All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

  ‘Where the hell do we go now?’ Aubrey barks behind her. But the volume of his voice has been turned down by the wind in Molly’s ears.

  Her eyes straight ahead. Her eyes fixed on the end of the promontory.

  ‘What the hell are you staring at?’ Aubrey calls to her.

  And the wind blows so hard now against Molly that it’s an effort to walk forward, and she has to push her slight frame on.

  ‘Where on earth do you think you’re going?’ Aubrey shouts.

  He watches the gravedigger girl walk slowly across the flat rock. She seems transfixed by something. Mesmerised by a sight he cannot see. All he sees is the deep country below them. All he sees are the edges and Molly Hook walking towards the void. Her boots occasionally lose their footing on the uneven surface but she keeps going. Her hands gripping her chest. Her palms over her heart.

  ‘Get back here, Molly,’ Aubrey hollers through the wind.

  She’s following in the footsteps of her mother, he tells himself. A Berry through and through, he tells himself. He raises the gun.

  ‘You don’t get out that easy,’ he shouts.

  The girl keeps walking. Aubrey fires a warning shot above Molly’s head.

  Molly freezes. Aubrey can see she is still a yard or two from the end of the plateau. Molly turns around.

  ‘Not until you’ve found my gold,’ Aubrey calls, his pistol pointed at her chest.

  The wind blowing the curls of her dusty brown hair across her face.

  ‘I wrote a poem, Uncle Aubrey,’ Molly says. ‘It’s about you. And it’s about me and Mum. It’s a beautiful poem, Uncle Aubrey. It’s graceful.’ She looks up at the grey sky. ‘It’s called, “We Are Treasure Buried by the Sky”.’

  And Aubrey Hook watches the gravedigger girl turn around again and then he watches her disappear into the rock surface. She simply vanishes. Not over the edge. But into the very rock itself. And for a moment Aubrey Hook believes in magic. For this trick must be the work of Longcoat Bob or the work of the spirits because children don’t just vanish into sandstone.

  He lowers his gun and, confused, dumbfounded, edges slowly forward to the place where Molly Hook disappeared, and he sees now that she was standing above a cavity, a hole in the rock that drops into blackness. Roughly ten feet wide and ten feet long. A bizarre eroded opening with the most uncommon shape.

  Aubrey Hook recognises that shape immediately. It’s the shape of a human heart. She did it, he thinks. She stepped inside her heart of stone.

  *

  She sits in a bed of dirt, nursing an ankle that twisted and almost broke when she landed. She sits inside a rock cave looking up to a ceiling as high as the ceiling in the cemetery house in Hollow Wood. She looks through the hole in this ceiling and that hole is the shape of a heart, a heart framing nothing but grey sky.

  The outline is rough but plain as day, like the hearts she has seen tattooed on the arms of singlet-wearing soldiers and farmers in the pubs along Smith Street. A fiction heart. An artist’s version of a heart. The kind of heart shape you draw an arrow through.

  She turns her head and sees an opening where more light is shining in, a natural archway at the bottom of a short downward slope. An access point not much bigger than the door of any Darwin house that suggests there are other ways to enter the belly of this strange rock formation than from a hole in its roof.

  Her hands run along the dirt floor and she finds several rocks that are cold to the touch. Then she finds more rocks sitting on top of these rocks and more on top of those. A whole pile of rocks. One or two the size of honeydew melons. Some the size of mangoes. Some the size of cricket balls.

  Then a sound from the cave roof.

  ‘Make yourself scarce,’ Aubrey Hook calls.

  She looks up to see him standing in the grey-sky light. He’s looking down into the darkness, his eyes finding the shape of the girl below. He drops Molly’s duffel bag through the hole and he uses the bag’s thump to gauge the distance to the ground. He doesn’t step into the hole like Molly did, but slides into it like he used to slide into the sacred graves of Hollow Wood, clinging now to as much ceiling rock as he can, leaving his legs to dangle in the black air before dropping down to the unseen floor he can only hope exists.

  He falls hard on the earth and his legs collapse and his side slams into the pile of rocks that Molly just ran her hands over. The pain in his shoulder causes him to howl and the howl bounces between the walls of the cave.

