Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  Jill's food was not as good as I imagined it would be, considering her domestic persona. Boiled white rice, tinned peas steamed warm, and strips of chicken in a thin sauce with capsicums. It might have worked with a nice heavy bread, homemade in the rustic oven. Meg's compliments, however, were over the top. Jill was coy.

  The huge jumper they lent me had sleeves down to my knees, while the body of it hardly covered my damp knickers. Rain on the tin roof made listening hard.

  'The fords will be over,' Jill commented, transforming into a thoughtful Jill. 'You will have to stay overnight unless you want to lose your vehicle in a broadside of rushing water.' Her hospitality made Meghan beam with pride.

  'In for a goat, in for a sheep,' I joked. 'Okay.'

  We all relaxed. I was here for the night.

  When the precipitation eased, Jill took charge of the conversation. She gave Meghan a sanitised and highly inaccurate version of the events of Friday night. One would have thought she was telling an anecdote second-hand, that she hadn't been there. Not even considering giving my version, I let my intuition wander. A visual of the cars came to mind. Red Saab. A van, Tarago Getaway. A light-coloured little sedan. Maria's Holden Camira, Alison's old Falcon, a station wagon and a couple of others. And there was a motorbike. A Hyundai Sonata and Excel Sprint. A Daihatsu four-wheel-drive, a real paddock-basher.

  'Who owns a Mitsubishi Triton GLS, cab chassis, ute with fibreglass canopy, four-wheel-drive, special purple duco and green interior?' I asked suddenly, remembering the woman who had passed me after I discovered the body when I was waiting for the police. 'With automatic power steering, V-8, airconditioning?' I pressed.

  'Judith's new vehicle,' Meghan responded.

  'The old bitch,' said Jill. 'How did she afford that?'

  'Are you talking about the singer?' I wanted to know. I had not connected the gurl gazing at the sea with the troubadour at the dance. Jill went into a take-off of Judith Sloane, draping a silk scarf across her head like a nun's veil to indicate the Joan Baez hair and aping the smoky, lustrous voice with a familiar ballad. It was excellent, and Jill's voice, with a trace of irony, was equal to the send-up. I laughed, very impressed. She really was a very good actress.

  'Judith is my friend, who lives out her principles,' Meghan took umbrage. 'And I like those old feminist folk songs. She would have missed me being there. She doesn't perform much any more.'

  'I don't think so,' said her girlfriend, dropping the act by flicking off the scarf. For once I agreed with Jill. Judith was making a very obvious play for an Aborigine at the Orlando Ball. I encouraged her to do more impersonations.

  Jill's art was contemptuous of nearly everyone. It gave an edge to her talent. Even though I was genuinely entertained, I found every sketch a little too cruel. Jill carries no extra weight but her Maria was fat and lazy. Wheezy. She did Sofia on medication. And then her refusing to take it, being hilariously manic.

  'Drama junkies,' Meghan said when the portrayal of their carnivorous partnership was over.

  'Really?' Jill mimicked.

  My Broomhilda came in for some schtick next. The wink and nudge in Jill's voice implied she had had sex with the Germans, or one of them. Or was she just a good gossip? I got an uncomfortable feeling that I had been talked about.

  Jill sat down and flexed herself into a broad-shouldered posture. 'Do you know Chandra?' she asked.

  'I've spoken with her on the phone,' I smiled.

  'Don't you dare,' hissed Meghan.

  Jill obediently stopped. Her performance was finished. Her teasing ceased. She looked serious.

  'Was she who I'm supposed to meet?' I put into the tense silence. Whether they ignored the query or didn't hear me I don't know. I felt there was more they could have told me about Chandra.

  'Chandra Williams has a five-acre block near the local general store,' Meghan explained, gesturing the direction and dismissing the subject.

  The mood had changed dramatically. It was time for bed. They gave me a futon to sleep on, dismantling the couch in the process.

  While Jill could turn on the charm, be tremendously amusing, Meghan was plainly generous. The obvious discrepancy in their relationship made me suspect Jill's motives. She had lied at least once. The interaction between them fascinated me, like watching a snake beguile a dog.

  The claustrophobia of the small residence, the restless ghosts of hungry cows, goat shit or the dampness disturbed my reliable sense of smell. I felt uneasy: there was a nasty scent somewhere. Something was off. The deformed dwarfed carrots hung around my mind as I lay on the floor near the heater waiting for the repose of dreams. When there's slime about you're liable to get slippery. One of them snored. Varieties of frogs chorused with drips on tin and trapped water while redolent leaf-mulch rotted. I drifted off.

  The wrecked cattle-yards where Victoria Shackleton parks her horse-float with care and skill are boggy. She unpacks, repacks into back-pack her provisions and rides into Lesbianlands, intending to stay about three days. She rugs and hobbles her horse. With her Dalmatian, impatient to meet and greet friends, especially Xena Kia, Judith Sloane and Virginia White, old mates, she sets out in wet-weather gear on foot. Xena and she have been romancing over long distance for years. Neither wants full-time commitment. Both are big, strong women with clothes expressing their abrupt, aggressive presence in the world. Vee who looks like a cowboy and Xena part-Maori with green symbols of power hanging around her neck and ankles, they walk together through the darkening, streaming forest along narrow tracks to Virginia's house.

