Mullumbimby (21 page)

Pete the Snakeman shrugged.

‘Sorry, mate, just doing me job. Normal people don't want snakes in the middle of town.' Pete turned away and added under his breath, ‘Or dirty old abos either.' He retrieved from his truck a long wire lasso, specially designed for extricating dangerous creatures from places they were feared or unwanted.

Humbug fumed. Until now, the Mullum RSL memorial flame had been an ideal spot from which to extract his rightful tithes from the community. The neighbourhood centre was right there next door, a
handy source of hot meals, cuppas and sympathetic female attention. Public toilets no more than twenty steps away. And the razzle-dazzle itself across the road. The club was, naturally, unavailable to him with his black face, his ragged attire, and his lack of ready cash, but as a veteran Humbug found some contrary solace in the building nevertheless. And he'd discoverd it took surprisingly little effort, in the late afternoons, to walk to the park beside the river and find enough dry palm fronds to turn the symbolic memorial flame into a real, substantial fire capable of warming himself, Slim and a tribe of motley hangers-on through the length of a chill August night.

Overshadowing all these pragmatic attractions, though, was the symbolism of the war memorial. It marked a sacred site – sacred enough that even the dugai (universally milbong and binung goonj as they were) could see it, and had gone to the trouble of solidifying the fact in white marble. Humbug well recalled his most recent release from the hospital a week ago. He'd walked the length of town in search of a lift home to Bruns. Upon reaching the RSL, he had stood in front of the low chain separating the marble monument and its flame from Dalley Street. Inscribed in the dignity of bronze he had observed the legend:

Humbug had never learned to decode the white man's writing, but he could recognise a snake track when he saw one. Since he was of the snake totem, and Slim was, of course, a python, Humbug felt that his path was clear. Slim took a little convincing to shift home so abruptly, but Humbug had patiently sat and explained the merits of the move until his brother finally agreed to give it a try. They had hitched up from Bruns the same afternoon.

But now, this dugai. Standing here with his van and his noose. This new and intolerable outrage.

‘You can't pucken touch my brother!' Humbug instructed Pete
the Snakeman hotly. His angry brown forefinger jabbed the air between them like a fang.

‘Can and will. It's me job, mate. Now hop it will ya?'

‘This is a
sacred site,'
Humbug insisted, as though to an obtuse child. ‘Ya got no pucken business here!'

Pete the Snakeman adjusted his lasso. He moved closer to where Slim was coiled asleep in the sun at the rear of the marble monument.

‘It's a sacred site for the bloody RSL, mate, not your lot. What war were you in, again?'

Humbug smiled a humourless smile that didn't reach his eyes, and allowed the contempt he felt for this imposter to show on his lips. The fool didn't realise he had been born into war. If Australia had a sole surviving battler, he was it. Humbug's mother before him had lived her entire life warring with the welfare which took seven babies off her, distributing them, apparently at random, to orphanages and foster homes throughout the land. His father's campaign against the mission superintendent and the tame blacks who did his bidding had consumed the man day and night until it killed him of sheer rage at the age of fifty-three. Humbug, stolen from his mother's arms in the hospital – or no, not
in
the hospital, out the back of the hospital in a dirty lean-to on a pile of stained chaff bags – taken from his distraught mother and gifted to the nuns down south, had likewise been at war for every single one of his forty-nine years. And now this cheeky dugai, standing there with a wire rope to twist around his brother's neck, ready and all too willing to effect another removal, wanted to know what war he'd been in?

Well.

‘This one,' cried Humbug, shattering the Snakeman's nose with his hard right fist.

Outside the courthouse, Sergeant Adams stiffened, and headed for the memorial, unhooking his handcuffs. The old darkie, making trouble again. It was about time he had a tune-up.

When Jo arrived home from Sangsurya, Ellen and Twoboy were waiting for her in the kitchen. Ellen thrust an entry form for the art competition at her. Pleased, Jo quickly scrawled her assent on the dotted line. Art is good. We like art, for our kids and for everybody else. Then Ellen handed her a large white envelope.

