'Yeah, that's what I meant by irresponsible gossip,' I said. 'The more it is repeated, the more it is believed.'
'And the less it is true,' Judith said, bitterly, 'Women can be known for ages, and not known at all. Which is a sad thing, because the dreams and myths are beautiful and nostalgic, as memories.'
I got the feeling she was watching her ideals disappear over the horizon on the beach that evening. What do people who gaze at the sea like that really see? A straight line, a stasis? 'If we lie to ourselves, we are lying to others,' I reckoned, trying to grasp the exact origin of my dislike of her and her views. Why this defensiveness? Was she sad, or bad? 'You sound depressed,' I offered.
'I've lived here a long time, and been very hurt. It's hard to trust when you have been as burnt as many times as I,' she said with a perverse relish as she got up.
'Your dreams and myths make great songs, though,' I tried encouragement.
Judith said she doesn't write songs any more, balling wool into a skein and throwing that into a basket.
'What about friends? Meghan Featherstone?' I heard my voice ask.
'Who?' She stopped in front of me, eye to eye, very close, staring, intimidating. 'Of course I know Meghan. I've know Meghan for years.'
Taken aback by her sudden aggro, I asked, 'Perhaps you could tell me what she is a doctor of?'
'She is a forensic geologist, an academic,' Judith replied, with pride. 'What's Meghan got to do with the bridge?'
'Nothing that I know about. I hadn't connected them.' But it was interesting that she did. And, in my admission of ignorance, I had obviously annoyed her. A lightning flash of vicious suspicion crossed her eyes. 'Geologist? That's interesting.'
'Is it?' Judith quipped.
'Seeing I'm investigating this matter on the part of your collective, might I have a look at the books?' I followed her outside to a little cabin which was like a woolshed in miniature. I inspected it. There were tin chests underneath the greasy fleeces. She put her key in a padlock and removed a heavy minute hardback and an exercise book.
'The journal, ledger, bank statements and cheque book are in my car,' she explained helpfully, and if I had asked why she would have had a lengthy tale to tell about the business she had done in town which would have been totally credible. As I simply did not believe her I nodded, glanced at the notes of the last meeting, the lines of figures and names in the school book and saw that a lot of gurls were behind in the yearly payments.
'Thanks,' I said and watched as she returned them under lock and key. Ignoring me was a positive and complete act. I was thin air.
'Cheerio,' I called, as I walked off across the paddock. No ciao, no adios, no goodbye came back at me, but I was gratified because in this instance nothing was something. Mention of Meghan roused her hackles. She was annoyed I had not dug deeper into the accounts, thus not seen what a responsible and reliable treasurer she was. I don't know, I just did not want to give her the pleasure.
Climbing a knoll in the sheep paddock, I surveyed the country. I saw the way across the hill towards the waterfall, and the solar panel that powered the phone transmitter, the tower, the satellite dish and a much easier path back to Rory's eyrie. The spines of ridges reared like the backs of a herd of dinosaurs. Deep rainforest greens merged with the lighter limes of lantana infestation where evidently there had been pasture, but higher up the bush looked impenetrable, brightened now and then with the red of flame trees. I heard a chain-saw rev, whine, cut, rev, whine, cut. It sounded quite close. I set off towards the higher path. Once I was below the tree-line I became disoriented. The mechanical noise ceased. I had only now the sound of water falling to guide me. If the worst came to the worst I would walk in the creek and follow its flow. Then I heard chopping.
My instinct served me well. I came across a beaten track, which led to a neat rectangular cabin in a small clearing. Functional, unadorned, surprisingly bright and dry inside, considering the setting. European and Asian herbs here were in terracotta pots on a specially constructed window-box within arm's reach of the kitchen bench, looking glossy and fresh. I chewed a sprig of parsley. The structure was open, airy, but closeable, and everything seemed to have its cupboard, books behind glass, food protected by steel mesh, matching jars of dried food lined the shady wall. Cups and utensils hung from hooks, plates, saucepans were shelved. A slow combustion stove separated kitchen from sitting-room. The bedroom opened onto the bush, facing east, wardrobes screened it from the lounge. One long couch and an armchair, a table and three straight-backed wooden chairs, the whole place was uncluttered, each space had a unique feel related to its use. A balance between tension and relaxation reflecting work and contemplation had been achieved somehow through the placement of furniture, attention to detail. Yet all so artless and unaffected my bought house seemed messy in comparison. Virginia interrupted my appreciation. The hectic, tall artist, her hair standing out from her head, her eyes direct and searching, although an imposing figure, she was in no way intimidating. Even though I was standing inside her home, uninvited, she smiled.
'Take a seat, Margot,' she pulled a chair out from the table. 'I assume your Achilles tendon is still sore?' Now I was the detail she was attending to and she remembered everything she knew about me; not much, but pertinent.
