Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  'Breaker, breaker White Virgin. Fucking thirteen, mate.'

  'You're dropping out.' Static. Interference. Ten ways to communicate and nothing doing. Nothing. No contact. They pull into the side of the road, parking closer than cars do.

  Truckman steps down from his rig thinking he'll go for a mixed grill, or fried eggs and chips. 'Booby farm girl gotta appreciate a man's gruff compliments.'

  'She won't last long in a place like this if she don't know the rules. Something they're born with, you can't teach it.' Samurai semis, enforcing the rules.

  'Get shirty if my table is occupied by anybody but the fraternity. Same table. Same tucker.' The lone conspirator carries on a conversation as if in monologue with himself.

  'They left their newspapers. Broadsheet. I get my news from tabloids and off the Internet. What I call news. But I look at the pictures and headlines.'

  The other trucker says, 'Look at that!'

  'The photo? Man in a suit looking up at a flying saucer, name Dr Seth Shostak: THEY'RE OUT THERE BUT THEY DON'T WANT TO EAT US.'

  It scares Ian. He yells at the waitress, 'Why don't you fucking clean up my table properly?'

  'Take it easy, comrade.'

  'Didn't mean to. It slipped out.' Sudden aggression, urgent defensiveness. 'She's gotta learn, blokes like me. We do long hours, and we got a code of honour, demanding respect from little cars and little girls.'

  The driver of the Scania 143 stares at the master of the bigger Freight-Liner FL112. Ian shows him the picture, and says, 'Just like mine.'

  'You see 'em too?'

  'I never bought this! They left it. They were here five minutes before me, pretending to be people. It spooked me.'

  'You're not wrong.' His partner humours him, listening.

  'Lucky I didn't get tossed out for swearing at booby waitress,' he confesses.

  'Fucking thirteen on the dateline, mate.' Jittery, high on speed. 'We'll be there. You know what we're carrying, Ian?'

  'Did ask myself that, Michael. It's not petrol. It's not milk. But it's a tanker, right?' Ian Truckman calms himself, tackling the question.

  'I reckon we've got toxic waste.' Partner's voice too high.

  'Hey, keep it down, you dork,' says Ian.

  A cunning gleam in Michael's eyes; the creep likes it, thinks Ian Truckman, essentially a solitary man.

  'Toxic waste, flying saucers. You ought to get a grip, Ian.' Partner, grinning at other blokes, speaks under his breath.

  Ian nods. 'Don't know about you, but I am going to get some kip. About twenty kilometres down the road there's a shady rest stop.'

  'You're my man, Ian. It's not as though they don't provide us, eh?'

  'Stopping too?'

  'You betcha. You're the senior man,' he shamelessly flatters. 'If you do, I can.'

  Ian Truckman does not know what being the senior man involves. He was never told.

  'Yeah well. I take it you're watching me.'

  'We gotta keep an eye out for each other, man.'

  28

  …no stasis…

  The gathering of many women focused on the unequivocal climax of a funeral, the swell of their strength and weakness lifts Cybil to an unfamiliar sense of belonging. She comes into her own, being helpful, generous, articulate. Her overt sensitivity to the observance of the occasion is appreciated. Her practical advice, her knowledge of the area and the options on offer saves the assembly from becoming a shambles of hysteria and histrionics. Sadness. She is a natural chairwoman.

  Spontaneously, Cybil wants to stay at Virginia's overnight and to see her work, the ship in a fallen dead tree, although she is terrified of the bush. Puddles, the poodle, will enjoy herself. She roots around the bottom of her built-ins for her oldest sloppy-joes. Her shiny car safely locked in the basement of the block of flats, she puts her weight in the passenger seat of her lover's turbo-diesel Rodeo. Virginia is thrilled. But it is not her only emotion. Maria was her friend. They share a voyage of discovery through myriad deaths and rebirths; there is no stasis, no end to the parabola of reincarnation. Dying and living are one. All time is now.

  Virginia drives fast, negotiating the bends she knows like the back of her hand with, what seems to Cybil, too little attention, and talks.

  Cybil cannot listen when she cannot see the road ahead. She is basically an urban woman for whom rainforest is jungle, full of snakes and poisonous vines. A sophisticated, cool woman, she is suppressing her fears of tumbling over rocks and disappearing into ravines. On separatist land, where men with their emergency services are not allowed, you could lie under a log with a broken leg like an escaped convict in colonial days and be maimed for life, that is, if you live. Starving to death. Listening to Virginia is making her feel worse. She shuts her out. She taps her new mobile phone. It won't work, out of the range of the air ambulance. The little dog paces and pants on the bench seat of the dual cabin, going from window to window, from all fours to two paws. And back again.

