Mullumbimby (16 page)

Jo stiffened. ‘What?'

‘Rob Starr bought a whole heap of pickets and some high-tension
wire about three days ago.' Dan looked at Jo doubtfully. Her eyes had narrowed to savage slits, and Dan was hoping that she still didn't own a firearm.

I'll fucken kill him. I'll tie
him
up with wire and chuck him off Federation Bridge. He wants to see the creek run with our mob blood, well then, let the river run with his–

‘It might just be a coincidence,' Dan added hastily.

‘Yeah,' said Jo very slowly, ‘yeah, it might be a coincidence.' But she was gonna make it her business to find out. And if it wasn't, well. Heads were gonna roll, onetime. She threw the lucerne bouquet in the back of the ute, and went inside with a stony face to sort out the order with Basho.

‘Yeah, we put that bit of fence up just the other day. Friday it woulda been.' Rob Starr watched Jo warily, his right foot resting on the bottom rung of his five-bar front gate. The Hilux engine was still ticking; the screech of its tyres braking on the gravel road lingered in both their ears, and the slam of the driver's door.

Jo had knocked off early and covered the ten kays from Mullum to Middle Pocket in record time. Now Starr's dark sunglasses prevented her from beaming her hatred directly into his optic nerves, searing him with her rage.

‘Did it occur to you to maybe ask me before you put up a fence on
my land?'
Jo spat in fury. Stay angry, she told herself, remember to stay proper bloody wild and then you won't cry. She'd had quite enough of crying in front of white men for one day.

‘On your land?' Starr answered with genuine surprise. ‘Where'd you get that idea?'

‘Oh, maybe cos my pedigree stockhorse colt's lying dead tangled up in it,' Jo oozed sarcasm. ‘Maybe cos I've got two eyes and a brain, and they both fucking work.' She could feel her heart hammering as she spoke. She ached to make an angry fist in the air, but if she did Jo thought she might just use it on him.

Rob Starr paused and touched the back of his hand to his nose
before blowing air audibly through his lips. Buying time. That shut ya up, didn't it, thought Jo with a tiny shred of satisfaction. When he answered, his tone had softened, and most of the wariness had been replaced with insight, now that he knew why a crazy woman was at his front gate spewing gravel and spitting chips.

‘Well. Well, I'm real sorry if you've lost your colt, but I still say that fence isn't on your land. I've got a survey map of the valley in the house. I'll show ya ... if ya like.'

No, Jo didn't want to see the survey, much less to set even one toe on his poisonous farm. She wanted the fence not to exist, for Comet not to have drowned, for her not to be put in the position of arguing uselessly with a middle-aged man – and a middle-aged dugai man at that – about far-and-away the worst thing to happen since her divorce. Starr stood there implacable in his old worn jeans and a cheap sky-blue pullover from Target, but the muddied boot resting on the bar of the gate was an R.M. Williams. Landed fucken gentry. How could she even begin to argue with someone who spent one of her weekly mortgage payments on working boots?

‘Well, if it's not on my land–' she snarled, ‘and I'm not saying it isn't – then it'd have to be on the fucking fire trail and that's illegal too. Probably more bloody illegal than trespassing on my property. What if the ridge caught fire? Hey? How would anyone get up there to put a bushfire out?'

Starr glanced up at the sodden ridge which lay between their two properties. The idea of it catching fire seemed very far-fetched at the moment. From where they were standing, Jo could see rivulets streaming down between the old rows of neglected bananas. These narrow streams were stained by topsoil, and the country looked like it was bleeding. She could see the profile of the eucalyptus with a heart-shaped canopy that she'd noticed that first morning. Starr had a distant view of the same tree on the same ridgeline, but of course his house and front paddocks faced it from the opposite side. Same same but different, Jo thought. Very bloody different.

When Starr answered, his voice remained infuriatingly mild.

‘Every fire truck I've ever seen had the universal key on it, as stock standard. And it's only a picket fence anyway. A truck could drive straight through it in an emergency. Same as every other picket fence on my place – or on yours for that matter.'

Jo was further enraged by the lack of bite in the man. If horses were to be murdered, if land was to be trespassed on, if illegal fences were to be erected, then wouldn't you think that a bit of fire and brimstone would be involved? But with no opposing force to match her anger, Jo found herself quickly becoming marooned in the sea of Rob Starr's equanimity.

