Mullumbimby (32 page)

‘You sure Slim's alright?' she called back. Bad enough that Humbug had been bashed, without his brother going missing as well. If she was in the lockup she'd want someone looking out for her family.

‘Yeah,' DJ replied in easy reassurance. ‘Big lump in him, too! I reckon he mighta grabbed somebody's budigan for feed last night.' They laughed at the idea of a domestic puss coming face to face with a hungry ten-foot python: Humbug's revenge.

As she walked back towards the ute, Jo reached a decision. If Humbug was locked up in Grafton jail, and if, at the same time, Ellen refused to leave her bedroom to go and see the old man, then whatever wisdom Humbug could have offered was unavailable. She had no other option, then, but to go to the water for answers.

Halfway across Torakina Bridge, Jo stopped and gazed down at the steadily rising current. It reached around the massive barnacled posts beneath her and flowed smoothly on either side, shining and rippling as it took the path of least resistance, heading upriver towards the mangroves. A few dark shapes hovered below her, waiting motionless in the deep pools low tide had left. Jalum, holding steady in a world of change. Downriver, just past the caravan park, a brahminy kite circled, ready to drop and snatch a meal. Jo knew that the water she watched was endlessly cycling upriver and down,
travelling constantly between the saltwater and the fresh. It struck her, as she watched the flow dividing around the bridge posts, that the Buddhists were right. Change
was
never-ending. Nothing in the world stood still for long, and to be alive was to move. They were right, but they had perhaps missed something, too, something key about the Bundjalung world of water and trees and jagan which surrounded her. Everything changes, Jo thought, as the current carried her mentally upriver to the fresh water, but not at random. There's a deep system and order to it, because everything is forever turning into its own opposite. Swimming fish becoming flying hawk. Swift hawk dying and decaying into solid earth. Earth reaching skyward as trees, turning to fruits and honey and flowers, falling back down again as leaves. Everything in the world was shapeshifting around her, every moment of every day. Nothing remained as it was.

Aunty Barb had gone in, the same as her parents had. Sally Watt and Uncle Oscar were unreachable, and Uncle Humbug was grasped powerfully tight in the grip of the dugai law. Jo looked down at the flowing path of the river and she set her jaw against these realities. If she really wanted answers, there was only one road open to her. She would have to do what Aunty Barb had always taught. She would sit and enter dadirri; she would watch and listen to the roll of the endless waves until some flash of enlightenment came, some message on how to respond to the rusted barbed wire nest of her life. She would go sit on high ground and find some way to help her suffering firstborn. There was nobody else left to ask. She, Jo Breen, would have to become her own elder.

If Bruns had been quiet, Ocean Shores was a ghost town. All the kids were in school, all the adults gainfully employed, and the tourists departed for points south and north. Jo sat cross-legged on the crest of the hill. She was resting her back against the granite and bronze directional marker that was the last material evidence of humanity between Ocean Shores and New Zealand. She gazed out over the
saltwater, where a distant late-season whale was spouting. A crow perched in the nearby lemon-scented gums, directly above a plaque proclaiming that somebody Devine had discovered this place. Jo would normally have been delighted to see that the crow had crapped purple fig-seeded birdshit all over this spurious claim. Today, though, she barely noticed it, nor the whale either. Her mind was boiling with other matters. It took all her composure simply to sit quietly in dadirri. To do nothing, with Ellen lost and afraid at home.

Sit still, Jo.

But,
her mind argued endlessly.
But.
But Ellen's terrified, and I'm confused, and Twoboy's gone, maybe for good, and what about Rob Starr and Sam Nurrung and–

Knock off yabbering! Jus sit ning. The answers are all there.

Jo sat, following the movement of her breath carefully and deliberately. Five minutes passed, ten minutes, a quarter-hour. She closed her eyes and became aware, beneath the jangling of her nerves, that she had only had two hours sleep. As she sat and stilled herself, though, silence wrapped itself around her, thread by thread. And in time, as she sat more intently, what had seemed to be silence then splintered, as she knew it would, into a myriad of small, discrete sounds. A motorboat chugged slowly upriver from the caravan park towards Mullum. An occasional cry of glee or despair made its way over from the golf course. Cars murmured along the highway. The seagulls at the Co-op a kilometre away squarked and squabbled over the scraps the fishermen allowed them.

