Mullumbimby

by Melissa Lucashenko

  ‘G’day mate,’ Jo offered, feeling unusually friendly. ‘Here on Saturday this week?’ That was how social interaction worked, wasn’t it? You stated the bloody obvious, and then they did, and then ultimately, after endless ritualistic chitchat, someone finally said something containing information or meaning and then there was actually a point to the conversation?

  ‘Yeah. I can’t make it out this Thursday.’ The woman answered, doubling her annual word total in one fell swoop. Jo nodded, encouraged by this uncharacteristic verbosity. It was tempting to offer Greasy Hair a cup of tea to enjoy while she sat by Jemima in the cool winter sun. How bereft would a person have to be to visit a grave every single week? How grief-stricken, or how lonely? Jo was on the verge of suggesting it, and going back to unlock the shed where the kettle lived, when Ellen screeched from outside the fence in indignation.

  ‘Maarm! Can you hurry up?’

  ‘Ah, bloody hell, no rest for the wicked. See you next time,’ Jo said hastily.

  ‘Who was that?’ Ellen asked, crankily adjusting her bra strap with unnecessary force. Jo told her about Greasy Hair’s Thursday visits, adding casually that she’d been tempted to offer the solitary woman a cuppa. Ellen looked daggers at her mother.

  ‘You know I’m an hour late for my party, and you still want to make her a cup of tea?’

  ‘You’ll get to your party,’ Jo retorted. ‘God only knows what kind of life she’s got.’ How cruel the young are, she reflected. How selfish and hard.

  ‘Well, thanks for thinking of your daughter first, before some complete stranger.’ Ellen folded her arms and frowned at the dashboard. ‘Or don’t I count?’

  ‘She’s not a “complete stranger”. She comes here every week.’ Jo realised with a sudden small shock that this was true. She didn’t know the woman’s name, or her occupation, if she had one, nor did she know where she lived or with whom. She didn’t even know the exact relationship of Greasy Hair to poor dead Jemima, whether friend was a euphemism for lover or not. But even with all this lack of information, Greasy Hair had still turned into something that wasn’t a stranger. She was an ongoing presence in Jo’s life, and now Jo felt an odd sense of unease develop, as though the woman’s unspoken pain and isolation had somehow managed to insinuate itself into her own days.

  ‘You always do this!’ Ellen blazed at her mother. Hot teenage tears were building behind her eyes and she was going to yell them away. It was an old story: apparently Jo had endless time and compassion for the world, sans Ellen – but not for her, who had to be as stolid and tough as Jo herself was, and who had better not require affection more than once every blue moon.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ howled the murderous two-year-old inside Ellen’s chest. ‘Not fair at all.’

  ‘Always do bloody what?’ Jo snapped, accelerating past the hospital. Always. Christ, teenagers. When would Ellen grow out of it and turn back into the delightful person she’d been at eleven? I at least had had the grace to run away to Aunty Barb. Ellen, on the other hand, Jo sensed, was going to stay and fight her mother’s authority to the bitter death. She’d tried giving her On the Road, followed by Rule of the Bone, but no good. Things were altogether too easy for her daughter, Jo reflected, at 287 Tin Wagon Road.

  ‘Nothin. Forget it.’ Put other people first. Make me feel like an accident, an afterthought. The freak mistake that killed your music and ruined your life. Ellen turned away as the tears trembled inside her eyelids, blurring the cane paddocks along Main Arm Road into a fuzzy green waterscape.

  Jo glanced at Ellen’s cold narrow shoulder and at the back of her head, and gritted her teeth at both these. The gulf between them was widening each day. Sometimes she could almost feel it physically, the tearing apart of mother and child with words and looks; with deeds done and undone. A psychologist would probably say the kid was separating from her, all very normal, but whatever the reason, Ellen was rapidly turning into a royal adolescent pain in the arse. Brattus brattus. Time she went and had some time with her father in Sydney. Maybe Paul held the missing magical ingredient that would bring her happy curly-haired Ellen back, make those green eyes sparkle again.

  ‘Sorry, sister, no can do,’ Therese said, as she stacked her marking into a tall perilous column beside the computer. ‘We’re going to Brisbane Friday night. Amanda’s got Mary for the weekend.’

