by Trent Dalton
‘We took care of you,’ Little Des shouted boldly across the town hall as the heads of suited guests reeled in shock and dismay, ‘and you stole that gold right out from under us.’
Tom Berry snapped back at Little Des from the stage. ‘Longcoat Bob told me it didn’t belong to your family,’ he shouted. ‘He told me it belonged to no one. I had every right to take it.’
Then a tall figure in a long black coat emerged behind Little Des. Some of the town hall guests questioned their eyesight because they struggled to comprehend the vision before them: an ageing Aboriginal man, thin and lanky but taller than any man in the room, walking silently down the central aisle of the hall, dressed improbably in an old black and gold French admiral’s frock coat. The Aboriginal man raised his right hand and exactly what he carried in this hand would be debated for all the years that followed in the pubs and general stores and hair salons of Darwin. Some said it was a stick shaped like a knitting needle with brown emu hairs tied to the end of it. Some said it was just the man’s extended forefinger but the finger was so long it looked like a sorcerer’s wand. Some said it was the bone of a sinful human covered in ochre and resin and maybe even the sinner’s blood. The man pointed at the newly rich prospector on stage. ‘Tom Berry,’ the old Aboriginal man said loudly. ‘A heart of stone.’ And that was all Longcoat Bob had to say.
*
At the side of the bridge crossing Candlelight Creek, Aubrey Hook kneels down and stares up the black tunnel of foliage that encloses the thin freshwater creek he walked up as a boy.
The longer I stand, the shorter I grow, he tells himself. He remembers the gravedigger girl writing those words in the scrub. She would write them everywhere. On the back of the Hollow Wood water tank, on the side of the thunderbox. She carved those words on trees, she wrote those words with letters made of broken twigs. The ramblings of a grandfather who ran into madness to escape the shame of his lies. To escape the curse of his past.
Resting beside Aubrey Hook’s left boot on the side of the bridge is a find that he might have once linked to luck back when he was foolish enough to believe in it. An empty round fruit can, its tin lid peeled back so coarsely that he wonders if its owner cut herself when she opened it, leaving drops of blood on her fingers and clothes, stains she would struggle to wash away.
The silver road glitters brighter than gold in the daytime. For almost two hours Molly’s been walking along the winding track that shimmers with silver light and still she stops to look at what presents to her eyes as flakes of clear cut-crystal glass beneath her dig boots. Each flake bouncing light and turning that light, up close, to flashes of pink and purple and aqua. Millions of clear flakes piled upon each other over time, which, seen as a whole, form a gleaming road of silver that Molly feels like she could mould together to form the shining armour of a Camelot knight. Or she could turn all the flakes into building bricks and she could make a glass castle that she and Greta could escape to after all this searching and questing is over.
She sweeps her hands over the silver road flakes and she cups them in her palm and they feel like fish scales but their colour is more magnificent, like they are the scales of silver mermaids from deep down in the kinds of seas sailed by Odysseus.
‘It’s ground mica,’ Molly says. ‘Rock crumbs left behind by time.’
Flakes as thin as the film stock they load into the projectors at the Star, but clear enough and twinkling enough to form the fake night sky that hangs above the picture house marquee. In some places the clear mica sheets have joined together in layers to create silver book-like structures that Molly can grip between her fingers and whose pages Molly can count, with one eye closed for clarity.
‘Isn’t it beautiful,’ Molly says. ‘Sam told me about the silver road. He called it the glass river. He reckoned a Dreamtime serpent snaked through this whole deep forest here and that serpent was made of stars and it was slithering through here for so long it kept shedding its skin. The serpent meant to leave the star skin behind because it knew the silver road would help people find their way through the forest at night.’
The silver road winds through a valley of cycads lining a narrow creek where Molly and Greta stop to rest and eat. They share a can of tinned corn from Molly’s duffel bag and Greta asks the gravedigger girl for an update on their food stocks. Six cans left in the bag, half a tube of condensed milk. Two cans of baked beans, one of oxtail soup, one of ham, one of corned beef and a can of peaches, which Molly keeps resisting the urge to open.