  Aubrey breathes deep. A wheezing in his lungs. Molly can’t see him clearly. Too dark. But she can smell him. The alcohol still leaching out with his sweat. The odour of tobacco in his clothes and from his mouth. He’s running his hands frantically across the rocks he tumbled onto. Now the smell of naphtha fluid, the flash of the turning flint on Aubrey’s worn metal cigarette lighter. Flash and flash and flame. The small lighter flame inside the cave, and then his face lighting up. His black eyes. The flame shimmering against his black eyes and Molly sees something in those eyes. A kind of dark wonder across them. A fever.

  He feels it before he sees it. The tingle of it runs from the base of his spine to its top. He swings the lighter over the pile of rocks and the rocks bounce light back to him. A gold light. A vivid and wondrous and fevered gold light from the patches of precious gold metal inside these rocks.

  The lighter flame roams across the pile of rocks and Aubrey allows himself a smile. A pile of gold ore. Rough gold nuggets in hard rock casings. Flashes of their wondrous gold light demanding to be exposed to the world.

  Even Molly feels the glowing. Some nuggets are so exposed and pure already that they look to Molly like large clumps of roughly torn honeycomb. Like stuff she could pull from holes in trees.

  This precious gold stuff Aubrey will pull from the heart of stone and carry back to Darwin as a new man. He will be transformed by the deep country and the twinkle of his eyes and the shine of his shoes will say nothing of the blackness inside him.

  Aubrey tries to count them all. Thirty gold nuggets. Forty nuggets. But he loses count. And he allows himself a giggle. And that giggle turns to a laugh and that laugh turns to a howl that echoes through the cave.

  Molly has seen that look upon Uncle Aubrey’s face before. It’s a look of satisfaction. He turns to Molly and howls and the girl brings her knees to her chest and she wraps her arms around her legs, studying the fevered man before her. Howl. Howl. Howl. That deranged howling from deep inside his white spirit stomach. The noise that is made when the tectonic plates in the stone of his heart rub against each other. Howl. Howl. Howl.

  Aubrey stands and rushes, breathless and panting, through the arched opening. His eyes adjust to the light and he sees that the cave opens onto a sandy clearing fringed by black wattle trees and native nutmeg trees and patches of vine forest. He looks back and up to find that he is now standing below the high promontory where he and Molly stood minutes earlier. To his right is another rushing waterway crossed by another makeshift bridge of eucalypt trunks, and to his left he sees a narrow path that disappears between rock walls. Two ways out of the clearing.

  He rushes back into the cave, picks up Molly’s duffel bag and dumps the contents in the dirt. The goldminer’s pan that started all this. Shakespeare’s life’s work. The red rock that Molly pulled from her mother’s chest, the red heart of Violet Hook that turned to stone.

  Aubrey frantically fills the duffel bag with the nuggets that shine brightest in the flamelight. Less rock, more precious metal. Smaller nuggets that might weigh ten pounds, larger ones of maybe twenty pounds and even a few he’s certain are heavier than thirty in his hand. He’s working with such urgency that he pays no mind to Molly when she reaches her hands across the floor in search of the rock she pulled from her mum’s chest. Violet’s rock. But she finds something else instead. Something that cuts her forefinger when she tries to grip it in the darkness. The paring knife.

  She crawls along the dirt floor with the knife and her left hand finds her mother’
s rock and she has all she cares about, so she crawls into a space against the cave wall and this space has a view up to the grey sky through the heart of stone. And she asks the sky for just one more gift. A fork of lightning to stab through that hole and burn Aubrey Hook to cinder. A bomb from a death plane. The same kind that tore Horace Hook in two and wedged him inside a tree. A long-lost mother with curled brown hair to come and take her away from the shadow. Take her away from him.

  Aubrey slips a total of ten gold nuggets into the duffel bag and braces his legs as he tests the weight. He strains. He feels a vein in his right temple about to pop, but the gold fever gives him strength. He manages to haul the bag over his shoulder and, satisfied he can bear the weight of all this found gold, he carries it out of the cave and drops it in the centre of the sandstone clearing. He then marches hurriedly back into the cave and picks up one of the largest nuggets, a hunk of gold-heavy ore shaped like a bull’s head that must weigh forty pounds or more. He drops it at Molly Hook’s feet.

