All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  The tree blood has stained the trunks of the towering natives. ‘“Out damned spot, out I say,”’ Molly recites to herself. She digs out her gold pan, studies her grandfather’s secret words, Tom Berry’s etched notes to self. Then she calls to Greta and Yukio, ‘“West where the yellow fork man leads, east in the dark when the wood bleeds”!’

  She looks down the eastern path, a thin animal track winding through thick forest. She looks down the western path, a thin animal track winding through thick forest.

  ‘We go this way,’ Molly says, excitedly peering down the eastern path.

  Yukio nods but Greta seems preoccupied. She’s looking up at the forest ceiling, a dense roof of palms like ship sails and branches that stretch and probe through all that green the way a jellyfish’s tentacles stretch through oceans.

  ‘Can you hear that?’ she asks. ‘It’s faint.’ She looks down the western path. ‘It’s music.’ But the faces of Molly and Yukio say they can’t hear it and Greta wonders if she’s hearing things because she’s tired and her stomach has been empty for the past six hours and her mind has been ravaged by war and monsters.

  But there it is again. Music. The faintest sound of music. Piano. She wants to say a word out loud but she holds that word in. A word from her childhood. A German word her father said. Liebesträume.

  ‘Greta,’ Molly says. ‘This way, come on!’

  And Molly skips down the thin path heading east and the pilot and the actress follow. But then she stops on the spot. ‘Wait, I hear something too,’ she says. ‘But it’s not music.’ She listens harder to the forest, her right ear up to the sprawling green canopy. ‘It’s a waterfall.’

  *

  Molly in the sky-blue satin dress, dirt-stained and creased, clomping along the dirt path in her dig boots. Bert the shovel helping to prop her up as she walks. The sound of a thunderous waterfall growing louder as the forest thins out. She feels it in the air, its spray fuelling a mist that seems to be permanently watering the giant ferns and grey-green cycads she passes.

  And then the waterfall comes into full view and it opens up to Molly Hook like a new world. An immense natural hall with a sky roof and mighty walls made of deep red sandstone, walls so dramatic Molly has to believe they were chiselled by Norse gods or the Lightning Man or just Father Time. A waterfall that Molly finds as deafening and spectacular as would be a thousand white horses charging over that same 250-foot cliff face. A rapid torrent rush so forceful she has to shout to have her voice heard by her fellow travellers. ‘Is this a dream, Greta?’ she screams and Greta smiles and shakes her head, her face wet with spray.

  Molly looks across the scene. A black and purple and white spider in a vast web in a tree beside her, the web fluttering in the draught from the waterfall. Vibrant native plants fringing the plunge pool. Large black boulders resting on the water’s edge like polite children being read to by a schoolteacher.

  What the plants, the birds, the rocks, the insects in the trees and the creatures below the pool have all come to see and hear today is the waterfall. Like Molly, they all made it this far through the deep country. The rocks rolled here, the birds flew, the plants crept, the insects crawled.

  Molly looks up to the sky-blue roof above it all. The day sky. She walks alone around the pool to a corner of the natural hall, and she talks to the day sky in a soft voice, letting the sound of the waterfall hide her thoughts from her companions.

  ‘I didn’t think I’d make it so far in,’ she murmurs, elated by the waterfall’s power and finding something more than gravity in it.

  ‘You’ve always been able to make it as far as you wanted to go, Molly,’ the day sky says to the gravedigger girl. ‘Why wouldn’t you make it this far?’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to stop at some point,’ Molly says. ‘I always reached a point where I was too afraid to go any further.’

  ‘What were you afraid of?’

  ‘Everything,’ she says.

  ‘Everything,’ the day sky says. ‘And only one thing.’

  ‘What?’ Molly asks.

  ‘Not what, Molly, who?’

  ‘My uncle.’

  ‘Aubrey Hook,’ the day sky says.

  ‘But I don’t have to worry about him no more.’

  ‘He died back in Hollow Wood,’ the day sky says.

  ‘Yes, he did, didn’t he?’ Molly replies.

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?’

  ‘No, Molly.’

  ‘But all you are is one big lie,’ Molly says. ‘You’re a trick.’

