All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  Greta turns back to the pilot. He’s still stuffing his face with soggy canned beef, licking his fingers. No helmet and goggles on his head now. His hair is black and militarily cut, short and neat. The pistol rests on the flat rock by his right knee.

  Yukio notices Greta staring at him. He stops eating. He offers her the open can of beef. ‘You?’

  Greta shakes her head, looks away, repulsion in that head shake.

  Yukio turns to Molly. The brown-haired girl who likes to talk is finally speechless, yet she makes noise even in her sleep. He smiles. He sees that she is shivering in her sleep. He places his near-empty can of beef down by his side and stands and walks softly over to her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Greta asks, protectively. ‘Get away from her.’

  Yukio does not stop. He unbuttons his flight jacket. It’s rust-coloured, made of a cotton and silk blend, thick and heavy. A blue chrysanthemum has been stitched into the jacket sleeve, the sacred mark of the Japanese naval aviator. He wears only a plain white T-shirt now, tucked tight into a thick brown military belt and pants. The shirt hugs his body and his body is all bone and muscle. A body of pure military means: lean, fit and useful. He kneels down and gently lays the flight jacket over the gravedigger girl. He walks back to his place at the fire, picks up his soft leather helmet – fur-lined and insulating – then he walks back to Molly and, carefully lifting her head up briefly from the slab of hard sandstone, gently slips it onto her head. Molly gives a loud snort, turns over onto her other side, instinctively pulls the welcoming jacket tight around her body, and nestles into the flight helmet.

  Yukio nods. He offers a half-smile as he turns back to Greta. ‘Ii ko da,’ he says. Greta stares at him, puzzled.

  He looks back down at Molly. The brown-haired girl has a good heart. He points at her. ‘Ii ko da,’ he says again, tapping his own heart.

  Greta nods with a vague sense of understanding.

  Yukio nods.

  He sits back down by the fire opposite Greta and warms his hands. A long silence between the man and the woman, no sound but the cicadas and the crackle of burning eucalypt logs.

  Yukio taps his chest. ‘Yukio,’ he says. He taps his chest again. ‘Yukio.’

  Greta nods. She taps her chest reluctantly with her forefinger. ‘Greta,’ she says.

  Yukio repeats the name. ‘Greta.’ He nods and taps his chest again. ‘Yukio Miki,’ he says.

  Greta takes a pained inhale. She nods, tapping her chest. ‘Greta Maze,’ she says.

  ‘Greta . . . Maze,’ Yukio repeats.

  He taps his chest again. ‘Yukio Miki . . . kara . . . Sakai . . . Japan.’

  Greta nods. ‘Greta Maze . . . Sydney . . . Australia.’

  Yukio nods, smiling. ‘Sid . . . inny,’ he says.

  Greta nods. She slides her backside closer to the fire, lies down on her side, rests the side of her face on her cupped hands. She still feels the bruising around her eye but the aching in her head is easing.

  She stares into the fire and the fire plays the flickering film reel of her life and how she left Sydney on a train as a young woman with a bag of clothes and then the train of her life ran off the tracks and careened into the arms of Aubrey Hook, and those arms of Aubrey Hook are whaling her now. Fists against the bones in her head. And she closes her eyes to sleep because sleep is the only thing that will stop those fists from flailing. But when she closes her eyes she sees something worse. A sterile white hospital room and a baby in her arms and the baby wailing. ‘Ssshhhhh,’ Greta whispers. ‘Ssssshhhh.’ But the baby’s wailing only grows louder. And Greta cries now, too. Greta Baumgarten in her mind and Greta Maze on a cold hard bed of sandstone. Both those women crying.

  ‘Tori no hoshi,’ Yukio says softly into the night air. Greta opens her eyes to see Yukio with his right arm pointing to the night sky. ‘Tori no hoshi,’ he says. And he smiles.

