All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  ‘Molly,’ Greta says, softly. Not a question. Not a suggestion. Just a name. ‘Molly. Talk to me, Molly.’

  Molly says nothing. She wanders deeper into the cemetery. In the long aisle formed by two rows of ornately carved headstones and slabs, a human figure crawls along the ground, hauling itself along on its elbows with regular, quiet, brute-effort heaves. Dirt-caked and black, the figure moves like a leech, or like a black grave wraith that has slipped out into the light and now wants to flee back down into the dark.

  Molly and Greta reach the feet of the slow-moving carcass and the carcass’s owner, Aubrey Hook, senses them walking behind him – the girl, he thinks, the girl with her beloved fucking shovel scraping along the dirt. He drags himself on and on for another twenty long yards before he tires completely and turns his body around and rests his head on the edge of a stone slab inscribed in honour of the departed William Shankland, 1843–1879: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.’

  Aubrey’s eyes squint in the full sun. His face is black with soil and red with blood. He’s reaching deep for breath but he’s too tired, too overwhelmed by the scene to catch a satisfactory gulp of Darwin’s hot air. He sets his eyes upon Greta and Molly, who stand over him. ‘Water,’ he gasps.

  Molly and Greta simply stare at him. Greta’s hand over her belly. The pain inside her. She looks at the man at her feet. The squirming monster. His tattered clothes. The sweat across his face, his arms and legs. The desperate movements of his fingers, patting his own chest. Confused, out of place here by this grave, lost. ‘Water,’ he says. He coughs hard and the cough turns into a blood vomit that spills over his chin and onto his buttoned shirt.

  ‘Take me to hospital,’ he pleads, gargling on his own blood.

  Greta leans down to Aubrey. She studies his face. She wonders how her life came to this, how she came to think she was in love with Aubrey Hook. He was charming once. Intelligent. They went to shows together. He showered her with gifts. They met when she was dancing most weeknights. He gave her good tips and then he gave her bad tips. Stick with me. Never leave Darwin. Die with me here in Hollow Wood Cemetery. Never walk into town and tell the police about the rage places I go and the nights I take you with me.

  Greta’s hands reach into Aubrey’s trouser pockets. He tries to bat her hands away but he’s too weak, too spent. Molly sees those hands ferreting through the pockets and then she sees Greta’s right hand extracting a set of keys.

  ‘I need a hospital!’ Aubrey gargles louder. He spits more vomit from his mouth with a laborious shake of his head. Greta turns and walks away, Molly follows. They head towards the half cemetery house and the one-legged man sitting in the tree, the desperate calls of Aubrey Hook echoing behind them. ‘You take me to the hospital now!’

  Greta and Molly walk on.

  ‘You are going to hell!’

  Greta and Molly walk on.

  ‘I curse the both of you,’ Aubrey screams to the sky. ‘I curse the both of yooouuuu!’

  *

  Greta shuffles slowly to the driver’s door of Aubrey’s red utility truck, still intact and parked in the gravel driveway in front of the bombed cemetery residence. Molly watches her climb awkwardly and painfully into the driver’s seat. She closes the door.

  ‘Get in,’ Greta says. ‘I’ll drive you to the hospital.’

  ‘I don’t need a hospital,’ Molly says through the open window. ‘But could you take me to Clyde River?’

  ‘Not going that way,’ Greta says.

  ‘All the ways go that way.’

  ‘Not the way I’m going, kid.’

  ‘Wait,’ Molly says. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going back to Sydney,’ she says, and she starts the truck, gives its rattling engine some heavy revs.

  ‘Wait,’ Molly says. ‘Let me show you something.’ She drops her duffel bag to the ground and reaches in to find the prospector’s pan amid the cans of beans and corned beef and the Shakespeare book and the blood-coloured stone the size of her dead father’s fist. She passes the pan through the driver’s-side window to Greta.

  ‘So,’ Greta says, turning it in her hands. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

  Molly points at the pan. ‘Look at the back,’ she says. ‘The words on the back.’

  Greta frowns, tries to scan the words on the back of the pan, fails. ‘I can’t read all those words,’ she says. ‘They’re covered in mud.’

  She tosses the pan back to Molly.

