Mullumbimby (5 page)

As Jo rode away along the fenceline, he began to trot in agitated
circles, tossing his nose at the sky. He neighed a frantic neigh, unsure of himself in his new paddock, and hating to be left alone there. Bloody herd bound, Jo cursed, what a pain in the neck that could turn out to be. Then Athena shied beneath her, pretending to see snakes in the long grass under the lowest strand of fence wire, and Jo grabbed the left rein, digging her heels in and wheeling the mare in tight circles as punishment.

‘Don't leave that hose running too long, alright? We're not on town water anymore,' Jo ordered over her shoulder.

‘I'd forgotten. It's been at least five minutes since ya told me,' Ellen called back with a face like thunder.

‘If you weren't binung goonj I might not have to tell you things a thousand times,' Jo retorted. ‘And if you rode this flaming horse properly I wouldn't have to re-educate her every three weeks.'

Ellen stiffened.

‘She went fine for me at Oliver's,' she yelled. ‘Maybe it's you that needs to ride her “properly” and not be so mean to her.'

‘Yeah?' Jo reacted. ‘Well, if I'm “mean” to her it's because she needs to know who's in charge – not her. Same as you're not. Goddit?'

There was no reply from Ellen, who was now stalking back towards the house with her fists clenched at her sides. Jo fumed and bellowed at this insubordination, swinging the horse around.

‘Ellen! Don't you walk away from me! Have you been riding this bloody mare the way you're supposed to, or not?'

The girl stopped and stood stock-still without turning around or acknowledging her mother's question. Her thin body radiated displeasure and tension.
Fuck you.

‘Cos I had a visit last week from a neighbour who reckons you've been riding his horses up the bloody road. Without asking.' Jo was horrified to hear this come out of her mouth. She'd meant to broach it tactfully, over hamburgers or something, when Ellen was in a mood to open up. But she was aching all over from fixing the farm – had been aching all over for a fortnight – and now Athena was being a mongrel, and Ellen had turned her back on her, which you just don't
do to your mother. Not if you don't want attention, you don't. Real quick attention upside of the head, same as she got as a kid with far less provocation than this.

‘Well?'

‘Yes. I've been riding her!' Ellen turned to face Jo. They both knew it was only half an answer.

‘Just bloody watch yaself, alright? We're always gonna be easy targets around here.' Jo's voice was hard, but she didn't know what else to do. She had a mighty job on her hands. Keep the locals onside, keep Ellen in line
and
talking to her, not a silent hating teenager like so many of them seemed to be, keep the cops well away so that disaster in a uniform didn't have a chance to find them, keep the animals healthy and alive, get the farm cleaned up, get to work on time five days a week and keep Basho happy, especially now there was a mortgage to consider.

‘Is anything I say to you sinking in?' she asked, at last allowing Athena to come to a breathless halt. Ellen shrugged. ‘Well, is there anything you want to tell me?' Jo asked in exasperation.

Ellen suddenly spoke the truth. ‘I miss my town friends. And I'm sick of all the work here. I never wanted to move here in the first place, it was your idea to buy a farm. Not mine.'

The girl stood with her arms folded in the shadow of the Piccabeen palms hanging over the bathtub. Jo sighed, and hauled Athena's head up from the paspalum patch she'd just found. Hadn't she spent night after night explaining to Ellen what it meant to have their own place? To have the horses right outside the back door, and much more important, to be owners again of some Bundjalung land? To take back even a tiny fraction of what had been lost? She thought Ellen had wanted it, too, as badly as she did.

Comet neighed and half-reared, his anxiety growing with every minute his mother was on the other side of the fence.

‘Well, look at it like this,' Jo told Ellen shortly: ‘You're gonna spend about six billion years turning back to dust in that bloody cemetery once ya dead, so take this as a very short enforced holiday away from the place, okay?'

‘Oh, you've got what you want, and I'll just put up and shut up. Fine!' Ellen stormed away into the house muttering curses under her breath that she wasn't foolish enough to say to her mother's face. Jo heeled Athena into a canter and left the latest drama of motherhood behind, as Comet took to his heels too, rocketing up the length of the paddock, bucking wildly and protesting his abandonment all the way.

‘Whaddya waiting for, hotpants, a written invitation?' came a familiar merry cry from the the side veranda. Jo peered into the dimly lit space where Therese, Amanda, and two other figures were perched on the deck. She wandered over, wrinkling her nose in disdain.
Hotpants.

