All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  Yukio, the pilot who fell from the sky, stares at these strange creatures in the water and wonders what kind of place he fell into here in this continent south of everything, a place where birds drop children from the sky and angels with blonde curls dive into crocodile-infested waters to save them. But this is not a time for thinking, he tells himself. This is a time for action. For doing – doing what the actress did.

  He’s not a natural swimmer. He was never the kind to dive into blind bodies of water. But this place south of everything is transformative. People can change here, he tells himself. And he feels himself turning. Turning, turning, turning by the water’s edge. And he dives into the water and dog-paddles awkwardly across the pool, panting with every movement and struggling to keep his heavy war boots moving. The raging waterfall thunders down to his right and he fights to stay away from the suck of the plunging water. Near the far edge of the pool his boots find purchase on moss and mud and his arms reach for a fern that he then uses to pull himself onto a thin ledge of sandstone. He stands up out of the water, puts his hands on his kneecaps to catch his breath and then staggers over to the women.

  Molly huddles against Greta’s left shoulder and Yukio now stands at her right shoulder and the three wanderers catch their breath as they gaze into the eyes of the newest member of their travelling party: a baby boy in Greta’s arms, his big brown eyes staring back at the woman who holds him so carefully, so naturally.

  ‘Ssssshhhh,’ Greta says. ‘Ssshhhhh.’

  And the boy does not cry.

  THE FOURTH SKY GIFT

  EVERYTHING WE NEED

  Cold in here. Dank and earthy and smelling of bat shit. This is the dark cave Greta spoke of. ‘Close your eyes,’ she said. ‘You don’t realise it, but you’re actually standing inside a large stone cave in total darkness.’ This is what Molly’s cave looked like in her mind. This was the place before the sad place she saw beyond her bedroom door. Outside that bedroom in her mind was a hallway and at the end of that hallway was a bedroom where the moon lit up her mother’s face and where the shadow wolf moaned in the dark. Everybody has a sad place, Molly thinks. What’s waiting for me outside this stone cave? What’s beyond the bedroom door?

  ‘Can you see anything ahead, Molly?’ Greta asks and her words echo through the pitch-black tunnel.

  Molly walks up front, banging Bert’s blade against the large boulders that clutter the passageway that has so far stretched some forty yards from the waterfall. ‘I can’t see nuthin’.’

  Greta, walking in the middle of the trio, holds the baby boy in a firm two-arm grip against her chest. If she trips again on one of these boulders, she’ll twist and shoulder the brunt of the fall. ‘This feller’s gonna need feeding,’ she says. Hold the boy, she tells herself. Protect him from this strange country. No place for a thing so perfect, no place for the miracle boy.

  ‘That feller needs his mum,’ Molly says.

  Yukio Miki walks behind the actress and the gravedigger girl, running his right palm along the cave ceiling, which is only a forearm’s length higher than his head.

  Molly remembers Greta’s words. ‘Then you see a line of fire draw a door on a wall of that cave. Up, across, down again and back across.’

  A fire-traced door is what she needs. She would open the door and step out of the cave into a new world. And what would that world look like? That place? What if there was no shadow in that place? No moonlight. Only sunshine. She sees her mother, Violet, and her mother is beautiful there and she wears a smart dress that her best friend, Greta Maze, bought for her – because in this place, in this world, Greta could be the friend her mother never had, the strong and reliable friend she always needed to lean on. These two best friends now sip fresh lemonade and smoke cigarettes in sunglasses under the milkwood tree in the backyard of her grandfather Tom Berry’s sprawling old house on the Darwin waterfront. And Molly runs into her mother’s arms and they spin and together they lie on their backs beneath the milkwood tree looking up at the sky. ‘Can you feel it, Molly?’ her mother asks. ‘Can you feel it? We’re on top now, Mol’. We’re on top.’

  ‘Greta?’ Molly calls softly through the darkness.

  ‘Yeah, kid.’

  ‘It wasn’t the sky,’ Molly says.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I know it wasn’t the sky who gave me that first gift,’ she says.

  ‘It wasn’t?’ Greta replies in the darkness, gently, tenderly.

