Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  With a pile of two-dollar coins in a tower, Sofia discovers interactive storytelling. Like an Olympic equestrian on a steed who snuffs the barriers with delight, leaping over the irritating banalities of technology, she is in a creative lather. She mutters to herself; she says, 'Okay,' each time she successfully completes a jump. The marvellous maze of the webset.wimmin.com.au has inspired her. The hypertextual avenues to others' work presents a labyrinth of fictional possibilities that she previously thought only her mind was capable of, an absolutely mental space where the frustrations of daily life fall away is her dream venue. Split asunder, she is free to be.

  Politically correct.

  She doesn't need much money to do it; she doesn't get any money for it. It is the conscious arena she has been searching for beyond the power of men and their commerce to address the demons that oppress her beleaguered goodness. That little elf of a thing resides in her soul, usually too weak to beat the angry beasts that prowl about scavenging scraps of her being to devour, scattering the remains, leaving her demented. She doesn't need the drugs to keep her in control because, here, here, she has a powerful self. Out of it is the last place she wants to be. Nor does she have to deal with the nonsense that prances boastfully calling itself sanity, or the ignorance of those who have no idea. In the puzzle of this site, males can take a hike. She is safe. They don't know who she is so how can they lock her up?

  'Now to express.' She ignores her friends who are doing something completely different together, and laughing. She shuts them out.

  A chap floats like a slave, a servant, in the peripheral vision of her eyes. She allows him to assist her. He clicks up a draft page for her. Sofia types. SOLILOQUY FOR THE FALLING ANGEL

  When someone dies you have a requiem. This is for myself and for the girl who was killed by the inter-capital passenger train at the other end of the railway bridge on Saturday night. My neighbour, in her nightgown with her mop, called the news across the fence. She, standing at her back door, the angles of houses receding behind her, was like an impressionist painting, although the bright sunny day is photo realism.

  A goods train percussed in our ears, locomotive number 8202, a rhythmic drumbeat. The XPT is quieter. This might be a reason. There was another girl hit by it at the level crossing last year. Both had the same Christian name. Incidental repetitions, in life, in music. The girls' names were Melissa, I did not know either Melissa. The river, the railway bridge, the station and the light industry comprise the rhymes and resonances of my outdoors, along with the closer squabbles of friar birds and honey-eaters in the grevilleas. I walk by the river. Brahmani kites swoop down on leaping bream and miss. The lofty eye, the heavy progress of freight, its da-dumb cacophony. Behind us, where we live, is a small farm with fat cattle. We had a flood across the river flats, made a lake of the paddocks, uprooted the casuarinas taking a whole chunk of the river-bank.

  The sun climbed the sky, I had not slept although it was already dawn. The still river steamed in intriguing patterns of mist, unlike clouds, unlike anything but itself. Unlike snow crystals, unlike the swirling geometry of snails' shells, yet each eddy of vapour was unique, while the water reflected the sky and the trees on the other side.

  The truth is the sensation of flying was approximated. But I had no feeling of suspension, no three-dimensional swimming with kicking feet, only a tearing pain on the inner edge of each shoulder blade, the weight of my body, the bane of my life, and my burden were ripping off my wings. The attachments, the muscles, the tendons, the sinews, were lengthening like chewing gum as I tried to fly like a kite, aloft, alone except for a single thread.

  A memory. A solo thought of suicide, but murder was better. 8202 drags its freight forward, hopefully avoiding disaster and fatality. I am the loaded goods train, trying to fly up off the rails. I am 8202*.

  Anything angelic was being ripped out of my body. I could hardly bear it. Why am I overloaded by gravity?, carrying a thousand things, when others walk along just fine? Why do I need to wing it?

  Who needs a dogged description of the trials and tests, the contents of the large, grimy containers of pain, depression and oppression, the procession of hardships? I take the name, the loco name, as my cyber tag. I'm loco, after all. Manic and mad.

  Something has been trying to kill me all my life. It, my enemy, has pierced my personality and is, at present, having a go at my character. I entertained thoughts of crashing to earth, of walking into the sea, boiling up the castor oil plant would do. There's enough of them around. I beguiled myself with means of killing, of letting go the final fine strings to my wings and watching them fly off like errant, erratic man-made kites.

  At that time I smiled. I will smile. Now, I, myself, might destroy what courage and optimism built. I fight not to blame my mother, but it is all her fault. She surrounds and smothers me. One of us must die for the other to live.

  As yet, by the river near the railway bridge, I am the falling angel. Present, and tense, expressing like a train. Will the driver go mad or stop? For Melissa, Melissa.

  Eyes glittering at me, checking on me. Keeping me in check. Knowing eyes, her eyes are all that move. Giving me pills. Whether they're cunning like a vixen's or alive with a desire to control, they are kind. All for my benefit. What a suffocating trap! With my interests at heart, her own interests, are, well, not necessarily foremost. I am suspended on the thinnest string of gum. A falling angel is a winged woman with too great a load to lift into the sky.

