All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

  So much love inside a cemetery. So much loss, but so much love. It’s the one thing Violet appreciated about gravedigging. She called it ‘the romance of the cemetery’, though Horace never understood what she meant. ‘Ain’t nuthin’ romantic about it,’ he said. ‘Just holes for dust an’ bones.’ But Violet saw the poetry in the place. She saw those lines on Cherie Lawrence’s grave. 1854– 1917. India red granite. A serpentine contour on top:

  EVERY DAY AT HALF PAST THREE

  A WHISPERED NAME, CHERIE

  AND YOU SAIL BACK TO ME

  ACROSS THE ETERNAL SEA

  A simple line of love for Henry Prendergast, 1866–1909: ‘I miss your hand in mine.’ The simple reflection on the life of Hazel Collins, 1854–1926: ‘Died grateful. Died loved.’

  The harrowing epitaphs to children. Violet Hook told Molly that these reminded her to be grateful. ‘Love lies below. Hope flies above’; ‘We held you for a day. We hold your heart forever.’ They reminded Violet of all she stood to lose.

  Molly’s yellow lamp lights up the darkened cemetery lanes. Her duffel bag hangs on her back with the strap stretching from her left shoulder to her right hip. Bert the shovel rests like a sheathed sword between her shoulder blade and the bag strap. All these gravestones she knows so well. All these life lessons from people in the beyond. Marion Curtis, 1854–1908: ‘Loved in life, lamented in death.’ Lucille Clifford, 1823–1874: ‘While we have time, let us do good.’ Molly was raised on these lessons, these headstone messages to God. All that trust in faith.

  ‘Blessed are the pure in heart.’

  ‘Eternity, be thou my refuge.’

  ‘I know that my redeemer liveth.’

  ‘A lonely scene shall thee restore.’

  Last words left behind by the dead. Concluding truths after lifetimes endured.

  But can she believe them? Can she believe the words of Eunice Milton, 1875–1934: ‘Don’t grieve, for what we lose comes around in another form’? Because Molly likes that one. She wants to believe in Eunice Milton. She won’t grieve the loss of her mother because Violet Hook is still here, in another form. Molly just hasn’t found her yet. But she’s here. She’s come around again.

  Now the night sky speaks to her.

  ‘What makes you so sure, Molly?’ the night sky asks.

  ‘I can feel her,’ she says, because to respond to the night sky like this is to be graceful and poetic.

  ‘Where can you feel her?’

  ‘Everywhere,’ Molly says. ‘In trees, in flowers, in the rocks, in the dirt.’

  Molly rushes on with her lamp. ‘Did she come back around in another form?’ Molly asks the night sky.

  ‘You’ve been talking to the day sky again, haven’t you?’

  ‘A little bit,’ Molly says.

  ‘It’s a lie, Molly.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The day sky. Be wary of the things it tells you. The day sky is an illusion. It’s a trick. You believe it’s so blue and so real you can touch it, but the truth is, Molly, the day sky is just more of me. More black. And the black goes on forever.’

  ‘A boundless sea?’

  ‘A black sea with no shore,’ the night sky says. ‘Never ending or beginning. Never to be trusted.’

  In the south-western corner of the cemetery she stops at a gravestone. Molly has found the grave she’s been looking for. Thelma Leonard. Upright limestone. Oval top contouring. She places her lamp beside the headstone. She slips off her duffel bag and holds the black tin box in two hands. She runs her fingers over her target connection point, a small hanging padlock at the centre of the tin box. Then, with a fierce swing of her gravedigger girl arms, she smashes the tin box against Thelma Leonard’s headstone.

  But the box does not break open. There are items in the box, hard and small, and they rattle and bang against the insides as though Molly’s holding a box of lit Chinatown firecrackers. Molly tries again, with another rabid, wild gravedigger girl swing that dents the box but does not break it open.

  ‘What are you doing, Molly?’ the night sky asks.

  ‘I’m putting it all back,’ she says.

  ‘You don’t have time for this, Molly,’ the night sky says. ‘The pubs are closing in town. They’ll be home soon.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘Night skies tell no lies, Molly.’

  Molly looks up to the black sky blanket beyond the hanging leaves of the milkwood tree. She looks back down at the black rock frog rock.

