Mullumbimby Read online

  ‘Yeah, that’ll be her,’ she called. ‘Seeya when the work’s finished! I wish.’

  ‘No rest for the wicked, darl,’ Chris replied, heading in the opposite direction to chauffeur Uncle Pat to the doctor.

  ‘Ellen,’ Jo turned and yelled at the house, ‘I didn’t say you could knock off yet, where the bloody hell are ya?’

  ‘Guess what?’ Therese’s almond eyes peered through the kitchen window a couple of days later. She heeled her gumboots off onto the bare veranda boards that Jo intended to paint once the two hundred more important jobs – building yards, slashing, lopping, burning, dismantling, poisoning where unavoidable, replanting, digging, mulching, weeding, fertilising – had been completed.

  ‘You’re mad and I’m not?’ Jo responded, putting the kettle on.

  Therese plonked down at the kitchen table, her body just as grimy as Jo’s.

  ‘That’s not news,’ Therese answered, tapping on the kitchen table, impatient to deliver her gossip.

  ‘You’ve decided to ditch Amanda and come be my fulltime unpaid farmhand and cook?’ Jo’s face glowed with enthusiasm for this excellent idea.

  ‘That’s it!’ said Therese. ‘And I’ll chuck in aaall my good advice for free while I’m at it. She reckons she’s sick to death of me farting in bed, anyway.’

  ‘Deal,’ said Jo, plonking her cup on the table and sinking into a well-deserved rest. The two women had just made short work of another two hundred metres of decrepit barbed wire. A score of uprooted fenceposts lay beside the fireplace, ready for a bonfire. ‘And I won’t even charge you for cuppas,’ she added.

  ‘Seriously, but,’ said Therese, ‘about these new blackfellas I met on Monday.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ Jo feigned indifference. This was something to be hearing. One would have to be the Spunk from the bookstore, surely. Jo slowly turned her tea mug in front of her, making a wet ring on the speckled laminex.

  ‘New in town from where?’ she asked, pausing in the turning long enough to spoon three sugars in.

  ‘Got enough diabetes there, luv?’ Therese asked. When Jo didn’t bite, Therese went on. The Goories were down from Brisbane, and not only new in town, but claiming native title over Tin Wagon Road and the surrounding valley. Twoboy and his brother Lazarus were here to prove their claim with books and family trees and lawyers and argument by any means necessary.

  Hooley dooley. Hundreds of acres of previously uncontested country. The goonah around here was going to hit the fan and then some.

  ‘Did he crack onto you?’ Jo wanted to know.

  ‘There was a hint of that,’ Therese smiled, ‘till I put him straight about Amanda. I’m all in favour of a light refreshing male between serious relationships, but I told him we’re together for the long haul, and he took it alright.’ Well, well, well, thought Jo. A liberal blackfella her own age, single, gorgeous, and in her town. Unfuckingbelievable. She briefly scanned the horizon for flying pigs.

  ‘So how’d you meet em?’ Jo said, lifting her aching, grimy feet up onto the kitchen table and not caring if it was rude cos it was Therese and she was as much a sister to her as Kym was, and non-judgemental with it, as a good Buddhist should be. And plus, anyway, she shoulda asked her along to this meeting on Monday morning. It was altogether too cheeky not to. Therese wasn’t even a blackfella and here she was knowing the good goss before Jo. Came of being a teacher – she heard everything off the kids. Talk about wikileaks, they had nothing on Ocean Shores Primary.

  ‘Oh, someone told Laz that Amanda’s good with websites, and he wanted some help with theirs,’ Therese said. ‘She’s gonna do it up for them on Saturday. We were thinking of offering them the spare room for a bit, actually.’

  Jo sucked air through her teeth in alarm.

  ‘What?’ Therese reacted.

  ‘I hope you know what you’re getting into. Sticking your oar in.’

  ‘It’s just a website,’ Therese waved Jo’s anxiety away. ‘Anyway, what’s the point of talking up Goorie rights if ya won’t actually get involved?’

  ‘Yeah, and there could be a fucken huge war between all the blackfellas around here for the next fifty years, too, while they work the native title out,’ said Jo. ‘Do you really want to be involved in that?’ Therese had no idea what went down between blackfellas when land was at stake. Think Gaza, she warned her. Think Custer’s Last Stand.