  ‘I guess you’ll just have to trust me,’ the day sky says.

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Like you trust the pilot.’

  ‘He’s a good man.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means we’ll have to wait and see what comes.’

  ‘What do you think is coming?’

  ‘Danger, Molly,’ the day sky says. ‘Pain. But wonder, too, and gratitude and joy. But you’d better keep an eye on that Yukio.’

  Molly looks across the plunge pool and sees Yukio drop his head and drink from its edge.

  ‘Careful Yukio,’ Molly calls. ‘Crocodiles.’ She snaps her arms in a chomping motion. Yukio nods, moves back from the pool edge.

  They rest for an hour by the crashing waterfall. Greta washes her face and underarms. Yukio studies the plants and insects in the fringing forest. Molly sits apart by a large black boulder with a chalky rock in her hand. She scrawls a new poem on the black rock.

  Yukio watches her writing. She can sense him over her shoulder. She turns and smiles at him. He sits by her side.

  ‘Poem,’ he smiles.

  Molly nods.

  ‘It’s about us,’ she says.

  Yukio points at a word on the rock.

  ‘Treasure,’ Molly says.

  ‘Treasure,’ Yukio repeats, smiling.

  Molly points at Yukio’s chest and then she points at Greta who is now on the other side of the plunge pool, cupping water onto her hair.

  ‘Both treasure,’ Molly says. ‘Both gold.’

  ‘Goooolldd!’ Yukio whispers, his eyes fixed on the actress who is standing now, a thick beam of sunshine backlighting her emerald dress, which is wet and sticking to her body. Molly sees the way he looks at her and, soon enough, Greta catches the pilot looking at her, too, and she returns his gaze.

  ‘What?’ she asks.

  Yukio points a finger at her.

  ‘Greta Maze is treasure,’ he says, nodding his head in earnest. And he stands now as though he needs to speak this truth to the whole of the forest. ‘Greta Maze is gold,’ he says.

  Greta freezes in confusion, then she blushes.

  And Molly stands now, too, and elbows the pilot, playfully. ‘Slow down, Romeo,’ she says.

  Yukio whips his head back to Molly. ‘Romeo!’ he rejoices in his broken but improving English. ‘Where . . . for . . . art . . . you . . . Romeo!’

  Molly waves him in close. She offers her wisdom with a series of backhand pats on his belly, like she’s a pub bookie giving priceless horse tips to a penniless mug.

  ‘Don’t go climbin’ up the balcony so quick, ya know what I mean?’ she whispers.

  Yukio’s eyes say he’s not following.

  ‘Don’t run yer race before the gun’s gone off, ya follow?’

  ‘Race . . . gun,’ Yukio says.

  She pats his belly again. ‘Ya gotta keep yer cards close, Yukio,’ she whispers. ‘Then lay down that king of hearts when she least expects it. Don’t go layin’ down all yer joker cards. You gotta show her yer heart without spillin’ yer beans.’

  Yukio concentrates on her words while Molly turns to the edge of the waterfall and skims the rock she used to write her poem along the rippling pool. She counts the number of times it skips across the water. ‘Five,’ she says, proudly.

  And from the other side of the pool Greta watches Yukio skippin
g stones into the water and laughing along with the gravedigger girl. And for a moment Greta wants this time in this place to slow – slow down so much the three of them could stay like this for a month, for a year, for a lifetime.

  That man saved her life. He came back for her. He fought a giant for her and he nearly died in the process. And she saw his face when his neck was being strangled by the giant’s hand. His face was so serene. His eyes were sailboats on calm seas and he was sailing off to some place she knows as well as him.

  It wouldn’t be so bad, she thinks. It wouldn’t be so bad if there’s nothing left. Not so bad if it’s all blown up back there, beyond the beginning of the deep country. Only three people left on earth to walk it. And it wouldn’t be so bad if one of them was him.

  She’s still staring at him when he turns to find her gaze across the pool. She’s still staring at him when he gives her a kind of half-smile that tells her in the best kind of language – the noiseless kind – that he knows it makes no sense to be here. He knows it makes no sense to feel so alive when she was just so close to death. Then in the tunnel of this view between them he stops smiling because attraction is a serious phenomenon and Greta knows in this moment that heart curses are just fantasies for twelve-year-old girls to believe because nothing could still her heart when it’s beating as fast as this.

