Wild hair and a wild black coat blowing in the wild wind. He seems possessed by the storm. In Molly’s eyes he is the lightning and all his power comes from the electricity in his right hand, and inside his right hand is a large ball of perfectly rounded granite that he is furiously bashing against Molly’s red rock, which he has placed in the centre of the bowl.
‘What are you doing?’ Molly screams through the rain. Her hair across her face. Her sky-blue dress soaked with rain. The old man strikes and strikes and strikes at the rock and the lightning strikes over him. Molly sees now that he’s trying to crack the red rock. Molly’s rock. Violet’s rock.
‘Stop it!’ she screams. ‘Stop it. You’re going to break it.’
And she rushes towards him at the very moment Longcoat Bob drops the ball of granite and leans back with his right arm held out to stop Molly in her tracks.
‘Watch,’ he says through the rain.
And Molly can see it already. The rock is bleeding. Streams of red leaching from the heart-shaped rock, as if it is dissolving. A work of black magic by Longcoat Bob the sorcerer, a man so powerful he can melt rocks dug out of the dead, the dead who were buried only five feet beneath the earth.
But then Molly sees a glowing in the rock and she knows it for what it is. It is the metal earth. It is the stuff that builds and hardens below the surface. It is the great story the sky and the earth keep hidden underground. An eternal story of time and growth and movement, of secrets buried in the soil.
A loosened outer layer of soft rock, a hard clay at best, is being stripped away by the pelting rain and the truth of the rock’s story is being exposed along with the glowing. More and more red running away, and more and more glowing. Patches of it showing and then whole sides of it showing. A precious metal breaking through hard earth. And Molly’s never seen gold glowing so bright.
The rain builds a pool of water in the hollow and that water has turned red from the colours in the rock’s outer shell. Longcoat Bob runs his hands around the rock and more earth and colour escape from the gold inside. Then Longcoat Bob sets the gold down on the plateau floor and he strikes it hard twice more with the ball of granite, which he wields now with two hands. Then he puts the granite aside and washes the gold again in the bowl and finally he stands up with a nugget of pure gold cupped in his hands. A nugget shaped like a human heart. A heart that’s been bashed and worn down and eroded and aged and forgotten and carried far and proven to be unbreakable.
The rain, the relentless rain, hammering the old man’s face, but it only makes him smile. And he hands the heart of gold to the girl in the sky-blue dress. And he laughs at the driving rain. ‘You carry no curse, Molly Hook,’ he says. ‘You carry only treasure.’
And Molly Hook holds the heart in her hands. And she is certain in this moment that it is not rain that floods across her face.
And she realises that if there is treasure to be found anywhere under the shimmering skies, if there is true value beneath the high plain of heaven, then it will be the lips of lovers that will one day fire her soul and the fear that will always make her fight and the friends who will take her fears away and the children she will call her own and the wonders she will see on the trees and leaves and mountains and in the stone and iron and glass buildings that will touch the day and night skies across her world. It will be in the joy and sadness that will gather in the corners of her eyes, all that salty treasure leaking from all the life she will bury inside herself, from the glowing inside her. An epitaph with no end, leaking out of the gravedigger girl, precious drop after precious drop after precious drop.
MOLLY AND THE EPITAPH
Sam Greenway the buffalo hunter knows the short way back home to Darwin, but Molly keeps insisting on going the long way. Sam makes the mistake of telling Molly about how good a mud whelk tastes cooked on a bed of hot coals. They are a delicacy, he says. They’re known as ‘long bums’ in his family. He says it’s a kind of snail that can grow as long as Molly’s middle finger and when he says it possesses the strangest blue colouring, like a bright blue sea, Molly begs him to take a detour off their path to a faraway mangrove forest where Sam knows the long bums will be clustering together in shells shaped like ice-cream cones.
