Too Much Lip Read online

  Melissa Lucashenko is a Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage. She has been publishing books with the University of Queensland Press since 1997, with her first novel, Steam Pigs, winning the Dobbie Literary Award and being shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Hard Yards (UQP, 1999) was shortlisted for the Courier-Mail Book of the Year and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and Mullumbimby (UQP, 2013) won the Queensland Literary Award and was longlisted for the Stella Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Fiction and the Kibble Literary Award. She has also written two novels for teenagers: Killing Darcy (UQP, 1998) and Too Flash (IAD Press, 2002). In 2013 Melissa won the inaugural long-form Walkley Award for her Griffith REVIEW essay ‘Sinking below sight: Down and out in Brisbane and Logan’.

  Bookclub notes are available at www.uqp.com.au

  Also by Melissa Lucashenko

  Steam Pigs (1997)

  Killing Darcy (1998)

  Hard Yards (1999)

  Too Flash (2002)

  Mullumbimby (2013)

  For my brother David, who swam a river to save my life.

  The writing of this novel was helped immeasurably by the 2016 Copyright Agency Author Fellowship. Thanks are also due to the Australia Council for a New Work grant; Avid Reader in Brisbane, who generously supplied a quiet place to work; and Jill Redmyre for precious writing time granted at Springbrook. Judith Lukin-Amundsen was the most scrupulous of editors – I thank her for her encouragement.

  She was charged with shooting the accused, who in giving evidence against her, made no secret of what his intentions were towards the woman. She, he said, was only a gin, and he could do what he liked with her.

  ‘District Court, Criminal Sittings’,

  Brisbane Telegraph, 31 January 1908

  Owen Addison, 1943

  It was Owen’s first time in the big country town that thought it was a city. The boy had never heard a tram rattle along a paved street, never before seen a raised boxing ring waiting for him empty and ominous under blazing electric light. The number of whitefellas in the world was a revelation. Dugai burst out of every door, their pale faces staring at him, strangers to a man. The great yellow hope, he heard one of them say to the flash piece of mutton hanging off his arm. Owen swallowed. At home his enemies were clear: Reverend O’Sullivan, the gunjibals, the Welfare. But where was the snake hidden in this particular paddock?

  There.

  Over in the corner, a stout gunjie with a flaming red beard. Three more beside him, all wearing the unfamiliar blue serge of the Queensland Police Force. His mum’s voice rang in his ears: keep your jang shut tight, son. It’s your job to keep the god botherers away. So keep quiet – and mind ya bloody win. Her arms flung around him so tight his breath was forced high into his throat. His arms roped around her, too, trembling. Pride bursting in his chest: I’m a man, fighting to keep us free. Me, Sissy, Bon. And the terror of it all falling on his head at fourteen.

  The red beard strolled over, smiling a smile to chill the marrow of your black bones. He shook Mr Lewis’s hand.

  ‘Corbett’s the name. So this is him, is it?’ he asked, swivelling to pin Owen beneath his gaze. ‘The new Jack Johnson?’ Owen stiffened. Melbourne had rioted after the Negro Johnson had won. Men had died. And Mr Lewis was a banana farmer; he knew nothing about gunjies.

  ‘Oh, Owen’s no flash Yank,’ Mr Lewis said mildly. ‘He’s just a handy half-caste from Rivertown.’

  ‘Is that right, boy?’ The sergeant seized upon the adjective. ‘Handy, are ya?’

  ‘Try to be.’ Owen’s chin jutted.

  The sergeant gazed at him, unsatisfied. He leaned closer and his copper’s breath blew hot in Owen’s ear.

  ‘You might be thought something pretty over the border,’ he said softly. ‘But the last coon that got too handy round here swung for it. Got that?’ He stepped back laughing, as though he’d made a fine and private joke. After a moment of incomprehension, Owen’s bladder jerked in fear. He wanted to kill the man standing in front of him, but there was his mother to think of. And Reverend O’Sullivan, sniffing after his sisters’ souls.

  ‘Yessir,’ Owen mumbled, though he didn’t. He’d heard the word a hundred times in approval from older men. Handy with a horse. Handy sort of a lad. Handy with his fists. Now, somehow, in the instant between Mr Lewis uttering the word and it ricocheting back at him, handy had become a steel trap.

