Mullumbimby (30 page)

‘Good thing Jase thought to chuck the topo map in, eh,' Kym said to nobody in particular, slapping at the first blood-engorged mozzie of the evening.

‘I got sick of doing unplanned overnighters when I was about twenty,' Jason told Jo, ‘I'm a proper little boy scout these days.'

As he spoke, a loud cooee trumpeted from the bush behind them. They swung around, relieved and singing out in response. A minute later, Twoboy emerged from the scrub, grinning and unharmed.

He hadn't been lost, he claimed, sucking great gulps of orange cordial, he just hadn't been in any great hurry to get back to the car. No worries.

‘Ah, gammon not lost! You reckoned you'd be back well before dark,' Jason mocked, as the women rolled their eyes at each other.

‘Well, look la – sun not gorn yet!' Twoboy climbed up into the ute, plopped himself down in the tray and pointed scornfully to the last tiny hint of gold that was lowering itself behind the ridge. ‘You Wakas too scared from the hairy man, are ya? Or are youse like dugais – scared of the bush?!'

‘I wouldn't be joking about dugais if I'd just been walking in circles for three hours, bruz,' Jason retorted.

‘If you've
quite
finished, let's just hit the road, eh?' Jo announced. ‘Get these jahjams home.' There was no time to be standing around swapping insults as the dark fell.

‘Don't go overestimating the charms of your company, brother,' Twoboy asserted. ‘I knew exactly where I was the whole time.'

‘It's the same,' Timbo said to his mother's back as she rearranged the bags in the cabin to make room for her feet. He was crouched over the topo map, which had fallen onto the white sand beside the ute.

‘Yeah, I believe you,' said Kym to Twoboy over her shoulder. ‘Millions wouldn't. Give that map here, bub, time to shoot through now. Get a jumper on Timbo, will ya Kai, or he'll freeze.'

‘Mum. It's the same,' Timbo repeated, to no avail.

‘Jump in the back, lad,' she repeated, lowering herself with some delicacy around the carefully positioned bags. Jason vaulted into the tray beside Twoboy and began extracting the jumpers the boys would need for the ride home in the cool night air. He beckoned Timbo towards him.

‘Look, Arnie Jo,' Timbo whinged, pushing the creased and folded topo towards his aunt.

‘Just make sure that fire's right out will you?' Jo asked Ellen, looking around to check that nothing got forgotten. She tapped the tailgate, causing both dogs to leap wetly into the tray. To her amusement, they shook copious amounts of lake water over the unrepentant Twoboy. He kicked out at them and growled in cranky protest. Jo laughed.

Baugul warrigal.

‘Hurry up, Timbo, we wanna hook it,' Kai moaned from the tray, squeezing Jervis aside to claim the central spot on the bar. A war of elbows ensued. Finally noticing Timbo's frustration at being ignored, Jo squatted down beside him in the circle of yellow thrown by the cabin light.

‘What's wrong, bub?' she asked impatiently. The child pointed at the passenger door where Ellen had pressed her red hand the previous afternoon.

‘It's the same,' he repeated, pointing at the topo. ‘See?'

It took Jo several moments to understand what he was talking
about. When she did get the sense of what the child was saying, the noise of the others instantly fell away. What had been idle chatter at the end of a long and happy day, was replaced abruptly by a kind of roaring blankness in her head. The world shrank in a split second to what lay inside the circle of yellow light: herself, the intricate whorls of the map, Timbo's tiny brown fingers curled over the edge of the paper, Ellen's red handprints.

‘Sweet Christ Jesus,' Jo whispered. She stared from the car door, to the map, and back again.

Everything was there.

The contour lines, roads and watercourses of the country shown by the map were marked in exact replica by Ellen's red palm print. Starting just below her daughter's fingers, the artery of the Brunswick River wound its ancient way through the valley. The major roads snaked over the land, with smaller gravel offshoots falling away to either side in the hills. There, mutely represented in clear red traces on the white car door, were the bitumen roads, built on bullock trails, that were built on the paths that the Bundjalung had made with their bare jinung before Rome was thought of, before Christ walked or Mohammed breathed. Before almost anything. Ellen's been carrying the entire valley around with her for thirteen years, unknowing, Jo thought wildly.
I gave birth to the valley.
Wordlessly she reached out for Ellen's right wrist. She turned the child's hand over so that her palm was clearly visible under the cabin light.

