All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

  ‘Nooooooooo!’ Greta wails.

  Inside that pilot’s shirt is a man Greta barely knows. A stranger who fell from the sky. Embracing her. Shielding her. Arms wrapped so tight around the actress. His cheek against hers. And he doesn’t want to pull away because he is warm here and he is home here and he wants to stay here. But pull away he does. Blood spilling from his lips. ‘Run!’ he says.

  And the actress obeys and she grips the baby to her chest and rushes through a break in a nearby wall as a second bullet cracks the sandstone mere inches above her head.

  And Yukio Miki falls hard into the dust.

  *

  Molly watches the sky. Keep your eyes on the sky, Molly. Keep your eyes on the sky. The sky grows darker. On earth, the mad howling laughter of Aubrey Hook echoes across the sandstone maze.

  ‘Where are you going to run to, Greta?’ he calls, dragging the dead weight of Molly beside him in a headlock.

  Molly kicks hard at his shins. ‘Lemme go!’ she screams. And her fingernails dig into Aubrey’s forearms, but it only makes him laugh louder.

  That deranged howling. That terrible reminder of Hollow Wood. Molly bites his hand and Aubrey loses patience and throws the gravedigger girl with force against a sandstone pillar and she falls hard to the earth. As she sits up, he places the revolver’s barrel end hard against the top of her skull. Molly closes her eyes and tucks her head into her chest.

  ‘Please, Greta,’ Aubrey calls. ‘Show yourself, woman. I’m not angry at youuuuuuuu. I’m angry at young Molly here. Come out now and Molly might just make it out of this alive.’

  Molly moves her head away from the gun barrel and screams as loud as she can, ‘Keep runnin’, Greta. Don’t worry about me.’ And she looks up at Aubrey looking down at her. ‘I’m not scared of monsters.’

  Molly sees him smile a wide look of satisfaction and over his shoulder she sees a way out of this. A fork of lightning, cutlery dropped from a mansion in the sky. A sky gift for the gravedigger girl.

  *

  Deep inside the maze of stone pillars, Greta scurries breathlessly along alleyways, turning and turning. The baby wails in fright and she puts a hand over his mouth. ‘Sssssshhhhh,’ she whispers as she runs. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’ The boy continues to cry beneath her muffling hand. ‘Please be quiet. Ssshhhhhh.’

  Greta is crying now, too, but she keeps her weeping silent. ‘Ssshhhhh,’ she whispers again, as much to herself as to the baby.

  The endless howling of Aubrey Hook’s laughter. The confidence in his voice. The whole black shadow of his being spreading across the stone city.

  ‘You left me for dead, Greta!’ he calls across the maze. ‘You left me for dead in that miserable, godforsaken cemetery.’

  Stone pillars gathering around Greta. Leaning over her. Pressing down on her. They want to take her. They want to drag her back to Aubrey Hook but she won’t let them.

  She’s spent from the running. Spent from the crocodiles in Candlelight Creek and the monsters in the tin mine and the sleepers and the dreamers and the poison-eaters inside the vine forest. She has to stop. She leans over her knees to suck in air. The baby feels so heavy. She turns in a circle looking for a place to hide and she sees an alley running to what looks like a wall of shrubbery. And shrubbery means the edge of the forest and the edge of the forest means a way out of the maze. So she runs down the alley and she’s almost at the forest edge when again she hears the voice of Aubrey Hook. Too close now. Too close for her to make a single movement.

  ‘You’ll die out here alone, Greta,’ Aubrey calls. ‘Show yourself.’

  Greta crouches down, presses her back against a stone wall. Even the baby senses the danger in Aubrey’s voice and he stays silent, though Greta does not remove her hand from his mouth.

  ‘I won’t hurt you,’ Aubrey calls. ‘I love you, Greta.’

  Even closer now. Greta realises he must be on the other side of the very stone wall she is leaning against, with her knees up to her chest where the baby rests. She can hear Aubrey’s footsteps, his boots on the gravel.

  She shuffles along the stone wall towards the forest edge until she runs out of wall. She cannot move any further, can only listen to his footsteps coming closer to her. One more corner for him to turn and Greta Maze will be lost again in the shadow of Aubrey Hook.

  One step. Two steps. Three steps. Greta breathes deep to hold her silence in.

