‘It’s ground mica,’ Molly says. ‘Rock crumbs left behind by time.’
Flakes as thin as the film stock they load into the projectors at the Star, but clear enough and twinkling enough to form the fake night sky that hangs above the picture house marquee. In some places the clear mica sheets have joined together in layers to create silver book-like structures that Molly can grip between her fingers and whose pages Molly can count, with one eye closed for clarity.
‘Isn’t it beautiful,’ Molly says. ‘Sam told me about the silver road. He called it the glass river. He reckoned a Dreamtime serpent snaked through this whole deep forest here and that serpent was made of stars and it was slithering through here for so long it kept shedding its skin. The serpent meant to leave the star skin behind because it knew the silver road would help people find their way through the forest at night.’
The silver road winds through a valley of cycads lining a narrow creek where Molly and Greta stop to rest and eat. They share a can of tinned corn from Molly’s duffel bag and Greta asks the gravedigger girl for an update on their food stocks. Six cans left in the bag, half a tube of condensed milk. Two cans of baked beans, one of oxtail soup, one of ham, one of corned beef and a can of peaches, which Molly keeps resisting the urge to open.
‘What else you got in that bag?’ Greta asks. ‘Looks like more than six tins of food in there.’
Molly’s fingers run over the blood-red rock she took from her mother’s chest.
Then she pulls out a book.
‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,’ she says. ‘Well, if we have to lie down and die somewhere out here,’ Greta says, ‘at least we’ll have the Bard to send us off to sleep.’
Greta rests by the creek, Yukio’s pistol in her hands. She thinks of the curious soldier who fell from the sky. She pictures him dead by a bedrock, a full day’s walk behind them. In her mind he’s long lost and given up, slumped over in a successful act of ritual self-sacrifice, the ornamental sword he seemed to cherish so much having disembowelled his flat stomach.
‘You ever fired one of those?’ Molly asks.
‘A couple of wood ones on stage,’ Greta replies.
‘Maybe you should get some practice,’ Molly says.
‘I don’t need any practice,’ Greta says. She stares down the length of the gun barrel with one eye closed. ‘Not much to it. Point and shoot and phone a lawyer.’
Molly pours the last mouthfuls of corn down her wide-open throat and rushes to a large black rock leaning over the creek like a warthog bending down for a drink. ‘You don’t necessarily have to shoot someone,’ she says. ‘You just have to be able to show them you could shoot them if you wanted to. That’s how Gary Cooper does it. He’ll shoot a can three times and make it bounce in the air so all them bad guys soil their pants and drop their guns.’
She rests the empty corn can on top of the rock. ‘See if you can hit that,’ she says.
Greta rolls her eyes, reluctantly plants her feet in a shooter’s stance and aims the handgun at the corn can. She fires a shot and the bullet chops the head off a young rock fig growing out of a rock wall across the creek, some ten feet above the level of the corn can.
Molly laughs. ‘Point and shoot and phone an eye doctor.’
Greta feigns anger. ‘I’ll point it at you if you’re not careful.’
‘Have another try,’ Molly says.
Greta inhales deeply and aims again, her left eye closed tight and her right eye zeroed in on the can with its aluminium top peeled back like an open hatch on a submarine. Her tongue licks her bottom lip and she stops breathing as she pulls the trigger.
And no bullets explode from the barrel.
She looks at the gun in confusion and she pulls the trigger once more. Nothing but the click of the trigger. She pulls it again. Nothing. And again. Nothing.
‘There’s no more bullets,’ Greta says.
‘What?’ Molly replies.
‘Who flies into battle with a gun with only one bullet?’ Greta asks.
Molly holds the gun now. She feels the weight of it. ‘He only needed one, for himself,’ Molly whispers.
Greta shakes her head.
‘Just put it in the bag, will ya?’
They walk on.
*
Five miles along the silver road. Six miles. Seven. In the afternoon, Molly rests against a bronze quartzite boulder being colonised by red shells of wild ruby dock weed. She sips from her water bag, reading her Shakespeare.
‘Which one are you up to?’ Greta asks.
‘The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,’ Molly says.
Greta lights a smoke. She has six left.
‘You can just call it Hamlet,’ Greta says.
‘Yeah, I know,’ Molly says. ‘But I like to use the full title.’
‘Where are you up to in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare, Bard of Avon?’ Greta asks.
Molly places the open book in her lap. ‘I just passed the bit where the gravediggers are wondering if Ophelia should be allowed a Christian burial if she took her own life,’ Molly says.
Greta nods, drags on her smoke.
‘Do you think Ophelia killed herself?’ Molly asks.
Greta exhales a long cloud of smoke. ‘Course she did,’ Greta says.
‘He doesn’t write it like she definitely did,’ Molly says. ‘He says a branch might have broke and she fell in that pond.’
‘She didn’t struggle too much in the drink, though, did she?’ Greta replies, stretching out beside the creek edge, resting her head on her propped arm. ‘Ol’ Bill’s bein’ all cagey because it’s hard for blokes to admit a woman might choose death over putting up with more of their bullshit.’
Molly nods, thinks for a moment. ‘Do
