This stone city has darkened. This sprawling city has shrunk. This place has turned into a cave. This is the dark place. The sad place.
‘I know why she left you, Molly.’
‘Shut up.’
‘She left you because she could not love you.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘I know why you want to find Longcoat Bob.’
‘Shut up!’
‘Shut up!’
And Molly closes her eyes and she’s standing inside her bedroom again and she’s opening her bedroom door and she’s walking down the hallway.
‘He will not tell you what you want to hear, Molly.’
‘I said “Shut up!”’
And now she’s standing in the doorway to her mother’s bedroom and the moonlight shines across her mother’s face and Violet Hook is staring at her daughter, Molly, and Violet Hook is weeping.
‘You want to find Longcoat Bob because you want him to tell you lies,’ the night sky says. ‘You want him to say it’s not true.’
‘Stop it.’
‘You want him to say it’s not true what he did to her.’
‘Stop it!’
And the shadow wolf is moaning in the dark and the shadow wolf is clawing at her mother. And a voice from behind whispers her name. ‘Molly.’ It’s the voice of Horace Hook, standing in the light of the kitchen.
‘You want him to say he’s not the wolf.’
‘Stop it.’
And Molly Hook turns back to the bedroom to find the face of her mother in the moonlight, but it’s not her face she finds. It’s the moonlit face of the shadow wolf. It’s the night sky face of Aubrey Hook.
‘You want him to say he’s not your father.’
‘STOP IIIIIIT!’ Molly screams to the night sky and she grips Bert in her hands and she swings hard at the sandstone wall and Bert’s blade hits it with such force that brief firework sparks pop from its edge and Molly plants her boots in the dust and swings again and the blade smacks against the stone but the stone does not crack in two so she swings again and again and again and the stone is her past and her present and her sky and her mother and her father and the stone is Yukio Miki and Greta Maze and the stone is Aubrey Hook.
‘Stop it!’ she screams. ‘Stop it!’ Crack. And Bert’s blade snaps clean away from his long wooden handle.
The gravedigger girl beneath the night sky holding the headless body of her only friend. She looks to the ground and finds the shovel blade in the moonlight. ‘Bert,’ she whispers. And she falls to the dirt and spear grass floor and she holds Bert’s blade in her lap as she rests against the rock wall and she wants to cry but she can’t because she’s cursed.
‘Your pocket, Molly,’ the night sky whispers.
And Molly reaches into the pocket of her sky-blue dress and grips a small piece of fruit. She turns the fruit in her palm. Orange and round and hard-skinned. A death she carries in her hand. A death that grows on trees in the deep country.
TRUE LOVE IS BURIED TREASURE
Yukio Miki holds the winged brown seed capsule of a stinkwood tree. It is long and curved and shaped like an aeroplane propeller blade. He raises it high and drops it and watches it twirl as it falls, spinning fast like the propeller blades on the Zero fighter he watched crash into a sandstone escarpment and burn. That seems so long ago now that he feels it was a different man who parachuted from that death fighter compared to the one who rests now on a sandstone rock beside Greta Maze and the baby who fell from the sky. The new man who is worried for them both. The new man who woke from a long sleep.
Morning sun warms his head and he turns to it and he finds it rising beyond a thin gravel path that leads out of the forest into stone country that spills away to the distant plateau over which he saw electric-blue lightning flash in the dark early hours of the morning. A thin freshwater stream flows by the stinkwood tree carrying fallen seed capsules that now resemble canoes rowing gently into the forest. Yukio wears his white undershirt because he has made a kind of crib out of his flight jacket for the baby to sleep in. He knows the boy, like Greta Maze, has slept too long and he wonders what strange potion those white-haired people in the miner’s cave might have given the infant and the actress to make them both sleep through the brute body-heaving forest trudging that brought them out of that strange monsoon vine land.
He has rested Greta’s head upon a pillow of rolled-up paperbark he stripped from nearby trees. Her back lies flat on a patch of soft, shaded grass beneath the stinkwood tree, whose shiny silver-brown trunk rises at least fifteen metres from the ground. The wind blows and the tree’s leaves shake and more propeller-blade seed capsules twirl to earth. For the third time in the past thirty minutes Yukio places his forefinger beneath the baby’s nostrils and for the third time he is relieved to feel the boy’s soft outbreath.
Yukio studies Greta’s face. The curve of her cheekbones. Her closed lips and their gentle contours. Her chest rising and falling in the emerald dress. He looks away from her at the very moment when his heart tells him he wants to look at her forever. Zutto. Boundless, measureless, endless.
He shakes his head. We must keep moving, he tells himself. We must find help for the baby. But you are the enemy, he reminds himself. They will kill you. Because you killed them.
He kneels now over Greta and claps his hands, hard and loud. Once, twice, three times. ‘Wake,’ he screams. ‘Wake . . . Greta Maze!’ He pushes her left shoulder and her body moves but she does not wake. He puts his fingers on her neck to find her pulse and it throbs every second for five seconds. He’s tired, so he lies down beside the sleeping actress.
His
