All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

  Then a voice from the kitchen. And that voice makes no sense to her. ‘Molly!’ And the girl turns back to the kitchen light to find her father, Horace, sitting at the kitchen table, his right hand gripping the whisky bottle. Then Molly can’t help but turn back towards the moonlight in the bedroom to find the face of the animal that’s now raised its head from the shadow. The face of the wolf.

  Another five seconds.

  ‘Now open your eyes,’ Greta says.

  Molly opens her eyes.

  ‘What did you see when you opened the door?’ Greta asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ Molly says. ‘I only saw black.’

  ‘Nothing?’ Greta asks, resting her back once more on the tray’s rear wall. ‘You don’t have a single memory that makes you feel sad?’

  Molly shakes her head. ‘I don’t think I can feel sad. I don’t think I’m even able to cry.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Greta says. ‘All kids cry. I cried enough tears as a kid to fill Sydney Harbour.’

  ‘I haven’t cried since I was seven,’ Molly says.

  Greta’s face goes blank. She knows what happened to the girl at seven.

  ‘I try sometimes,’ Molly says. ‘I stare into a mirror and I think of everything that ever happened to me that should make me cry, but those things never make me cry.’

  ‘What do they make you feel?’

  ‘They make me feel like running.’

  Greta studies the girl’s face, fascinated. She shakes her head at Molly. ‘Well, I guess you’re lucky, kid,’ she says, returning her eyes to her script. ‘Every bastard out there wants to make us girls cry. No such pleasure from our young Molly Hook!’

  ‘My heart is turning …’ Molly says, softly.

  Greta doesn’t hear. ‘What’s that?’ she asks.

  ‘Nuthin’,’ Molly says. She pauses for a moment. ‘Greta?’

  ‘Yeah, kid.’

  ‘What do you see when you open the door?’

  Greta turns her face to Molly. Weighs up her company, smiles. She comes close to saying something true. She comes close to saying that there is a white room beyond her open door. She comes close to saying that there is a newborn baby girl in that room and that girl is in her arms. But then she closes the door, slams it shut in her mind.

  ‘Naah, sorry hon’,’ she says. ‘Can’t give away all my acting secrets.’ She looks at the sun. Looks at the sky. Shift the gaze, change the subject. ‘Those boys nearly done?’ she asks.

  ‘Almost.’

  ‘They make me sick,’ Greta says.

  ‘It’s not them.’

  ‘It’s not?’

  ‘No,’ Molly says. ‘It’s the curse.’

  ‘Oh, of course, I forgot,’ Greta says. ‘The great curse of Longcoat Bob’s lost gold! You still gettin’ worked up by all that bush hocus-pocus, Molly Hook?’

  ‘Don’t you wonder about all the bad things that have happened to my family?’ Molly asks.

  ‘Hate to break it to you, Molly, but bad things sometimes happen around bad people. That’s a fact of life. Got nuthin’ to do with blackfeller magic.’

  ‘You think I’m a bad person?’

  ‘No, Mol’,’ Greta says. ‘You’re not bad. You’re not bad at all.’

  Greta lies back on the tray now and raises her knees, as though sunbaking. ‘That gold wasn’t cursed, kid,’ she says. ‘If I knew where that gold was today I’d be grabbing your mate Bert there and I’d be diggin’ for my fortune, safe in the knowledge there are no kinds of magic in this world, black or otherwise. There’s only people, Molly. There are good ones and there are bad ones and then there’s all of us nuts stuck in the middle.’

  Greta’s eyes study the script she holds up now to block the full sun from her face. She hasn’t noticed, but Molly has, that her summer dress has fallen between her legs, and bruising – scarlet and violet and blue bruising – can be seen on her inner thighs. Finger-shaped bruises. Stains on the skin that won’t wash out.

  ‘Do you love Uncle Aubrey?’ Molly asks.

  Greta takes another shot from the flask, winces on the burn of the spirits.

  ‘Yeah, I love him,’ she says. ‘But I hate him, too.’

  ‘He’s a bad one,’ Molly says, matter-of-factly.

