‘But I am a man of my word,’ Tom Berry announced in the public bar on that revelatory afternoon. ‘I told Longcoat Bob I would do good with that gold and I fully intend to do just that.’
At the same time as the newly wealthy Tom Berry was building his wife, Bonnie, and his children, Violet and Peter, a new and grand house on the Darwin waterfront that overlooked the Timor Sea, he set about drafting plans for a new school, one street back from the waterfront at Mindil Beach. Aubrey and Horace Hook attended the very town hall meeting at which Tom Berry stood on stage in a new black suit and vest and tie and proclaimed proudly to the gathered residents of Darwin that Mindil Beach Primary School would be a place of learning for children of all colours and creeds, all races and religions. ‘From the grandsons of our Afghani cameleers to the descendants of our Aboriginal elders who are the children of what they call “the Dreaming”,’ he read from a page of inspired pencil notes. ‘The Mindil Beach Primary School will open its doors to all who are willing to learn. And what learning they will enjoy, from the poems of Edgar Allan Poe to the theories of Pythagoras and, yes, to the traditional campfire histories of this very rich and promising shared territory passed down by its original inhabitants over the course of millennia.’
But then the doors of the town hall swung open loudly and some four hundred seated attendees turned their heads to the voice of an Aboriginal woman standing at the entrance of the town hall, calling, ‘Thief!’
It was Little Des and she had come from the deep country to tell the residents of Darwin that Tom Berry’s tale of good fortune and long walk redemption was a charade, an elaborate work of fiction masking the fact he had stolen from Little Des’s family.
‘We took care of you,’ Little Des shouted boldly across the town hall as the heads of suited guests reeled in shock and dismay, ‘and you stole that gold right out from under us.’
Tom Berry snapped back at Little Des from the stage. ‘Longcoat Bob told me it didn’t belong to your family,’ he shouted. ‘He told me it belonged to no one. I had every right to take it.’
Then a tall figure in a long black coat emerged behind Little Des. Some of the town hall guests questioned their eyesight because they struggled to comprehend the vision before them: an ageing Aboriginal man, thin and lanky but taller than any man in the room, walking silently down the central aisle of the hall, dressed improbably in an old black and gold French admiral’s frock coat. The Aboriginal man raised his right hand and exactly what he carried in this hand would be debated for all the years that followed in the pubs and general stores and hair salons of Darwin. Some said it was a stick shaped like a knitting needle with brown emu hairs tied to the end of it. Some said it was just the man’s extended forefinger but the finger was so long it looked like a sorcerer’s wand. Some said it was the bone of a sinful human covered in ochre and resin and maybe even the sinner’s blood. The man pointed at the newly rich prospector on stage. ‘Tom Berry,’ the old Aboriginal man said loudly. ‘A heart of stone.’ And that was all Longcoat Bob had to say.
*
At the side of the bridge crossing Candlelight Creek, Aubrey Hook kneels down and stares up the black tunnel of foliage that encloses the thin freshwater creek he walked up as a boy.
The longer I stand, the shorter I grow, he tells himself. He remembers the gravedigger girl writing those words in the scrub. She would write them everywhere. On the back of the Hollow Wood water tank, on the side of the thunderbox. She carved those words on trees, she wrote those words with letters made of broken twigs. The ramblings of a grandfather who ran into madness to escape the shame of his lies. To escape the curse of his past.
Resting beside Aubrey Hook’s left boot on the side of the bridge is a find that he might have once linked to luck back when he was foolish enough to believe in it. An empty round fruit can, its tin lid peeled back so coarsely that he wonders if its owner cut herself when she opened it, leaving drops of blood on her fingers and clothes, stains she would struggle to wash away.
THE DEVIL’S HEARTBEAT
The silver road glitters brighter than gold in the daytime. For almost two hours Molly’s been walking along the winding track that shimmers with silver light and still she stops to look at what presents to her eyes as flakes of clear cut-crystal glass beneath her dig boots. Each flake bouncing light and turning that light, up close, to flashes of pink and purple and aqua. Millions of clear flakes piled upon each other over time, which, seen as a whole, form a gleaming road of silver that Molly feels like she could mould together to form the shining armour of a Camelot knight. Or she could turn all the flakes into building bricks and she could make a glass castle that she and Greta could escape to after all this searching and questing is over.
She sweeps her hands over the silver road flakes and she cups them in her palm
