Mullumbimby (28 page)

‘Yeah, we must've done something right,' Annie said with a small smile of pride, sliding the rugs off to reveal the horse's sculptured lines. The filly flicked her creamy tail at an imaginary insect on her flank, then rubbed her dark nose against a foreleg. Her large eyes held a haughty expression, not caring whether or not the humans watched her. She was a princess holding court before her inferiors.

‘Far fucking out. What's her name?' said Jo, entranced.

‘We registered her as Burringbar Hotrod, because she's a Hot Cat granddaughter, but her stable name's Gift.'

‘Wow. You gonna start her before you sell her?' Jo asked. The taffy let out a loud whinny to one of the broodmares outside, and shifted nervously in the stall, her tail swishing with mild anxiety. Not yet settled from her trip up, Jo thought, still working out where in the new herd she belonged.

‘Steady on, love. Who said I'm selling her?' Annie said. Of course, Jo chided herself. A filly like this didn't come along every season; Annie would keep her to breed from, try and get more of the taffy colour into her herd, and the height and that fine-boned head, too.
Maybe by the time Gift was dropping foals in a few years, Jo'd be in a position to buy one. She should get Annie to stick her on the list of people lining up to buy the colt foals. Jo dreamed of rounding up cattle in the Big Paddock aboard a leggy taffy gelding that could turn on a dime.

‘How did she end up taffy?' Jo asked with a wrinkled brow, suddenly curious. Taffy was a genetic variant of black, and neither Annie's stallion nor the father of the bays was black.

Annie laughed. ‘Ah, now there's a story. Her mum's an escape artist from way back – that little bay Hot Cat mare, remember her? Well, when she was down south last year – having been trucked there, mind you, at great bloody expense, to have a dirty weekend with Jagged Edge – she decided she liked the look of the thoroughbred across the road better. Big, black mother of a thing that placed in two Caulfield Cups. Mum jumped the fence and here's the result. She should make sixteen hands, I reckon.'

Jo laughed, too. That adventure meant the filly was a first cross stockhorse, not a pure blood. That would bring the price down a little. Say four thousand. Still unimaginably out of reach.

‘So you like her, eh?' Annie was squinting into the stall.

‘Yeah,' replied Jo, ‘of course I do. She's bloody beautiful.'

‘Well, mate, there's a reason we called her Gift,' Annie said.

Jo looked across, not understanding. Doofus nudged her leg, and Jo reached down and patted the dog without taking her eyes off Annie. She waited for an explanation.

‘She's yours. We registered you as the new owner,' Annie said, sticking her hands in her jeans pockets and leaning back against the stable wall. Ellen let out a squeal of delight that made several sets of ears swivel her way.

Jo instantly shook her head, ignoring the childish voice inside her that was screaming to say yes. She didn't want charity off Annie. Off anyone. Land, yes. Justice, yes. But not bloody charity. The awful loss of Comet wasn't for Annie to try and fix; she wasn't responsible for that. She wasn't even a dugai. That tragedy had nothing to do with her.

‘I don't accept charity off friends, mate. Thanks anyway.'

‘Hang on a minute. It's not charity, exactly,' said Annie, watching the filly, who was now rubbing her nose on the steel mesh partition of the stall. ‘I'm not losing anything on her, put it like that. Just accept that the horse is yours – that she's meant for you. And don't go looking her in the mouth too hard.'

‘Take her, Mum!' Ellen urged, horrified at the idea of the filly being lost because of her mother's stupid pride. ‘Don't be an idiot. How else are you ever gonna get a horse like that?'

Jo shot Annie a curious look. Not losing anything on her?

‘I'm serious,' Annie said, beginning to smile because she could tell Jo was about to give in. ‘Accept her gracefully, and don't ask too many questions. She's yours. It's really very simple.'

‘She's not stolen, is she?' Jo probed, chewing on her bottom lip.

Annie laughed and said she would show Jo the papers back at the shed.
Therese,
thought Jo suddenly, tears accumulating hotly behind her eyes. This is Therese's doing, with some of that ten grand from the scratchie. She looked at the filly and began to imagine owning her. Riding her. Putting her in foal, eventually, and breeding more taffies. Watching newborn golden colts and fillies cantering in her paddocks beside their mother.

‘I'll truck her over for you today, if you want,' Annie added with a huge grin.

‘You've made me cry now, you bloody beeyatch.' Jo blew her nose.

‘Stand next to her,' Ellen instructed, raising her mobile phone. She took Jo's picture with Gift looking over her shoulder at the camera.

