Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  'After the meal, the meal of maize and gristle and a green herb like rocket, the full moon forty-five degrees high in the sky, some women got to their feet eagerly, feeling their skirts for leaves and twigs to brush off. Hermione hesitated and stared at the fire. I was a girl. I watched her across the flames. The women walked away in the moonlit darkness and the men chatted as if nothing much were happening in the cutting hut. We wrapped ourselves in carpets and held each other and slept until dawn. With her arms around my young girl's body in such a fierce hug, she felt me. Hermione touched me, until then I loved her. At first she patted and stroked and didn't see the tears in my eyes. The other women slowly and efficiently packed up their beds and went outside to make a fire and sing some songs. The early morning sunlight came in shafts through the cracks in the rough walls.' Sofia babbles on, pulling jars of grains out of the pantry, gathering blankets, undoing the well-meant organisation of the good Samaritans.

  Mary Smith tries to hold her, to shut her up.

  Sofia isn't eating anything, only drinking coffee and alcohol. Africa, the American, has no time for Sofia's racist madness. In her bag of pills for all occasions, she has the makings of a Mickey Finn. She makes the mistake of suggesting this solution to one of the Territory women. They, then, guard Maria's daughter, knowing that more poison in her system is not what she needs.

  Before I set off for Penny Waughan's I spoke with Chandra on the phone for about an hour. We discussed my job, how I discovered the truth, how it must be more than simply asking questions and I told her some of my techniques but concluded, with a laugh, it is an inborn talent. I needed to know more about computers.

  She said, 'On the net are hundreds of youth suicide sites.'

  'Are they hidden or obvious?' I asked, pencil in hand.

  'Depends on what you know already, really.'

  'Hundreds of sites?' I wrote down a few as she called them up at her desk.

  She told me about the gopher field and the password field then extemporised on the subject of young males today. 'Probably an underestimate. They have this friend, a computer. They're alone and depressed. Unlike me, fifty, a kid of the 'fifties, fed on sentiment, lachrymose schmaltz, for entertainment these kids are given psychopathic nutcases as models when they are vulnerable. Ghouls, Hallowe'en creeps who mean it with hook hands and axes and brilliant blades, and blood, blood everywhere. Violence is in their baby food. And they're more computer literate than their folks, who can maybe write a letter and do a spreadsheet of household expenses but have no real idea of how the net works. Cyberspace is outer space to them, while their kids live there, drumming up motives for themselves to be antiheroes. I'm talking Play-Station games and action videos, as well.' Chandra sounded though she hated males.

  'Yes, but they say those games aren't so bad. Just the challenge of problem-solving,' I felt the need to argue. 'Anyway. Penny, his mother, teaches computers.'

  'Doesn't mean she knows where he goes,' Chandra was into her topic. 'In his imagination.'

  'Went,' I corrected. I'm interested in where he went in reality, as it happens.'

  'Yeah,' she said vaguely. I had the feeling she was keying in things as she spoke to me. 'And they're going to put more policing pressure on parents. It's horrendous when you think about it. The computer is a friend when you are alone. I reckon when teenagers get together, they hike off down to the "drug store".' Chandra put on an American accent, 'And hang out, at the shopping centre, showing off how loose and cool they are. However, the lonely one has all these cyber-friends who have no facial expressions, who can't punch you in the arm or wrestle you to the ground, who can turn you off, who can romanticise themselves. The inherent frustration is siphoned off into obsession, addiction. To a type of fantasy. The funny thing is his virtual world is like Victorian fiction. Yet it is a whole world away from it all. A gone yet here world. It's very Gothic. If you're young, you need your peers, like you really do. Hence hundreds and thousands of suicide sites.'

  I remembered how Neil frightened Tilly with a cape and make-up. 'What? Do they glamorise it?'

  'They give recipes and methods and means,' she answered. 'How to do it without too much pain, or with heaps of drama, on costs and not being found out beforehand. Or if not so blatant, there is passive encouragement, support for the action, curiosity about it and each member grows in estimation as he comes closer to his decision. Imagine, a tiff, the hormonal big-dipper of despair and elation. Death has a fascination. For the adolescent male, apparently.'

  'Many do it?' I dropped my pen, and sat listening to her voice. 'For the voyeurism of their cybermates?'

  'Yes, lots. A great number. It is all very poetic. The big act of courage getting esteem from these peers is in going. Doing it. First, privately you have to whip a motive inside yourself or interpret the world you breathe in as hostile. Your mother. Your father. School. The girlfriend who rejects you is a favourite. And underneath this is real depression, the motive itself. Can you check his computer?'

  'I suppose so,' I flipped a page of the notebook.

  'Search through Youth Suicide,' she instructed. Chandra gave me a quick review of the lesson on what to expect if I managed to get to Neil's computer.

