Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  Evidence of fresh grading, uprooted trees preceded a bridge we crossed. Rory pulled up and got out. 'Now this one,' she was saying, 'needed doing. It collapsed last year. We had a bloke in. He brought down a couple of ironbarks and straddled the creek. Hardwood planks. Cost a thousand dollars, and we paid. The creek was invisible before. We didn't really know there was a spring here.'

  'Beautiful place,' I said. A clearing in woodland defied time and seemed as if it could be found anywhere on the earth, the rustic bridge a mere mention of European habitation.

  'Someone just piled a few logs across the seepage and filled it with dirt a few decades ago. The wood rotted, of course. It's not a bad job, pretty hairy for riders. Horses could rear up and go over the side if they panicked. The next one collapsed. After the main gate. It didn't need doing when we had the work done last year. Floods gully-raked it into bunches of rocks that were really dangerous, because your vehicle could get stuck on the top of them. Anyway he fixed that. No big deal. This next bridge is a different story. Tracks are very recent.'

  We got back in the Land Rover Guntractor. Rory took off her hat and slammed it down on the seat.

  'It makes me roaring mad. Excuse the pun. I do have a temper. And I get stubborn. This bridge was perfectly all right to take the weight of my truck. Which is the heaviest car that gurls have. What we reckon is someone drove his bulldozer over it. Broke it. Wanton damage, deliberate. Saw his chance. Crunch. Why did he do it? No reason, I can see.'

  'Who saw it happen?' I asked and frowned. I didn't have this information.

  'Pam. She hid.' Rory laughed. 'She said she was hiding behind that white mahogany.'

  'There?' I pointed. 'Majestic tree!'

  'She should have leapt out at him in her bejewelled nudity and cursed him in abracadabra, that would have frightened him out of his boots.'

  We stopped again after a few bends, dips and rises.

  'Judith came in soon after it happened,' she mused as we were looking down on the scene. There were the jagged remains of an incomplete bridge. A track down to the creek and over the rocks and water was visible.

  'Lazy. Or ignorant. Or thoughtless. Or greedy. Or malicious. I don't know people's motives for this sort of thing. But now we've got no bridge here. If Willy did it, we want him accountable. He is the one we employ when we need work done.' She turned away and pulled out some rolling tobacco. I walked over to the broken bridge, bent down and reached out my hand. The lichen was thick, moist and soft. There was rot inside the log and the break was spiky, following the weaker grain of the wood. On the parallel partner the damage was minor. 'Where were the tracks in the mud?' She replied that it had rained heavily since. The planks had fallen off one side and lay for the most part propped against the other. Whatever had happened, the offending bearer was going to go sometime. I returned to my transport and client-friend who was sitting behind the incredibly skinny steering wheel. 'Marvellous pebbles in the creek,' I said.

  'What I need,' Rory stated as we plunged over the side of the track into the creek, 'is a helicopter.' She laughed when I told her the South African guy did have one. 'I'd like a whirly-bird like that.'

  The English army vehicle seemed to walk across the rocks like a bandi-coot, first one corner, then the next, then the next, and the fourth, then she climbed the rise with a roar. This Guntractor could take punishment and come through with good old British grit.

  'Vanderveen mustn't come up here much, then?'

  'I've heard him once or twice. To tell you the truth, I thought the helicopter was National Parks.'

  Putting the damaged civil engineering behind us, we entered the rainforest and progressed through dripping green darkness. Like a dwelling in a fairy tale is Rory's house. I gasped. It had hand-formed curves like Gaudi architecture and the serenity of a Tibetan temple, jutting out from the rock face, made of rock, clay and rough-hewn timber. Organic to its surrounds, the colour of gingerbread. The afternoon sun caught its higher windows with an orange wash, both house and land looked burnished. The shade was deep negative space, a jungle of vines and luscious growth.

  Standing on the swing bridge and gazing, I said, 'There's one a bit like this at Nimbin, but that woman had a pulley and a flying fox to get the rocks up. Yours doesn't seem to have one. I'm just struck dumb with its charm, Rory. What a place!' She was again carrying my carton of food and I could only see the back of her but she seemed to swell with pride. She turned.

  'Well, we carried everything. There is a bush path down to the road over there. Plenty of women helped. I couldn't count the number. Visitors, residents, everyone lent a hand.'

  When I came up to her I could see why she had stopped right there. We had a view through the valley a little way to a waterfall. Rory blushed when she said, 'I'm glad you like it, Margot. And I'm glad you came.'

  I wondered how long Rory had fancied me. It's funny how you suddenly absorb the obvious.

  Rory dropped my gear and took me on a reconnaissance walk of her surrounds, presenting everything with broad gestures and enthusiastic explanation. I smiled and asked about the smoke coming out of her chimney.

