Sally and I sit side-by-side on the sofa. Teabag pulls a chair over from the table. He’s wheezing and huffing a fair bit. By the time he sits down he sounds like he’s run a marathon.
‘What’s all this about a father, then.’
Sally nudges me with her elbow. I can’t think. My mind is blank and my throat is dry. At least I don’t feel like throwing up. And then I’m thinkin’ that this is a bloody high price to pay for sex. If the truth be known, I was as happy to have that scrumpled, scratchy list of names stay under the fridge magnet forever. Sally nudges me again.
‘Well, my mum gave me a list of names. Blokes who she said could be my father. And, well, you’re on the list.’
Teabag’s quiet for a minute. Then he’s laughing. Tears spring to his eyes and he’s wiping them away with the back of his hand. ‘You’ve got to be shittin’ me. This a practical joke or somethin’?’
I knew it. My entire life is a bloody joke. Just mentioning the absurd facts sounds ridiculous.
‘No. He’s serious,’ Sally says, glancing at me.
Teabag settles down and sniffs. ‘You really serious?’
I nod.
‘Who’s your mum, then?’
‘Dolly Mundy.’
Teabag thinks. His forehead wrinkles. ‘Dolly ... Mundy,’ he says slowly.
Sally looks at me and shrugs.
‘Where from?’ he asks.
I have to think about this. I have to put the timeline of where we’ve been together in my head. ‘Ah, I think it would have been in Batchelor, seventeen, eighteen,’ I correct, ‘years ago.’
He’s thinkin’ again. Probably a good sign, at least.
‘Listen,’ he says looking at me. ‘I have trouble rememberin’ what I did last week. Let alone eighteen bloody years ago.’
‘But you do remember a Dolly Mundy?’ Sally chips in.
He’s wrinkling his nose and nodding his head slowly like he’s just about to make the connection. ‘Yeah, I remember the name but I can’t place who she is or where I know it from.’
Sally looks at me again.
‘Were you there eighteen years ago? Around the Rum Jungle?’ I ask.
Suddenly Teabag’s eyes light up. ‘Dolly. Dolly Mundy. Beaut little sheila with long dark hair. Had a van.’
‘Yeah, that’s her,’ I say. I feel excited. Like something is going to happen.
‘Yeah,’ he says slowly. ‘I remember her now. I gotta say you’ve taken me a bit by surprise, you kids. Takin’ me back to those days.’
‘So. It could be you, then,’ Sally’s leaning forward on the sofa.
Teabag smiles. ‘She was a nice sort. We had a good thing for a bit.’
Sally looks at me again and nudges me. I know what she’s thinkin’. This is it. This is my father. Aka Teabag Jones. The reason I’m dark.
Teabag laughs again. A chuckle. ‘But there ain’t no way I could be your father. See, I’ve been married four times. Couldn’t father a bloody thing. And it weren’t for lack of tryin’.’
Sally deflates beside me.
‘Well. Truth be known I’d make a fuckin’ lousy father at any rate.’
‘Do you recognise any of these names?’ Sally hands over the piece of paper before I realise what she’s doin’.
‘Toucan, Stumpy, Lovejack, Boomboom. Jesus, boy. You sure you wanna do this?’
I look at the carpet and tuck my hands under my legs. No, I’m bloody well not.
‘Lovejack,’ he looks like he’s faraway again. ‘Yeah. That name rings a bell. He was around back then. Worked at the pub. Bloody rough sort of fella from what I remember. Spanish bloke or some such. Dark skin and a foul temper. Died while I was still around those parts, I reckon. So if he was the bloke, you’ll never know, I’d say.’
I suddenly want to get as far away from him as possible. I stand up and rush to the door.
‘Thanks,’ Sally says. ‘We’re at the Humpty Doo Hotel if you think of anything else.’
Teabag stands up and sees us to the door.
‘Why are you called Teabag?’ Sally asks. I just want to get back in the car.
‘My real name is Lipton. Lipton Jones.’
‘Oh,’ Sally says.
