‘Maybe it’s the war,’ Molly says.
‘What do you mean?’ Greta asks.
‘It messes with their heads,’ Molly says. ‘I once saw Bluey Scofield acting like this out front of The Vic. He was ravin’ about seeing things on the Somme and then he’d smile at a passing pigeon like it was some kind of angel from heaven.’
Across the plain, a troupe of seven dancing brolgas perform a kind of ballet on the grass, and their will to move, their need to share their strange beauty like this, makes Yukio’s bottom lip fall. He laughs again. ‘Migoto!’ he hollers, in their honour. He claps his hands. An ovation.
A pair of masked lapwing birds fly over his head and he nearly falls on his backside trying to maintain his skyward view of their strange bright-yellow caruncles, which cover their faces like they are wearing yellow pilots’ helmets and the side flaps are oversized and hanging from the bird’s spear-like beak. And he laughs. ‘Migotoooohh!’
Further on, Yukio spots an aquatic frog with its legs glued to a floating lily pad, and he plants one foot in the marshy pond to inspect its wide yellow eyes.
‘Migoto,’ he whispers.
The frog’s green and brown skin resembles a perfect leaf that wraps around its body like a tailored suit. Then the frog leaps to a neighbouring lily pad and the fallen pilot nods in thanks, clapping his hands.
Later, by a flowing freshwater channel, closer to the sandstone plateaus, he stops to marvel at a water python speeding across leaf-strewn ground to the safety of a crack-filled rock wall dividing a row of eucalypts. The snake is three metres long and its back is black and brown like the rocks Yukio keeps picking up and holding in his hands, but the snake’s belly is the colour of full sun. It looks to Yukio like someone must have painted that colour on the snake – vivid yellow oil paint, still wet – but the headstrong snake leaves no winding yellow trail as it moves towards its shelter.
The Japanese pilot is so mesmerised by this snake that Greta, who stands within arm’s reach of the distracted stranger and has noted the pilot has lowered the handgun to his right thigh, sees an opportunity. ‘Fat barramundi!’ she says.
But Molly misses the secret communication because she is standing beside Yukio Miki with her eyes on the leafy ground, equally captivated by the reptile. She smiles at Yukio.
‘Fat barramundi!’ Greta says, louder this time, and Molly finally hears her. But then she turns her eyes to Greta and discreetly shakes her head. No.
She lifts her eyes to Yukio, smiling. ‘Migoto,’ she says, nodding her head knowingly. ‘Very . . . very . . . migoto.’
And Yukio smiles and Molly spots for the first time the light in the eyes of the pilot, the warmth in his smile, his innocence. That is a silver light, she tells herself. A silver light for the silver road, if not the silver screen.
Greta shakes her head, marches on across the floodplain.
*
Wide spaces between them, walking single file. Greta in front, Molly in the middle, Yukio at the back with his eyes on the woman in the emerald dress. He does not know where the woman is heading and he wonders if she does not know either. The brown-haired girl seems to walk by instinct, as if something deep inside her is pushing her thin bones forward. Her ramblings made no sense, even when she pointed at the copper pan in her bag and seemed so determined to express the deep meaning of the words etched into its base.
Now the girl’s feet move faster as the trio near the edge of the severed sandstone range that spreads across the fringe of the floodplain like a fortress for Greek gods.
‘We made it to the range!’ Molly hollers.
The ground changes from boggy grassland to a series of tree-lined rocky inclines shaped like giant whale heads leading to one of the towering sandstone escarpments. The rocky outcrops are slippery to walk up and Yukio loses his footing several times and has to cling to clumps of weed sticking out of the old rocks. Wide bowls have been carved out of the rock by water and wind. Strange and unsettling things in the earth that Yukio has not seen before. Inside these perfectly smooth and circular hollows are old animal bones and coals from long-abandoned fires.
Molly spots birds in the tall trees growing in the shadow of the plateau. A red-backed kingfisher. Blue-faced honeyeaters. She stops and waves Yukio over, puts a finger to her mouth. ‘Ssshhhh.’ She kneels silently and Yukio kneels with her, follows the girl’s pointing finger to a rock fig growing in a deep crevice. He squints and finds the subject of the girl’s fascination: a perfectly still, crimson finch, so brilliant and so fragile and so red it might as well be made of ruby. And Yukio hears the girl talking English and realises quickly she is not talking to him but to the bird.
‘Hello Mr Finch,’ she says. ‘Have you seen Longcoat Bob anywhere around these parts?’
Yukio smiles. That name again. Bob. Easy enough to say. ‘Bob,’ he says, nodding.
Molly nods. ‘Bob,’ she confirms.
And Yukio and Molly stand as the vivid crimson finch flies from the rock fig and shoots deep into the canyon that stretches out before them between the two grand sandstone plateaus divided by a freshwater stream that Molly connects in her head to the channels of the floodplain and, way, way back, to the three crocodile kings of Candlelight Creek. ‘This way,’ she says.
*
Molly sings. ‘Pennies From Heaven’. She sings loud because she wants to hear the echo of her voice climb the canyon walls that are three times the height of the Bank of New South Wales building on Smith Street back in town.
Yukio cups water with his hand and drinks from the thin clear stream meandering through the canyon. Molly and Greta collect dry twigs as kindling for a fire
