Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  'Okay, that's fine with me. Point me in a direction.' I was bright from a terrific sleep and this experience of being away from it all, being in 'her' land, not 'his' land. And I had a job to do. Rory took her cup and mounted the stairs to her bed.

  I had a bowl of muesli, did the dishes in the sun, then put a bag of nuts and dried fruit in my pocket with my notebook and pen and set off. The mountains in the distance were being brought out in purple relief against a sky as fragile as a light-blue eggshell.

  During the bush-walk, the pain in my heel was only spasmodic. Everywhere I looked I was surrounded by views that could make you weep for love of this country. Forsaking the vista, I saw a path through the lantana; lantana was everywhere. It became very thick. The way through it was like a hallway or a tunnel. It branched like a maze, or a labyrinth. I went up with the climb, hoping to come to a high point where I might see where I had come from and where I was going. Rory had been tired, her directions rudimentary, dismissive. I suspected she left out mentioning a hill or two. Too bad.

  Virginia sleeps in the back of the ute under a silver tarpaulin until dawn. Then she works for an hour or so by herself, moving rocks and assessing the situation. Fortunately, although the exhaust-pipe is caught, most of the load is resting on axle and the front diff. To find some help, she walks to Gig Brisson's, the closest, then up to Ti Dyer's, because she is strong. Individually, they light their fires and, after making tea, come to her aid. By mid-morning the vehicle is out of the creek and a rough and ready ford made. Yvonne, Helen and Ci hang about, rustle up food. Jay and Fi do a bit.

  Gurls can deal with logs across the road, landslides and, indeed, cars stuck on boulders, without dramatics, taking their time. Unlike a meeting or a party or having personal visits, a gathering focused on a necessary job is treated with good humour. Fighting bushfires, for example, brings out genial, generous interaction, the primary concentration being the physical exertion. Incidental chatty gossip is couched in companionable lack of intensity. Virginia hears about an altercation outside the Pearceville pub in which one of the Campbell fellows threatened Helen with rape, and later, when Pam came through, they ringed her and repeated the intimidation. 'To teach us a lesson,' says Yvonne, 'All we need is a good screw.' Ci makes light of the rumpus caused by the gurls themselves, describing how the males butted in. 'It turned them on, you reckon?' 'You're kidding.' Jay is of the opinion they meant it this time. 'They always mean it.' 'The men had singled out a "good looker".' 'I saw it in his eyes.' 'It can happen any time, to any woman, anyhow,' says Fi.

  Virginia eats with the mob, thanks, talks, drinks, shares perceptions, comments that without co-operation coercion is always imminent and gets up to move on. Says and is told how lucky she was as a flock of rainbow lorikeets descends into flowering wattles and bottle-brushes, chattering with high-pitched urgency. Her motor has no oil-sump which could have cracked, leaking a slick into the creek. 'Didn't happen.' 'Thank the goddess.'

  'Be careful, you old diesel dyke,' Ti Dyer jibes, offishly. Virginia glares at her through beetling brows. The would-be if could-be bulldozer driver, Ti, who gets her pride at the end of a needle not from her enviable strength, with her low-brow pun intends a compliment, and given Ti's set of values, it is sincere warmth: VeeDub is as butch as they come. It does not please her. Gig, in contrast, sensitively offers commiseration for the loss of her friend and recalls a little of the time Maria and Trivia were on Lesbianlands. She makes her way up into the clouds, which metaphor Cybil would approve, that'd be right, and Maria would say, why not?

  Gossamer veils still cling in the trees of the higher gullies with sunbeams banding rays through them like direct intervention from god the father in religious art. Virginia seeks her sculpture. It is breathtakingly beautiful. Cybil simply could not see it, and Maria never will. Virginia runs her fingers through her coarse-grained, streaked and black hair, making it stand out from her head like steel wool. She arches her fingers into a cathedral, then various rectangles framing details, imagining camera angles, and goes home, stepping on twigs and stones, seeking pain, but the soles of her feet are as hard as dog's pads. The rainforest weeps. She stops at her woodpile, picks up her block-buster and begins splitting sawn hardwood into chocks for her stove. Disbelief like an iron ball swings through her rib cage into the solar plexus damaging the edifice of self-respect, wall by wall. It must have meaning. Incredulity crashing and thumping, Virginia keeps trying to understand. Chopping fuel is where her axing skills are at, right now. Cybil makes her crude, telling her that she is not who she thinks she is, but someone worse. 'Involving all my time in confused emotions, I can't find the me in me, I stew over the impossible task of pleasing the unpleasable. I cannot be her idea of perfection. Am I her projection? How could she want to annihilate me and my work? No, I am not nothing, but Cybil, do you loathe yourself so much you loathe me even more for loving you?'

  The woodpile grows. Virginia expects conversation as well as sex in the gift of selves in intimacy. 'Why won't you let me know you?' But one or other is withheld with Cybil. Virginia refuses to feel despair. 'I'm not a loser. She is afraid nothing is there. No person. She could not be more wrong. The self in her is so strong all her life it has been acted upon, reacted to, plundered, defined, presented back to her as something she does not want to be. Self-knowledge, in Cybil, is self-hatred.'