  ‘“While we have time, let us do good,”’ she says. ‘The Japs are comin’. Everybody’s gettin’ out. Stuart Highway’s gonna be full of buses and cars and army troop lorries. They’ll be stuck in town for hours.’

  ‘What if they’re not in town?’ the night sky asks. ‘What if they’re just at Aubrey’s house, sipping moonshine in the old shed?’

  The thought of Aubrey fills Molly’s arms with warm blood and she tenses her muscles and she bashes the tin against the rock so hard her gritted front teeth feel set to crack. This time the box lid bursts open and flashes of gold and silver spread across the dirt. Jewellery. Necklaces, bracelets, rings. Wedding bands. Engagement rings. Victorian engagement rings. Edwardian engagement rings. Molly takes the lamp and runs it over the ground, her fingers scrabbling for the scattered jewellery and carefully placing it back in the box. More than twenty pieces in total. Diamond. Amethyst. Opal. Pearl. Gold and gold and more of other people’s gold, all stolen by her father and uncle and stockpiled in the black tin box until they were ready to take the train to Sydney, where no Darwin loved ones would spot the sacred items in the shop window of a King’s Cross pawnbroker.

  Here lies Thelma Leonard, 1813–1867: ‘Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.’ Molly drives Bert into the soil in front of Thelma’s stone, her right boot stomping hard on the blade edge. Four quick shovelfuls, not enough time to go deeper. Inside the black box she sifts through the pieces. She remembers Thelma’s ring – she remembers them all – a small sapphire in a crystal setting the same square shape as Thelma’s gravestone. Molly drops the ring into the hole and fills it in, flattening the dirt with four hard whacks with the back of Bert’s blade.

  On the eastern edge of Hollow Wood, amid a cluster of flat, square tablet headstones, Molly stops at the grave of Phyllis Quinn, 1865–1914: ‘There shall be no darkness. There shall be light and music.’ When she reads the epitaphs, Molly hears human voices, as if the grave’s owner is talking to her, and maybe that was the intention. Phyllis Quinn’s voice is eloquent, a touch of Irish in it. Musical. Phyllis played piano. Phyllis sang Irish lullabies to her children. And there was no darkness in the sunroom of her two-storey Darwin home. There was only light and music. Molly digs her hole, drops the flower brooch inside it, returning it to its rightful owner, the single pearl bud inside the flower buried with a single shovel load. ‘I’m sorry, Phyllis,’ Molly whispers.

  And Molly moves on through the cemetery, corner to corner, grave to grave, returning the objects Aubrey and Horace robbed from the dead. A pink sapphire engagement ring replaced in the grave of Sarah Hill. ‘To undreamed shores,’ Sarah says on her headstone. Three turquoise balls like blue moons set into a gold ring go back into the grave of Julia Hancock. And Julia’s words on her headstone are Molly’s reward: ‘To live in the hearts of those we love is not to die.’ More life lessons. More messages from beyond.

  A silver enamel bird pendant for Geraldine Lamb: ‘Whither thou goest, I will go.’ A ruby and diamond ring for Eva Gordon: ‘We come whirling out of the nothingness, scattering stars like dust. The stars made a circle and in the middle we dance.’ Crystal pendant earrings for Agnes Herman: ‘Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.’ A black opal ring for Marilyn Prince: ‘I know I am deathless. I know this orbit of mine.’ Just words on a red granite grave. Lessons.

  ‘“I know I am deathless,”’ Molly tells the night sky. ‘“I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by the carpenter’s compass.”’
/>   ‘Marilyn Prince does not lie,’ the night sky says back to her.

  ‘Walt Whitman does not lie,’ Molly says. ‘Dad said my mum was always talking about that line on Marilyn Prince’s headstone and she asked anyone in town with half a brain what it meant. Someone in a mobile library told her it was by an American called Walt Whitman.’

  Molly flattens the dirt with Bert’s blade.

  ‘“My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,”’ she says, reciting more Whitman. ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution. And I know the amplitude of time.”’

  And a voice in darkness adds to those lines. But it’s not the night sky. The voice in the darkness is deep and muddled. Drunken.

  ‘“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,”’ the voice says.

  And Molly turns to the voice, raising Bert the shovel to defend herself.

  ‘“If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.”’

