Read Online Mullumbimby by Melissa Lucashenko - Free Book Online Page B

soul for thirty years?’ Jo said, watching the bird circle over the burbling creek then land on the opposite bank. ‘I certainly wouldn’t do it to live in a brick shitbox in the suburbs.’
    â€˜For sure. But don’t you ever get lonely, all the way out here?’
    Jo laughed, and told Caro that no, she didn’t feel alone, what with Ellen and the yarraman, and the magpies singing and mulanyin flying around and the fairy-wrens talking a mile a minute, bossing everybody around with their little chittering instructions.
    â€˜Alone! Not even. Most of the time visitors make me feel like the TV’s on full blast with the remote missing.’
    The women both laughed, though Caro laughed louder, a woman in love.
    It had been nearly two years since Jo had had anyone to hold in bed, and she was beginning to miss it something fierce as the morningsgot frosty and she found an occasional grey hair among her long brown ones. Probably that was all that had happened at the pub with Twoboy the other night: sexual starvation rearing its ugly head. A woman could get enough of being alone every night, and a woman’s body could realise the fact long before the woman herself did, Jo mused.
    Half an hour later Caro and Stevo backed their Avis Falcon out of the drive.
    In the deep quiet which fell in their wake, Jo stood beneath the mango tree and looked to the west. She glanced at the far fences sagging into the foothills of Mount Chincogan. The weak and rusting strands ended up in the high ridge, where the hills and gullies were full of old banana trees nobody had farmed for years and which had now gone wild. What else was hiding up there in the thick scrub? Rob Starr’s corner boundary, for one thing, not that she was in any hurry to visit him.
    Listening to the huge booming silence of the paddocks, the word she had denied so vigorously that morning suddenly struck Jo afresh. Maybe Caro had a point. For all that the farm was only twenty minutes from town, maybe she really was more alone than she’d recognised. Chris was regularly depressed for weeks on end and Therese spent half her free time in Brisbane getting a fix of the city lights. A flicker of doubt entered Jo’s mind for the first time since she’d seen the farm in the real estate window.
    Think of the Ten Year Plan, she encouraged herself. It doesn’t have to all be done right now. And you might also remember, dickhead, that a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle – but this commonsense advice didn’t cancel out the faint ember of fear that had lodged in her chest. Try as she might to ignore it, Caro’s question – Don’t you get lonely out here on your own? – reverberated all day, unwelcome, in her ears.

Four
    Jo pressed the tea towel hard against her shoulder, but blood continued to seep slowly through the striped cotton in an oddly Australia-shaped blot. Shit and damn and fuck, she thought, where’re the bloody doctors in this joint? Though the Mullum hospital was mere staggering distance from the cemetery, proximity wasn’t much comfort if there was no bloody staff, was it. She buzzed for help again, and this time, hallefuckenlujah, a nurse popped her head out from the double glass doors of the general ward. The doctor would have to come in from town, she said, the GPs were on rotating call from their own surgeries.
    Peeling away the tea towel, Jo displayed an impressive gash running horizontally across her upper arm.
    â€˜I think it might need stitches,’ she said, trying not to look at the revolting scarlet drips she was leaving on the tiled floor.
    â€˜How’d you manage that?’ The nurse wasn’t giving anything away, least of all free sympathy. Burnt out from trying to cover for missing doctors. Or maybe she just didn’t like blackfellas very much.
    â€˜I tripped and fell onto a vase,’ Jo answered, wondering if the nurse assumed she was drunk. She