All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

‘I can’t breathe,’ Molly says, the words muffled by the woman’s stomach. ‘Lemme go! I can’t breathe.’ And Molly is suffocating now.

  The old woman can only weep and howl to the heavens. She can’t let go. Her grief is too strong and she cannot release this girl and Molly pushes against the old woman but she won’t release her, so Molly stomps on the old woman’s feet with her dig boots. ‘Lemme go!’ she yells.

  ‘It’s okay,’ the old woman replies in a thick German accent, furiously patting Molly’s hair. ‘I’ve got you. It’s okay.’

  And Molly kicks now at the old woman’s shin bones. She kicks and kicks and the old woman finally releases her.

  ‘It’s okay,’ the old woman howls as Molly runs. Run, Molly, run.

  *

  Looters in the shops. Looters in the houses. Men rushing out of bombed-out hardware stores with tools. Men rushing out of bombed-out homes with rugs and furnishings and bags full of jewellery. Two men lugging a looted piano along Smith Street. Convoys of cars and lorries, civilians and deserting servicemen, rushing south to safety in the distant towns of Katherine and Larrimah and Daly Waters.

  Shirtless and brave servicemen staying put to reload mobile anti-aircraft guns.

  Chinese restaurant proprietors and Greek café owners at last convinced of the need to evacuate – they needed to see the actual bombs dropping before they were finally persuaded to leave. Run, Molly, run.

  Then stop. A row of town-centre stores with their front windows shattered. Civilians stepping over glass shards to let themselves into locked fashion stores. People walking out of stores, arms filled with three-piece suits. And the sky-blue dancing dress still hanging on the mannequin in the window of Ward’s Boutique. Molly presses her face against the glass. She sees herself dancing again, when the earth rights itself and Darwin returns to normal and Sam comes home. She’ll be older, then, and Sam will be honoured to walk into a dance hall with her on his arm, wearing a dress like that. Molly watches a woman, a nurse from the hospital, come out of Ward’s Boutique carrying two gowns over her right forearm then scurry off up the street. Molly looks at that blue dress again and then slips through the front door of Ward’s, her duffel bag over her shoulder, Bert still tucked between the shoulder strap and her spine.

  There are no lights on in the boutique because there’s no electrical power in town. She walks by racks of gowns and dresses, scans the room. She finds it at the back of the store by the store counter and cash register: the one sky-blue dress left on the rack. She lifts it off by its hanger, holds it up to assess the size. Before trying it on in the changing room, she shuffles through a back door that leads to a bathroom, where she hopes to quench her thirst and wash the dirt and sweat from her face, but she can only manage a few brief sips of rusty water from a tap that then stops running.

  In the changing room, she takes off her old boy’s pants and soiled work shirt, both heavy with earth and stinking of sweat. She slips into the sky-blue dress and turns to face a full-length mirror fixed to the wall. The dress is too big for her, the hemline hanging well below her knees and the shoulder straps almost sliding off her collar bones. But it works, she tells herself. I’ll grow into it, she tells herself. I’ll grow.

  She straightens her hair. She allows herself half a smile. The sky-blue satin dress of her dreams, something to wear through this nightmare. She walks out of the changing room, leaving her old clothes where they lie. Making her way through the boutique aisles, she hears a deafening siren that’s so loud it rattles the shopfront window. She rushes outside to the footpath.

  Soldiers and civilians sprinting in all directions. Nurses holding their hats as they run. Soldiers holding their helmets as they run towards defence posts. ‘They’re comin’ back!’ one civilian hollers, tripping over himself as he dashes away from a butcher’s shop carrying a ham under each arm. The air raid siren wails again and Molly turns her eyes to the sky. Another squadron of Japanese bombers approaching from the south-west. More bombers, more than twenty of them, attacking from the north-east.

  ‘They’re gonna hit the airfield,’ a soldier shouts. Then Molly feels as much as she hears the violent pressure-wave of patterned bomb-drops thudding into Darwin earth. Flashes of yellow flame light the horizon and black smoke shrouds the town like a low-hanging cloud from hell. And then a red utility truck screams to a halt at the side of the dirt street, directly in front of Molly.

  Greta Maze leans over from the steering wheel and speaks through the open passenger-side window. ‘Get in,’ she says, a lit cigarette hanging from her lips.

  Molly beams wide, slips immediately into the front seat.