Then Jo opened her eyes, for she had once more heard the distinctive chittering of fairy-wrens.
You again, you buggers. What now?
She shifted her weight nervously and waited to be inundated, but the mass of birds from the ridge didn't materialise. Instead, a single pair, a blue-backed male and his drab grey-brown wife, chirped at her from a red-flowering bush on the hillside. Jo looked steadily back, waiting to see what kind of spectacle she would be presented with this time. Encouraged, the male darted up onto the directional marker at her back. The massiveness of the granite and bronze plinth served
to underline that, for all his beauty, the wren was little more than a few dozen feathers and a voicebox. The bird trilled loudly at Jo, and then rose in a kind of arabesque before returning to the flat circle of the bronze disc. His wife joined him and did the same midair dance. Over and over again, as Jo looked up at them, the two birds fluttered in their repetitive pattern above the marker plinth. The movements reminded her of something, but exactly what the
something
was eluded her.

Jo puzzled over it, and then, as she failed to extract any purpose from the birds' flight, her eyelids sagged wearily. She let her head fall back; twisting herself around to watch them was making her neck ache. She no longer watched the dancing, but she saw it instead in her mind's eye, the landing and lifting, the pattern of the birds' movements in the salty air. She ached to understand. Almost certainly it was connected to something important she had seen recently, but her head was a fog of sleeplessness and confusion. Jo groaned aloud, exhausted by her ignorance and the unending demands being made on her to exceed it. The temptation to fall asleep in the sun, and leave these demands far behind, began to take her over.

No. We need answers.

With a tremendous effort of will, Jo forced her eyes open and turned around. As she did so, a fat cloud blew across the face of the sun. Momentarily the wrens became, not birds, but mere dark movement, silhouettes against the looming grey mass of water vapour. For a split second, in the changed light, Jo stopped noticing the birds' feathers, their chittering, and their contrasting colours. She saw only the path they tracked though space, the great looping shapes they were making in the air above the plinth. And then she realised what it resembled. The birds' dancing curlicues looked like the curves the kids had made when dusk fell at the lake, the insults and names that they had written in the air with their glowing firesticks.

The hairs on Jo's arms goosepimpled. Her breathing grew fast. These two wrens weren't flying aimlessly, any more than the flock at dawn had been. The birds were messengers, talking to her in the only
language they could share, dancing their message in the air. Jo had watched their kin on the farm, flitting between trees and bushes time and time again. She had listened to them chirping there, had spoken to the wrens often, at home, at work and this morning upon the ridge. She had even grown to love the tiny birds, but, she now realised with an unspoken curse for her own obtuseness, she had never before really paid attention. Sitting bolt upright with all thoughts of sleep forgotten, she looked at the male with new eyes. Sensing a change, it gave a long, excited trill, then started from the bronze marker and flew west-south-west to its red-flowering shrub. It trilled anxiously at her before it flew back to land where it had begun.

The female went next. By the time the birds had darted west-south-west and then returned twice more, Jo was on her feet and ready to resume her search for the old man, even if meant a six-hour return trip, west-south-west to the Grafton jail. She'd drag Ellen there, if need be.

Jo shouted her thanks to the wrens as she bolted along the hilltop to the ute and hurled herself inside. Screeching to a halt at the stop sign at the bottom of the hill, she turned her mobile back on: eleven missed calls. The first eight were from Twoboy, and were ignored, but the last three were from home. Fear seized Jo.

Then the phone rang in her hand.

‘Come back, come back home now!' Holly sobbed over the screaming in the background. ‘I went to the toilet and Ellen stuck her hands in the fire–'

Jo's right foot hit the accelerator and didn't lift.

The animal screaming had stopped, finally, with the morphine in the ambulance. Now Jo sat beside Ellen's stretcher at Lismore Base Hospital telling Paul to get himself on a flight that afternoon, the earlier the better. Surgery was at seven o'clock. Then she turned the phone off again. She didn't need any more texts from Twoboy on top of the fifteen already unread in her inbox.

