Mullumbimby (22 page)

‘Nice big flattie she got,' Jo reported.

Twoboy grunted, stood up, and made a whirring circle overhead with his line, letting it soar out till it nearly reached the small island opposite. The line fell with a satisfying plonk into the deep water where Jo remembered the sea turtles of her childhood swimming. She wondered if they still swam there. She had an idea that turtles were very long-lived. Strange to think that while she'd been travelling the continent, living far away in Brisbane and Sydney and other points north and west, the turtles she'd watched as a kid might have stayed in the same few square miles of water for decades, feeling the same currents on their leathery skins, avoiding the same sharks, eating at the same haunts. The animals, Jo reflected, they're the ones who know the country more than any of us ever will. They have no rights and yet all the deep, deep knowledge is written in their muscles and their bones. She stood watching the channel for a long time, but no turtles appeared to greet her.

With her line in the water, she eventually settled down on the flattest boulder she could find. The salt smell of the river filled her nostrils, and the afternoon sun warmed her head and shoulders. She became lost in a lasting reverie, that was only interrupted by the occasional nibble, and by Chris's success in hauling in three bream.

As the tide turned and the bites became more frequent, Twoboy's
dark mood lightened. Finally he cracked open a fresh stubby of Gold, and began to yarn.

‘Laz was over at the archives the other week...' he was telling the women by late afternoon, retrieving his line for the umpteenth time to rebait it. He shook the last piece of squid out and carefully folded the empty plastic bag into his jeans pocket.

‘Yeah?' Jo encouraged, dangling her feet in the cold river water. She was bored with fishing now, lacking Chris's patience or Twoboy's killer instinct that kept them keen well into the third and fourth hours of the line-wetting.

Twoboy gave a twisted grin as he cast one last time in the wake of a passing kayaker who was headed up the inlet towards Simpson's Creek.

‘He was reading about the Straddie mob, just in case something turned up about Grandad in their records,' he said. ‘And – oh, truegod I laughed when he told me, eh – he found this letter in the file from Thomas Welsby–'

‘Early white naturalist,' Jo chimed in for Chris's benefit, as she jigged her line and hoped to make the squid on it look alive. She wondered what Laz had stumbled across; she hadn't heard this tale before. Maybe Twoboy had been saving it for an audience. He certainly seemed pleased with himself as he told it now.

‘Laz shoulda been looking for the Chief Protector reports on the Native Police, but he got sidetracked, as you do. He found this letter that Welsby wrote to the governor, complaining about the conditions on the island. Poor bloody Noonuccals, the government dumped all sorts at Dunwich back then, womba ones, lepers, murderers, you name it. And they set up the missions there, too, as if the Goories didn't have enough to worry about. So Welsby goes and writes this letter complaining that the kanakas over there were all getting around the mission holding these Christmas cards–'

Twoboy shook with fresh laughter. The two women grinned expectantly.

‘–holding these Christmas cards that they'd bought off the
missionary for five shillings each – the poor bastards thought they were buying tickets into heaven!' Twoboy exploded with mirth, rocking back and forth on his boulder, dreads bouncing. Jo locked eyes with Chris, who raised her eyebrows, shook her head and looked away.

‘That's not funny,' Jo retorted. ‘That's fucked.'

‘Five shillings,' Twoboy howled with tears rolling down his face, ‘for Christmas cards!'

‘You're a horrible person,' Chris told him with a sudden upward jag of her line as she felt a nibble. ‘Would you be laughing if they were Noonuccals?'

‘Well, they
weren't
Noonuccals,' Twoboy argued, wiping his eyes, ‘Just a bunch of myall kanakas buying their tickets for heaven!' He exploded sideways again, and had to put his line down or drop it in the river.

‘Can you even
talk
like that?' Jo asked, for there it was. The same worrying tone that had dismissed Carly in Nimbin. And besides, if he didn't knock off and sit ning, the fish would soon be high-tailing it away from the noise and Chris would never manage to feed them all. Jo rebaited her hook with a shred of squid that she had wisely put aside earlier, and then shifted upriver with a copy of the
Echo.
The calm ease of a lazy afternoon in the sun had evaporated, and she needed to be by herself to try and get it back. Jo threw her line in the river and found a comfy tree to lean against. Opening the paper, she discovered with an astonished snort of laughter that the poetry competition had been won, not by one of the shire's scores of angst-ridden unemployed wordsmiths, but by the lumbering and unlikely Basho. Life, she thought in wonder, is nothing if not full of suprises.

