All Our Shimmering Skies

The snake’s headless body wriggles around Bert’s blade face as Molly sweeps it and the black head out the laundry door and into the cemetery yard. Molly rewards her efforts by sticking her open mouth under the laundry tap and letting the town water that tastes like rust and dirt flow down her throat and spill over her chin. Then a voice from the front driveway to the house: ‘“Out damned spot! Out, I say!”’

The words of Shakespeare floating over gravestones, floating over the dead.

‘“What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?”’

The words of a woman, shouting.

‘“Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.”’

Molly turns the laundry tap off, the tap grips digging hard into her palm until the tap stops dripping, then scurries out the laundry door and along the rotting grey timber slats of the house’s left-side exterior wall. Uncle Aubrey’s rusting red utility truck is parked in the long dirt driveway. Standing on the hulking truck’s back tray is a slim blonde woman in a striking red polka-dot dress – her uncle’s sometime lady friend, Greta Maze.

Truck trays are stages for Greta Maze. Footpaths are stages for Greta Maze. Wet bar tops and soapboxes and bathroom floors and swimming pools are stages for Greta Maze. She stands on the tray with a well-thumbed script in her right hand by her waist, deep into the monologue. ‘“The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now? What, will these hands ne’er be clean? No more o’ that, my lord, no more o’ that: you mar all with this starting.”’

That tight red summer dress with white spots, a fitted waist with cuffs just above the elbows, patch pockets – one for Greta’s smokes and matches, another for her hip flask filled with more air than cheap whisky. The sight of that dress makes Molly smile and her smile widens further when she spots Greta’s brown and white two-tone, low-heel canvas saddle shoes, the kind Molly would love to dance in one day when she’s older and when she’s not digging graves anymore. Greta’s wild blonde curls all form a great wave that crashes like a force of nature over her left ear. Round brown sunglasses over her eyes, and perfect porcelain skin that will never be tainted by all the exposure it gets to the soft lights of Darwin’s beer halls and gin joints and deep Chinatown basement opium dens.

Greta watches Molly approach the truck tray and her heels spring up an inch, her voice becomes louder, her performance more heartfelt, for she now has an audience. She smells her own hands, and her character, her latest grand local theatre role, is repulsed by them. ‘“Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!”’

Greta squeezes her hands together, urgent, dismayed. Crazed.

‘“Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale.”’ She paces back and forth along the truck tray. ‘“To bed, to bed! There’s knocking at the gate.”’

Greta rushes to the edge of the tray and extends her hand to Molly. ‘Come, come, come, come, give me your hand.’

Molly reaches her hand up to Greta, and it’s thrilling for her to play a small part in this show. This acting. This art. All the way out here in dead-end Hollow Wood. The actress kneels down and grips the gravedigger girl’s fingertips, and the touch of those fingers brings comfort to her character, but that comfort is too brief and too late. And Greta stares into Molly’s eyes, breathless and distraught, and Greta removes her sunglasses to study Molly’s face, unfiltered, and she weeps in front of her, tears welling in her emerald eyes and falling over the clean, cushioned landscape of her cheeks. And Molly wants to cry with her, but she can’t, so she simply stares in wide-mouthed wonder.

‘“What’s done cannot be undone,”’ the actress whimpers, like all hope is lost for her now, and Molly doesn’t even know why but she wants to change things for this troubled woman. Then Greta stands and turns away from her audience of one and pads slowly to the other side of the truck tray, the back of her stage, and she drops her head and freezes there in the timeless silence that is broken eventually by Molly’s rapturous applause.

‘Bravo!’ Molly hollers.

Greta turns around to accept her applause, waving to the imaginary audience up in the cheap seats. She puts her sunglasses back on, nods her head twice in thanks, and takes an elaborate bow. Then she reaches for her hip flask. She raises a toast towards Molly then takes a triumphant post-performance guzzle of spirits.

She offers the flask to Molly. ‘You fancy a blast?’

‘No, thanks,’ Molly says.

Greta nods. ‘Smart kid,’ she says, capping the flask, resting her backside on the tray and leaning her back against the truck’s cab.

‘I made a meal of that “thane of Fife had a wife” line, didn’t I?’ Greta says.

‘No, not at all,’ Molly says, certain of it. ‘You were spectacular.’

Greta lights a smoke. ‘I was, wasn’t I.’ She smiles, breathing in then blowing smoke.

‘What’s it from?’ Molly asks.