  ‘Again?’ Jo asked. Amanda had been up to Wynumn twice in the past five weeks. Therese nodded slow exaggerated nods as she raised her eyebrows high, meaning Amanda’s mother was bloody hard work, especially after a week on Special Class at Ocean Shores. She poked irritably at her marking tower, which was trembling and threatening to collapse onto the tiled floor.

  ‘Yes, again. Mary had another fall yesterday. And of course the family think Amanda’s the total bitch from hell because she won’t just move up and live with her till she drops off the perch.’

  Jo grimaced sympathetically. Amanda’s aged mother was in that hideous limbo world where she needed a fulltime carer and had none. Because Amanda wasn’t out to half her family, it seemed obvious that she, an apparently single woman with no kids, was the ideal candidate for the job.

  ‘Serves the homophobic fuckers right if they end up doing it all. But daw, poor me – I’ll hafta stay home and be Nigel No Friends!’ Jo said, shelving her plan to go to Kym’s for the weekend and snap herself out of the blues.

  ‘Can’t Chris feed the animals?’ Therese proposed.

  ‘Nah, she’s been sick for a month. I really should go visit her.’ But Jo knew Chris loathed visitors when she was sick; her mysterious depressions made her less welcoming of her friends, not more. ‘Ah, doesn’t matter much. Ellen’ll be old enough to leave at home one of these days. And anyways, I can’t really afford the petrol.’ Jo sighed a tiny sound of despair, meant only for her ears.

  Therese gave her friend a sideways look from where she’d begun emptying the dishwasher of its clean plates and glasses. She’d heard that same sigh from three of the special kids’ mums this week.

  ‘You okay, mate?’

  Jo’s mouth twisted sideways. She shrugged with one shoulder. Yes. No. Maybe. She regularly lay awake thinking of fences and numbers; she went to sleep the same way, tossing and turning before sleep did finally arrive with its nightmares of unpaid bills and flooding creeks. And since their abortive trip to Lismore, a nagging anxiety about Twoboy had joined the other fears swirling in her head.

  Twoboy was scrupulously respectful of Jo and Ellen, but his acid response to Carly had troubled her. In her worst moments, sleepless as the early morning light arrived on the eastern horizon, Jo could imagine the same male derision being turned in her direction one day. Twoboy was quick to reassure her when they were together, but the court case was reaching determination stage, and he’d barely been out of the city for three weeks. Jo had had plenty of time on her own since Mardi Grass to imagine what she had with Twoboy warping into just another tangle of unmet needs and unvoiced accusations. She had a recurring vision of him telling some other woman in a year’s time, ‘Jo? Ah, she’s bloody womba, I told you that. Ancient history’.

  ‘Talk to me, girlfriend,’ Therese said, hopping backwards up onto the kitchen bench and peeling a bright orange mandarin that colour-matched the carp on her forearms.

  Rather than answer, Jo turned away to a brochure on the fridge. Sangsurya Buddhist Centre. Two days of mindfulness in the beautiful Byron Bay hinterland. A grey-haired woman with familiar brown eyes looked out from beneath the heading.

  ‘You going to this?’

  ‘Bloody oath, she’s amazing. You should come,’ Therese’s voice leapt.

  ‘Do I look like I need a fucking guru? Anyway, I’m broke, I’ll just go fishing. The river’s my church.’ Poverty had one sole redeeming feature – it was the perfect excuse for getting out of stuff. But what was it about those eyes? Were they blackly Eurasian like Therese’s? No, that wasn’t it.

  Therese was giving her the unrelenting look that always
made Jo uneasy. To stop herself from fidgeting under the microscope of friendship, Jo folded her arms and glared back.

  ‘So – you been getting down to the water much lately?’ Therese probed.

  Now Therese had one bossy hand on her hip, her lips pursed. ‘You’ve been fishing, swimming ... going for walks on the beach, I suppose?’ Jo looked out the window. It had been countless weeks. Three months probably, since that night at Bruns beach with Chris. And even then she’d needed dragging away from the work of the farm, that early hauling and clearing and burning of old crap that had almost been forgotten now that the place was finally beginning to take shape and look like a home and not a rubbish dump.

  ‘Well?’ Therese had her head to one side, mandarin peel wadded in one hand and her cheeks bulging with the soft juicy fruit.

  ‘I’ve been flat strap on the farm,’ Jo said feebly, prompting a loud scornful raspberry from her friend.