‘Let's cruise over and get some chips,' Jo suggested twenty minutes later to Chris, who had decided to sacrifice a bream in the hope of a more impressive catch, and was settled now in the motionless cross-legged posture of a Buddha or serious fisherwoman.

Her friend wrinkled her nose, and kept looking into the current, reading the signs. If Simmo could catch a four-kilo flathead in this water then there was no earthly reason she couldn't as well.

‘Already?' she complained, ‘I'm only just warming up.'

Jo looked at Chris's two fat live bream swimming in the bucket. It wasn't really fair to expect Chris to stop now just because she, Jo, was the worst excuse for a fisherman in the Northern Rivers. She turned to Twoboy.

‘How about you?' she asked hopefully.

His stomach rumbling, and not liking his chances of hooking anything, Twoboy agreed. They decided to walk across the bridge to the Co-op; Chris could drive over and meet them in an hour. Then they would chauffeur their jalum home in style, wrap them in foil, and lay them ever so gently on the glowing coals of Jo's firepit.

Jo and Twoboy padded down the quiet bush track which ran beside the river. It was in poor repair since the big rains: deep potholes cratered the surface every few metres. It hadn't taken long for the ground to dry out though; after a fortnight without rain the crofton weed and lantana along the low edges of the road were already caked with fine yellow dust. They walked quietly, Jo looking and listening for wrens and turkeys and other birds in the thick undergrowth which rose up the hill on their right. Twoboy listened too, harder and more intent than Jo, just in case the song of the country decided to come to him. The shadows of the trees had lengthened, and now bats began to flap by overhead, on their way out of the colony to visit the shire's banana farms and fruiting figs.

‘Mum and Dad used to hunt them as kids, eh,' Twoboy told her, his head swivelling to follow the bats upriver. Jo made a face but Twoboy swore they had tasted alright, before the various viruses of the twenty-first century made them too dangerous to harvest. Jo was all for bush tucker, and for self-sufficiency too, but she thought she'd have to be mighty hungry before chowing down on anything that looked like a bloody fruit bat.

The talk of food spurred her on though, and she saw that while
she wore runners, Twoboy had only thongs to protect his feet from the gravel road.

‘Race you to the bridge!' she challenged as she took off. But even in thongs, Twoboy sprinted past her easily, his knees scissoring high and his dreads flying. By the time she reached the streaming traffic of the main road, he was standing waiting for her, his breathing already back to normal. Jo bent over, laughing, as she heaved for oxygen.

‘You seem to forget I played for the junior Broncos,' he teased her in triumph, checking his phone for messages.

‘Yeah, a million gazillion years ago when dinosaurs ruled the earth,' Jo answered scornfully, straightening.

Her pulse hammered in her neck as they made their way across the bridge. She ran her left hand along the top railing until, at the halfway point, she stopped and faced out to the Heads. She peered down the fifteen-metre drop that the local teenagers all jumped, testing their mettle in defiance of the warning signs, all summer long. It was a bloody long way down to the river; she wouldn't jump it, even if it hadn't been cold as a witch's tit now that the sun was sinking behind Chincogan. The very last rays were bronzing the water and the surrounding bush. Soon that full kibum would be rising over the ocean, dragging the fish in with it. Jo closed her eyes and breathed the rich strong mud smell of the mangroves on the southern bank. Listen, she thought. Feel. Smell. Be alive, here and now. Underneath the hum of the traffic the faint cry of gulls from the Co-op reached her, and she felt her worries sliding away with the tide. Ah girl, never forget to be grateful. You really do live in paradise, standing on this budheram jagan.

‘When I go back in,' she told Twoboy, opening her eyes, ‘scatter my ashes here.' She pointed to the bank of the river where the tangled trees hid a midden and other ancient stories. There was no reply.

Jo looked around to discover Twoboy standing rigid, his legs far apart and his arms folded. Stalking towards them from the southern end of the bridge were Oscar Bullockhead and his burly nephew Johnny. On the shoulder of the road a blue Falcon XR6 had screeched
to a stop in a hurry, and that might be Oscar's girlfriend sitting in the passenger seat with what sounded like a crying kid on her lap.

