‘Course, if I’m wrong, you’ll have to come and bail me outta lockup. If you can get bail for triple homicide,’ he added with a twisted grin.
‘You might have to bail me out, pal,’ Jo said, talking tough to keep down the whimpering puppy that had taken up residence in her stomach. ‘I can hold me own.’
Twoboy laughed and put his hands back on the leather-covered steering wheel.
‘Funny sort of Buddhist you’re gonna make,’ he observed, as he pulled back into the stream of traffic headed north. He took his phone and surreptitiously turned it off. The text Jo had read aloud was the fifth that day from Oscar Bullockhead, and the least vicious of the lot.
Jo wheeled her council barrow past the rainforest grove, where the leaf mould was building up nicely into a thick layer of rich pungent mulch, providing homes for beetles and bugs galore. The cemetery’s resident brush turkey paused in its scratching as she passed. Its brilliant red, black and yellow colouring always struck Jo as unnecessarily lairy, the bird constantly dressed for a land rights demo. There was some purpose to it, she supposed, some natural selection that meant bright primary colours were the order of the day. What was the proper word for turkey? Kalwun. No, that was lyrebird. It was something like that though ... Jo stood and puzzled for the missing word a few moments longer, before admitting defeat. Ah, fuck it.
Jingawahlu turkey.
Things could have more than one name. Things could have lots of names.
On the far side of the clustered jali jali quandong and bungwall, Jo reached the dead gum branches that she had earmarked for firewood earlier in the week. She eyed the mother gum they’d fallen from to see if another heavy branch was about to come down and crack her on the skull while she worked. Assessing that she was safe, Jo slipped her earplugs in, chainsawed the fallen branches into manageable lengths and then stacked the barrow high with enough timber for this week’s cooking fires. With a sweat sheen on her face and arms despite the coolness of the day, she manoeuvred her wobbly load back towards the storeroom. She stacked the wood in the ute, then upended the barrow inside the storeroom, handles resting against the wall to save space, and cleaned the chainsaw, before flicking the kettle on and performing the increasingly useless ritual of ringing Trev.
‘Any luck with that part yet, mate?’ she asked, trying hard to keep a note of optimism in her voice. A weary chuckle was her reply.
‘Try me again next week,’ he advised her. ‘The Honda rep’s gone on long service leave now and there’s a new one coming on Monday.’
Jo shook her head in amazement, rang off and gazed out the window that was fogging with condensation from the kettle. Muffler or not, the hill still needed mowing – the hill would always need mowing, it was a given, she was Sisyphus with earmuffs – so after lunch she would fire up the trusty Hondaroonie, hope that the neighbours could stand the racket once again and that industrial deafness wouldn’t blight her old age, should she live so long. Jo made a cuppa and took it outside to the narrow wooden bench beneath the Piccabeen palms – jali jali Piccabeen. She opened the zen book Therese had pressed on her the other day. The ideas of the teacher were interesting, but playing insistently through Jo’s mind as she read was the clear bright memory of Twoboy kissing the back of her neck as she got dressed for work that morning, his hands reaching up beneath her t-shirt to clasp her breasts, and gently insisting that she come back to bed, the warm, warm deliciousness of early morning bed, just for a little while.
Jo smiled and touched her neck, remembering. Sometimes she didn’t mind being late for work.
‘You coming?’ Jo stood in the doorway, offering a beanie. Outside was another fabulous royal-blue day of sunshine and birdsong, and she wanted to make sure the wood box was stocked to overflowing for the freezing nights that were about to hit.
‘Gimme a couple more minutes,’ Twoboy answered, deep in the AIATSIS catalogue.
Jo sighed. She knew full well what a wild-goose chase he was on. Twoboy had recently rediscovered the precious recordings of an old great-great-uncle from Piccabeen and was painstakingly cross-indexing them against the brief wordlist his mother’s father had left behind. Piccabeen was a bloody long way from Tin Wagon Road, true, but linguistic clues travelled far. There were words on Brisbane street maps that Goories still used every day, and a clutch of terms like binna and jinung had currency across the entire east coast. Twoboy had been told by the lawyers that he had to piece together the cultural jigsaw that had been exploded by his family’s diaspora, or else accept defeat. The court wasn’t interested in the gaps, only in the complete picture: songs, sites, family trees, language, ceremony. Especially songs. His case had to be watertight, strong enough to counter the automatic power that Oscar had, just from being born here and living on Bundjalung country all his fat, corrupt, deceitful life, without actually contributing anything of worth to the culture or to the Goories he claimed to lead.
