The Maskeys, page 12
Billy came in and found his mother scrabbling in a drawer for a packet of cigarettes. Finding a pack, she lit one. ‘I’m delivering a birdbath to the gallery today,’ she said, blowing smoke.
‘You smoking again?’ Billy said.
She went to the stove for the platter of toast and placed it in the centre of the table. ‘You can help me take it there.’
‘I can help ya,’ Caleb said, barging into the room.
‘Billy can do it,’ Hilda said. ‘You’re busy.’
‘Not with all the cops in town, I’m not,’ he said, grabbing two slices.
She ignored him. ‘Billy?’ she persisted.
‘Sure, Mum,’ he said, acknowledging his brother with a friendly shrug.
Soon after, mother and son loaded a large mosaic birdbath onto the tray of Billy’s ute. Hilda was still moody. ‘Didn’t sleep,’ she replied in cold response to a query from Billy into her wellbeing. She wiped her hands on the hips of her jeans while Billy secured the heavy sculpture with straps. He went to board. ‘I’ll drive,’ his mother said.
‘What about your DUI?’ he asked.
She moved him out of the way, snatched the keys and drove them from the property.
Billy noticed Celeste watching them leave. ‘She’s always looking,’ he said, ‘isn’t she?’
Hilda glanced grimly at the girl but did not respond. At the end of the gravel, she took a hard left.
‘I thought we were going to the gallery,’ Billy said.
His mother floored the accelerator; their heads flew back in the cabin. ‘I’ll be real quick.’
‘What’s the hurry?’ he said, gripping the dash. ‘You’re speeding.’ She ignored him. ‘We’ll lose the birdbath!’ He turned his head to check that it wasn’t coming loose and then, looking at his mother, checked the urgency in her face.
At the letterbox that belonged to no-obvious-house, Hilda braked and, crunching down gears, turned off the Naples Road.
‘It’s not safe to go to the crop,’ Billy said.
Ignoring her son, she drove on a short distance and parked behind an overgrown hedge of privet.
Billy thought he could see a house up ahead. ‘Where’s this?’
She got out. ‘You wait here.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Stay where you are,’ she ordered, running on a short distance.
He got out of the ute and followed. Observing the sign, Trespassers Will Be Shot, he walked on and, squatting down low, watched his mother disappear between the jacks. She lifted a trapdoor and then stood up into the place.
‘It’s gone,’ Hilda cried in alarm. She climbed up inside, and Billy heard her stomping from room to room, crying, ‘It’s all gone!’
A minute later she was on her knees and crawling out.
‘What is this place?’ Billy said.
His mother swept her hair back from her face and stomped angrily to the ute.
‘Mum, you’re worrying me. What’s wrong – what is this place?’
‘I said stay in the car,’ she said, brushing herself off.
Billy followed.
‘You drive,’ she said, throwing him the keys.
He dropped them.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’
‘I’ve been putting a bit of money away.’ She boarded the vehicle.
‘There was money in there?’
‘No, silly, marijuana. Hurry up, Billy, get in the car.’
‘There was dope in there?’
‘Rodney’s been growing for me. Someone’s stolen it.’
‘Why do you need money?’
‘What a stupid question,’ she said.
‘Mum!’
‘I’m leaving George. Why else?’
Billy turned the key in the ignition. ‘I thought you two were getting better. I thought —’
‘He’s on a waiting list to have his legs removed. Don’t tell anyone. Not even Caleb knows.’
‘Shit,’ Billy said, reversing out.
‘It’s his choice. The pain’s too much. I’m not hanging around for that. No way. You kids are grown. The twins don’t need us anymore —’
‘You’re not telling him?’
‘Why should I?’ she said, her eyes darkening. ‘I hate him.’
‘No, you don’t.’
‘Don’t tell me who I hate or don’t. We had everything. Now all we have is shit.’
Billy remembered his mother’s assurances, made regularly, that the family would pull through together; Hilda read his mind. ‘Oh, you try marriage. Real marriage. Bring kids into the world. Bury a couple of them.’
