PUBLIC NOTICE
I, Tom Berry, hereby proclaim my solemn vow to return all the gold I recently acquired to the godforsaken hole in which I found it. It is with great displeasure that I must publicly acknowledge the growing hysteria and muddy rumour that has swirled in recent months around the Berry family. I do not believe in blackfeller magic. I do, however, believe in plain bad luck. And ever since I brought this gold back to Darwin, it’s the only kind of luck my family has seen. I swear, under God, Longcoat Bob told me that gold did not belong to anyone. But, I am man enough to admit, at no time did he say that gold should belong to me. I have been found guilty of my own pride and my own greed. I do not believe in curses. But I believe a man should admit when he’s wrong and, where possible, he should endeavour to right his wrongs. I will travel back into the deep country as soon as I am able and I will put that gold back where I found it. And, should Longcoat Bob’s finger indeed wield a dark and inexplicable power and should he still be pointing that finger at my family, I expect him to promptly stick that finger someplace else.
Aubrey Hook howls again and his laughter fills the space between two walls of a jagged sandstone canyon. The double sun falls in the sky. He stops by a swamp to feast at a gooseberry shrub that has dropped an entire season’s worth of green tomato-like wild fruits, some twenty-six of which Aubrey shovels down his throat the way he used to shovel grave dirt into buckets.
‘Berries!’ he howls to the sky. ‘Tom’s berries!’
He drops his strides immediately after feasting on the gooseberries and he squats and releases a diarrhoea torrent onto a patch of grey sand. After cleaning up as best he can, he fills his right pants pocket with more gooseberries and he fills his left pants pocket with a handful of eucalyptus leaves that he rips from a young stringybark. Further along his frenzied journey, he finds a rusting billy can in a natural rock dish in a sandstone outcrop and he lights a night fire from gathered sticks and paperbark that he ignites with one of his lit cigarette papers. He boils the eucalyptus leaves in the billy can and drinks from the can then splashes the boiling water over the festering bite wound in his shoulder.
He lies by the fire with his arms gripping his pounding chest, his body shaking. He stares into the fire and he repeats the words of Walt Whitman. ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution.”’
And inside the fever and inside the flames he sees a memory of himself. A young man, tall and handsome. That young man kept his promise. He survived the rockfall that killed his hate-filled father, Arthur Hook, and he held true to his private pact. He had only love in his heart that Sunday afternoon when he rode his horse to Violet Berry’s home on the Darwin waterfront. He roped his ride out of view of the house’s windows to lengthen the odds that Tom Berry might see a son of Arthur Hook approaching his yard. He walked to the front door unseen and was about to knock when he heard Violet’s laughter echoing from the backyard. Aubrey trod lightly down the side of the house and, half-hidden by the curve of a rusting water tank, he spied Violet beneath a sprawling backyard milkwood tree. And he saw the awful reason for her laughter: the hands of the young man who lay beside her, squeezing her ribs. And then he saw the awful owner of Violet Berry’s heart. That soft young man beside her. That vibrant and joyful and weak young man beside her. That second son of Arthur Hook. His own beloved brother, Horace.
Aubrey Hook went riding alone along the waterfront that Sunday afternoon. He took his horse to the highest point he could find along the Dripstone Cliffs overlooking the beach stretching beyond the Rapid Creek inlet. He gave the horse a fifty-yard run-up and he heeled it hard in its belly and it galloped towards a blind clifftop horizon. They were but ten yards from the edge when something inside Aubrey’s heart caused him to pull hard on the reins and circle away from the void. This certain something inside him would prove in the decades to come to be a light in all of his endless dark hours. Nothing else would prove so sustaining. Not love. Not work. Not liquor. The only thing that ever saved Aubrey Hook was hate.
‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution’”’ he mumbles at the fire. ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution.”’
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. And if he says these words long enough, then she might return to him.
‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution,”’ he says. ‘“And I know the amplitude of time.”’
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution and I know the amplitude of time.”’
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
‘“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.”’
And he sees the face of Molly Hook’s mother.
‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution,”’ he mumbles. ‘“And I know the amplitude of time” . . . “Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.”’
And he sees the face of Violet. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
THE THIRD SKY GIFT
OPHELIA
She is drawn to the rapids. She is sixteen years old and walking barefoot along a plateau buried in blue sky. Her infant son is four months old and curled comfortably inside a sling carrier made of bush string, paperbark and cane strips. From terraces high above, a river plummets into a deep, craggy, sandstone gorge and the force of the great and relentless
