Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  Sometimes I hate my suspicious mind. I thought of dusting it for fingerprints other than mine. I was actually eager to do that soon because I could and I hadn't yet. In my chook-house studio I have fixed up a black plastic darkroom for my hobby, amateur black and white photography. So far I've had no chance to find out whether it is operative. I rifled through my bag, put it to one side then realigned the futon on the frame to become a neat sofa. And folded up the bedding. I was over at the pot-belly shaking out my clothes when I heard Jill's yawning voice.

  'Hope you slept well, Margot. Like a coffee?' she invited, hospitably.

  'Thanks, yeah. Please,' I replied. 'My boots dried.'

  'Good.'

  She had no clothes on. The vibe was sexy, but I was not provoked. Instead I slid the glass door aside and walked up to my car. The rain-cleansed air was so fresh and the distant hills such a dense blue-grey that after throwing my bag inside I kept walking along the stone and mud drive to the top of the hill, then did some deep breathing, chest-thumping, followed by tranquil observation. Their place was oriented the wrong way. The dwelling had a southern aspect, which might have been okay for a dairy, not a house. To the east a tall stand of eucalypts and she-oaks blocked most of the morning sun.

  Meghan came up beside me, and whispered, 'Come, have a coffee.'

  The birds in the timber were positively happy, raucous. Black cockatoos, bell-birds, spinebills, honey-eaters and fairy wrens. Meghan was better at identifying than I. We turned and walked together down the hill into the shade of trees, welcomed by the smell of freshly brewed coffee.

  It was as if they expected a guest for breakfast, not for dinner. The coffee was really good. Quality stuff. We had English muffins from a packet with marmalade, and halved grapefruit. The sunlight speckled through leaves onto the picnic table we were sitting at on benches. The conversation was jolly. The goat I had saved yesterday took an interest. We roamed around easy topics: rowing, cycling, swimming, triathletics, coming events, the triathlon on Sunday. The pretty brown and white kid eyed me. I frowned back at it; does a goat have a measure of heroism?

  The most interesting thing to report from the sporty talk was the change that came over Jill when I responded to a question about my trainer, Sean Dark.

  'I don't mind poofters,' said Jill, 'but when I saw him on Saturday night cross-dressing, I decided never to trust him again.'

  'It was a joke,' I supplied. 'A queen as the Virgin Queen. He's a radical celibate.'

  'No, he's not!' Jill's tone was vicious. 'He's a transvestite and I hate them.'

  Meghan interrupted, gently. 'Tell Margot why, Jill.'

  Jill then told a bitter tale about the death and sickness of a number of her friends in Sydney. It was before the public recognition of AIDS and transmission of the HIV virus, but the guy knew he had it. He dressed as a woman and shared with a group of lesbians a smack needle, thus infecting them all. Jill considered it an act of calculated misogyny which gave her untold sadness through the loss of women she loved. Her hatred seethed with longings for revenge.

  'It's just something a woman would never do,' she finished.

  Meghan abruptly got up. It was time for me to go. 'Margot, you drive me down the road,' she commanded, 'and I'll show you Chandra's place.'

  My polite thanks for dinner, breakfast and hospitality were met with sulky silence, as Jill slumped into the melancholic melodrama of her own feelings.

  There was still a fair flow of water over the cemented ford. For the hell of it, I put the Sierra into four-wheel drive before we got in and was glad I did as we slid down to the wooden bridge.

  'You could get stranded here,' I said with distracted concern, glancing upriver.

  'When I have to get to work in a flood, I take off all my clothes, put them into a waterproof bag, hold it up and throw myself in and get swept down,' Meghan explained as if it were nothing at all.

  'True?' I believed her.

  'I land about there,' she pointed. Higher up the bank, beside the road, was her car, an expensive-looking sports sedan. I smiled, tried to match woman with vehicle. Both speedy.

  'Then I get dressed and go to work. Don't have to today, but my car is always parked there.' Meghan told me as if assuming I thought the rusty navy-blue Nissan Urvan up at the house was hers.

  'Tell me about your work?' I questioned politely as the Sierra splashed across the second creek-crossing, skidding dangerously. Was it locally based or Sydney? Was it urgent? Could she take flexitime?

  She would not answer. So I kept rephrasing my queries.

  'You seem to want to know an awful lot about me,' she said eventually.

  'I'm curious by nature,' I smiled. We can all play the ignorance game.

  'I cannot—cannot—comprendez?—tell you what I do,' she said emphatically. 'Can't even tell Jill.'

