All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  ‘Thanks for the offer, but we’d best be pushing on,’ Greta says, moving forward. But the large man steps sideways to block her.

  The beating of Greta Maze’s heart. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  ‘Please,’ the large man says, dropping the pickaxe to his waist. ‘I’m afraid I must insist.’

  *

  Two thick logs for seats and a stump for a table. A black billy simmers on an iron heat rack stretched across a fire set inside a circle of broken rocks. The large man with one eye holds an enamel cup filled with tea in his left hand. He sips and he appreciates the warmth of the brew.

  Molly holds her tea in two hands, her elbows resting on her knees. She’s staring at the swelling and crusty ulcers across the one-eyed man’s face. She sees his fingers more clearly now, sees how he still holds the teacup comfortably by its handle despite having lost the little finger of his left hand.

  Greta sips her tea and the large man watches her do so and so do the four miners standing behind and to the sides of the improvised tea setting. Each one has his own unique range of visible swellings and lesions across his face and limbs. One of the miners is a red-haired boy, who can’t be much older than Molly. His left cheek and left upper lip are so swollen that it looks like they might swallow up his mouth, which has retreated into his chin.

  ‘Thank you,’ the one-eyed man says.

  ‘For what?’ Greta asks.

  ‘For drinking from my cup.’

  ‘The cup was clean,’ Greta says.

  ‘They always are,’ the one-eyed man says. ‘But few are willing to drink from them.’

  He sips again.

  ‘My name is George Kane,’ he says.

  ‘Greta Maze.’ Greta turns to Molly, the girl’s cue to say her name.

  But Molly isn’t following the conversation. She is too transfixed by the red pool in the well of George Kane’s right eye. He winks his left eye and the action snaps Molly out of her staring. She drops her head to focus on her tea.

  ‘And what’s your name, young lady?’ Kane asks.

  ‘Molly,’ she says. ‘Molly Hook.’

  ‘Go ahead and ask me,’ Kane says.

  ‘Ask you what?’ Molly replies.

  ‘That question on the tip of your tongue.’

  ‘What question?’ Molly asks.

  ‘I know,’ Kane says, smiling. ‘How do I keep my hair so clean all the way out here in the scrub?’ He runs his hand through his thick brown mop. ‘Vinegar!’ he laughs. ‘I wash my hair in vinegar!’

  Molly smiles. ‘I’m sorry I was starin’,’ she says.

  Kane shakes his head. ‘There’s a lot to look at, unfortunately.’

  ‘You boys come over from Channel Island?’ Greta asks.

  ‘You know Channel Island?’

  She nods. ‘I act a bit,’ Greta says. ‘Me and some friends, we were asked by the church to go over and perform for the kids.’ One of the toughest performances of Greta Maze’s fledgling career. Crossing Darwin Harbour and disembarking at the Channel Island Leprosarium. Good money. Bad memories. Singing popular showtunes for a group of children – mostly Aboriginal – living with leprosy and forcibly removed from their families in Darwin and sent to Channel Island. Minimal access to doctors and medicine. Scarce food and running water, even for the visiting theatre troupe. Armies of mosquitoes and flies and an island of dead bodies in shallow graves.

  ‘I didn’t know quite what that place was,’ Kane says. ‘I thought it was a prison at first, but then I realised it was a cemetery. They sent us there to rot. We should have burned that place to the ground.”

  He stands and addresses the men around him. ‘But now we’re here safe in the scrub.’ He smiles. ‘While Australia burns.’

  And the men around him smile and nod their heads and Greta Maze wonders exactly what kind of place they have walked into.

  ‘What do you mean “Australia burns”?’ Greta asks.

  ‘Haven’t you heard?’

  ‘Heard what?’ Molly asks.

  ‘We’re done for,’ Kane says.

  ‘Who’s done for?’ Greta asks.

  ‘Australia,’ he says. ‘It’s done. It’s no more. All those selfish, proud men in red coats that turned into black suits. The ones who came here from across the sea. They thought they could turn this place into a new England. They chased everyone who didn’t look like them out of the cities. And now the Japs have burned all them city princes and princesses to dust.’

  He drops his voice to a whisper. ‘They hit Brisbane with twice the force they hit Darwin,’ he says. ‘Boom. Boom. Boom.’

