‘Why?’ asks the night sky.
‘I make the shadow.’
‘Why?’ asks the night sky.
‘I remind him of her.’
‘Who?’ asks the night sky.
‘Her,’ Molly says. ‘Mum. I saw the way he looked at her. I saw the things he wanted to do to her. I saw his envy. I saw his lust. The poets all write about it. I saw it in his eyes. I saw it in his shadow.’
Molly returns to her digging. Stop talking to the sky, ignore the night sky, she tells herself. But the sky keeps talking to her.
‘You saw a question, Molly?’
‘I don’t want to ask it,’ she says.
‘You will feel no pain, Molly. You will never be afraid.’
‘I know what the question is.’
‘You have always known the question.’
Molly stabs Bert into the dirt and looks up at the night sky.
‘What did he do to her?’
The night sky says nothing and that’s how Molly knows she asked the right question.
‘You can save me,’ Molly says.
‘How can I possibly save you from up here?’ asks the night sky.
‘A sky gift,’ Molly says.
The night sky says nothing and that’s how Molly knows the night sky is thinking.
‘Do you remember what I told you?’
‘Keep your eyes on the sky,’ Molly says.
‘Keep your eyes on the sky, Molly Hook.’
*
The night animals of Hollow Wood can see all of this curious scene: the man on the rock and the girl in the hole and the dim lamplight. The fruit bats in the trees. A black-headed python on a cool-air night hunt slipping behind the black rock frog rock, unseen. Two possums bouncing across to a high branch in the milkwood tree, which are startled by the lamplight. A saggy-bottomed wombat lumbering towards the hole suddenly frozen stiff by the sound of Molly’s voice.
‘Drink break?’ she asks, turning to face her uncle.
Aubrey’s head is down. He spits a strand of tobacco from his bottom lip.
‘No breaks,’ he says. ‘Dig, Molly, dig.’
Molly digs.
WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST
Evacuations. Daytime preparations. Night-time blackouts. Young men painting Darwin’s street lights with dark blue paint. Orderlies from the Cullen Bay civil hospital carrying elderly patients to the waterfront. Women and children first. Nurses to stay and care for the wounded.
Some 530 evacuees squeeze onto the troopship Zealandia bound for southern Australia. The ship hasn’t been cleaned for months. Minimal toilet and washing facilities. Anyone carrying a suitcase of belongings weighing more than thirty-five pounds – and there are many – has to watch that suitcase being thrown into the sea by guards and their keepsakes, photographs, money, savings, winnings and heirlooms sinking to the sand where the stingrays hide. White Australian families share cabins built for four with as many as twelve. Chinese families are not allowed in cabins at all, but are forced by the guards to spend the long journey south on the open deck.
On shore, a wealthy cattleman in a black suit slams a handful of notes down on the front desk of the office of the State Shipping Company.
‘Sorry, Sir, women and children first,’ says a flustered young office clerk.
More notes on the counter. ‘Just git me on that fuckin’ boat.’ Some 187 evacuees sail south from Darwin Harbour on the passenger ship Montoro. Some 173 aboard the Koolama. A final shipload of seventy-seven women and children on the Koolinda. Dazed children on the decks; toddlers confused and frightened by the suffocating rush, gripping doll heads and the sweaty palms of mothers whose husbands remain in town digging sheltering trenches the same way Molly Hook digs graves: blade into soil, boot onto blade, soil into cart.
Two men in singlets smoking by a sandbag filling station. One bloke says to the other bloke that he heard about a bloke who knows a bloke who’s handing out cyanide pills. ‘If the Japs wanna set up shop ’ere,’ he says, ‘I’ll be stickin’ one of those in me pie, thank you very much.’
Dusty and frantic families carrying calico bags full of clothing and food on the long road south. Families near flattened by fast-moving military convoys barrelling north to RAAF airfields, hangars, fuel dump zones, workshops and ammunition stores. Australian Kittyhawk fighters zipping through the sky on test flights. An evacuating mother of three waiting for transport on the side of the Stuart Highway. Her youngest son, eight years of age, holds a suitcase in his right hand. With his left forearm he hugs to his chest a small and plucky Australian terrier with dark brown eyes. In her dress pocket, his mother clutches a National Emergency Services leaflet she found in her letterbox.
Each and every Evacuee will be entitled to take the following articles, as personal belongings:
(a)One small calico bag containing hair and tooth brushes, toilet soap, towel, etc (personal only).
(b)One suitcase or bag containing clothing, and such shall not exceed 35 lbs gross weight.
(c)A maximum of two blankets per person.
(d)Eating and drinking utensils.
(e)One 2 gal. water bag filled for each family.
(f)No Evacuee shall take, or attempt to take, with him or her, any domestic pet, either animal or bird, and any such pets owned by the Evacuees should be destroyed prior to the Evacuation.
The mother gives the boy a look he knew was coming. Grim wartime pragmatism. He hands her the dog and she walks it into the scrub lining the Stuart Highway.
A town of men now. Men who spend their days as clerks and shoe salesmen and taxation officers are rushing through the streets carting the sand that fills the sandbags that will cushion the impact of dreadful things the Japanese plan to drop from the sky. Men who are trawlermen and house painters and fencers and farmers by day are being taught by shipped-in Australian army recruits how to feed ammunition to a Lewis gun, while more seasoned soldiers oil anti-aircraft guns on the oval in the centre of town and another on high ground at Fannie Bay, north of town. Men are loading twenty-eight-pound shells that can soar six-and-a-half miles into the sky. Blazing heat. Soldiers
