Mullumbimby (33 page)

Jo sprang up and followed, to find Ellen asleep in yet another part of the hospital. The grafts had been completed. And now, the doctor said, it was a matter of being sure that that they took, and that infection could be kept at bay.

Seeing Ellen lying there in the hospital cot, pale and vulnerable, with her hands transformed into great white bandaged clubs, Jo could barely speak. She nodded like a bobble doll at everything the uniforms said, then sank into a chair, clutching sheafs of paperwork. She was too drained to cry or ask questions, too tired to do anything but sit and look at the still lightly sleeping child, and follow numbly as they were taken back to Ward Three. When her mobile rang she lifted it dully to her ear without thinking.

‘Jo! Where in Christ's name have you
been?
I've been trying to get onto you–'

‘I'm at Lismore hospital with Ellen,' she told Twoboy, who screeched to a halt in the middle of his questions. Jo told him the saga, and there was a long, ticking silence between them. She waited for him to ask the one unforgivable question, to ask if Ellen had succeeded in destroying the map on her hands.

‘So she's outta surgery?' Twoboy asked. ‘Is she gonna be alright?'

‘They reckon. No thanks to you.'

‘How about you – are you alright?'

Jo laughed, a slightly hysterical laugh. A map of the valley had appeared unbidden on Ellen's hands. Birds were telling her where to go and what to do. Rob Starr and Sam Nurrung had been doing God knows what in the early light of dawn. Her daughter – her daughter
the artist
– was lying in front of her with hands like raw beef sausages. And the only possible avenue Jo could think of for answers was Uncle Humbug, locked away behind blocks of sandstone and razor wire in Grafton jail.

‘Am I
alright?'
she choked. ‘Am I
alright?'

‘Yeah,' said Twoboy, sounding alarmed, ‘are you with someone, Jo? Who's with ya? Is there a nurse or someone I can talk to–'

Jo turned her phone off. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on. She sat, turning around in her head the question of whether or not she was in any way
alright.
As she considered this, two nurses pushed a trolley bearing a car accident through the swinging doors at the end of the ward. Down the gleaming lino they came towards her in their starched blue uniforms, looking like a royal procession. Their rubber shoes were soft and silent, and apart from the faint squeaking of the trolley wheels, the entire immaculate parade made no sound. When it arrived next to her, Jo stopped laughing. She simply stared. The stretcher was not a car accident at all.

The nurses had delivered to the bed next to Ellen the swollen, battered and yet apparently indestructible person of Uncle Humbug.

The nurses manoeuvred the old man into bed and carefully positioned his drip out of harm's way. Humbug's cop-blackened eyes glittered with rage above the tubes pumping oxygen into his nostrils. Then the nurses shifted, blocking Jo's view. Indistinct muttering reached her ears.

‘Still waking up,' one nurse told the other, ‘hallucinating about pythons, the poor old bugger.'

When they had left, Humbug turned his head slightly to face Jo. The tiny movement made him groan aloud.

‘You, girl,' he rasped through what remained of his teeth, ‘get me outta here. I gotta find my brother.'

Jo scraped her chair over to the old man and told him that Slim was safe back at home in Bruns.

Then, ‘You gotta help me, Uncle,' she started. ‘I got some problems – big problems I need to ask you about.'

The old man smiled weakly. He did more than smile – he wheezed with quiet, agonised laughter. Then he gave Jo his considered opinion, that at this particular moment, he, Uncle Humbug – the homeless, diabetic bearer of seven fractured ribs, a broken nose, a fractured arm, two severely blackened eyes and a swollen mouth with thirty stitches in it – was the one who had
big problems.

‘I know you do.' Jo grasped his good arm. ‘But you can see my girl lying here hurt bad, eh. And you
told
me Bruns is your country. So, Uncle, tell me what you make of this–'

Jo sat by the old man and unfolded the story of the strangeness that she had lately seen and heard. She told him about hearing the talga the first time, and how she had run from hearing it ever since. She described Twoboy's fruitless striving to capture the song for himself. She spoke of the trip to the lake, and the revelation of Ellen's hands. The vision – or had it perhaps been a hallucination, Jo now wondered – of Rob Starr and Sam Nurrung, the boy standing covered in fairy-wrens on the western slope of the ridge. And last of all, the birds on the hill at Ocean Shores who had sent her to find him, before she was interrupted by the terrible phone call from Holly.

