All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

  All that flame, Yukio tells himself. And he remembers Pearl Harbor. How he kept firing and firing and hoping those American warship cannons would fire back and a direct hit would end it all for him and he would be at peace because he could then stop firing, end it all with his honour intact. All that burning, he tells himself. All that yellow and red turning to black down there. Down there where Darwin is being incinerated. Just like all those Japanese carpenter ants. All that work those people down there put into their little city by the sea, all set alight by Yukio and his brothers. The blood flowers are blooming across Darwin. The pattern of bombs dropped by the Nakajima B5Ns. Bloom. Bloom. Bloom.

  Yukio’s left hand reaches for the gunsight fixed between his two 7.7-millimetre machine guns. The Zeroes will strafe a series of military installations. The Zeroes will fire at anything in their way and they will shoot those black ants in the back and in the front and in the side, and those black ants will not fire back because they’re not ready to.

  The low-flying Zeroes on his left and right release their terrifying strafing fire and the machine-gun rounds thump through concrete and dirt and human flesh. But Yukio Miki can’t bring himself to pull his trigger. He cannot fire on all those fleeing carpenter ants. And if he cannot fire in this moment, if he cannot serve his brothers as he vowed, then he is a coward and he is an enemy of his brothers and the enemy must be vanquished.

  He reaches his right hand out to grip the photograph of Nara. He pulls it from the ball of gum above his fuel gauge and he slides the photograph carefully into the breast pocket of his shirt beneath his puffy flight jacket. And he knows now what he must do, and so he searches through his glass canopy window for a building tall enough to fly directly into at the Zero’s top speed of five hundred kilometres per hour, but all the buildings of Darwin have been incinerated. Then he pulls back hard left on his flight stick and the Zero suddenly veers away from the formation in an arcing left turn that makes no sense to his brothers on the wings beside him.

  But Yukio needs to fly away from here. He needs to leave the blood flowers blooming. He needs to find the sky again. And then he needs to find a mountain.

  Molly wakes. She hears the distant sound of the air raid siren in town. Her head is on its side and her eyes are adjusting to the image of her own left hand resting on the ribcage of her mother’s skeleton. Her fingers brush the worn and damp fabric still pressed to her mother’s chest bones. She needs to look inside. There are answers inside.

  Molly raises her head, rests her weight on her elbow. She stares at the square of fabric and it might as well be a curtain, the kind of curtain one pulls back on theatre stages or sideshow alleys to reveal great wonders never before seen. She closes her eyes and her thumb and forefinger grip a corner of the fabric and she gently peels it back, tearing away a layer of clay or mud beneath it. Then the fabric rips and Molly has to peel it back in strips. When she opens her eyes she is staring at the insides of her mother’s chest.

  Her mother’s ribs have a created a kind of home for something. This home is a pocket of air and dirt that has a ceiling of arching rib bones, and there is only one thing inside this home and it is a rock the size and shape of a human heart. A blood-coloured rock like none she has seen before, nestling in a bed of dirt inside her mother’s chest. A stone organ.

  Molly’s left hand digs through the dirt at the base of the ribcage and scoops out handfuls of earth. At first the rock won’t move because it’s fixed in place by old dirt beneath it, but Molly’s fingers claw like a dozer bucket beneath and around it and soon she gets a grip on it and works it back and forth until it breaks free from its dirt casing and the gravedigger girl pulls the blood-coloured rock the shape of a human heart out through the base of her mother’s ribcage.

  Smooth and crimson. Shaped like a strawberry the size of her father’s clenched fist. Heavy in her hand.

  Half of the midday sun can be viewed from the bottom of the grave and Molly holds the blood rock up to the sky and whispers one perfect word.

  ‘Mum.’

  *

  Molly finds her father’s left leg beside the backyard thunderbox. She knows the leg is her father’s and not her uncle’s because the shoe on the leg’s attached foot is a brown leather lace-up and Aubrey Hook only ever wears black work boots. The leg lies in the grass like a misplaced theatre prop. Hollow Wood Cemetery is bomb-scarred and ravaged. One half of the cemetery house stands and the rest is rubble, concrete, brick and splintered wood spread across the dirt yard.

