All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  ‘And how will you find Longcoat Bob’s gold out here?’ he asks.

  ‘I’ll follow the lightning,’ Molly says.

  Aubrey turns just in time to see a fork of lightning shooting down from the gathering storm clouds. He turns back to Molly, points his revolver at her heart.

  ‘Walk,’ he says.

  Pressed against the sandstone wall, Greta waits for the sound of Aubrey’s boots to fade. Then she scampers low to the edge of the maze, a wall of shrubs with white fruits, and she ducks down into them with the baby at her chest and she crawls and crawls to the only safety she has now – the safety of the vine forest. But she’s moving so fast and so frantically that she doesn’t see that the shrubs screen a sharp gully slope and as she pushes face-first through the final layer of shrubs she drops down this unseen slope and it takes every ounce of her strength to roll to one side and hug the baby to her chest as she shoulder-slides on loose leaves and dirt and grass to the gully floor, which she hits with a thud.

  Her view from the gully floor is of yellow flame trees. A cluster of floral fire lit by a kind of yellow Greta once thought she would see only in her dreams. But there is still danger in this gully. Footsteps. Someone padding across the forest floor. Someone so close there is no use in moving. And she resigns herself to the shadow of Aubrey Hook. He heard her in the shrubbery, she tells herself, and he followed her down the gully. She was foolish to think she could ever escape him.

  The footsteps stop. Silence in the forest. Then a man leans into her view, blocking the fire of the flame trees. An old man. Black skin. A very old man. Grey hair. And a long black military coat with gold trim the colour of the leaves on a yellow flame tree.

  CARRY ALL YOU OWN

  The blue sky over Darwin saw too much, she tells herself. It could not understand the horrors it witnessed and it ran away with the wind to think on them. The sky is grey now and the grey sky will not speak to Molly.

  A gunpoint walk across sandstone rubble and earth. Her dig boots on rock. Her sky-blue dress. Her Uncle Aubrey a few paces behind her, a hand inside her duffel bag.

  Follow the lightning. Yellow forks dropped from mansions in the sky. The crashing lightning but still no rain. The sky can wallop but it cannot weep. She wants to go above it now. She wants to go beyond the sky to where her mother is and where her grandfather Tom Berry could tell her the true story of the long walk and she could look into his face and see when he was lying.

  She places a palm against her chest. Her fingers feel for her heart, push down on her chest. I do not fear death, she tells herself. And if she does not fear death – if there is a part of her that wants her uncle to end it all here with a bullet in the back of her head – then surely her heart has finally turned all the way to stone. The curse is complete, she tells herself. No blue sky to tell me any different. No blue sky to tell me lies I want to hear. Only grey sky truth. She had to leave, she tells herself. She had to escape. Mum could not stay. She could not live. With. The. Grey. Sky. Truth. She could not stay. With—

  ‘Stop there,’ Aubrey Hook instructs Molly.

  Him.

  They stand at the edge of the maze. The lightning has led them out.

  A high sandstone plateau. Tree-lined edges falling away on either side to canyons far below. Only one direction to go now. Straight ahead. They can hear water. Fast water. Rapids.

  Aubrey stands alongside Molly. He holds Tom Berry’s goldminer’s pan in his hands. He runs a finger along the back of the pan. The final line.

  Own all you carry, carry all you own

  Step inside your heart of stone

  ‘What does that mean?’ Aubrey asks.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand it,’ Molly says. ‘You have to be graceful to understand it. You have to be poetic.’

  Aubrey places his right hand on the back of Molly’s neck. He squeezes hard. ‘Let me try to understand,’ he whispers. He shakes her hard.

  Molly says nothing.

  ‘What does it mean?’ Aubrey barks through clenched teeth. He pushes her head closer to the pan.

  Molly reads the words.

  Own all you carry, carry all you own

  Step inside your heart of stone

  ‘It means we must face the truth of who we are, Uncle Aubrey,’ she says. ‘Everything you have ever done and everything you will ever do . . . you must own it. Because you are those things. You carry those things with you. My grandfather knew this. My grandfather knew the person he had become. He couldn’t escape it. Wherever he went, he had to carry himself with him.’

