Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  21

  …murdered by those bastards…

  Ian Truckman is enthralled, playing with his Pentium. He types 'sport' and he can see in digital resolution anything from caber-throwing in remote Scotland to kick-boxing from Thailand, anything. Amazing.

  Sometimes, he is given words he does not type with his forefingers even though the thoughts are probably in his head. He suspects the computer is reading his mind. When he goes to his pornography site, he gets the Police Gazette advertising pages.

  AFP spokesman said in Sydney yesterday that the flying squads, to come under the banner of 'Drug Task Forces—National Mobile Strike Teams', would be open to applications from officers experienced in the field of anti-drugs operations with State police services.

  Tracking his UFO buddies, he is totally out of control of his screen. The CB radio crackles, Breaker, breakman, trucker truckman! Your rig looks like a Russian Topot-12M mobile missile, just a mighty big phallic threat.

  His fart is wet. Ian Truckman pulls into a road-house before his long haul south. He will have breakfast at noon.

  Lois and Thrust do not live at the Koori settlement out of town, Crossroads, where a rare moment of enlightenment in public housing resulted in interesting, energy-efficient roof designs among the cheap shanties of an earlier generation. Kids, bikes, broken-down cars, weeds and spindly scrub occupy the space. At the turn-off is a large petrol station, restaurant and highway general convenience store. In this brightly lit establishment, which is half-way between their places, Chandra is having a cup of tea with her busy friends, Haze and Daze, who are a pair of hard-working women's libbers of the old school. They have been together so long they finish each others sentences and sometimes talk at the same time without noticing. Daisy is about ten years older than Hazel, who is sixty-odd.

  'Male violence and money conspire in the annihilation of women.'

  'It doesn't matter to him,' Haze points at a truckie, 'what the material he is carrying…'

  'Provided he is getting good money for the job,' finishes Daze. 'In today's world, even women's morals go to pot under the overriding need for money. As an ethical being…'

  'It explains, excuses, enslaves, buy souls, is unavoidable,' interrupts Haze, 'Above all, it is dangerous. Male violence is essentially cowardly and fascist.'

  'So he does have bosses,' Daze takes over.

  Haze butts in. 'His having bosses releases him from any responsibility for this stuff. As he has bosses so does he boss, or oppress; as he lives in fear being a coward so he delivers fear.'

  'Enjoys other's fear,' Daze elaborates. 'When he stops at a truck stop, likely as not, there is his picture on the wall.'

  Daze displays a knowledge of trucks that surprises the amused Chandra. She nods towards a gleaming silver and white outfit, 'So in that small world of fanatical, big-gutted men, he is an aristocrat.'

  'They are all going to call him "mate" whether he is or not. It is the class of his rig that matters, its petrol consumption and its natural enemies…'

  'Retirees on their round-Australia getaways with caravans or furnished vans.'

  'One day, dear,' Hazel reaches for Daisy's hand and gives it a squeeze. Since they started this routine of meeting once a month, Chandra finds the environment they've chosen features in the conversation for a while.

  'Essentially he lacks imagination and is lonely and too stupid to know it.' Chandra decides, 'He is proudly able to express his inadequacy in whatever way he chooses.'

  'Boys do not criticise each other for having toys,' says Haze.

  'They die of envy,' laughs Daze.

  Haze frowns. 'He constitutes a threat to women, the ecology and reconstituted men merely by being. He will live unchallenged until the planet runs out of oil because no one in power has the slightest interest in re-educating him.'

  'It's funny you should mention annihilation,' Chandra says. 'It is a word that has come up a bit lately.' Chandra trusts Haze and Daze completely. They are crones to her middle age.

  'Oh, the restless white man,' proclaims Haze, 'searching for the place to fight for his rights. The restless white man is the hungriest thing on earth.'

  'He thinks he is heroic if he fights for his rights,' contributes Daze.

  'But he has everything there is to have,' comments Chandra.

  'Yes,' Haze suddenly hears her, 'Words do come in and out of fashion. We hardly know we're using them.'

  'There is this net-nutter who has this theory of the trials of annihilation, and I don't know whether she is full of hot air or dangerously fanatical.' Chandra feels safe confiding in these two.

  'It's all beyond me, I'm afraid. Solid Newtonian physics is what I understand, gravity and all that.' Daisy is the picture of solidity, indeed, solidarity.

  'When I studied,' Haze looks back into the dim, dark ages, 'I found it hard enough to understand George Berkeley who said the table wasn't there unless you were looking at it.'

  Chandra is truly fond of these two, tireless old hags. 'There are some cyber-friends who want to do something revolutionary.'

  'Ah ha, Haze, we're too 'seventies, again.' Daisy looks affectionately at her long-time partner. 'Our refuge is old hat.'

  'We work, Chandra. Where it matters, where women are suffering.' Haze is defensive almost as an automatic reaction.

