All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  Marielle looks across the table at Greta. ‘Is that why you have come?’ she asks. ‘Have you come to ease the pain?’

  Greta focusses on the question. ‘What?’ she replies, and her mouth feels dry.

  ‘Why have you come to us?’ Marielle asks, smiling tenderly and speaking as softly as a cloud. ‘Have you come to ease the pain, Greta?’

  Greta has an answer to this question but she can’t wrap a knot around it in her mind. She can’t focus, but a name comes to her.

  ‘Longcoat Bob,’ she says.

  ‘Greta,’ Molly says.

  ‘We’re looking for Longcoat Bob,’ Greta says.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, Greta?’ Molly asks. She turns to Lars and points to her cup. ‘What is that stuff?’ she asks.

  ‘It will help you sleep,’ Lars says, sipping from his cup. ‘It will help you dream.’ He turns to Greta. ‘You will have dreams of love,’ he says. ‘It will take your pain away. It will drain the pain out of you and you will sleep for fifteen hours and you will wake with a clarity of mind that you did not think possible.’

  Greta studies the clay mug before her. Her fingers wrap around it.

  ‘We need to go, Greta,’ Molly says. ‘We need to find Longcoat Bob.’

  Marielle reaches a hand across the table and rests it on Molly’s wrist. ‘I’m so sorry, Molly,’ Marielle says.

  ‘What?’ Molly asks.

  ‘I’m so sorry, child,’ Marielle says mournfully.

  ‘Sorry for what?’

  She rubs Molly’s wrist. ‘So much pain,’ she whispers.

  Molly pulls her wrist from her touch. ‘What are you sorry for?’ she asks.

  ‘You will not find Longcoat Bob, child,’ Marielle says, gently. ‘Longcoat Bob has gone from us.’

  Molly studies Marielle’s face for a moment. The white-haired woman with the skeleton body. Her cheekbones high and the flesh on her face drawn into her mouth.

  ‘That’s not true,’ Molly says, indignant. ‘That’s not true. Sam said he went for a walk. He’s just gone walkabout.’

  Greta raises the mug in her right hand.

  ‘He’s dead, Molly,’ Marielle says. ‘You have come all this way for nothing.’

  ‘That’s a lie!’ Molly says. ‘You’re lying!’

  Lars discreetly leaves the table, walks over to the piano, sits down at it and raises the fallboard.

  ‘But you have found us now,’ Marielle says, softly. ‘You can rest now.’

  Lars begins to play. The Liebesträume. The love dream. Gentle keys. Soft notes falling into soft notes. And Greta drinks from the mug.

  ‘Don’t drink that, Greta!’ Molly calls. But Greta keeps drinking.

  ‘You can all stay here,’ Marielle says. ‘You can rest. You can sleep.’

  ‘I don’t want to sleep here,’ Molly says. ‘I don’t want to stay here.’

  Molly turns to the pilot but he, too, is drinking from his mug. ‘Yukio,’ she says. ‘We need to keep going.’

  ‘Do not be afraid, Molly,’ Marielle says. ‘We will take the pain away. You carry too much. Too much pain for one little girl.’

  Then a tear forms in Greta Maze’s right eye and it runs down her cheek. She turns to the sleeping baby she saved from the deep black water.

  ‘Have you come to ease the pain, Greta?’ Marielle asks.

  Another tear falling down the actress’s face. ‘Ease the pain, Greta,’ Marielle urges. ‘Ease the pain.’

  Greta rises gently from the dining table and she walks to the sleeping baby.

  ‘Greta, we have to go!’ Molly says.

  ‘I’m staying, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘I want to stop. I want to sleep.’ She lies down beside the infant and weeps openly now.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, Greta?’ Molly asks.

  ‘I’m staying Molly,’ Greta says. ‘I can’t walk with you no more.’

  ‘But we need to find Longcoat Bob!’ Molly says.

  ‘Stop, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘Stop it. I should never have come with you.’

  Molly stands up. ‘But you got us this far!’ she barks. ‘It was you who got us here.’

  Greta shakes her head, weeping. ‘I’m not what you think I am,’ Greta says. ‘You don’t need me, Molly. You’ve never needed anyone.’

  ‘I need you, Greta,’ Molly hollers. ‘I need you.’

  ‘You need to go home, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘We went too far in. You need to go home. You don’t belong here.’

