The smell of the dead mixing with the smell of exhaust and oil. The smell of cordite and burnt wood and burning buildings. Sailors in small boats lifting desperate swimmers into their vessels. Bodies on the beach shot in the back by warplane machine-gun fire. In the mangroves of Port Darwin two crocodiles feast on the carcasses of drowned American sailors. Terrified in-patients from the evacuated Cullen Bay civil hospital huddle beneath the sheltering cliffs of Cullen Bay. Further along the beachfront is a train, a whole locomotive, upturned by a well-targeted bomb and flipped into the sea. Six railway wagons have sunk into the water with it. A whole war ship, Neptuna, a vessel the length of a football field, is turned over on its side in the low tide waters around the wharf, clouds of black smoke rising into the air.
So many sunken ships. USS Peary. HMAS Mavie. SS Zealandia. SS Mauna Loa. Oil tankers ablaze. Men still swimming frantically around sinking merchant vessels. The wharf labourers’ recreation shed blown to bits. Great sections of the wharf blown away. Soldiers and police and nurses rushing to and from the town’s flattened communications centre between The Esplanade and Mitchell Street, which housed the post office, the telephone exchange and cable office. A hole in the ground where the post office once stood; hills of wooden house framing and rubble have been formed by the explosions. A city of fallen masonry. Bodies on the ground covered in tastefully patterned living room house curtains. Another man’s body blown into another fork of a tree.
Molly walks on. A.E. Jolly’s convenience store has disintegrated, the Bank of New South Wales has been gutted. Sheets of corrugated iron and nails and sheets of fibro are spread across the streets. A naked man gone mad is running through Cavenagh Street shouting Bible verse.
Deeper into suburban streets, homes split in two. Ghost houses with swinging front doors blowing in the wind. More abandoned cats and dogs. Dogs howling mournfully. Two-storey homes built to withstand fierce cyclones flattened by bombs.
An old woman stands dazed by her letterbox, the only thing still standing on her property – her house is a mound of rubble. She speaks in what sounds to Molly like German. She’s heavyset and her big arms are raised in confusion and she weeps, she howls, uncontrollably, talking to God or talking to those Japanese warplanes. When she sees Molly, she beckons the gravedigger girl to her. ‘Please, please,’ the old woman says. She opens her arms out to Molly, suggesting she needs a human embrace, she needs to hold something comforting, she needs to hold the gravedigger girl. Molly approaches her cautiously.
‘Did you have family here?’ Molly asks.
The woman rambles something loudly through tears in German.
‘Why didn’t you get out?’ Molly asks.
‘Please, please,’ the old woman says, opening her arms for an embrace. And, reluctantly, Molly moves in close and leans into the woman for a hug. The old woman wraps her arms around Molly’s neck and brings the girl’s face to her belly. The old woman weeps into Molly’s hair, squeezing her tight. And the embrace feels warm to Molly, too, and she wonders if she needed this embrace as much as the old woman.
But then the old woman howls again and grips Molly tighter still, and Molly’s face is now being pushed hard into the woman’s belly and Molly feels like her head is tucked into a pillow. She motions to pull away but the old woman’s heavy arms hold her tight and Molly has to struggle to breathe through her mouth and nose and then she discovers she can’t really breathe at all, so she pulls away hard but the old woman simply howls more loudly and presses Molly more firmly against her belly.
‘I can’t breathe,’ Molly says, the words muffled by the woman’s stomach. ‘Lemme go! I can’t breathe.’ And Molly is suffocating now.
The old woman can only weep and howl to the heavens. She can’t let go. Her grief is too strong and she cannot release this girl and Molly pushes against the old woman but she won’t release her, so Molly stomps on the old woman’s feet with her dig boots. ‘Lemme go!’ she yells.
‘It’s okay,’ the old woman replies in a thick German accent, furiously patting Molly’s hair. ‘I’ve got you. It’s okay.’
And Molly kicks now at the old woman’s shin bones. She kicks and kicks and the old woman finally releases her.
‘It’s okay,’ the old woman howls as Molly runs. Run, Molly, run.
*
Looters in the shops. Looters in the houses. Men rushing out of bombed-out hardware stores with tools. Men rushing out of bombed-out homes with rugs and furnishings and bags full of jewellery. Two men lugging a looted piano along Smith Street. Convoys of cars and lorries, civilians and deserting servicemen, rushing south to safety in the distant towns of Katherine and Larrimah and Daly Waters.
Shirtless and brave servicemen staying put to reload mobile anti-aircraft guns.
Chinese restaurant proprietors and Greek café owners at last convinced of the need to evacuate – they needed to see the actual bombs dropping before they were finally persuaded to leave. Run, Molly, run.
Then stop. A row of town-centre stores with their front windows shattered. Civilians stepping over glass shards to let themselves into locked fashion stores. People walking out of stores, arms filled with three-piece suits. And the sky-blue dancing dress still hanging on the mannequin in the window of Ward’s Boutique. Molly presses her face against the glass. She sees herself dancing again, when the earth rights itself and Darwin returns to normal and Sam comes home. She’ll be older, then, and Sam will be honoured to walk into a dance hall with her on his arm, wearing a dress like that. Molly watches a woman, a nurse from the hospital, come