  ‘Are you there, Greta?’ Aubrey calls. ‘I know you’re there, Greta!’

  Then the voice of Molly Hook. ‘Stop it,’ she says, flatly.

  ‘Let her go,’ Molly says. ‘Let her go and I’ll take you to Longcoat Bob’s gold. I know exactly where it is, Uncle Aubrey. You can have it all. You can have everything you’ve ever wanted. But you can’t have her.’

  Silence now in the city of stone. Aubrey Hook turning to face Molly.

  ‘And how will you find Longcoat Bob’s gold out here?’ he asks.

  ‘I’ll follow the lightning,’ Molly says.

  Aubrey turns just in time to see a fork of lightning shooting down from the gathering storm clouds. He turns back to Molly, points his revolver at her heart.

  ‘Walk,’ he says.

  Pressed against the sandstone wall, Greta waits for the sound of Aubrey’s boots to fade. Then she scampers low to the edge of the maze, a wall of shrubs with white fruits, and she ducks down into them with the baby at her chest and she crawls and crawls to the only safety she has now – the safety of the vine forest. But she’s moving so fast and so frantically that she doesn’t see that the shrubs screen a sharp gully slope and as she pushes face-first through the final layer of shrubs she drops down this unseen slope and it takes every ounce of her strength to roll to one side and hug the baby to her chest as she shoulder-slides on loose leaves and dirt and grass to the gully floor, which she hits with a thud.

  Her view from the gully floor is of yellow flame trees. A cluster of floral fire lit by a kind of yellow Greta once thought she would see only in her dreams. But there is still danger in this gully. Footsteps. Someone padding across the forest floor. Someone so close there is no use in moving. And she resigns herself to the shadow of Aubrey Hook. He heard her in the shrubbery, she tells herself, and he followed her down the gully. She was foolish to think she could ever escape him.

  The footsteps stop. Silence in the forest. Then a man leans into her view, blocking the fire of the flame trees. An old man. Black skin. A very old man. Grey hair. And a long black military coat with gold trim the colour of the leaves on a yellow flame tree.

  The blue sky over Darwin saw too much, she tells herself. It could not understand the horrors it witnessed and it ran away with the wind to think on them. The sky is grey now and the grey sky will not speak to Molly.

  A gunpoint walk across sandstone rubble and earth. Her dig boots on rock. Her sky-blue dress. Her Uncle Aubrey a few paces behind her, a hand inside her duffel bag.

  Follow the lightning. Yellow forks dropped from mansions in the sky. The crashing lightning but still no rain. The sky can wallop but it cannot weep. She wants to go above it now. She wants to go beyond the sky to where her mother is and where her grandfather Tom Berry could tell her the true story of the long walk and she could look into his face and see when he was lying.

  She places a palm against her chest. Her fingers feel for her heart, push down on her chest. I do not fear death, she tells herself. And if she does not fear death – if there is a part of her that wants her uncle to end it all here with a bullet in the back of her head – then surely her heart has finally turned all the way to stone. The curse is complete, she tells herself. No blue sky to tell me any different. No blue sky to tell me lies I want to hear. Only grey sky truth. She had to leave, she tells herself. She had to escape. Mum could not stay. She could not live. With. The. Grey. Sky. Truth. She could not stay. With—

  ‘Stop there,’ Aubrey Hook instructs Molly.

  Him.

  They stand at the edge of the maze. T
he lightning has led them out.

  A high sandstone plateau. Tree-lined edges falling away on either side to canyons far below. Only one direction to go now. Straight ahead. They can hear water. Fast water. Rapids.

  Aubrey stands alongside Molly. He holds Tom Berry’s goldminer’s pan in his hands. He runs a finger along the back of the pan. The final line.

  Own all you carry, carry all you own

  Step inside your heart of stone

  ‘What does that mean?’ Aubrey asks.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand it,’ Molly says. ‘You have to be graceful to understand it. You have to be poetic.’

  Aubrey places his right hand on the back of Molly’s neck. He squeezes hard. ‘Let me try to understand,’ he whispers. He shakes her hard.

  Molly says nothing.

  ‘What does it mean?’ Aubrey barks through clenched teeth. He pushes her head closer to the pan.

  Molly reads the words.

