Yukio releases a brief sigh of awe. ‘Mmmm.’
‘See the bridge?’ Molly asks. The ants have built a bridge out of their own connected bodies to create a shortcut for the gluers wanting to access a branch below them.
‘I wish that feller Adolf Hitler could see this,’ Molly whispers.
‘Hitler?’ Yukio echoes, confused.
‘Yeah,’ Molly says. ‘We could get Hitler and what’s his name, Mussalino . . .
‘Mussolini,’ Yukio says.
‘Yeah, Mussolini,’ Molly says. ‘We get Hitler, Mussolini and Winston Churchill all together and they could come and look at this ant bridge for a while. Calm themselves down a bit. Just watching some green ants working for an hour or two.’
Yukio turns to the girl for a moment, puzzled by her words.
‘Sam says he once saw a group of these fellers combining their strength to drag a dead honeyeater bird back to their nest,’ Molly says. ‘That’s like you and me carryin’ a brewery home for after-dinner drinks. These fellers will build this home for themselves and they’ll take care of the other insects on the branch as well. They’ll protect the little caterpillars and aphids around them who thank them for the protection by shooting honeydew from their arses.’ Molly nods her head in reverence. ‘Yep, gotta bow down to the aphids, Yukio, even their shit tastes like sugar. These ants drink honeydew like my old man drinks plonk.’
Drank, Molly tells herself. Drank. Her old man doesn’t drink anymore because she asked for the sky gifts.
‘Plonk?’ Yukio repeats.
‘Yeah, plonk,’ Molly says. ‘Grog. Slops. Piss. Plonk.’
Yukio then watches Molly grab a green ant by its head and bite its backside clean off. ‘They’re tasty, too,’ Molly says.
She eats another. ‘Try one,’ she says, nodding to the ants. ‘But just bite the arse, not the head.’
‘Arse,’ Yukio says. ‘Not head.’
The Japanese fighter pilot eats the arse of a green ant. ‘Ooohhh!’ he says.
Molly nods. ‘Tastes like mint,’ Molly says.
‘Mint,’ Yukio nods.
‘Good for a sore throat.’
Molly grips her duffel bag strap and takes one last look at the ant nest.
‘Yep, them ants, they’re the ant’s pants,’ she says.
She continues along the path and Yukio walks with her.
‘Ant’s . . . pants,’ he says.
‘Yeah,’ Molly says, ‘that’s Australian for “the bee’s knees”.’
Yukio doesn’t follow.
Greta watches these interactions unfold, shaking her head.
‘Look, Yukio,’ says Molly, ‘you’re probably gonna be spending a bit of time here in Australia, so I guess you should learn how to speak like one of us.’
Yukio struggles to understand but nods his head anyway. Molly strolls on, using Bert the shovel like a walking stick.
‘If you walk into a pub here, let’s say, I don’t think it would be good for you to be speaking all that Japanese,’ Molly says. ‘People talk different in those pubs. They’ve got their own language and it’s not Japanese, but it’s not English either.’
‘Not . . . English?’ Yukio asks.
‘“This crow eater had a fair dinkum blue with the trouble and strife,”’ Molly says. ‘That’s Australian for “The man from South Australia had a genuine disagreement with his wife.”’
Greta, who is walking five yards ahead, turns to smile at Molly.
‘If you want a meat pie, you ask for “a dog’s eye”,’ Molly says. ‘If you don’t know where some place is then you can say it’s in “Woop Woop”.’
‘Woop . . . Woop,’ Yukio repeats.
‘If you’re out of money, you say you haven’t got a brass razoo.’ Molly adopts her thickest outback Australian drawl. ‘Haven’t got a brass razoo, so I’m gonna shoot through.’
‘Shoot . . . through,’ Yukio says.
‘Yeah, you’ve gotta go,’ Molly says. ‘You’ve gotta leave. Shoot through.’
‘Shoot . . . through,’ Yukio repeats.
‘Yeah, that’s it,’ Molly says. ‘But slow it down and stretch it out: “Shyuuuut theruuuuuu”.’
Yukio ponders her words and responds. ‘Shyuuuuut theruuuuuu.’
‘That’s it, Yukio,’ she says. ‘Now here’s what you say if you need a shit . . .’
*
The silver road lost its lustre long ago, the peppering of shimmering mica flakes slowly giving way to rocks and pebbles and thin stretches of dirt covered in rock wallaby prints and the tail-drag marks of black wallaroos.
They pass a group of brilliant green and yellow figbirds fussing about in the upper strata of a cluster of tall fig trees. The pilot and the actress walking side by side in silence now. Mica flakes beneath their shoes. Bird whistles. Molly has skipped ahead.
‘Thank you,’ Greta says. Yukio turns to Greta, confused.
‘Thank you for saving me,’ she says. ‘You saved me from those men.’
Yukio nods. They walk on in silence for another minute, a long one.
‘I’ve never killed anyone before,’ Greta says.
Yukio thinks on this for a moment.
‘Greta Maze . . . no kill . . .’ he says, shaking his head, pointing back over his shoulder to the tin mine, to the recent past. ‘Yukio kill . . . man.’
Greta takes a breath. ‘That’s nice of you to say, but I think I might have helped a bit,’ she says.
Another long pause.
‘War,’ Yukio says, shaking his head.
Greta can only assume what that means and she takes it to mean that Yukio believes one-eyed giants of the woods act differently amid the pressures of war.
‘Guess you might have killed someone before?’ she asks.
Yukio looks at Molly. He nods only once. He watches the girl as her eyes follow the soaring flight path of a gold and green pigeon with a rose-pink crown.
‘I thought it was beautiful what you said last night,’ Greta says.
Yukio stiffens.
‘What you said about your wife,’ she says.
Yukio nods.
‘Where were you going?’ Greta asks.
Yukio is confused.
‘In your plane,’ Greta says. ‘When we saw you come down? Where were you going?’
Yukio looks at