  A branch of Virginia's sculpture is in the busy water of the creek. She fashions details of a horse's head on a human female body out of an ancient branch. She is using a knife; the wood is easy to work when it is soaked. Closer to the coast it is raining hard, here she is in cloud. The gloom of mist and the onset of evening suspend the artist in the fantasy of her solid wood. In the eerie light, time is of vertical essence: the present moment slides to a presence in the past, Amazons gather and argue.

  Aella, that whirlwind of a woman, picks up her labrys; Antiope smirks as if she enjoys discord; Hippo stamps her foot and snorts, stutters in that absurdly high-pitched voice of hers; Hippolyta stands. Hippolyta commands attention from all with the force of her unquestionable beauty. The high curves of her cheek-bones and the breadth of her forehead find harmonious reiteration in the line of log, the turn of the grain. Virginia's eyes are playing tricks with her; she hadn't until this moment named the figures on her boat. Indeed, they are not formed yet.

  'But how is history written?' Virginia asks herself. 'Did Hippolyta impress a single scribe or was it the careful archaeologist who brushed the dust away from her remains, who judged her skeleton perfectly proportioned?' The battle was on, whether Amazons liked it or not. Serene and statuesque, letting the tides of fate draw her in, still woman in the fluctuating world, a reed in the breeze, says, 'We have no choice.'

  Virginia actually hears the voice in her head. The wet night closes in and she is, spookily, not alone. Marpesia eager to be military at any cost, Otrere nimble as a butterfly, carefree. In a warrior society the truly radical believe in peace, that there is no such thing as armed peace, thinks Virginia in her hypersentient state. Her boat is going to war. Amazons are an armed people, with many employed in the industry of beating out shields and fashioning arrows and dress-making the garb of aggression and defence. Omphale, heavy like Maria, dared to make Heracles her slave. The defence of Troy?

  Virginia doesn't know what is true. Although she can hardly see her sculpture through the blackness, she is seeing another time, past or future. A future without freedom does not wash with the warrior women who spend their days sharpening their blades and expecting death, embattled. Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, Pantariste, Aella, Lysippe, bitter feelings souring her palate, Thalestris and Cressida, Amazons musing over the purple ranges of time, considering millennia. Virginia is with them in her reverie. She stumbles home, glad of the rain, the wetness
, the reckless surrender to the continuum. Her vision is scored through with timeless aphorisms. Prophecy is memory. Stories of boats, of horses, weapons and castes, of when the sky-creatures invaded and rapid change came upon the earth, might triumphing over commonsense; invasion became adventure, in the songs of heroism.

  'The trade routes of Bosporus are at stake,' says Cressida. 'It is all about economics. We must protect the Hellespont.'

  'Colonisation is the name of the game,' answers Virginia.

  Aella ceases her axe-work with the logs. Silver-tongued Pantariste leads her to the arms of the chubby Antiope. And Antiope looks like Cybil. Aella does not want to fight in man's stupid war.

  'But the rules are set. Gods and goddesses play with human lives,' Virginia says. She doesn't even know these deities. She is going mad. But a yodel pierces the mystical realm of her mind and brings her into the present. That can only be Victoria. She gets up and goes outside with her torch.

  Vee and Xena shake off their rain-coats. The black-spotted white dog enthusiastically makes muddy circles on the floor with paw-prints. Hugs all round. Vee's loud voice segues into her vision, which was, of course, an argument. Virginia lights her fire with the twigs and dry wood ready, collecting her thoughts. She activates the flames to warm her room, puts the billy on and settles into hospitality.

  Xena makes tea and VeeDub and Vee catch up with what each has been doing over the past few months. Virginia cannot help speaking about her sculpture and Amazons. 'With our backs to the future we browse over the past, though we will never see anything distinctly except our present.'

  'Come again?' Xena says. 'You've lost me.'

  'I don't know,' shrugs Virginia. 'I really don't know how their society was organised.'

  'I love talking about Amazons,' Vee Shackleton states.

  Xena nods, 'Same for me. Fancy worshipping the scorching sun when the moon and the earth make more sense of our moods! That's why I live under the trees.'

  'My dog's called Dike, after the goddess, Justice,' Shackleton confesses gruffly.

  Xena and Virginia have both heard the explanation before. 'Did you see the full moon last night, here I mean?' Xena asks Virginia. 'Witches were flying across it. True.'

  'Black, winged creatures. I did actually. Probably bats. I've been thinking about female cultures. They were done in in a short few hundred years. Amazons were at war for so long they couldn't see peace either in the future or the shape of it in the past.' Virginia is earnest. 'We're all slaves to it.'

  'How depressing!' comments Xena.

  'No, the war is still on.' The voices of the Amazons, though fading fast, continue in Virginia's head. And she speaks aloud. 'Penthesilea made a mistake willingly going into battle against the Greeks.'

  'Snivelling hebephiles? I can live with it,' booms Vee. 'The idea that we're warriors. We have no choice.'

