Mullumbimby (11 page)

‘Gotta cruise,' said Twoboy over Jo's shoulder, frowning at the downpour and making an unhappy mouth. ‘I can't get stuck here, my darlin. That judge'll be giving me country away to Oscar Bullockhead, to anyone with a black face and a lovely yarn to spin em, if I'm not there with Mum and Laz on Wednesday.'

‘Off you go then.' Jo was shivering on the veranda in wet clothes. She had just returned from fixing the water pump which delivered her water out of Stoney Creek across the road. The neighbour's
cattle regularly knocked the cover off, exposing the pump to the elements. No cover, no working pump. No pump, no water in the tanks for showers or washing. And so every time rain threatened it was a sprint across the road to undo the Brahmins' endless mischief. And that would continue to be the story until Jo found time to move the pump and hook its black plastic pipes up to her own top dam instead of to the cleaner running water of Stoney Creek. It was just another of the many tasks that seemed to multiply while she was at work, and only got remembered in the early hours before dawn when Jo would lie awake in the dark, worrying about them.

She unceremoniously shooed Twoboy away.
On ya bike.

‘You think I want to go, eh?' Twoboy raised his eyebrows in amusement, feet planted squarely on the boards of the veranda.

‘How the fuck would I know what you want?' Jo put one hand on her hip as the wind whipped the rain in under the roof, making the dogs cower against the kitchen wall, daw, poorfellas. ‘Just go if ya going. No need to make a song and dance about it, is there?' And what a dugai expression that is, Jo realised, even as her shooing hand flicked him towards Tin Wagon Road and the tribunal in Brisbane that would decide his family's future.

‘What I want–' Twoboy grabbed Jo's dismissive rain-wet hand and held it pressed hard up against his heart – ‘is to stay here with you for a
very, very
long time. But if I'm not there for the hearing it'll put us about three years behind the bloody eight ball. And you know how these creeks come up.'

Jo didn't, in fact, know the nature of ‘these creeks', having grown up in the shady backwater of South Golden Beach, where the sludgy canal was a lot slower to react to storms than the streams that fed off Bottlebrush and Chincogan.

‘Well, I'm learning.'

But it was no good, words were no good. Par for the course, once they were touching each other – even just rain-cold hands – nothing but their touching mattered. Twoboy was in her orbit again and she was kissing him, wrapping herself in him, lost in a universe of his dreads,
and his mouth, and his warm chest, a universe of mutual desire and urgency. He reached lower and lifted her up onto him, both of them fully clothed and neither of them dry; rain pummelling the ground just beyond the veranda and the spray off the outside boards reaching them as fine mist. She clasped her heels into his wet back, kissing him and smiling at the same time, wanting this never to end.

‘Why would I
want
to leave,' Twoboy whispered, ‘are you insane?'

‘My ex-husband thinks so. Told me on a regular basis.'

‘He's a prize fuckwit.'

‘Mm-hmm.'

Jo slid back down to earth and they stumbled inside, half-running to the bedroom, as the rain hammered even more heavily on the tin roof. Jo kicked the door shut, knowing that Ellen would hardly hear it bang over the torrents flooding down. When Twoboy lifted her wet shirt off and began to kiss her belly, she tilted his chin up with one finger.

‘Hey – you have to go, remember? Very important tribunal business in Brisbane? And the creeks all coming up like there's no tomorrow?'

‘I'm gone.' Kissing her smooth golden belly. ‘I'm not here. Must be someone else doing this.' Twoboy smiled.

Jo closed her eyes as he moved his kisses slowly, oh so slowly towards her hips, her thighs, her junoo.

‘Definitely not here.'

‘Ah.'

‘Or here.'

‘Ah.'

‘Or here.'

‘I don't care where you are. Just keep doing what you're –
ah
– doing.'

‘Nice way to talk.'

‘I'm single, I can talk how I like. Oh,
yeah,
do that.'

‘You sure about that?'

‘Very.'

‘I don't just want to stay a bit longer today – I want to be with you,' Twoboy told Jo when she was lying floppily against him beneath the blanket, rain thrumming on the roof. ‘And I don't want to share. Very greedy I am. I want everything all to myself, no exceptions.'

‘Well, you do have a penis,' Jo teased, ‘so that kind of goes without saying.'

Twoboy looked out the window. The wind was lashing the white cedar tree in the paddock.

‘Be serious. I want to be
with
you,' he whispered beneath the pounding rain. ‘The goddamm paterfamilias.'

‘You
are
with me,' Jo protested, avoiding his meaning.