  Owen’s job was clear. Keep the gunjibals away by winning in the grimy tents of country towns, by boxing his way to the title Mr Lewis said was his for the taking. By being the native pride of Rivertown, so authority had no excuse to come hunting down his sisters and him. But if Queensland didn’t like its blacks handy – if Queensland lynched them for it – then was he supposed to win this match, or not? It was a question gnawing at him when he ducked between the taut white ropes. Still consuming him when the copper’s eyes bored into him on his corner stool, warning him away from handiness. And paralysing him until the instant his opponent, a red-haired chunk of a lad, was announced as ‘our own Johnny Corbett’.

  Owen knew then what he had to do to win. Could guess, too, in a general sort of way, what the Silver Gloves would cost him. He bent and spat into the zinc bucket, his pulse hammering in his neck. Then the lad rose to stand lean and tall and black beneath the blazing lights which multiplied his shadow in four directions. All fear evaporated. This was the moment he had been born for, oh yes. His Old People hadn’t made him into a man for nothing. Owen made sure the newspaper fella was watching, and swung to face the baying crowd. He whooped loudly, and slammed his gloved hands together above his head. ‘Second round,’ he called, ‘I’ll lay your Queenslander out in two.’ The room howled as Owen turned back to look Johnny Corbett fair in the eye. There was no mystery here. The snake in the room was him and by Christ he was ready to strike.

  ~

  Owen survived the retribution that followed his victory. He went home a hero, stunned by the new kinds of violence in the world, and refusing point blank to satisfy any of Mr Lewis’s questions about his shattered face, his bloodied legs. He had understood early in the night that the price of his life would be silence. And when Owen died, a very old man in a house far away to the south, there were seven decades of agony caged in him, held down by liquor and a steely pride, and by various acts of bastardry his family could never quite manage to forget. But he had held one thing dear. Since the night the sergeant locked the cell door behind them, laughing with the other white men waiting there, nobody – not his wife, nor his brother, nor any of his descendants – would ever see Owen Addison cry. He had left his tears behind on the cracked cement floor of a Queensland watch house.

  Chapter One

  A stranger rode into town only it wasn’t a stranger, it was Kerry, come to say goodbye to Pop before he fell off that perch he’d been clinging to real stubborn way for so long. Cancer, Ken reckoned, never mind cancer, ya couldn’t kill the old bastard with an axe. But ah, no good. The call come last night. Get yerself home, chop chop.

  Kerry dropped into second as she cruised past the corner store, clocking the whitenormalsavages, a dozen blue eyeballs popping fair outta their moogle heads at the sight of her. Skinniest dark girl on a shiny new Softail, heart attack city, truesgod. So yeah, let’s go for it, eh, you mob. Let’s all have a real good dorrie at the blackfella du jour. Kerry resisted the urge to elevate both middle fingers as she rode past the astounded locals, past the produce store. Past Frankie’s Mechanical. Past the vacant lot with its waist-high weeds hiding a generation’s worth of fag ends, torn condom wrappers and empty bottles. Past the landmark pub which hadn’t changed in a century and w
asn’t about to start now, thanks very much all the same. And when Kerry had made it to the other end of Main Street, that was about it for Durrongo (‘Place of Centrelink fraud,’ according to Ken), population 320. Now, as ever, if you wanted anything more complicated than a beer, a bale of hay, or a loaf of last week’s bread from Kath at the general inconvenience store, you had to make tracks for Patto, half an hour up the highway.

  As Durrongo petered out Kerry throttled back. She stopped at the T-junction of Main and Mount Monk Road and straightened first one stiff leg, then the other, letting her toes point skyward in heavy black leather boots. Twenty thousand bucks of American heritage engineering shifted in her hands as she did. Right boot out: a small tilt to the left. Left boot out: a small tilt to the right. Then, in a futile gesture towards flying under the gossip radar for at least the afternoon, Kerry turned the bike off. Silence expanded around her. She flipped her visor up and flinched, late December bouncing straight up at her off the tar. Eleven in the morning and already the road soft beneath her boot heels. Sweat broke out on her forehead as she gazed around the empty intersection and the paddocks beyond it.

