‘I can’t be sure I’ll do that, Greta,’ Molly replies. ‘I’ll be aiming for his legs but I’ll probably get him in the head or somethin’ and I don’t want to kill any human being, even if his mates did blow up the milk bar on Bennett Street.’
From the ground, Yukio’s squinting eyes look up into the sky as he slowly raises his hand and points between Molly and Greta.
‘Hikoki,’ he says, softly, his finger pointing towards the falling sun. He makes the hand gesture of a plane moving through the sky. ‘Hikoki.’
Molly and Greta turn their heads instinctively towards where Yukio is pointing and see nothing but blue sky, and Molly turns back just in time to find Yukio engaging her in a silent wrist bend and then a near-invisible leg sweep that lands her, in the space of half a second, flat on her back and disarmed. Yukio now stands pointing his pistol at Greta.
‘How did you do that?’ Molly asks, awed and elated. ‘That was incredible!’
Yukio points at the shovel in Greta’s hands, waves two fingers towards himself as he holds out his free left hand. Greta hands the shovel to the pilot. Yukio passes it straight to Molly. ‘Doko ni Iku no,’ he says, nodding.
Molly takes the shovel. She remembers to be graceful. ‘Thank you,’ she says to the fallen pilot.
‘You don’t have to use your manners around cold-blooded killers, Molly,’ spits Greta.
Yukio waves the gun at Molly, directing her to move back beside Greta.
Yukio stands soaking wet in his flight uniform. Goggles on his forehead keeping his dripping fur-lined flight helmet in place. Not a single line on his face. High cheekbones, and cheeks that would be fuller if he ate more. A large deep-brown freckle on his right cheek and two smaller ones above his top lip.
He points at Greta and Molly. ‘Doko ni Iku no?’ he asks, sharply. He points at them again. Then he gestures a walking motion with his left-hand forefinger and middle finger. ‘Aust . . . ralians.’ Then another walking finger gesture.
‘Where are we going?’ Molly offers, courteously.
Yukio nods. Molly nods enthusiastically. She holds up a finger.
‘You want to come with us?’ Molly asks, her words louder than they would be talking to Greta.
Yukio nods.
‘Wait,’ she says. ‘I need to show you something.’ She rushes to her duffel bag, retrieves Tom Berry’s copper pan, hands it to Yukio. He’s immediately confused by the girl’s presentation of the pan.
‘You use it to find gold in creeks,’ Molly says. ‘Look on the back.’ She makes a revolution with her finger. ‘Turn it over,’ she says. And she moves closer to the pilot as he turns the pan over and studies the writing etched on its base. ‘We’re on a great quest,’ Molly says. She runs her finger over the words. Yukio turns his eyes back to Greta, keeps his weapon on her. Molly oblivious to any possible tension in the moment. ‘These are directions and clues to buried treasure,’ she says, wide-eyed. ‘A pile of gold sitting in the ground.’ She holds her palms together like she’s carrying a large gold nugget. ‘Gold!’ she says. She points at Greta. ‘Greta wants to find that gold because she’s convinced no harm can come to her from keeping that gold because she doesn’t believe in curses,’ Molly says, talking too fast because she’s nervous, because she’s on her way to find Longcoat Bob. Because she’s free. ‘All that “hocus-pocus”, she calls it.’ Molly smiles.
Confusion across Yukio’s face. ‘Hocus . . . pocus?’ he says, doing his best to repeat the words accurately.
The pilot turns to Greta, who rolls her eyes.
‘I don’t care about the gold,’ Molly continues. ‘I just want to find Longcoat Bob. He’s the bloke who put a curse on my family because the buried gold was his and my grandfather stole it. But then my grandfather put that gold back because all these terrible things started happening to him and his family members, but even after he put the gold back Longcoat Bob never lifted his curse from my grandfather, Tom, and all those terrible things kept happening.’ Molly is making her own realisations as her explanation is unfolding. ‘And now . . . and now . . . those terrible things are all happening to me.’
Yukio struggles to make the slightest sense of Molly’s words. ‘Curse?’ he says, repeating an English word vaguely familiar to his ear.
‘Yeah, curse,’ Molly says.
Yukio makes a walking gesture with his fingers. ‘You?’ he prompts.
‘We’re walking to the range,’ Molly says, pointing at the two red sandstone plateaus in the distance. ‘We’re going to find the silver road and then we’re going to find Longcoat Bob.’