‘Not just like this, I mean
really
with you. I mean I've–'

Jo pulled the blanket higher, covering her heart. ‘Don't say it,' she cut in, tightly. ‘Not unless you mean it. Actually, don't even say it if you do mean it.'

A cool silence ensued.

‘I don't like that rule much,' Twoboy told her then. There was genuine hurt in his dark eyes.

‘My house, my rules. And anyway, didn't you have to be gone half an hour ago?'

‘Yep. Yep, I did.' Twoboy got up and dressed faster than usual. There was a new wound in him now. The man didn't so much as glance at Jo as he searched the room for his runners.

She lay and grimaced at the ceiling. It was never easy.
Nothing
was allowed to be easy. You had to be building granite fortress walls to protect yourself – that, or be the one getting boiling oil poured on your head from above.

‘Don't rush me,' she told Twoboy as he brusquely kissed her goodbye. ‘I've
heard
how much men love me too many times in my life, that's all. And I have to think of Ellen, too.'

‘Believe it or don't believe it,' he told her without the usual smile lighting up his face. ‘It's the truth.'

Jo pulled the ripcord, and the whipper snipper roared satisfactorily into life first go, sending vibrations coursing up her forearms and into her braced elbows. She reefed her earmuffs down – as if she wasn't half binung goonj already from the band days – and headed over towards the cemetery's memorial wall. Lowering the machine head, she began to tidy up the only signs on this earth that various Mullumites had ever existed. Mullumites? Mullumbimbians? Mullumbimbos – yeah, she decided with a grin. Mullumbimbos. As the sweeping motion of the work gradually took hold, her mind drifted away from the cemetery. Grass spewed sideways from the spinning head with its lashing plastic string, but in her daydreams Jo saw only Twoboy's smile, Twoboy's mesmerising black eyes, Twoboy's dark arms reaching for her in bed yesterday. And that was okay, no problemo. What she
saw
was fine. It was what she then remembered coming out of his mouth that troubled her.

I want to be with you, really with you.
And:
I don't want to share.

Jo felt a deep primal alarm in her gut as she remembered these words. She'd thought she could make marriage work with Ellen's father, of course, but that illusion had been disastrous. During her divorce, Jo had decided that she was too damaged to love anyone except Ellen. Mum and Dad had done their best, but flogging her and Kym and Stevo into compliance was all they could think of to protect their coffee-skinned kids from the dangerous world of dugai power and dugai hypocrisy. Hide from trouble, don't fight it. Be Quiet. Be
Obedient. Be White. At thirteen, when the car accident killed her parents and took her world away, Jo had already had it with their strategy for living. She'd fled South Golden and, despite the hard yakka put in by Aunty Barb, it didn't take long for trouble to find her. She'd had to climb a long way up from the floor of the pub toilet since then.

And here I am now, a parent myself, Jo thought, with me and Ellen all on our lonesome ownsome – except then Twoboy arrives chucking declarations of love around like confetti. Coming in to fuck everything up, just when I've got my freedom, a job I can tolerate, the best horse I could ever hope to breed, and the farm I always dreamed about. Sweet Christ Jesus.

How did that Dylan song go?
I gave you my heart but you wanted my soul.
Jo had never really understood the difference. Giving her heart away felt exactly the same as giving up her soul. She wasn't ready to gamble on Twoboy, wasn't nearly ready to sign up for the swings and roundabouts of being only the half of something. No, she was already the whole of something else – something completely different. And there was Ellen to think of, too.

As Jo worked her way around the edge of the memorial wall, digesting these problems beneath the comforting, muffled, white noise of the whipper snipper, a sharp quartz pebble rocketed up, flung by the plastic string of the machine. It pinged loudly against a metal name plate before ricocheting back onto her shin.

Jo took her finger off the trigger. Silence fell.

Her shoulders and forearms ached from the effort of keeping everything looking nice, and she became aware that she'd been frowning as she worked. She read the bronze memorial plaque on the wall while she rubbed her stinging leg:

Rolling up her jeans Jo discovered a small boomerang of a bruise already decorating her shin. Should she, she wondered, take this
stinging quartz pebble, this tiny attack of the universe upon her person, as evidence that life was short, that any love is good love, and a clear enough indication that she should dive headlong into the deep, dangerous territory of Twoboy Jackson and his unreliable professions of fidelity? Or should it rather be read as a message that real love is worth waiting for – that husbands and daughters who will grieve for you are not thick upon the ground, and that she should look long and hard before she leapt?