‘There’s months of work in these bloody language lists,’ Twoboy said. ‘I dunno when I’m supposed to get to the Native Police records in Sydney and see if Grandad’s name’s there.’ He raked through his dreads with his hands, scratching at his scalp in frustration.
‘Well, I’m done waiting.’ Jo tossed the beanie on the desk beside the computer. ‘If you want us, we’ll be outside, actually working on our country insteada reading about it.’
The back door banged, not quite a slam, but not far off it either. Twoboy rolled his eyes at the sound, and stayed put. He played the uncle’s recorded language clips over and over, finding and comparing his transitive verbs with the murky pencilled phrases left to him in his grandfather’s unschooled hand.
An hour later, Jo stood beneath the giant tallowwood holding a heavy armful of powdery-barked branches, hoping that a huntsman spider wasn’t about to crawl out and start exploring her face. She staggered forward a few steps, toppled the timber into the almost-full ute, and then slapped its side twice to tell Ellen to drive on. Her daughter carefully put the car into first gear, and then kangaroo hopped over toward the beehives in the dip.
‘Watch out for the bees, eh,’ Jo called in alarm, imagining the mayhem if Ellen ploughed into the twenty white boxes and their savage inhabitants. The kid had only been driving the paddocks for a little while, and at nearly fourteen had as much immunity to advice on this as any other topic.
‘Yeah, yeah...’
‘One word from you and she does anything she likes, eh?’ Twoboy said, appearing beside Jo, in jeans, flannie and his green woollen jumper, looking like he’d stepped out of a men’s magazine.
Jo merely grunted, heading for the next lot of branches. Ellen might drive her up the wall, but nobody else was allowed to criticise her, or even to notice her flaws. The first rule of parenthood. Especially when it was her, Ellen and Therese doing all the hard yakka of harvesting wood, while Twoboy bludged on the internet, pretending to do Native Title research all afternoon when he was probably fucking around on Facebook. She stopped and toed the soft ground beneath the tallow, which was dotted with evidence of overnight digging.
‘The bloody bandicoots are still going for it,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘You’d think the dogs’d keep em away.’
‘I’ll come out tonight and catch a couple for the pot, if you like,’ offered Twoboy.
Jo swung around in surprise. Unlike the roos that came down regularly out of the scrub, she’d never thought of the bandicoots as food.
‘You eat em?’ she asked, taken aback.
‘Yeah. We used to trap em in Karawatha Forest as kids. Wallaby and roof rabbit, too. What?’
‘I assumed hunting bush tucker only happens, well, in the bush.’
‘You assume a lot of things,’ Twoboy said under his breath.
‘Oh yeah, well, life’s short, hey?’ Jo flared. ‘It saves time.’
‘Not if you’re wrong, it don’t.’
Twoboy bent and easily picked up a large log that had been sawed years ago by some long-departed farm worker. He
shouldered the timber, as Jo savagely hurled a smaller branch in the direction of the ute, now parked twenty metres away beside the camphors. Her branch fell far short; Ellen clapped sarcastically at the fail. Jo glared, showed her a lone middle finger and gestured for her to pick it up.
‘Who’s wrong?’ asked Therese, coming up from behind them with an arm full of kindling.
‘Oh, just me again, same as usual,’ said Jo, still insulted. She snapped a sizable tallow branch across her left thigh and stood holding the two halves like waddies. Therese raised her eyebrows.
‘So what else do I ‘assume’ then?’ Jo asked Twoboy testily. ‘Come on.’
Twoboy looked at Therese, weighing up whether or not to engage with Jo in public.
‘Ah, forget it,’ he muttered.
‘No,’ Jo insisted. ‘Let’s have it.’
Twoboy licked his lips and, with the heavy log balancing on his right shoulder, began counting off his left hand.