Jo's gut clenched in alarm. Fuck me days. What now.

‘Here we go. Get behind me,' Twoboy muttered, staring at the two men approaching. He handed Jo his phone.

Before Jo could answer, the enemy were upon them.

‘You wanna get back to the other side of the border, cunt,' said Oscar, getting up in Twoboy's face and jerking an angry thumb towards the north bank. His nephew, a big yellow-skinned boy of about twenty-five, smirked nastily. Jo saw that he was holding a length of narrow poly pipe diagonally across his back, a hand on either end. That was the kind of people the Bullockheads were, she thought with horrified insight, the kind to carry weapons in their cars, just in case you needed to randomly smash someone.

She checked the silhouette in the distant car, almost certain it was a woman and a kid. If it was another bloke they'd be gone for sure. But of course another bloke would have gotten out, and would be standing there already beside Oscar and Johnny.

‘Is that right?' Twoboy asked. He put on a show of calm Jo couldn't help but be impressed with. ‘Yez gonna double-bank me now?'

‘Too fucken right that's right. So take your gin and ya pretty-boy haircut, and fuck off back up where ya come from,' Oscar instructed heavily.

Gin, thought Jo, momentarily distracted from the looming danger, long time since I've been called a
gin
to my face.

Out of the corner of her eye she noticed the traffic on the bridge slowing, intrigued faces peered out of car windows trying to catch a glimpse of the drama before they whizzed past. One sedan let out an excited scream of approval as it went by. Some shithead who couldn't resist vicariously getting in on the excitement, Jo thought with a mental shake of her head, someone with no fucking boundaries at all. And us about to die.

‘I don't reckon I will, ya know,' Twoboy informed Oscar lightly, as though the three men were discussing whether to go to the shop.
Johnny took a step forward, poly pipe tapping at his left palm now in a transparent indication of what Twoboy had coming if he didn't flee. A momentary flash of rage crossed Twoboy's face. Then he shut his reactions down with a deliberate, physical effort.

Did they see that shudder of his shoulders, Jo wondered? Do they really know what they're doing here? Does he?

Twoboy turned away from the muscle and danger of Johnny, and back to Oscar.

‘This ere's my grandfather's country,' he informed Oscar. ‘And he told me to come look after it. So I reckon I'll be stopping ere, onetime.'

‘You bin told once,' Johnny taunted, pointing straight at Twoboy's face with the pipe. ‘So fuck off, ya lying black cunt, and get back up ta Queensland.'

Twoboy smiled, almost but not quite managing to hide the fury in his half-lidded eyes.

‘Do ya want me to take that thing off ya and show ya how to use it, Johnny?' he asked with a dangerous smile.

Jesus, thought Jo, here we fucken go. Was she supposed to step in between two blokes fighting? Was a woman an equal party in all this? Did obese old Oscar count as a combatant? She was holding Twoboy's mobile phone with all its valuable evidence of death threats, and it needed to be kept safely out of the river, too. What, she suddenly wondered, would constitute living my
best life,
right now?

Before Jo could work out a strategy for surviving the afternoon, Johnny spat a gob of phlegm close to her feet, then stepped in and swung hard and fast at Twoboy's skull. With a fluid movement, Twoboy swept towards his attacker, turned in a semicircle and some how ended up standing where Johnny had been ten seconds earlier. A sheen of sweat glistened on his ebony forehead. Several dreads had broken loose of their leather thong and were hanging over Twoboy's face. But it was he, not Johnny, who was now holding the poly pipe.

Johnny was clearly unhappy at this reversal of fortune. He shook his right wrist hard, as though he could flick away the pain of holding
the twisting pipe for several seconds too long. Despite losing his weapon, though, he stayed facing Twoboy. A stream of invective continued to pour from him.

The kid's got guts anyway, Jo thought, greatly relieved to see the pipe change hands. Then, to her horror, Twoboy tossed it over the railing into the water. Oh, that's just perfect, she thought, just bloody perfect. You idiot. What'd you do
that
for?

‘We's going this way,' Twoboy told Oscar, breathing hard. He rested a hand on the bridge railing and indicated the path to the Co-op with an economical movement of the other. ‘So I suggest yufla get back in ya flash car and keep going too, before I get proper cranky.'