Mullumbimby (17 page)

‘Yeah, stupid me, eh,' Jo managed a feeble smile.

‘Atta girl,' Therese told her with a wink. ‘Let's go inside, I'm bloody
starving.' She stopped herself just in the nick of time from saying what she could eat.

‘You lot go get cleaned up,' Jo informed the others, ‘I'm gonna take a minute here.'

Therese hesitated, and looked over to Ellen, whose thin shoulders had sagged at Jo's statement.

‘Get cracking, bub,' Jo said to Ellen, walking back to the grave alone.

In the days and weeks after Comet's death – in what she came to think of as A.C. time – Jo started to examine closely things around her that she'd barely noticed before. As she drove from the farm into Mullum each morning, she ruminated on the clear fact that the country roads she travelled were lined with fences, boundaries, impenetrable borders. She saw with fresh eyes the road signs and their host of admonitions to slow, to stop, to give way. Where previously she had seen paddocks and house lots (and admired or dismissed the fences around them), now she saw mainly the fences themselves. Even many of the individual saplings on the properties that she drove past were surrounded by wire tree guards, which, of course, were nothing but mini-fences. Everything in the world, she began to see, was bordered. Almost everything was locked up and claimed by other people. The dugai had come and had planted that bloody flag of theirs at Botany Bay, and in the intervening centuries had taken it upon themselves to lace the country tight, using bitumen and wire and timber to bind their gift of a continent to themselves.

Jo obsessed over this inclination of the dugai to take things – normal, natural things like earth and creeks and trees – and tie them up in their endless clever ways. She spent hours looking at detailed topo maps of the shire, discovering in the process that Rob Starr was telling the truth; that the fence beyond the creek which had killed Comet wasn't technically on her farm at all. She rediscovered, too,
that every small part of the ridge, and each acre of the low-lying land along Stoney Creek, each field and paddock and roadside had not simply been named and claimed by the whitefellas. The taking of the land had been more absolute and thorough than she'd realised. Jo found that the pieces of land, dismembered each from the other, the orphaned parts of a now-dissolved whole, were to be found on the maps all
numbered
in the way that the graves at the Mullum cemetery were numbered in her groundkeeper's register. The way that convicts – rapists and murderers – were numbered in prison. Jo found this numbering deeply disturbing.

At the same time, she was occasionally aware that all was perhaps not quite right in her head. The fences had been along Tin Wagon Road long before she had arrived. There was nothing new, either, in seeing tree guards, or stop signs, and in fact her own casuarinas had plastic protectors around them which were clearly a milder, cheaper version of tree guards. She had seen a lot number on her contract when she'd bought the farm, though the significance of it had escaped her then. The newness, the terrible insult she felt at the dividing of her budheram jagan, and at the anonymous authority of the road signs, the horror of the never-ending fences and of the numbering, some subterranean part of her realised, was in herself, not in the world. Jo swung helplessly between these two sets of knowledge: that the universe she inhabited was very clearly being bound and strangled with white people's ruler-straight lines and fences, and that the very fact of not being able to get over this meant that mayb
e – maybe
– she was losing the plot.

And running beneath both these strands was another, complicating impulse that was unmistakable and constant: she needed to travel west, had to go towards the setting sun, in the direction of Mullum, and Piccabeen, and Lismore. She had no idea why.

‘Do you even
know
anyone in Piccabeen or Lismore?' Twoboy asked two weeks later from the hammock that swung on the veranda. An
earmarked copy of a lengthy Native Title document lay face down on his chest, and Jo knew he was looking for any chance to avoid it.

‘I thought you had to make notes?' she lectured.

Twoboy waved the document at her and curled his lip.

‘I keep hoping old fatguts'll have that third heart attack and join these imaginary ancestors of his. We'd be right then. I can talk sense to Sally.'

‘All cos he called you a boy?' Jo asked, recalling the incident outside the New Brighton store a week ago. Oscar and his three grown nephews had sneered from a departing car, telling Twoboy to yanbillilla over the border, onetime, if he didn't want his head caved in. Raucous laughter. Screeching of tyres. And a ton of staircase wit in Twoboy's mouth for the next three days.

Boy.

If Laz had been standing beside him, Twoboy had said in quiet fury, he would have ripped his brother's shirt open on the spot to show Uncle Oscar the scarring that said, Here is a man made by men, and that Twoboy was simply waiting his turn patiently in that ancient queue. But they had been caught off guard, and alone, with only a surfboard and their anger to defend them.