‘One, you assume that I’m much like every other bloke you’ve met – that I only ever think with my dick,’ he said bluntly. ‘Two, you assume you know what the court case means to me and Mum and Laz, when you clearly don’t. And three, I’m pretty bloody sure you assume that I’m gonna do the wrong thing by you, and run away just as soon as I’ve had my fun or won the case, whichever comes first. Shall I go on?’
Discomfited, Therese wandered away to where Ellen was gathering fallen sticks and making a game of trying to toss them unseen over her shoulder into the ute tray.
Watching Therese walk past the bees and join in Ellen’s game, Jo felt winded by the man’s sudden harsh commentary, not least because it was true. On some level she did expect betrayal, heartbreak and agony. Not because her lover was Twoboy, but because he was alive, and that’s what living people – men, mainly – did in this world. They used you up, hurt you, took your trust and affection and betrayed you. And if they didn’t, then you did it to them, often automatically, without even meaning to. Her divorce had taught her that.
But what did he mean about Native Title?
‘Land means everything,’ she told him. ‘And how can anything mean more than everything? It means a home you can’t be kicked off of. A chance for a decent life on your own country, for you and your kids.’
Twoboy gazed at her implacably and didn’t answer.
‘We’re still here,’ Ellen cried from the beehives. ‘What’s the hold up?’
‘Wait up!’ Jo yelled, as she stared back at Twoboy, standing there in his green jumper and black jeans, dreads hanging down over his shoulders and the steadily rising wind making the yellow cockatoo feathers in his hair dance a merry jig. Irritation rose in her chest at this silent interrogation. Was he playing at being a Big Man, making out there were mysteries and cultural secrets where none existed? Well, fuck him if he thought he was blacker than she was. She knew plenty of lingo, more than he did. She knew some Law too. And just as important, she really knew the country she lived and worked on. Knew it in her nostrils and in her bones, knew the feel of it under her feet seven days a week – unlike Twoboy who lived behind the wheel of the Commode, forever driving the hundred kays between Tin Wagon Road and Woodridge.
‘So tell me what it means then. Educate me,’ she taunted, ignoring the long-distance death stares she was getting from Ellen.
‘Do you really want to know?’ Twoboy asked, shifting the dead weight of the log to his left shoulder. ‘Or do you just feel like having an argument, and this’ll do?’
‘Yes, I want to know!’ Jo retorted. Christ. She stuck her hands in her armpits to guard against the chill wind. Too early this year, it couldn’t wait for August to start blowing them all into their beds with double pneumonia.
Twoboy put his log down and came closer. He turned Jo around by the shoulders to face Bottlebrush Hill, put his face next to hers and pointed. High above them, the big tallowwood swayed and moaned, buffeted by gusts of wind, as the surface of the dam rippled suddenly with tiny whitecaps. When her man whispered his heart, Jo had to lean in even closer to hear it. Twoboy’s gaze was fixed on Bottlebrush and the enormous trees which decorated its peak.
‘Look at that hill. I dunno for sure, but I reckon Mum’s old people, a lotta our old people, gotta be buried up there. And for close on two centuries now they’ve had to watch the dugai come in to this valley. Had to watch em cut down cedars and gums that were as thick around as six men’s arms. Watch em run their horrible bloody fences over our songlines. Old Goorie law men and old Goorie law women been sitting up on that hill, dead, while the fucken cattle dip leached poison into their creek, year after year after year. Birds dying, jalum dying. Nothing them old people could do, for two hundred years, but wait for us boys to be born now, in a time when there’s a chance. The tiniest chance, the tiniest little crack in the dugai law, to get a little bit of it back, and look after our budheram jagan. Heal it. Sing it. And maybe then our old people might rest easy for once. That’s what the court case is about.’
Jo shivered, and told herself it was from the cold.
‘And when we win it back–’ Twoboy paused, maybe frightened to fully speak his dream aloud in case he cruelled it – ‘then them old people might show us what we’ve lost.’
Jo reached down to the ground and pulled out one of the yellow-flowering fireweeds that dotted her paddocks. It fluttered in her hand, whipped by the wind that was tearing up the gully now. Almost everything had been lost when the dugai arrived with their guns and their axes. Which part was he talking about?