  'Margaret,' Sofia calls.

  'Margaret isn't here,' says Jill David as she sits down beside her.

  'Help me upload. I want to be a part of things. Happening things.'

  Jill helps her post her story onto the Webset.Wits.com.au/Cyberfiction htm site.

  Jill says, 'Anyone searching "angels" will find it, too.'

  Sofia imagines strange cyborgs pressing the hypertext angels in the on-going novel of women's experience and flights of fancy and fantasy coming across her real experience, and be enriched by it. She has never felt so useful in her life.

  Jill offers to give her a lift back to Stuart. But Maria is waiting in the park.

  Phil and I were alone in the detectives' office, talking across his desk. Looking about for bugs with a silent question mark on my features, I asked what he felt about Crankshaw.

  'I don't think I should tell you,' he said with just a touch of humour. The very black eyebrows frowned, paternalistic and macho. 'He's on my case, I don't know why. Hates Greeks maybe.'

  If we were being overheard, neither of us minded. Bravado on my part. I did not want to be seen by the Crank. He is a nosy type, the sort that doesn't forget a face.

  'Is he at this station today?' I asked.

  The Detective Constable nodded bleakly.

  'Okay, just testing you, mate. Stay honest.'

  He queried, 'The ones at the barbecue? I would rather like to find out if they knew that the stiff was a boy. They all said "she". I never mentioned otherwise.'

  Philippoussis wanted assistance. I half-smiled, sat, crossed my knees and took in the decor. New shop, pretty neat and tidy considering what these places are usually like. An old poster of missing kids hung on the pin-board.

  'The women were crazy, anyway,' Pip voiced his opinion. 'They came up with conspiracy theories and other nonsense. We're all out to get them because they're lesbians. And gays. I backed off, Margot. I didn't see the need to unduly upset them.'

  I nodded.

  'But Commander Crankshaw does not have the same tolerance of lifestyle choices and gender differences.' A multicultural boy in a postmodern world, Australia the land of anything goes. 'I don't think they have anything to do with it,' he said. 'To tell the truth.'

  'The Crank has them taped as marijuana croppers and dippy hippies.'

  Philippoussis shrugged.

  I said, 'You are all fascists, only interested in busting small growers of a drug that should be legal for adult users? It would save a lot of tax-payers' money if the
State let them grow their own, anyway.'

  'You are not wrong. Getting close to the size of it. Actually the narcotic in question is probably heroin.' Phillip heaved a big sigh. 'I have two dead boys, died within five kilometres of one another and absolutely nothing similar about them at all. Except they are practically identical. If their deaths are primarily drug-related, or self-inflicted, they are small fry. Junkies chucked where junkies belong, in the junk box.'

  'He wants bigger fish, naturally.' I got up, speaking to the bugs.

  'So the man says.'

  I paced around. Here was a veiled invitation to work closely with the databases, the computers, crime files and other useful amenities; to what cost? Be DC Philippoussis' snout?

  In my gut, I didn't want Crankshaw to know I exist. Still we were baiting his eavesdropping devices and I was in the double jeopardy of trusting the young detective as well.

  'Pip? Can I see them?' I begged.

  'Phil,' he corrected. 'Who?'

  'The bodies.'

  'Why?' he asked.

  'Perspective,' I answered. 'I'm employed by the mother of the corpse I found,' I explained, 'as of last night.'

  'I'll see what I can do,' he rose to his feet. 'For you.'

  We shook hands. A clean-living fellow, I could feel it in his pressure, see it in his eyes and smell it on his person. I can't know whether he is tough enough, though. He may buckle under. I have seen so many fellows change after the age of about twenty-eight. It is as if conservative values hit them as they become victims to greater forces. Whereas younger blokes can still have a fire for justice forging iron in their souls.

  On my stroll to the coffee shop, I saw Maria eating hot chips from a greasy bag. I did not want to catch her attention. But she called me over, like Queen Victoria or someone, with a little movement of her finger. I stopped myself saying, 'You really don't do your health any good, Maria. Gobbling up that stuff.'

  'Hello, Margot,' Maria said. 'I'm missing my doctor's appointment.'

  'Why?'

  'I know what she'll say and I don't want to hear it.' She licked her fingers.

  'I need a good night's sleep,' I smiled, referring to her distress calls.

  'I shouldn't bother you,' she admitted. She vigorously crunched up the paper bag. 'No, what I mean is, Sofia is, well, a genius.'

  'Is she?' I wondered.

  Maria was defiant, defensive. 'And you have to make allowances, don't you think? It's okay now, she has found a place for her work.'

  'Her work?' I let my scepticism show.

  'She's a writer. But, as a separatist feminist no one would publish her stories. Now, there is the Internet. Epublishing. She is creating!'

  'Good. Look, I've got an appointment. Got to go, I really do.' I tapped my wristwatch.

  'Yes,' she said, waving me off. 'I just wanted you to know. There is another side.'

  'Sure.'

