by Trent Dalton
‘She was beautiful,’ Molly says. ‘Have you ever seen anything so pretty?’
‘Scared the shit out of me,’ Greta says. ‘Cheeky bitch stole your lunch.’
‘She needs it more than me,’ Molly says and shrugs. She thinks to herself for a moment. ‘Imagine being that brave, Greta. Only mums are that brave. Mums with kids to feed.’
Then a thumping sound from beyond the spring. It sounds like it’s coming from deep beneath the forest floor. A thunderous drumming in hell. Thump. Thump. Thump.
‘What is that?’ Greta asks.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Something heavy pounding into earth.
Molly has no answer for Greta. She reaches for her friend, the shovel she calls Bert because Molly and Bert are on a first-name basis.
*
The gravedigger girl follows the thumping sound along the silver road that runs through an avenue of blue cycad trees with leaves the colour of the moon. Thump. Thump. Thump. Louder now. A thin walking trail branches off the road of shimmering mica and Molly and Greta branch off with it, Molly leading the way, gripping Bert’s handle ever tighter as the thumping grows ever louder.
Thump. Thump. Thump. Something being crushed. Something breaking into pieces. Rock.
Then a noise so loud it hurts Molly’s ears and makes her shoulders jump. An explosion inside a cave.
‘Gelignite,’ Greta says.
Molly quickens her step, follows that sound along the thin trail, which breaks through a screen of ferns and hanging vines into a clearing where Molly stops before what she can now see is a small mine built deep in the heart of the deep country. Thump. Thump. Thump. Molly and Greta kneel behind the cover of a thick fern bush to assess the scene. There is a rudimentary crushing plant housed beneath a triangular shed of rusting corrugated-iron sheets leaning on poles made of the blue cypress pines Molly and Greta have been passing since the Clyde River. A tin mine most likely, Molly tells herself, built against a sloping wall of dark grey rock crawling with weeds and vines.
Two men in blue singlets and wide-brimmed hats are overseeing the crushing of hulking chunks of white quartz. The rocks are being placed under a motorised crusher made out of three heavy, rusting steel-block stamps that are being raised and dropped by a series of rusting camshafts.
Thump. The steel stamps pound so hard upon a quartz boulder that the rock breaks into four pieces. The miners then feed the pieces into a rattling jaw crusher that mashes the stone into a gravel that will be transferred to a sluicebox, which Molly figures must be somewhere close to this mine, beside a natural waterway. Cut along the upper side of the rock slope is a small rail line about fifty yards in length that extends from the crushing plant to the mine entrance, a hole blasted into the side of the rock face, just like the ones Molly remembers her father showing her on Top End bush camping trips not so long ago when Horace Hook still walked in light moods. Horace told her most of those blown-out mine shafts were only useful now to the ghost bats who call them home during the daylight hours. ‘But there’s fellers still finding their riches all across this country,’ Horace said. ‘And they guard those treasure holes the way a magpie guards its nest. Every bastard is a threat.’
The mine entrance is not much wider than the door to a two-man tent and a man emerges from it now, hunching down and pushing a cart of mined ore. He wears a singlet and pants and a brown stockman’s hat. His brown beard is full and billowing down to his chest.
‘His skin,’ Greta whispers.
Molly looks closer. There are small lumps across the man’s arms and shoulders. Ulcers and scarring. His right cheekbone is abnormally enlarged and the skin on his forehead is swollen and so dry it’s started to crack like the clay in Hollow Wood Cemetery during a drought. The man lifts heavy rocks from the mine cart into a hopper connected to the crushing plant and Molly can see now that three of the fingers on his right hand have been severed at the middle knuckle. On his left hand he’s missing his thumb and forefinger.
