All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

  ‘A gift from the sky,’ Molly says.

  ‘They’re searching for Longcoat Bob,’ Lars says to his wife.

  Marielle nods slowly and gracefully. ‘I see,’ she says.

  A young Chinese woman approaches Greta with a bowl of sliced apple and boiled bush yams. Marielle waves an arm towards the dining table. ‘Please, eat with us,’ she says. ‘You must be so tired. You need rest.’ Then she turns to Molly and smiles warmly. ‘You have come so far to be with us. You have seen so much.’ She puts her hand under Molly’s chin, stares deep into her eyes. ‘You carry so much with you,’ she says. ‘So much pain.’

  *

  They eat surrounded by the dying. Greta and Yukio spooning up mouthfuls of a hot bush onion soup that’s the colour of dirty water but tastes so good slipping down their throats and filling up their bellies that they splash it across their chins in their hurry to get more down. Yukio stuffing boiled yam chunks into his mouth with his fingers. Greta sucking on the skin of a cured eel that Lars pulled from the traps he keeps in the waterfall pool back beyond what he calls the birth cave.

  ‘The people who find us leave their old selves on the other side of that birth cave,’ Lars says. ‘They come to us reborn at the very moment they are ready to die.’

  When he says things like this Molly turns to Greta and gives her an urgent and brief look that says they should leave, but Greta stays because she is tired and she needs to rest and she will do that tonight, even if it means sleeping among the living dead.

  ‘I know it must seem strange to you,’ Lars says. ‘A hospice in a goldmine. But the fact remains that I have achieved more in the field of plant science and pain reduction in this unlikely cave than I did in a lifetime inside a laboratory.’

  ‘These people,’ Greta says, spooning up more of her soup. ‘You … give them things?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Lars says. ‘And they are grateful for it. That is why they stay. Where would these people go in Darwin? Who would look after them?’ He turns to Molly. ‘The only help they’d ever receive is a free ride on the back of a wagon to the nearest cemetery.’

  Molly pecks lightly on long roasted yams that taste like sweet potato, but she reaches more frequently for a bowl of sliced wild passionfruit.

  ‘You’re not having your soup?’ Lars asks Molly.

  Molly shakes her head. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she says.

  *

  An hour passes at the dining table. They eat brown, grape-sized balls of bush-bee sugarbag honey for dessert. Marielle speaks of the couple’s long journey into the forest. Amsterdam as young lovers. From Amsterdam to London as students of science. From London to Shanghai and back to Amsterdam and then down into wild Australia.

  Greta watches the boy who fell from the sky sleeping inside a canvas sheet on the daybed beside the piano. A sleeping baby, she tells herself. Something so perfect and vulnerable in a world so deadly and cruel. Her vision is blurred briefly and she loses focus on the boy, so she rubs her eyes and considers how little sleep she has had since going on this foolhardy journey with the gravedigger girl. Foolhardy journey, she tells herself. Foolish journey, she tells herself. What on earth is an actress like Greta Maze doing in a cave for the dying in the middle of Australia’s northern nowhere? Why on earth is a Japanese fighter pilot by her side?

  She turns to Yukio and he smiles at her. There is a boy-like warmth to that smile. There is innocence.

  ‘Greta?’ Yukio begins. ‘Greta … okay?’

  And Greta dwells on those words of Yukio’s because there is something strange about the way those words came out. The way they came out so slowly from his mouth. Then Yukio taps the fingers of his right hand and waves his fingers oddly in front of his eyes.

  Greta turns to Lars and Marielle and she realises the room is warmer, the glow of it has brightened. Lars and Marielle speak of their strange cave hospice in the deep country; how they would travel deep into this forest on research trips from Darwin; how they decided one day to simply stay put. Why go back when the forest had everything they needed? ‘Anyone we met in the course of our journey, we invited into the forest to join us,’ Lars says. ‘Broken down and penniless Chinese goldminers. Starved Chinese farmers who’d fled to the forest hills when the towns of the Northern Territory had no place for them. Criminals and vagrants and men with dark pasts. They all had their reasons for coming, but they all came to ease the pain. And they all found salvation here in the underground.’