  The Paradiso is one of a strip of cafés and eateries on the road down to the marina. From CyberCage I heard the beer hall Bavarian drinking song, rather than dulcet, tones of my Broomhilda's Germanic laugh. Trying to ignore it and not be disturbed by the thought she should be elsewhere, saving the trees, I parked myself in the garden. Sofia passed me on her way out with Jill David. She was, as Maria indicated, extremely happy and really attractive. Busy. Inspired. In a hurry. We exchanged a greeting.

  Mrs Penny Waughan was a woman about my own age, slim with dyed fair hair and a clipped walk. She immediately lit up. The ashtray was beneath the sugar dispenser. We occupied fold-up seats either side of a moulded table. Beneath an umbrella, she talked and I took out my notebook.

  'Nigel Neil Waughan, his father is Nigel you see,' she directed as I wrote down the victim's name. 'I'm Penny. Call me Penny. I called him Neil because every man I've known called Neil has been a nice person. I miss him.' She laughed self-deprecatingly, and fiddled with her Lights. I wondered what pharmaceuticals she had taken to keep her grief at bay. 'Call me Penny.' She kept saying that.

  'Tell me a bit about yourself, your son, your situation, anything.' I smiled with my eyes, keeping my mouth serious.

  'Well I'm a TAFE teacher. Computer studies. Basically it's, well, I started out. Um, I taught typing in high schools, sort of low on the academic rung if you like. Because word-processing was the next step and then computers generally, then desk-top publishing, I, I suppose, leap-frogged over my more learned colleagues into a relatively prestige position. I really only kept up with the secretarial demands outside education. My salary increased, of course.' She flicked her gold cigarette lighter into flame and joined a fresh smoke to it. 'If, if I'd known, I was going to end up with such a good career, I might not have had a child. Never felt particularly maternal. I was only ever a good average pupil at school myself, groomed for marriage from an early age, taking bookkeeping, typing, shorthand, geography, economics and English Expression, easy subjects. I got into Teachers' College and passed. A pleasant shock at the time. Still is, I suppose. My parents are humble folk. Ten-pound tourists, Nigel called them. They came to Australia poor, they stayed poor.'

  A wistful look passed across Penny Waughan's face as she gazed into her past. I had given her a licence to talk which she grasped with both hands. For my own part I found it interesting. I wanted to know what happened to Neil Waughan. And why. Background was a start. I answered her melancholy with a gentle nod. She took a breath of nicotine and tar, and let all the smoke out in an accepting sigh.

  'Nigel was the right man for me, the worst thing about him was his name. Can you believe that? We honeymooned at Hayman Island where they had a heart-shaped bed. We walked along the sand in the sunset holding hands. Happy. I was happy because Nigel was really happy.' She searched my features for irony or sarcasm. 'You want me to get onto the present?'

  I nodded. I didn't mind.

  'You see, Nigel really does love sand. He worked in banking with dry as dust numbers and always dreamed of sand, a Lawrence of Arabia at heart. Men have those sorts of silly dreams. It keeps them going. Neil was born in our first year of marriage, and I went back to teaching when he was about two because we needed two incomes to buy a house. Another child was put off, and put off, because of small practical things, at the beginning of each month. The pill suited my hormone levels anyway. I had had difficult periods before I went on it. After, well, regular and comfortable.'

  I settled back with a cappuccino, gesturing thanks to the waitress. Penny is the type to partake in women-talk about the pill and babies, doctors and gynaecological matters in general.

  'Tell me about Neil,' I suggested, taking the fluff off my drink with a spoon, dreading the love I was going to hear of and its loss.

  'Neil was a good student at primary school, smart and popular. We, er, changed houses, suburbs. My salary overtook Nigel's when we had just about paid for our first home in Sydney. Prices were booming in the inner west and a few years on we decided we could afford to buy land and build on the Paradise Coast. It seemed okay for Neil as it would coincide with his going to high school. Nigel was over the moon, building, planning, bossing, landscaping and being on the beach. Out in the air. Closer to his daydream. Work became less and less attractive to him, even though he had a job. Banking had changed around him.' Penny seemed to pull herself under control, talking about her husband, as if it were an effort to keep her contempt from running amok.

  'He was a hands-on, person-to-person, old-gold-standard type of money-manager. Really, I think he cannot grasp or won't accept the concepts of value the electronic world requires, with bull markets and bear markets and huge, inconceivably huge, debts and loans. I think I was more interested in the turns that capital and global economics were taking. Strictly a cash teller, Nigel. Likes to handle it. He really couldn't understand unsecured finance. He took redundancy. Off his own bat. Just like that. The burden of our new life fell on my earning capacity. Meanwhile, Neil hated school here. He was too sophisticated. He knew more about computing than his teacher, was more artistic th
an his art teacher and generally felt surrounded by boorish hicks who teased him. For a while he tried, hung around with the worst types in town, in the mistaken impression that they could protect him from the middle lot who for some reason loathed him, as did the teachers. Neil loves clothes.'