  ‘Been a fair while,’ Kerry murmured to nobody and to everybody. ‘Been a fair old while.’ She let out a sharp bark of laughter. There was no telling what today might bring, or who might be alive at the end of it. Same as any other fucking day in Durrongo, in other words, only more so.

  ~

  Three waark flapped down onto the road beside her, drawn to the flattened remains of a king brown which looked to have lost a fight with Scruffy McCarthy’s cattle truck.

  The birds stared at Kerry, cawing obnoxiously before they turned to their snake, and promptly ripped it in half. The biggest crow seized the open-jawed front end of the carcass, and hopped with glee to the grassy verge. Hungry, it plunged hard into the rotting head, seeking out the reptile’s soft brain, and then looked up, totally baffled. The fanged snake skull had gotten wedged hard onto the bird’s beak. The crow shook its head, first in surprise and then in anger, but to no avail. Kerry watched, fascinated and appalled. Would the crow manage to free itself? Or would the mundoolun have the last grim laugh, its hard, tiny skull locking the crow’s beak shut until the bird starved to death? The eaters and the eaten of Durrongo, having it out at the crossroads. You don’t see old mate Freddy McCubbin painting that, do ya? Talk about down on his fucking luck.

  The other crows noticed their companion’s plight.

  ‘Hahaha, looks like a mutant, half a bird and half a snake,’ mocked the one on the left.

  ‘Are you sssssssssssstuck?’ asked the other, falling about with delight at its own wit.

  I’m not the only one in Durrongo plagued by arseholes then, Kerry noted.

  ‘Yugam baugal jang! Wahlu wiya galli!’ the luckless crow complained. My beak’s no good. You could help a bird.

  Kerry looked around the deserted road.

  ‘Yugam baugal jang! Buiyala galli! Yugam yan moogle Goorie Brisbanyu?’ You could help, instead of sitting up there like a mug lair from the city.

  Kerry looked around again. The waark hopped up and down in rage.

  Then the second crow chimed in, dripping scorn.

  ‘It’s no good to ya, fang-face. Can’t talk lingo! Can’t even find its way home! Turned right at the Cal River when it shoulda kept going straight. It’s as moogle as you look.’

  ‘How the hell do you lot know where I’ve been?’ Kerry retorted. Back in town five minutes and the bloody wildlife keeping tabs on her already. The second crow preened as it gave her a self-important sideways glance.

  ‘Us waark see all that happens. We see the platypus in his burrow at midnight. We see the dingo bitch in her lair under the new moon; we see—’

  The third crow butted in, impatient.

  ‘Oh shuttup ya bloody blowhard. Make me sick, truesgod! Old Grandfather Pelican went and told our aunty second cousin he seen ya get lost at the bridge. Goodest blackfella!’ The third crow sharpened its beak on the bitumen in contempt. Kerry turned to the trapped bird, pulling her hair up into a tight ponytail to get it off her neck. Because Jesus Christ Almighty, the heat.

  ‘I’ll help if you fly up here,’ she offered, tapping her handlebar. The other crows instantly began to shriek in alarm.

  The snake-crow tilted its mutant head at her.

  ‘Gulganelehla Bundjalung.’ Speak Bundjalung. A test of good character.

  ‘Bundjalung ngaoi yugam baugal,’ she said. My Bundjalung is crap. The bird hesitated.

  ‘It’s a trap, a trap, a trap!’ the other crows screeched.

  The sun beat down on four black heads as one minute passed, and then another. Kerry shrugged and kicked the Harley to life again, the enormous vee-engine booming like a bitch over the thistle-studded paddocks.

  ‘Well, suit yerself bunji. I’m not sitting here getting cooked to death.’

  With a last suspicious glance at her the crow took two fast hops and then was airborne. Its so-called friends took off as well, bullying each other all the way across the paddock to the dead gum standing by the creek.

  Kerry sat for another troubled moment, feeling certain the crow was going to spend several hideous days before starvation claimed it. But she hadn’t ridden three hours to worry about a doomed waark. She was here to deliver her final goodbye to Pop, and then fuck off quick bloody smart back over the border to Queensland, well away from anything resembling Durrongo.

