by Trent Dalton
‘Dickinson, Dad,’ Molly says. ‘And I’m going to be a famous actress-poet named Marlene Sky.’
Horace nods again, not at all surprised by his daughter’s announcement. ‘You’ll make more money diggin’ graves,’ he says. ‘But I guess you won’t get no standing ovation for hiding the dead.’ He lifts and looks at his shaking left hand, turns it into a fist.
‘What’s that stuff you and Uncle Aubrey have been drinkin’?’ Molly asks.
‘Mind your own business.’
‘You’re becoming more and more like him, Dad,’ Molly says.
‘Like who?’
‘Like Uncle Aubrey.’
Another shaky sip of tea.
‘You look like a shadow,’ Molly says. ‘Uncle Aubrey is nothing but shadow. You’re shadow, too, Dad, but you’re light as well.’
Horace says nothing.
‘When are you going to stand up to him?’ Molly asks. ‘He doesn’t care about us, Dad. He doesn’t care about Greta. He only cares for the gold. The only thing that makes him feel anything is the way that gold glows. I see it, Dad. He’s gold sick. He’s always been gold sick. He’s always talkin’ about my grandfather and how gold sick he got, but I reckon Aubrey’s as sick right now as a man can be.’
Horace rubs his temples with his fingers, trying to ease the blows of the dropping hammer in his head.
‘He thinks that glowing will chase away the shadow,’ Molly says, her train of thought burning with new coal now. ‘But it won’t. It’s already too dark.’
Horace rubs his forehead, closes his eyes. There’s no telling where a memory will come from; no figuring where and when the sleeping librarian of Horace Hook’s memory room is likely to wake with a start and dig into the dusty drawers of lived experience and produce a folder filled with a past-coloured story. Aubrey Hook and Horace Hook throwing rocks at each other’s faces. Horace is twelve and his brother is thirteen. They’re pickaxing the face of a goldmine near Tom’s Gully along Mount Bundey Creek, far south of Darwin. Their father, Arthur Hook, a seasoned gold prospector, has ridden on horseback to Pine Creek on a supply run. No information in the library on what started it all, only how it ended. Aubrey lands a rock the size of a tennis ball on Horace’s right eye. Horace responds with a similar-sized rock that Aubrey does not duck or turn away from but willingly allows to land flush on his mouth, where it dislodges one of his two front teeth. Aubrey searches the dirt floor of the goldmine dugout and grips another rock the size of his metal water canister and throws it at his younger brother, who ducks swiftly out of the way of the deadly projectile. The thrown rock bounces against the chalky mine wall and falls beside Horace’s work boots. He picks it up and snap-throws it back. Once more, Aubrey does not duck or turn away or guard his face with his hands. He stands proudly and lets the rock hit his face so hard that it breaks his nose. Blood runs across his chin and down his work shirt. And Aubrey Hook smiles. Red across his teeth. A mouth full of blood. Something in the smile makes Horace turn cold. Something across his brother’s face other than blood and rock dust. It’s satisfaction.
‘Why do you need permission from Aubrey to let me go to the Star with Sam?’ Molly asks.
‘Be quiet now, Molly,’ Horace says.
‘I’ve been watching you both,’ Molly says. ‘There’s something strange about you two. I think that moonshine is sending you both mad. I think you should stop drinkin’ for a bit.’
Horace raises his eyebrows. ‘Tom Berry’s grandkid telling me about madness,’ he says. ‘I like that.’
‘Maybe you’ve got the curse, too,’ Molly says.
‘Be quiet now, Molly.’
The girl is silent for a long moment. But then Molly breaks the silence. Molly always breaks the silence.
‘I was thinking about Mum the other day,’ she says, softly. Horace reacts to that word ‘Mum’. He turns his head like he turns his head in pubs when anyone says the name ‘Violet’ or the word ‘wife’.
‘I was looking in the mirror of her duchesse,’ Molly continues, ‘and I was missing her so much. I felt so sad about it, but I couldn’t cry. I tried so hard to let some tears out for her because sometimes I feel like maybe she’s somewhere where she can see me but I can’t see her and if she can see me then I want her to see that I’m crying for her and that way she’ll know how much I miss her and how much I hate her for leaving us down here. But then I remembered Longcoat Bob and I knew what was happening.’
‘What was happening?’ Horace asks.