  Aubrey Hook staggers into Molly’s lamplight. The girl draws a sharp, deep breath. Her uncle holds a single-shot .22-calibre rifle in his right hand, rests it on his right shoulder, wobbles it up there dangerously, like it could swing around to Molly any second now.

  ‘“You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,”’ Aubrey continues, still reciting Whitman. ‘“But I shall be good health to you … neverthe …”’ And he struggles to say the words with all the white spirit inside him. He’s all shadow. His black hat and his moustache the colour of the shadows passing across the lamplight. ‘“… nevertheless … and filter and fibre your blood.”’ And Aubrey looks to the night sky. Looks to the stars. He points his rifle upwards, closes one eye to take better aim, then staggers with the effort. ‘“Failing …”’ he says, reaching deep into his fogged memory. ‘“Failing to fetch me … at first” … “at first” … Oh, damn it.’ He turns to Molly. ‘Do tell me how it ends, Molly,’ he says, trying to be tender. ‘Your mother used to tell me how it ended. She knew that whole thing almost by heart and there were pages of it. Pages and pages, big words and more big words.’

  Molly is silent. Aubrey staggers forward, closer to Molly. He burps, spits, snorts the air. ‘Tell me how it ends,’ he barks, vicious and frothing, and his intensity makes Molly jump atop Marilyn Prince’s grave. She turns her eyes to the headstone then recites: ‘“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged. Missing me one place search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.”’

  Aubrey giggles at this and his giggles erupt into his deranged howl, that sick howl again, something to scare the fruit bats, a laugh so chilling it might bring the black rock frog rock to life, make it hop away south with everybody else who’s fleeing Darwin. ‘Do you think your mother’s somewhere waiting for you, Molly?’

  He howls again. ‘Maybe she’s in the grass,’ he says. He looks theatrically beneath his boots. ‘Maybe she’s under my bootsoles,’ he says, inspecting the ground. ‘Nope, not there I’m afraid.’

  Molly feels cold now, even on a Darwin summer night this still. ‘Where’s Dad?’ she asks.

  ‘Town,’ Aubrey says, groggy and brief, and Molly knows her uncle just spoke a lie because her uncle can’t lie like the day sky can lie.

  ‘I had to let myself into the house,’ Aubrey says. ‘Then I saw the strangest thing. Your father’s bedroom door was wide open and his drawers were pushed across the floor and damned if our treasured black tin box wasn’t missing.’

  Molly’s eyes fall on the box beside her lamp. Aubrey smiles.

  ‘I thought the house might have been robbed,’ Aubrey says. ‘Filthy …’ – searching for the word – ‘opportunists … Molly. Everybody’s evacuating their houses and all through town those evacuated houses are being looted by filthy opportunists making the most of this …’ – he takes a while longer to find this word – ‘precarious … situation … Darwin has … found itself in.’

  A wobble. A stagger.

  ‘Imagine that: robbing the homes of people running for their lives from the Japs.’

  ‘Next they’ll be robbing from the dead,’ Molly says.

  Aubrey smiles, waves a knowing forefinger at Molly. Then he relaxes his right arm, lets the rifle down, waves it about. ‘I thought I’d better grab Horace’s rifle and explore the extent of the burglary,’ he says. ‘Then, to my surprise, I saw a flicker of light from the kitchen window. Someone was walking through the cemetery. And now, who should I find burying … my … valuable …’ – another search for the right word, another stagger – ‘tr … tr … treasure.’

  ‘It doesn’t belong to—’

  ‘Be quiet now, child,’ Aubrey snaps. ‘You talk too much, child. Maybe that’s why you talk all that gibberish to the sky. There’s nobody left on earth who can stand listening to your drivel.’ He moves closer to Molly. He leans down and takes the lamp by its hooped wire handle. His eyes settle on the duffel bag hanging over Molly’s shoulder. ‘Hand me the bag,’ he says.

  Molly reluctantly slips the bag from her shoulders, hands it to her uncle who tips the contents onto the ground by his boots. Canned goods and utensils. Water. A thick black book with yellowed pages. Aubrey squats down to examine the book’s spine. ‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,’ he reads.

  He stands once more. ‘You going somewhere, Molly?’ he asks. ‘You disappearing into the bush again? You about to get yourself lost in the godless wild again?’