  ‘Look, kid, you need to get yourself to hospital,’ she says. ‘They need to check you for shellshock or somethin’. And once they’re done doin’ that, you need to get the bloody hell outta Darwin. Them Japs ain’t finished with this place.’

  Molly holds the pan up. ‘They’re the directions to Longcoat Bob’s gold,’ she says. ‘My granddad etched them in the copper so he’d never forget them. I can take you there, Greta. Buried treasure. You said if you knew where that treasure was you’d grab Bert right away and you’d dig down for your fortune. Well, you can have it all if you want it. You could be richer than your wildest dreams. You could finally be where you belong. We could go to Hollywood together and you could get your name up in lights and I could change my name and . . . and—’

  ‘I’m sorry, Molly,’ Greta says softly.

  But Molly pushes on. ‘Greta Maze and Marlene Sky,’ she urges. ‘You can do it, Greta. You just have to get us to the Clyde River. I’ll take care of the rest. You can do it, Greta.’

  Greta turns her head away from Molly because she doesn’t want the girl to see her crying.

  Molly goes on. ‘We could go on double dates with Tyrone Power and Gary Cooper,’ she says. ‘And then we could drive up into the Hollywood Hills and see if we could find Errol Flynn’s house and we could ask him to let us in because we’re Australians, too.’

  Greta wipes her eyes, smiles, turns back to Molly. ‘That’s a nice film, Mol’,’ she says. ‘I’ll be sure to go see it some time.’ Then she slams on the accelerator.

  ‘Greta, wait!’ Molly hollers. But the truck reverses quickly out through the cemetery gates.

  ‘Wait, Greta!’ Molly cries, her sore bones stumbling feebly after the truck. Then she stops and watches the truck speed south on the road out of Darwin. Silence and dust. She drops her head, eyes to the ground, and the ground is covered in domestic debris from the bombed house. This bombed world. And something at Molly’s feet steals her attention. She bends down to pick it up. She holds it up to the sky to see it properly, turning it around between her forefinger and thumb. The red tin thimble.

  WAR SKIES

  The gravedigger girl and a city on fire. A city in a war dream that she can walk through without being noticed because nobody here can see anything but fire.

  A portly man sitting in a gutter on Darwin Esplanade, his hands on his knees. His clothes have been blown off and half of the hair on his scalp is missing. He weeps. Empty military tents on the roadside. Homeless dogs and cats sifting through piles of rotting food. Six soldiers sprinting along the street. Soldiers missing arms and legs on stretchers being carried by soldiers with faces covered in black oil. Bandages being wrapped around temples. Shrapnel sticking out of shoulder blades and thighs and chests. Soldiers gone blind. Soldiers gone mad from shellshock, rambling things to the sky that make no sense to Molly. The face of someone senior turning to the gravedigger girl. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ the man barks. ‘Someone get this kid outta here, for God’s sake.’

  Molly runs. On the beach at Doctor’s Gully there are men pulling bodies in from the shore. The bodies have drowned in oil. There are bodies still in the water, some floating face down and some face up, and the skin on their arms and faces has burned to a raw red flesh. One man pulls on a soldier’s arm in the water and the loose skin on the forearm slides off the bone like a flesh-coloured glove.

  The smell of the dead mixing with the smell of exhaust and oil. The smell of cordite and burnt wood
and burning buildings. Sailors in small boats lifting desperate swimmers into their vessels. Bodies on the beach shot in the back by warplane machine-gun fire. In the mangroves of Port Darwin two crocodiles feast on the carcasses of drowned American sailors. Terrified in-patients from the evacuated Cullen Bay civil hospital huddle beneath the sheltering cliffs of Cullen Bay. Further along the beachfront is a train, a whole locomotive, upturned by a well-targeted bomb and flipped into the sea. Six railway wagons have sunk into the water with it. A whole war ship, Neptuna, a vessel the length of a football field, is turned over on its side in the low tide waters around the wharf, clouds of black smoke rising into the air.

  So many sunken ships. USS Peary. HMAS Mavie. SS Zealandia. SS Mauna Loa. Oil tankers ablaze. Men still swimming frantically around sinking merchant vessels. The wharf labourers’ recreation shed blown to bits. Great sections of the wharf blown away. Soldiers and police and nurses rushing to and from the town’s flattened communications centre between The Esplanade and Mitchell Street, which housed the post office, the telephone exchange and cable office. A hole in the ground where the post office once stood; hills of wooden house framing and rubble have been formed by the explosions. A city of fallen masonry. Bodies on the ground covered in tastefully patterned living room house curtains. Another man’s body blown into another fork of a tree.

