‘Can you see anything ahead, Molly?’ Greta asks and her words echo through the pitch-black tunnel.
Molly walks up front, banging Bert’s blade against the large boulders that clutter the passageway that has so far stretched some forty yards from the waterfall. ‘I can’t see nuthin’.’
Greta, walking in the middle of the trio, holds the baby boy in a firm two-arm grip against her chest. If she trips again on one of these boulders, she’ll twist and shoulder the brunt of the fall. ‘This feller’s gonna need feeding,’ she says. Hold the boy, she tells herself. Protect him from this strange country. No place for a thing so perfect, no place for the miracle boy.
‘That feller needs his mum,’ Molly says.
Yukio Miki walks behind the actress and the gravedigger girl, running his right palm along the cave ceiling, which is only a forearm’s length higher than his head.
Molly remembers Greta’s words. ‘Then you see a line of fire draw a door on a wall of that cave. Up, across, down again and back across.’
A fire-traced door is what she needs. She would open the door and step out of the cave into a new world. And what would that world look like? That place? What if there was no shadow in that place? No moonlight. Only sunshine. She sees her mother, Violet, and her mother is beautiful there and she wears a smart dress that her best friend, Greta Maze, bought for her – because in this place, in this world, Greta could be the friend her mother never had, the strong and reliable friend she always needed to lean on. These two best friends now sip fresh lemonade and smoke cigarettes in sunglasses under the milkwood tree in the backyard of her grandfather Tom Berry’s sprawling old house on the Darwin waterfront. And Molly runs into her mother’s arms and they spin and together they lie on their backs beneath the milkwood tree looking up at the sky. ‘Can you feel it, Molly?’ her mother asks. ‘Can you feel it? We’re on top now, Mol’. We’re on top.’
‘Greta?’ Molly calls softly through the darkness.
‘Yeah, kid.’
‘It wasn’t the sky,’ Molly says.
‘What’s that?’
‘I know it wasn’t the sky who gave me that first gift,’ she says.
‘It wasn’t?’ Greta replies in the darkness, gently, tenderly.
‘It was my mum who gave it to me,’ Molly says. ‘I know that. I’ve always known that. I just liked the idea that the sky might give me gifts. No one else was giving me gifts. I thought that the sky might see me down here and it might want to make me happy or somethin’.’
Three wanderers and a baby in the darkness. A long silence.
‘But why would she give me my grandfather’s map like that?’ Molly asks. ‘Why would she say it was all coming from up there and not down here?’
‘Maybe she wanted you to know there was always some place beautiful to turn to,’ Greta says. ‘She gave you the sky, Molly. Maybe that was the gift. Not the bloody copper pan.’
‘I reckon she wanted me to find Longcoat Bob,’ Molly says. ‘She wanted me to find him and ask him to leave me be. She didn’t want my heart to turn like hers did.’
‘Molly?’
‘Yeah,’ Molly says.
‘Your mum loved you a whole lot.’
‘How do you know that?’ Molly asks.
Mums just know, Greta thinks. ‘I just know,’ she says.
‘Yeah, I reckon she did. But then her heart turned to stone and she had to go away,’ Molly says, her hands reaching blindly for a boulder that her boots have struck. She lifts her legs over the boulder and says, ‘Boulder comin’ up.’
‘Hearts don’t turn to stone, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘But they do turn. One day your heart is filled with nothing but love and then something gets inside and mixes in with all that love and sometimes that something is black and sometimes it’s cold and feels just like stone because it’s heavy, and sometimes it gets so heavy you can’t carry it inside you no more.’
‘Sometimes I feel mine turning,’ Molly says.
‘Yeah, I feel it, too,’ Greta says.
‘You do?’
‘Of course, I do,’ Greta says. ‘But guess what?’
‘What?’
‘Sometimes I feel it turning back the other way.’
‘You do?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘When?’ Molly asks.
‘When I talk to you for a start,’ Greta says.
Molly stops walking. She reaches a hand out for Greta in the darkness. She finds her shoulder and Greta finds the gravedigger girl’s hand in the black and she briefly squeezes it, but the moment is too sweet for someone so battle-hardened so she shatters it with humour. ‘And then there’s the times we go on long walks through old rock vaginas . . .’
And Molly laughs, but a sound makes her turn back the way she was heading, a sound somewhere in the black, somewhere towards the end of the passageway. ‘Can you hear that?’ she asks. ‘It’s music.’ And she quickens her pace, tapping Bert’s blade against earth and rock as she goes.
‘Piano keys,’ Greta says. Those perfect notes. Greta knows them. Greta remembers them. ‘It’s the Liebesträume,’ Greta says, ‘the Love Dream.’ She remembers every note. ‘My father played this when I was a girl. I’d go to sleep at night and he’d rest his drinks on the piano top and play me to sleep with this music. My father said that was how I should always go to sleep, with a love dream.’
Molly listens hard. Notes falling into notes, echoing through the cave. Some of the long, melancholy notes moving in the opposite direction to others that are sharp and bright. The song feels to Molly like a heart that has not turned yet, a song for a heart filled as much with joy and hope as it is with sadness and longing.
Then she sees light ahead, and she