Drawing nearer, Jo saw in horror that one of the men was the blackfella from the bookstore, looking as good up close as he had from half a street away. The weathered dreadlocks which cascaded down his broad back were tied together with a yellow cord that ended in a tassel of cockatoo feathers. A narrow leather bracelet beaded in red, black and yellow circled one wrist. From close quarters she saw now that his very dark skin wasn't down to Islander blood. A few strands of loose hair that had escaped his dreads had no kink to them, and his features were too Aboriginal to evoke the islands of the north, or of the Pacific either.

Ambushed, she leaned on a veranda post, glared at Therese, and felt her internal defences fall into place, unbidden. Slam, slam, slam. They slid sideways and they slid vertical, like the doors on ‘Get Smart'. All of these doors were solid, locked, and smoothly impenetrable. All of them had emblazoned on them the same simple and undeniable message:

‘Fellas – this is Jo Breen, our mate, the one with the farm I've been telling you about.'

Therese affectionately threw a crooked arm around Amanda's neck, crossed her legs and flashed a look at Jo that said
Well?
Jo gave her one straight back that read: Did I even say I was looking for a man, you cheeky slag with your ‘meet us at the pub' and your ‘wear that red t-shirt', ooh, your arse is so grass my friend, your arse is so fucken grass.

The man grinned, giving Jo the little chin lift that signalled acknowledgement and he didn't look away. Then he didn't look away some more. Jo, transitioning at warp speed from wary to transfixed, was sideswiped with lust from behind her slammed-shut doors. Oh for Chrissake, she snarled at herself, you're not fourteen. Get a fucking grip, girl.

‘Which way?' said the man, still not breaking their eye lock, his smile broadening.

‘Same way,' said Jo. Her pulse surged in her throat, and she was frightened to say more in case she jabbered rubbish. She stuck her hands in her jeans pockets and bunched them into fists.

Good-looking men are nothing but trouble.

At that moment, Basho lumbered past, his cumbersome pot belly banging the edge of their long wooden table. Apologising, he had to say ‘g'day Jo' twice before his voice even registered. Rob Starr wandering through to the servery covered in engine grease and red mud didn't rate any kind of attention at all. Then Amanda finally leaned over, breaking the spell; she pulled Jo onto the pine bench seat beside her.

‘Hey spunky, you scrub up alright, don't ya? Jo – this is Twoboy and Laz. The Jackson Brothers – straight outta Compton. Compton Road, Woodridge, that is.'

‘The Jackson two,' Jo said, relieved to have regained the power of speech.

‘That's it,' Laz agreed from the opposite side of the table, a slightly heavier, younger Twoboy without the dreads or the juice.
The gelded version, Jo thought, then mentally smacked her hand for thinking it.

‘Your shout, moll,' Jo told Therese.

‘Stevo turn up yet?' Amanda asked.

‘Two guesses,' Jo answered, wincing with the strain in her aching legs as she stretched them beneath the table.

‘My little brother,' she explained to the Jacksons. ‘We're fencing this weekend. Guess who hasn't shown.'

‘Fencing's hard yakka,' Twoboy answered knowingly. ‘You'll feel that the next day.'

‘Last time we done any real fencing was out round Canungra as young blokes, eh?' Laz chipped in. ‘Must be a good, what, fifteen years since I sunk any posts.'

‘Well, anytime you feel like rediscovering the lost art, brother, just say the word,' Jo replied. Like Twoboy, Laz was tall and well-built. He looked like he could shift a fair bit of timber without too much effort. But Laz simply laughed. No fucken way, his gap-toothed smile said.

‘So, you fellas been round town long?' Jo asked, as Therese handed her a beer.

‘We drove down from Brissie with our old Mum a couple of weeks ago,' Laz answered. ‘She gone home to the grannies in Logan now, but we're staying put. We got a nation to rebuild.' And it will take a nation of millions to hold us back, Jo thought automatically.

‘True. So you're Bundjalung then?' Jo replied with a faint hint of suspicion. You're pretty dark for Bundjalung boys.
Where the hell are you from?
Are we related, or enemies by default, thanks to some long ago war that our relatives fought with each other? Or so distantly connected that we might be what dugais call strangers?