Sam walks in front and Molly walks in the middle and Greta Maze walks behind. Three travellers again in the deep country. Sam holds only his spear but Molly and Greta carry grass shoulder bags filled with fresh berries and bush tomatoes and snake meat wrapped in mulberry leaves and water, all given to them by Sam’s aunties. Molly doesn’t want this walk home to end because there is no fear now in the journey. She feels like she’s walking inside the very moment in a Gary Cooper picture when the bad guys have gone away or been buried in the dirt and the sun is taking its time to set and everything seems to glow with hope and security. It’s always been her favourite part of any picture. She always wanted to stay in the warmth of that balanced moment, dive into it, but then the canvas picture screen at the Star would turn to black and the picture credits would roll and people in the audience would clap their hands with joy, but Molly Hook would sit in silence because those picture credits rolling meant she had to go home. And that’s what Darwin is to her now. Darwin is the black screen. Darwin is the credits rolling. Darwin is real life.
*
They pass two cascading waterfalls along the way to the mangrove forest. They see a tree that Sam smiles at and he tells them it has red-black staining berries and corky-textured branches that he uses to make his spear shafts. ‘Good wood for music, too,’ he says.
They see a cluster of bright pink ground-cover flowers that Sam eats raw and calls ‘pigface’. They come to a clump of vivid blue weed that Sam picks for Molly and Greta and says they should store in their grass bags because it will be good for relieving any colds they get.
Passing a sprawling milkwood tree, Molly thinks of her mother and her mother’s old house. She turns to Greta behind her. ‘Do you think it’s still there?’ she asks.
‘What?’ Greta asks.
‘Darwin,’ Molly says.
Greta thinks on this for a moment. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘That town ain’t goin’ anywhere.’
Greta ducks under the low-hanging branch of a litsea tree, from which Sam pulls bunches of leaves that he tells Molly and Greta to keep in their shoulder bags because the leaves will soothe the sore muscles they’ll have after their long walk.
They light a fire and form a bed of cooking coals in a flat space inside the mangrove forest Sam promised to show Molly. They feast on the mud whelks, which Sam cooks straight on the coals before removing the snail meat from the hard, burnt conical shells by cracking them with a creek rock.
Molly swallows five snails and wonders about the Star Theatre.
‘You reckon the Star is still standin’, Sam?’ Molly asks.
‘Better be,’ Sam says, working the coals around with his spear. ‘I still ain’t seen High Sierra.’
*
The next morning, Sam leads Molly and Greta through a vine forest thicket buzzing with mosquitoes. Sam lights a handful of bark he strips from a bush plum tree and the smoke seems to drive the insects away. Through a dark tunnel of climbing plants the trio walk another mile or so before the thicket opens onto a narrow red dirt road bordered by more vine forest.
Sam stops and looks left along the straight road. He turns to Molly. ‘I gotta get back, Mol’,’ he says, softly.
‘I thought you were coming all the way with us?’
‘I was,’ he says. ‘But them tasty long bums ate up all me time. I gotta be back before tomorrow mornin’. Uncle Bob’s takin’ me for a walk.’ His eyes light up with pride and Molly knows why. Sam’s been chosen. Longcoat Bob wants him to learn things about the deep country that others will never be allowed to know.
‘That’s great, Sam,’ Molly says. ‘That’s real great.’
Sam turns to Greta, who stands a few yards away, giving the gravedigger girl and the buffalo hunter some space to say meaningful
things to each other should they manage to dig them up from the places where they have buried them.
‘Walk up ’ere for four miles,’ he says, pointing his spear along the dirt track. ‘You’ll come to a crossroads. Left is the road north to Darwin. Right is the road south to Katherine. And the road straight ahead will get you on your way to Sydney. But I’d be waving down a lift if you don’t want to get all shrivelled up like one of them long bums on the coals.’
Greta smiles gratefully. ‘Thanks, Sam,’ she says.
Sam nods. He turns back to Molly. ‘And I guess you know how to get back to me.’
Molly nods. ‘Follow the lightning,’ she smiles.
Sam nods. ‘Follow the lightning.’
And he moves towards the girl like he wants to say something more, but he doesn’t say a word. Instead he speaks in actions, bending at the waist to kiss his friend the gravedigger girl on her forehead.
‘Bye, Molly Hook,’ he says, turning and rushing back into the vine forest.
Molly watches him disappear into the deep country. ‘Bye, Sam.’
*
Silent country. The stillness of the bush. Not even the cicadas making noise. It’s too hot and humid after the rains for activity. Greta Maze padding along the centre of the red dirt track, her face red with heat and sweat. Molly Hook beside her but walking backwards with her head tilted up to a cloudless blue sky.