Everybody had fallen silent.

‘Gimme that pen you had,' Jo finally said to Kym, without taking her wary eyes off Ellen. She held her breath as she traced each line of her daughter's palm in black ink. When she was finished there was no need to compare it against the topo. The map of flesh staring back at them was exactly correct.

Jo dropped Ellen's wrist, and stepped back, staring at her from the edge of the circle of light. She felt blood thrumming in her ears. Kookaburras laughed loudly on the ridge, but Jo didn't hear a thing.

‘What's it mean?' Ellen asked in a tiny voice.

‘I don't know,' Jo told her. ‘I don't know. But it'll be alright. If it's there today, it's always been there.'

I hope it'll be alright. I hope it's always been there.

‘Do yours,' said Ellen shakily. But when Kym used the pen on Jo's hands, a random assortment of unfamiliar lines appeared, telling them nothing, just as they did on her own, and on Twoboy, and on the boys. Night fell, and in the darkness it seemed clear that this business belonged to Ellen, and nobody else.

Jo drove away from the lake feeling as though a thick fog had risen to separate her and Ellen from the rest of the world. Her daughter sat trembling beside her in the front seat, her face tense and pale, eyes fixed on the dashboard and her hands pressed down hard against her thighs in denial. Jo craned forward as she drove, headlights piercing the night, as she tried to make some distinction between the forking paths the road presented her with. After four or five uncertain guesses that proved correct, she eventually recognised a particular burnt-out tree, and swung the steering wheel hard left with a great sigh of relief. A couple of minutes later they passed the cattle dip. With the others yelling and hammering on the cabin roof in triumph, Jo reached out and took Ellen's right hand. She held it to her shirt just above her heart, and said the only thing that seemed to make any sense.

‘You're safe with me, Elle. So don't panic, not yet.'

‘But what's it
mean?
Why's it on me, not on you or Aunty Kym? Or Twoboy?'

‘I don't know,' Jo said truthfully. ‘But if it's there now, it's always been there. The only difference is we know about it now.'

‘I hate this stuff,' said Ellen vehemently, on the verge of tears. ‘I
hate
it!'

‘I know, but it's part of you, Elle,' Jo said carefully. ‘We're gonna have to find a way to live with it. Together. We all are.'

Jo squeezed the jahjam's hand hard, then started to put her own hand back on the steering wheel, but Ellen laced her pale fingers
through her mother's, and stubbornly refused to let go. As they drove the dirt tracks back to the Burringbah turnoff, Jo swallowed the claustrophobia that surged through her at Ellen's clinging. With a deliberate effort, she fought down the almost overwhelming urge to reef her hand away to freedom. At fourteen, when she was running wild, looking for trouble anywhere she was likely to find it, Aunty Barb had held her close and had loved her. That old lady had wound herself around the child that Jo had been with the soft words and tenderness that a hurting teenager craved. Now, however difficult it was, however much it felt to Jo like her hand was locked in a slowly tightening vice, she knew she had to keep holding on. She would become Aunty Barb, keep Ellen close in her turn, and in that way, her terrified daughter's world would be kept from splintering further into chaos.

Later that night Jo sat frozen into immobility at the kitchen table. Ellen was perched on a wooden chair beside her, bony knees drawn up to her chest, as Twoboy talked on and on, intent on making his case. It is really very important, Jo thought in a hazy, disconnected way, that all I do now, for this minute, is continue to breathe. Don't speak. Don't argue. Don't, above all, raise your eyes to the man standing there and start screaming at him, because once you do ... once you do ... Beneath the endless words streaming from Twoboy, a part of Jo was dimly aware of the kitchen knives, resting in the slotted knife box on the other side of the room. If I just sit still, and breathe, and don't scream at him, and
definitely
don't move towards the knives, it might all be okay. If only he would just shut up; shut up and go away so that my head could begin to work again.

‘But can't you see it's why we had to go to the lake?' Twoboy urged. His black eyes were alight with triumph, for he knew that his quest was over at last. ‘The song on the ridge was a red herring. Or only meant for you, Jo. But this is different, this is Proof. We can show them her hands and then there's no arguing with it, because it's right there staring them in the face! They
can't
deny it!'