‘What's this?' Jo asked suspiciously, fearing some unexpected bill. Creation was good for the soul, but was she going to have to fork out for oil paints, or expensive hog-bristle brushes, or...

‘A present.' Ellen had that brittle look on her face again. Craving approval, but ready at the drop of a hat to back away into the refuges of sarcasm and anger. Her daughter reminded Jo of the turtles that sunned themselves on the rocks in the Bangalow Creek; tentatively poking their heads out, but hard shells always at the ready if trouble should arrive.

‘A
present?'

Jo glanced over at Twoboy, who was waiting with an expectant grin for her to open the envelope. Her mouth fell open as she took out a fine ink sketch of Comet grazing beneath the distant lychee trees. Across the bottom of the drawing Ellen had written:
Comet Breen. RIP.
Jo's heart clenched tight with pain and with love. She hugged Ellen tightly to her as she told her that she loved the picture, raising her eyebrows at Twoboy over the child's shoulder.

‘I dunno what you said or did to her,' she told him before releasing Ellen, ‘but whatever it was, keep it up.'

‘You underestimate that girl, you know,' Twoboy answered mildly.

‘How about we paint the ute when Aunty Kym gets here?' Jo added as she threw a packet of frozen snags into the microwave, noting that the dogs were almost out of dry food. ‘She might have some good designs. And some paint too, for that matter.' They had discussed turning the old bomb into an art car many times, but it just never seemed to happen. ‘And you could talk to her about the competition, too, see if she's got any ideas.'

Ellen shot her mother a withering glance. She went to her room and when she returned a couple of minutes later, she silently handed
over a large sketchpad. Jo took it in two-handed amazement. Ellen had never volunteered to show her sketchpad to anyone, ever. Something was shifting inside the child for this to happen. Jo smiled, grateful for this tiny, unheralded step into Ellen's world, as the microwave dinged behind her to say the snags were defrosted.

When she opened the sketchpad, Jo discovered a term's work that made her catch her breath and sink slowly onto a kitchen chair. Ochre handprints emerged from flying clouds of dust that suddenly became the eyes of an eagle looking down from the peak of Bottlebrush. The Milky Way – Emu in clear view – soared above a winding river of diamonds which mirrored it in the valley below. And a pencil drawing of a decayed red quandong leaf – its ribs remaining after it had been eaten out by miniscule snails (exactly as Jo had seen them lying on the banks of Stoney Creek) – which rested at the base of a grove of walking stick palms festooned with bright red berries.

Jo was lost for words. The drawings weren't just technically excellent. The kid had infused them with a real knowledge of country, and a vision that went way beyond thirteen. A shine of delight entered Ellen's eyes as Jo sat transfixed.

‘Who taught you this?' she finally breathed.

‘Different people. Aunty Kym mainly. What I've seen in shops. Twoboy. And DJ taught an art class at school this term. I have got eyes and ears, you know,' Ellen added slyly, ‘mil
and
binung.'

‘Told ya.' Twoboy ruffled Ellen's hair affectionately.

‘Huh.' Jo rifled through the rest of the sketchbook, discovering that almost everything in it looked gallery quality to her. Had anyone spoken to Ellen about selling her work, she wondered, about being a professional?

‘I don't mind painting the ute with Aunty Kym,' Ellen told Jo with haughty teenage dignity, ‘but I don't want any help winning that prize.'

‘I don't think you
need
any help,' Jo replied. ‘These are really, really good. How deadly are you?' She looked up at Ellen, her dark hair
falling around a pale heart-shaped face, her green eyes dancing with pleasure.
My daughter, the artist.

‘Yeah, I know, eh?' said Ellen, taking the sketchpad back and grinning.

