All Our Shimmering Skies by Trent Dalton

Author:Trent Dalton [Dalton, Trent]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-08-22T17:00:00+00:00

An olive-coloured Model A Ford pulls over to the side of a thin red dirt road lined with orange-flowered honeysuckle trees. Aubrey Hook yanks hard on the Ford’s handbrake and the action makes the wound in his left shoulder howl with blinding pain. He slowly unbuttons his work shirt. The dried yellow-white pus of the bite wound has stuck hard to the fabric of his shirt. He pulls on his sleeve, tearing away the pus-rimmed scabbing that has built up around the edge. Only hate could have caused such a wound, he tells himself. Only hate could turn a man into a dingo like that, turn his younger brother, Horace, into a wild dog who could bite the flesh from his own brother’s shoulder.

He gets out of the car and assesses the damage to his shoulder in the car’s side mirror. An infected mess of pus and blood – his brother’s teeth were rotting like his own. There are white-bellied mangrove snakes sliding along the mudlined creeks beyond those honeysuckle trees and they spend their days eating dead mud crabs and poison-bellied toads and they still have fangs less infectious than Horace Hook’s pearly blacks. He looks at the wound and all he sees in the side mirror is the gravedigger girl and her miserable story and the series of miserable events that placed his brother beneath that Japanese bomb that removed his body so inconveniently from his left leg. Not a Hook at all, he tells himself. The girl is a Berry through and through.

He buttons his shirt and walks along the dirt road. On the right side of the road he drops his head to follow two parallel wheel tracks that run down an incline to his own red utility truck, which sits abandoned with its front bonnet crumpled hard against a cluster of stringybark trees. The truck’s windows are wide open and, on the driver’s side, it appears that something smashed into the vehicle. Aubrey retraces his steps and paces back along the road, past his parked automobile, to a series of skid marks bending and curving across the damp dirt road. Then, back further along the road, a series of animal footprints running from one side of the road to the other. He turns to the roadside trees and scrublands that wall a fertile woodland stretching to the sea in the far distance. Not the prints of horses. These hoofprints are too widely spaced for cows. These animals had agility. Buffalo, he tells himself. And he ponders the grave misfortune of the actress and the gravedigger girl. Imagine living with that kind of luck, he tells himself. To be cursed with such black fortune that your vehicle is run off the road by a panicked herd of Northern Territory water buffalo. That’s a Tom Berry kind of luck, he thinks. That’s a Berry family kind of misfortune.

*

‘What are the chances?’ Tom Berry rejoiced, spilling his beer on the unvarnished wooden floors of the Hotel Darwin’s public bar.

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