When Jo finished, she sat and humbly waited. The old man hadn't responded at all as she recounted her story. He had looked straight ahead at the ceiling, avoiding her gaze. If his eyes hadn't been open she might have thought he was asleep, or even dead. Jo was patient, as the seconds stretched out into minutes of waiting. But she was reaching the limit of her endurance when Humbug finally answered.

‘I dunno nothing bout any of that,' he muttered. ‘My head hurting, anyways.'

‘Ah, how can you not know something?' said Jo, shattered. ‘You said you were the one true owner for Bruns!'

Humbug lay very still in his cot. Shame and fear mingled in his mind as he tried to think through the fog of pain that was enveloping him. It was less than twenty-four hours since the dugai's right boot had landed squarely in his jang, the same dugai's boot that had been stomping on his face forever. This young woman sitting here beside him needed somebody, yes, but Humbug wasn't the one to give that kind of help. Talga in the hills was nothing. Everyone with any sense knew that the old mooki were still in there, still singing up the country. But the mountains appearing mapped on the palms of her daughter's hands?

Fuck that,
thought Humbug.
Gonna leave that kind of shit well alone.

‘Nuns bin raise me in the Home, girl,' he told Jo. ‘Ya gotta look somewhere else.'

‘But you have to know!'

Jo felt like throttling the old liar. There could be no mistake. The wrens had sent her towards Humbug, who had claimed to be the one true blackfella for the valley. Jo
knew
he had the answers she craved, the answers that would ease Ellen's troubled mind and take away the terror in her eyes. Every cell in her body was screaming it.

‘Go ask someone else. Go to the old mission, ask themfla.' Humbug closed his eyes in dismissal. He really did have a splitting headache. That arsehole copper needed singing onetime.

‘Who? Who do I ask?'

Jo fumed, but Humbug ignored her, feigning sleep. She swore under her breath, casting a helpless sideways look at Ellen who lay oblivious in the next cot.

‘Please, Uncle Humbug, please!' Jo found she was begging. ‘I'll help you. I'll get you outta here, I swear I will.'

Humbug opened his eyes. Now she was talking.

‘I'll take you home to Slim,' Jo promised wildly, hope building
inside her. ‘Just
please
tell me who to talk to.
Please.
I gotta help my girl, Uncle, look at her. She's only thirteen. I gotta look after her.'

Humbug glanced at Ellen and swallowed. His bruised and bloodshot eyes narrowed as he examined Jo's face. Even though his head was throbbing, he could see the woman's anguish and her fierce determination. This jalgani wasn't going to give up her fight anytime soon. Uh-huh. She was ready to kill somebody if she had to, to protect her jahjam. Nobody, Humbug reflected bitterly, had been prepared to help him when he was thirteen and in the Home. Thirteen was an age that he remembered certain parts of all too well. Other parts of thirteen, even worse, had been locked away forever in the dark caverns of his memory. Humbug had spent his adult life knowing that none of his ancient shame would ever alter or disappear – but now, lying in Ward Three of Lismore Base Hospital, he discovered that he had been wrong. To his astonishment, watching Jo sitting there fighting to protect her daughter, the old man felt something shift inside his chest. Something that had been badly broken, that had been jammed in exactly the wrong spot for over forty years, clicked then, into its proper place. Humbug blinked with surprise. His headache had vanished.

‘Well,' he said reluctantly, ‘my big tidda. She really the one ya want. Not me.'

Jo's heart leapt with sudden hope. She flashed a dazzling smile at Humbug. At last, someone with a direction to point her in; someone with something useful to say about this whole mess and confusion. Someone older, someone wiser, to tell her what the fuck to
do.

‘Oh! Thank you, thank you so much, Uncle. Where can I find her?' Jo asked, feeling the impossible load of responsibility already begin to lift from her shoulders. Humbug painfully raised a withered finger, lowered his gaze along its trajectory, and pointed to the swinging doors – just as, through them and into the ward, walked the surgeon, two green-clad nurses, and Granny Nurrung.

‘That's er.'

Granny Nurrung looked hard at Jo, then at Ellen, and lastly at Humbug.

‘You best close your jang, girl,' she advised Jo, whose jaw hung open in amazement, ‘afore a big snake crawls in and makes his yumba there.'

