‘The people who find us leave their old selves on the other side of that birth cave,’ Lars says. ‘They come to us reborn at the very moment they are ready to die.’
When he says things like this Molly turns to Greta and gives her an urgent and brief look that says they should leave, but Greta stays because she is tired and she needs to rest and she will do that tonight, even if it means sleeping among the living dead.
‘I know it must seem strange to you,’ Lars says. ‘A hospice in a goldmine. But the fact remains that I have achieved more in the field of plant science and pain reduction in this unlikely cave than I did in a lifetime inside a laboratory.’
‘These people,’ Greta says, spooning up more of her soup. ‘You . . . give them things?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Lars says. ‘And they are grateful for it. That is why they stay. Where would these people go in Darwin? Who would look after them?’ He turns to Molly. ‘The only help they’d ever receive is a free ride on the back of a wagon to the nearest cemetery.’
Molly pecks lightly on long roasted yams that taste like sweet potato, but she reaches more frequently for a bowl of sliced wild passionfruit.
‘You’re not having your soup?’ Lars asks Molly.
Molly shakes her head. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she says.
*
An hour passes at the dining table. They eat brown, grapesized balls of bush-bee sugarbag honey for dessert. Marielle speaks of the couple’s long journey into the forest. Amsterdam as young lovers. From Amsterdam to London as students of science. From London to Shanghai and back to Amsterdam and then down into wild Australia.
Greta watches the boy who fell from the sky sleeping inside a canvas sheet on the daybed beside the piano. A sleeping baby, she tells herself. Something so perfect and vulnerable in a world so deadly and cruel. Her vision is blurred briefly and she loses focus on the boy, so she rubs her eyes and considers how little sleep she has had since going on this foolhardy journey with the gravedigger girl. Foolhardy journey, she tells herself. Foolish journey, she tells herself. What on earth is an actress like Greta Maze doing in a cave for the dying in the middle of Australia’s northern nowhere? Why on earth is a Japanese fighter pilot by her side?
She turns to Yukio and he smiles at her. There is a boy-like warmth to that smile. There is innocence.
‘Greta?’ Yukio begins. ‘Greta . . . okay?’
And Greta dwells on those words of Yukio’s because there is something strange about the way those words came out. The way they came out so slowly from his mouth. Then Yukio taps the fingers of his right hand and waves his fingers oddly in front of his eyes.
Greta turns to Lars and Marielle and she realises the room is warmer, the glow of it has brightened. Lars and Marielle speak of their strange cave hospice in the deep country; how they would travel deep into this forest on research trips from Darwin; how they decided one day to simply stay put. Why go back when the forest had everything they needed? ‘Anyone we met in the course of our journey, we invited into the forest to join us,’ Lars says. ‘Broken down and penniless Chinese goldminers. Starved Chinese farmers who’d fled to the forest hills when the towns of the Northern Territory had no place for them. Criminals and vagrants and men with dark pasts. They all had their reasons for coming, but they all came to ease the pain. And they all found salvation here in the underground.’
A young Chinese woman brings a clay jug to the table. She places five clay mugs on the table before Lars and Marielle, who nods permission for the girl to pour drinks for the group. Molly watches a thick black liquid run into the mugs. It looks to her like syrup, but it’s the colour of the sarsaparilla in Bert Green’s lolly shop on Sugar Lane, that place of her dreams that belongs to a world that feels so far away now. She walked through that birth cave and she came out into a different time, a different world. Nothing makes sense in this new world.
She looks at Greta. Even Greta seems different here. She looks at Yukio. He’s staring at a rock wall and his eyes seem different. There’s no more life in his face. She watches Lars sip his drink like it was breakfast tea. He closes his eyes after several sips, breathes deep.
Marielle looks across the table at Greta. ‘Is that why you have come?’ she asks. ‘Have you come to ease the pain?’
Greta focusses on the question. ‘What?’ she replies, and her mouth feels dry.
‘Why have you come to us?’ Marielle asks, smiling tenderly and speaking as softly as a cloud. ‘Have you come to ease the pain, Greta?’
Greta has an answer to this question but she can’t wrap a knot around it in her mind. She can’t focus, but a name comes to her.
‘Longcoat Bob,’ she says.
‘Greta,’ Molly says.
‘We’re looking for Longcoat Bob,’ Greta says.
‘What’s wrong with you, Greta?’ Molly asks. She turns to Lars and points to her cup. ‘What is that stuff?’ she asks.
‘It will help you sleep,’ Lars says, sipping from his cup. ‘It will help you dream.’ He turns to Greta. ‘You will have dreams of love,’ he says. ‘It will take your pain away. It will drain the pain out of you and you will sleep for fifteen hours and you will wake with a clarity of mind that you did not think possible.’
Greta studies the clay mug before her. Her fingers wrap around it.
‘We need to go, Greta,’ Molly says. ‘We need to find Longcoat Bob.’
Marielle reaches a hand across the table and rests