‘The turning,’ Molly says. ‘The heart doesn’t turn to stone right away. It takes time to take hold because the heart is warm and it keeps beating and it keeps fighting against all that cold stone. But, soon enough, it all turns and then you feel nuthin’. All you got inside is cold rock. Like Uncle Aubrey.’
Horace stares at his daughter and he realises how deeply she’s lost in a trance of her own thinking. He worries for her. He cares for her. Molly looks at her father.
‘And you’re turning, too, Dad,’ Molly says.
‘That’s enough now, Molly,’ Horace says.
‘I can tell, Dad. I can see it happening to you. Kin means husbands, Dad.’
‘Let’s just have some breakfast.’
‘Kin means brothers, Dad. It means uncles and aunties and cousins, everything.’
And Horace slams his fist on the kitchen table.
‘Keep goin’, Molly,’ he barks.
His eyes. That horrifying warning men like Horace give to children like Molly with their eyes, in kitchens like this one. Danger. Do anything but keep going.
So Molly picks up a cutting knife and runs it six times, both sides, along the black leather razor strop hanging from a nail by the gas stove. She cuts three neat slices from a warm slab of six-day-old corned beef and fries them beside two halves of a ripe tomato in a thick black square iron skillet on the stove top.
Horace sips the tea quietly, sits the mug down on the table. His fingers reach for the red tin thimble in the centre of the table. ‘You see this thimble?’ he asks.
Molly nods at it, turning the tomatoes on the pan.
‘This thimble belonged to your mother,’ Horace says. ‘In the good years … when she was clear-headed, I mean, she would sit in the corner over there hand-sewing clothes for you. Pinafores and all that. And I’d be where you are right there. I’d fry up a feed of red emperor I’d caught on the rocks at Frances Bay, and I’d fry some potatoes up with it and we’d boil some muddies, too. And she was happy.’
Horace slips his forefinger into the thimble. Molly plates the corned beef and fried tomato, places the breakfast down for her father. He cuts into the beef, chews it along with the tomato that he’s sprinkled with too much salt and pepper.
He rests back in his chair. ‘The Japs are comin’,’ he says.
‘Who’s comin’?’
‘The Japanese. Three hundred and fifty Jap aircraft just blew the arse out of Hawaii. They’ll be comin’ for us next. These idiots who run this town will take a while to wake up and smell the fiery death fleet heading our way, but you can take it from me, Mol’, the war’s comin’ to Darwin.’
He sips his tea.
‘I reckon there’s some high-up Jap right now stickin’ a big fat red sun marker over Darwin on his map.’
‘Why would they wanna come all the way here?’
‘They’re rat-fucking the Yanks and we’re helpin’ the Yanks. You’ve seen all them navy boats in Darwin Harbour. We’ve got giant fuel tanks fillin’ Allied ships. We’ve got oil tanks and army bases and aerodromes, and all we got protectin’ ’em is a few big guns and a couple of barefoot kids with slingshots. Why wouldn’t they come to Darwin?’
‘So when do we leave?’ Molly asks.
Horace places his cup down again on the table. ‘We’re not going anywhere,’ he replies. ‘Our ship is about to come in, Molly. War is a goldmine for the gravedigger. Those Japs are comin’ and anyone stupid enough to stick around to greet them will be dead within
a day.’
‘Including us,’ Molly says.
‘We’re not in the firing line. They’ll go for the town and the port, mostly. And when the dust settles the Federal War Cabinet will be more than grateful to pay up handsomely to anyone who can give all them sorry bodies a proper burial.’
Horace gets up from the table, ambles into the living room. He returns with a large wooden box filled with bottles of disinfectant and sugar soap and scrubbing brushes. He places the box in the centre of the kitchen.
It’s the curse, Molly tells herself. It’s the curse that’s made him hard. Kin means fathers. Kin means husbands, too. Longcoat Bob turned his good heart to stone.
‘I need this place cleaned,’ Horace says. ‘I need you to dust, wash and disinfect every last corner, every last crack in this godforsaken shithole.’
Horace picks up the red tin thimble, holds it up to Molly. ‘I’m goin’ in to town and I won’t be home until tonight,’ he says. ‘Before I leave, I’ll be hiding this thimble somewhere in the house. To find it, you will need to inspect and clean every nook and cranny. If you have not found the thimble by the time I return, I will know you have not cleaned the house properly and you will be punished. Do you understand?’
