Mullumbimby (13 page)

Worried, Chris folded the newspaper in half and put it on the veranda.

‘Did you hit your head?' she asked.

‘Nah, just bruised my ribs is all. I was thinking alright,' Jo explained. ‘You know that old bush saying about when you get lost you siddown and have a cuppa tea before you do anything else? Well, I figured doing dadirri was the best thing to do after Comet buggered off. And lying quiet way, there on the track, I heard this trail bike. Only it wasn't a trail bike.'

Jo hesitated, then threw herself off the brink.

‘It was chanting.' She whispered. ‘Chanting in language. I'm positive it was.'

Well,
that's
captured their attention, Jo thought. Both Chris and Twoboy were staring now, and four dark arms were goosepimpling. Six if you counted hers; she had spooked herself, remembering. On the other side of the house, one of the horses, unseen, blew breath noisily out of its nostrils, and was answered by the other. Cattle two properties away made long bovine complaints about being yarded. And across the Big Paddock, level with Jo's eyeline, the heron flapped her way from the top dam across to Stoney Creek. Her harsh croaking punctuated the afternoon. ‘Jingawahlu mulanyin,' Jo called softly, and wondered about the timing. What you telling me this time, my bird?

Hearing chanting in the hills, a wide-eyed Chris agreed, was very fucking full-on.

‘I caught it on my phone,' Jo added, growing bolder. ‘Listen.'

She hit the play button and all three of them leaned in to the phone, listening with utmost attention. Nothing happened. Four more attempts to find the talga failed, and Jo sat back in exasperation.

‘It was definitely saved – I played it back a couple of times when I was still up there.'

‘Let me try.' Twoboy had a go, but he was no more successful than Jo had been, and he finally handed the phone back in disgust.

‘Maybe it's only going to work when you're up there,' Chris suggested. ‘If that's where the song belongs–'

Uncharacteristically, Twoboy interrupted Chris. ‘Did you understand any of it? How did it go?'

The man's face was clouded over with frustration. Jo easily hummed the tune, and described the few words of lingo she'd been able to pick out. Headshaking, Twoboy swore one long ferocious swear, then abruptly got up from the veranda and stalked off into the Big Paddock.

‘What's his problem?' Chris asked with a wrinkled brow.

Jo shrugged, her eyes still on the man. Jealous, maybe. Everyone wanted the culture back, mobs all over the country were trawling in dugai libraries and dugai archives retrieving little bits of songs, stories, dances. Those fragments that had been recorded or written down while elders lived. And yeah, theirs was a living language, true, but only barely, and this talga might be a completely unknown song for a little understood patch of country.

Together the women watched the tall outline of Twoboy stride the length of the farm and finally reach the World Heritage corner. To Jo's surprise, he stopped at the wire gate as though that dugai boundary meant something to him. Twoboy stood a long while facing the hills, an upright black exclamation mark upon the green page of the farm. Jo imagined that he was talking to the old people using what language he knew, asking them to share with him the song that they'd let her hear. Pleading his case. What mood would he return to
the house in, she worried, picking up the Maton to put it back in its hard protective case. As she lifted the guitar, it swung sideways and its body hit the side of the farmhouse, making a loud expensive clang. Jo hissed anxiously through her teeth and examined the treasured instrument for chips. It looked okay, luckily, but she was a great deal more careful as she laid it down and locked it away safely inside its red-velvet resting place.

‘I'm so gonna win this next year,' said Jo confidently, as Kym and the kids clustered around the Australian Stockman's Challenge website. Jo could picture it now. Herself and Comet, galloping past the finishing post to victory with a red, black and yellow saddlecloth, sticking it to all the dugai cattle farmers who rubbished the blacks who built their empires for them. Nine-year-old Jarvis asked hopefully if he could enter the challenge, too. Jo smiled. No fear, that kid, and no idea that some things might be way out of his reach.

‘Yeah, course ya can, bub. When you've learn to ride but, eh?' Jo grinned at his innocent ambition, wondering if Kym would allow the lad's Little Athletics legs anywhere near a yarraman.

‘You go girl,' Kym encouraged her sister while Ellen blew a loud raspberry. ‘You wish you were gonna win it,' the teenager snorted, the polar opposite of her aunt.

‘You'll see,' Jo retorted, ‘and no need to come looking for part of the prize bungoo, either. Me 'n' Aunty Kym'll grab it and have us a holiday, eh.'

