All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  ‘Molly, that’s enough!’ Greta says, louder than she had intended.

  Yukio whips his head around to Greta and she is forced to ease his curiosity with a smile and a shake of her head. ‘She does love those stars,’ Greta says, pointing upwards.

  Yukio nods, smiles.

  *

  Three wanderers flat on their backs around a campfire, staring up at the stars. Molly’s fingers turn into a pair of scissors. “Cut him out in little stars”, she says to herself, and when she cuts out the face of Romeo from the star-filled night sky it’s the face of Sam Greenway she sees. Sam Greenway, hunter of buffalo, star-crossed thief of hearts.

  Greta’s eyes are closed but she does not sleep. She still hears the thump of the rock stamp from the tin mine worked by the monsters. The fear of it lingers and that fear reminds her of hopelessness and pressure and those things remind her of the hospital room and the baby in her arms so she opens her eyes to fill her mind instead with a cinema screen of pulsing stars.

  Still night. No wind this deep in the country. The sound of cicadas and the sound of wood popping and crackling in the fire, the skin layers of a dry ironwood log the size of a full Christmas ham being eaten away by flame. Nothing more but the night.

  And then Yukio Miki speaks.

  ‘Yukio . . . had wife,’ he says. ‘Nara.’ He thinks on his words. He thinks on his English, a hundred or so words that he might be able to drag up from his tired mind to answer the girl’s question. ‘Died,’ he says. ‘Sick . . . very sick.’

  Greta turns her head to see the pilot talking to the sky on the other side of the fire. She looks at Molly and her puzzled face says the same thing Greta’s does. He can speak English.

  ‘Yukio held . . . held . . . arms . . .’ he says. He’s crying now. He holds his own chest. ‘Yukio . . . speak . . . Nara. No . . . afraid. No afraid. Yukio . . . promise . . . promise. Nara . . . change. Nara . . . fly away. Nara . . . still beautiful.’

  Molly and Greta prop themselves up on their elbows, waiting for the pilot to say something else. He turns his back to them and lies on his side, closes his eyes. Only one more line to say before he sleeps and it comes out slowly and clearly.

  ‘Nara . . . is . . . butterfly.’

  *

  In the dawn light, they pass three large spherical boulders left balancing and exposed by erosion on a ridgeline that lights up in the rising sun.

  ‘Look, that’s us,’ Molly says. ‘Greta, that’s you up front, the bigger boulder. That’s me in the middle, the little one. And that’s Yukio up the back. See it, Greta, see?’

  ‘I see it, Molly,’ Greta says, rubbing sleep from her eyes as she hauls her body over several jagged sandstone rocks.

  Molly stops abruptly and Yukio and Greta stop with her.

  ‘What is it?’ Greta asks, concerned.

  Molly swings her head around. She breathes the morning air in deep through her nose. She looks up at the sky, shimmering with pinks and reds slowly transforming to blues. She breathes in the trees, the rocks, the insects beneath the rocks, the lizards beneath the dirt, the worms beneath the lizards, the dirt beneath her fingernails, the blood beneath her skin.

  ‘What if we’re the treasure?’ she asks. She looks back up at the sky. ‘I’d try to hide us, too. That sky is the lid of a treasure chest. That sky is a blanket. Or a cloak.’

  Molly turns to Yukio, who struggles to understand the girl.

  ‘We are treasure buried by the sky,’ Molly says.

  A brown and emerald-green bird in the sky makes a kak-kak-kak sound and spreads its wings wide to show two white coin-shaped dots on their undersides.

  ‘Dollarbird,’ Molly says. And she talks back to it. ‘Kak-kak-kak.’

  Yukio joins in from behind. ‘Kak-kak-kak,’ he says, laughing. ‘He . . . say . . . “Good morning . . . Molly . . . Hook.”’

  Molly smiles. The bird makes another call. Kak-kak-kak.

  Molly turns back to Yukio.

  ‘He just asked us around to his place for breakfast,’ she says. ‘He’s got fresh coffee and he’s fried a bunch of eggs and some bacon steaks as thick as my head.’

  Molly responds to the bird’s kind invitation. ‘Sorry, mate, can’t stop. We’ve got to find Longcoat Bob. You know where he is, Mr Dollarbird?’

  ‘Bob,’ Yukio says. ‘Long . . . coat . . . Bob.’

