ALL OUR SHIMMERING SKIES
Trent Dalton

Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Trent Dalton 2020

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Trent Dalton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008438371

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2020 ISBN: 9780008438388

Version: 2020-11-09

Praise for All Our Shimmering Skies

‘As Australian as outback red dirt and as universal as the sky young Molly Hook’s journey takes place beneath, All Our Shimmering Skies is an open-hearted wonder, by turns heartbreaking and full of hope, no less than an instant classic’ Venero Armanno

‘A glinting, big-hearted miracle of a book’ Richard Glover

‘Australia has a new literary hero. Molly Hook – part Cordelia, part Jo March, part Pippi Longstocking – pulls us into a story and a landscape that is mythic, beguiling and almost hallucinatory in its beauty. And instantly recognisable as our own’ Kristina Olsson

‘Only from the fantastical mind of Trent Dalton could this story be realised with such vivid finesse. My mind is blown once again by his extraordinary imagination and truly engaging characters – this ensemble of angels and monsters will stay with me forever. Trent’s gift is born of a true heart, the most curious of minds and an unashamed gusto for the truth. For me, this is storytelling at its absolute purest and most enlightening: provocative, deeply moving and infinitely insightful. All Our Shimmering Skies is a courageous expression of longing, hope and love against unimaginable odds’

Asher Keddie

Praise for Boy Swallows Universe

‘The best Australian novel I have read in more than a decade … The last 100 pages of Boy Swallows Universe propel you like an express train to a conclusion that is profound and complex and unashamedly commercial … A rollicking ride, rich in philosophy, wit, truth and pathos’

Sydney Morning Herald

‘A towering achievement. It is the Cloudstreet of the Australian suburban criminal underworld’ Herald Sun

‘A story in thrall to the potential the world holds for lightness, laughter, beauty, forgiveness, redemption and love’

The Australian

‘One of the best Australian novels I’ve ever read … The characters are human and complex, the writing is fast-paced and heartfelt, and every sentence is surprising … This book will stay with me for a long time’ The Guardian

‘Filled with beautifully lyric prose … the characterization, too, is universally memorable, especially of Eli and August. At one point Eli wonders if he is good. The answer is “yes,” every bit as good as this exceptional novel’ Booklist (USA)

‘Funny, tender and raw … It is a remarkably compelling story, but what really makes Boy Swallows Universe shine is its use of language. Dalton has invented a kind of clipped, poetic vernacular that colours the entire book … there’s something distinctly picturesque about Dalton’s language that makes it inherently Australian … A wonderful, unexpectedly beautiful portrayal of boyhood and destiny’ Better Reading

‘The book is plotted like a murder mystery, with the requisite twists and turns providing illuminating surprises right to the last page. Scenes are rendered in intimate detail, the characters are as real as your family and the writing is glorious’ Adelaide Advertiser

‘Oh my God. Wow. It’s just superb. I’ve always looked out for Trent’s work because he has a magic about him: what he sees, how he explains things. He can describe a kitchen table in a way that makes you want to throw your arms around it. After reading Boy Swallows Universe I realise that his genius isn’t really just about writing so much; it’s about hope, and his instinctive and infectious “Yes” to one of the most plaguing questions of the human night: can tenderness survive brutality? This novel confirms Trent Dalton as a genuine treasure of Australian letters’ Annabel Crabb

‘As a brilliant journalist, Trent Dalton has always intimately understood how fact is often stranger than fiction. Perhaps it took someone like him to produce a novel so humming with truth. Call it a hunch, but I think he might’ve just written an Australian classic’ Benjamin Law

‘I’ve finally had a chance to immerse myself in this – a truly incredible book, one where I feel I will miss the characters as if they’re real friends. What an achievement’ Leigh Sales

‘Stunning. My favourite novel for decades. Left me devastated but looking to the heavens’ Tim Rogers

‘An astonishing achievement. Dalton is a breath of fresh air – raw, honest, funny, moving. He has created a novel of the most surprising and addictive nature. Unputdownable’ David Wenham

‘I couldn’t stop reading from the moment I started, and I still can barely speak for the beauty of it. Trent Dalton has done something very special here, writing with grace, from his own broken heart’ Caroline Overington

‘This novel is a raucous, moving, hilarious triumph – a major new voice on the Australian literary scene has arrived’

Nikki Gemmell

‘A gothic humdinger, wrapped around a love story, wrapped around a riddle, wrapped around the universe: this is the book that has everything’ Richard Glover

‘Enthralling – a moving account of sibling solidarity and the dogged pursuit of love’ Geoffrey Robertson QC

‘It’s fresh, original, it’s dripping with promise. A voyage of wide-eyed wonder’ Radio New Zealand

‘A true Australian masterpiece’ Marie Claire

‘Boy Swallows Universe is a wonderful surprise: sharp as a drawer full of knives in terms of subject matter; unrepentantly joyous in its child’s-eye view of the world; the best literary debut in a month of Sundays’ The Australian

‘Boy Swallows Universe hypnotizes you with wonder, and then hammers you with heartbreak’ Washington Post

Dedication

For Fiona, Beth and Sylvie

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for All Our Shimmering Skies

Praise for Boy Swallows Universe

Dedication

The First Sky Gift

Molly and the Epitaph

Black Rock Frog Rock

The Seed of a Story

Yukio Miki and the Black Dragon Sky

The Ways in and Out of the Maze

Red Tin Thimble

Graves at her Command

Women and Children First

Night Skies Tell no Lies

Blood Flowers Blooming

The Bone Pillow

War Skies

The Second Sky Gift

The Man Who Hated Gold

Nine Northern Dingoes

Tear Driven

The Admiral’s Frock

The Devil’s Heartbeat

Delirium Tremens

The Third Sky Gift

Ophelia

The Sky Buried Treasure

The Ten Second Sky

Dreams of Love

The Fourth Sky Gift

Everything We Need

The Owner of the Waterfall

On the Plain of High Heaven

Moon Truth

True Love is Buried Treasure

Own All You Carry

Carry All You Own

The First Sky Gift

The Actress and the Poet

Molly and the Epitaph

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

About the Publisher

A bull ant crawls across a curse. The bull ant’s head is blood red and it stops and starts and stops and starts and moves on through a chiselled gravestone letter ‘C’ and Molly Hook, aged seven, wonders if the bull ant has ever been able to see the whole of the sky given all those magic gravity angles bull ants walk. And if it has no sky to see then she will make a sky for it. The bull ant follows the curved bottom of a ‘U’ and moves to an ‘R’ and winds through a twisting ‘S’ and exits through an ‘E’.

Molly is the gravedigger girl. She’s heard people in town call her that. Poor little gravedigger girl. Mad little gravedigger girl. She leans on her shovel. It has a wooden handle as long as she is tall, with a wide dirt-stained sheet-steel blade with teeth on its sides for root cutting. Molly has given the shovel a name because she cares for it. She calls the shovel Bert because those side teeth remind her of the decaying and icicle-shaped fangs of Bert Green who runs the Sugar Lane lolly shop on Shepherd Street. Bert the shovel has helped dig twenty-six graves for her so far this year, her first year digging graves with her mother and father and uncle. Bert has killed a black whipsnake for her.

Molly’s mother, Violet, says Bert is Molly’s second best friend. Molly’s mother says her first best friend is the sky. Because the sky is every girl’s best friend. There are things the sky will tell a girl about herself that a friend could never tell her. Molly’s mother says the sky is watching over Molly for a reason. Every lesson she will ever need to learn about herself is waiting up there in that sky, and all she has to do is look up.

Molly’s bare feet are dirt-stained like the shovel face and there are copper-coloured lines of cemetery clay where her elbows and knees bend. Molly, who is right to consider this rambling and rundown and near-dead cemetery her queendom, hops onto a slab of old black stone and kneels down to put a big blue eyeball up close to the crawling bull ant and she wonders if the ant can see the deep dark blues in her eyes and thinks that if the ant can see that kind of blue then maybe it will know what it feels like to see all of the vast blue sky over Darwin.

‘Get off the grave, Molly.’

‘Sorry, Mum.’

The sky is the colour of 1936 and the sky is the colour of October. Seen from the blue sky above and looking down and looking closer in and closer in, they are mother and daughter standing before a goldminer’s grave in the furthermost plot in the furthermost corner from the gravel entrance to Hollow Wood Cemetery. They are older and younger versions of themselves. Molly Hook with curled brown hair, bony and careless. Violet Hook with curled brown hair, bony and troubled. She’s holding something behind her back that her daughter is too busy, too Molly, to notice. Violet Hook, the gravedigger mum, always hiding something. Her shaking fingers, her thoughts. The gravedigger mum, burying dead bodies in the dirt and burying secrets alive inside herself. The gravedigger mum, walking upright but buried deep in thinking. She stands at the foot of the old limestone grave, grey stone weathered into black; porous and crumbling and ruined like the people who paid for the cheap graves in this cheap cemetery, and ruined like Aubrey Hook and his younger brother, Horace Hook – Molly’s father, Violet’s husband – the penniless drunkards who are tall and black-hatted and sweat-faced and rarely home. The black-eyed brothers who inherited this cemetery and who reluctantly keep its crooked and rusted gates open, overseeing cemetery business from the pubs and the gin bars in Darwin town and from a lamp-lit and worn red velvet lounge five miles away in the underground opium brothel beneath Eddie Loong’s sprawling workshed on Gardens Road, where he dries and salts the Northern Territory mullet he ships to Hong Kong.

Molly plants her right hand on the grave slab and, because she wants to and because she can, she spins off the gravestone into a series of twirls executed so wildly and so freely that she’s struck by a dizzy spell and has to turn her eyes to the sky to find her balance again. And she spots something up there.

‘Dolphin swimming,’ Molly says, as casually as she would note a mosquito on her elbow. Violet looks up to find Molly’s dolphin, which is a cloud nudging up to a thicker cloud that Violet initially sees as an igloo before changing her mind. ‘Big fat rat licking its backside,’ she says.

Molly nods, howling with laughter.

Violet wears an old white linen dress and her pale skin is red from the Darwin sun, hot from the Darwin heat. She’s still clutching something behind her back, hiding this thing from her daughter.

‘Stand beside me, Molly,’ Violet says.

Molly and Bert the shovel, stout and reliable, take their place beside Violet. Molly looks at the thing Violet seems struck by. A name on a headstone.

‘Who was Tom Berry?’ Molly asks.

‘Tom Berry was a treasure hunter,’ Violet says.

‘A treasure hunter?’ Molly gasps.

‘Tom Berry searched every corner of this land for gold,’ Violet says.

Molly finds numbers beneath the name on the headstone: 1868–1929.

‘Tom Berry was your grandfather, Molly.’

There are so many words beneath those numbers: cramped and busy and too small, filling every available space on the headstone. It’s less an epitaph than a warning, or a public service message for the people of Darwin, and Molly struggles to fathom its meaning.

LET IT BE KNOWN I DIED ACCURSED BY A SORCERER. I TOOK RAW GOLD FROM LAND BELONGING TO THE BLACK NAMED LONGCOAT BOB AND I SWEAR, UNDER GOD, HE PUT A CURSE ON ME AND MY KIN FOR THE SIN OF MY GREED. LONGCOAT BOB TURNED OUR TRUE HEARTS TO STONE. I PUT THAT GOLD BACK BUT LONGCOAT BOB DID NOT LIFT HIS CURSE AND I REST HERE DEAD WITH ONE REGRET: THAT I DID NOT KILL LONGCOAT BOB WHEN I HAD THE CHANCE. ALAS, I WILL TAKE MY CHANCE IN HELL.

‘What’s all the words for, Mum?’

‘It’s called an epitaph, Molly.’

‘What’s an epitaph, Mum?’

‘It’s the story of a life.’

Molly studies the words. She points her finger at a word in the second line.

‘A maker of magic,’ Violet says.

Molly points at another word.

‘Bad magic for someone who might deserve it,’ Violet says.

The child’s finger on another word.

‘Kin,’ Violet says. ‘It means family, Molly.’

‘Fathers?’

‘Yes, Molly.’

‘Mothers?’

‘Yes, Molly.’

‘Daughters?’

‘Yes, Molly.’

Molly’s right forefinger nail scratches at Bert’s handle.

‘Did Longcoat Bob turn your heart to stone, Mum?’

A long silence. Violet Hook and her shaking hands. A long lock of curled brown hair blowing across her eyes.

‘This epitaph is ugly, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘Your grandfather has tarnished his life story with bluster and vengeful thoughts. An epitaph should be graceful and it should be true. This epitaph is only one of those things. An epitaph should be poetic, Molly.’

Molly turns to her mother. ‘Like the writing on Mrs Salmon’s grave, Mum?’

HERE LIES PEGGY SALMON

WHO FISHED FOR LOVE AND WINE

THOUGH IT WAS NO FEAST NOR FAMINE

SHE ALWAYS DROPPED A LINE

‘Will you promise me something, Molly?’

‘Yes.’

‘Promise me you will read all of the poetry books on the shelf by the front door.’