  'China and Jo, a couple of campers from the city, are here. Arrived today. Go tomorrow. Happens all the time.' She laughed. 'I really should charge.'

  We stood still and let the evening become quiet around us. Sherry flagons set in mud-brick made a feature as we climbed up to the door. The early settlers and writers always referred to the Australian bush as silent, empty of noise. They must have been deaf. It was so alive with constant sound. Inside, the dwelling was basic. The bedroom reached out from the rock-face on sort of horizontal piers and rock stumps. We entered at ground level through an earthen kitchen-bathroom space. That led to a hexagonal-shaped main room with a fireplace built out of stone. A solid, stunted staircase joined the sleeping eyrie. Its windows let in the last beams of the western sun which streamed light onto the varnished floor where we were standing.

  The holiday-makers from the city, China and Jo, were seated either side of the fireplace leaning forward in deep discussion. They turned reluctantly away from each other and nodded on introduction to me, whom they plainly expected to dislike. They continued their dialogue immediately after the introductions.

  'He/she/it, followed me around the back of the church, which was really dark and spooky, like a rapist. She/he stalked me, like a stereotype of a man. I mean they learn to be masculine, they can never be male.'

  'There's a difference,' China was saying.

  'Deliberate mutes,' put in Rory who picked up the topic straightaway.

  'To think I knew her when she was a baby butch!' Jo was indignant, personally affronted. Then they explained to me they were talking about a female-to-male transsexual.

  'Changing gender is easy because it is a sociological construct. Masculinity and femininity are learnt behaviours, and both, both of them, serve the patriarchy.' China's accent was pure Melbourne.

  'It's like she has been given one right to act like a man,' Jo wanted to hammer the subject. 'To stalk a woman. Yet this was an all-female party. She had only completed her transformation a few weeks before. After the invitation.' Jo was Joanne, but I couldn't help but be struck by the pair of words which are colloquially mates in the male mateship game naming two very radical feminist lesbians.

  I began speaking to Rory as I got out the cheeses and fruit. She asked me about my Achilles tendon, genuinely interested. She opened the wine, a Grants Gully Estate Premium claret, a velvety soft dry red.

  'Let it breathe, Rory. It was matured in oak hogsheads prior to bottling. And it's such an easy drink, you may not realise its fine fruity blend of grape varieties. From south-eastern Australia,' I sounded pretentious.

  China and Jo said they had to go to their camp site, but Rory invited them to stay for the meal. China offered to do reiki on my heel. I accepted and sat down by the fireplace. The pain went as I gazed at the bare uprights and noggins of the stud-frame wall. This healer could be an escapee from j
ustice or a professor of theology for all I cared. Although they had finished their earnest discussion of transgender operations and moved onto sports injuries, Jo apprised me of Achilles' sojourn in the court of Scyros dressed as a girl to avoid Ulysses' call-up to Trojan war duty.

  Then China said, 'Priests wear women's clothing to obtain some level of divinity. Like Heracles, Achilles, Dionysus and judges. And men into witchcraft.'

  When she had finished, my heel felt better. Rory stewed vegetables in the camp oven. The Grants Gully 1993 tasted like ambrosia in this magnificent setting. We had hardly more than a glass each and yet the conversation didn't lag. It broadened in subject matter as the night wore on. My mind felt pleasantly drunk though not from alcohol. China and Jo were leaving in the morning. 'More's the pity,' Joanne opined. 'At least I've been able to help you with your new computer, Rory.'

  'A great help.' Before she went to sleep, Rory settled down at a desk in the corner. The Chinese antique, made for the travelling aristocracy of some mandarin period, seemed in harmony with its rocky alcove. I got cosy on a mattress on the floor, completely bushed. The space was lit by a cold blue glow, not the warm flickers of candle or oil lamp. Within the sylvan surrounds good taste seemed nothing more than the intelligent placing of things, the odd piece of art or sculpture catching the eye, crafts of amateur ingenuity, quirkiness, unified by the blatant female theme. Comfortable as the house was, an invisible mite bit me and made me itch my armpits and pubic hairs. There was movement in the ceiling. Rory saw me glance upwards, and told me about her welcome swallows. Presuming I was wary of nature, she boasted about her fifteen-foot python, Nygella. 'Keeps out the rats in summer. And possums might walk over your sleeping bag in their nightly peregrinations. If you are afraid of spiders,' she shrugged, 'there's nothing much I can do. They're everywhere.'

  'I don't mind spiders,' I said, 'but cobwebs bother me a bit.' Red-backs and funnel-webs. Eek.

  She wanted to kiss me good-night but I think she was too shy. I slept as if the air was enhanced with something narcotic.

