Mullumbimby (7 page)

Think of the Ten Year Plan, she encouraged herself. It doesn't have to all be done right now. And you might also remember, dickhead, that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle – but this commonsense advice didn't cancel out the faint ember of fear that had lodged in her chest. Try as she might to ignore it, Caro's question –
Don't you get lonely out here on your own? –
reverberated all day, unwelcome, in her ears.

Jo pressed the tea towel hard against her shoulder, but blood continued to seep slowly through the striped cotton in an oddly Australia-shaped blot. Shit and damn and fuck, she thought, where're the bloody doctors in this joint? Though the Mullum hospital was mere staggering distance from the cemetery, proximity wasn't much comfort if there was no bloody staff, was it. She buzzed for help again, and this time, hallefuckenlujah, a nurse popped her head out from the double glass doors of the general ward. The doctor would have to come in from town, she said, the GPs were on rotating call from their own surgeries.

Peeling away the tea towel, Jo displayed an impressive gash running horizontally across her upper arm.

‘I think it might need stitches,' she said, trying not to look at the revolting scarlet drips she was leaving on the tiled floor.

‘How'd you manage that?' The nurse wasn't giving anything away, least of all free sympathy. Burnt out from trying to cover for missing doctors. Or maybe she just didn't like blackfellas very much.

‘I tripped and fell onto a vase,' Jo answered, wondering if the nurse assumed she was drunk. She didn't add that she'd tripped at work, nor that the vase was a jar full of fresh flowers on the grave of a little kid killed a month ago in a crash near Pottsville. Served her right, really, for stepping rudely across a grave of the newly dead instead of walking around it.

The nurse gave her arm an expert touch with her forefinger and pursed her lips.

‘Is that a clean tea towel?'

‘Came out of the wash today.'

‘Well, keep pressing down on it, that does need stitching. You can sit in here till doctor comes.'

The nurse opened the ward door again and motioned Jo into a plastic chair just inside. Instantly she heard an unmistakable Goorie-holler from the far end of the long blue room. It was Uncle Humbug, cleaner than Jo had seen him in ages, shaved even, wearing a hospital gown with tubes running every which way out of his medium brown body. ‘Take me
home,
girl,' he immediately ordered Jo, ‘take me back to Bruns fer Chrissake.' The nurse – for whom Uncle Humbug was a nebulous entity somewhere between a person and a problem – shot daggers out of her eyes at this, and it quickly dawned on Jo why her own reception had been a bit on the cool side. There was Blood Pressure to think of before discharge, the nurse said starchily to Humbug. And Sugar Levels. And the Tendency of Certain Patients to think that they Knew Better than the Doctors and Fail to take their Medication until they were Admitted in Diabetic Comas in the Middle of the Night. Jo didn't give a sound to her mirth, but Uncle saw it in her eyes and took fresh hope.

‘How long ya been here, Uncle?'

‘Too pucken long! Take me 'ome to my house! My tidda won't come get me from Lismore, the bloody black bitch of a thing.'

‘She knows very well that you're better off here where we can look after you properly.' The nurse was implacable, having seen it all before from any number of patients.

‘I'll have an 'eart attack if ya don't lemme go – that'll show yez. Kidnapping a man! I'll have the law on yez! I'm an Indigenous elder, and this the way yez treat me!' Uncle Humbug was breathless with outrage at the way he had been shanghaied once again into the hands of authority, for it was the longstanding story of his life.

‘Is that the same law that brought you in unconscious two nights
ago, with a full bottle of unopened medication in your bag?' the nurse countered, adjusting something on Humbug's drip.

Uncle Humbug heaved an angry sigh. ‘I know my rights,' he muttered. ‘You mob just wanna steal blackfellas, that's all it is.'

‘Nobody wants to steal you, Mr Milbung,' the nurse assured him with some feeling.

‘Take me 'ome to my house, girl!' This last exhortation was for Jo. House, she thought, what
house?
Uncle Humbug lived in a sixth-hand rusty van wedged deeply in the bush at the back of the Bruns park. How he managed to persuade council not to evict him was an enduring mystery of the shire. Maybe he knew where Basho's skeletons were buried, Jo mused. Regardless, anybody who stood long in his vicinity would soon discover that Humbug was not only the owner of the unregistered rust bucket, but also the self-appointed manager, groundskeeper and caretaker of the Bruns park and all the wildlife in it. Most particularly, Humbug was the custodian of and brother to Slim, an enormous carpet python which lived a charmed life beneath the old Bruns bridge.

