All Our Shimmering Skies: an extract by Trent Dalton
The sky is full of gifts, for people who know where to look. An exclusive extract from All Our Shimmering Skies, the new novel by Trent Dalton.
A bull ant crawls across a curse. The bull ant’s head is blood red and it stops and starts and stops and starts and moves on through a chiselled gravestone letter ‘‘C’’ and Molly Hook, aged seven, wonders if the bull ant has ever been able to see the whole of the sky given all those magic gravity angles bull ants walk. And if it has no sky to see then she will make a sky for it. The bull ant follows the curved bottom of a ‘‘U’’ and moves to an ‘‘R’’ and winds through a twisting ‘‘S’’ and exits through an ‘‘E’’.
Molly is the gravedigger girl. She’s heard people in town call her that. Poor little gravedigger girl. Mad little gravedigger girl. She leans on her shovel. It has a wooden handle as long as she is tall, with a wide dirt-stained sheet-steel blade with teeth on its sides for root cutting. Molly has given the shovel a name because she cares for it. She calls the shovel Bert because those side teeth remind her of the decaying and icicle-shaped fangs of Bert Green who runs the Sugar Lane lolly shop on Shepherd Street.
Bert the shovel has helped dig twenty-six graves for her so far this year, her first year digging graves with her mother and father and uncle. Bert has killed a black whipsnake for her.
Molly’s mother, Violet, says Bert is Molly’s second best friend. Molly’s mother says her first best friend is the sky. Because the sky is every girl’s best friend.
There are things the sky will tell a girl about herself that a friend could never tell her. Molly’s mother says the sky is watching over Molly for a reason. Every lesson she will ever need to learn about herself is waiting up there in that sky, and all she has to do is look up.
Molly’s bare feet are dirt-stained like the shovel face and there are copper-coloured lines of cemetery clay where her elbows and knees bend. Molly, who is right to consider this rambling and rundown and near-dead cemetery her queendom, hops onto a slab of old black stone and kneels down to put a big blue eyeball up close to the crawling bull ant and she wonders if the ant can see the deep dark blues in her eyes and thinks that if the ant can see that kind of blue then maybe it will know what it feels like to see all of the vast blue sky over Darwin.
‘‘Get off the grave, Molly.’’ ‘‘Sorry, Mum.’’
The sky is the colour of 1936 and the sky is the colour of October. Seen from the blue sky above and looking down and looking closer in and closer in, they are mother and daughter standing before a goldminer’s grave in the furthermost plot in the furthermost corner from the gravel entrance to Hollow Wood Cemetery.
They are older and younger versions of themselves. Molly Hook with curled brown hair, bony and careless. Violet Hook with curled brown hair, bony and troubled. She’s holding something behind her back that her daughter is too busy, too Molly, to notice.
Violet Hook, the gravedigger mum, always hiding something. Her shaking fingers, her thoughts. The gravedigger mum, burying dead bodies in the dirt and burying secrets alive inside herself. The gravedigger mum, walking upright but buried deep in thinking.
She stands at the foot of the old limestone grave, grey stone weathered into black; porous and crumbling and ruined like the people who paid for the cheap graves in this cheap cemetery, and ruined like Aubrey Hook and his younger brother, Horace Hook – Molly’s father, Violet’s husband – the penniless drunkards who are tall and black-hatted and sweat-faced and rarely home.
The black-eyed brothers who inherited this cemetery and who reluctantly keep its crooked and rusted gates open, overseeing cemetery business from the pubs and the gin bars in Darwin town and from a lamp-lit and worn red velvet lounge five miles away in the underground opium brothel beneath Eddie Loong’s sprawling workshed on Gardens Road, where he dries and salts the Northern Territory mullet he ships to Hong Kong.
Molly plants her right hand on the grave slab and, because she wants to and because she can, she spins off the gravestone into a series of twirls executed so wildly and so freely that she’s struck by a dizzy spell and has to turn her eyes to the sky to find her balance again. And she spots something up there.
‘‘Dolphin swimming,’’ Molly says, as casually as she would note a mosquito on her elbow. Violet looks up to find Molly’s dolphin, which is a cloud nudging up to a thicker cloud that Violet initially sees as an igloo before changing her mind. ‘‘Big fat rat licking its backside,’’ she says.
