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?’
RED TIN THIMBLE
Tapping metal typewriter keys echoing through a house of timber and tin and old wooden stumps. Peeled paint on the walls inside. A hole in the living room wall above a broken and dusty pneumatic pianola, where Molly once watched her Uncle Aubrey drive his younger brother’s bloodied head during a mindless and lengthy drinking binge that ended with the brothers shooting nips of paint thinner.
‘And have you thought about the inscription on the headstone?’ Molly Hook asks across an old wooden table, her busy twelve-year-old fingers already wiggling above the keys, ‘R’, ‘I’ and ‘P’.
Mouldy air and sunlight pushing through a faded curtain in the living room where the business is conducted. The Hook family business of burying the dead.
When Horace Hook’s in a light mood, Molly sometimes suggests to her father that this cemetery keeper’s house feels like a kind of tomb in itself, as dark and dead as the 894 (and always counting) tombs that surround it. She suggests more windows. She suggests more cleaning. She suggests more food to eat. Fewer maggots in the sink. Fewer bloodstains on the kitchen walls. Fewer unwashed forks and dinner plates caked in old gravy. Fewer weevils in the oats in the pantry. Fewer silverfish crawling through Emily Dickinson and William Butler Yeats and Walt Whitman on Violet’s bookshelf by the front door. Fewer empty whisky bottles filling the space beneath the kitchen sink. Fewer strips of flypaper hanging from the ceiling, turned black with the stuck dead wings, heads and legs of house flies.
In the two chairs across from Molly’s typewriter sit two grieving customers, sixty-eight-year-old Mildred Holland and her twenty-seven-year-old son, Clem Holland. Mildred wears a black cardigan and tightly grips a purse with both hands on her thighs. Her wide-eyed and round-faced son wears white overalls covered in flour. He’s come straight from work, the same bakery on Herbert Street where his father, Lloyd Holland, died instantly of heart failure at dawn four days ago. Clem found his father lying amid twelve freshly baked loaves of bread that were sold for half price that same afternoon.
Mildred places her reading glasses on her nose, pulls a rolled piece of paper from her purse, unrolls it and reads from it. ‘We wish to have the following words written on the gravestone,’ she says. She studies the paper and reads the words out slowly. ‘“Rest . . . in . . . peace . . . Lloyd”.’
Molly taps these words out on the typewriter. ‘Good, and what should we write next?’ she then asks.
Mildred is puzzled. ‘That’s all we could think of to say,’ she says.
Clem shrugs his shoulders. ‘Pretty well says it all, don’t ya think?’
Molly nods. ‘Would you consider a couple more lines, perhaps, that say something more about the full life he enjoyed before he passed away?’ Molly suggests.
‘He didn’t really enjoy much at all,’ Clem says.
‘Something about how he cherished his family and friends, perhaps, and how he was cherished in return?’ Molly tries again.
Mildred looks at her son, grimly. Looks back at Molly.
‘He was mean and sour most of the time,’ Mildred says.
Clem turns to his mother. ‘When I told people the news, everybody seemed to have the same look on their face.’
‘What look was that?’ asks Mildred.
‘Relief,’ Clem says.
‘I see,’ Molly nods, understandingly. ‘If Lloyd had one belief, Mrs Holland, one value that he really lived by, what would you say it was?’
Mildred shrugs. ‘He believed in bread,’ she says. ‘He believed there was something beautiful in creating something that tasted so good out of just, you know, flour and . . . you know . . .’ Mildred looks to her son.
Clem nods knowingly. ‘Water,’ he adds. ‘Just flour and water.’
‘Flour and water,’ Mildred repeats, nodding.
‘I see,’ Molly says.
Mildred looks around the house. She looks at the closed bedroom doors beyond the hall off the living room. ‘Where did you say your father was, again?’ Mildred asks.
‘He’s fallen ill,’ Molly says.
Clem smiles. ‘Got the brown-bottle flu, has he?’
Molly gives a half-smile. ‘Mrs Holland, if you had any thoughts about anything that interested him, then I could perhaps help you craft something that might be a more fitting tribute to your late husband.’
Molly turns to Clem. ‘Something his children’s children might appreciate half a century from now.’
Molly looks back at Mildred. ‘I know I’m only young, but I’ve helped many people find the words that are just right for their departed loved one.’
‘How old are you, anyway?’ Mildred asks.
‘I’m thirteen in a month.’
