All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  Then he tries his English words again for Greta Maze, digs up every last one of them that he stores in his busy mind and he tries to explain something to the sleeping actress. He lies on his side and he rests his head on his right elbow and he leans in to Greta Maze’s ear and he whispers, ‘Greta . . . make . . . whole again . . . Yukio . . . wanted . . . to go.’ He looks to the sky. ‘Yukio . . . wanted . . . sky.’

  The actress is sleeping but still she makes him nervous. Every broken word an act of release. An act of confession.

  ‘I want to stay,’ he whispers. Clear English. Near-perfect English.

  The admission feels like a betrayal as much as it feels like the truth. And the truth of it makes him weep. ‘I want to stay,’ he whispers. Words between tears. ‘I want to stay . . . Greta Maze . . . I want to stay.’

  He wipes his eyes. Rubs them. Pulls himself away from the actress. Standing now. Ashamed. Embarrassed. He walks to the stream by the stinkwood tree and he watches the seed capsule canoes flow into the forest. Rowing away.

  The pilot’s back is turned to Greta, so he does not see her open her eyes. He does not see her looking to the sky through the branches of the stinkwood tree, her eyes slowly adjusting to the light. Her mind is processing the information of the moment – birdsong, running water, the smell of earth and bark, the touch of the grass on her palms by her side, the beating of her heart. And her heart is absorbing the words of Yukio Miki, his whispered broken-English confession. She woke to those whispered words. They opened her eyes, but she kept them closed. The treasure he dug from deep within his heart and soul and handed to a woman he barely knows.

  She stands in silence and she treads softly on the grass beneath her saddle shoes. This might still be the long dream, she tells herself. Her cave-bound stupor. She turns and finds the pilot standing at the stream. Yukio doesn’t hear her footsteps. To him she only appears, as if she has come from another dimension, from that world to this one, from the vanished to the found.

  ‘I just had the strangest dream,’ Greta says.

  Yukio’s head is turned to his side and his eyes are on her face and her face is staring deep into the tangled vine forest.

  ‘I dreamed that I was dreaming,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want to wake up from the dream. But you were beside me, Yukio. You kept waking me up. I wanted to sleep but you kept waking me up. You didn’t want me to sleep. You didn’t want me to go to the dream. You kept screaming a word at me. The same word over and over.’

  She turns to him. ‘Stay.’

  She steps closer to him. Closer to the pilot who fell from the sky. Who fell for her. She raises her left hand and her fingers brush his cheek because she needs feeling, touch, to tell her this is not the long dream. And that touch makes him close his eyes because that touch is too gentle, too caring, and so warm and filled with such feeling that he wants to pull away from it. But he will stay. Stay.

  ‘Stay,’ he says.

  And she moves closer still and their bodies are touching now and he can feel her breathing and he can feel her chest against his and the curls of her hair are brushing his forehead and he can smell her and that smell is earth and life and future and past and his doom and his regret for finding this stranger in this upside-down land where he is the enemy, and her cheek is brushing his cheek now and his body and the motion inside it make him a sinner. Forgive me, Nara, he tells himself. Her skin is a landmine. Her skin is a dropped bomb. Her skin is the end of this world war and it’s the world exploding into pieces. Forgive me, Nara. And the movement in his neck is a betrayal and a truth and the weight he shifts to his cheek to brush back against hers is a crime and a miracle and a crime. And in the violent war inside his mind a call of retreat is made and Greta can feel the conflict in his muscles and he’s about to pull away but he’s held in place by a single word.

  ‘Stay,’ she whispers, and her arms wrap around him and her sweeping lips find his temple and the bone around his left eye and then his high cheekbone and she breathes deep and the motion in her body feels like meaning. And the pilot’s lips touch her skin.

  And then a baby cries. The infant wailing of the baby who fell from the sky, and it is the sound of the baby waking from his long sleep but also the sound of Yukio Miki and Greta Maze waking from a dream they both walked into.

  Greta breathes and breaks away from the embrace. She rushes to the baby, cradled in the pilot’s jacket. She picks him up and draws him to her chest. ‘Sssshhhh,’ she says. ‘Ssshhhhh.’ She rocks the baby in her arms. Then she looks up at the pilot. ‘Where’s Molly?’ she asks.

