Get up. Stand up. Start walking.
Go west.
Jo left the house in bare feet, ignoring the soft whickering of the horses when they saw her looming in the starlight. Daisy and Warrigal padded in her wake, but she didn’t see them. In the sheen of the waning three-quarter moon, she clambered through the barbed wire gate at the back of the Big Paddock and headed up along the trail she’d ridden on the day of the talga. She padded steadily higher, until she reached the fallen gum.
Jo stood there, listening to the night sounds. The urge to keep going remained. She clambered over the high white trunk and kept on walking, growing breathless from the steepness of the trail. She hoped that Ellen was still sleeping in the house below. Anxious as she was about this, the sensation dragging her to the top of the ridge was far too strong to disobey. It felt, now that she was out of the house and actually walking westward, as though the pulling was a kind of long unsung music inside her, growing ever louder, demanding to be voiced when she reached her destination. As she drew closer to the summit, Jo felt the blood in her veins becoming richer, turning to a mingling of many bloods and of many stories. She felt a strange and ancient current springing from the jagan to course through her body and her brain. Walking the trail as it rose through the folded hills, Jo knew that nothing else in her life mattered as much as this. She had been born to walk to the top of this ridge, and put on earth to look, at this particular time, from its summit to the western horizon, where Mullumbimby slumbered. She could no more have turned around to check on Ellen than she could have leapt from the hilltop and flown.
At last, mud-streaked and grazed from a myriad of tiny lantana scratches, she was finally there. She stood atop the spur of Chincogan, her right hand resting on the trunk of a huge mountain ash. She breathed hard as she looked down into the crease of land below. A dozen patchwork farms, Rob Starr’s among them, lay sprawled between her and the distant silvery curve of the river. In the far distance, the shops and houses of Mullum were faint, lit squares in the misty pre-dawn light. Chincogan squatted fatly to the side of the town, its high, curved, saddle peaks rising up against the still-starry sky. The Southern Cross hung directly over the town, and Bottlebrush Hill was a dark bulge behind her, surveying her as she stood and waited. Jo could hear the distant pounding of the surf hitting the beach at South Golden; gradually she became aware that the regular thudding of the waves on the hard sand exactly matched the metronome of her own insistent pulse.
Well I’m here, she thought, listening, her nerves wildly alive with expectation.
Nothing happened for a long, pregnant minute. Then, as the first touch of dawn began to break far in the east, she became aware of small rapid movements in the bushes around her. She heard familiar twitters. Fairy-wrens, a dozen or more, were lining the low branches she stood among. The birds flicked their tails upward, popping from branch to branch. They chirped severely at her. As she watched, more and more of the tiny birds arrived. After five minutes there were two dozen, three dozen, fifty, a hundred fairy-wrens, chirping and scolding in the trees surrounding her.
The hair on the back of Jo’s neck slowly rose as she understood that every single wren was looking straight at her. She swallowed.
Jingawahlu nyawarnibil, she offered nervously. Hello little birds.
In response, the birds rose as one body. For a crazy moment, Jo thought they meant to attack her. She flinched, and went to protect her face with her hands. But instead, the mass of tiny feathered souls flashed past so close that they brushed her arms and her hair. She felt a small grey wingtip against her cheek. Then as she stood and watched, the flock hugged the curve of the hillside, diving down through an ocean of crisp morning air until they reached the bottom of the western slope, where Rob Starr was squatting beside a rocky waterhole, facing a shirtless Sam Nurrung.
Jo couldn’t find the air to breathe.
The black boy had his back to her. He stood facing west with his arms outstretched, a crucifix backlit by the emerging dawn. From her vantage point, half a kilometre above, Jo couldn’t see Sam’s face. Nor could she make out the expression on Rob Starr’s. Fearful, and with a sense of growing disbelief, Jo watched as the wrens wheeled in unison above the distant figures, to land on the spreadeagled arms of the boy. Sam Nurrung didn’t move, but stood in front of Starr unflinching. A low hum rose through the air and Jo knew that she was hearing the talga again. The song was making its way up the face of the ridge to where she stood, invisible and trembling. She let out a small moan.
Ah, no. Nothing makes sense. It’s too much.