  ~

  Revving the throttle, she looked straight in front of her, down a long gravel driveway to the house that jack shit built. It huddled beneath the spreading arms of a large leopard tree. Same old fibro walls. Same old iron roof with rust creeping into a few more panels each wet season. The lawn bore a lopsided Mohawk from where the mower had died or been stolen or where Ken had run out of the minimal motivation he’d had to begin with. Gazing at the front veranda where the old nickel bath used to live, Kerry felt her scalp begin to itch. She hauled her helmet off and scratched furiously at her sweaty head.

  Ken still hadn’t replaced the busted louvre beside the front door. More accurately, Kerry squinted, he’d replaced it with a strip of roughly hacked ply, and this had become a permanent memorial to the window his stubby had flown through upon discovering a $125 council parking fine in the mail. The offending Falcon stood in exactly the same spot Kerry had seen it last Christmas. Beside it another two old bombs kept the rusting XD company. Kerry guffawed. Jerry, she thought, still scratching the long-dead nits of childhood, they shoulda named him Jerry – everything the prick does is Jerry-built. My biggest blue-eyed brother. Such a fucking boon to the tribe.

  Suddenly not caring about the local gossips and their hurricane tongues – for she would be long gone this time tomorrow – Kerry revved the Hog. In their distant gum tree, the crows cawed in mocking response. Kerry revved the bike again, louder, and gave an evil grin. That’s a warning to yez all. Big dorrie locals, paranoid crows, flattened brown snakes, the big brothers of the world. Or maybe it’s just a real deadly welcome home to meself. Cos ready or not, here I come. She threaded her helmet onto her left forearm and released the clutch. Plummeted down the drive to where Pretty Mary was continuing her life’s work cursing the inhabitants of Durrongo, as if anyone with two eyes in their head to see with couldn’t have told her the fucking place was cursed to hell and back already.

  ~

  In Sydney, Martina closed her eyes, not believing what she’d just heard from the state director of sales.

  ‘Tom,’ she said very carefully, ‘I’m really not that interested. Things are going right off in Metro South, so thanks but no thanks.’

  ‘Eight weeks, Martina. Ten at the most. It’s just till Jim Buckley’s replacement wraps things up in Auckland. You could probably even do it from Byron. Come to the party, and I promise you, you’ll be at the top of the list of applicants for the next Metro agency.’

>   Martina paused. Applicants! Supplicants would be a better word. There was a limit, however, to how often you could say no to senior management. Fuck. Tom had no idea what he was asking of her.

  ‘I heard Glen Plummer’s retiring.’

  Martina opened her eyes wide. Glen had owned the premier real estate agency in Sydney’s inner south for thirty years. She did some rapid mental arithmetic as her pulse quickened. Two months exiled to Shitsville for an outside shot at her dream.

  ‘The boss smiles on team players, Martina.’

  Martina grimaced. She’d never been an arselicker. But for a chance to buy her own agency, she’d pucker up with the best of them.

  ‘Eight weeks, tops. And Buckley pays my airfares and accommodation.’

  ‘Good girl, I knew I could count on you. We’ll need you there Monday.’

  ~

  Kerry shrugged off her blue backpack and apologised to the terrified ginger cat crouching under Ken’s car. Poor puss. But the noise of the Harley didn’t worry Elvis one bit. A small cunning mutt of no discernible heritage, he raged at the bike from the top of the stairs, finding it a worthy adversary. When he recognised Kerry, Elvis leaped off the veranda and beat his half-a-tail wildly in greeting, all the while conspiring to get past her and piss on the bike’s front wheel. On his third attempt, the dog nearly made it, hopping sideways on three legs with the fourth poised high in anticipation. Kerry whirled to head him off at the pass. Stymied, but with the cork already out of the bottle, Elvis ended up spraying the length of her leather boot instead. She screeched in disgust as she flung him away from her. ‘Go piss on ya owner’s boots, ya dirty little unit,’ she added. Elvis made landfall heavily and ran yelping towards the chicken pen, as Ken appeared at the back door.

  ‘I see Elvis has left the building,’ he observed.