There are no lights on in the boutique because there’s no electrical power in town. She walks by racks of gowns and dresses, scans the room. She finds it at the back of the store by the store counter and cash register: the one sky-blue dress left on the rack. She lifts it off by its hanger, holds it up to assess the size. Before trying it on in the changing room, she shuffles through a back door that leads to a bathroom, where she hopes to quench her thirst and wash the dirt and sweat from her face, but she can only manage a few brief sips of rusty water from a tap that then stops running.
In the changing room, she takes off her old boy’s pants and soiled work shirt, both heavy with earth and stinking of sweat. She slips into the sky-blue dress and turns to face a full-length mirror fixed to the wall. The dress is too big for her, the hemline hanging well below her knees and the shoulder straps almost sliding off her collar bones. But it works, she tells herself. I’ll grow into it, she tells herself. I’ll grow.
She straightens her hair. She allows herself half a smile. The sky-blue satin dress of her dreams, something to wear through this nightmare. She walks out of the changing room, leaving her old clothes where they lie. Making her way through the boutique aisles, she hears a deafening siren that’s so loud it rattles the shopfront window. She rushes outside to the footpath.
Soldiers and civilians sprinting in all directions. Nurses holding their hats as they run. Soldiers holding their helmets as they run towards defence posts. ‘They’re comin’ back!’ one civilian hollers, tripping over himself as he dashes away from a butcher’s shop carrying a ham under each arm. The air raid siren wails again and Molly turns her eyes to the sky. Another squadron of Japanese bombers approaching from the south-west. More bombers, more than twenty of them, attacking from the north-east.
‘They’re gonna hit the airfield,’ a soldier shouts. Then Molly feels as much as she hears the violent pressure-wave of patterned bomb-drops thudding into Darwin earth. Flashes of yellow flame light the horizon and black smoke shrouds the town like a low-hanging cloud from hell. And then a red utility truck screams to a halt at the side of the dirt street, directly in front of Molly.
Greta Maze leans over from the steering wheel and speaks through the open passenger-side window. ‘Get in,’ she says, a lit cigarette hanging from her lips.
Molly beams wide, slips immediately into the front seat.
Another thundering drum roll of bombs shakes the town and Greta Maze bounces in her seat. She drags on her smoke nonchalantly and gives her passenger a sideways look, noticing something new about the gravedigger girl. ‘Nice dress,’ she says, then slams her foot on the accelerator.
THE SECOND SKY GIFT
THE MAN WHO HATED GOLD
Eyes closed. He sleeps flat on his back amid twenty wounded men and women being rushed to Cullen Bay civil hospital in the back of an army transport truck that’s been scouring Darwin streets for raid casualties. There’s a weight on his chest that makes it hard for him to breathe and this suffocating weight puts thoughts in his head. It’s not a dream but it’s a memory that comes to him in his sleep. The same memory that always comes to him. Aubrey Hook is fifteen years old and he’s being buried alive inside a goldmine and he has the wherewithal to blame his impending death on true love.
Love and hate. Man and woman. Rich and poor. Dirt and gold. His father, Arthur Hook, believed in absolutes and lived in them, too. Arthur Hook loved Bonnie Little absolutely. Childhood sweethearts, they rode horses together. They rode through Howard Springs and Humpty Doo and they rode all the way to Kakadu country and Bonnie Little would let her wild auburn hair spill out from beneath her riding hat and that hair was the colour of the gorge clifftops that she’d stand upon, screaming her name – ‘Bonnie Little’ – into the ancient echo chamber of a Kakadu chasm. They danced together in Darwin town hall and they dreamed together of the things they would do once Arthur and his best friend and early goldmining partner, Tom Berry, got lucky in the Pine Creek goldfields.
‘You’re my lucky strike, Bonnie Little,’ Arthur said with wide eyes. ‘You’re my greatest find.’ Because that’s what true love is, Arthur thought. True love is a pure gold vein in a dry hillside of dirt and stone. Some will never find that kind of gold seam. Some just don’t have the nose for it. But he did. And he loved her absolutely – until the day Bonnie Little fell in love with Arthur’s best friend and goldmining partner, Tom Berry.
‘Tom?’ Arthur gasped. It was New Year’s Eve. He and Bonnie were standing in a storeroom off the public bar in the Hotel Darwin.
‘Tom Berry?’ he gasped again. His best friend. The hapless, hopeless Tom Berry. Clumsy, awkward, bookish, meek, insecure, weak, poet Tom Berry. The friend who begged Arthur to let him accompany him on horseback as he rode into the deep country in search of a gold seam. That schoolteacher type. That literate scholar who possessed, at once, a gold sense as keen as a melon but a worrying gold lust like none Arthur had seen before. He’d nearly got himself killed only two months before, after blasting a hole with too much dynamite. And suddenly, on that New Year’s Eve, Arthur wished he had.
‘I can’t help how I feel, Arthur,’ Bonnie said.
Arthur never
