Greta’s hands reach into Aubrey’s trouser pockets. He tries to bat her hands away but he’s too weak, too spent. Molly sees those hands ferreting through the pockets and then she sees Greta’s right hand extracting a set of keys.
‘I need a hospital!’ Aubrey gargles louder. He spits more vomit from his mouth with a laborious shake of his head. Greta turns and walks away, Molly follows. They head towards the half cemetery house and the one-legged man sitting in the tree, the desperate calls of Aubrey Hook echoing behind them. ‘You take me to the hospital now!’
Greta and Molly walk on.
‘You are going to hell!’
Greta and Molly walk on.
‘I curse the both of you,’ Aubrey screams to the sky. ‘I curse the both of yooouuuu!’
*
Greta shuffles slowly to the driver’s door of Aubrey’s red utility truck, still intact and parked in the gravel driveway in front of the bombed cemetery residence. Molly watches her climb awkwardly and painfully into the driver’s seat. She closes the door.
‘Get in,’ Greta says. ‘I’ll drive you to the hospital.’
‘I don’t need a hospital,’ Molly says through the open window. ‘But could you take me to Clyde River?’
‘Not going that way,’ Greta says.
‘All the ways go that way.’
‘Not the way I’m going, kid.’
‘Wait,’ Molly says. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going back to Sydney,’ she says, and she starts the truck, gives its rattling engine some heavy revs.
‘Wait,’ Molly says. ‘Let me show you something.’ She drops her duffel bag to the ground and reaches in to find the prospector’s pan amid the cans of beans and corned beef and the Shakespeare book and the blood-coloured stone the size of her dead father’s fist. She passes the pan through the driver’s-side window to Greta.
‘So,’ Greta says, turning it in her hands. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’
Molly points at the pan. ‘Look at the back,’ she says. ‘The words on the back.’
Greta frowns, tries to scan the words on the back of the pan, fails. ‘I can’t read all those words,’ she says. ‘They’re covered in mud.’
She tosses the pan back to Molly.
‘Look, kid, you need to get yourself to hospital,’ she says. ‘They need to check you for shellshock or somethin’. And once they’re done doin’ that, you need to get the bloody hell outta Darwin. Them Japs ain’t finished with this place.’
Molly holds the pan up. ‘They’re the directions to Longcoat Bob’s gold,’ she says. ‘My granddad etched them in the copper so he’d never forget them. I can take you there, Greta. Buried treasure. You said if you knew where that treasure was you’d grab Bert right away and you’d dig down for your fortune. Well, you can have it all if you want it. You could be richer than your wildest dreams. You could finally be where you belong. We could go to Hollywood together and you could get your name up in lights and I could change my name and . . . and—’
‘I’m sorry, Molly,’ Greta says softly.
But Molly pushes on. ‘Greta Maze and Marlene Sky,’ she urges. ‘You can do it, Greta. You just have to get us to the Clyde River. I’ll take care of the rest. You can do it, Greta.’
Greta turns her head away from Molly because she doesn’t want the girl to see her crying.
Molly goes on. ‘We could go on double dates with Tyrone Power and Gary Cooper,’ she says. ‘And then we could drive up into the Hollywood Hills and see if we could find Errol Flynn’s house and we could ask him to let us in because we’re Australians, too.’
Greta wipes her eyes, smiles, turns back to Molly. ‘That’s a nice film, Mol’,’ she says. ‘I’ll be sure to go see it some time.’ Then she slams on the accelerator.
‘Greta, wait!’ Molly hollers. But the truck reverses quickly out through the cemetery gates.
‘Wait, Greta!’ Molly cries, her sore bones stumbling feebly after the truck. Then she stops and watches the truck speed south on the road out of Darwin. Silence and dust. She drops her head, eyes to the ground, and the ground is covered in domestic debris from the bombed house. This bombed world. And something at Molly’s feet steals her attention. She bends down to pick it up. She holds it up to the sky to see it properly, turning it around between her forefinger and thumb. The red tin thimble.
WAR SKIES
The gravedigger girl and a city on fire. A city in a war dream that she can walk through without being noticed because nobody here can see anything but fire.
A portly man sitting in a gutter on Darwin Esplanade, his hands on his knees. His clothes have been blown off and half of the hair on his scalp is missing. He weeps. Empty military tents on the roadside. Homeless dogs and cats sifting through piles of rotting food. Six soldiers sprinting along the street. Soldiers missing arms and legs on stretchers being carried by soldiers with faces covered in black oil. Bandages being wrapped around temples. Shrapnel sticking out of shoulder blades and thighs and chests. Soldiers gone blind. Soldiers gone mad from shellshock, rambling things to the sky that make no sense to Molly. The face of someone senior turning to the gravedigger girl. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ the man barks. ‘Someone get this kid outta here, for God’s sake.’
Molly runs. On the beach at Doctor’s Gully there are men pulling bodies in from the shore. The bodies have drowned in oil. There are bodies still in the water, some floating face down and some face up, and the skin on their arms and faces has burned to a