  The bird star story. The story of the brightest star he sees shining up there far beyond the canyon walls. That’s a good story to tell by a fire like this one. The nighthawk star story. The ugly nighthawk who felt ugly on the inside because all the other birds in the forest said he was ugly on the outside. They said his feathers had no colour, only the reddish-brown colours of dirt and clay. The crimson finch he saw today. That bird reminded Yukio of the nighthawk. The other birds said the nighthawk’s beak was flat and useless and pointed out that his mouth was so wide it stretched from one ear to the other. And the nighthawk was so saddened by his ugliness he decided to leave the forest, but when he left he was still sad and he thought the only thing that could take his sadness away was to leave the earth altogether, and so he flew high into the blue sky, so high that his beak bumped into the sun. And the nighthawk told the sun he was fixing to die. And the bird asked, ‘Sun, will you take me with you when you fall into the night? I’ll be glad to die in your fire. And my ugly body will give out one single flash of light as it burns and that light will be beautiful.’

  ‘I cannot take you with me,’ the sun said. ‘I belong to the day, my friend, and you belong to the night. You need to fly on, nighthawk, fly on to the stars, who belong to the night like you.’

  And the bird flew on, flapping its tiring wings, up, up, up into the night sky until it ran into three young night stars who were talking among themselves.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the bird. ‘I’m wondering if you could take me with you when you leave before daylight.’ But the three young stars laughed at the bird and said they would never welcome such an ugly colourless creature into their star sky. The nighthawk wept but it flew on, higher into the night sky, so high that it was soon soaring above every star.

  The nighthawk looked down upon the stars now instead of looking up at them, and it felt proud to have soared so high – surely higher than any other forest bird had ever flown. But then the nighthawk’s wings stopped flapping because it was exhausted by its journey from the forest to the stars, and its eyes closed and the bird fell asleep, just as its tired wings made their final flaps. The bird died in that moment, but it did not fall from the sky for it was then reborn. Transformed.

  That night back on earth and deep in the forest, the pretty birds who had laughed and joked about the ugly nighthawk were stunned to see a new star in the night sky. It sat higher and burned more brightly than any other star and inside it twinkled every colour of the spectrum. It was the prettiest thing the forest birds had ever seen.

  ‘Tori no hoshi,’ Yukio says to the night sky.

  ‘The stars?’ Greta nods.

  ‘Tori no hoshi,’ the pilot says, nodding.

  Greta watches the pilot lie flat on his back, his eyes fixed on the stars in the night sky. The pinholes of light are losing the war between the stardust and the darkness, but the stardust won’t give up the fight.

  ‘The stars,’ Yukio whispers. And his heavy eyes close to darkness.

  *

  Molly wakes with a hand on her face.

  ‘Sssshhhh,’ whispers Greta. The actress stands silently, a forefinger to her lips.

  Molly rubs her eyes. Embers in the fading fire. She can see her duffel bag hanging over Greta’s shoulder.

  Molly stands silently. Greta takes several light-footed steps in her saddle shoes across the flat rock to where Yukio sleeps on his side, close to the edge of the fire, arms across his chest, hugging his body tight. The handgun rests behind his back on the rock. His family sword rests by the handgun.

  Then the pilot shifts his position, turns hard to his other side, back to the handgun, and then his head shakes rapidly in his sleep.

  Greta stands still, watching him.

  Molly freezes.

  ‘Ssshhh,’ Greta whispers again, her eyes fixed on the pilot who appears to be struggling with the dreams inside his head.

  Then a sharp and aching ‘Ugghh’ emerges from his lips and seems to hurt him. He jolts in his sleep. He shudders in his sleep. Then he turns back to the fire, eyes shut. ‘Ugggghhh,’ he groans again and that sound seems
to come from deep within his corned-beef gut. It’s a rumble, a pain rattle, the echo of a thousand sorrows, and it makes Molly move closer to the pilot. She sees that his whole body is shaking now.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Molly whispers.

  ‘Ssshhh,’ Greta snaps back sharply, silently stepping over Yukio’s body and bending down to pick up the handgun. She shakes her head towards the dark valley running out of the canyon and deeper into the black scrub.

  ‘C’mon,’ Greta whispers.

  ‘We can’t just leave him out here in the bush like this,’ Molly says.

  ‘Ssshhh!’ Greta says again. She grits her teeth, nodding furiously at the gravedigger girl then runs a finger along her neck and that finger turns into a fist and a thumb pointing up the canyon. She silently mouths her final word. Now!