  OWN ALL YOU CARRY

  A girl’s open mouth. The girl in the sky-blue satin dress lying on her side in the sun. Half an orange strychnine fruit sitting in her open palm. Her eyes closed. Brown boots covered in dirt and dust. Duffel bag straps over her shoulder. She lies motionless at the foot of four stone pillars that look like family members standing over a crib, peering down at a newborn.

  The girl’s name echoes across the maze of stone pillars. ‘Molly.’

  She stirs. Her left boot moves. Her left leg kinks at the knee. Her name echoes again across the stone city. ‘Molly!’

  The girl’s eyes flash open. Her view is dirt and spear grass and stone. She looks up to the sun and the sky and she finds the stone pillars of last night. They’re not as threatening in the daylight. Not as monstrous. She feels the fruit in her hand and she brings it to her eyes and she throws it at the rock wall opposite her. The fruit bounces off the sandstone and lands a few feet from the other half of the fruit that she spat out last night because it was so bitter and dry and near impossible to swallow. But she remembers how willing she was to swallow it and she is ashamed of this.

  She turns to the sky. ‘Why did you tell me those things?’ she asks.

  But she gets no reply.

  Then her name again, echoing across the stone city. ‘Moll-yyyyy.’

  She knows that voice. There’s projection in it. There’s performance. Greta.

  ‘Moll-yyyyy!’

  She stands and runs towards the voice. She attempts to say her name but her throat is parched and she needs to swallow saliva twice before she can get a single word out. ‘Greta,’ she says weakly.

  She runs closer to the voice. She breathes deep and summons a louder call and lets it rip across the stone city. ‘Gret-aaaaaaaaa!’ she hollers. She darts left and right and ducks into alleys running diagonally right, then veers into passages running diagonally left and beats her own path through the maze of stone pillars.

  ‘Moll-yyyyy!’

  ‘Gret-aaaa, I’m coming!’ Molly screams.

  Hard left, hard right. Pillar after pillar after pillar. Follow the voice, Molly tells herself. She came for you. She cares for you. Because you care for her. The heart is warmed by warming the hearts of others. You only had a stone heart to give, she thinks, but she took it anyway. Run to her, Molly. Run, Molly, run.

  ‘Moll-yyyyy!’

  ‘Greta!’ Molly screams. ‘I can hear you. I’m coming. I’m coming.’ And she runs. Zigging and zagging through the maze, the voice of her friend as her compass point.

  ‘I’m coming Greta,’ Molly calls. ‘Keep shouting! I can hear you! I’m coming.’

  ‘Moll-yyyyy!’ Greta calls in the distance.

  And the gravedigger girl smiles as she takes a blind corner around a giant pillar that stands some fifty feet tall. She takes the blind corner so fast that her boots slide on the gravel beneath her and her legs lose their footing and she lands hard on her chest and belly, and skin rolls painfully away from her kneecaps and elbows, but she doesn’t care because Greta is close and she pulls herself up with her hair in her eyes and she’s still bent half over when she brushes her hair back and focusses on the impossible vision of her uncle, Aubrey Hook, standing before her. The shadow.

  She tells herself it can’t be him, standing within arm’s reach of her, towering almost as high as the monster pillars surrounding him. She tells herself she’s dreaming, s
till back there in the heart of the maze, back there sleeping with the orange fruit in her hand. She tells herself this can’t be real, but she knows it is when his long shadow fingers reach out and smother her nose and mouth.

  *

  ‘Moll-yyyyy!’ Greta calls, holding the baby to her chest. Sun and sweat across her face, she catches her breath at the foot of three pillars that look regal, like a king and queen and a younger, shorter prince sitting down at a sandstone slab that holds a palace feast. Rubble for roast chickens. Fallen stones for goblets. Yukio stands a foot behind her, studying the shapes of other rocks and pillars, committing them to memory in case they have to travel back through this godforsaken maze. He knows they are up high now. He noticed that the stone city sits on an incline rising to a high ridge and when the wind blows in certain directions he can hear water flowing in the distance ahead of them. And although they are up high, this is surely a place created in the underworld. Yomi-no-kuni, he tells himself. The World of Darkness must look like this. Mazes of stone monsters where creatures lurk behind every turn. A place that can’t be trusted. A feeling in his bones. In his heart.