  She looks up into Aubrey’s eyes. ‘You must own all you carry too, Uncle Aubrey,’ she says. ‘Step inside your heart of stone. You must embrace it now. Step inside it. You are the heart of stone.’

  ‘Where’s the gold?’ he asks, impatient.

  ‘All you’ve ever wanted was treasure,’ Molly says.

  ‘Where is it?’ Aubrey barks.

  ‘My mum was treasure,’ she says. ‘She glowed. She was like the glowing. She made you gold sick. So sick that you had to have her.’

  ‘Where is it?’ Aubrey barks.

  Molly looks across the plateau to a path that climbs to a ridgeline running across the horizon.

  ‘It’s just beyond that ridge,’ Molly says.

  Aubrey steps back and points the handgun at the space between Molly’s eyes.

  ‘Walk,’ he says.

  *

  They pass boulders in piles and boulders standing alone. One shaped like a hot-air balloon. Another like a tractor wheel. The gravedigger girl and the shadow walk beneath the grey sky. Half a mile. One full mile into a high range. Angular pyramidal shapes and jagged edges that remind Molly of the thorny devil lizards she once saw with her father in the central deserts beyond Tennant Creek. The path bends around a series of broken ridges that remind Molly of the meat-tearing canine teeth of the stray dogs of Darwin town, then it curls dangerously along the right edge of an exposed plateau and Molly stops to assess the drop to the canyon below. She kicks a red-coloured rock and she leans over the edge of the plateau to watch it bounce three times down an almost-sheer rock face and disappear into a vine forest canopy maybe a hundred yards below them.

  The path narrows to less than a foot wide as it skirts a granite ridge that blocks their passage to the other side of the sprawling range.

  ‘Keep moving,’ Aubrey says.

  ‘The path’s not wide enough,’ Molly says, studying it. Loose rocks and yellow dirt drop away sharply. ‘This is a path for rock wallabies, not gravediggers,’ she says. ‘We gotta turn back.’

  ‘Walk,’ Aubrey says.

  Molly turns her head right and peers into the canyon below, her cold skin telling her to turn back to the rock face on her left. She turns that way and hugs the ridge wall as she steps sideways, one slow and sure foot after the other, along the narrow path, her uncle following close behind. Pressing her chest against the rock, she feels for handholds but finds only smooth grey granite. She keeps shuffling along, boot after boot after boot, and then one of those boots steps on a loose rock and Molly slips and she feels her body part from the rock face. Her arms flail, trying to find something to take hold of, but all she can grip in her fists is air and her body falls backwards towards the canyon below. Then a hand wraps around her left wrist as she falls and all the weight of the gravedigger girl is dangling from the bony left arm of Aubrey Hook, who screams in pain as the girl’s weight pulls on the festering wound from his brother’s rabid dog bite back in godforsaken Hollow Wood Cemetery.

  Aubrey’s agonised wailing echoes across the canyon and he closes his eyes to fight the pain and when he opens them again he’s staring into the eyes of Molly Hook. Own all you carry, he tells himself. Carry all you own. The eyes of Molly Hook. Lift her up, he tells himself. Let her go, he tells himself. Step inside your heart of stone, he tells himself. The girl offers nothing. The girl, he tells himself, is ready to fall.

  Then Molly poses a question he has never asked himself. �
�Why could you not love me?’ she asks.

  Such calm in the way she asks it. Such ease in the way she hangs from his hand.

  Let her fall, he thinks. Lift her up, he thinks. And he howls as he lifts the gravedigger girl back up to the narrow path. As he drops her, he catches his breath and she does too, her body pressed flat against the hard granite wall.

  ‘Walk,’ he whispers.

  *

  They march across a tableland of red sandstone studded with clusters of ironwood and paperbark trees. The stone is cracked and layered, forming natural steps in places and wide slabs that look like theatre stages where Greta Maze could perform all five acts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Molly hopes Greta Maze made it out of the maze. She hopes she’s on her way back to Darwin now. I never should have mentioned the gold pan map to her, she thinks. I never should have dragged her through the darkness of Candlelight Creek. Never dragged her through the colourful wonders of the floodplains.