‘I know, Mum.’
‘You left that boy, David, for being nice – and for keeping ferrets!’ She sniffed a tear. ‘I’m trying to save my fucking life, okay.’
‘I miss the twins too,’ Billy said, changing up. ‘I didn’t know things were so bad.’
‘You haven’t been here. Have you. I’m dying.’
He thumped the ute, and the birdbath it carried, back onto the Naples Road. He dared another question. ‘How long have you been growing for?’
‘A couple of seasons.’
‘But George knows everyone around here. How does Rodney offload the dope without him finding out?’
‘Rodney has some contact away from here. He gets a house delivered at night – no one suspects anything. When it’s full of plants, the house gets picked up and driven out west somewhere. Then Rodney gets another house delivered.’
‘You’ve got to be joking!’
‘Just so I can afford to make a new start; you know – get this stupid tattoo removed,’ she said, pulling at her neckline. She softened. ‘I’m sorry about back there. I don’t want to hurt you. I could never, ever do that. I’m just really stressed about Rodney,’ she went on, finally noticing her seatbelt was unfastened. She looked sadly down into her tattooed breast and clicked the belt. ‘He’s very protective of me. He won’t let anything happen to that marijuana – whoever’s got it.’
‘Do you think it might be our neighbour?’
‘Can’t be Duncan.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothing.’
They sped past the turn-off to Longwhile. Watching the road ahead, Billy felt some sympathy for George. ‘When are you leaving?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hilda said, looking ahead. ‘Don’t tell anyone this, only Rodney knows,’ she said, touching Billy on the arm, ‘but after George had his accident, I started stealing money from him.’
Billy took his eyes off the road.
‘You know – not a lot,’ she whispered softer, as though cautious the hills might overhear. ‘Just a few hundy a day. He was sick, he didn’t suspect.’
‘Shit, Mum.’ Billy sympathised.
‘You remember how angry I was with him. I managed to get a few thou put aside – you know, just for me – and I thought, This is no good, what am I doing? What the fuck am I actually doing? Excuse my language. But I was desperate. And then I thought – What if I grew some myself? Why shouldn’t I grow some myself? I confided in Rodney what I’d been doing and how wretched I felt about it – and he agreed to start another site for me. My own wife site. One for the little lady, a smaller one,’ she mocked. ‘A secret one.’
As they drew near to town, Billy slowed.
Hilda went on, ‘Rodney didn’t approve. He would never go behind your father’s back about anything. But – why the fuck shouldn’t I?’
Billy saw the Potter’s Gallery up ahead. He forgot about George and wondered about Rodney. What did it mean that Rodney was missing? What did it mean that a house full of drying plants belonging to his mother had been found, and stolen?
He struggled to find somewhere to park.
‘The crip space,’ his mother said.
He reversed the ute into a disabled zone.
George was on his usual seat outside the gallery. He stepped up to the ute. ‘What took yous?’
‘I dropped a little piece at Carol’s,’ Hilda, the mosaic, replied.
Billy avoided eye contact with his stepfather. He moved to the vehicle’s tray and began to loosen the straps securing the work. The police uniforms, dotted here and there up the street, were not of concern to Billy: being not a match for his mother’s law.
George returned to the bench and watched Billy and Hilda struggle with the weighty mosaic; almost as heavy, Celeste’s make-up radiated her presence at George’s side.
Peeling away from people milling about, a Bundjalung elder paused when he arrived at the bench.
‘Are they finding much?’ George asked him.
‘They’re findin everythin, brotha. And they’re not leavin neither, till it’s all gone. Been burnin it for the cameras.’
‘Don’t suppose you’ve seen Rodney, have you?’ George asked.
Hilda’s and Billy’s eyes met, as they passed, to hear the old man’s reply.
‘No, brotha. That one – he has a way of seein you, before you see im.’ The elder laughed.
‘If you hear anything then,’ George said, catching his wife’s eye as she disappeared inside the gallery.
Celeste stood. ‘I have to run an errand, Dad. I won’t be long.’