  ‘Yeah, Longcoat Bob,’ Molly says. ‘Didn’t realise you spoke such good English, Yukio Miki?’

  Yukio raises his forefinger and thumb, leaves a small gap between both. ‘Little . . . little,’ he says. ‘English . . . come . . . Sakai . . . Molly . . . speak . . . English . . . good,’ he says.

  ‘You bet your arse I do, Yukio Miki,’ Molly says. ‘I’m poetic. Poetic and graceful.’

  She spots a large army of green ants building a nest between two thin twig branches of a flimsy tree with floppy green leaves. ‘Look at this, Yukio,’ Molly whispers, leaning in to the tree where a line of ants with amber bodies and glowing jade-coloured abdomens are carrying a white grub along a designated worker road on a branch. ‘They make their homes out of leaves. Some of the ants are the tough ones who will work together to hold the leaves up and some of the ants are the clever ones who will weave the leaves together and some of them are gluers who use that white stuff they’re carrying to stick all the leaves in place.’

  Yukio releases a brief sigh of awe. ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘See the bridge?’ Molly asks. The ants have built a bridge out of their own connected bodies to create a shortcut for the gluers wanting to access a branch below them.

  ‘I wish that feller Adolf Hitler could see this,’ Molly whispers.

  ‘Hitler?’ Yukio echoes, confused.

  ‘Yeah,’ Molly says. ‘We could get Hitler and what’s his name, Mussalino . . .

  ‘Mussolini,’ Yukio says.

  ‘Yeah, Mussolini,’ Molly says. ‘We get Hitler, Mussolini and Winston Churchill all together and they could come and look at this ant bridge for a while. Calm themselves down a bit. Just watching some green ants working for an hour or two.’

  Yukio turns to the girl for a moment, puzzled by her words.

  ‘Sam says he once saw a group of these fellers combining their strength to drag a dead honeyeater bird back to their nest,’ Molly says. ‘That’s like you and me carryin’ a brewery home for after-dinner drinks. These fellers will build this home for themselves and they’ll take care of the other insects on the branch as well. They’ll protect the little caterpillars and aphids around them who thank them for the protection by shooting honeydew from their arses.’ Molly nods her head in reverence. ‘Yep, gotta bow down to the aphids, Yukio, even their shit tastes like sugar. These ants drink honeydew like my old man drinks plonk.’

  Drank, Molly tells herself. Drank. Her old man doesn’t drink anymore because she asked for the sky gifts.

  ‘Plonk?’ Yukio repeats.

  ‘Yeah, plonk,’ Molly says. ‘Grog. Slops. Piss. Plonk.’

  Yukio then watches Molly grab a green ant by its head and bite its backside clean off. ‘They’re tasty, too,’ Molly says.

  She eats another. ‘Try one,’ she says, nodding to the ants. ‘But just bite the arse, not the head.’

  ‘Arse,’ Yukio says. ‘Not head.’

  The Japanese fighter pilot eats the arse of a green ant. ‘Ooohhh!’ he says.

  Molly nods. ‘Tastes like mint,’ Molly says.

  ‘Mint,’ Yukio nods.

  ‘Good for a sore throat.’

  Molly grips her duffel bag strap and takes one last look at the ant nest.

  ‘Yep, them ants, they’re the ant’s pants,’ she says.

  She continues along the path and Yukio walks with her.

  ‘Ant’s . . . pants,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah,’ Molly says, ‘that’s Australian for “the bee’s knees”.’

  Yukio doesn’t follow.

  Greta watches these interactions unfold, shaking her head.

  ‘Look, Yukio,’
says Molly, ‘you’re probably gonna be spending a bit of time here in Australia, so I guess you should learn how to speak like one of us.’

  Yukio struggles to understand but nods his head anyway. Molly strolls on, using Bert the shovel like a walking stick.

  ‘If you walk into a pub here, let’s say, I don’t think it would be good for you to be speaking all that Japanese,’ Molly says. ‘People talk different in those pubs. They’ve got their own language and it’s not Japanese, but it’s not English either.’

  ‘Not . . . English?’ Yukio asks.

  ‘“This crow eater had a fair dinkum blue with the trouble and strife,”’ Molly says. ‘That’s Australian for “The man from South Australia had a genuine disagreement with his wife.”’

  Greta, who is walking five yards ahead, turns to smile at Molly.

  ‘If you want a meat pie, you ask for “a dog’s eye”,’ Molly says. ‘If you don’t know where some place is then you can say it’s in “Woop Woop”.’