  Molly rushes towards the bed. ‘I’m getting you out of here,’ she says and she reaches for Greta, pulls hard at her arm.

  ‘Get away from me!’ Greta screams, snapping. And her anger makes her cry harder and Molly can only step backwards from her friend in confusion. Greta turns her face back to the sleeping baby. ‘I won’t leave you,’ she whispers.

  Yukio rises from the table and he slowly walks over to Greta on the bed. He lies down on the other side of the boy, the child between them.

  ‘What are you doing, Yukio?’ Molly asks. ‘It’s that black stuff. They poisoned you, Yukio. They gave you poison. They’re gonna make you sleep here.’ Molly looks at the faces of all the skin-and-bone men and women, dazed and sleepy and half-dead and sinking into their stretchers and daybeds and worn and torn lounges. ‘They’re gonna make you sleep here forever!’

  Greta won’t stop weeping. ‘They took my child,’ she whispers through her tears. ‘They took my child.’

  Then tears fall from Yukio’s eyes. One tear, two tears, then a flood. He speaks in Japanese through his tears and he cries harder when he finishes his sentence. And Molly watches Greta reach an arm over to Yukio and Greta leaves that tender hand on his side and he reaches an arm over across the baby and he rests his trembling hand on her side and Molly watches these two strangers – her companions, her friends, her strange long-walk family – weeping together. Weeping without her because she is the girl who cannot cry. She is the girl who was born into the curse of Longcoat Bob. She is the girl whose heart will turn to stone. Then she hears more weeping from the dining table. It is Marielle. She is staring at Greta and Yukio, tears streaming down her face. Then she begins to wail loudly. Hysterically.

  ‘Stop it,’ Molly says.

  But Marielle keeps wailing.

  ‘Stop it,’ Molly says.

  Lars’s melancholy piano notes grow louder and then the pianist with hair like lightning begins to wail with his wife.

  ‘Ease the pain!’ Marielle howls. ‘Ease the pain!’

  ‘Eeeeeease the pain!’ Lars hollers.

  Lars’s tears fall onto his piano keys and a crazed guttural wail echoes through the orange-glow cave chamber and this wailing seems to make the near dead rise. The patients in their stretchers sit up and weep and others roll and squirm in their beds, releasing their own stored-up tears, spreading infections of weeping through the room and triggering one crazed and primal bout of sobbing after another.

  Molly screams, ‘Stop it. Stop! Stop!’

  But the lunatic wailings only build and they swirl around her dizzy head and she closes her eyes and blocks her ears with her palms and all she sees is her Uncle Aubrey now and all she hears is his deranged howling laughter and all she sees is his smile beneath his black moustache, his deep satisfaction rising up from the cave of his cold stone heart.

  She opens her eyes again and she finds Bert – the only friend she has in this upside-down world who is not crying. He’s guarding her duffel bag, which carries the rock that she pulled from the chest of her mother, where once a good and kind heart beat warmly.

  She grips her shovel and grips her bag and she runs. Dig, Molly, dig. Run, Molly, run. Run from this terrible mine. Run from this terrible wailing. Run towards the night. Run towards the night sky that tells no lies. Run towards the lightning. Run, Molly, run.

  THE OWNER OF THE WATERFALL

  He is content because the gastric mill of his digestive tract is grinding the body of an orange-footed scrubfowl swallowed whole some way back
through the vine forest. And he’s almost home.

  The crocodile’s slender, darkly speckled snout pushes through a wall of evergreen ferns whose serrated fronds barely register on his pebbled and armoured scales. He can smell the waterfall almost as well as he can hear it, and he can see it all in colour. He stops at the edge of the black pool and his heavy, shielded triple eyelids open and close as he scans his surroundings for threats and prey. He moves his nine-foot body slowly forward to the smooth black rocks that edge the pool, but then he stops because his eyes have locked onto an object across the water. It is blurred to him, too far away to be clearly visible, but he registers it as a threat and, as always, his instincts are correct. Were he to slip into the water, swim nearer and, with his two eyes just above the surface, observe the object closely, he would see that it is organic. A thing of flesh and blood with a thick moustache, wearing a black hat and sitting on a rock. A man. A shadow. In his right hand he carries a gun. In his left he holds an empty can. He’s reading words roughly scribbled on a rock.

