She climbs up the side of the clearwater rapids and stops at a deep pool where the current moves more slowly. She lays her baby down inside the sling on a flat rock and the boy’s eyes find points of colour and movement and light and settle on his mother’s eyes staring back at his. But then the mother’s eyes start weeping and then the mother’s eyes turn to the pool. And she walks away from her baby. Reaching the water’s edge, she plants a hand on a large water-worn boulder for balance, finds her footing among the loose black rocks on the surface of the deep emerald pool. She dives under the water and propels herself only with her legs, mermaid-like, emerges with a deep breath, then breast-strokes in a circle before turning to float on her back with her arms and legs outstretched and her eyes filled with all of the blue in all of the sky. Just one fluffy fat cloud and she tells herself it looks like a big white witchetty grub without its yellow head. She can hear herself breathe and she can hear the rush of the rapids downstream. And she lets the water push her.
The witchetty grub starts to crawl across the blue roof, but that’s just an illusion. The cloud isn’t moving. She is. The slow, gentle push of the current. Push, push, push, and the girl drifts slowly along the surface of the water towards the gorge.
And to the sky she makes a wish. She wishes to be water. Because water has no feeling. Water feels no pain. Water is never afraid. Water feels no sorrow. And she thinks about the life she could have had if she’d known how to move through this complex earth the way water always knows how to move through it.
THE SKY BURIED TREASURE
The stone country. Three wanderers of the silver road that turns and twists – just like a python turns and twists as it slides along the base of a nearby ironwood tree, its movement and its size drawing applause from a foreign spectator named Yukio Miki.
Single file. Greta Maze walks in front and Molly Hook pads along in the middle, turning her head back regularly to find the strange pilot stopped before another natural northern Australian point of wonder. He bends down to a frill-necked lizard resting on a burnt log, and the lizard fans its red frills in defiance of the smiling man’s inspection. He passes a eucalypt tree with a hole in its trunk the diameter of his own head. Molly watches Yukio insert his right arm into the hole, pull his arm out and study his right fist, now crawling with orange and white termites.
Yukio watches Molly reach into a nest of stingless black bees wedged between two branches of a stringybark tree and pull out a handful of deep red sugarbag honey, which looks to Yukio like melting wax. She drops a dollop of the honey in Yukio’s hands and she eats a dollop herself. Greta finds another nest nearby and grabs a handful of the dark, strong-flavoured gloop too. Yukio tentatively licks the honey in his palm. Liking the taste, he slips it all into his mouth and his eyes light up like his smile. ‘Migoto!’ he says.
‘Very, very . . . migoto,’ Molly says, licking her hands.
At a slow-moving freshwater stream that cuts across the silver road, Greta relieves herself behind a thick wall of shrubs with red pendulous flowers whose small pink fruits sprout tentacle-like fibres that make the fruits look like they’ve been snap-frozen in a state of self-combustion.
Yukio follows Molly to the stream. He stands above her as she kneels down.
She points two fingers to her own eyes and then she points to the stream.
‘You,’ she says. ‘Watch for crocs.’
Yukio is blank.
‘You be on the lookout,’ Molly says, pointing to her eyes again and then pointing to the water. ‘Crocodiles,’ she says, forming her hands into a snapping crocodilian mouth. ‘They’ll drag you down underwater. Wedge you under a rock and let you tenderise for a month.’
Yukio nods, casting a keen and immediate eye across the stream.
Molly places Bert the shovel on the muddy ground beside her boots and reaches into the duffel bag. She pulls out the blood-red rock that she found inside her dead mother’s chest. It’s stained now. Covered in splatters of blood from the smashed head of the one-eyed tin-miner monster. Molly places the rock in the clearwater stream and rubs the monster’s blood away. “Out damn spot. Out, I say,” she says to herself.
Yukio studies the girl’s actions, curious.
Molly feels him looking over her shoulder. ‘It’s my mum’s heart,’ she says. ‘It’s what happens at the end of the turning, Yukio. It’s what Longcoat Bob done.’
Molly looks up at Yukio. The weight of the story across her face. ‘He said our hearts would turn to stone and my mum’s heart slowly did. And now I can feel my heart going that way, too. It’s getting heavier, Yukio. I feel it inside me. I’ve stopped caring about people.’
She looks at the sword hanging from his belt. ‘I watched you cut the throats of those men back there and I felt nuthin’ for it,’ she says. ‘Do you follow me, Yukio?’ she asks, but she doesn’t care if he doesn’t. It feels good to say it out loud and maybe even better saying it to someone who can’t understand. ‘I wasn’t scared,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t sorry. If anything, I was glad you did it to ’em.’
She studies Yukio’s face. Blank but for his eyes, which say he’s listening hard to the gravedigger girl.
‘Can you understand anything I’m saying to you?’
Yukio is silent. He smiles uncertainly. ‘You,’ he says, enigmatically, repeating the last word he heard.
‘You can’t understand a word, can you?’ Molly asks.
‘You,’ he says again.
Molly
