REALLY SEARCHING FOR WERE ANSWERS
TO QUESTIONS SHE COULD NOT BRING
HERSELF TO ASK. IN A PITIFUL ACT OF
BLIND VENGEANCE, MOLLY BLUDGEONED
LONGCOAT BOB TO DEATH WITH A BLOOD-
COLOURED ROCK SHE BELIEVED WAS
HER MOTHER’S TRUE HEART TURNED TO
STONE. MOLLY DIED MANY YEARS LATER,
RIDING HER BICYCLE OFF A KATHERINE
GORGE CLIFF FACE, AGED 122. SHE IS
SURVIVED BY HER HUSBAND, SAM, AND
THEIR HANDSOME AND RICH TWIN SONS,
TYRONE AND GARY.
Molly stops and reaches into her duffel bag to check the blood-coloured stone is still inside, but really she doesn’t need to check because she knows she carries her mother’s heart inside her duffel bag as much as she carries it inside her chest. Greta moves on ahead in the dark.
‘Is that really your plan, Molly?’ asks the night sky.
‘Maybe,’ Molly says. ‘If he doesn’t cooperate.’
Molly closes the bag and walks on again.
‘You’re going to crack that rock over Longcoat Bob’s skull?’
‘Yep,’ Molly says. ‘If I have to.’
‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, Molly.’
‘Really?’ she says. ‘Really? You could have fooled me. My whole life I’ve been doing things I don’t want to do.’
Greta emerges from the darkness.
‘Who you talkin’ to?’ she asks.
‘I’m talking to the sky,’ Molly says.
‘Oh, good,’ Greta says, straight-faced. ‘I thought you’d lost your marbles for a second there, but you were only talking to the sky.’
*
They negotiate a series of sandstone outcrops and step slowly through a blind natural alley between two rock walls. They come to a clearing of quartzite the size of half a football field and the silver moon reflects in pools of water collected in eroded holes the size of wagon wheels. The clearing blends into a scree slope that runs down to a thick patch of floppy billygoat plum trees and little gooseberry trees, through which they have to battle hard, with Bert in full swing.
Brute wandering. Always Molly breaking the silences. High on another outcrop, she sees a dark, black-brown bird in the sky. ‘Wedge-tailed eagle!’ Molly rejoices.
The glorious bird circling in the thermal updraughts of its own shimmering sky. That heavenly wingspan looks as wide to Molly as some cars. It’s not even flapping its wings, Molly tells herself. It’s floating. It’s levitating. The bird is magic up there in its sky territory, where it circles now beneath a cloud shaped like a domed castle, and there it is home and there it is queen.
‘She’s the queen,’ Molly says. ‘Her majesty!’ she calls to the sky, waving in the same way she might wave at a royal from the mother country. She breathes deep and beams.
‘She’s just like us, Greta,’ Molly says. ‘She’s free.’ Molly nods. ‘Yep, this is full life livin’, Greta. This is how we’re supposed to be livin’.’
‘I can think of several other ways I’d prefer to be livin’,’ Greta says. ‘And I’m holding a glass in every one of ’em.’
‘I mean this is what we’re supposed to be doing with our lives, isn’t it?’ Molly replies. ‘We’re supposed to find ourselves things to etch on our gravestones. And now we’re writing our own epitaphs, Greta. You’re writin’ yours. I’m writin’ mine.’
Greta can see her grave now. ‘“She was the next Greta Garbo,”’ she says, ‘“but she died prematurely from prolonged exposure to the sun and girls who talk to the sky. The Palmerston Players closed their theatre two days later out of respect, and also due to the fact that its troupe numbers were cut by a third upon Miss Maze’s untimely demise.”’
‘I’ll always remember this long walk with you, Greta,’ Molly says.
‘That’s good, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘Because if we don’t find your grandfather’s silver road this may be the last walk you’ll have to remember.’
A spring-fed forest of monsoon palms thins out briefly to reveal a wide bed of sandstone rising to a wave-shaped overhang that is blocking the wind and prompts Greta to stop and suggest they sleep before they set off on a day of sunlit wandering. She sits down between a large boulder and the overhang, drops her head to her knees. But Molly still stands because she is struck by the outline of an unusual rock formation on top of the overhang: a red sandstone block that has been weathered into the rough and jagged shape of a human face, albeit one with square-shaped eyebrows and a diamond-shaped nose and a dusty crease for a half-smile. A face, the hard face of a man, worked by water and wind and ancient friction and the rising and falling of seas and the landmass that holds Australia’s greatest mystery – the time trapped inside all that is moving and all that is still. And this face is alive to Molly in the moonglow, as if it might turn and look down at her and tell her that it is bad manners to stare so hard at your elders.
‘I’ll be back soon,’ Molly says. She rushes around the base of the rock.
‘Where are you going?’ Greta shouts after her, confused.
Molly doesn’t even hear the question because she’s focussing on her footing in the dark as she clambers over boulders and scree and lifts herself up onto shelves and ledges.
Greta stands, concerned now, and tries to follow Molly’s footsteps with her eyes, but the girl has disappeared into the dark, scampering quickly around the corner of a sloping stone shoulder that rises to the top of the wave-shaped overhang that supports the formation that contains the face of a man.
‘Molly!’ Greta calls. But the gravedigger girl is too quick. And now the gravedigger girl is gone.
*
Small scree rocks sliding beneath her boots. At this hour, so close to dawn, everything is a shimmering blue in Molly’s eyes. She approaches the overhang from a sharp rubble slope that runs down its back like a spine. It’s so sheer that she has to fall to her hands and knees and crawl up it, her fingers tingling with flurries of fright whenever she loses her grip on the shifting stones.
The flat top of the overhang is