  Own all you carry, carry all you own

  Step inside your heart of stone

  ‘It means we must face the truth of who we are, Uncle Aubrey,’ she says. ‘Everything you have ever done and everything you will ever do … you must own it. Because you are those things. You carry those things with you. My grandfather knew this. My grandfather knew the person he had become. He couldn’t escape it. Wherever he went, he had to carry himself with him.’

  She looks up into Aubrey’s eyes. ‘You must own all you carry too, Uncle Aubrey,’ she says. ‘Step inside your heart of stone. You must embrace it now. Step inside it. You are the heart of stone.’

  ‘Where’s the gold?’ he asks, impatient.

  ‘All you’ve ever wanted was treasure,’ Molly says.

  ‘Where is it?’ Aubrey barks.

  ‘My mum was treasure,’ she says. ‘She glowed. She was like the glowing. She made you gold sick. So sick that you had to have her.’

  ‘Where is it?’ Aubrey barks.

  Molly looks across the plateau to a path that climbs to a ridgeline running across the horizon.

  ‘It’s just beyond that ridge,’ Molly says.

  Aubrey steps back and points the handgun at the space between Molly’s eyes.

  ‘Walk,’ he says.

  *

  They pass boulders in piles and boulders standing alone. One shaped like a hot-air balloon. Another like a tractor wheel. The gravedigger girl and the shadow walk beneath the grey sky. Half a mile. One full mile into a high range. Angular pyramidal shapes and jagged edges that remind Molly of the thorny devil lizards she once saw with her father in the central deserts beyond Tennant Creek. The path bends around a series of broken ridges that remind Molly of the meat-tearing canine teeth of the stray dogs of Darwin town, then it curls dangerously along the right edge of an exposed plateau and Molly stops to assess the drop to the canyon below. She kicks a red-coloured rock and she leans over the edge of the plateau to watch it bounce three times down an almost-sheer rock face and disappear into a vine forest canopy maybe a hundred yards below them.

  The path narrows to less than a foot wide as it skirts a granite ridge that blocks their passage to the other side of the sprawling range.

  ‘Keep moving,’ Aubrey says.

  ‘The path’s not wide enough,’ Molly says, studying it. Loose rocks and yellow dirt drop away sharply. ‘This is a path for rock wallabies, not gravediggers,’ she says. ‘We gotta turn back.’

  ‘Walk,’ Aubrey says.

  Molly turns her head right and peers into the canyon below, her cold skin telling her to turn back to the rock face on her left. She turns that way and hugs the ridge wall as she steps sideways, one slow and sure foot after the other, along the narrow path, her uncle following close behind. Pressing her chest against the rock, she feels for handholds but finds only smooth grey granite. She keeps shuffling along, boot after boot after boot, and then one of those boots steps on a loose rock and Molly slips and she feels her body part from the rock face. Her arms flail, trying to find something to take hold of, but all she can grip in her fists is air and her body falls backwards towards the canyon below. Then a hand wraps around her left wrist as she falls and all the weight of the gravedigger girl is dangling from the bony left arm of Aubrey Hook, who screams in pain as the girl’s weight pulls on the festering wound from his brother’s rabid dog bite back in godforsaken Hollow Wood Cemetery.

  Aubrey’s agonised wailing echoes across the canyon and he closes his eyes to fight the pain and when he opens them again he’s staring into the eyes of Molly Hook. Own all you carry, he tells himself. Carry all you own. The eyes of Molly Hook. Lift her up, he tells himself. Let her go, he tells himself. Step inside your heart of stone, he tells himself. The girl offers nothing. The girl, he tells himself, is ready to fall.

  Then Molly poses a question he has never asked himself. ‘Why could you not love me?’ she asks.

  Such calm in the way she asks it. Such ease in the way she hangs from his hand.

  Let her fall, he thinks. Lift her up, he thinks. And he howls as he lifts the gravedigger girl back up to the narrow path. As he drops her, he catches his breath and she does too, her body pressed flat against the hard granite wall.

  ‘Walk,’ he whispers.

  *

  They march across a tableland of red sandstone studded with clusters of ironwood and paperbark trees. The stone is cracked and layered, forming natural steps in places and wide slabs that look like theatre stages where Greta Maze could perform all five acts of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Molly hopes Greta Maze made it out of the maze. She hopes she’s on her way back to Darwin now. I never should have mentioned the gold pan map to her, she thinks. I never should have dragged her through the darkness of Candlelight Creek. Never dragged her through the colourful wonders of the floodplains.

