It must be here. It must be here. She runs a rag across the dust that blankets the skirting boards of every wall. Breathe. She pulls a wooden step behind her through the house so that she can reach her wire-bone arms up to run the rag across the endless crowning moulds atop every internal wall. Breathe, Molly Hook. Every wardrobe drawer. Every corner of every duchesse, every sideboard, every broom closet. Please be here.
Floors scrubbed, curtains washed. Dig, Molly, dig. It must be here somewhere. Lye dropped down the pipes in the kitchen sink. The kitchen sink and the bathroom washtub scrubbed with a wire brush and scouring powder. She drags three large house rugs down the back staircase and uses the wooden step to help her hang the rugs on the backyard clothesline. She beats the rugs with the rear blade face of Bert the shovel, coughs hard when she swallows decades-old dust. For five straight hours she works. She works through lunch with no break and no food; there isn’t even time to stop for a cup of water. She must find the thimble because she feels the curse.
Knobs turning, doors opening, cupboards slamming shut, and now she’s opening cupboard doors she’s opened thrice before, and now she’s dizzy and so tired and she can’t keep a single straight thought inside her busy mind. Drawers pulled open frantically and frantically pushed shut. Red tin thimble. Red tin thimble. So small. Nothing to it, really. Just an object that once belonged to her mother, Violet. It means nothing to her and everything to her.
She searches and searches through the sprawling house. Inside cracks and under mats, hands reaching beneath crockery cabinets and finding only the bodies of living and dead spiders. So many cockroaches crawling and so much cockroach shit to pick up in her hands. But she finds no red tin thimble.
The gravedigger girl’s heart pounding because she can never seem to find exactly what she’s looking for and the curse of Longcoat Bob blows in from the graveyard to mix with the smell of ammonia and bleach and she wonders if it’s the ammonia in the bathroom or the methylated spirits in the kitchen or the missing red tin thimble that is making her feel light headed. Her father will come home, he will come home, because fathers always come home, sure as the Darwin sun rises each day like the bread in the late Lloyd Holland’s bakery. He will come home and she will not have found the thimble and she will be punished and he will not even know the effort she put into finding her mother’s red tin thimble. He will not know because he won’t be able to see the truth beyond the dark veil of Longcoat Bob’s curse that she can feel is so close to her now, and so close to her father because of her, so close it hurts. Her Uncle Aubrey will be with her father when he comes home and they will both be liquored and Uncle Aubrey will be worse than her father because he is all shadow, and he will take on the punishing like he always does because it satisfies him.
She scurries from the bedrooms to the kitchen to the bathroom to the living room to the bedrooms to the kitchen to the bathroom and she spins around on the spot, wondering where her father could have possibly placed that red tin thimble and she finds the locked door to Horace Hook’s bedroom where he keeps the buried and unburied treasures of Hollow Wood’s ever-trusting dead. And her heart is beating so fast with all the thinking and the work and exhaustion that she can’t catch her breath, and she tries to suck more air into her lungs but nothing goes in and she remembers water and she scrambles to the kitchen but then she sees flashes of yellow and purple in her mind’s eye and she can’t focus on anything and her hands are so cold and the blood seems to rush out of her body and drain like lye into the cracks in the polished wooden floorboards beneath her bare feet and she closes her eyes and sees only a black room and this feels safe so she stops breathing and falls with a thud to the floor of the kitchen of the caretaker’s quarters in ruined Hollow Wood Cemetery, where the only people close enough to hear a single sound from Molly Hook, aged twelve years and eleven months, are buried in dirt. And the last thing she sees in the black room of her mind is an audience rising to its feet to give a soaring standing ovation for the gravedigger girl as the side of her skull hits the theatre stage.
‘Bravo, Molly!’ they scream. ‘Bravo!’
*
Seen from the blue sky above and looking down and looking closer in and closer in, she is a brown-haired girl standing in pants made for boys before a dress-shop window on Cavenagh Street, central Darwin. If someone told Molly Hook she had dreamed herself here in this moment, she would believe it because Darwin is a dream at sunset in summer and the dress in the window is the kind of dress Molly wears in her dreams. A teenager’s dress and a going-out dress that Molly could wear to a dance or a school graduation or to a Hollywood film premiere on the arm of Gary Cooper, if only she wasn’t so busy digging graves in Darwin, Australia. A light blue satin dress the colour of the Darwin sky in summer, resting on the Ward’s Boutique shop window mannequin, whose expressionless face says nothing of how wonderful it must be to wear something so beautiful.
It’s not long till her birthday. She will soon be able to