  ‘Ah, you worry too much,’ Therese laughed.

  ‘Bullshit, I do,’ Jo retorted.

  Several days later, the horses were installed in their brand-new paddock. Straightaway Jo threw her right leg over Athena, and eased down onto the smooth brown leather of her favourite old stock saddle. Her feet found the stirrups and her body remembered, for the ten thousandth time, the feeling of a horse between her knees. The mare fought against the bit, though, wanting to get free to scratch her foreleg. Jo let the leather reins slide through her fingers so that Athena could stretch and use her teeth on the offending itch. But afterwards the horse began swishing her tail in irritation, sidestepping away from the gate to Tin Wagon Road. Jo shortened the reins, bridging them on the mare’s mane, and dug her heels in. You will do as I say and not what you feel like. Athena tossed her head in dissent, her tail going like a semaphore. A hind leg lashed out in anger, striking nothing but air.

  ‘Whattya you been doing with this yarraman?’ Jo asked Ellen, who was standing beside the bathtub that now held the horses’ drinking water. The kid had a list of Saturday jobs a mile long to get through before she could escape back to her room. Ellen was morose as she wove the end of the hose through five strands of barbed wire so that the slow drip would fill the tub.

  ‘Riding her.’ Duh.

  ‘Well, she’s got the manners of a frigging racehorse all of a sudden,’ Jo snapped, finally getting the gate open and riding through. ‘Bugger off, you idiot,’ she said, clapping loudly at Comet who was approaching the half-open gate with interest. The colt propped and snorted, and paused long enough for Jo to lean sideways, far out of the saddle, and slide the chain end over its silver knob, securing the paddock. Comet was altogether puzzled to suddenly find the steel gate between himself and his mother.

  As Jo rode away along the fenceline, he began to trot in agitated circles, tossing his nose at the sky. He neighed a frantic neigh, unsure of himself in his new paddock, and hating to be left alone there. Bloody herd bound, Jo cursed, what a pain in the neck that could turn out to be. Then Athena shied beneath her, pretending to see snakes in the long grass under the lowest strand of fence wire, and Jo grabbed the left rein, digging her heels in and wheeling the mare in tight circles as punishment.

  ‘Don’t leave that hose running too long, alright? We’re not on town water anymore,’ Jo ordered over her shoulder.

  ‘I’d forgotten. It’s been at least five minutes since ya told me,’ Ellen called back with a face like thunder.

  ‘If you weren’t binung goonj I might not have to tell you things a thousand times,’ Jo retorted. ‘And if you rode this flaming horse properly I wouldn’t have to re-educate her every three weeks.’

  Ellen stiffened.

  ‘She went fine for me at Oliver’s,’ she yelled. ‘Maybe it’s you that needs to ride her “properly” and not be so mean to her.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Jo reacted. ‘Well, if I’m “mean” to her it’s because she needs to know who’s in charge – not her. Same as you’re not. Goddit?’

  There was no reply from Ellen, who was now stalking back towards the house with her fists clenched at her sides. Jo fumed and bellowed at this insubordination, swinging the horse around.

  ‘Ellen! Don’t you walk away from me! Have you been riding this bloody mare the way you’re supposed to, or not?’

  The girl stopped and stood stock-still without turning around or acknowledging her mother’s question. Her thin body radiated displeasure and tension. Fuck you.

  ‘Cos I had a visit last week from a neighbour who reckons you’ve been riding his horses up the bloody
road. Without asking.’ Jo was horrified to hear this come out of her mouth. She’d meant to broach it tactfully, over hamburgers or something, when Ellen was in a mood to open up. But she was aching all over from fixing the farm – had been aching all over for a fortnight – and now Athena was being a mongrel, and Ellen had turned her back on her, which you just don’t do to your mother. Not if you don’t want attention, you don’t. Real quick attention upside of the head, same as she got as a kid with far less provocation than this.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been riding her!’ Ellen turned to face Jo. They both knew it was only half an answer.

  ‘Just bloody watch yaself, alright? We’re always gonna be easy targets around here.’ Jo’s voice was hard, but she didn’t know what else to do. She had a mighty job on her hands. Keep the locals onside, keep Ellen in line and talking to her, not a silent hating teenager like so many of them seemed to be, keep the cops well away so that disaster in a uniform didn’t have a chance to find them, keep the animals healthy and alive, get the farm cleaned up, get to work on time five days a week and keep Basho happy, especially now there was a mortgage to consider.

