Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  5

  Several days have passed, and nights with lights. I am living on water and sunflower seeds. Before Trivia I was Zola. Zola had taken for a surname the maiden name of her maternal grandmother, Zakharov, a Russian emigré. Zola Zakharov, a perfectly legal pseudonym. The passage of the white Russians from the revolution-torn capital was often through Siberia, into China, Japan and eventually Australia. Although Zola herself believes, and believed when she changed her name by deed poll, passionately in continuing revolution, the beloved maternal grandmother, Anna Zakharov, yearned in her declining years for the Chekhovian gentility of a culture, a country, a religion gone. The fibro granny flat behind the house in south-western Sydney was for little Zola an exotic cabin in a time-travelling locker.

  She walked from the Formica-Laminex glisten of her mother's kitchen along the back path to a room (a converted garage) darkened by rich red brocades, heavily patterned floor rugs and tasselled tablecloths. The round table was crowded with photos of unknown, pompous ancestors dressed in fur with backgrounds of snow. The old lady had lost her mind by the time Zola, the fourth child in a family of seven, reached the age of reason, which was a pity as the little girl was agog with questions and curiosity. Instead she sat silently running her small square hands across the velvet, listening to undulating mumble in a foreign language and building walls of pretty tiles in games of senseless majong.

  Beneath a long, narrow icon on gilded wood of a madonna in a warm shawl of deep blue and maroon dress with the child in green and gold, an angel either side of her ornate crown and halo, one holding a sword, one holding a cross, Zola became an iconoclast, a revolutionary, not because of Anna Zakharov's own beliefs but because the dear old thing in her senility had established a world in her garage which challenged that outside, the reality of the poorer suburbs of Sydney. The kid, Zola, had a secret and the secret was: It doesn't have to be like this. I confronted every teacher who tried to bring me into line in all the neighbouring schools with questions, or more specifically, the question, why? When told to sit down and do what I was told, or whatever, she, I, you, whoever unanswered and unsatisfied, resorted to the language of the streets and was soon expelled.

  The days seemed mellow as I gave birth to another ego, Zola. In long evenings, she and you settled into an I, not Zola, while of a morning, Friesians with their white feathered friends stalking around their legs were picturesque. Mary's angels wiggled necks on the look-out for grubs exposed by the weighty hard feet of the beasts on the soft earth. Heavy-light pelicans preened on wooden jetties jutting out into the delta. Sun, moon, stars played with cloud formations. It was for me, okay. To take the name of Trivia, for humility and pride. My indulgence in sweetness was due to a resurrection as well, but I had not been dead.

  Yet, Maria saved me.

  The goddess, said my lover, walks among us, she of the many names. You entertained her in bed one morning with the litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, for instead of Russian Orthodox little Zola went to a Catholic school. 'Holy Trinity One God, Have mercy on us Holy Mary, pray for us. Holy Mother of God, pray for us. Holy Virgin of virgins, Mother of Christ… Mother of Divine Grace, Mother most pure… Mother most chaste… Mother inviolate… Mother undefiled… Mother most amiable… Mother most admirable… Mother of good counsel… Mother of our Creator… Mother of our Saviour… Virgin most prudent… Virgin most venerable… Virgin most renowned… Virgin most powerful… Virgin most merciful… Virgin most faithful… Mirror of justice… Seat of wisdom… Cause of our joy… Spiritual vessel… Vessel of honour… Singular vessel of devotion… Mystical rose… Tower of David… Tower of ivory… House of gold… Ark of the covenant… Gate of heaven… Morning star… Health of the sick… Refuge of sinners… Comforter of the afflicted… Help of Christians… Queen of angels… Queen of patriarchs… Queen of prophets… Queen of Apostles… Queen of martyrs… Queen of confessors… Queen of virgins… Queen of all saints… Queen conceived without original sin… Queen assumed into heaven… Queen of the most holy rosary… Queen of peace.'

  Your memory is impressive, Maria said to me as little Zola lay in her arms. We came to help build Lesbian Nation. It was her idea.

  For me, Persephone, alive again in another spring, we left the dolphins to hear the mermaids sing. And goddesses may well be there.

  6

  Aliens, my goodness, we have seen and tried to read the marks, lines, short lines on the ground, burnt with no fire I know—a fire that crystallises the sand particles. Makes them green and iridescent. Like featherlight quartz.

  Arrow-heads in different relation to each other. Chevrons and foreign punctuations.

  7

  Evil is not a term accepted in Lesbian Nations, because etymologically it comes from Eve and clearly places bad as female. Per se. To root out evil from the girl, the mother, the prostitute is the twisted motivation of many a murderer in movies, in history, in literature and court cases, accepted by critics, by academics, by judges and journalists as feasible. This is the world I left. I had personally to experience a holy war conducted against me to wholeheartedly embrace existence in the margin. I have begun hallucinating. Zola is dead. The body as beautiful in death, like the Morrigan, white with long hair floating outwards in the water. The next image put splotches of brown mud on her naked legs. Your own Imagination saw the dawn across the wide river lighting the mangrove banks in red, her limp form caught in the roots beside water-logged debris buffeted by the out-going tide.

