All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

  ‘Deeper,’ Aubrey barks.

  I will feel no pain, she tells herself. I will feel no pain. I will feel no pain. Dig for your courage, Molly. Dig for your soul.

  The day sky says nothing. The gravedigger girl will uncover the bones of her mother alone.

  ‘Deeper,’ Aubrey hollers, leaning in to the grave more with each macabre sighting of bone. More leg bones. Arm bones across a waist.

  It’s not her, she tells herself. It’s not her. It’s not her. She’s not down here. She’s not down here. She went up there. She went up there.

  The last thin fibres of a dress, earth-eaten and browned by soil, covering a ribcage with three missing ribs. Objects surrounding the skeleton, dirt-caked and heavy. A jewellery box. A pair of dancing shoes. Books. So many books around the skeleton.

  ‘Keep digging, Molly,’ Aubrey says.

  The shovel goes deeper. More objects. More of Violet Hook’s belongings. A porcelain figurine. A teacup. Then Molly’s eyes catch the edge of a copper circle. Bert’s blade digs around the copper – scrape, scrape, dig, dig – then Molly does the rest by hand, fingers frantically searching for a hold on the copper sky gift she thought was lost, disposed of in a bag of rubbish with a pig’s head and a dozen eggshells. She pulls her grandfather’s copper pan from the earth, runs her fingers over it, inspects its underside, scratches the dirt off it with her fingernails.

  The words are still there. The directions.

  I will never be afraid. Rock is hard. Can’t be broken. ‘Liar,’ she screams. ‘You … fuckin’ … animal … liar.’

  ‘Give me that pan,’ Aubrey says from the grave edge.

  Molly hugs it close to her chest. ‘It’s mine,’ she says. ‘The sky gave it to me.’

  Aubrey points the gun barrel at Molly’s face. ‘And now you’re gonna give it to me.’

  Molly stays put.

  Aubrey cocks the rifle’s hammer. ‘I won’t ask again, Molly.’

  Two eyes to two eyes. Blue to black. Light to shadow. Molly tosses the pan to the surface. Aubrey picks up the pan.

  ‘There’s no such thing as curses, Molly,’ he says, inspecting the words on the back of the pan. ‘There’s no such thing as sky gifts either.’

  He wipes more dirt off the pan, uncovering the third and last set of words Tom Berry engraved. Molly sees a strange light – a brief glowing – shift across her uncle’s eyes and she can’t tell if it’s a reflection from the copper pan or the light of inspiration on his face.

  ‘But make no mistake, Molly, there is such a thing as gold.’ Aubrey drops the pan by his boots. ‘Keep diggin’,’ he says.

  Molly grips Bert’s handle once more. She digs.

  ‘You don’t need nuthin’ from Longcoat Bob, Molly,’ Aubrey says. ‘You don’t need to find some ol’ black witch doctor to give you your answers.’

  The shovel blade scraping away more dirt.

  ‘You see this gun, Molly,’ Aubrey says. Molly turns her eyes to the gun barrel. ‘Here’s your answers right here. She took this gun and she got herself lost, too, out there in that deep country. Maybe she went looking for Longcoat Bob, too. We found her four days later. She was lying flat on a rock by Strike-a-Light Creek.’

  The shovel blade scraping away dirt.

  ‘I’ll never forget her face,’ Aubrey says.

  Molly turns to her uncle. He’s lost in his mind, distant.

  ‘Your mother had a nice face,’ he whispers.

  He snaps back to the moment. ‘Show me her face,’ he says, pointing the gun at Molly.

  And the gravedigger girl’s boots stumble on the uneven soil and she kneels beside the bone frame of her mother, not entirely because she’s being ordered to at the end of a gun barrel. There is a space inside the gravedigger girl’s mind that wants to see her mother’s face. She wants to see the shape of her cheekbones, her jawline. She wants to touch that face. Her soil-covered fingers brush dirt off her mother’s skull. Her right thumb strokes a cheekbone. She’s dreaming this, she tells herself. She’s been dreaming since she was standing outside Ward’s Boutique staring at that sky-blue dancing dress. She can do things like this in her dreams, kneel beside her mum like this, touch her bones. She can find beauty in the act. She can make it tender.

  Two nasal cavities. She loved this woman, so she can love this bone face. The smooth bone bowl that once carried her left eye now carrying a collection of soil that Molly dusts away as carefully as she dusts off Bert’s blade at the end of a long day’s digging. The gentle curve of the left-side temporal bone, like an empty rock pool at Butterfly Gorge when there’s been no rain.

