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Overview
2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award Winner
A dark and funny new novel from the multi-award-winning author of Mullumbimby.
Too much lip, her old problem from way back. And the older she got, the harder it seemed to get to swallow her opinions. The avalanche of bullshit in the world would drown her if she let it; the least she could do was raise her voice in anger.
Wise-cracking Kerry Salter has spent a lifetime avoiding two things—her hometown and prison. But now her Pop is dying and she's an inch away from the lockup, so she heads south on a stolen Harley.
Kerry plans to spend twenty-four hours, tops, over the border. She quickly discovers, though, that Bundjalung country has a funny way of grabbing on to people. Old family wounds open as the Salters fight to stop the development of their beloved river. And the unexpected arrival on the scene of a good-looking dugai fella intent on loving her up only adds more trouble—but then trouble is Kerry's middle name.
Gritty and darkly hilarious, Too Much Lip offers redemption and forgiveness where none seems possible.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780702261046 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Queensland Press |
| Publication date: | 07/25/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A stranger rode into town only it wasn't a stranger, it was Kerry, come to say goodbye to Pop before he fell off that perch he'd been clinging to real stubborn way for so long. Cancer, Ken reckoned, never mind cancer, ya couldn't kill the old bastard with an axe. But ah, no good. The call come last night. Get yerself home, chop chop.
Kerry dropped into second as she cruised past the corner store, clocking the whitenormalsavages, a dozen blue eyeballs popping fair outta their moogle heads at the sight of her. Skinniest dark girl on a shiny new Softail, heart attack city, truesgod. So yeah, let's go for it, eh, you mob. Let's all have a real good dorrie at the blackfella du jour. Kerry resisted the urge to elevate both middle fingers as she rode past the astounded locals, past the produce store. Past Frankie's Mechanical. Past the vacant lot with its waist-high weeds hiding a generation's worth of fag ends, torn condom wrappers and empty bottles. Past the landmark pub which hadn't changed in a century and wasn't about to start now, thanks very much all the same. And when Kerry had made it to the other end of Main Street, that was about it for Durrongo ('Place of Centrelink fraud,' according to Ken), population 320. Now, as ever, if you wanted anything more complicated than a beer, a bale of hay, or a loaf of last week's bread from Kath at the general inconvenience store, you had to make tracks for Patto, half an hour up the highway.
As Durrongo petered out Kerry throttled back. She stopped at the T-junction of Main and Mount Monk Road and straightened first one stiff leg, then the other, letting her toes point skyward in heavy black leather boots. Twenty thousand bucks of American heritage engineering shifted in her hands as she did. Right boot out: a small tilt to the left. Left boot out: a small tilt to the right. Then, in a futile gesture towards flying under the gossip radar for at least the afternoon, Kerry turned the bike off. Silence expanded around her. She flipped her visor up and flinched, late December bouncing straight up at her off the tar. Eleven in the morning and already the road soft beneath her boot heels. Sweat broke out on her forehead as she gazed around the empty intersection and the paddocks beyond it.
'Been a fair while,' Kerry murmured to nobody and to everybody. 'Been a fair old while.' She let out a sharp bark of laughter. There was no telling what today might bring, or who might be alive at the end of it. Same as any other fucking day in Durrongo, in other words, only more so.
* * *
Three waark flapped down onto the road beside her, drawn to the flattened remains of a king brown which looked to have lost a fight with Scruffy McCarthy's cattle truck.
The birds stared at Kerry, cawing obnoxiously before they turned to their snake, and promptly ripped it in half. The biggest crow seized the open-jawed front end of the carcass, and hopped with glee to the grassy verge. Hungry, it plunged hard into the rotting head, seeking out the reptile's soft brain, and then looked up, totally baffled. The fanged snake skull had gotten wedged hard onto the bird's beak. The crow shook its head, first in surprise and then in anger, but to no avail. Kerry watched, fascinated and appalled. Would the crow manage to free itself? Or would the mundoolun have the last grim laugh, its hard, tiny skull locking the crow's beak shut until the bird starved to death? The eaters and the eaten of Durrongo, having it out at the crossroads. You don't see old mate Freddy McCubbin painting that, do ya? Talk about down on his fucking luck.
