Mullumbimby (29 page)

‘You've gone walkabout again.' Kym looked across at her.

‘Just thinking bout Mum and Dad,' Jo said. ‘Dunno why. I can go a week at a time, these days. Longer even.'

Kym nodded and put her hand gently on Jo's shoulder.

‘What's this you've got?' she asked curiously, rubbing at the raised weal on Jo's arm with the ball of her thumb.

Jo told her about falling on the vase.

‘You know that's how some blackfellas get married? With a scar there, just like that?'

Jo laughed and looked in the rear-view mirror at Twoboy. My husband? My
crazy
husband. Not that he's Robinson Crusoe there.

‘Remember Mrs Epstein at Mum and Dad's funeral with the gladioli?' Jo asked. To her relief, Kym nodded at the same memory. It had really happened. ‘Thank Christ Aunty Barb was there for us, eh. I haven't been to visit her grave for the longest time. And after all we put her through.'

It was nine months or more since Jo's last visit. The trip to the Piccabeen cemetery, on the far outskirts of the inland town, was one
of those out-of-the-way journeys that Jo just never seemed to make without deliberate planning. She would go soon, she decided. Pay her respects in person. Take Twoboy along, and introduce him as her man – she should have done that weeks ago, even if it was deep in the heart of Bullockhead territory.

‘Speak for yourself,' Kym retorted, diving into her handbag for chewies. ‘I was an angel, you were the bloody ratbag, always taking off. Well, you and Stevo.' She wound the ute window down and held the chewies out and back for Kai. ‘How is he, anyway, you talk to him lately?'

‘Yeah, last week. They're talking about going to live in Mumbai, now. New business opportunities springing up there, he reckons.'

‘I bet the gunjies chasing him over Devine's Hill when he was eleven never saw that in his future.' Kym shook her head at how their little brother had turned out.

‘All's well that ends well.' Jo had slowed until Kai got both hands firmly on the bar again. She looked pensively in the rear-view. The dogs were milling happily at the far end of the tray. She could only glimpse them through a forest of brown legs, and Ellen's jeans.

‘Eh, look out!' Kym cried as a pair of wedgetails came into view, riding the thermals far overhead. Jo leaned forward and peered up, focusing on the distinct diamond of each bird's tail and the massive span of their black-brown wings. Little wonder the Yanks took an eagle for their national totem, she thought. Blind Freddy could see it was the king of birds.

‘That's Twoboy's meat,' she told Kym, still craning her neck and slowing. ‘And Laz too – all the Jackson men are eagles.' Kym turned and banged on the back window to make sure the crew in the tray had seen. Six upturned faces told her that they had. The wind whipped his words away, but Jo could see in the side mirror Twoboy's mouth moving as he greeted his bird. He'll be pretty happy, Jo thought, now that the eagles had come to give him safe passage onto the country they were about to enter.

After several minutes of driving on corrugated dirt, Jo began to
take note of the sparse road signs on the tracks forking off the main road. It had been a very long time since she'd been to the lake, and she was wondering if she'd missed the turn when a familiar derelict cattle dip told her she hadn't. They bumped down a sandy anonymous trail for two more songs, to eventually find a large clearing in the tea-tree scrub. The lake stretched out, smooth and blue and beautiful, in front of them. The clearing, they were delighted to see, was empty of other people, decorated only with a National Parks list of exhortations in a plastic sleeve pinned to a fencepost, telling the world not to light fires, leave rubbish, bring dogs, nor to kill anything in the area. I'll chain the dogs, Jo thought, but bugger not having a fire. And any pooning that wanders in will just have to take its chances. She couldn't see Twoboy and Jason letting a fat porky wander off uneaten, and fair enough too. Not like they were an endangered species.

‘It's not a total fire ban, is it?' she asked Twoboy, who had no idea.

‘Last one in's a rotten egg!' yelled Jarvis, as he leapt from the tray, ripped his shirt off and bolted towards the water. Jason flung the esky down and sprinted after his middle son. It was Kai who got to him first though, catching his brother by the waistband of his shorts and hurling him in a wide flailing semicircle away from the water.

‘You gone and lost ya fucken marbles, boy!' Jason asked, looking down at Jarvis sprawled on the fine white sand. ‘Don't you know you never jump in strange water straight up? This place don't know you! Crikey!'

