She lay there, breathing harshly, breathing hard enough for the two of them, yet it was only her whose body moved, only her lungs which heaved for air, pulling it in and expelling it, that lifelong dance which tied her to the cosmos. As she lay wetly defeated, sheltering Comet’s young body from the horror of the world with hers, feeling the chill and stillness of his flank, the chill and stillness of death where she had only ever before known a hotly breathing, living yarraman, a yarraman that walked and cantered and neighed and shied and bucked, a yarraman who daily knew the world through all his myriad senses, Jo fell still and silent. She finally surrendered; her face crumpled like a child’s.
With an anguished groan, she knew that wherever Comet’s head was lying, underwater or on the land, and whether the creek rose, or whether it fell, and whether she got the murdering wire off his legs, or whether it stayed there, forever rusting in the grave with him, she understood: it didn’t matter. This horror in the red earth, on her own baugal jagan – this was the trouble of Ellen’s dream made manifest. And it didn’t matter one bit what she now did or failed to do. Comet could never be alright again, because Comet was no longer here.
Jo stumbled into the kitchen and sagged against the sink, smearing the edge of the laminex benchtop with her muddied shirt. She ran the cold tap, rinsing clean the wounds on her hands and arms and letting the red water swirl away down the plughole. She needed some sort of antiseptic and serious bandaging. A tetanus shot, probably.
The clock on the wall had stopped at 7:49. Jo gazed at it dully. She registered that the hands were no longer moving, and that the mechanism had failed. But her brain didn’t manage to make the further step, to knowing that the time on display was therefore wrong. Still enough time to get to work by 8:30. On autopilot, Jo boiled the kettle, made herself a cup of tea, ladled in four sugars, and drank it as she changed out of her sodden gear into dry clothes. Bloodless ones which lacked any recent history.
Outside, the rain had eased at last. Athena was wandering the Big Paddock now in distress, whinnying over and over again for her missing youngster. Jo tried to block the sound out as she got into the ute, but the awful keening followed her most of the way to Mullum. She drove over the range in silence. Spearhead couldn’t fix what was wrong with today.
She left the tunnel road and was about to drive across the river next to St John’s when, noticing blood still trickling down her forearms, it suddenly occurred to Jo: it might be a good idea to ring someone. Chris. No. Chris was depressed in bed, was no good to her today, no good even to herself. Therese’s mobile was out of range, because half of South Golden was a mobile black hole, and Jo wasn’t about to drag her out of the classroom anyway, shame. Twoboy then, in Brisbane. Still parked beside the river, Jo hit speed-dial and a moment later his warm voice was with her, a balm to her misery. His concern turned quickly to outrage.
‘A barbed wire fence – on your place!’ he exclaimed in disbelief.
‘And Comet was all wrapped up in it, all tangled up, and he’s drowned in the creek,’ Jo wailed, bursting into hot angry tears again.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, darling. Christ, I wish I was there with ya. Hey, hey, pull over, pull over, you can’t be driving like this,’ Twoboy ordered in alarm. Jo was shaking with emotion now that someone was right there on the phone, and it was finally safe to feel helpless. She told him that Kym was well away to Coffs with the boys, and Chris was down sick. Twoboy grimaced. Jo’s parents were dead; vulnerability wasn’t particularly high on any blackfella list of survival traits, and Jo’s list of safe people to call was even shorter than his own.
‘God, I wish I was there with you, darlin,’ he told Jo. ‘But I’ve gotta be in court till at least four-thirty – I can come down after that–’
‘No,’ Jo told him, wiping her eyes and realising that her fresh shirt was now bloodied, too. ‘It’s okay. It’s not like it’ll bring him back. If you miss court. Stay there, and come down tomorrow.’
‘Okay, I’ll call you the minute it’s over okay,’ he told her, then risked ending with, ‘love ya, babe’. Click. Jo had hung up and Twoboy was left standing at court, all styled up in a charcoal grey suit, not knowing if she’d heard his last three words or not.