  ‘Is anything I say to you sinking in?’ she asked, at last allowing Athena to come to a breathless halt. Ellen shrugged. ‘Well, is there anything you want to tell me?’ Jo asked in exasperation.

  Ellen suddenly spoke the truth. ‘I miss my town friends. And I’m sick of all the work here. I never wanted to move here in the first place, it was your idea to buy a farm. Not mine.’

  The girl stood with her arms folded in the shadow of the Piccabeen palms hanging over the bathtub. Jo sighed, and hauled Athena’s head up from the paspalum patch she’d just found. Hadn’t she spent night after night explaining to Ellen what it meant to have their own place? To have the horses right outside the back door, and much more important, to be owners again of some Bundjalung land? To take back even a tiny fraction of what had been lost? She thought Ellen had wanted it, too, as badly as she did.

  Comet neighed and half-reared, his anxiety growing with every minute his mother was on the other side of the fence.

  ‘Well, look at it like this,’ Jo told Ellen shortly: ‘You’re gonna spend about six billion years turning back to dust in that bloody cemetery once ya dead, so take this as a very short enforced holiday away from the place, okay?’

  ‘Oh, you’ve got what you want, and I’ll just put up and shut up. Fine!’ Ellen stormed away into the house muttering curses under her breath that she wasn’t foolish enough to say to her mother’s face. Jo heeled Athena into a canter and left the latest drama of motherhood behind, as Comet took to his heels too, rocketing up the length of the paddock, bucking wildly and protesting his abandonment all the way.

  Three

  ‘Whaddya waiting for, hotpants, a written invitation?’ came a familiar merry cry from the the side veranda. Jo peered into the dimly lit space where Therese, Amanda, and two other figures were perched on the deck. She wandered over, wrinkling her nose in disdain. Hotpants.

  Drawing nearer, Jo saw in horror that one of the men was the blackfella from the bookstore, looking as good up close as he had from half a street away. The weathered dreadlocks which cascaded down his broad back were tied together with a yellow cord that ended in a tassel of cockatoo feathers. A narrow leather bracelet beaded in red, black and yellow circled one wrist. From close quarters she saw now that his very dark skin wasn’t down to Islander blood. A few strands of loose hair that had escaped his dreads had no kink to them, and his features were too Aboriginal to evoke the islands of the north, or of the Pacific either.

  Ambushed, she leaned on a veranda post, glared at Therese, and felt her internal defences fall into place, unbidden. Slam, slam, slam. They slid sideways and they slid vertical, like the doors on ‘Get Smart’. All of these doors were solid, locked, and smoothly impenetrable. All of them had emblazoned on them the same simple and undeniable message:

  Good-looking men are nothing but trouble.

  ‘Fellas – this is Jo Breen, our mate, the one with the farm I’ve been telling you about.’

  Therese affectionately threw a crooked arm around Amanda’s neck, crossed her legs and flashed a look at Jo that said Well? Jo gave her one straight back that read: Did I even say I was looking for a man, you cheeky slag with your ‘meet us at the pub’ and your ‘wear that red t-shirt’, ooh, your arse is so grass my friend, your arse is so fucken grass.

  The man grinned, giving Jo the little chin lift that signalled acknowledgement and he didn’t look away. Then he didn’t look away some more. Jo, transitioning at warp speed from wary to transfixed, was sideswiped with lust from behind her slammed-shut doors. Oh for Chrissake, she snarled at herself, you’re not fourteen. Get a fucking grip, girl.

  ‘Which way?’ said the man, still not breaking their eye lock, his smile broadening.

  ‘Same way,’ said Jo. Her pulse surged in her throat, and she was frightened to say more in case she jabbered rubbish. She stuck her hands in her jeans pockets and bunched them into fists.

  Good-looking men are nothing but trouble.

  At that moment, Basho lumbered past, his cumbersome pot belly banging the edge of their long wooden table. Apologising, he had to say ‘g’day Jo’ twice before his voice even registered. Rob Starr wandering through to the servery covered in engine grease and red mud didn’t rate any kind of attention at all. Then Amanda finally leaned over, breaking the spell; she pulled Jo onto the pine bench seat beside her.