  Another thundering drum roll of bombs shakes the town and Greta Maze bounces in her seat. She drags on her smoke nonchalantly and gives her passenger a sideways look, noticing something new about the gravedigger girl. ‘Nice dress,’ she says, then slams her foot on the accelerator.

  Eyes closed. He sleeps flat on his back amid twenty wounded men and women being rushed to Cullen Bay civil hospital in the back of an army transport truck that’s been scouring Darwin streets for raid casualties. There’s a weight on his chest that makes it hard for him to breathe and this suffocating weight puts thoughts in his head. It’s not a dream but it’s a memory that comes to him in his sleep. The same memory that always comes to him. Aubrey Hook is fifteen years old and he’s being buried alive inside a goldmine and he has the wherewithal to blame his impending death on true love.

  Love and hate. Man and woman. Rich and poor. Dirt and gold. His father, Arthur Hook, believed in absolutes and lived in them, too. Arthur Hook loved Bonnie Little absolutely. Childhood sweethearts, they rode horses together. They rode through Howard Springs and Humpty Doo and they rode all the way to Kakadu country and Bonnie Little would let her wild auburn hair spill out from beneath her riding hat and that hair was the colour of the gorge clifftops that she’d stand upon, screaming her name – ‘Bonnie Little’ – into the ancient echo chamber of a Kakadu chasm. They danced together in Darwin town hall and they dreamed together of the things they would do once Arthur and his best friend and early goldmining partner, Tom Berry, got lucky in the Pine Creek goldfields.

  ‘You’re my lucky strike, Bonnie Little,’ Arthur said with wide eyes. ‘You’re my greatest find.’ Because that’s what true love is, Arthur thought. True love is a pure gold vein in a dry hillside of dirt and stone. Some will never find that kind of gold seam. Some just don’t have the nose for it. But he did. And he loved her absolutely – until the day Bonnie Little fell in love with Arthur’s best friend and goldmining partner, Tom Berry.

  ‘Tom?’ Arthur gasped. It was New Year’s Eve. He and Bonnie were standing in a storeroom off the public bar in the Hotel Darwin.

  ‘Tom Berry?’ he gasped again. His best friend. The hapless, hopeless Tom Berry. Clumsy, awkward, bookish, meek, insecure, weak, poet Tom Berry. The friend who begged Arthur to let him accompany him on horseback as he rode into the deep country in search of a gold seam. That schoolteacher type. That literate scholar who possessed, at once, a gold sense as keen as a melon but a worrying gold lust like none Arthur had seen before. He’d nearly got himself killed only two months before, after blasting a hole with too much dynamite. And suddenly, on that New Year’s Eve, Arthur wished he had.

  ‘I can’t help how I feel, Arthur,’ Bonnie said.

  Arthur never believed a word of that sentence that fell so slowly from Bonnie’s mouth because he was a walking example of how a human can, in fact, help how they truly feel – because he truly felt, every second of every hour of every day after he heard those words, like crushing Tom Berry’s skull in two with a large piece of quartz, yet he resisted that profound feeling and just turned away from how he felt. So why couldn’t Bonnie Little help how she felt?

  From that day on, Arthur Hook could only hate Bonnie Little. And he hated her absolutely. But he hated Tom Berry twice as much as he hated Bonnie and his hate for Tom Berry bled into what later seemed to his fifteen-year-old son
, Aubrey, to be a hatred for all of life. Arthur hated the leaves that dropped from trees and gathered on his porch. He hated horses and the sound their hooves made on concrete, and he hated the smell of their droppings as he meandered through hillside paths and range tracks that he took with his young sons, Aubrey and Horace, on gold-prospecting trips through Pine Creek country. He hated the woman he eventually married, June Buttigieg, the only daughter of Stanley Buttigieg, owner-operator of Darwin’s fledgling Hollow Wood Cemetery. Poor and sorry June, he told himself, with that lazy left eye that always sat like a fallen mango at the bottom of her eye socket whenever Arthur asked her questions about dinner or weather patterns or what it felt like to carry a child inside her belly. The gravedigger’s daughter with the dead left eye. Pull that eye out and bury it six feet deep, he told himself. He hated the way June howled during childbirth and he hated the smell of the black shit that burst from baby Aubrey’s backside and over his fatherly fingertips. He hated the tea leaves that built up in the bottom of his teacup and he hated the branches from the backyard oak tree that scratched against his tin roof and he hated the sun that kept on rising and telling him to go to work and he hated the sound of the fiddle players in the Hotel Darwin and he hated the beer that warmed too quickly in his hand and he hated anyone who wished good fortune on Tom Berry because he hated Tom Berry most of all.

