All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  PUBLIC NOTICE

  I, Tom Berry, hereby proclaim my solemn vow to return all the gold I recently acquired to the godforsaken hole in which I found it. It is with great displeasure that I must publicly acknowledge the growing hysteria and muddy rumour that has swirled in recent months around the Berry family. I do not believe in blackfeller magic. I do, however, believe in plain bad luck. And ever since I brought this gold back to Darwin, it’s the only kind of luck my family has seen. I swear, under God, Longcoat Bob told me that gold did not belong to anyone. But, I am man enough to admit, at no time did he say that gold should belong to me. I have been found guilty of my own pride and my own greed. I do not believe in curses. But I believe a man should admit when he’s wrong and, where possible, he should endeavour to right his wrongs. I will travel back into the deep country as soon as I am able and I will put that gold back where I found it. And, should Longcoat Bob’s finger indeed wield a dark and inexplicable power and should he still be pointing that finger at my family, I expect him to promptly stick that finger someplace else.

  Aubrey Hook howls again and his laughter fills the space between two walls of a jagged sandstone canyon. The double sun falls in the sky. He stops by a swamp to feast at a gooseberry shrub that has dropped an entire season’s worth of green tomato-like wild fruits, some twenty-six of which Aubrey shovels down his throat the way he used to shovel grave dirt into buckets.

  ‘Berries!’ he howls to the sky. ‘Tom’s berries!’

  He drops his strides immediately after feasting on the gooseberries and he squats and releases a diarrhoea torrent onto a patch of grey sand. After cleaning up as best he can, he fills his right pants pocket with more gooseberries and he fills his left pants pocket with a handful of eucalyptus leaves that he rips from a young stringybark. Further along his frenzied journey, he finds a rusting billy can in a natural rock dish in a sandstone outcrop and he lights a night fire from gathered sticks and paperbark that he ignites with one of his lit cigarette papers. He boils the eucalyptus leaves in the billy can and drinks from the can then splashes the boiling water over the festering bite wound in his shoulder.

  He lies by the fire with his arms gripping his pounding chest, his body shaking. He stares into the fire and he repeats the words of Walt Whitman. ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution.”’

  And inside the fever and inside the flames he sees a memory of himself. A young man, tall and handsome. That young man kept his promise. He survived the rockfall that killed his hate-filled father, Arthur Hook, and he held true to his private pact. He had only love in his heart that Sunday afternoon when he rode his horse to Violet Berry’s home on the Darwin waterfront. He roped his ride out of view of the house’s windows to lengthen the odds that Tom Berry might see a son of Arthur Hook approaching his yard. He walked to the front door unseen and was about to knock when he heard Violet’s laughter echoing from the backyard. Aubrey trod lightly down the side of the house and, half-hidden by the curve of a rusting water tank, he spied Violet beneath a sprawling backyard milkwood tree. And he saw the awful reason for her laughter: the hands of the young man who lay beside her, squeezing her ribs. And then he saw the awful owner of Violet Berry’s heart. That soft young man beside her. That vibrant and joyful and weak young man beside her. That second son of Arthur Hook. His own beloved brother, Horace.

  Aubrey Hook went riding alone along the waterfront that Sunday afternoon. He took his horse to the highest point he could find along the Dripstone Cliffs overlooking the beach stretching beyond the Rapid Creek inlet. He gave the horse a fifty-yard run-up and he heeled it hard in its belly and it galloped towards a blind clifftop horizon. They were but ten yards from the edge when something inside Aubrey’s heart caused him to pull hard on the reins and circle away from the void. This certain something inside him would prove in the decades to come to be a light in all of his endless dark hours. Nothing else would prove so sustaining. Not love. Not work. Not liquor. The only thing that ever saved Aubrey Hook was hate.

  ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution’”’ he mumbles at the fire. ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution.”’

  Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. And if he says these words long enough, then she might return to him.

  ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution,”’ he says. ‘“And I know the amplitude of time.”’

  Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

  ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution and I know the amplitude of time.”’

  Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

  ‘“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.”’

  And he sees the face of Molly Hook’s mother.

  ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution,”’ he mumbles. ‘“And I know the amplitude of time” . . . “Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.”’

  And he sees the face of Violet. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

  THE THIRD SKY GIFT

  OPHELIA

  She is drawn to the rapids. She is sixteen years old and walking barefoot along a plateau buried in blue sky. Her infant son is four months old and curled comfortably inside a sling carrier made of bush string, paperbark and cane strips. From terraces high above, a river plummets into a deep, craggy, sandstone gorge and the force of the great and relentless water rush against the rocks sprays a fine mist onto her face even as she stands some twenty-five yards back from the lip of the gorge.

  She climbs up the side of the clearwater rapids and stops at a deep pool where the current moves more slowly. She lays her baby down inside the sling on a flat rock and the boy’s eyes find points of colour and movement and light and settle on his mother’s eyes staring back at his. But then the mother’s eyes start weeping and then the mother’s eyes turn to the pool. And she walks away from her baby. Reaching the water’s edge, she plants a hand on a large water-worn boulder for balance, finds her footing among the loose black rocks on the surface of the deep emerald pool. She dives under the water and propels herself only with her legs, mermaid-like, emerges with a deep breath, then breast-strokes in a circle before turning to float on her back with her arms and legs outstretched and her eyes filled with all of the blue in all of the sky. Just one fluffy fat cloud and she tells herself it looks like a big white witchetty grub without its yellow head. She can hear herself breathe and she can hear the rush of the rapids downstream. And she lets the water push her.

  The witchetty grub starts to crawl across the blue roof, but that’s just an illusion. The cloud isn’t moving. She is. The slow, gentle push of the current. Push, push, push, and the girl drifts slowly along the surface of the water towards the gorge.

  And to the sky she makes a wish. She wishes to be water. Because water has no feeling. Water feels no pain. Water is never afraid. Water feels no sorrow. And she thinks about the life she could have had if she’d known how to move through this complex earth the way water always knows how to move through it.

  THE SKY BURIED TREASURE

  The stone country. Three wanderers of the silver road that turns and twists – just like a python turns and twists as it slides along the base of a nearby ironwood tree, its movement and its size drawing applause from a foreign spectator named Yukio Miki.

  Single file. Greta Maze walks in front and Molly Hook pads along in the middle, turning her head back regularly to find the strange pilot stopped before another natural northern Australian point of wonder. He bends down to a frill-necked lizard resting on a burnt log, and the lizard fans its red frills in defiance of the smiling man’s inspection. He passes a eucalypt tree with a hole in its trunk the diameter of his own head. Molly watches Yukio insert his right arm into the hole, pull his arm out and study his right fist, now crawling with orange and white termites.

  Yukio watches Molly reach into a nest of stingless black bees wedged between two branches of a stringybark tree and pull out a handful of deep red sugarbag
honey, which looks to Yukio like melting wax. She drops a dollop of the honey in Yukio’s hands and she eats a dollop herself. Greta finds another nest nearby and grabs a handful of the dark, strong-flavoured gloop too. Yukio tentatively licks the honey in his palm. Liking the taste, he slips it all into his mouth and his eyes light up like his smile. ‘Migoto!’ he says.

  ‘Very, very . . . migoto,’ Molly says, licking her hands.

  At a slow-moving freshwater stream that cuts across the silver road, Greta relieves herself behind a thick wall of shrubs with red pendulous flowers whose small pink fruits sprout tentacle-like fibres that make the fruits look like they’ve been snap-frozen in a state of self-combustion.

  Yukio follows Molly to the stream. He stands above her as she kneels down.

  She points two fingers to her own eyes and then she points to the stream.

  ‘You,’ she says. ‘Watch for crocs.’

  Yukio is blank.

  ‘You be on the lookout,’ Molly says, pointing to her eyes again and then pointing to the water. ‘Crocodiles,’ she says, forming her hands into a snapping crocodilian mouth. ‘They’ll drag you down underwater. Wedge you under a rock and let you tenderise for a month.’

