bewildering screams which evolved into ‘For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow’. Therese and Amanda both threw themselves at Jo and Ellen, hugging them like they’d last seen them three months ago, not three days.
‘Come here, you good thing, rub some of that Virgo magic off onto me!’ Trinity fell upon Ellen in a cloud of patchouli and tie-dyed cheesecloth. Ellen grinned and sucked it up, for what Trinity lacked in sanity she made up for with a heart the size of Sydney Harbour.
‘Look!’ Amanda flapped wildly at them, waving something in the air and cackling. Jo put down her keys and mobile and seized the bit of shiny paper. On three of the jagged scratched panels she read, $10 000.
‘Well fuck me dead and bury me pregnant,’ Jo said to Therese, gazing at the scratchie and shaking her head, ‘for once in me life I got something right.’
‘For you,’ Therese yelled later that night over the hubbub, holding out Jo’s mobile – ‘Twoboy.’
Jo took the phone down the hall away from the chaos, giving Therese’s hip-thrusting action the middle finger as she went. Cheeky yellow slag.
‘Hey you.’ Jo smiled to hear her lover’s voice.
‘You never said there was a party!’
Jo laughed and told him about Therese and Amanda’s good luck. Twoboy gave a low whistle.
‘They chucking any your way?’ he asked.
‘Not that I heard,’ Jo answered. ‘Grog and pizza for everyone tonight, and Therese slung Ellen a hundred cos she picked out the scratchie.’
‘Huh,’ Twoboy grunted. Jo could tell what he was thinking – that despite her Japanese father Therese was still a typical tightarse dugai.
‘So when ya taking me surfing?’ Jo asked, partly to change the subject and partly to make up for the hurt of last weekend.
‘Anytime. I didn’t know you wanted to.’
‘Yeah, you gotta teach me to stand up,’ she said. ‘Can I use your board?’
‘Mmm ... we might hafta find you a slower one, I reckon...’ Twoboy sounded as if he was seeing Jo wiped out bigtime and his prized McCoy board snapping in two.
‘Well, let’s do it this weekend, hey?’ she said with a surge of excitement.
‘Okay,’ agreed Twoboy, ‘you borrow a big, slow Mal and I’ll teach ya. In our spare time,’ he added ironically.
‘I’ll make time if you do,’ Jo told him, and then rang off before he could get all lovey-dovey on her. Whoo hoo. She struck a surfer’s pose in front of Therese’s bathroom mirror, and sang the ‘Hawaii Five-O’ song to her reflection.
And somewhere between the pizzas being delivered from Ocean, and the bolt at nine o’clock to the Billi for another slab of Tooheys Old, Jo was reluctantly prodded to pick up a guitar, for the first time in three years, and give Kasey a run for her money.
The more Jo drank the better she played, until, her fingers flying over the frets during ‘Me and Bobby McGee’, she looked over to see Ellen riveted.
‘Why?’ her daughter asked in the car on the way home. ‘Why did you ever stop, when you can play like that?’
‘Ecclesiastes,’ answered Jo drily. ‘Ecclesiastes, and a crying baby girl.’
Jo woke as Saturday’s dawn poured in her bedroom window, and was instantly buoyed as she remembered yesterday. Therese and Amanda both worked fulltime jobs but they – like most people – had no safety net, no savings. They lived week to week, much as she did. But now her mates had something to put aside. Sometimes things pan out for the good people, Jo thought happily, sometimes. And it’s a sunny morning, too, hallelujah, crisp, and not so windy you’d be taking your life in your hands to ride a young stockhorse up the western ridge, she decided.
She gulped a coffee down, threw on jeans and riding boots, and in ten minutes had Comet saddled in the backyard. Once she was on board though, Jo realised that she’d forgotten to leave a note for Ellen saying where she was headed, just in case of the black snake striking. The horse rearing on top of her. The hoof in the rabbit hole and the snapping of the front leg. The girth that didn’t hold. The branch that slammed you off and left you concussed, high on the remote ridgetop. Or any other of the thousand disasters that awaited you when you saddled up and put your life in the hands of a half-ton prey animal with a mind of its own. She took her right foot out of the stirrup, then hesitated, and thought: fuck it. Although today was definitely not a good day to die – no day is a good day for that, are you fucking kidding me – if it had to be today, then so be it. Her phone was in her pocket, not that there would be any coverage, and the sun was shining, and God was in his heaven according to some, all was right with the world according to others, and she was not getting off Comet and being sensible like she knew she should, not for anything, no siree.