‘The Palmerston Players are doing a two-week run of Macbeth,’ Greta says. ‘That’s Lady Macbeth sleepwalking through her castle, rambling all of her black confessions.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘She’s mad as a cut snake,’ Greta says. ‘Her feller’s even worse.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘He keeps hearing strange voices in his head, keeps seeing things that aren’t really there.’

Molly dwells on this. ‘I think I hear voices in my head,’ she says.

Greta nods. ‘Of course you do, you’re mad as a box of frogs.’ She winks. ‘That’s why I like you. Nuts like you and me should always mix together.’

Molly beams a smile. ‘I talk to the sky sometimes,’ she confesses.

Greta smiles immediately: ‘Who doesn’t?’

‘You talk to the sky, Greta?’

‘Sure.’

‘Does it ever talk back to you?’

‘Sure.’ Greta shrugs.

‘What’s it sound like when it talks back to you?’

‘My sky sounds like Humphrey Bogart.’

Molly laughs.

‘What’s it sound like to you?’ Greta says.

Molly looks up to the sky as she ponders this. Turns back to Greta.

‘I can’t make it out,’ Molly says. ‘It sounds a bit like me. But me if I was a lot older.’

Greta nods.

‘You think it’s really the sky talkin’ to me?’ Molly asks.

‘If you’re hearin’ it, then I guess it’s talkin’ to ya,’ Greta says.

‘I sometimes see things out bush that aren’t really there,’ Molly says, proudly now.

‘How wonderful!’ Greta says. ‘Like what?’

‘Like the other week we were way up Rapid Creek and I thought I saw Medusa.’

‘Medusa?’ Greta echoes. ‘Like, scary Greek monster Medusa?’

‘Like in Mum’s bookshelf up there,’ Molly says.

Greta knows the shelf. She’s run her fingers along the spines of the dusty old black and brown and olive-green and blue hardbacks that Violet Hook bought mostly from the Collins Bookshop on Knuckey Street, using spare grocery money collected over many weeks. Greta’s run her eyes over those titles and admired the woman’s taste, wished she had more time to read as much as Violet must have read. Collections of poetry, mostly. Irish poets and English and American poets. The Song of Brotherhood by the Australian poet John Le Gay Brereton. She’s fond of Victor Daley and his Sydney poems. She’s opened his book Wine and Roses, and she’s smiled at ‘The Woman at the Washtub’, pictured that poem as her own sad life summary and even her epitaph should her greatest fear come true: to live the rest of her days with Aubrey Hook, trapped forevermore inside the small hot kitchen of the small hot two-bedroom corrugated iron shell of a house he rents in Darwin town and on one sorry, inevitable day be buried in the hard dirt of this godforsaken cemetery.

HERE LIES GRETA MAZE

SHE WAS BORN FOR THE STAGE.

SHE DIED DOING THE DISHES.

‘THE WOMAN AT THE WASHTUB, SHE WORKS TILL FALL OF NIGHT; WITH SOAP AND SUDS AND SODA HER HANDS ARE WRINKLED WHITE. HER DIAMONDS ARE THE SPARKLES THE COPPER-FIRE SUPPLIES; HER OPALS ARE THE BUBBLES THAT FROM THE SUDS ARISE …’

‘Mum had a book on Greek mythology there,’ Molly continues. ‘And I’d been reading about Medusa and how she turned all them blokes to stone just because they looked at her, and then I’m walking through the mangroves of Rapid Creek and I swear I see Medusa standing in the middle of the scrub up ahead. And she’s got all her snakes wriggling from her head and I shoot my head down straightaway because I don’t want to be turned to stone but eventually I look up because I can’t resist, you know …’

‘Well, of course, you can’t,’ Greta says.

‘And I look up at her and …’ Molly says, excited by the telling.

‘And did you turn to stone?’ Greta asks.

Molly shakes her head, almost disappointed. ‘No, because it wasn’t Medusa. It was half a trunk from a dead ironwood tree with a shabby hawk’s nest sticking out the top.’

Greta drags on her smoke, shakes her head. ‘And here I was thinking it was gonna be a Greek monster out in that Darwin scrub.’

Molly shrugs, moves quickly on because she can move quickly on from anything. Beltings. Burns. Bereavement. Burials. Blood.

‘What’s the spot on the lady’s hands?’ Molly asks.

‘It’s blood,’ Greta says. ‘But it’s not really blood. It’s guilt. Her and her feller, Macbeth, have done terrible things to get where they’ve got to, and they’re cursed by the past.’

‘Cursed?’ Molly echoes.

