Mullumbimby (20 page)

‘Yeah, yeah...'

‘One word from you and she does anything she likes, eh?' Twoboy said, appearing beside Jo, in jeans, flannie and his green woollen jumper, looking like he'd stepped out of a men's magazine.

Jo merely grunted, heading for the next lot of branches. Ellen might drive her up the wall, but nobody else was allowed to criticise her, or even to notice her flaws. The first rule of parenthood. Especially when it was her, Ellen and Therese doing all the hard yakka of harvesting wood, while Twoboy bludged on the internet, pretending to do Native Title research all afternoon when he was probably fucking around on Facebook. She stopped and toed the soft ground beneath the tallow, which was dotted with evidence of overnight digging.

‘The bloody bandicoots are still going for it,' she said, changing the subject. ‘You'd think the dogs'd keep em away.'

‘I'll come out tonight and catch a couple for the pot, if you like,' offered Twoboy.

Jo swung around in surprise. Unlike the roos that came down regularly out of the scrub, she'd never thought of the bandicoots as food.

‘You eat em?' she asked, taken aback.

‘Yeah. We used to trap em in Karawatha Forest as kids. Wallaby and roof rabbit, too. What?'

‘I assumed hunting bush tucker only happens, well, in the bush.'

‘You assume a lot of things,' Twoboy said under his breath.

‘Oh yeah, well, life's short, hey?' Jo flared. ‘It saves time.'

‘Not if you're wrong, it don't.'

Twoboy bent and easily picked up a large log that had been sawed years ago by some long-departed farm worker. He shouldered the timber, as Jo savagely hurled a smaller branch in the direction of the ute, now parked twenty metres away beside the camphors. Her branch fell far short; Ellen clapped sarcastically at the fail. Jo glared, showed her a lone middle finger and gestured for her to pick it up.

‘Who's wrong?' asked Therese, coming up from behind them with an arm full of kindling.

‘Oh, just me again, same as usual,' said Jo, still insulted. She snapped a sizable tallow branch across her left thigh and stood holding the two halves like waddies. Therese raised her eyebrows.

‘So what else do I ‘assume' then?' Jo asked Twoboy testily. ‘Come on.'

Twoboy looked at Therese, weighing up whether or not to engage with Jo in public.

‘Ah, forget it,' he muttered.

‘No,' Jo insisted. ‘Let's have it.'

Twoboy licked his lips and, with the heavy log balancing on his right shoulder, began counting off his left hand.

‘One, you assume that I'm much like every other bloke you've met – that I only ever think with my dick,' he said bluntly. ‘Two, you assume you know what the court case means to me and Mum and Laz, when you clearly don't. And three, I'm pretty bloody sure you assume that I'm gonna do the wrong thing by you, and run away just as soon as I've had my fun or won the case, whichever comes first. Shall I go on?'

Discomfited, Therese wandered away to where Ellen was gathering fallen sticks and making a game of trying to toss them unseen over her shoulder into the ute tray.

Watching Therese walk past the bees and join in Ellen's game, Jo felt winded by the man's sudden harsh commentary, not least because it was true. On some level she did expect betrayal, heartbreak and agony. Not because her lover was Twoboy, but because he was alive, and that's what living people – men, mainly – did in this world. They used you up, hurt you, took your trust and affection and betrayed you. And if they didn't, then you did it to them, often automatically, without even meaning to. Her divorce had taught her that.

But what did he mean about Native Title?

‘Land means everything,' she told him. ‘And how can anything mean more than everything? It means a home you can't be kicked off of. A chance for a decent life on your own country, for you and your kids.'

Twoboy gazed at her implacably and didn't answer.

‘We're still here,' Ellen cried from the beehives. ‘What's the hold up?'

