Free Mullumbimby by Melissa Lucashenko

didn’t add that she’d tripped at work, nor that the vase was a jar full of fresh flowers on the grave of a little kid killed a month ago in a crash near Pottsville. Served her right, really, for stepping rudely across a grave of the newly dead instead of walking around it.
    The nurse gave her arm an expert touch with her forefinger and pursed her lips.
    â€˜Is that a clean tea towel?’
    â€˜Came out of the wash today.’
    â€˜Well, keep pressing down on it, that does need stitching. You can sit in here till doctor comes.’
    The nurse opened the ward door again and motioned Jo into a plastic chair just inside. Instantly she heard an unmistakable Goorie-holler from the far end of the long blue room. It was Uncle Humbug, cleaner than Jo had seen him in ages, shaved even, wearing a hospital gown with tubes running every which way out of his medium brown body. ‘Take me home, girl,’ he immediately ordered Jo, ‘take me back to Bruns fer Chrissake.’ The nurse – for whom Uncle Humbug was a nebulous entity somewhere between a person and a problem – shot daggers out of her eyes at this, and it quickly dawned on Jo why her own reception had been a bit on the cool side. There was Blood Pressure to think of before discharge, the nurse said starchily to Humbug. And Sugar Levels. And the Tendency of Certain Patients to think that they Knew Better than the Doctors and Fail to take their Medication until they were Admitted in Diabetic Comas in the Middle of the Night. Jo didn’t give a sound to her mirth, but Uncle saw it in her eyes and took fresh hope.
    â€˜How long ya been here, Uncle?’
    â€˜Too pucken long! Take me ’ome to my house! My tidda won’t come get me from Lismore, the bloody black bitch of a thing.’
    â€˜She knows very well that you’re better off here where we can look after you properly.’ The nurse was implacable, having seen it all before from any number of patients.
    â€˜I’ll have an ’eart attack if ya don’t lemme go – that’ll show yez. Kidnapping a man! I’ll have the law on yez! I’m an Indigenous elder, and this the way yez treat me!’ Uncle Humbug was breathless with outrage at the way he had been shanghaied once again into the hands of authority, for it was the longstanding story of his life.
    â€˜Is that the same law that brought you in unconscious two nightsago, with a full bottle of unopened medication in your bag?’ the nurse countered, adjusting something on Humbug’s drip.
    Uncle Humbug heaved an angry sigh. ‘I know my rights,’ he muttered. ‘You mob just wanna steal blackfellas, that’s all it is.’
    â€˜Nobody wants to steal you, Mr Milbung,’ the nurse assured him with some feeling.
    â€˜Take me ’ome to my house, girl!’ This last exhortation was for Jo. House, she thought, what house? Uncle Humbug lived in a sixth-hand rusty van wedged deeply in the bush at the back of the Bruns park. How he managed to persuade council not to evict him was an enduring mystery of the shire. Maybe he knew where Basho’s skeletons were buried, Jo mused. Regardless, anybody who stood long in his vicinity would soon discover that Humbug was not only the owner of the unregistered rust bucket, but also the self-appointed manager, groundskeeper and caretaker of the Bruns park and all the wildlife in it. Most particularly, Humbug was the custodian of and brother to Slim, an enormous carpet python which lived a charmed life beneath the old Bruns bridge.
    â€˜Ah, better not risk it, Uncle,’ Jo warily avoided the old man’s ordering and beseeching. Take him home and he carks it she knew who’d get the blame from a suddenly devoted family. It would probably do him some good to have three feeds a day for a while anyway. The old man was very thin underneath his hippy trousers, multiple coloured necklaces and woven bracelets. His hands were so