Mullumbimby

by Melissa Lucashenko

  Duty done, Granny Nurrung stepped back into the line of dignitaries. There had been no direct praise of the heathen DJ, Jo noticed. The entire speech was brief and low-key, she thought as she clapped, very modest, just like the conservative clothes the old lady had chosen for the event. In stark contrast to the dancers, and to most of the Aboriginal people in the crowd, Granny Nurrung wore no red, black or yellow. A paisley scarf in brown ochres was draped around her shoulders in a kind of gesture towards the occasion, but her skirt and jacket were bottle green with a blue trim, suitable for any CWA meeting in the land, and the silver cross around her neck was easily visible from the floor of the hall. As the old lady stepped back out of the limelight, her trim black court shoes stepped on tiny lumps of white ochre which had fallen from the dancers, grinding them into the floorboards. Not for the first time, Jo reflected on the different paths that Goories had taken over the years, the different strategies for survival that individuals and families had found.

  ‘At least she didn’t say the bloody Lord’s Prayer to kick off,’ she told Chris, ‘cos I would have walked out, truegod, and probably the Singhs would have come with me. You couldn’t blame them.’

  ‘Shush,’ said Chris, ‘the prizes.’

  Participation certificates were distributed, and then the two highly commended awards were given out. Jo began to feel a thrill of jangling nerves, and shifted anxiously where she stood.

  Third went to the charcoal drawing of Chincogan. A shy pale girl with a big smile split off from the Bullockhead table and walked up to receive her fifty-dollar voucher, beaming at the floor.

  ‘Sally’s granddaughter,’ Chris whispered.

  Second prize went to the Yamatji boy and his boab trees. Holy crap, thought Jo, meeting Ellen’s anxious eyes.

  ‘And first prize,’ announced the head to the hushed crowd, pausing for full dramatic effect, ‘goes to Ellen Breen, for her painting, Goorie Life.’

  Jo, Chris and Uncle Pat erupted in cheers, holding each other in a triangle as they bounced up and down for joy.

  Filthy looks and a hastily quietened boo from the Bullockheads couldn’t spoil the moment. When the head handed Ellen her art-supplies voucher worth three hundred dollars, one of the white teachers leaned over and told her she was the most promising young artist in the northern rivers and not to stop painting, whatever she did. So that’s it then, thought Jo later, when Ellen reported this. The dice is thrown and my daughter’s future is sealed.

  ‘Talent will out,’ Chris said happily on the way home, coasting down the tunnel road to save juice and because the Econovan rolled faster than it drove.

  ‘Just don’t think you’ll make a living out of art,’ Jo lectured Ellen sternly, ‘cos in this philistine country you have to be able to kick a football or run like Cathy Freeman to make any real money.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Ellen contradicted, waving her voucher joyfully in her mother’s face till Jo batted it away in proud irritation. Be good, she reflected, if it was a voucher for Fred Henry’s garage in Billinudgel and not for the Lismore art supply shop. Having a three-hundred-dollar voucher was one thing, having the petrol to get over and redeem the bloody thing was quite another.

  ‘You done good,’ Jo smiled at Ellen. ‘Real good, bub.’

  ‘Well, I don’t need to ask who won!’ Twoboy laughed when they ran inside, Ellen literally bouncing for joy as she showed him her voucher.

  Jo kissed the man in front of Ellen and Chris, delighted that he had turned up without warning on a weeknight. The sight of the Commodore parked in the drive still thrilled her as much as it had the first time. It had her singing as she threw her bag into the bedroom. Maybe it really was love, love, love ... luh-huv...

  ‘Hers was the best by about a country mile,’ Jo skited, opening the fridge. A fresh carton of Tooheys stashed there. She ripped three stubbies out.

  ‘Want a drink?’ Jo asked Ellen, awarding Twoboy another brownie point because he’d thought to bring soft drink for the kid.

  ‘Shoulda heard how many people wanted to buy it,’ Chris added proudly, winking at Ellen.

  ‘You can get some really good paints with that,’ Twoboy told her, handing the voucher back. ‘Canvasses, too.’

  ‘Don’t want paint,’ Ellen disagreed, ‘I’m concentrating on drawing and pastels. Can I have a beer, Mum?’