As she considered this concept – sorrowful husbands and daughters – everything, suddenly, was too much for Jo. Her eyes welled up, surprising her with tears for her lost marriage; for her tightly held dream of a family. The dream she had fucked up all on her own with her cold anger and her rages and her disappearing to gigs; her refusal to let Paul in; her immense self-loathing that told her constantly that whatever she had was never, never enough. That she was bad, and if anyone dared to love her, it was simply evidence that they, too, were deeply and irrevocably flawed.

Frustrated at her welling tears, Jo smacked the side of her head so hard that she floated momentarily, located somewhere between the pain in her shin and the stinging of her reddened right ear.

Ellen's dad wasn't coming back. She didn't want him to. They were so badly matched she must have been insane to ever conceive a child with him. So why this ache, this never-ending burden she carried in her gut? The craving for the dream of a real family, a Mob. Belonging. A couple of dozen people who hung together and shared and laughed, who were all on the same team. Her team.

Terrifyingly, this was what Twoboy had whispered the possibility of, beneath the pounding Bundjalung rain. This was his implicit offer, his solution to her desperate, unspoken, unacknowledged loneliness. But Jo wasn't sure she was brave enough. She felt hollowed out by life, feared that she was useless for anybody who wanted a complete human being to love. Ellen had the best of her, and there was bugger all left over. Twoboy thought there was enough for him to love as well, but Twoboy was just plain wrong.

Jo started the whipper snipper up again with a savage yank, and laid into the setaria threatening the appearance of the dead all over the hillside. She massacred the clumps of lime-green grass, flayed them, ground them so low that Basho would beam with pleasure at her meticulousness, unaware that really Jo was killing the past. Murdering the final lacerating months of her marriage. Assassinating the pain of Paul finally walking away, having had enough. And not least, flaying the dugais for what they'd done long before Paul came along to try and live with the half-crazed consequences.

After an hour of this frenzied attack Jo halted, sweating and defeated. The cemetery was immaculate, but she was a mess. And worse, far worse, she was just playing silly buggers, going round and round in circles in her own mind. There was no way she could say no to Twoboy. She knew she was already in too deep with that dreadlocked fella, and no matter what he was selling with his handsomeness and his smiling declarations of fidelity, the price could never be too high.

‘You gotta come over right now!' Therese insisted down the phone on Friday afternoon, knock-off time or near enough. Jo's lip curled automatically at being told what to do, even by her best friend.

‘Why
do I gotta? What's up?'

‘Just get your arse here straight away – I got something you and Ellen need to see.' There was an excited burbling in Therese's tone, a lightness and a promise of good times that did the trick. Jo scratched her scalp, and decided that it wouldn't kill the horses to be fed after dark for once.

‘Okay, seeya in ten.'

She turned to Ellen, and gave her the news. Ellen moaned a familiar mantra: the world against her; powerless; trapped into going home with her mother instead of catching the long and winding bus down Main Arm Road. And now it would be an extra hour, probably, until she was safely inside the cocoon of her own locked room with
the adult world kept at bay for another night. A spasm of irritation shot through Jo at these complaints, but she contained herself. Show some self-discipline, she thought, and have a bit of patience with the child. For she is just a child, though where last year's joyful twelve-year-old had gone was one of life's little mysteries. Maybe Ellen was getting her first period? Lordy, that was gonna be fun. Not.

‘What's she want?' Ellen asked, texting somebody her misery.

‘Got good news, she reckons. She wouldn't say what.'

Ellen stopped texting, closed her eyes, and let her head rest briefly against the glass of the passenger window. Did she already know what good news was coming?

‘What's up?'

‘Noth-ing.' Ellen sighed. Like she didn't want to spoil the surprise.

Jo shuffled left-handed among scores of CDs, and picked a Spearhead track to bounce them down the Tunnel Road to the beach. She cranked it up and sang loudly to Ellen, to the birds, the camphors and the banyan trees. Oh yeah, baby. Music was the solution, nine times out of ten, to any of life's littler woes and trifling problems ... and that was definitely worth making a song and dance about, truegod.

Pulling in at Therese and Amanda's place, Jo found Trinity's RAV4 was also parked on the footpath. Even Chris's last-legs Econovan was putting in an appearance. Jo raised her eyebrows. A part-ay, it looked like. But why, and why unheralded till an hour ago?

They drew close, and Kasey Chambers pounded out of the kitchen window, along with shrieks of laughter and the sound of bottles being uncorked. The kettle was screaming its whistle along for good measure. Fat-bellied Buddha sat on his wooden stand beside the stairs, wearing a new plastic hibiscus lei. ‘Bit bloody noisy round here,' Jo told him, but Buddha simply smiled serenely back at her. Must like Kasey, old fat belly. And why wouldn't he? Buddha was cool, even if he was two thousand years old.