‘I promise, Mum.’

‘Will you promise me something else, Molly?’

‘Yes, Mum.’

‘Promise me you will make your life graceful, Molly. Promise me you’ll make your life grand and beautiful and poetic, and even if it’s not poetic you’ll write it so it is. You write it, Molly, you understand? Promise me your epitaph won’t be ugly like this. And if someone else writes your epitaph, don’t make them struggle to write your epitaph. You must live a life so full that your epitaph will write itself, you understand? Will you promise me that, Molly?’

‘I promise, Mum.’

Molly wobbles her knees. Molly is restless. Because she wants to and because she can, Molly drops Bert on the dirt and executes a cartwheel beside her grandfather’s grave and her yard dress falls down over her face and she’s blinded and she can’t nail the cartwheel’s landing and stumbles and falls into the dirt in a mess of legs and arms.

‘Not very graceful, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘Those poetry books will teach you how to be graceful.’

Molly brushes her floppy hair from her eyes and smiles. Violet directs the gravedigger girl back to her side with a sharply pointed forefinger. Molly picks up Bert the shovel and resumes her place close to her mother’s hip.

‘Be quiet now,’ Violet says.

The stillness of this cemetery, this sun-baked dead collective. Dry season Darwin and every tree in the cemetery wants to burn. Darwin stringybark eucalyptus trees leaning over graves so old their owners can’t be identified. Woollybutt trees and their fallen and dead orange-red flowers surrounding each trunk like fire circles, growing in gravelly soil for fifty years and climbing as high as the shops on the Darwin Esplanade. Wild weeds and grasses creeping over memorials to carpenters, farmers, criminals, soldiers and mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. Kin.

The earth is swallowing up Hollow Wood Cemetery. The dirt below it has eaten the dead and now it chews on the evidence of their living.

Molly breaks the silence. Molly always breaks the silence.

‘Is my grandfather down there?’ Molly asks.

Violet takes a moment to answer.

‘Some of him is down there,’ Violet says.

‘Where’s the rest of him?’

Violet looks up at that blue sky the bull ant hasn’t noticed yet.

‘Up there.’

Molly flips her head back and takes in the sky, her eyes squinting in the Darwin sun at full height.

‘The best of him is up there,’ Violet says.

Molly readjusts her footing, shifts her right foot back, never turns away from the sky. There’s a single dry season cumulus cloud on the left side of Molly’s sky, a fluffy and heaped floating metropolis of warm rising air that looks to Molly like the foam that forms when Bert Green drops a scoop of ice cream into a tall glass of sarsaparilla. Everything to the right of that cloud is blue. Violet Hook follows her daughter’s gaze to the sky and she stares up there for almost half a minute, then she turns back to stare at something equally expansive: her daughter’s face. Dirt across her left cheek. A blotch of breakfast egg yolk hardened at the left corner of her lips. Molly’s eyes always on the sky.

‘What is this place, Molly?’

Molly knows the question and she knows the answer. ‘This place is hard, Mum.’

‘What is rock, Molly?’

Molly knows the question and she knows the answer. ‘Rock is hard, Mum.’

‘What is your heart, Molly?’

‘My heart is hard, Mum.’

‘How hard is it?’

‘Hard as rock,’ Molly says, eyes still on the sky. ‘So hard it can’t be broken.’

Violet nods, breathes deep. A long silence now. Then four simple words. ‘I’m going away, Molly.’

Molly shifts her bare left foot and turns her head to her mother. ‘Where ya goin’, Mum?’ she asks, her right hand driving Bert’s blade haphazardly into the dirt. ‘You goin’ to Katherine again, Mum?’

Violet says nothing.

‘You goin’ to Timber Creek again, Mum? Can I come, too?’

Violet’s eyes turning up to the sky now. Another long silence.

Molly banging her right heel into the dirt, waiting for her Mum to respond.

And Violet seems lost in that sky. Then she closes her eyes and reaches her right arm out to her daughter and Molly watches that hand come all the way across to rest upon her left shoulder. Her mother’s fingers are shaking. And Molly can see now that her mother’s arms are thinner than she’s ever seen them. Her skin, paler.

‘Why are your fingers doing that, Mum?’

And Violet opens her eyes and studies her shaking right hand, close up, then hides it once more behind her back. She turns her eyes again to the sky. ‘I’m going up there, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘I’m going up there to be with your grandfather.’

Molly smiles. Turns her head back to the sky. Eyes alight. ‘Can I come, too?’

‘No, Molly, you can’t come, too.’

And Molly feels thirsty now and her belly turns inside her and the toes of her right foot dig into the red earth beneath her and she makes nervous fists with her hands and the longest nails on her fingers dig so deep into her palms that they dig through the skin. Turn again to the sky. Turn again to Mum.

‘I’m not coming back down again, Molly.’

Molly shakes her head. ‘Why not?’

‘Because I can’t stay down here anymore.’

Molly raises her eyes to the sky again. She searches for a town up there. She searches for the house her mum will stay in up there. She searches for streets in the sky and lolly shops and liquor stores. The town beyond the clouds. The town beyond the sky.

‘This is the last time you will see me, Molly.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m going away.’

Molly drops her head. Toes digging deeper in the dirt. And she wants to know how her mother pulls this magic trick, how she turns so quickly from the light and into the dark. She’s daylight switching straight into night-time, Molly tells herself. Day sky to night sky, with no living done in between. No time in between. No chores. No afternoon tea. Day sky blue with dolphin clouds to a night sky only black.

‘What are you feeling inside, Molly?’ Violet asks.

‘I feel like I want to cry.’

Violet nods her head.

‘Then cry, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘Cry.’

And the gravedigger girl’s eyes squint and her body shudders like it wants to vomit and her neck jolts forward and she sobs. Two brief sobs and her eyes have to open wide for a river of tears that turn to tributaries that split through the dry dirt and dust on the girl’s face, and these new water lines on Molly’s cheeks look to Violet like the creek systems she would see on her father’s gold fossicking maps as a girl.

‘Keep going,’ Violet says. And the girl cries harder and she puts her hands to her face and fluid runs from her nose and saliva drips from her lips and her mother does not touch her. Does not hold her. Does not reach for her.

‘Cry, Molly, cry,’ Violet says, softly.

The gravedigger girl howls so loud that Violet turns her head, instinctively, towards the cemetery house beyond a cluster of trees, just in case that sound is loud enough to wake her husband from a long daylight liquor sleep.

‘Good,’ Violet says. ‘Good, Molly.’

And Molly cries for a full minute more and then she swallows hard and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. She grips a fistful of her dress and lowers her face to wipe it clean.

Violet stands in front of her child now, hands still behind her back.

‘Are you finished?’

Molly nods, snorting fluid back up through her nose.

‘Did you get it all out?’

Molly nods.

‘Now look at me, Molly,’ Violet says.

Molly looks up at her mother.

‘You will never weep for me again,’ she says. ‘Not a single tear will you shed for me from this moment on. You will never feel sorrow. You will never be afraid. You will feel no pain. For you are blessed, Molly Hook. Never let a single person tell you any different.’

Molly nods.

‘What is this place?’

‘It’s hard, Mum.’

‘What is rock?’

‘It’s hard, Mum.’

‘What is your heart?’

‘My heart is hard, Mum.’

‘How hard is it?’

‘Hard as rock. So hard it can’t be broken.’

Violet nods.

‘No one can ever break it, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘Not your father. Not your uncle. Not me.’

Molly nods. She watches her mother look back to the cemetery house. There is fear on her face. There is worry.

Violet turns back to her daughter. ‘Now is there anything you want to ask me before I go?’

Molly’s head down, staring at the dirt. Staring at a platoon of ants marching towards her grandfather’s grave.

‘Will I still be able to talk to you?’

‘We can talk any time you want to talk,’ Violet says. ‘All you have to do is look up.’

‘But how will I hear you?’ the girl asks.

‘All you have to do is listen.’

Molly’s head stays down.

‘No, you can’t be doing that,’ Violet says. ‘You can’t be keeping your head down like that, Molly. You must look up. You must always look up.’

Molly looks up. Violet nods, half-smiles.

‘Is there anything else you want to ask me?’

Molly scratches her face, twists her left foot in the dirt, something on her mind.

‘What is it, Molly?’

Molly’s screwed-up face.

‘You’re gonna miss my birthday,’ Molly says.

‘I’m gonna miss all of your birthdays, Molly.’

Molly drops her head.

‘I won’t get any more gifts from anyone,’ Molly says.

‘You’ll still get gifts from me.’

‘I will?’

‘Of course you will.’

Molly points to the sky.

‘But you’ll be up there.’

Violet smiles.

‘That’s where the best gifts come from.’

Violet looks at the sky again.

‘The rain, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘The rainbows. The dolphin clouds. Elephant clouds. Unicorn clouds. The great big bolts of lightning. The sky gifts, Molly. I’ll send them all down for you.’

‘The sky gifts,’ Molly says. She likes those words. ‘Just for me?’

‘Just for you, Molly. But you have to keep your eyes on the sky. You have to keep looking up.’ Violet points at the sky. ‘There’s one falling now.’

‘Where?’ Molly gasps, scanning the blue sky.

Violet points to the sky again.

‘There,’ she says. And Molly squints her eyes and shades her face with her hands to block the glare.

‘It’s a gift from your grandfather, Molly. It’s something he wants you to have.’

Molly bouncing on the spot now. ‘What is it? What is it?’

‘It’s how your grandfather found his treasure,’ Violet says, staring at the sky.

‘Treasure!’ Molly says.

‘We all have our own treasure to find, Molly. He wants you to find yours.’

Molly stares harder into the sky, but she can’t see the falling sky gift.

‘Keep looking up, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘Just keep your eyes on the sky, Molly. Don’t look away or you’ll miss it falling.’

Molly stares harder into the sky but she can’t see the falling sky gift.

‘Keep looking up, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘Just keep your eyes on the sky, Molly. Don’t look away or you’ll miss it falling.’

Molly feels her mother move closer to her. Molly feels her mother’s arms wrap around her shoulders. She feels her mother’s lips against her temple.

‘I’m going now, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘But you must not watch me go. You must keep looking up. You must keep your eyes on the sky.’

And Molly looks at the sky and looks and looks and she wants to turn her eyes away but she listens to her mum, she believes in her mum, she believes her, and she never takes her eyes off that high blue roof and she feels her mum move away from her, hears her mum’s sandals crushing leaves and grass shoots behind her, and she wants to look away from the sky and turn her eyes towards those sounds but she listens to her mum because her mum is always right, always true, always graceful.

‘You can write your own epitaph now, Molly.’ Further away.

‘It won’t be written for you. You can write it yourself. Just keep your eyes on the sky, Molly.’ Further away.

‘Keep your eyes on the sky, Molly.’ Further away.

‘Keep your eyes on the sky, Molly.’ Too far away.

Molly keeps her eyes on the sky and she stares up at that sky for so long she tells herself she will only stare at that sky for sixty more seconds and she counts sixty seconds in her head and when she has only five more seconds to count she vows to count another sixty seconds and she does. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

She still can’t see the sky gift, so she turns her eyes away from the blue and she sighs, her belly still turning inside, and she whips her head round to where the last sounds of footsteps came from. She looks for her mother. But there are only trees and graves and weeds and mounds of pebbled clay covering the dead, nothing else. And she stares into that still cemetery space waiting for her mother to walk back into it. But she does not.

An image enters the gravedigger girl’s mind. A bull ant crawling across a curse. A single word carved in stone. Bad magic for someone who might deserve it. She turns to read her grandfather’s epitaph and resting upon the slab of stone by her twig-thin shinbones is a flat, square cardboard gift box. It’s wrapped in a ribbon tied in a bow. The colour of the ribbon is the colour of the sky.

Molly leaps on the sky gift and shakes it in her hands. She rips at the ribbon and her belly isn’t turning anymore. Her dirt and sweat fingers claw at the sides of the box. At last, an opening, and her fingers rip the thin, cheap cardboard roughly across the bottom edge and something metal – something hard – slides out of the box and into her hands.

She holds it up to the sky. A round metal dish. Solid copper. Old and caked in dirt. She thinks it’s a dinner plate at first. Maybe a serving dish for sandwiches. But the dish has raised, sloping sides and a flat base, and it’s not much smaller than a car’s steering wheel. And Molly’s seen one of these before. In the back tray of her Uncle Aubrey’s red utility truck, in the old metal box where he keeps his fossicking tools. It’s not a plate, she tells herself. It’s a pan. A pan for finding gold. A pan for finding treasure. And Molly Hook, aged seven, knows not what to say back to the sky for such generosity, so she looks up to it and says what she can only hope is graceful. ‘Thank you.’ And in the silence of the cemetery the gravedigger girl waits patiently for the sky to say something back.

The gravedigger girl by the water, four days later. Molly Hook kneeling on the muddy bank of Blackbird Creek, which runs along the eastern edge of Hollow Wood Cemetery. She holds the sky gift. Earth, dirt and silt have turned the copper pan to a dark mud-brown colour. She fills the pan with dry creekbed gravel and duck-waddles without standing into the shallow creek water. With two steady hands, she submerges the pan and the cleaner parts of its edge bounce sunlight off copper and Molly mistakes these magic tricks of the light for early and miraculous strikes of gold.