  Yukio, Molly says to herself. She wishes Yukio Miki had never fallen from the sky. And if she has a stone heart inside her, it’s fracturing and cracking in two. It is useless to her now. Rock is not hard. Rock is brittle. Rock is weak.

  ‘Rapids,’ Molly says. She hears them first. Then she sees them.

  They have come to an open expanse of rugged sandstone cut deep by two parallel rivers tumbling down from higher up the range on Molly’s left, their white waters rushing through narrow gorges towards the eastern edge of the plateau. Molly steps towards the first gorge and feels the spray from the water slamming against rocks. The gorge is about fifteen yards wide and there is only one place where it can be crossed: a thin makeshift bridge made of four slender eucalypt trunks tied together with thick vine. The bridge is not fixed in place, its ends simply resting on the rock, and with the rapids roaring no more than six feet below them, the tree trunks have turned slimy and black and slippery. Molly walks to the start of the bridge and turns around to look tentatively at Aubrey.

  ‘Walk,’ he says, not feeling the need, yet, to point the handgun at Molly.

  Molly steps carefully onto the bridge. She puts her arms out to balance herself and she shifts some weight onto her left leg to test the integrity of the structure, which tilts and bends even under her modest weight. But she walks on, boot after boot after boot, and the tree trunks bear her weight. Halfway across, though, she makes the mistake of looking down and she is momentarily transfixed by the rapids’ power, the deadly confusion of all that pressure and all that water and all that rock in a meeting that has lasted millennia. Her legs wobble briefly, but she looks up and focusses on the end of the bridge and her balance is restored. She’s so frightened and in such a hurry to get off the tree trunk platform that she shuffle-runs across the last six feet or so. Reaching solid ground, she exhales and closes her eyes before turning round to watch Aubrey make his unsteady way across.

  She asks things of the water. Take him down. Take him down, down, down into the black. She watches him step awkwardly to the centre of the bridge then she looks down at her end of it. She could heave that end up and tip the whole bridge into the water and Aubrey Hook would be tossed
in with it. He would be sucked over the side of the range and his shadow would never cross her light again.

  ‘Get back,’ Aubrey calls from the bridge, pointing his gun at Molly. ‘Right back.’

  Molly retreats as Aubrey advances to the end of the bridge.

  ‘Walk,’ he says.

  *

  It’s a short walk across stone to the second river, where the bridge is made of just three eucalypts but the crossing is only ten yards wide. The gravedigger girl steps carefully across it. On the other side the plateau ends at a narrow sandstone promontory. It’s oval and featureless. There is nothing here. There is nothing but rock and air and sheer drops on all sides. To her left she can look over the edge and see the rivers dropping down the side of the range then merging and running beneath a majestic rock arch. To her right she can see another river system being sucked into a narrow valley that, she thinks, must push the water on down the range so that it can end with a curtain-call bow at one of those spectacular waterfalls that spills into the kind of crystal pools that exist only in dreams – dreams that unfold in colour far above the grey sky.

  And from that grey sky the lightning strikes again and the wild and terrifying grandeur of this strange place wraps itself around the gravedigger girl. The dream of it. A paradise for her light and for her black shadow. A city of elaborate, ancient rock architecture threaded by rivers that twist and turn and dive deep into black holes. The promontory feels like the central point of all this natural wonder and she turns in a circle to drink in the cave dwellings she can see on a distant cliff face, the rainbow-coloured and red and black velvet birds flying in circles around her. These birds call as if they are welcoming her, as if they are congratulating her for coming so far into the deep country. She breathes deep and she smells the rapids and she senses the earth shifting deep, deep, deep underground and she feels the electric air that turns like this only when it’s about to storm in the north of a raw southern land. And the Lightning Man in the sky mansion bends the rods down from his ears and the forks of his magic seem to strike directly above Molly Hook’s head and the wind blows her hair across her face and it blows the hemline on her sky-blue dress and the grey sky wants to weep so hard that the gravedigger girl can feel it in her cold bones. And she looks ahead across the rough surface of the narrow promontory and she can see now where she must go. So she starts walking towards the edge of the plateau, some twenty yards in front of her.