The other crows noticed their companion's plight.
'Hahaha, looks like a mutant, half a bird and half a snake,' mocked the one on the left.
'Are you sssssssssssstuck?' asked the other, falling about with delight at its own wit.
I'm not the only one in Durrongo plagued by arseholes then, Kerry noted.
'Yugam baugal jang! Wahlu wiya galli!' the luckless crow complained. My beak's no good. You could help a bird.
Kerry looked around the deserted road.
'Yugam baugal jang! Buiyala galli! Yugam yan moogle Goorie Brisbanyu?' You could help, instead of sitting up there like a mug lair from the city.
Kerry looked around again. The waark hopped up and down in rage.
Then the second crow chimed in, dripping scorn.
'It's no good to ya, fang-face. Can't talk lingo! Can't even find its way home! Turned right at the Cal River when it shoulda kept going straight. It's as moogle as you look.' 'How the hell do you lot know where I've been?' Kerry retorted. Back in town five minutes and the bloody wildlife keeping tabs on her already. The second crow preened as it gave her a self-important sideways glance.
'Us waark see all that happens. We see the platypus in his burrow at midnight. We see the dingo bitch in her lair under the new moon; we see — '
The third crow butted in, impatient.
'Oh shuttup ya bloody blowhard. Make me sick, truesgod! Old Grandfather Pelican went and told our aunty second cousin he seen ya get lost at the bridge. Goodest blackfella!' The third crow sharpened its beak on the bitumen in contempt. Kerry turned to the trapped bird, pulling her hair up into a tight ponytail to get it off her neck. Because Jesus Christ Almighty, the heat.
'I'll help if you fly up here,' she offered, tapping her handlebar. The other crows instantly began to shriek in alarm.
The snake-crow tilted its mutant head at her.
'Gulganelehla Bundjalung.' Speak Bundjalung. A test of good character.
'Bundjalung ngaoi yugam baugal,' she said. My Bundjalung is crap. The bird hesitated.
'It's a trap, a trap, a trap!' the other crows screeched.
The sun beat down on four black heads as one minute passed, and then another. Kerry shrugged and kicked the Harley to life again, the enormous vee-engine booming like a bitch over the thistle-studded paddocks.
'Well, suit yerself bunji. I'm not sitting here getting cooked to death.'
With a last suspicious glance at her the crow took two fast hops and then was airborne. Its so-called friends took off as well, bullying each other all the way across the paddock to the dead gum standing by the creek.
Kerry sat for another troubled moment, feeling certain the crow was going to spend several hideous days before starvation claimed it. But she hadn't ridden three hours to worry about a doomed waark. She was here to deliver her final goodbye to Pop, and then fuck off quick bloody smart back over the border to Queensland, well away from anything resembling Durrongo.
* * *
Revving the throttle, she looked straight in front of her, down a long gravel driveway to the house that jack shit built. It huddled beneath the spreading arms of a large leopard tree. Same old fibro walls. Same old iron roof with rust creeping into a few more panels each wet season. The lawn bore a lopsided Mohawk from where the mower had died or been stolen or where Ken had run out of the minimal motivation he'd had to begin with. Gazing at the front veranda where the old nickel bath used to live, Kerry felt her scalp begin to itch. She hauled her helmet off and scratched furiously at her sweaty head.
Ken still hadn't replaced the busted louvre beside the front door. More accurately, Kerry squinted, he'd replaced it with a strip of roughly hacked ply, and this had become a permanent memorial to the window his stubby had flown through upon discovering a $125 council parking fine in the mail. The offending Falcon stood in exactly the same spot Kerry had seen it last Christmas. Beside it another two old bombs kept the rusting XD company. Kerry guffawed. Jerry, she thought, still scratching the long-dead nits of childhood, they shoulda named him Jerry — everything the prick does is Jerry-built. My biggest blue-eyed brother. Such a fucking boon to the tribe.