Jo found herself still sitting at the steering wheel. She steadied herself and dried her swollen face for the umpteenth time that morning, then noticed with horror that the car clock said 9.13. What? Shit. Basho was going to be ropable. She checked her phone. Sure enough, the time was correct and she’d missed three calls from him in the deadzone between home and Mullum. Jo was supposed to meet her boss at the Co-op at 8.45, to organise an order for the next six months’ supplies of trees, mulch, and fertiliser.
Now she clashed the gears ferociously and pulled out and onto the bridge.
‘Ah, look what the cat’s dragged in. Good afternoon, madam.’ Basho greeted her airily, one elbow on the counter yarning to Fat Tony. He was in a good mood by the look of it, thank Christ. ‘Get flooded in, did ya?’
‘Sorry boss. Nope, I had a dead colt in my paddock this morning,’ Jo explained, gulping back tears and hoping she actually looked as shitty and grief-struck as she felt. The bloody lacerations on her arms would have to help with that. Fat Tony’s eyes widened at Jo’s words but Basho didn’t understand the import of them at all, and ploughed on regardless.
‘Did you try and ride it here – is that why you’re late?’ he joked, before he saw Jo’s eyes well up and her lip quiver. He instantly turned his attention to the order for the cemetery, and together with Fat Tony started picking trees out of the seedling trays. Basho had the dugai allergy to any female emotion, and Fat Tony wasn’t much better, although he at least had the mitigating factor of his mother’s recent death. Jo stayed outside and, filled with shame at not being able to harden the fuck up in public, in front of blokes, in front of her boss, she leant her forehead against the green colorbond wall of the Co-op, and cried.
It wasn’t long before Cheery Dan wandered around the corner in his Billabong cap and flannie.
‘You right there, are ya, matey?’ he asked, with a kind, boyish smile, redeeming an entire generation of male Mullumbimbos.
‘Oh ... I will be,’ Jo replied through streaming tears. ‘My colt died this morning. Drowned in the creek.’
‘Jesus!’ He frowned. ‘That sucks. Severely.’ He stood beside Jo, chewing on a stalk of lucerne. Jo told him the story of the mystery wire fence, then rubbed her face hard and extracted a leafy stalk of her own to chew, from the shedded bales stacked just inside the roller door. Dan grabbed a large fistful of the tasty legume and held it out to her like a bouquet. Jo snorted a damp snort, and took it from him gratefully.
‘You wanna cuppa tea, mate? Or an ... an icecream or something?’ Dan asked, throwing a hand uselessly towards the ice-cream freezer that brought the high school kids swarming over the road at lunchtime. Jo smiled a watery smile. Bloody hell, she thought. With young blokes like you I think we might be alright. For all that the planet’s killing us back these days, and there are wars everywhere you look. Not to mention some fucking arsehole erecting barbed wire fences on my land. Jo gazed at Dan and wondered if she wanted to kiss him on his nineteen-year-old mouth. Nah. But geez, the relief of having a human being notice that you were dying inside, and actually bothering to care. She dried her eyes on her sleeve and privately decided to declare Cheery Dan an honorary Bundjalung.
‘I’ll be right, Dan. But thanks. And thanks for–’ and here Jo lifted and waggled the lucerne bouquet.
‘No worries. You know what they say – if you’ve got live ones, you’ll have dead ones.’ He touched her arm in sympathy.
Jo put her hand on top of his for a moment, and noticed the glint of his stainless-steel eyebrow ring as the sun slipped briefly out from the clouds. If it stays clear I can go for a ride on Comet after work, she thought automatically – before realising that no, she couldn’t.
‘Wanna marry me, Dan?’ Jo asked through red-lidded eyes. ‘Get us
a bunch of shitty-arsed kids and a huge mortgage?’
‘Fuck, yeah. Tomorrow?’
‘Deal.’ Jo managed a wan smile. From the corner of her eye she glimpsed Basho and Fat Tony in the shed, turning away in relief.
‘Well ... I hope ya get to the bottom of that fence business, hey,’ Dan said, pulling his cap down tight over his forehead, and climbing into the forklift. ‘Actually–’ and here he paused in middle of the forklift’s whining reversal, wondering whether or not to speak.
Jo stiffened. ‘What?’