  ‘I’ll carry the bag,’ he says. ‘You’ll carry this one.’

  Molly holds her mother’s red rock in both hands.

  ‘No,’ she says.

  ‘Come on, child, let’s go,’ he says. ‘Pick up the rock.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You will carry that rock out of here or you won’t be goin’ out at all,’ Aubrey says.

  Aubrey stands over her now. His black hat and his black shadow face fill the heart-shaped skylight.

  I don’t fear death, she thinks. I have a heart of rock. Molly shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says.

  Aubrey takes the pistol from the back of his trouser belt. Points it at Molly. Casts his eyes briefly around the dark cave.

  ‘Then I guess this hole is the last grave you’ll ever dig yourself into,’ he says.

  His right forefinger slips across the trigger.

  Molly looks past the gun to the sky above the shadow’s head.

  And the frame of grey sky now fills with the frame of Yukio Miki. The sky gift pilot wobbling, groggy and spent, and living and dying. His family’s sacred shortsword in his right hand. His eyes struggling to fix on the shadows moving in the darkness below him.

  Aubrey Hook and his long and bony trigger finger.

  Then Molly holds the red rock up with two hands. She presents it to Aubrey, presents it to the sky. There is little light flowing in through the heart-shaped frame, but all of it catches the colour of the rock. The colour of blood.

  The girl holds the rock as if it is a source of power, as if it is some kind of magic shield forged inside her dead mother’s chest that could somehow protect her from a bullet. Her mother’s stone heart. Her mother’s heart. She holds it there. She holds it there. She holds it there.

  ‘Why couldn’t you love me?’ she whispers.

  And Aubrey Hook is momentarily entranced by the rock’s colour. He’s taken with it. He’s frozen by it, and a long-buried truth is briefly revealed in his voice, an honesty exposed to the light of day, a flash of gold in the broken ore of his life. ‘She wouldn’t let me,’ he says. His eyes on the rock. His finger on the trigger. His eyes on the rock. His finger on the trigger.

  Then Molly drops the red rock and grips the paring knife she holds in her hands behind it and she lunges forward and she screams as she brings her hands down hard, driving the short blade into Aubrey’s right thigh. And Yukio drops blindly through the hole, the near-dead weight of his body landing heavily on Aubrey’s shoulders. His sword spills from his hand on impact but he keeps a grip on Aubrey’s neck, his left arm around the older man’s throat and his right arm already reaching for the pistol that Aubrey instinctively tries to bring to the head of his impossible assailant.

  Aubrey still has Molly’s paring knife stuck in his thigh when he rushes blindly backwards and slams Yukio’s back into the cave wall. There’s a bullet still resting in Yukio’s back and the cave wall meets its point of entry and the pilot screams in agony but he will not release his grip.

  Aubrey is a wild dog now. He roars. Saliva and sweat and blood and bruising across his face. He charges sideways, driving Yukio towards the arched opening. Molly scrambles along the floor, her hands searching blindly in the darkness for the shortsword. Aubrey roars again as he builds to a run and he carries the pilot like a wheat sack and he drives himself and his assailant hard against another wall and the men bounce off this wall and stumble into a roll that spins them out of the cave, where they land hard on the rough rock of the sandstone clearing, just beside Aubrey’s bag of gold.

  The sound of the full river running alongside them, its whitewater spray. The pilot has fate on his side and he has Nara, and he ends the tumble with his weight on top of Aubrey Hook and he can grip the gravedigger’s pistol hand well enough now to smash it three times against the bag of gold and then he watches the weapon bounce across the ground. Then Aubrey twists hard and fast and the men roll twice again across the sandstone and in the chaos of their movements they do not see that the gun has landed only a yard from two black bare feet poking out of a pair of brown slacks. Aubrey slips a hand free and reaches for the paring knife still stuck in his thigh. He pulls it from his flesh and shoves the blade into the side of Yukio Miki’s stomach.