She wanted desperately to turn away and bolt home, back to the safety of her own house, her own bed. But something in the song caught her. The talga held her, trapped beside the ancient mountain ash, as the sound reverberated through the valley. Far below, Starr spoke to Sam, who spun around and faced the ridge. Starr pointed directly at Jo. Horrified, she lunged a couple of panicky steps backward into the bush. Starr couldn’t have seen her so far away and so shrouded in forest, she told herself.
Sam shaded his eyes, searching, staring. The movement of his arm made the wrens flutter and wheel above his head, protesting and looking for another perch. Then the boy let out a stark cry in words that Jo didn’t recognise.
The birds reformed themselves into a squadron, and flew like bullets back up the slope. They found Jo easily where she crouched among wattle branches in fear. They danced in the air around her, circling her, pirouetting from branch to air and back again to the trees. They followed her escape downhill, chittering in annoyance all the way, until, dew-soaked and sobbing for breath, she reached the fenceline. Jo flung herself through the wire and bolted across the Big Paddock, back to safety and home, back to some semblance of normality, where she could hear the phone ringing off the hook as she arrived at the back door.
Jo stepped out of the shower and towelled herself dry. Hot water pounding on her head for half an hour had helped push down the sight of Rob Starr and Sam Nurrung. It was now time to think about Ellen. From the doorway of the big bedroom Jo looked at her daughter still lying in the foetal position beneath the warm blue doona. The child absolutely refused to entertain the idea of going to school, or even of leaving the farm with Jo to seek answers. She refused to do anything but lie still, and hope that everything inexplicable in her life would simply go away. That she might wake up, the next time, with nothing at all unusual on the reddened, black-lined hands she constantly scraped at as Jo talked.
‘Well, will you come with me and see Uncle Humbug?’ Jo urged gently. ‘He might know. It might have happened before, to someone else.’
Ellen shook her head, obstinate with incomprehension and fear. Nobody could explain her, let alone help her. She was a freak of nature, and she was staying put in the hope that nothing even worse would go wrong.
Jo rubbed hard at her face in frustration, trapped by impulses that tore at her in different directions. The solace of the shower had told her that she needed to go to water now, to be beside the healing ocean until she found some direction, but at the same time Ellen clearly needed her here at home. Chris was sick again. Therese couldn’t help either, for she was in Brisbane where Amanda’s mother was now in intensive care. Jo gazed at her daughter, wondering how her life had come to this pass. It seemed such a short time ago that the biggest mystery she faced had been the old headstones at work, and who they belonged to; a question, and a state of being, that now seemed pathetically simple.
At the other end of the house, the phone rang on and on. Caller ID said it was Twoboy. Jo blocked out the clamouring, then finally threw the phone onto the kitchen bench, disconnected. The man could wait, along with his stupid blokey blindness and his mad demands upon Ellen. There were no good answers to be had in his phone calls, nor in the Native Title Tribunal either.
‘I just feel like Uncle Humbug might be able to help,’ Jo said tiredly, sitting down on the bed and holding Ellen’s soft white wrists that were black where the Nikko pen had smeared
during the night. Hadn’t the old man claimed to be the one true blackfella for this country? In the absence of her parents and her darling Aunty Barb, in the absence of other elders, Jo would take what was on offer. She had to look for Humbug.
‘You go,’ Ellen said, roughly shrugging Jo’s hands away and pulling the doona high around her ears. ‘Holly’s coming round. She’ll be here by one.’ Jo breathed out, closed her eyes, and assessed this idea. Was Ellen waiting to see if she was going to abandon her? Or would she really be alright if Jo went seeking the old man in the park, if she went and spilled her tales to him of mapped hands and enchanted wrens, of the signs and wonders of the Mullum ridge?
‘I’ll wait till she gets here.’ It was too risky to leave the kid alone, and, anyway, Humbug might take some finding. Ellen rolled over in the bed and squeezed her eyes tight in obvious relief. Good call, Jo thought, as she lay down beside her child and held her tight, all the while trying to find some way to put a squatting Rob Starr together with a crucified Sam Nurrung in her head and not go stark raving mad.