  A young Chinese woman brings a clay jug to the table. She places five clay mugs on the table before Lars and Marielle, who nods permission for the girl to pour drinks for the group. Molly watches a thick black liquid run into the mugs. It looks to her like syrup, but it’s the colour of the sarsaparilla in Bert Green’s lolly shop on Sugar Lane, that place of her dreams that belongs to a world that feels so far away now. She walked through that birth cave and she came out into a different time, a different world. Nothing makes sense in this new world.

  She looks at Greta. Even Greta seems different here. She looks at Yukio. He’s staring at a rock wall and his eyes seem different. There’s no more life in his face. She watches Lars sip his drink like it was breakfast tea. He closes his eyes after several sips, breathes deep.

  Marielle looks across the table at Greta. ‘Is that why you have come?’ she asks. ‘Have you come to ease the pain?’

  Greta focusses on the question. ‘What?’ she replies, and her mouth feels dry.

  ‘Why have you come to us?’ Marielle asks, smiling tenderly and speaking as softly as a cloud. ‘Have you come to ease the pain, Greta?’

  Greta has an answer to this question but she can’t wrap a knot around it in her mind. She can’t focus, but a name comes to her.

  ‘Longcoat Bob,’ she says.

  ‘Greta,’ Molly says.

  ‘We’re looking for Longcoat Bob,’ Greta says.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, Greta?’ Molly asks. She turns to Lars and points to her cup. ‘What is that stuff?’ she asks.

  ‘It will help you sleep,’ Lars says, sipping from his cup. ‘It will help you dream.’ He turns to Greta. ‘You will have dreams of love,’ he says. ‘It will take your pain away. It will drain the pain out of you and you will sleep for fifteen hours and you will wake with a clarity of mind that you did not think possible.’

  Greta studies the clay mug before her. Her fingers wrap around it.

  ‘We need to go, Greta,’ Molly says. ‘We need to find Longcoat Bob.’

  Marielle reaches a hand across the table and rests it on Molly’s wrist. ‘I’m so sorry, Molly,’ Marielle says.

  ‘What?’ Molly asks.

  ‘I’m so sorry, child,’ Marielle says mournfully.

  ‘Sorry for what?’

  She rubs Molly’s wrist. ‘So much pain,’ she whispers.

  Molly pulls her wrist from her touch. ‘What are you sorry for?’ she asks.

  ‘You will not find Longcoat Bob, child,’ Marielle says, gently. ‘Longcoat Bob has gone from us.’

  Molly studies Marielle’s face for a moment. The white-haired woman with the skeleton body. Her cheekbones high and the flesh on her face drawn into her mouth.

  ‘That’s not true,’ Molly says, indignant. ‘That’s not true. Sam said he went for a walk. He’s just gone walkabout.’

  Greta raises the mug in her right hand.

  ‘He’s dead, Molly,’ Marielle says. ‘You have come all this way for nothing.’

  ‘That’s a lie!’ Molly says. ‘You’re lying!’

  Lars discreetly leaves the table, walks over to the piano, sits down at it and raises the fallboard.

  ‘But you have found us now,’ Marielle says, softly. ‘You can rest now.’

  Lars begins to play. The Liebesträume. The love dream. Gentle keys. Soft notes falling into soft notes. And Greta drinks from the mug.

  ‘Don’t drink that, Greta!’ Molly calls. But Greta keeps drinking.

  ‘You can all stay here,’ Marielle says. ‘Y
ou can rest. You can sleep.’

  ‘I don’t want to sleep here,’ Molly says. ‘I don’t want to stay here.’

  Molly turns to the pilot but he, too, is drinking from his mug. ‘Yukio,’ she says. ‘We need to keep going.’

  ‘Do not be afraid, Molly,’ Marielle says. ‘We will take the pain away. You carry too much. Too much pain for one little girl.’

  Then a tear forms in Greta Maze’s right eye and it runs down her cheek. She turns to the sleeping baby she saved from the deep black water.

  ‘Have you come to ease the pain, Greta?’ Marielle asks.

  Another tear falling down the actress’s face. ‘Ease the pain, Greta,’ Marielle urges. ‘Ease the pain.’

  Greta rises gently from the dining table and she walks to the sleeping baby.

  ‘Greta, we have to go!’ Molly says.

  ‘I’m staying, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘I want to stop. I want to sleep.’ She lies down beside the infant and weeps openly now.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, Greta?’ Molly asks.

  ‘I’m staying Molly,’ Greta says. ‘I can’t walk with you no more.’

