All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

  ‘You want him to say he’s not the wolf.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  And Molly Hook turns back to the bedroom to find the face of her mother in the moonlight, but it’s not her face she finds. It’s the moonlit face of the shadow wolf. It’s the night sky face of Aubrey Hook.

  ‘You want him to say he’s not your father.’

  ‘STOP IIIIIIT!’ Molly screams to the night sky and she grips Bert in her hands and she swings hard at the sandstone wall and Bert’s blade hits it with such force that brief firework sparks pop from its edge and Molly plants her boots in the dust and swings again and the blade smacks against the stone but the stone does not crack in two so she swings again and again and again and the stone is her past and her present and her sky and her mother and her father and the stone is Yukio Miki and Greta Maze and the stone is Aubrey Hook.

  ‘Stop it!’ she screams. ‘Stop it!’ Crack. And Bert’s blade snaps clean away from his long wooden handle.

  The gravedigger girl beneath the night sky holding the headless body of her only friend. She looks to the ground and finds the shovel blade in the moonlight. ‘Bert,’ she whispers. And she falls to the dirt and spear grass floor and she holds Bert’s blade in her lap as she rests against the rock wall and she wants to cry but she can’t because she’s cursed.

  ‘Your pocket, Molly,’ the night sky whispers.

  And Molly reaches into the pocket of her sky-blue dress and grips a small piece of fruit. She turns the fruit in her palm. Orange and round and hard-skinned. A death she carries in her hand. A death that grows on trees in the deep country.

  Yukio Miki holds the winged brown seed capsule of a stinkwood tree. It is long and curved and shaped like an aeroplane propeller blade. He raises it high and drops it and watches it twirl as it falls, spinning fast like the propeller blades on the Zero fighter he watched crash into a sandstone escarpment and burn. That seems so long ago now that he feels it was a different man who parachuted from that death fighter compared to the one who rests now on a sandstone rock beside Greta Maze and the baby who fell from the sky. The new man who is worried for them both. The new man who woke from a long sleep.

  Morning sun warms his head and he turns to it and he finds it rising beyond a thin gravel path that leads out of the forest into stone country that spills away to the distant plateau over which he saw electric-blue lightning flash in the dark early hours of the morning. A thin freshwater stream flows by the stinkwood tree carrying fallen seed capsules that now resemble canoes rowing gently into the forest. Yukio wears his white undershirt because he has made a kind of crib out of his flight jacket for the baby to sleep in. He knows the boy, like Greta Maze, has slept too long and he wonders what strange potion those white-haired people in the miner’s cave might have given the infant and the actress to make them both sleep through the brute body-heaving forest trudging that brought them out of that strange monsoon vine land.

  He has rested Greta’s head upon a pillow of rolled-up paperbark he stripped from nearby trees. Her back lies flat on a patch of soft, shaded grass beneath the stinkwood tree, whose shiny silver-brown trunk rises at least fifteen metres from the ground. The wind blows and the tree’s leaves shake and more propeller-blade seed capsules twirl to earth. For the third time in the past thirty minutes Yukio places his forefinger beneath the baby’s nostrils and for the third time he is relieved to feel the boy’s soft outbreath.

  Yukio studies Greta’s face. The curve of her cheekbones. Her closed lips and their gentle contours. Her chest rising and falling in the emerald dress. He looks away from her at the very moment when his heart tells him he wants to look at her forever. Zutto. Boundless, measureless, endless.

  He shakes his head. We must keep moving, he tells himself. We must find help for the baby. But you are the enemy, he reminds himself. They will kill you. Because you killed them.

  He kneels now over Greta and claps his hands, hard and loud. Once, twice, three times. ‘Wake,’ he screams. ‘Wake … Greta Maze!’ He pushes her left shoulder and her body moves but she does not wake. He puts his fingers on her neck to find her pulse and it throbs every second for five seconds. He’s tired, so he lies down beside the sleeping actress.