‘Wait up!' Jo yelled, as she stared back at Twoboy, standing there in his green jumper and black jeans, dreads hanging down over his shoulders and the steadily rising wind making the yellow cockatoo feathers in his hair dance a merry jig. Irritation rose in her chest at this silent interrogation. Was he playing at being a Big Man, making out there were mysteries and cultural secrets where none existed? Well, fuck him if he thought he was blacker than she was. She knew plenty of lingo, more than he did. She knew some Law too. And just as important, she really knew the country she lived and worked on. Knew it in her nostrils and in her bones, knew the feel of it under her feet seven days a week – unlike Twoboy who lived behind the wheel of the Commode, forever driving the hundred kays between Tin Wagon Road and Woodridge.

‘So tell me what it means then.
Educate
me,' she taunted, ignoring the long-distance death stares she was getting from Ellen.

‘Do you really want to know?' Twoboy asked, shifting the dead weight of the log to his left shoulder. ‘Or do you just feel like having an argument, and this'll do?'

‘Yes, I want to know!' Jo retorted. Christ. She stuck her hands in her armpits to guard against the chill wind. Too early this year, it couldn't wait for August to start blowing them all into their beds with double pneumonia.

Twoboy put his log down and came closer. He turned Jo around by the shoulders to face Bottlebrush Hill, put his face next to hers and pointed. High above them, the big tallowwood swayed and moaned, buffeted by gusts of wind, as the surface of the dam rippled suddenly with tiny whitecaps. When her man whispered his heart, Jo had to lean in even closer to hear it. Twoboy's gaze was fixed on Bottlebrush and the enormous trees which decorated its peak.

‘Look at that hill. I dunno for sure, but I reckon Mum's old people, a lotta our old people, gotta be buried up there. And for close on two centuries now they've had to watch the dugai come in to this valley. Had to watch em cut down cedars and gums that were as thick around as six men's arms. Watch em run their horrible bloody fences over our songlines. Old Goorie law men and old Goorie law women been sitting up on that hill, dead, while the fucken cattle dip leached poison into their creek, year after year after year. Birds dying, jalum dying. Nothing them old people could do, for two hundred years, but wait for us boys to be born now, in a time when there's a chance. The tiniest chance, the tiniest little crack in the dugai law, to get a little bit of it back, and look after our budheram jagan. Heal it. Sing it. And maybe then our old people might rest easy for once.
That's
what the court case is about.'

Jo shivered, and told herself it was from the cold.

‘And when we win it back–' Twoboy paused, maybe frightened to fully speak his dream aloud in case he cruelled it – ‘then them old people might show us what we've lost.'

Jo reached down to the ground and pulled out one of the yellow-flowering fireweeds that dotted her paddocks. It fluttered in
her hand, whipped by the wind that was tearing up the gully now. Almost everything had been lost when the dugai arrived with their guns and their axes. Which part was he talking about?

She shook loose earth off the roots of the fireweed and then tossed it aside; once dessicated by the sun and wind, the weed would quickly rot and turn into soil again. Jo was about to ask Twoboy exactly what he meant – when, with a great and sudden tearing the tallowwood, let a branch drop.

It fell lethally fast, right beside Ellen, and smashed open the closest beehive. A cloud of furious buzzing insects emerged, looking for their enemy. Ellen shrieked with her hand to her mouth, and Therese took two large unthinking leaps backwards. The tallowood groaned loudly in the wind, threatening to drop more branches.

‘Holy Jesus!' Jo screamed, her feet glued in place with terror – ‘Ellen!'

Twoboy ran to the girl, seized her forearm and pulled her from the drop zone, yelling at Jo to get the fuck away from the tree.

Then they bolted to the farmhouse.

With the windows firmly shut against furious bees, and cups of hot coffee in hand, they were free to imagine What If.

That night Jo made Ellen's favourite dinner, spag bol, and booted Twoboy off the computer so that the kid could have an extra half-hour on Facebook.

‘If I'd lost you today,' Jo told Ellen with a rib-crunching hug, ‘I wouldn't have known whether to shit or go blind, girl.'

‘I love you too, Mum,' Ellen replied. Then, ‘Can I get a puppy for my birthday?'

‘Absolutely not.'