  ‘Woop . . . Woop,’ Yukio repeats.

  ‘If you’re out of money, you say you haven’t got a brass razoo.’ Molly adopts her thickest outback Australian drawl. ‘Haven’t got a brass razoo, so I’m gonna shoot through.’

  ‘Shoot . . . through,’ Yukio says.

  ‘Yeah, you’ve gotta go,’ Molly says. ‘You’ve gotta leave. Shoot through.’

  ‘Shoot . . . through,’ Yukio repeats.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ Molly says. ‘But slow it down and stretch it out: “Shyuuuut theruuuuuu”.’

  Yukio ponders her words and responds. ‘Shyuuuuut theruuuuuu.’

  ‘That’s it, Yukio,’ she says. ‘Now here’s what you say if you need a shit . . .’

  *

  The silver road lost its lustre long ago, the peppering of shimmering mica flakes slowly giving way to rocks and pebbles and thin stretches of dirt covered in rock wallaby prints and the tail-drag marks of black wallaroos.

  They pass a group of brilliant green and yellow figbirds fussing about in the upper strata of a cluster of tall fig trees. The pilot and the actress walking side by side in silence now. Mica flakes beneath their shoes. Bird whistles. Molly has skipped ahead.

  ‘Thank you,’ Greta says. Yukio turns to Greta, confused.

  ‘Thank you for saving me,’ she says. ‘You saved me from those men.’

  Yukio nods. They walk on in silence for another minute, a long one.

  ‘I’ve never killed anyone before,’ Greta says.

  Yukio thinks on this for a moment.

  ‘Greta Maze . . . no kill . . .’ he says, shaking his head, pointing back over his shoulder to the tin mine, to the recent past. ‘Yukio kill . . . man.’

  Greta takes a breath. ‘That’s nice of you to say, but I think I might have helped a bit,’ she says.

  Another long pause.

  ‘War,’ Yukio says, shaking his head.

  Greta can only assume what that means and she takes it to mean that Yukio believes one-eyed giants of the woods act differently amid the pressures of war.

  ‘Guess you might have killed someone before?’ she asks.

  Yukio looks at Molly. He nods only once. He watches the girl as her eyes follow the soaring flight path of a gold and green pigeon with a rose-pink crown.

  ‘I thought it was beautiful what you said last night,’ Greta says.

  Yukio stiffens.

  ‘What you said about your wife,’ she says.

  Yukio nods.

  ‘Where were you going?’ Greta asks.

  Yukio is confused.

  ‘In your plane,’ Greta says. ‘When we saw you come down? Where were you going?’

  Yukio looks at Greta. Her face, her green eyes the colour of her dress. Her hair when it moves in the light like that. He looks away from her and he’s saved from the moment – saved from feelings he does not understand – by Molly running back to him.

  ‘Yukio!’ she hollers. ‘Yukio!’

  Her hands are cupped, holding something inside them.

  ‘I’ve got a gift for you,’ she says. She uncups her hands and a butterfly with flapping wings the colours of a tiger launches itself haphazardly into the sky.

  ‘Butterfly,’ Molly rejoices.

  ‘Butter . . . fly.’ Yukio smiles.

  Greta walks on ahead by herself. Molly and Yukio watch the tiger butterfly disappear into the thick vine scrub lining the path.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said last night,’ Molly says. ‘You said your wife didn’t just die.’ She stops and thinks harder on what she’s trying to say. ‘Well, ummm, she didn’t just go into the ground.’

  Yukio turns to the girl, expressionless. Molly continues.

  ‘You said she turned into a butterfly,’ she says. ‘What a beautiful thing to turn into.’

  Yukio nods, silently.

  ‘I lost my mum when I was seven years old,’ Molly says.

  Yukio nods, silently. Molly tells Yukio Miki again about the curse of Longcoat Bob. She tells him about her home at Hollow Wood Cemetery. A place where she helped her father and her uncle bury people in dirt. She hoped for so long that there was more to death than dirt. ‘Then you come along and say there’s butterflies,’ she says.

  They walk along silently for a stretch, passing a rocky vine thicket studded with pale grey trees with shiny dark green leaves and bright orange berries.

  ‘Them Japanese bombs blew Hollow Wood up,’ Molly says. ‘Them Japanese bombs blew my dad to bits.’

  ‘I sorry,’ Yukio says.