‘That lying black dogfucker is gonna learn that I'm no fool, and that I'm no child either. And revenge is a dish I'm prepared to eat frozen–' Twoboy added – ‘if I have to.'

Jo looked at the creek and decided to take the path of least resistance.

‘I don't know anyone in Piccabeen except for a couple of people I went to primary school with in the Goldie.'

‘You got another man waiting over there, eh?' Twoboy teased. ‘Gonna go play up on me?'

‘Hah, that's all I need,' Jo answered. There was nothing like a death to flatten your libido. A.C. was turning into After Sex as well.

‘It's Mardi Grass this weekend, we could drive over there through Lismore, if you want,' Twoboy offered, pretending to roll and smoke a big fat spliff.

‘You got petrol?' Jo asked. Between the two of them there was usually at least one car with the fuel light showing. But the ute was about fifteen thousand kays overdue for its service. With the rates due in a fortnight, it wasn't about to get it.

‘Full tank. I busked in town the other day,' Twoboy told her. Jo raised her eyebrows. She'd noticed a yidaki in the Commode but hadn't yet heard Twoboy use it.

‘How much?'

‘Eighty bucks in a coupla hours. Woulda been double that, but I kept me gear on.'

Jo spluttered and choked on her cordial, before agreeing that if Twoboy was making that sort of money off the tourists then he could definitely afford to drive her to Mardi Grass. The hippies and their yarndi worship didn't interest her except as sociology made flesh, but they could go through Lismore and she might find out why the hell she needed to be over that way. Maybe shut up the voice that echoed day and night with the nagging imperative to go west, young woman, go west. And Twoboy was right. She did need her mind taken away from the farm, and from the bare red patch in the Small Paddock that she visited morning and night. The low cairn of her offering stones there already reached halfway to her knees.

And there was a third reason to go to Nimbin, too. Apart from anything else, there were fewer fucking fences over there.

The noise was unbearable. A symphony of alarms squealed from all sides. In the midst of the Ocean Shores Bi-Lo, Uncle Humbug pressed his palms hard against his ears and grimaced. Around him shoppers were looking at each other in bewilderment, before reluctantly abandoning their trolleys and streaming out of the centre. Some mothers of small children did this at a run, craning their necks to find out what the awful commotion was about. They expected to see flames crackling at the back of Maria's fruit shop or smoke billowing out from the hairdresser's. A small boy wailed to his grandmother about
terrorists. The shoppers formed clumps of concern on the concrete apron of the shopping centre, while the drone of the Bruns fire-engine could be heard tuning up from across the river. Two thousand bats in the riverside colony squawked and flapped on their branches at this aural disturbance, as though they felt obliged to do their bit to add to the cacophony.

Uncle Humbug set his face grimly and continued to stand in the deli section with his palms jammed hard against his binung. They would come for him any moment. Knowing this, he acted lightning fast and slipped a block of Mersey Valley cheese into the pocket of his jacket. Sure enough, here came that young manager fella, the dugai with the comb marks in his hair and a red rope around his neck that he called a tie. The noise grew even more overwhelming, if that was possible.

‘Mr Milbung!' the dugai cried, his mouth moving silently beneath the sirens. ‘I'm going to have to ask you to leave the building, sir!'
Ask,
his mouth said, but
tell
was what the iron grip on Uncle Humbug's upper arm delivered. Humbug protested all the way to the glass doors, invoking human rights, Indigenous rights, land rights, citizenship rights and any other rights he could think of, but to no avail.

When Humbug had been emphatically evicted, the young dugai made a phone call to security, and the sirens abruptly cut off. The silence which followed had a peculiar quality of stark contrast to what had gone before. The shoppers standing in the carpark became aware that their ears had actually been physically hurting. They rubbed at their heads, and began joking in relief with each other.

‘People!' the manager told the crowd. ‘There's no problem! False alarm! Please resume your shopping. The technical problem has been–' and here he glanced meaningfully at Uncle Humbug who was scowling at the world, smoking a durrie with the skinny Scottish music teacher who had donated it – ‘the problem has been rectified.' The shoppers hoisted their handbags onto their shoulders and prepared to re-enter the building.