‘A tattoo then?'

Jo peered into her daugher's face. The child was serious.

‘In your dreams.'

Winter wattle made a sensational necklace for the roads as Jo and Therese headed down the highway. Fragrant balls of blossom exploded in lemon and buttercup yellow and gold everywhere she looked, and ten thousand daw poorfellas were no doubt sneezing miserably into their indoor hankies. And ah, look. Mulanyin there, fishing for taran in the drain next to the Ocean Shores entry gates, while the traffic thundered past three metres away. Budgeree jahlela, mulanyin, good eating to you, my bird. Wish I was gonna spend the day jalum bira like you.

Therese was cheerfully gabby as she negotiated the Writers' Festival traffic, dodging a Sunnybrand truck filled with doomed chickens, and accelerating fast past a retro Kombi complete with a faded
Wilderness not Woodchips
sticker from 1987. Just how, Jo wondered idly, did Therese intend to spend a whole weekend in silence? And if there was a direct correlation between silence and enlightenment, why wasn't she herself already topped with a shining silver halo? She, who worked with the dead and lived with a monosyllabic teenager. If it wasn't for Twoboy, and his nightly phone calls when he was in Brisbane, Jo reflected, she could easily go days on end without a proper conversation. Warrigal and Daisy didn't count, not really. There's only so much you can communicate using ears and a tail.

‘Don't worry,' Therese reassured her after an exhaustive rundown
of what to expect on the retreat, ‘if in doubt, just copy what everybody else does.'

‘If you say so.' Jo cast a wistful glance at the river as they drove south through the Bruns roundabout. It was perfect weather for chucking a line in. Just her dumb luck that she'd agreed to sit inside a bloody hut with a bunch of white hippies for two entire days while the sun shone from a cloudless sky. A person must be womba, out of her tiny fucking brain. But then, as Therese had said, it was only one weekend out of a lifetime. And once it was over she would have the power, simply by lifting a cautionary forefinger, to shut Therese up on the subject of Buddhism, meditation and any other improving
modality
she felt Jo was in dire need of, ever again. That'd be worth something, Jo thought with dark satisfaction. That would be worth quite a lot. She picked up an
Echo
from beneath her feet and began leafing through it.

‘That man of yours getting anywhere with his research?' Therese asked, turning into Bruns to pick up supplies. She slowed a little as they drew level with the poor womba woman who was always to be found with her thumb out, travelling between Mullum and the Bruns convenience store, continually disappointing the tourists who, in a fit of holiday-induced generosity, would stop to give her a lift, only to be met with grunts or paranoid silence.

‘Oh, no, not today!' Jo hastily told Therese, and they sped up again, passing as they did young Sam Nurrung. The dark teenager was standing as proud and as straight-backed as his grandmother, thumbing a ride in the opposite direction. That jahjam likes to get around, reflected Jo. I bet he can't wait till he's old enough to get a set of wheels and hoon around like the rest of the kids.

‘Yes and no. They found the exemption records online. But it's hard evidence about Great-grandad Tommy being taken away he needs. Everything else is just hearsay – his grandfather's stories about Bottlebrush, and their totems and all that. The tribunal wants to see stuff written down, not just oral history ... and then the family trees are all so bloody complicated. When you count the northern lot, there's five John Jacksons in the last three generations alone – try
sorting that lot out. Sometimes I think every blackfella in Australia is related.'

‘You sure you and him aren't first cousins?' Therese asked, suddenly dubious. Jo laughed, insulted. Christ Jesus. That much at least they'd been able to work out. There'll be no raising iguanas for me, thankyou kindly.

‘So no two-headed babies coming along anytime soon?' joked Therese.

‘No babies of any sort, thanks. Especially not with twins in his family,' Jo answered, as if the temptation to make beautiful black babies with Twoboy had never crossed her mind.