  'I realise,' I said, 'that Jill doesn't know I am working for you, she thinks that I am just a friend, who is interested in sport, and, who was invited out to tea. There are discrepancies in your paperwork that I can chase up, but I need you to, at least, tell me where you were on certain dates. When large amounts of money went from your accounts. I can't believe you don't look at your bank statements when they come!'

  Meghan Featherstone's face seemed to flick through a directory of personalities before it chose one. Then she brushed her head vigorously with her hands as if she had walked through a fine cobweb by accident.

  'Does your work know about Jill?' I pressed.

  'Good question.' Her reply was in that chirpy I-am-a-fool-can't-you-see voice that I was beginning to suspect was both incredibly honest and incredibly deceitful at the same time.

  Impatiently, I said, 'I used to work for the Commonwealth, National Crime Authority. Stationed both Sydney and Adelaide. Previously with the New South Wales police force, rank, Detective Senior Constable. Served Redfern, Marrickville, and for a short time in Central Sydney. Trained Goulburn, graduating with credits. You think I can't find out where you work?'

  She shook her head. Then spoke almost too quietly to be heard. 'I have access to more information than you've dreamed of, Margot.'

  In a raised voice she gave me directions to turn right at the next dirt road, and finished. 'In your philosophy.'

  Meghan changes like the wind, I was thinking, when she said, 'I am an idiot with money. Although I am a scientist, in reality I can't stand figures. Well, only in the abstract. I can't seem to whip up the enthusiasm. The envelope says bank, I just toss it. I know I have enough money to live,' she admitted, slapping her hands together, point by point.

  'You can't be real,' I commented, slowing down so that I could look at her. 'Fair dinkum? You're short thousands of dollars and you won't tell me whether you were in the city, in the vicinity, at the time it was withdrawn.'

  'Business can be done over the telephone. All bills I pay with plastic,' she said conversationally. Then blew me away with, 'I did not employ you to find out who is taking money from my accounts.' She said it so softly I hardly heard her.

  'What did you say?' I was frustrated, confused.

  'I said, I did not employ you to look into my financial affairs,' she stated.

  We looked at each other, searching the eyes for answers neither of us had.

  'What?' I demanded, incredulous. 'But it was your voice on the telephone, not a good line, mind you. Then the documents arrived, not a full set, mind you.' It was getting hilarious. I wanted to laugh.

  Meghan looked as if she wanted to cry but didn't know how. Body language read, here was one stressed lady. I breathed in through my nose to the count of seven and exhaled to the count of four. Secrets were bound together in there like sticks of dynamite.

  'So, you have my financial papers?' she asked.

  'Yes. Here, you can have them back.' I reached over the back of the seat feeling for the folder.

  She looked very unhappy for one moment. Then she was bouncing in her seat, saying, 'No, no. Keep them. Keep working for whoever me is. Find out what y
ou can.' With that she employed me. 'There's Chandra's place.'

  Whoever me is, what a choice of words!

  She had me stop at a scenic spot. We overlooked bottle-brush in the foreground, an elegant sweep of valley, distant hills, wonderfully mauve, and in the middle, a sunlit north-facing hill, a small area of vegetables, dark glossy silver beet, beans on trellises, a large patch of sweet corn grown about six foot, tomato vines, passionfruit covered the two tanks either side of a shed. Herb gardens close to the house were interlocked with flower beds. A native fig the size of a house and post-and-rail fences gave perspective. A ride-on motor mower was being driven by a woman in a marvellous hat. We gazed for a moment. I opened my door. Meghan let herself out of the car. But she was not taking in the scenery when I glanced at her but biting her fingernail, perusing the ground. Jerkily, she sprang to attention.

  'Okay, okay. I'll ring you. That is Chandra riding her mower. She is terrific, really,' she said, but stopped me asking anything by saying, 'She just has a problem with me.'

  'Well I probably won't visit her, anyway,' I reckoned.

  'I think I'll walk home,' she said in her artless way, as if we hadn't exchanged knowledge of a mystery. Viz, who employed me in the first place.

  She started off. I followed her. 'Hey! You have to make an appointment with me. What's your sister's address? You got any other girlfriends in other parts of the country? I have so many questions.'

  'I'll ring,' she brushed me away.

  'You had better, or I'll resign from the job. And why aren't you introducing me to the lady on the tractor?' I skipped around in front of her.

  'We are not on speaking terms at the moment,' she explained. I held her still. 'What I mean is Chandra is so in your face. I can't deal with her right now.'