  ‘It was my mum who gave it to me,’ Molly says. ‘I know that. I’ve always known that. I just liked the idea that the sky might give me gifts. No one else was giving me gifts. I thought that the sky might see me down here and it might want to make me happy or somethin’.’

  Three wanderers and a baby in the darkness. A long silence.

  ‘But why would she give me my grandfather’s map like that?’ Molly asks. ‘Why would she say it was all coming from up there and not down here?’

  ‘Maybe she wanted you to know there was always some place beautiful to turn to,’ Greta says. ‘She gave you the sky, Molly. Maybe that was the gift. Not the bloody copper pan.’

  ‘I reckon she wanted me to find Longcoat Bob,’ Molly says. ‘She wanted me to find him and ask him to leave me be. She didn’t want my heart to turn like hers did.’

  ‘Molly?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Molly says.

  ‘Your mum loved you a whole lot.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Molly asks.

  Mums just know, Greta thinks. ‘I just know,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah, I reckon she did. But then her heart turned to stone and she had to go away,’ Molly says, her hands reaching blindly for a boulder that her boots have struck. She lifts her legs over the boulder and says, ‘Boulder comin’ up.’

  ‘Hearts don’t turn to stone, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘But they do turn. One day your heart is filled with nothing but love and then something gets inside and mixes in with all that love and sometimes that something is black and sometimes it’s cold and feels just like stone because it’s heavy, and sometimes it gets so heavy you can’t carry it inside you no more.’

  ‘Sometimes I feel mine turning,’ Molly says.

  ‘Yeah, I feel it, too,’ Greta says.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Of course, I do,’ Greta says. ‘But guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sometimes I feel it turning back the other way.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘When?’ Molly asks.

  ‘When I talk to you for a start,’ Greta says.

  Molly stops walking. She reaches a hand out for Greta in the darkness. She finds her shoulder and Greta finds the gravedigger girl’s hand in the black and she briefly squeezes it, but the moment is too sweet for someone so battle-hardened so she shatters it with humour. ‘And then there’s the times we go on long walks through old rock vaginas . . .’

  And Molly laughs, but a sound makes her turn back the way she was heading, a sound somewhere in the black, somewhere towards the end of the passageway. ‘Can you hear that?’ she asks. ‘It’s music.’ And she quickens her pace, tapping Bert’s blade against earth and rock as she goes.

  ‘Piano keys,’ Greta says. Those perfect notes. Greta knows them. Greta remembers them. ‘It’s the Liebesträume,’ Greta says, ‘the Love Dream.’ She remembers every note. ‘My father played this when I was a girl. I’d go to sleep at night and he’d rest his drinks on the piano top and play me to sleep with this music. My father said that was how I should always go to sleep, with a love dream.’

  Molly listens hard. Notes falling into notes, echoing through the cave. Some of the long, melancholy notes moving in the opposite direction to others that are sharp and bright. The song feels to Molly like a heart that has not turned yet, a song for a heart filled as much with joy and hope as it is with sadness and longing.

  Then she sees light ahead, and she rushes towards it, the strange notes leading her on to where the p
assageway ends at a narrow gap she finds she can slip through easily when she turns side-on and leads with her left shoulder.

  She emerges into a clearing flanked by rugged and sloping sandstone. Opposite her, a loose path of dirt and small rocks splits in two. The western fork runs to a ridge of sandstone beyond which Molly can see an expanse of stone country in the distance. A fork of silver-blue lightning splits the deep grey sky ahead.

  ‘The Lightning Man,’ she whispers. ‘“Follow the lightning.”’

  But then Molly hears the piano notes coming from down the eastern fork, which heads off through a stand of black wattles and soap trees with flat round black fruits and then down an avenue of trees with mottled cream-grey bark and stiff leaves exploding with small ripe red fruits. These tree clusters are all canopied by a dense climbing vine with orange-yellow flowers shaped like starfish, and the melancholy piano notes float through this forest like saddened spectres.

  Greta and Yukio emerge from the tunnel and Greta, holding the baby boy in her arms, the baby boy who fell into her arms from the sky, instinctively follows the notes down the vine forest avenue.