‘Good enough,’ George replied, not interested.
Off the leash, Celeste hurried past the pub and down Judith Street. When she drew near to the servo, she dropped her smoke and stamped on it. At the shop entrance, Duncan’s Missing Person notice caught her eye. She looked about; there was no one near to interfere with her, just a girl behind the counter, and people lined up, waiting to pay for fuel. She tore the notice off the glass. Folded it into her jeans, and hurried back to George.
The bench seat outside the Potter’s Gallery had been a fixture of the postcode for twenty years and, just like several other big-shot dealers of the town, George Maskey a fixture upon the bench for just as long. From this vantage point, the town’s Mr Bigs found they could keep an eye on their runners, and customers, and business being done, up and down the street.
And it was there, on that same bench seat, while George was rolling a smoke one day, that a child’s raspy voice sounded out of the throng of tourist foot-traffic milling past.
‘I heard ya lookin for a grower, Mr Maskey,’ the boy said.
George wasn’t sure he’d heard him correctly.
‘Someone said ya not dealin the hard stuff no more, ya wanna move into green.’
‘What’s it to you?’ George sneered with a sideways glance at another big shot seated at the far end of the bench.
‘Ya got that girl in your life now,’ Rodney said, referring to Hilda, ‘and ya givin up dealin the hard shit, for her.’
‘And how would you know that?’
‘The old aborigine, Serenade – she told me,’ Rodney said. ‘She knows everythin.’
George’s eyes located Serenade sitting at her table across the road. She offered him a friendly wave. But he did not enjoy the familiarity. He lit his smoke. ‘You’re giving me the shits,’ George huffed. ‘Piss off – I’m busy.’
‘No. You ain’t heard my proposition yet.’
‘What of it?’
‘Mr Maskey – I’m offrin you a business opportunity.’
George guffawed.
‘Coz, I know how to grow plants. And not only that, I have a great place to do it, that no one knows about even. No one.’
Against his instincts to mistrust the kid, George wondered what harm it could do to hear the urchin out. ‘Where?’
Rodney sat down between George and the other big shot. ‘It’s a secret place on the Knuckle,’ the boy whispered, cautious of being overheard. ‘where I been livin the last two years, or close enough.’
‘And what would you know about growing marijuana?’
‘Plenty. Nearly everythin there is to know.’
Rodney pulled out a tattered volume of Marijuana Botany from his hunter’s vest pocket. He waved the book at George. ‘See – I’m growin up there already. They’re beauties. But I wanna go bigger!’ He produced a plastic bag containing a large green bud.
George took the bag and had a sniff. ‘You grew this?’ he asked, not unimpressed.
Rodney drifted into a kind of trance upon finding himself so close to the rugged profile of George Maskey for the first time. His veil of long dark beard fraying into loose wires about his pirate ear piercings and his craggy neck; low-tide hairline of salt and pepper pulled tight over his high forehead and ending in a dribble between his shoulder blades.
George lifted his sunglasses to look closely at Rodney. ‘Kid?’
Rodney blinked and snapped out of his trance. ‘I can show ya if you don’t believe me. I promise, I can do everythin, but I need some stuff delivered.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I already got quarters up there and a dunny dug out – I made all that by meself,’ he said, becoming excited. ‘And I need a generator. I need heaps of tarps, irrigation stuff – you can get it from the hardware – or I can get it – but I need help to get it on site. They won’t deliver … up there.’ Rodney shaded his mouth with his hand, cautious of the other gentleman.
‘Why would I trust a snivelling little weasel like you?’ George said with a chuckle, inviting his comrade on the bench to share in the joke.
‘You trusted me mother,’ Rodney said. ‘She was diddlin you from day one, Mr Maskey.’
George sobered. ‘What?’
‘Ask Serenade, Mr Maskey,’ Rodney went on, standing.
George looked across the road and saw that Serenade was still watching on.