  For a moment Molly considers picking up the leg. She could slip it into the duffel bag that hangs once again over her shoulder. But then she thinks of where she’s heading and she wonders what use she would have all that way out there for her father’s bomb-severed but sensibly shoed left leg?

  ‘Who belongs to that?’

  Molly looks up to where the voice came from, keeping a firm grip on Bert’s handle. Greta. The great Greta Maze, toast of Darwin, all the way from the theatre stage to the blitzed lawns of Hollow Wood Cemetery. A Hollywood starlet. In the flesh, Molly tells herself. Such as that flesh is. Bruises across her arms. A black and swollen left eye. Stitches across her face. Molly tells herself not to ask Greta about her eye, about her face, because she learned the hard way how humiliating it is to answer questions about visible cuts and bruises.

  ‘It’s my dad’s leg,’ Molly says, staring at it.

  ‘You okay, Molly?’ Greta asks.

  Molly considers this question. She doesn’t respond. She turns and pads across the dirt yard, deeper into the cemetery. Greta follows. Greta moves slowly and Molly notices. Greta’s insides are hurting when she walks and her right hand clutches the right side of her abdomen.

  At the edge of the yard, a one-legged man is sitting in a sprawling oak tree, six feet off the ground. He’s wedged in awkwardly, his head pushed down into his lap, between the tree’s trunk and three thick branches that thrust skywards in different directions. One of the man’s arms is jammed absurdly behind his neck and the other hangs where his left leg used to be. Molly stares curiously at him. Her father, Horace Hook.

  ‘Molly,’ Greta says, softly. Not a question. Not a suggestion. Just a name. ‘Molly. Talk to me, Molly.’

  Molly says nothing. She wanders deeper into the cemetery. In the long aisle formed by two rows of ornately carved headstones and slabs, a human figure crawls along the ground, hauling itself along on its elbows with regular, quiet, brute-effort heaves. Dirt-caked and black, the figure moves like a leech, or like a black grave wraith that has slipped out into the light and now wants to flee back down into the dark.

  Molly and Greta reach the feet of the slow-moving carcass and the carcass’s owner, Aubrey Hook, senses them walking behind him – the girl, he thinks, the girl with her beloved fucking shovel scraping along the dirt. He drags himself on and on for another twenty long yards before he tires completely and turns his body around and rests his head on the edge of a stone slab inscribed in honour of the departed William Shankland, 1843–1879: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.’

  Aubrey’s eyes squint in the full sun. His face is black with soil and red with blood. He’s reaching deep for breath but he’s too tired, too overwhelmed by the scene to catch a satisfactory gulp of Darwin’s hot air. He sets his eyes upon Greta and Molly, who stand over him. ‘Water,’ he gasps.

  Molly and Greta simply stare at him. Greta’s hand over her belly. The pain inside her. She looks at the man at her feet. The squirming monster. His tattered clothes. The sweat across his face, his arms and legs. The desperate movements of his fingers, patting his own chest. Confused, out of place here by this grave, lost. ‘Water,’ he says. He coughs hard and the cough turns into a blood vomit that spills over his chin and onto his buttoned shirt.

  ‘Take me to hospital,’ he pleads, gargling on his own blood.

  Greta leans down to Aubrey. She studies his face. She wonders how her life came to this, how she came to think she was
in love with Aubrey Hook. He was charming once. Intelligent. They went to shows together. He showered her with gifts. They met when she was dancing most weeknights. He gave her good tips and then he gave her bad tips. Stick with me. Never leave Darwin. Die with me here in Hollow Wood Cemetery. Never walk into town and tell the police about the rage places I go and the nights I take you with me.

  Greta’s hands reach into Aubrey’s trouser pockets. He tries to bat her hands away but he’s too weak, too spent. Molly sees those hands ferreting through the pockets and then she sees Greta’s right hand extracting a set of keys.

  ‘I need a hospital!’ Aubrey gargles louder. He spits more vomit from his mouth with a laborious shake of his head. Greta turns and walks away, Molly follows. They head towards the half cemetery house and the one-legged man sitting in the tree, the desperate calls of Aubrey Hook echoing behind them. ‘You take me to the hospital now!’