  I died among mangroves, the lungs of the earth being choked by silt. Forgive me. I must move myself, my bones are poking out from my flesh and my joints are aching.

  8

  The words came out onto the page of the notebook Maria gave and named for me, out of me like blood from my face, off me like sweat from the brow, like blood from my wrists, squared my shoulders with the yoke of centuries, hardened my thighs for the hills I had to walk, to walk anywhere and I read it aloud one drunken night to the lesbian nationals gathered around and later looked in the mirror. Spring, summer and autumn had come and gone with women tearing each other's hearts out of their chests. In the hysteria of the fast and eating the bush food to hand, possibly magic mushrooms, she, you and I danced down the hills.

  I have prised the quartzy chevrons from the ground and carry the lumps of rocks about with me. Found rubies, too. But I had done something very wrong. Panic attacked me.

  Maria did not understand. She was not very impressed with the ordinary green quartz I held for dear life in my palm.

  I thought I was special. I stopped by a creek and let the rubies go, fresh spring water flowing by my fingers.

  Maria, you found me.

  I told my lover when I came to and she wanted to believe me but couldn't comprehend why I called my watery blood gemstones. She thought I was a suicide, but I have lost my ego in the plural self.

  I am trivia. Trivia dies. Trivia lives.

  I had been to hell.

  The cattlemen's fires burnt down the shelter I built with Maria. Green glass is in its place. And green grass. She took me away. I woke up in a motel room with a copy of Gideon's Bible resting on my chest open at The Apocalypse by St John.

  9

  Maria has left me alone. If I am too much for her, I am too much for anybody. For she is a strong and beautiful woman, and I hope my floating off to another plane does not disturb her karma. Whoever finds me please find her and give her this diary, dedicated with a deep love that goes beyond the grave. Beyond the vale of tears.

  For Maria, yours always, Trivia.

  34

  …the funeral…

  In the icy paleness before dawn, while Chandra is at her computer and Meghan travels to the airport, Margot wakes as if poked in the centre of her back by the forefinger of conscience. She looks out her bedroom window to see grey light flooding the eastern sky and reacts like a recruit at army camp, spinning out of bed to a type of attention. As Margot stretches each muscle and tendon of her body she remembers reading ha
lf the night. Weeping has made her sinuses gummy. Feeling the sharp tang of cold on her doona-warmed skin, she drops to her hands stiff as a board and presses herself through twenty fast push-ups, exchanging bed-warmth for blood-warmth. As she does a handstand against the wall, she sees a red eye flashing on the television screen. For the moment she thinks it is weird. Then she realises it is the message-blinker on her answer machine reflected from across the room, sparking warnings. She paces her hands out from the skirting board and her feet down the wall until her back arches as far as it can go, in which position the energies at the base of her spine act like a pocket of radiogenic rocks spreading heat throughout her frame. Upside down, blood rushes through her head, flushing her nasal passages. An exquisite balance between pleasure and pain teeters on nuministic experience as she inches her limbs closer together.

  Having finished a few easier postures, she goes down her cute cement path to the outside loo. Wisps of fog hang in the paperbarks behind the fence. Stilled for a moment to listen, she thinks she hears the distinct sound of plate falling against crockery. As neither of her neighbours is in residence as far as she knows, it must be a lyrebird. Winter on the Paradise Coast is a subtle season, and autumn does have its mellow mystery. Morning crispness suggests a coldness which never really comes. Deciduous leaves colour and fall as if the entire tree is dying against the background of native evergreens. Because she is in an unaccustomed mood, Margot sits down at the end of her yard and stares into the space between her plot and the bush block behind. Doing nothing is uncharacteristic. Margot thinks when she is busy. Her mind nags on the word, waste. Waste of time. Rubbish and compost. Trivia. Little things, like cooking an old potato. The peel with its dirt and the edible flesh are one until the peel needs to be thrown away. The water which boils the white pieces is also tossed. Neither can be done away with before the process deals with them. Her brain box empties as the analogy works its logic. She catches herself realising her present vacancy is necessary. Yet, boiling potatoes can cause the house to burn down, taking with it all worldly possessions, computer, money, licence and cards, and may happen because the telephone rang. Indeed the telephone did ring, an emergency, a woman in distress. Maria. Margot has the sensation of having left something undone.

  Her mind is tired, her emotions flattened by an enormity she has no words for, things she doesn't understand. Human life on the planet. The predicament of intelligence, awareness. The paranormal. All she knows of aliens comes from a TV program she watched recently. UFO'S in Australia, ordinary people telling their stories. She wrote as a note to the Featherstone file: 'I sat there and believed them, just for the sake of it. But no matter how hard I tried I couldn't figure the apostrophe. Is there only one UFO in Australia? No, because the one at Gosford was a completely different shape from the one at Narre Warren, which was different from the one on the road to the Dandenongs. Do UFOs own Australia? No, there is an unnecessary preposition. Conclusion, it is all bullshit.'

