An avenue of creamy pink Northern Territory salmon gums and a red utility truck running between them on a narrow and damp red-dirt road filled with dry holes and full puddles. Beyond the scrub to Molly’s left is the rail line running south to Alice Springs. Momentum. Destiny. She feels this. Every moment in her life unfolding precisely as it needed to in order to place the gravedigger girl right here in a fast car beside the actress.
‘Faster,’ Molly says.
‘You wanna drive?’ Greta responds, weaving the vehicle through deep potholes in the road. She brakes at a flooded road crossing.
‘We can make it across,’ Molly says.
‘What makes you so sure?’ Greta asks.
‘Because we’re meant to make it across,’ she says. ‘We’ve only just begun. There’s no way they’d make us stop so soon when we’ve only just begun.’
‘Who’s “they”?’
‘Everybody,’ Molly says. ‘Everything.’
Greta hits the accelerator and the truck powers into a stretch of floodwater that rises above its old worn rubber tyres and halfway up the front grille. More gas and Greta keeps the steering straight and Molly gives her driver an encouraging pat on the shoulder. ‘Almost there,’ she says. ‘Keep going.’
The car feels like it will stall, but Greta presses harder on the accelerator and the wheels grip the road and the truck lurches back out of the flooded crossing. Molly claps her hands.
‘Pass me one of them smokes, will ya?’ Greta asks.
Molly taps a cigarette from Greta’s pack and lights it for her with two confident strikes of a match. She passes the lit smoke to Greta who sticks it in the left corner of her lips where all cigarettes seem to Molly to belong.
‘You need anything else?’ Molly asks. ‘I got food. Water.’
Greta turns to Molly. Raises her eyebrows. ‘We’re gonna need more of both, you know,’ she says.
‘I know,’ Molly says. ‘I know how to get more of both, too.’
‘More tips from your boyfriend, Tyrone Power?’
‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ Molly says.
‘He’s not? I thought you two were gonna run away together?’
Molly shakes her head. She looks out the window. Two sapphire-blue butterflies are bobbing around a Leichhardt tree with the kind of glossy green leaves Molly could fan her face with in high summer, and yellow and white flowers that look to Molly like peeled oranges sitting on lollypop sticks.
‘So when’s this turn-off comin’?’ Greta asks.
‘Soon,’ Molly says.
‘Read that pan out again, will ya?’ Greta asks.
Molly doesn’t have to read from the pan. She knows the words by heart. ‘“The longer I stand, the shorter I grow”,’ she recites. ‘“And the water runs to the silver road.”’ Then she sniffs. She’s got something stuck up her nose, a ball of dried blood, a clump of dirt. Ash, maybe.
‘Why did he write all these directions in riddles?’ Greta asks, frustrated. ‘Why didn’t he just say straight up where the bloody gold was?’
‘Because those riddles were just for him,’ Molly says. She blows her nose into her cupped hand. ‘He didn’t want anyone else to know what he was talking about. But maybe he wanted my mum to know. And maybe he wanted me to know one day and he knew we’d understand. We’d understand what he was talking about because we look at the world the same way he does. Because we’re poetic.’
Molly sticks half a forefinger up her nose.
‘You’re poetic?’ Greta asks.
‘Yeah, poetic and graceful, like how my mum taught me to be,’ Molly says, not looking at Greta as she pulls a large black ball of snot from her nose and flicks it casually out her window.
Greta shakes her head. ‘You sure you know where you’re going?’
‘Yeah,’ Molly says. ‘You sure you want to come with me?’
Greta gives a half-smile, eyes fixed on the narrow side road that bends now past a row of honeysuckle trees with showy orange flowers that look to Molly like big fat orange caterpillars who have enjoyed too much plonk, which is why they’re crawling aimlessly across the tops of those silvery fern leaves.
‘Why did you come back for me?’ Molly asks.
‘Because you’re gonna take me to all that shiny gold,’ Greta says. ‘And then I’m gonna fly away to Hollywood like you said.’
Molly smiles with her lips closed. ‘I think there was something else you came back for,’ she says. And the gravedigger girl turns her head to study Greta’s face and she watches her driver drag hard on her smoke and then she looks past Greta’s perfect profile, past her bruised and swollen left eye and the line of her forehead and the straight bridge of her nose, to a line of trees on the right-hand side of the road, and among those trees she sees movement. Something black and fast. Four legs. Long black horns. Then something else beside it coming out of the trees. Charging.
‘Watch out!’ Molly screams.
And Greta turns her head just in time to see nine large water buffalo, frightened and reckless, charging at full speed through the scrub and onto the thin dirt road. Behind them Molly sees streaks of yellow-orange fur. Two vicious dingoes pursuing the smallest buffalo in the herd.
One buffalo loses its footing in the uneven roadside and careens unstoppably into Greta’s door, horns crashing into moving metal. The fierce impact causes Greta to yank the steering wheel hard left and the truck slides across the slippery dirt road, then she reefs the wheel right and straightens the vehicle just as another confused and breathless buffalo charges across the road in front of her. Greta instantly turns hard right again, sending the truck flying down the sharp incline at the side of the road towards a thick cluster of stringybark trees, then she stamps on the flat metal brake lever and the utility glides on the wet grass until it
