Mullumbimby (14 page)

‘Is it you, darlin? Has anyone hurt you?' Jo asked.
I'll gut em where they stand.

But Ellen shook her head.

‘Do you know who? Or where?' Jo thought of Twoboy, forever driving tired on the slick road between Mullum and the Brisbane tribunal. Or Chris and her wheelchair-bound dad up the road, no doubt flooded in, by the sound of that rain.

Ellen's dark curls shook negatively again, and Jo squeezed her even closer, using a forefinger to position her daughter's hair behind the pale shell of her pink ear.

‘Well, darling, you're okay and I'm okay, and Kym and the boys are all here,' she pointed out, knowing all the while it was futile. ‘And the phone's not ringing yet.'

It could be Ellen's dad, of course; that would shatter Ellen, if he was hurt or dead.

‘I think it's someone around here,' Ellen whispered miserably. Jo held her tight a while longer, then got up and made two big cups of cocoa. An hour later they were both tucked up in Jo's bed.

Ellen faded back to sleep fast while Jo stared at the red numerals of the clock and waited for the unhappy phone call to come.

Jo woke unrested at dawn, burdened with knowledge: today was going to bring terrible shit down on someone she knew.

After an uneasy half-hour listening to the gwong pound the tin roof, she rang Chris. On the ninth ring her bowels began to slacken with fear. But before the phone could peal again, Uncle Pat picked it up. Chris, he reported, was basically alright, but down, sunk in another of her Hill-dweller's Depressions. Ah Christ Jesus. She wouldn't be leaving the house for weeks, Uncle Pat yawned glumly, would in fact barely be leaving the island of safety which was her bed, even if they hadn't been flooded in since dinnertime last night.

Jo commiserated with the old man on both counts and hung up. The catastrophe didn't belong to Chris, then.

And not to Kym, clearly, and not the boys either who, power-pointed or not, had survived the night and were now filling their faces with Weetbix, hoeing into the sugar big time and complaining loud and long about Jo's low-fat milk which they claimed came from inferior and anorexic New South Wales cows – them are
gammon bulang,
Aunty Jo. She made a mental note to remind them at some length that they were Bundjalung as well as their father's Waka Waka, once this much more urgent business of who was headed for trouble got sorted.

Therese and Amanda were altogether unimpressed at being called so early. Jo put the receiver down – sorry, sorry – with a grin of relief. Okay, well, if not them, then who? Who?

Jason had facebooked that he was running late for the airport and good luck to the littles in Coffs, so Ellen's midnight tears were not for him. The sisters looked blankly at each other across the kitchen, uncertain quite what course to take next.

‘We can just wait,' Jo said finally, crossing her arms. ‘I mean why go ringing around
looking
for a shit sandwich for breakfast? It's not like grief's ever had any bloody trouble finding us before.'

‘You rung Twoboy, eh?' Kym checked. But Jo was afraid to. Of everyone she knew, Twoboy was the most likely to have bad news. Laz's boy Billy, in particular, lived on a razor's edge of cones, pills, stupid-arse street fights and suicidal mood swings. To call Twoboy and tell him that Ellen had predicted Trouble coming, Jo told her sister, would be like poking a caged tiger with a stick.

Above them the clock on the wall had somehow crept around to 7.15. About time I was getting ready for work, Jo realised, as she tried unsuccessfully to undo the hard-knotted laces of Jarvis's running spike with her teeth. Kym swung around from where she was scraping Weetbix into the compost.

‘He's not getting bloody fist-happy with ya is he?' Kym had a blunt older-sister tone in her repertoire that she wasn't afraid to haul out and use. ‘Cos if he is I'll be gettin Jase and his brothers to flog the piss and shit outta him, I swear ta—'

‘God, no. He's a big pussycat. He's just a bit cranky with the Native Title stuff,' Jo blurted hastily. ‘Or not even cranky. Just stressed. He's not violent,' she reiterated. Twoboy's fathers had taught him how to pick his battles. How to walk away when that was the smart thing to do. No, it wasn't an eruption of random violence that Jo was concerned about, but the loading onto the man's Bundjalung shoulders of even more problems than he already had to cope with. Every day that he and Laz and their mum spent in court saw new lies that needed countering; the money from the Native Title Tribunal for lawyers was running out fast, and the legal arguments went around and around in ever-expanding circles as Mum Jackson and Uncle Cheezel grew older, and more frail, and ever less equipped to keep on
top of the whole bullshit saga of proving who they were and where they belonged, to the satisfaction of the dugai judge.

‘You sure?' asked Kym in a been-there-done-that voice.

