Bloke, page 16
‘And not one of my cousins is living with a bloke who isn’t bludging on them one way or the other.’
‘What, all of them?’
‘Well, some of them are good blokes, but none of the women have finished school and even if they did go to TAFE it’d be part-time and they’d —’
‘So what about when you’re forty?’
‘You said thirty.’
‘Not much difference.’
‘Well, I don’t know what I’ll be thinking then.’
‘It’s a waste not to —’
‘It’s not a waste, it’s my body, I’ll do what I like with it.’
‘I wasn’t talking about your body, Spiderwoman, I was talking about you. You’ve —’
‘Got such a good personality.’
‘Forget it, forget I mentioned it, you’re not even trying to understand what I’m saying.’
‘You’re saying the only future for a woman is with a man.’
‘Don’t laugh, it works sometimes.’
‘From your experience?’
It stung again.
‘Yes, but also from plain commonsense. People have to make compromises.’
‘From my experience, it’s only the women who make the sacrifices. And I’m going to qualify and —’
‘And what?’
‘Well, now that you’ve asked, I’m going to work for my people, work in the law so that at least some of my people can compete against those who’re trying to rob them blind with reconciliation.’
‘Is reconciliation to blame?’
‘What’s the good of reconciliation if most Australians believe black people are inferior, can’t look after their kids, can’t even wash their face without a white man’s help? I did work experience when I was in Year Ten with Helen Argus up in Alice. That’s what I want to be like. A fighter for the people.’
‘A warrior?’
‘Don’t you bloody sneer. What have you ever done for your people?’
The whip again, but I didn’t take my eyes off her face. ‘They lied to me too you know. And my mother.’
‘Sorry.’
‘I know I haven’t followed it up. I knew ages ago. Well, not really knew, but if I’d asked around I would have found out. Earlier than this. But I have to get used to it. Like I’m a different person or something. Different history, different family, getting used to having a family at all, a different colour. I survived by looking after myself and now I’m kind of frozen. I don’t want to take another step, it’s like … like walking away from who I am.’
‘Tough. But that’s how it is. And you knew a while ago. You admit that yourself. There’s no way out. Lot of people find it easier to act dumb but we know who they are.’
She stared across the river and I followed her gaze to the rocky wall where water ferns and maidenhair draped in elegant cascades above the pool.
‘White people never understand.’ I looked at her. ‘They never get how we think, what we’re responsible for, who we’re responsible to. Never ever think that when they ask us about child molesters and inventing the wheel that they’re not accusing all black people of being the same. And you, you’re not even sure you’re black. Are you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, you’ll have to make up your mind. Our mob’s looking after you, has been for months because we know you’re black, but if you don’t believe you are then you’d better piss off. We can see what you’re thinking, but you can only keep thinking for so long before being. Being black. Otherwise you’re a danger to us. Just another bludger.’
‘I’m not bludging.’
‘Well, you’d better start being then.’
‘Retha —’
‘Stop looking at me like that! You’re just out of gaol. You turn up here and you’re more interested in your balls than you are in who you are.’
‘I didn’t mean to —’
‘Forget it, Jim. Get yourself sorted out before you start propositioning people you hardly know.’ She picked up Lilly, a hint of exasperation in her movements. Edgy. Jaggy. Lilly stirred querulously. ‘Anyway, Aunt wants you to chop some wood for the stove. We’re having chook.’
‘But it’s thirty-five degrees.’
‘Yes, but it’s Friday. She always has her chook. To make up for the Fridays when she had nothing.’ She turned back to look at me. ‘You haven’t even asked about your aunt’s life.’
‘She finds plenty of excuses to tell me.’
‘Bit of respect, Jim. You don’t know anything about that lady.’
‘I know what she’s like. I’m not blind. I can see how …’ I tailed off, not sure what I could see.