  Stalking around the campsite now, charged by the electricity of his own visions. ‘Then they moved on to Sydney and all those fat men in all those tall buildings didn’t see the fire coming. They could only stare at it through their office windows. And they watched the heat blister their skin. They watched the fire distort their faces.’

  Seated on the log, Greta slips a hand around Molly’s arm, squeezes it, discreetly shakes her head.

  The girl knows her now. She knows her looks, she trusts them, and this one says this can’t be true, he’s not a good one, Molly.

  ‘And in the reflections of their office windows,’ Kane says. ‘The last thing they ever saw was the monsters they had become.’

  Then Greta sees George Kane whispering to a younger, thinner man with lesions across his bald head. Kane has his back turned to Greta and Molly, and Greta can’t figure out what he’s saying to the bald man, only that he’s saying something he doesn’t want her to hear.

  Greta whispers to Molly. ‘Give me the bag,’ she says.

  Molly unslings the duffel bag and slides it to Greta with her foot.

  Kane turns back around and resumes what Greta notes is rapidly becoming a sermon. ‘And now the meek shall inherit the earth,’ he proclaims. And the men around him nod because they are as easily impressed as they are led.

  Kane finds his seat again on the log in front of Greta and Molly. ‘All of us exiles and outcasts,’ he says. ‘We’ll start all over again. And we’ll be happy and a century from now the people of this land will celebrate the day the bombs of the Imperial Japanese Navy blew greed and avarice into the wind.’

  He takes another sip of tea then throws what’s left into the fire. He turns to speak to Greta, who now has her hands inside the duffel bag. No welcome and no warmth in his voice anymore. Only suspicion. ‘What’s in the bag?’ he asks.

  ‘Just a few tins of food,’ Greta says. ‘Water. Stuff from home.’

  Kane looks deep into her two eyes with his one eye. A long, painful silence.

  ‘There’s no one waiting for you back by that plateau, is there?’ Kane asks.

  Greta is silent. Then she smiles and says, ‘Thank you for your hospitality.’ She taps Molly’s shoulder. Gets up. ‘We’ll leave you fellers to it.’

  Molly stands, gripping Bert the shovel. ‘Thanks for the tea,’ she says.

  George Kane nods at Molly, remaining seated. He nonchalantly waves a finger at the men behind him. They immediately close in around the actress and the gravedigger girl.

  Greta turns to face the men and swiftly pulls the Japanese handgun from the duffel bag. She points it confidently, sweeping her arm across the men.

  ‘Get back,’ she snaps. ‘Back!’

  And George Kane laughs. ‘The gun has no bullets,’ he says. He gets up from the log, struggling to haul his large limbs into motion, then he points to the red-haired boy. ‘Shane over there was quite taken by you girls back by the creek.’

  Shane gives two short snorts that constitute his laughter. Another large man in a hunting jacket turns to Shane and makes fun of his snorting by snorting loudly three times and this makes all the men laugh and they’re laughing now like deranged clowns and their bodies close in on the girls and Greta steps back from them.

  ‘Get back!’ she says, feebly.

  But the bodies come closer and the deranged laughter makes Molly Hook think of her Uncle Aubrey an
d she finds the eyes of the bald man with lesions across his face and his scalp and his mouth is wide and his laughter sounds like a car horn and his hands are reaching for her and all she has in this strange world is her best friend after the sky, Bert the shovel, and she swings him hard at the bald man’s nose and blood rushes from his nostrils as he falls to his knees.

  Greta steps back further from the men, who rush at her now, and she falls into the arms of George Kane, who bear hugs her with all his strength, the crusty welts and scabs across his arms rubbing against her shoulders. The actress stomps her feet on his boots, kicks her heels against his shins.

  Molly turns her head in time to find the red-haired boy charging wildly at her. But the gravedigger girl is wilder and she swings her gravedigger shovel and the root cutting teeth of Bert’s blade meet the red-haired boy’s left ear and the top half of that ear pops away from his head and soars momentarily through the air to land a foot from the crackling campfire. Stunned, the red-haired boy falls to the ground clutching his severed ear, his fingers running through dirt and gravel in search of the rest of it.