  Greta pockets the flask. Looks at Molly’s face, expressionless.

  With the toe of her right boot, Molly traces a circle, a moon, in the gravel driveway beneath her. ‘How do you love someone and hate them at the same time?’ she asks.

  ‘You’ll understand when you find a man of your own.’

  ‘What if I already have found a man of my own?’

  Greta turns to Molly, beams a smile. ‘Good for you, gravedigger girl! He handsome this boy?’

  ‘Very much so,’ Molly says, certain of it. ‘He looks like Tyrone Power, except if only Tyrone Power was a blackfeller from out past Mataranka.’

  ‘And what might this boy’s name be?’

  ‘His name’s Sam, and he’s not a boy, he’s a man. He’s sixteen and he’s got a job shooting buffalo with Johnston Traders. He makes good money.’

  ‘Then why are you still here in this shithole cemetery? Why don’t you run away with Sam the sixteen-year-old man who makes good money?’

  ‘Dad would never let me leave.’

  ‘Who said you have to ask for his permission?’

  Molly’s never thought of it that way. Maybe she could just leave. She turns to the front gate of the cemetery house. It’s open. It’s only thirty or so yards to the front gate. Maybe five more miles into town. Maybe three thousand more miles to Brisbane, Queensland. Maybe ten thousand more miles to Hollywood, California.

  Molly grips the side of the tray, swings her body back and forth, bending her knees as she does.

  ‘Why are you still here?’ Molly asks.

  ‘Huh,’ Greta says.

  ‘You should be on stage in London,’ Molly says. ‘You should be starring in films in Hollywood. Then I could see your name in lights at the Star. “Humphrey Bogart, Vivien Leigh, and introducing … the toast of Darwin, Australia … Greta Maze”.’

  Greta smiles. Full lips; a top lip that curls when it feels like it. She likes the thought of those lights. ‘Can’t,’ she says. ‘Got too much on my plate, right here.’

  Molly’s still looking at Greta’s thighs, but not just the bruising now. It’s the shape of her legs, her femininity, the silver screen in them.

  ‘Greta?’

  ‘Yeah, kid?’

  ‘Is it true that Maze isn’t your real last name?’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘What’s your real name?’

  ‘Baumgarten. Greta Waltraud Baumgarten.’

  ‘Why’d you change your name?’

  ‘Nobody wants to see a Kraut name like that up in lights beside “John Wayne”.’

  ‘I like Maze,’ Molly says.

  Greta smiles.

  ‘It makes you seem mysterious, like it’s hard to work you out. There are twists and turns all through you.’

  Greta nods. ‘You can find your way into Greta Maze, but you may never find your way back out,’ she says.

  Molly smiles. She pictures Greta in silver screen black and white. That perfect face in black and white, emerging from a cloud of Humphrey Bogart’s cigarette smoke. Bogie and Baumgarten. Bogie and Maze. Those porcelain pins in black and white. The bruising wouldn’t look so harsh in black and white. And the big film studios have make-up artists to cover up that sort of thing. Dottie Drake from the Fannie Bay hair salon told Molly all about the make-up artists in Hollywood, how they could cover up anything, from the bags under Joan Crawford’s eyes to Errol Flynn’s split lip.

  ‘Do you think I could ever change my name?’ Molly asks.

  ‘Of course you could. Anyone can. What’s your new name gonna be?’

  Molly thinks for a long moment, tilts her head upwards.

  ‘Sky,’ she says.

  Greta looks up, too.

  ‘I like that,’ Greta s
ays. ‘You could jazz up that first name, though’ – she thinks for a moment – ‘give it a splash of Dietrich,’ she says.

  Molly beams. Gasps the name, whispers it like it’s sacred: ‘Marlene Sky.’

  Greta nods, eyes still up in the sky. ‘Well, would you look at that!’ she says.

  ‘What?’ asks Molly.

  ‘Up there. It’s your name up in lights.’

  Molly laughs. And they both stare into the sky for a moment, the sky that’s so far away from their dark caves and their silly fire-traced doors leading to dark places. Molly looks again at Greta’s bruises.

