All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  Greta moves closer to Molly now. She rests a hand on the girl’s shoulder.

  ‘My dad was all right. He had his problems but he still loved me. He did.’ And Molly wants to cry in front of these crocodiles. And maybe this is what people mean when they talk about crocodile tears: what you shed when you talk to crocodiles about your dead dad. Cry, Molly, cry. They’ll let you pass if you cry for them. Cry, Molly, cry. But she can’t. And she tilts her head up to find the sky but there’s no sky to be seen this far up Candlelight Creek.

  ‘So I’m gonna go ask Longcoat Bob if he could stop all the bad things that keep happenin’ to me,’ Molly says. ‘And if you fellers could just sit right there and let us pass we’ll walk on up this creek and we’ll thank you for your grace.’

  Molly waits for a response. The crocodiles lie still and Molly nods her head confidently. She fixes the strap on her duffel bag, pulls it tight over her shoulder. She grips Bert the shovel in both hands like a spear and she walks on along the creek edge.

  ‘Follow me, now,’ Molly whispers to Greta under her breath. Greta watches Molly walk innocently, almost casually, past the crocodiles and she follows hurriedly in her footsteps. Her eyes can’t help but turn to the trio of toothy creatures, who remain deathly still as their eyes – three sets of cold and ghostly and milky eyes with dark coin-slot pupils – follow every last movement of the actress’s clumsy course across the slippery ancient rocks that line their creek home.

  Greta moves so fast that she eventually overtakes Molly. ‘Faster,’ Greta says. ‘Faster.’

  *

  Forty more minutes of walking and the creek bends away to the right and Greta can see a patch of grey light at the end of the tunnel. ‘C’mon,’ she says. ‘We’re almost out.’

  She hurries along the creek bank, her movements more assured now. Greta in a summer satin dress, emerald-coloured, which shimmers when it finally finds the light of a clearing that extends from the end of the suffocating tunnel to a vast freshwater floodplain covered in pink and red lotus lily flowers that stand tall out of submerged rootstocks connected to smooth, green, rounded leaves so wide and flat they look to Molly like circular steps she could walk on to make her way across the deepest wetland pools.

  ‘Look at this place!’ Greta screams. The actress starts to run and she breathes the wetland air deep into her lungs and she raises her arms to the sun. To her left is a billabong of vivid water lilies like something from her wildest twilight dreams, perfect suns of gold rising from the centre of each purple flower. To her right is a field of white snowflake lilies, their showy flowers like ostrich feathers made of the desiccated coconut flakes in which she rolls her freshly iced lamingtons on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

  ‘What is this place?’ Greta hollers back to Molly.

  And Molly screams back to the actress in delight, ‘It’s Australia.’

  They walk on for a few miles, their shoes sloshing through thick green grass that grows from water that in places reaches up to Molly’s kneecaps. It is at least cooling. Greta cups three handfuls and splashes them across her face. At a small buildup of water in a circle of spear grass, Molly kneels down with her grandfather’s prospector’s pan and washes away the hard cemetery earth that masks the mysterious etchings on its battered underside.

  Greta stands at Molly’s shoulder, drinking from the water bag. Molly studies the pan. It’s smaller than she remembers it being. She runs her fingers over the etched words her grandfather wrote to himself and maybe, just maybe, to his daughter and his daughter’s daughter.

  The longer I stand, the shorter I grow

  And the water runs to the silver road

  Molly’s dirt-caked forefinger traces the carefully drawn line that meanders down the circular base, taking occasional lefts and rights, to a second set of words.

  West where the yellow fork man leads

  East in the dark when the wood bleeds

  The line is like a road and the sets of words are like rest stops along that road.

  ‘This pan was a gift to me when I was seven years old,’ Molly says. ‘My mum called it a sky gift. She said there are gifts that are always falling from the sky. This was one of the gifts that fell from the sky just for me, Greta. I looked up at the sky and when I looked down again my mum had disappeared into the bush and I never saw her again. Then I turned around and this pan was lying at my feet. I reckon she wanted me to have it, but I don’t know why she wanted me to have it.’