  Having finished splitting what wood is there, Virginia finds her chain-saw and energetically pulls the starter three times. It whirrs to angry life, bites into the horizontal log as she presses down. She zips along creating rounds which fall on the ground. Her blood pounds in her veins. Creativity is deadened by the monopolisation of her feelings, so she makes good use of her time completing chores. The mind is a deep pool and she is not aware that her distraction, her feeling that her genius is being sucked out of her has, also, to do with sadness and incomprehension of grief. Her vision is blurred. Cybil could not see it for the object it will become. Dead lumber hacked a bit, the expression of our future and past culture, a sort of sacred presence, an honouring labour, a struggle for meaning, is something Maria would have seen the value of, for Cybil not more than a place lichen clings to, indistinguishable from the living decay around it. The mossy growth, embryonic fern varieties, ignorance of the analogy of growth, of learning, Virginia wishes for the logic of wordlessness in what she is showing, in what she is doing, muscle throbbing alongside the electrical pulses and chemical carry-on in her brain. Driven by set tasks, seven superhuman trials, heroic initiations to the next level of awareness, she is always a reaching towards a sense of things as they really could be. Each test is a mortal challenge requiring courage. But Virginia has forgotten that each must be dealt with always, including the corrosion of self through lack of money and the deviousness of others.

  The sawing done, she uses the axe again, thinking of hubris and humility as frail faults, when the nature of community is interdependence reliant on the independence of each entity: an individual is intricately woven into the white woman's quilt, a torn fabric fraying for centuries. In need of repair. Virginia picks up the wood piece by piece with one hand, making a load in the crook of her other arm, believing that she works at the artistic end of cultural needs, importantly occupied in full accord, past present and future, as still as a mountain ash and as busy as an ant.

  Taking the fuel inside, restless, questing, she makes her way, again, towards her art, tossing tin over the pile of firewood as she goes. The boat of seven trials is a personal voyage, yet she wants to dedicate a moment in the log to the shape of Maria. Her figures are objectified women. In the distance, the rounded mountains furry with old forest growth and rearing above clouds backlit by sun are too familiar for Virginia to see. She cannot find appropriate stumps on the tree to mould the classic fat goddess. Herself is the subject. 'Who will know if I starve to death, if I hide, wrap the forest around me in splendid isolation? Will they find me in the lovely lichenoid boat, an ancient tree fallen long ago, alive or as bones? I
could arrange my bones and let heart, mind and flesh detach and leave. Dead white purity.' She thinks of suicide.

  Eventually I came out of the prickly thickets and, climbing over a stile, proceeded into a paddock. Smoke came from a hollow. Walking that way, I saw the rusty roof of a dwelling, and a tin chimney. Several brown-fleeced sheep gazed lugubriously at me as I passed them, ripping at their pasture. The little humpy was surrounded by stands of sweet corn, a pumpkin vine, balls of parsley, salad burnet and other English herbs, within a barbed and chicken-wire fence. I found a gate near an exotic cactus plant and entered the garden with a rather weak cooee. As Rory had pointed me towards the home of Virginia White, once a famous sculptor, I thought I had found it.

  'Remember me to Virginia White,' Auntie had said in the Kimberley. The woman was sitting in front of the fire, black logs smouldering on a ploughshare; half the smoke went up the chimney while the rest hung in the rafters. She was spinning, not wanting to be disturbed yet commanding attention in the way she ignored my entrance. She acted like a famous person. In the gloom long hair hid her features. It was Judith Sloane. I made all the play at small talk while she spun and uttered pearls of abstract wisdom. For such a grand natural environment, it was stuffy in there, with the heady smell of fleece and my back to the view. I turned around.

  'What's that?' I asked, seeing something silver glimmer through the trees.

  'Rory's phone tower. You would have passed it on your way here. Or did you come the low path? Powered by a solar panel? You didn't see it?' Snobby voice sneering at either my justifiable ignorance or Rory's need to maintain contact with the real world, she wanted to put me in my place.

  Laughing it off, I said, 'I must have been watching the birds.'

  Judith smirked a little and put the brake on the wheel. 'Would you like some cheese?'

  It was such an odd request I accepted. I was quite happy to have encountered Judith instead of Virginia. Not only was I on a job here, I remembered her signature when I was looking at the handwriting on some of Meghan's papers.

  'I used to make my own,' she began piously. 'But…'

  Her voice faded out, I didn't hear any more. She had turned away. She was not kidding, cheese. A block of cheese with bits of blue mould on its hardened outer edges was placed in front of me. She watched me until I had some. As I did it quickly, I ate mould as well.

  'That's how we live here. It's hard. It's the frontier, your cheese goes green. That's why I got myself a cow. Fresh milk, protein, calcium. And a herb garden. Greens. Yoghurt, cottage cheese. Women should stay healthy. The revolution starts with the self. Subsistence. Discipline.' Judith Sloane apparently thought she was being educative.

  I recalled the bright purple duco on her car. New, that vehicle would have cost about thirty thousand. She had a mesmerising, prohibiting way about her. 'You don't have a phone?'