  Molly walks on. A.E. Jolly’s convenience store has disintegrated, the Bank of New South Wales has been gutted. Sheets of corrugated iron and nails and sheets of fibro are spread across the streets. A naked man gone mad is running through Cavenagh Street shouting Bible verse.

  Deeper into suburban streets, homes split in two. Ghost houses with swinging front doors blowing in the wind. More abandoned cats and dogs. Dogs howling mournfully. Two-storey homes built to withstand fierce cyclones flattened by bombs.

  An old woman stands dazed by her letterbox, the only thing still standing on her property – her house is a mound of rubble. She speaks in what sounds to Molly like German. She’s heavyset and her big arms are raised in confusion and she weeps, she howls, uncontrollably, talking to God or talking to those Japanese warplanes. When she sees Molly, she beckons the gravedigger girl to her. ‘Please, please,’ the old woman says. She opens her arms out to Molly, suggesting she needs a human embrace, she needs to hold something comforting, she needs to hold the gravedigger girl. Molly approaches her cautiously.

  ‘Did you have family here?’ Molly asks.

  The woman rambles something loudly through tears in German.

  ‘Why didn’t you get out?’ Molly asks.

  ‘Please, please,’ the old woman says, opening her arms for an embrace. And, reluctantly, Molly moves in close and leans into the woman for a hug. The old woman wraps her arms around Molly’s neck and brings the girl’s face to her belly. The old woman weeps into Molly’s hair, squeezing her tight. And the embrace feels warm to Molly, too, and she wonders if she needed this embrace as much as the old woman.

  But then the old woman howls again and grips Molly tighter still, and Molly’s face is now being pushed hard into the woman’s belly and Molly feels like her head is tucked into a pillow. She motions to pull away but the old woman’s heavy arms hold her tight and Molly has to struggle to breathe through her mouth and nose and then she discovers she can’t really breathe at all, so she pulls away hard but the old woman simply howls more loudly and presses Molly more firmly against her belly.

  ‘I can’t breathe,’ Molly says, the words muffled by the woman’s stomach. ‘Lemme go! I can’t breathe.’ And Molly is suffocating now.

  The old woman can only weep and howl to the heavens. She can’t let go. Her grief is too strong and she cannot release this girl and Molly pushes against the old woman but she won’t release her, so Molly stomps on the old woman’s feet with her dig boots. ‘Lemme go!’ she yells.

  ‘It’s okay,’ the old woman replies in a thick German accent, furiously patting Molly’s hair. ‘I’ve got you. It’s okay.’

  And Molly kicks now at the old woman’s shin bones. She kicks and kicks and the old woman finally releases her.

  ‘It’s okay,’ the old woman howls as Molly runs. Run, Molly, run.

  *

  Looters in the shops. Looters in the houses. Men rushing out of bombed-out hardware stores with tools. Men rushing out of bombed-out homes with rugs and furnishings and bags full of jewellery. Two men lugging a looted piano along Smith Street. Convoys of cars and lorries, civilians and deserting servicemen, rushing south to safety in the distant towns of Katherine and Larrimah and Daly Waters.

  Shirtless and brave servicemen staying put to reload mobile anti-aircraft guns.

  Chinese restaurant proprietors and Greek café owners at last convinced of the need to evacuate – they needed to see the actual bombs dropping before they were finally persuaded to leave. Run, Molly, run.

  Then stop. A row of town-centre stores with their front windows shattered. Civilians stepping over glass shards to let themselves into locked fashion stores. People walking out of stores, arms filled with three-piece suits. And the sky-blue dancing dress still hanging on the mannequin in the window of Ward’s Boutique. Molly presses her face against the glass. She sees herself dancing again, when the earth rights itself and Darwin returns to normal and Sam comes home. She’ll be older, then, and Sam will be honoured to walk into a dance hall with her on his arm, wearing a dress like that. Molly watches a woman, a nurse from the hospital, come out of Ward’s Boutique carrying two gowns over her right forearm then scurry off up the street. Molly looks at that blue dress again and then slips through the front door of Ward’s, her duffel bag over her shoulder, Bert still tucked between the shoulder strap and her spine.

