All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  He rests back in his chair. ‘The Japs are comin’,’ he says.

  ‘Who’s comin’?’

  ‘The Japanese. Three hundred and fifty Jap aircraft just blew the arse out of Hawaii. They’ll be comin’ for us next. These idiots who run this town will take a while to wake up and smell the fiery death fleet heading our way, but you can take it from me, Mol’, the war’s comin’ to Darwin.’

  He sips his tea.

  ‘I reckon there’s some high-up Jap right now stickin’ a big fat red sun marker over Darwin on his map.’

  ‘Why would they wanna come all the way here?’

  ‘They’re rat-fucking the Yanks and we’re helpin’ the Yanks. You’ve seen all them navy boats in Darwin Harbour. We’ve got giant fuel tanks fillin’ Allied ships. We’ve got oil tanks and army bases and aerodromes, and all we got protectin’ ’em is a few big guns and a couple of barefoot kids with slingshots. Why wouldn’t they come to Darwin?’

  ‘So when do we leave?’ Molly asks.

  Horace places his cup down again on the table. ‘We’re not going anywhere,’ he replies. ‘Our ship is about to come in, Molly. War is a goldmine for the gravedigger. Those Japs are comin’ and anyone stupid enough to stick around to greet them will be dead within a day.’

  ‘Including us,’ Molly says.

  ‘We’re not in the firing line. They’ll go for the town and the port, mostly. And when the dust settles the Federal War Cabinet will be more than grateful to pay up handsomely to anyone who can give all them sorry bodies a proper burial.’

  Horace gets up from the table, ambles into the living room. He returns with a large wooden box filled with bottles of disinfectant and sugar soap and scrubbing brushes. He places the box in the centre of the kitchen.

  It’s the curse, Molly tells herself. It’s the curse that’s made him hard. Kin means fathers. Kin means husbands, too. Longcoat Bob turned his good heart to stone.

  ‘I need this place cleaned,’ Horace says. ‘I need you to dust, wash and disinfect every last corner, every last crack in this godforsaken shithole.’

  Horace picks up the red tin thimble, holds it up to Molly. ‘I’m goin’ in to town and I won’t be home until tonight,’ he says. ‘Before I leave, I’ll be hiding this thimble somewhere in the house. To find it, you will need to inspect and clean every nook and cranny. If you have not found the thimble by the time I return, I will know you have not cleaned the house properly and you will be punished. Do you understand?’

  Molly nods. It’s the curse, she tells herself again. The curse of Longcoat Bob.

  ‘Say it,’ he says.

  ‘I understand,’ Molly says.

  ‘You understand who?’ her father asks, placing the red tin thimble in the pocket of his pants.

  ‘I understand you, Dad.’

  And her mind rattles with two words. The turning. The turning. The turning.

  *

  Cupboard doors opening. Cupboard doors slamming shut. Wipe, scrape, rub, dust. Breathless gravedigger girl on her hands and knees with an old toothbrush scrubbing bloodstains off the hallway floor. ‘Out damned spot,’ says Lady Macbeth in her mind. ‘Out! Out, I say.’ But some spots can’t be removed.

  The girl spreading wax on the floor and rubbing and polishing the old wood. Her kneecaps get so red and sore she ties her father’s thick winter socks around her knees to cushion them. She pulls a heavy bucket of water and disinfectant across the living room floor. A cotton mop and a wringer.

  It must be here. It must be here. She runs a rag across the dust that blankets the skirting boards of every wall. Breathe. She pulls a wooden step behind her through the house so that she can reach her wire-bone arms up to run the rag across the endless crowning moulds atop every internal wall. Breathe, Molly Hook. Every wardrobe drawer. Every corner of every duchesse, every sideboard, every broom closet. Please be here.

  Floors scrubbed, curtains washed. Dig, Molly, dig. It must be here somewhere. Lye dropped down the pipes in the kitchen sink. The kitchen sink and the bathroom washtub scrubbed with a wire brush and scouring powder. She drags three large house rugs down the back staircase and uses the wooden step to help her hang the rugs on the backyard clothesline. She beats the rugs with the rear blade face of Bert the shovel, coughs hard when she swallows decades-old dust. For five straight hours she works. She works through lunch with no break and no food; there isn’t even time to stop for a cup of water. She must find the thimble because she feels the curse.