Molly nods, howling with laughter.
Violet wears an old white linen dress and her pale skin is red from the Darwin sun, hot from the Darwin heat. She’s still clutching something behind her back, hiding this thing from her daughter.
‘‘Stand beside me, Molly,’’ Violet says.
Molly and Bert the shovel, stout and reliable, take their place beside Violet. Molly looks at the thing Violet seems struck by. A name on a headstone.
‘‘Who was Tom Berry?’’ Molly asks.
‘‘Tom Berry was a treasure hunter,’’ Violet says. ‘‘A treasure hunter?’’ Molly gasps.
‘‘Tom Berry searched every corner of this land for gold,’’ Violet says.
Molly finds numbers beneath the name on the headstone: 1868–1929.
‘‘Tom Berry was your grandfather, Molly.’’
There are so many words beneath those numbers: cramped and busy and too small, filling every available space on the headstone. It’s less an epitaph than a warning, or a public service message for the people of Darwin, and Molly struggles to fathom its meaning.
LET IT BE KNOWN I DIED ACCURSED BY A SORCERER. I TOOK RAW GOLD FROM LAND BELONGING TO THE BLACK NAMED LONGCOAT BOB AND I SWEAR, UNDER GOD, HE PUT A CURSE ON ME AND MY KIN FOR THE SIN OF MY GREED. LONGCOAT BOB TURNED OUR TRUE HEARTS TO STONE. I PUT THAT GOLD BACK BUT LONGCOAT BOB DID NOT LIFT HIS CURSE AND I REST HERE DEAD WITH ONE REGRET: THAT I DID NOT KILL LONGCOAT BOB WHEN I HAD THE CHANCE. ALAS, I WILL TAKE MY CHANCE IN HELL.
‘‘What’s all the words for, Mum?’’
‘‘It’s called an epitaph, Molly.’’
‘‘What’s an epitaph, Mum?’’
‘‘It’s the story of a life.’’
Molly studies the words. She points her finger at a word in the second line. ‘‘A maker of magic,’’ Violet says.
Molly points at another word. ‘‘Bad magic for someone who might deserve it,’’ Violet says.
The child’s finger on another word. ‘‘Kin,’’ Violet says. ‘‘It means family, Molly.’’
‘‘Fathers?’’ ‘‘Yes, Molly.’’ ‘‘Mothers?’’ ‘‘Yes, Molly.’’ ‘‘Daughters?’’ ‘‘Yes, Molly.’’
Molly’s right forefinger nail scratches at Bert’s handle. ‘‘Did Longcoat Bob turn your heart to stone, Mum?’’
A long silence. Violet Hook and her shaking hands. A long lock of curled brown hair blowing across her eyes.
‘‘This epitaph is ugly, Molly,’’ Violet says. ‘‘Your grandfather has tarnished his life story with bluster and vengeful thoughts.
An epitaph should be graceful and it should be true. This epitaph is only one of those things. An epitaph should be poetic, Molly.’’
Molly turns to her mother. ‘‘Like the writing on Mrs Salmon’s grave, Mum?’’
Here lies Peggy Salmon
Who fished for love and wine
Though it was no feast nor famine
She always dropped a line
‘‘Will you promise me something, Molly?’’ ‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘Promise me you will read all of the poetry books on the shelf by the front door.’’
‘‘I promise, Mum.’’
‘‘Will you promise me something else, Molly?’’ ‘‘Yes, Mum.’’
‘‘Promise me you will make your life graceful, Molly. Promise me you’ll make your life grand and beautiful and poetic, and even if it’s not poetic you’ll write it so it is.
You write it, Molly, you understand? Promise me your epitaph won’t be ugly like this.
And if someone else writes your epitaph, don’t make them struggle to write your epitaph. You must live a life so full that your epitaph will write itself, you understand? Will you promise me that, Molly?’’
‘‘I promise, Mum.’’
■ ■ ■
The stillness of this cemetery, this sun-baked dead collective. Dry season Darwin and every tree in the cemetery wants to burn. Darwin stringybark eucalyptus trees leaning over graves so old their owners can’t be identified. Woollybutt trees and their fallen and dead orange-red flowers surrounding each trunk like fire circles, growing in gravelly soil for fifty years and climbing as high as the shops on the Darwin Esplanade. Wild weeds and grasses creeping over memorials to carpenters, farmers, criminals, soldiers and mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. Kin.