Gold, Mum, gold. And she turns her head to the sky. Is this you, Mum? Are you doing this? Can you hear me, Mum?

And it makes sense to Molly in this moment when she is so close to her eighth birthday that the god of minerals, that miserable and selfish spirit god of gold, that son of Zeus, Khrysos – whose grave her father and her uncle say they’re always pissing on when they’re liquored – would grant her a gold strike on this day. This strange day of all strange days, this dark mood of a day when her father, Horace, and her uncle, Aubrey, are over there by the black rock frog rock beneath the sprawling milkwood tree digging a deep dirt hole to rest another human body in for eternity.

She watches them digging. Aubrey Hook is two years older than Horace Hook and half a foot taller. The brothers are aged in their mid-thirties but too much toil and too much Darwin sun have dragged them prematurely into their forties. Both brothers wear wide-brimmed black hats that shadow their hands as they break to open their rectangular and rusting Havelock tobacco tins and roll their smokes, silent as always. The men wear white cotton shirts and black trousers and black work boots covered in dirt. Their spines bend sharply at the top, as if their shoulder blades are pushing their heads over, like they were born disfigured, but it’s all because of the shovel work. Digging graves for the dead and all those years they spent digging eventual graves for themselves in the sorry rear end of the Northern Territory gold rush. It takes decades for a spine to assume the dig position, but it catches on eventually, starts curling into a comfortable place, the way Horace and Aubrey will one day curl gratefully into a mud-cake brown-dirt hole just like the one they’re digging beside the black rock frog rock.

Aubrey has a moustache but Horace does not. Red kerchiefs round their necks for sweat, white handkerchiefs in their trouser pockets to wipe dirt off their foreheads. Men of bone and skin and work and broken sleep and worry. Men who Molly believes might have been born in dirt. Men who did not come from the place she came from. Men who emerged from the earth they’re always digging up. The girl knows if she drove Bert into her father’s belly and stomped on the blade shaft with her right boot, she’d find the same red, yellow and brown earths she keeps finding beneath all these old black cemetery gravestones lining Blackbird Creek. She’d find the Darwin kandosols her dad has told her about, those hard Top End soils that hold little water, the sandy and loamy surface soils, inside her own father. Then she’d dig deeper and she’d find no innards in the man, no gut tubes, no organs, no heart, just the vertosols, the same cracking clays and black soils found beneath the Top End’s vast floodplains. She can’t picture Uncle Aubrey’s insides, thinks he’s hollow like the dead, termite-ravaged trees that gave this cemetery its name. All he has inside is shadow.

‘Black rock frog rock,’ Molly mumbles to herself as she pans.

The black rock frog rock beneath the milkwood tree looks to Molly like the black rock frogs she always sees hopping through Hollow Wood. The frogs remind her of burnt damper. Hopping lumps of burnt bread.

She likes those words. ‘Black rock frog rock.’ She sounds like a croaking creek frog when she says those words fast. ‘Black rock frog rock. Black rock frog rock.’ And she laughs.

Molly shakes the pan from side to side, vigorously enough to turn the gravel, gently enough to keep the gravel in the pan. She takes the larger gravel rocks from the pan, washes them clean in the water, discards them. Circular pan movements now, revolutions of gravel and water as dirt and clay dissolve. The gravedigger girl’s fingers working lumps of dirt and clay, working smaller rocks to the surface, letting the heavier minerals – the gold, Mum, the gold – settle at the bottom of the pan. The pan goes up and the pan goes down and the dirt spins like the earth spins beneath Molly Hook’s dirt-brown bare feet. And she searches for those flashes of gold for forty-five minutes and she never finds them.

But after all the searching, all the sifting, she finds that the sky-gifted pan has been washed clean on both sides. The wet copper shimmers in the Darwin sun and she turns the pan in her hands and she guides a reflecting beam of the sun onto her left palm and she wonders if the beauty of that light on her skin is prettier than any large nugget of gold she could ever find, anyway. Maybe this was the kind of treasure her grandfather hunted across every corner of this land. The treasure of pure golden light.

She’s tired now and she lies back on the dry creek bed to rest and she looks up to the wide blue sky and she talks to it. She asks a question of it: ‘Why did you give me this?’ And the sun blasts whiteness in her eyes and she shields the sun with the perfect circle of the copper pan and she wonders if that’s why she received this gift, so she could look up and see only sky. But what she sees when she looks up is cursive. Words. A series of sentences roughly engraved on the underside of the prospector’s pan. She reads the words with the same interest with which she reads the epitaphs on the crumbling gravestones of Hollow Wood Cemetery, all those final deep-grief stories yielding clues to the lives of the departed souls, while the mud beneath her right forefinger nail underlines each strange word.

The longer I stand, the shorter I grow,

And the water runs to the silver road

She repeats those words to herself. Repeats them over and over. ‘“The longer I stand, the shorter I grow, and the water runs to the silver road” … “The longer I stand, the shorter I grow, and the water runs to the silver road.”’

From the words runs the etched line of what could only be called a map, but it’s like no map that Molly Hook has ever seen. She has seen maps of her country. She has seen the dot of Darwin resting like a jewel in a princess’s tiara on the left-hand corner of the top of Australia. She has seen the rectangle of the Northern Territory wedged in straight lines between a mapped out and vast Western Australia to its left and the eastern bulge of Queensland to its right. She has stared at all the wondrous names of places she hopes to visit across her Northern Territory when she’s done with digging holes for the dead and for her dad. Auld’s Ponds. Teatree Well. Eva Downs Station. Waterloo Wells. Each place conjures a vision in her head. Blue ponds where long-legged white storks stand on lily pads the size of Roman shields that float across the noses of sleeping crocodiles. A deep well full of English tea, where fancy men and fancy women in fancy hats fill bone-china cups as they watch lawn games unfold to the sounds of dappled-sunshine violin players. A woman named Eva Downs who looks like that actress Katharine Hepburn and who runs a thriving cattle property with a shotgun in one hand and a martini in the other. That place in the central Australian desert where Napoleon fell back down to earth.

Her father has a prospector’s map of Australia from 1914. He keeps it in his work room off the main bedroom that Molly’s never supposed to enter. The prospector’s map doesn’t even have Darwin marked on it. It doesn’t even show the whole of the Northern Territory. That map is pink and everywhere outside of what is mapped out as the states of Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria is marked simply with the word ‘Aborigines’. Depending on the wilting spirit or rabid desperation of the goldminer, these areas marked ‘Aborigines’ were seen by Horace and Aubrey and their old goldminer friends as either dangerous no-man’s-lands or untouched gold-rich money fields ripe for a sharpened pickaxe. But this etched map in her hands is like no map Molly has seen. This is a map from a storybook. This is a map not of towns and cities, rivers and roads. This is a map of wonder and mystery, fortune and glory. And treasure. She remembers what her mother said: ‘We all have our own treasure to find.’

A treasure map, Molly tells herself, as her fingernail traces the single etched map line down to a second set of words.

West where the yellow fork man leads

East in the dark when the wood bleeds

She doesn’t repeat these words because she can see more words below them and she’s too desperate to follow the etched line that travels from north-west to south-east now down the back of the copper pan in a shaky course to another set of words, and a thousand blue butterflies are set free inside her stomach as she runs her short forefinger beneath them.

City of stone ’tween heaven and earth

The place beyond your place of birth

The map line runs on and there are more words to be read on the pan but they are covered in silt. She rushes into the creek water once more and uses her yard dress to wipe the back of the pan completely clean, and she must remember to breathe when she raises her grandfather’s sky-gifted treasure map to the blue sky and reads the last collection of words etched into the pan.

Own all you carry, carry all you own

Step inside your—

‘Moll-yyyyyy!’

Uncle Aubrey is shouting at her from beneath the milkwood tree.

‘Get outta that feckin’ creek, child!’

The gravedigger girl rushes and splashes out of the water and crawls up the creek edge, grasping at clumps of tall grass to haul herself up and onto the cemetery grounds. Molly can see her uncle standing over the grave he’s just dug, leaning on the long shovel he used to dig it. Her father stands next to him, his head down and his black hat in his hands.

‘Get over here, child,’ Aubrey commands. His long thin arms and his long thin finger bones are waving her towards him, but she doesn’t want to go there.

‘May I please stay here, Uncle Aubrey?’ Molly calls.

‘No,’ her uncle says. ‘Come here now.’

‘I don’t want to go over there,’ she says.

‘Get over here now, child,’ Aubrey Hook barks. He’s so tall and thin, and his wide-brimmed work hat is black like his eyes and his eyebrows and his gaze. And Molly wants to cry now to show her uncle that she’s frightened. Cry, she tells herself. Cry, Molly, cry. Cry and he will understand you. Cry and he will care for you. But she cannot cry in this moment, no matter how hard she forces herself to.

‘Dad,’ Molly calls.

But her father says nothing. And she knows her father is weaker than her uncle.

‘Dad!’ Molly calls again.

But her father has gone away in his mind. Gone away, she tells herself, gone away like Horace and Aubrey said her mum had gone away. They said she wandered off into the bush. They said she was lost in the wild and deep country and she couldn’t find her way back again. Back to Hollow Wood. Back to Molly.

Horace is frozen in this moment, head down, his hat in his hands.

‘You will come here now, child, and you will say goodbye to your mother,’ Aubrey demands from the edge of the grave.

Molly grips the sky gift copper pan and hugs it to her chest. I will never be afraid, she tells herself. I will feel no pain. Rock is hard. Can’t be broken. She shakes her head. No. ‘She’s not in there,’ Molly calls.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘She’s not in that hole,’ Molly says. She points to the sky. ‘She’s up there.’

Aubrey is momentarily stunned by his niece’s words. He looks at her closely to see where they might have come from, which part of the girl’s bent mind. He tilts his head and squints his eyes. Poor little gravedigger girl, he tells himself. Mad little gravedigger girl, he tells himself. Mad like her grandfather, mad like her mother.

‘What is that you’re holding?’ Aubrey barks.

Molly is silent. He takes a few steps closer.

‘What is that you’re holding, child?’

Three more steps closer and then he stops.

‘It’s a sky gift,’ Molly says, nervously. ‘It’s my grandfather’s pan. He wanted me to have it, so he dropped it from the sky.’

Aubrey studies his niece again and then he removes his black hat and wipes the sweat from his forehead. He breathes and sighs loudly, pulls a hip flask from his pocket, unscrews the cap and takes a long, hard swig. He pockets the flask and runs his dirty right hand across the stubble of his cheeks. And then he marches quickly to his niece, gritting his white wolf teeth, and he digs his wolf claws hard into Molly’s right shoulder and pulls her towards the milkwood tree. As he drags her across the cemetery ground, he reaches for the pan in her hands, pulls hard at it.

‘Gimme that feckin’ pan!’ he spits.

‘No,’ Molly screams. ‘No, Uncle Aubrey! It’s mine. It was given to me.’

The tall black shadow uncle’s hairy black wolf arm wrenches the pan violently from his niece’s hands and he tugs Molly Hook towards the milkwood tree and the black rock frog rock, and she digs her feet hard into the dirt to slow their movement but the tall black shadow uncle is too strong. He grips her body like he grips a shovel. Closer and closer to the milkwood tree he hauls her, until she can see the hole in the ground.

‘No!’ Molly screams. ‘Please, Uncle Aubrey. Noooooo.’

A rectangular grave with no headstone. A rectangular dirt prism of air sunk into the earth, with no name and no epitaph. No story of a life. No existence. No goodbye. No luck.

Her father stands at the foot of the grave. Her father can cry, and he’s weeping here. Aubrey yanks at the girl’s arm and swings her forward to the edge of the grave. ‘Say your goodbyes,’ he roars, furious and volatile.

The girl’s feet nearly slip into the grave but stop at the edge where she can’t help but look down inside the hole. She’s terrified of what she will see, but what she sees is nothing. What she finds is a dig with no end. The hole goes on forever. She could dive into that grave right now and she could fall through the earth for eternity and every muscle in her body wants to do just that. It’s a bottomless grave. It’s a black void, and this black void proves Molly Hook right and she shouts at her father across the grave. ‘I told him, Dad. She’s not down there.’ She points to the sky. ‘She’s up there, Dad!’

Her father offers no response to his daughter beyond weeping. Her father has gone away. Gone away like Mum. I will never be afraid, she tells herself. I will feel no pain. I will feel only rage. Then Molly makes fists with her hands and she clenches them so hard that her fingernails draw blood from her palms and she screams. ‘She. Is. Not. Down. There!’

Aubrey steps to the side of the grave and talks to his brother calmly. ‘Control your child, brother.’

But Horace is blank. Horace only weeps. Molly’s banshee screams echo across the cemetery. Loud enough to wake its eternal residents. A scream from the bottom of the endless black void inside her. High and sharp and piercing. ‘She. Is. Not. Down. Therrrrrrrrre!’