‘Let’s keep going,’ Greta says, standing and turning to go back the way they have come but she stops because she is confronted by a large man resting a pickaxe on his shoulder, filling the width of the trail back to the silver road. Greta inhales sharply, reels back at the sight of him. His face, too, is dry, and so swollen that it looks distorted, like it’s been moulded out of shape. There are patches of scarring and discolouration across his neck and arms. Welts and small growths. But Greta is drawn mostly to his eyes. He has no eyebrows nor any eyelashes, and he only has one eye he can see out of, his left one. Where his right eyeball once was, there is an empty socket containing a thin pool of blood. His nose is distorted and big. Molly can’t remember when she last saw a man built like this. He’s a giant to her. Big broad shoulders. Big biceps. Big legs. Big fingers and thumbs. Big brown hair on his head, in natural and careless curls.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, softly. A thick Irish accent. His face is so stiff his speech feels like old air being forced through a crack in a mountain. ‘Not so easy on the eye am I?’ He chuckles to himself. ‘We’ve been up here so long we almost forgot what we must look like to pretty girls like you.’
Greta gives him a halfhearted smile. She studies the man’s face.
‘You two lost or something?’ he asks.
Molly jumps on the question. ‘We’re going to find Longcoat—’
‘My feller and this one’s dad are camped back along the plateau,’ the actress interjects, with a natural ease. ‘We were out looking at the birds and butterflies when we heard that rock crusher thumping away and we thought we’d come and have a look at what was scaring all the birds off.’
The man with the pickaxe nods. He looks at Molly and she nods too.
Then the large man smiles. ‘Well, let me fix you a warm brew before you go.’
The crusher hammers into another chunk of quartz. Thump. Thump. Thump. Twigs and dry leaves break beneath boots behind them. Greta looks over her left shoulder to see the two miners from the crushing plant now standing behind her.
‘Thanks for the offer, but we’d best be pushing on,’ Greta says, moving forward. But the large man steps sideways to block her.
The beating of Greta Maze’s heart. Thump. Thump. Thump.
‘Please,’ the large man says, dropping the pickaxe to his waist. ‘I’m afraid I must insist.’
*
Two thick logs for seats and a stump for a table. A black billy simmers on an iron heat rack stretched across a fire set inside a circle of broken rocks. The large man with one eye holds an enamel cup filled with tea in his left hand. He sips and he appreciates the warmth of the brew.
Molly holds her tea in two hands, her elbows resting on her knees. She’s staring at the swelling and crusty ulcers across the one-eyed man’s face. She sees his fingers more clearly now, sees how he still holds the teacup comfortably by its handle despite having lost the little finger of his left hand.
Greta sips her tea and the large man watches her do so and so do the four miners standing behind and to the sides of the improvised tea setting. Each one has his own unique range of visible swellings and lesions across his face and limbs. One of the miners is a red-haired boy, who can’t be much older than Molly. His left cheek and left upper lip are so swollen that it looks like they might swallow up his mouth, which has retreated into his chin.
‘Thank you,’ the one-eyed man says.
‘For what?’ Greta asks.
‘For drinking from my cup.’
‘The cup was clean,’ Greta says.
‘They always are,’ the one-eyed man says. ‘But few are willing to drink from them.’
He sips again.
‘My name is George Kane,’ he says.
‘Greta Maze.’ Greta turns to Molly, the girl’s cue to say her name.
But Molly isn’t following the conversation. She is too transfixed by the red pool in the well of George Kane’s right eye. He winks his left eye and the action snaps Molly out of her staring. She drops her head to fo
cus on her tea.
‘And what’s your name, young lady?’ Kane asks.
‘Molly,’ she says. ‘Molly Hook.’
‘Go ahead and ask me,’ Kane says.
‘Ask you what?’ Molly replies.
‘That question on the tip of your tongue.’
‘What question?’ Molly asks.
‘I know,’ Kane says, smiling. ‘How do I keep my hair so clean all the way out here in the scrub?’ He runs his hand through his thick brown mop. ‘Vinegar!’ he laughs. ‘I wash my hair in vinegar!’
Molly smiles. ‘I’m sorry I was starin’,’ she says.
Kane shakes his head. ‘There’s a lot to look at, unfortunately.’
‘You boys come over from Channel Island?’ Greta asks.
‘You know Channel Island?’
