The following Saturday, early in the morning, Jeff Toms’s rattle-bang ute brought Frances to Arthur’s house.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you so early,’ she told Judy, ‘but I wonder if Jacqui has seen anything of John Munda this morning.’
Jacqui stared. ‘Why should I? He never comes around here anyway.’
‘It’s just that I was expecting Betty first thing. She said she’d be early because we’ve got a lot to do to get ready for the stall, but she hasn’t turned up.’
‘Maybe she forgot?’
Maybe she’s sick. Maybe she’s dead: Jacqui was full of suggestions, some of which she kept to herself.
‘It’s not like her but you’re probably right. I expect I’m getting worked up about nothing. By the time I get home, she’ll probably be there, waiting for me.’
And laughed merrily, pleased by the prospect of proving herself wrong.
‘I’ll come with you, if you like,’ Jacqui said.
‘That would be good. I am such a fusspot,’ she scolded herself.
Perhaps she was but, when Jeff dropped them at Frances’s house, neither Betty nor John was there and they saw nothing of either of them all day. Jacqui gave her a hand getting the stall ready but that was no longer the issue.
‘I’d better go and make sure she’s all right,’ said Frances. ‘I hate to do it, though. I feel I’m intruding.’
‘I’ll go for you, if you like,’ Jacqui offered. ‘I can always say I’m looking for John.’
Frances’s face cleared. ‘That would be great, if you’re sure you don’t mind. Make sure she knows I’m not angry, won’t you? I don’t want her thinking I’ve sent you to fetch her, or anything like that.’
The camp on the far side of Roper’s Creek was a place that everyone knew was there but that few white people visited. Jacqui started out confidently enough but, once she’d left the road and gone into the camp area, she began to hesitate. There was an Aboriginal flag hanging from a mast, but it was not the flag that made Jacqui feel she was in another country. There were the eyes, for a start; she could not see them but felt them watching her. There was an atmosphere, too, strange and uncomfortable, of poverty and resentment.
A woman with a disapproving face came out of one of the huts.
‘What you doing here?’
‘I’m looking for John Munda. And his Auntie Betty.’
‘What you want them for?’
‘They’re my friends.’
‘They’re busy. Better you don’t bother them now.’
At least that meant they were here, somewhere. ‘I gotta see them.’
The woman was obviously unwilling to help her. She went back inside the hut and pulled the door shut behind her.
There were children: some curious, some, Jacqui thought, willing to be friendly but unsure, watching her as though she might be strange or dangerous.
‘John Munda?’
A little girl giggled and was at once hushed into silence.
‘Betty Ngaro?’
Silence.
A small, naked boy watched silently, thumb in mouth. Jacqui glanced at him and he trotted off. Not knowing what else to do, she followed him. Perhaps he would lead her where she wanted to go.
There was litter everywhere: stripped cars, gaunt as metal ghosts beneath gum trees that sagged wearily, breathing dust; scraps of paper blowing in the listless wind; cans and bottles, the burnt ashes of old fires. People watched silently as though they, too, had been discarded in this place. And still the boy trotted ahead of her, puffs of dust rising from his heels at every stride.
Eventually he stopped outside a hut. She looked at its drooping grey roof, the plywood door on which words had been painted a long time ago, the letters smeared by time like the ghosts of things long past. The hut looked no different from all the rest, yet somehow she knew that this was Betty’s hut.
She knocked tentatively on the door. Her knuckles barely grazed the plywood surface yet the frail door quivered at her touch.
‘Auntie Betty?’
Nothing.
‘Auntie?’
The naked boy watched.
She pushed the door open a crack. Inside was darkness. The air was so close that it felt as though it could be made into bricks.
‘Auntie Betty?’
Jacqui heard something: a faint thread of sound that barely disturbed the still and menacing air.
She knew the eyes of all the camp were pinned to her back. She shoved the door hard. It scraped on the earth floor and swung all the way open. Holding her breath, heart pounding, she edged inside.
