Making a date with Alison proved difficult. Perhaps I could pick up Tilly for her from school and bring her around to an address she spelt out. I asked, 'Do you recall any other vehicles in the carpark near the toilets before I arrived?'
'Lenny was impressed by a suped-up Valiant Charger,' she said. Her voice changed. It dropped a complete octave as she said, 'There are spooks sniffing about.'
'Yes,' I affirmed her suspicions, 'but what are they interested in?'
'Drugs, what else?' She put down the phone abruptly.
I gazed at the greasy Nadir cap I had perched on top of the Waughan file, trying to vibe out its secrets.
Alison rang back, explaining that Tilly, her daughter, thought she had a part in Neil's murder. 'Murder?' I queried. She told me that Tilly was a baby witch. All she has to say, is: I hate you, I wish you were dead.
'All the kids say that now,' I expressed my disbelief.
'But Tilly felt she could point the bone and someone would die.' Alison pleaded with me: could I explain that I was looking for the real killer? And do it convincingly.
'I guess so,' I said uncertainly. No one had established that it was murder yet.
Dello and Maz were picking up Tilly from school. These two conversed in a way which implied that there was something to tell but they were not letting on. They didn't give me much of an idea of who else was at the barbecue either. Tilly was to be dropped off at ballet practice.
When I took Tilly back to the car after asking her formally what she said to Neil and when she heard that he died and how she felt about it, and reassured her that she could not have been responsible, I quizzed Maz, 'Did you have any idea that the girl that night was a boy?'
'No way,' said Maz. 'We talked with her.'
'Nuh, her politics were too good for a jock,' Dello agreed.
'For one so young. For a male. What was it she called men, Dell?' Maz spoke. 'Something right on.'
'Her father?' asked Dello, 'She called him an emotional miser.'
'She said, "Never met a wise man, if so it's a woman."'
'She also said something really sweet when we picked her up. What was it?'
'"Maybe I'm to blame for all I've heard but I'm not sure." and "I'm so excited to meet you",' supplied Dello.
'How did you come to take her to the barbecue?' I acted innocent confusion with facial expressions.
'You don't know Dell,' said Maz. 'Dell picks up strays. Cats, dogs, kids, you name it.'
'No, well? Was she stoned?' I asked. Dello glanced at me through the curtains of her hair, then moved a strand from her face and shook it all backwards.
'She chatted on about the G7 and GATT, the Third World and the International Monetary Fund and how the rainforests are being fucked by loggers and plantations taking people's food to put a cup of coffee on the tables of cafés,' Maz expanded.
'So you picked up a stray hitch-hiker and took her to a party? Just like that?' I sniffed, raised my eyebrows in wonder.
'Wouldn't have done it if we thought she was a trannie,' Dello grumbled.
'No way!' asserted Maz.
'Who exactly was at this celebration? What was it in aid of?'
'Equinox. There were gay girls there, you know, from town. Not a lot of them stayed around,' Maz explained.
'When us mob turned up in numbers with our kids and camp ovens, they were out of there. Some stayed. All the cool doods took off, leaving the riff-raff.'
'There was a kind of fight. Poofter buddies weren't welcome so the cock-suckers boycotted. We were supposed to pay and all. We didn't, of course.'
'I guess, gurls ruined it for them. Again.' Maz laughed.
'Did many poofters go?' I wanted to know.
'Yeah, I think there was one car-load. We pissed them off with ululations, brown-eyes and other disgusting actions. Jeez, I didn't know the kid was a boy. No wonder he killed himself.'
'Do you know that?' I took Dello up on her suicide theory.
'Well,' Maz expressed her opinion. 'She was awfully depressed. We thought it would cheer her up.'
'I thought she was scared,' Dello said. 'We could heal that, the company of women, you know?'
'Were there a lot of drugs?' I queried coyly.
Dello and Maz looked at me as if I were stupid then changed the subject and talked to each other. 'The white man's ideal woman.' I didn't know what they were referring to until I saw the poster on the schoolyard fence: the political face of the Extreme Right, the white virgin.
'She could be worse. She could be a man. In drag.' Maz laughed at her own joke. I did not join in the mirth.
'My brother says,' Tilly piped up, 'She wants to kick Kooris out of their own country. Auntie Iris reckons, You don't have to pay for things twice.'
'Who do you work for, Margot?' Maz gunned her motor, all humour gone.
'Different people. Professional confidentiality, you know.' I grinned. 'I'm not the undercover cop you're worried about,' I called as I waved to my little friend, who was sitting quietly in the back seat of the van fiddling with her ballet clothes.