Aubrey shouts at his brother now. ‘Control your child, Horace!’

But Horace Hook has gone away. Horace only weeps. And with every tear her father sheds, the gravedigger girl grows more and more hysterical.

‘What are you crying for?’ she screams. ‘She’s not down there. She’s not down there. SHE’S NOT DOWN TH—’

And the gravedigger girl is silenced by the back of her uncle’s knuckle and bone hand landing flush across her face. Molly Hook falls back hard on the hard cemetery dirt. She wipes her nose and looks at her fingers covered in the same blood that’s spread across her face. This place is hard, she tells herself. Rock is hard. My heart is hard as rock, she tells herself. I will never be afraid. I will feel no pain.

Molly looks up at her uncle, who is still holding her grandfather’s pan when he turns his back on Molly and looks back down into the grave. Molly stands and wipes her face with her yard dress and she spits half a mouthful of blood on the dirt and then she runs fast at her uncle and she drives her shoulder hard into his back and she pushes against him with her legs. She will send him to hell where he belongs and the quickest route she can see is through that endless black void.

But her uncle doesn’t move. His bones are too hard from digging. His bones are too hard from living. ‘This is your grave!’ Molly screams, pushing with all her strength as her bare toes slip in the soil beneath them. ‘This is yoourrr grave!’

Then she gives up pushing against her uncle and reaches for the pan he holds in his right hand. ‘This is mine,’ she screams. ‘Give it back.’ She tugs on the pan and pulls back on it with all her strength and all that is left of her will. ‘Give it back.’

Aubrey Hook is still gripping the pan when he turns and smiles at his niece as though he’s going to enjoy the thing he’s about to do, and the gravedigger girl is still bulldog-clinging to the pan when her uncle swings his right arm with such fury and power that Molly’s feet are lifted from the earth and she is thrown through the air and the only thing that stops her wild forward motion is the impact of her left temple meeting the edge of the large black rock frog rock next to the grave. Then she might as well be the one who is falling through that endless void towards hell because everything in her world, even the day sky, has turned to black.

A black flying fox in the predawn pink of a wet season sky. Gravity turns the fruit bat’s faeces into a teardrop falling fast to the earth and inside that teardrop is a single seed. Wind pushes the teardrop towards a eucalypt woodland with a vast understorey layer of vibrant green spear grass. The teardrop falls hard and finds its own permanently moist pocket of earth. The sun rises and falls in the sky and rises and falls in the sky and the black flying foxes of the Northern Territory fly east and west with and towards their kin.

Wet seasons turn to dry seasons and turn to wet again, and suns make way for moons and then a tree grows out of a pocket of moist earth where once a fruit bat’s seed found a home. It has rough dark-grey bark, stands thirty feet high and has glossy, round leaves that bounce light like the inside of an oyster shell. And from among these leaves, on the morning of 7 December 1941, a small round fruit appears before the world. It is the colour red and it is ribbed all around. It is a red bush apple.

His gloved hand reaches for her photograph in the grey blindness of a cloud. ‘Nara, make me strong,’ he whispers. The photograph is fading, stuck by gum above the circular fuel gauge of Yukio Miki’s Mitsubishi A6M ‘Zero’ long-range fighter. The original photograph was wider: Nara Nui kneeling on the floor beside the right leg of her father, Koga Nui, who was seated on a wooden chair, his right palm resting on his right thigh and his left hand concealed by the long sleeve of his hemp and silk kimono – his winter kimono – patterned with pine trees that Yukio always considered a fair pictorial representation of Koga Nui’s existence: towering and bristling and hard to kill with anything but an axe.

Yukio sliced the photograph in half, weeks ago, with his pocket knife pressed against an aircraft carrier mess hall table in Hitokappu Bay, in the Kuril Islands, leaving only Nara to grace the sacred gum space above his fuel gauge. Nara’s not looking at the camera in the photograph, and she told Yukio she was looking, in fact, at her nine-year-old niece, Soma, who was walking precariously behind the camera on a pair of empty soup tins tied with rope. It was Soma who was making Nara smile so wide, she said, but Yukio knew the truth, that it was life that gave Nara Nui her smile; it was children and snow and harlequin ducks bobbing along clearwater streams and it was fat fish hanging from her hook and it was a red paper kite stolen by the wind and carried across southern Osaka; it was the air and the sea and the sky that formed that smile. Nara wears her one and only kimono in the photograph, patterned with plum blossoms, winter cousin of sakura – cherry blossom. The plum blossoms always bloomed in time for the cold days when Nara would nestle into the soft cushion of flesh between Yukio’s right breast and right shoulder. He would feel her lips moving on his chest as she spoke of their love and their future, and all he saw as he lay with his back on the snow-flaked grass were the gold hearts of hanging white plum blossom flowers against a sky as grey as the cloud he flies through now. It felt, then, like Nara was talking to his chest on purpose and when she whispered ‘zutto’ – eternally – she really was meaning to say it up so close; she meant to say it directly to his fast-beating heart.

There is a parachute pack stuffed behind his seat. Few Zero pilots carry parachutes. He could slip his on here now in the cloud, he tells himself. The Zero’s cockpit can’t be jettisoned but it can be opened in flight. He could exit here, slip away unseen by his brothers and feel no shame. The high winds of the Pacific would carry him to a tropical island, carry him to Egypt, to Paris, to London with its big round yellow ticking clock in the night sky. A strong enough updraught could lift him and his parachute up through the clouds, even, through the sky and the stars and into Takamanohara, the Plain of High Heaven.

No, he tells himself. A Zero samurai fights to the death. Death, he tells himself. Death. The only answer to every question he ever asked about life. The shortest route to heaven. The quickest road to Nara.

*

The shortsword that rattles against metal in the left-side gap between the Zero’s pilot seat and cockpit door is called a wakizashi. The shortsword’s blade is only thirty centimetres long. Wakizashi swords were traditionally made for close-quarter fighting or to commit seppuku, ritual suicide, but Yukio carries the sword today not for the sharpness of its blade but for the power of the object’s story. A gift from father to son. A sword more than two centuries old, passed through the hands of Miki men, all of whom, with the exception of Yukio the fighter pilot, worked in the artisan knife-making workshops of old town Sakai, on the edge of Osaka Bay, at the mouth of Yamato River.

There is an image of a butterfly engraved on the handle end of the sword’s blade. The blade was forged in the Miki family workshop in the heart of Sakai, a bustling fishing port and one of Japan’s busiest and oldest foreign trading hubs, filled with the sacred air of maritime commerce and tuna blood and the guts of fat red queen crabs. It was in the same modest and small and well-kept laneway knife-making workshop that Yukio’s father, Oshiro Miki, passed the wakizashi to his first-born son, then aged in his mid-twenties, on the day he left Sakai to join his military brethren in the selective and punishing Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service pilot training programme. Oshiro had told his son the story of the sword’s creation many times but on this day of sad departures he felt he needed to tell him again.

‘No more stories, father,’ Yukio pleaded. He had grown tired of his father’s stories. As a boy, Yukio had lived for his father’s tales. Tales of how the Miki family had been making blades for six hundred years. Tales of samurai swords forged for great warriors. Tales of how the flames of feudal war were finally extinguished and the need for samurai swords was blown away with the ashes of the dead, and how the Miki family elders then turned their sword-making skills to creating the sharpest fishermen’s filleting knives in all of Sakai. Knives forged for cutting the heads off tuna that could still carve through the neck bones of any fisherman foolish enough to doubt the integrity of Miki family steel.

Yukio would sit for hours behind the workshop counter on an upturned wooden wash bucket, polishing and sharpening filleting blades as he watched his father dazzle fishermen with increasingly elaborate tales of each sold knife’s mythic creation. Fishermen from the Black Sea and from the Mediterranean and the Pacific and the Atlantic, and from seas as high and cold as the world went, and as wide and warm. They would come to Sakai port to hear Oshiro Miki tell his knife-maker tales. And, every single week, young Yukio was surprised to find that his father had miraculously acquired a new sacred and old blade that he had promised never to part with but might consider selling to one lucky foreign fisherman if he deemed him worthy of the knife’s ownership.

‘You carry yourself with honour,’ Oshiro would say to that week’s particularly fortunate customer. ‘You have treated my family and me with respect, and for this kindness I will repay you by showing you a most uncommon blade. I will now tell you the story of this blade, but you must never repeat it and you must never speak of where you found this blade.’

What followed was usually a tale of adventure, courage, sacrifice, tragedy and, always, true love. The blade Yukio’s father held in his hands was invariably the sacred object with which the tragic hero of each story managed to overcome a malevolent force – deceitful loved one, old wizard, seductive witch, many-limbed sea monster – standing in the way of true love’s triumph. Oshiro would complete these lucrative counter transactions and then turn to his son and whisper about the wonders and importance of story. ‘The finest blades are forged not with steel, son,’ he would say. ‘But with story.’ Oshiro Miki knew full well that his customers would speak freely of where they found their precious new blades. He knew his strict requests to keep his hallowed workshop and its treasured stories secret was the very reason Miki family blades were spoken about over tuna nets and chopping boards across the globe.

As Yukio grew into his teens behind the workshop counter, his father taught him how to tell these knife stories to foreign travellers in broken English and broken French and broken Spanish. The stories, he said, could sound even more mystical and significant when told in a few carefully selected English words.

‘Love!’ Oshiro hollered in perfect English to a wealthy American couple sailing the seven seas, oil money spilling from their pockets. He waved his hands excitedly at the long-married husband and wife. ‘I see … love!’ he declared. And then he explained in broken English that the word ‘love’ was his favourite word in the entire English language because it was the first word of English he ever learned. How perfect, Oshiro recognised, and how fortunate was he that the first word of English he ever learned was also the language’s most profound and sacred and joyous. ‘True … love,’ he said with a smile.

And Yukio watched as the Americans smiled with the newfound knowledge that their shared love, despite whatever feelings they may have harboured to the contrary, was clear and strong enough to cross even the divides of sea and language. Then Yukio’s father spoke of how that couple’s true love reminded him of a true-love story behind a sacred and expensive wakizashi that he just knew would make the perfect souvenir to show their many friends back home in Pennsylvania.

‘Was “love” the first word of English my father learned?’ Yukio asked his grandfather Saburo Miki, who was an old and quiet and thoughtful man, as they washed dishes that night.

‘Ha!’ Saburo laughed. ‘The first word of English your father learned was “dog”. The second word he learned was “fish”.’

‘Then my father is a liar,’ Yukio said.

‘Your father is a storyteller,’ Saburo said, washing thick brown fish sauce off a dinner plate. ‘He tells those stories to fill this plate for you each night. There is a difference between liars and storytellers, Yukio.’ The grandfather passed the clean dinner plate to his grandson. ‘Some storytellers still make it to heaven.’

*

‘Just one more story,’ Oshiro Miki said, holding the wakizashi in two hands before his son. He prefaced this story as he’d done every other time he told it, by acknowledging its more questionable narrative turns. ‘For this story to reach your heart, son, you may need to swallow it down with a sprinkling of salt from the shores of the inland sea,’ Oshiro said. ‘You should write the facts of this story only on tissue paper. But you should carve its meaning in stone.’

Yukio patiently and respectfully listened, again, as his father spoke of how the shortsword was made in the 1700s by a quietly spoken and diligent knife-maker named Asato Miki, who had discovered that the love of his life, Rina, had left Sakai in the arms of his younger brother, Uno. All but swallowed up by the dark shadow of grief and betrayal, Asato Miki willed himself to forge the perfect wakizashi blade, with which he was determined to cut out his own beating heart and toss it into the furnace that had forged his own murder weapon. For such an impossible act, Asato reasoned, he would need to forge an impossible blade and, in a single, dizzying twenty-four-hour haze of fevered and hate-filled industry, Asato hammered two types of metal together – soft and workable jigane iron and hard and deadly tamahagane steel – in a furnace so hot he could only work in thirty-minute blasts of furious activity between guzzles of fresh water fetched by his apprentice, which would also serve to cool and harden the blade. Asato felt so strong that day that he came to believe the very breath of Futsunushi – god of swords – had filled his workshop and a dragon’s fire had filled his blood. Asato forged the two metals into a single blade so sharp it cut the four legs off the bed he had shared for three years with Rina in four swift strokes.

The tortured ironworker was stunned by a newfound artistry born of pain. He was more stunned, still, to discover that the joy of his newfound gifts had swallowed up the sorrow that had driven him to make the sword in the first place. Asato began demonstrating and advertising his miraculous ironwork skills in sake houses across Sakai by having loose-pocketed drinkers throw objects – apples, oranges, carrots, potatoes, unlucky alehouse kitchen rats – at him, each of which he would slice into two perfect halves with a single swipe of a short but swift sword as thin as a Yamato River ghost.

One day a legendary vagabond assassin known as the ‘White Tiger’ sailed into the Sakai port, his thick mane of pure white hair braided and hanging almost to his calves. He began asking questions about an impossible blade forged by love and betrayal and loss and hate.