  Dirt falling off that face. But her left hand explores too far – some pieces of archaeology should never be uncovered. Dirt falls away on the upper right side of the skull, from Violet Hook’s frontal bone, her high vertical plate, and there is a hole where the right side of her skull should be. There is no smooth bone bowl around her right eye. There is only dirt.

  ‘How do you do that?’ Aubrey asks.

  ‘I have a heart of stone,’ Molly asks. ‘I will never be afraid. I will feel no pain.’

  ‘There’s something wrong with you, child,’ Aubrey says.

  ‘I know,’ Molly replies.

  Molly runs her eyes over her mother’s skeleton. It’s not her, she tells herself. It’s not her. It’s not her. She lingers on the chest bones. But it is her. She is here. She is down here, too. There is a thin sheet of worn dress material stuck to her upper chest bones. Her mother’s heart once beat beneath that fabric. Molly’s hands reach for the material. She will peel it away and she will know the truth. The night sky truth, not the day sky truth. Night skies tell no lies.

  But then a voice from the surface. ‘Get away from her, Molly.’

  Molly swings her head back over her shoulder. Her father, Horace, stands beside his brother at the edge of the grave, five feet above her. He holds a long pickaxe in his right hand. The sight of her father makes Molly snap out of her dream, snap out of her deep-grave fever. She reels back.

  ‘He was gonna shoot me, Dad,’ Molly says.

  Aubrey howls. A frenzied guffaw. He slaps his knees grandly. He adopts the voice of a twelve-year-old girl. ‘“He was gonna shoot me, Dad!”’ he howls. He staggers to his left, finds his footing at the edge of the grave. Then his face goes dark in an instant. ‘Have you seen what your child has done?’ he asks, two hands on the rifle handle, balls of saliva gathering on his moustache.

  ‘I’ve seen what you done to Greta,’ Horace says. ‘You went too far this time. She came into town, Aubrey. She told the police. If we survive these Japs, they’ll be comin’ for ya.’

  Horace takes in the scene. His gravedigger daughter. The open grave. His grave older brother. His grave shadow.

  ‘Your wheels ’ave come off the train tracks, brother,’ Horace says.

  ‘I’m teaching your child a lesson,’ Aubrey shouts.

  ‘You’ve gone too far, Aubrey,’ Horace replies. He stares at his brother while he speaks to his daughter. ‘You come up outta there, Molly.’

  Molly moves towards him along the uneven surface, stepping on a glass box that breaks beneath her boots. Her father leans down and offers his right arm. Molly grips it with her right hand and is hauled to the surface with Bert the shovel in her left hand, her muddy boots tearing dirt from the grave walls.

  ‘Go back to the house, Molly,’ Horace says.

  ‘No,’ Molly says.

  Horace turns to his daughter. Aubrey laughs.

  ‘I’m never going back inside that house,’ she screams. ‘It’s cursed. This whole graveyard is cursed.’

  Molly spots her pan at Aubrey’s feet and she rushes for it. Pick it up, Molly, and run for your life. Dig, Molly, dig.

  But Aubrey stops Molly in her tracks by swinging the gun barrel towards her chest. ‘You gonna attack me, Molly Hook?’ Aubrey asks. ‘You are brave, aren’t you? Braver than my sorry little brother here, that’s for certain.’ He waves the gun barrel. ‘Get over
there beside your father.’

  Father and daughter standing on the edge of Violet Hook’s grave. Aubrey points the rifle at them both, switching frantically between faces. ‘I was just trying to give the girl some answers,’ he says. ‘You know what I mean, little brother? Answers to the girl’s questions. Do you have any answers for her, little brother?’

  Molly turns to her father, briefly puzzled by these words.

  ‘Let’s calm down for a second, Aubrey,’ Horace says. ‘You need to sleep this one off. Let’s go back to the house.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Aubrey says. ‘Maybe the girl’s right. Maybe this place is cursed. Maybe you two are cursed. Maybe I’d be better off without you both. Maybe you’d be better off in that hole with Violet. Three pretty little faces all in a row.’

  Molly watches her uncle’s eyes. His eyelids are closing on him involuntarily, his head’s rolling. He’s tiring.