  How dangerous is gullibility? Now, she remarks on the stubborn pedantry of her thinking only of the apostrophe. She remains seated, hoping to hear the lyrebird again. She hears, instead, the split-second timing of whipbird call and response. Suicides. Homicides. Accidental deaths. Autopsies. Words float through her brain. Bushfires. Arson. The young man who burnt down the historical cathedral in Parramatta got a light sentence because, the judge who gave it to him said, the boy felt no remorse. Her stillness absorbs thought forms, the information overload, the burden of nonsense attacking the psyche which seems to be in the air even away from the immediacy of the media. A persistent impression which she cannot find the words for keeps her in a trance. The connection, Margot grasps, is The Golden Notebook. Something in the diary is significant: unidentified flying objects? What was it that had a price above rubies? A man's soul? A girls virginity? Maria's call for help had confused, yet gripped her.

  The photo in Meghan's house Margot, an amateur photographer and developer of black and white prints, knows is a hoax. The snap captures high-beam headlights reflected in a rear-vision mirror, the two-lane blacktop of a highway in the background, giving the impression of a bright flying saucer hovering over a road at night-time. The negative was tampered with. Telltale signs of singular attachments have been removed. Such she thought, but now she doesn't know what to believe. Regarding Chandra, she feels on the threshold of a journey of an expedition into uncharted territory so far as her own life's experience goes. She has no idea where it will take her, what will be expected of her strength of mind, her sense of direction, her array of talents: what sacrifices? what gains? Sex would change the landscape. Provide a path. But she faces a dense jungle, a wall of living questions to which there are no correct answers. She cannot comfortably say Sofia is responsible for Maria's dying, nor Maria for Trivia's apparent suicide, but somehow she wants to get it right. To name the moment and move on.

  Margot, having tied strings of rubbish together, composts them mentally. Like a siren in a factory, her phone rings. The bell. Communication technology tugs her back to work as surely as her athletic body demands exercise, care and expression of its potential. The answer machine takes the message. Inside, the piles of files remind her that she must have discipline. Before she deals with any of it, she cleans the house and gets down to some practical thinking.

  The writer is not only Australian and female, but from the district and pretty familiar with the gurls. Chandra is convinced of this because she has discovered the Web address of the person who posted the recipes, which included the dope cake Maria was eating the day she died, and it leads to either the Annihilation Tragic or the clever hacker trying to take over control of her structure for the mobilisation of the Solanasite conspiracy. Whether or not this is one and same she is not at all sure, but her gut-feeling is not, ravers not usually being foot soldiers. Anonymity is a blessing and a curse on the Web. Theorists, generally, do not throw the bombs in bloody revolution. Furthermore, unable to catch the source of the glitches, she wonders whether the intruder is out to subvert the plans of the whole international network, or is attacking Chandra herself personally, through her site or, indeed, whether the whole thing is a prank or deadly serious. So far, all it's doing is making Chandra decidedly unsettled. To interfere with the superficial thing, her screen saver, requires nerdy know-how capable of plumbing the depths of the maze. As Chandra cannot figure out how to regain control of that, she has no way of knowing how deep the imposter, the meddling arsehole, has gone. Nor why. So she must come out of cyberspace into the real world of detection, reassess the character of her friends. She needs a private eye, and the odd thing is she has one right in the centre of her acquaintance. But she can't use her, she knows her too well. Margot Gorman would probably flush out the culprit; at the same time ten years' zealous work would go down the drain. Meanwhile Chandra has options to pursue and opportunity today to quiz women on their technical knowledge, on their attitude to SCUM and Valerie Solanas and to have a look around the mob to see who might have it in for her. Conceivably, there is someone in the community so adamantly opposed to separatist policy in sexual politics that he or she, happening upon the site, simply wants to destroy anything or everything that radical feminists set up. She gets on the blower, inadvertently, trumpeting her investigation.

  An announcement in the departure lounge informs travellers of a delay, due to a few problems with the aircraft. Trouble with the Dash 8 to country towns is nothing new. Meghan Featherstone is used to it. She sighs, pulls her slim PC onto her lap, realises she cannot go on-line and plays with design of her homepage but, for several reasons, she is not feeling artistic. She is making a quick trip to attend Maria's funeral. She has to be back in Melbourne for a series of meetings starting Wednesday.

  Chemicals, she writes, then looks around at her fellow passengers and their luggage. Almost everyone is sitting patiently. A couple of holiday-makers in matching canary yellow shorts take the seats beside her. She balances the laptop on the end of her skinny knees,
tilted towards her relaxed arms. Fingers light on the keyboard, she stares them out when they want to chat or sneak a look at her screen. Businessmen reading magazines are similarly contemptuous of the tourists. One women in high heels and smart skirt-suit trots to the counter, has an argument, then anxiously paces. It is a long way out to the front of the terminal to go for a smoke from this backwater lounge in the huge building. Of course, she must make the trip for Maria's funeral. Fly in, fly out. Someone will miss her.

  Meghan expresses her irritation in leg-jiggling. Escapist reading for her has not been written, yet. Virtual diversions, being able to say what she likes, give a fragile link to her social circle. Thoughts of where she belongs and what she really cares about distract her. The worried lady in a power-suit who fiddles with her gold lighter gives her an idea.