Suddenly not caring about the local gossips and their hurricane tongues — for she would be long gone this time tomorrow — Kerry revved the Hog. In their distant gum tree, the crows cawed in mocking response. Kerry revved the bike again, louder, and gave an evil grin. That's a warning to yez all. Big dorrie locals, paranoid crows, flattened brown snakes, the big brothers of the world. Or maybe it's just a real deadly welcome home to meself. Cos ready or not, here I come. She threaded her helmet onto her left forearm and released the clutch. Plummeted down the drive to where Pretty Mary was continuing her life's work cursing the inhabitants of Durrongo, as if anyone with two eyes in their head to see with couldn't have told her the fucking place was cursed to hell and back already.
* * *
In Sydney, Martina closed her eyes, not believing what she'd just heard from the state director of sales.
'Tom,' she said very carefully, 'I'm really not that interested. Things are going right off in Metro South, so thanks but no thanks.'
'Eight weeks, Martina. Ten at the most. It's just till Jim Buckley's replacement wraps things up in Auckland. You could probably even do it from Byron. Come to the party, and I promise you, you'll be at the top of the list of applicants for the next Metro agency.'
Martina paused. Applicants! Supplicants would be a better word. There was a limit, however, to how often you could say no to senior management. Fuck. Tom had no idea what he was asking of her.
'I heard Glen Plummer's retiring.'
Martina opened her eyes wide. Glen had owned the premier real estate agency in Sydney's inner south for thirty years. She did some rapid mental arithmetic as her pulse quickened. Two months exiled to Shitsville for an outside shot at her dream.
'The boss smiles on team players, Martina.'
Martina grimaced. She'd never been an arselicker. But for a chance to buy her own agency, she'd pucker up with the best of them.
'Eight weeks, tops. And Buckley pays my airfares and accommodation.'
'Good girl, I knew I could count on you. We'll need you there Monday.'
* * *
Kerry shrugged off her blue backpack and apologised to the terrified ginger cat crouching under Ken's car. Poor puss. But the noise of the Harley didn't worry Elvis one bit. A small cunning mutt of no discernible heritage, he raged at the bike from the top of the stairs, finding it a worthy adversary. When he recognised Kerry, Elvis leaped off the veranda and beat his half-a-tail wildly in greeting, all the while conspiring to get past her and piss on the bike's front wheel. On his third attempt, the dog nearly made it, hopping sideways on three legs with the fourth poised high in anticipation. Kerry whirled to head him off at the pass. Stymied, but with the cork already out of the bottle, Elvis ended up spraying the length of her leather boot instead. She screeched in disgust as she flung him away from her. 'Go piss on ya owner's boots, ya dirty little unit,' she added. Elvis made landfall heavily and ran yelping towards the chicken pen, as Ken appeared at the back door.
'I see Elvis has left the building,' he observed.
'Small-dog syndrome. Has to mark everything he sees.' Kerry lifted her drenched boot to demonstrate. 'The dirty little cunt.'
Ken laughed as he took in the extremely interesting fact of his baby sister on a late-model Harley. 'He's got anger issues,' he said, raking his fingers through his mullet.
'Show me someone who don't, brah, and I'll lick their crack for em,' Kerry joked.
Ken leaned over the veranda rail, six foot two and heavy with muscle from years of basketball and footy. Sweat glistened on his corded neck. Enough had already trickled south to turn his navy singlet, fresh that morning, to a clammy charcoal. Kerry squinted up at her oldest brother. He'd stacked on the weight since he got out. Now, with his long flat nose and greying hair, Ken was looking more like a giant overgrown koala every time she saw him.
'Bugger me, two visits in a year.' He grinned, his busted teeth showing. 'Stalking us now are ya?'
'Don't get used to it.' Kerry was climbing the stairs.
Ken nodded down at the Hog.
'Might have to take this for a burn.'
'It's hot. I flogged it on the Goldie last night,' Kerry said, deflecting his suggestion and pushing past him to dump her backpack on the kitchen table. Safe in full view. Beside the fridge an upright fan was blowing a gale of hot air around the small fibro house.