If Maz did not trust me, I certainly did not trust them. The teenager had quoted lyrics from Nirvana? Kids don't usually articulate very much to adults; saying the words of his favourite songs was clever. I gathered from Penny, he was a smart lad. And whatever else, his father wasn't an emotional miser.
Later at home, filling in a couple of hours gladly, doing formwork for the cementing around the chookhouse-studio, I thought about Kurt Cobain. Didn't he commit suicide by overdose? Was it a trend, an end of the century nihilism among young men, to glorify their own death? Or was Kurt murdered? I will check Neil's CD collection tonight when I go there.
I tend to imagine that everyone has a life they haven't lived, a kind of parallel possibility, something that would equally have fulfilled you. With me, it is geology. I could have been a geologist. I am amazed by the properties of minerals. Earth. That concrete can be made from sand and lime and water and sometimes gravel is amazing. I needed to spend time with the ground, levelling it out, thrusting a crowbar into it, digging. But I didn't know anything at all about geology. I wondered what time I should go to Penny's. Perhaps quite early, immediately after dark.
Canisteo Bayou, a suburb of Port Water, is built on mangrove swamp converted into canals. Successful people in this world can have as much as the rich, it seems. Palaces, boats, except they've got neighbours and borrowed money. Rich in the red. I parked in the circular drive-way. When I entered the brick veneer mansion, I was moved by the atmosphere of emptiness. Penny was, of course, tragically lonely, devastated by the incontrovertible fact that her boy was dead. She adored her son. He was her emotional life. 'His mother's only joy'? She wore her grief like a cloak of the same colour over an underlying despair. Her face was lined by the frowns and squints avoiding the cigarette smoke as it hung around her head. I took one of my best bottles of wine with the quality of an art piece that will make you remark upon it even if you don't want to. A gesture of comfort. She found a corkscrew in the well-appointed kitchen, having opened and shut several wrong drawers.
'My cleaner knows more about my things than I do. Here it is.' She handed the designer wine-opener to me and turned to a cabinet which had many shiny and purpose-shaped crystal pieces inside. She picked the right-sized stemmed glasses and checked for smudges before she sat them on the coffee table between us. She lied about the cleaner to cover her distraction. Her place would be a dream to clean.
'What a nice idea. Chips and cheese, too. Good.' Penny nibbled a bit, but could not eat and smoke at the same time. Easier to talk with a cigarette. The lighter was closer to me so I held the flame for her.
'You know I did everything I did for Neil. Everything. He wouldn't thank me for saying that. He was a beautiful person. Although he dressed as one, he would hate to be called a vampire. But it was my blood he drank. You don't realise how invading motherhood is even when they are almost grown. Now he's gone I have no blood at all.' Penny did not ignore t
he wine. 'An exceptional red,' she said.
'Things are never the same after you have a child. You are not the same. Then childless. The death of a child is worse than worse. I've, well, for the last fifteen years, complained, I suppose. Now, despair, utter, hopeless despair. Oh, don't worry, I'll go on. I won't let grief entirely destroy me. I am not a coward. I am hollow, now. Teaching gets me out of myself. Adult students are so appreciative. Giving of yourself and that not being trampled upon, well, it's the best you can expect out of life, don't you think?'
I said, 'Yes, teaching is very selfless. I reckon. Generous people are great teachers.'
'You think despair would make you give up, but it's the opposite, despair drives me, like a demon. Despair means I will never give up. Why did Neil do it?'
'You think he killed himself?'
'No,' she shook her head. 'Why did he paint his face and then die?'
'Can I have a look at his room, Penny?' I asked at an appropriate pause.
She took a sip of wine before she got up. We went back to the foyer of the house near the front door. She switched on lights. To our right was the study, a small room with a computer on a specially angle-designed table. We turned right, through a big bedroom which looked unlived in to a smaller one behind it. Neil's room was superficially untidy. Books and disc jackets were on the floor near the sound system. There was another computer in here.
'How many computers do you have?' I asked.
'Three. It's my job, of course. There is another one in the garage, pretty well exclusively for playing games on. This is for school and surfing the net. So is mine. What did you want in here?'
'A look.' I picked up a CD, Regurgitator, and pulled out the booklet with the lyrics and sped-read them. That accounted for the lines about the G7 and GATT. The Nirvana disc was there, as well. Maz and Dello were word perfect.
'If you play that I will certainly cry,' said Penny.
'Why don't we play it, then?' I smiled.
'Okay,' Penny put it in the player, pressing buttons. We stood for a while and then there was the song I wanted, 'Never met a wise man, if so it's a woman.'
'Neil played this over and over. He has a lovely voice this young man. Are you making some sort of parallel? Teenage male suicide…' She spun on her heel and exited the room saying, 'I must have another taste of that delicious claret. Excuse me.' She wanted to be alone for a minute.