‘Its a crap photo,' she informed her mother. ‘Your face looks all blurry. She looks good, but. See.'

‘My face
is
all blurry,' Jo said, wiping her streaming eyes and going into the stall to introduce herself.

‘I'm heading up the top now,' Twoboy rumbled. ‘You coming, or what?'

Jo briefly took her eyes from the wonder of Gift, grazing right there in her paddock, to look at her lover stowing an MP3 player into his backpack. His question was pregnant with meaning. Whose side are you on, it asked, mine – or the rest of the world? The man had spent half the afternoon testing the device, readying it for this latest excursion to the ridge. As he waited for her answer, Twoboy squirted white insect repellent onto his hands and smeared it thickly over his neck and ears, readying himself for the long hours of searching. Its chemical stench filled the kitchen, overpowering the incense that Jo had just burned in an attempt to drive out the lingering smell of the mould the big rain had left behind.

‘I said no,' Jo flared. ‘Which part of no are you having trouble with, exactly?'

There were a million things she'd rather do than go up on the ridge and seek out the talga of the dead, full moon or no full moon. If she thought it would make any difference to the case, then maybe –
maybe
– she would have agreed to go along with his crazy obsession, stepping by his side onto that dangerous ground. But her man was living in cloud cuckoo land, chasing after songs and meanings that no dugai in Australia would ever consider important, or even admit were real. Maybe a wild-eyed anthro or two might agree
that the ancestors were talking to him. Everybody else would sling him in the Lismore clinic onetime, and throw away the key. Same as they'd lock her up if she went around telling everybody about what she'd heard beside the fallen gum. They'd be whipping out the Melleril before she had time to say
audio – visual psychosis
or
schizophrenic tendencies.
It was lose – lose, and this little black duck was staying right at home where she belonged, thank you very much.

‘Then I'll go by meself,' he answered, turning abruptly on his heel and heading across the Big Paddock. ‘Thanks for nothing.'

‘Ah, get over yaself, ya womba prick,' Jo muttered, and turned her back on Twoboy and the ineffable mysteries of the ridge. She eyed, instead, the infant walking-stick palms that she had uprooted at work and brought home to replant around Comet's grave. The half-dozen seedlings were clustered in a muddy bundle against the side of the feed shed, and she had plenty of light left to get them in the ground if she hurried. Then maybe time to do another session on the lunge with Gift. Jo's face softened.

She wondered for the thousandth time how she should best respond to Therese, who consistently denied, grinning and shaking her head, that she had anything to do with the horse's sudden appearance in her life.

‘I'm gonna go whack these in near the dam,' Jo called to Kym.

Her sister, along with Ellen and the boys, was standing at the ute, which was now newly decorated with an assortment of stars, handprints, and stylised local wildlife. The cheerful art reminded her of Rover Thomas but with a distinctly east-coast flavour. On paper last night Jo hadn't been convinced, but she was proved wrong now. Splashed over the doors and bonnet of the car, their bold, simple Goorie designs in red, black and yellow looked exactly right.

‘Good eagle!' Jo praised their efforts with a tiny pang of misgiving. She and Ellen would be conspicuous everywhere they drove now; no more hiding away in the anonymity of just another white Toyota. The car proudly proclaimed that here were Goories driving around, coming soon, alive and deadly, to a town near yufla. Jo hoped that
the Bullockheads were planning on keeping to the south of the shire; they certainly wouldn't have any trouble finding her on this side of the river if they came north. Maybe it was time she, too, started carrying a pipe or a baseball bat behind the driver's seat. Ah, lordy. What
would
Buddha do?

‘She's pretty flash, eh?' Kym said proudly, putting a finishing touch to a purple platypus swimming towards the ute's rear wheel, which now stood for a waterhole.

With her passenger door complete, Ellen suddenly dumped her brushes in a vegemite jar of water, roared a mock threat and broke away. She chased Jarvis and Kai, trying to smear her paint-reddened hand across their faces. The boys shrieked happily as they did dust-spurting laps of the house. Daisy and Warrigal barked and bounded alongside the kids, tails wagging sixteen to the dozen. As Ellen ran out of puff, the boys and dogs collapsed in a pile of giggles beside the car – where Timbo was intently using a mango twig to scrape a delicate pattern in the yellow paint of his turtle.

The lad's pretending to write his name, Jo noted in amusement. Well, we've got a muso and a couple of decent artists in the family now, must be about time we had a writer.

