All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

  ‘It’s bleeding,’ Molly says.

  She watches it bleed, bleed its colour into the water and she watches the folds and waves of that colour disappear into the slow current. And at first she doesn’t realise that Yukio is kneeling beside her now. Then he’s gently lifting her arm up out of the water and he’s reaching for the blood-red rock and holding it in his cupped hands. He dries the rock with the inside of his flight jacket and he places it gently in the duffel bag. Then he hands the bag by its strap to Molly.

  ‘You,’ he says, and Molly hears something instructive in the word. Something encouraging. Something with care in it.

  *

  Purple sky with streaks of pink and red, streaks of fire. Three wanderers moving under and over sandstone ledges, around freestanding rock outcrops. A shifting landscape, stone country turning to brief rainbow-coloured clusters of orchids and banksias and woollybutt trees, then turning back again to stone country filled with runs of misshapen boulders that the gravedigger girl and the actress and the pilot who fell from the sky must clamber over for two, three, four miles.

  Yukio tells himself to stop sneaking glances at the actress, but his eyes have a will of their own and they keep finding new small wonders in the things the blonde woman does. The way she helps Molly over two slippery moss-covered rocks. The way she tucks a clump of that wild hair behind her right ear. The way she pretends not to see the way he looks at her and then the way she decides to stare straight back at him, looking so deeply that he doesn’t speak a word inside his mind in case she hears it. And then he must look away from her because he feels she could turn him into a scared boy with a single glance, and then he must look to the sky for his manhood. And he looks at the purple and pink afternoon sky, he talks to it because when he talks to the sky he is talking to Nara. ‘Can you see me, Nara? I was coming to you. I am coming to you, Nara. I promise. Will you wait for me?’

  *

  At a muddy billabong, Greta spots a thick-bodied, light-brown snake with a small head shaped like a bulldog’s head. The snake burrows itself down into a sloshy bed of mud to hide, but Molly spots the black and scaly tiger prints of its skin before it disappears. ‘File snake,’ she says, digging Bert deep into the mud. She heaves a mud load from the ground and the file snake is pulled up with it, wriggling and fretting on the shovel blade and then leaping off it towards Yukio’s military boots. He steps back with a brief yelp and only has a moment to see the snake’s head before it’s chopped off by the side of Bert’s blade. Molly picks up the file snake’s still wriggling but headless body and hands it to Yukio.

  ‘Hold this for me, will ya?’ she asks.

  *

  Yukio builds a tepee-shaped campfire out of dry branches and paperbark and when the fire has turned to hot coals Molly drops the file snake on top of them, whole and unskinned. While she waits for the snake to cook she reads Romeo and Juliet aloud to Yukio. She acts out Romeo’s passages in her best Tyrone Power voice, fair Verona by way of Universal Pictures, Los Angeles, California. ‘“If I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle sin is this, my lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand, to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”’ Molly’s eyes light up with the matinee-idol thrill of Romeo Montague’s boldness.

  When she acts out the words of Juliet she channels a lovesick and exasperated Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind. ‘“Come, gentle night,”’ she gasps, ‘“come, loving, black-browed night; give me my Romeo; and, when I shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine, that all the world will be in love with night.”’

  And the night comes and Molly cuts up the file snake by flamelight with Yukio’s wakizashi, slicing its fat and juicy but stringy flesh into segments the size of sausages, which Yukio and Greta chew and suck and swallow down with deep gratitude. In the flickering flamelight Molly takes a long moment to admire Yukio’s shortsword. She runs a light finger across the cutting edge and that finger finds the engraving of a butterfly above the sword’s hilt.

  ‘Why a butterfly?’ Molly asks, holding the image up to Yukio.

  Yukio nods.

  ‘Butterfly?’ Molly repeats.

  Yukio nods.

  ‘Butterfly,’ Yukio says.

  ‘Yes, it’s a butterfly,’ Molly says. ‘But why do you have a butterfly engraved on your sword?’

  Yukio is silent for a long moment. He smiles. ‘Butterfly,’ he repeats without confidence.

  Molly tears a mouthful of snake flesh from its crispy skin and turns to Greta. ‘He can’t understand a thing we’re sayin’,’ she says, her words muffled by the snake meat.

  ‘I can’t understand a thing you’re sayin’ when you talk with half a snake in your gob,’ Greta replies. She looks at Yukio and Yukio looks back at her. Greta smiles back at him. ‘I reckon he understands enough,’ she says.

