All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

  ‘Theo!’ Marg called. ‘Theo!’

  Theo used his last gasp of air to holler, ‘I love ya Marg and I always will’. Then his head was drowned by the grains.

  Aubrey chuckles. Then his eyes find another epitaph in the termite mound city. ‘Esme Berry, 1843–1916’. Tom Berry’s aunt died three weeks after Theo from a gastrointestinal infection.

  ‘Clara Berry, 1845–1916’. Tom Berry’s beloved mother, Clara. A month after her sister-in-law died, Clara’s right leg fell clean through a rotting wooden board on the thin rear deck of her small home in Batchelor, south of Darwin. Her leg was gouged sickeningly through the rear calf when it landed on the large rusted tooth of an old manual crop cultivator which was being stored in the space beneath the deck. The tooth went so deep that the town surgeon said the leg would have to be amputated above the knee, but the surgery was poorly carried out, the leg became infected, gangrene set in and Clara Berry died a painful death some two months after the death of her sister-in-law.

  Aubrey’s eyes move to another mound. ‘Charles Berry, 1909–1916’. It was at Clara Berry’s wake that Esme Berry’s seven-year-old grandson, Charles, was challenged by two older boys to eat a peculiar slug they had found crawling in the backyard tool shed of the man who was hosting the wake, Darwin councilman Henry Pegg.

  That afternoon in Pegg’s living room, with his fingers sticky from the scone he was eating with jam and cream, Charles Berry fell to the floor and began frothing at the mouth and shaking with convulsions. He died on the right shoulder of Henry Pegg, who was then running towards the Darwin emergency hospital.

  And Aubrey Hook smiles. He laughs at the wild misfortune of it all. Then he howls, his deranged and deep guffaws echoing across the still floodplain.

  It was after the death of young Charles Berry that the Darwin Examiner made the first public press reference to a rumour that had been swirling across town: Longcoat Bob had put a curse on Tom Berry for the sin of his greed, and the curse was proving to be real. The newspaper ran a quote from an anonymous source who claimed to have been in the Darwin town hall the night Longcoat Bob placed his so-called curse on Tom Berry. ‘The sorcerer had a bone in his hand,’ the anonymous witness said. ‘He pointed it at Mr Berry and he said in a loud and commanding voice, “I curse you and your kin, Tom Berry. Your hearts will turn to stone.” That’s what he said. And look at all the bad fortune that’s come over that family. That blackfeller was talking black magic and the rest of us was lucky he didn’t decide to talk to us.’

  Tom Berry tossed the newspaper into his living room fire when he read it. ‘There’s a difference between a curse and piss-poor luck,’ he screamed, so loud it made his wife, Bonnie, jump in her armchair beside his. ‘Did any one of those people die of a stone heart?’ Tom Berry barked, uncapping a bottle of whisky and reaching for a glass. ‘Has my heart turned to stone! Has your heart turned to stone, Bonnie? Have mercy!’

  Bonnie Berry sat in silence, looking into the warm fire and wondering if her husband’s statements were entirely true. She’d seen something change inside her husband since his return from his strange and fruitful odyssey through the deep country, and despite his newfound wealth, a cloud seemed to follow him wherever he went. He was irritable and, although now more generous, less kind. And how was Bonnie to explain the heaviness of her own heart, were it not itself undergoing some slow transformation? How was she to explain how low she had felt in recent months? She had tried to express to friends the feeling of unwillingness she had carried for so long, a dread of living that made her belly sick. Unwilling to rise in the morning. Unwilling to cook. Unwilling to clean. Unwilling to love. Anyone and anything. She read so many poetry books that sang of the workings of the human heart, its mystic machinery, of the fountain inside of us all that gives and receives love in the endless and glorious thud of a chest beat. She placed her palm on her chest by the fire and she could feel the beat of her heart, but she could not feel the love she had once kept inside it for her husband. A heart that can no longer love, she told herself, might as well be made of stone.

  ‘Tom,’ Bonnie said by the fire.