‘Anyway, you’ll need to cut some kindling for her. Thank your lucky stars she didn’t ask you to kill the chook. She’ll be up there throttling it herself. Never uses the axe, just chokes the poor bloody things.’ She turned and left the shade and marched up through the rye stalks, her gait awkward with the weight of the sleeping child.
Aunty Cookup was plucking a big cockerel over an enamel basin, her skirt hoiked over her knees.
‘She reckons I choke them. Bulldust. I just grab ’em an’ they think I’m givin ’em a good old cuddle, an’ then they go to sleep. That’s why I pet all the little chickens. Get ’em used to a cuddle. That’s all.’
‘I’ll chop some wood.’
‘You look like ya mum, y’know. She had that kind of face. Sort of half sad.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Sort of serious, a bit worried all the time. She was a bit of a thinker, that girl.’
‘When did she leave school?’
‘School? Well, there was no school them days, there were schools from here to Bega. We went to ’em all. Pickin beans here, corn there, potatoes somewhere else, cleanin fish, we even went with the beeman doin the honey. Schools all over the place. I dunno, she might have done Grade Six. She was better than most of us. I never liked it meself.’
‘Did she go to work?’
‘Oh, we all did. If we weren’t pickin we were cleanin some white woman’s house, wipin her babies’ bums. That was our work.’
I picked up the axe, not sure what else to ask, what else I wanted to know. The old woman plucked away in a dream of riverland crops, farmers’ houses, tin humpies, fleeting visits to schools, a lot of schools.
‘Oh, that’s right,’ she said, ‘letter for you.’
‘Letter? No one’s supposed to know I’m here.’
‘Black hand to black hand. Special delivery.’ She took a letter from her apron pocket that looked like it had gone overland with Burke and Wills.
I split the kindling, stacked it by the stove, and left by the front door. Down the lane, through the ryegrass and down to the river.
I opened the letter in purple shade.
It was a stiff sort of letter, almost formal. She never mentioned Baras but it was obvious she hadn’t forgotten my accusation. Well, I saw it as a query, she saw it as … Who knows what she thought? But what was I supposed to think? She might have been using me as a lever against him. I’d seen people use each other like that. I’d been on guard all my life, waiting for the slightest … I had to, it’s how I survived and I wasn’t about to … I looked down at that letter. Poor little Jimmy. Did I believe all this shit?
I stared at the paper trying to work out thought from device, defence from attack. Other people must talk about this stuff. I never could. It froze on my tongue. Maybe why the letter was so cool.
fourteen
Here I am, back at my aunt’s table listening to gossip picked up by a bowerbird. It’s hard to imagine how one little town can survive the intrigues and betrayals, the hopes and failures, the passions and the passivity, the pre-Christmas parties where bourbon and Coke encourages the gutless to attempt the unthinkable on the unwilling.
Smug? Or just trying to survive? What do you think? They’re probably thinking similar things about me. Well, she always was attracted to the no-hopers and criminals. Preferably both.
I know what it’d sound like. I’ve heard the town’s love choices and accidents exposed with biting analysis.
I wait. Only so many sunset walks on the beach can be tolerated, only so many schools of curving dolphins can provide solace.
I decked for Bob Phillips but he’s withdrawn and self-absorbed and I think I know why. A dependence on his own imports. I had a few days at the fish factory cutting the rings out of abalone and whipping fillets off flathead, but I’m sick of the smell of fish, the lame jokes of the marginally employed. The family feels sorry for me so I end up at the aunts’ birthdays, the nieces’ gymnastic performances, and the relationship vivisections.
I sit in front of more chicken parmigianas than you can shake a floral hanky at while Aunt unwraps a blouse that would make Kath and Kim weep. We clink glasses with pretend glee, give hearty cheers, and sing happy birthday with the kind of jollity which only too much Spumante can produce.
One night of the party parmas, the Christmas break-up of the ladies’ netball, I was just trying to make my excuses to leave when Aunty Vega noticed Stoker in the saloon. I could just see the back of his head. His wife was with him. Madeleine. They met at school; he was four or five years ahead of me so I didn’t see much of him there, just the usual thuggery, enough to learn to keep away from him. He’d had affairs all over the place so I’d presumed he and Madeleine were finished.