  Greta and Molly walk on.

  ‘You are going to hell!’

  Greta and Molly walk on.

  ‘I curse the both of you,’ Aubrey screams to the sky. ‘I curse the both of yooouuuu!’

  *

  Greta shuffles slowly to the driver’s door of Aubrey’s red utility truck, still intact and parked in the gravel driveway in front of the bombed cemetery residence. Molly watches her climb awkwardly and painfully into the driver’s seat. She closes the door.

  ‘Get in,’ Greta says. ‘I’ll drive you to the hospital.’

  ‘I don’t need a hospital,’ Molly says through the open window. ‘But could you take me to Clyde River?’

  ‘Not going that way,’ Greta says.

  ‘All the ways go that way.’

  ‘Not the way I’m going, kid.’

  ‘Wait,’ Molly says. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I’m going back to Sydney,’ she says, and she starts the truck, gives its rattling engine some heavy revs.

  ‘Wait,’ Molly says. ‘Let me show you something.’ She drops her duffel bag to the ground and reaches in to find the prospector’s pan amid the cans of beans and corned beef and the Shakespeare book and the blood-coloured stone the size of her dead father’s fist. She passes the pan through the driver’s-side window to Greta.

  ‘So,’ Greta says, turning it in her hands. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

  Molly points at the pan. ‘Look at the back,’ she says. ‘The words on the back.’

  Greta frowns, tries to scan the words on the back of the pan, fails. ‘I can’t read all those words,’ she says. ‘They’re covered in mud.’

  She tosses the pan back to Molly.

  ‘Look, kid, you need to get yourself to hospital,’ she says. ‘They need to check you for shellshock or somethin’. And once they’re done doin’ that, you need to get the bloody hell outta Darwin. Them Japs ain’t finished with this place.’

  Molly holds the pan up. ‘They’re the directions to Longcoat Bob’s gold,’ she says. ‘My granddad etched them in the copper so he’d never forget them. I can take you there, Greta. Buried treasure. You said if you knew where that treasure was you’d grab Bert right away and you’d dig down for your fortune. Well, you can have it all if you want it. You could be richer than your wildest dreams. You could finally be where you belong. We could go to Hollywood together and you could get your name up in lights and I could change my name and … and—’

  ‘I’m sorry, Molly,’ Greta says softly.

  But Molly pushes on. ‘Greta Maze and Marlene Sky,’ she urges. ‘You can do it, Greta. You just have to get us to the Clyde River. I’ll take care of the rest. You can do it, Greta.’

  Greta turns her head away from Molly because she doesn’t want the girl to see her crying.

  Molly goes on. ‘We could go on double dates with Tyrone Power and Gary Cooper,’ she says. ‘And then we could drive up into the Hollywood Hills and see if we could find Errol Flynn’s house and we could ask him to let us in because we’re Australians, too.’

  Greta wipes her eyes, smiles, turns back to Molly. ‘That’s a nice film, Mol’,’ she says. ‘I’ll be sure to go see it some time.’ Then she slams on the accelerator.

  ‘Greta, wait!’ Molly hollers. But the truck reverses quickly out through the cemetery gates.

  ‘Wait, Greta!’ Molly cries, her sore bones stumbling feebly after the truck. Then she stops and watches the truck speed south on the road out of Darwin. Silence and dust. She drops her head, eyes to the ground, and the ground is covered in domestic debris from the bombed house. This bombed world. And something at Molly’s feet steals her attention. She bends down to pick it up. She holds it up to the sky to see it properly, turning it around between her forefinger and thumb. The red tin thimble.

  The gravedigger girl and a city on fire. A city in a war dream that she can walk through without being noticed because nobody here can see anything but fire.

