Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  The elders have left for the desert leaving the wealthy whites to take care of their own. Sofia is beginning to use language which shocks everyone. She has developed a hatred for the Negress who persists in hanging about with Mary Smith. She is recognising no rules of polite behaviour. She grabs women and holds their arms with a fearsome strength. 'Now she excited the girl. She dragged her arms, her hands, down her body and shook her forehead against her belly, then she put her tongue on the clitoris she was about to remove. She sucked with infinite tenderness because the erect clitoris was easier to hold and slice. With a power only known to women, a psychic ability to axe sensibility and get on with the job, with the sharpened stone. Irrationally, finally dissociated from herself, she jokes with the women, sometimes in men's hearing, about slicing off his member. But it's hollow laughter covering the trauma and tragedy each woman, everywhere, experienced at the very same age, crying, screaming and bleeding. The statuesque nanny who was like a highly paid model in her beauty and commanding appearance walked away onto the savannah with bloody hands.'

  Sofia swans around the garden. 'With bloody hands,' she repeats as she pushes the sane women away. 'Stop watching me like screws.' They cannot pin her down, but they keep their eyes on her.

  'Should we section her?' they say, keeping their voices low. Mary Smith has to go back to the city to work. Worried women whisper to each other, even so Sofia does hear them, for they, like she is, are saying the same sort of thing over and over. She turns mean. She is cunning. Although they galvanised into the busy activity of finding all blades, she has hidden a knife in her knickers and secateurs up her sleeve.

  Suddenly she is competent. Compliant. Their relief is palpable. They boil water for tea in a saucepan.

  'I'm just going to the toilet.' She knows they have been watching her. Like hawks.

  'I am just going to throw up and piss, vultures. Vipers,' she hisses.

  'Uh ho,' Mary is immediately on the ball. But too late. Sofia has locked herself in.

  She calls, 'Sof, are you okay? Come out. Are you finished? I need the loo, now. I'm busting.'

  All present know she has gone too far when she sings out, 'What can white women do with ties of blood? Slice the tie. And bleed from their fucking bleeding hearts.'

  They put their shoulders to the door and burst the latch. Sofia is beyond dramatic effect, and quite into the sensations of self-harm, talking to the blood, getting it everywhere. Especially on her hands. She wants to pat their faces, baptise them in her blood.

  'You know nothing, my children. Nothing. I bless your ignorance. In the name of the mother, and the nanny, this is the blood of the daughter, taste it, my sisters. Drink my blood and ye shall be saved.'

  'Let's get her into Accident & Emergency,' says Africa. They grab her limbs, manhandle her into a car and take her to the hospital, where she is a bloody and raving lunatic and the medical profession deals with her straight away.

  Sofia is locked up in a ward with bars on the windows, and force-fed drugs which make her dribble and shake.

  Efficient women clean and seal the house and arrange with locals to have the lawn mowed and the mail collected. They fill their cars with petrol and take the roads north, south and west out of the town of Stuart.

  Libby Gnash responded to my message with aggressive curiosity. It was ironic. She did not trust me, but, for all her pugnaciousness, on a gut level, I trusted her. I appealed to her stronger suit. The Fight Against Injustice. Would she help me in the Featherstone affair? There was nothing fair about this contract. I made an appointment for later on in the afternoon.

  No sooner had I put the phone down then it belled. I picked up within seconds to be, again, greeted with the cutting off of the other end as I said 'hello'. The third time it happened in the past few hours. Images of Meghan's ransacked joint came to mind. My house could easily be burgled. If Meghan was away, who cleaned it up? What happened to the goats? As if I were psychic, I knew I had to do with the reason. I was not being paranoid. I was the object of the game. Instinctively, intuitively, I felt something or someone was out to get me; yet I didn't know what it was about. It could have been any of my three cases; it could have been personal; it could have to do with the past; it could have to do with the future. I felt a sensation of frustration, of fear. Certainly there was too much on my plate. I was afraid I was not competent to deal with it. In that instance, what had I forgotten? What have I overlooked? I have been meticulous. It was more than being overwhelmed by jobs. It was outside me, outside of control, somehow entering my nervous system. Awareness of high jinks in the huge continent of my ignorance made me search my home, restlessly looking for the clue, for the thing I had lost, or forgotten. I picked up the bottle of nux vomica I had not given Philippoussis. Of course, I couldn't trust him: what was I thinking? No way would they not do an autopsy on Maria's body. The circumstances of her death required it. By law. Yet they had released it for burial as if that were no big deal. Poisoning by cane-toad is so bizarre it would make the papers.

  In the spirit of dealing with things, I rang Sofia's number. Mary Smith told me that Sofia had suffered a psychotic episode and had been taken to hospital and was in the care of Mental Health. The house had been totally cleaned and furniture put in storage. It really wasn't my business. Everything was under control. Without Maria, herself, calling on my assistance, I admitted that was right. The feeling about Maria, or even about Sofia's welfare, was in essence different from that which was troubling me. It was melancholy, not embattled.