‘Rob Starr bought a whole heap of pickets and some high-tension wire about three days ago.’ Dan looked at Jo doubtfully. Her eyes had narrowed to savage slits, and Dan was hoping that she still didn’t own a firearm.
I’ll fucken kill him. I’ll tie him up with wire and chuck him off Federation Bridge. He wants to see the creek run with our mob blood, well then, let the river run with his–
‘It might just be a coincidence,’ Dan added hastily.
‘Yeah,’ said Jo very slowly, ‘yeah, it might be a coincidence.’ But she was gonna make it her business to find out. And if it wasn’t, well. Heads were gonna roll, onetime. She threw the lucerne bouquet in the back of the ute, and went inside with a stony face to sort out the order with Basho.
‘Yeah, we put that bit of fence up just the other day. Friday it woulda been.’ Rob Starr watched Jo warily, his right foot resting on the bottom rung of his five-bar front gate. The Hilux engine was still ticking; the screech of its tyres braking on the gravel road lingered in both their ears, and the slam of the driver’s door.
Jo had knocked off early and covered the ten kays from Mullum to Middle Pocket in record time. Now Starr’s dark sunglasses prevented her from beaming her hatred directly into his optic nerves, searing him with her rage.
‘Did it occur to you to maybe ask me before you put up a fence on my land?’ Jo spat in fury. Stay angry, she told herself, remember to stay proper bloody wild and then you won’t cry. She’d had quite enough of crying in front of white men for one day.
‘On your land?’ Starr answered with genuine surprise. ‘Where’d you get that idea?’
‘Oh, maybe cos my pedigree stockhorse colt’s lying dead tangled up in it,’ Jo oozed sarcasm. ‘Maybe cos I’ve got two eyes and a brain, and they both fucking work.’ She could feel her heart hammering as she spoke. She ached to make an angry fist in the air, but if she did Jo thought she might just use it on him.
Rob Starr paused and touched the back of his hand to his nose before blowing air audibly through his lips. Buying time. That shut ya up, didn’t it, thought Jo with a tiny shred of satisfaction. When he answered, his tone had softened, and most of the wariness had been replaced with insight, now that he knew why a crazy woman was at his front gate spewing gravel and spitting chips.
‘Well. Well, I’m real sorry if you’ve lost your colt, but I still say that fence isn’t on your land. I’ve got a survey map of the valley in the house. I’ll show ya ... if ya like.’
No, Jo didn’t want to see the survey, much less to set even one toe on his poisonous farm. She wanted the fence not to exist, for Comet not to have drowned, for her not to be put in the position of arguing uselessly with a middle-aged man – and a middle-aged dugai man at that – about far-and-away the worst thing to happen since her divorce. Starr stood there implacable in his old worn jeans and a cheap sky-blue pullover from Target, but the muddied boot resting on the bar of the gate was an R.M. Williams. Landed fucken gentry. How could she even begin to argue with someone who spent one of her weekly mortgage payments on working boots?
‘Well, if it’s not on my land–’ she snarled, ‘and I’m not saying it isn’t – then it’d have to be on the fucking fire trail and that’s illegal too. Probably more bloody illegal than trespassing on my property. What if the ridge caught fire? Hey? How would anyone get up there to put a bushfire out?’
Starr glanced up at the sodden ridge which lay between their two properties. The idea of it catching fire seemed very far-fetched at the moment. From where they were standing, Jo could see rivulets streaming down between the old rows of neglected bananas. These narrow streams were stained by topsoil, and the country looked like it was bleeding. She could see the profile of the eucalyptus with a heart-shaped canopy that she’d noticed that first morning. Starr had a distant view of the same tree on the same ridgeline, but of course his house and front paddocks faced it from the opposite side. Same same but different, Jo thought. Very bloody different.
When Starr answered, his voice remained infuriatingly mild.
‘Every fire truck I’ve ever seen had the universal key on it, as stock standard. And it’s only a picket fence anyway. A truck could drive straight through it in an emergency. Same as every other picket fence on my place – or on yours for that matter.’