‘That sword is not for sale,’ Asato told the stranger in his workshop.

‘What if I told you the first person I will kill with this blade will be your betrayer, Rina?’ the White Tiger asked. ‘And what if I told you the second person I will kill with this blade will be your younger brother, Uno?’

Asato was silent for a moment. ‘The sword is not for sale,’ he said.

The White Tiger reached into a leather pouch slung to a belt around his waist. He raised a closed fist then opened it to reveal a pure white butterfly, which launched into flight from the assassin’s soft, open palm.

‘Have you heard the story of the gravedigger and the butterfly?’ the assassin asked.

‘I have not,’ said Asato.

*

And so now Oshiro Miki told his story of how the White Tiger told his story of Takahama, who was born into wealth and was highly educated but, despite his good fortune, chose, in the prime of his life, to spend the rest of his days alone, digging graves and tending the headstones of the dead, as caretaker for what was believed to be the most haunted cemetery in all of old Japan. So humble was the caretaker’s hut connected to the cemetery grounds that Takahama’s wealthy and influential family refused to visit for fear of embarrassment. Years later, when two neighbouring villagers stumbled upon an aged Takahama slowly dying alone on his bed, they called for the cemetery keeper’s remaining relatives to visit him at once.

Takahama’s long-lost nephew, Hansuke, made it to the old man’s bed just in time to witness his final hours of life. As Takahama drew his last laboured breaths, a pure white butterfly flew in through his window and perched itself peacefully on the tip of his nose. The butterfly flapped its wings once, twice, three times. Hansuke shooed the butterfly away, and it flew off and returned and flew off and returned to the tip of the old man’s nose. Then Takahama’s eyes closed forever and the white butterfly seemed to know this and flew back out the window. Instinctively, Hansuke followed it deep into the haunted cemetery. He ran through grey and black gravestones covered in weed and moss, aisle upon aisle of the never-visited dead. The white butterfly flew left and flew right and then deep into a tunnel of elm trees that ended at a single tomb, where the butterfly rested itself on the only grave in the cemetery without a trace of moss or dirt upon it. Indeed, the grave was as pristine as if the headstone and tomb had been placed that very day. There was a name on the headstone: ‘Akiko’.

Studying the gravestone epitaph, Hansuke began to piece together the story behind his late uncle’s decisions. Akiko and Takahama had been betrothed, but Akiko had died the day before their wedding. Since Takahama had already promised to look after his beloved Akiko, every hour of every day, he swore he would continue to do that, even if it meant caring only for her grave.

As he stood pondering this, Hansuke noticed another small white butterfly emerge from the dense forest surrounding the cemetery and flutter towards the one he had followed to the grave, which was still hovering above the headstone. The two white butterflies circled each other for a long moment and then Hansuke edged closer to them, but his movement caused the butterflies to fly away from the headstone and they fluttered up into the sky and never came back down again. The nephew stared at that blue sky above, not with a sense of grief or confusion, but only wonder.

Asato Miki stroked his chin inside his knife-making workshop, absorbing the assassin’s tale.

‘Well?’ the assassin asked.

‘Well what?’ Asato replied.

‘What did you learn from the story?’ the assassin asked.

Asato stroked his chin some more, then gave his answer. ‘It is a simple tale you tell and there is only one lesson to be learned from it,’ he said. ‘Transformation. Sometimes they stay with us. And sometimes they wait for us. The lost are not lost. We can change into things. We can transform ourselves. Sometimes for the better …’

‘Sometimes for the worse,’ said the assassin, his eyes turning to the pure white butterfly that was now flapping above his right shoulder. He turned back to Asato. ‘I must take your life now,’ he said.

‘Why?’ Asato asked.

‘Because you will not share your artistry with me.’

‘You haven’t given me a chance,’ Asato said.

The assassin paused. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Show me the full extent of your artistry.’

‘How would I do that?’ Asato replied.

The assassin turned his eyes to the butterfly. ‘Take your sword and slice a wing off this flying white butterfly.’

‘That’s impossible,’ Asato said.

‘So is your blade,’ the assassin said.

Asato took a deep breath then exhaled slowly. He retrieved his impossible sword from a small locked room off the workshop’s furnace area and returned to stand before the butterfly and the assassin. He gripped the sword’s handle tight and raised the perfect blade high as the butterfly hovered, as if by will, as if by command, before his eyes. The betrayed sword-maker drew a short breath, tensed his shoulders, fixed his feet to the floor and began to swing his blade – but he immediately pulled out of the swing, and presented the sword to the assassin, handle end first. ‘I can’t,’ he said, shaking his head.

The assassin raised his eyebrows.

‘The butterfly’s life is already too short,’ Asato said.

The assassin lifted the sword to his eyes, laid his forefinger gently on the blade. He turned to face Asato and swung the blade three times. The sound of steel slicing through air was the only evidence of his actions, the blade moving too fast to be visible. Asato heaved a long sigh of relief on realising that he was still breathing.

The White Tiger rested the sword in his open palms then handed it back to its creator. ‘You are right, knife-maker,’ he said, before turning and exiting the workshop through its rusty-hinged wooden front door.

Asato stood in silence, then rushed to the door, just in time to see the assassin disappearing into the bustling port-village crowd, the pure white butterfly hovering peacefully above his right shoulder.

*

‘Well?’ Yukio asked.

‘Well what?’ Oshiro replied.

‘What are you trying to tell me, father?’ Yukio asked.

‘The lost are not lost,’ Oshiro Miki said in the silence of the Sakai workshop.

Yukio nodded his head in understanding. ‘There is something I must tell you about sad love stories, father,’ he said. ‘They are not as enjoyable when they are true.’

Oshiro was silent. Then he nodded sincerely and said, ‘The lost are not lost. Sometimes they transform. Sometimes they stay with us.’

And it was with two open palms that Oshiro Miki handed the old fire-forged shortsword to his first-born son, Yukio, before he set off to war.

Yukio received the sword in silence. He walked to the front door of the workshop, then turned to speak to the father he loved.

‘And sometimes they wait for us,’ he said. Yukio left his father in the workshop and walked out the door in the direction of war.

*

Nara smiling at him now in a winged weapon. Now the deephell machinery sound of Yukio and his airborne brothers, who do and do not fear their death, spread across an attack wave of 183 battle planes in arrow formations: 89 Nakajima B5N bombers carrying 800-kilogram torpedoes and 250-kilogram bombs; 51 Aichi D3A dive bombers, each with a 250-kilogram bomb slung under its fuselage and two 30-kilogram bombs nestled on racks under its wings; and 43 agile Zero fighters flying above it all, closer to the blue sky ceiling, closer to heaven. The vicious snarl of that sound, the growl of it. The wasp of it. The tiger of it. A violent symphony of three-blade propellers slicing air and overworked engines spitting smoke. Red spots on battle wings. All those red rising suns in a morning sky formation.

Yukio’s cockpit canopy has a 360-degree view of sky, water and land. A high green mountain range on Yukio’s right side, cloud on his left. It’s 7.48 a.m. and he’s been flying for one hour and forty minutes. The air fleet banks west and along a turquoise coastline and Yukio reaches quickly for his binoculars. Two glass lenses magnifying the beauty and terror of eight majestic battleships lining the port of Pearl Harbor, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. There are smaller grey warships anchored around them like mice sleeping beside greyhounds.

Yukio drops his binoculars and his naked eyes find the ‘black dragon’, an electrifying dark blue flare that’s now rising into the light blue sky. They don’t know we’re coming, Yukio tells himself. The fleet’s leader, Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, is speaking loudly and clearly to Yukio and his brothers with that dark blue flare. Speaking without speaking. He’s saying only one word. Screaming it through a burning and soaring dragonflare streak. Demanding it. Just one word. Attack.

Yukio’s left hand reaches for the gunsight fixed between his two 7.7-millimetre machine guns. His right hand reaches for the photograph fixed above his fuel gauge. He folds the top half of the photograph down over the bottom half. He doesn’t want her to see this. ‘I’m coming, Nara,’ he whispers, as his fighter swoops down towards a horizon lit by fire.

Here lies Lisbeth Fleming. Dead at seventy-three, influenza. Buried 1884. Here stands Molly Hook, aged twelve years and nine months, four feet deep in Lisbeth’s grave, Bert’s blade biting through old dirt that’s meeting the sun for the first time in fifty-seven years.

‘Water?’ Molly asks.

‘Break at five feet,’ says her father, Horace. ‘These old gravediggers always took shortcuts. They usually called it quits at five and a half.’

A gravestone. A hole in the ground. The girl in the hole, and her father and her uncle, Aubrey, leaning on their shovels above ground, each taking a side of the grave. Around the grave are mountains of dirt and a single pile of rocks beside the rusting mattock that was used to dig them all up.

Molly digs. Molly digs. Molly digs. She wears old brown leather boots, her dig boots, and a pair of brown pants made for boys that Horace found in a Tennant Creek thrift store.

Molly digs, her thin arms, only bone and muscle, filling a wooden bucket with grave dirt that her father and uncle pull to the surface after every eight shovel loads.

‘Dad.’

Horace takes a long drag on his smoke. Exhales.

‘Mmmm,’ he offers Molly. This is her permission to speak.

Molly digs hard as she talks, heartened by her father’s permission to do so. ‘I was just thinkin’ about how I’ve dug up six already this week and this will be my seventh and I’ve been working real hard with the customers as well and I was wondering if you would let me go to the Star with Sam on Saturday night?’

‘I can’t afford for you to go to no picture theatre, Molly,’ Horace says.

‘No, no, Sam said he’s gonna pay for me,’ Molly says.

‘Who’s Sam?’

‘Sam Greenway.’

‘The coon boy?’

Just Sam and nothing else, Molly thinks. Her best friend who’s not a shovel or a sky.

‘Sam’s good stock, Dad. He works hard and he’s real smart and he’s been telling me all there is to know about what it’s like growing up out there in the bush, in the real deep country past the Clyde River.’

‘And what does Sam tell you about what it’s like out there in the deep country?’

Molly stops digging. She turns to her father, up there on the surface, sun shining over his shoulders and onto her face. She puts a palm over her eyes.

‘He says it’s magical,’ Molly says. ‘He says there’s crocodiles in the creeks as old as dinosaurs and the crocodiles talk to him and he says there’s plants out there so big that their vines can suffocate you in your sleep and there’s trees with bark so soft you can roll it up and sleep on it under the stars, and the trees talk to you, too. Then there’s Ol’ Man Rock and he’s just a big rock, but he knows the answer to any question you could possibly think to ask him.’

Horace Hook scrapes a cake of mud from the sole of his left boot with a stick. ‘I hope he told you, too, about all the criminals who live in shacks and caves out there,’ he says. ‘Did he tell you about that, Mol’? Murderers on the run from the law, hiding themselves in scrub so thick and dangerous the cops would never dare go after ’em. Thieves and rapists livin’ on river rats and peanut bushes. Men sick with pox, women gone brain-mad with syphilis. Kidnappers who’d swap a twelve-year-old girl’s virginity for a can of oil. Lunatic child killers who’d cut a girl’s heart out and trade it for a fresh orange.’

Molly is silent. Her eyelids blinking.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Sam said nuthin’ about that.’

‘You go walkin’ too far into that deep country, you might never come back,’ Horace says. ‘So no more bloody walkabouts, Molly, ya hear me?’

‘I hear you.’

‘Dig, Molly, dig.’

Molly digs. Horace smokes his strong tobacco and enjoys the quiet for a moment. Then Molly breaks the silence. Molly always breaks the silence.

‘Sam told me how to eat an echidna, even though I thought it would be impossible to eat an echidna,’ she says, dropping another dirt load in the wooden bucket. ‘Do ya wanna know how to eat an echidna, Dad?’

Horace sighs, drags on his smoke. ‘How do you eat an echidna, Molly?’

‘The trick of it is all those spines on top, of course,’ she says. ‘But Sam says you just cover the spines with a thick layer of clay – you know, like that red ferrosol stuff you told me about – then you whack the echidna on the fire and when it’s all cooked you take it out and let it sit, and then you peel back that layer of clay on top and all the spines come off with it and it’s like you’re peeling back the lid on a can of sardines, except what you have underneath those spines is tastier and oilier than any duck you’d find on a plate in Paris.’

Molly digs, transfers the dirt, counts off the eighth shovel load and lets her uncle heave the wooden bucket to the surface.

‘The Star’s playin’ The Cowboy and the Lady, with Gary Cooper,’ Molly says. ‘You’d like Gary Cooper, Dad. He doesn’t talk much in the pictures. He’s all quiet and serious, like how you and Uncle Aubrey are.’

Molly looks at her father and, as he always does, her father looks at his older brother, Aubrey. And Uncle Aubrey briefly shakes his head from side to side.

‘But I haven’t been—’

‘Quiet now, Molly,’ Aubrey says, his lips unseen beneath his black moustache.

‘But—’

‘Dig, child, dig,’ Aubrey grunts.