  'Cressida sings our sorrows over the centuries, sealed them inside rocks for Amazons of the future to hear,' says Virginia, feeling relatively crazy.

  'Didn't know Cressida was an Amazon,' Vee admits. 'I've heard of Cassandra, she was a prophet wasn't she?'

  'Perhaps Penthesilea was in love with her,' opines Xena.

  'Or Polyxena, her sister,' Virginia grins. 'She gets on quite well with Priam and Hecuba, too. Cassandra, of course, was given the gift of prophecy and then cursed with the bane of no one believing what she had to predict.

  Victoria displays her knowledge. 'That is the men's story. The truth is more logical than that.'

  'Ask me,' Xena scoffs. 'No one believes me.'

  'Most intelligent people can probably work the future out, but few are prepared to act within that knowledge. They don't have the power! The political power!' Thus, Victoria is dramatic as she stands to warm her hands. 'Unable to implement policy.'

  'I resign from the world,' Xena explains to two women who know very well the nuts and bolts of Xena Kia's resignation. Change of name. Off all electoral rolls. Embrace of dreams. No bank account. Cash-flow from the goddess-plant, barter.

  'Reaping the rewards of Lesbianlands, mate,' Vee says affectionately.

  Virginia smiles, 'It is easy to cheat.' She frowns. 'But what to do when you win. You haven't got real knowledge, you can't purchase knowing,' Virginia declares.

  Vee nods. 'No power.'

  'Amazonian intellectuals don't get spoken about much,' VeeDub says light-heartedly.

  'Except for the nag,' Xena puts in, 'Cassandra, the scold.'

  'She wasn't an Amazon!' Victoria erupts. 'Nor a lesbian!'

  Three of them talk about the importance of wood to each individually and agree on the symbolic importance of the trees.

  'I love trees. I love them like people, though. They're my friends,' Xena says proudly.

  'Black wattles have shot up since I was here last. Fences broken in my horse yard,' sighs Victoria. 'Nicole's living there. Can I stay with you?' she asks Xena.

  'Did you come for the meeting?' asks Virginia.

  'I heard about it in Tamworth,' Victoria answers. 'So yeah, I guess so.' Xena and she are ready to go.

  Virginia fixes the stub-ends of candles into a couple of rusty tin cans with handles, 'Here take these. The moon won't give you much light in this weather.'

  'Thanks.'

  * * *

  Coloured light fell across my face as I opened my eyes. The day glistened. Puddles exploded with sunshine and reflected blue skies. The foliage was washed to a sparkle. Blades of lomandra shone clean at the edge of a square of cut lawn where dewdrops weighted the ends of grasses. Efforts had been made in this funny idea of a home. Specifically, stained glass: a learner's work of jagged daggers of leaded yellow like comic book lightning; and an art deco bubble-glass style, probably from a kitchen dresser picked up at a second-hand place, or the tip; but the third design was an impressively beautiful window. Rich apostles' cloak hues were rendered in a design of modern simplicity. I hadn't noticed them in the evening. An unfinished one of native fauna was leaning, unframed, against a wall, suggesting both had gone to class together. One talented in lead-lighting, the other not so good at it? If I had to guess the arty one, I'd say Jill.

  A perfect cobweb pearled, seemingly suspended from nothing. I had slept well, considering the unsettling thoughts I was entertaining last night. They were no longer rank. The morning air was freshly pungent. Gaps in the data twisted with inconsistent personal impression made the sets of questions so carefully set in columns start knotting like strings. The job was not mentioned after the goat-kid incident. A simple financial search and discover, the fixing up of a glitch in accounting possibly had become complex with sexual overtones, and other components. Lying on my back on the futon, I saw a pale blue, artificial light come into the dark loft. More stained glass newly hit by the sun?

  Daydreaming, I lay on my stomach, thinking. The window through which I was now taking in the dazzling outdoors was actually an aluminium-framed door. The light in the loft was not there when I checked again, must have a narrow angle to the east.

  The enthusiastic strains of Meghan's vocal cords suddenly chimed like a clock, jostling my meditations.

  'Morning, Margot,' she called as she backed down the ladder.

  'Beautiful day,' I responded. She sat on the uncushioned frame of the couch and pulled on lace-up shoes.

  'Coming?' she inquired.

  Much as I wanted to get her on her own, as well as see whether the creek was still in flood, I am no fool. Recent soaking suggested slush underfoot. I felt like keeping my feet on solid ground and observing the wonder of nature from a distance. The green grass hid an underlying marsh, I was sure. Besides, over near the pot-belly I could see my Doc Martens really needed some tender loving care. Characterised by knobbly knees, her skinny legs disappeared into an oversized plaid shirt as she took off. The goats were being spoken to like children. I reached out for my bag which was within an arm's length of the pillow last night and did not lay a hand on it. That made me get up. Stretches. My mind took a Co
ok's tour of my body. The routine's automatic. I checked out the tendons, the shoulders, the neck: wherever there was tension I paid attention to it for a moment. No stiffness, muscles in order. I noticed my bag, while doing a couple of push-ups. It was the other side of the naked lounge. The notebook was dislodged.