  ‘Run, Molly, run!’ Greta shouts, twisting her body in the grip of the heavyset Kane.

  Molly sprints through a gap in the group left by the stunned and bleeding boy.

  And the day sky talks to her now. ‘Run, Molly, run,’ it says. And she listens. She listens so well. She bashes through ferns and figs and palms and her shoulders and legs are scratched by the thorns of weeds. ‘Don’t look back, Molly, don’t look back,’ the day sky says.

  ‘Greta!’ Molly screams, as she turns into the detouring path that took her away from the silver road and down to the bad ones.

  ‘Don’t look back, Molly,’ the day sky says.

  She runs and she runs and she runs.

  ‘Greta!’ she calls to the sky.

  ‘Don’t look back, Molly,’ the day sky says.

  And Molly sprints on through the scrub and she bursts through a fringe of palms back to the side of the creek where she leaned happily against a rock reading the works of William Shakespeare.

  ‘Greta,’ Molly says.

  ‘Don’t look back,’ the day sky says. ‘Run, Molly, run.’

  But she stops. She turns around, sucking air into her lungs, and she knows now why the sky asked her not to look back. The bald man with the bloodied nose is bursting through a natural fern wall and charging at her. She turns to run again but he’s too fast, too filled with rage, and his right hand grips her shoulder and the momentum of his running is enough to drag Molly along the creek bedrock, the skin on her kneecaps and shins tearing away against the sandstone surface, and he drags her to the creek and he dumps her head, face-first, into the water and her world exists only underwater now.

  Clear water. Bubbles from her mouth. Pebbles on the sandy creek floor. The bald man holds her head down and the shock of these actions unfolding within a second causes Molly to suck a belly full of water and that water has nowhere else to go but to circle around her good heart that has been turning, turning, turning to stone.

  *

  George Kane dragging Greta along the ground by her right arm. The man in the hunting jacket dragging her by her left arm. Greta kicks uselessly at the earth.

  ‘Let me go!’ she screams. ‘Fucking animals. Animals! Let me go!’

  There is spit coming from Kane’s mouth. Sweat across his face. He turns to a man in a black stockman’s cap with a red work shirt and braces.

  ‘Kenny,’ Kane says. ‘Go help Hoss with the girl.’

  Kenny runs off towards the thin path Molly ran down moments ago. Kane points at Shane, the red-haired boy, now with a rag pushed hard against his left ear, still stunned by the actions of the gravedigger girl.

  ‘Crank the plant up!’ Kane barks.

  ‘She chopped my ear off!’ the boy says, sounding as hurt by this event as he is confused.

  ‘Just get the fuckin’ crusher started!’ Kane hollers.

  And Greta hears the spitting of oil inside a rusting generator and then she hears the movement of cranks and pulley systems coming to life again and she’s being dragged along on her back and she can see flashes of cloud and blue sky and she leans her head back hard to her left to see where she’s being taken.

  Greta screams, a primal howl. Deep terror in it. But rage in it, too. Fight. She thrashes along the ground and an arm slips free and she punches at her captors. The man in the hunting jacket kicks her hard in the stomach and the blow winds her and she sucks deep for breaths that don’t fill her lungs.

  ‘Lemme go,’ she says, but the words barely come out.

  George Kane stands over her now as she lies flat on the ground, his face – his disfigured and crusted face – close to hers. His right hand is big enough to grip both of her cheeks and squish her lips together.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ he sneers. ‘Don’t you see, pretty girl? We cannot let you go, pretty one. You will run back to what’s left of your home and you will tell the survivors of that airborne apocalypse that you have found a paradise deep in the scrub and they will come for us and they will bring all their fear and prejudice with them and they will turn our new sanctuary into the same hell they just watched burn to dust.’

  Then the thumping. Greta turns her head and sees the three rusted steel-block stamps piled on top of each other thumping into flattened earth. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Kane grips Greta by the neck and pulls her. Closer, closer, closer to the thumping stamps of the crushing plant, which feels alive to Greta, a living thing of metal and oil, monstrous and hungry, with rotating arms and jaws and a need to crush her skull like a block of mineral-rich quartzite.

  Kane shouts at the red-haired boy. ‘Rope!’

