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,’