  Yukio, Molly says to herself. She wishes Yukio Miki had never fallen from the sky. And if she has a stone heart inside her, it’s fracturing and cracking in two. It is useless to her now. Rock is not hard. Rock is brittle. Rock is weak.

  ‘Rapids,’ Molly says. She hears them first. Then she sees them.

  They have come to an open expanse of rugged sandstone cut deep by two parallel rivers tumbling down from higher up the range on Molly’s left, their white waters rushing through narrow gorges towards the eastern edge of the plateau. Molly steps towards the first gorge and feels the spray from the water slamming against rocks. The gorge is about fifteen yards wide and there is only one place where it can be crossed: a thin makeshift bridge made of four slender eucalypt trunks tied together with thick vine. The bridge is not fixed in place, its ends simply resting on the rock, and with the rapids roaring no more than six feet below them, the tree trunks have turned slimy and black and slippery. Molly walks to the start of the bridge and turns around to look tentatively at Aubrey.

  ‘Walk,’ he says, not feeling the need, yet, to point the handgun at Molly.

  Molly steps carefully onto the bridge. She puts her arms out to balance herself and she shifts some weight onto her left leg to test the integrity of the structure, which tilts and bends even under her modest weight. But she walks on, boot after boot after boot, and the tree trunks bear her weight. Halfway across, though, she makes the mistake of looking down and she is momentarily transfixed by the rapids’ power, the deadly confusion of all that pressure and all that water and all that rock in a meeting that has lasted millennia. Her legs wobble briefly, but she looks up and focusses on the end of the bridge and her balance is restored. She’s so frightened and in such a hurry to get off the tree trunk platform that she shuffle-runs across the last six feet or so. Reaching solid ground, she exhales and closes her eyes before turning round to watch Aubrey make his unsteady way across.

  She asks things of the water. Take him down. Take him down, down, down into the black. She watches him step awkwardly to the centre of the bridge then she looks down at her end of it. She could heave that end up and tip the whole bridge into the water and Aubrey Hook would be tossed in with it. He would be sucked over the side of the range and his shadow would never cross her light again.

  ‘Get back,’ Aubrey calls from the bridge, pointing his gun at Molly. ‘Right back.’

  Molly retreats as Aubrey advances to the end of the bridge.

  ‘Walk,’ he says.

  *

  It’s a short walk across stone to the second river, where the bridge is made of just three eucalypts but the crossing is only ten yards wide. The gravedigger girl steps carefully across it. On the other side the plateau ends at a narrow sandstone promontory. It’s oval and featureless. There is nothing here. There is nothing but rock and air and sheer drops on all sides. To her left she can look over the edge and see the rivers dropping down the side of the range then merging and running beneath a majestic rock arch. To her right she can see another river system being sucked into a narrow valley that, she thinks, must push the water on down the range so that it can end with a curtain-call bow at one of those spectacular waterfalls that spills into the kind of crystal pools that exist only in dreams – dreams that unfold in colour far above the grey sky.

  And from that grey sky the lightning strikes again and the wild and terrifying grandeur of this strange place wraps itself around the gravedigger girl. The dream of it. A paradise for her light and for her black shadow. A city of elaborate, ancient rock architecture threaded by rivers that twist and turn and dive deep into black holes. The promontory feels like the central point of all this natural wonder and she turns in a circle to drink in the cave dwellings she can see on a distant cliff face, the rainbow-coloured and red and black velvet birds flying in circles around her. These birds call as if they are welcoming her, as if they are congratulating her for coming so far into the deep country. She breathes deep and she smells the rapids and she senses the earth shifting deep, deep, deep underground and she feels the electric air that turns like this only when it’s about to storm in the north of a raw southern land. And the Lightning Man in the sky mansion bends the rods down from his ears and the forks of his magic seem to strike directly above Molly Hook’s head and the wind blows her hair across her face and it blows the hemline on her sky-blue dress and the grey sky wants to weep so hard that the gravedigger girl can feel it in her cold bones. And she looks ahead across the rough surface of the narrow promontory and she can see now where she must go. So she starts walking towards the edge of the plateau, some twenty yards in front of her.

  ‘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.