There was a bed with a steel frame. Beside it, a table on which stood an old-fashioned alarm clock, a water glass, a folded pair of spectacles, an open purse. On the bed …
A figure that breathed and turned heavily, trying to sit up and failing.
‘What you come here for?’
Auntie Betty’s voice, or something like it, but it, too, was smeared, like the letters on the door.
Jacqui peered and saw beneath blood and bruises what had been Betty Ngaro’s face.
Her hands lifted instinctively to her own face. She was scared half to death.
‘What happened?’
‘Never mind that.’ The voice was stronger now, although still etched with what might have been pain. ‘I asked what you doing here?’
‘Frances wanted to know if you were all right.’
A sigh as Betty sagged back on the bed. ‘I’m fine.’ Incredibly, given her state, she managed a laugh of sorts. ‘Really fine.’
The laugh stopped. Her breath hissed. She held her side for a moment.
‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘Never you mind. Say thanks to Miss Frances, all right? Say I’ll be calling on her soon.’
And sighed as though the few words had drained her strength. She turned her back and lay still.
There was nothing more Jacqui could do. She didn’t like leaving Betty in this state, but as far as she could see she had no choice. She made one final effort.
‘Is John anywhere?’
No answer. The air settled heavily once more.
Jacqui went out into the warm afternoon. The boy had gone. Everyone had gone or at least were no longer to be seen, but the unseen eyes still watched, their weight pressing upon her. Walking quietly, not looking about her, Jacqui carried the memory of what she had seen from the camp.
As soon as Jacqui had told her of Betty’s state, Frances, her eyes angry and frightened behind the pebble glasses, got Jeff Toms to take her to the camp.
‘They won’t like it,’ he cautioned her. ‘Maybe even she won’t like it.’
‘I don’t care what they like, or she likes. Betty Ngaro is my friend. If we don’t help our friends we’re nothing. When she’s well again she can decide what she wants to do, but in the meantime I shall not leave her at the mercy of that man.’
And away, in a storm of outrage and blue exhaust.
Betty stayed at Frances’s house for two weeks, until the battered face was almost normal again. Jacqui did not understand what had happened so eventually asked, and Frances told her.
‘Her husband beat her up, took her money.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Tommy George is a drunk, a bully, a horrible man. He probably beat her because she had no more money for him to steal. Or perhaps he just felt like it.’ Frances spat the words like gravel. ‘Who knows why men like that do anything?’
‘Who is Tommy George?’ Apart from being a drunken bully, with fists.
‘She calls him her husband. But I doubt they were ever married.’
Jacqui had never seen her aunt so upset yet, when Betty was on her feet again, with the bruises still on her face — and the rest of her, Frances said savagely, although she was the only one to have seen them — back she went to the camp.
Frances tried to talk her out of it. ‘One of these days he’ll kill you.’
‘What can I do? That is my place.’
‘You can stay here. You know you can.’
She would not. She would not even let Jeff Toms drive her. She went back on her feet, as she did each day when she had given Frances a hand with her stall.
Frances fretted until the following Saturday.
‘Why don’t you go and see her?’ Jacqui wondered.
‘She wouldn’t want that.’
‘I can go, if you like.’
Jacqui was proud of her bravery in having gone alone into the camp, was quite willing to reclaim the limelight that she privately thought had slipped away from her too quickly.
‘No need.’
‘I wouldn’t mind —’
‘No!’
The following Saturday, as though nothing had happened at all, Betty Ngaro came trudging up the driveway of Frances’s house on her long, thin legs.
This time John came, too.
Jacqui found it hard to wait until they were alone before she asked her question. ‘Where were you the other day, when I came to the camp?’
John leapt high in the air, making eyes like a tiger at the monsters that inhabited the tall grass of Frances’s garden. He whirled and sang to himself, his eyes shut to Jacqui’s questioning face, his ears to her voice.
