She pads into the kitchen. Empty bottles and shattered glasses. A patch of human hair on the floor. Streaks of blood across the walls. Blood and bile vomit in the sink.
Molly fills a cup of water, glugs it down. She sits for a moment at the kitchen table. A beer-stained newspaper on the table covered in bush tobacco and ash. Northern Standard. Days old, weeks maybe. It’s open at a public notice, an order. Molly dusts off the tobacco, holds the paper up to her eyes.
COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA
NORTHERN TERRITORY ADMINISTRATION
PROCLAMATION
EVACUATION ORDER
CITIZENS OF DARWIN
The Federal War Cabinet has decided that women and children must be compulsorily evacuated from Darwin as soon as possible, except women required for essential services. Arrangements have been completed and the first party will leave within the next 48 hours. This party will include sick in hospital, expectant mothers, aged and infirm and women with young children. You have all been issued with printed notices advising you what may be taken and this must be strictly adhered to. Personal effects must not exceed 35 lbs. The staff dealing with evacuation is at the Native Affairs Branch in Mitchell Street and will be on duty day and night continuously. The personnel who will make up the first party will be advised during the next few hours and it will be the duty of all citizens to comply at once with the instructions given by responsible authorities.
Remember what your Prime Minister, Mr Curtin, said recently. ‘The time has gone by for argument. The instructions of the Federal Government must be carried out.’ The Federal Government has made all arrangements for the comfort and welfare of your families in the South. Darwin citizens will greatly assist the war effort by cheerfully carrying out all requests. There will be hardship and sacrifice, but the war situation demands these and I am sure Darwin will set the rest of Australia a magnificent example to follow.
(Sgd.) C.L.A. ABBOTT,
Administrator of the Northern Territory.
Molly places the paper back on the table. She pads to her bedroom and slips on her dig boots. Dig, Molly, dig. Dig for your courage. Dig for your soul. Dig for your rage.
Bert the shovel leans against her bedroom wall by a window. Bert’s been waiting for this moment and Molly knows it. Molly and Bert walk to Horace Hook’s bedroom at the end of the long hallway. His door is locked as always because Molly and Bert are never to enter Horace’s bedroom. Molly raises the shovel in two hands the way she might point a spear at a lion and she drives the shovel blade hard and fast into the wood where the lock meets the door. The blade digs in, the old wood splitting and splintering. Molly pulls Bert back and drives him in again and again. Finally he digs in hard and Molly puts all her weight on the end of the shovel and the door cracks and flies open.
Her father’s room is dark and smells of sweat and sick and spirits – the liquor kind and maybe the ghost kind too. She slides under her father’s bed, grips a large canvas drawstring duffel bag filled with tools, drags it out and dumps its contents on the floor: blunt pickaxes and files, hammers and spades. She takes the duffel bag into the kitchen, fills it with every canned food she can find in the pantry. Canned corned beef, canned corn. One can of Nestlé Sunshine powdered milk.
Molly hurries back to her bedroom, finds her leather water bag in the corner of her room beside a wide-brimmed yard hat which she stuffs in the duffel bag. Back into the kitchen to fill the water bag then back to her father’s bedroom where she digs her shoulder into the side of a chest of drawers. She pushes hard with her legs, her boots slipping on the floorboards but sticking enough to slide the chest of drawers a few feet across the room. Three wooden panels in the newly exposed floor are shorter than those flanking them. Molly kneels down and finds a crack wide enough for her to slip in her right forefinger and pull one panel up. Her left hand removes the other two panels then her right hand reaches into the space not more than one foot deep between the bedroom floorboards and the under-house ceiling. She knows what she’s looking for. A black metal box, lidded and locked, not much bigger than the square shortbread biscuit tins lining the shelves at A.E. Jolly’s store in town. She does not replace the panels or slide the chest of drawers back where it was. There is no time for that now.
‘“While we have time”,’ she says to herself, ‘“let us do good.”’
The Japs are coming. Time is running out. There is only time enough to be good.
*
Darkness now in Hollow Wood Cemetery. Molly carries a kerosene lamp but she could find her way through this cemetery without a light. She could close her eyes and make it through this death hall, just by running her hands over the shapes of the cemetery headstones.
Martha Sorenson, 1842–1908. Granite stone work. Ridgetop contouring. ‘In loving memory of dear mother.’ Someone might be alive today who misses Martha Sorenson the way Molly misses her mother.
Teddy Byrne, 1854–1904. Limestone in a bevelled block. ‘Sure is dark down here,’ Teddy offers on his headstone. Teddy reminds Molly to laugh.
Edwin Harper, 1803–1887, reminds Molly to carry on. ‘Edwin Harper. Robbed, stabbed twice in neck, 22 years. Survived sinking of Fortuna, 33 years. Met June Mooney, 35 years. Farewelled June, 83 years. Died, 84 years.’
Norman Ballard, 1877–1926. Blue-pearl granite. Gothic top contouring. ‘The end and reward of toil is rest.’ Molly cannot rest. Not yet. Not until she has opened