  *

  Molly drowning. Molly with nothing left. The bald man’s right arm forcing her head into the still creek water. She is Ophelia now in the grip of the brook. She will not have her Christian burial. Maybe she doesn’t deserve one, anyway. She thinks of her father in the fork of the tree in Hollow Wood Cemetery. She should have buried him properly. She counted at least six holes the Japs had dug deep enough with their sky bombs. She could have pulled Horace from that tree and placed him in one of those holes and sent him back to the earth that made him.

  But she had to walk away. She had to find Longcoat Bob before it was too late. She had to find the sorcerer before her heart turned to stone like her father’s did so close to the end. A stone heart like his brother’s, like her uncle’s. Uncle Aubrey. The bald man’s face, she remembers. It was disfigured. But beneath the bald man’s swellings and lesions was a face that reminded her of her uncle’s face. Could that be possible? A dark magic, perhaps. The work of Longcoat Bob? She left her uncle to squirm and rot in the Darwin sun back there in Hollow Wood Cemetery. But maybe Longcoat Bob resurrected Aubrey Hook’s soul, or the earth did, and placed it in the body of the deranged bald man whose arm seems so filled with strength and hate as he holds her down, down, down inside her water death.

  Sam said the earth would rebel. Sam said the earth would not want her here. But who said Molly Hook was not allowed to rebel too? Dig, Molly, dig. Dig for your courage. Dig for your rage.

  And the gravedigger girl thrashes her head in the water and pushes her head back against the hand that holds her down. Her legs kick and kick and thrash against the rocks on the surface and then, as if the earth is responding to her will, relenting to it, the hand holding her hair and her head falls away, the pressure eases. And the clear water surrounding her turns red.

  Her head is still underwater when she sees the body of the bald man fall in and down into his own water death, the eyes open on his disfigured face, looking back at Molly. Such surprise on that face, such confusion. Then Molly’s underwater eyes find the source of his puzzlement: a hole in his stomach, leaking blood into the water in the languid way the smoke from Bogart’s cigarette can fill an office. Blood folding in the water like cirrus clouds in a blue sky.

  Molly lifts her head out of the w
ater and sucks air into her lungs and turns to find the Japanese pilot standing above her, his sword fixed in his right hand, its short blade red with the blood of the man who now floats face down in the creek.

  ‘Yukio,’ Molly whispers. She breathes again, hard and fast, her backside flat on the rocky creek bank. Soaking wet.

  ‘Yukio Miki,’ she says, pointing at the pilot, between further sharp inhalations. ‘The good one.’ Gathering her breath, but needing to acknowledge this. ‘I knew it, Yukio, I knew it.’

  The wonder of all this. She points at him again. ‘The good one who fell from the sky.’

  *

  Thump. The steel block stamps meet the ground and the brief shockwaves of that meeting reverberate beneath Greta’s flat back. Thump.

  ‘Who told you about us?’ Kane barks.

  ‘Nobody!’ Greta says. Her arms are outstretched and her hands are bound by rope that tears at the skin on her wrists. Circles of blood around her ankles where her feet have been roped together too tight.

  ‘Who else knows you’re here?’ Kane blasts.

  ‘Nobody does,’ Greta says. ‘Please. Please. Nobody knows we’re here. We came looking for someone.’

  Thump. Thump. Thump. Steel blocks smashing against the earth.

  ‘Who are you looking for?’

  ‘The girl,’ Greta says – there are tears in her eyes now – ‘the girl believes she’s had some sort of curse put on her. She wants to find the blackfeller who can take the curse away before her heart turns to stone.’

  She shakes her head. It sounds foolish saying it out loud. She breathes hard. ‘That’s the truth,’ she says. ‘You let us walk out of here and we won’t tell a soul about this place. I swear that to you.’

  Greta pants. Panicked. Primal. Kane studies the actress’s eyes.

  ‘Throw me that bag,’ Kane says to the red-haired boy, who immediately slings Molly’s duffel bag to his boss. Kane kneels, dumps the bag’s contents at his feet. He inspects a couple of food tins. Flips through the Shakespeare. Scans the gold pan briefly and tosses it aside. Then he holds the blood-red rock up to Greta’s eyes.