  ‘Yes, my love.’

  ‘I think you should put the gold back where you found it.’

  *

  Aubrey Hook stares into the floodplain sun and his fever vision splits the sun into two, like a double-yolk egg frying on a skillet. He dumps his head into a waterhole, slaps his face hard. Then he marches on across the floodplain, his hatred giving him pace.

  His mouth is dry and desperate for spirits. He wonders about explorers who came through here on horseback and on foot. He wonders if they ever tossed their whisky bottles from their horses. Buried them in dirt to save for return journeys. Buried spirit treasure. He curses the blacks who walked these isolated lands for millennia and never once took the time to construct a saloon among the forests and plains, a glowing two-storey pub with piano music and song echoing through its windows, high up on the range he can see in the distance.

  He walks along a woodland avenue of fern-leafed grevilleas and milky plum trees with yellow fruits that he rips from the branches in desperate grabs and shovels into his mouth like they were pub bar peanuts. ‘The damned,’ he tells himself, his mouth full of fruit, juice streams spilling down his chin. ‘The daaaammned!’ he laughs. He knows whose footsteps he’s following. The footsteps of damned Tom Berry, the accursed goldminer who made his intentions clear for all to read when he placed an announcement in the Darwin Examiner.

  PUBLIC NOTICE

  I, Tom Berry, hereby proclaim my solemn vow to return all the gold I recently acquired to the godforsaken hole in which I found it. It is with great displeasure that I must publicly acknowledge the growing hysteria and muddy rumour that has swirled in recent months around the Berry family. I do not believe in blackfeller magic. I do, however, believe in plain bad luck. And ever since I brought this gold back to Darwin, it’s the only kind of luck my family has seen. I swear, under God, Longcoat Bob told me that gold did not belong to anyone. But, I am man enough to admit, at no time did he say that gold should belong to me. I have been found guilty of my own pride and my own greed. I do not believe in curses. But I believe a man should admit when he’s wrong and, where possible, he should endeavour to right his wrongs. I will travel back into the deep country as soon as I am able and I will put that gold back where I found it. And, should Longcoat Bob’s finger indeed wield a dark and inexplicable power and should he still be pointing that finger at my family, I expect him to promptly stick that finger someplace else.

  Aubrey Hook howls again and his laughter fills the space between two walls of a jagged sandstone canyon. The double sun falls in the sky. He stops by a swamp to feast at a gooseberry shrub that has dropped an entire season’s worth of green tomato-like wild fruits, some twenty-six of which Aubrey shovels down his throat the way he used to shovel grave dirt into buckets.

  ‘Berries!’ he howls to the sky. ‘Tom’s berries!’

  He drops his strides immediately after feasting on the gooseberries and he squats and releases a diarrhoea torrent onto a patch of grey sand. After cleaning up as best he can, he fills his right pants pocket with more gooseberries and he fills his left pants pocket with a handful of eucalyptus leaves that he rips from a young stringybark. Further along his frenzied journey, he finds a rusting billy can in a natural rock dish in a sandstone outcrop and he lights a night fire from gathered sticks and paperbark that he ignites with one of his lit cigarette papers. He boils the eucalyptus leaves in the billy can and drinks from the can then splashes the boiling water over the festering bite wound in his shoulder.

  He lies by the fire with his arms gripping his pounding chest, his body shaking. He stares into the fire and he repeats the words of Walt Whitman. ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution.”’

  And inside the fever and inside the flames he sees a memory of himself. A young man, tall and handsome. That young man kept his promise. He survived the rockfall that killed his hate-f
illed father, Arthur Hook, and he held true to his private pact. He had only love in his heart that Sunday afternoon when he rode his horse to Violet Berry’s home on the Darwin waterfront. He roped his ride out of view of the house’s windows to lengthen the odds that Tom Berry might see a son of Arthur Hook approaching his yard. He walked to the front door unseen and was about to knock when he heard Violet’s laughter echoing from the backyard. Aubrey trod lightly down the side of the house and, half-hidden by the curve of a rusting water tank, he spied Violet beneath a sprawling backyard milkwood tree. And he saw the awful reason for her laughter: the hands of the young man who lay beside her, squeezing her ribs. And then he saw the awful owner of Violet Berry’s heart. That soft young man beside her. That vibrant and joyful and weak young man beside her. That second son of Arthur Hook. His own beloved brother, Horace.

