A fat and drunk man sleeps on the toilet seat of a hot tin earth closet on a corner of Knuckey Street. Molly blocks her nostrils with her forefinger and thumb as she passes. The man’s ‘long drop’ waste will sit for days before being mercifully burned. There’s the state school bus that’s been parked on Peel Street for the past month, a rusting semitrailer with a long rear tray. On the days when her father bothers to send her to school, Molly and her mates sit beneath a mesh cage, their arse bones bouncing hard on the metal tray at every pothole on the road to Darwin Primary.
Molly ambles barefoot into Chinatown. Half a century ago, the Chinese outnumbered the Europeans here four to one. Horace Hook told his daughter once that the Orientals – the ‘Celestials’ – called Australia ‘The New Gold Mountain’, while California was the ‘The Old Gold Mountain’. Then the new gold finds got old, too, and half the Chinese left. The other half stayed to keep breaking their backs for five shillings a day building the railway line from Port Darwin to the goldfields of Pine Creek. ‘Then when the railway line was finished,’ Horace said, ‘when there was no more hard labour to be done by the Chinese, the government told ’em they best not lob in here no more.’ Horace considered that for a moment. ‘Nice bastards, eh.’
Molly nods to an old Chinese woman selling green mangoes from a table at the side of the wide yellow dirt road of Cavenagh Street. She passes a Chinese tailor, a Chinese fruit market, a stonemason’s workshop. Four Chinese fishermen walk alongside a thin and hungry brown horse pulling a cart filled with a day’s haul of trap-caught fish off Fannie Bay. Another old woman in front of a vegetable market stirs a pot of seafood soup. A Chinese boy by her side wears a white long-sleeved shirt and white pants. His hair is tied by a band in the centre of his scalp and it sprouts from his head the way a bunch of celery rises from dirt. His top button is done up so tight his neck fat spills over his collar. He blows on a red paper windmill spinning on the end of a bamboo stick.
Corrugated-iron sheds of blue-grey and rust and Chinese characters on the subtlest signage lining entryways to stores and workshops. Families of fourteen share ramshackle two-storey dwellings made of scavenged materials – old car bonnets and flattened and nailed kerosene tins turned into walls – while the wealthy whites who frequent these markets and stalls live in raised houses where they sip gin on wide, latticed verandas and the air blows against wet kerchiefs around their necks.
Molly sees old Chinese men with hollowed cheeks and white chin hairs finger-shaped so that their beards look like white flames when they blow in the Darwin breeze. One, who has only a bottom row of teeth, rests his backside on a wash bucket as he nails a heel back on to his right black slipper, a smoking pipe gripped in his left fist.
Molly stops briefly outside her favourite store, Fang Cheong Loong’s rambling giftware and clothing shop filled with Chinese dolls and red and blue and green cheongsams and camphor-wood boxes carved with the outlines of dragons and emperors and Chinese princesses. She walks past the Crown Bakery and Suns Inc. Tailors to the two-storey, white-walled bloodhouse of Gordon’s Don Hotel. She creeps up to the sprawling pub’s swinging entry doors and sneaks a look inside, eyes drawn straight to the bar just as two stockmen in shorts fall down arm in arm singing a song about Ireland. They roll into the stool-bound legs of Horace and Aubrey Hook, and it’s Molly’s uncle who kicks the Irish beer swillers away with a push of his right boot while keeping a firm grip on a foggy glass of brown spirit. Horace Hook, as if by instinct, turns his slow-moving neck and his bloodshot eyes to the swinging entry doors. He’s all shadow and he’s too dark and drunk to know if it’s his only daughter standing beyond those swinging doors or if, in fact, it’s the ghost of Lisbeth Fleming and she’s come to collect what rightfully belongs to her – Horace Hook’s grey-coloured heart and the pitch-black soul of his older brother, Aubrey.
Molly rushes backwards from the swinging doors into bustling Cavenagh Street, bumping into a young Chinese woman carrying a tray of purple plums that nearly spill. ‘Sorry,’ Molly says. And she runs now because night is here and she needs to go home. She needs to find the red tin thimble. It has to be there. It has to be there. And the few street lights of Cavenagh Street flash on, and Molly runs past A.E. Jolly’s store and Cashman’s Newsagency and the Bank of New South Wales and the town post office where not a single letter has ever arrived with the name ‘Molly Hook’ on its envelope. Run, Molly, run. Dig, Molly, dig. Heart pounding. Dirt roads beneath her feet. Speed. Motion. Destiny. But, wait, there’s a face she knows on her left. Stop right here on the spot because it’s him, it’s Tyrone Power in the flesh, by way of Mataranka, south of Katherine, right here on Smith Street, Darwin.
Sam Greenway stands on the footpath beneath the awning of the Star Theatre. He wears a red long-sleeved stockman’s shirt and dirt-covered brown pants, and his black broad-brimmed riding hat sits back on his scalp so that his full black mop of hair glows beneath the throbbing awning ceiling bulbs. He’s laughing hard and his big wide smile is as bright as the lights that border the partly open-air cinema’s roof lining and climb like a string of pearls to a shining ornamental night star rising over Darwin. The same kind of star that drew wise men from the