‘What else you got in that bag?’ Greta asks. ‘Looks like more than six tins of food in there.’
Molly’s fingers run over the blood-red rock she took from her mother’s chest.
Then she pulls out a book.
‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,’ she says. ‘Well, if we have to lie down and die somewhere out here,’ Greta says, ‘at least we’ll have the Bard to send us off to sleep.’
Greta rests by the creek, Yukio’s pistol in her hands. She thinks of the curious soldier who fell from the sky. She pictures him dead by a bedrock, a full day’s walk behind them. In her mind he’s long lost and given up, slumped over in a successful act of ritual self-sacrifice, the ornamental sword he seemed to cherish so much having disembowelled his flat stomach.
‘You ever fired one of those?’ Molly asks.
‘A couple of wood ones on stage,’ Greta replies.
‘Maybe you should get some practice,’ Molly says.
‘I don’t need any practice,’ Greta says. She stares down the length of the gun barrel with one eye closed. ‘Not much to it. Point and shoot and phone a lawyer.’
Molly pours the last mouthfuls of corn down her wide-open throat and rushes to a large black rock leaning over the creek like a warthog bending down for a drink. ‘You don’t necessarily have to shoot someone,’ she says. ‘You just have to be able to show them you could shoot them if you wanted to. That’s how Gary Cooper does it. He’ll shoot a can three times and make it bounce in the air so all them bad guys soil their pants and drop their guns.’
She rests the empty corn can on top of the rock. ‘See if you can hit that,’ she says.
Greta rolls her eyes, reluctantly plants her feet in a shooter’s stance and aims the handgun at the corn can. She fires a shot and the bullet chops the head off a young rock fig growing out of a rock wall across the creek, some ten feet above the level of the corn can.
Molly laughs. ‘Point and shoot and phone an eye doctor.’
Greta feigns anger. ‘I’ll point it at you if you’re not careful.’
‘Have another try,’ Molly says.
Greta inhales deeply and aims again, her left eye closed tight and her right eye zeroed in on the can with its aluminium top peeled back like an open hatch on a submarine. Her tongue licks her bottom lip and she stops breathing as she pulls the trigger.
And no bullets explode from the barrel.
She looks at the gun in confusion and she pulls the trigger once more. Nothing but the click of the trigger. She pulls it again. Nothing. And again. Nothing.
‘There’s no more bullets,’ Greta says.
‘What?’ Molly replies.
‘Who flies into battle with a gun with only one bullet?’ Greta asks.
Molly holds the gun now. She feels the weight of it. ‘He only needed one, for himself,’ Molly whispers.
Greta shakes her head.
‘Just put it in the bag, will ya?’
They walk on.
*
Five miles along the silver road. Six miles. Seven. In the afternoon, Molly rests against a bronze quartzite boulder being colonised by red shells of wild ruby dock weed. She sips from her water bag, reading her Shakespeare.
‘Which one are you up to?’ Greta asks.
‘The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,’ Molly says.
Greta lights a smoke. She has six left.
‘You can just call it Hamlet,’ Greta says.
‘Yeah, I know,�
�� Molly says. ‘But I like to use the full title.’
‘Where are you up to in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare, Bard of Avon?’ Greta asks.
Molly places the open book in her lap. ‘I just passed the bit where the gravediggers are wondering if Ophelia should be allowed a Christian burial if she took her own life,’ Molly says.
Greta nods, drags on her smoke.
‘Do you think Ophelia killed herself?’ Molly asks.
Greta exhales a long cloud of smoke. ‘Course she did,’ Greta says.
‘He doesn’t write it like she definitely did,’ Molly says. ‘He says a branch might have broke and she fell in that pond.’
‘She didn’t struggle too much in the drink, though, did she?’ Greta replies, stretching out beside the creek edge, resting her head on her propped arm. ‘Ol’ Bill’s bein’ all cagey because it’s hard for blokes to admit a woman might choose death over putting up with more of their bullshit.’
Molly nods, thinks for a moment. ‘Do you think Ophelia deserved a Christian burial if she took her own life?’