The temperature at the table dropped a couple of degrees. Laz grew still, and the gap between his front teeth went into hiding. It was Twoboy who replied, with ice just beneath the calm surface of his voice.

‘Too right we're Bundjalung. This is our great-grandfather's country we're sitting on here.' Twoboy palmed the air in demonstration, Tupperware style. ‘This pub's on our land. Nudgel. Tin Wagon Road. All the way up to Crabbes Creek. Us Jacksons are claiming the lot, onetime.'

Jo could just about hear Uncle Oscar Bullockhead in Piccabeen having a heart attack from where she sat.
These two black bastards waltz into town and start chucking their weight around, telling lies about whose country this is...

Twoboy waited for some sign of assent or approval, but Jo found she had no words. What was Uncle Oscar going to do when he heard about this declaration of war? And Aunty Sally Watt? The silence at the table grew taut as Jo imagined the firepower of the Bullockhead and Watt families coming up against the two Jackson brothers.

‘So you're dead set slapping a claim over the valley then?' she asked.

Her grin made this something between an innocent query and an outright challenge. The silence at the table expanded, bulging at the seams with unspoken tension.

Twoboy put his stubby back down and then laced his fingers together behind his head. Slowly he leaned backward and gazed across at Jo. His tongue found the inside of his top lip and pushed it out. Anxiety burned all the watching faces. With his hands behind his head, Twoboy's biceps had flexed into dark sinewy peaks half-showing beneath his snug black t-shirt sleeves. Jo wondered if he knew how gorgeous he looked, and thought that yes, he was a smart bloke and he probably did. But when Twoboy finally spoke, there was no flirtation left in his voice or his eyes. What he was lusting after, Jo suddenly saw, was not a woman for a night or a week, but for his country. The man spoke with utter certainty and great emphasis.

‘That's it, sis. I'm the eldest and that makes me the one true black-fella for this place la. Our great-grandfather, Tommy Jackson, he knew this valley back to front and inside out, and he knew who he was too, a Bundjalung man robbed of his rights by the land-grabbers. Fred Wheeler kidnapped him into the Native Police in 1864–'

When she heard the words Native Police, Jo gave a tiny involuntary flinch sideways. Twoboy noticed, but he continued in a strong, level voice.

‘–and the first chance grandad Tommy had – after about a week – he shot that booliman over him. He took off running and didn't stop till he got past Rocky.'

Ah.

‘He didn't have any interest in murdering Goories for the benefit of white men and their bullang. He didn't like that idea one bit, so he grabbed a station girl from the north, and they travelled all over the Top End together. Laying low his whole life with a false name cos of that dead sergeant. But he knew where he really belonged, made sure all our family knew it too. I got his name, and I got his meat. And now we're back to collect what's ours. Humble Pies n all.'

The silence returned as Jo and the others digested this.

‘Black Power Pies,' joked Laz, raising a semi-ironic fist.

‘Bloody oath,' agreed Therese amiably, holding her stubby to the light to assess its state, which was nearly empty. ‘Sounds like a plan.'

In the next three seconds, Jo came speedily to certain conclusions. These were that (a) native title over the Billinudgel valley generally, and the Jackson family genealogy in particular, was really none of her business; (b) that getting involved in the looming shitfight between Jacksons and Bullockheads and Watts was asking for way, waaay more trouble than she had stomach for; and (c) above all else, her daughter and her farm with its title deed sitting in her kitchen drawer were the only things that really mattered. She had her twenty acres and her version of culture safely tucked in her back pocket. There's no chokecherry tree on my back, she reminded herself. I'm a free enterprise, freehold blackfella, beholden to nobody except my own family and my own conscience. She'd circled right around the hideous politics of colonial fallout, and bought back the ancestral land herself.

Cash on the stump, you fuckers.
Game over.

‘Well, just don't go claiming my farm,' she told Twoboy, ‘or it'll be pistols at dawn, brother.'

The tension broke with this tacit consent to the Jackson's wider claim, and everybody breathed out, grinning broadly.

‘I don't fight women,' Twoboy answered. ‘Only Mr Pitiful does that.'

‘You're a lover, not a fighter, is that it?' Therese flirted as though she wasn't a dyed-in-the-wool dyke from the year dot. Jo and Amanda rolled their eyes and groaned. Oh, puh-lease. No, insisted Twoboy, ignoring the flirting and groaning, he was a lover
and
a fighter. Only these days we fight with lawyers, not with guns. So long as the Native Title Tribunal came to the party anyway. If they didn't, then he'd be on the phone to Al Qaeda mob, onetime.