  Yukio nods, casting a keen and immediate eye across the stream.

  Molly places Bert the shovel on the muddy ground beside her boots and reaches into the duffel bag. She pulls out the blood-red rock that she found inside her dead mother’s chest. It’s stained now. Covered in splatters of blood from the smashed head of the one-eyed tin-miner monster. Molly places the rock in the clearwater stream and rubs the monster’s blood away. “Out damn spot. Out, I say,” she says to herself.

  Yukio studies the girl’s actions, curious.

  Molly feels him looking over her shoulder. ‘It’s my mum’s heart,’ she says. ‘It’s what happens at the end of the turning, Yukio. It’s what Longcoat Bob done.’

  Molly looks up at Yukio. The weight of the story across her face. ‘He said our hearts would turn to stone and my mum’s heart slowly did. And now I can feel my heart going that way, too. It’s getting heavier, Yukio. I feel it inside me. I’ve stopped caring about people.’

  She looks at the sword hanging from his belt. ‘I watched you cut the throats of those men back there and I felt nuthin’ for it,’ she says. ‘Do you follow me, Yukio?’ she asks, but she doesn’t care if he doesn’t. It feels good to say it out loud and maybe even better saying it to someone who can’t understand. ‘I wasn’t scared,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t sorry. If anything, I was glad you did it to ’em.’

  She studies Yukio’s face. Blank but for his eyes, which say he’s listening hard to the gravedigger girl.

  ‘Can you understand anything I’m saying to you?’

  Yukio is silent. He smiles uncertainly. ‘You,’ he says, enigmatically, repeating the last word he heard.

  ‘You can’t understand a word, can you?’ Molly asks.

  ‘You,’ he says again.

  Molly nods, smiling. She turns back to the water, stares at the red rock in her hand. ‘That’s how it starts,’ she says. ‘You go numb. You stop caring about people. You start to hate things. You only care about yourself and all the things swimming around in your own head.’

  She grips the rock, squeezes it hard like she wants to break it in two, but it has no give in it. ‘Then you wake up one day and your heart has finally turned all the way to rock and you feel nothing whatsoever, so it makes no difference if you’re here or if you’re not. This rock can’t feel nuthin’, Yukio. No matter how much I could feel for it, it can’t feel nuthin’ for me. Why am I even carrying it, Yukio? It can’t feel nuthin’. It can’t give nuthin’ back. I should just let it go. I should just drop it right here and let it sink to the bottom of the creek and it can sit there feelin’ nuthin’ for a million years.’

  Yukio notices a cloud of colour mixing with the water. A thin layer of red-brown clay or dirt pulling away from the rock, like it’s losing a layer of skin. It looks to Molly like the blood of the bald man she saw rising like smoke in the creek water.

  ‘It’s bleeding,’ Molly says.

  She watches it bleed, bleed its colour into the water and she watches the folds and waves of that colour disappear into the slow current. And at first she doesn’t realise that Yukio is kneeling beside her now. Then he’s gently lifting her arm up out of the water and he’s reaching for the blood-red rock and holding it in his cupped hands. He dries the rock with the inside of his flight jacket and he places it gently in the duffel bag. Then he hands the bag by its strap to Molly.

  ‘You,’ he says, and Molly hears something instructive in the word. Something encouraging. Something with care in it.

  *

  Purple sky with streaks of pink and red, streaks of fire. Three wanderers moving under and over sandstone ledges, around freestanding rock outcrops. A shifting landscape, stone country turning to brief rainbow-coloured clusters of orchids and banksias and woollybutt trees, then turning back again to stone country filled with runs of misshapen boulders that the gravedigger girl and the actress and the pilot who fell from the sky must clamber over for two, three, four miles.