  ‘I’m gonna test him,’ Molly says.

  ‘How about you quit ramblin’ and just eat your mud snake before it goes cold?’

  But Molly doesn’t take to that suggestion. She lifts her head to the stars in the sky, but the words that come from her mouth are not related to the stars.

  ‘I think he’s handsome,’ she says.

  ‘Molly!’ Greta shrieks, short and flustered.

  Molly continues to talk to the stars and Yukio’s eyes follow Molly’s to the heavens. ‘He has a smile like Clark Gable,’ she says, staring deep into the night sky.

  ‘Stop it, Molly,’ Greta says gently.

  ‘I think he’s smitten with you,’ Molly says, head up still. ‘He’s been staring at you all day. And I saw you staring at him once, too!’ She chuckles to herself.

  ‘Molly, that’s enough!’ Greta says, louder than she had intended.

  Yukio whips his head around to Greta and she is forced to ease his curiosity with a smile and a shake of her head. ‘She does love those stars,’ Greta says, pointing upwards.

  Yukio nods, smiles.

  *

  Three wanderers flat on their backs around a campfire, staring up at the stars. Molly’s fingers turn into a pair of scissors. “Cut him out in little stars”, she says to herself, and when she cuts out the face of Romeo from the star-filled night sky it’s the face of Sam Greenway she sees. Sam Greenway, hunter of buffalo, star-crossed thief of hearts.

  Greta’s eyes are closed but she does not sleep. She still hears the thump of the rock stamp from the tin mine worked by the monsters. The fear of it lingers and that fear reminds her of hopelessness and pressure and those things remind her of the hospital room and the baby in her arms so she opens her eyes to fill her mind instead with a cinema screen of pulsing stars.

  Still night. No wind this deep in the country. The sound of cicadas and the sound of wood popping and crackling in the fire, the skin layers of a dry ironwood log the size of a full Christmas ham being eaten away by flame. Nothing more but the night.

  And then Yukio Miki speaks.

  ‘Yukio … had wife,’ he says. ‘Nara.’ He thinks on his words. He thinks on his English, a hundred or so words that he might be able to drag up from his tired mind to answer the girl’s question. ‘Died,’ he says. ‘Sick … very sick.’

  Greta turns her head to see the pilot talking to the sky on the other side of the fire. She looks at Molly and her puzzled face says the same thing Greta’s does. He can speak English.

  ‘Yukio held … held … arms …’ he says. He’s crying now. He holds his own chest. ‘Yukio … speak … Nara. No … afraid. No afraid. Yukio … promise … promise. Nara … change. Nara … fly away. Nara … still beautiful.’

  Molly and Greta prop themselves up on their elbows, waiting for the pilot to say something else. He turns his back to them and lies on his side, closes his eyes. Only one more line to say before he sleeps and it comes out slowly and clearly.

  ‘Nara … is … butterfly.’

  *

  In the dawn light, they pass three large spherical boulders left balancing and e
xposed by erosion on a ridgeline that lights up in the rising sun.

  ‘Look, that’s us,’ Molly says. ‘Greta, that’s you up front, the bigger boulder. That’s me in the middle, the little one. And that’s Yukio up the back. See it, Greta, see?’

  ‘I see it, Molly,’ Greta says, rubbing sleep from her eyes as she hauls her body over several jagged sandstone rocks.

  Molly stops abruptly and Yukio and Greta stop with her.

  ‘What is it?’ Greta asks, concerned.

  Molly swings her head around. She breathes the morning air in deep through her nose. She looks up at the sky, shimmering with pinks and reds slowly transforming to blues. She breathes in the trees, the rocks, the insects beneath the rocks, the lizards beneath the dirt, the worms beneath the lizards, the dirt beneath her fingernails, the blood beneath her skin.

  ‘What if we’re the treasure?’ she asks. She looks back up at the sky. ‘I’d try to hide us, too. That sky is the lid of a treasure chest. That sky is a blanket. Or a cloak.’

  Molly turns to Yukio, who struggles to understand the girl.

  ‘We are treasure buried by the sky,’ Molly says.

  A brown and emerald-green bird in the sky makes a kak-kak-kak sound and spreads its wings wide to show two white coin-shaped dots on their undersides.