‘Ah, better not risk it, Uncle,' Jo warily avoided the old man's ordering and beseeching. Take him home and he carks it she knew who'd get the blame from a suddenly devoted family. It would probably do him some good to have three feeds a day for a while anyway. The old man was very thin underneath his hippy trousers, multiple coloured necklaces and woven bracelets. His hands were so meatless that they resembled great huntsman spiders flopping loosely against the bedcovers.

‘Ah, risk what? Better than risking being bored to fucken death in this bastard dugai joint!'

Uncle Humbug grumbled on to himself from beneath wild silver eyebrows. Poor old bugger. Well, no, not old – he probably hasn't even hit sixty yet, Jo thought. But sick as a dog, and just another statistic waiting to pile up in somebody's report, somebody's fucking thesis.

‘I'm the one true blackfella for this place, and what've I got?' Uncle
Humbug spat hotly at the nurse's retreating back. ‘You dugai bastards sitting on a gold mine ere in Mullum! Everybody cept Humbug making the biggest dollar from this place!'

‘Yes, of course you are,' the nurse patronised him over her shoulder, ‘and that's why we need to keep you here to get you healthy, Mr Milbung.'

Jo stared at the old man.
The one true blackfella.
Those were the words Twoboy had used the other night at the pub. Were the two men related – or had Uncle Humbug in his madness simply picked up a convenient phrase floating around the zeitgeist?

Stung with guilt at not busting him out, and filled, too, with curiosity about his claim (for she had always thought of him as a Koori and a southerner) Jo promised that she would call in after work and see about taking him home. Hardly appeased, Uncle Humbug watched as Doctor Michelle put six stitches in Jo's upper arm.

‘You come get me when you knock orf work, girl,' he dictated, as she went to leave.

A hand flung in the air from the other side of the double glass doors was her only answer; giving Uncle a lift home was going to wipe half an hour at least off the time she had available for riding Comet. Humbug took the provision of lifts and food and tithes as his natural born right. Jo was not only youngish and a Goorie, but she was female and therefore, in Frederick J. Milbung's eyes, entirely subject to his constant demands. Could you get any further from aloof Granny Nurrung with her straight back riding her treadly to church, Jo wondered. And where, she thought in added irritation, were Uncle's legions of white hippie girlfriends when he needed them? Normally there was at least one dreadlocked drama queen hanging on his every solemn pronouncement and feeling she was all-but-Aboriginal after rooting Humbug for two weeks in the back of his decrepit van.

‘You coming to the beach?' Jo asked her daughter a few nights later, hoping Ellen might have something going on with friends.

Ellen shook her head, picked up a toasted sandwich and headed silently back to her room. Jo watched that narrow disappearing back. At what point, she wondered, do you start to worry? At what point does ordinary teenage angst start to look like depression, and isolation, and looming disaster?

‘Well, the dogs are fed. And if I'm not home, I'll be at Therese's,' she called out as she grabbed her keys. ‘Love you!'

In the South Golden car park Jo could hear the sounds of merrymaking from beyond the dunes, and see sparks flying up from a driftwood fire. Somebody had brought a guitar, and two or three somebodies were singing ‘Flame Trees', with a mouth organ wailing along for good measure. An old white couple wandered back to the car park through the banksias, their grey hair still dripping from the ocean, and half-zipped wetsuits draped around their hips. Bit bloody late in the year for swimming isn't it, she thought.
Respect.

‘They're getting pretty happy down there,' the man warned her with a grin.

An alcohol-fuelled cheer rose as Jo crested the narrow track. Below the timber lookout platform, Therese sat cross-legged in the sand, a cheap new Chinese ukelele in her lap, smiling broadly and sampling the joint that was doing the rounds of the fire. Drawing closer, Jo could see Therese's niece and nephew, Amanda's stepsister from Tweed, Therese's next-door neighbour Trinity, and a few strays Jo knew by face but not by name.

‘Happy Birthday, ya old bag,' Jo said, hugging Therese and giving her the only present she could afford this month, a five-dollar scratchie from the Billinudgel newsagent. ‘That's from Ellen, too. Now, are you turning sixty or seventy? I couldn't remember.'

‘Ah. That would be down to my air of timeless oriental wisdom, grasshopper,' Therese replied, steepling her fingers in front of her and adopting a Fu Manchu expression.