  ‘Maybe she wanted you to go find that gold for yourself,’ Greta says. ‘Maybe this pan is your inheritance. She wanted to give you something before . . .’ Greta doesn’t finish that sentence.

  ‘Before what?’ Molly asks.

  ‘Before she had to go away.’

  Molly scratches at the pan, soaks it in the water again, scrubs it with her fingers.

  ‘I think she wanted me to find Longcoat Bob,’ Molly says.

  She soaks the pan again, and a third set of words reveals itself in the afternoon light.

  City of stone ’tween heaven and earth

  The place beyond your place of birth

  Greta kneels down beside Molly for a closer look.

  ‘“The place beyond your place of birth”,’ Greta considers. She dwells on this for a moment. ‘Where was your grandfather born?’

  ‘He was born in Halls Creek, across the border in Western Australia,’ Molly says.

  ‘Where were you born?’ Greta asks.

  ‘I think I was born in Darwin Hospital like my mum,’ Molly says.

  ‘You got any idea what he’s on about?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Molly replies. ‘We haven’t gone deep enough yet to find out.’

  She soaks the pan again, scrubs at the bottom of the base and holds the pan up to the light once more. Her forefinger runs along more newly revealed words and the mystery of them sends a shiver down her twelve-year-old spine.

  Own all you carry, carry all you own

  Step inside your heart of stone

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Greta asks.

  ‘That’s what Longcoat Bob said he was going to do with his curse,’ Molly says. ‘He said he would turn our true hearts to stone.’ Molly thinks of the blood-red rock she’s carrying inside her duffel bag.

  ‘But how do you step inside a heart of stone?’ Greta asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Molly says. ‘Maybe we’ll only know when we know. We have to follow the path. One step at a time.’

  She traces the map line with her fingernail. ‘When we find the silver road we follow this line going down here. And we look for things. I reckon my grandfather saw things like I see things sometimes. Maybe I’ll be able to see what he saw when I see those same things.’

  Greta raises her eyebrows, takes another swig of water. ‘So what do you see now, Molly?’

  Molly’s eyes follow the thin stretch of what’s left of Candlelight Creek, which snakes through the wetlands towards what appear to be, a mile or maybe two in the distance, two towering red sandstone plateaus split by a deep and miraculous canyon.

  ‘The water runs to the silver road,’ Molly says. ‘We follow the water to that range. The silver road is in there somewhere.’

  Then she turns her head to the sun. ‘But we’d best get there before dark.’ And she keeps staring in the direction of that sun because she can see a flash of silver in the sky beneath it. She puts a palm to the top of her forehead and looks harder at the silver flash.

  ‘A plane,’ Molly says.

  Greta turns her head to where Molly is looking. The silver plane moves closer. They can hear its engine now, the relentless buzz of its front propeller. Molly can tell how light and agile the plane is by the way it bobs and shudders in air pockets, but otherwise it maintains a steady course that she comes to realise is leading it straight towards them. Greta stands, confused, eyes up to the sky as the plane flies over her head. Then she sees the red circles. The red rising-sun circles of paint on the underside edges of the plane’s s
parkling metal wings. A Japanese fighter plane. All this way from Japan via Pearl Harbor and the Darwin central business district. All that blue sky and the hornet buzz of the metal fighter cutting through it.

  ‘It’s a Jap,’ Greta says. ‘But what’s he doing all the way out here?’ The fighter zooms high over Greta’s head and banks hard left and circles back around to where it came from and Molly and Greta turn in a circle in the sloshy floodplain grass without taking their eyes off the plane.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Molly asks.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Greta says.

  The fighter comes lower this time. It halves its speed and it circles Greta and Molly.

  ‘Should we run for it?’ Molly asks.

  Greta scans the floodplain. No trees for shelter. There’s an ochre-coloured termite mound taller than her, but it must be at least a hundred yards from where she stands in the open wetland. ‘We’d be dead already if he wanted to kill us,’ she says.