Instead, she footed the stirrup, gathered up her reins, and wheeled the colt around into the Big Paddock, heading for the back corner where the farm met the fire trail bordering the World Heritage. As Comet stepped out beneath her with his mother’s big thoroughbred stride, Jo looked at her flourishing stands of camphors that needed poisoning, and at the Big Paddock that needed slashing with a tractor she didn’t own, and would have to hire with money she definitely didn’t have. These jobs, lingered on, normally drove her to distraction, but this morning she felt something close to detachment. Heaven is the breeze between a good horse’s ears, the Arabs reckon. True dat, she thought, as Comet plunged through the knee-high paspalum, eager to be cantering, while Athena stood at the dam with the fattening steers, her head raised, calmly watching where her son and the human were off to this time
.
Past the makeshift wire gate and inside the World Heritage, Comet trod a narrow kangaroo trail through high, white-trunked eucalypts and the ever-present camphors, climbing, climbing all the while as the farmhouse shrank behind them and the calls of pigeons and whip-birds replaced the sounds of cattle and the rushing creek. Civilisation faded and the ground grew steep on both sides of the track as they climbed. The red soil of the gully Jo rode through was moistly lush, sprouting dozens of tree ferns. This high country harboured tribes of lizards and birds and other slithering critters which rustled away through the leaf litter in alarm at her intrusion.
Halfway to the top, Jo noticed a light green plant-protector marring the jungled slope on her left. Curious, she pulled Comet up. When she dismounted and clambered over to it through the lantana thickets, she discovered a healthy marijuana seedling happily thriving inside the little, open-topped plastic tent. It’s not my land, she told herself, and so it’s not my problem, unlike the dozen or so plants the Mooneys had left dotting the margins of the farm. Plants that Jo had pulled up and thrown unceremoniously on the fire pile, while making sure that Ellen saw, and noticed. The kid knew very well that her mother considered yarndi just another tool of the landgrabbers. Leave it alone. Stay away from the snake. Addiction is no revolution.
Leaving this plant unmolested behind her, Jo rode on through dappled sunlight. Comet was sweating now, but still steady and surefooted beneath her. The kangaroo trail broadened out, branching to the right and turning into a clear cattle path as they climbed above the thick scrubby country into more open land. Now there was an occasional glimpse of the ocean. Far below were the houses on Tin Wagon Road, and the cattle yards where the old dip used to be – and here was a family of four bounding wallabies making Comet shy and prance, half unseating Jo and making her swear and wonder about the whole idea of riding alone on a young, green horse in remote hill country.
She heaved herself back into position in the saddle, shaken and breathing hard. Then came some cloven cattle tracks, and a motorbike tyre print in soft mud, strange, it looks quite fresh and yet I’ve heard nothing, Jo thought: even if the breeze is from the other direction, you’d normally hear a trail bike, wouldn’t you? And here is some country that’s had a bit of a fire through recently, and here’s some tall lantana to avoid so as not to be sandpapered by it as the horse goes past, and here, suddenly, is a fallen eucalypt log a metre high blocking the bloody trail, and the ground on either side far too steep and too soft to ride around–
Bugger.
Jo sat still, contemplating the situation. On the other end of the reins Comet snatched a few mouthfuls of grass. The tree trunk lying in front of them was smooth and barkless, exactly like the white gums she’d ridden through for the past half-hour. If she’d been on Athena it would have been an easy decision to back up a few metres and then trust the clever old mare to make the jump, since the track on the other side was clear and open. But jumping Comet? The colt was barely used to having her on his back, let alone leaping fallen trees on high, narrow bush tracks with nobody around to help if things went wrong. Jo screwed her mouth sideways, considering the risks. The smart thing to do, she knew, would be just to turn around and go home. Mosey on back to the ranch, cowgirl.
Finally, she reached a decision, and dismounted. She unclipped one side of the rein from the bit, and pushed Comet back with a stern finger on his nose. Obediently the horse reversed in a straight line, until there was ten clear metres of path between him and the tree. Jo geed him up, and then she ran on foot directly at the trunk, the double-length of rein clutched in her left hand and Comet trotting willingly behind her. In a fluid motion Jo leapt onto the trunk – willing Comet to jump, too, and for her riding boots not to slip and fail her.
After the tiniest of hesitations, Comet lifted his forelegs and curved himself easily over the tree, landing on the other side with room to spare. Then he kept going – with enough speed to snatch the single rein unwittingly out of Jo’s hand.
Jerked forward by the horse’s momentum, Jo stumbled. She fell hard against a protruding branch of the fallen eucalypt, shit and bugger and fuck as the muddy ground whirled up to meet her head, very very much the wrong way.
Jo sat, blowing, coughing, and spitting several times onto the bushfire-blackened ground beside the track.
When her breath eventually returned to normal, she cursed her empty left hand and rubbed at her bruised ribcage. Comet had disappeared around the bend, rein flapping merrily in the breeze of his departure.
‘Comet,’ Jo called hopefully. ‘Comet, come back boy.’