‘Bob,’ Yukio says.
‘Yeah, Bob,’ Molly says.
Yukio waves his handgun towards the sandstone range.
‘Aruke,’ he says. He waves his gun again.
‘Sorry, I don’t speak Japanese,’ Molly says.
Another walking gesture with his fingers. ‘Aruke.’
‘Walk?’ Molly guesses.
‘Walk,’ Yukio repeats.
Molly turns to Greta. ‘He wants us to walk,’ she says happily.
Greta shakes her head.
Molly throws her duffel bag over her shoulder. ‘You comin’ with us?’ she asks Yukio, bright and optimistic.
‘Aruke,’ Yukio says blankly.
Molly marches off through wetland grass up to her thighs. ‘I think he’s comin’ with us,’ she shouts to Greta, who runs to catch up with her.
Yukio falls in behind them, his handgun pointing at Greta’s back.
‘Have you lost your mind?’ Greta whispers.
‘What?’ Molly ponders, innocently.
‘He’s not coming with us, Molly. You think he parachuted out of his fighter plane and floated all the way down here just so he could take a gentle stroll with us?’
Molly looks back over her right shoulder to see Yukio sloshing through the grass, the handgun still firmly gripped in his right fist. Molly gives him a warm smile, turns back to Greta. ‘He’s gonna help us, Greta,’ she says, never more certain of anything.
‘Molly, wake up,’ Greta says. ‘He’s going to walk us into the foothills of that range and he’s gonna shoot you between the eyes and he’s gonna rape me and if you’re lucky, kid, it won’t be the other way round.’
‘You think he’s a bad one?’ Molly whispers.
‘It doesn’t matter what one he is,’ Greta says. ‘That army came here to kill us, Molly. They’ve got it in for us and the kinda hate they’re carrying is a spell that can’t be lifted. You just be ready to pass me that shovel when I give you the sign.’
‘Okay,’ Molly says.
Yukio watches the blonde-haired woman and the brown-haired girl with the shovel trudge across the soggy floodplain.
‘Greta,’ whispers Molly.
‘Yes,’ Greta whispers back.
‘What’s the sign gonna be?’ Molly asks.
‘It doesn’t matter, Molly, you’ll know the sign when you see it.’
Yukio sees the girl raise her right fist and extend her thumb from it.
‘What about a thumbs-up?’ Molly suggests.
‘I was thinking something a little more subtle,’ Greta says. ‘Just a nod will do. You’ll know the nod when you see it. Keep walking.’
They walk for another thirty yards or so through an open field.
‘Greta,’ Molly whispers.
‘Yes, Molly.’
‘He can’t speak English.’
‘So?’ Greta replies.
‘Maybe the sign could be a secret password that he won’t understand?’ Molly says.
‘Like what?’ Greta asks.
‘Fat barramundi,’ Molly says confidently.
‘Fat barramundi?’ Greta repeats, dubious. ‘Why “fat barramundi”?’
‘Was just thinkin’ about how much I’d go some fried fish for dinner.’
Greta nods.
‘Fat barramundi,’ Molly says. ‘No way a Jap flyboy would have eaten a fat barramundi before.’
‘Okay, Molly,�
�� Greta says. ‘The sign is a secret password and the secret password is “fat barramundi”.’
Molly nods.
Greta marches on, frustrated by their circumstances, the length of the grass scratching her legs, the humidity of the wetlands, the Japanese serviceman with a pistol walking behind her. Molly walks through the grass with a spring in her step, privately thrilled by the unexpected third-party turn in her quest.
‘Greta?’ Molly whispers.
‘Yes, Molly.’
‘Would “Mangrove Jack” work better as a secret password?’
*
Seen from the orange-red sky above and looking down and closer in and closer in, they are three wanderers crossing a vivid floodplain cut by sinuous rivers and wide freshwater channels dotted with lily-fringed waterholes.
The sun low and honeyed. The man in the Japanese military uniform at the back of the group stopping every so often in his tracks to breathe the wild floodplain deep inside him, to take in the vision of all this wild green life. By the edge of a clearwater billabong he pauses briefly to smell a floating vine flower, the kangkong, with its white and pink flowers shaped like trumpets. The intoxicating scent and the depth of the pink colour that deepens and darkens inside the flower’s wide throat. It makes him laugh.