  Molly turns back to Yukio. He’s sweating. There’s a war going on inside him and Molly knows the strange and warm-faced pilot is losing that war like Darwin is losing a war north of here, back by the sea. Molly has seen her father shake like this. Deep shaking. Involuntary. She knew when she saw that shaking that her father had a trouble inside him that could not be soothed from the outside. All she could do was pat her father’s forehead and whisper, ‘Sssshhhh, Dad, sssshhhh. It’s all right, Dad.’ What she meant was that she knew she was only ten or eleven or twelve but everything was going to be all right as long as they had each other. Then she sees her father in her mind, limbless and bomb-torn and wedged inside the fork of a tree. She closes her eyes and when she opens them again she removes the aviator jacket and places it over Yukio. ‘Ssshhhhh,’ she whispers into his ear and the sound seems to still the pilot. So she whispers again: ‘Ssshhhh. It’s all right, it’s all right.’

  *

  She is still wearing his flight helmet when she turns and follows Greta into the forest darkness that waits beyond the canyon, and she is still wearing it when they stumble blindly through a thick infestation of thorny mesquite trees with branches that seem to reach out to Molly and tear at her exposed skin.

  The earth rebels, she tells herself. It rebels against wrongdoers, she tells herself. Sam knew this. Molly knew this. The earth in rebellion. Buffalo charging at cars. Crocodiles stalking girls in creeks. Tree branches reaching out to strangle her dead in the dark.

  She’s still wearing the pilot’s helmet when she walks face-first through the circular web of a golden orb spider. The web is made of golden yellow silk and its miraculous architecture is so grand that it stretches the whole way across the path they follow through moonlit monsoon vine thickets. The girl feels the web’s maker, a female spider with a body three inches long, land on the back of the pilot’s leather helmet and she leans forward knowing she’s in the wrong here, knowing that the golden orb spider spent hours in this forest darkness constructing her grand silk insect trap only to have it destroyed by the careless head of a Darwin gravedigger girl.

  She puts a light hand to the back of her head, brushing the spider off the helmet. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, as much to the spider as to the Japanese pilot they left back in the canyon. The foreigner in as foreign a land as he could ever fall into from the sky. If the earth can rebel, she tells herself, then the sky can, too. A sky gift rejected. A sky gift left behind. A sky gift abandoned in a canyon.

  ‘We shouldn’t have left him back there,’ Molly says.

  Greta holds Bert the shovel in her hands, waves it at the darkness before her, batting down branches and vines.

  ‘He’s been droppin’ bombs on folks across the world,’ Greta says. ‘Stop sparing thoughts for the bastards who just blew half your house to Adelaide.’

  ‘The sky wanted us to meet him,’ Molly says.

  ‘Is that right?’ Greta replies. She stops and turns to Molly, agitated, tired. ‘And I guess the sky wanted your father blown to bits?’

  Molly stops now, too. She wonders who, indeed, wanted that to happen to her father. Her father, Horace, the good and the bad one, blown across the yard and lodged in the fork of a tree. Blood dripping from his thigh where the rest of his leg used to be. Who did ask for that? She’d asked for another gift from the sky. Then the sky had rained Japanese bombs. Who did ask for that?

  *

  They beat a loose path through a fringe of red ash trees that meets a rocky incline where a solitary pandanus tree stands, its wedge-shaped, bright-red fruits looking like the kinds of jewels Aubrey and Horace Hook would rob from Hollow Wood’s dead. When their improvised course takes them higher across sandstone ranges and rises, the moon throws enough light down for the actress and the gravedigger girl to see the land that unfolds before them. Then they follow a clearer path through the trees and the sandstone gullies and outcrops. Sam Greenway might have walked this way once, Molly tells herself. His people have walked this path for millennia and so have the short-eared rock wallabies and the black-footed tree rats and the short-beaked echidnas and the golden bandicoots. And now the gravedigger girl and the actress.

  The moon is silver and the stars surrounding it dutifully assemble into shapes for Molly. An arrow. An elephant. A warrior’s shield. A gravestone.

  Her mother, Violet, made her promise she would make her life beautiful and grand and poetic and she promised her mother that she would write her own epitaph, that she would live a life that could be written about with ease on an upright slab of limestone.

  Now the night sky whispers to her, ‘What would it say, Molly? And be honest. I’m not like that fool the day sky. I will know if you are lying.’

  ‘I know exactly what it will say,’ Molly whispers.