  ‘But we need to find Longcoat Bob!’ Molly says.

  ‘Stop, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘Stop it. I should never have come with you.’

  Molly stands up. ‘But you got us this far!’ she barks. ‘It was you who got us here.’

  Greta shakes her head, weeping. ‘I’m not what you think I am,’ Greta says. ‘You don’t need me, Molly. You’ve never needed anyone.’

  ‘I need you, Greta,’ Molly hollers. ‘I need you.’

  ‘You need to go home, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘We went too far in. You need to go home. You don’t belong here.’

  Molly rushes towards the bed. ‘I’m getting you out of here,’ she says and she reaches for Greta, pulls hard at her arm.

  ‘Get away from me!’ Greta screams, snapping. And her anger makes her cry harder and Molly can only step backwards from her friend in confusion. Greta turns her face back to the sleeping baby. ‘I won’t leave you,’ she whispers.

  Yukio rises from the table and he slowly walks over to Greta on the bed. He lies down on the other side of the boy, the child between them.

  ‘What are you doing, Yukio?’ Molly asks. ‘It’s that black stuff. They poisoned you, Yukio. They gave you poison. They’re gonna make you sleep here.’ Molly looks at the faces of all the skin-and-bone men and women, dazed and sleepy and half-dead and sinking into their stretchers and daybeds and worn and torn lounges. ‘They’re gonna make you sleep here forever!’

  Greta won’t stop weeping. ‘They took my child,’ she whispers through her tears. ‘They took my child.’

  Then tears fall from Yukio’s eyes. One tear, two tears, then a flood. He speaks in Japanese through his tears and he cries harder when he finishes his sentence. And Molly watches Greta reach an arm over to Yukio and Greta leaves that tender hand on his side and he reaches an arm over across the baby and he rests his trembling hand on her side and Molly watches these two strangers – her companions, her friends, her strange longwalk family – weeping together. Weeping without her because she is the girl who cannot cry. She is the girl who was born into the curse of Longcoat Bob. She is the girl whose heart will turn to stone. Then she hears more weeping from the dining table. It is Marielle. She is staring at Greta and Yukio, tears streaming down her face. Then she begins to wail loudly. Hysterically.

  ‘Stop it,’ Molly says.

  But Marielle keeps wailing.

  ‘Stop it,’ Molly says.

  Lars’s melancholy piano notes grow louder and then the pianist with hair like lightning begins to wail with his wife.

  ‘Ease the pain!’ Marielle howls. ‘Ease the pain!’

  ‘Eeeeeease the pain!’ Lars hollers.

  Lars’s tears fall onto his piano keys and a crazed guttural wail echoes through the orange-glow cave chamber and this wailing seems to make the near dead rise. The patients in their stretchers sit up and weep and others roll and squirm in their beds, releasing their own stored-up tears, spreading infections of weeping through the room and triggering one crazed and primal bout of sobbing after another.

  Molly screams, ‘Stop it. Stop! Stop!’

  But the lunatic wailings only build and they swirl around her dizzy head and she closes her eyes and blocks her ears with her palms and all she sees is her Uncle Aubrey now and all she hears is his deranged howling laughter and all she sees is his smile beneath his black moustache, his deep satisfaction rising up from the cave of his cold stone heart.

  She opens her eyes again and she finds Bert – the only friend she has in this upside-down world who is not crying. He’s guarding her duffel bag, which carries the rock that she pulled from the chest of her mother, where once a good and kind heart beat warmly.

  She grips her shovel and grips her bag and she runs. Dig, Molly, dig. Run, Molly, run. Run from this terrible mine. Run from this terrible wailing. Run towards the night. Run towards the night sky that tells no lies. Run towards the lightning. Run, Molly, run.

  He is content because the gastric mill of his digestive tract is grinding the body of an orange-footed scrubfowl swallowed whole some way back through the vine forest. And he’s almost home.