‘Yeah, cursed, kid,’ Greta says. ‘The stains of the past. Ol’ Lady Macbeth, she can’t wash those stains away.’

Greta drags on her smoke, exhales. ‘You ever had any stains you couldn’t wash away, Molly?’

‘Just cut the neck off a brown snake in the laundry,’ she says. ‘A bit of blood got on the concrete, but I’ll just wash that away with some water, maybe some metho if it don’t come out.’

Greta smiles. ‘Guess Lady Macbeth could have used a splash of methylated spirits.’

Another drag on her cigarette. Greta studying her script.

‘How do you cry like that?’ Molly asks.

‘What do you mean?’

‘How does an actress just cry any time she wants to?’

‘That doesn’t just happen any time I want it to happen,’ Greta says. ‘I’ve got to build up to it. I’ve got to earn it. I’ve got to bleed for it, Molly Hook.’ Greta points a finger to her temple. ‘I’m saying those lines up here,’ she says. Then she places a hand on her chest. ‘But I’m feeling those lines in here, and all the time I’m feeling those lines I’m also feeling things I’ve felt before in my life. That’s what you gotta do to be true, Molly. You gotta go down deep inside your heart and soul and you gotta find that dark and scary and fragile place you’ve been to before. You know what I mean. We all have a place like that.’

Molly smiles. ‘I wish I could do what you can do.’

Greta shifts the way she’s sitting, slides her backside along the tray, leans over the tray edge, taking another puff on her smoke.

‘Close your eyes,’ she says.

Molly closes her eyes.

‘Now keep those peepers shut and go to your place, Molly,’ Greta says.

‘What if I don’t like my place?’ Molly askes. ‘Why would anyone want to go to the place that makes them sad?’

‘Because sadness is the truest emotion,’ Greta says. ‘Happiness isn’t to be trusted. It’s a bald-faced liar. But the truth of your sadness enriches every other thing inside you, especially your joy. You shouldn’t be afraid to go to the place that makes you sad, Molly Hook. The more you go to that dark place inside you, the lighter it gets. You go there enough times, you realise that dark place is actually your sacred place. That place is all of you and the tears you take from that place are just the darkness leaking out, precious drop by precious drop. You following me?’

‘No,’ Molly says.

‘Keep your eyes closed for sixty seconds,’ Greta says.

Molly closes her eyes.

‘You’re standing in darkness,’ Greta says.

Ten seconds.

‘You don’t realise it but you’re actually standing inside a large stone cave in total darkness.’

Twenty seconds. Greta studies the girl’s face. So trusting. So ready for the experience. So ready to embrace the unknown. She sees parts of herself at twelve. She can’t help but smile at the girl because she knows her past and she worries about her future, but the poor little gravedigger girl, mad as a box of frogs, seems to worry about nothing.

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

Thirty seconds.

‘Then a circle of fire that is a door knob, and you can touch this fire because it’s cool and your hand reaches out to that door knob and you turn that door knob and that door opens outwards and you walk into your sacred place and you see it so close and real that you could reach out and touch the memory of it.’

And then in her mind in this strange and long minute, Molly Hook stands in the dark before an open door and she knows that door is the one to her bedroom just up there in the cemetery house. She hears something beyond the open bedroom door. A thumping sound.

Forty seconds. ‘Do you see it, Molly?’ Greta asks from the truck tray. ‘Do you feel it?’

Molly’s eyes still closed. Thump, thump. Something banging against a wall in the bedroom down the hall. Mum and Dad’s bedroom. Violet and Horace’s bedroom. Molly rubs her eyes and walks slowly down the hall, her open palms brushing against the hallway walls. Walking blind but following the sound of the thumping. Thump, thump. And she hears something else now. It’s the sound of something animal. The sound of the wolf.

Small steps along the hallway and she sees a light to her right and turns to look into the kitchen off the hall. An empty table and a half-drunk bottle of whisky. Thump, thump. In front of her is the closed bedroom door at the end of the hall and she reaches her hand out to the door knob and she realises the door isn’t fully closed and she can push it open with the gentlest tap of her left hand. And what she sees in that bedroom is a full moon through the bedroom window and the silver light of that floating night sky orb falling on the face of her mother, Violet Hook, lying on her back in her bed, her nightclothes torn from her shoulders. The high, dark brown wooden bedhead banging against the wall. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. And there is something animal atop Molly’s mother. A thing cloaked in shadow. Crawling and turning like a wolf. And in the moonlight she can see only the creature’s hairy arms and claws, its long fingers digging into her mother’s ribs. And the moonlit face of Violet Hook turns from the window to the bedroom door and it finds Molly Hook because that face has always found Molly Hook, and Violet Hook begins to weep silently in the moonlight but the weeping doesn’t stop the bedhead from banging the wall and the weeping doesn’t stop the animal from crawling across her.