A perfect day. Jo grinned some more and fought the temptation to turn a hose on the tangled pile of boyish limbs in front of her. She longed to hear her nephews scream and laugh all day – the sound that had echoed through this valley for thousands of years. Happy blackfella kids,
jahjam minjehleyni.
The tanks weren't big enough to squander the water though, so Jo went, instead, to put her trees in the ground.

‘Come and slap ya hand on ere first, tidda,' Kym called. ‘It's your car.' Jo obediently came back, to place a yellow palm on the driver's side door where a space had been left below the Milky Way for just this purpose. Twoboy wasn't here to add his print, she said then – he'd gone up to begin his crazy vigil on the ridge again.

‘Tilting at windmills, eh? What that fella reckon he's gonna find up there?' Kym asked, beginning to tidy the paint and rinse the brushes
under the outside tap, turning the muddy puddle beneath it into a watery rainbow.

‘Enlightenment, maybe,' Jo said. ‘Christ only knows. Who knows what men think?'

‘It's for court, but, hey?' Kym pressed.

Last night Jo had finally told Kym about hearing the talga. Jason had enough similar tales from Waka Waka country to make Kym listen and nod thoughtfully. It was a shame, the sisters agreed, that Aunty Barb had passed, since their old aunt would have known exactly what to make of the talga, or at least what to do next. Jo told Kym that, since asking Aunty Sally Watt obviously wasn't an option any more, she intended to look for Uncle Humbug and get his opinion. That's if he would agree to yarn. Some weeks only Slim was privy to Humbug's communications, and besides, the old man had been keeping a low profile lately. Someone said he'd been locked up again, poorfella.

‘Can't Twoboy just ask his mum?' Kym looked up from her dripping brushes to the ridge.

Mum Jackson was pretty vague to start with, Jo explained, and a minor stroke a month earlier had disabled her even more. Laz had been at his wits' end trying to keep on top of his son's misdemeanours, keep Mum Jackson out of hospital, and do the Native Title research as well.

‘That's the thing about elders, eh?' Kym responded wryly, flicking her brushes dry. ‘They're
old.'

‘Yep. But Twoboy thinks he's the man, and can short-circuit the process,' Jo said. ‘Go bush and talk to the ancestors, straight up. I keep expecting him to come back down and say yeah he found em, and they told him to get a haircut and get a real job.'

Kym laughed, then grew more thoughtful.

‘It's a fulltime job, Native Title, eh?' she said. ‘It's driving Jason's family mad too. Shitfights everywhere you look. First cousins not talking after fifty years, brothers bashing brothers, it's Colonisation 4.0. The dugai don't have to lift a finger anymore – they've outsourced it to us.'

‘Yeah, you're right. I really think Twoboy's finally lost the plot, too,' Jo said. ‘He thinks if he can just get them old fellas singing on his little recorder, he can learn it and sing it in language at the tribunal, and that'll prove the connection he needs. But, I mean...'

She opened her palms and shrugged in mute frustration. It was madness.

‘That doesn't make sense,' Kym agreed, narrowing her eyes. ‘Not unless it's been written down somewhere already by anthros. Even then.'

‘I tried to get Laz and Uncle Cheezel to talk sense into him, but no good,' Jo went on. ‘The stress is pushing him right over the edge, I reckon.' She sighed mournfully and walked away to the dam.

Half an hour later, with dusk falling, the spindly palms had been planted in a circle around Comet's cairn. Come next summer, she told the colt, there's gonna be red berries fruiting all around you, lad. That'll bring bilin bilin for sure. Jo went to the fringe of the pine grove and checked the she-oaks. Each of the two dozen saplings she'd planted in May looked to have survived the worst of winter. Most were now beginning to poke their dark green tips out of the tops of their plastic bags, Jo noted with approval, as she ripped crofton and billygoat weed from around their bases.

Finally she stood tall and stretched her tight back muscles to either side, then washed her hands with a bucket of dam water. Jo whistled for Gift, banging on the plastic of the empty bucket.

The filly immediately came trotting over from where she'd been grazing beside Athena, neck arched and tail high. You are so bloody beautiful, Jo thought, putting a moist hand on the soft dark velvet of Gift's muzzle. She couldn't even look out her kitchen window at the filly without a big silly grin on her face. Horses were so easy to love.

‘Can one of you blokes grab that esky?' Jo asked the next day, staggering to the ute with her backpack, a long length of dog chain, assorted towels and jumpers, and a three-litre bottle of orange cordial.