Molly digs. One, two, three shovel loads. Four, five, six shovel loads. Bert the shovel clangs against a large rock buried in the grave soil. Molly reaches for a forged steel spud bar leaning against the right-side grave wall. With both hands she drives the spud bar, wedged at the business end, clean into the rock three times and the rock breaks into three smaller pieces that she hacks out with a smaller pickaxe.

More shovelling. Seven shovel loads. Eight shovel loads. Total silence. Horace hauls the bucket up the side of the hole. Molly watches a long black earthworm wriggle along the north wall of the grave. Up, up, up towards the surface. Her eyes go up with the worm and a little further up to settle on a view of Lisbeth Fleming’s headstone.

‘Who was she?’ Molly asks.

‘Who was who?’ Horace replies.

‘Lisbeth Fleming.’

‘She wasn’t anyone.’

‘Everybody’s someone,’ Molly says. ‘Ya reckon she’s still got family in town?’

The men say nothing. Aubrey pats the deep lines in his forehead with his handkerchief.

‘“Matthew, Iris and George”,’ Molly says, reading the headstone epitaph. Molly’s right boot kicks hard at Bert’s blade and the bucket is back to receive another shovel load. She pauses to read more from Lisbeth Fleming’s headstone. ‘Matthew, Iris and George were her kids,’ Molly says. ‘I wonder if Iris is Iris Brentnall who worked behind the counter in the saddlery in town.’

Aubrey Hook takes a long swig from a rusting silver hip flask, directs a sharp and perturbed look towards his younger brother across the grave.

‘Quiet now, Molly,’ Horace says.

Molly digs and Bert’s blade tip thumps against wood. Molly bangs the blade twice more. Thump, thump.

Aubrey shifts his smoke to the left side of his lips and leans down slowly, bones aching, to grip the mattock resting by the piles of dirt. ‘Out,’ he says through his near-closed lips.

Molly turns and scrambles up a small wooden ladder resting against the south wall of Lisbeth Fleming’s grave. Her father hands her a brown leather water bag. She unscrews the cap and guzzles down the liquid, letting it splash across the soil covering her face and neck.

Aubrey doesn’t use the ladder, simply slides down into the grave, his black boots landing heavily on Lisbeth Fleming’s rotting wooden casket. His right boot scrapes away the dirt on the casket top, searching for an entry point. He stomps his boots three times, testing the thickness of the wood. On the third stomp he finds a softer, rotted section. He raises his mattock high with a two-handed grip and drives the mattock down on the casket like he is staking a claim in the earth. Old wood cracking, splintering. Aubrey raises the mattock at the same point, drives it down again.

The shiver along his worn spine is the same shiver of expectation he used to feel in the gold-digging years, a gold shiver. It was the thrill of mining a hole where you could smell the gold and that smell turned into a taste and that taste was blood and metal on a tongue tip. The gold in all those deep rocks was all buried treasure. He and Horace and Violet’s father, Tom Berry, and all those Chinamen who followed them down into those holes were all pirates, except they had no treasure maps to work from, only their instinct, only the shivers that ran along their worn spines. That shiver meant success.

Aubrey wedges the mattock between the casket top and its side and pushes hard. Molly, from above ground, watches the casket lid flip up from the dirt like the lid of a jewellery box. But there is no jewel sparkle to be seen inside Lisbeth Fleming’s coffin, only bones. The casket’s bottom has largely disintegrated. A skull with a mouth full of dirt. Dirt in the eye holes. Dirt in a cracked cheekbone. I will never be afraid, Molly tells herself. I will feel no pain.

Arm bones and hand bones resting upon each other, meeting at the waist of a torso that time and slow earth movement have torn away from Lisbeth’s leg bones. There is a book by her waist that Aubrey digs from the earth, prises open with two hands. Pages fused together by decades of damp. ‘Bible,’ he says, tossing the book to the side of the grave. There is a round tobacco case by Lisbeth’s right elbow. Aubrey bangs the case against the mattock, caked dirt falling over his long fingers. He pulls a small pocket knife from his back pants pocket and runs the knife blade along the lid rim. He bangs the case again on the mattock and blows dirt from it that clouds above Lisbeth’s skull face. Gripping the lid firmly, he twists it off, drops it in the dirt and tips the case’s contents into his left hand. He holds an amethyst and crystal bead necklace to the sun for less than ten seconds then tosses the necklace over his shoulder towards his younger brother, who catches it and lifts it up to the light.

Aubrey kneels down over Lisbeth’s waist and lifts her hands up as nonchalantly as he might lift a pile of kindling sticks. There’s a pure gold band on Lisbeth’s left-hand ring finger. He tries to slip it off, but it’s set in place by gathered dirt. Molly watches her Uncle Aubrey wrench the ring finger bone back and forth and back and forth then rip the finger from its socket. He blows on the finger, spits on the finger, makes a cloth of his shirt and rubs the finger like he’s polishing his boots. Then Molly watches her Uncle stick the long-dead corpse finger in his mouth, grip the gold band in his teeth like an animal and pull it off. He drops the finger in the dirt and he spits the gold band into his palm. Then he spits on the ring again and polishes it in his shirt before holding it up to the sun.

Even from above ground, Molly and Horace can clearly see the unearthed treasure because there are no earths and no sins and no deaths that can keep the edge of a pure gold band from glowing in the lemon light. Molly observes the way her uncle smiles at it now. His secret smile. The silent affair he has maintained with the glowing. She’s studied this bond for some time now.

The gravedigger girl has been reading the poetry books on the shelf by the front door of the cemetery house as her mum told her to do. She’s been trying to find bits of her mum inside them, the bits of those books she connected to. All those hardback and dusty books of poems by all those graceful poets like John Keats and Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe and William Butler Yeats and Emily Dickinson, who is Molly’s favourite because although she doesn’t seem as graceful as the rest, she seems more honest, and not afraid to show when she’s mad in the heart and in the head. All that those poets seemed to do all day was study people like her Uncle Aubrey. All those poets seemed to write about were the things you can’t see on the outside of people like Uncle Aubrey. They were always writing about emotions like love and hate and envy and regret and rage and they were always using real-life creatures like nightingales and crows and horses to represent those emotions.

Almost a year ago, Molly Hook started scribbling poems of her own with chalky rocks on the backs of random headstones throughout Hollow Wood. She recently wrote a poem with no title about the bond her uncle shares with the glowing. She etched the poem into the back of a nameless gravestone deep in the south-western corner of Hollow Wood. She used all the creatures she sees in the cemetery to represent things inside her uncle that can’t be seen from outside. She wrote it out of anger, like all her best poems.

The bird said he dug for the bread

The scorpion said he dug for treasure

The worm said he dug for the dead

The snake said he dug for pleasure

It was a poem about how Molly believed it wasn’t the precious metal that her uncle was hoping to find in all these graves, it was the glowing – the brief flash of new light the dug-up gold brought into his world. There was a kind of love in it, she thought. A romance, maybe. Lust, surely. Not the picture-theatre kind, but a darker kind that dwells in shadows and never sleeps. The Edgar Allan Poe kind.

And she has come to believe, lately, that her uncle would do anything for the glowing because the glowing is breathing and eating and drinking and sleeping and fighting and digging. The glowing is all of life and he lives only in the briefest moments when the glowing bounces back into his shadowy eyes. It’s a private affair, a solitary lust. She’s not supposed to know about it.

He whips his head to the side and catches Molly staring at him. ‘Make yourself scarce,’ he growls.

*

The gravedigger girl and Bert the shovel standing alone and silent before Tom Berry’s grave, with the sun in the middle of the sky. Molly reads her grandfather’s epitaph. Her eyes are drawn to the same sentence they’re always drawn to.

LONGCOAT BOB TURNED OUR

TRUE HEARTS TO STONE.

Molly places her right hand against her chest. Molly tries to feel her heartbeat because a heart can’t beat inside stone. And she can feel the weight of her heart inside her chest, and she could swear her heart grows heavier every year.

Molly has a book of poetry in her left hand. It’s the Dickinson book with the hard and faded blank olive-green cover. She has the book open at a poem she likes. It’s a poem about the sky and the things that take place above it.

Molly looks up to a clear blue sky today. ‘I worked it out,’ she says.

And the day sky responds to Molly Hook because it’s the graceful thing to do. ‘You did?’

‘“The longer I stand, the shorter I grow,”’ Molly recites.

‘You worked it out, Molly?’

‘It’s a candle,’ Molly says.

‘A candle!’ the day sky says. ‘Of course! The longer I stand, the shorter I grow.’

‘He’s talking about candlelight,’ Molly says. ‘Tom Berry started out from Candlelight Creek.’

‘Candlelight Creek!’ the day sky says. ‘Of course! So what are you going to do now, Molly?’

Molly says nothing.

‘Mmmmm,’ says the knowing day sky. ‘You gonna go walkabout again?’

Molly says nothing.

Her father would kill her. No more walkabouts. When she was nine years and three months of age, Molly walked deep into the scrub beyond the edge of Hollow Wood Cemetery. She walked off with no water, no food, no shoes. She can’t even remember now exactly why she walked off like that, so deep into the wild where the grass was so hard it felt like broken glass beneath her feet. She just kept on walking and she can’t recall if the deep country out there was pulling her further in or if this dark and damned cemetery was pushing her further out. Soon she was lost in a pathless mess of towering cypress pines. Horace and Aubrey found her almost two days later, asleep and breathing slowly beneath the shade of a sand palm. Her uncle said she should have been flogged for walking off like that, but her father did not belt her that day because he was so relieved to find his daughter still alive. He thought he’d lost her and he held her to his chest as they padded back out of the deep scrub. He held her tighter that day than he’d ever held her, and Molly remembered there was as much daylight in her father then as there was night-time.

When Molly was eleven years and three months of age, her father woke before dawn one morning by the edge of the Adelaide River, south of Darwin and north of Katherine, to find the camping swag beside his – Molly’s swag – empty. He found her deep in the bush beyond the river four hours later, sleeping and breathing slowly in the centre of a low-lying flat cluster of more than a hundred termite mounds, some of them twelve feet tall. Violet Hook had once told Molly that termite mounds like that were meridional and miraculous, built instinctively by the white-bodied debris-feeding termites that manage to magnetically align each tall mound in a north–south direction so that the eastern face of each mound is warmed rapidly by the morning sun and the hottest midday sun hits only the thinnest profile of the termite’s strange architecture. Molly saw the mounds as perfectly aligned gravestones. Same chalky grey colours. Same colour of stone. The cluster was a cemetery, but a cemetery filled with microcosmic life. Molly saw it as Hollow Wood Cemetery; she saw it as home.

Horace belted Molly that day. There and then, he hit her arse so many times and so hard with his open palm that she could not sit back down in the spot where he’d found her. He did not carry her out of the scrub, but left her to walk back to their campsite alone. ‘No more fuckin’ walkabouts,’ he said, before disappearing back into the thick bush.

No more fuckin’ walkabouts.

‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ the day sky says.

‘Why do you say that? Dad always says that. Uncle Aubrey always says that. “Dig, Molly, dig.” That’s all I ever hear.’

‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ the day sky says.

‘Dig for what?’

‘Dig for the answers.’

‘But I don’t even know the questions.’

‘Of course you know the questions, Molly.’

Molly turns her head back to her grandfather’s gravestone. She reads more of Tom Berry’s last words to the world.

I TOOK RAW GOLD FROM LAND BELONGING TO THE BLACK NAMED LONGCOAT BOB AND I SWEAR, UNDER GOD, HE PUT A CURSE ON ME AND MY KIN FOR THE SIN OF MY GREED.

Molly turns her eyes back up to the sky. ‘Why did she leave me down here?’

The day sky says nothing.

‘How could she leave me like that? How could she leave me here with them?’

The day sky says nothing. But Molly waits for an answer.

‘These are questions for the night sky, Molly.’

Molly shakes her head in disappointment.

‘I know why she left. It was Longcoat Bob. It was the curse. Kin means daughters. Kin means granddaughters. Kin means mothers. Kin means fathers. She said I was blessed because she wanted to make me feel better. How could I possibly be blessed, stuck down here with them?’ Molly nods her head, sure of her words. ‘I know a curse when I see one. I see one every day. A mum would have to be cursed to do what she did.’

‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ the day sky says.

‘Have you seen what they’ve been doing?’

‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ the day sky says.

‘Robbing dead folks of their most precious belongings.’

‘Dig, Molly, dig.’

‘She had to be cursed to do what she did and they must be cursed to do what they do. Cursed, just like this whole place. Cursed and damned and dead.’

‘Dig, Molly, dig.’

‘Dig for what?’

‘The book, Molly, the book.’

Molly raises the Dickinson in her hand. She opens the book at the page of the poem she likes about the sky.

‘It’s called “The Lightning is a Yellow Fork”,’ she says. ‘It’s about all the things that are happening up in the sky. She says there’s a great big mansion up there and there’s a great big dining table inside the mansion and there’s all these extraordinary people, all these special people, all sitting around that table and one of those people drops a yellow fork from the table and that yellow fork drops through the sky as lightning.’