  Arthur beat his sons. He beat the backs of their ducking heads with his closed fist and each beating made him hate Tom Berry even more because he blamed Tom Berry for stealing the only thing he ever loved and turning him into the kind of man who beats his sons. He beat his sons with rocks and whip handles and sticks and fists and then he watched his sons grow into muscular teenaged boys who beat each other.

  ‘Hate’s not such a bad thing,’ he told his boys once, swigging whisky under campfire light on a long Pine Creek gold search. ‘Never underestimate the power of hate. My hate for Tom Berry is what gets me up in the morning. I hate him so much that it gives me the energy I need to work those mines. I hate him so much I want to steal every piece of gold he’ll ever hope to get his hands on. And I will. I’ll do it. My hate for Tom Berry’s gonna make us rich.’ And Arthur Hook drank his whisky and his head turned to his sons, looking through the flames of the campfire. ‘What do you boys hate?’ he asked.

  And Aubrey and Horace turned to each other, both knowing the other’s answer but not giving it.

  Arthur Hook grew to hate the very gold he was seeking to find. He grew to hate the very mountains that hid the gold he despised. He hated the hills and valleys and ranges that kept their gold secrets from him. In the pubs of Darwin town he would hear whispers of Tom Berry’s successes in the goldfields and he would be enraged and he would curse the earth that chose to smile on such a deceitful man as Tom Berry and ignore a decent, hard-working miner such as Arthur.

  He drove his pickaxe into those hills and every wild swing was an act of vengeance. Fellow prospectors often questioned his reckless approach. He cut great trenches into the earth but he never took the time to repair the holes he dug, leaving the mountain wounded. Older goldminers would pass his digs and shake their heads. ‘That mountain’s gonna turn on him one day,’ they said, because the older goldminers knew what the blacks knew about the mountain, about the Northern Territory earth. It felt things. Mysterious things. And it rewarded the prospector who felt those things, too, and it punished, they said in campfire whispers, the prospector who ignored those mysteries.

  Hate drove Arthur Hook to ride horseback with his sons deep into the scrub beyond Marrakai Crossing, east of fruitful Mount Bundey and the nearby Rustler’s Roost goldmine, seeking the long-lost and near-mythical Black Leg Mine. It was named after its owner, Percy ‘Black Leg’ Gould, a seasoned prospector whose left leg had become wedged under a fallen rock in a trench when he was twenty-two. By the time Percy was found, his leg had turned gangrenous and black, and it had to be cut off and replaced with a wooden peg that he walked on for four more decades before disappearing somewhere in the hills between the Rustler’s Roost mine and Mount Ringwood, along the Margaret River. The Black Leg Mine was said to contain great riches just waiting for anyone brave or foolish enough to try to hack through its unstable and unpredictable rocks.

  Arthur Hook found what he thought was the Black Leg Mine after he and his sons rode along a precarious cliff-edge track that skirted Dead Bullock Needle, a natural obelisk pointing 150 feet into the sky that wandering and lost cows and sheep have tried and failed to skirt around for centuries, their bones left to rot beside the trunks of tall native trees some hundred yards beneath the cliff-edged needle base. Beyond the needle, along a winding track through thick brush, wide enough for only one horse, Arthur Hook reached the entrance to the mine, a hole in the ground in which stood a long ladder with forty or so rungs. He climbed down with a lamp then followed a tunnel to a rock face crossed by a rich vein of white quartz, and that quartz sent a shiver down Arthur Hook’s spine. And he knew that shiver for what it meant. Gold.

  He explained to his sons how millions of years ago pockets of liquid had turned solid inside rocks, trapping free-flowing grains and nuggets of gold, and how these gold-bearing quartz veins had waited ever since for the Hook boys to find them and dig them out and make their fortune. ‘It’s like big ol’ bank vaults that are locked up down there,’ Arthur Hook said, and he raised his pickaxe, ‘and we got the key to the lock.’