  She turns in another circle, following the fighter plane as it orbits the blonde actress in the shimmering emerald dress and the gravedigger girl in the sky-blue dress that she hopes to dance in one day with handsome Sam Greenway the buffalo hunter. The plane circles the girls once more and this time it comes in so close and low that Greta can see directly into the plane’s cockpit. The pilot is staring back at her. He leans hard left on his control stick, but his eyes don’t care for direction, they appear to care only for the actress whose saddle shoes are waterlogged in the wetland slush.

  Greta can see the man clearly now. A hard jawline beneath thick brown aviator goggles. A brown leather flight helmet, fur-lined, with its side flaps covering his ears. Then the engine seems to cut out and the plane appears to be gliding around her and there is no sound, only a metal flight machine floating on the breeze and the machinery of her heart beating fast beneath her chest. The pilot won’t stop staring at Greta and now, to Molly’s befuddlement, he raises his goggles to his forehead, and his Japanese face looks stunned-mullet puzzled by the actress. The silent plane looks to Molly like a bird, a grey brolga in the low sky with its big black wings outstretched, hovering effortlessly on an invisible wind.

  Then the engine rattles back to life and the plane turns and roars back to where it came from, back towards the sun, before circling around once more, but higher now. It soars above Greta and Molly and their eyes turn up to watch it flying towards the two tall red sandstone plateaus.

  And Greta and Molly watch the plane fly on its inexplicable course towards red rock and their feet begin to move involuntarily because they are drawn to the image of that silver arrow moving in the sky. But then they stop in their tracks when they see the white mushroom cloud of a parachute with a pilot attached to it falling from the fighter’s cockpit. The aircraft flies on as the parachute spirals down towards the floodplain. Beyond the parachuting pilot, the plane nose-dives in a great arc towards the plateaus and it must be moving at two hundred miles an hour or more when it meets a craggy outcrop of red rock and explodes into a brief ball of flame. Molly looks back to the pilot falling from the sky and her feet want to move faster now. These feet have their own instincts and she follows them.

  ‘Wait, Molly!’ Greta calls.

  ‘C’mon, Greta!’ Molly says, sprinting across the floodplain. ‘He wants to meet us.’

  ‘He’s a Jap, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘He’s our enemy, Molly! Stop!’

  ‘He’s not our enemy,’ Molly shouts behind her. ‘He’s our gift.’

  *

  Yukio Miki’s family shortsword tucked into his belt. His brown leather flight boots making circles in the air as the parachute plummets in a spiral to the ground. He can’t see anything on the ground that will help him plan a safe landing. Just long grass. Wetlands. Deep green and black pools of water. Purple flowers. Red flowers. His brown leather boots spin and the world spins with them.

  Then he crashes hard and fast into a pool, so hard and fast that his boots touch the marshy bottom. There are reeds and grass spears beneath the surface that he struggles to kick through. He swallows water and pushes his way back up, arms and legs flailing, to the surface, where he assesses the diameter of the small lagoon he has fallen into. One of its banks is only eight or nine metres from him and he attempts to paddle to it, but the billowing canopy of his white silk parachute is sinking into the water and pockets of it are growing heavy and threatening to pull him deep below the surface. His right hand reaches for the chute pack release buckle at his belly, but to open it he must stop the furious dog-paddling that is keeping his head above the water. He voluntarily sinks into the water and with two hands reefs at the buckle, but the heavy weight of the now-sunken chute is pulling on the two metal connectors and jamming them in their sockets. He tugs again but the buckle won’t release, and he reaches momentarily for the Miki family blade in his belt, but he needs more air so he pushes back up to the surface and he sees the blue northern Australian sky above him and he looks for the pool edge and then he sees the girl and the woman.