‘You heard from the sky lately, Greta?’ Molly asks, not turning her head from the wide blue roof.
‘Not lately,’ she says.
They keep walking in silence, Molly still moving backwards. She stumbles in a pothole.
‘Careful,’ Greta says, reaching an arm out to stop Molly from falling onto the red dirt road.
More walking. More of Molly looking up to the sky.
Greta glances right at her travelling companion. The gravedigger girl with the shortsword of a Japanese fighter pilot tucked between her back and the loop of her shoulder bag. The gravedigger girl with her eyes and her mouth wide open to the endless sky. She smiles at the life in the child.
‘I notice you’re not rambling to the sky as much as you used to,’ Greta says. ‘You run out of things to say?’
‘I ran out of questions for it,’ Molly says, eyes still to the sky. ‘So lately I’ve just been listenin’ to what she’s tellin’ me.’
‘She?’
Molly nods.
Greta nods, too, chuckling to herself. ‘What’s she told you today?’
Molly stops on the spot, but Greta keeps walking because she can see the crossroads Sam spoke of. Their own dirt track meeting three more.
Greta realises Molly has stopped behind her. She turns around to see Molly staring at the ground. Deep in thought.
‘Today’s my birthday,’ the girl says.
Something about those words makes Greta’s flesh-and-blood heart hurt. She rushes back to Molly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know.’ She looks into her grass shoulder bag. She pats her sides where the empty pockets of her dress are. Looks around. It’s no use. There’s nothing in her bag or her pockets, nothing so far out in the deep-country silence to give her. I have nothing, she thinks. ‘I don’t have anything to give you,’ she says.
Molly looks up at Greta.
‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘I already got what I wanted.’ And she looks down at her sky-blue dress. It’s torn and covered in dirt and mud and berry stains and blood. ‘I wanted somethin’ nice to go dancin’ in,’ she says, a half-smile spreading across her face.
Greta smiles, too, wrapping an arm around the girl’s neck. ‘C’mon, kid,’ she says.
They come to the crossroads and peer along each dirt track. Identical red clay roads flanked by northern Australian scrub. The actress and the gravedigger girl standing side by side. Shoulder to shoulder. Elbow to elbow.
‘So which way you goin’?’ Molly asks, staring ahead. She knows what the answer will be. Don’t look at her, she thinks. Don’t let her see how much it hurts when she says what she has to say.
Greta looks left and ahead and then right.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘I thought I’d go wherever you’re goin’.’
And Molly stares ahead in silence.
‘Nuts like you and me should always mix together,’ Greta says with a wink.
And Molly feels that the whole of the deep country is silent. Except for the sound she now makes as she tries and fails to hide her tears.
She rubs her eyes.
‘Are you cryin’?’ Greta gasps, theatrically. ‘I thought you couldn’t do that?’
The girl laughs and snorts through her tears and her face goes red with embarrassment. ‘Turns out I can only do it when I’m happy,’ she chuckles, wiping her eyes with her birthday dress.
Greta elbows the girl. ‘So which way you goin’, Molly Hook?’ she asks.
Molly turns her head to the sky for a moment and she nods her head at that blue ceiling as though she’s heard a message from it loud and clear. And Greta watches Molly reach into her makeshift shoulder bag and retrieve a piece of raw gold bigger than her fist, which she then rests on her open palm.
‘What’s the quickest way to California?’ the girl asks. And she turns her head to Greta Maze and she smiles because the actress glows. She glows so bright that she attracts a small and wondrous creature to her that flies from the edge of the vine forest. A small white butterfly that floats out of the deep green and flutters around the shoulders of Greta Maze before rising towards the blue sky and pausing to hover momentarily above the tilted and awed faces of the crossroads travellers. Molly Hook reaches both her arms up to the butterfly, beaming and bouncing as she waves at it.
The butterfly pushes on through the warm air and Greta smiles and her eyes follow its direction of travel. ‘That way,’ she says.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The traditional story that Sam Greenway refers to in his recollections of what his grandfather called ‘The Lightning Man’ is from the story of Namarrkon (pronounced narm-arrgon), who signifies the coming of the wet season in Australia’s Top End. This story belongs to the traditional owners of this vast region and it is with utmost respect and thanks to elders, past, present and emerging that I refer to it briefly in this story. Deepest thanks to Alison Nawirridj and her husband, Leslie Nawirridj, a senior member of the Kunwinjku family of artists from Western Arnhem Land. Leslie’s grandfather told him the story of Namarrkon and I am profoundly grateful that he helped me word the text and this acknowledgement.