Kerry looked around at the changes in a home where nothing ever, ever changed. A narrow hospital bed had been squeezed into the lounge room, beneath the louvres that looked out onto Scruffy McCarthy's bull paddock. So Pretty Mary had moved Pop back indoors, then. A notorious snorer, Pop had been exiled for decades to the Viscount caravan that sat out the back, rusting beside the chook shed in a forest of dockweed and fourth-rate yarndi.
Home at last, thought Kerry. Great godamighty, he's home at last. Though Pop had appreciated the privacy of the caravan, he had never quite felt it reflected his status as patriarch of the mob. Now, nearing death, he was back squarely in the centre of things, with everybody knowing his business. And I wonder just how well that's going down, Kerry mused.
Upended beside the empty bed was a red Crazy Clark's crate, piled high with pill packets, betting slips and Homebrand ginger ale cans. Form guides and wellthumbed racing mags littered the sheet and every other flat surface. On the TV leggy thoroughbreds were walking around a saddling yard.
Just inside the back door a Watchtower magazine lay on the kitchen table, untouched inside its clear plastic wrapper. Kerry picked it up and gammon crossed herself with it for Ken's benefit.
'Bless me Father, for I'm a lezzo and a crim!' she laughed.
'Don't let Mum hear ya say that,' Ken warned. 'She's gorn natural-born Christian again.'
'The JWs in Durrongo, ah, fuck me roan.' She tossed the magazine back onto the table and began unlacing her boots. The smell of her feet would give a baby a nosebleed, but that was too bloody bad.
'It's all go round here, I tells ya. There'll be quinoa salad at the pub next,' Ken answered, deadpan. 'Keep that door shut, willya? The flies are gonna carry this feed off, the dirty little black shits,' he added, returning to the stove.
'Got one of them for me?' With her chin Kerry indicated the stubby holder in Ken's left hand. He was on beers, thank Christ. Her brother hesitated for a split second, a hesitation so brief it would have been invisible to anyone not a Salter. Ken wanted Kerry to drink with him, naturally, because he wanted everyone to drink with him, all the time. If, in this particular instance, Kerry drank with him, it added unspoken weight to the fantasy that being on your third beer at eleven in the morning was nothing remarkable, something anyone — even your little sister — might do. But on the flip side, there was only half a six-pack and one single solitary tallie in the fridge, with payday two days away, and both his credit cards maxed out since who could fucking remember when. A third, complicating factor was the distinct possibility that Kerry, who had come into possession of a Harley-Davidson Softail since he'd last seen her, might have arrived bearing gifts. Hard cash, even. And so Ken hesitated.
Suddenly overcome with irritation that he had to be hospitable when he was on the bones of his arse, he grabbed a stubby from the fridge. Without warning, he flicked it backhanded to Kerry. Acting on pure reflex, she jerked sharply sideways to keep the bottle from crashing onto the worn lino; her hands met around the slippery brown glass. Triumphant, she straightened and casually knocked the bottle cap off on the table edge with an emphatic thump of her right fist. You'll have to get up earlier in the morning than that to fuck with me, mate.
Ken turned back to the stove.
'Cheers, big ears.' As the icy liquid hit the back of her throat Kerry realised how parched she was. Must have been pushing forty in the middle of the road, arguing with them bloody waark. 'Fuck, that hits the spot. Judge Judy home?' Kerry meant her mother.
'She took Pop up to see the specialist.' Ken was stirring hamper on the stove and swatting furiously at the half dozen flies that had slipped inside with Kerry. 'His head was shocken again last night.'
Ken's ancient blue Falcon stood not five short steps from the veranda; the spiderweb of its permanently busted windscreen was visible from where Kerry sat. As a former captain of the Patto footy team several years running, Ken had an understanding with the local constabulary, and usually got away with trivial shit like that.
'On the bus.' Kerry's voice was flat. Dangerously so, since Ken had long held the monopoly on anger in the Salter family. But Kerry didn't give a rat's. She couldn't see Ken busting her up today.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Too Much Lip"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Melissa Lucashenko.
Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
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