  *

  At lunchtime Molly looks into the duffel bag for something to eat. One can left in the bag, a tin of her father’s oxtail soup. The trio sit together by the edge of the black pool. Molly makes a hole in the soup can with her paring knife and the three travellers take sips of the soup, which is lukewarm from the heat of the day. Greta nearly vomits her first taste back up, but then she squeezes three more mouthfuls down out of necessity.

  As she savours her mouthful of soup, Molly looks up and is struck by a peculiar cave in the cliff face behind the waterfall. She notices a series of boulders, fallen and crumbled into place over millennia, which form a rough climbing route up to the cave entrance, and she studies the curious shape of the cave’s black void.

  Greta washes her hands in the plunge pool. ‘So where do we go now?’ she asks. ‘We’ve run out of track.’

  Molly is still looking at the cave veiled by the rushing water.

  ‘Where were you born, Greta?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with where we’re heading?’

  ‘Just tell me where you were born?’

  ‘Leipzig,’ Greta says.

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘About a hundred miles south-west of Berlin,’ she says. ‘My family came to Sydney when I was two years old.’

  Molly gulps another mouthful of oxtail soup. She sits higher up than the others, on a smooth black boulder, while Yukio sits crossed-legged on the grass and Greta lies next to him with her head resting on a grey rock slab half-buried in dirt.

  ‘You were born in Germany,’ Molly says. She nods at Yukio. ‘He was born in Japan and I was born in Darwin. But I reckon we all came from the same place.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘My grandfather’s directions,’ she says. ‘The place beyond your place of birth.’

  She nods to the cave behind the waterfall. ‘What does that cave look like to you?’

  Greta studies the peculiar shape of the cave. Like a pumpkin seed, like an oyster, she tells herself, like the fresh mussels they sell by the waterfront on Sunday mornings. Then she sees it. ‘Well, ain’t that just like a bloke,’ she says. ‘Sitting in God’s country surrounded by a thousand natural miracles and all he sees is a lady’s pigeonhole.’

  Yukio follows the gazes of the women but struggles to see what they see.

  ‘Pigeon . . . hole?’ he ponders.

  Molly howls with laughter.

  Greta smiles, points at the cave beyond the waterfall. ‘The shape of the cave,’ she says.

  Yukio squints.

  ‘The nick in the notch, the naughty,’ Greta laughs. ‘The ol’ rest and be thankful.’

  Molly slaps her thighs and Yukio laughs with her, still not following.

  ‘Yer periwinkle?’ Molly giggles, hands over her mouth.

  Greta rattles off names now, not even laughing, just stewing on the minds of all the men she’s danced with and worked around since the age of twenty-two. She adopts the voice of a drunken red-dirt cattleman. ‘Yer ninepence, yer nursery, yer Itching Jenny, yer Irish fortune,’ she says, picking up small rocks from the ground beside her and tossing them into the deep black waterhole. ‘Tulip, pokehole, spout, twotch, twitchet, knish, naf, naggie and feckin’ nettle bed.’ She pauses to think on something for a moment and she returns to her natural voice. She sees all their faces and all their fingers. ‘Cunts,’ she says.

  Rusting wheels suddenly turn into motion in Yukio’s mind. ‘Ohhhhhh!’ he gasps, pointing at the cave, wide-eyed and embarrassed.

  And Molly howls so hard she falls backwards off her sitting rock.

  Yukio’s laughter then echoes across the waterfall chamber and his joy is a welcome infection for Greta, who lets her pursed, puffy lips slowly break into a smile.

  Molly stands up now, collecting herself, and nods her head at the cave. ‘All the stories I ever heard in town about my grandfather’s long walk,’ Molly says, ‘he never said exactly where he went. But he spoke about what it was like. He said he went into magic places with Longcoat Bob.’ She looks around her setting. ‘This feels pretty magic to me, this place. He said he walked through places with Longcoat Bob and he came out the other side into places that felt like different worlds. Different dimensions, even.’

