All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

  Rusting wheels suddenly turn into motion in Yukio’s mind. ‘Ohhhhhh!’ he gasps, pointing at the cave, wide-eyed and embarrassed.

  And Molly howls so hard she falls backwards off her sitting rock.

  Yukio’s laughter then echoes across the waterfall chamber and his joy is a welcome infection for Greta, who lets her pursed, puffy lips slowly break into a smile.

  Molly stands up now, collecting herself, and nods her head at the cave. ‘All the stories I ever heard in town about my grandfather’s long walk,’ Molly says, ‘he never said exactly where he went. But he spoke about what it was like. He said he went into magic places with Longcoat Bob.’ She looks around her setting. ‘This feels pretty magic to me, this place. He said he walked through places with Longcoat Bob and he came out the other side into places that felt like different worlds. Different dimensions, even.’

  Molly takes a deep breath. ‘Yep, this is the way,’ she says. ‘We gotta swim over to the other side of the waterhole. We gotta go through that cave up there.’

  ‘What about the crocodiles?’ Greta asks.

  ‘I think we’ll be all right,’ Molly replies.

  ‘You gonna talk to them again?’ Greta says, drily. ‘Ask them for permission to cross?’

  Molly smiles. ‘Nah, them crocs will come ’ere every now and then but I reckon they won’t want to hang around too long because of that noisy waterfall.’

  ‘Crocodiles,’ Yukio says, airing his concern.

  ‘Yeah, but just freshies this far inland, Yukio,’ Molly says.

  Greta places a calming hand on Yukio’s thigh. ‘Don’t worry, the freshies only grow to nine feet,’ she says.

  But Yukio doesn’t hear that line because he’s distracted by something moving low in the sky over Greta’s shoulder.

  Then Greta hears it too, something familiar, something impossible. It’s the sound of a baby crying, loud enough to be heard above the noise of the waterfall. She follows Yukio’s gaze and turns around to see a dark, black-brown wedge-tailed eagle cutting from east to west across the wide black pool. So big and majestic and powerful is the creature that Greta flinches when she sees it. An adult female with a wingspan that must be more than eight feet across; a flying motion of such grand design and power that as the wings cut the air they make a noise like a silk sheet being shaken in the wind. And she knows it is the queen they saw before.

  The great bird has a fanned and wedged tail almost two feet across – so wide and balanced Greta could serve scones on it with mini bowls of jam and cream – and a hooked grey beak appropriately shaped like Death’s scythe. But the raptor is burdened. It moves slow through the sky with laboured flaps of its wings because somewhere along its endless hunt for easy prey – a moving and pitiless ground feast of rabbits and brown hares and foxes and koalas and wombats and small wallabies – its long black talons have hooked a strange treasure more cumbersome than even this raptor’s normally impressive endurance and leg strength can accommodate: a howling human infant nestled in a baby sling made of bush string, paperbark and cane strips, which now hangs from the eagle’s vice-grip talons by its woven cane and paperbark carry strap. Greta hears that cry again, splitting the air and splitting her heart.

  Two other, smaller birds shoot down from high above towards the eagle and its plunder. They look like brown hawks, and Greta now realises that the eagle is waging a mid-air fight to keep hold of its treasure. One brave hawk flaps a wing across the eyes of the eagle, which then slows, and this slowing of momentum seems to add to the weight of the cargo and the eagle must work hard now to start the motor of its wings again and find enough energy to make it to the top of the waterfall. Then the second hawk attacks the eagle from the side with a surprise flurry of wings and raised legs and talons, and the mighty eagle is forced to defend itself. It releases its prized and howling plunder and raises its own spent legs and talons up to the spirited hawk, driving hard with a flap of its wide wings to force the hawk back so it can fly freely out of the gorge.

  Molly Hook sucks air deep into her lungs as she watches the baby sling with the baby inside it falling towards the black pool. But Greta Maze, the toast of Palmerston, is already swimming across the water as the baby lands hard.

  ‘Greta!’ Molly calls.