‘She knows how honest I am,’ Rodney added. ‘Oh, there’s heaps of water up there too!’ came another whisper. ‘Meet me here tomorrow, and I’ll show ya, Mr Maskey.’ Rodney peeled off into the stream of tourists, leaving George to wonder about the strange boy. ‘Tomorrow, Mr Maskey. This same time. Don’t keep me waitin,’ Rodney added, when not quite gone from view.
‘Fucking little brat – who is that kid?’ George asked the nearby big shot.
‘That’s Lucy’s kid.’
‘Lucy? She died.’
‘Yep.’
‘He’s Lucy’s kid? How old is he?’
‘About fifteen, I think.’
Little for his age, George thought, saying aloud: ‘How did I not know Lucy had a kid?’
‘Guess she made sure you never found out, George,’ the gentleman replied, smirking into his tobacco pouch.
Rodney ran across the street and got tangled up in another throng of tourist commerce. Feeling proud to have pitched his great plan to George Maskey, he darted through the crowds, awning poles and scattered council-assets, holding tight on to his volume of Marijuana Botany and compiling lists in his head of all he’d need supplied from the town’s Mr Big, soon to be his partner in business: a man his mother had worked for all those years but got nowhere with.
Just one day away from becoming an entrepreneur, a success, a boy with a big future, proving his mother wrong – his head tickled with the possibility of it all. He launched himself with a jolly skip over a buckled flagstone and found his progress halted when the scruff of his hunter’s vest was yanked hard by Serenade.
‘Little one, ain’t you got nothing to tell me?’ she said.
Rodney scratched his neck.
‘What did he say?’
Inconvenienced by this impediment to his progress down the street, he didn’t care to hide it. ‘Don’t you know?’ he snapped, straightening his vest.
‘Don’t give cheek. I want to hear it from your own lips.’
‘I’m meeting him tomorrow, and he’s gonna inspect the grow site I found. He’s gonna go into business with me.’
‘Oh, that’s good,’ Serenade said. ‘Nothing else?’
‘No.’ Rodney looked across the road at George.
‘Didn’t you tell him who you are then?’
Rodney shook his head.
‘Why not?’ Serenade went all gimlet-eyed.
‘Can I go now?’ he said. Tiring of the old downer, he pulled free and ran on.
As he disappeared from Serenade’s near-sight, she who sees everything read in the child’s defensiveness that he was trying to dismiss the unwelcome complication of his blood relation to his soon-to-be business partner. A relationship that many others might take as advantage. Not the weasel, though. Who was pretty well accustomed to having no father. And who would never be in the mood to have his authentic and original ambitions polluted by nepotism – if he’d ever heard of such a word in the first place.
8
Back in the here and now, the never-ending surprises of Naples were working a strange magic on Leanne. And sometime during the morning, while staffing the servo, she came to feel simply elated.
It was something about the town’s energy. The sunshine, the music, the air perfumed with incense and weed. Smiling barefoot hippies, kids in tow – pulling in for fuel and swapping news about the raids going on in the hills. Friendly farmers with all the time in the world to introduce themselves to her; stoned backpackers, music blaring from their cars. A town full of cops – and everyone chilled.
A barefoot Bundjalung youth, wearing orange Speedos and a few clay smearings, came in to buy smokes. Leanne didn’t know where to look. He was carrying a beatbox, and hanging off his back was a didgeridoo. In the attractive youth’s service, Leanne came to believe there were all sorts of possibilities for her and Jay in this strange new town.
The young man said he was heading up to a local garden cafe, to busk for a few hours. He happily demonstrated his sound for Leanne, raising the roof off the shop with his wide instrument.
Watching the man walk away, she felt better than she had for months. Maybe years. When Gayle entered from the garage, Leanne released a squeal of joy. ‘I just love it here!’ she exclaimed, beaming.
‘Where’s my boy’s Missing notice?’ Gayle said.
Leanne had no idea.
‘Why would someone tear my notice down – did you see anything?’
She apologised.
‘Fetch Rodney’s breakfast things for me.’
Leanne hurried upstairs, and Gayle stepped behind the counter. She opened a drawer and found a duplicate notice.