She shook loose earth off the roots of the fireweed and then tossed it aside; once dessicated by the sun and wind, the weed would quickly rot and turn into soil again. Jo was about to ask Twoboy exactly what he meant – when, with a great and sudden tearing the tallowwood, let a branch drop.
It fell lethally fast, right beside Ellen, and smashed open the closest beehive. A cloud of furious buzzing insects emerged, looking for their enemy. Ellen shrieked with her hand to her mouth, and Therese took two large unthinking leaps backwards. The tallowood groaned loudly in the wind, threatening to drop more branches.
‘Holy Jesus!’ Jo screamed, her feet glued in place with terror – ‘Ellen!’
Twoboy ran to the girl, seized her forearm and pulled her from the drop zone, yelling at Jo to get the fuck away from the tree.
Then they bolted to the farmhouse.
With the windows firmly shut against furious bees, and cups of hot coffee in hand, they were free to imagine What If.
That night Jo made Ellen’s favourite dinner, spag bol, and booted Twoboy off the computer so that the kid could have an extra half-hour on Facebook.
‘If I’d lost you today,’ Jo told Ellen with a rib-crunching hug, ‘I wouldn’t have known whether to shit or go blind, girl.’
‘I love you too, Mum,’ Ellen replied. Then, ‘Can I get a puppy for my birthday?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘A tattoo then?’
Jo peered into her daugher’s face. The child was serious.
‘In your dreams.’
NJANJARGALI
lies
Ten
Winter wattle made a sensational necklace for the roads as Jo and Therese headed down the highway. Fragrant balls of blossom exploded in lemon and buttercup yellow and gold everywhere she looked, and ten thousand daw poorfellas were no doubt sneezing miserably into their indoor hankies. And ah, look. Mulanyin there, fishing for taran in the drain next to the Ocean Shores entry gates, while the traffic thundered past three metres away. Budgeree jahlela, mulanyin, good eating to you, my bird. Wish I was gonna spend the day jalum bira like you.
Therese was cheerfully gabby as she negotiated the Writers’ Festival traffic, dodging a Sunnybrand truck filled with doomed chickens, and accelerating fast past a retro Kombi complete with a faded Wilderness not Woodchips sticker from 1987. Just how, Jo wondered idly, did Therese intend to spend a whole weekend in silence? And if there was a direct correlation between silence and e
nlightenment, why wasn’t she herself already topped with a shining silver halo? She, who worked with the dead and lived with a monosyllabic teenager. If it wasn’t for Twoboy, and his nightly phone calls when he was in Brisbane, Jo reflected, she could easily go days on end without a proper conversation. Warrigal and Daisy didn’t count, not really. There’s only so much you can communicate using ears and a tail.
‘Don’t worry,’ Therese reassured her after an exhaustive rundown of what to expect on the retreat, ‘if in doubt, just copy what everybody else does.’
‘If you say so.’ Jo cast a wistful glance at the river as they drove south through the Bruns roundabout. It was perfect weather for chucking a line in. Just her dumb luck that she’d agreed to sit inside a bloody hut with a bunch of white hippies for two entire days while the sun shone from a cloudless sky. A person must be womba, out of her tiny fucking brain. But then, as Therese had said, it was only one weekend out of a lifetime. And once it was over she would have the power, simply by lifting a cautionary forefinger, to shut Therese up on the subject of Buddhism, meditation and any other improving modality she felt Jo was in dire need of, ever again. That’d be worth something, Jo thought with dark satisfaction. That would be worth quite a lot. She picked up an Echo from beneath her feet and began leafing through it.
‘That man of yours getting anywhere with his research?’ Therese asked, turning into Bruns to pick up supplies. She slowed a little as they drew level with the poor womba woman who was always to be found with her thumb out, travelling between Mullum and the Bruns convenience store, continually disappointing the tourists who, in a fit of holiday-induced generosity, would stop to give her a lift, only to be met with grunts or paranoid silence.
‘Oh, no, not today!’ Jo hastily told Therese, and they sped up again, passing as they did young Sam Nurrung. The dark teenager was standing as proud and as straight-backed as his grandmother, thumbing a ride in the opposite direction. That jahjam likes to get around, reflected Jo. I bet he can’t wait till he’s old enough to get a set of wheels and hoon around like the rest of the kids.
Mullumbimby Page 17