Jo leaned back and closed her eyes, giddy with exhaustion and remorse. What had she been thinking, leaving a fragile thirteen-year-old in the care of another
child?
A wave of revulsion ran through her at what Ellen had done. She shivered at the picture of her daughter turning the stove burners on high and thrusting her two hands into the flames, trying to burn away the evidence on her palms. Oh Ellen, my jahjam, my darling girl, what is it we've done?

‘Miz Breen, has Ellen tried to hurt herself before, to your knowledge?' asked a mental health nurse. Jo opened her eyes and tried to focus. Christ. Now it begins.

‘No. Never.'

‘And she wasn't at school. You say you weren't at home with her...' A meaningful pause.

‘Clearly not,' Jo said wearily.

‘Well, when she gets out of surgery, we're going to ask you and her father to come and meet with the mental health team, so we can talk about what to do next–'

‘She's not crazy–' Jo began, then quickly stopped when she saw the nurse's face. There had been blood, and pain, and screaming. And Ellen – the fact made choking tears rise in Jo's throat – had done this to herself. A different tack was required. She swallowed the tears.

‘Is there a Koori liaison?'

‘Are you part-Aboriginal?' The nurse seemed surprised.

Are you part-fuckwit?

‘I'm Goorie.'

‘She's on sick leave, sorry. I could try and find someone from the health service to come over, if you like, but there's a lot of people away at a funeral...'

Ambulance sirens sounded on the road outside, and the normal commotion of a hospital went on all around them. Patients wheeled and crutched past. A man with a face like a smashed crab was hurried past by orderlies; his gay partner trailed, inconsolable, behind them. Lifts rose and fell beyond the glass doors that separated Emergency from the other wards. Forms were thrust at people, to be filled out,
then taken away again. The nurse standing in front of her wasn't unsympathetic, but Jo could feel Ellen being dragged inexorably in the direction of the psych ward or DOCS or both, if she couldn't find a Goorie in a uniform who understood that you might have certain inexplicable reasons to stick both your hands into an open flame and still not be exactly mad. And that, far from neglecting Ellen, she had been trying to find her some help.

‘Can you? I need to talk to a Goorie...' Jo said, as she leant forward to rest her head momentarily on the wall, and fell asleep in mid sentence.

When she woke, Ellen was in theatre. The distance between herself and her damaged child – Ellen, badly hurt on another floor of the hospital, being stitched by dugais she'd never even met – struck Jo fully then. She wept helplessly into the white bedsheets beside her, bent over by great racking sobs of sorrow and failure.

When the storm eased, she blew her nose and got up. She wandered unfamiliar corridors, found some espresso in a cafe, and after a call to Kym that brought more tears and fresh questions, made her way back up to Emergency. She had no desire to share the second-hand smoke and misery of the others waiting around outside; she wanted to be exactly where Ellen would be when she woke up. Through there, the nurse pointed with a clean bedpan, Ward Three. But you'll be waiting a while, she warned.

Jo called Therese, trying not to sound as desperate as she felt, and then briefly considered ringing Twoboy. But she was dirtier on him now than she had been the night before, since if he hadn't pressured them in the kitchen for that agonising hour ... who knew? Her head still swirled with the horror of Ellen's bleeding, crippled hands. No, she'd talk to Twoboy when she was good and ready.

Inside Ward Three, Jo kicked her shoes off and collapsed onto a vacant bed. She pulled the clean sheet up over her head and lay there, hoping to be invisible to the world, or at least unmolested by it. Her
mind raced between the image of Ellen's meat-raw fingers, curled in agony as Holly ran the kitchen tap water over them, and what she'd seen from the top of the ridge at dawn. I'm not mad, she thought suddenly, beneath the hospital sheet, but this must surely be what going mad feels like.

The ten p.m. news scrolled silently on a TV screen, showing a single-fatality accident on the Piccabeen bypass and a grassfire being brought under control at The Pocket. Texts arrived in Jo's phone, and sirens and trolleys came and went as she dozed, but it was a different sound that woke her in the end.

‘Miz Breen, Miz Breen, your daughter's out of surgery. She'll be waking up in Recovery soon.' The nurse smiled as she shook Jo's shoulder. ‘This way.'