  His eyes find a full sky of blue and he begins to talk in Japanese. He speaks of his dream. He speaks of Nara and the weeks and the months during which he watched her disintegrate. He speaks of how he saw no beauty in the world when she left. No colour anymore in the trees and the leaves and the flowers of Sakai. No story anymore in its rivers and creeks. No joy anymore in its people. He recalls how the violent and bloody world war followed her sickness and he felt it was right that the world should burn for letting her go, so he climbed into a fighter plane and his hands that had once gripped wondrous knife blades in his family’s workshop now gripped gun controls and he aimed those bullets and bombs at other men and he cursed them all for being human, for knowing love but not knowing what it feels like to lose it.

  He remembers what the gravedigger girl said in the gallery chamber staring at the Lightning Man: that we are treasure buried under sky. He couldn’t follow all her English words, but he could sense the timbre of her heart, the strange beat of her soul. Love is a hidden treasure, too, he thinks. You meet the one the universe forged in the fire just for you and they bury their love deep inside you but sometimes you don’t even know it’s inside you until it’s ripped out of you, until it’s dug up out of you like pure gold dug out of earth. The hole remains. The hole is never filled and your blood and your soul and your joy and your life leak out of that hole, until you are empty. Until you are a ghost.

  Then he tries his English words again for Greta Maze, digs up every last one of them that he stores in his busy mind and he tries to explain something to the sleeping actress. He lies on his side and he rests his head on his right elbow and he leans in to Greta Maze’s ear and he whispers, ‘Greta … make … whole again … Yukio … wanted … to go.’ He looks to the sky. ‘Yukio … wanted … sky.’

  The actress is sleeping but still she makes him nervous. Every broken word an act of release. An act of confession.

  ‘I want to stay,’ he whispers. Clear English. Near-perfect English.

  The admission feels like a betrayal as much as it feels like the truth. And the truth of it makes him weep. ‘I want to stay,’ he whispers. Words between tears. ‘I want to stay … Greta Maze … I want to stay.’

  He wipes his eyes. Rubs them. Pulls himself away from the actress. Standing now. Ashamed. Embarrassed. He walks to the stream by the stinkwood tree and he watches the seed capsule canoes flow into the forest. Rowing away.

  The pilot’s back is turned to Greta, so he does not see her open her eyes. He does not see her looking to the sky through the branches of the stinkwood tree, her eyes slowly adjusting to the light. Her mind is processing the information of the moment – birdsong, running water, the smell of earth and bark, the touch of the grass on her palms by her side, the beating of her heart. And her heart is absorbing the words of Yukio Miki, his whispered broken-English confession. She woke to those whispered words. They opened her eyes, but she kept them closed. The treasure he dug from deep within his heart and soul and handed to a woman he barely knows.

  She stands in silence and she treads softly on the grass beneath her saddle shoes. This might still be the long dream, she tells herself. Her cave-bound stupor. She turns and finds the pilot standing at the stream. Yukio doesn’t hear her footsteps. To him she only appears, as if she has come from another dimension, from that world to this one, from the vanished to the found.

  ‘I just had the strangest dream,’ Greta says.

  Yukio’s head is turned to his side and his eyes are on her face and her face is staring deep into the tangled vine forest.

  ‘I dreamed that I was dreaming,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want to wake up from the dream. But you were beside me, Yukio. You kept waking me up. I wanted to sleep but you kept waking me up. You didn’t want me to sleep. You didn’
t want me to go to the dream. You kept screaming a word at me. The same word over and over.’

  She turns to him. ‘Stay.’

  She steps closer to him. Closer to the pilot who fell from the sky. Who fell for her. She raises her left hand and her fingers brush his cheek because she needs feeling, touch, to tell her this is not the long dream. And that touch makes him close his eyes because that touch is too gentle, too caring, and so warm and filled with such feeling that he wants to pull away from it. But he will stay. Stay.

  ‘Stay,’ he says.

  And she moves closer still and their bodies are touching now and he can feel her breathing and he can feel her chest against his and the curls of her hair are brushing his forehead and he can smell her and that smell is earth and life and future and past and his doom and his regret for finding this stranger in this upside-down land where he is the enemy, and her cheek is brushing his cheek now and his body and the motion inside it make him a sinner. Forgive me, Nara, he tells himself. Her skin is a landmine. Her skin is a dropped bomb. Her skin is the end of this world war and it’s the world exploding into pieces. Forgive me, Nara. And the movement in his neck is a betrayal and a truth and the weight he shifts to his cheek to brush back against hers is a crime and a miracle and a crime. And in the violent war inside his mind a call of retreat is made and Greta can feel the conflict in his muscles and he’s about to pull away but he’s held in place by a single word.