Jo pulled up in Bruns and switched off the clattering ute. The river beyond the massive Norfolk Island pines was a mere skin of water on the land. Long fingers of exposed sandbank had dried to yellow in the midday sun, and the pirate ship loomed menacingly out of the river, marooned there until the turning tide came and floated it again. Now that school holidays were over, a mere handful of locals were sprinkled throughout town. Jo was the only person standing on the pub side of the river. She walked across Torakina Bridge, peering beneath the heavy timbers, and wondering where Slim and Humbug might be found.
‘I brought Slim home,’ DJ told her from where he sat fishing on the rocky seawall beneath the casuarinas, ‘but Uncle Humbug’s in the lockup again. That prick of a copper in Mullum booked him for drunk and disorderly.’ He raised his bushy eyebrows at Jo: It sucks, but what can you do. Jo grimaced in return, seeing her chances of easy enlightenment collapsing. On the beach behind them, DJ’s kids played sandcastles. The toddler was learning how to count using the half shells of ugari which the full moon had left in its wake.
‘Least he’ll get a feed, I suppose,’ she said.
DJ grimaced.
‘Feed of shoe leather maybe. The dogs flogged him up real good, from what I heard. Palm Island all over again, except you’ve gotta die to make the news – or no, you need a riot to make the papers,’ he corrected himself. ‘Nobody gives a shit if you just die.’
‘How can they do that to an old bloke?’ Jo curled her lip in disgust. She imagined the outcry if a blackfella had belted into one of the grey-haired pensioners who sat gossiping each morning outside the newsagent. The Goories would never hear the end of it, but because Humbug had shown the terrible judgement to be both homeless and black, well, that was an entirely different kettle of jalum.
‘How ya doing, anyway, tidda? You look tired,’ DJ asked.
Jo muttered something dismissive. Instinct told her that no Wiradjuri man, however decent, would have the answers to her Bundjalung problems. Defeated by his news, she turned back towards the other side of the river – but then stopped dead in the middle of the sandy track.
‘You sure Slim’s alright?’ she called back. Bad enough that Humbug had been bashed, without his brother going missing as well. If she was in the lockup she’d want someone looking out for her family.
‘Yeah,’ DJ replied in easy reassurance. ‘Big lump in him, too! I reckon he mighta grabbed somebody’s budigan for feed last night.’ They laughed at the idea of a domestic puss coming face to face with a hungry ten-foot python: Humbug’s revenge.
As she walked back towards the ute, Jo reached a decision. If Humbug was locked up in Grafton jail, and if, at the same time, Ellen refused to leave her bedroom to go and see the old man, then whatever wisdom Humbug could have offered was unavailable. She had no other option, then, but to go to the water for answers.
Halfway across Torakina Bridge, Jo stopped and gazed down at the steadily rising current. It reached around the massive barnacled posts beneath her and flowed smoothly on either side, shining and rippling as it took the path of least resistance, heading upriver towards the mangroves. A few dark shapes hovered below her, waiting motionless in the deep pools low tide had left. Jalum, holding steady in a world of change. Downriver, just past the caravan park, a brahminy kite circled, ready to drop and snatch a meal. Jo knew that the water she watched was endlessly cycling upriver and down, travelling constantly between the saltwater and the fresh. It struck her, as she watched the flow dividing around the bridge posts, that the Buddhists were right. Change was never-ending. Nothing in the world stood still for long, and to be alive was to move. They were right, but they had perhaps missed something, too, something key about the Bundjalung world of water and trees and jagan which surrounded her. Everything changes, Jo thought, as the current carried her mentally upriver to the fresh water, but not at random. There’s a deep system and order to it, because everything is forever turning into its own opposite. Swimming fish becoming flying hawk. Swift hawk dying and decaying into solid earth. Earth reaching skyward as trees, turning to fruits and honey and flowers, falling back down again as leaves. Everything in the world was shapeshifting around her, every moment of every day. Nothing remained as it was.