  A portly man sitting in a gutter on Darwin Esplanade, his hands on his knees. His clothes have been blown off and half of the hair on his scalp is missing. He weeps. Empty military tents on the roadside. Homeless dogs and cats sifting through piles of rotting food. Six soldiers sprinting along the street. Soldiers missing arms and legs on stretchers being carried by soldiers with faces covered in black oil. Bandages being wrapped around temples. Shrapnel sticking out of shoulder blades and thighs and chests. Soldiers gone blind. Soldiers gone mad from shellshock, rambling things to the sky that make no sense to Molly. The face of someone senior turning to the gravedigger girl. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ the man barks. ‘Someone get this kid outta here, for God’s sake.’

  Molly runs. On the beach at Doctor’s Gully there are men pulling bodies in from the shore. The bodies have drowned in oil. There are bodies still in the water, some floating face down and some face up, and the skin on their arms and faces has burned to a raw red flesh. One man pulls on a soldier’s arm in the water and the loose skin on the forearm slides off the bone like a flesh-coloured glove.

  The smell of the dead mixing with the smell of exhaust and oil. The smell of cordite and burnt wood and burning buildings. Sailors in small boats lifting desperate swimmers into their vessels. Bodies on the beach shot in the back by warplane machine-gun fire. In the mangroves of Port Darwin two crocodiles feast on the carcasses of drowned American sailors. Terrified in-patients from the evacuated Cullen Bay civil hospital huddle beneath the sheltering cliffs of Cullen Bay. Further along the beachfront is a train, a whole locomotive, upturned by a well-targeted bomb and flipped into the sea. Six railway wagons have sunk into the water with it. A whole war ship, Neptuna, a vessel the length of a football field, is turned over on its side in the low tide waters around the wharf, clouds of black smoke rising into the air.

  So many sunken ships. USS Peary. HMAS Mavie. SS Zealandia. SS Mauna Loa. Oil tankers ablaze. Men still swimming frantically around sinking merchant vessels. The wharf labourers’ recreation shed blown to bits. Great sections of the wharf blown away. Soldiers and police and nurses rushing to and from the town’s flattened communications centre between The Esplanade and Mitchell Street, which housed the post office, the telephone exchange and cable office. A hole in the ground where the post office once stood; hills of wooden house framing and rubble have been formed by the explosions. A city of fallen masonry. Bodies on the ground covered in tastefully patterned living room house curtains. Another man’s body blown into another fork of a tree.

  Molly walks on. A.E. Jolly’s convenience store has disintegrated, the Bank of New South Wales has been gutted. Sheets of corrugated iron and nails and sheets of fibro are spread across the streets. A naked man gone mad is running through Cavenagh Street shouting Bible verse.

  Deeper into suburban streets, homes split in two. Ghost houses with swinging front doors blowing in the wind. More abandoned cats and dogs. Dogs howling mournfully. Two-storey homes built to withstand fierce cyclones flattened by bombs.

  An old woman stands dazed by her letterbox, the only thing still standing on her
property – her house is a mound of rubble. She speaks in what sounds to Molly like German. She’s heavyset and her big arms are raised in confusion and she weeps, she howls, uncontrollably, talking to God or talking to those Japanese warplanes. When she sees Molly, she beckons the gravedigger girl to her. ‘Please, please,’ the old woman says. She opens her arms out to Molly, suggesting she needs a human embrace, she needs to hold something comforting, she needs to hold the gravedigger girl. Molly approaches her cautiously.

  ‘Did you have family here?’ Molly asks.

  The woman rambles something loudly through tears in German.

  ‘Why didn’t you get out?’ Molly asks.

  ‘Please, please,’ the old woman says, opening her arms for an embrace. And, reluctantly, Molly moves in close and leans into the woman for a hug. The old woman wraps her arms around Molly’s neck and brings the girl’s face to her belly. The old woman weeps into Molly’s hair, squeezing her tight. And the embrace feels warm to Molly, too, and she wonders if she needed this embrace as much as the old woman.

  But then the old woman howls again and grips Molly tighter still, and Molly’s face is now being pushed hard into the woman’s belly and Molly feels like her head is tucked into a pillow. She motions to pull away but the old woman’s heavy arms hold her tight and Molly has to struggle to breathe through her mouth and nose and then she discovers she can’t really breathe at all, so she pulls away hard but the old woman simply howls more loudly and presses Molly more firmly against her belly.