Jo was further enraged by the lack of bite in the man. If horses were to be murdered, if land was to be trespassed on, if illegal fences were to be erected, then wouldn’t you think that a bit of fire and brimstone would be involved? But with no opposing force to match her anger, Jo found herself quickly becoming marooned in the sea of Rob Starr’s equanimity.
The man’s hands were clasped firmly over the top rail of his steel gate. Like hers, they were scarred with the recent evidence of unhappy meetings with barbed wire, though Jo’s deeply cut right hand was bandaged and Starr’s fingers, which were a mass of shallow scratches, were not. They’d had iodine put on them by someone. Yellow smears stained the red marks, reminding Jo of Ellen’s pots of watercolour paint and her bottles full of brushes – which now lived in the back bedroom at the farm.
Jo lifted her eyes from the many cuts and stared at Rob Starr’s sunglasses in contempt. Her distorted reflection looked back at her. The prick appeared to have no shame at all, was not backing down, not even bothering to argue about who was right or wrong. Just calmly agreeing that he’d erected a fence, probably on public land. Admitting that her beautiful Comet was dead and gone, sorry about it even – and for what?
Killer.
‘I’m sorry about your colt,’ he repeated steadily, flexing his damaged fingers on the gate, ‘but that fence is definitely not on your land. I haven’t lived here forty-five years for nothing, I know where the boundaries are along these roads, and I just wouldn’t do that. But if you need any help sorting out the carcass–’
‘No!’ Jo turned away, bile rising up in her mouth at the word carcass. ‘The day I need your help...’ But there was no point in even insulting the man.
She walked away from his steel five-bar gate and his view of the Heart Tree and his R.M. Williams boots, shaking her head. They just can’t stop taking, can they? They just wouldn’t know how.
‘Hang on, I’ll get in,’ Therese said, stopping Jo. She took Jo’s shovel and placed it across the top of the hole. Then she crouched, and swung with muddied hands off the long wooden handle. Therese discovered that when she stood upright in the hole, only her head and neck protruded. Gazing directly at eye-level across the paddock at the newly tarped body of Comet, she gave an involuntary shudder. Amanda and Jo glanced at each other.
‘You okay?’ Jo asked doubtfully, through sheeting light rain. Kipper gwong. What a fucking horrible day it had been, and now her best mate was standing in a grave.
‘Yeah, it’s just a bit ... you know.’ Therese made a face. Standing in a grave, even a horse’s grave, gave her the willies. She stepped squelchily backward, to give herself some room to dig.
‘I should be doing this, not you,’ Jo told her. She was mortified, really, even to need any help, but once Twoboy had rung them there was no stopping Therese and Amanda from arriving after school in a borrowed 4WD. They had forded the flooded road just outside Nudgel and turned up at the farm to find Jo and Ellen standing in the paddock, weeping and close to exhaustion. The wet grave was only three feet deep after a solid hour of digging.
Ellen was gently despatched to bring hot drinks from the kitchen, and the two dykes
had set about finishing the hole.
‘Shuttup and pass me that short-handled shovel,’ Therese answered. ‘Youse can both spell me in a minute.’
She dug and dug, and then she dug some more. Red earth, red mud really, steadily emerged from the hole, until after twenty minutes only the crown of Therese’s head was visible. Jo could hear her gasping for breath, even over the rushing of the creek. The bloody creek, the murdering water. She would never swim there again, Jo vowed, and would never look at its winding course through her land with anything like pleasure either.
‘My turn,’ she tried, but it was to Amanda that the short-handled shovel went next, and it was Amanda whose wet Levis were now bright with mud from sliding down the sides of the grave. Jo stood helplessly watching as, centimetre by centimetre, air replaced solid earth in the hole. The heap of extracted dirt was a startling red against the green grass and the silver-grey of the rain. Coochin. The colour of blood, almost, and the colour of war, too, in the old days. She had a vision of herself, daubed liberally with the dirt, reappearing at Rob Starr’s gate but this time bearing weapons, raising her tommyhawk high above her ochred head and–
‘Got that axe there?’ Amanda asked, reaching behind her.
Jo came speeding back to the present, and handed the axe to Amanda to chop through another pine root.
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