  A voice from the north-west. Faint. ‘Greta.’

  ‘Moll-yyyyy!’ Greta calls again and she runs to the sound.

  ‘Greta . . . wait,’ Yukio says.

  But the actress does not stop. She only runs. Startled by the movement, the baby cries loudly and Greta tries to calm him as she moves. ‘It’s okay,’ she says, in a soft and tender voice. ‘We’re going to find Molly. We’re going to find Molly.’

  She turns left and right and left again. ‘Moll-yyyyy!’ she calls.

  She rushes on through the maze. Her left shoulder catches on the edge of a stone pillar, tearing a hole in the sleeve of her emerald dress that is now so worn and so journeyed that it has turned a light grey from kicked-up dust and brown from the ground dirt it collected in successive nights of rough and fitful sleeps beneath stars.

  Yukio runs behind her, loyally following her crooked path. ‘Greta . . . wait,’ he shouts.

  ‘Come on, Yukio,’ Greta calls back without stopping or turning around. ‘Come on. She’s close.’

  The pilot who fell from the sky watches the actress who has woken from her long sleep so renewed, so purposeful, so driven. He watches her legs moving, her shoes stepping between clumps of spear grass and stepping around jagged boulder heads that have fallen from pillars. He watches her dart left and right again and he watches her stop abruptly in a ball of dust kicked up by her skidding shoes. He hears her inhale sharply and he comes to her side and looks at her face. White. Ghost-white. Horrified. Her full lips trembling. And he follows her gaze down a straight, narrow alley and he discovers that the subject of her gaze is a tall, thin man with a black moustache in a wide-brimmed black hat. And there is time enough in this moment for Yukio to see that the tall man has his left forearm around Molly Hook’s mouth and there is time enough for Yukio to see the look upon the man’s face and there is time enough to know that look is one of strange satisfaction and there is time enough to see the tall man’s right arm pointing a revolver straight at Greta Maze.

  Molly flails her legs and pulls hard at her uncle’s left arm and manages to shift it enough to squeeze two words out into the still air. ‘Run, Greta!’

  But Greta is frozen in this moment. She’s frozen in the memory of his fists. She’s frozen in the muscle memory of the journey she made to this wild land from Sydney. She’s frozen in the fact she was too young to care for the baby who was taken away from her and how those midwives and those hospital doctors took away more than her baby that day. They took away value and pride and purpose and they took away the notion that anyone in this world should care about Greta Baumgarten, not even herself. And so she tried to become someone else. Maybe, she thought, someone might care for Greta Maze instead. The showgirl. The public bar temptress. The punching bag. The actress.

  ‘Run, Greta!’ Molly calls.

  But, standing beside the actress in the emerald dress, Yukio knows that all the time inside the moment is up.

  It’s just another journey in the Top End. Much shorter from start to finish than Molly Hook’s long walk into the deep country. Yukio turns and twists his body to stand in front of Greta and the baby in her arms. A hammer drops. A firing pin strikes the primer of a bullet. Yukio staring into the actress’s eyes. Primer ignites propellant. Bang.

  Yukio’s arms around the actress. The propellant pushes the bullet core so fast through the air that it can’t be seen. Only the end of the journey can be seen. A bullet driving through the back of a pilot’s white T-shirt.

  ‘Nooooooooo!’ Greta wails.

  Inside that pilot’s shirt is a man Greta barely knows. A stranger who fell from the sky. Embracing her. Shielding her. Arms wrapped so tight around the actress. His cheek against hers. And he doesn’t want to pull away because he is warm here and he is home here and he wants to stay here. But pull away he does. Blood spilling from his lips. ‘Run!’ he says.

  And the actress obeys and she grips the baby to her chest and rushes through a break in a nearby wall as a second bullet cracks the sandstone mere inches above her head.

  And Yukio Miki falls hard into the dust.