She fell silent as they drew closer to Byron and its tourist traffic. Getting pregnant. Now, that really would be the last move, welding herself to the Jackson clan and their battle.
Exactly
what she'd warned Therese against all those months ago. She was already waist deep in the big muddy, anyway, just being with Twoboy. Last Wednesday in Mullum, Sally Watt had walked out of the council building flanked by Basho and a bunch of other bureaucrats. Horrified, Jo had been forced to flee into the library to avoid an embarassing encounter with the gracious old lady. And for all Jo knew her own name was now on the same hit list as Twoboy's in the eyes of Uncle Oscar, who had never been known to be gracious to anyone in his corrupt and contemptuous life.

She frowned and rubbed the back of her skull with her knuckles. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.

‘What's up?' Therese glanced over at her.

‘Native Title. Years of hard yakka and fuck all at the end of it, except a community in ruins. It's really ramping up with the Bullockheads. And it's all such bullshit.' Jo paused, and the image came to her of Humbug haunting the Dolphin Cafe that day in May, begging for his supper really, even though Uncle spun it, made it all seem like a bit of a lark. How many times a week did he go to sleep hungry? She grimaced. Native Title wasn't going to fill that old brown belly anytime soon.

‘I mean take Uncle Humbug,' she said to Therese, ‘he must have a Native Title claim to
somewhere.
But I can't see him fronting any tribunal, can you? He's flat out getting over to Bi-Lo on pension day.'

Therese chewed on this for a minute.

‘What's Twoboy say?'

‘He reckons Humbug's just another jumped-up southerner like Oscar. Not to mention having a few dozen roos loose in the top paddock, which isn't really debatable. Doesn't mean he should be left starving in the bloody park though, does it?' Jo replied.

The picture of Humbug cold and hungry nagged at Jo like a toothache. It prompted her to describe a vision she had recently developed of Tin Wagon Road: the farm with five or six houses dotted on it instead of just one, and an Aboriginal family living well in every building, thriving, healthy, prosperous.

Therese whistled. ‘A nice dream, but it's pretty different to how you live now,' she pointed out. ‘Like a hermit.'

Jo nodded, growing enthused.

‘But that's the difference, see. It's my place, so I can do what I like on it ... Twoboy gets proper cranky sometimes, cos he's got so much riding on the court case and I don't.'

‘I can understand him being jealous of the farm,' Therese concluded. ‘And here we are.' She pulled up the steep driveway of the Buddhist retreat, where huge gums framed a stunning view of Suffolk Park and Seven Mile Beach.

Jo fell silent as she reflected on how Therese's view of the world never quite matched her own. They'd been friends forever, since grade four at Billinudgel Primary, but still Therese managed constantly to fractionally misunderstand her. She sighed.

‘He's not
jealous
– Native Title isn't about acreage. It's...' Jo struggled for the words to make Therese understand. ‘It's about honour, I suppose. If he's recognised as a traditional owner, then he's a warrior who's finally made things better for his family, a tiny bit. It's about winnng a war that nobody even talked about for two hundred years,' Jo added as they got out of the car. ‘And its about never giving up,
never,
no matter what.'

Jo was woken early on Sunday morning by a strange rattly annoyance that she didn't recognise. Were tiny elves banging on the leadlight windows of her Sangsurya cabin? She yawned and realised that she had slept through the optional six a.m. yoga that was added to the six hours of daily meditation the retreat required. No great loss there. She yawned again, then realised that for the first time in months, she had slept past dawn. Taken aback, Jo lay looking at the ceiling. Her limbs were relaxed, and her back had mysteriously lost its ache. Yesterday afternoon, during the fourth hour of sitting still and following the flow of her breath in and out, even her neck had softened.
Shit,
Jo frowned,
Therese was bloody right, the bag!
Irritated and amused in equal portions, she hauled herself out of bed and into the shower. As she dressed, she discovered that the unfamiliar tapping was the sound of fairy-wrens manically attacking their own reflections in the leadlight glass of the window above her bed. Mad little buggers, Jo thought with a shake of her head, feeling like she understood them only too well.