The man's hands were clasped firmly over the top rail of his steel gate. Like hers, they were scarred with the recent evidence of unhappy meetings with barbed wire, though Jo's deeply cut right hand was bandaged and Starr's fingers, which were a mass of shallow scratches, were not. They'd had iodine put on them by someone. Yellow smears stained the red marks, reminding Jo of Ellen's pots of watercolour paint and her bottles full of brushes – which now lived in the back bedroom at the farm.

Jo lifted her eyes from the many cuts and stared at Rob Starr's sunglasses in contempt. Her distorted reflection looked back at her. The prick appeared to have no shame at all, was not backing down, not even bothering to argue about who was right or wrong. Just calmly agreeing that he'd erected a fence, probably on public land. Admitting that her beautiful Comet was dead and gone, sorry about it even – and for what?

Killer.

‘I'm sorry about your colt,' he repeated steadily, flexing his damaged fingers on the gate, ‘but that fence is definitely not on your land. I haven't lived here forty-five years for nothing, I know where the boundaries are along these roads, and I just wouldn't do that. But if you need any help sorting out the carcass–'

‘No!' Jo turned away, bile rising up in her mouth at the word
carcass.
‘The day I need your help...' But there was no point in even insulting the man.

She walked away from his steel five-bar gate and his view of the Heart Tree and his R.M. Williams boots, shaking her head. They just can't stop taking, can they? They just wouldn't know how.

‘Hang on, I'll get in,' Therese said, stopping Jo. She took Jo's shovel and placed it across the top of the hole. Then she crouched, and swung with muddied hands off the long wooden handle. Therese discovered that when she stood upright in the hole, only her head and neck protruded. Gazing directly at eye-level across the paddock at the newly tarped body of Comet, she gave an involuntary shudder. Amanda and Jo glanced at each other.

‘You okay?' Jo asked doubtfully, through sheeting light rain.
Kipper gwong.
What a fucking horrible day it had been, and now her best mate was standing in a grave.

‘Yeah, it's just a bit ... you know.' Therese made a face. Standing in a grave, even a horse's grave, gave her the willies. She stepped squelchily backward, to give herself some room to dig.

‘I should be doing this, not you,' Jo told her. She was mortified, really, even to need any help, but once Twoboy had rung them there was no stopping Therese and Amanda from arriving after school in a borrowed 4WD. They had forded the flooded road just outside Nudgel and turned up at the farm to find Jo and Ellen standing in the paddock, weeping and close to exhaustion. The wet grave was only three feet deep after a solid hour of digging.

Ellen was gently despatched to bring hot drinks from the kitchen, and the two dykes had set about finishing the hole.

‘Shuttup and pass me that short-handled shovel,' Therese answered. ‘Youse can both spell me in a minute.'

She dug and dug, and then she dug some more. Red earth, red mud really, steadily emerged from the hole, until after twenty minutes only the crown of Therese's head was visible. Jo could hear her gasping for breath, even over the rushing of the creek. The bloody creek, the murdering water. She would never swim there again, Jo
vowed, and would never look at its winding course through her land with anything like pleasure either.

‘My turn,' she tried, but it was to Amanda that the short-handled shovel went next, and it was Amanda whose wet Levis were now bright with mud from sliding down the sides of the grave. Jo stood helplessly watching as, centimetre by centimetre, air replaced solid earth in the hole. The heap of extracted dirt was a startling red against the green grass and the silver-grey of the rain.
Coochin.
The colour of blood, almost, and the colour of war, too, in the old days. She had a vision of herself, daubed liberally with the dirt, reappearing at Rob Starr's gate but this time bearing weapons, raising her tommyhawk high above her ochred head and–

‘Got that axe there?' Amanda asked, reaching behind her.

Jo came speeding back to the present, and handed the axe to Amanda to chop through another pine root.

In a year, Jo told Therese, those roots will regrow, but this time through Comet's bones. They'll wind in and out of his ribcage, until it softens into soil itself. She blinked at the suddenness of death, and the permanence of it. This time yesterday her yarraman had been grazing, perfectly healthy, in this very same place. She could have leapt onto him bareback, given enough nerve, and galloped him all the way to the waves of South Golden. Now the flies clustered around his eyes, where they could get in under the edge of the tarp. His muscles had already begun to soften and rot. In the Big Paddock, Athena continued to whinny for Comet every quarter hour. The sound was lacerating.