  Virginia chauffeurs Cybil back to the coast, driving conservatively and not saying much.

  Cybil Crabbe is positively confident in the car.

  They quarrel. Virginia cannot sleep and Cybil can. Too thoroughly awake, she drives back to the bush at three o'clock in the morning. The highway is black and empty of traffic and the bush tracks are like the tunnels of a Luna Park Ghost Train ride. Virginia feels she has accommodated Cybil's limitations by not demolishing her self-esteem with ardent argument. She does not want to destroy her. But for Cybil it is not an investigation, rather a battleground with winners and losers. Words as firepower get loaded and shot from the guts until there are victors and vanquished, not an arrival at an understanding, for instance, of the difference between love and like. The mechanics of, and the distinction between, intimacy and friendship, are immensely interesting to Virginia, not a matter of life and death. Debating the role of spoken and written language and the way it obliterates womanspeak, for Cybil, is a crock of nonsense. Virginia has no idea! But the lack of words for much of what women feel and know distresses Virginia. She tried to tell her, 'We are of nature. It is not an out there, not an enemy: the ecology is our environment, our habitat,' 'Dream on,' Cybil had replied. And when Virginia said, 'Perhaps when computers and Internet technology synchronise our activity further we will communicate as well as ants', Cybil scoffed, 'You are so full of bullshit, it's unbelievable.'

  A rock lodges beneath her undercarriage as she crosses the creek where the bridge is broken. The Rodeo is stuck.

  Book Five

  chemicals

  Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday

  But the child that is born on the Sabbath day is bonny and blithe and good and gay

  30

  …not known at all…

  In the morning it felt pleasantly eerie. No one was about. The forest had disappeared overnight. I had to check my watch for the hour, nearly nine. The luminous greyness was fog. I did not wander far after relieving myself for fear of going over a rock face. Mist was mystery in the trees and structural shapes embraced by the white blanket of dampness were the antithesis of the boxes and grids of the rat-race. My mood was to dream and be conscious as well. The vaporous air was energising, exciting. I breathed in wonder. Rory was boiling water on the portable gas stove, wrapped in a great woollen dressing gown when I came back into her house. I looked out all the windows, watching the hazy wall break up gradually. Sunlight caught the high branches of the gums behind the darker, closer lilly-pilly and coachwood. Birds began to sing. They must have been quiet, because now I noticed them, close and busy. One sang, 'Oh oi I, am in situ, wanna be wit you.' I turned back to the interior for human contact, afraid my anthropomorphic projections were bending my brain.

  Rory queried, 'Tea?' Her robe was royal blue; angled patches of sun on the noggins and varnished floor made complementary shapes of sharp orange. Where was my camera?

  I accepted, and began stacking the plates from last night's dinner which had been left where they were in the dimness as, I was told, it was a waste of light to wash them then. The oriental desk merged with all the other dusty clutter in the daylight. I found the washing up table outside in a place now warmed by the sun. What a pleasant task at this time of day!

  When I sat down to drink tea with Rory, I was surprised by a change in her. Her eyes were under-shaded by dark bags and bloodshot with weariness.

  'You look as if you have been up all night,' I commented.

  She nodded. 'Been surfing the Internet. Did you know there was a big trade in counterfeit labels of 1990 Penfolds Grange?' she asked evasively.

  'Well, I did actually, but it seems awfully irrelevant right now.' I smiled, shaking my head, listening to the birds and glancing as often as polite through the windows.

  Rory good-humouredly acknowledged my point. 'Do you know anything about the Internet?'

  I shook my head.

  'It's addictive,' she frowned. 'I'm like that. I worry things to death.'

  'Like this bridge thing?' I asked, getting her concern into a subject I was involved with. 'It was going to break anyway, sooner or later.'

  'It's the intrusion, really,' she explained. 'The invasion.' She leaned back and stretched. 'Farmers, it's an endless uphill battle against them! Ownership of land has made me angry ever since I was a young child.'

  'How the country got given over to the most ignorant and stubborn people in the world really riles Vanderveen as well,' I imparted, referring to the passions of the conservationist with all the possessions money can buy, transport through the air and property in this range.

  'Who?' Rory was confused for a minute, 'Oh him, he didn't do it.'

  'You think it was the farmer, Campbell, too? I had made up my mind about the dentist. 'Why would Willy do it?'

  'Trees, wouldn't he love to log our trees!' She gestured towards the arboreous abundance in the mist.

  'He couldn't do that without permission.' I felt indignant that the female feel of the place had been penetrated by foreign bodies.

  'Well,' she remarked, 'I wouldn't necessarily put my money on that. Who could stop him?' She yawned. 'I need to give my head a rest. Why don't you take a walk? Maybe go up to Virginia's. See her sculpture.'