At midnight, Jo turned her phone back on and gave Kym an update. Two minutes later, Twoboy rang.

‘How is she?' he said immediately. ‘Is she okay?'

‘She's awake, and pretty sore and groggy,' Jo replied tightly. ‘But she'll survive.'

‘How are you?'

‘Yeah.'

‘You hear about Oscar?' Twoboy asked cautiously. Jo sighed. He was in that other world still, and she was in this one.

‘Yep. I heard.'

‘Aunt Sally mob wants to meet up here for mediation. But if you want me down there with you, I'll–'

‘No.' Jo said instantly.

‘Alright. I'll stay away. If that's what you want.' A hundred miles to the north, Twoboy shut his eyes, wondering what he had broken, and all for nothing.

‘I don't want you here,' Jo told him.

‘I hear ya,' he answered in a smaller, sadder voice.

‘Not yet.'

Twoboy's heart lifted. He threw his head back in relief, and tears pricked at his eyes. ‘Okay. Okay. I'll call you first thing in the morning, darlin, alright?'

‘If you want.'

Jo snapped her phone shut and went back to the ward.

Three days later Ellen had been moved to the Mullum hospital, into a room with a window looking out on the lush lawns of the cemetery. It was here that Granny Nurrung sat outside on a blue plastic deckchair, holding court beneath a stand of Piccabeen palms, which had dropped
an avalanche of red berries onto the square pavers at her feet. Jo sat stiffly to one side of the old lady, holding a soft drink in her lap like it was her only friend in the world. Rob Starr and Sam both sat on the concrete kerb on the other side of Granny, next to Humbug's wheelchair. Ellen was inside on the ward, recuperating. She had had her own personal audience with Granny Nurrung the night after the surgery, a conversation that Jo hadn't been privy to, and which Ellen refused to talk much about. It had taken only ten minutes, but it left the child smiling, and that was enough for Jo. The wrens hadn't lied. But now it was her turn.

‘Robbie here says you seen some things. Reckons you need some answers,' Granny Nurrung told Jo in a voice that suggested she felt very differently. Far from gratitude, Jo felt irritation flare at the very idea of Rob Starr discussing her needs with anyone. She said nothing about this lingering resentment, but Granny Nurrung saw it.

‘Robbie's a good man. And he bin a good friend to our family.'

‘He threatened to kill my dog,' Jo blurted.
And that was just for starters–

‘I'd never really hurt a dingo,' Rob Starr told her quietly from the other side of the small courtyard.

‘–and then he murdered my best horse!' Jo added, shooting him a hostile glance.

‘And apologised for it,' Granny countered.

Jo shrugged at the pavers. An apology. So bloody what.

‘And then replaced him, with another yarraman,' Granny Nurrung went on. Jo's head snapped up at that. It had been Rob Starr all along.

Jo shifted in her plastic chair as she processed this information. She gazed across at the man sitting opposite, seeing him morph for the first time into something more complicated than a killer.

‘But why put that rotten fence there at all?' she demanded. ‘You knew it blocked the fire trail! You knew it was public land.' Rob Starr nodded, then looked to Granny.

‘Fire trail in the wrong blooming place, that's why,' Granny answered for him, ‘Old Jimmy Mooney went and built that track in
the wrong place altogether. I
told
Robbie to put that fence up. Cos we don't want strangers traipsing all over the place. Going where they don't belong. Seeing things they shouldn't see.'

‘Seeing things they shouldn't...' Jo repeated uneasily. She had
traipsed about,
gone up the ridge at dawn. Seen things.

‘Mmm. Special things.' Granny glared at the entire assembly, then paused. ‘I wouldn't say. I wouldn't say it – except for your girl. Her hands. We bin waiting for her, see. For ceremony.'

Jo folded her arms and leaned back in the chair, staring hard at the red berries dotted on the ground before her. Her heart pounded in her chest. She felt as though she was sitting inside a kaleidoscope, a kaleidoscope that had just been shaken by a great dark hand. She had attributed greed to Rob Starr, and stupidity, and malice. Had judged the man an ignorant redneck and probably a paedophile. But the real explanation was one she couldn't possibly have arrived at on her own. The blunt dugai farmer with his barbed wire atrocity and his three-hundred-dollar boots was doing Granny Nurrung's bidding all along, protecting the Goorie Law. Looking after the place that Granny now spoke of in a hushed and reluctant voice.