‘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