  ‘Greta?’ Molly begins.

  ‘Yeah, kid.’

  ‘I heard my dad talking about you to his limestone supplier,’ Molly says.

  Greta turns to Molly, follows her eyes to the leg bruising. She sits up self-consciously, pulls the dress back over her knees.

  ‘And what did your father say about me?’

  ‘He said you take your clothes off for money in the Edinburgh Arms pub.’

  Greta sucks on another cigarette, pulls her sunglasses down over her nose. ‘Did anyone ever tell you that you talk too much, Molly Hook?’

  ‘Yeah, everyone,’ Molly says.

  ‘I trust your father then told that shocked limestone salesman how those nights I take my clothes off might represent my finest role of all.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything about any role you were playing.’

  ‘Of course it’s a role I’m playing,’ Greta says. ‘I’m playing Greta Maze, a thirty-three-year-old actress with too much talent and not enough opportunity who stayed in the arse end of the earth because she thought she loved an older man.’

  Greta closes the script, tucks it under her arm and swings her legs over the side of the truck tray, the rubber soles of her laced saddle shoes leaving imprints in the dirt driveway where she lands.

  ‘And what role are you playing today, Molly?’ Greta asks. ‘Or are you still working on that twelve-year-old gravedigger girl who has convinced herself she’s not being raised by monsters?’

  Tapping metal typewriter keys echoing through a house of timber and tin and old wooden stumps. Peeled paint on the walls inside. A hole in the living room wall above a broken and dusty pneumatic pianola, where Molly once watched her Uncle Aubrey drive his younger brother’s bloodied head during a mindless and lengthy drinking binge that ended with the brothers shooting nips of paint thinner.

  ‘And have you thought about the inscription on the headstone?’ Molly Hook asks across an old wooden table, her busy twelve-year-old fingers already wiggling above the keys, ‘R’, ‘I’ and ‘P’.

  Mouldy air and sunlight pushing through a faded curtain in the living room where the business is conducted. The Hook family business of burying the dead.

  When Horace Hook’s in a light mood, Molly sometimes suggests to her father that this cemetery keeper’s house feels like a kind of tomb in itself, as dark and dead as the 894 (and always counting) tombs that surround it. She suggests more windows. She suggests more cleaning. She suggests more food to eat. Fewer maggots in the sink. Fewer bloodstains on the kitchen walls. Fewer unwashed forks and dinner plates caked in old gravy. Fewer weevils in the oats in the pantry. Fewer silverfish crawling through Emily Dickinson and William Butler Yeats and Walt Whitman on Violet’s bookshelf by the front door. Fewer empty whisky bottles filling the space beneath the kitchen sink. Fewer strips of flypaper hanging from the ceiling, turned black with the stuck dead wings, heads and legs of house flies.

  In the two chairs across from Molly’s typewriter sit two grieving customers, sixty-eight-year-old Mildred Holland and her twenty-seven-year-old son, Clem Holland. Mildred wears a black cardigan and tightly grips a purse with both hands on her thighs. Her wide-eyed and round-faced son wears white overalls covered in flour. He’s come straight from work, the same bakery on Herbert Street where his father, Lloyd Holland, died instantly of heart failure at dawn four days ago. Clem found his father lying amid twelve freshly baked loaves of bread that were sold for half price that same afternoon.

  Mildred places her reading glasses on her nose, pulls a rolled piece of paper from her purse, unrolls it and reads from it. ‘We wish to have the following words written on the gravestone,’ she says. She studies the paper and reads the words out slowly. ‘“Rest … in … peace … Lloyd”.’

  Molly taps these words out on the typewriter. ‘Good, and what should we write next?’ she then asks.

  Mildred is puzzled. ‘That’s all we could think of to say,’ she says.

  Clem shrugs his shoulders. ‘Pretty well says it all, don’t ya think?’

  Molly nods. ‘Would you consider a couple more lines, perhaps, that say something more about the full life he enjoyed before he passed away?’ Molly suggests.

  ‘He didn’t really enjoy much at all,’ Clem says.