  'Why can't you deal with it now? Meghan, what is really going on?' I demanded. She side-stepped me and went quickly the way we'd come. As I waited for some kind of assurance, she turned and touched her nose with her forefinger. Then she grinned broadly, gave a hop and began to jog off like someone happily into a training routine.

  Who was it I was supposed to meet? Meghan Featherstone herself, plainly. Whoever wanted me interested certainly had me hooked.

  11

  …bliss of being and non-being…

  A little girl on a dappled grey pony rode up the hill on the other side of the house. There seemed to be no gate or drive-way this side of the property.

  The land must have been subdivided in the last ten years into five- and twenty-five acre blocks, judging by the houses, which were new. Each looked like someone's dream of mansions, fancies of other places. There was the American clap-board look alongside the Southern States colonnades, a suggestion of Dutch African Colonial, a two-storey mansion, a manor house complete with rose garden. Early Australian imitation homesteads, in carefully combined heritage colours, of Hardiplank or aluminium siding or new wood glistening with paint. Some with no flowers, lawn or trees yet. Each of these homes aspired to a unique vision, isolated from one another. Brick veneer off-the-rack architecture with pretty English cottage neighboured Spanish ranch-style. Swimming pools galore. Here people plonked their individual ideas side by side with no recognition of each other's taste or the nature of the land. I wondered how it would look in a hundred years: would they have found some kind of unity by then beyond the general air of borrowed style? Would it say to future generations: here was a society in which citizens worked all their life solely in order to own a home? I could not criticise because I do it myself. We put a lot of energy into our relationship with a house. In ownership of land and dwelling, each person is so aggressive, obsessive and possessive. Yet I bet they are all similar people here. Tradesmen who have done well enough financially to be able to afford to live in their ideal chateau. Neat and new.

  Chandra's block was quite different from the rest in that the residence was the original farmhouse. An ancient native fig dominated one side, while on the other the garden, designed for produce, was more successful visually than the bordering villas' picture-book appearance.

  The Seaside Shopping Complex is a commercial village under a roof with air-conditioning. Dogs and skate-boards are not allowed. Sofia is horrified to discover that neither is smoking. She disobeys. She goes into the supermarket. She has it in mind to buy food, but she reads about food. She reads the small print on cartons of milk, on the tins, the cans, the boxes. Too much food. Too much packaging. She hates food. It is all poisoned, anyway. They do things without telling anyone. She tries to explain to shoppers the words on the packet can only be understood by the scientifically educated, but she can decode some of them. No one listens. She throws the things she has been studying into others' trolleys. She lights another cigarette, looks about for an official and gets ready to run. She suspects every person in a suit. There is a conspiracy afoot, poisoning not only peoples bodies, but their minds as well. They have invented substances in the laboratories that get into women's souls. She must find out the secrets. The only people she sees in suits are women, power-dressing. Freaks rule! The one-eyed scientists managed to change an X chromosome into Y in the laboratories. Now the method has hit the streets.

  Riding escalators in the Seaside Shopping Complex, Sofia is in the here and now of the brave new world. Nothing is friendly. The people are robots, pretending to be human, overacting. She can see through them. She spies a phone. She has an idea.

  She rings Chandra. 'It is all obfuscation.' The place you go to find the truth is on the World Wide Web.

  Chandra calms her down by making the basics simple. 'Do you understand?'

  'Now I have a purpose,' she whispers into the mouthpiece and puts it down. She walks slowly towards plate glass and sees herself slim and beautiful; tosses her hair; shakes it back into place. But that is her disguise. She is really a hideous flying creature.

  Sofia is thrilled to discover that in the internet café, CyberCage, they are not strict on smoking. She has a quick mind if she stays on a train of thought and does not disembark. She pays her money and types the address: www.webset.com.au/wimmin.htm. She has followed Chandra's instructions and she is a whiz. She is bouncing with excitement. She has to get up and pace a bit. Then she enters the kitchen chat.

  Been cleaning the white goods listening to the radio.

  Let's cook up a plan to assassinate the White Virgin.

  She is worse than the Iron Butterfly.

  She's a woman, no. She's being used. BFN

  Sofia writes down the number of a goods locomotive and has her say.

  <8202*> If you imagine any woman has any real power beyond information you're fooling yourself.

  If only we had the diamonds.

  But we cannot rob the earth mother.

  Greed, one of the ways the men get you on their side.

  <8202*> Real poison. I have proof. They're lopping a leg off an X, making wobbly Ys.

  We could put something in the water that kills sperm or makes them impotent. B.O.B. Okay, lesbian cyborg candidate for Oz Presidency logging on.

  Gotta hitch-hiker. Cane toads! Anyone want a pet?