  Aubrey Hook went riding alone along the waterfront that Sunday afternoon. He took his horse to the highest point he could find along the Dripstone Cliffs overlooking the beach stretching beyond the Rapid Creek inlet. He gave the horse a fifty-yard run-up and he heeled it hard in its belly and it galloped towards a blind clifftop horizon. They were but ten yards from the edge when something inside Aubrey’s heart caused him to pull hard on the reins and circle away from the void. This certain something inside him would prove in the decades to come to be a light in all of his endless dark hours. Nothing else would prove so sustaining. Not love. Not work. Not liquor. The only thing that ever saved Aubrey Hook was hate.

  ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution’”’ he mumbles at the fire. ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution.”’

  Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. And if he says these words long enough, then she might return to him.

  ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution,”’ he says. ‘“And I know the amplitude of time.”’

  Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

  ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution and I know the amplitude of time.”’

  Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

  ‘“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.”’

  And he sees the face of Molly Hook’s mother.

  ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution,”’ he mumbles. ‘“And I know the amplitude of time” … “Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.”’

  And he sees the face of Violet. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

  She is drawn to the rapids. She is sixteen years old and walking barefoot along a plateau buried in blue sky. Her infant son is four months old and curled comfortably inside a sling carrier made of bush string, paperbark and cane strips. From terraces high above, a river plummets into a deep, craggy, sandstone gorge and the force of the great and relentless water rush against the rocks sprays a fine mist onto her face even as she stands some twenty-five yards back from the lip of the gorge.

  She climbs up the side of the clearwater rapids and stops at a deep pool where the current moves more slowly. She lays her baby down inside the sling on a flat rock and the boy’s eyes find points of colour and movement and light and settle on his mother’s eyes staring back at his. But then the mother’s eyes start weeping and then the mother’s eyes turn to the pool. And she walks away from her baby. Reaching the water’s edge, she plants a hand on a large water-worn boulder for balance, finds her footing among the loose black rocks on the surface of the deep emerald pool. She dives under the water and propels herself only with her legs, mermaid-like, emerges with a deep breath, then breast-strokes in a circle before turning to float on her back with her arms and legs outstretched and her eyes filled with all of the blue in all of the sky. Just one fluffy fat cloud and she tells herself it looks like a big white witchetty grub without its yellow head. She can hear herself breathe and she can hear the rush of the rapids downstream. And she lets the water push her.

  The witchetty grub starts to crawl across the blue roof, but that’s just an illusion. The cloud isn’t moving. She is. The slow, gentle push of the current. Push, push, push, and the girl drifts slowly along the surface of the water towards the gorge.

  And to the sky she makes a wish. She wishes to be water. Because water has no feeling. Water feels no pain. Water is never afraid. Water feels no sorrow. And she thinks about the life she could have had if she’d known how to move through this complex earth the way water always knows how to move through it.

  The stone country. Three wanderers of the silver road that turns and twists – just like a python turns and twists as it slides along the base of a nearby ironwood tree, its movement and its size drawing applause from a foreign spectator named Yukio Miki.

  Single file. Greta Maze walks in front and Molly Hook pads along in the middle, turning her head back regularly to find the strange pilot stopped before another natural northern Australian point of wonder. He bends down to a frill-necked lizard resting on a burnt log, and the lizard fans its red frills in defiance of the smiling man’s inspection. He passes a eucalypt tree with a hole in its trunk the diameter of his own head. Molly watches Yukio insert his right arm into the hole, pull his arm out and study his right fist, now crawling with orange and white termites.