Jarvis shrugged, suddenly shamed. He looked away and feigned interest in the freshwater reeds at the water's edge. Jason shook his head, then squatted on his haunches and introduced his family to the water. Twoboy and Jo joined him, performing the necessary steps to ensure they could swim there unharmed.

Two hours later the boys were shivering with cold around Jo's illicit campfire, despite the warm sun and bellies full of burnt sausages.

‘These jahjams need some exercise to warm them up,' announced Twoboy with an evil grin.

He and Jason led the kids into the bush, trekking around the
eastern edge of the lake to where a rocky hill overlooked a tiny hidden gully filled with tree ferns and orchids. From the lake shore, Jo and Kym saw the boys scatter into the undergrowth, chasing goannas. There was yelling, laughter, and no success. Lucky we're not relying on you lot for a feed, their father observed drily.

Twoboy announced soon after that he was leaving them, to head into the bush alone, Kai and Jervis found a thousand different ways to ask him what he'd be doing by himself in this strange country. Their uncle had only one infuriating answer for them: silence. Jason flicked a hand up in salute, and led the boys back to the lake, where Jo, Kym and Ellen were sprawled at ease on the sandy edge of the water, listening.

‘C'mere bub,' Kym said to her youngest later in the afternoon. Timbo was poking at the coals with a piece of driftwood, trying to turn its tip to a glowing orange coal. She put down her sudoku book and brushed white grains of sand off his arms. ‘Had enough to eat?' The child shook his head, and Kym found him the last boiled egg from the bottom of the esky. Jo took the egg and displayed it between her thumb and forefinger.

‘Who disfla?' Jo asked. Timbo screwed his face up.

‘Bilin?' he guessed. Everybody laughed.

‘No, not bilin, bub. Jugi jugi,' Jo taught, as she peeled the egg for him. ‘Got that?'

‘Not bilin,' the child repeated uncertainly, the large white ovoid cradled in his tiny brown hand. Kym and Jo both laughed again.

‘No, it's a bit big for that mate. And we don't eat bilin eggs anyway, not these days,' his mother told him, ‘they're too pretty for that. Not enough of them to be eating their eggs just for fun.'

‘I seen two bilin before,' Timbo said, taking a careful bite out of the white egg, exposing its crumbly yellow core. ‘When the mibun flew up high, high, high in the sky.'

Jo pricked her ears. So, when the eagles were soaring and wheeling overhead that morning, Timbo had noticed two bilin, hiding in a treetop, beside the road. ‘Like this,' he said now, lowering his head
and freezing with his little legs tucked beneath him, the very picture of a king parrot making itself the smallest possible target. Jo and Kym glanced at each other. Nobody else had seen the brilliant scarlet and green parrots, or even suspected them.

‘He doesn't miss much,' Jo said, approving.
Baugul mil.

‘The thing is how much there is to miss,' agreed Kym thoughtfully. ‘I mean most of the time, by definition, we think we
have
seen everything. Because how do you even begin to know what you haven't seen?'

‘Sounds like Schrödinger's cat. That shit can really make your head hurt if you think about it too much,' Jo answered. Right then she was more worried about what she definitely hadn't seen – Twoboy, who was still not back from his quest with the sun now getting alarmingly close to the top of the hill on the other side of the lake. The largest trees, eucalypts and quandongs, were already throwing long slanting shadows across the lake's rippled surface. The water that had looked a bright appealing blue to Jervis beneath the midmorning sun as they arrived was now closer to black.

‘Ellen,' Jo urged in an attempt to take her mind off this problem, ‘give us a hand to put this stuff away, eh?' Ellen groaned, and mimed creeping away, with exaggerated raising of her knees and shoulders. ‘It won't take long,' Jo insisted.

Ten minutes later the camp was clear and the ute packed. Everything and everybody was ready to go – except for the one missing ingredient: Twoboy.

‘I'm freezing,' complained Jarvis. Behind him, Kai sneezed.

Crap, thought Jo, seeing the first bat of the evening flying overhead. She grimaced at the idea of navigating the forking sandy trails at night.

‘We'll end up lost in the hills near bloody Murbah, if we're not careful,' she told Kym. ‘Bugger that for a joke. Be better off camping here for the night and braving the mozzies.'

‘I'll check if any of these tracks show up in the UBD,' Kym offered.