  ‘Something about how he cherished his family and friends, perhaps, and how he was cherished in return?’ Molly tries again.

  Mildred looks at her son, grimly. Looks back at Molly.

  ‘He was mean and sour most of the time,’ Mildred says.

  Clem turns to his mother. ‘When I told people the news, everybody seemed to have the same look on their face.’

  ‘What look was that?’ asks Mildred.

  ‘Relief,’ Clem says.

  ‘I see,’ Molly nods, understandingly. ‘If Lloyd had one belief, Mrs Holland, one value that he really lived by, what would you say it was?’

  Mildred shrugs. ‘He believed in bread,’ she says. ‘He believed there was something beautiful in creating something that tasted so good out of just, you know, flour and … you know …’ Mildred looks to her son.

  Clem nods knowingly. ‘Water,’ he adds. ‘Just flour and water.’

  ‘Flour and water,’ Mildred repeats, nodding.

  ‘I see,’ Molly says.

  Mildred looks around the house. She looks at the closed bedroom doors beyond the hall off the living room. ‘Where did you say your father was, again?’ Mildred asks.

  ‘He’s fallen ill,’ Molly says.

  Clem smiles. ‘Got the brown-bottle flu, has he?’

  Molly gives a half-smile. ‘Mrs Holland, if you had any thoughts about anything that interested him, then I could perhaps help you craft something that might be a more fitting tribute to your late husband.’

  Molly turns to Clem. ‘Something his children’s children might appreciate half a century from now.’

  Molly looks back at Mildred. ‘I know I’m only young, but I’ve helped many people find the words that are just right for their departed loved one.’

  ‘How old are you, anyway?’ Mildred asks.

  ‘I’m thirteen in a month.’

  Mildred studies Molly’s face, dismayed by the idea of having to think more deeply about her husband. She ponders. She looks at her son, pats a cloud of flour from his shoulder. She shakes her head. ‘I guess the only thing that made him happy was a loaf of well-baked bread in the morning.’

  Molly nods, swinging the typewriter’s carriage-return lever over to start a new line of text. She looks out the only window in the living room, where a slice of blue sky fills half the frame.

  ‘What about this?’ she asks. And she speaks the words as she types them. ‘Like … a … falling … sun,’ she types, ‘you … closed … your … eyes.’

  Tap, tap, tap. Carriage-return lever. New line of text.

  ‘Like … morning … bread … may … your … spirit … rise.’

  Molly looks up at her customers. ‘Rest in peace … Lloyd,’ she says.

  And Mildred turns to her son and Clem’s eyebrows rise in approval. Mildred beams. ‘Well, I quite like that,’ she says. She thinks on it some more. ‘“Like morning bread”. Yes, I think Lloyd would like that, too. Yes. Yes. Let’s go with that, shall we?’

  ‘Of course, I need to tell you, Mrs Holland,’ Molly offers, ‘two more lines of engraving on the stone will cost you an additional four shillings,
but I find customers don’t usually mind paying a little extra when it comes to honouring the departed.’

  Mildred turns to her son, Clem. He shrugs, unsure.

  ‘It’s only two more lines,’ Mildred says, loosening the grip on her purse.

  *

  A red tin thimble in the centre of the small wooden kitchen table where Molly and her father have breakfast. Horace sweats. He is thin. All limbs and burden. His hair is combed back hard and straight. He stinks of methylated spirits. Alcohol leeching from his armpits and his breath. Beads of sweat above his top lip.

  Molly places a white enamel mug of black tea on the table. Her father picks it up with his right hand, which shakes when he lifts the mug to his lips.

  ‘What day is it?’ Horace asks.

  ‘Thursday,’ Molly says. ‘You drank through Monday and Tuesday. Slept through Wednesday.’

  ‘Did I leave you be?’

  Molly nods.

  ‘I stayed in my room and read,’ she says.

  Horace nods now, relieved.

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.’

  Horace nods.

  ‘I think I want to be an actress, like Greta,’ Molly says.

  ‘I thought you were going to be a famous poet like Emily Dickens?’