As if. That never happened. Horses didn’t backtrack, given a choice. He’d be halfway to Mullum by now, if he could find a trail through. Probably hightail it back to his old paddock at Oliver’s. Jo cursed a final curse, and cautiously began to haul herself up to her feet by the offending branch, which promptly snapped and sent her back to earth once more, arse up. Streaks of pain radiated up and down her left side from the rib that was really caning her now. This time Jo’s swearing was of a rare quality: she lay face-up in the mud cursing the malice of the tree, her own stupidity, the dugai who had so rightly created a World Heritage park and then so wrongly failed to maintain the tracks (and what were cattle doing up in the World Heritage anyway?), her bruised ribs, the unknown and unheard motorbike rider for not being here to rescue her, and even poor innocent Comet who could hardly be expected to know he was meant to stop beside her once the trunk had been successfully negotiated.
Jo lay in the red mud a good while, gazing up at the clear blue of the sky, wondering what the lesson was here. Not to overreach the abilities of young horses, probably, though Aunty Barb would have said she was stood on ground that didn’t want her there, and to listen to that ground, pay attention to it or else pay the price.
Listen to country, girl, it’s been here a damn sight longer than you have.
Jo sighed heavily and felt the pain in her side afresh. Okay, Aunty Barb, you win. She lay and pricked her binung and deliberately let in the bush sounds that she had been keeping out with her swearing and her incessant thinking. Shuttup, Jo, and just listen. Where am I? What lives here, who lived here? What’s gone, and what remains? Jo’s breathing gradually eased to slowness, and she at last really began to hear. Birds. Insects. A humming in the far distance. The trail bike rider. Or no, perhaps not a bike. A plane? No, not that either. Superman, she laughed to herself, as the humming continued.
The sun warmed Jo’s face where she lay, and as her hurt rib stopped complaining she became almost comfortable. Her limbs relaxed, and her jaw softened. The smell of the earth’s rich humus entered her nostrils. A magpie sang a little further down the slope. Listen to that koruhmburuhn talga. Just slow down and listen. Aunty Barb’s dry cackle echoed in her mind – ‘It’s always a good time for dadirri, unless a Brahmin bull’s after you that is!’ No Brahmins here, Aunt, not many even down on the road a good half-hour walk away as the crow flies, but still the humming of a motor continuing, on and on. The koruhmburuhn warbled again, and was answered now by a bellbird medley. A chainsaw, maybe? No. Water pump, then. No. The sound had a human quality to it that ruled all these out. And it was at the instant that this thought came into Jo’s mind – a human quality – that the humming became much louder and much clearer. And then, goosepimpling all over, Jo finally heard the humming for what it really was. It wasn’t a motor at all. What she was hearing was voices. Ancient human voices.
Chanting.
The hills were singing to her.
Jo’s bowels shrank where she lay. Oh Jesus, oh sweet fucking Jesus Christ. She froze as though utter stillness could stop the terror, could save her. How she wished, now, that she’d never gotten on Comet, never ridden through the wire fence into the World Heritage, and, above all, had taken seriously the blind freddy message of a felled tree directly in her path. How stupid am I, she wondered, how fucking blind? Just like the dugai, blundering into God knows what danger for God knows what
insane reason.
On and on the chant hummed, now rising and now falling. Like wind in high treetops. Like waves slapping a shoreline over and over.
The words were indistinct. Although Jo was far from fluent in language, she thought she could pick out some words. Jagun – land – and mibun – eagle – among them. And jalgani too – woman. The voices, she realised after a minute of horrified gut-clenched listening, were male and female both. Jo breathed out then, a tiny hesitant breath, since women’s voices meant it was unlikely she’d stumbled – stupidly, ignorantly, unbelievably unwittingly – onto sacred men’s ground. Breathing lightly now, her heart racing still. Good one, Aunty Barb, so what do I do now? Dadirri is one thing, but what the hell do you do with this?
Is a Brahmin bull after you? Aunty Barb asked sharply from the Piccabeen cemetery. No, Aunt, Jo replied testily, obviously not. Well then, Aunty Barb retorted, it’s always a good time for dadirri.
And so Jo reluctantly lay still and listened some more. Two minutes of chanting passed. Three minutes. She heard the words for Land. Eagle. Woman. Water. The Southern Cross. And could have sworn she’d even heard yarraman and something that sounded a lot like Tin Wagon, too.
Maybe, she suddenly felt, maybe it’s not a warning at all, but some other kind of message. Not a sign to stop on pain of death – No Trespassing – perhaps instead, the tree was just a means to slow her down, stop her mad rushing about, to get through to her? Wait here a while, girl. Stop with us.
Heartened by this thought, Jo slowly winched her way to the vertical, using the branch stub. She sat and looked about her. There was nobody visible, from this century or any other. The talga belonged to the trees, the wind, the earth, the charcoaled ground where fire had passed through, the lantana thickets and the tree ferns that clustered at the base of the strangling figs and camphors. And was the chant fading now? Growing fainter?
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