‘Yes.
I swear ta God.'

Then the phone rang on the kitchen wall.
Tragedy,
it said, with its first long single peal.

Yours,
Jo pointed with the running spike. Kym took a wary half-step in the other direction. Then Ellen appeared. On her way through the kitchen to go julabai she glanced at the phone, and then at her mother and aunt. Her eyes developed a protective blankness.

‘You'd better answer it. It's not going to change what's happened,' Ellen advised over her shoulder.

‘She's right,' chimed in Kym, nodding at the sinister beige plastic handset.

Jo reluctantly picked it up – and discovered that Twoboy was fine, that he, Laz, Rhonda and their grown kids had all been at the Browns Plains RSL till midnight, and Billy had picked up fifty bucks clear profit on the pokies.

‘Nobody hurt then, no dramas?' she queried.

Not as far as Twoboy knew, and he'd most likely be down tomorrow night for some more good loving, babe–

‘Is something the matter?' he asked, hearing worry in Jo's voice.

‘No,' she lied, ‘it's all good here. Kym's off to Coffs with the boys in a minute, Kai reckons his hamstring's come good. And if it ever stops fucken raining I'll get you to help me spray those camphors next time you're ... Yeah, nah she'll get out alright in the Pajero, Chris's already flooded in, but. Those creek crossings on the way to her place aren't up to shit. And you wanna hope this gwong stops pissing down by tomorrow, but, or there won't be any good loving for ya, it'll be owner-operator all the way, bunji...'

Still laughing with relief, Jo sculled the last mouthful of her coffee. Then she hugged Kym goodbye, exhorting her to drive slow and careful on the bloody wet road. More hugs, and you make sure you stick it to the competition now, for the older boys. She kissed and
tickled Timbo until he squealed for mercy, and then could delay her chores no longer.

Leaving them packing up inside the house, she dragged on her raincoat and akubra, bracing herself to go into the weather. ‘Tain't fit out there for man nor beast,' she muttered under her breath.

Comet and Athena were on a schedule. They would both stand at the fences and wait pointedly for an hour or more if she didn't pour a few handfuls of pellets into their dark green plastic feed bins. It was good discipline to have them come in for feed twice a day; it kept them in a routine, especially important for a youngster like Comet who would soon revert to wildness and mischief if he was left to his own devices.

So Jo lurched out the door, swearing as she bent into the torrential rain. At the small garden shed beneath the African tulip she ladled a couple of containers of pellets and chaff into a bucket, tipped half the mixture out for a rain-slick, whinnying Athena – time I started rugging you for winter, old girl – and then noticed a gap in Comet's usual spot beneath the mango in the Small Paddock. The mud, scraped and indented from his habitual waiting there, was blank. A horse-shaped hole in Jo's morning.

Here was something out of the ordinary. Here was something definitely amiss in the world of the farm.

Jo scanned the Small Paddock a second time, and a third. There was no sign of the colt. He wasn't standing among the pines, nor was he in the distance among the furthest lychee trees. She didn't think he'd escaped into the Big Paddock, since the fences all looked to be intact. From the dry veranda, the dogs were gazing out at her with unusual stillness.

Rain blew onto the back of Jo's neck and into her ears. She shivered and hoiked the raincoat higher, half over her head. Between the gumboots and the glistening yellow plastic hem of the coat her legs were bare and wet. She shivered again. Bloody yarraman. A person'd be womba to have horses, wouldn't she?

Gwong was pelting heavily now, dripping off the wire of the fences,
streaming off the mango leaves, and falling straight from the sky into the feed bucket, forming tiny rivulets among the pellets. That didn't matter, horses could eat wet feed with impunity. Her glistening wet neck didn't matter, nor did her cold legs, and neither did the growing dampness inside her squelching gumboots. But where the hell was her Comet? A sick anxiety began to develop inside Jo's chest. Nothing good could come from this odd development. It was inexplicable, unless ... had he been stolen? Some local farmers locked their gates, but it had never occurred to Jo that this was anything more than another expression of the ridiculous anal tendencies of the dugai world.

She glanced behind her. Through the rain she could faintly hear Kym gathering the boys and their gear, and the slamming of Pajero doors from the far side of the house. The pump was throbbing beneath the house – Ellen was having her shower – and the school bus would be hissing to a halt right outside the driveway in under ten minutes. Jo knew that if Comet was to be found before work – and he had to be found before work, because you didn't leave valuable young animals lost and wandering loose all day to get hit by cars, especially not in weather like this – she would have to track him down all on her Pat Malone. Shit and damn and fuck the ways of stockhorses all to hell, Jo told the sodden earth. She contemplated giving Ellen the day off school to look for him. Ah, better not. School might be all a crock, according to Twoboy, but Jo knew Ellen didn't need any more excuses to hate the place. Jo would continue to act as though school mattered, just in case one day it did.