Mildred studies Molly’s face, dismayed by the idea of having to think more deeply about her husband. She ponders. She looks at her son, pats a cloud of flour from his shoulder. She shakes her head. ‘I guess the only thing that made him happy was a loaf of well-baked bread in the morning.’
Molly nods, swinging the typewriter’s carriage-return lever over to start a new line of text. She looks out the only window in the living room, where a slice of blue sky fills half the frame.
‘What about this?’ she asks. And she speaks the words as she types them. ‘Like . . . a . . . falling . . . sun,’ she types, ‘you . . . closed . . . your . . . eyes.’
Tap, tap, tap. Carriage-return lever. New line of text.
‘Like . . . morning . . . bread . . . may . . . your . . . spirit . . . rise.’
Molly looks up at her customers. ‘Rest in peace . . . Lloyd,’ she says.
And Mildred turns to her son and Clem’s eyebrows rise in approval. Mildred beams. ‘Well, I quite like that,’ she says. She thinks on it some more. ‘“Like morning bread”. Yes, I think Lloyd would like that, too. Yes. Yes. Let’s go with that, shall we?’
‘Of course, I need to tell you, Mrs Holland,’ Molly offers, ‘two more lines of engraving on the stone will cost you an additional four shillings, but I find customers don’t usually mind paying a little extra when it comes to honouring the departed.’
Mildred turns to her son, Clem. He shrugs, unsure.
‘It’s only two more lines,’ Mildred says, loosening the grip on her purse.
*
A red tin thimble in the centre of the small wooden kitchen table where Molly and her father have breakfast. Horace sweats. He is thin. All limbs and burden. His hair is combed back hard and straight. He stinks of methylated spirits. Alcohol leeching from his armpits and his breath. Beads of sweat above his top lip.
Molly places a white enamel mug of black tea on the table. Her father picks it up with his right hand, which shakes when he lifts the mug to his lips.
‘What day is it?’ Horace asks.
‘Thursday,’ Molly says. ‘You drank through Monday and Tuesday. Slept through Wednesday.’
‘Did I leave you be?’
Molly nods.
‘I stayed in my room and read,’ she says.
Horace nods now, relieved.
‘What are you reading?’
‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.’
Horace nods.
‘I think I want to be an actress, like Greta,’ Molly says.
‘I thought you were going to be a famous poet like Emily Dickens?’
‘Dickinson, Dad,’ Molly says. ‘And I’m going to be a famous actress-poet named Marlene Sky.’
Horace nods again, not at all surprised by his daughter’s announcement. ‘You’ll make more money diggin’ graves,’ he says. ‘But I guess you won’t get no standing ovation for hiding the dead.’ He lifts and looks at his shaking left hand, turns it into a fist.
‘What’s that stuff you and Uncle Aubrey have been drinkin’?’ Molly asks.
‘Mind your own business.’
‘You’re becoming more and more like him, Dad,’ Molly says.
‘Like who?’
‘Like Uncle Aubrey.’
Another shaky sip of tea.
‘You look like a shadow,’ Molly says. ‘Uncle Aubrey is nothing but shadow. You’re shadow, too, Dad, but you’re light as well.’
Horace says nothing.
‘When are you going to stand up to him?’ Molly asks. ‘He doesn’t care about us, Dad. He doesn’t care about Greta. He only cares for the gold. The only thing that makes him feel anything is the way that gold glows. I see it, Dad. He’s gold sick. He’s always been gold sick. He’s always talkin’ about my grandfather and how gold sick he got, but I reckon Aubrey’s as sick right now as a man can be.’
Horace rubs his temples with his fingers, trying to ease the blows of the dropping hammer in his head.
‘He thinks that glowing will chase away the shadow,’ Molly says, her train of thought burning with new coal now. ‘But it won’t. It’s already too dark.’