17
Some other facts I’ve collected.
1. Harold Thomas is the bloke who designed the Aboriginal flag.
2. Humpty Doo is where Harold Joseph Thomas used to live.
3. In 2005, snake condoms were made in Aboriginal colours and were responsible for raising condom usage among Aboriginals by about 20 per cent.
4. If I am Aboriginal, I’m a disgrace to the Health Program. My first chance to use my snake and I don’t cover up.
5. Australia has the most dangerous snakes in the world.
We’re driving all the way through Darwin with Atomic Kitten blaring from the backseat. Sally wants fish and chips from the bay.
The bay is full of fishing boats and trawlers when we get there. The air is thick with the smell of the sea and salt and every time the wind blows I can taste it. The boats vary in size and age, but they’re all resting beside each other in rows in the inlet.
One boat is an old timber fishing boat. It’s been painted pale blue and has buoy rings hanging from nails along the cabin, and nets and fishing corks strung all over it. There are two large beams that rest over the roof of the cabin. I can imagine them hanging out from the boat when she’s at sea, like arms; the nets like heavy shopping bags as she plods on home, dragging her catch.
Sally knows where she’s going and leads me down a small laneway where there’s a number of signs at doors advertising the sale of fresh fish. We keep walking until we get to the door of a fish and chip place. Coloured plastic streamers hang down across the doorframe and a doorbell ding-dongs as we walk inside.
‘Just chips for me,’ I say to the girl behind the counter.
There isn’t much of a beach around the fishing port, but we walk out to the end of a timber jetty and sit down. There’s a splodge of seagull shit on the timber between us.
Beside us, just back along the jetty, is a houseboat. It’s small and narrow and I wonder what it would be like to live there. I suppose Mum’s van is the land equivalent, just hook it onto a car and go wherever you want.
‘Do you ever think about what’s going to happen?’
The wind is whipping Sally’s hair back from her face. She’s staring out to sea.
‘Not much, I suppose.’
‘I couldn’t do what my folks did,’ she looks down at the crumbed perch in her lap. She fingers the chips. ‘You know, settle down, have kids. Get married and all that shit.’ She puts two chips in her mouth.
‘Never thought much about it.’
‘That’s what I like about you, Barra. You’re a mystery. One day you weren’t here and the next you were. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day I turned up to work and you were gone again.’
The wind off the water is giving me goose bumps.
‘What is it like not knowing who your father is?’
I think how simple it would be just to shrug and mumble like I always do. It’s so damn easy just to let people ramble on while I stay shut up tight. I’m thinkin’ about Deano, always lookin’ down. Always playing dumb.
‘For some reason I just have to know. And then some days I don’t want to go near the idea. Like lookin’ at crocs, I guess. Something about it is so fascinating you have to get as close as you can but your heart is racing because you’re scared as hell.’
‘What if you never find him?’
‘Dunno. At least I tried, I guess.’
‘Do you hate your mum?’
I put my cardboard chip tray over the bird shit and lick the grease and salt from my fingers. ‘Did for a while.’
‘Do you think she s
hould have stuck around with your father?’
‘Geez, Sally.’
‘Come on, Barra, it’s not like I’m asking you to explain the mysteries of the universe.’ She takes my hand and her fingers loop around mine.
‘Yeah,’ I say suddenly, ‘I think she should have.’
There’s a different past of mine playing over in my mind. One with a father and a house and mum not having to shag any old bastard just to get the van hooked up on the back of the car. I’ve even got a dog. Mum’s got a string of pearls around her neck.
If a bloke buys his woman pearls, you know he loves her. I remember my mum saying that. There’s things I know about pearls, she said once. Pearls are so special there’s a different name for each different length you can get. All depends on where it sits on a woman’s neck. Collars, chokers, princess, matinee – and there’s one more I can never remember – and then the best of ’em all is the pearl rope. Longest you can get.
‘What about you, Sally?’
‘What about me?’ she says, letting go of my hand and standing up. She wipes her hands on the denim of her skirt and holds her hair back from her face against the wind. She walks back towards the car.