  ‘Dollarbird,’ Molly says. And she talks back to it. ‘Kak-kak-kak.’

  Yukio joins in from behind. ‘Kak-kak-kak,’ he says, laughing. ‘He … say … “Good morning … Molly … Hook.”’

  Molly smiles. The bird makes another call. Kak-kak-kak.

  Molly turns back to Yukio.

  ‘He just asked us around to his place for breakfast,’ she says. ‘He’s got fresh coffee and he’s fried a bunch of eggs and some bacon steaks as thick as my head.’

  Molly responds to the bird’s kind invitation. ‘Sorry, mate, can’t stop. We’ve got to find Longcoat Bob. You know where he is, Mr Dollarbird?’

  ‘Bob,’ Yukio says. ‘Long … coat … Bob.’

  ‘Yeah, Longcoat Bob,’ Molly says. ‘Didn’t realise you spoke such good English, Yukio Miki?’

  Yukio raises his forefinger and thumb, leaves a small gap between both. ‘Little … little,’ he says. ‘English … come … Sakai … Molly … speak … English … good,’ he says.

  ‘You bet your arse I do, Yukio Miki,’ Molly says. ‘I’m poetic. Poetic and graceful.’

  She spots a large army of green ants building a nest between two thin twig branches of a flimsy tree with floppy green leaves. ‘Look at this, Yukio,’ Molly whispers, leaning in to the tree where a line of ants with amber bodies and glowing jade-coloured abdomens are carrying a white grub along a designated worker road on a branch. ‘They make their homes out of leaves. Some of the ants are the tough ones who will work together to hold the leaves up and some of the ants are the clever ones who will weave the leaves together and some of them are gluers who use that white stuff they’re carrying to stick all the leaves in place.’

  Yukio releases a brief sigh of awe. ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘See the bridge?’ Molly asks. The ants have built a bridge out of their own connected bodies to create a shortcut for the gluers wanting to access a branch below them.

  ‘I wish that feller Adolf Hitler could see this,’ Molly whispers.

  ‘Hitler?’ Yukio echoes, confused.

  ‘Yeah,’ Molly says. ‘We could get Hitler and what’s his name, Mussalino …

  ‘Mussolini,’ Yukio says.

  ‘Yeah, Mussolini,’ Molly says. ‘We get Hitler, Mussolini and Winston Churchill all together and they could come and look at this ant bridge for a while. Calm themselves down a bit. Just watching some green ants working for an hour or two.’

  Yukio turns to the girl for a moment, puzzled by her words.

  ‘Sam says he once saw a group of these fellers combining their strength to drag a dead honeyeater bird back to their nest,’ Molly says. ‘That’s like you and me carryin’ a brewery home for afterdinner drinks. These fellers will build this home for themselves and they’ll take care of the other insects on the branch as well. They’ll protect the little caterpillars and aphids around them who thank them for the protection by shooting honeydew from their arses.’ Molly nods her head in reverence. ‘Yep, gotta bow down to the aphids, Yukio, even their shit tastes like sugar. These ants drink honeydew like my old man drinks plonk.’

  Drank, Molly tells herself. Drank. Her old man doesn’t drink anymore because she asked for the sky gifts.

  ‘Plonk?’ Yukio repeats.

  ‘Yeah, plonk,’ Molly says. ‘Grog. Slops. Piss. Plonk.’

  Yukio then watches Molly grab a green ant by its head and bite its backside clean off. ‘They’re tasty, too,’ Molly says.

  She eats another. ‘Try one,’ she says, nodding to the ants. ‘But just bite the arse, not the head.’

  ‘Arse,’ Yukio says. ‘Not head.’

  The Japanese fighter pilot eats the arse of a green ant. ‘Ooohhh!’ he says.

  Molly nods. ‘Tastes like mint,’ Molly says.

  ‘Mint,’ Yukio nods.

  ‘Good for a sore throat.’

  Molly grips her duffel bag strap and takes one last look at the ant nest.

  ‘Yep, them ants, they’re the ant’s pants,’ she says.

  She continues along the path and Yukio walks with her.

  ‘Ant’s … pants,’ he says.

  ‘Yeah,’ Molly says, ‘that’s Australian for “the bee’s knees”.’

  Yukio doesn’t follow.

  Greta watches these interactions unfold, shaking her head.