Aunty Barb had gone in, the same as her parents had. Sally Watt and Uncle Oscar were unreachable, and Uncle Humbug was grasped powerfully tight in the grip of the dugai law. Jo looked down at the flowing path of the river and she set her jaw against these realities. If she really wanted answers, there was only one road open to her. She would have to do what Aunty Barb had always taught. She would sit and enter dadirri; she would watch and listen to the roll of the endless waves until some flash of enlightenment came, some message on how to respond to the rusted barbed wire nest of her life. She would go sit on high ground and find some way to help her suffering firstborn. There was nobody else left to ask. She, Jo Breen, would have to become her own elder.
If Bruns had been quiet, Ocean Shores was a ghost town. All the kids were in school, all the adults gainfully employed, and the tourists departed for points south and north. Jo sat cross-legged on the crest of the hill. She was resting her back against the granite and bronze directional marker that was the last material evidence of humanity between Ocean Shores and New Zealand. She gazed out over the saltwater, where a distant late-season whale was spouting. A crow perched in the nearby lemon-scented gums, directly above a plaque proclaiming that somebody Devine had discovered this place. Jo would normally have been delighted to see that the crow had crapped purple fig-seeded birdshit all over this spurious claim. Today, though, she barely noticed it, nor the whale either. Her mind was boiling with other matters. It took all her composure simply to sit quietly in dadirri. To do nothing, with Ellen lost and afraid at home.
Sit still, Jo.
But, her mind argued endlessly. But. But Ellen’s terrified, and I’m confused, and Twoboy’s gone, maybe for good, and what about Rob Starr and Sam Nurrung and–
Knock off yabbering! Jus sit ning. The answers are all there.
Jo sat, following the movement of her breath carefully and deliberately. Five minutes passed, ten minutes, a quarter-hour. She closed her eyes and became aware, beneath the jangling of her nerves, that she had only had two hours sleep. As she sat and stilled herself, though, silence wrapped itself around her, thread by thread. And in time, as she sat more intently, what had seemed to be silence then splintered, as she knew it would, into a myriad of small, discrete sounds. A motorboat chugged slowly upriver from the caravan park towards Mullum. An occasional cry of glee or despair made its way over from the golf course. Cars murmured along the highway. The seagulls at the Co-op a kilometre away squarked and squabbled over the scraps the fishermen allowed them.
Then Jo opened her eyes, for she had once more heard the distinctive chittering of fairy-wrens. You again, you buggers. What now? She shifted her weight nervously and waited to be inundated, but the m
ass of birds from the ridge didn’t materialise. Instead, a single pair, a blue-backed male and his drab grey-brown wife, chirped at her from a red-flowering bush on the hillside. Jo looked steadily back, waiting to see what kind of spectacle she would be presented with this time. Encouraged, the male darted up onto the directional marker at her back. The massiveness of the granite and bronze plinth served to underline that, for all his beauty, the wren was little more than a few dozen feathers and a voicebox. The bird trilled loudly at Jo, and then rose in a kind of arabesque before returning to the flat circle of the bronze disc. His wife joined him and did the same midair dance. Over and over again, as Jo looked up at them, the two birds fluttered in their repetitive pattern above the marker plinth. The movements reminded her of something, but exactly what the something was eluded her.
Jo puzzled over it, and then, as she failed to extract any purpose from the birds’ flight, her eyelids sagged wearily. She let her head fall back; twisting herself around to watch them was making her neck ache. She no longer watched the dancing, but she saw it instead in her mind’s eye, the landing and lifting, the pattern of the birds’ movements in the salty air. She ached to understand. Almost certainly it was connected to something important she had seen recently, but her head was a fog of sleeplessness and confusion. Jo groaned aloud, exhausted by her ignorance and the unending demands being made on her to exceed it. The temptation to fall asleep in the sun, and leave these demands far behind, began to take her over.
No. We need answers.
With a tremendous effort of will, Jo forced her eyes open and turned around. As she did so, a fat cloud blew across the face of the sun. Momentarily the wrens became, not birds, but mere dark movement, silhouettes against the looming grey mass of water vapour. For a split second, in the changed light, Jo stopped noticing the birds’ feathers, their chittering, and their contrasting colours. She saw only the path they tracked though space, the great looping shapes they were making in the air above the plinth. And then she realised what it resembled. The birds’ dancing curlicues looked like the curves the kids had made when dusk fell at the lake, the insults and names that they had written in the air with their glowing firesticks.
Mullumbimby Page 27