Lars shakes his head, looking down again at the orange fruit in his hand. He looks back up to find his three guests staring at him with visible concern for his sanity.
‘Milk?’ Greta asks.
*
A long dark tunnel then a corridor turning left. Another young Chinese woman standing at the entrance to what Molly assumes is the woman’s cave version of a bedroom. She nods at Molly but she does not smile. Molly catches up with Greta in the corridor. ‘We feed the boy then we leave as soon as we can,’ she whispers.
‘It’s getting dark out there, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘We need to eat and we need to rest. He’s gonna let us do both, so you just remember your manners and be thankful for the kindness.’
Lit by candles and lanterns, Lars’s dining hall is a cold, rectangular cave with several hardwood poles capped by broad beams acting as cave-in props. Its walls are scarred with pickaxe marks where hopeful miners chased gold along quartzite seams. Molly casts her eyes around the space and the first thing she sees is a rusted candelabra hanging from the centre of the ceiling. There is a dining table below it, long enough to seat eight people. Another upright piano rests against the wall facing her. There are lounges and armchairs and there is a daybed made of bamboo, and there are stretcher beds made of canvas and cracked wood, set out in rows. And there are people here and they are old. Ten, twelve, fourteen people. They look to Molly like they are wilting, like they are dissolving into their beds, their skin hanging loosely from their bones. Most of them are old Chinese men, their beards long and braided, and old Chinese women in loose black robes. There is one old Afghani man, and three others are European white and European wilted, laid out flat and sleeping upon the beds and lounges or upright in the armchairs and dining table chairs with their eyelids half-closed and their heads wobbling and wanting to fall into their chests. The warm yellow glow of the candles and lanterns reflects from their faces and the rock walls.
‘What is this place, Greta?’ Molly whispers. ‘I want to leave.’
Greta hears the girl but keeps her eyes on Lars.
‘Friends,’ Lars announces to the room. ‘We have visitors.’
Greta turns to the people in the room, smiling. Few of Lars’s friends even register they are there. ‘Where did they all come from?’ she asks.
‘Same place you came from,’ Lars says. ‘They came out of the birth cave. They travelled far like you, but they found us here. And here they stayed.’
A rattling wheeze echoes from a skeletal elderly Chinese man lying flat and shirtless on a stretcher. He coughs and spits saliva and blood into a bowl carried by a young Chinese woman who seems to be nursing several of the men and women.
Greta looks around the room. Bodies thin as glass. Chest bones sucked down into flesh by time and sickness. ‘They’re all dying,’ she says.
Lars nods his head. ‘And they will die without pain.’ He says they are the unwanted. He says they are the ones who ran to the gold then ran further into the deep country when the government asked them to sail back home.
‘What do you all live on down here?’ Greta asks.
Then a voice from an entrance to her right. ‘Understanding,’ says a thin, slow-moving woman in her sixties or seventies with long straight hair as white as Lars’s. ‘Compassion. Sacrifice. And . . .’ – the woman hands Greta an aged glass nursing bottle – ‘kindness.’ The bottle has a rubber teat fixed to its top, and is full of milk. Greta takes the bottle with gratitude then gently brings the teat to the baby’s mouth and the boy’s lips suck on instinct and relief spreads across his face.
The white-haired woman smiles. ‘I’d say he’s never had evaporated milk before,’ she says. ‘It’s sweeter than what he gets from his mother.’
‘This is my wife, Marielle,’ Lars says to Greta, who shakes Marielle’s hand.
‘Thank you for helping us,’ Greta says. ‘I’m Greta. This is Molly. That’s Yukio.’
Marielle casts a curious eye towards the Japanese pilot, who is standing back from the group, studying the bodies laid out across the room.
‘Don’t worry about him,’ Greta says.
‘He jumped out of his plane out past Candlelight Creek,’ Molly says.
Marielle smiles at this fantastical story, examines the pilot standing in her makeshift cavern home.
‘Why is he travelling with you?’ Marielle asks.
‘He was sent to protect us,’ Molly says, sounding more defensive than she intended. ‘He’s our friend, that’s all.’
Marielle nods.
‘The baby dropped out of the sky, too, it seems,’ Lars says.
Marielle is silent for a long moment, nodding to herself. She focusses on Greta. ‘Like a gift from God,’ she says.
‘A gift from the sky,’ Molly says.
‘They’re searching for Longcoat Bob,’ Lars says to his wife.
Marielle nods slowly and gracefully. ‘I see,’ she says.
A young Chinese woman approaches Greta with a bowl of sliced apple and boiled bush yams. Marielle waves an arm towards the dining table. ‘Please, eat with us,’ she says. ‘You must be so tired. You need rest.’ Then she turns to Molly and smiles warmly. ‘You have come so far to be with us. You have seen so much.’ She puts her hand under Molly’s chin, stares deep into her eyes. ‘You carry so much with you,’ she says. ‘So much pain.’
*
They eat surrounded by the dying. Greta and Yukio spooning up mouthfuls of a hot bush onion soup that’s the colour of dirty water but tastes so good slipping down their throats and filling up their bellies that they splash it across their chins in their hurry to get more down. Yukio stuffing boiled yam chunks into his mouth with his fingers. Greta sucking