  HERE LIES BRAVE ORPHAN MOLLY

  HOOK WHO LOST HER MOTHER AND FATHER

  BEFORE THE AGE OF 13 AND SET OFF INTO

  THE NORTHERN AUSTRALIAN WILDERNESS

  IN SEARCH OF A SORCERER NAMED

  LONGCOAT BOB BUT WHAT SHE WAS

  REALLY SEARCHING FOR WERE ANSWERS

  TO QUESTIONS SHE COULD NOT BRING

  HERSELF TO ASK. IN A PITIFUL ACT OF

  BLIND VENGEANCE, MOLLY BLUDGEONED

  LONGCOAT BOB TO DEATH WITH A BLOOD-

  COLOURED ROCK SHE BELIEVED WAS

  HER MOTHER’S TRUE HEART TURNED TO

  STONE. MOLLY DIED MANY YEARS LATER,

  RIDING HER BICYCLE OFF A KATHERINE

  GORGE CLIFF FACE, AGED 122. SHE IS

  SURVIVED BY HER HUSBAND, SAM, AND

  THEIR HANDSOME AND RICH TWIN SONS,

  TYRONE AND GARY.

  Molly stops and reaches into her duffel bag to check the blood-coloured stone is still inside, but really she doesn’t need to check because she knows she carries her mother’s heart inside her duffel bag as much as she carries it inside her chest. Greta moves on ahead in the dark.

  ‘Is that really your plan, Molly?’ asks the night sky.

  ‘Maybe,’ Molly says. ‘If he doesn’t cooperate.’

  Molly closes the bag and walks on again.

  ‘You’re going to crack that rock over Longcoat Bob’s skull?’

  ‘Yep,’ Molly says. ‘If I have to.’

  ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, Molly.’

  ‘Really?’ she says. ‘Really? You could have fooled me. My whole life I’ve been doing things I don’t want to do.’

  Greta emerges from the darkness.

  ‘Who you talkin’ to?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m talking to the sky,’ Molly says.

  ‘Oh, good,’ Greta says, straight-faced. ‘I thought you’d lost your marbles for a second there, but you were only talking to the sky.’

  *

  They negotiate a series of sandstone outcrops and step slowly through a blind natural alley between two rock walls. They come to a clearing of quartzite the size of half a football field and the silver moon reflects in pools of water collected in eroded holes the size of wagon wheels. The clearing blends into a scree slope that runs down to a thick patch of floppy billygoat plum trees and little gooseberry trees, through which they have to bat
tle hard, with Bert in full swing.

  Brute wandering. Always Molly breaking the silences. High on another outcrop, she sees a dark, black-brown bird in the sky. ‘Wedge-tailed eagle!’ Molly rejoices.

  The glorious bird circling in the thermal updraughts of its own shimmering sky. That heavenly wingspan looks as wide to Molly as some cars. It’s not even flapping its wings, Molly tells herself. It’s floating. It’s levitating. The bird is magic up there in its sky territory, where it circles now beneath a cloud shaped like a domed castle, and there it is home and there it is queen.

  ‘She’s the queen,’ Molly says. ‘Her majesty!’ she calls to the sky, waving in the same way she might wave at a royal from the mother country. She breathes deep and beams.

  ‘She’s just like us, Greta,’ Molly says. ‘She’s free.’ Molly nods. ‘Yep, this is full life livin’, Greta. This is how we’re supposed to be livin’.’

  ‘I can think of several other ways I’d prefer to be livin’,’ Greta says. ‘And I’m holding a glass in every one of ’em.’

  ‘I mean this is what we’re supposed to be doing with our lives, isn’t it?’ Molly replies. ‘We’re supposed to find ourselves things to etch on our gravestones. And now we’re writing our own epitaphs, Greta. You’re writin’ yours. I’m writin’ mine.’

  Greta can see her grave now. ‘“She was the next Greta Garbo,”’ she says, ‘“but she died prematurely from prolonged exposure to the sun and girls who talk to the sky. The Palmerston Players closed their theatre two days later out of respect, and also due to the fact that its troupe numbers were cut by a third upon Miss Maze’s untimely demise.”’

  ‘I’ll always remember this long walk with you, Greta,’ Molly says.

  ‘That’s good, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘Because if we don’t find your grandfather’s silver road this may be the last walk you’ll have to remember.’