The earth is swallowing up Hollow Wood Cemetery. The dirt below it has eaten the dead and now it chews on the evidence of their living.
Molly breaks the silence. Molly always breaks the silence. ‘‘Is my grandfather down there?’’ Molly asks.
Violet takes a moment to answer.
‘‘Some of him is down there,’’ Violet says. ‘‘Where’s the rest of him?’’
Violet looks up at that blue sky the bull ant hasn’t noticed yet. ‘‘Up there.’’
Molly flips her head back and takes in the sky, her eyes squinting in the Darwin sun at full height.
‘‘The best of him is up there,’’ Violet says.
Molly readjusts her footing, shifts her right foot back, never turns away from the sky.
There’s a single dry season cumulus cloud on the left side of Molly’s sky, a fluffy and heaped floating metropolis of warm rising air that looks to Molly like the foam that forms when Bert Green drops a scoop of ice cream into a tall glass of sarsaparilla.
Everything to the right of that cloud is blue. Violet Hook follows her daughter’s gaze to the sky and she stares up there for almost half a minute, then she turns back to stare at something equally expansive: her daughter’s face. Dirt across her left cheek. A blotch of breakfast egg yolk hardened at the left corner of her lips. Molly’s eyes always on the sky.
‘‘What is this place, Molly?’’
Molly knows the question and she knows the answer. ‘‘This place is hard, Mum.’’
‘‘What is rock, Molly?’’
Molly knows the question and she knows the answer. ‘‘Rock is hard, Mum.’’
‘‘What is your heart, Molly?’’ ‘‘My heart is hard, Mum.’’ ‘‘How hard is it?’’
‘‘Hard as rock,’’ Molly says, eyes still on the sky. ‘‘So hard it can’t be broken.’’
Violet nods, breathes deep. A long silence now. Then four simple words. ‘‘I’m going away, Molly.’’
■ ■ ■
Molly keeps her eyes on the sky and she stares up at that sky for so long she tells herself she will only stare at that sky for sixty more seconds and she counts sixty seconds in her head and when she has only five more seconds to count she vows to count another sixty seconds and she does. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
She turns her eyes away from the blue and she sighs, her belly still turning inside, and she whips her head round to where the last sounds of footsteps came from. She looks for her mother. But there are only trees and graves and weeds and mounds of pebbled clay covering the dead, nothing else. And she stares into that still cemetery space waiting for her mother to walk back into it. But she does not.
An image enters the gravedigger girl’s mind. A bull ant crawling across a curse. A single word carved in stone. Bad magic for someone who might deserve it. She turns to read her grandfather’s epitaph and resting upon the slab of stone by her twig-thin shinbones is a flat, square cardboard gift box. It’s wrapped in a ribbon tied in a bow. The colour of the ribbon is the colour of the sky.
Molly leaps on the sky gift and shakes it in her hands. She rips at the ribbon and her belly isn’t turning anymore. Her dirt and sweat fingers claw at the sides of the box. At last, an opening, and her fingers rip the thin, cheap cardboard roughly across the bottom edge and something metal – something hard – slides out of the box and into her hands.
She holds it up to the sky. A round metal dish. Solid copper. Old and caked in dirt. She thinks it’s a dinner plate at first. Maybe a serving dish for sandwiches. But the dish has raised, sloping sides and a flat base, and it’s not much smaller than a car’s steering wheel.
And Molly’s seen one of these before. In the back tray of her Uncle Aubrey’s red utility truck, in the old metal box where he keeps his fossicking tools. It’s not a plate, she tells herself. It’s a pan. A pan for finding gold. A pan for finding treasure.
And Molly Hook, aged seven, knows not what to say back to the sky for such generosity, so she looks up to it and says what she can only hope is graceful. ‘‘Thank you.’’ And in the silence of the cemetery the gravedigger girl waits patiently for the sky to say something back.
This is an edited extract of the opening chapter of All Our Shimmering Skies, by Trent Dalton, to be published on September 28 (4th Estate, 448pp, $32.99).