  ‘Greta, where are you going?’ Molly asks.

  Greta says nothing, just walks deeper into the forest.

  ‘We need to go this way,’ Molly says, pointing towards the stone country. ‘We need to follow the lightning. We’re almost there, I can feel it!’

  But Greta walks on, her head turning left and right to study the hall of trees enveloping her, swallowing her whole. Deeper, deeper into the forest, the notes of the piano drawing her along another dirt path that veers off through a wall of crab’s-eye vine with purple pea-like flowers. Beyond this natural barrier, in front of a sandstone rock wall swallowed long ago by snaking and multiplying and unstoppable vines, is a circular clearing. And Greta now sees metal gold rush relics in the foliage around her: two upright wagon wheels rusting away by the rock wall; an ore cart; a wooden ladder; a pile of chains and straps and shafts and poles.

  In the centre of the clearing is a single tall bombax tree, maybe sixty feet high, with rough pale grey bark covered in conical thorns. The tree is alive with fleshy red flowers and oblong brown seed capsules, hundreds of which lie on the ground, their capsules split open like they were alien vessels whose absent owners abandoned them long ago. Beneath this tree sits a skeletal old man with long white hair, snowy eyebrows, a bushy chalk-white beard and old worn hands that are moving purposefully across the black and white keys of an old and moulding walnut-wood upright piano. He wears a cheap, cream-coloured Chinese-style flowing tunic over loose brown slacks. No shoes on his feet. He’s lost in his own music, his eyes closed and his head moving along the hills and valleys of his ghost notes that spirit themselves away from the piano and into the dense forest.

  And Molly can see now that the old man is playing for an audience of a kind. There are eight bodies scattered behind him across the forest floor. Eight people sleeping – at least Molly hopes they’re sleeping. Chinese men and women in rag clothes. All of the sleepers are old and frail. Some rest on their backs on low stretchers and some rest their backs directly on the forest floor. Some laughing in their sleep, some turning their heads. Two of them look particularly serene: asleep in the daylight, but smiling as though the music is reaching right through to their dreams, conjuring expressions of deep contentment.

  ‘Come, come!’ the old man says, still playing with his eyes closed. ‘Come closer. Do not be afraid.’ He sounds European. Dutch, maybe.

  Greta slowly and cautiously approaches the piano, holding the sky baby close. Molly and Yukio join her and they all stare at the man with hair so lightning-white Molly wonders for the briefest moment if they have not stumbled upon Sam’s Lightning Man here in the flesh, the one who sprays bending rods of electricity from his ear holes.

  Yukio rests his hand on the grip of the shortsword hanging from his military belt. His eyes scan the clearing for signs of danger and the fact he sees none does not blunt the edge of his vigilance.

  Greta gazes over the sleepers in the forest. ‘What are they all doing here?’ Greta asks.

  ‘What does it look like they’re doing?’ the old man replies, not skipping a note.

  ‘Sleeping,’ Greta says.

  ‘Not just sleeping,’ he replies. ‘Dreaming.’

  Piano notes bending through the forest trees. ‘You play beautifully,’ Greta says.

  The old man does not stop his fingers to respond. ‘I play nothing,’ he says. ‘The machine plays me. I just sit down at it.’

  Notes into notes. Fingers still working across the keyboard. There is little flesh in the old man’s cheeks and even less hanging off his arm bones.

  ‘I’ve always liked this music,’ Greta says.

  ‘Your father played it for you,’ the old man says.

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘I played this for my daughters,’ the old man replies. ‘Fathers should always play the Liebesträume for their daughters.’

  When the old man talks Greta can see that his teeth are rotting and there are faint black stains on what’s left of them. There’s a tar-black tinge, too, around the edges of the beard hairs closest to his mouth.

  ‘Dad said it was from a poem,’ Greta says.

  Notes into notes into notes.

  ‘“O love, as long as love you can,”’ the old man recites. ‘“O love, as long as love you may.”’

  Now Greta can see that the old man’s tongue is black too.

