Her mother’s ribs have a created a kind of home for something. This home is a pocket of air and dirt that has a ceiling of arching rib bones, and there is only one thing inside this home and it is a rock the size and shape of a human heart. A blood-coloured rock like none she has seen before, nestling in a bed of dirt inside her mother’s chest. A stone organ.
Molly’s left hand digs through the dirt at the base of the ribcage and scoops out handfuls of earth. At first the rock won’t move because it’s fixed in place by old dirt beneath it, but Molly’s fingers claw like a dozer bucket beneath and around it and soon she gets a grip on it and works it back and forth until it breaks free from its dirt casing and the gravedigger girl pulls the blood-coloured rock the shape of a human heart out through the base of her mother’s ribcage.
Smooth and crimson. Shaped like a strawberry the size of her father’s clenched fist. Heavy in her hand.
Half of the midday sun can be viewed from the bottom of the grave and Molly holds the blood rock up to the sky and whispers one perfect word. ‘Mum.’
*
Molly finds her father’s left leg beside the backyard thunderbox. She knows the leg is her father’s and not her uncle’s because the shoe on the leg’s attached foot is a brown leather lace-up and Aubrey Hook only ever wears black work boots. The leg lies in the grass like a misplaced theatre prop. Hollow Wood Cemetery is bomb-scarred and ravaged. One half of the cemetery house stands and the rest is rubble, concrete, brick and splintered wood spread across the dirt yard.
For a moment Molly considers picking up the leg. She could slip it into the duffel bag that hangs once again over her shoulder. But then she thinks of where she’s heading and she wonders what use she would have all that way out there for her father’s bomb-severed but sensibly shoed left leg?
‘Who belongs to that?’
Molly looks up to where the voice came from, keeping a firm grip on Bert’s handle. Greta. The great Greta Maze, toast of Darwin, all the way from the theatre stage to the blitzed lawns of Hollow Wood Cemetery. A Hollywood starlet. In the flesh, Molly tells herself. Such as that flesh is. Bruises across her arms. A black and swollen left eye. Stitches across her face. Molly tells herself not to ask Greta about her eye, about her face, because she learned the hard way how humiliating it is to answer questions about visible cuts and bruises.
‘It’s my dad’s leg,’ Molly says, staring at it.
‘You okay, Molly?’ Greta asks.
Molly considers this question. She doesn’t respond. She turns and pads across the dirt yard, deeper into the cemetery. Greta follows. Greta moves slowly and Molly notices. Greta’s insides are hurting when she walks and her right hand clutches the right side of her abdomen.
At the edge of the yard, a one-legged man is sitting in a sprawling oak tree, six feet off the ground. He’s wedged in awkwardly, his head pushed down into his lap, between the tree’s trunk and three thick branches that thrust skywards in different directions. One of the man’s arms is jammed absurdly behind his neck and the other hangs where his left leg used to be. Molly stares curiously at him. Her father, Horace Hook.
‘Molly,’ Greta says, softly. Not a question. Not a suggestion. Just a name. ‘Molly. Talk to me, Molly.’
Molly says nothing. She wanders deeper into the cemetery. In the long aisle formed by two rows of ornately carved headstones and slabs, a human figure crawls along the ground, hauling itself along on its elbows with regular, quiet, brute-effort heaves. Dirt-caked and black, the figure moves like a leech, or like a black grave wraith that has slipped out into the light and now wants to flee back down into the dark.
Molly and Greta reach the feet of the slow-moving carcass and the carcass’s owner, Aubrey Hook, senses them walking behind him – the girl, he thinks, the girl with her beloved fucking shovel scraping along the dirt. He drags himself on and on for another twenty long yards before he tires completely and turns his body around and rests his head on the edge of a stone slab inscribed in honour of the departed William Shankland, 1843–1879: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.’
Aubrey’s eyes squint in the full sun. His face is black with soil and red with blood. He’s reaching deep for breath but he’s too tired, too overwhelmed by the scene to catch a satisfactory gulp of Darwin’s hot air. He sets his eyes upon Greta and Molly, who stand over him. ‘Water,’ he gasps.
Molly and Greta simply stare at him. Greta’s hand over her belly. The pain inside her. She looks at the man at her feet. The squirming monster. His tattered clothes. The sweat across his face, his arms and legs. The desperate movements of his fingers, patting his own chest. Confused, out of place here by this grave, lost. ‘Water,’ he says. He coughs hard and the cough turns into a blood vomit that spills over his chin and onto his buttoned shirt.
‘Take me to hospital,’ he pleads, gargling on his own blood.
Greta leans down to Aubrey. She studies his face. She wonders how her life came to this, how she came to think she was in love with Aubrey Hook. He was charming once. Intelligent. They went to shows together. He showered her with gifts. They