Molly nods. It’s the curse, she tells herself again. The curse of Longcoat Bob.
‘Say it,’ he says.
‘I understand,’ Molly says.
‘You understand who?’ her father asks, placing the red tin thimble in the pocket of his pants.
‘I understand you, Dad.’
And her mind rattles with two words. The turning. The turning. The turning.
*
Cupboard doors opening. Cupboard doors slamming shut. Wipe, scrape, rub, dust. Breathless gravedigger girl on her hands and knees with an old toothbrush scrubbing bloodstains off the hallway floor. ‘Out damned spot,’ says Lady Macbeth in her mind. ‘Out! Out, I say.’ But some spots can’t be removed.
The girl spreading wax on the floor and rubbing and polishing the old wood. Her kneecaps get so red and sore she ties her father’s thick winter socks around her knees to cushion them. She pulls a heavy bucket of water and disinfectant across the living room floor. A cotton mop and a wringer.
It must be here. It must be here. She runs a rag across the dust that blankets the skirting boards of every wall. Breathe. She pulls a wooden step behind her through the house so that she can reach her wire-bone arms up to run the rag across the endless crowning moulds atop every internal wall. Breathe, Molly Hook. Every wardrobe drawer. Every corner of every duchesse, every sideboard, every broom closet. Please be here.
Floors scrubbed, curtains washed. Dig, Molly, dig. It must be here somewhere. Lye dropped down the pipes in the kitchen sink. The kitchen sink and the bathroom washtub scrubbed with a wire brush and scouring powder. She drags three large house rugs down the back staircase and uses the wooden step to help her hang the rugs on the backyard clothesline. She beats the rugs with the rear blade face of Bert the shovel, coughs hard when she swallows decades-old dust. For five straight hours she works. She works through lunch with no break and no food; there isn’t even time to stop for a cup of water. She must find the thimble because she feels the curse.
Knobs turning, doors opening, cupboards slamming shut, and now she’s opening cupboard doors she’s opened thrice before, and now she’s dizzy and so tired and she can’t keep a single straight thought inside her busy mind. Drawers pulled open frantically and frantically pushed shut. Red tin thimble. Red tin thimble. So small. Nothing to it, really. Just an object that once belonged to her mother, Violet. It means nothing to her and everything to her.
She searches and searches through the sprawling house. Inside cracks and under mats, hands reaching beneath crockery cabinets and finding only the bodies of living and dead spiders. So many cockroaches crawling and so much cockroach shit to pick up in her hands. But she finds no red tin thimble.
The gravedigger girl’s heart pounding because she can never seem to find exactly what she’s looking for and the curse of Longcoat Bob blows in from the graveyard to mix with the smell of ammonia and bleach and she wonders if it’s the ammonia in the bathroom or the methylated spirits in the kitchen or the missing red tin thimble that is making her feel light headed. Her father will come home, he will come home, because fathers always come home, sure as the Darwin sun rises each day like the bread in the late Lloyd Holland’s bakery. He will come home and she will not have found the thimble and she will be punished and he will not even know the effort she put into finding her mother’s red tin thimble. He will not know because he won’t be able to see the truth beyond the dark veil of Longcoat Bob’s curse that she can feel is so close to her now, and so close to her father because of her, so close it hurts. Her Uncle Aubrey will be with her father when he comes home and they will both be liquored and Uncle Aubrey will be worse than her father because he is all shadow, and he will take on the punishing like he always does because it satisfies him.
She scurries from the bedrooms to the kitchen to the bathroom to the living room to the bedrooms to the kitchen to the bathroom and she spins around on the spot, wondering where her father could have possibly placed that red tin thimble and she finds the locked door to Horace Hook’s bedroom where he keeps the buried and unburied treasures of Hollow Wood’s ever-trusting dead. And her heart is beating so fast with all the thinking and the work and exhaustion that she can’t catch her breath, and she tries to suck more air into her lungs but nothing goes in and she remembers water and she scrambles to the kitchen but then she sees flashes of yellow and purple in her mind’s eye and she can’t focus on anything and her hands are so cold and the blood seems to rush out of her body and drain like lye into the cracks in the polished wooden floorboards beneath her bare feet and she closes her eyes and sees only a black room and this feels safe so she stops breathing and falls with a thud to the floor of the kitchen of the caretaker’s quarters in ruined Hollow Wood Cemetery, where the only people close enough to hear a single sound from Molly Hook, aged twelve years and eleven months, are buried in dirt. And the last thing she sees in the black room of her mind is an audience rising to its feet to give a soaring standing ovation for the gravedigger girl as the side of her skull hits the theatre stage.