‘Yeah, well, good luck,' replied Jo glumly, wondering if Jason could
navigate by the stars. Bored with waiting, Ellen picked up Timbo's driftwood firestick from the coals and began tossing it end over end at the water's edge. Its reddened tip made narrow ellipses of fire in the grainy air.

‘You get another one, bub,' she encouraged her cousin. Before long all four kids had glowing throw-sticks and were making patterns against the dusk, laughing and yelling, writing their names and miscellaneous insults for each other in the dark.

‘Do you remember how to tell how much light's left?' Jo asked Jason, who wrinkled his nose and shook his head. It had something to do with how many fingers you could hold between the setting sun and the horizon, but what length of time the fingers equalled nobody knew. He held his right hand up. Two fingers. No, not really two, closer to one and a half.

‘Real good blackfellas we are,' mourned Kym.

‘Get a jumper on, Jarvis,' Jason reminded his son. ‘It's in the black bag.'

‘Oh, fuck Twoboy!' Jo suddenly erupted, slamming an open hand loudly against the car. ‘Where the bloody hell has he got to?'

‘Nothing here,' Kym said, closing the street directory, with its useless maps of suburban roads and major highways. ‘We'se waaay too far off the beaten track.' She let the UBD fall heavily onto the passenger seat, and sighed.

‘Try that topo map,' Jason suggested with a hint of smugness. ‘I stuck it in the backpack last night.'

‘Aunty Barb would know about the fingers,' Jo said.

Jason strode to the water's edge and let fly a series of loud cooees that sounded through the clearing and across the lake. There was no reply, and Jo felt a spasm of alarm run through her. Sounds carry a long way over water. Was Twoboy safe, somewhere – or had he finally strayed too far, and too dangerously for the ancestors to overlook his transgressions? Was he lying bitten by a brown snake, or sweating in
agony with a snapped leg in some distant gorge? She let out her own cooee, but the only answers came from frogs and cicadas. Then a trio of kookaburras on the ridge sang out, chuckling. Great, thought Jo, that's all we bloody need – rain. Now we can get bogged as well as lost. She saw a bank of thick cloud building over the hilltop; any faint hope of navigating their way home by the stars faded.

‘Everything alright?' Ellen asked, returning to the car trailed by a petulant Timbo. The boys had thrown his firestick into the lake just to hear its angry hissing.

‘Yeah. Probably,' said Jo, causing Ellen's forehead to crease with worry. She promptly picked Timbo up and rested him on her skinny hip, where he had scarcely been since he was a toddler.

‘Here,' said Kym, as she closed the car door and waved the topo map at Jo, ‘if the tracks aren't on this they're not gonna be on anything.'

She spread the much-folded paper across the bonnet of the ute. Five concerned faces peered down. What had infuriatingly been called ‘limit of maps' in the street directory was, on the topo, a finely detailed area full of whorled contour lines, clearly marked minor roads and symbols indicating landmarks large and small. With her index finger, Jo traced the morning's route from the Burringbar turnoff, south-east through the valley and onto the dirt backroads that had led through the thick bush to the lake. Even the old cattle dip was marked. Kym and Ellen both yelped when Jo's finger ran off the edge: the map ended well before the much-forking track they had taken arrived at the water. Jo twisted her mouth ruefully and looked up. It would still be a risk to drive out in the dark. She found herself thinking about that last boiled egg, and wondering if the thermos was really completely empty of coffee.

‘Well, if we're careful we should be right, eh,' Kym said, finally. Not a statement, but a question. Maybe, thought Jo. Accentuate the positive, unless it means a cold night in the ute tray with four young kids and no fucking dinner.

‘How much petrol you got?' Kym asked, wrapping a damp towel around Timbo, who was starting to shiver in Ellen's arms.

‘Half a tank. It's not that, it's the idea of buggerising around getting lost on these tracks in the dark,' said Jo. ‘And maybe bogged.'

‘We better see if Twoboy turns up, first,' Jason chimed in. ‘How dirty will he be if he turns up and we've gone?'

Let him find the dig tree, thought Jo. Serve him right for pissing off and not coming back, not even thinking of the kids, looking for unfindable answers to questions nobody else is even asking. Who does he think he is, Bilbo fucken Baggins?

‘Mmm,' she answered, throwing another futile cooee towards the water and hearing the sound fade to nothing.