Then a voice from the kitchen. And that voice makes no sense to her. ‘Molly!’ And the girl turns back to the kitchen light to find her father, Horace, sitting at the kitchen table, his right hand gripping the whisky bottle. Then Molly can’t help but turn back towards the moonlight in the bedroom to find the face of the animal that’s now raised its head from the shadow. The face of the wolf.

Another five seconds.

‘Now open your eyes,’ Greta says.

Molly opens her eyes.

‘What did you see when you opened the door?’ Greta asks.

‘Nothing,’ Molly says. ‘I only saw black.’

‘Nothing?’ Greta asks, resting her back once more on the tray’s rear wall. ‘You don’t have a single memory that makes you feel sad?’

Molly shakes her head. ‘I don’t think I can feel sad. I don’t think I’m even able to cry.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Greta says. ‘All kids cry. I cried enough tears as a kid to fill Sydney Harbour.’

‘I haven’t cried since I was seven,’ Molly says.

Greta’s face goes blank. She knows what happened to the girl at seven.

‘I try sometimes,’ Molly says. ‘I stare into a mirror and I think of everything that ever happened to me that should make me cry, but those things never make me cry.’

‘What do they make you feel?’

‘They make me feel like running.’

Greta studies the girl’s face, fascinated. She shakes her head at Molly. ‘Well, I guess you’re lucky, kid,’ she says, returning her eyes to her script. ‘Every bastard out there wants to make us girls cry. No such pleasure from our young Molly Hook!’

‘My heart is turning …’ Molly says, softly.

Greta doesn’t hear. ‘What’s that?’ she asks.

‘Nuthin’,’ Molly says. She pauses for a moment. ‘Greta?’

‘Yeah, kid.’

‘What do you see when you open the door?’

Greta turns her face to Molly. Weighs up her company, smiles. She comes close to saying something true. She comes close to saying that there is a white room beyond her open door. She comes close to saying that there is a newborn baby girl in that room and that girl is in her arms. But then she closes the door, slams it shut in her mind.

‘Naah, sorry hon’,’ she says. ‘Can’t give away all my acting secrets.’ She looks at the sun. Looks at the sky. Shift the gaze, change the subject. ‘Those boys nearly done?’ she asks.

‘Almost.’

‘They make me sick,’ Greta says.

‘It’s not them.’

‘It’s not?’

‘No,’ Molly says. ‘It’s the curse.’

‘Oh, of course, I forgot,’ Greta says. ‘The great curse of Longcoat Bob’s lost gold! You still gettin’ worked up by all that bush hocus-pocus, Molly Hook?’

‘Don’t you wonder about all the bad things that have happened to my family?’ Molly asks.

‘Hate to break it to you, Molly, but bad things sometimes happen around bad people. That’s a fact of life. Got nuthin’ to do with blackfeller magic.’

‘You think I’m a bad person?’

‘No, Mol’,’ Greta says. ‘You’re not bad. You’re not bad at all.’

Greta lies back on the tray now and raises her knees, as though sunbaking. ‘That gold wasn’t cursed, kid,’ she says. ‘If I knew where that gold was today I’d be grabbing your mate Bert there and I’d be diggin’ for my fortune, safe in the knowledge there are no kinds of magic in this world, black or otherwise. There’s only people, Molly. There are good ones and there are bad ones and then there’s all of us nuts stuck in the middle.’

Greta’s eyes study the script she holds up now to block the full sun from her face. She hasn’t noticed, but Molly has, that her summer dress has fallen between her legs, and bruising – scarlet and violet and blue bruising – can be seen on her inner thighs. Finger-shaped bruises. Stains on the skin that won’t wash out.

‘Do you love Uncle Aubrey?’ Molly asks.

Greta takes another shot from the flask, winces on the burn of the spirits.

‘Yeah, I love him,’ she says. ‘But I hate him, too.’

‘He’s a bad one,’ Molly says, matter-of-factly.

Greta pockets the flask. Looks at Molly’s face, expressionless.

With the toe of her right boot, Molly traces a circle, a moon, in the gravel driveway beneath her. ‘How do you love someone and hate them at the same time?’ she asks.

‘You’ll understand when you find a man of your own.’

‘What if I already have found a man of my own?’