  Suicide was, of course, a possibility. I wondered on my drive over to Canisteo Bayou how depressed he really was. Click on his Favourites menu, I repeated to myself, so as not to forget.

  Penny Waughan's dinner table was set, with a cloth, correct cutlery, a bread and butter plate with a warm Italian bun in a checked napkin, a wine glass, a Cabinet-Merlot with the $7.99 price still stuck on the bottle, all ready for one. A small card of anti-depressants was the only little mess in the classy tidiness. I suspected that would have been removed before she sat down to her formal supper. Her feast would be a pasta with a red sauce. A little salad was prepared with lettuce, tomato and olives, sprays of basil and parsley decorating. I thought it a nice honouring of herself and a nod of respect to the twenty-nine per cent of the Australian population, who live by themselves in their own place. Count me in, I couldn't judge. However, I could not avoid feeling the full blast of pathos in the sad nobility of it. When she answered the door she must have shrugged at my timing. Actually I thought she was dining a little early.

  'Come in, Margot. Sit down.' The sitting-room in this house was beyond the dining-room though they were one large space angled away from each other by the position of furniture. She offered me a sherry, which I accepted as I sat on the three-seater couch. She poured the extra dry flor into tiny crystal glasses from a matching crystal carafe. She lowered herself into an armchair perpendicular to me and went about the ritual of lighting a cigarette. A jazzy blues track was playing on the CD at a low volume. I registered a few bars in silence but could not recognise the artists. The saxophone was the voice of the piece. I resisted the temptation to comment on the music. She made no reference to her dinner table. She was still breaking bread with the deceased Neil. He was in his room perhaps, a sense of presence altered time. The recent past was here as if it were sealed away by no more than a skin of Glad-wrap. But. There was nothing sentimental about this woman's strict and uptight mourning. I found it hard to fight back a tear as a particular riff in the jazz caught up the thread of her inner devotion, now a void. There was a thin crust between this piece and a full-on Negro spiritual with wailing and keening and unrepressed sobbing. I swallowed.

  'It seems your son was a hero to his father,' I said.

  'Neil was Nigel's son too. I have to remind myself of that.' She stubbed out her butt, continuing, 'I feel no comfort in the fact that Nigel will be grieving was well. Neil was much more like me. Not only in looks but inside. But yes, Nigel loves heroes.'

  'Was Neil a hero?' I encouraged.

  Penny looked at me and smiled. 'What would I say? Of course.'

  'By that I mean, do you think he had the spine?' I changed key.

  She nodded.

  'Okay, let's take it from there. Am I interrupting your meal?' I was, after al
l, a professional PI.

  Penny Waughan pushed herself out of her chair and went into the kitchen and called, 'I'll just turn it all off. It's only spaghetti bolognaise. I have to keep myself together. I'm tempted not to eat at all.' On her way back, she removed the pills from the dining table and put them in a drawer. Then she refilled our glasses with sherry from the decanter. Every movement was executed with slow care.

  Spiral shorthand book on my knee, I asked, 'Do you think he was depressed? Seriously?'

  'No,' she said without a beat.

  'No,' I echoed her.

  'What do you mean?' she asked as she sat again. 'Neil would not have committed suicide.' She was really indignant. 'He would not have done that to me.'

  'Of course,' I pacified. 'A hero, in any sense of the word, does not kill himself, though he may take life-threatening risks. Because heroes have causes. A sense of right and wrong, a purpose.' Pursuing that direction, I went on, 'Where do we look for his cause? His crusade?'

  Another cigarette, this one lit more urgently. 'Neil had nothing to be afraid of. He had his father's love and mine. Although he was spoilt, he was not ruined. He had our care and he had his freedom. What he did with his freedom I'm not exactly sure, but I could trust him. That is the horrible irony of his death. Neil was naturally cautious. He was sensitive, too. He would not put himself in danger because he knew it would hurt me terribly. He was mature. For fifteen.'

  'Caution,' I said and wrote. 'Okay. I accept that. And from Nigel I accept that Neil was Luke Skywalker. I already know he was a computer whiz.'

  'Of a weekend,' Penny gazed into the past. 'The boys would be in there jockeying the screen, and Lisa would come up and help me with the pizzas. I'd give anything to Neil, so I networked the two computers in the same ISP account. Lisa used my computer then, when she got sick of the all-male stuff. You know what teenage boys are like. Neil had his own email address.'

  I figured that must be sometime back. 'How about lately?'

  'Recently?' Penny frowned. 'He kept going out. He didn't mope or sulk. He had things to do.'