  Knobs turning, doors opening, cupboards slamming shut, and now she’s opening cupboard doors she’s opened thrice before, and now she’s dizzy and so tired and she can’t keep a single straight thought inside her busy mind. Drawers pulled open frantically and frantically pushed shut. Red tin thimble. Red tin thimble. So small. Nothing to it, really. Just an object that once belonged to her mother, Violet. It means nothing to her and everything to her.

  She searches and searches through the sprawling house. Inside cracks and under mats, hands reaching beneath crockery cabinets and finding only the bodies of living and dead spiders. So many cockroaches crawling and so much cockroach shit to pick up in her hands. But she finds no red tin thimble.

  The gravedigger girl’s heart pounding because she can never seem to find exactly what she’s looking for and the curse of Longcoat Bob blows in from the graveyard to mix with the smell of ammonia and bleach and she wonders if it’s the ammonia in the bathroom or the methylated spirits in the kitchen or the missing red tin thimble that is making her feel light headed. Her father will come home, he will come home, because fathers always come home, sure as the Darwin sun rises each day like the bread in the late Lloyd Holland’s bakery. He will come home and she will not have found the thimble and she will be punished and he will not even know the effort she put into finding her mother’s red tin thimble. He will not know because he won’t be able to see the truth beyond the dark veil of Longcoat Bob’s curse that she can feel is so close to her now, and so close to her father because of her, so close it hurts. Her Uncle Aubrey will be with her father when he comes home and they will both be liquored and Uncle Aubrey will be worse than her father because he is all shadow, and he will take on the punishing like he always does because it satisfies him.

  She scurries from the bedrooms to the kitchen to the bathroom to the living room to the bedrooms to the kitchen to the bathroom and she spins around on the spot, wondering where her father could have possibly placed that red tin thimble and she finds the locked door to Horace Hook’s bedroom where he keeps the buried and unburied treasures of Hollow Wood’s ever-trusting dead. And her heart is beating so fast with all the thinking and the work and exhaustion that she can’t catch her breath, and she tries to suck more air into her lungs but nothing goes in and she remembers water and she scrambles to the kitchen but then she sees flashes of yellow and purple in her mind’s eye and she can’t focus on anything and her hands are so cold and the blood seems to rush out of her body and drain like lye into the cracks in the polished wooden floorboards beneath her bare feet and she closes her eyes and sees only a black room and this feels safe so she stops breathing and falls with a thud to the floor of the kitchen of the caretaker’s quarters in ruined Hollow Wood Cemetery, where the only people close enough to hear a single sound from Molly Hook, aged twelve years and eleven months, are buried in dirt. And the last thing she sees in the black room of her mind is an audience rising to its feet to give a soaring standing ovation for the gravedigger girl as the side of her skull hits the theatre stage.

  ‘Bravo, Molly!’ they scream. ‘Bravo!’

  *

  Seen from the blue sky above and looking down and looking closer in and closer in, she is a brown-haired girl standing in pants made for boys before a dress-shop window on Cavenagh Street, central Darwin. If someone told Molly Hook she had dreamed herself here in this moment, she would believe it because Darwin is a dream at sunset in summer and the dress in the window is the kind of dress Molly wears in her dreams. A t
eenager’s dress and a going-out dress that Molly could wear to a dance or a school graduation or to a Hollywood film premiere on the arm of Gary Cooper, if only she wasn’t so busy digging graves in Darwin, Australia. A light blue satin dress the colour of the Darwin sky in summer, resting on the Ward’s Boutique shop window mannequin, whose expressionless face says nothing of how wonderful it must be to wear something so beautiful.

  It’s not long till her birthday. She will soon be able to say she is in her teens. She will soon be old enough to attend the winter dance in Darwin’s town hall. She could wear this blue dress to the dance. Perhaps her father will buy it for her, for her birthday. She won’t ask how he got the money; she won’t ask if it was bought with the gold her uncle bit free from Lisbeth Fleming’s dead ring finger. She will wake up on the morning of her birthday and she will open the dress box her father has wrapped for her and she will whisper, ‘It’s beautiful, Dad.’ And he will ask her to try the dress on and she will spin before him and he will smile and she will run into his arms and he will say he’s sorry he can’t always be like this. And when they embrace, his face won’t be unshaven and bristly, he won’t smell of spirit and week-old sweat. There will be only colour. Sky blue.

  Molly’s made her pilgrimage to this untouchable dress twice a week for the past four weeks, but, no matter how many times she wills a different outcome, her pockets are empty when she gets there, and she always turns away empty handed.