‘Yeah,' Kym agreed. ‘We can go up north in a troopie, go to Laura.' The kids and adults were all enthused by this idea, the kids in the mistaken belief that it might mean time off school. Jo and Kym began to formulate a real plan, one that involved Therese and Amanda and their newly acquired ten grand, and a hire car, and borrowed swags. Then Kym remembered that the festival clashed with the zone finals.

‘Can't they skip it one year at least? For their culture?' Jo probed. A withering look from Kym told her that the answer was no.

‘Comet's going fantastic, eh,' Jo said later as they collapsed in front of the TV, red wines in hand. Kym raised her eyebrows.

‘You got how many busted ribs now?' she asked.

‘Bruised, not busted,' argued Jo.

‘Yer mad, ya unit,' Kym replied amiably.

Jo paused, and wondered if she could to talk to her sister about the chanting without sounding like she was indeed completely off her head. The song had never come back onto her mobile. It was gone for good, despite Twoboy taking the phone apart umpteen dozen times as well as haunting the ridgeline most of last weekend. Jo took another sip of wine and decided the time wasn't right. Kym was one of the few people who knew about her being slung in the PA psych ward at sixteen, and Jo didn't feel like dredging that old shame and horror up, thanks very much.

‘Is Comet as good as Athena?' Kym asked, the old mare her single point of equine reference. Jo nodded. To her, Comet was so much more than his mother was, but unhorsy Kym wasn't about to grasp that difference. Dog, cat, horse – they were all just pets to Kym. Not
family.

‘Better. He's better balanced, and he's smart as all get out, too. But nice natured. A lot of smart, athletic horses are arseholes, but he's sweet, and he actually likes people.' She glanced over at the screen-saver which showed Comet beneath the mango tree and Jo standing beside the colt with her arm flung over his neck, grinning at Twoboy as he took the shot.

‘Well, just don't come running to me when you break your leg,' Kym parroted their mother's classic expression. ‘Actually, don't come running to me any time, I've got me hands full with this lot. Talk about smart athletic arseholes, we see em every weekend when the boys flog em. They come and congratulate us through gritted teeth.' Kym demonstrated the gammon, pained smile of the other athletes, and both women laughed. ‘Ah, it's worth it when they do good,' Kym added happily. ‘Even if it does mean I live on the road.'

‘Mum's taxi's what you get for having so many jahjams, luv,' Jo told her sister, secretly a bit jealous of the happy brood that Kym
took so much for granted. Maybe she should have done what her sister had done, grabbed the first decent black man who asked her out, and had a clutch of youngsters with him.

Her sister grinned ruefully.

‘They don't tell you when you sign em up at six that you're gonna be driving them to meets all over the state for the next ten years,' she moaned, not really minding cos Kai could run the pants off a kangaroo and, more importantly, off just about any other kid black or white in the south-east region. His half of the dresser he shared with Jarvis bulged with gold statuettes. Kym and Jason had last year refused a meeting with Athletics Australia on the grounds that, no, their jahjams were far too young at ten and nine to be talking pre-sponsorship deals with anyone. Lettem be kids for Chrissake.

‘Give us a look at ya, bub,' Jo swung back to where Kai, Jarvis and Ellen were mucking around on the laptop.

‘Stand against the wall, eh.'

Kai stood, his neck stretched as high as possible, and Jo scanned him while she marked his height on the door jamb that was mouldy white from the weeks of rain. The boy was as lean and brown as an ironbark sapling. He had her own long-jawed face, and his Waka Waka father's dark body, all muscle and sinew. Yet despite his good looks and the many trophies, Kai showed none of the attitude she'd noticed in the other Little A kids over the years.

‘Ya lookin fit there, lad,' she praised him up. Accentuate the positive.

‘I train hard,' Kai shrugged.

‘Only every day,' Kym said drily, ‘in the car at 6.30 five mornings a week, and meets every weekend.'

‘Me too, eh,' added Jarvis in his high-pitched voice, pushing in with his crewcut and a grin that could melt any heart. ‘I'm lookin fit too, eh, Aunty Jo,' flexing his nine-year-old biceps beneath a Titans guernsey, busting to be noticed, for someone to look at him for once and not at his star older brother.

