She is sick of messing up porn sites and perpetuating nonsense in UFO newsgroups. Flaming was fun for a while. She wants bloody revolution. She settles down and brings up a search engine. Wearily she types an E, a V, an I, and L and S. She is too tired but she cannot sleep, exposure to the electromagnetic field has made her feel electric through lack of negative ions. She wakes with a start. Her screen turns as magnificent as diamanté and the sound card starts blasting nostalgia from the king. The sites are numerous and colourful, and all conceivable Internet applications are utilised by the undying Presley fan club, clubs, fanatic fringes, lunatic land, suburban circles, the impersonator societies and so on constantly chatting about his resurrection in different forms and immanence.
MOP hits a gold-mine. She fists her hand and punches the air. To reclaim evil, she has to seek cover in the court of the king.
She typed EVILS, got Elvis. With this she can certainly carpet-bomb the enemy, gum up emails everywhere with the fractals of graphics. The king will overtake the world. The mistake was using text. The centre core of the really radical Solanasites will find this useful. Evils, first a general category, evil, which became too cumbersome, is so obvious. Wrong. A hammer and tong. They simplify with the added s to slim it down, then twist. If the goddess of inspired coincidences is working with her this morning, then other Solanasites might have typed, or mistyped evils. It is a matter of going into the Elvis maze to find her, or them.
Suddenly her system clears up. Cyber-conversation gets going. The first and most obvious place is food, white food, hamburger buns. Ingredients. How to get away from the real fanatics, the Presleyites? She gets the ingredients of the hamburger buns. She sifts a lot of data on how to make them exactly as Elvis would have loved them, great contention.
MOP has found the big girls, the cadre in their hide-out in the mountainous bullshit of Presley-mania, screened by the enthusiasts of the diamondstudded momma's boy.
The goddess is working with her. Boredom she links with evils. An action of evil is the absence of any meaningful action, truly without feeling or thought, let alone passion and interest in others. Forget compassion.
She waits for a bite, closely monitoring each indignant or drug-crazy sentence.
She sits, hovering like a goshawk over its prey, watching all the other reactions as they come up. Some smart alecs even give chemical formulas for White Virgin and how it could be masked in hamburger bun dough. The two words repeat with a question mark, masquerading as a glitch. Slowly losing the dills, but new idiots come on-line as Americans get home from work. Her mind flips file cards of produce.
MOP's fingers are busy wings, but she doesn't dive. She is hungry but she must wait for the misspeller, glitch-user, to come on line. Whether or not that happy happenstance will be hours or days later she can't say. She believes it will occur soon.
MOP frowns: mistyping backfiring?
MOP stays in the conversation, using nonsense, but she is not sure of the right input, so she simply puts U in imitation of a virus, with a question mark. She uses one of her illegal programs to ensure continual interruption. It doesn't commit her one way or the other. An acronym is MOP's only reading. What's that doing in the Elvis maze with her? She waits. The other conspirators scroll.
She wants to check to see if anyone on line at the moment was with her earlier in the Solanasite cell.
As an angler rests the baited line, not expecting a fish to get hooked immediately, she leaves her desk for a cigarette. The sky is pale in the east. She watches the clouds' abstract designs with faint violet and washed yellow cadmium.
Most women don't know their boredom is a function of evil, she muses idly. The fisherman's hell, she recalls, is where, for eternity, the line is thrown, the fish is caught and the fish is perfect, the catch immediate and the shore is pleasant, the tide is right. Am I fish or fisher? She wishes her system would crash to give her a break. When she goes back to the screen, sure enough, a message:
Beautiful beautiful rock spider, is sung through the amp, by a rugged, amateur voice.
Not only Solanasites feeding off the Presleyites, but paedophiles as well. Charming. MOP wonders if the intercourse is still taking place between that of the conspirators and innocent recipe-writers because she cannot find out for herself. Her gear is reacting sporadically.
MOP feels her way humbly. Anon allows her in. MOP is caught off guard. She is in a space of direct language. There are four in the private chat room, hidden within the glitter and sentiment of Elvis fans' networks, a continent away from other political lesbians.
Moments of Pleasure, sure her net-name was secure, is now convinced the other three know who she is. She doesn't know exactly who or what they are. She feels cornered. Cyberspace had been her romping ground. The higher political purpose of the serious Solanasites, really worthwhile, exciting and violent though it is, is not her obsession. Computer savvy gives her an edge. She could, on behalf of the boss, deliver orders. Take orders. There is money. There are schemes. There are contracts. There is intelligence. MOP feels compromised, scared. She is trapped in readiness to being used. They tease her with nonsense.