‘What’s he laughing at?’ Molly asks.
‘He’s a nut,’ Greta says.
Yukio turns a full circle on his feet, taking in his setting. He raises his palms to the sky, smiling. He wonders for a moment if this very floodplain is Takamanohara, the Plain of High Heaven, and he crossed into it somehow the moment he left his war brethren flying over Darwin. A part of him surely died back there in that bomb-ravaged town, and maybe that was the part of him that broke prematurely through the gates of the afterlife and this, this sweltering, primordial, vine-strewn utopia, is where Nara waits for him.
‘Maybe it’s the war,’ Molly says.
‘What do you mean?’ Greta asks.
‘It messes with their heads,’ Molly says. ‘I once saw Bluey Scofield acting like this out front of The Vic. He was ravin’ about seeing things on the Somme and then he’d smile at a passing pigeon like it was some kind of angel from heaven.’
Across the plain, a troupe of seven dancing brolgas perform a kind of ballet on the grass, and their will to move, their need to share their strange beauty like this, makes Yukio’s bottom lip fall. He laughs again. ‘Migoto!’ he hollers, in their honour. He claps his hands. An ovation.
A pair of masked lapwing birds fly over his head and he nearly falls on his backside trying to maintain his skyward view of their strange bright-yellow caruncles, which cover their faces like they are wearing yellow pilots’ helmets and the side flaps are oversized and hanging from the bird’s spear-like beak. And he laughs. ‘Migotoooohh!’
Further on, Yukio spots an aquatic frog with its legs glued to a floating lily pad, and he plants one foot in the marshy pond to inspect its wide yellow eyes.
‘Migoto,’ he whispers.
The frog’s green and brown skin resembles a perfect leaf that wraps around its body like a tailored suit. Then the frog leaps to a neighbouring lily pad and the fallen pilot nods in thanks, clapping his hands.
Later, by a flowing freshwater channel, closer to the sandstone plateaus, he stops to marvel at a water python speeding across leaf-strewn ground to the safety of a crack-filled rock wall dividing a row of eucalypts. The snake is three metres long and its back is black and brown like the rocks Yukio keeps picking up and holding in his hands, but the snake’s belly is the colour of full sun. It looks to Yukio like someone must have painted that colour on the snake – vivid yellow oil paint, still wet – but the headstrong snake leaves no winding yellow trail as it moves towards its shelter.
The Japanese pilot is so mesmerised by this snake that Greta, who stands within arm’s reach of the distracted stranger and has noted the pilot has lowered the handgun to his right thigh, sees an opportunity. ‘Fat barramundi!’ she says.
But Molly misses the secret communication because she is standing beside Yukio Miki with her eyes on the leafy ground, equally captivated by the reptile. She smiles at Yukio.
‘Fat barramundi!’ Greta says, louder this time, and Molly finally hears her. But then she turns her eyes to Greta and discreetly shakes her head. No.
She lifts her eyes to Yukio, smiling. ‘Migoto,’ she says, nodding her head knowingly. ‘Very . . . very . . . migoto.’
And Yukio smiles and Molly spots for the first time the light in the eyes of the pilot, the warmth in his smile, his innocence. That is a silver light, she tells herself. A silver light for the silver road, if not the silver screen.
Greta shakes her head, marches on across the floodplain.
*
Wide spaces between them, walking single file. Greta in front, Molly in the middle, Yukio at the back with his eyes on the woman in the emerald dress. He does not know where the woman is heading and he wonders if she does not know either. The brown-haired girl seems to walk by instinct, as if something deep inside her is pushing her thin bones forward. Her ramblings made no sense, even when she pointed at the copper pan in her bag and seemed so determined to express the deep meaning of the words etched into its base.
Now the girl’s feet move faster as the trio near the edge of the severed sandstone range that spreads across the fringe of the floodplain like a fortress for Greek gods.
‘We made it to the range!’ Molly hollers.
The ground changes from boggy grassland to a series of tree-lined rocky inclines shaped like giant whale heads leading to one of the towering sandstone escarpments. The rocky outcrops are slippery to walk up and Yukio loses his footing several times and has to cling to clumps of weed sticking out of the old rocks. Wide bowls have been carved out of the rock by water and wind. Strange and unsettling things in the earth that Yukio has not seen before. Inside these perfectly smooth and circular hollows are old animal bones and coals from long-abandoned fires.