  The girl carries a shovel and she smiles and she has brown hair and she wears a sky-blue dress and black boots. And then the woman appears beside her, panting and gathering her breath. That blonde hair that falls to one side over her face. The way she stands in the green dress. He notices there is pink and blue bruising around one of the blonde woman’s eyes and then those eyes, those perfect green eyes, find Yukio Miki and they reach into him, deep inside him, and he is immediately frozen by that stare. He has never seen a woman who looks like this and something about her has turned his body to lead, to stone, and he can no longer wave his arms and legs about in the water to keep himself afloat because she has frozen him with that face of hers and he gargles on wetlands water as his dumb blank head sinks gradually below the surface again. And Yukio thinks for a moment how strange it is to die like this and to have that vision – that woman with the green eyes – as the last thing his tired eyes will see on earth. But something about it makes him feel better, makes him feel good and ready now for Takamanohara. It was all worth it. The training. The discipline. The punishment. He will go now, content with that final vision. He will sink into the Plain of High Heaven and the last thing he will hear will be the voice of the Australian girl saying in English, ‘Swim, swim.’

  His eyes are still open as he sinks down and sunlight breaks through the water and lights the emerald greens in the floodplain pool and he realises that the water is the same colour as the blonde woman’s dress and eyes. And the sinking parachute drags him further and the surface sunlight fades as he descends. It’s nice down here, he realises, if he does not fight against the pull of the chute. He could stay here and find peace in the emerald green.

  But then through the last beams of sunlight comes a wooden pole, a shovel handle. And Yukio reaches out instinctively for that lifeline as his body sinks deeper, and at first only three fingers of his left hand can grip its end, but that’s enough to pull it towards him and get four then five fingers on it, and with those five fingers he hauls himself back up towards the daylight, towards the sky. And the shovel handle keeps lifting him and he rises to the surface to find the girl, that young girl, up to her chest in the water, pulling hard with all her strength, her bony left arm extending the shovel and her right arm gripped, behind her, by the two hands of the blonde woman, who pulls and heaves and pulls and heaves from the grassy bank.

  Soon Yukio is close enough to the water’s edge to plant a boot on the pool bottom and push hard with his legs while still dragging the buckle-jammed chute behind him. The young girl scrambles to land and she rushes to a canvas duffel bag and finds a small paring knife she has wrapped in an old tea towel. She rushes to Yukio’s shoulders and hacks back and forth rapidly at the chute pack’s shoulder straps as Yukio leans forward hard at the water’s edge.

  The straps snap free and the parachute pack sinks into the water followed by the chute canopy and Yukio falls face-first on the soggy ground. He raises his head to give thanks, but he sees the
girl with the curled brown hair moving cautiously away from him, her eyes drawn to the pilot’s waist. Not to the Miki family sword tucked inside his flight belt, but to the black Japanese army service pistol holstered at his side. She is frightened by the handgun.

  Yukio’s hand moves instinctively to his waist. He will remove the pistol and holster. He will show the girl he means no harm. But then the shovel blade is suddenly inches from his eyes.

  ‘Don’t you dare touch that gun,’ says Greta, gripping the shovel in both hands like it’s a cricket bat and she’s set to knock the Japanese pilot’s head over the nearest boundary fence.

  Yukio freezes, raises his arms, palms open towards the sky.

  ‘What are you doing this far south?’ Greta probes. It’s a theatrical performance. Today’s role: somebody tougher and harder than Greta Baumgarten ever was. One show only. She knows, deep down, she’ll crumble into nervous stuttering any second now.

  Yukio speaks a series of Japanese words.

  ‘English?’ Greta asks. ‘You speak any English?’

  Yukio says more Japanese words.

  Greta nods at Molly. ‘Molly, get that handgun there.’

  Molly crawls in close to the pilot. She unbuttons the side holster and removes the pistol with its brown wooden handle and thin black barrel.

  ‘Come up here with me, Molly,’ Greta says.

  The girl springs to her feet and stands beside the actress.

  ‘Now point that thing at him but, you know, don’t shoot ’im,’ Greta says.

  Molly takes a deep breath and exhales. ‘Don’t you think that feels a little aggressive, pointing a gun at him?’ she asks.

  ‘Him and his mates just blew up half of Darwin, I think we should feel a little aggressive,’ Greta says. ‘If he moves, shoot him in the legs.’