  ‘Stay,’ she whispers, and her arms wrap around him and her sweeping lips find his temple and the bone around his left eye and then his high cheekbone and she breathes deep and the motion in her body feels like meaning. And the pilot’s lips touch her skin.

  And then a baby cries. The infant wailing of the baby who fell from the sky, and it is the sound of the baby waking from his long sleep but also the sound of Yukio Miki and Greta Maze waking from a dream they both walked into.

  Greta breathes and breaks away from the embrace. She rushes to the baby, cradled in the pilot’s jacket. She picks him up and draws him to her chest. ‘Sssshhhh,’ she says. ‘Ssshhhhh.’ She rocks the baby in her arms. Then she looks up at the pilot. ‘Where’s Molly?’ she asks.

  A girl’s open mouth. The girl in the sky-blue satin dress lying on her side in the sun. Half an orange strychnine fruit sitting in her open palm. Her eyes closed. Brown boots covered in dirt and dust. Duffel bag straps over her shoulder. She lies motionless at the foot of four stone pillars that look like family members standing over a crib, peering down at a newborn.

  The girl’s name echoes across the maze of stone pillars. ‘Molly.’

  She stirs. Her left boot moves. Her left leg kinks at the knee. Her name echoes again across the stone city. ‘Molly!’

  The girl’s eyes flash open. Her view is dirt and spear grass and stone. She looks up to the sun and the sky and she finds the stone pillars of last night. They’re not as threatening in the daylight. Not as monstrous. She feels the fruit in her hand and she brings it to her eyes and she throws it at the rock wall opposite her. The fruit bounces off the sandstone and lands a few feet from the other half of the fruit that she spat out last night because it was so bitter and dry and near impossible to swallow. But she remembers how willing she was to swallow it and she is ashamed of this.

  She turns to the sky. ‘Why did you tell me those things?’ she asks.

  But she gets no reply.

  Then her name again, echoing across the stone city. ‘Mollyyyyy.’

  She knows that voice. There’s projection in it. There’s performance. Greta.

  ‘Moll-yyyyy!’

  She stands and runs towards the voice. She attempts to say her name but her throat is parched and she needs to swallow saliva twice before she can get a single word out. ‘Greta,’ she says weakly.

  She runs closer to the voice. She breathes deep and summons a louder call and lets it rip across the stone city. ‘Gret-aaaaaaaaa!’ she hollers. She darts left and right and ducks into alleys running diagonally right, then veers into passages running diagonally left and beats her own path through the maze of stone pillars.

  ‘Moll-yyyyy!’

  ‘Gret-aaaa, I’m coming!’ Molly screams.

  Hard left, hard right. Pillar after pillar after pillar. Follow the voice, Molly tells herself. She came for you. She cares for you. Because you care for her. The heart is warmed by warming the hearts of others. You only had a stone heart to give, she thinks, but she took it anyway. Run to her, Molly. Run, Molly, run.

  ‘Moll-yyyyy!’

  ‘Greta!’ Molly screams. ‘I can hear you. I’m coming. I’m coming.’ And she runs. Zigging and zagging through the maze, the voice of her friend as her compass point.

  ‘I’m coming Greta,’ Molly calls. ‘Keep shouting! I can hear you! I’m coming.’

  ‘Moll-yyyyy!’ Greta calls in the distance.

  And the gravedigger girl smiles as she takes a blind corner around a giant pillar that stands some fifty feet tall. She takes the blind corner so fast that her boots slide on the gravel beneath her and her legs lose their footing and she lands hard on her chest and belly, and skin rolls painfully away from her kneecaps and elbows, but she doesn’t care because Greta is close and she pulls herself up with her hair in her eyes and she’s still bent half over when she brushes her hair back and focusses on the impossible vision of her uncle, Aubrey Hook, standing before her. The shadow.

  She tells herself it can’t be him, standing within arm’s reach of her, towering almost as high as the monster pillars surrounding him. She tells herself she’s dreaming, still back there in the heart of the maze, back there sleeping with the orange fruit in her hand. She tells herself this can’t be real, but she knows it is when his long shadow fingers reach out and smother her nose and mouth.