  ‘No bloody way. Have a coke or a cuppa tea.’ Jo frowned. Now she’d need to keep a closer eye on how many stubbies were left in the fridge in the mornings. ‘Your brain’s still growing and it don’t need grog.’

  ‘Whereas yours is shrinking and it no longer matters?’ asked Ellen. Jo raised her palm and gammoned she was about to slap the child to the ground.

  ‘Was old goonah guts there?’ Twoboy asked, draining two-thirds of his beer in one long draw and, winking at Jo, surreptitiously backhanding the remainder to the kid. Ellen quickly disappeared with it to her room. Chris grinned while Jo pursed her lips. Grog was for adults, not kids.

  ‘No,’ Jo answered, ‘but there was a dozen Bullockheads. None of them too happy when they realised who Ellen was and that she’d done them out of three hundred bucks.’

  ‘They try anything on?’ Twoboy asked, suddenly tense. Jo shook her head.

  ‘Nah, just a few dirty looks. The joint was packed fulla white parents, anyway. But I was glad Chris was with us when we walked out.’

  Jo ran a finger around the mouth of her stubby. It was difficult to know just how worried to be about the Bullockheads. Whether to accept Twoboy’s analysis that they were basically all talk, or, alternatively, keep in mind the memory of Oscar and Johnny on the Devine bridge, approaching with a blunt instrument and only too happy to use it. Sally Watt, Twoboy then revealed, hadn’t been at the art show because she’d been in Brisbane that morning, fronting the tribunal with her concoction of half-truths about her family tree.

  ‘Half-truths?’ Jo asked. She was weary of multiple barely understood family trees, and the suspicions that they aroused. ‘How do ya mean, half-truths? Have they got a claim or haven’t they?’

  ‘Sally’s Oscar’s second cousin, right?’ Twoboy said, as he ripped the scab off another stubby and threw it into the recycling bucket. His look said he’d been through this a million times before – why couldn’t Jo seem to keep it straight in her mind?

  ‘Only second?’ Jo asked, surprised. Yes, Twoboy sighed.

  ‘According to Mum, Sally’s great-great-grandmother Mary Mullet was born in Piccabeen, but her great-grandfather on the other side, Albert Watt – who’s Oscar’s great-grandfather too, of course, and Steve’s and Patti’s and Shane’s and all them lot – he was from Newcastle or Sydney or somewhere else way the hell down south. He might even have been from Westown, the lawyer told me today. So Sally might – might – have a real claim through her maternal line, but for some fucking reason she’s saying her links coming from the great-grandfather Albert. Same bloke Oscar’s claiming through, but it’s all bullshit.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’ Jo asked, deciding that she liked the effect of the beer far too much to stop at one or two. Fuck it, she was going to get bombed on the windfall of Twoboy’s carton. She’d gone to work with a hangover before. ‘Why not just go it alone on the great-great-grandmother line and not have to deal with Oscar’s mob at all?’

  ‘She’s running scared,’ Chris interjected. ‘Oscar’s got all them mad cousins that are forever in and out of jail, and he’s a bully from way back, always has been. Even as a teenager he was a bloody prick. I remember him bashing the tourist kids one Christmas at the Piccabeen pool. He’s standing over Sally to lie for him in court, I betcha anything.’

  Jo opened a packet of two minute noodles, and considered this idea. It made a lot of sense. Aunt Sally had always struck her as a decent woman, someone who genuinely wanted to hold the community together with the scant resources she had at her disposal. But good intentions were no match for the brute force of Uncle Oscar. Sally, Jo reflected, had little more than her white
husband and her own straight Goorie backbone to rely on when it came to countering the nephews and poly pipes that Oscar could summon with a snap of his fingers. Maybe, given the choice of going Oscar’s way or getting nothing at all, Sally had decided to trust the thin trail of blood that they shared, and treat it as the path of least resistance. Jo upturned the Mi Goreng into a bowl and broke the hard wavy mass apart with her fingers before putting it on the bench.

  ‘Yeah, you’re probably right,’ Twoboy agreed, crunching noodles. ‘I used to like Sally alright, before all this shit came along. But she’s picked her side. Just bad luck for her she’s gone and listened to old goonah guts and jumped onto the wrong team. Cos he ain’t winning jack shit at the tribunal with his lies, I’ll tell you that for free.’

  ‘I dunno...’ Jo tossed her empty stubby into the recycling. ‘Have you seen his birth certificates and everything?’