There’s no music. It’s just the two of us, blasted by the hot wind, staring at the road ahead. We’re suspended, her and I, on an endless path from nowhere to somewhere, at least that’s what we think. But for every tree and hill that races past, the road stretches on before us. It never ends. It’s only the petrol gauge that marks time, falling slowly towards empty.
Sally pulls over to the side of the road. She smiles at me, just faintly, before getting out. There are no houses out this way, just the bush, the ground, the sky. Trees – some of them blackened – standing, tired, in the sun. The grass is brown and spindly and sticks up out of the ground like twigs. The wind pushes against my face in bursts.
There are more termite mounds than trees out this way. Some mounds wider and almost as tall. You’d go crazy trying to count them.
Sally kicks the ground between two dusty mounds. She lifts her skirt, pulls her knickers down and squats on the ground. I can’t look away. Her head is bent over her body and for a moment her hands come up to her head. Until now I have never imagined that she is vulnerable to anything, but there in the distance, she is small and I could hold her out there, but I stay where I am.
As Sally stands, she smooths down her skirt and leans over towards the ground again. She stays that way for a minute, then spits.
The magnetic termite mounds are another Top End mystery. Every single mound is built to line up with the magnetic poles of the earth. How the little buggers know how to do that is beyond me. I remember learning about it in school. It’s got something to do with temperature. Even an insect can make me feel small and lost in the world.
Back in the car Sally sighs beside me and checks her face in the rear-view mirror. She leans over my body, opens the glove box, and grabs her lip gloss. She applies it, pink, smacking her lips together.
In the car park outside the hotel Sally turns the car off.
‘Don’t get out, Barra.’ She fumbles in her handbag and takes out her mobile phone. ‘Ten minutes,’ she says, looking at the time. ‘Let’s watch everyone who walks into the pub for ten minutes. I want you to tick off the last three names on your list.’
‘What?’
‘Your father could be anyone. Why not choose?’
‘You’re crazy,’ I say. My hand rests on the door handle.
Sally turns back in her seat to stare out of the windscreen. Her hands grip the steering wheel. ‘I wish I didn’t like you, Barramundy.’
Shit. Girls don’t make any sense to me.
‘Listen, Sal—’
‘You just might be too late for me.’
18
The Story of Lovejack Smith
The ladies all loved him for different reasons. For some it was his body: lean, hard muscles and dark looks. The way they’d have to look up at him and blink to find his eyes way up there somewhere, lost in the height of him, wondering where he came from. Some loved his smile and the way he’d promise them the world and not mean a damn word of it. Some loved him because he could take them away from their greasy lives with stories about the seas and adventure like they couldn’t imagine.
Ah, love, down at the bottom of the sea, when your only lifeline is a hollow pipe and air, you’re stepping through the garden of heaven, but you’re banging on hell’s door.
But every woman with pearls around her neck loved him because he found the best of them. They didn’t know he existed, in all likelihood, but his hands had touched every perfect pearl that came from anywhere up the Top End of Australia. His simple name was Jack, but everyone in the business called him Lovejack.
Gotta love ya, Jack, it began at first. He never came up from the bottom of the ocean empty-handed. Only the best South Sea pearl oysters. He had an eye, some said, or the heart for it.
Here he comes, bring us the love, Jack, it became when everyone knew he wove magic under the water every day he was on the job. It was Lovejack forever the day three of his crew were lost. Two to the bends and one to a shark. Not only did Jack survive that day but he came up with two natural pearls. One of which, some would forever say, was the perfect pearl. You can dig up a ton of oysters and not find a single natural pearl among them. But Lovejack could feel them.
Pearling’s a bloody rough business, but blokes do it for the love of it. You can never tell the true cost of a pearl around a lady’s neck. Men may well have died for it.
Once, pearling was an art. Japanese and Chinese divers searched the seas for the rare gems. Diving to unnatural depths to find them. Dying, too, for the passion of the pearl. And just like everything else that’s worth money in the wild, man learned how to farm it. Catch it, grow it up, multiply and sell it.