‘Who you calling a rectum?' Humbug spluttered suddenly,
forgetting for a moment that he had a kilo of stolen cheese on his person. The manager swung around. He was twenty-four years old, with a brand-new business degree, moderate acne, and a burning desire to get in the pants of Natasha on register four.

‘Mr Milbung, I don't think it's going to do anyone any–'

‘You the rectum!' Humbug cried. ‘All I want's one jugi jugi! Once a fucken payday, is that too much to ask! Truegod, where's the respect for the black man in this country!'

A murmur of confused support ran through parts of the crowd.

‘Dis fella always calling me bad names!' Humbug told the onlookers, shaking his head. ‘And he reckons I can't even go in his shop! Never! Not one time!'

‘Shame,' said the grandmother of the frightened boy to her neighbour. A loud boo erupted from one of the hippies at the back.

‘Talk about bloody apartheid' said his music teacher friend, loudly.

The manager was young but he wasn't stupid; he made another call to security. He then spoke in a low voice to Humbug, who eventually nodded and delicately produced some coinage from beneath the illicit cheese. The manager looked at the meagre coins, and then at the crowd, where four or five locals were organising themselves into the Humbug Defence Fund.

‘Roast chooks are nine ninety-nine, Mr Milbung,' said the manager, suddenly aware of Natasha watching from beside the ATM.

‘Well, let me go gettim. I can put him on my card,' bluffed Humbug, who had rejected plastic money in 1988, chucking it into the rubbish bin along with Vatican Two and the fanciful concept of paying any rent whatsoever to dugai land-grabbers. He took a large step towards the glass doors. The manager immediately took a larger one, blocking his way.

The Humbug Defence Fund bristled.

‘You can't go in there!' the manager blurted, knowing all too well that the smoke alarms would start screaming again the instant Humbug got within five metres of the sensors.

‘You gonna stop me?' Humbug wanted to know, his eyes alight
with the knowledge that the crowd was drifting onto his side. Then, under his breath, ‘You want me to come back this arvo? And tomorrow? And the day after that? Could be a veeery exciting week at Ocean Shores shops...' Humbug took a long drag on his durrie, and waited. He owned no watch, no phone, no clock; he had all the time in the world to wage a campaign of terror upon the Bi-Lo.

The manager smiled weakly, and shepherded Humbug to the far side of the chemist.

‘No. But look. If you'll just wait here, I'll go get a hot chook for you myself. Will you wait?' Humbug agreed with this eminently sensible idea. The manager shook his head slightly and clutched Humbug's four dollars tight in his sweating palm.

‘And some of that good cheese too, mate,' Humbug triumphantly inflated his order as the manager turned to go inside. ‘That Mersey Valley one, eh?'

Jo looked around at the tiny festive township where everyone, Twoboy included, was having a wonderful time. Yarndi flavoured the air, drums were beating, the pub was doing a roaring trade, music was playing and old friends were catching up over cones, spliffs and hash cookies. Placards waved, declaring that the legalisation of marijuana was self-evidently a good thing, that hemp was going to save the world if only it was allowed to, and that recreational drug use was synonymous with freedom.

Above it all, over the heads of several thousands of happy revellers – dreadlocked funky hippies and the young city acidheads, the assorted Murries and Goories and the local baby boomers who'd come in the seventies and stayed – above all of these, Wollumbin sent his sacred peak soaring into a perfect winter sky. Where, thought Jo bitterly, as she looked at the shadow of the mountain's distinctive silhouette falling on the Rainbow Cafe, was this perfect weather when Comet had died? If it hadn't rained cats and dogs that week, would he have sought refuge on the high side of the creek? Gotten tangled in
Rob Starr's barbed wire abomination and died there? No, he wouldn't have, and therefore the blue of the Saturday sky was pure provocation to her.

She looked up at the top of the big mountain, then quickly away. Since hearing the chanting on the ridge Jo had had a rethink about what she'd always dismissed as pure superstition. She knew Wollumbin was strong men's business, and to be avoided at all costs. She turned away from the peak, anxious to get going to some safer country.

Twoboy made his way back through the crowd holding two fish-burgers, and Jo took one gratefully. Biting into the juicy battered flake, Jo saw that the distant peak of the big mountain was clearly reflected in the shopwindow in front of her. There's no getting away from the bloody mountain in this town, she thought uneasily.