She’s a big girl now, not the kind he’s been squiring in the resorts, a habit he copied off Baras, his idol when it came to selfish pleasure. But Stoker seems to have lost a bit of the old arrogance. Almost furtive. Hard to believe it’s the same ruthless bastard.
The aunts saw the situation and started grabbing cardigans and bags and hustling me out as quick as we could go, but with all the tinsel in their hair and the Santa caps it looked a bit like the seven dwarfs in a drugs raid. In the passage between the main bar and the toilets we came face to face with Madeleine. She grabbed my arm and hauled me into the bar. She’s always been strong, comes from lugging all those fish bins when she was a young wife.
I didn’t want to make a scene but I made sure I sat where I could watch the door. What was I expecting? A hitman in Nullakarn? A hitwoman?
She saw my wariness and told me to relax, yelled out to the barman for some champagne. ‘And none of that Minchinbury shit, Jack,’ she yelled. Jack was one of her boyfriends at school. Nearly made Richmond Reserves. Now he works in the bar and does the goal umpiring for the under-17s.
Madeleine’s big, no two ways about it, but she’s still got the tits and that’s usually enough to stop most pub conversations. Especially if you can afford the clothes. A bit garish if you ask me, but enough to excite most fishermen.
‘Relax,’ she said, slipping a note for the champagne. ‘Stoker’s over it. They’ve screwed him to the wall but he’s not gunna kill no one. He can’t concentrate for long, you know that.’
It was funny seeing her and Jack looking at each other. She was his one true love. He’d do anything for her, asked her to marry him at least three times – well, that’s what Madeleine told us at school. Jack is one of the gentlest men there is, but Madeleine had her eye on bigger, flasher fish. Knowing our histories I’ve always been sensitive to how she managed her life. And disappointments. She’d seen enough young girls regret their marriages, bragged that she’d seen enough disappointment without waiting to see it get fat and balding and wearing Kmart jeans. She preferred her disappointment and baldness associated with open credit cards and world travel. If you called Thailand and Singapore world travel. Abalone and drug markets don’t always provide entrée to the pinnacle of world culture.
She raised her glass and gave me a frank inspection over its rim. She reckoned we had a lot in common. Sisterhood. We’d both married cynical smartarses on the edge of crime. Difference was, she said, I walked out with nothing while she had negotiated a profitable truce.
Without a hint of self-pity she told me that Stoker was still moping for the latest girlfriend, Miss Wonderbra, but she’d done him like a dinner, got half his dough, so he crawled back to Madeleine so she wouldn’t divorce him and take the other half.
‘Not bad, eh, for a girl who left Nullakarn High in Year Nine?’ You have to like her. Well, I do. She’s totally honest. Reckons Stoker’s over shooting people. Even too scared to shoot her. Because of all the cops. ‘Anyway, he’s not a bad bloke. As bad blokes go.’ Bit of the fatalist about her.
We were never great mates at school, but we’d never been enemies. I was ridiculed by most of the girls for being too conchy, and some had cute ways of expressing that contempt, but Madeleine never did that. She was loud and crude, never wasted time on homework; in fact, she was a bit of a moll, apprenticing for sexual power, learnt early that boys’ fascination with her breasts was as good as gold.
‘I know you’re worried about your Jim fella, but it’ll work out. This abalone disease has affected their brains as well as the fish.’
‘But people have died because of this before.’
‘Those days are over, Vanna. The boys like to chest each other a bit, show who’s boss, but right now no one can move without attracting attention.’
‘I wish I had your confidence.’
‘This industry has always been full of heroes and bullshit artists.’
‘But some of them are dangerous. I’ve seen it first-hand.’
‘I know ya have, darl, we both have.’
We might be mates, well, friends anyway, but I hated being called darl.
‘And you know men have been shot just for looking at another bloke’s fish.’