  *

  Molly watches the sky. Keep your eyes on the sky, Molly. Keep your eyes on the sky. The sky grows darker. On earth, the mad howling laughter of Aubrey Hook echoes across the sandstone maze.

  ‘Where are you going to run to, Greta?’ he calls, dragging the dead weight of Molly beside him in a headlock.

  Molly kicks hard at his shins. ‘Lemme go!’ she screams. And her fingernails dig into Aubrey’s forearms, but it only makes him laugh louder.

  That deranged howling. That terrible reminder of Hollow Wood. Molly bites his hand and Aubrey loses patience and throws the gravedigger girl with force against a sandstone pillar and she falls hard to the earth. As she sits up, he places the revolver’s barrel end hard against the top of her skull. Molly closes her eyes and tucks her head into her chest.

  ‘Please, Greta,’ Aubrey calls. ‘Show yourself, woman. I’m not angry at youuuuuuuu. I’m angry at young Molly here. Come out now and Molly might just make it out of this alive.’

  Molly moves her head away from the gun barrel and screams as loud as she can, ‘Keep runnin’, Greta. Don’t worry about me.’ And she looks up at Aubrey looking down at her. ‘I’m not scared of monsters.’

  Molly sees him smile a wide look of satisfaction and over his shoulder she sees a way out of this. A fork of lightning, cutlery dropped from a mansion in the sky. A sky gift for the gravedigger girl.

  *

  Deep inside the maze of stone pillars, Greta scurries breathlessly along alleyways, turning and turning. The baby wails in fright and she puts a hand over his mouth. ‘Sssssshhhhh,’ she whispers as she runs. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’ The boy continues to cry beneath her muffling hand. ‘Please be quiet. Ssshhhhhh.’

  Greta is crying now, too, but she keeps her weeping silent. ‘Ssshhhhh,’ she whispers again, as much to herself as to the baby.

  The endless howling of Aubrey Hook’s laughter. The confidence in his voice. The whole black shadow of his being spreading across the stone city.

  ‘You left me for dead, Greta!’ he calls across the maze. ‘You left me for dead in that miserable, godforsaken cemetery.’

  Stone pillars gathering around Greta. Leaning over her. Pressing down on her. They want to take her. They want to drag her back to Aubrey Hook but she won’t let them.

  She’s spent from the running. Spent from the crocodiles in Candlelight Creek and the monsters in the tin mine and the sleepers and the dreamers and the poison-eaters inside the vine forest. She has to stop. She leans over her knees to suck in air. The baby feels so heavy. She turns in a circle looking for a place to hide and she sees an alley running to what looks like a wall of shrubbery. And shrubbery means the edge of the forest and the edge of the forest means a way out of the maze. So she runs down the al
ley and she’s almost at the forest edge when again she hears the voice of Aubrey Hook. Too close now. Too close for her to make a single movement.

  ‘You’ll die out here alone, Greta,’ Aubrey calls. ‘Show yourself.’

  Greta crouches down, presses her back against a stone wall. Even the baby senses the danger in Aubrey’s voice and he stays silent, though Greta does not remove her hand from his mouth.

  ‘I won’t hurt you,’ Aubrey calls. ‘I love you, Greta.’

  Even closer now. Greta realises he must be on the other side of the very stone wall she is leaning against, with her knees up to her chest where the baby rests. She can hear Aubrey’s footsteps, his boots on the gravel.

  She shuffles along the stone wall towards the forest edge until she runs out of wall. She cannot move any further, can only listen to his footsteps coming closer to her. One more corner for him to turn and Greta Maze will be lost again in the shadow of Aubrey Hook.

  One step. Two steps. Three steps. Greta breathes deep to hold her silence in.

  ‘Are you there, Greta?’ Aubrey calls. ‘I know you’re there, Greta!’

  Then the voice of Molly Hook. ‘Stop it,’ she says, flatly.

  ‘Let her go,’ Molly says. ‘Let her go and I’ll take you to Longcoat Bob’s gold. I know exactly where it is, Uncle Aubrey. You can have it all. You can have everything you’ve ever wanted. But you can’t have her.’

  Silence now in the city of stone. Aubrey Hook turning to face Molly.