  No weights of gold to measure

  Only scales of truth and lies

  For we are living treasure

  Under all our shimmering skies

  The man in the black hat looks up at the waterfall, stares through it to the cave behind its cascading freshwater veil. He is so transfixed by what he sees that he pays no heed to the crocodile, which remains frozen at the water’s edge, breath slow, heart slow, then retreats quietly through the wall of evergreen ground ferns, convinced the waterfall now belongs to a new creature of the forest.

  ON THE PLAIN OF HIGH HEAVEN

  He dreams of Darwin. His Zero fighter plane has stopped in the centre of Smith Street, the fuel gauge reading empty. He pushes open the cockpit canopy and he can see the town’s destruction. Every stone building ripped apart by bombs. A silence so heavy his own breathing sounds intrusive. No wind. No movement in the town. Only desolation.

  He climbs down from the cockpit and stands in the street, the only man here, the only man alive in all the world. He looks to his feet and he sees that he’s standing on a silver road, a road of glittering mica. And he walks up this straight silver road and he turns left and then right and he sees that this silver road is not fringed by vine forest but by the limbless bodies of dead Australians. Piles of bodies, hundreds of bodies, their arms and legs branching into other arms and legs like the limbs of the sprawling and nightmarish forest trees that he saw with the gravedigger girl and the actress. Flesh-and-blood pavements of women and men split by a thin silver road that he must walk down. He removes his soft pilot’s helmet out of respect for the dead, but he can’t bring himself to look sideways anymore so he looks down at his boots, his war boots crushing the silver flakes of mica as he walks and walks and walks until his boots have no more silver road to walk on because they are blocked by a bed.

  It’s Nara’s bed and Nara lies upon it, sleeping. And Yukio Miki wants to lie down beside his wife but his body won’t move forward. His legs won’t walk and his arms won’t move. He wants nothing more than to fall asleep with Nara’s breath on his face, but he can only call to her. ‘Nara,’ he says. ‘Nara.’ And she wakes and she coughs twice because she is sick, but she smiles for him because she is strong and she always smiled for him like that.

  ‘Forgive me, Nara,’ Yukio says.

  ‘Forgive you for what, Yukio?’ Nara replies.

  ‘I was coming to you,’ Yukio says. ‘But I could not leave this world.’

  ‘You saw the woman in the grass,’

  ‘I thought there was no more beauty left to see,’ he says. ‘But then I saw it everywhere in this strange place. There was so much of it here I thought it must be Takamanohara.’

  ‘But, don’t you see, Yukio,’ Nara says. ‘It is. All of it. It always has been.’

  ‘I’m coming Nara,’ Yukio says.

  ‘But what about the girl?’ Nara asks.

  ‘The woman in the grass?’

  ‘The gravedigger girl, Yukio.’

  ‘The gravedigger girl,’ Yukio repeats, and he turns around to look at the ruins of Darwin town. Rubble and dust and waste. But there are no bodies in Smith Street now. There is no silver road. There are only butterflies, hundreds of white butterflies rising up to the blue sky.

  ‘Wait,’ Yukio calls to the butterflies. ‘Wait.’ But the butterflies keep rising.

  *

  He wakes in sweat. His flight jacket wet with it. The bed he lies on wet with it. An orange glow. Firelight. Rock walls. A dining table. Stretcher beds and daybeds and armchairs. All empty. He’s the only person there. His mind is slow and his brain is heavy, trying to replay the events that placed him inside this cave.

  His heart races and he stands quickly and collapses immediately, but then he stands again slowly and he moves to the dining table where he recalls spooning mouthfuls of onion soup, but little else. He stumbles groggily to an opening in the rock face and he looks down the corridor beyond it, but he can see nothing in the darkness. He moves back to the other side of the cave where another opening leads to another blind corridor. ‘Greta Maze,’ he calls in his best English, and his voice echoes down the corridor. ‘Molly Hook,’ he calls.

  He finds a third opening and he rests his arm against the rock wall as he calls again. ‘Greta Maze!’ Only his echo is returned.

  He breathes quick and deep. His mouth is bone dry. Only darkness in his vision. Then, far along the corridor, he sees someone, a woman, walking across the tunnel from left to right, from one side passage to another, holding a lantern up with her right arm. She moves quickly.

  ‘Hello,’ Yukio calls.

  But the figure does not stop.