  ‘I seen enough,’ Twoboy responded tartly. ‘He was born here, more’s the pity, and so he reckons this his country! But that fat old prick’s from freshwater mob, ya can see it in his ugly mug. He wouldn’t know how to find the beach with a fucken GPS. Put him up on the hill at Ocean and he’d go, oh daw, what’s the big blue wet thing? Yeah, the fucken jang can flap, but he got any story for this country? He’s gammon, he got nothing!’

  ‘Well, I hope the tribunal sees it that way,’ Jo said, finally convinced that Twoboy knew what he was talking about when it came to the Bullockheads and their scorched earth campaign. With a new beer open, she put it to Twoboy that, really, if you looked at it objectively, Sally Watt was being shafted, the same as he and Laz and Mum Jackson were: cos if Oscar managed to convince the tribunal to hand him the powers of a traditional owner, there’d be no way in hell Sally would share in whatever bounty followed – she’d quickly find herself persona non grata in Oscar’s stronghold of Piccabeen, and might would once again have been made right, the same as it always had been when it came to blackfellas and the dugai law.

  ‘Are you asking me to feel sorry for Sally Watt?’ Twoboy asked, folding his arms and drilling Jo with his black-eyed stare. ‘Christ almighty.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Jo felt like being stubborn. ‘She always had time for me, before you came along. We got along pretty good.’

  ‘She’s worked her ring off for years to keep the blackfellas around here at peace,’ added Chris.

  Twoboy ignored this, and addressed Jo instead.

  ‘Listen, pollyanna, this might look like a fight with lawyers in a fancy courtroom, but really it’s a war. You got that? A war, not a game, over the same thing that war’s always been over anywhere in the world – country. And the sooner you realise that, the sooner you’ll work out where I stand, and why.’

  It sounded like he was saying, where you stand too. ‘Like there’s ever going to be perfect justice come out of a white man’s court. Us mob are at war over the scraps off the white man’s table, and once you decide to play that game, it’s no holds barred–’

  But Jo still couldn’t get the picture of Johnny and Oscar on the bridge out of her mind. Something had been bothering her about that day, something that didn’t quite fit with Twoboy’s avowals of war. She suddenly remembered what it was.

  ‘Well, if it’s all a war, if real justice doesn’t come into it, then why’d ya chuck Johnny’s pipe in the river that day, instead of just smashing him with it?’ she countered, before adding tartly, ‘and don’t fucking call me pollyanna, thanks. I’ve been around the block a couple of times.’

  ‘Assault with a weapon,’ Twoboy told her, ‘gets you double the jail time as ordinary assault. Johnny Bullockhead might be fucken stupid enough to go down for a three-year stretch in the middle of a Native Title case, but I’m not. I’m playing the long game, girl.’

  ‘You really thought of that, with him standing there ready to smash you?’ Jo asked, disbelieving that anyone could be so cool, half-completed law degree or not.

  Twoboy looked away briefly. Then he unfolded his arms and braced his hands on the top of the kitchen bench. Chris and Jo watched him.

  ‘Listen. Strength lies in unity, not in numbers. Oscar thinks cos he’s got a big mob of family, all them hardheaded nephews, he’s got the advantage, and to an extent that’s true, especially right now. But Oscar’s really just a fat old cunt who’s got where he is with pure rat cunning, not strategic intelligence. And come one week, two weeks, three weeks time, Johnny – who’s no fucken rocket scientist, mind you – he’s gonna be sitting in front of the telly, or driving the kids to school, or on the bog having a shit, and he’s suddenly gonna go: Hey! Uncle Oscar wanted me to go up against Twoboy on the bridge that day, when he had the weapon, and I had seven-eights of fuck all.’

  Twoboy’s eyes gleamed with the pleasure of anticipating this revelation on Johnny’s part.

  ‘And at that second, at that exact moment, Oscar’s biggest advantage is gonna flip, and become his weakness. Cos Johnny’s a fucken dickhead, but he’s not so dumb that he’ll put his arse on the line for Oscar time and time again once he realises he’s expendable. Won’t be long, Oscar’s gonna be spending more time keeping them boys of his in line, than thinking about how to win the case. And then,’ Twoboy concluded with a small grim smile, ‘I’ll have him.’