‘Bravo, Molly!’ they scream. ‘Bravo!’
*
Seen from the blue sky above and looking down and looking closer in and closer in, she is a brown-haired girl standing in pants made for boys before a dress-shop window on Cavenagh Street, central Darwin. If someone told Molly Hook she had dreamed herself here in this moment, she would believe it because Darwin is a dream at sunset in summer and the dress in the window is the kind of dress Molly wears in her dreams. A teenager’s dress and a going-out dress that Molly could wear to a dance or a school graduation or to a Hollywood film premiere on the arm of Gary Cooper, if only she wasn’t so busy digging graves in Darwin, Australia. A light blue satin dress the colour of the Darwin sky in summer, resting on the Ward’s Boutique shop window mannequin, whose expressionless face says nothing of how wonderful it must be to wear something so beautiful.
It’s not long till her birthday. She will soon be able to say she is in her teens. She will soon be old enough to attend the winter dance in Darwin’s town hall. She could wear this blue dress to the dance. Perhaps her father will buy it for her, for her birthday. She won’t ask how he got the money; she won’t ask if it was bought with the gold her uncle bit free from Lisbeth Fleming’s dead ring finger. She will wake up on the morning of her birthday and she will open the dress box her father has wrapped for her and she will whisper, ‘It’s beautiful, Dad.’ And he will ask her to try the dress on and she will spin before him and he will smile and she will run into his arms and he will say he’s sorry he can’t always be like this. And when they embrace, his face won’t be unshaven and bristly, he won’t smell of spirit and week-old sweat. There will be only colour. Sky blue.
Molly’s made her pilgrimage to thi
s untouchable dress twice a week for the past four weeks, but, no matter how many times she wills a different outcome, her pockets are empty when she gets there, and she always turns away empty handed.
She walks barefoot. She dreams and Darwin dreams with her. It refuses to wake up, so the strange daily film-reel dream of the town on the geographical top of Australia during World War II unspools in all its scenes that make no sense. Darwin, which was not made by God but by a theory of evolution. Made by the earth spinning and by 5800 people who lost their footing, slid southwards and northwards on the rocking floors of ships with no anchors, and found the wreckage and flotsam of their lives washed ashore at Port Darwin. Greek and Italian storeowners, Chinese market sellers, Japanese divers, Filipino fishermen, German miners, Afghan cameleers, Thai whores, Malay traders, Javanese labourers, New Guinea labourers, South Sea island labourers press-ganged onto boats and forced to work inside the Darwin dream. A dream that starts in the Timor Sea on a sheet of turquoise coastal water so clear you feel you could dance on its hard glass. A girl like Molly Hook could make slippers out of that sea glass and she could wear them to a Country Women’s Association ball with a sky-blue satin shop-window dress.
Those mangroves on the shore would be no place to dance. The mangroves belong to the bodies of root-wedged dead gangsters and the crocodiles who feast on their sins. But inside that mangrove fringe is a place where humans come to re-invent themselves. A place to change your dream, to change your name, to change your ending. Baumgarten to Maze. Molly to Marlene. Nobody knows anything and everybody keeps it that way. Don’t trouble the man in the black hat three stools down along the bloodstained bar of the National Hotel; he’s the devil on a day off.
The Darwin sunset is gold then red then purple then black. The town is corrugated-iron fortress homes that fall with a sneeze. Dirt for roads and dirt for air. Cyclone-ravaged for a century. Architectural impermanence. Darwin dreams in sungolds and earth-browns. It dreams in violent rain and wind. ‘Nungalinya,’ Sam Greenway once told Molly Hook. That’s the Dreamtime ancestor in charge of the cyclones and storms that tear the tin skin off town pubs and stores with a single whistle from His lips. Sam said Nungalinya is angry at all the white settlers who keep landing in Port Darwin, keep skipping ashore with their pickaxes and shovels to chip away at Ol’ Man Rock. Nungalinya, Sam said, lifts fishing boats from the sea, sucks them into the air and bats them a hundred yards through the wind against shore rocks that smash metal hulls the same way all those white settlers smash the shells of fat-clawed East Point mud crabs.