Jo grabbed her nephew and hugged him to her chest. ‘Yes, darling, you looking fit too, you'll be giving budda a run for his money
soon...' And that was all it took – him and Kai and even Timbo were off, hurtling around the circuit between kitchen and lounge, flat strap, heads down, legs pumping.

‘Youse two wanna knock orf, ya moogle lot!' Kym yelled, thinking of tomorrow's meet in Coffs Harbour. ‘I didn't take three days off work so youse could pull hammies mucking around here. Save it for the track!'

‘Wait for me, wait for me!' screamed Timbo as the older boys lapped him, but they had selective deafness and paid him no mind, hurtling one-armed around the doorways, leaping the Wii console and shoving each other back roughly, as though there were sheep farms at stake.

‘Aunty Jo, makem wait up for me!' Timbo ordered as he slowed, tears brimming and five-year-old lip all aquiver.

‘Ah gawd, competitive sport,' Jo muttered, ‘c'mere, my darlin.' Her arms were a wide-open haven, and Timbo was heading happily towards them when Jarvis casually cuffed the back of his brother's head with an open palm on the way through. Timbo flipped in an instant from sooky to homicidal. Jaw thrust out, he hurled himself back into the fray, charging after the older boys with one arm straight out in front, index finger extended.

‘I'm gonna powerpoint you, Jarvis! You better lookout, man, my powerpoint's gonna smash you onetime!'

‘What's he on about?' Jo puzzled.

‘He saw it on SBS the other night,' Kym explained with a snort of laughter. ‘Pointing the bone, he means.' Jo smiled uneasily. That stuff was a little bit too strong to be mucked about with. Not when there were already ancient songs in the hills giving her messages she couldn't begin to fathom or talk about.

‘What?' Kym asked, pulling Timbo out of the fray and onto her lap for a cuddle.

‘Nothing. Just...' Jo winced. Where did you start?

‘You're not getting all superstitious in yer old age, are you?' Kym wondered.
‘You?'

‘I just don't like mucking around with that stuff,' Jo muttered.

‘Ah, chillax. He's just playing – he's only five years old,' Kym reassured her.

‘Yeah,' Jo agreed finally. ‘I'm just a bit on edge cos of this claim. Twoboy takes it all super serious,' she explained. ‘Must be rubbing off.'

Before falling asleep that night Jo noted in her bedside diary:
Comet came home by himself last Saturday, after I fell on the ridge.
AND THIS TIME NEXT YEAR, she wrote in precise red capitals,
I'm entering the Northern Rivers Stockman's Challenge on him. To win.

It was very dark; it was the middle of the night. There was a doona, and the air was winter-sharp, and no other body beside her. Jo struggled up through several layers of consciousness to realise that one of the kids was crying. Probably Timbo having a nightmare. Then the last shreds of sleep left her and she got up, shivering with cold, to investigate. As she opened her bedroom door Jo realised it wasn't a boy's voice at all, but Ellen sobbing to herself beneath the thrumming of yet more rain overhead. A thread of alarm wound through Jo as she walked the dark corridor to her daughter's room. Hadn't she been vigilant enough, kept the sickos of the world at bay? What had happened to give her girl nightmares?

‘What's up, Ell?' Jo sat on the single bed and shook Ellen awake. ‘It's okay, bub, wake up.' Ellen's pale face was streaked with tears when she woke, and her eyes had tripwires in them. Say the wrong thing, thought Jo in fear, and she'll snap shut. I'll never get to the bottom of it. Whatever ‘it' is.

‘Poor ting, you were crying in your sleep,' Jo told her, carefully not grilling the girl for answers. She opened her arms, wondering if Ellen would be too old to take comfort there, but the kid collapsed into her embrace. Jo lay down beside her and stroked the back of her head, Ellen's dark curls so much like her own.

‘Something's wrong,' the girl said to the wall through tears and sniffles.

‘Hmmm?' Jo responded, eggshells all the way.

‘Someone's in trouble.'

Jo's gut tightened. Christ. Like Aunty Barb, Ellen had the second sight, and if she said someone was in trouble, then she would be proved right. Didn't normally come in dreams, though, normally it came while Ellen was wide awake in ordinary life. Kaboom – a message from the Otherverse. Or the Dreaming. Twoboy said it was from the old people. Ellen simply knew: periodically she got messages she didn't ask for, about disasters that nobody wanted to know about.