  What little strength the pilot has left in his arms now abandons him. Aubrey turns him over easily and reaches again for the blade sticking out of Yukio’s belly. He pulls the blade out and he breathes deep and hard and he raises the blade over Yukio’s heart and the only thing that stops him from driving the short knife down into the pilot’s chest are the words of a sixteen-year-old Aboriginal buffalo hunter named Sam Greenway. ‘Hold up there, feller.’

  Aubrey turns to his left to find a pistol pointing at his head. The young man’s face is covered in faded strips of white paint. He’s shirtless and barefoot and in his left hand he carries a long, carved wooden spear almost twice his height. Across his chest are more white lines that rise and bend like fountain water over his shoulders and arms.

  ‘Sam,’ says Molly, standing now at the entrance to the cave, the shortsword in her hands, momentarily dazed by the sight of him. Tyrone Power by way of Mataranka. Her cowboy carrying a spear and a gun. She wanted to say his name louder but it came out so soft. So beaten.

  ‘You all right, Mol’?’ Sam asks.

  Molly has no answer to that. She can only turn silently to Aubrey sitting atop her friend who fell from the sky.

  ‘This feller hurt you, Mol’?’ Sam asks.

  Molly has no answer to that one either. Too dazed. Too spent. She sees movement to her left. Four more Aboriginal men, a similar age to Sam Greenway, emerging from the path between the two rock walls on the left side of the clearing. Same faded paint across their faces and across their chests. Same spears in their hands. The young men say things to Sam in their own language. Sam says things back to them and the young men hiss. One young man taps his spear twice on the ground.

  ‘You want me to plug this feller for you, Mol’?’ Sam asks.

  Molly is silent. She doesn’t take her eyes off Aubrey. ‘Get away from Yukio,’ she says to him.

  The gravedigger drops his head and smiles. He takes his time to adjust his skewed black hat then he stands confidently, shaking his head. He steps back from Yukio and Molly rushes to the bleeding pilot. His head is limply turned to the side. Blood across his belly. A line of blood running from his mouth. Molly kneels down beside him and she places her hand over the leaking knife wound.

  ‘I’m sorry, Yukio,’ she says. ‘I should never have led you here.’

  Sam keeps the pistol trained on Aubrey, who holds his arms out with the paring knife still in his right hand, staring down the young man with the gun.

  ‘You even know how to work one of those, blackfeller?’ Aubrey asks. ‘You ever held a white man’s weapon, eh blackfeller? You ever come across one of those on walkabout?’ Aubrey chuckles to himself. ‘You better not miss, boy.’ And he firms his grip on the knife in his fist.

  Then
Sam points the gun at a spot on the ground about three feet to the left of Aubrey and six feet or so behind him.

  ‘And you’d better pick up that hat,’ Sam says.

  Aubrey glances at the spot where Sam is pointing.

  ‘What hat?’ Aubrey asks, puzzled.

  With lightning speed, Sam fires a shot that blows Aubrey’s hat off his head and lands it in the very place Sam was indicating.

  ‘That hat,’ Sam says. Then he looks Aubrey in the eye as he spins the pistol around his finger like a Wild West circus act, stopping the spin twice to aim the weapon threateningly at his target’s forehead before resuming the showy gunplay. Sam’s barefoot friends laugh at the gravedigger’s expense, but their elbow-nudging chuckles are silenced when the old Aboriginal man in the black and faded French admiral’s frock coat emerges from the path between the two rock walls.

  Molly gasps. ‘Longcoat Bob,’ she whispers. The old man’s wild grey hair. So many lines across his face. The crevices in his cheeks are the cracks in all the rocks Molly saw along her journey into the deep country. Longcoat Bob’s country. The scarring across his chest. Each line of it a rapid river running through this treacherous paradise. The long fingers by his sides. The fingers that pointed at her grandfather all those years ago. The fingers that called him out. Stone heart, Bob said. Stone heart.

  Molly turns to Yukio and whispers in his ear. ‘It’s Longcoat Bob, Yukio. He’s a medicine man. I’m gonna ask him to save you. He can save you, Yukio.’ She grips Yukio’s hand. She grips it to her chest. ‘Just hold on. Don’t go anywhere. Just hold on. Please. Please hold on.’