  Yukio barrels down the dark corridor blindly, his right hand feeling the rock wall for the entryway the lantern carrier scurried into. With his left hand, he pats the handle of his family sword and the touch of it brings a comfort that does nothing to slow his heartbeat. His boots kick up dirt as he walks and the corridor is cold and the air is thick.

  ‘Hello,’ he calls.

  His right hand finally finds a wide space. ‘Greta Maze,’ Yukio calls. ‘Molly Hook,’ he calls into the passageway.

  His feet move faster as he turns into the black void and he keeps his hands on the walls to feel his way along the corridor. ‘Hellllooooo!’ he hollers, the sound echoing through the tunnels. He moves faster still because his heart beats faster still and he cuts his hand on a sharp rock edge sticking out of the wall and then he releases his hand from the guiding right wall and breaks into a jog.

  ‘Greta!’ he screams. ‘Molly!’

  And he builds to a blind run and then his face slams hard into a junction wall and he has to stop and put his hands to his nose because it feels like it’s about to run with blood. He breathes hard, looks up once again, looks left, looks right, but finds only darkness. Then he looks left again and sees the woman with the lantern once more, turning right into another passage, and he runs after her. ‘Wait!’ he says. ‘Wait.’

  And he charges down the passage and his arm reaches out for the guidance of the rock wall and his palm finds air and he turns right quickly into a new passage and he sees the lantern woman moving slowly now into a doorway from which light spills into the darkened corridor. Yukio pads quickly to the glowing light and turns into the opening. ‘Greta Maze!’ he barks as he enters another spacious cavern that looks almost identical to the one he just woke up in, except there is only one large wooden bed with no mattress here – no tables, no chairs, no stretchers, no piano. And the bed is in the centre of the space and all the people of this troubling underworld, all the sleepers, all the half-dead, have formed a circle around it. ‘Ssshhhhh!’ says Marielle, turning from the circle to admonish the Japanese pilot. ‘They are dreaming.’

  Yukio can make no sense of the scene and the confusion makes him ache and the incongruity of it all makes his head throb even more than it throbbed when he woke from his dreaming. He must catch his breath and as he does he sees tha
t Greta Maze is lying on the large bed, lying on her side in a deep sleep and the baby who fell from the sky is sleeping there, too, nestled in the warmth of her chest. Yukio can see now that all the men and women of the cave hold wax candles aflame and they are watching Greta sleep and they are whispering in Chinese and at the head of the bed stands the piano player with the hair as white as Sakai snow in winter, scribbling his observations in a notebook with a pencil as long as his thumb.

  Yukio’s fast-beating heart turns to fire, and a rage inside him compels him to break through the circle of cave dwellers and crawl onto the hard bed. ‘Greta Maze!’ he screams. ‘Wake up.’ He screams again in broken English. ‘Wake now. Wake now.’

  Two old Chinese men with thin bones and long beards reach for Yukio. ‘Noooooo!’ one old man wails. ‘She is dreaming. Noooooo.’ And then more of the cave dwellers reach for Yukio, tugging at his arms and shoulders and speaking in Chinese, loud and panicked.

  ‘Wake up, Greta!’ Yukio hollers, his hands shaking her now. He pushes her hard and she flops over onto her back, eyes still closed.

  ‘She will not wake,’ Lars says, matter-of-factly. ‘She does not want to wake.’

  ‘Why did you wake, Yukio?’ Marielle asks. ‘You were dreaming so beautifully.’

  Yukio shakes Greta again. More cave dwellers crowd around him, hands reaching for him. The pilot turns and all he can do is roar because he doesn’t have the words to speak to them. He pulls his shortsword from his belt and he charges at Lars, whose bulging blue eyes are so crazed and wild they can only stare in wonder at the stranger who now raises a blade to his face and drives him hard against the cavern wall.

  ‘Back!’ Yukio snarls as he tears the notebook from the old scientist’s hands and throws it across the room. Yukio grits his teeth – the wild dog of his fury, the tiger of it – presses the blade tip hard against Lars’s throat and lets loose a barrage of hate-filled words in his native tongue that spray against the old man’s face, words about how Yukio came to this forest to escape the killing of men but every bone in his rabid body right now is willing him to resume it. He roars and raises his elbows high and drives the blade hard and straight towards Lars’s eyes, adjusting his thrust late so that the sword slices the top of the botanist’s right ear and stabs through the handle loop of a gas lantern that hangs from a nail against the rock wall.