‘Eh, knock off!' Lazarus chimed in with a frown. ‘Start talking like that some dickhead'll have us in the paddy wagon before ya know it. CIA'll turn up in Wilfred Street.'

Jo shouted with laughter, and talked into where her wristwatch would be if she owned one.

‘Radical blackfellas at two o'clock. Book em Danno.'

‘That might be just what it takes, eh,' Twoboy twinkled at the three women sitting opposite. Jo hoped the brother was joking. There had to be a middle path didn't there? Something between the white man's table crumbs and the Taliban? Else we're all fucked.

‘Uh, there's no twin towers round here, in case you hadn't noticed,' she suggested, gesturing at the one-horse town that was Billinudgel.

‘No twin towers!' Twoboy said in mock-horror, half-rising from his seat and looking about him at the weed-infested railway line and the tennis court with its torn and rusted wire mesh hanging lazily from the poles, testament to a thousand bored pub brats using it as a bouncy castle. ‘You mean we
aren't
in downtown Manhattan?' He turned to Laz.

‘This is another fine mess you've gotten us into, Pocahontas!'

Jo found herself warming to Twoboy.

‘Not to tell you your business or anything,' she said drily, ‘but you might wanna get your continents straight before claiming them land rights, bala. This is Australia, y'know? Dead Heart. Meat Pies. Holden Cars. Racists.'

Twoboy put an index finger to his pursed lips, thinking hard.

‘And – waaait – it's
America
with the Statue of Liberty, and the Lincoln Memorial?'

‘I believe so, yes,' Jo answered, grinning.

He winced and smacked his forehead, making the yellow feathers on the end of his dreadlocks do a little dance. Then he beamed at Jo, who was laughing in disbelief. Spunky. Educated. Smart as a whip.
And funny.

The workmen in the front bar roared as someone in another city scored a try.

‘Titans,' said Laz to Therese, ignoring Twoboy's performance. ‘Titans and Rabbitohs.'

‘What's the score?' asked Amanda, but nobody knew.

‘I've been missing those land rights, you know,' Twoboy said softly to Jo. ‘They really tied the room together.'

And just like that, Jo felt the hard carapace of her resistance begin to flake and crumble away. Years worth of armour fell from her tender heart. Great slabs of steel and granite hit the wooden floorboards and shattered into fragments there. Jo sat, wondering, among the shards. This isn't happening. A black prince rocking up at the Billi on a Friday night, quoting the Coens at her.

‘Well, The Dude abides,' she murmured in disbelief.

‘He certainly fucking does.' Twoboy grinned, untying his dreads and shaking them loose. ‘But maybe not in Billinudgel,' they chorused together, laughing.

Lazarus noticed this sudden softening of Jo toward his older brother. He wondered in an abstract way whether Twoboy would fuck things up for them again. There were more important things at stake in Billinudgel than whether Twoboy got his dick wet tonight, Laz worried. Much more important things.

Twoboy drained his last long mouthful of beer and stood up to replace it.

‘Well, anyways, if you're Bundjalung tidda, yorright by me. We'll let ya stay on ya farm.'

He leaned across the table and gave her shoulder a friendly squeeze as he winked. She could feel the steel of his strength even in that brief touch.

‘That's bloody big of ya,' Jo retorted, tingling from his fingers on her skin and wanting more, more, more of the same. He was Goorie, and gorgeous, and her desires were endless.

If many hands make light work, Jo silently asked the paddock in front of her, then why is it that many hands always arrive just as the light is failing. Why is it that
many hands
sit around the fire drinking your piss and talking up a storm about how much work they're going to do at some pleasantly nonspecific time in the future?

Pondering this perennial question, Jo let her gaze drop from the rolling hills to the firepit. There stood Stevo warming his arse in front of the latest stack of burning fenceposts. A six-foot eucalyptus fencepost is a mighty heavy thing, even when the termites have got to it and the barbed wire that gave it a purpose has rusted into earth a dozen summers ago. Each blazing post had left a tightly knotted signature in Jo's neck. She flung her head sharply to the right, hoping to hear the bonecrack that would signal relief, but there was none. Jo
nil;
fenceposts
too many to count.