  Virginia is speaking too much. 'Made, unmade and made again through the ages, the connection of fighting women, a network of ferocious, bitter women who usually only wanted somewhere to live, laugh and work but were forced to fight. Indeed they were—we were—heard laughing under the full moons in the months and years that preceded the agrarian revolutions. Strong females met with the other peasants to organise action for justice, under the best light they had. Once a month in a safe natural light. Night light. Subversives know the magical humour of such occasions which must seem mysterious to fascists. When revolutionary cells are described in films or books, they are greyish earnest gatherings. That is not true. I guess you had to be there. Comic imagination is fired by hope and readiness when revolution is brewing. Well-intentioned peasants were feared, called names, groups of women became cults, sheeted home to the poor old virgin goddesses, Diana, Selene, Artemis, or to animals. Herbalists, witches, madwomen, bedlamites. Women with a modicum of power, even if it were among the powerless, were blamed and accused. As soon as an alliance among females could be proved, or provided, be it kinship, or mere acquaintance, let alone passionate friendship, not to mention—never to mention—sexual devotion, the sword descended to slice it apart. The cowardice of men rationalised its way into law so they could act out its worst fantasy, and destroy with impunity and indulgence. Legally, culturally.'

  'You are so naive,' Cybil comments, 'All this crap about goddesses is a lot of hot air'.

  Virginia is definite. 'In another age I would be burnt as a witch.'

  'Pleasant thought.' The highway is straight, at this point. Cybil glances at the speedometer.

  'When I chip away at my boat, my muscles powered by hatred and resentment, indignant with knowledge, I work furiously. My head gets full of voices. Trying to counter the process of cultural annihilation.'

  'Annihilation?'

  'Yes. What is the opposite of that?' Virginia asks in an effort to make Cybil think about what she is saying.

  'Preservation? Conservation?' Cybil mentions a few more words. 'Continuance. Maintenance. Upkeep.'

  'Exactly, you understand. But it is discovery as well. Life,' Virginia philosophises, 'which includes death.'

  Cybil sparks up. 'Hey! Did you remember to bring my crossword puzzle?'

  'What? Yes, today's paper is there. Why?' Virginia is disconcerted.

  'Because I have to have something to do. You brought insect repellent? I am allergic to bites.' Cybil is fearsome when fearful. Bossy.

  Virginia feels a kind of impatient yet gentle protectiveness. When she turns off the tarred road and continues to speed, Cybil's knuckles go white as she grasps the dash and barely contains her panic.

  'Socially I am wooden, stiff with the energy of past and future,' Virginia continues. 'A Luddite, I live as Europeans did after the gutters and viaducts of Rome's superlative plumbing were grown over with weeds. Collect my water in tanks, cook over an open fire, carry fuel. Except for the chain-saw. I eat, simply, grains, rice and lentils, potatoes, yabbie
s and eels I catch in the creek. Bush tucker, lilly-pilly berries, native fig.' She laughs at her perverse boasting. 'Woodworm.'

  'For godsake, slow down!' Cybil orders. 'You're making me sick.'

  The cows move out of her way with plenty of room, two or three feet, so Virginia thinks she must be talking too fast. 'It is a covenant. I must be mad or in contact with another who knows as I know that it is dire. Ghosts, perhaps. The ectomorphic presences dressed in wisps of mists visit in silence. I am grateful for my eyes to dissolve. Then I work again, furiously. When I spin I think of spiders and when I weave I think of schemes. Who can know that I am like this? Seething like a nest of killer ants…'

  'Slow down!' Cybil shrieks.

  'Okay,' Virginia turns to her smiling, one hand on the wheel, eyes off the road. 'So I don't spin or weave, but I could. It feels as though I could do any craft reasonably well.'

  Cybil screams, 'Watch where you're going!'

  'Don't worry, it's okay. It's okay.' Dawdling is too much of a compromise for Virginia to make.

  At the gate, Virginia introduces Emma Ledgerwood, and her daughters, Serena, Venus and Cassie, big, bland Bea Valiante and Olga with her dog, Owtchar, and Dee Knox, whom she has met before at the triathlon, to Cybil Crabbe, formally with pride. 'My tribe.' The gurls are pleasant and chatty.

  Bea says, 'You're a member of my clan. I like you.'

  Cybil notices how awfully dressed in rags they are, almost indecent. She frowns, no longer feeling at one in the company of women as she had a couple of hours ago. Virginia finishes the interchange with a claim for the pressure of time and the explanation that Cybil has never been bush before. Gurls and girls grin knowingly.

  'What was that about?' Cybil demands as Virginia skilfully jolts her vehicle through the creek and up the bank, commenting on the broken bridge as she does so. When she is back on hard road, she answers, 'Bea is a member of the elephant family, according to herself. She likes all women with no knees or ankles, with straight elephant legs,' Virginia elucidates.

  Cybil is not exactly pleased.

  'So do I, or, at least, I love you.' Virginia is blatant as if a skin of civilised language has been ripped exposing raw meaning.

  At home in the wilderness she fits, Cybil loves her too, but doesn't say. As the territory becomes more hairy, she trusts her more. She has to. She is in Virginia's hands. Soon she feels the thrill of a pioneer as they climb into the range, and stunning vistas appear when cathedral walls of tall timber part to reveal the expanse of valley they have already travelled through. 'Wow,' Cybil mutters. The tension in her hands has become a tremble throughout her being. She lets it happen. She lets herself feel. At the edge of her terror is excitement; any sort of thought would torment her.