  ‘I’m going to find Longcoat Bob,’ Molly replies.

  Aubrey laughs, the lamp moving in his hand, sending light to new points of darkness.

  ‘And why …’ – Aubrey shakes his head, piecing his words together slowly – ‘would you … seek … to find … that sssssssnakey sssssssorcerer … Longcoat Bob?’

  ‘I’m going to ask him to lift the curse he put on our family,’ Molly says, flatly.

  Aubrey howls with laughter. ‘Of course, of course, the curse,’ he says. ‘You still believe in curses, Molly?’ He nods his head vigorously. He moves closer to her from the shadows. He hisses at her. ‘You still believe in sssssssorcery?’

  She doesn’t look at him. He’s Medusa from the shadows.

  ‘Even after everything I’ve told you about Tom Berry,’ he says.

  Closer still.

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you, child, that some children are born into this world destined to lead lives of pure and unavoidable misery?’ He extends a crooked right forefinger and he taps it hard three times on her chest as he says, ‘And you are …’ – tap – ‘quite simply …’ – tap – ‘… one of those children.’ Tap.

  Aubrey turns and tilts his head to the stars. ‘You can’t blame Longcoat Bob,’ he says, snidely, waving a finger at the sky. ‘Blame God. Blame your precious sky. Blame your shimmering stars.’ He turns to Molly. He snarls at her. The shadow snarl. ‘Blame your mother,’ he says. He laughs. Staggers on his feet again.

  ‘I was there, Molly,’ he says, his drunk head bobbing on his shoulders.

  Molly can’t resist Medusa. ‘Where?’ she asks.

  ‘When your mother gave birth to you,’ he says. ‘I was there.’ His drunk legs move beneath him, but his head returns to the stars. ‘I saw the sadness of you arrive from nothingness. One minute your sadness was not in this universe, and the next minute it was.’ His hands make a mushroom cloud. ‘Pwoof. Like one of those stars arriving up there. You were suddenly … here. You arrived, Molly, in all your tragic … predestined … hardly immaculate …’ – he turns back to her – ‘misery.’

  He walks over to her and smiles. He grips her chin, lifts her face to the lamplight.

  ‘It was remarkable how quickly it all unfolded,’ Aubrey says. ‘The single worst thing that ever happened to us.’

  He studies her eyes. ‘I do wonder, young Molly,’ he says. He laughs to himself and shakes his head. ‘If you are so evidently capable of believing in the notion of sorcerers and curses, I do wonder if you are also capable of believing in the notion that the lives of your mother and your f
ather and, indeed, your uncle, only descended into misery the moment you were born. I wonder if you have ever considered the possibility, Molly Hook, that there was a curse given to this family – and that curse was you.’

  He keeps hold of her face, stares deep into her eyes. Molly gives nothing away. Her uncle smiles. ‘But, alas, still no tears,’ he says.

  Aubrey staggers backwards four paces then drops himself down on his backside on the hard dirt and grass, rolls himself a smoke.

  Molly watches him lick his tobacco papers. I will never be afraid, she tells herself. I will feel no pain. Rock is hard. Can’t be broken. ‘You ought to believe in Longcoat Bob’s curse,’ she says. ‘Because it has passed to you, Uncle Aubrey. I know this now.’

  He does not look up. ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘Only a cursed man would say those things to a child,’ Molly says. ‘That curse has got into your heart and turned you black. You’re only shadow now, Uncle Aubrey.’

  He lights his smoke with a match. ‘I won’t argue with that,’ he murmurs. Then he sucks on his smoke and exhales slowly, the grey smoke floating across the nearby gravestones like the souls of their occupants escaping. ‘Now, tell me Molly,’ Aubrey asks, waving the smoke away. ‘How do you intend to find the elusive Longcoat Bob in all that deep country?’

  Molly rests her backside on the soil, tired. ‘The sky gift,’ she says.

  Aubrey smiles. ‘Aaaah, but of course, Molly Hook’s magical gift that fell from the sky on the day her mother abandoned her like a lame fawn.’

  Molly shakes her head in disgust. I will never be afraid. I will feel no pain. ‘It was a map leading right to Longcoat Bob’s gold and you took it from me and you threw it away because you were so angry and so stupid,’ Molly says.