  And Arthur Hook swung his axe at that underground rock face as if it were the face of Tom Berry himself. He hacked at it, slashed it and smashed it. And for three straight weeks he and his sons worked on that face, Aubrey and Horace lugging buckets of mined ore up the ladder and over to a nearby creek, where they sorted through rocks and panned the most promising dirt, letting lighter materials wash away down the creek and waiting, hoping, for the heavy gold to sparkle at the dirty bottoms of their pans. But the gold never showed itself and a rage grew inside Arthur Hook. ‘Where are you?’ he screamed. ‘Where are you?’ And his axe swung and the muscles in his wire skeleton and no-meat body tore and he coughed and spluttered on all the rock dust he was sucking into his lungs.

  It was Aubrey who told his father he was working too hard on the rock face, too fast, who told him he wasn’t respecting the mountain as he should. That he was too reckless. Too hungry. Too vengeful. That they were moving too fast through the tunnel and they were not propping up the roof of their dig hole with sufficient wooden frames. But his father did not listen, could not listen, because his father was someone else. He was now a man with a yellow light in his eyes, a fire in his eyes, gold in his eyes. He was overcome by the lust for gold. The hatred for gold. The absolutes of it all.

  And it was Aubrey who was at the rock face with the ore bucket, standing six safe feet behind his father’s flailing rock hammer, when twenty feet of unsupported rock ceiling caved in on father and son. Aubrey saw the tunnel ceiling fall in on his father first and had time enough to turn and kneel down on the ground with his head towards his crotch and his arms over his skull, and brace for the cave-in. Two large boulders wedged a pocket of air around his face, which was pushed hard against the ground, and grey rock dust and debris pressed on his back and for three full minutes he breathed the shortest of breaths while waiting for the oxygen in that small pocket of air to be used up, and in his final moments beneath that terrifying rubble blanket he discovered the only thing in life he cared about.

  It was a girl. The image of her entered his mind. She was spinning in a white dress at the school dance that past summer. Violet Berry, the teenaged daughter of Tom and Bonnie Berry. Violet Berry, with the curly brown hair and blue eyes and deep red lipstick. Violet Berry, who he was not supposed to talk to under any circumstances, and that had suited him fine because he always knew she would blind him, make him deaf and dumb, were he to stand too close to those eyes. An angel too precious to say hello to, much less ask to square dance. But now he was so close to death that he had the courage to make a pact with himself. If I
survive this cave-in, he thought, I will ask Violet Berry to go riding one Sunday afternoon.

  And then he felt a shovel scraping at the rubble mound above him. He felt a boulder give way and the weight of the cavein release its suffocating pressure on his chest. Then another boulder was removed, and a shovel was frantically digging into the mound, scraping, hauling, shifting the pressure away from Aubrey’s body. Soon the dirt around him was loose enough that he could push his right-hand fingers up through it and those fingers found other fingers. His brother’s hand. And Horace pulled with all his strength, pulled so hard on his older brother’s right arm that Aubrey thought it might come clean away from his shoulder.

  Horace pulled and pulled and soon he could see his brother’s hair buried in the dirt, coloured grey by the rock dust. Then he saw his face, so grey that it looked like Aubrey had turned to stone beneath that rubble. Finally his brother emerged with the air-sucking gasp of a vampire that had been trapped in a coffin for five hundred years. And Horace fell on his backside beside his coughing and spluttering older brother and the two boys looked at the impenetrable rubble wall before them knowing they both now had to dig for their father, who was lying somewhere beyond it.

  But something mysterious kept them from reaching for their shovels and pickaxes. It was a strange and powerful force running through them both, something they knew never to underestimate. It was hate.

  *

  On the army transport, flat on his back between the human rubble of bloodied bodies, Aubrey Hook wakes with a deep and loud suck on Darwin air. His chest rises then falls back hard on the transport tray. He’s punch-drunk and dazed. He looks around him. Men and women. Soldiers mostly. Some have died during the trip. Their eyelids and their mouths still open. Hands on their hearts.

  The truck bounces along the uneven streets, motoring fast. Then it brakes and skids to a halt outside Cullen Bay civil hospital. Two shirtless soldiers pull the truck’s rear tray guard down and begin hauling the bodies onto hospital stretchers. More soldiers come, reach for the hands and feet of the dead and wounded. Aubrey stands. His head spins but, to his surprise, he can actually walk now and so he staggers to the side of the tray and slides off the back.