It is said that Lovejack carried a pouch of pearls in his pockets for meeting ladies. Just before he made love to them he’d place one in the hollow of their neck. Now you know you’ve been loved by Jack.
But men like Lovejack know that magic is a rare gift that can’t ever be made white and fixed and grown. The taste of it was in him, by some miracle, but it was not his and he didn’t own it. He was at the mercy of nature’s rarest gift of all and it ticked inside him like a clock that would one day stop.
He disappeared from the pearling luggers, one day, just like that. Gone in a mystery as strange as the magic that made him. Some say it was fear. The odds for any pearler were bad anyway, and he’d stacked up so many odds on the other side it was sure to even out sooner or later. And the later he left it, the sooner it was going to happen.
His pearls ran out around Gove and he was a man without his master. Just the shape of his body, his memories and his name was all he had.
The idea of it all was enough for Dolly Mundy. Oh what a life. She had a magic of her own, if the truth be told, and she had plenty of it to spare. She could imagine the feel of the pearl well enough in that soft hollow at her throat. Sometimes just thinking about it meant she found it hard to swallow. She didn’t need the real thing.
19
‘Good weekend?’ Boof asks.
It’s cooler this morning. The air has a crisp feel to it and there’s a breeze. It’s easier to breathe in the Land Rover today. ‘Yeah. Not bad.’
‘There’s fish for ya in the back,’ Boof says. ‘The fishing was good. We did alright.’
‘Great.’ I’m wondering what I’m going to do with the fish. There’s no way I’m eating it, but I’m not going to be rude and turn it down. The foam esky squeaks every time there’s a bump in the road.
‘Say,’ he says, ‘we’re going to Mindil markets on Thursday night. Want to come along?’ He doesn’t give me a chance to answer. ‘You ever been there?’
&
nbsp; I shake my head.
‘Best around. It’s good, Barramundy. You’ll love it. Food an’ fun an’ all sorts of entertainment. We take chairs and an esky. It’s right on the beach. Watch the sun go down. Nothin’ better, mate. True.’
‘Yeah?’
‘We’ll go straight from work. Bring a change of clothes to work, okay?’
And it’s settled. I’m going to Mindil markets with Boof and Cassie on Thursday night.
I look out of the window. The road seems like the only thing that doesn’t change. Everything else whizzes past in a blur, but the road seems to be under the car, in front and behind all at once. Endless and motionless.
Bait’s in the back. Snoring. I turn to look at the mangy thing and he’s flopped in the seat with his tongue hanging out. Peaceful, content. Loud as a bloody chainsaw. I feel a flicker of affection for the little bastard.
‘You want me to cut the meat today?’ I ask. It’s the least a mate can do.
Boof looks at me across the wheel. ‘Last time I asked you to do that you looked like you were gonna puke on me boots,’ he says with a smirk.
‘Na. I’m good. I’ll do it. No problem.’
The pig meat has to be hacked into chunks that can be hung on the croc hook. Boof does it in the mornings, usually, and stacks the icebox. It’s loaded up in the top deck of The Darling ready for the day’s feeding.
I’ve got the pig carcasses in front of me, the meat cleaver in my hand. All I have to do is lay into the flesh with the blade, hack through the bone, and load the esky. Easy. It’s beastly, is what it is. But I don’t shy away from hard work. It’s only fair.
I’m slamming the blade down, too gutless at first, and it doesn’t sever the bone all the way through. I’ve got to get tougher. Roughen up a little.
‘You right,’ Boof calls out behind me. I look up, turn around and nod.
Be brave, Barry. Lay into the bloody thing. So I slam the cleaver down again and again, and after a while it doesn’t feel too bad. It’s just meat and bone, and I’ve got a job that has to be done. After a while it’s satisfying work. The esky is full and I’m taking it to the boat. The crocs have to be fed because the tourists have to be pleased and I’m the man with the axe. My hands smell like raw steak.
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