Molly and Greta dig his grave together. Foot by foot. Resting every half hour to drink from their water bag. The sun is falling when they’ve finished filling the hole in. Molly stands in the orange light at the foot of the grave. She holds the pilot’s family sword. ‘Can I say somethin’ for him?’ she asks Greta.
The actress nods silently.
Molly holds the sword in both hands. ‘Hi, Yukio,’ she says. ‘You probably won’t even be able to understand everything I’m saying, but I just wanted to say thanks for saving us. I’ve never had many friends. Before I met you and Greta the only friend I had outside of Sam was a shovel. I guess that sounds kinda sad, but the only sad thing about that is that I didn’t get to be friends with you for longer. And I just wanted to tell you that I’m gonna keep your sword, Yukio. I was gonna bury it down there with you, but I just couldn’t do it. And then I remembered my old mate, Bert, and I thought if I could be friends with a shovel for so long then why can’t I be friends with a sword?’
Molly turns to Greta, who is nodding with encouragement.
‘Anyway,’ Molly says. She leans down to her feet and picks up a burial cross she has fashioned out of two tree branches strung together with vine. ‘I didn’t have a chisel or any limestone blocks to carve you a proper epitaph,’ she says. ‘So I hope you won’t mind this.’ At the cross section of the branches she has hung a circle of rusted iron sheeting with a message carved into it. ‘I didn’t know what to write for your epitaph because I didn’t hear the whole story of your life,’ she says. ‘I had to summarise it a bit, sorry. But I think I got it right. It’s not very poetic but I hope it’s graceful.’
Molly bangs the cross into the head of the grave and Greta places her arm over Molly’s shoulder.
‘Goodbye Yukio,’ Greta says.
And the weary gravediggers head back into the scrub before they get themselves too lost in the dark, and the lemon light of the setting sun shines over Molly Hook’s sharpened-stone etchings hanging from the cross.
HERE LIES YUKIO MIKI
HE FELL FROM THE SKY
HE DIED IN OUR ARMS
HE WAS MIGOTO
*
On the sixth day, the wind comes. The sky turns to grey and then to green. The lightning returns and the roofs of the huts must be tied down with old rope and vine. Then the rain comes. And the elders turn their heads to the sky and it is decided that the group will leave the camp and move to the shelter of a spacious cave less than a mile to the east.
As the rain falls hard on her hut, Molly sits alone on her paperbark bed holding the red rock she took from the cradle of her mother’s chest.
Then Longcoat Bob opens the woven spear grass door. The girl freezes. Longcoat Bob enters the hut and kneels down beside the girl. He studies her in silence and then he reaches his hand out to hold the red rock that she nurses so fondly. He moves it close to his old face and he studies it for a long moment and then he looks into Molly’s eyes.
‘You stopped talking to the sky,’ he says.
‘What?’ Molly replies, stunned, confused.
And for a moment she believes in magic. He is all they say about him, she thinks. Longcoat Bob the sorcerer. Longcoat Bob the witch-doctor magic man. Longcoat Bob the spinner of spells. Conjurer of curses. Reader of minds.
‘Sam said you talk to the sky,’ he says. ‘But you’ve stopped.’
Molly nods, struggling to keep eye contact with the old man.
‘I talk to the sky, too,’ he says.
And he smiles.
‘I heard her, Molly Hook,’ he says.
‘Who?’
He stares into her eyes. He places a hand on her shoulder. Then he turns to leave, taking the red rock with him.
‘Come,’ he says. ‘She needs to tell you somethin’.’
And he walks out into the driving rain.
*
Rain so thick Molly can barely see Greta and Sam and Sam’s family and friends as they set off east through high, thick scrub with baskets of provisions in their hands. Molly heads in the opposite direction, scampering west, barefoot because she left her boots back in the hut, through the slamming wind and rain behind Longcoat Bob, whose long black coat seems to be some kind of iron armour against the wild elements.
‘Wait!’ Molly calls as the old man cuts along a barely visible forest path through clusters of soap trees and a row of dense pongamia trees with pink and white flowers that shake like rattlesnake tails in the constant wind.
‘Come, Molly Hook!’ Bob calls, waving his arm as he disappears down an invisible path through thick, rambling forest climbers with purple berries. The lightning crashes in the sky and it makes Molly duck her head and when she looks back up again she can’t see the old man through the grey wall of rain. So she runs and she runs, only on instinct, and she catches the swing of Bob’s blowing coat as he darts left along a path through a wall of palms with yellow flowers and the fruits that Molly saw back in the camp, hanging from the necklaces of the female elders.
‘Wait!’ Molly calls.
Molly is lost now in a thick monsoon vine forest with no sign of Longcoat Bob and she turns on the spot in the suffocating wind and