  ‘Nah, I know it wasn’t you, Yukio,’ Molly says. ‘I didn’t see no place for bombs on your little plane.’

  She kicks a rock the size of a tennis ball with her right boot. It rolls along for ten feet or so and she kicks it off the path with another solid boot.

  ‘But maybe my mum and dad transformed, too?’ she says. ‘Maybe they’re butterflies now. Or maybe they’re the grass like Walt Whitman says, or maybe they’re the sky.’

  Molly looks up to the blue sky. Thin day sky clouds like flour dusting a bread loaf. ‘The day sky and the night sky,’ Molly says.

  ‘Day sky.’ Yukio nods. ‘Night sky.’

  ‘Night skies tell no lies,’ Molly says.

  ‘Night skies tell no lies,’ Yukio repeats, smiling.

  The three of them stop to drink from a thin freshwater creek. Molly shows Yukio her grandfather’s gold pan. She runs her fingers along the line on the flat underside.

  ‘This was the first gift from the sky,’ Molly says. ‘It’s leading us to Longcoat Bob.’

  She looks to the blue sky again. It’s now filled with high puffs of small round clouds that look to Molly like the scales on a black bream. ‘Then I asked the sky to drop them bombs on Hollow Wood,’ Molly says. ‘But I didn’t want those bombs to blow my dad to bits.’ She puts the pan back in the duffel bag and they all walk on.

  ‘You were the next gift, Yukio,’ Molly says. ‘You fell from the sky. You came to help us.’ She looks further along the dirt track at Greta who is marching ahead through a mess of strangler figs inside another pocket of vine forest.

  ‘Or maybe you came to help Greta,’ Molly says.

  ‘Greta,’ Yukio repeats. He watches her walking when he says her name.

  ‘She’s sad, Yukio,’ Molly says. ‘There’s something inside her that makes her low. My friend, Sam, he’s a blackfeller who knows all there is to know about this deep country and he said the land gives you all you need if you know the right way to ask for it. I reckon the sky is like that, too. You saved us back there, Yukio. You fell from the sky because you knew you had to save us. You had to save me. And you had to save Greta. The sky knew she needed you.’

  The vine forest clears and the thin track disappears into a giant sandstone rock formation shaped like an igloo, split by a thin crack down its middle with enough space for a body to walk through sideways. Greta turns to her side and puts her arms out as she squeezes through the narrow space, eyes raised to the line of sky ru
nning across the dome. Molly and Bert the shovel follow Greta and Yukio follows Molly.

  Yukio’s eyes light up when he emerges from the crack to find he’s standing inside a kind of natural gallery space enclosed by high walls of sandstone and a wide rock overhang. On the other side of this space are three openings, like exits, one leading to the east, one to the north and one west. The floor of the space is dotted with smooth, eroded grinding holes. On the wall beside each opening is a vivid and ancient rock painting. The eastern wall features a painting in reds and browns and whites and yellows of three tall, thin figures wearing dresses, which seem to Molly to be women but are also strange-looking and not of this world. They have no eyes or noses or mouths but seem to be staring at her and she is unsettled by these stares. On their heads are what appear to be headdresses shaped like quartered lemon pieces. The figures seem important, like they have all the answers to all of Molly’s questions.

  ‘Where am I going?’ she asks them. ‘Why have I come this far?’ Then the whole truth of the gravedigger girl in a single conundrum: ‘Why did she go?’

  On the northern wall is a painting of a white kangaroo standing tall on the tips of its back legs and looking down on something and on closer inspection that something is a tall ship at full sail. Yukio runs his fingers over the ship’s faint white sails and the ship seems like a ghost ship to him, sailing across a mystic sea of ancient red rock, sailing away from the giant kangaroo, who looks to Yukio, when compared to the tiny tall ship, like one of the giant sea monsters his grandfather spoke of when Yukio was a boy, creatures that rose from the seas to drag mariners to their death. His grandfather said some of those monsters were so big that it took Japanese mariners three days to sail past one. And young Yukio pictured a monster watching the mariners as they passed by, the creature pondering when it should strike, the men wondering when they might die. His grandfather said some mariners could not stand the wait, the terrible suspense, and threw themselves overboard in preference to being swallowed up and sucked into the slimy innards of the sea monster. Yukio, aged eight, told his grandfather he would wait it out. ‘What if the monster let them sail by?’ the boy asked. ‘What if things got better for them?’