  ‘Hey spunky, you scrub up alright, don’t ya? Jo – this is Twoboy and Laz. The Jackson Brothers – straight outta Compton. Compton Road, Woodridge, that is.’

  ‘The Jackson two,’ Jo said, relieved to have regained the power of speech.

  ‘That’s it,’ Laz agreed from the opposite side of the table, a slightly heavier, younger Twoboy without the dreads or the juice. The gelded version, Jo thought, then mentally smacked her hand for thinking it.

  ‘Your shout, moll,’ Jo told Therese.

  ‘Stevo turn up yet?’ Amanda asked.

  ‘Two guesses,’ Jo answered, wincing with the strain in her aching legs as she stretched them beneath the table.

  ‘My little brother,’ she explained to the Jacksons. ‘We’re fencing this weekend. Guess who hasn’t shown.’

  ‘Fencing’s hard yakka,’ Twoboy answered knowingly. ‘You’ll feel that the next day.’

  ‘Last time we done any real fencing was out round Canungra as young blokes, eh?’ Laz chipped in. ‘Must be a good, what, fifteen years since I sunk any posts.’

  ‘Well, anytime you feel like rediscovering the lost art, brother, just say the word,’ Jo replied. Like Twoboy, Laz was tall and well-built. He looked like he could shift a fair bit of timber without too much effort. But Laz simply laughed. No fucken way, his gap-toothed smile said.

  ‘So, you fellas been round town long?’ Jo asked, as Therese handed her a beer.

  ‘We drove down from Brissie with our old Mum a couple of weeks ago,’ Laz answered. ‘She gone home to the grannies in Logan now, but we’re staying put. We got a nation to rebuild.’ And it will take a nation of millions to hold us back, Jo thought automatically.

  ‘True. So you’re Bundjalung then?’ Jo replied with a faint hint of suspicion. You’re pretty dark for Bundjalung boys. Where the hell are you from? Are we related, or enemies by default, thanks to some long ago war that our relatives fought with each other? Or so distantly connected that we might be what dugais call strangers?

  The temperature at the table dropped a couple of degrees. Laz grew still, and the gap between his front teeth went into hiding. It was Twoboy who replied, with ice just beneath the calm surface of his voice.

  ‘Too right we’re Bundjalung. This is our great-grandfather’s country we’re sitting on here.’ Twoboy palmed the air in demonstration, Tupperware style. ‘This pub’s on our land. Nudgel. Tin Wagon Road. All the way up to Crabbes Creek. Us Jacksons are claiming the lot, onetime.’

>   Jo could just about hear Uncle Oscar Bullockhead in Piccabeen having a heart attack from where she sat. These two black bastards waltz into town and start chucking their weight around, telling lies about whose country this is...

  Twoboy waited for some sign of assent or approval, but Jo found she had no words. What was Uncle Oscar going to do when he heard about this declaration of war? And Aunty Sally Watt? The silence at the table grew taut as Jo imagined the firepower of the Bullockhead and Watt families coming up against the two Jackson brothers.

  ‘So you’re dead set slapping a claim over the valley then?’ she asked.

  Her grin made this something between an innocent query and an outright challenge. The silence at the table expanded, bulging at the seams with unspoken tension.

  Twoboy put his stubby back down and then laced his fingers together behind his head. Slowly he leaned backward and gazed across at Jo. His tongue found the inside of his top lip and pushed it out. Anxiety burned all the watching faces. With his hands behind his head, Twoboy’s biceps had flexed into dark sinewy peaks half-showing beneath his snug black t-shirt sleeves. Jo wondered if he knew how gorgeous he looked, and thought that yes, he was a smart bloke and he probably did. But when Twoboy finally spoke, there was no flirtation left in his voice or his eyes. What he was lusting after, Jo suddenly saw, was not a woman for a night or a week, but for his country. The man spoke with utter certainty and great emphasis.

  ‘That’s it, sis. I’m the eldest and that makes me the one true black-fella for this place la. Our great-grandfather, Tommy Jackson, he knew this valley back to front and inside out, and he knew who he was too, a Bundjalung man robbed of his rights by the land-grabbers. Fred Wheeler kidnapped him into the Native Police in 1864–’

  When she heard the words Native Police, Jo gave a tiny involuntary flinch sideways. Twoboy noticed, but he continued in a strong, level voice.