Deepest thanks to Tess Atie and Greg Balding. Tess grew up in the area that was later proclaimed Litchfield National Park. She has family all the way from Mandorah on the Cox Peninsula to Peppimenarti, beyond the Daly River. Tess runs Northern Territory Indigenous Tours, a wholly Indigenous-owned tour company specialising in natural and cultural interpretation from an Aboriginal viewpoint. She and her partner, Greg, generously assisted me with passages of the text and showed me how to see the Top End with my heart and soul as much as with my head. Their deep knowledge and infectious love for their wondrous and vast backyard ripples through this book.
In January 2019, it was my honour to travel to Groote Eylandt, off the remote eastern coast of Arnhem Land, with the MJD Foundation, an extraordinary organisation that works in partnership with Aboriginal Australians, families and communities living with the genetically inherited neurodegenerative condition Machado-Joseph disease. The highest concentration of MJD in the world is on Groote Eylandt, where an estimated 186 members of the 1100-strong Indigenous population have parents or grandparents who inherited the disease, giving them a 50 per cent chance of also having MJD. It was amid the dream-like wilderness of Groote that Steve ‘Bakala’ Wurramara told me of the bush medicine and deep magic knowledge passed on to him by his father and grandmother, which he is using to assist Sydney scientists in finding a treatment or cure for his MJD condition. I could not have met a more inspiring individual just prior to writing this book and I have no doubt tha
t a good deal of Bakala’s charm and charisma unconsciously found its way into Molly’s hero, Sam Greenway. Deepest thanks to Bakala and the MJD Foundation. Thanks to the team at Translationz for assistance with Yukio’s dialogue.
The poem Greta enjoys in the story is ‘The Woman at the Washtub’, written in 1902 by the Australian poet Victor Daley. Molly and Aubrey quote lines from Walt Whitman’s 1855 poem ‘Song of Myself’.
Story and structure ripple through Catherine Milne’s veins and her passion for books and words infects the blood of every last writer lucky enough to work with her. You saw where Molly was going from the start, Catherine, and it opened skies in my head. Thank you, dear friend. Alice Wood – wing woman, wonder, weapon – this book exists because of you. Everyone needs a Scott Forbes in their life. Sentence saviour. Error terrier. Hawk-eyed genius. Thank you, Scott. Thanks for the exceptional proofreads, Pamela Dunne and Nicola Young. Darren Holt, you are a miracle man to me. A gift, too. Thank you. Thanks to Jim Demetriou, Brigitta Doyle, Libby O’Donnell, Darren Kelly, Tom Wilson and the whole rattling and unstoppable HarperCollins Australia engine. Thanks to the great James Kellow for your faith, which turned into my belief. Thanks to every last Australian bookseller and book reader for everything you did for Eli Bell and his family and by that I mean my family.
Thanks to Christine Middap and the whole beloved Oz mag gang. Thanks to Christine Westwood, Michelle Gunn, Helen Trinca, Chris Dore, Nicholas Gray, Michael Miller, Campbell Reid, Justin Lees, Amy Lees, Andrew McMillen and all the glorious members, past and present, of that white-hot indie-pop-rock-journo band The Bureau. Thanks, Mark Schliebs, for the early read and the inspiration. Thanks, Stephen Romei, fellow rooster. Thank you, Sir Matthew Condon, fellow sailor. Thank you, Asher Keddie, Kristina Olsson, Richard Glover, Venero Armanno, Annabel Crabb, Clare Bowditch and Kathleen Noonan, earth angels all. Thanks for your magic, Mem Fox. Thanks to Adriana and Dan Penman, Kristi and Matthew Gooden, Rebecca and Chris Lane, dear laughing circle. Thanks, Kristine and Stefan Szylkarski, Suellen Cash and Brad Sonego, Serena Coates, Edward Louis Severson III and every last beloved friend I thanked the last time.
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