She nods. ‘I act a bit,’ Greta says. ‘Me and some friends, we were asked by the church to go over and perform for the kids.’ One of the toughest performances of Greta Maze’s fledgling career. Crossing Darwin Harbour and disembarking at the Channel Island Leprosarium. Good money. Bad memories. Singing popular showtunes for a group of children – mostly Aboriginal – living with leprosy and forcibly removed from their families in Darwin and sent to Channel Island. Minimal access to doctors and medicine. Scarce food and running water, even for the visiting theatre troupe. Armies of mosquitoes and flies and an island of dead bodies in shallow graves.
‘I didn’t know quite what that place was,’ Kane says. ‘I thought it was a prison at first, but then I realised it was a cemetery. They sent us there to rot. We should have burned that place to the ground.”
He stands and addresses the men around him. ‘But now we’re here safe in the scrub.’ He smiles. ‘While Australia burns.’
And the men around him smile and nod their heads and Greta Maze wonders exactly what kind of place they have walked into.
‘What do you mean “Australia burns”?’ Greta asks.
‘Haven’t you heard?’
‘Heard what?’ Molly asks.
‘We’re done for,’ Kane says.
‘Who’s done for?’ Greta asks.
‘Australia,’ he says. ‘It’s done. It’s no more. All those selfish, proud men in red coats that turned into black suits. The ones who came here from across the sea. They thought they could turn this place into a new England. They chased everyone who didn’t look like them out of the cities. And now the Japs have burned all them city princes and princesses to dust.’
He drops his voice to a whisper. ‘They hit Brisbane with twice the force they hit Darwin,’ he says. ‘Boom. Boom. Boom.’
Stalking around the campsite now, charged by the electricity of his own visions. ‘Then they moved on to Sydney and all those fat men in all those tall buildings didn’t see the fire coming. They could only stare at it through their office windows. And they watched the heat blister their skin. They watched the fire distort their faces.’
Seated on the log, Greta slips a hand around Molly’s arm, squeezes it, discreetly shakes her head.
The girl knows her now. She knows her looks, she trusts them, and this one says this can’t be true, he’s not a good one, Molly.
‘And in the reflections of their office windows,’ Kane says. ‘The last thing they ever saw was the monsters they had become.’
Then Greta sees George Kane whispering to a younger, thinner man with lesions across his bald head. Kane has his back turned to Greta and Molly, and Greta can’t figure out what he’s saying to the bald man, only that he’s saying something he doesn’t want her to hear.
Greta whispers to Molly. ‘Give me the bag,’ she says.
Molly unslings the duffel bag and slides it to Greta with her foot.
Kane turns back around and resumes what Greta notes is rapidly becoming a sermon. ‘And now the meek shall inherit the earth,’ he proclaims. And the men around him nod because they are as easily impressed as they are led.
Kane finds his seat again on the log in front of Greta and Molly. ‘All of us exiles and outcasts,’ he says. ‘We’ll start all over again. And we’ll be happy and a century from now the people of this land will celebrate the day the bombs of the Imperial Japanese Navy blew greed and avarice into the wind.’
He takes another sip of tea then throws what’s left into the fire. He turns to speak to Greta, who now has her hands inside the duffel bag. No welcome and no warmth in his voice anymore. Only suspicion. ‘What’s in the bag?’ he asks.
‘Just a few tins of food,’ Greta says. ‘Water. Stuff from home.’
Kane looks deep into her two eyes with his one eye. A long, painful silence.
‘There’s no one waiting for you back by that plateau, is there?’ Kane asks.
Greta is silent. Then she smiles and says, ‘Thank you for your hospitality.’ She taps Molly’s shoulder. Gets up. ‘We’ll leave you fellers to it.’
Molly stands, gripping Bert the shovel. ‘Thanks for the tea,’ she says.
George Kane nods at Molly, remaining seated. He nonchalantly waves a finger at the men behind him. They immediately close in around the actress and the gravedigger girl.
Greta turns to face the men and swiftly pulls the Japanese handgun from the duffel bag. She points it confidently, sweeping her arm across the men.
‘Get back,’ she snaps. ‘Back!’
And George Kane laughs. ‘The gun has no bullets,’ he says. He gets up from the log, struggling to haul his large limbs into motion, then he points to the red-haired boy. ‘Shane over there was quite taken by you girls back by the creek.’
