The boy watches the caterpillar and then he watches Aubrey casually lob it into the campfire, the creature roasting to a black ball within seconds.
‘Would you like me to help you?’ Aubrey asks, soft and tender.
The boy holds the gun in his hands. He considers the offer for a long moment. He hands the pistol to the man.
‘Thank you,’ the boy says. He lies back down beside the man he loved most in this turning world, the one-eyed giant named George Kane.
‘You just look on up to the sky, young Shane,’ Aubrey says. ‘I will count backwards from ten and if you want me to stop at any time, you just go ahead and sit up.’
The boy settles into place and nods his head, arms straight and flat by his side.
‘Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven,’ Aubrey says, his right arm out and the pistol pointed at the boy’s head. ‘Six . . . five . . . four.’
The boy closing his eyes.
‘Three.’
The gun’s barrel the length of a hand away from the boy’s temple.
‘Two.’
The boy opening his eyes again to the blue sky.
‘One.’
‘Wait,’ says the boy.
And the gunshot echoes across the deep country.
DREAMS OF LOVE
Prove it, Nara, Yukio Miki says silently to the sky. Prove to me that this is not your Plain of High Heaven that I have parachuted into. For all I see is your paradise. There are things in this world down here so beautiful that they must have been made by you.
The pilot runs his hand through a bed of vivid purple flowers and then to a thick grey eucalypt covered in so many hanging red and green figs they could form a dress for the tree. Or a silk kimono. There are birds in the trees with orange breasts that glow like the setting sun and azure shoulders that shine like a blue moon. There are birds on the ground making homes for their lovers and the homes are made only of curved twigs but the homes have great archways and the birds gather bright-coloured shells and flakes and stones and they lay them at the entry to their houses in the hope that a lover might care to drop by.
He finds a climbing vine with soft, round green leaves covered in fur and from these leaves sprout lilac and white sepals, and from the purple base of those sepals rises a fountain of green and yellow petals and from those petals emerges the fine and fragile shape of a woman dancing – the flower’s style and stigma and anther. The woman’s leg is raised and her elbows are high and her head is tilted, lost in the music that makes her move. And Yukio can see Nara in this high heaven flower. Prove it to me, Nara, Yukio Miki asks the sky. Prove it.
‘Looks like a music box ballerina,’ Greta says, appearing at Yukio’s side. ‘It’s beautiful.’
Yukio nods. He looks into Greta’s eyes and nothing he sees in her emerald iris galaxies serves to weaken his theory that he may have fallen into his own Takamanohara. ‘Beautiful,’ he says.
And Greta feels something strange and unsettling and tender passing from the pilot’s eyes in that moment, so she turns away and they walk together down a thin path that leads through tall trees and past thick walls of scrub.
Molly walks three paces behind them, thinking about a story Yukio told her over breakfast. He spoke of it in broken English but his flailing arms and finger gestures were enough to communicate its essentials to a girl so ready to hear it. The story of the assassin known as the White Tiger, who came to Yukio’s village all those years ago to meet the maker of a blade designed to cut the beating heart out of the very man who forged it. He spoke of the cemetery keeper who spent his life polishing the grave of his one true love. Molly wasn’t sure if she got the story right, but she thinks the old man died and when he died he turned into a white butterfly and flew on up to heaven to be with his one true love who was now the most beautiful butterfly in a sky full of butterflies. Molly knew that when he told this story Yukio was thinking of his wife, Nara. That’s why people tell stories, she thinks. They remind us why we love things. They remind us why we love other people.
Molly is struck by a notion she wants to share with Yukio, so she rushes forward and wedges herself between her travelling companions.
‘I reckon that old man did turn into a butterfly, Yukio,’ Molly says.
Yukio nods. He chuckles to himself. ‘Butterfly . . . in . . . sky,’ he says.
‘It was like magic,’ Molly says. ‘And I was thinkin’, Yukio, that what Longcoat Bob did to my grandfather was a kind of magic, too. But it was bad magic. And if there’s bad magic then there’s gotta be good magic, too.’
‘Good . . . magic,’ Yukio nods. He likes the thought of it.
‘Good magic like turning the people we care about into butterflies when they die,’ Molly says. ‘But there’s somethin’ I don’t understand about the story, Yukio?’
Yukio slows. He turns his head down to Molly. ‘Molly . . . no . . . understand?’
‘Yeah,’ Molly says. ‘I don’t understand why he turned into a butterfly. Why turn him into something that’s only going to die a few days later?’
Yukio stops on the spot and the travelling party stops with him. He kneels down before Molly. ‘Nooooooo, Molly Hook,’ he says with a knowingly theatrical hint of the mystic. ‘Butterfly . . . short life. But butterfly . . . see . . . all world. Butterfly . . . love . . . all world. Butterfly . . . short time . . . no lose time.’
He raises his arms to the trees around him and the insects in those trees and the sun over their heads.