Jo fed Aunty Barb's fishing rod backwards through the rear window of the Commode and into Chris's waiting hands. Then she hopped in the front and slapped her thighs. ‘Hey-ho, let's cruise, the bream and luderick can't wait to jump on me hook today,' she said, thinking that when the moon rose over the hill tonight it would be round and fat and full. ‘This arvo is gonna be my lucky day.'

‘If them jalum hear you skiting,' Chris chastised the back of Jo's head, ‘they'll be long gorn, yanbillilla to Tweed by the time we get there.'

Behind the wheel Twoboy offered no opinions on fishing or anything else. His mind was overflowing with tribunal depositions, State Library files, and the unwelcome lawyerly advice, offered two days ago, that their paperwork was still far too weak, lacking in hard evidence of who Grandad Tommy was or why he had left the area, let alone that his ‘cultural ties and traditions' had been maintained by his descendants. As he drove past Devine's Hill into Bruns, Twoboy looked through jaundiced eyes at the country that seemed to be slipping, slowly but inevitably, from his grasp.

Clutching frozen bait and iced coffees from the Caltex, the troupe drove back over the bridge. They turned onto a narrow bush track that ended in a clearing where a small rocky peninsula jutted into the river. The three Goories got out and immediately fanned away from the car, making a slow careful circuit of the open space, gathering up the ugliness of crumpled tin cans, dirty plastic bags and loose tangles of fishing line that others had left behind to strangle the pelicans and choke the turtles. When the country had been appeased and the offenses of these nameless others amended, the time was right for jalum bira.

In clear view on the opposite shore, a scattering of fishermen stood next to the Co-op, reeling in and casting out in states that ranged from exaltation to misery. Most were ragged flanny-wearing pensioners from the caravan park trying to supplement their meagre government pay, but a late model Prado had disgorged a cheerful family of tourists who, Chris muttered, couldn't have caught a fish if it leapt out of the river, Free Willy style, into their waiting arms. The tourists had come well prepared in their Gap t-shirts and red tab Levis, and had brought along, for good measure, a barking beige Labrador with a comical plastic funnel around its head.

‘That warrigal be picking up SBS over there, la,' noted Chris in quiet amusement.

Jo sputtered with laughter as she watched the animal take its lampshade head over and piss surreptitiously against the tourists' own esky.

The Prados stumbled about, unfolding their camping chairs, dropping brand-new handlines into the cracks between the rocks, and generally making enough noise to scare half the fish in New South Wales over the border. In a dead gum behind Twoboy, the resident brahminy kite waited for the right moment to swoop down, cross the river, and steal the Prado's bait while they weren't paying attention. Twoboy simply stared momentarily across the water at the dugai, then stalked away towards the oyster sheds, shaking his head. Colonised by wankers.

Suddenly a whoop made Jo swivel around. Upriver, Simmo, a Wiradjuri whose boy was in Ellen's grade, was steadily winding in something heavy that was fighting for its life and making her frizzy blonde halo shake with effort. Every eye on the riverbank was soon fixed on Simmo's curved green rod and the outstanding tendons of her skinny pale wrists. Her freckled face split wide open in a massive grin when a monster flattie rose to break the surface. Brilliant drops of saltwater flew as the fish twisted and writhed in the air, flashing silver. From downriver the Prado kids broke into spontaneous applause.

‘Ooh, yes, my favourite!' Simmo expertly deposited the fish on the grassy river edge in triumph.

Jo called out in admiration, and discovered that Simmo was using prawns and long shank hooks, not squid and round hooks.

‘But you'll pick up a nice bream with that tackle,' Simmo advised, packing up to take her trophy home for tea.

Jo strolled over to where Twoboy was baiting a handline, as far as he could get from the sight of the Prados and the other dugai fishers. Normally he would have burleyed the water first with a pointed rock, but he wasn't about to do that with every bastard in northern NSW looking on, albeit from the other side of the channel. And what Jo was doing taking advice from whitefellas on how to hunt in her own country, he couldn't fathom at all.