  ‘I didn’t think so. What if I shout you?’ said Therese on impulse. ‘Go on. Do it this once, and I’ll never hassle you about it again.’ Her gaze didn’t waver.

  Jo fingered the brochure, intrigued by the clarity in the eyes of the teacher. Somebody with eyes like those might be able to see certain untellable things, Jo mused. Because nobody knew. Nobody else knew what it was like to wake in the night and be unable to get the picture of Comet drowning out of her mind, to endlessly imagine him being held underwater by the bloodied wire while the brown creek water filled his nostrils, his throat, his lungs. Nobody knew, because Jo absolutely refused to risk hearing the words: but he was only a horse.

  Maybe going on this retreat could help her sleep again. Or make the nightmares stop.

  ‘Whaddya got to lose?’ Therese kept prodding away. ‘It’s two days out of an entire lifetime. My shout.’

  ‘Ah, for fuck’s sake,’ Jo looked up, surprising both of them. ‘Alright, I’ll go.’

  Athena nosed in the corners of her feed bin, making it clang against the fence rail where it hung. Jo refused to think about the blank space ten metres away where Comet used to eat. She stroked the old mare’s neck instead, leaning in to the smell and feel, the absolute comfort that was warm horse. Athena had grown a fuzzy winter coat and no longer looked much like the sleek thoroughbred she’d been at Main Arm in April. Ringed at a distance by four steers with unrealistic hopes of getting their moist black noses into her breakfast, Athena flattened her ears and looked around at them, boss of the paddock. When the very last pellet had been hunted down and devoured, the mare turned to go and drink from the bathtub by the front gate.

  ‘No you don’t, wait up,’ Jo told her, clinging tightly onto her black mane as Athena pulled away in protest. She wanted to ride bareback around the paddock and check the fenceline before work. It was a long-neglected job that couldn’t be avoided any longer, not since the neighbour’s young bull had started knocking fences down across the road, having tired of playing with the water pump cover. While part of Jo applauded him – bring it on, knock all the fucking fences down you like, pal! – the larger part of her knew that everybody’s cattle in the valley needed containing and that hers were no exception. But Athena careered away, belting through the steers at an extended trot that scattered them left and right with indignant moans. The boldest came straight over to the empty feedbin and plunged its nose in. The others clustered around, begging Jo for pellets with baffled moos.

  ‘Whadda you lot bloody looking at?’ Jo snapped as she flung away a handful of Athena’s mane, ‘Go eat some grass.’

  She traipsed back inside past a large pile of dirty washing on the laundry floor. Tension was lodged tight in her rigid neck and shoulders. It was school holidays, and Ellen had been at her father’s for seven nights now. In her absence, the washing wasn’t doing itself, just as the fence line remained uninspected and the car still unserviced. It can wait, it can wait, it all has to bloody wait, Jo told herself, changing into her least dirty work clothes.

  As she snatched the ute keys off the kitchen wall, Jo spotted Aunty Barb’s fishing rod resting unused in the corner. Jo’s shoulders bunched. All the light seemed to have gone out of things. She felt as though, if one more tiny thing built up on her have-to-do or can’t-afford-it lists, she would fall down in a heap right where she stood.

  ‘Suck it up, girl,’ she ordered herself sternly, ‘just suck it up.’ The fishing rod rested indifferently in the corner, a long strand of cobweb draped around it mimicking the line.

  If she hadn’t promised to go to Therese’s bloody stupid Buddhist thing this weekend, she could have gone fishing instead.

  ‘That wall’s crying out for graffiti, eh.’

  Jo and Twoboy were driving past the high concrete retaining barrier which separated Devine’s Hill from the mangroved edge of the river. He grinned agreement, and proposed a midnight art project for Ellen sometime soon.

  ‘She’s got to do some proper art for school first, unless she already finished it at Paul’s ... Hey, you got a message.’ Jo picked up his phone from the console.

  ‘Graffiti is “proper art”. Who’s it from?’ Twoboy responded.

  ‘Christ!’ said Jo, her face changing abruptly. ‘What’s this shit?’

  ‘Eh?’ Twoboy replied as they passed the Burringbar exit and headed into another mobile deadzone, on their way to retrieve Ellen from Coolangatta airport.

  Jo read the message aloud.

  U can fool sum v da peeps sum v da time but u cant fool us ya black DOG-CUNT u best be lookin behind u 24/7 cos u gonna get urs proppa wayz signed Da Real Deal.