Greta shrugs. ‘Poor girl wasn’t thinkin’ straight,’ she says. ‘That’s what men can do to ya, Molly. Drive a girl bonkers; make her wanna go sleep forever in the nearest brook.’ Greta looks into the clear creek water.
Then she turns to Molly, realises the girl has invested more in this question than humour could return for her. ‘God would take Ophelia in, don’t you worry,’ Greta says, nodding. ‘I reckon He’d know she deserved a proper burial and the only thing she didn’t deserve was some of those fellers in her life.’
Molly smiles weakly.
‘You think there’s more good fellers in the world than bad fellers?’ Molly asks.
‘Oh, there’s plenty of good fellers in this world,’ Greta says.
‘Like who?’
‘Romeo Montague,’ Greta smiles.
Molly smiles, too. ‘I like him,’ she says. Then she looks up to the blue sky. ‘I reckon my mum didn’t deserve some of the fellers in her life.’ She looks over at Greta now.
‘Yeah, I reckon you’d be right there, Mol’,’ Greta says.
‘One of Ophelia’s gravediggers was saying this thing about whether or not she went into that water or if that water came to her,’ Molly says. ‘I wonder about that with my mum. Did she go to that grave in Hollow Wood or did life bring the grave to her?’
‘Life’s always bringin’ the grave to us, kid.’
‘Yeah, but why bring it so early to some and so late to others?’
‘I’m afraid Hamlet’s mum was right about all that, Mol’,’ Greta says.
‘I forgot what she said about it.’
‘She said all that lives must die,’ Greta says. ‘And she said we all know that shit’s common.’
‘That shit’s comin’?’ Molly ponders.
‘Common,’ Greta clarifies. ‘That shit’s all too common.’ Greta drags on her smoke, rests her head back on a rock. ‘But I guess it’s always comin’, too.’
*
The silver road bends through a forested gully and then a brief canyon lined with hanging five-fingered ferns that look to Molly like a thousand little green hands reaching out of the rock face. She tests the echo of her voice and it bounces through the canyon.
‘Marlene Sky,’ she hollers between two hands.
Birds fly out of the canyon, startled by the noise. Rainbow bee-eaters, hooded parrots, bustards and two northern rosellas with black, white and blue-violet wings.
Molly and Greta can feel and smell the humidity of the north. Everything sweats. Everything is damp. The walls of the canyon are smooth and stained black by water run-off. Greta’s saddle shoes slip on wet, slimy rocks and she fights to fill her lungs in the thick air and she doesn’t feel like smoking so much in these strange places.
The silver road meanders on through great green palms shaped like wood screws stuck in the earth and passes a great sandstone outcrop that Molly sees as a giant wombat, except the wombat wears a jagged battle helmet on its head with shards of sandstone jutting abruptly from the top in case the wombat’s unlikely battle foes – echidnas dressed in chainmail, possums wearing platemail – choose to leap atop its head.
Molly pauses to stare at a majestic green emperor dragonfly caught and tangling itself further in the sticky web of a St Andrew’s Cross spider. The dragonfly looks to Molly like something flown by the Wright brothers, with a torso made of what seems to be some rare kind of soft velvet pea beaded on a black string, and a scorpion’s tail and vast wings that are clear but somehow shimmer with purple light as the dragonfly flaps in fear of being so close to the web’s master builder.
‘The dragonfly’s still alive,’ she calls to Greta, who has stopped to scratch the back of her calves with a stick. ‘The spider’s comin’ to get him now,’ Molly says. ‘I’m gonna pull the dragonfly out.’
‘You can’t do that!’ Greta says. ‘That spider probably hasn’t eaten a meal in days and it’s gone to all that trouble to build a web to catch some lunch.’
‘Does it have to eat something so pretty?’ Molly asks.
‘Don’t think spiders give a damn about pretty, Molly,’ Greta says.
‘They just haven’t seen a Carole Lombard film yet,’ Molly says. ‘I’m gonna pull the dragonfly out.’