  My mind was working fast and having a lot of trouble with my ignorance of the superhighway and its byways. I imagined the signposts lay in the hardware, but I did not have the language, nor did I want to push Penny into cracking through the fragile surface of her grief because I would not be able to cope with the shards. I did not want to shatter her. However, when I looked up I saw she was looking at me with a steely gaze, full of backbone and intelligence. She, on all appearances, had ended up better off than her husband in the financial disputes he had said were so acrimonious. So she had the grit in the awful emotional warfare. Maybe that was what she meant when she said Neil was like her inside.

  'Can we check his email? Or is this not a good time?' I caught her steady scrutiny with mine.

  'Well, now is as good a time as ever.' She got up, smoothed down her skirt and led the way. 'His room,' she said as she came to the desk, 'is a lot neater than I would have expected.' Indeed, all disks and piles of paper were squared off and dusted.

  'What's that?' I asked, pointing to one of the bits of hardware that were not printers, or monitors, or keyboards.

  'Which? Fax, modem, flatbed scanner.' She tapped the equipment and bent down to the power point. Again she was surprised. The electricity was on. There was a light on the multi-adaptor which had a number of plugs through the spaghetti junction of leads. She pressed one button on the main computer and everything whirred to life. She murmured. 'The cleaner doesn't usually disturb his arrangement. But, of course, she would know.'

  It was much neater than last time I was here. Penny sat down and her fingers danced on the board for a second, while her eyes remained fixed to the screen which registered asterisks in response to her typing. No words, letters or numbers. The modem beeped out a telephone call.

  NiNwalker Attention. Attachment download. Go NiN, this is really interesting.

  We both read together. A number of messages attracted my curiosity and I suggested we print them out.

  'You don't want all this advertising.' The pages came with surprising speed.

  Penny frowned, as she moved on.

  'They're asking for a password I don't have.'

  'Try R2D2,' I said.

  She did.

  Penny worked the mouse. The screen slowly composed a graphic of a plant, and its botanical name. I did not recognise the name but the leaves looked like some kind of wattle. Penny tapped again and pushed her seat back. The printer ground out the picture of the tree. She slid back to the computer and brought up the index of Neil's email. 'Look at the dates,' she indicated, dismayed. Dew-like tears emerged from the corners of her eyes.

  'Some of this came after he—' she hesitated—'He died.'

  I picked up the pile of paper. Among the firm bond was a limp shinier sheet. Again, Attention NiNwalker and a date after his death. It read: As soon as you take DMT you need some cushions behind you because you fall over. Takes effect real quick, dramatically increasing heart rate and blood pressure. Tastes like burning plastic, but it's natural man.

  I moved my gaze onto the monitor and Penny was reading about the same drug. She was crying freely now.

  'Neil was not into drugs,' she sobbed. 'We talked about it. He had a heart-murmur. He wouldn't take something as dangerous as this!' She fisted her hands and spoke through clenched teeth. 'Neil was not robust. His heart, he knew. He wouldn't.'

  Still holding the sheets of paper I'd picked up, I put my hand on her shoulder, 'I haven't had a chance to talk with Dr Neville. He's away on holidays. And the complete autopsy report is not available yet. But.' I pulled up a chair and sat beside her. 'Working from the premise that he was a hero, that he was cautious, that he was extremely computer literate, his fight may have been in cyberspace. We are looking for his crusade.' Removing my hand from her arm, I shuffled through the pages and came across a diagram. I showed it to her. 'Is this Neil's handwriting? A laboratory has been discovered in the country district around Port Water.'

  Penny obliged me by looking, and affirmed as she shook her head in confusion, 'But I have no idea what it means.'

  'It reminds me of algebra, perhaps a formula of some sort. What were those initials? DMT? These notes all seem to have something to do with it, and acid, LSD, crack, cut heroin, sugar, gelatine. But what bothers me is this.' I put the fax sheet in front of her and pointed to the date.

  'Well, that warning is too late. Too fucking late.' She fiddled angrily. 'What was he doing?'

  'I don't know, Penny.' I raised my eyebrows in ignorance. 'But obviously someone else has been using his computer.' That someone was Alison Hungerford.

  Penny lit a cigarette. Her hands were shaking and it took her a moment. I hoped it would calm her. I collected the paper, found a folder, labelled it and asked if I could take it with me.

  She nodded distractedly, whipping herself up. 'What do you know, Margot? What have you found out so far? Sweet FA, I'd say. What has this got to do with the women's clothing?'

  'Don't get upset,' I ordered. She had been drinking and taking anti-depressants; her mood changed, her rage erupted

  'Don't say that to me, you patronising bitch.' She exploded, screaming, abusing, smoking, sobbing and banging about the room. 'You've got no fucking idea, have you? You haven't got a clue about how it feels to be a mother who has lost not only her only son, her only child, but her best friend as well. We were close. He is gone. I miss him more than I can say. I don't know why I hired you. Why would I? It doesn't bring him back, does it? I just know someone murdered him. I feel it inside.' She collapsed into a huddle on the floor, keening like a banshee.