  Chandra sighs, 'Well, I wasn't going to tell you the whole conspiracy.'

  'What you clever hacking girls should do is get at the banks. They are criminal. Immoral,' Daisy says with what, for her, would approximate hatred. She is a gentle soul.

  'Precisely,' agrees Chandra. 'We're working on it.'

  'Why don't you slip in a virus that redistributes wealth?' asks the impossibly romantic Daisy.

  'Great idea,' agrees Hazel. 'To everyone with under five hundred in their savings, rather than slugging the poor with bigger charges and rewarding the rich under the great forgive-all, the shareholders' interests.'

  'Take it away from this late capitalist shenanigans, subvert the stock exchanges…' Daze is interrupted.

  By Haze, 'Stop the weird scientific brains running around in search of the be-all and end-all answer of why are we here?'

  'The nonsense of trying to take birth away from the female. That's what it is all about,' states Daisy seriously.

  Haze is also serious, 'Modern science is detail, immense and minute detail. Even scientists in the same field can barely talk to each other…'

  'Let alone the rest of us,' interjects Daze, 'Because their expertise either doesn't overlap or they're in competition.'

  'Or conflict,' clarifies Haze. 'What about medical technology? Women's bodies are there to be explored and probed like outer space. Forget about the female as a person, she doesn't exist!'

  'Meghan is one of the genius-types running around searching for the beall,' comments Chandra. Chandra tells Haze and Daze about their vicious disagreement and why it happened.

  'Meghan, a charming lass,' opines Hazel.

  'I like Meghan,' agrees Daisy.

  The double act bubbles on. 'When the brain needs a logical and complete answer,' Haze finishes a previous thought.

  'Like God was,' understands Daisy. Chandra is lost.

  'It can lead to conclusions which are nonsense or are made nonsense of,' Haze is apparently back on the subject of science. 'It is a question of truth and belief.'

  'And what we are forced to believe,' expands Daze. 'Germaine Greer says that women will never know themselves as well as a girl of three!'

  Haze jibes to a different tack, 'The devious doings of Dionysian-type guys!'

  Daze joins her. 'Their mission is women's madness.'

  'You're a couple of mad women,' Chandra teases affectionately. 'But saner than anyone I know.'

  'And, one would have to suppose, that, for all her genius, Meghan is too,' Hazel jumps back into the slipstream.

  'But many characters qualify for madness because, in one way, the sensitivity of a woman can present as madness simply by being
misunderstood by everyone else,' Daisy explains.

  'That's right, Daze,' Haze turns affirmatively to Daisy as if it is the first time she has heard her say that.

  All three of a piece know time's up and start fidgeting for their things. Chandra holds her sticks still for a minute staring at her friends, then asks, 'Do you two still have sex?'

  'Of course.' Daze is indignant at the question.

  Haze raises her eyebrows. 'Regularly. What about you, Chandra?'

  'I'm thinking about it,' Chandra grins.

  'You wouldn't be Robinson Crusoe in that,' remarks Hazel.

  It takes them at least another ten minutes to get into their cars and go their separate ways. Chandra feels nicely warm having been in the glow of passionate female friendship.

  Resisting Chandra's number for about half a second, I did press her buttons but the whine of the fax machine replied. I put the handset down, knowing I had no idea what I was going to say, anyway. Work to do.

  First, on Penny's job, I had to speak with the lad's father, and I could find him? On the beach. With the camels. And Cybil Crabbe? I found out where she worked. Le Cote de Paradiso Holidays, cottages, caravans and cabins. I looked in the Yellow Pages and decided to turn up in person.

  Instead of heading towards the ferry crossing, I turned left out of my driveay. I drove very slowly for the next hundred metres, trying to see if a car had turned into next door. There were no tyre tracks in the black mud off the shoulder of the gravel before their gate. I backed as if I had forgotten something at my place. Yes, tyre marks would have shown if he had been there last night. I continued north. As I came to the corner where the accident had been, I had to brake as there was a police car on the verge. A uniformed policewoman and a fat female teenager were planting a white cross. A narrow young girl with sharp features stood nearby with a bunch of plastic flowers held in two hands watching.

  White crosses on the roadside where teenage boys lost their lives have become almost iconic about the country. I mused that probably most were young drivers and passengers, not only because of their high road accident death rate but also because the incidental, simple crosses begging remembrance spoke of the grief of life unlived, an innocence, a real loss for a real family. I drove out along the surf beaches road to the tourist end of Port Water. Where are the poppies for the babies who die from domestic violence? Boys' reckless despair or brattish arrogance monopolised my thoughts as I passed alpaca, ostrich, deer and angora in paddocks looking for camels. Welcome to Australia! We shoot wallabies, don't we?

  Neil Waughan. I did not know him alive.