  She walks barefoot. She dreams and Darwin dreams with her. It refuses to wake up, so the strange daily film-reel dream of the town on the geographical top of Australia during World War II unspools in all its scenes that make no sense. Darwin, which was not made by God but by a theory of evolution. Made by the earth spinning and by 5800 people who lost their footing, slid southwards and northwards on the rocking floors of ships with no anchors, and found the wreckage and flotsam of their lives washed ashore at Port Darwin. Greek and Italian storeowners, Chinese market sellers, Japanese divers, Filipino fishermen, German miners, Afghan cameleers, Thai whores, Malay traders, Javanese labourers, New Guinea labourers, South Sea island labourers press-ganged onto boats and forced to work inside the Darwin dream. A dream that starts in the Timor Sea on a sheet of turquoise coastal water so clear you feel you could dance on its hard glass. A girl like Molly Hook could make slippers out of that sea glass and she could wear them to a Country Women’s Association ball with a sky-blue satin shop-window dress.

  Those mangroves on the shore would be no place to dance. The mangroves belong to the bodies of root-wedged dead gangsters and the crocodiles who feast on their sins. But inside that mangrove fringe is a place where humans come to re-invent themselves. A place to change your dream, to change your name, to change your ending. Baumgarten to Maze. Molly to Marlene. Nobody knows anything and everybody keeps it that way. Don’t trouble the man in the black hat three stools down along the bloodstained bar of the National Hotel; he’s the devil on a day off.

  The Darwin sunset is gold then red then purple then black. The town is corrugated-iron fortress homes that fall with a sneeze. Dirt for roads and dirt for air. Cyclone-ravaged for a century. Architectural impermanence. Darwin dreams in sungolds and earth-browns. It dreams in violent rain and wind. ‘Nungalinya,’ Sam Greenway once told Molly Hook. That’s the Dreamtime ancestor in charge of the cyclones and storms that tear the tin skin off town pubs and stores with a single whistle from His lips. Sam said Nungalinya is angry at all the white settlers who keep landing in Port Darwin, keep skipping ashore with their pickaxes and shovels to chip away at Ol’ Man Rock. Nungalinya, Sam said, lifts fishing boats from the sea, sucks them into the air and bats them a hundred yards through the wind against shore rocks that smash metal hulls the same way all those white settlers smash the shells of fat-clawed East Point mud crabs.

  The Darwin dream has a smell and it smells like the maggots eating all those discarded crab claws. It smells like all the cut ends of vegetables left to rot in Chinatown bins that dingoes and lost dogs tip over after dark. Darwin dreams in drink and sweat. Warm beer and toil. Fat-bellied fist fighters and men who piss in buckets beneath their bar stools. Empty car bodies left abandoned in the streets outside town by empty men who shot themselves dead inside them. It’s frontier territory where nothing stays nailed down. America’s Wild West all the way down here in Australia’s wild north. Some came by boat and some just emerged from the dust; they crawled out of the dirt and dusted off their shoulders and staggered into the Victoria Hotel on Smith Street for three shots of black rum then a glass of water. Darwin dreams in dinner dances and woodchopping contests and travelling freak show tents where Sydney wolf boys and Melbourne pig girls reel in horror at the ticket-buying Darwin locals staring at them through the glass.

  Van Diemen Gulf and Snake Bay to the north. South Alligator River to the east, the Rum Jungle to the south. And beyond it all, the vast ancient wetlands and wilderness of Molly Hook’s wild dreams, the prehistoric stone and vine country. The deep country. Suffocating monsoon forests and tidal flats and jagged plateaus and rock formations that tower over the city buildings of the London and New York and Paris in Molly’s head.

  Giant tree rats just on the outskirts of town. Killer snakes beneath your bed. Killer spiders crawling up your trouser legs. Here are Japanese pearling crews tying down rickety luggers in Darwin Harbour. Here are Christian missionaries instructing Aboriginal servants, whose families once sang on the land where they now dust down church pews. Drunk and wealthy cattlemen and their mistresses skinny-dipping in the voluminous water tanks of the abandoned Vestey’s meatworks at Bullocky Point. Sunburnt stockmen clocked off and rolling dice in a Mitchell Street gambling hall. There are hardly any cars on the street: most everybody walks or rides bicycles in the Darwin dream.