‘You came!' Twoboy was suddenly there, rising to his feet. ‘I've been hanging out to see this gorgeous chick from Billinudgel! How lucky am I? Wanna cold one?'

Jo accepted a stubby of Heineken.
What an Extremely Bad Idea you'll doubtless turn out to be.

‘I thought it might be too good to be true,' Twoboy said, his gleaming black eyes hooking her in and holding her spellbound. When he put his hand on her right shoulder and leaned in to kiss her hello on the cheek, an electric thrill rocketed up and down the length of Jo's body. A faint whiff of marijuana came along with the kiss, perfuming the air between them.

She looked at the jewel-green glass of the stubby she was holding, and spoke like someone who had full control of their limbs and faculties.

‘Heineken! You win the lotto, didja?'

‘Why not Heineken? You deserve the best. We all do,' Twoboy said, holding his sculpted arms wide. The straight women around the fire were checking him out, but Twoboy was unfazed by their attention.

‘Is that right?' Jo grinned.

‘Fucken oath, sis. My family never signed any contract agreeing to live happily in poverty all our born days. While I'm breathing, I'm gonna grab the good life with both hands.'

‘Come and give us a song,' beseeched Amanda from the fire, but Jo ignored her, and the guitar passed safely to Trinity.

‘Do you always talk such shite at parties?' Jo asked Twoboy, glad of the yarndi she could smell because it was something she could use to dismiss him. A safety valve for her heart.

‘Talk shit? Me? Never. Well – maybe if I'm really sparked up,' Twoboy grinned. ‘Or when I'm just about to fall madly in love.'

‘So you'd be pretty sparked up then, eh?' Jo asked. If the bloke got any more relaxed it looked like he'd subside into a big black puddle of gorgeousness beside the fire.

‘Not at all, Jo,' he said, much more quietly. ‘Not even close.'

Jo looked away from this imminent and fascinating danger, down to the waves slapping the beach over and over again. The stars burned magnificently overhead. A few fishermen were trying their luck up the beach closer to New Brighton, but otherwise
the horizon was empty. Jo took herself away from the fire. She meandered to the water's edge in search of firmer ground, and stood there with her head craned skywards. The huge Njuruyn of the Milky Way lay across the heavens. Jo breathed out deliberately, remembering how long it had taken her to see it: sitting not far from here on the Bruns rockwall with Aunty Barb, peering into the sky night after night, until it finally crashed into her understanding all of a sudden, just before her twelfth birthday. Having seen the Emu once, Jo now saw it every time without difficulty. She realised with a small shock that Ellen was already past the age she had been that night, and a stab of regret pierced her. If only Aunty Barb had still been here to show Ellen, but the old girl was long gone into the Piccabeen cemetery beside Mum and Dad, poor darling, and the job of teaching Ellen was down to her.

With a jolt, Jo became aware of Twoboy standing in the dark behind her.

‘Deadliest sky, eh?' Jo said, swivelling on her heel. Come on, she silently invited the man, patronise me. Tell me about the Njuruyn hidden in the stars. Offer to show it to me. To open my eyes.

‘Yeah, she's a beautiful night,' Twoboy answered, his gaze high and his lips slightly apart. ‘Them emus be laying yet, you reckon?'

Nonplussed, Jo turned back around and let her eyes drop to the surf endlessly curling over itself onto the sand. Back at the fire someone was drumming on a beer carton with a driftwood stick. These are the same sounds the ancestors heard, thought Jo. Waves. Drumming. Human voices, and laughter around a wirringin fire.

‘Nah, June they sit on the nest, eh,' she replied.

‘Hard to keep up sometimes. There's a bit of an emu shortage in Woodridge.' Twoboy smiled wryly.

‘At least she's still there.' Jo gestured skyward with her stubby. ‘She's not going anywhere in a hurry.' They both gazed up at the Emu, conscious of a mutual urge to retain their old people's knowledge.

‘I've grown up in the culture,' Twoboy said quietly, lowering his gaze to the water, hunching his broad shoulders and pocketing his
hands away from the cool night air, ‘and I've had some bloody good teachers, but I still sometimes feel like I know fuck all, eh.'

‘Ah, we all know fuck all really,' Jo agreed, feeling a tension she hadn't been aware of instantly drain away, ‘us young ones. My aunty, not my blood aunty, other way, she had the names for the constellations, the whole bloody lot, in two or three different languages. And she could tell you exactly where every single star was – in the
daytime.
But she went and died before I was old enough to really listen.'