Jason shouldered the blue and white esky and eased it down into the tray of the ute where dogs and kids milled in noisy chaos, fighting for space and vantage points. The big boys and Ellen were standing with their arms looped under the bar that ran across the top of the cabin. Twoboy and Jason both sat beneath, their backs against the cabin, looking at the tailgate. Timbo was firmly wedged on his father's lap with strong tan arms lacing him where he belonged. The dogs resigned themselves to being lowest on the pecking order, standing at the men's feet with their tongues lolling.

‘Youse wanna hang on tight,' Jason warned Kai and Jarvis before calling, ‘Drive nice 'n' slow, sis, we don't want any of these lads sailing over the top.' He stubbed his durrie out on the scoured white paint of the tray and redoubled his grip on Timbo.

‘Nah, foot it, darl. They'll bounce,' Twoboy joked, then he instructed the boys on how to stand, with legs spread wide and their knees bent to absorb the shock of the rough roads. Despite hearing nothing the previous night on the ridge, his mood this morning was buoyant. Perhaps today, at the lake, far from prying white eyes and the interference of mobile phone signals and satellite TV waves, he would at last receive the ancient messages he was waiting for.

‘Yeah, I know,' Jo called back, with a dubious glance in the rearview mirror. The boys were safe enough at low speeds, but she doubted they'd have the stamina to stand and cling for the forty minutes of dirt track it would to take to get to the lake. After checking once again with Kym that she didn't want to take two cars, Jo slowly reversed out of the drive. Beneath the lychees, Athena and Gift briefly raised their heads to check on the movement of vehicle and humans, and then returned, satisfied, to their endless munching. The outline of Gift silhouetted against the backdrop of green hills stayed with Jo as she drove south into Billinudgel; the creamy contrast of the filly's mane and tail to the bronzed slate of her body, her delicate nostrils, the sharp ridges of her cheekbones running beneath satin skin. That darkest brown of her wise eyes.

I think I could stand and look at them long and long...

‘You're miles away, aren't ya?' commented Kym, bringing Jo back to the cabin. A carful of Murries in the other lane of the Pacific Highway suddenly tooted and yelled in appreciation of yesterday's art. Yep, this automatic visibility, thought Jo, tooting and waving back, was going to be the future. Oh well. Probably do Ellen good to have a bit more recognition, help her feel okay about living in that lily-white skin.

‘Ah, look at this bloody dickhead, will ya,' Jo sneered, as a buttercup yellow Hummer roared past them in the right-hand lane at a hundred and forty kays. On its rear window was a large Australian flag inscribed with the legend:
Support Our Troops.

‘They support the troops alright,' Kym replied, ‘till they come home foaming at the mouth with PTSD. Who else is gonna die to fill their petrol tank?'

‘You reckon they've thought it through that far?' Jo asked sceptically.

‘Nah, probably not. But did you hear they've brought out a more affordable version of the Hummer? It's a car sticker that says
I'm a complete fucktard.
Fits any model, apparently.'

Jo laughed.

Then the Burringbar exit came into view, and she pulled off into the hinterland, where boolimen were scarce, and wouldn't be magnetically attracted by the art and the dark bodies in the tray. The busy clamour of highway traffic was replaced by a Kev Carmody CD and by the wind rushing past Jo's right ear. As they hit the first stretch of dirt and heard the kids shriek with excitement at the potholes, she slowed even more, and realised that the drive was going to take a lot longer than they planned.

‘Crap,' said Jo vehemently to the steering wheel, ‘I forgot to bring matches. And the bloody insect repellent.'

‘Nah, it's all good. Jason's got his lighter,' Kym reassured her. ‘And there shouldn't be many mozzies at this time of year, eh, not during the day.'

‘Real good blackfellas, eh,' Jo mocked herself. ‘Can't go bush without a carload of crap. Not like the old days.'

‘Yeah, I remember when we was littles, eh,' Kym agreed, ‘Mum'd give us a box of matches and a spud to put in our pocket, and say gorn, get, I don't wanna see yez till its dark.'

‘I meant way back when, but yeah, I remember...' The tallow-wood trees beside the road were in heavy blossom. The delicate creamy flowers reminded Jo of the gum blossom that had decorated their parents' coffins in the Ballina funeral home. Aunty Barb had insisted on native Australian flowers; a white neighbour, Mrs Epstein (Jo suddenly remembered this for the first time in nearly thirty years), came bearing a beautiful bouquet of yellow and orange gladioli, and had to leave them in the foyer. Only gum blossom was allowed to go to the fires with Mum and Dad. Shit, Jo thought, why think of that horror today? It was going to be a good day, a family day at the lake, and there was no need to dwell on morbid things. She hadn't gone to counselling for two years to be dragged backwards to childhood misery, not after all this time.