  A puritanical look of disgust passed over her features as if having a phone were the height of cowardice, the root of all evil. She pointed out the cooing of carrier pigeons in a loft close by. 'There are other methods of communication.'

  'Rory has bought herself a computer,' I said, cheerfully.

  'Does Rory deny herself anything?' Judith asked rhetorically, hardly disguising a bitterness. 'She has to have roads and bridges, for her convenience. Why did we come here? Wasn't it to live in the wild?'

  'I don't know,' I said simply. 'Why did you come here?'

  Judith had the dark-haired good looks of someone who was photogenic. She needed a kind of staged lighting to be at her best advantage, and this effect she was trying on me in her shadowy shanty. She had not, herself, touched the mouldy cheese she offered me.

  'To be the noble savage, raw in tooth and claw,' she answered enigmatically. 'Be self-sufficient.'

  Unlike Rory, she seemed weary of welcoming guests to Lesbianlands. Her hostility was palpable, but I could not see its purpose. I said thanks for the cheese and complimented the view. I did not feel like becoming any more intimate than a wandering visitor but I had to ask questions. It was why I was here. She was there the day Maria died.

  'You're a singer, aren't you? I'm sure I have seen you perform. At the Orlando Ball?' I was inspecting the guitar on the sheepskins on the couch.

  'And you're the detective, Margot Gorman,' the smart-arse countered.

  Her English voice was sweet with super-sensitivity, but spiked like arsenic in old lace. Her skin was very tanned, but without sun would be very pale, no freckles; her eyes slightly too close together. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail and tied it with wool from her spindle. Burnt poles held up this rugged shack.

  'So what is your story about the broken bridge?' I asked cheerily.

  'I'm not prepared to gossip.' She watched me take my notebook from my pocket, and sighed with forbearance. 'It's the hobgoblin of small minds.' I lay my book down on the oddly rocky Laminex table, wondering what a hobgoblin was.

  'Spell Sloane with an e,' said Judith. 'I was walking out and I found the bridge had been destroyed, and when I met the gurls coming in I told them, but I don't know anything.'

  'Well, could you speculate for me? What is your theory?' If she was a cactus I was a daisy.

  'As I said, I don't gossip.' She stated a rule. I could tell she wanted me to go away, but she had to charm me as well.

  'Gossip, I should have thought, was a responsibility for women.' I spoke in the broadest Strine of my working-class roots. 'The passing on of knowledge and wisdom over the back of the fence, in the market places, around the kitchen table, waiting in queues, spending time with one's peers. Gossip keeps women informed,' I said grandiloquently, responding to her facial expression. 'Probably men too.'

  The seductive side to Judith Sloane appeared. 'But if gossip were our only means of learning it would have to be the truth. I actually don't know what happened to the bridge.'

  'That's not what I heard on the grapevine,' I threw in a fib as a bait.

  'I can only go by my experience,' she intoned, piously. Her voice was measured, gentle.

  Deciding to use a similar tactic that of talking to Cybil Crabbe, I opined, 'If I were to seek a recipe through the channels of gossip, I would not expect the aunt, friend, acquaintance, mother, to deliberately add a tablespoon of chilli to spoil the menu for me. However if an erroneous piece of information were added with the intention of, say, ensuring that dish could not be effectively made by anyone else, I would suspect the giver, the perpetrator, of some degree of nastiness.' Judith looked at me sharply.

  'All types of information are put on the conveyor belt of gossip, but what oils it and keeps it rolling is the interest we have in each other. We write our own scripts of, and enjoy, others' stories in the same way we might watch Neighbours, say, Days of Our Lives, perhaps?' I continued. Judith went back to her spinning wheel, using it as smokers use cigarettes, as something to do with their hands, something to fiddle with. She expressed ignorance of TV soaps and would not catch my eye.

  'Yeah, it's a form of entertainment. We talk about others, and in talking about others, we can entertain or inform. Often we colour it with our personality, our language skills and our opinion,' I lectured, self-importantly.

  'You judge as you talk, you mean?' A bit of insight from the spinner.

  'Most of it is okay because we have checks and balances and arrive at our own evaluations. We have memories. We instinctively know whether it's fact, or accurate knowledge,' I said slowly, and added, 'or considered opinion.'

  'Deliberate lying is as nasty as throwing an extra tablespoon of chilli into a recipe?' She was playing me out like the yarn across the warp and woof of her mechanism.

  'Deliberate lying, actually, is slander. Using the daisy-chain of fair dinkum gossip to convey false information, knowingly, either about character or fact, leads to false judgements and ill-considered opinions. You see gossip loses all its intrinsic interest if it is known to be made up. Slander lives off the trust inspired by gossip, like a parasite,' I finished as I felt s
omething furry under the table. An elderly cat I had not noticed before adjusted its position and went back to sleep.

  'Well most gossip is slander,' Judith concluded pompously, concentrating on her craft.

  'So, what do you think happened to the bridge?' I lifted my voice.

  'Mistaken judgements of women can go on for years and pass through a lot of mouths in this community, Margot.' She was determined to make me feel like a new girl at an English boarding school.