Something is seriously wrong if the congress is sacrificed to an individual, no matter how 'good' that person is. On the other hand, how does anything actually happen if there is not chain of command? She will be able to implant a bug in the arseholes pace-maker, detonate him from the inside. MOP wants these orders. She wants her strength and acumen co-ordinated with others all around the world. 'A small handful of SCUM can take over …within a year by systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder.' Solanas' list of targets and objectives are rich men with pea-brains, the captains of industry, bloated with power, gambling with other people's money and lives. And specialist doctors on the cutting edge of medical science and IVF technology, experimenting with women's lives. For MOP there is no doubt these people are bad. Other SCUM will destroy all useless and harmful objects, like Great Art.
MOP coolly deletes all unnecessary software from her desktop, feeling the load of better revenge lift off her brain and leech into her muscles. She turns off her computer. And before she puts herself to bed in the day-time she checks her wardrobe for her uniform, her jewel-box for her name-pin and brief-case for her registration papers. Something to look forward to: the real world.
23
…the information on the monitor…
This morning I had a hunch: if I dropped in on Meghan, or Jill
, or both, without warning, I might get one or two of my questions answered, simply by wrong-footing them as it were. Passing cloud weakened sunlight as I drove along the narrow strip of bitumen between tall tree trunks. The patterns of shadows came in and out of sharp focus. The weather was cooler, fresh. I liked slow driving in certain moods in this kind of terrain. The road's bends dipped down to creek bridges to weave up again, requiring constant gear shifts. Beyond the fringe of gums were farms and houses, cows and horses; barns, some on the lean, others shiny galvanised steel. And beyond them the washy outline of distant ranges. Foreground features. Idiosyncratic letterboxes. A person on a tractor. Children waiting for the school bus. Xs and arrows indicating the way to the dirt-bikes' trail painted on boards tacked at turn-offs for the next Motor Cross meet. Two men chewing grass over a gate. Stacked white boxes of bee-hives. Honey-coloured limbs of grey gums newly stripped of bark. A small mill with its pile of sawdust smoking.
The rhythm of the road had me cogitating. A car approaching, driving too fast, hugging the centre, narrowly missed my fender. Woke me up. Attracted my attention. Altered my meditation. These maniacs drive as if in a constant state of panic. The interface of death shimmering like some celluloid cloth glistening with temptation to enact contempt for life with the lure of beyond, every near accident must give them a rush, a glimpse of some exciting, fearsome unknown. It is immaterial whether these boys are suicidal or homicidal. The glorious edge of death, either way, has them entranced. The survivors became truckies, I supposed bitterly. Or tow-truck drivers. I recalled the video game, Carmageddon, in Lisa's friend's rumpus room and wondered about the difference between virtual driving and real driving. Maybe they saw death as an entrance into another reality where they became supermen, able to fly, jump tall buildings, have fire-power beyond their wildest dreams. Cybergods. Neil Waughan: how could I hope to understand the hormone-crazed youth, the testosterone teenager, with an electronic superworld at his fingertips? How normal could he be in my comprehension of normality? Taking into account my ignorance of the information, entertainment and communication revolution, how could I assess the norms? How could I know science fiction from what was technologically possible? Theoretically in the pipe-line or actually happening?
After the sign for Lebanese Plains, following the arrows, coincidentally, pointing down the same gravel alley, I fell into the same trap as Philip-poussis. Because the two boys died on the same night there had to be a connection. Hugh Gilmore was none of my business. Neil's GP was away on leave for a month. The receptionist was busy and would only answer basic questions: I would have to wait until Dr Neville returns. The death certification was signed by the locum. Very fuzzy, the behaviour of the busy medical profession! My guess is that signature was no more than a formality.
A tickle on my tongue made me glance towards Chandra's property. Meghan Featherstone's white Daewoo Leganza SX 2.2L (I had this detail from an insurance form) was not in its place on the safe side of the water-course. The creek was much lower, babbling nonsensically and innocently across pleasant-looking stones. I achieved the hill after the last ford in two-wheel drive. As the sun was well risen, the dark clouds away to the west and near cumulus as jolly as dollops of ice-cream, the valley did not look as depressing as it did before. When I got out, however, there was a dankness about the long runners of kikuyu climbing the fence-wire, thick around the posts. The smell of choking grass underneath did not have the nice pungency of dead mulch rotting. The goats were on tethers, forlorn with drooping ears and arrogant noses; silly, sad aristocrats. Curly Cue nibbled the air in my direction. Assuming no one was home as Jill's old Urvan was not in its spot, I walked down past them to the stake which held the rope and pulled it out to take them higher, near the gate where the feed was untouched. Instinctively, I noted the tyre marks on the driveway: broad defined off-road treads were unlikely to be the van's. The goats were like dogs to lead. I saw a couple of buckets under the tank-stand. They drank thirstily, then attacked the scraggly vegetable garden.