  ‘I’m so fuckin’ sick of diggin’ holes with you two,’ Aubrey says. His eyelids drop down, open again. ‘I think I need to get out of the gravediggin’ business, don’t you? Get back into the gold-diggin’ business.’

  Then the sound of engines in the sky. The sound of gas and death and war. The wasp of it. The tiger of it. Molly’s senses are sharpest and she looks up to the sky first. Her father looks up next and, lastly, Aubrey turns his eyes to the sky and his face lights up like he’s felt the breath of God and his mouth falls open and he laughs. He howls at the impossible sight of a Japanese air fleet moving as one perfect attack arrow across the vivid Darwin blue sky. His drink-skewed vision blurs and the terrible fleet doubles, triples, in number. And he thinks of locusts. He thinks of plague. He thinks of the great ending.

  ‘Insects,’ he says. ‘Buzzzzzzzzz,’ he screams at the locusts. ‘Buzzzzzzzzz,’ he screams at the sky. And he howls with laughter. He’s still smiling when he turns his face back towards Molly Hook and the flat back blade of Bert the shovel smashes into the left side of his face.

  More arrows of Japanese aircraft now and Molly rushing for her grandfather’s prospector’s pan. She scoops it up from the ground and dashes across the graveyard.

  ‘Get under the house,’ her father screams.

  Aubrey Hook falls to his right, staggers for three paces then finds his footing again on a fourth. Blood runs from the inside of his left ear. His tomato-coloured face. His rage. He shakes his stunned head into action and he brings the rifle to his shoulder and turns towards his fleeing niece.

  ‘Run, Molly, run!’ Horace screams as he drives his shoulder high into his older brother’s ribcage, now exposed by Aubrey’s raised right arm. A rifle shot explodes aimlessly into the sky and Horace and Aubrey roll onto dirt hard, the way shot black buffalo roll onto dirt. And the Hook brothers of Darwin, Australia, twist and turn and wrestle and roll in the soil as 188 green and grey and silver Japanese aircraft soar above them. Some eighty-one Kate horizontal bombers, seventy-one Val dive-bombers and thirty-six Zero fighters in attack formations.

  The brothers scratch at each other’s eyes and cheeks and they scratch at their shared past. Horace’s mouth finds the flesh of his brother’s shoulder and he bites deep into it. Aubrey’s hands find his brother’s Adam’s apple and he squeezes hard. Horace’s left hand finds Aubrey’s left eyeball and his thumb pushes against that white-flesh lychee organ. They are wolves, both, and they want blood, but blood is flying through the sky above them.

  ‘Run, Molly, run!’ hollers Horace Hook through his choke-gripped neck.

  Molly runs. Past headstones and trees towards the flat yard that leads to the cemetery house. Then a whistle sound, like a boiled kettle whistling, the largest kettle ever boiled, and this impossible kettle is falling through the sky. Now she hears other whistles: five, six in chorus. Giant boiled kettles dropping towards her. The whistle sounds seem to bend, like the very sound is fixed to a curved wire in the air and that wire is arched like a rainbow and that rainbow ends somewhere in Hollow Wood Cemetery. And the whistling gets louder and louder and louder and she knows the falling kettles are getting closer and closer and closer. But she can see the cemetery house now and she will go there even if it’s cursed, and she will hide beneath the house and lie flat against the downstairs concrete and wait all this out. Just Molly Hook and the brown snakes cooling their bellies.

  Run, Molly, run. Foot after foot. Boot after boot. But the whistling, that terrifying whistling, so loud and so close, it’s falling on top of her. A sound is falling on her. A sound that has transformed in the sky into something physical. Now it’s so near it makes her fall to the ground and put her head between her legs and her twig-thin arms over her ears and her scalp. And finally the terrifying whistling ends in a violent explosion that rumbles across the earth and rattles Molly Hook’s growing bones. Yard dirt rains upon her and she feels like she’s sitting beneath a tip truck and a team of town labourers are unloading a tray of council dirt on top of her body, and she knows she must get up and run again because she will suffocate beneath all that flying earth. She stands up and moves forward three steps, but something has wrecked her equilibrium and she falls face-first onto the dirt.

  She raises her head once more and tries to focus on something, anything, between the grey smoke and earth debris, and she finds what must be the cursed cemetery house, but it is no longer the house she grew up in. Half of the house is missing, flattened into the dirt. The other half stands exposed, like it has been sliced down its centre and its domestic innards are spilling onto the ground. Molly can see the kitchen stove in broad daylight. She can see her mother’s bookshelf, fallen on its side beneath half a tin roof sheltering devastation and destruction, household items – plates, glasses, ornaments – shattered and spread across the yard.