  Twoboy laughed, but not before Jo had seen it: his jaw clenched tightly shut for a brief second.

  ‘Just Oscar and his pack of inbred rellies. That’s the second one he’s sent.’

  ‘You worried?’ Jo asked, hastily putting the phone back down as though it might burn with its vitriol.

  Twoboy forced another laugh.

  ‘Old fatguts couldn’t fight his way out of a brown paper bag. And them boys of his aren’t as tough as they think they are. Nah, Bullockhead mob come after us they’ll get a real fight, don’t ya worry.’

  ‘You should go to the cops.’ Jo’s brow furrowed. ‘Get him charged.’ She spoke knowing that this would never, ever happen. The day a Goorie man took his private black business to the gunjies was the day he’d officially lost his balls, whipped them off and put them on a platter for Her Majesty to sample. It was bad enough having to submit to the bullshit and humiliation of the Native Title Tribunal.

  ‘Maybe Bullockhead mob should go on your Buddhist retreat, eh,’ Twoboy joked. ‘Chill the mad fucks out a bit.’

  ‘Did you answer the first one?’

  Twoboy shook his head.

  ‘If I don’t answer, they don’t know whether I’ve got it, see? And information is power. C’mon, darling – ya don’t need to look like that. You know I’m Captain Goorie!’

  Jo summoned half a smile for her very own dreadlocked superhero. Into her guts, though, next to the insomnia and the unpaid bills, and Twoboy’s response to Carly, and the never-ending memory of poor drowned Comet, a new worry now crept in and made itself a warm, comfortable nest. While she was on the retreat, Ellen would be at the farm with Twoboy in charge of her. And what if the Bullockheads really did mean business? What if they knew where to find her man, in the depths of Tin Wagon Road, and what if they stumbled upon Ellen there as well? Jo’s heart hammered with potential catastrophe. She felt like buying a shotgun. Two shotguns. Buy them with what, she didn’t know, but how comforting would it be to know that a .404 was resting in the corner of the bedroom when a convoy of Bullockheads arrived in the night to dispense some homegrown justice? Tendrils of fear spiralled inside her, filling her emptiness with their poison.

  Twoboy cheerfully clapped her on the thigh. It’ll be right. Jo took his dark hand and held it tight in both of hers, wishing futilely for peace in their time. Her arms felt like they were made of boiled spaghetti, flopping uselessly as the enemy circled around h
er daughter. The idea of taking on the Bullockheads terrified Jo.

  ‘You’re worried about Ellen, eh?’ Twoboy asked. Jo nodded, reaching a decision.

  ‘I’m staying home with her. Bugger the retreat.’ she said, making a mental inventory of the weapons on the farm – stockwhip. Pitchfork. Shovels. Star pickets. Some could be locked away and some kept close for use in an emergency. Jo pondered ringing Kym and Jason, and asking them to drive down. But no – that would just put the boys in harm’s way.’

  Twoboy sighed and smiled at her.

  ‘Darlin – if you’re gonna take someone out, you just do it. You don’t send them texts first. Oscar’s a big talker in a white man’s court, but get him on the street and he’s weak as piss.’

  ‘He might bring a mob though,’ she countered. Twoboy was tough and, yeah, he was big, but there was only one of him. Laz was still needed in Brisbane most weekends and had been looking after his boy when he wasn’t doing research. In stark contrast, Oscar Bullockhead, who’d lived on Bundjalung country all his life, had half-a-dozen nephews to call on in Piccabeen alone.

  ‘They only know my Mullum address,’ Twoboy reassured her. ‘They won’t come looking for me at the farm.’

  Jo hesitated. Seeing her waver, Twoboy slowed and pulled the Commodore over onto the shoulder of the highway. He turned to face Jo.

  ‘Listen up, darlin. Them tiny words on a gammon screen mean fuck all. Mob or no mob, anyone touches a hair on Ellen’s head they’ll have sixteen different kinds of shit coming down on em from me. So you go on your retreat, darling. I’ve got your back.’

  Jo’s heart swelled for a love that stood alongside her, near as fierce and protective of Ellen as her own. She wasn’t alone now after all, it seemed, in keeping Ellen from a world of hate and harm. She leant over and kissed Twoboy square on the mouth, her eyes bright.