Horace rubs his forehead, closes his eyes. There’s no telling where a memory will come from; no figuring where and when the sleeping librarian of Horace Hook’s memory room is likely to wake with a start and dig into the dusty drawers of lived experience and produce a folder filled with a past-coloured story. Aubrey Hook and Horace Hook throwing rocks at each other’s faces. Horace is twelve and his brother is thirteen. They’re pickaxing the face of a goldmine near Tom’s Gully along Mount Bundey Creek, far south of Darwin. Their father, Arthur Hook, a seasoned gold prospector, has ridden on horseback to Pine Creek on a supply run. No information in the library on what started it all, only how it ended. Aubrey lands a rock the size of a tennis ball on Horace’s right eye. Horace responds with a similar-sized rock that Aubrey does not duck or turn away from but willingly allows to land flush on his mouth, where it dislodges one of his two front teeth. Aubrey searches the dirt floor of the goldmine dugout and grips another rock the size of his metal water canister and throws it at his younger brother, who ducks swiftly out of the way of the deadly projectile. The thrown rock bounces against the chalky mine wall and falls beside Horace’s work boots. He picks it up and snap-throws it back. Once more, Aubrey does not duck or turn away or guard his face with his hands. He stands proudly and lets the rock hit his face so hard that it breaks his nose. Blood runs across his chin and down his work shirt. And Aubrey Hook smiles. Red across his teeth. A mouth full of blood. Something in the smile makes Horace turn cold. Something across his brother’s face other than blood and rock dust. It’s satisfaction.
‘Why do you need permission from Aubrey to let me go to the Star with Sam?’ Molly asks.
‘Be quiet now, Molly,’ Horace says.
‘I’ve been watching you both,’ Molly says. ‘There’s something strange about you two. I think that moonshine is sending you both mad. I think you should stop drinkin’ for a bit.’
Horace raises his eyebrows. ‘Tom Berry’s grandkid telling me about madness,’ he says. ‘I like that.’
‘Maybe you’ve got the curse, too,’ Molly says.
‘Be quiet now, Molly.’
The girl is silent for a long moment. But then Molly breaks the silence. Molly always breaks the silence.
‘I was thinking about Mum the other day,’ she says, softly. Horace reacts to that word ‘Mum’. He turns his head like he turns his head in pubs when anyone says the name ‘Violet’ or the word ‘wife’.
‘I was looking in the mirror of her duchesse,’ Molly continues, ‘and I was missing her so much. I felt so sad about it, but I couldn’t cry. I tried so hard to let some tears out for her because sometimes I feel like maybe she’s somewhere where she can see me but I can’t see her and if she can see me then I want her to see that I’m crying for her and that way she’ll know how much I miss her and how much I hate her for leaving us down here. But then I remembered Longcoat Bob and I knew what was happening.’
‘What was happening?’ Horace asks.
‘The turning,’ Molly says. ‘The heart doesn’t turn to stone right away. It takes time to take hold because the heart is warm and it keeps beating and it keeps fighting against all that cold stone. But, soon enough,
it all turns and then you feel nuthin’. All you got inside is cold rock. Like Uncle Aubrey.’
Horace stares at his daughter and he realises how deeply she’s lost in a trance of her own thinking. He worries for her. He cares for her. Molly looks at her father.
‘And you’re turning, too, Dad,’ Molly says.
‘That’s enough now, Molly,’ Horace says.
‘I can tell, Dad. I can see it happening to you. Kin means husbands, Dad.’
‘Let’s just have some breakfast.’
‘Kin means brothers, Dad. It means uncles and aunties and cousins, everything.’
And Horace slams his fist on the kitchen table.
‘Keep goin’, Molly,’ he barks.
His eyes. That horrifying warning men like Horace give to children like Molly with their eyes, in kitchens like this one. Danger. Do anything but keep going.
So Molly picks up a cutting knife and runs it six times, both sides, along the black leather razor strop hanging from a nail by the gas stove. She cuts three neat slices from a warm slab of six-day-old corned beef and fries them beside two halves of a ripe tomato in a thick black square iron skillet on the stove top.
Horace sips the tea quietly, sits the mug down on the table. His fingers reach for the red tin thimble in the centre of the table. ‘You see this thimble?’ he asks.
Molly nods at it, turning the tomatoes on the pan.
‘This thimble belonged to your mother,’ Horace says. ‘In the good years . . . when she was clear-headed, I mean, she would sit in the corner over there hand-sewing clothes for you. Pinafores and all that. And I’d be where you are right there. I’d fry up a feed of red emperor I’d caught on the rocks at Frances Bay, and I’d fry some potatoes up with it and we’d boil some muddies, too. And she was happy.’
Horace slips his forefinger into the thimble. Molly plates the corned beef and fried tomato, places the breakfast down for her father. He cuts into the beef, chews it along with the tomato that he’s sprinkled with too much salt and pepper.
All Our Shimmering Skies Page 7