Molly spots birds in the tall trees growing in the shadow of the plateau. A red-backed kingfisher. Blue-faced honeyeaters. She stops and waves Yukio over, puts a finger to her mouth. ‘Ssshhhh.’ She kneels silently and Yukio kneels with her, follows the girl’s pointing finger to a rock fig growing in a deep crevice. He squints and finds the subject of the girl’s fascination: a perfectly still, crimson finch, so brilliant and so fragile and so red it might as well be made of ruby. And Yukio hears the girl talking English and realises quickly she is not talking to him but to the bird.
‘Hello Mr Finch,’ she says. ‘Have you seen Longcoat Bob anywhere around these parts?’
Yukio smiles. That name again. Bob. Easy enough to say. ‘Bob,’ he says, nodding.
Molly nods. ‘Bob,’ she confirms.
And Yukio and Molly stand as the vivid crimson finch flies from the rock fig and shoots deep into the canyon that stretches out before them between the two grand sandstone plateaus divided by a freshwater stream that Molly connects in her head to the channels of the floodplain and, way, way back, to the three crocodile kings of Candlelight Creek. ‘This way,’ she says.
*
Molly sings. ‘Pennies From Heaven’. She sings loud because she wants to hear the echo of her voice climb the canyon walls that are three times the height of the Bank of New South Wales building on Smith Street back in town.
Yukio cups water with his hand and drinks from the thin clear stream meandering through the canyon. Molly and Greta collect dry twigs as kindling for a fire they want to have lit before nightfall.
‘Bing Crosby,’ Molly explains to Yukio despite his lack of understanding. ‘Dottie Drake plays Bing all day in the hair salon. I’ve always liked “Pennies From Heaven”. It’s a song about sky gifts. Bing says the clouds are filled with pennies and whenever it rains, the coins fall from the sky. So you shouldn’t be afraid of storms because them storms are what shake all the pennies from the clouds, and actually we’d be wise to walk outside with our umbrellas upside
down.’ Molly has a thought and it stops her in her tracks. ‘Do you reckon the hair salon is still there, Greta? I hope Dottie got out before the bombs hit.’
Greta keeps her head down, searching a rock platform now for thicker logs. She moves closer to Molly.
‘You reckon anything’s left at all back in town?’ Molly asks. ‘Do ya reckon anyone got—’
‘Molly, shut your trap for a second and listen to me,’ Greta whispers. ‘When the fire starts, you give this feller a nice big can of that corned beef in your bag. We’ll get him nice and cosy and the minute he drops off to sleep, we’ll grab that gun and run like hell.’
‘I don’t think he’s gonna hurt us, Greta,’ Molly says. ‘He’s a good one. I can see it all over him.’ Molly looks over her shoulder to the stream, where Yukio is staring at the water, distant and frozen in his thoughts. ‘He’s just sad, that’s all,’ Molly says. ‘I think he wants to help us.’
‘He’s a loop at best, and the worst ain’t worth thinkin’ about,’ Greta says. ‘You just stay awake and wait for my signal.’
‘“Fat barramundi”?’
‘No, Molly, the signal isn’t gonna be bloody “fat barramundi”. It’s gonna be me grabbing you by the arm and silently dragging you away from the strange-fruit Jap flyboy. You follow?’
Molly nods.
‘You just be sure to stay awake,’ Greta says. ‘Got it?’
‘Got it,’ Molly says.
*
Full stars shimmering in a night sky framed by the canyon walls. A thousand pinholes of silver light breaking through a blanket of black. A frog croaking somewhere wet. Cicadas in the ghost gums, the kind they call the northern double drummer, creating their great wall of sound. A crackling fire on a flat rock by the canyon stream, and on one side of that fire sits Greta Maze with her knees tucked up to her chest and looking through the fire at the Japanese pilot sitting on the other side, who’s scooping salty wet beef from a roughly cut open tin. And soundtracking all of this night sky, star-wrapped scene is the relentless snoring of Molly Hook, the obnoxious nose and throat rattle of it bouncing between the canyon walls.
Greta assesses the snoring girl and rolls her eyes. Molly lasted thirty minutes by the fire before she was dead to the world and now she sleeps, deep and loud, turned on her side on the flat rock, knees pulled to her chest for warmth, arms over her shins. It’s cool and getting cooler in the bottom of the canyon.
All Our Shimmering Skies Page 18