  More whistling now. Closer and closer. And Molly watches the earth away to her right explode in fire and dirt, and she runs forward but the earth explodes again up ahead, so she turns and runs and runs and runs back through the smoke and dirt and violence and war. The whistling sounds are all around her still and now she knows they are bombs, war bombs, falling from the sky and thumping into earth, and she barely has time to react to one earth-tearing explosion before she has to react to another, changing her direction with every thunderous eruption.

  But then the sounds fade. The whistling is not in the sky anymore. There’s only a sharp and thin whistling of a different kind in her ears. A ringing. Run, Molly, run. She can’t see her father and uncle. She can’t see the scrub in front of her. She can’t see the gravestones of Hollow Wood. Run, Molly, run. Foot after foot. Boot after boot. Her heart. Her cursed stone heart somehow beating for her. Pulsing for her. Moving her forward. Run and run and run and then fall.

  Molly drops into a hole in the earth. Her feet land hard on uneven ground and her body lands spine-first on uncovered bones. She wipes dirt from her eyes and looks up out of the hole she’s fallen into and realises she’s in the grave she just opened, a rectangular prism five-and-a-half feet deep in the ground. She turns and finds her mother’s hollowed-out face and draws a deep breath, then rolls instinctively off her mother’s skeleton. Yet this hole down here feels safe, safer than what’s happening up there, so she squeezes her body into the space between her mother’s left arm bone and the grave wall. And there she stays. As another bomb drops somewhere on the terrifying land above her, she reaches instinctively for her mother’s hand, the thin bones resting on the broken waist bones.

  Keep your eyes on the sky, Molly. Keep your eyes on the sky.

  And the edges of that grave become a window frame for Molly Hook. Then the smoke drifts away and all that fills the grave window frame now is a rectangle of perfect blue sky and the endless arrows of Japanese warplanes passing across it, dropping their bombs as they go. And time slows now and all that exists in this world is that view from the grave and those bombs look to Molly like bull ants. That’s all they are, Molly, bull ants. But that’s a day sky lie and the gravedigger girl is scared, so she squeezes her mother’s hand.


  ‘Can you feel it, Mum?’ she whispers. ‘We’re on top now, Mum. Can you feel it? We’re floating. We’re on top!’ And seen from the daylight blue sky above and looking down and looking closer in and closer in, through the smoke and the earth debris, they are mother and daughter, flat on their backs and hand in hand, waiting for war to stop falling from the sky.

  ‘We’re on top, Mum,’ she whispers. ‘We’re on top, Mum. We’re on top, Mum.’

  Black ants. From so high up in the sky, through the flat glass canopy window of a top-speeding Zero, all those scrambling soldiers and citizens of Darwin, Australia, look like black ants to Yukio Miki of old town Sakai. Helpless black ants zipping in and out of concrete buildings like the organised-chaos lines of the black carpenter ants he’d stare at as a boy. He would rest his chin on his knee by a pile of firewood near his family’s backyard incinerator and watch the lines of carpenter ants butt heads trying to figure out how they were going to make use of such a large plunder of wood. Yukio would run his boyhood fingers along the entry holes to the tunnel networks the ants had chewed inside the fire logs and he’d wonder how creatures so seemingly disordered could create something so smooth and artful. And he would marvel for a full hour at the relentless industry of those carpenter ants and then his heart would hurt when his father, Oshiro, would grip two logs filled with a whole microscopic civilisation of black ants, a whole world built by toil, and toss them so casually into the incinerator. The heat of that stone box. The flames from it. The fire. All that yellow and red.

  Everything inside his cockpit is hot and rattling now. Too much noise up here. Greased metal and unprotected mechanical controls: rattling cowl-flap controls, fuel-tank selectors, hydraulic system controls, buzzing electric switchboxes, landing-gear controls. Jammed in hard inside the cramped flying machine, part of the awe-inspiring and awful arrow of thirty-six agile redsun fighters now nose-diving through the air towards central Darwin, Yukio thinks of his late grandfather, Saburo Miki, a strange and thoughtful man, who once told Yukio the riddle of the blood flower. ‘The blood flower blooms only when provoked,’ Saburo Miki said. ‘The blood flower blooms on battlefields.’