I sat down and gave her Auntie's message. I told her about meeting my destiny in the gorges of the Devonian Reef. She sighed and said she had never been to Western Australia. The grey nomad was important to her, she wanted to be reassured of her welfare. Being with Virginia White gave me a sense of the powerful sisterhood reputed to be about in the 1970s. Unlike Judith Sloane, trust was not an issue with her. She gave it as freely as the date loaf and coffee that appeared in front of me. She must have prepared it, jiggered up the fire, found plates, cake and cups during my account of my travels, and then we spoke about Maria.
'Lesbians who are only after a good time get my criticism because we have such a lot of work to do,' she said as she sat down at the table ready for discussion. 'But.'
'What about all the hard work and heartache and effort their lives demand?' I countered with a twinkle of humour.
'This is where I disagree. I think "I just want a good time" killed Maria,' said she rather dramatically. 'If I commanded the minds of the masses, I would allow them small time in which to indulge what they think their needs are.'
'If only those needs weren't controlled by a sick society,' I grimaced, exaggerating my facial expression. Did this noble-minded lesbian ever stoop to consider the lowly matter of the fiscal running of the place, or did she leave all that to the goddess?
She nodded, earnestly. 'Generally, addictions that blot out lives. Real living. That doesn't mean you can't have fun, the most sublime fun is had in cultural sincerity. Can't the beauty of women's achievement be celebrated without expressing, in behaviour, the damage, the sexual violence internalised into a cynical put-down of the women who try? We women who try are seen to be privileged and I suppose we are. And that is what it is inside of me, privilege makes you obliged.'
Throughout our chat, I felt that Virginia's intensity was ignited by a clear and present personal hurt but the heat generated concern for a larger problem.
'The lesbian and ethical way to grow and create community and culture, and consequently greater happiness for ourselves, is to get to know each other as well and as fairly as we can,' she theorised. How well did she really know the women she lived with, Judith, for instance? Could any of them have anything to do with the broken bridge, and the inexplicable explosions?
On leaving, when she was showing me the way to Rory's, I asked what she felt about it.
'A bloody nuisance,' she replied. 'And no, I don't think anyone has booby traps. Though, once, I did go on-line to see how they're made.'
'You surf the Internet?' I displayed my amazement with a gesture of opened palms indicating the authentic integration of her full-time home in these remote mountains, so plainly without the mod cons of Rory's res
idence.
'My brother is a nuclear physicist,' she informed me. 'I've been mucking around the technology since its inception.'
'Really?' I was sure neither Chandra nor Rory knew this.
'Yeah,' she affirmed casually.
The walk to Rory's was relatively flat, mostly downhill, and easy because Virginia had taken me to where her car was parked and all I had to do was follow the road.
After a late lunch I put my triathletic body in the icy shower of the waterfall and squealed with the pleasure of it. Rory paled when I suggested Judith could possibly be dishonest. There was no sight nor sound of the other women from last night. They had gone, she told me, about eleven.
Virginia, even though she enjoyed the conversation with Margot, is restless. Over-tired, she walks up the mountain, taking the steepest path, forcing herself to step firmly on the jagged blue copper rock. The grass trees bend in frozen communion with the land. She looks down on the canopy. The bones of a wallaby catch her eye. Death.
The skeletons on the ground on the spiky new growth, reflect her emotional state. A weight. A non-flowing. She recalls smelling and seeing the smoke in the distance in her forwards and back race to Cybil's flat by the sea and is disgusted with herself, for her neglect of the land. She walks down from Widow's Peak, feeling an aching sorrow. The fellowship of trees is accommodating beyond words.
Every spring the Campbells light the bush, and don't care if it gets out of control. What an act of huge self-hatred on the part of humankind to set fire to the jungle and let it rage destructively. It is massacre. One man's excuse is the justification for decimation of millions of living life-forms. It doesn't do the rock or the air any good either. The ozone. Life. Mystery. Life, from that of the tiniest ant in its tireless work to the majestic serenity of the mountain ash whose life ant-industry helped to create, Virginia's love of the surrounding beauty turns to a righteous wrath. She wishes she were a simple soul, like Olga, the hours of whose days are dictated by care: for women, for children, for dogs, goannas, snakes—always something, a kookaburra with a broken wing— whose heart can dissolve in uncomplicated bliss. Anger is her ready mate these days. If she could duel with someone, as she and Jeff did in the make-believe sword-fights of their childhood, using home-made blade and shield in fair combat, she would like nothing better.
Murder? Aggression? Like? Love? Hatred? Power? She has heard gurls call each other stupid and ladies call themselves stupid women. Why does someone like Dee turn herself into a doormat? The dutiful daughter obedient, even to the demands of her dog, Dee relates to all with powerlessness as an integral part of her character. Everyone's her mother. The world as a household is the only way to cope. She wishes she could be as sober as the weather-beaten, old-fashioned Vee, Victoria Shackleton, who comes and goes with her horse-float. Or Pam, for that matter, for whom black is black, and white is white; what to be devoted to and what to despise determined by her feelings; the natural eternal teenager. Gurls call Pam Roxburgh a baby VeeDub: she looks so like her physically, but twenty years younger.