Jo saluted the statue, then slid open the glass door to Therese's lounge – where a motley assortment of family and friends were
clustered together having their photo taken. As she stepped inside everybody erupted into laughter and bewildering screams which evolved into ‘For She's a Jolly Good Fellow'. Therese and Amanda both threw themselves at Jo and Ellen, hugging them like they'd last seen them three months ago, not three days.

‘Come here, you good thing, rub some of that Virgo magic off onto me!' Trinity fell upon Ellen in a cloud of patchouli and tie-dyed cheesecloth. Ellen grinned and sucked it up, for what Trinity lacked in sanity she made up for with a heart the size of Sydney Harbour.

‘Look!' Amanda flapped wildly at them, waving something in the air and cackling. Jo put down her keys and mobile and seized the bit of shiny paper. On three of the jagged scratched panels she read,
$10 000.

‘Well fuck me dead and bury me pregnant,' Jo said to Therese, gazing at the scratchie and shaking her head, ‘for once in me life I got something right.'

‘For you,' Therese yelled later that night over the hubbub, holding out Jo's mobile – ‘Twoboy.'

Jo took the phone down the hall away from the chaos, giving Therese's hip-thrusting action the middle finger as she went. Cheeky yellow slag.

‘Hey you.' Jo smiled to hear her lover's voice.

‘You never said there was a party!'

Jo laughed and told him about Therese and Amanda's good luck. Twoboy gave a low whistle.

‘They chucking any your way?' he asked.

‘Not that I heard,' Jo answered. ‘Grog and pizza for everyone tonight, and Therese slung Ellen a hundred cos she picked out the scratchie.'

‘Huh,' Twoboy grunted. Jo could tell what he was thinking – that despite her Japanese father Therese was still a typical tightarse dugai.

‘So when ya taking me surfing?' Jo asked, partly to change the subject and partly to make up for the hurt of last weekend.

‘Anytime. I didn't know you wanted to.'

‘Yeah, you gotta teach me to stand up,' she said. ‘Can I use your board?'

‘Mmm ... we might hafta find you a slower one, I reckon...' Twoboy sounded as if he was seeing Jo wiped out bigtime and his prized McCoy board snapping in two.

‘Well, let's do it this weekend, hey?' she said with a surge of excitement.

‘Okay,' agreed Twoboy, ‘you borrow a big, slow Mal and I'll teach ya. In our spare time,' he added ironically.

‘I'll make time if you do,' Jo told him, and then rang off before he could get all lovey-dovey on her.
Whoo hoo.
She struck a surfer's pose in front of Therese's bathroom mirror, and sang the ‘Hawaii Five-O' song to her reflection.

And somewhere between the pizzas being delivered from Ocean, and the bolt at nine o'clock to the Billi for another slab of Tooheys Old, Jo was reluctantly prodded to pick up a guitar, for the first time in three years, and give Kasey a run for her money.

The more Jo drank the better she played, until, her fingers flying over the frets during ‘Me and Bobby McGee', she looked over to see Ellen riveted.

‘Why?' her daughter asked in the car on the way home. ‘Why did you ever stop, when you can play like that?'

‘Ecclesiastes,' answered Jo drily. ‘Ecclesiastes, and a crying baby girl.'

Jo woke as Saturday's dawn poured in her bedroom window, and was instantly buoyed as she remembered yesterday. Therese and Amanda both worked fulltime jobs but they – like most people – had no safety net, no savings. They lived week to week, much as she did. But now her mates had something to put aside.
Sometimes
things pan out for the good people, Jo thought happily, sometimes. And it's a sunny morning, too, hallelujah, crisp, and not so windy you'd be taking
your life in your hands to ride a young stockhorse up the western ridge, she decided.

She gulped a coffee down, threw on jeans and riding boots, and in ten minutes had Comet saddled in the backyard. Once she was on board though, Jo realised that she'd forgotten to leave a note for Ellen saying where she was headed, just in case of the black snake striking. The horse rearing on top of her. The hoof in the rabbit hole and the snapping of the front leg. The girth that didn't hold. The branch that slammed you off and left you concussed, high on the remote ridgetop. Or any other of the thousand disasters that awaited you when you saddled up and put your life in the hands of a half-ton prey animal with a mind of its own. She took her right foot out of the stirrup, then hesitated, and thought:
fuck it.
Although today was definitely not a good day to die – no day is a good day for that, are you fucking kidding me – if it had to be today, then so be it. Her phone was in her pocket, not that there would be any coverage, and the sun was shining, and God was in his heaven according to some, all was right with the world according to others, and she was not getting off Comet and being sensible like she knew she should, not for anything, no siree.