‘I'm really sorry, mate,' Therese hugged her very briefly, winding her tattooed carp and mermaids around Jo's sodden shoulders. ‘He was a beautiful horse.' From behind them, Ellen, red-eyed but silent ever since hearing the awful news as she stepped off the school bus, wrapped her pale arms around her mother's waist, resting her sharp chin onto Jo's right shoulder. Jo allowed this for a moment, then found that she had to pull away. Not even Ellen was allowed close at a sorry time like this.

Watching Amanda's progress in the hole, Jo missed the tightening of her daughter's mouth when she loosened her fingers and pushed her narrow forearms aside.

The kipper gwong continued to fall as they worked steadily. As the blurred pale disc of the sun fell onto the ridgeline, the earth was finally ready to take the body. Therese positioned Johnno's 4WD, and ropes were tied from its bullbar to the horse's fetlocks. Then, with the knobbly tyres of the vehicle spinning, spraying mud out and up at every angle, the women heaved and groaned and somehow managed to drag Comet's body closer, and then, momentum building, to tumble him into the grave. Jo heaved a great sigh of relief that was as much a sob: she'd feared leaving his body out all night for the dingos and lizards to get at. He would be spared that indignity, at least.

‘Do you want this tarp, or will I leave it?' Therese needed to know. Jo paused. She did indeed want the tarp. It was worth sixty bucks at the disposals store in Mullum. But she definitely didn't want dirt falling onto Comet's open eyes, or, equally horribly, into his ears. Something had to protect him from that, same as paperbark protected the old people when they went into the ground. She stood, unable to decide, and half-heartedly looked around for an oodgeroo tree to strip.

‘You'll never use it again,' said Therese softly, and Jo realised she was right. It belonged in the ground with Comet. She nodded silently.

‘Is it time?' Therese checked. Jo nodded again, tears rolling down her cheeks. She blew her nose on the bottom of her t-shirt.

Therese and Amanda began to cover Comet's tarp with red soil, shovelful by shovelful, as Jo stood and watched with her arms folded, shaking in grief. This time Ellen kept her distance. Ten metres away, she leaned on a pine trunk at the edge of the grove, the fairy-wrens chittering in protest above her, diving in and out of their lantana thicket, despite the rain.

‘You want to finish it?' Therese held her shovel out, her wet dark
hair plastered against her face, neck and chest. Orange rivulets ran down the face of the blade.

This is friendship, thought Jo shakily, as she took it and plunged it into what remained of the pile of extracted dirt, this is something real. Friendship isn't just swims at South Golden or a few beers of a weekend. No. It's driving through floodwater in a borrowed truck, to somewhere you'd rather not be on a cold July afternoon, and digging a fucking great hole in the pouring rain. That's real mates for you. She looked up at Therese and Amanda, who had clustered wetly beside Ellen, beneath the pines. The rain was intensifying again now; the three of them were shifting on their feet, wanting to get inside and cleaned-up and warm.

‘I couldn't have better sisters than you two,' Jo told Therese and Amanda, after she'd used the blade of the shovel to flatten the earth on top of the grave. She stood and straightened, and held the shovel over her shoulders like an old-fashioned water yoke. Her sad hands dangled loosely over the handle, and she widened her stance, forming, she realised, an enormous distorted X in front of the grave. X
marks the spot.

‘I won't forget this in a hurry.' Jo told them as she walked away from the humped mound, her brain dull with death. Ellen looked over at the bare patch of the world that they had made together. She touched her forearms where Jo had shoved them carelessly aside, and closed her eyes. Something was building inside her eyelids, pressing against them.

‘What – ya reckon we're gonna let you forget?' Amanda retorted, bending over to retrieve the empty tea and coffee mugs that already held a centimetre of rain. ‘Geez, dream on, sister!'

‘The invoice'll be in the mail tonight,' Therese added, grinning. With her full-sleeve tattoos, red smears of dirt on her shirt and up each denimed leg, and the axe hoisted over her muscular shoulder, she looked like she'd eat Hannibal Lecter for breakfast.