Shane gives two short snorts that constitute his laughter. Another large man in a hunting jacket turns to Shane and makes fun of his snorting by snorting loudly three times and this makes all the men laugh and they’re laughing now like deranged clowns and their bodies close in on the girls and Greta steps back from them.
‘Get back!’ she says, feebly.
But the bodies come closer and the deranged laughter makes Molly Hook think of her Uncle Aubrey and she finds the eyes of the bald man with lesions across his face and his scalp and his mouth is wide and his laughter sounds like a car horn and his hands are reaching for her and all she has in this strange world is her best friend after the sky, Bert the shovel, and she swings him hard at the bald man’s nose and blood rushes from his nostrils as he falls to his knees.
Greta steps back further from the men, who rush at her now, and she falls into the arms of George Kane, who bear hugs her with all his strength, the crusty welts and scabs across his arms rubbing against her shoulders. The actress stomps her feet on his boots, kicks her heels against his shins.
Molly turns her head in time to find the red-haired boy charging wildly at her. But the gravedigger girl is wilder and she swings her gravedigger shovel and the root cutting teeth of Bert’s blade meet the red-haired boy’s left ear and the top half of that ear pops away from his head and soars momentarily through the air to land a foot from the crackling campfire. Stunned, the red-haired boy falls to the ground clutching his severed ear, his fingers running through dirt and gravel in search of the rest of it.
‘Run, Molly, run!’ Greta shouts, twisting her body in the grip of the heavyset Kane.
Molly sprints through a gap in the group left by the stunned and bleeding boy.
And the day sky talks to her now. ‘Run, Molly, run,’ it says. And she listens. She listens so well. She bashes through ferns and figs and palms and her shoulders and legs are scratched by the thorns of weeds. ‘Don’t look back, Molly, don’t look back,’ the day sky says.
‘Greta!’ Molly screams, as she turns into the detouring path that took her away from the silver road and down to the bad ones.
‘Don’t look back, Molly,’ the day sky says.
She runs and she runs and she runs.
‘Greta!’ she calls to the sky.
‘Don’t look back, Molly,’ the day sky says.
And Molly sprints on through the scrub and she bursts through a fringe o
f palms back to the side of the creek where she leaned happily against a rock reading the works of William Shakespeare.
‘Greta,’ Molly says.
‘Don’t look back,’ the day sky says. ‘Run, Molly, run.’
But she stops. She turns around, sucking air into her lungs, and she knows now why the sky asked her not to look back. The bald man with the bloodied nose is bursting through a natural fern wall and charging at her. She turns to run again but he’s too fast, too filled with rage, and his right hand grips her shoulder and the momentum of his running is enough to drag Molly along the creek bedrock, the skin on her kneecaps and shins tearing away against the sandstone surface, and he drags her to the creek and he dumps her head, face-first, into the water and her world exists only underwater now.
Clear water. Bubbles from her mouth. Pebbles on the sandy creek floor. The bald man holds her head down and the shock of these actions unfolding within a second causes Molly to suck a belly full of water and that water has nowhere else to go but to circle around her good heart that has been turning, turning, turning to stone.
*
George Kane dragging Greta along the ground by her right arm. The man in the hunting jacket dragging her by her left arm. Greta kicks uselessly at the earth.
‘Let me go!’ she screams. ‘Fucking animals. Animals! Let me go!’
There is spit coming from Kane’s mouth. Sweat across his face. He turns to a man in a black stockman’s cap with a red work shirt and braces.
‘Kenny,’ Kane says. ‘Go help Hoss with the girl.’
Kenny runs off towards the thin path Molly ran down moments ago. Kane points at Shane, the red-haired boy, now with a rag pushed hard against his left ear, still stunned by the actions of the gravedigger girl.
‘Crank the plant up!’ Kane barks.
‘She chopped my ear off!’ the boy says, sounding as hurt by this event as he is confused.
‘Just get the fuckin’ crusher started!’ Kane hollers.
And Greta hears the spitting of oil inside a rusting generator and then she hears the movement of cranks and pulley systems coming to life again and she’s being dragged along on her back and she can see flashes of cloud and blue sky and she leans her head back hard to her left to see where she’s being taken.