  Molly takes a deep breath. ‘Yep, this is the way,’ she says. ‘We gotta swim over to the other side of the waterhole. We gotta go through that cave up there.’

  ‘What about the crocodiles?’ Greta asks.

  ‘I think we’ll be all right,’ Molly replies.

  ‘You gonna talk to them again?’ Greta says, drily. ‘Ask them for permission to cross?’

  Molly smiles. ‘Nah, them crocs will come ’ere every now and then but I reckon they won’t want to hang around too long because of that noisy waterfall.’

  ‘Crocodiles,’ Yukio says, airing his concern.

  ‘Yeah, but just freshies this far inland, Yukio,’ Molly says.

  Greta places a calming hand on Yukio’s thigh. ‘Don’t worry, the freshies only grow to nine feet,’ she says.

  But Yukio doesn’t hear that line because he’s distracted by something moving low in the sky over Greta’s shoulder.

  Then Greta hears it too, something familiar, something impossible. It’s the sound of a baby crying, loud enough to be heard above the noise of the waterfall. She follows Yukio’s gaze and turns around to see a dark, black-brown wedge-tailed eagle cutting from east to west across the wide black pool. So big and majestic and powerful is the creature that Greta flinches when she sees it. An adult female with a wingspan that must be more than eight feet across; a flying motion of such grand design and power that as the wings cut the air they make a noise like a silk sheet being shaken in the wind. And she knows it is the queen they saw before.

  The great bird has a fanned and wedged tail almost two feet across – so wide and balanced Greta could serve scones on it with mini bowls of jam and cream – and a hooked grey beak appropriately shaped like Death’s scythe. But the raptor is burdened. It moves slow through the sky with laboured flaps of its wings because somewhere along its endless hunt for easy prey – a moving and pitiless ground feast of rabbits and brown hares and foxes and koalas and wombats and small wallabies – its long black talons have hooked a strange treasure more cumbersome than even this raptor’s normally impressive endurance and leg strength can accommodate: a howling human infant nestled in a baby sling made of bush string, paperbark and cane strips, which now hangs from the eagle’s vice-grip talons by its woven cane and paperbark carry strap. Greta hears that cry again, splitting the air and splitting her heart.

  Two other, smaller birds shoot down
from high above towards the eagle and its plunder. They look like brown hawks, and Greta now realises that the eagle is waging a mid-air fight to keep hold of its treasure. One brave hawk flaps a wing across the eyes of the eagle, which then slows, and this slowing of momentum seems to add to the weight of the cargo and the eagle must work hard now to start the motor of its wings again and find enough energy to make it to the top of the waterfall. Then the second hawk attacks the eagle from the side with a surprise flurry of wings and raised legs and talons, and the mighty eagle is forced to defend itself. It releases its prized and howling plunder and raises its own spent legs and talons up to the spirited hawk, driving hard with a flap of its wide wings to force the hawk back so it can fly freely out of the gorge.

  Molly Hook sucks air deep into her lungs as she watches the baby sling with the baby inside it falling towards the black pool. But Greta Maze, the toast of Palmerston, is already swimming across the water as the baby lands hard.

  ‘Greta!’ Molly calls.

  The actress’s arms turning like windmills through the water; calves and thighs thrashing through the glassy pool, her saddle shoes still tied to her feet. Her head is down in the water and she takes no breaths because she doesn’t want to lose any speed. A single word crosses her busy mind while her head is under the water: freshies. But she powers on and when she raises her head she sees the baby in the sling bobbing momentarily on the surface, but then the water fills the sling and sucks the baby under. Greta takes a deep breath and dives deep and hard. Molly and Yukio watch her disappear.

  ‘Greta!’ Molly screams.

  No movement for a long moment. Just the crashing of the waterfall.

  And then she reappears, the actress, one arm stroking across the water and the baby inside the sling held up to her chest. Her usually bouncy blonde curls sopped across her ears, concentration and determination and fire across her face.

  Molly breathes with relief and she knows now just how much she cares for this woman in the water. A good one, she tells herself. The real good one. She would cry for her if she could, but instead she drops the empty can of soup on the ground, picks up Bert the shovel and her duffel bag, dives into the black water and follows the actress to the other side of the falls.