Molly stares up at the sky and three blowflies buzz around her face but she doesn’t blink an eye.

‘A yellow fork, Molly,’ the day sky says.

Molly nods. ‘Yes, I remember seeing those words on Grandpa’s pan, but I can’t remember what else it said.’

‘Where’s the pan, Molly?’

‘Uncle Aubrey threw it away,’ Molly says.

‘It wasn’t his to throw away.’

‘He said he wrapped it in a rubbish bag with a pig’s head and a dozen eggshells.’

‘That pan was a gift for you, Molly.’

‘A sky gift,’ Molly says.

‘Sky gifts for the gravedigger girl.’

‘Do you have any more?’

‘More what?’

‘Sky gifts.’

‘Always, Molly.’

‘How will I find them?’

‘Just look up.’

*

Molly lies flat on her back in the dirt clearing beside her grandfather’s grave. She stares for ten straight minutes up at the sky, her arms fanned out from her sides. She remembers lying like this with her mother. Mother and daughter, flat on their backs, hand in hand. Molly remembers her mother telling her there was a huge milkwood tree in the backyard of the house she grew up in, a sprawling two-storey cyclone-proof family home for four on the Darwin waterfront. She said that tree had branches like a tarantula raising its front legs, and she and her younger brother, Peter, who was a thoughtful and deep boy just like Molly, would stretch their arms out beneath the shade of the tarantula’s legs and look up through those leg cracks to the sky, and they’d pretend the world was upside down and they were actually floating above the milkwood tree and the tree was sprouting from a ground made of blue sky.

‘It always amazes me how little time people spend looking up at that sky,’ Violet said.

Molly nodded.

‘Maybe it’s too beautiful,’ Violet continued, ‘maybe nobody looks up at it anymore because they know they’d want to spend the rest of the day looking at it. I guess we’d never get anything done if we spent all day looking up at the sky.’

‘Can something be too beautiful, Mum?’

‘Some things, Mol’. Not you. You’re just the right amount of it.’

Then Violet gripped her daughter’s hand. ‘Let’s float, Molly,’ she said. ‘Let’s float.’ And she smiled and breathed deeply.

‘Can you feel it, Molly?’ she asked.

‘What is it, Mum?’

‘The world is turning upside down. Can you feel it?’

And Molly saw clouds shifting across the sky. She saw leaves blowing. She saw movement. ‘I can, Mum. I can feel it.’

‘We’re on top now, Molly! Can you feel it? We’re floating. We’re on top!’

Molly remembers all of that now and she smiles. She stands and picks up Bert, who’s been leaning against her grandfather’s headstone. She pads between the rows of the long dead, through avenues of limestone and dirt, back to the cemetery caretaker’s house.

The back door to the cemetery house is painted dark green and Molly turns a loose, rusted bronze door knob to enter the downstairs laundry space, where she stops immediately before a curled western brown snake, cooling itself on the laundry’s concrete floor. Her friend from town, Sam Greenway, and his family have a word for the western brown snake that Molly can’t pronounce correctly, but it’s a catch-all word meaning, ‘If you come across this deadly snake you would be well advised to change your course and go the long way around.’ Molly likes the way Sam’s family can say so many things in a single word.

Molly doesn’t change course. She wants to drink from the laundry sink tap, and brown snakes can’t be gathering beneath the house, so she fixes her eyes on the snake’s black head that’s resting on the third ring of its own curled brown skin and drops Bert’s cutting blade down on the snake’s exposed neck so hard and fast that a brief spark flies from the concrete floor as the severed snake head is propelled towards the downstairs toilet running off the laundry.

The snake’s headless body wriggles around Bert’s blade face as Molly sweeps it and the black head out the laundry door and into the cemetery yard. Molly rewards her efforts by sticking her open mouth under the laundry tap and letting the town water that tastes like rust and dirt flow down her throat and spill over her chin. Then a voice from the front driveway to the house: ‘“Out damned spot! Out, I say!”’

The words of Shakespeare floating over gravestones, floating over the dead.

‘“What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?”’

The words of a woman, shouting.

‘“Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.”’

Molly turns the laundry tap off, the tap grips digging hard into her palm until the tap stops dripping, then scurries out the laundry door and along the rotting grey timber slats of the house’s left-side exterior wall. Uncle Aubrey’s rusting red utility truck is parked in the long dirt driveway. Standing on the hulking truck’s back tray is a slim blonde woman in a striking red polka-dot dress – her uncle’s sometime lady friend, Greta Maze.

Truck trays are stages for Greta Maze. Footpaths are stages for Greta Maze. Wet bar tops and soapboxes and bathroom floors and swimming pools are stages for Greta Maze. She stands on the tray with a well-thumbed script in her right hand by her waist, deep into the monologue. ‘“The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now? What, will these hands ne’er be clean? No more o’ that, my lord, no more o’ that: you mar all with this starting.”’

That tight red summer dress with white spots, a fitted waist with cuffs just above the elbows, patch pockets – one for Greta’s smokes and matches, another for her hip flask filled with more air than cheap whisky. The sight of that dress makes Molly smile and her smile widens further when she spots Greta’s brown and white two-tone, low-heel canvas saddle shoes, the kind Molly would love to dance in one day when she’s older and when she’s not digging graves anymore. Greta’s wild blonde curls all form a great wave that crashes like a force of nature over her left ear. Round brown sunglasses over her eyes, and perfect porcelain skin that will never be tainted by all the exposure it gets to the soft lights of Darwin’s beer halls and gin joints and deep Chinatown basement opium dens.

Greta watches Molly approach the truck tray and her heels spring up an inch, her voice becomes louder, her performance more heartfelt, for she now has an audience. She smells her own hands, and her character, her latest grand local theatre role, is repulsed by them. ‘“Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!”’

Greta squeezes her hands together, urgent, dismayed. Crazed.

‘“Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale.”’ She paces back and forth along the truck tray. ‘“To bed, to bed! There’s knocking at the gate.”’

Greta rushes to the edge of the tray and extends her hand to Molly. ‘Come, come, come, come, give me your hand.’

Molly reaches her hand up to Greta, and it’s thrilling for her to play a small part in this show. This acting. This art. All the way out here in dead-end Hollow Wood. The actress kneels down and grips the gravedigger girl’s fingertips, and the touch of those fingers brings comfort to her character, but that comfort is too brief and too late. And Greta stares into Molly’s eyes, breathless and distraught, and Greta removes her sunglasses to study Molly’s face, unfiltered, and she weeps in front of her, tears welling in her emerald eyes and falling over the clean, cushioned landscape of her cheeks. And Molly wants to cry with her, but she can’t, so she simply stares in wide-mouthed wonder.

‘“What’s done cannot be undone,”’ the actress whimpers, like all hope is lost for her now, and Molly doesn’t even know why but she wants to change things for this troubled woman. Then Greta stands and turns away from her audience of one and pads slowly to the other side of the truck tray, the back of her stage, and she drops her head and freezes there in the timeless silence that is broken eventually by Molly’s rapturous applause.

‘Bravo!’ Molly hollers.

Greta turns around to accept her applause, waving to the imaginary audience up in the cheap seats. She puts her sunglasses back on, nods her head twice in thanks, and takes an elaborate bow. Then she reaches for her hip flask. She raises a toast towards Molly then takes a triumphant post-performance guzzle of spirits.

She offers the flask to Molly. ‘You fancy a blast?’

‘No, thanks,’ Molly says.

Greta nods. ‘Smart kid,’ she says, capping the flask, resting her backside on the tray and leaning her back against the truck’s cab.

‘I made a meal of that “thane of Fife had a wife” line, didn’t I?’ Greta says.

‘No, not at all,’ Molly says, certain of it. ‘You were spectacular.’

Greta lights a smoke. ‘I was, wasn’t I.’ She smiles, breathing in then blowing smoke.

‘What’s it from?’ Molly asks.

‘The Palmerston Players are doing a two-week run of Macbeth,’ Greta says. ‘That’s Lady Macbeth sleepwalking through her castle, rambling all of her black confessions.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘She’s mad as a cut snake,’ Greta says. ‘Her feller’s even worse.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘He keeps hearing strange voices in his head, keeps seeing things that aren’t really there.’

Molly dwells on this. ‘I think I hear voices in my head,’ she says.

Greta nods. ‘Of course you do, you’re mad as a box of frogs.’ She winks. ‘That’s why I like you. Nuts like you and me should always mix together.’

Molly beams a smile. ‘I talk to the sky sometimes,’ she confesses.

Greta smiles immediately: ‘Who doesn’t?’

‘You talk to the sky, Greta?’

‘Sure.’

‘Does it ever talk back to you?’

‘Sure.’ Greta shrugs.

‘What’s it sound like when it talks back to you?’

‘My sky sounds like Humphrey Bogart.’

Molly laughs.

‘What’s it sound like to you?’ Greta says.

Molly looks up to the sky as she ponders this. Turns back to Greta.

‘I can’t make it out,’ Molly says. ‘It sounds a bit like me. But me if I was a lot older.’

Greta nods.

‘You think it’s really the sky talkin’ to me?’ Molly asks.

‘If you’re hearin’ it, then I guess it’s talkin’ to ya,’ Greta says.

‘I sometimes see things out bush that aren’t really there,’ Molly says, proudly now.

‘How wonderful!’ Greta says. ‘Like what?’

‘Like the other week we were way up Rapid Creek and I thought I saw Medusa.’

‘Medusa?’ Greta echoes. ‘Like, scary Greek monster Medusa?’

‘Like in Mum’s bookshelf up there,’ Molly says.

Greta knows the shelf. She’s run her fingers along the spines of the dusty old black and brown and olive-green and blue hardbacks that Violet Hook bought mostly from the Collins Bookshop on Knuckey Street, using spare grocery money collected over many weeks. Greta’s run her eyes over those titles and admired the woman’s taste, wished she had more time to read as much as Violet must have read. Collections of poetry, mostly. Irish poets and English and American poets. The Song of Brotherhood by the Australian poet John Le Gay Brereton. She’s fond of Victor Daley and his Sydney poems. She’s opened his book Wine and Roses, and she’s smiled at ‘The Woman at the Washtub’, pictured that poem as her own sad life summary and even her epitaph should her greatest fear come true: to live the rest of her days with Aubrey Hook, trapped forevermore inside the small hot kitchen of the small hot two-bedroom corrugated iron shell of a house he rents in Darwin town and on one sorry, inevitable day be buried in the hard dirt of this godforsaken cemetery.

HERE LIES GRETA MAZE

SHE WAS BORN FOR THE STAGE.

SHE DIED DOING THE DISHES.

‘THE WOMAN AT THE WASHTUB, SHE WORKS TILL FALL OF NIGHT; WITH SOAP AND SUDS AND SODA HER HANDS ARE WRINKLED WHITE. HER DIAMONDS ARE THE SPARKLES THE COPPER-FIRE SUPPLIES; HER OPALS ARE THE BUBBLES THAT FROM THE SUDS ARISE …’

‘Mum had a book on Greek mythology there,’ Molly continues. ‘And I’d been reading about Medusa and how she turned all them blokes to stone just because they looked at her, and then I’m walking through the mangroves of Rapid Creek and I swear I see Medusa standing in the middle of the scrub up ahead. And she’s got all her snakes wriggling from her head and I shoot my head down straightaway because I don’t want to be turned to stone but eventually I look up because I can’t resist, you know …’

‘Well, of course, you can’t,’ Greta says.

‘And I look up at her and …’ Molly says, excited by the telling.

‘And did you turn to stone?’ Greta asks.

Molly shakes her head, almost disappointed. ‘No, because it wasn’t Medusa. It was half a trunk from a dead ironwood tree with a shabby hawk’s nest sticking out the top.’

Greta drags on her smoke, shakes her head. ‘And here I was thinking it was gonna be a Greek monster out in that Darwin scrub.’

Molly shrugs, moves quickly on because she can move quickly on from anything. Beltings. Burns. Bereavement. Burials. Blood.

‘What’s the spot on the lady’s hands?’ Molly asks.

‘It’s blood,’ Greta says. ‘But it’s not really blood. It’s guilt. Her and her feller, Macbeth, have done terrible things to get where they’ve got to, and they’re cursed by the past.’

‘Cursed?’ Molly echoes.

‘Yeah, cursed, kid,’ Greta says. ‘The stains of the past. Ol’ Lady Macbeth, she can’t wash those stains away.’

Greta drags on her smoke, exhales. ‘You ever had any stains you couldn’t wash away, Molly?’

‘Just cut the neck off a brown snake in the laundry,’ she says. ‘A bit of blood got on the concrete, but I’ll just wash that away with some water, maybe some metho if it don’t come out.’

Greta smiles. ‘Guess Lady Macbeth could have used a splash of methylated spirits.’

Another drag on her cigarette. Greta studying her script.

‘How do you cry like that?’ Molly asks.

‘What do you mean?’

‘How does an actress just cry any time she wants to?’