  ‘Divide and rule,’ Jo mused.

  ‘An army’s opportunities come from exploiting the openings in the environment caused by the enemy’s weakness in a given area,’ Twoboy recited. ‘Sun Tzu. Han Dynasty. If Oscar had read it, I might be worried, but he hasn’t, or if he did he didn’t pay much fucking attention. So when we win in court, it’ll be all over red rover for Oscar and every other Bullockhead. The whole mob of em can go and rot in hell, for all I care.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Jo said slowly, looking at Chris and aware that now she perhaps was being a little bit of a pollyanna. ‘I thought you Lawmen were supposed to take care of everything on your country. No exceptions.’

  ‘And?’ Twoboy looked blank. The idea that the Bullockheads were a part of his country had never once entered his head.

  ‘Aunty Barb always told me Law meant taking responsibility for the whole bloody lot.’ Jo went on, remembering how adamant the old girl had been on this point. Chris nodded. Everything was connected, and nothing could be ignored, however inconvenient.

  It finally dawned on Twoboy what his woman was on about.

  ‘Shit. You looking for Saint Twoboy again, are you?’ he asked sarcastically.

  ‘I’m just looking for a bit of consistency,’ Jo argued, digging in. ‘Either everything on country’s connected, or nothing is.’

  ‘Well, once they lose the case and fuck off, they won’t be on my country,’ Twoboy said breezily. ‘So the problem won’t exist.’

  ‘But you just said Sally might have a legitimate claim!’ Jo retorted as she opened the fridge door.

  A momentary pause.

  ‘So, I contain multitudes,’ Twoboy threw at her with a boyish grin. ‘Sue me.’

  You charming handsome bastard, thought Jo, softening. You get me on that jag hook every time.

  As Chris’s old bomb sputtered and backfired into life in the drive-way a few minutes later, Jo opened another stubby and looked at Twoboy through frosted beer goggles.

  ‘I might be a little bit drunk,’ she confessed.

  ‘I think you might be right,’ he twinkled.

  Jo decided that standing in front of her was absolutely the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen, let alone kissed. She told him so, and Twoboy laughingly agreed. He scooped Jo up and into the bedroom, where they proceeded to make a great deal of noise. Lying in the rumpled bedclothes, Jo reminded Twoboy of what he’d said earlier in the week.

  ‘You know how you said you’re big and black and educated, and nobody thinks you’re a good idea?’ she asked.

  ‘Mmm,’ he responded, half-asleep with his arm around her neck and his dreads spilling chaotically over both pillows.

  ‘Well, I think you’re a good idea,’ Jo told him, curl
ing into his shoulder. ‘I think you’re a bloody good idea.’

  Twoboy smiled gently, and promptly lost consciousness. Soft snoring filled the room.

  ‘I love you,’ Jo whispered anyway.

  ‘So we finally gotcha over to the wilds of Burringbar,’ Annie teased. Jo stood on the dusty concrete apron of the Produce Store at the End of the World. Outside the huge metal shed, Ellen was making a noisy fuss of Annie’s Irish wolfhound, Doofus. Annie clambered down from her antediluvian forklift, which stank of burning brake pads, tossed her cowboy hat onto the counter, and hugged her visitors. From his reclining lounge chair in the depths of the shed, Dicko boomed a greeting. Nothing new there then, thought Jo drily, Annie doing all the hard yakka while Dicko nurses his depression and talks shit to the few customers he can actually stand.

  ‘How’s business?’ she asked, comparing Annie’s prices on the wall to those at the Co-op. Slightly cheaper. They’d want to be, since the Produce Store really was at the end of the world, out along a beautiful but isolated bush road dead-ending at the western foot of Bottlebrush. If it wasn’t for Annie, Jo often thought, nary a soul would make the trip to this out-of-the-way valley. Personally, she wouldn’t have gone to the end of her driveway to buy feed off Dicko.

  ‘Yeah, not too bad. The salt-licks are flying out the door, they keep us going.’ Annie nodded at the salt-licks custom-made onsite that she sold all over the east coast to the owners of glossy show horses desperate for an edge in the ring.

  ‘Remind me to grab one when I go,’ Jo offered. It was payday, her petrol tank was full, and the rates were finally taken care of. She’d have thirty dollars spending money this fortnight, after the indulgence of the salt-lick.