‘Or his wife.’
‘They’re dangerous, and some of them prefer violence to freedom.’
‘Yeah, seen plenty of them, in this very room, eh Jack?’
Jack looked over and beamed at her shyly, as if she’d asked to hold his hand. He was a good bloke, Jack, but not exciting enough for someone like Madeleine. She didn’t get the nickname Maddy for nothing.
‘I’m just sayin, Stoker’s got more on his mind at the moment than you and your bloke. No, your Bloke.’
Well, I grinned a bit. I suppose it might have looked a bit like a hole in gladwrap but I didn’t want to go all worldly wise on Maddy, she wasn’t a bad woman, just twice as honest as most. I sent a letter to Jim so he’d know what was going on. Aunty Vic knew the Koorie woman in the pub kitchen at Goongerah. She reckoned that lady was more reliable than the Canadian Mounties. Sixties kid shows were big on the reliability of Canadian Mounties. Especially their hats. Looked a bit like postmen too, Aunty Vic reckoned.
I wanted Jim to know Madeleine’s assessment of the risk. I was going to add that he’d have to trust me about the Baras business but I couldn’t do it, didn’t feel like I had to beg for that belief.
fifteen
‘So, how’s the girlfriend?’ I’d hardly got in the door before the old woman tackled me while in the middle of troubling a lump of corned beef in a pot. Neither Retha nor Lilly were in the room.
‘Who?’
‘The girlfriend.’
‘You read my mail?’
‘That’s not mail. That come black delivery.’
‘But it’s my letter.’
‘And who else would know you were here?’
‘All right, so it was her.’
‘So how is she? That’s all I asked.’
‘She’s okay.’
‘Big fat letter for okay.’
Retha came in and Aunty Cookup jabbed a vicious, three-tined fork into the meat and I jammed a piece of three-by-two in the firebox and slammed the door. She looked at us both. Happy families.
Next day a bloke turned up in a ute. Darkish bloke.
‘G’day. Jim, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Nugget and Smearcat said you was lookin for work. I used to strap in the stables with Nugget in Maffra. Good bloke. Me cousin. Said you needed work. Hop in.’
‘What do I need?’ I needed work but I didn’t know what work he did.
‘Packet of tea – and a lettuce if yev got one.’
‘That all?’
‘Boots if yev got ’em.’
The old Toyota was a bit loose. The tray and doors rattled so much you could hardly hear the motor.
‘What are we working at?’
‘Cuttin willas.’
We drove for an hour and eventually descended into a deep river valley on a track so narrow and overgrown that branches slapped and scraped at the side of the ute. On the floor of the valley there they were. The willows.
‘Yev gotta cut ’em off at the base and dab a bit of this shit on ’em. Try not to swaller it or get it in yer eyes. Kill a bloody willa, it’s certain ta kill you.’
For the rest of the morning we cut willows, dabbed the stump with poison gel and stacked the branches into a sheaf. Hard work, swinging an axe into the base of the trees, hauling the trunks and branches. Smoko was actually lunch. He already had the fire lit and had gone down to the river. Fishing.
I was starving. I took out the lettuce and looked at it. I wasn’t that hungry. I made cups of tea and took one down to him.
‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘me name’s Darce.’
‘Darce.’
‘Here,’ he said, ‘boil these bastards an’ we’ll have some tucker.’
He’d caught half a dozen yabbies, stored them in his hat covered in damp grass. He kept fishing while I boiled the yabbies. Dark, green-brown fellas about six inches long.
‘Wrap ’em in the lettuce,’ he said, throwing another hatful of yabbies by the fire. ‘Here, look, some salt an’ vinegar.’ His pockets carried the essentials.
Yabbies salted and vinegared in lettuce leaves, I’ll never forget it. Not only for the taste but for the location. And company. At around six he stoked up the fire and went fishing again, calling over his shoulder as he went, ‘Yer can camp by the fire or in the back of the ute. Suit yerself.’