  ‘Look, Yukio,’ says Molly, ‘you’re probably gonna be spending a bit of time here in Australia, so I guess you should learn how to speak like one of us.’

  Yukio struggles to understand but nods his head anyway. Molly strolls on, using Bert the shovel like a walking stick.

  ‘If you walk into a pub here, let’s say, I don’t think it would be good for you to be speaking all that Japanese,’ Molly says. ‘People talk different in those pubs. They’ve got their own language and it’s not Japanese, but it’s not English either.’

  ‘Not … English?’ Yukio asks.

  ‘“This crow eater had a fair dinkum blue with the trouble and strife,”’ Molly says. ‘That’s Australian for “The man from South Australia had a genuine disagreement with his wife.”’

  Greta, who is walking five yards ahead, turns to smile at Molly.

  ‘If you want a meat pie, you ask for “a dog’s eye”,’ Molly says. ‘If you don’t know where some place is then you can say it’s in “Woop Woop”.’

  ‘Woop … Woop,’ Yukio repeats.

  ‘If you’re out of money, you say you haven’t got a brass razoo.’ Molly adopts her thickest outback Australian drawl. ‘Haven’t got a brass razoo, so I’m gonna shoot through.’

  ‘Shoot … through,’ Yukio says.

  ‘Yeah, you’ve gotta go,’ Molly says. ‘You’ve gotta leave. Shoot through.’

  ‘Shoot … through,’ Yukio repeats.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ Molly says. ‘But slow it down and stretch it out: “Shyuuuut theruuuuuu”.’

  Yukio ponders her words and responds. ‘Shyuuuuut theruuuuuu.’

  ‘That’s it, Yukio,’ she says. ‘Now here’s what you say if you need a shit …’

  *

  The silver road lost its lustre long ago, the peppering of shimmering mica flakes slowly giving way to rocks and pebbles and thin stretches of dirt covered in rock wallaby prints and the tail-drag marks of black wallaroos.

  They pass a group of brilliant green and yellow figbirds fussing about in the upper strata of a cluster of tall fig trees. The pilot and the actress walking side by side in silence now. Mica flakes beneath their shoes. Bird whistles. Molly has skipped ahead.

  ‘Thank you,’ Greta says. Yukio turns to Greta, confused.

  ‘Thank you for saving me,’ she says. ‘You saved me from those men.’

  Yukio nods. They walk
on in silence for another minute, a long one.

  ‘I’ve never killed anyone before,’ Greta says.

  Yukio thinks on this for a moment.

  ‘Greta Maze … no kill …’ he says, shaking his head, pointing back over his shoulder to the tin mine, to the recent past. ‘Yukio kill … man.’

  Greta takes a breath. ‘That’s nice of you to say, but I think I might have helped a bit,’ she says.

  Another long pause.

  ‘War,’ Yukio says, shaking his head.

  Greta can only assume what that means and she takes it to mean that Yukio believes one-eyed giants of the woods act differently amid the pressures of war.

  ‘Guess you might have killed someone before?’ she asks.

  Yukio looks at Molly. He nods only once. He watches the girl as her eyes follow the soaring flight path of a gold and green pigeon with a rose-pink crown.

  ‘I thought it was beautiful what you said last night,’ Greta says.

  Yukio stiffens.

  ‘What you said about your wife,’ she says.

  Yukio nods.

  ‘Where were you going?’ Greta asks.

  Yukio is confused.

  ‘In your plane,’ Greta says. ‘When we saw you come down? Where were you going?’

  Yukio looks at Greta. Her face, her green eyes the colour of her dress. Her hair when it moves in the light like that. He looks away from her and he’s saved from the moment – saved from feelings he does not understand – by Molly running back to him.

  ‘Yukio!’ she hollers. ‘Yukio!’

  Her hands are cupped, holding something inside them.

  ‘I’ve got a gift for you,’ she says. She uncups her hands and a butterfly with flapping wings the colours of a tiger launches itself haphazardly into the sky.

  ‘Butterfly,’ Molly rejoices.

  ‘Butter … fly.’ Yukio smiles.

  Greta walks on ahead by herself. Molly and Yukio watch the tiger butterfly disappear into the thick vine scrub lining the path.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about what you said last night,’ Molly says. ‘You said your wife didn’t just die.’ She stops and thinks harder on what she’s trying to say. ‘Well, ummm, she didn’t just go into the ground.’