Time was ticking away and Jo was growing ever wetter and later for work. She put the feed bucket down at the base of the mango, where it would have some protection from the rain, and plunged into the long grass. There was only one place on the farm that Comet could possibly be – in the far corner of the Small Paddock, invisible until you got well past the pine grove. If the creek had come right up, Jo reasoned, then the colt might have become stranded on the fire trail on the far side; the narrow strip of land there was high enough
that it would never flood this side of Armageddon. He might have wandered up there before the creek started to swell, and then gotten stuck, afraid to risk the ever-rising waters to come back over to the level ground where he normally grazed. She winced, imagining young, terrified Comet stuck all night in the driving rain as the creek swelled and plunged and roared beneath him. He would be freezing by now, shaking with cold and hungry, as well.

Guilt lashed at her. Walking faster, she asked herself why she hadn't simply left him in the Big Paddock with Athena and the cattle. It wasn't as though he was hard to catch. No, it was just her pathetic desire to control him that little bit more; to have him ready at her fingertips on this small, soggy patch of the earth instead of roaming the hills of the Big Paddock as he should have been, with his mother. I'm no better than the bloody missionaries, Jo thought. Berating herself further, she began to list the illnesses that a horse could develop from exposure: Pneumonia – often fatal in horses. Colic, brought on by the stress, ditto. Rain scald. Greasy heel. A hundred other ailments she didn't even know about. Oh fer Chrissake, shuttup, she told herself. You don't even know that he'll be on the bloody hillside. He could be in the back of a horsefloat on his way to a Sydney horse sale by now.

Another couple of minutes passed, all muddy traipsing and sliding through the tussocks of paspalum and rhodes grass. Jo failed to notice Kym's departure, or the school bus carrying Ellen and the rest of the kids away to Mullum. Finally she reached the edge of the pine grove, and paused on the spongy carpet of light tan pine needles. A host of camphor laurel seedlings, six inches high, erupted at regular intervals from this carpet; they all needed pulling out before they reached the knee-high stage when pulling got too difficult and spraying became unavoidable. Jo reached down and ripped several of the weeds out automatically, but impetus kept her going beyond the pines.

When she stood in the clearing facing the fire trail, the uprooted camphor seedlings dangling from her right hand, a fierce debate began between Jo's eyes and Jo's brain.

She gazed east at the corner of the Small Paddock which was now revealed.
There,
her eyes said with horrible chilling accuracy. See there – see that extraordinary dark lump, lying wetly half-in, half-out of the swollen creek at the base of the hill. That lump which is approximately horse-sized. Horse-shaped. And see, too, how the fenceline at that spot is different, the star pickets ripped from the wet ground, and the strands of wire pointing tautly into the water and failing to form a set of pleasing horizontal lines as they normally would. See the vee of that fence which, in fact, doesn't even belong there – the brand-new barbed wire fence, which is where a fence shouldn't be and never was before this day. This is what Jo's eyes saw.

And Jo's brain answered with its own rigid authority: No. No, no, no. We won't look, we won't walk over there. I refuse.

And Jo's eyes said ah but you must, and Jo's legs said we will keep walking towards the new part of this story until you tell us otherwise and Jo's eyes said here: look some more. Here we are, you see, a yarraman – and it is, after all, a yarraman you are seeking – Comet, or what had been Comet – lying large and brown and sodden, and his poor sorry head sunk beneath the muddied torrent that the hills had delivered to this lower ground. His neck was extended into the swirling dirty water so that his soft darling black nose must be pointing, beneath the murky current, the way to the ocean, floodwater washing his beautiful, long black mane away from the muscle of his neck, streaming the thick hair out like seaweed or seagrass or, no, because seaweed and seagrass grow in saltwater and this is a freshwater story and it's a story that now contains the new wrongwire of a nonsense wrongfence that shouldn't be here, a hideous unwanted barbed wire fence
that doesn't belong here
wrapped tightly around her colt's front legs and around his neck, making hideous red gashes in the brown hide, and tricking him and trapping him and murdering him, yes, murdering and it can't be, it
just cannot be
but oh God oh God, Comet it is. It is.

Jo stood for a long time. This sight. This unknown fence. This disaster and this result that had ceased to be Comet, lying wet and muddy half in a creek that was not a babbling brook any longer but a
hostile murderous brown snake of fatal water, twisting and writhing its way through her innocent green farm.