  ‘“The time will come, the time will come,”’ the old man says. ‘“When you will stand at the grave and mourn! Be sure that your heart burns, and holds and keeps love, as long as another heart beats warmly, with its love for you.”’

  The old man opens his eyes now and he finds Greta staring at him but he does not stop playing and then his eyes move to the baby boy in her arms. The man’s eyes are a deep blue and the colour pops from his face because everything else about him is white. He smiles, and his smile stays wide when he turns to Molly behind Greta’s shoulder and Yukio behind Molly’s shoulder. He stares into Molly’s eyes.

  ‘Do you want to know the secret?’ he asks the gravedigger girl.

  ‘Yes,’ Molly says.

  ‘My human heart needs to stay warm,’ he says. ‘But it can only stay warm by warming your heart. That’s the trick of the human heart.’

  The old man now stares into Yukio’s eyes. ‘But the music that came from that poem is far more miraculous than any poem, don’t you think?’ the old man asks. Yukio’s face reveals nothing when he stares back at the old man. The old man plays on. ‘The music! The music reminds us that the miracle of love is that it is transcendent. That’s the trick of true love. It transcends even death.’

  The baby in Greta’s arms cries. The old man plays on.

  ‘That baby does not belong to you,’ the old man says.

  Molly steps forward to stand beside Greta. ‘The boy dropped from the sky,’ she says.

  The man doesn’t miss a note, keeps on playing. Changes in key signatures, long notes with stretched stems, a high-note cadenza, a bright run of notes that feels to Greta like the story of the song is moving now into the composer’s intended dream territory.

  ‘A baby boy just fell from the sky?’ the old man ponders.

  ‘An eagle had his hooks in him but then he dropped him in the drink,’ Molly says. ‘It was only because of Greta that he’s still breathin’.’

  The old man nods at Yukio. ‘Did the eagle drop the Japanese soldier down here, too?’

  The baby cries again. Greta rocks him. ‘Ssshhhh,’ she whispers.

  ‘I once saw an eagle flying with its claws hooked into a dead goanna twice as long as that baby,’ the old man says. ‘Remarkable creatures.’

  ‘Do you know who the baby belongs to?’ Greta asks.

  ‘No,’ the old man says.

  ‘Do you know where I might find the boy’s family?’

  ‘No,’ he replies. ‘Because that boy’s
family never stays in one place. They’re like these fingers of mine, always moving. But you rest assured they’ll find the boy.’

  ‘How will they find him if I have him?’

  ‘He’s a son of this place,’ the old piano player says. ‘The land will tell his family you have him.’

  Molly spots a small green fruit resting on top of the piano. The fruit has been split open, revealing a marble-sized black seed that seems, to Molly’s eye, to be covered in bright red blood. She leans closer to inspect the strange seed.

  ‘Myristica insipida,’ the old man says. ‘Native nutmeg.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Molly asks.

  ‘I’m Lars,’ he says. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Molly Hook from Darwin,’ she says. ‘I’m looking for a blackfeller named Longcoat Bob.’

  The old man’s fingers stop with a low note thud and he slams the fallboard down hard over the keys, making Molly jump on the spot.

  ‘Why do you want to find Longcoat Bob?’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Everybody in this forest knows Longcoat Bob for one reason or another,’ he says. ‘But what’s your reason for knowing Bob?’

  ‘He put a curse on my family because my grandfather stole his gold long ago,’ Molly says.

  ‘What happened to your family?’ the old man probes in a soft voice.

  ‘Longcoat Bob turned their hearts to stone,’ Molly says. ‘They all started dyin’. Some died quick and some died slow and some died long before they should have.’

  ‘Everybody dies, child,’ the old man says. ‘I suspect there are hundreds lying dead in your home town as we speak.’ He swings round to Yukio. ‘They died before they should have, too, and not at the hands of a black man’s magic stick.’ He turns back to Molly. ‘But one should never mourn the dead, Molly Hook from Darwin, for they have embarked on a journey far more wondrous even than the one that brought you here. You stumble blindly in your boots here on earth. But the dead take flight, Molly Hook, through light and through dark and through light again.’