  A fat and drunk man sleeps on the toilet seat of a hot tin earth closet on a corner of Knuckey Street. Molly blocks her nostrils with her forefinger and thumb as she passes. The man’s ‘long drop’ waste will sit for days before being mercifully burned. There’s the state school bus that’s been parked on Peel Street for the past month, a rusting semitrailer with a long rear tray. On the days when her father bothers to send her to school, Molly and her mates sit beneath a mesh cage, their arse bones bouncing hard on the metal tray at every pothole on the road to Darwin Primary.

  Molly ambles barefoot into Chinatown. Half a century ago, the Chinese outnumbered the Europeans here four to one. Horace Hook told his daughter once that the Orientals – the ‘Celestials’ – called Australia ‘The New Gold Mountain’, while California was the ‘The Old Gold Mountain’. Then the new gold finds got old, too, and half the Chinese left. The other half stayed to keep breaking their backs for five shillings a day building the railway line from Port Darwin to the goldfields of Pine Creek. ‘Then when the railway line was finished,’ Horace said, ‘when there was no more hard labour to be done by the Chinese, the government told ’em they best not lob in here no more.’ Horace considered that for a moment. ‘Nice bastards, eh.’

  Molly nods to an old Chinese woman selling green mangoes from a table at the side of the wide yellow dirt road of Cavenagh Street. She passes a Chinese tailor, a Chinese fruit market, a stonemason’s workshop. Four Chinese fishermen walk alongside a thin and hungry brown horse pulling a cart filled with a day’s haul of trap-caught fish off Fannie Bay. Another old woman in front of a vegetable market stirs a pot of seafood soup. A Chinese boy by her side wears a white long-sleeved shirt and white pants. His hair is tied by a band in the centre of his scalp and it sprouts from his head the way a bunch of celery rises from dirt. His top button is done up so tight his neck fat spills over his collar. He blows on a red paper windmill spinning on the end of a bamboo stick.

  Corrugated-iron sheds of blue-grey and rust and Chinese characters on the subtlest signage lining entryways to stores and workshops. Families of fourteen share ramshackle two-storey dwellings made of scavenged materials – old car bonnets and flattened and nailed kerosene tins turn
ed into walls – while the wealthy whites who frequent these markets and stalls live in raised houses where they sip gin on wide, latticed verandas and the air blows against wet kerchiefs around their necks.

  Molly sees old Chinese men with hollowed cheeks and white chin hairs finger-shaped so that their beards look like white flames when they blow in the Darwin breeze. One, who has only a bottom row of teeth, rests his backside on a wash bucket as he nails a heel back on to his right black slipper, a smoking pipe gripped in his left fist.

  Molly stops briefly outside her favourite store, Fang Cheong Loong’s rambling giftware and clothing shop filled with Chinese dolls and red and blue and green cheongsams and camphor-wood boxes carved with the outlines of dragons and emperors and Chinese princesses. She walks past the Crown Bakery and Suns Inc. Tailors to the two-storey, white-walled bloodhouse of Gordon’s Don Hotel. She creeps up to the sprawling pub’s swinging entry doors and sneaks a look inside, eyes drawn straight to the bar just as two stockmen in shorts fall down arm in arm singing a song about Ireland. They roll into the stool-bound legs of Horace and Aubrey Hook, and it’s Molly’s uncle who kicks the Irish beer swillers away with a push of his right boot while keeping a firm grip on a foggy glass of brown spirit. Horace Hook, as if by instinct, turns his slow-moving neck and his bloodshot eyes to the swinging entry doors. He’s all shadow and he’s too dark and drunk to know if it’s his only daughter standing beyond those swinging doors or if, in fact, it’s the ghost of Lisbeth Fleming and she’s come to collect what rightfully belongs to her – Horace Hook’s grey-coloured heart and the pitch-black soul of his older brother, Aubrey.

  Molly rushes backwards from the swinging doors into bustling Cavenagh Street, bumping into a young Chinese woman carrying a tray of purple plums that nearly spill. ‘Sorry,’ Molly says. And she runs now because night is here and she needs to go home. She needs to find the red tin thimble. It has to be there. It has to be there. And the few street lights of Cavenagh Street flash on, and Molly runs past A.E. Jolly’s store and Cashman’s Newsagency and the Bank of New South Wales and the town post office where not a single letter has ever arrived with the name ‘Molly Hook’ on its envelope. Run, Molly, run. Dig, Molly, dig. Heart pounding. Dirt roads beneath her feet. Speed. Motion. Destiny. But, wait, there’s a face she knows on her left. Stop right here on the spot because it’s him, it’s Tyrone Power in the flesh, by way of Mataranka, south of Katherine, right here on Smith Street, Darwin.