  The crocodile’s slender, darkly speckled snout pushes through a wall of evergreen ferns whose serrated fronds barely register on his pebbled and armoured scales. He can smell the waterfall almost as well as he can hear it, and he can see it all in colour. He stops at the edge of the black pool and his heavy, shielded triple eyelids open and close as he scans his surroundings for threats and prey. He moves his nine-foot body slowly forward to the smooth black rocks that edge the pool, but then he stops because his eyes have locked onto an object across the water. It is blurred to him, too far away to be clearly visible, but he registers it as a threat and, as always, his instincts are correct. Were he to slip into the water, swim nearer and, with his two eyes just above the surface, observe the object closely, he would see that it is organic. A thing of flesh and blood with a thick moustache, wearing a black hat and sitting on a rock. A man. A shadow. In his right hand he carries a gun. In his left he holds an empty can. He’s reading words roughly scribbled on a rock.

  No weights of gold to measure

  Only scales of truth and lies

  For we are living treasure

  Under all our shimmering skies

  The man in the black hat looks up at the waterfall, stares through it to the cave behind its cascading freshwater veil. He is so transfixed by what he sees that he pays no heed to the crocodile, which remains frozen at the water’s edge, breath slow, heart slow, then retreats quietly through the wall of evergreen ground ferns, convinced the waterfall now belongs to a new creature of the forest.

  He dreams of Darwin. His Zero fighter plane has stopped in the centre of Smith Street, the fuel gauge reading empty. He pushes open the cockpit canopy and he can see the town’s destruction. Every stone building ripped apart by bombs. A silence so heavy his own breathing sounds intrusive. No wind. No movement in the town. Only desolation.

  He climbs down from the cockpit and stands in the street, the only man here, the only man alive in all the world. He looks to his feet and he sees that he’s standing on a silver road, a road of glittering mica. And he walks up this straight silver road and he turns left and then right and he sees that this silver road is not fringed by vine forest but by the limbless bodies of dead Australians. Piles of bodies, hundreds of bodies, their arms and legs branching into other arms and legs like the limbs of the sprawling and nightmarish forest trees that he saw with the gravedigger girl and the actress. Flesh-and-blood pavements of women and men split by a thin silver road that he must walk down. He removes his soft pilot’s helmet out of respect for the dead, but he can’t bring himself to look sideways anymore so he looks down at his boots, his war boots crushing the silver flakes of mica as he walks and walks and walks until his boots have no more silver road to walk on because they
are blocked by a bed.

  It’s Nara’s bed and Nara lies upon it, sleeping. And Yukio Miki wants to lie down beside his wife but his body won’t move forward. His legs won’t walk and his arms won’t move. He wants nothing more than to fall asleep with Nara’s breath on his face, but he can only call to her. ‘Nara,’ he says. ‘Nara.’ And she wakes and she coughs twice because she is sick, but she smiles for him because she is strong and she always smiled for him like that.

  ‘Forgive me, Nara,’ Yukio says.

  ‘Forgive you for what, Yukio?’ Nara replies.

  ‘I was coming to you,’ Yukio says. ‘But I could not leave this world.’

  ‘You saw the woman in the grass,’

  ‘I thought there was no more beauty left to see,’ he says. ‘But then I saw it everywhere in this strange place. There was so much of it here I thought it must be Takamanohara.’

  ‘But, don’t you see, Yukio,’ Nara says. ‘It is. All of it. It always has been.’

  ‘I’m coming Nara,’ Yukio says.

  ‘But what about the girl?’ Nara asks.

  ‘The woman in the grass?’

  ‘The gravedigger girl, Yukio.’

  ‘The gravedigger girl,’ Yukio repeats, and he turns around to look at the ruins of Darwin town. Rubble and dust and waste. But there are no bodies in Smith Street now. There is no silver road. There are only butterflies, hundreds of white butterflies rising up to the blue sky.

  ‘Wait,’ Yukio calls to the butterflies. ‘Wait.’ But the butterflies keep rising.

  *

  He wakes in sweat. His flight jacket wet with it. The bed he lies on wet with it. An orange glow. Firelight. Rock walls. A dining table. Stretcher beds and daybeds and armchairs. All empty. He’s the only person there. His mind is slow and his brain is heavy, trying to replay the events that placed him inside this cave.

  His heart races and he stands quickly and collapses immediately, but then he stands again slowly and he moves to the dining table where he recalls spooning mouthfuls of onion soup, but little else. He stumbles groggily to an opening in the rock face and he looks down the corridor beyond it, but he can see nothing in the darkness. He moves back to the other side of the cave where another opening leads to another blind corridor. ‘Greta Maze,’ he calls in his best English, and his voice echoes down the corridor. ‘Molly Hook,’ he calls.