She grips the rock, squeezes it hard like she wants to break it in two, but it has no give in it. ‘Then you wake up one day and your heart has finally turned all the way to rock and you feel nothing whatsoever, so it makes no difference if you’re here or if you’re not. This rock can’t feel nuthin’, Yukio. No matter how much I could feel for it, it can’t feel nuthin’ for me. Why am I even carrying it, Yukio? It can’t feel nuthin’. It can’t give nuthin’ back. I should just let it go. I should just drop it right here and let it sink to the bottom of the creek and it can sit there feelin’ nuthin’ for a million years.’
Yukio notices a cloud of colour mixing with the water. A thin layer of red-brown clay or dirt pulling away from the rock, like it’s losing a layer of skin. It looks to Molly like the blood of the bald man she saw rising like smoke in the creek water.
‘It’s bleeding,’ Molly says.
She watches it bleed, bleed its colour into the water and she watches the folds and waves of that colour disappear into the slow current. And at first she doesn’t realise that Yukio is kneeling beside her now. Then he’s gently lifting her arm up out of the water and he’s reaching for the blood-red rock and holding it in his cupped hands. He dries the rock with the inside of his flight jacket and he places it gently in the duffel bag. Then he hands the bag by its strap to Molly.
‘You,’ he says, and Molly hears something instructive in the word. Something encouraging. Something with care in it.
*
Purple sky with streaks of pink and red, streaks of fire. Three wanderers moving under and over sandstone ledges, around freestanding rock outcrops. A shifting landscape, stone country turning to brief rainbow-coloured clusters of orchids and banksias and woollybutt trees, then turning back again to stone country filled with runs of misshapen boulders that the gravedigger girl and the actress and the pilot who fell from the sky must clamber over for two, three, four miles.
Yukio tells himself to stop sneaking glances at the actress, but his eyes have a will of their own and they keep finding new small wonders in the things the blonde woman does. The way she helps Molly over two slippery moss-covered rocks. The way she tucks a clump of that wild hair behind her right ear. The way she pretends not to see the way he looks at her and then the way she decides to stare straight back at him, looking so deeply that he doesn’t speak a word inside his mind in case she hears it. And then he must look away from her because he feels she could turn him into a scared boy with a single glance, and then he must look to the sky for his manhood. And he looks at the purple and pink afternoon sky, he talks to it because when he talks to the sky he is talking to Nara. ‘Can you see me, Nara? I was coming to you. I am coming to you, Nara. I promise. Will you wait for me?’
*
At a muddy billabong, Greta spots a thick-bodied, light-brown snake with a small head shaped like a bulldog’s head. The snake burrows itself down into a sloshy bed of mud to hide, but Molly spots the black and scaly tiger prints of its skin before it disappears. ‘File snake,’ she says, digging Bert deep into the mud. She heaves a mud load from the ground and the file snake is pulled up with it, wriggling and fretting on the shovel blade and then leaping off it towards Yukio’s military boots. He steps back with a brief yelp and only has a moment to see the snake’s head before it’s chopped off by the side of Bert’s blade. Molly picks up the file snake’s still wriggling but headless body and hands it to Yukio.
‘Hold this for me, will ya?’ she asks.
*
Yukio builds a tepee-shaped campfire out of dry branches and paperbark and when the fire has turned to hot coals Molly drops the file snake on top of them, whole and unskinned. While she waits for the snake to cook she reads Romeo and Juliet aloud to Yukio. She acts out Romeo’s passages in her best Tyrone Power voice, fair Verona by way of Universal Pictures, Los Angeles, California. ‘“If I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle sin is this, my lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand, to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”’ Molly’s eyes light up with the matinee-idol thrill of Romeo Montague’s boldness.
When she acts out the words of Juliet she channels a lovesick and exasperated Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind. ‘“Come, gentle night,”’ she gasps, ‘“come, loving, black-browed night; give me my Romeo; and, when I shall die, take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine, that all the world will be in love with night.”’
And the night comes and Molly cuts up the file snake by flamelight with Yukio’s wakizashi, slicing its fat and juicy but stringy flesh into segments the size of sausages, which Yukio and Greta chew and suck and swallow down with deep gratitude. In the flickering flamelight Molly takes a long moment to admire Yukio’s shortsword. She runs a light finger across the cutting edge and that finger finds the engraving of a butterfly above the sword’s hilt.
‘Why a butterfly?’ Molly asks, holding the image up to Yukio.
Yukio nods.
‘Butterfly?’ Molly repeats.
Yukio