  There are no lights on in the boutique because there’s no electrical power in town. She walks by racks of gowns and dresses, scans the room. She finds it at the back of the store by the store counter and cash register: the one sky-blue dress left on the rack. She lifts it off by its hanger, holds it up to assess the size. Before trying it on in the changing room, she shuffles through a back door that leads to a bathroom, where she hopes to quench her thirst and wash the dirt and sweat from her face, but she can only manage a few brief sips of rusty water from a tap that then stops running.

  In the changing room, she takes off her old boy’s pants and soiled work shirt, both heavy with earth and stinking of sweat. She slips into the sky-blue dress and turns to face a full-length mirror fixed to the wall. The dress is too big for her, the hemline hanging well below her knees and the shoulder straps almost sliding off her collar bones. But it works, she tells herself. I’ll grow into it, she tells herself. I’ll grow.

  She straightens her hair. She allows herself half a smile. The sky-blue satin dress of her dreams, something to wear through this nightmare. She walks out of the changing room, leaving her old clothes where they lie. Making her way through the boutique aisles, she hears a deafening siren that’s so loud it rattles the shopfront window. She rushes outside to the footpath.

  Soldiers and civilians sprinting in all directions. Nurses holding their hats as they run. Soldiers holding their helmets as they run towards defence posts. ‘They’re comin’ back!’ one civilian hollers, tripping over himself as he dashes away from a butcher’s shop carrying a ham under each arm. The air raid siren wails again and Molly turns her eyes to the sky. Another squadron of Japanese bombers approaching from the south-west. More bombers, more than twenty of them, attacking from the north-east.

  ‘They’re gonna hit the airfield,’ a soldier shouts. Then Molly feels as much as she hears the violent pressure-wave of patterned bomb-drops thudding into Darwin earth. Flashes of yellow flame light the horizon and black smoke shrouds the town like a low-hanging cloud from hell. And then a red utility truck screams to a halt at the side of the dirt street, directly in front of Molly.

  Greta Maze leans over from the steering wheel and speaks through the open passenger-side window. ‘Get in,’ she says, a lit cigarette hanging from her
lips.

  Molly beams wide, slips immediately into the front seat.

  Another thundering drum roll of bombs shakes the town and Greta Maze bounces in her seat. She drags on her smoke nonchalantly and gives her passenger a sideways look, noticing something new about the gravedigger girl. ‘Nice dress,’ she says, then slams her foot on the accelerator.

  THE SECOND SKY GIFT

  THE MAN WHO HATED GOLD

  Eyes closed. He sleeps flat on his back amid twenty wounded men and women being rushed to Cullen Bay civil hospital in the back of an army transport truck that’s been scouring Darwin streets for raid casualties. There’s a weight on his chest that makes it hard for him to breathe and this suffocating weight puts thoughts in his head. It’s not a dream but it’s a memory that comes to him in his sleep. The same memory that always comes to him. Aubrey Hook is fifteen years old and he’s being buried alive inside a goldmine and he has the wherewithal to blame his impending death on true love.

  Love and hate. Man and woman. Rich and poor. Dirt and gold. His father, Arthur Hook, believed in absolutes and lived in them, too. Arthur Hook loved Bonnie Little absolutely. Childhood sweethearts, they rode horses together. They rode through Howard Springs and Humpty Doo and they rode all the way to Kakadu country and Bonnie Little would let her wild auburn hair spill out from beneath her riding hat and that hair was the colour of the gorge clifftops that she’d stand upon, screaming her name – ‘Bonnie Little’ – into the ancient echo chamber of a Kakadu chasm. They danced together in Darwin town hall and they dreamed together of the things they would do once Arthur and his best friend and early goldmining partner, Tom Berry, got lucky in the Pine Creek goldfields.

  ‘You’re my lucky strike, Bonnie Little,’ Arthur said with wide eyes. ‘You’re my greatest find.’ Because that’s what true love is, Arthur thought. True love is a pure gold vein in a dry hillside of dirt and stone. Some will never find that kind of gold seam. Some just don’t have the nose for it. But he did. And he loved her absolutely – until the day Bonnie Little fell in love with Arthur’s best friend and goldmining partner, Tom Berry.