Greta turns to Molly, beams a smile. ‘Good for you, gravedigger girl! He handsome this boy?’

‘Very much so,’ Molly says, certain of it. ‘He looks like Tyrone Power, except if only Tyrone Power was a blackfeller from out past Mataranka.’

‘And what might this boy’s name be?’

‘His name’s Sam, and he’s not a boy, he’s a man. He’s sixteen and he’s got a job shooting buffalo with Johnston Traders. He makes good money.’

‘Then why are you still here in this shithole cemetery? Why don’t you run away with Sam the sixteen-year-old man who makes good money?’

‘Dad would never let me leave.’

‘Who said you have to ask for his permission?’

Molly’s never thought of it that way. Maybe she could just leave. She turns to the front gate of the cemetery house. It’s open. It’s only thirty or so yards to the front gate. Maybe five more miles into town. Maybe three thousand more miles to Brisbane, Queensland. Maybe ten thousand more miles to Hollywood, California.

Molly grips the side of the tray, swings her body back and forth, bending her knees as she does.

‘Why are you still here?’ Molly asks.

‘Huh,’ Greta says.

‘You should be on stage in London,’ Molly says. ‘You should be starring in films in Hollywood. Then I could see your name in lights at the Star. “Humphrey Bogart, Vivien Leigh, and introducing … the toast of Darwin, Australia … Greta Maze”.’

Greta smiles. Full lips; a top lip that curls when it feels like it. She likes the thought of those lights. ‘Can’t,’ she says. ‘Got too much on my plate, right here.’

Molly’s still looking at Greta’s thighs, but not just the bruising now. It’s the shape of her legs, her femininity, the silver screen in them.

‘Greta?’

‘Yeah, kid?’

‘Is it true that Maze isn’t your real last name?’

‘It’s true.’

‘What’s your real name?’

‘Baumgarten. Greta Waltraud Baumgarten.’

‘Why’d you change your name?’

‘Nobody wants to see a Kraut name like that up in lights beside “John Wayne”.’

‘I like Maze,’ Molly says.

Greta smiles.

‘It makes you seem mysterious, like it’s hard to work you out. There are twists and turns all through you.’

Greta nods. ‘You can find your way into Greta Maze, but you may never find your way back out,’ she says.

Molly smiles. She pictures Greta in silver screen black and white. That perfect face in black and white, emerging from a cloud of Humphrey Bogart’s cigarette smoke. Bogie and Baumgarten. Bogie and Maze. Those porcelain pins in black and white. The bruising wouldn’t look so harsh in black and white. And the big film studios have make-up artists to cover up that sort of thing. Dottie Drake from the Fannie Bay hair salon told Molly all about the make-up artists in Hollywood, how they could cover up anything, from the bags under Joan Crawford’s eyes to Errol Flynn’s split lip.

‘Do you think I could ever change my name?’ Molly asks.

‘Of course you could. Anyone can. What’s your new name gonna be?’

Molly thinks for a long moment, tilts her head upwards.

‘Sky,’ she says.

Greta looks up, too.

‘I like that,’ Greta says. ‘You could jazz up that first name, though’ – she thinks for a moment – ‘give it a splash of Dietrich,’ she says.

Molly beams. Gasps the name, whispers it like it’s sacred: ‘Marlene Sky.’

Greta nods, eyes still up in the sky. ‘Well, would you look at that!’ she says.

‘What?’ asks Molly.

‘Up there. It’s your name up in lights.’

Molly laughs. And they both stare into the sky for a moment, the sky that’s so far away from their dark caves and their silly fire-traced doors leading to dark places. Molly looks again at Greta’s bruises.

‘Greta?’ Molly begins.

‘Yeah, kid.’

‘I heard my dad talking about you to his limestone supplier,’ Molly says.

Greta turns to Molly, follows her eyes to the leg bruising. She sits up self-consciously, pulls the dress back over her knees.

‘And what did your father say about me?’

‘He said you take your clothes off for money in the Edinburgh Arms pub.’

Greta sucks on another cigarette, pulls her sunglasses down over her nose. ‘Did anyone ever tell you that you talk too much, Molly Hook?’

‘Yeah, everyone,’ Molly says.

‘I trust your father then told that shocked limestone salesman how those nights I take my clothes off might represent my finest role of all.’

‘He didn’t say anything about any role you were playing.’

‘Of course it’s a role I’m playing,’ Greta says. ‘I’m playing Greta Maze, a thirty-three-year-old actress with too much talent and not enough opportunity who stayed in the arse end of the earth because she thought she loved an older man.’