  Yukio watches Molly reach into a nest of stingless black bees wedged between two branches of a stringybark tree and pull out a handful of deep red sugarbag honey, which looks to Yukio like melting wax. She drops a dollop of the honey in Yukio’s hands and she eats a dollop herself. Greta finds another nest nearby and grabs a handful of the dark, strong-flavoured gloop too. Yukio tentatively licks the honey in his palm. Liking the taste, he slips it all into his mouth and his eyes light up like his smile. ‘Migoto!’ he says.

  ‘Very, very … migoto,’ Molly says, licking her hands.

  At a slow-moving freshwater stream that cuts across the silver road, Greta relieves herself behind a thick wall of shrubs with red pendulous flowers whose small pink fruits sprout tentacle-like fibres that make the fruits look like they’ve been snap-frozen in a state of self-combustion.

  Yukio follows Molly to the stream. He stands above her as she kneels down.

  She points two fingers to her own eyes and then she points to the stream.

  ‘You,’ she says. ‘Watch for crocs.’

  Yukio is blank.

  ‘You be on the lookout,’ Molly says, pointing to her eyes again and then pointing to the water. ‘Crocodiles,’ she says, forming her hands into a snapping crocodilian mouth. ‘They’ll drag you down underwater. Wedge you under a rock and let you tenderise for a month.’

  Yukio nods, casting a keen and immediate eye across the stream.

  Molly places Bert the shovel on the muddy ground beside her boots and reaches into the duffel bag. She pulls out the blood-red rock that she found inside her dead mother’s chest. It’s stained now. Covered in splatters of blood from the smashed head of the one-eyed tin-miner monster. Molly places the rock in the clearwater stream and rubs the monster’s blood away. “Out damn spot. Out, I say,” she says to herself.

  Yukio studies the girl’s actions, curious.

  Molly feels him looking over her shoulder. ‘It’s my mum’s heart,’ she says. ‘It’s what happens at the end of the turning, Yukio. It’s what Longcoat Bob done.’

  Molly looks up at Yukio. The weight of the story across her face. ‘He said our hearts would turn to stone and my mum’s heart slowly did. And now I can feel my heart going that way, too. It’s getting heavier, Yukio. I feel it inside me. I’ve stopped caring about people.’

  She looks at the sword hanging from his belt. ‘I watched you cut the throats of those men back there and I felt nuthin’ for it,’ she says. ‘Do you follow me, Yukio?’ she asks, but she doesn’t care if he doesn’t. It feels good to say it out loud and maybe even better saying it to someone who can’t understand. ‘I wasn’t scared,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t sorry. If anything, I was glad you did it to ’em.’

  She studies Yukio’s fac
e. Blank but for his eyes, which say he’s listening hard to the gravedigger girl.

  ‘Can you understand anything I’m saying to you?’

  Yukio is silent. He smiles uncertainly. ‘You,’ he says, enigmatically, repeating the last word he heard.

  ‘You can’t understand a word, can you?’ Molly asks.

  ‘You,’ he says again.

  Molly nods, smiling. She turns back to the water, stares at the red rock in her hand. ‘That’s how it starts,’ she says. ‘You go numb. You stop caring about people. You start to hate things. You only care about yourself and all the things swimming around in your own head.’

  She grips the rock, squeezes it hard like she wants to break it in two, but it has no give in it. ‘Then you wake up one day and your heart has finally turned all the way to rock and you feel nothing whatsoever, so it makes no difference if you’re here or if you’re not. This rock can’t feel nuthin’, Yukio. No matter how much I could feel for it, it can’t feel nuthin’ for me. Why am I even carrying it, Yukio? It can’t feel nuthin’. It can’t give nuthin’ back. I should just let it go. I should just drop it right here and let it sink to the bottom of the creek and it can sit there feelin’ nuthin’ for a million years.’

  Yukio notices a cloud of colour mixing with the water. A thin layer of red-brown clay or dirt pulling away from the rock, like it’s losing a layer of skin. It looks to Molly like the blood of the bald man she saw rising like smoke in the creek water.