  Virginia's house is primitive, comfortable and clean. It is cosy. Cybil enters a realm in her emotional landscape past death's crossroads; she moves into a hyper-sensual place, a sexio-spiritual fantasy she can express no other way than making love. The darkness of a moonless night is darker in the bush, and deeper with echoing sounds of barking owls, dingo howls, close and distant nocturnal activity. All superlatively sinister, Cybil shivers with the menace of secrecy, her own and that around, and delves into Virginia. Savage in her lust.

  While Alison's bowels bleed with emotions among women she thinks love her, she does not want them dead. She is too busy to go to Chandra's. Alison goes to work without Penny Waughan's knowledge. She sits down at the computer and logs in. She finds peace in the community in cyberspace. There in freedom her alien spirit can fly.

  The lesbian cyborgs are chatting. They are discussing whether women can be as psychopathic as men. It is a hot debate. She is just about to enter a private chat room when the telephone rings. She closes down and puts on her cleaning gloves. The action and the texture help her get into the appropriate character.

  In Stuart, on my way back from Lebanese Plains, realising I should have spoken to Jill about the mess at Meghan's and admitted I was an intruder, I pulled up beside the public phone-box, pushed in my phone card and punched out her mobile number. She responded within seconds. At first, it was hard to hear her voice. She was speaking softly and the unmistakable ring, ting and din of poker machines was close to the mouthpiece. As we spoke I was conscious of the fact that she kept playing, although she made no mention of it. I asked some questions and was not satisfied with her concentration. She was putting me off with vagueness, and short answers to my wordy questions. I rang off with only one useful piece of information: Meghan Featherstone's girlfriend is a gambler. You never win at that game. It is more an addiction to losing as addicts tend to send good money chasing after bad. It is a fixation, an obliteration, I cannot understand. I have seen women's desperation turn to despair as the last wager is lost, the last cent in the kitty gone. Then they kind of pack up their devastation with their handbags and force their heads high as they walk out of the club. Something is seriously wrong in a society where the absentee landlords of old with their back-breaking rack-rents, their cruel wringing of blood from a stone for their tithes, their taxes, whatever, is absorbed into the mentality of the peasants so that they do it to themselves. Worse still, when the waves of feminism have brought some modicum of freedom for some women, those women go and flush it away down some toilet: heroin, gambling, god knows. Financial independence in a capitalist system must be the first step, not the end of the story. Wasting time and money is wasting freedom.

  In a more tolerant frame of mind I could rationalise that if it were your way of dumbing out when emotional strife got too much, then poker machines with their hypnotic mandalas turning could make you forget. Whatever was happening for Jill David, apart from the trauma of Maria's dying the way she did and Jill being present, then the intensity of so many women talking, shouting, feeling, some of whom may well have been intimate with her in the past (or present?), drove her post-haste to the comfort of the casino room. So where was the other gurl who was at the scene of both demises? She was not among the mob mourning for Maria. I was lucky, in the end, to find her.

  Alison answered as I was speaking to Penny's answer phone and sounded overjoyed to be invited to join me for afternoon tea at the surf club kiosk. The deck overlooks a longish beach with rolling surf scalloping in between two cliffs of spectacular rock formations. The surf was murky with the red weed. I sat with a mineral water, letting the wind bounce my fringe around. Each time I have seen Alison she has been dressed completely differently. Walking towards me on the boards today she was in a uniform like a nurse's aide and low lace-up shoes. She carried a purse and a pair of rubber gloves. Even so she is a striking woman with black hair and dark eyebrows, high cheek-bones and exquisitely shaped mouth. After waving recognition she leant on the railing before coming over to the table. She inhaled in the sea air and turned towards me with an expiration of appreciation. She raised her brows and I smiled.

  'Why the rubber gloves?' I wondered inquisitively.

  She said she cleaned for Penny Waughan, as if I didn't know, and hadn't rung her there. We did the business of ordering, then Alison was silent. I explained, patiently, how I was going in the work for her boss.

  She frowned. It was a pose that brought to mind self-portraits of Frida Kahlo, with the entrails of pain exposed on the viscera and absent from the face.

  'Neil?' she asked, though she had to know that.

  'Dressed as a girl,' I encouraged.

  'I didn't recognise him,' said she so vaguely I doubted her mind was in residence.

  It occurred to me, in a flash of intuition: she saw the body.

  I sighed, 'How's Tilly, my little mate?'

  'I've sent Tilly away with Dello and Maz. Had to. She still thinks she killed him.' What she said, or rather how she said it, had about as much emotional connection to the matter as a story told in animation with elastic cartoon characters. Playing with her gloves in a way actresses convey idle days in a pension beside Swiss lakes, she sighed. 'I was never cut out for motherhood, you know. Not
a part of me as I know myself. I threw up every time I had to clean up shit, or vomit. Even baby milk burps made me retch. Have you ever thought about homosexuality and parenthood, Margot? Feminism never had the time to understand the freedom it was asking for women, of women, nor did it ever have the power "to let women down", as it is accused of, or enough power in the face of the status quo to establish any infrastructure for its theories. Amazingly, perhaps, they believed they could do it all, thus their disillusion is superbad.'