  The actress’s arms turning like windmills through the water; calves and thighs thrashing through the glassy pool, her saddle shoes still tied to her feet. Her head is down in the water and she takes no breaths because she doesn’t want to lose any speed. A single word crosses her busy mind while her head is under the water: freshies. But she powers on and when she raises her head she sees the baby in the sling bobbing momentarily on the surface, but then the water fills the sling and sucks the baby under. Greta takes a deep breath and dives deep and hard. Molly and Yukio watch her disappear.

  ‘Greta!’ Molly screams.

  No movement for a long moment. Just the crashing of the waterfall.

  And then she reappears, the actress, one arm stroking across the water and the baby inside the sling held up to her chest. Her usually bouncy blonde curls sopped across her ears, concentration and determination and fire across her face.

  Molly breathes with relief and she knows now just how much she cares for this woman in the water. A good one, she tells herself. The real good one. She would cry for her if she could, but instead she drops the empty can of soup on the ground, picks up Bert the shovel and her duffel bag, dives into the black water and follows the actress to the other side of the falls.

  Yukio, the pilot who fell from the sky, stares at these strange creatures in the water and wonders what kind of place he fell into here in this continent south of everything, a place where birds drop children from the sky and angels with blonde curls dive into crocodile-infested waters to save them. But this is not a time for thinking, he tells himself. This is a time for action. For doing – doing what the actress did.

  He’s not a natural swimmer. He was never the kind to dive into blind bodies of water. But this place south of everything is transformative. People can change here, he tells himself. And he feels himself turning. Turning, turning, turning by the water’s edge. And he dives into the water and dog-paddles awkwardly across the pool, panting with every movement and struggling to keep his heavy war boots moving. The raging waterfall thunders down to his right and he fights to stay away from the suck of the plunging water. Near the far edge of the pool his boots find purchase on moss and mud and his arms reach for a fern that he then uses to pull himself onto a thin ledge of sandstone. He stands up out of the water, puts his hands on his kneecaps to catch his breath and then staggers over to the women.

  Molly huddles against Greta’s left shoulder and Yukio now stands at her right shoulder and the three wanderers catch their breath as they gaze into the eyes of the newest member of their travelling party: a baby boy in Greta’s arms, his big brown eyes staring back at the woman who holds him so carefully, so naturally.

  ‘Ssssshhhh,’ Greta says. ‘Ssshhhhh.’

  And the boy does not cry.

  Cold in here. Dank and earthy and smelling of bat shit. This is the dark cave Greta spoke of. ‘Close your eyes,’ she said. ‘You don’t realise it, but you’re actually standing inside a large stone cave in total darkness.’ This is what Molly’s cave looked like in her mind. This was the place before the sad place she saw beyond her bedroom door. Outside that bedroom in her mind was a hallway and at the end of that hallway was a bedroom where the moon lit up her mother’s face and where the shadow wolf moaned in the dark. Everybody has a sad place, Molly thinks. What’s waiting for me outside this stone cave? What’s beyond the bedroom door?

  ‘Can you see anything ahead, Molly?’ Greta asks and her words echo through the pitch-black tunnel.

  Molly walks up front, banging Bert’s blade against the large boulders that clutter the passageway that has so far stretched some forty yards from the waterfall. ‘I can’t see nuthin’.’

  Greta, walking in the middle of the trio, h
olds the baby boy in a firm two-arm grip against her chest. If she trips again on one of these boulders, she’ll twist and shoulder the brunt of the fall. ‘This feller’s gonna need feeding,’ she says. Hold the boy, she tells herself. Protect him from this strange country. No place for a thing so perfect, no place for the miracle boy.

  ‘That feller needs his mum,’ Molly says.

  Yukio Miki walks behind the actress and the gravedigger girl, running his right palm along the cave ceiling, which is only a forearm’s length higher than his head.

  Molly remembers Greta’s words. ‘Then you see a line of fire draw a door on a wall of that cave. Up, across, down again and back across.’