‘How could you be so cruel?’ Greta responds. ‘I reckon a dragonfly would be better than rump steak to the average spider, and you’re gonna come along and rip that poor spider’s lunch away just as it’s tucking its serviette down its shirt front. What sort of monster are you, Molly Hook?’
*
At a small freshwater spring Molly and Greta stop to share a can of corned beef and refill the water bag. Molly scoops her half of the corned beef onto a plate fashioned from a strip of smooth paperbark and sits on a flat rock by the spring.
Greta complains of a throbbing pain in her lower back. She slips off her emerald dress, turns her back to Molly and asks her to inspect her lower spine. Molly places her paperbark plate of corned beef on the flat rock, walks over to Greta and immediately spots two fat leeches sucking their way along the top lining of the actress’s underpants. There’s another leech crawling up the back of her left thigh.
‘Leeches,’ Molly says.
‘What?’ Greta gasps. ‘How many?’
‘Three,’ Molly says.
Greta executes a strange shuffle that makes her look like she’s barn dancing. ‘How big are they?’ she asks, panicked.
‘Well, judging by their size I’d say they’ve had main course and they’re progressing to dessert.’
‘Get them off!’ Greta howls.
‘Nah,’ Molly says.
‘What are you talking about, “Naaahh”?’ Greta exclaims. ‘Get the bloody bloodsuckers off me, Molly!’
‘You’re best to just let them have a feed and then they’ll drop off all by themselves,’ Molly says.
‘That’s ridiculous!’
‘It’s not. They keep all this filth inside their stomachs, and if I was to go ripping them off halfway through a meal, there’s a chance some of that filth could get stuck inside your open suck wounds.’
‘Suck wounds?’ Greta repeats.
‘Oh dear,’ Molly whispers.
‘What?’
‘One just crawled on to your backside.’
‘Get that thing off me!’
‘Just relax and let them finish up,’ Molly says. ‘Besides, just think of all the trouble they went to crawling up those long pins of yours. They probably haven’t eaten for days and now you want to just rip them away from their grub. What sort of monster are you, Greta Maze?’
‘Molly, get them off me, dammit!’ Greta screams.
‘All right, all right,’ says Molly, who has already found the paring knife in her duffel bag. ‘Don’t chuck a willy.’ She scrapes the paring knife gently and carefully beneath the narrow head of each fat-bodied leech, flicking them in turn from Greta’s pale skin.
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‘You’d better move away,’ Molly says. ‘I think those leeches have got a taste for German rump.’
Greta rushes across the flat rock, slipping her dress back over her shoulders, zipping it up at the back. But then she freezes because she hears something moving in the wall of scrub fringing the freshwater spring.
‘You hear that?’ Greta asks.
‘Hear what?’ Molly replies, finding the place in the scrub where Greta’s eyes have been drawn.
Stillness now. A bird whistle. A trickle of spring water. And the actress and the gravedigger girl staring at a wall of palms and cycads and banksias.
More a feeling than anything else. No evidence for it. Just a chill down Greta’s spine.
‘You think he’s following us?’ Molly asks.
‘Who?’
‘Yukio.’
‘You guys on a first-name basis?’
Molly shrugs. ‘I’m just saying his name.’
‘I think we’d be dead by now if he was following us,’ Greta says.
Molly turns back to the rock beside the spring just in time to see something she has to look at twice to be sure it’s not an illusion, not deep-country magic: the wide, black-brown wings of a wedge-tailed eagle plummeting downwards.
Greta spots the bird now, too. ‘Ahhhh!’ she screams.
Molly is frozen by the silent predator and keeps watching as it swoops down to her flat rock and, without ever touching ground, claws two large clumps of her corned beef in its large talons and then arcs back up and out of the clearing as gracefully as it entered it. It’s an act so bold it could only be the work of a queen. Close up, Molly could see how beautiful she is, how regal, how strong. If she’d wanted to, Molly tells herself, she could have lifted the whole duffel bag in those deadly talons – food cans and rock heart included – taken it high into the sky and back to her family to inspect her plunder from Horace Hook’s pantry.
Molly can push only one word out of her voice box. ‘Wait!’ she calls to the eagle.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Greta says. ‘What the bloody hell was that?’