  I turned at a sign on a fence 'Camel Tours Beach Safaris 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.', and was relatively surprised to see native fauna in the shape of kangaroos grazing about the edges of the scrub.

  Nigel Waughan was preparing his beasts for their afternoon walk. Apart from being barefooted with grey hair braided down his back, he did have the bearing of a bank clerk. Perhaps it was the words he said, 'May I help you?' We went into his office, which was hardly more than the tin shed it seemed. A noticeboard was thick with fliers of ecological concerns with detailed accounts of Council's misdoings and a plea to demonstrate against the racist rally and the visit of the white virgin.

  Nigel addressed the woman behind the desk, 'Susie, let's swap jobs.'

  Susie, dressed in ranger-like gear, was plainly eager to be with the camels. She strode out, a dykey type who wouldn't come within a bull's roar of a lesbian. Nigel sat on the table with his feet on a chair, his posture in complete contrast with his manner, which retained the unerring 'have a good day efficiency of the teller who crisply hands you freshly printed currency notes.

  'Mr Waughan, I am the one who found your son. I was jogging near the beach close to where I live and I stopped at the toilet block. I thought at first it was a girl and that she had died from heroin overuse or overdose. I called the police and was later told his actual sex,' tumbled out of me in a stream. The man had to know I cared.

  Nigel interrupted me with a hand gesture. Easy tears came to his eyes. He snuffled them up through his nose.

  'Can you tell me about him? What he was like?' I asked, concerned. 'What was your relationship with him like?'

  Nigel would talk, he was a feminised gent. He did.

  'Where to start? I could talk about that lad for hours, he blows me away. The greatest kid a man ever fathered. I bothered to father, you see. I parented. Supermarket, childcare, play. What a kid! It changed my life being a father. Penny wanted to work, wanted to study, and teach. I went to the bank each day and did not work or think about work a second longer than I had to and I was home, picking up this perfect little person from day care, throwing him up on my shoulders. We walked, we went places. Penny dug it. She flew, the new woman, the superwoman. Her salary went from a standing start to passing mine halfway down the straight, so that, with both of us working, we soon had enough money to do what we wanted. I wanted the sand, well, that's how she puts it. She said I have gritty old sand in my blood like the books on my side of the bed, Lawrence of Arabia and Seven Years in Tibet, adult adventure books. Neil was so bright. He could talk in sentences when hardly more than a year old. And when she started bringing home computers! Well, I tell you, I felt like Biggles overtaken by Luke Skywalker, rumbling along in an old bi-plane in goggles, while the boy wielded the Force and piloted spaceships. But we shared something at the bottom of all that. Do you ever think about good and evil? Well if there isn't a devil creating merry hell on the planet, how do these bastards get away with it?' He waved his knuckles at the noticeboard. I assumed the bastards were mining companies, the logging and chemical industries, local councils, estate agents, developers and politicians. My eyes followed his directing arm and I saw an announcement about a Men's Group Gathering in the forest. I nodded.

  'Neil was a fucking hero. He was going to change the world. Can I get you a cup of coffee?' he suddenly offered.

  'Okay,' I accepted.

  Nigel filled the kettle with spring water from a large blue plastic container with a little tap. 'The devil's not stupid. It's no accident he died,' he said. Waughan plugged in the cord and swung around, standing over me. The gentle gent became a he-man. 'She tried to castrate him! I never thought it would happen. That we would grow to hate each other over Neil. Women should not have boys after the age of twelve!' he said with conviction.

  'Really?'

  'Really. After we moved up here and I finally decided to make my life my own. Penny is a mean, bitter pragmatist, while I am an impossible romantic,' he shrugged. 'She won custody.'

  'You fought for custody?' He didn't answer my query.

  'She's sick. She would dress him in girls' clothes and put make-up on him. She was playing with this kid like he was a doll. But he was beyond primary school. Sometimes it happened when I was still living in the house…' This man had learnt to talk about his feelings.

  'I had an affair,' he confessed. 'I was guilty. She threw this at me. I had no moral courage. I wanted to stop her putting that green stuff all over his face. But I got angry. The two of them laughing! At me!'

  I looked meaningfully at his beautifully plaited long hair.

  'Grotesque, it was. I've always been a sort of SNAG, but I felt the rage. When I look at it in the cool light of therapy, I only saw it a couple of times but they are exaggerated in my memory because of the suppressed anger I held inside me. And jealousy, I'll own that too.'

  'You both loved him so much,' I said mildly.

  'Oh, I didn't fight it. I did love my son!' Nigel made coffee from a jar of instant de-caf and offered me soy milk. He, however, did not wait for my refusal, and handed me a mug with 'Men Are from Mars Women Are from Venus' decorating its heavy porcelain. We heard Susie call from outside. The camels were lined up head to tail with glamorous Arabian cloth across their saddles. Gold, maroon and aqua tassels festooned their noble heads.