But Virginia doesn't actually feel envy. She is in love with a woman she does not like, who says what draws her to women is lust, no more. She cannot work. She goes, instead, to lie in the lap of the goddess and let the pensive persona assail her, heal her. She lowers herself down onto the crunchy bed to let the ants run over her bare skin, not noticing whether they nip her or not. She tries to mourn for Maria but trivial history intervenes, the immediate past, the busy day, little sleep. The light love of the commune, lending her support, rests like a fine cotton blanket over the heavier passions in her heart; it is a kind of dearness, an essential caritas in the anima of society, which is a need to give, and in the giving, take. Margot's wholesome, whole-hearted appreciation of her shack. Her mind wanders to what has been built as she touches the spaded sides of her original folly. Each woman's dwelling has the singular charm of her own creation.
Now she cries. She sobs, lying among the tree-roots. She feels annihilated as a female artist by the tongue-lashings Cybil spits out, assuming superiority. Telling Virginia she has no idea! Cybil's voice was as cold and cutting as stalactites and stalagmites of ice. All the polished dreams of separatism fade away. Her work is undermined by the plight of ordinary women, the lies they live with, while for Virginia, it is inexplicably courageous. A butcher bird's sublimely beautiful whistle inspires a smile. It occurs to her that Cybil is jealous of her famous past. But Virginia wouldn't have looked at her then. Succeeding in the gallery scene, rewarded by grants and engagements and exhibitions for being known, exposure of safely understood work is the past. Virginia's personal progress is that her art is a spiritual vehicle, not a product in the commerce of capitalism. Logically, it can be no other way. Black cockatoos scream overhead, squealing of coming rain. Rain-birds, so many of them living in the tall casuarinas which comprise the flora of the steepest gullies, it is hard to believe superstitions. For the moment it is dry.
The insects go about their lives, perceiving the long limbs of the woman too big to bother about. 'Cybil does not even know me, and that is what it is all about. Being known.' Virginia looks at the side of her misbegotten dream-place. The acacia and the she-oak intertwine with each other beneath the skin of the earth, while above the ground they are separate. She does not axe or saw living wood. The roots relate in a different way from the branches, the leaves and the flowers. The bushfires were, for them, a short trial. Virginia rests the flat of her hand on a rock which she feels, almost vibrates, and she cries, 'Hell!'
Rory, when I recounted my discussion with Judith, commented, 'The past is dead if it's stuck in a freeze-frame and doesn't change, like the future is dead already if you live in it today. If Judith is stuck in the past, then her present is a lie.'
'The bank books were in her vehicle,' I said. 'Why?'
She interrupted my mundane concern about the financial condition of the collective with, 'Her past is rewritten.' Did neither Virginia nor Rory care that Judith controlled the money?
When I had heard about big-winged creatures, lights in the sky, spaceships landing, goddesses dancing, that ghosts sang haunting melodies, cyberspace and other high-flown matters, I asked, 'Where are the deeds to your property?'
'In a safety-deposit box,' she replied. 'At Stuart's remaining bank.'
'Perhaps I could come out again? I seem to have been busy with everything but detection. Willy Campbell wasn't home when I called,' I said lazily.
'Wilma and Barb, too,' Rory reminded me. 'You've done Vanderveen. That's good.'
Eventually, I said I would walk back to my car.
'No, don't walk with your bad heel, I'll drive you,' Rory offered. 'When do you want to go?'
'Pretty soon,' I said. 'But I wish I could stay longer. I have an appointment I have to keep in the morning.'
On the drive through the bush, Rory asked me about the Friday night Neil died. I told her the bare facts of my involvement, complimenting the cool efficiency of Alison, and the strange coincidence that I had been engaged by the mother to find his 'murderer'.
'Alison,' Rory smiled with all the features in her face. 'A more unsuitable woman to be a mother I have never met. She is brilliant, but she shouldn't have children. They will kill her, or vice versa.'
'Are you serious?' I asked, remembering how flaky I found Alison.
'Not really. It's a hell of a life with boy children. Harold, I heard, was working for the syndicate, growing dope in the National Park,' Rory casually imparted. I took note.
'I met Lenny that night. What a handsome lad!' I commented. 'And Tilly is delightful.'
'Different fathers. Harold is handsome, too.' The big vehicle murmured slowly along the stony road. Rory became uncharacteristically quiet and short after mentioning this boy's name. 'We had a lot to do with him when he was younger.'
Gone were the explanations which flowed from her complete with embellishments from history and theory, peppered with anecdotes from life. Silence. We passed the wr
eck of a Toyota Cressida rusting away in the bush. I mentioned it, and Rory's said it was Trivia's car, and left it at that.
'You're like the landscape, Margot,' she said suddenly. 'Things happen upon you but it would take an earthquake to tangle you up the way of lot of us are. Everything about you has a sort of evenness, if you know what I mean? So bland and honest and there.'
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