  A fire-traced door is what she needs. She would open the door and step out of the cave into a new world. And what would that world look like? That place? What if there was no shadow in that place? No moonlight. Only sunshine. She sees her mother, Violet, and her mother is beautiful there and she wears a smart dress that her best friend, Greta Maze, bought for her – because in this place, in this world, Greta could be the friend her mother never had, the strong and reliable friend she always needed to lean on. These two best friends now sip fresh lemonade and smoke cigarettes in sunglasses under the milkwood tree in the backyard of her grandfather Tom Berry’s sprawling old house on the Darwin waterfront. And Molly runs into her mother’s arms and they spin and together they lie on their backs beneath the milkwood tree looking up at the sky. ‘Can you feel it, Molly?’ her mother asks. ‘Can you feel it? We’re on top now, Mol’. We’re on top.’

  ‘Greta?’ Molly calls softly through the darkness.

  ‘Yeah, kid.’

  ‘It wasn’t the sky,’ Molly says.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I know it wasn’t the sky who gave me that first gift,’ she says.

  ‘It wasn’t?’ Greta replies in the darkness, gently, tenderly.

  ‘It was my mum who gave it to me,’ Molly says. ‘I know that. I’ve always known that. I just liked the idea that the sky might give me gifts. No one else was giving me gifts. I thought that the sky might see me down here and it might want to make me happy or somethin’.’

  Three wanderers and a baby in the darkness. A long silence.

  ‘But why would she give me my grandfather’s map like that?’ Molly asks. ‘Why would she say it was all coming from up there and not down here?’

  ‘Maybe she wanted you to know there was always some place beautiful to turn to,’ Greta says. ‘She gave you the sky, Molly. Maybe that was the gift. Not the bloody copper pan.’

  ‘I reckon she wanted me to find Longcoat Bob,’ Molly says. ‘She wanted me to find him and ask him to leave me be. She didn’t want my heart to turn like hers did.’

  ‘Molly?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Molly says.

  ‘Your mum loved you a whole lot.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Molly asks.

  Mums just know, Greta thinks. ‘I just know,’ she says.

  ‘Yeah, I reckon she did. But then her heart turned to stone and she had to go away,’ Molly says, her hands reaching blindly for a boulder that her boots have struck. She lifts her legs over the boulder and says, ‘Boulder comin’ up.’

  ‘Hearts don’t turn to stone, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘But they do turn. One day your heart is filled with nothing but love and then something gets inside and mixes in with all that love and sometimes that something is black and sometimes it’s cold and feels just like stone because it’s heavy, and sometimes it gets so heavy you can’t carry it inside you no more.’

  ‘Sometimes I feel mine turning,’ Molly says.

  ‘Yeah, I feel it, too,’ Greta says.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Of course, I do,’ Greta says. ‘But guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sometimes I feel it turning back the other way.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘When?’ Molly asks.

  ‘When I talk to you for a start,’ Greta says.

  Molly stops walking. She reaches a hand out for Greta in the darkness. She finds her shoulder and Greta finds the gravedigger girl’s hand in the black and she briefly squeezes it, but the moment is too sweet for someone so battle-hardened so she shatters it with humour. ‘And then there’s the times we go on long walks through old rock vaginas …’

  And Molly laughs, but a sound makes her turn back the way she was heading, a sound somewhere in the black, somewhere towards the end of the passageway. ‘Can you hear that?’ she asks. ‘It’s music.’ And she quickens her pace, tapping Bert’s blade against earth and rock as she goes.

  ‘Piano keys,’ Greta says. Those perfect notes. Greta knows them. Greta remembers them. ‘It’s the Liebesträume,’ Greta says, ‘the Love Dream.’ She remembers every note. ‘My father played this when I was a girl. I’d go to sleep at night and he’d rest his drinks on the piano top and play me to sleep with this music. My father said that was how I should always go to sleep, with a love dream.’

  Molly listens hard. Notes falling into notes, echoing through the cave. Some of the long, melancholy notes moving in the opposite direction to others that are sharp and bright. The song feels to Molly like a heart that has not turned yet, a song for a heart filled as much with joy and hope as it is with sadness and longing.

  Then she sees light ahead, and she rushes towards it, the strange notes leading her on to where the passageway ends at a narrow gap she finds she can slip through easily when she turns side-on and leads with her left shoulder.