  *

  ‘Moll-yyyyy!’ Greta calls, holding the baby to her chest. Sun and sweat across her face, she catches her breath at the foot of three pillars that look regal, like a king and queen and a younger, shorter prince sitting down at a sandstone slab that holds a palace feast. Rubble for roast chickens. Fallen stones for goblets. Yukio stands a foot behind her, studying the shapes of other rocks and pillars, committing them to memory in case they have to travel back through this godforsaken maze. He knows they are up high now. He noticed that the stone city sits on an incline rising to a high ridge and when the wind blows in certain directions he can hear water flowing in the distance ahead of them. And although they are up high, this is surely a place created in the underworld. Yomi-no-kuni, he tells himself. The World of Darkness must look like this. Mazes of stone monsters where creatures lurk behind every turn. A place that can’t be trusted. A feeling in his bones. In his heart.

  A voice from the north-west. Faint. ‘Greta.’

  ‘Moll-yyyyy!’ Greta calls again and she runs to the sound.

  ‘Greta … wait,’ Yukio says.

  But the actress does not stop. She only runs. Startled by the movement, the baby cries loudly and Greta tries to calm him as she moves. ‘It’s okay,’ she says, in a soft and tender voice. ‘We’re going to find Molly. We’re going to find Molly.’

  She turns left and right and left again. ‘Moll-yyyyy!’ she calls.

  She rushes on through the maze. Her left shoulder catches on the edge of a stone pillar, tearing a hole in the sleeve of her emerald dress that is now so worn and so journeyed that it has turned a light grey from kicked-up dust and brown from the ground dirt it collected in successive nights of rough and fitful sleeps beneath stars.

  Yukio runs behind her, loyally following her crooked path. ‘Greta … wait,’ he shouts.

  ‘Come on, Yukio,’ Greta calls back without stopping or turning around. ‘Come on. She’s close.’

  The pilot who fell from the sky watches the actress who has woken from her long sleep so renewed, so purposeful, so driven. He watches her legs moving, her shoes stepping between clumps of spear grass and stepping around jagged boulder heads that have fallen from pillars. He watches her dart left
and right again and he watches her stop abruptly in a ball of dust kicked up by her skidding shoes. He hears her inhale sharply and he comes to her side and looks at her face. White. Ghost-white. Horrified. Her full lips trembling. And he follows her gaze down a straight, narrow alley and he discovers that the subject of her gaze is a tall, thin man with a black moustache in a wide-brimmed black hat. And there is time enough in this moment for Yukio to see that the tall man has his left forearm around Molly Hook’s mouth and there is time enough for Yukio to see the look upon the man’s face and there is time enough to know that look is one of strange satisfaction and there is time enough to see the tall man’s right arm pointing a revolver straight at Greta Maze.

  Molly flails her legs and pulls hard at her uncle’s left arm and manages to shift it enough to squeeze two words out into the still air. ‘Run, Greta!’

  But Greta is frozen in this moment. She’s frozen in the memory of his fists. She’s frozen in the muscle memory of the journey she made to this wild land from Sydney. She’s frozen in the fact she was too young to care for the baby who was taken away from her and how those midwives and those hospital doctors took away more than her baby that day. They took away value and pride and purpose and they took away the notion that anyone in this world should care about Greta Baumgarten, not even herself. And so she tried to become someone else. Maybe, she thought, someone might care for Greta Maze instead. The showgirl. The public bar temptress. The punching bag. The actress.

  ‘Run, Greta!’ Molly calls.

  But, standing beside the actress in the emerald dress, Yukio knows that all the time inside the moment is up.

  It’s just another journey in the Top End. Much shorter from start to finish than Molly Hook’s long walk into the deep country. Yukio turns and twists his body to stand in front of Greta and the baby in her arms. A hammer drops. A firing pin strikes the primer of a bullet. Yukio staring into the actress’s eyes. Primer ignites propellant. Bang.

  Yukio’s arms around the actress. The propellant pushes the bullet core so fast through the air that it can’t be seen. Only the end of the journey can be seen. A bullet driving through the back of a pilot’s white T-shirt.