After breakfast, Jo joined the others in the zendo for that morning's dharma talk. Sitting on cushions along with the three dozen students, she listened as the teacher, Libby, expounded upon the causes of suffering. The possibility of an end to suffering. The illusory nature of reality, and of the self. Greed, Anger, Delusion: the causes of all our petty woes. All very well, she had commented to herself on Friday night, if you live in Paddington on macrobiotic tofu and organic beetroot juice, but not if you live on Tin Wagon Road with Oscar Bullockhead threatening to cave your boyfriend's head in any old tick of the clock.

When the first set of instructions had been given to the beginners on Saturday, it was all Jo could do to stop from busting out in cynical laughter. Sit comfortably, try not to move, and follow your breath. Or, if you prefer, concentrate on another sense – on what you're hearing, for example, or on what your body is physically touching. Jo had always imagined Buddhist meditation to be about breathing.

‘It's dadirri!' she had insisted to Therese in the cabin later that
night. ‘It's exactly what blackfellas have been doing here for thousands and thousands of years – sitting still and listening to the world. The exact same thing. I've been meditating all my life, fuck ya!'

Therese had merely smiled and raised a finger to her lips to remind Jo that it was a totally silent retreat.

By midday Saturday, Jo had begun to re-evaluate. Sitting inside a hall on a beautiful May day was still middle class hippy crap, but perhaps, she reflected reluctantly over lunch, Libby did have some things to say that were worth hearing. But Jo grew impatient with the silence, burbling with unexpressed ideas; she itched to grill both Therese and Libby. Late on Saturday as she finished her sixth painful hour of cross-legged sitting, it had dawned on her why Libby had such familiar eyes. Their depth and their expression, for all that they were in Libby's dugai face inside a Japanese zendo at a Sufi-styled retreat, were familiar from Jo's childhood. They were, she marvelled, Aunty Barb's eyes set in a stranger's face. It had taken her six hours of sitting perfectly still to see it.

‘So what's the verdict, luvvy?' Therese asked as they packed their bags on Sunday afternoon.

‘There's a lot to it,' Jo admitted, swinging her bag onto her shoulder. ‘But basically it's just what Goories have been doing since the year dot.'

Therese smirked.

‘I knew you'd like it. Not that I reckon you mob were necessarily talking about greed, anger and delusion, back in the day.'

‘I didn't say I – ouch!' Jo lifted her right foot from the floor in sudden sharp pain. ‘What the hell?'

Therese apologised, and bent to show Jo what she had stepped on. It was a bird's nest that she had found in the bush outside.

Jo took the nest in her hands and marvelled. The outer layer was made entirely from old and rusted strands of barbed wire. Inside, the nest had been carefully lined with feathers, and with grey and white down that some long-dead bird had donated for the comfort of her chicks. Talk about resilience, Jo thought, as she turned the singular
object around in her hands. She imagined a mother magpie bringing the strands of fence wire to a fork in a gum tree, and twisting them with her beak into a suitable place to lay her eggs.

‘That's wild, eh,' Jo said softly in wonder. ‘You should give it to the Sangsurya mob.'

‘I offered it to them,' Therese said, ‘but they told me to keep it. And it was on the ground, so the bird's not using it anymore.' She placed the nest very carefully in the top of her rucksack and zipped it inside.

It was not until they were zooming up the highway, almost back at South Golden, that Jo realised: this beautiful nest and the fence which had killed Comet were made of the same stuff. She blinked. Maybe her grief was lifting. Maybe she was starting on the way back to herself.

Humbug regarded Pete the Snakeman, and Pete the Snakeman regarded Humbug, and nothing at all passed between them. Humbug felt his lifelong sense of burning grievance double and then double again. The old story was repeating itself: a trespasser standing uninvited upon
his
land. And not content with that, the dugai world had now seen fit to add insult to injury, to deliberately send this gammon imposter – a white man who thought he knew snakes, the very idea was laughable – to evict him and his brother from where they had lately taken up residence at the RSL memorial.