  She emerges into a clearing flanked by rugged and sloping sandstone. Opposite her, a loose path of dirt and small rocks splits in two. The western fork runs to a ridge of sandstone beyond which Molly can see an expanse of stone country in the distance. A fork of silver-blue lightning splits the deep grey sky ahead.

  ‘The Lightning Man,’ she whispers. ‘“Follow the lightning.”’

  But then Molly hears the piano notes coming from down the eastern fork, which heads off through a stand of black wattles and soap trees with flat round black fruits and then down an avenue of trees with mottled cream-grey bark and stiff leaves exploding with small ripe red fruits. These tree clusters are all canopied by a dense climbing vine with orange-yellow flowers shaped like starfish, and the melancholy piano notes float through this forest like saddened spectres.

  Greta and Yukio emerge from the tunnel and Greta, holding the baby boy in her arms, the baby boy who fell into her arms from the sky, instinctively follows the notes down the vine forest avenue.

  ‘Greta, where are you going?’ Molly asks.

  Greta says nothing, just walks deeper into the forest.

  ‘We need to go this way,’ Molly says, pointing towards the stone country. ‘We need to follow the lightning. We’re almost there, I can feel it!’

  But Greta walks on, her head turning left and right to study the hall of trees enveloping her, swallowing her whole. Deeper, deeper into the forest, the notes of the piano drawing her along another dirt path that veers off through a wall of crab’s-eye vine with purple pea-like flowers. Beyond this natural barrier, in front of a sandstone rock wall swallowed long ago by snaking and multiplying and unstoppable vines, is a circular clearing. And Greta now sees metal gold rush relics in the foliage around her: two upright wagon wheels rusting away by the rock wall; an ore cart; a wooden ladder; a pile of chains and straps and shafts and poles.

  In the centre of the clearing is a single tall bombax tree, maybe sixty feet high, with rough pale grey bark covered in conical thorns. The tree is alive with fleshy red flowers and oblong brown seed capsules, hundreds of which lie on the ground, their capsules split open like they were alien vessels whose absent owners abandoned them long ago. Beneath this tree sits a skeletal old man with long white hair, snowy eyebrows, a bushy chalk-white beard and old worn hands that are moving purposefully across the black and white keys of an old and moulding walnut-wood upright piano. He wears a cheap, cream-coloured Chinese
-style flowing tunic over loose brown slacks. No shoes on his feet. He’s lost in his own music, his eyes closed and his head moving along the hills and valleys of his ghost notes that spirit themselves away from the piano and into the dense forest.

  And Molly can see now that the old man is playing for an audience of a kind. There are eight bodies scattered behind him across the forest floor. Eight people sleeping – at least Molly hopes they’re sleeping. Chinese men and women in rag clothes. All of the sleepers are old and frail. Some rest on their backs on low stretchers and some rest their backs directly on the forest floor. Some laughing in their sleep, some turning their heads. Two of them look particularly serene: asleep in the daylight, but smiling as though the music is reaching right through to their dreams, conjuring expressions of deep contentment.

  ‘Come, come!’ the old man says, still playing with his eyes closed. ‘Come closer. Do not be afraid.’ He sounds European. Dutch, maybe.

  Greta slowly and cautiously approaches the piano, holding the sky baby close. Molly and Yukio join her and they all stare at the man with hair so lightning-white Molly wonders for the briefest moment if they have not stumbled upon Sam’s Lightning Man here in the flesh, the one who sprays bending rods of electricity from his ear holes.

  Yukio rests his hand on the grip of the shortsword hanging from his military belt. His eyes scan the clearing for signs of danger and the fact he sees none does not blunt the edge of his vigilance.

  Greta gazes over the sleepers in the forest. ‘What are they all doing here?’ Greta asks.

  ‘What does it look like they’re doing?’ the old man replies, not skipping a note.

  ‘Sleeping,’ Greta says.

  ‘Not just sleeping,’ he replies. ‘Dreaming.’

  Piano notes bending through the forest trees. ‘You play beautifully,’ Greta says.

  The old man does not stop his fingers to respond. ‘I play nothing,’ he says. ‘The machine plays me. I just sit down at it.’

  Notes into notes. Fingers still working across the keyboard. There is little flesh in the old man’s cheeks and even less hanging off his arm bones.