‘That doesn’t just happen any time I want it to happen,’ Greta says. ‘I’ve got to build up to it. I’ve got to earn it. I’ve got to bleed for it, Molly Hook.’ Greta points a finger to her temple. ‘I’m saying those lines up here,’ she says. Then she places a hand on her chest. ‘But I’m feeling those lines in here, and all the time I’m feeling those lines I’m also feeling things I’ve felt before in my life. That’s what you gotta do to be true, Molly. You gotta go down deep inside your heart and soul and you gotta find that dark and scary and fragile place you’ve been to before. You know what I mean. We all have a place like that.’

Molly smiles. ‘I wish I could do what you can do.’

Greta shifts the way she’s sitting, slides her backside along the tray, leans over the tray edge, taking another puff on her smoke.

‘Close your eyes,’ she says.

Molly closes her eyes.

‘Now keep those peepers shut and go to your place, Molly,’ Greta says.

‘What if I don’t like my place?’ Molly askes. ‘Why would anyone want to go to the place that makes them sad?’

‘Because sadness is the truest emotion,’ Greta says. ‘Happiness isn’t to be trusted. It’s a bald-faced liar. But the truth of your sadness enriches every other thing inside you, especially your joy. You shouldn’t be afraid to go to the place that makes you sad, Molly Hook. The more you go to that dark place inside you, the lighter it gets. You go there enough times, you realise that dark place is actually your sacred place. That place is all of you and the tears you take from that place are just the darkness leaking out, precious drop by precious drop. You following me?’

‘No,’ Molly says.

‘Keep your eyes closed for sixty seconds,’ Greta says.

Molly closes her eyes.

‘You’re standing in darkness,’ Greta says.

Ten seconds.

‘You don’t realise it but you’re actually standing inside a large stone cave in total darkness.’

Twenty seconds. Greta studies the girl’s face. So trusting. So ready for the experience. So ready to embrace the unknown. She sees parts of herself at twelve. She can’t help but smile at the girl because she knows her past and she worries about her future, but the poor little gravedigger girl, mad as a box of frogs, seems to worry about nothing.

‘Then you see a line of fire draw a door on a wall of that cave,’ Greta says. ‘Up, across, down again and back across.’

Thirty seconds.

‘Then a circle of fire that is a door knob, and you can touch this fire because it’s cool and your hand reaches out to that door knob and you turn that door knob and that door opens outwards and you walk into your sacred place and you see it so close and real that you could reach out and touch the memory of it.’

And then in her mind in this strange and long minute, Molly Hook stands in the dark before an open door and she knows that door is the one to her bedroom just up there in the cemetery house. She hears something beyond the open bedroom door. A thumping sound.

Forty seconds. ‘Do you see it, Molly?’ Greta asks from the truck tray. ‘Do you feel it?’

Molly’s eyes still closed. Thump, thump. Something banging against a wall in the bedroom down the hall. Mum and Dad’s bedroom. Violet and Horace’s bedroom. Molly rubs her eyes and walks slowly down the hall, her open palms brushing against the hallway walls. Walking blind but following the sound of the thumping. Thump, thump. And she hears something else now. It’s the sound of something animal. The sound of the wolf.

Small steps along the hallway and she sees a light to her right and turns to look into the kitchen off the hall. An empty table and a half-drunk bottle of whisky. Thump, thump. In front of her is the closed bedroom door at the end of the hall and she reaches her hand out to the door knob and she realises the door isn’t fully closed and she can push it open with the gentlest tap of her left hand. And what she sees in that bedroom is a full moon through the bedroom window and the silver light of that floating night sky orb falling on the face of her mother, Violet Hook, lying on her back in her bed, her nightclothes torn from her shoulders. The high, dark brown wooden bedhead banging against the wall. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. And there is something animal atop Molly’s mother. A thing cloaked in shadow. Crawling and turning like a wolf. And in the moonlight she can see only the creature’s hairy arms and claws, its long fingers digging into her mother’s ribs. And the moonlit face of Violet Hook turns from the window to the bedroom door and it finds Molly Hook because that face has always found Molly Hook, and Violet Hook begins to weep silently in the moonlight but the weeping doesn’t stop the bedhead from banging the wall and the weeping doesn’t stop the animal from crawling across her.

Then a voice from the kitchen. And that voice makes no sense to her. ‘Molly!’ And the girl turns back to the kitchen light to find her father, Horace, sitting at the kitchen table, his right hand gripping the whisky bottle. Then Molly can’t help but turn back towards the moonlight in the bedroom to find the face of the animal that’s now raised its head from the shadow. The face of the wolf.

Another five seconds.

‘Now open your eyes,’ Greta says.

Molly opens her eyes.

‘What did you see when you opened the door?’ Greta asks.

‘Nothing,’ Molly says. ‘I only saw black.’

‘Nothing?’ Greta asks, resting her back once more on the tray’s rear wall. ‘You don’t have a single memory that makes you feel sad?’

Molly shakes her head. ‘I don’t think I can feel sad. I don’t think I’m even able to cry.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Greta says. ‘All kids cry. I cried enough tears as a kid to fill Sydney Harbour.’

‘I haven’t cried since I was seven,’ Molly says.

Greta’s face goes blank. She knows what happened to the girl at seven.

‘I try sometimes,’ Molly says. ‘I stare into a mirror and I think of everything that ever happened to me that should make me cry, but those things never make me cry.’

‘What do they make you feel?’

‘They make me feel like running.’

Greta studies the girl’s face, fascinated. She shakes her head at Molly. ‘Well, I guess you’re lucky, kid,’ she says, returning her eyes to her script. ‘Every bastard out there wants to make us girls cry. No such pleasure from our young Molly Hook!’

‘My heart is turning …’ Molly says, softly.

Greta doesn’t hear. ‘What’s that?’ she asks.

‘Nuthin’,’ Molly says. She pauses for a moment. ‘Greta?’

‘Yeah, kid.’

‘What do you see when you open the door?’

Greta turns her face to Molly. Weighs up her company, smiles. She comes close to saying something true. She comes close to saying that there is a white room beyond her open door. She comes close to saying that there is a newborn baby girl in that room and that girl is in her arms. But then she closes the door, slams it shut in her mind.

‘Naah, sorry hon’,’ she says. ‘Can’t give away all my acting secrets.’ She looks at the sun. Looks at the sky. Shift the gaze, change the subject. ‘Those boys nearly done?’ she asks.

‘Almost.’

‘They make me sick,’ Greta says.

‘It’s not them.’

‘It’s not?’

‘No,’ Molly says. ‘It’s the curse.’

‘Oh, of course, I forgot,’ Greta says. ‘The great curse of Longcoat Bob’s lost gold! You still gettin’ worked up by all that bush hocus-pocus, Molly Hook?’

‘Don’t you wonder about all the bad things that have happened to my family?’ Molly asks.

‘Hate to break it to you, Molly, but bad things sometimes happen around bad people. That’s a fact of life. Got nuthin’ to do with blackfeller magic.’

‘You think I’m a bad person?’

‘No, Mol’,’ Greta says. ‘You’re not bad. You’re not bad at all.’

Greta lies back on the tray now and raises her knees, as though sunbaking. ‘That gold wasn’t cursed, kid,’ she says. ‘If I knew where that gold was today I’d be grabbing your mate Bert there and I’d be diggin’ for my fortune, safe in the knowledge there are no kinds of magic in this world, black or otherwise. There’s only people, Molly. There are good ones and there are bad ones and then there’s all of us nuts stuck in the middle.’

Greta’s eyes study the script she holds up now to block the full sun from her face. She hasn’t noticed, but Molly has, that her summer dress has fallen between her legs, and bruising – scarlet and violet and blue bruising – can be seen on her inner thighs. Finger-shaped bruises. Stains on the skin that won’t wash out.

‘Do you love Uncle Aubrey?’ Molly asks.

Greta takes another shot from the flask, winces on the burn of the spirits.

‘Yeah, I love him,’ she says. ‘But I hate him, too.’

‘He’s a bad one,’ Molly says, matter-of-factly.

Greta pockets the flask. Looks at Molly’s face, expressionless.

With the toe of her right boot, Molly traces a circle, a moon, in the gravel driveway beneath her. ‘How do you love someone and hate them at the same time?’ she asks.

‘You’ll understand when you find a man of your own.’

‘What if I already have found a man of my own?’

Greta turns to Molly, beams a smile. ‘Good for you, gravedigger girl! He handsome this boy?’

‘Very much so,’ Molly says, certain of it. ‘He looks like Tyrone Power, except if only Tyrone Power was a blackfeller from out past Mataranka.’

‘And what might this boy’s name be?’

‘His name’s Sam, and he’s not a boy, he’s a man. He’s sixteen and he’s got a job shooting buffalo with Johnston Traders. He makes good money.’

‘Then why are you still here in this shithole cemetery? Why don’t you run away with Sam the sixteen-year-old man who makes good money?’

‘Dad would never let me leave.’

‘Who said you have to ask for his permission?’

Molly’s never thought of it that way. Maybe she could just leave. She turns to the front gate of the cemetery house. It’s open. It’s only thirty or so yards to the front gate. Maybe five more miles into town. Maybe three thousand more miles to Brisbane, Queensland. Maybe ten thousand more miles to Hollywood, California.

Molly grips the side of the tray, swings her body back and forth, bending her knees as she does.

‘Why are you still here?’ Molly asks.

‘Huh,’ Greta says.

‘You should be on stage in London,’ Molly says. ‘You should be starring in films in Hollywood. Then I could see your name in lights at the Star. “Humphrey Bogart, Vivien Leigh, and introducing … the toast of Darwin, Australia … Greta Maze”.’

Greta smiles. Full lips; a top lip that curls when it feels like it. She likes the thought of those lights. ‘Can’t,’ she says. ‘Got too much on my plate, right here.’

Molly’s still looking at Greta’s thighs, but not just the bruising now. It’s the shape of her legs, her femininity, the silver screen in them.

‘Greta?’

‘Yeah, kid?’

‘Is it true that Maze isn’t your real last name?’

‘It’s true.’

‘What’s your real name?’

‘Baumgarten. Greta Waltraud Baumgarten.’

‘Why’d you change your name?’

‘Nobody wants to see a Kraut name like that up in lights beside “John Wayne”.’

‘I like Maze,’ Molly says.

Greta smiles.

‘It makes you seem mysterious, like it’s hard to work you out. There are twists and turns all through you.’

Greta nods. ‘You can find your way into Greta Maze, but you may never find your way back out,’ she says.

Molly smiles. She pictures Greta in silver screen black and white. That perfect face in black and white, emerging from a cloud of Humphrey Bogart’s cigarette smoke. Bogie and Baumgarten. Bogie and Maze. Those porcelain pins in black and white. The bruising wouldn’t look so harsh in black and white. And the big film studios have make-up artists to cover up that sort of thing. Dottie Drake from the Fannie Bay hair salon told Molly all about the make-up artists in Hollywood, how they could cover up anything, from the bags under Joan Crawford’s eyes to Errol Flynn’s split lip.

‘Do you think I could ever change my name?’ Molly asks.

‘Of course you could. Anyone can. What’s your new name gonna be?’

Molly thinks for a long moment, tilts her head upwards.

‘Sky,’ she says.

Greta looks up, too.

‘I like that,’ Greta says. ‘You could jazz up that first name, though’ – she thinks for a moment – ‘give it a splash of Dietrich,’ she says.

Molly beams. Gasps the name, whispers it like it’s sacred: ‘Marlene Sky.’

Greta nods, eyes still up in the sky. ‘Well, would you look at that!’ she says.

‘What?’ asks Molly.

‘Up there. It’s your name up in lights.’

Molly laughs. And they both stare into the sky for a moment, the sky that’s so far away from their dark caves and their silly fire-traced doors leading to dark places. Molly looks again at Greta’s bruises.

‘Greta?’ Molly begins.

‘Yeah, kid.’

‘I heard my dad talking about you to his limestone supplier,’ Molly says.

Greta turns to Molly, follows her eyes to the leg bruising. She sits up self-consciously, pulls the dress back over her knees.

‘And what did your father say about me?’

‘He said you take your clothes off for money in the Edinburgh Arms pub.’

Greta sucks on another cigarette, pulls her sunglasses down over her nose. ‘Did anyone ever tell you that you talk too much, Molly Hook?’

‘Yeah, everyone,’ Molly says.

‘I trust your father then told that shocked limestone salesman how those nights I take my clothes off might represent my finest role of all.’

‘He didn’t say anything about any role you were playing.’

‘Of course it’s a role I’m playing,’ Greta says. ‘I’m playing Greta Maze, a thirty-three-year-old actress with too much talent and not enough opportunity who stayed in the arse end of the earth because she thought she loved an older man.’

Greta closes the script, tucks it under her arm and swings her legs over the side of the truck tray, the rubber soles of her laced saddle shoes leaving imprints in the dirt driveway where she lands.

‘And what role are you playing today, Molly?’ Greta asks. ‘Or are you still working on that twelve-year-old gravedigger girl who has convinced herself she’s not being raised by monsters?’

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