‘She said no way,' Jo answered in a dead voice, wishing Twoboy would just get in his car and go, as Kym and Jason eventually, reluctantly, had gone. Like any tribunal judge would care about Ellen's hands.
If it pleases Your Honour, come and have a dorrie at this.

‘But it's the key to the whole bloody thing!' Twoboy argued, losing his last fragment of patience after more than an hour of fruitless back and forth. ‘It's the last piece of the puzzle, Jo! It's the proof we've been after for five fucking years!' He stood squarely on the other side of the table, clenching and unclenching his fists on the back of the chair in frustration. Ellen shrank further into herself, lowering her face onto her knees so that she became invisible behind a curtain of brown curls.

‘Your binung painted on or what?' Jo repeated wearily. ‘She said no an hour ago,'

Ellen began silently crying. When Jo turned, it was to glimpse a single fat tear sliding down her daughter's face, hovering at her pale jawline before dripping onto the leg of her jeans, darkening the sky blue denim to cobalt. Ellen once again had her mother's left hand in a vice-like grip, and all of a sudden Jo didn't find this terrified clutching to be claustrophobic at all. Hot rage at Twoboy boiled up in her like lava. Jo knew that she was on the verge of becoming somebody very dangerous indeed.

‘She doesn't get the legal implications,' Twoboy ploughed on, not seeing Ellen's tears. ‘That's why she's saying no. But Elle, if you just knew what it could mean for us, for Mum and Uncle Laz and–'

Jo looked up and locked eyes with the tall man. She realised, as though from somewhere outside of her body, that she no longer really cared if she started screaming at him. Whatever it took to make Ellen stop crying and shaking. That was what she would do. Talking wasn't working, therefore it was time for Twoboy to leave the house. That would make space for something else to happen. When Jo spoke again, it was in a very clear and deliberate tone.

‘She's not fucking stupid. But she's a kid, she's
thirteen.
And she said no. So you need to go now, and let us sort this out on our own.'

‘You wanna think about what you're doing, Jo,' Twoboy warned
grimly as her words sank in. He folded his arms and glared across the kitchen. ‘It's no time to be sittin on the fence, here. You're part of this case. You wanna give that up? Let the dugais win? Let Oscar steal this country from under us?'

Christ, can you even see this jahjam shaking in front of you? Jo thought. She stood and put her hands firmly on Ellen's narrow shoulders. Can you see the prison of fear she's locked in? Or is she suddenly invisible to you? Jo felt the lava rise higher, almost into her throat. Her eyes flicked to the knife box and back.

‘Listen. You're way off tap if you think any white court's gonna give two shits about her hands. But even if they did then I'd give it up like that,' said Jo, snapping her fingers. ‘Let Oscar fucking have it. Let them win. How can anything be
winning
if it hurts her this bad?'

Twoboy gave a short astonished laugh.

‘Let them win.
Well, that just says it all, doesn't it?' he answered bitterly, staring at Jo.

Jo knew now that she wouldn't go to the knives. Somehow, the instant she had uttered the words
let Oscar fucking have it,
her body had begun to change. Jo now felt the fleshy boundaries of her skin weirdly dissolving. She became tremendously heavy and solid. There was no need for knives, nor even for argument, for she was as massive as a mountain, as heavy and immovable as Chincogan or Bottlebrush. Standing in her kitchen with her hands on her daughter's quaking shoulders, she had somehow grown large enough to contain every Bundjalung woman who had ever stood near the place she stood. With her palms on Ellen's shoulders, she was a thousand black women, ten thousand black women, a mighty army of Goorie women who had been holding their jahjams safely on this same spot for tens of thousands of years. As her body swelled and rippled with this army's massive strength, Jo came to understand that she was no more alone than the stones in the creek were alone, or the blades of grass in the paddocks.

‘That's it, bub,' said Aunty Barb, carefully rolling a smoke in the corner of the kitchen. ‘That's the way.'

‘You know what you remind me of?' Jo said to Twoboy, dangerously quiet. ‘Those people that go I'm not racist
but.
I'm not sexist,
but.
I'll tell you this onetime, Twoboy Jackson – if you love me, you'll drop this crap right now. Cos there's more to Law than some bullshit dugai court will ever know, and there's more to life than politics. And if you can stand there in front of me and talk about making this jahjam go to court, and not see her crying, not hear her saying it's too bloody hard for her, then...' Jo shook her head in utter disgust.