The door opened easily. The place had been ransacked. The living-room looked as if a hurricane had come and gone. A tantrum? The kitchen was undisturbed, just a little dirty. I went up to the bedroom and instantly knew this was where the force of the storm hit. A small filing cabinet was overturned, each drawer emptied. A bedside bureau had spilled its contents: photographs, pill jars, repeat subscriptions, lotions and oils, discoloured bandages, dental floss. An unwound yoyo with tangled string. I moved slowly, surveying, frowning. The perpetrator was not necessarily trying to intimidate—pillows, for instance, had not been torn open; no loose feathers for cinematic effect—so, was possibly alone. The night cream and moisturisers had not been splattered in the tempest of personal spite. It was more like a search which had grown more frenetic as it became unsuccessful, perhaps. The papers in the main room had either blown from the loft or been thrown, some were scrunched. In the middle of the eiderdown I discovered the key to the house, along with the telephone, another article in the mess. Did I have Meghan's work number on me? The connection was dead anyway.
My silent mouth open, I abruptly sat on the bed, processing it all for a minute. She would have to be ringing from a cell phone if she were camping out under the stars on the Nullarbor? The concurrence of reading about the Radiation Health Standing Committee and seeing a map with the Eyre Highway and the Great Victorian Desert, Pitjantjatjara Land and Maralinga Land with Meghan ringing from the vicinity had me believing she was a nuclear physicist. But she could be any of those exotic scientists: anthropologist, archaeologist or palaeontologist digging up fossils from the Jurassic period or whenever. The more spurious, the more madcap the scientific exploits, the more generous research grants were, it seemed.
One of the pages was a birth certificate. I expected Meghan Feather-stone's and Jillian T.David's names on the papers. I reached down and read it. A female was registered as coming into the world on the 18th day of the fifth month in 1981. She was called Hope, Hope O'Lachlin. Her parents were married to each other and then resided in Auckland, New Zealand. I picked up a handwritten note on a piece of pin-feed computer paper 'Our agenda is pretty clear. The elite of the elite is divided up into spies and killers.'
Suddenly I was absolutely furious. I kicked around the balled papers some more in the bedroom. I found no further evidence of the existence of Hope O'Lachlin, but I scribbled her name in the little notebook I carry with me in my hip pocket when the spiral one might be too obvious, speculating about Christian names chosen by parents across the Tasman Sea. Perhaps a Prudence and a Patience completed an uptight Kiwi family. Faith, perchance? Charity? I knelt down to look at the scattered photos. Most of the snaps were of lesbians in various states of undress with backgrounds of bush or desert. Several I recognised. There were far too many shots of the goats as kids to be of any use to anybody. Some prints had been ripped. Interesting. To settle my disordered mind I tried to piece together severed parts. Unusually boring was one of a rear-view window filled with high-beam headlights of a following vehicle taken from the driver's seat of a car. It brought to mind dodgy UFO pictures.
The pot-belly stove seemed to have been pelted with bits of documentation scrunched by hominid hands. A rate notice from a municipality in Queensland, Brisbane, the suburb of St Lucia. The address the same as the mortgage for that property. Another, a letter, was from the solicitor who had refused to see me, angrily discarded. This was about a power of attorney. A photo fell from a pile of envelopes I picked up. Another black and white snapshot of a saucerish white shape against a background of a two-lane black-top lit by car tail-lights. An actual UFO? I slipped the picture into my pocket.
Before I left, I sniffed the air indoors with my eyes closed, each area. It was pretty much the same as the night I had stayed except for two scents. There was a lingering drift of greasy wool, fleece, in the bedroom. Downstairs, something so familiar the word for it was on the tip of my tongue and I couldn't catch it for a while. Then the membranous brain clic
ked, in one single pouch, female-sweat-perfume-filter-cigarettes, as you smell in clubs full of poker-machines or the casino-rooms of pubs. Neither I identified as Jill or Meghan.
Outside, I patted the nanny goat's snobbish snout, vacantly murmuring reassurances. I went over the rough map of Meghan's financial situation that I had. Her source account was a cheque and savings into which went her pay, in uneven sums; from that flowed a key card and credit card which dealt with property expenses and everyday living. A debit account with another bank which could be the mortgage on the property I was now standing on. Yet why would she take out a mortgage when in a few months she could have bought it outright? About eighty thousand in the red being paid off at about six thousand six hundred per annum, but something funny was going on because someone was also taking money out of that account. Meghan's two hundred a week was automatically transferred and Jill's $60 p.w. was more spasmodic. There was financial neglect here, as well as physical. There was hole spreading across the two: where was that money going? Thirdly, she had a hunky-dory superannuation nest egg into which the government and she paid equal amounts. What I needed was evidence of a share portfolio. The ATM dockets I'd been given showed that money had been taken out in town X while Meghan said she was in town Y. Proof that something was up. She was too otherworldly to keep a proper track of her bank statements, this I had been told. The accountant probably got copies when she needed them on payment to the bank in question. There was a lot of money somewhere. Where? Other properties, apart from the flat in Brisbane? Buried cash in case Armageddon crashed the banking system? Rosemary Turner would have to know if Meghan had any other income. How did she write off the deficit?
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