  Yukio tells himself to stop sneaking glances at the actress, but his eyes have a will of their own and they keep finding new small wonders in the things the blonde woman does. The way she helps Molly over two slippery moss-covered rocks. The way she tucks a clump of that wild hair behind her right ear. The way she pretends not to see the way he looks at her and then the way she decides to stare straight back at him, looking so deeply that he doesn’t speak a word inside his mind in case she hears it. And then he must look away from her because he feels she could turn him into a scared boy with a single glance, and then he must look to the sky for his manhood. And he looks at the purple and pink afternoon sky, he talks to it because when he talks to the sky he is talking to Nara. ‘Can you see me, Nara? I was coming to you. I am coming to you, Nara. I promise. Will you wait for me?’

  *

  At a muddy billabong, Greta spots a thick-bodied, light-brown snake with a small head shaped like a bulldog’s head. The snake burrows itself down into a sloshy bed of mud to hide, but Molly spots the black and scaly tiger prints of its skin before it disappears. ‘File snake,’ she says, digging Bert deep into the mud. She heaves a mud load from the ground and the file snake is pulled up with it, wriggling and fretting on the shovel blade and then leaping off it towards Yukio’s military boots. He steps back with a brief yelp and only has a moment to see the snake’s head before it’s chopped off by the side of Bert’s blade. Molly picks up the file snake’s still wriggling but headless body and hands it to Yukio.

  ‘Hold this for me, will ya?’ she asks.

  *

  Yukio builds a tepee-shaped campfire out of dry branches and paperbark and when the fire has turned to hot coals Molly drops the file snake on top of them, whole and unskinned. While she waits for the snake to cook she reads Romeo and Juliet aloud to Yukio. She acts out Romeo’s passages in her best Tyrone Power voice, fair Verona by way of Universal Pictures, Los Angeles, California. ‘“If I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle sin is this, my lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand, to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”’ Molly’s eyes light up with the matinee-idol thrill of Romeo Montague’s boldness.

  When she acts out the words of Juliet she channels a lovesick and exasperated Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind. ‘“Come, gentle night,”’ she gasps, ‘“come, loving, black-browed night; give me my Romeo; and, when I shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine, that all the world will be in love with night.”’

  And the night comes and Molly cuts up the file snake by flamelight with Yukio’s wakizashi, slicing its fat and juicy but stringy flesh into segments the size of sausages, which Yukio and Greta chew and suck and swallow down with deep gratitude. In the flickering flamelight Molly takes a long moment to admire Yukio’s shortswo
rd. She runs a light finger across the cutting edge and that finger finds the engraving of a butterfly above the sword’s hilt.

  ‘Why a butterfly?’ Molly asks, holding the image up to Yukio.

  Yukio nods.

  ‘Butterfly?’ Molly repeats.

  Yukio nods.

  ‘Butterfly,’ Yukio says.

  ‘Yes, it’s a butterfly,’ Molly says. ‘But why do you have a butterfly engraved on your sword?’

  Yukio is silent for a long moment. He smiles. ‘Butterfly,’ he repeats without confidence.

  Molly tears a mouthful of snake flesh from its crispy skin and turns to Greta. ‘He can’t understand a thing we’re sayin’,’ she says, her words muffled by the snake meat.

  ‘I can’t understand a thing you’re sayin’ when you talk with half a snake in your gob,’ Greta replies. She looks at Yukio and Yukio looks back at her. Greta smiles back at him. ‘I reckon he understands enough,’ she says.

  ‘I’m gonna test him,’ Molly says.

  ‘How about you quit ramblin’ and just eat your mud snake before it goes cold?’

  But Molly doesn’t take to that suggestion. She lifts her head to the stars in the sky, but the words that come from her mouth are not related to the stars.

  ‘I think he’s handsome,’ she says.

  ‘Molly!’ Greta shrieks, short and flustered.

  Molly continues to talk to the stars and Yukio’s eyes follow Molly’s to the heavens. ‘He has a smile like Clark Gable,’ she says, staring deep into the night sky.

  ‘Stop it, Molly,’ Greta says gently.

  ‘I think he’s smitten with you,’ Molly says, head up still. ‘He’s been staring at you all day. And I saw you staring at him once, too!’ She chuckles to herself.