Where? Why?
He would not answer her.
Finally they followed the creek together as they had done before. He did not stop her coming with him but she sensed the separation that had grown up between them. It scraped her, like a piece of stone. Jacqui resented it: hated it, almost. She felt something rising in her, growing tight until she thought her skin might burst because of it.
‘I am your friend,’ she said.
He stood still and stared at her, looking deep into her with the dark eyes that reflected the light but revealed nothing of his true feelings.
‘Friend?’ His voice was not friendly at all.
‘Yes.’
‘White people are not friends. White people do not care.’
‘I care. So does Frances.’
‘White people do not care. White people never care!’ And whirled and lunged at her with his imaginary spear. ‘Ah ha!’
It was a game no longer and the spear pierced her, as he had intended. As, perhaps, it had also pierced him. He ran away from her, going faster than she could. She watched him as he disappeared into the trees, the black figure at home in the landscape that for the first time she felt had rejected her, as John himself had rejected her.
Even when she wasn’t there, Frances saw things. That night, after Betty and John had gone, she said: ‘You have a fight with John?’
Jacqui told her what had happened. She had cried, earlier, but now was resentful. ‘I don’t see why he should be mad at me. I haven’t done anything.’
‘He wasn’t mad at you.’
‘He was!’
‘No. He was mad at what happened. He was ashamed.’
‘Why? It wasn’t his fault.’
‘Suppose Arthur beat Judy up? Suppose he or Betty came and took her away because they were afraid what he might do to her next? Wouldn’t you feel ashamed?’
‘Arthur wouldn’t.’ The idea was ridiculous.
‘But what if he did?’
It was another new thing. Jacqui thought about it cautiously. ‘I might …’
‘You see?’
She did see. It made her feel, not right, but better. It helped her to behave normally and without anger when, the following Saturday, John turned up again. They played together, as before; they were comfortable with each other, as before, and neither of them said anything about what had happened the previous week. Everything seemed back to normal; yet, later, when they walked into the town together to buy themselves a packet of chips, this Saturday, too, proved to have its share of calamity.
Because it was Saturday afternoon, Goorapilly was quiet. A few beery blokes belched and bellowed inside the pub; Pokies Paradise had its usual customers at the gaming machines, pressing buttons, pulling levers, driving F1 cars in electronic frenzy around an endless track; but for the most part the main street, like the rest of town, drowsed in summer somnolence.
John and Jacqui went into the takeaway, discussed whether to go for ham- or curry-flavoured chips, settled eventually on salted plain, and went happily out into the sunlight. Brett Shaughnessy, Magnus Clark and a couple of their mates stood on the pavement and grinned at them.
‘How ya going?’
‘Good,’ John said.
Jacqui’s muscles were wire-tight.
Brett prowled a little closer, then smiled at her. It was not a nice smile. ‘Too toffy to talk, are you?’
‘I’m good, too.’ Somehow she managed not to croak.
‘That’s nice.’ He put out his hand and stroked her arm, grinning slyly. ‘Know somen? You feel nice, too.’ He turned to Magnus. ‘See how nice she feels.’
Magnus, hot smile nailed to his face, also reached out a hand.
‘You lot stop it,’ John Munda said.
Brett turned to him with the beaming delight of a cat watching a mouse. ‘This here’s whitefella business, boong … Why don’ you go walkabout, or somen?’
Again he stroked Jacqui’s arm but his eyes, hot and excited, remained fixed on John.
And John, half his size, slugged him.
Or tried to but Brett, letting go of Jacqui’s arm at once, moved away from him.
‘See that?’ he said.
‘Boong tried to belt you,’ Magnus said.
‘Reckon he needs sorting out?’
‘I reckon.’
‘What I reckon, too.’
Run, John! It was painfully obvious he had no chance, but Jacqui, motivated by pride for him as well as herself, somehow managed to bite down the words.
And Brett moved in.