I sat down on his bed, imagined myself to be Neil, idolising the singer. I took off the CD and put in Regurgitator. 'Couldn't do it'…possibly for myself. It's a favourite of mine.
Penny had pulled herself together using cigarettes and wine. Was his death the sum total of a disappointing life? She began talking as soon as I entered the living-room.
'I want to know why he died where he died and why he was dressed like that. I don't want it to be a mystery. I teach desk-top publishing. I am going to write a tribute to my son, a statistic of teenage suicide, blame it on society! No. I want to know what happened to my reason for being. It doesn't matter now. Nothing matters, so I might as well work hard. I don't mind paying you, Margot. You provide me with every detail. I am haunted also by Hugh's face, cut all over with abrasions. I knew Neil loved make-up. It was a game we shared together, of a Sunday morning.'
We finished one bottle of wine and in a moment, Penny was opening another, talking all the time. 'Gillian Gilmore was a friend of mine, but she hardly had room for friendship, or for herself actually. I didn't have much, either, I suppose. But Gillian wasn't allowed time.'
'Were your sons friends?' I pulled my notebook towards me. 'I mean, good friends. Would they spend time together?'
'Hugh,' sighed Penny, 'was a very unhappy boy. After Elias threw him out he had nowhere to go, nothing in the future. He came here a couple of times. I couldn't get two words out of him. They would sit and watch videos; or he would sit down there on the other computer shooting things. When he got into stealing cars, I put a stop to it. Neil had to study.'
'And Neil?'
'Neil seemed quite relieved.'
'I have to ask you this…' I began.
She interrupted, 'I know what you are going to say. Marijuana is the only drug Neil ever touched and that rarely. I know they are saying he had drugs in his system. But it's not Neil. He wanted to be an adult. He wanted a life. I know that, we talked about it. He loved the idea of university. He had ambition. He was not a loser!'
I drove very carefully back to my place between the paperbarks and the sea. Back inside, I handwrote: who was wearing the black cap? who was driving the yellow Charger? ditto ditto the red Saab? was the second car that sped past here 'the carload of poofters'? As I wrote that the sounds of that night came back to me. The throbbing muffler, the suped-up Valiant, the one Hugh died in, the other was simply speeding, not necessarily a heavy car. It went by first. Didn't it? My memory was not clear. What was it Cybil wasn't saying? I had to spread out the jigsaw pieces before I could put them together. Form-work.
Book Four
nonsense
Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
Wednesday's child is full of woe
22
…boredom is a function of evil…
Playing in cyberspace is so sexy. Power, pure eroticism, a Faustian contract, worth it. The user of the pseudonym, Moments of Pleasure, MOP, appears as if she has not eaten proper food for a week. She is tired. Her whole body expresses one corporeal sigh. The many windows, directories and sub-files she has on her home computer are a tangled labyrinthine web. Her desktop is clogged with state-of-the-art software, what she downloads from the Internet, give-away CD-ROMs in bought magazines, program for encryption and fast-pace hacking, but that is not the real problem. She is too tired to dispose of the rubbish. The installer, an inoffensive nerd with a limp and a harelip, has unlocked the secret, which is inexplicable. Satisfaction and frustration are the complementaries of the palette of her life, as others swing in the health-sickness duality. The controller is silent. Or stabbed in the back. Gossip is that she has died, defected or, simply, decamped. That yarn having been spun for all it's worth, speculation moves on to who she was anyway: some powerful rich woman working out of the Bahamas, Norfolk Island or from a cruising yacht; she had been a baby lover of Valerie herself and was dedicated to avenge her death, her mistreatment, to advance her thoughts from paper to action; she was a young Valerie, a teenage genius, with computer skills beyond any adult's.
MOP has to be creative. Her finger hammers the Delete button, a function she usually presses with utmost caution and forethought. She has to simplify the subversive stuff, to disguise files, favourites, parents and passages to camouflage the conspiracy, itself a blind for her solo activity. Revenge. Fisherman's hell, she can crack and hack wherever she wants. The embarrassment of riches has sucked her humour. She needs to focus her vengeance. Express her hatred. She intends to ride the conspiracy to its demise, to surf its wave for her personal ends. Alone at three a.m. in her room, she opens her tool-box with its array of illegal programs. Her fellow Solanasites are not up to speed. The chat has become ridiculous, gutless women backing off, mouthing off.
She leaves her desk to go out into the moonless night to think. Boredom, of course, isn't women's fault. The whole fucking society is so pornographic, boredom is a healthy, not to say, sane reply to the muck dished out. Without control, the net-gliders are uncensored. It doesn't matter now, MOP decides. She returns to her keyboard, standing, frowning, to read.
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