  If Meghan's place was raided, was her stuff at my place threatened? My security leaves a lot to be desired. I didn't want to jump to any conclusions. Forget it, I told myself. It might never happen. I wondered if I could keep the Featherstone file away from other things in my neat dwelling, make sure the possible home-invaders go for it and not destroy my things wantonly. Get paranoid, and you can't move. But I felt apprehensive. Something was out there, actively trying to upset me. And succeeding. As I was hiding it in the laundry behind the detergents and odds and ends in that cupboard, I looked at the stupid snaps of suspected UFOs. Although fakes as I had first thought, their existence fed my present dread. Fraudulent or not, what was I to make of them? Did someone want to send me mad? Believing in Martians invading the planet was not in my scheme of things. Yet, logically, I can accept the concept that humans are not the only conscious, mentally impartial, abstract thinking beings in the universe. It was the data that was ridiculous. These snaps were proof, rather, of another woman playing with my head: why? Folding the contract into my spiral notebook and putting that in my satchel, I covered the rest with a rag and put a packet of Surf and a bottle of cloudy ammonia on top. Whether I was being silly or wise didn't matter.

  At the barbecue were—I picked up the biro—Maria, Sofia, Alison, Jill David, Alison's son, Maz and Dello, Spider-coalition dykes and poofters. Someone driving a nice car. Rosemary Turner? Someone wearing a mining company hat. (Why did I suddenly imagine mining on Lesbianlands? Explosions.) Cybil Crabbe. The Larrikin was there, but left? Someone dealing, or distributing drugs. Tiger Cat big-noting herself. Judith Sloane on the beach. There were another couple of kids playing behind the group. I wondered if Margaret Hall knew anything. I rang Margaret and discovered she has moved to Sydney. I had to interview each one. For Alison I had Chandra's and Penny's numbers. As soon as I thought of Chandra the whole arrangement of my nervous system altered to a kind of pleasurable terror alert. Was this 'psychic' fear I felt no more than as yet unexpressed sexual needs? Pleasant anticipation of emotional engagement was closer to the tenseness, but not it exactly.

  No excuse to ring Chandra now. And anyway, I felt it would distract me from the quest of the moment. I doodled a map of the picnic site, the sandhills, the beach, the road, the car park, the convenience shelter. Sketched cars in, from my shaky memory. Drew donuts in the square beyond the caravan park, wiggled a line for the beach, initialled in places where characters were. J.S. opposite the beach path to
the picnic facilities. Interesting. Where was young Lenny? A chat with him alone would not hurt. 'Find Alison,' I read my own note. As I did I recalled she had been beaten, battered like a wife, and Tilly had old bruises. Was this what I had forgotten? Well, I had and Alison was important in relation to the material on Neil's computer as well.

  Whatever, when I got up from my desk, I still felt nervous, incompetent, vulnerable. Above all, frustrated, half-way through a jigsaw puzzle with plenty of loose pieces, none of which seem to fit anywhere, too garish and diverse to make sense. Feeling I should be doing something else…

  39

  …kidnapped…

  Virginia White finds herself in a void. She has fallen into the labyrinth during her night of the soul. She passes in and out of consciousness, spinning within a moment of time, suspended in the vertical ever-is of emotional intensity, images following one upon the other with such a fluid alacrity they are as contradictory as surreal paintings. Not words, nor memory, could capture them, let alone sculpture. She lies unmoving, with the moist rocky floor of the tunnel embossing her flesh, for so long speedy little spiders construct traps for other insects in the hair of her head. When her eyes open they see absolute blackness. Yet the brain is bright with the yellow sandy beaches of her childhood, the blistering burn on the soles of her feet, first she is tiny, then enormous. The tremendous clashes of colours in her husband's ties and shirts, his Melanesian skin, his swaggers of bold arrogance, his thoughtless expressions of violence and remorse segue into the covert schemes of others to make her unimportant.

  Then, the need for survival jerks her into awareness. Alien slime covers her features, drips off proud skin. She is intolerably itchy. She has to find water to wash. She sinks into half-sleep again. A finer pain puts the physical irritation into perspective, oh god! Her distant self knows the goddess is unimpressed by filth and pain. She is incensed, enraged on behalf of the planet. The dead feeling of depression threatens to suck the life out of her being except for the ache of hunger and thirst. The rocks' jagged edges jade her nerves.

  Time forgotten, she concentrates on her belly and throat. She relaxes for a second, probing the industry of the spiders about her forehead. Her rage goes. With eyes open seeing nothing, feeling about with her hands, she moves. She derives subtle comfort from the roots of a tree; the living thing having a closer than rocks', though not the same, relation to time as she. By habit she worries about what she should be doing, but none seems important. Money has no reality. The lover, depraved woman, hurts her more than any enemy could. Or deprivation. She carries that pain in her bosom even in the present predicament.

  Vigour returns. She scrapes up a handful of the mud near her buttock, rubs it onto her abrasions and epidermal soreness. The relief is the absence of the tickling itches and stings. The mud begins to cake. She searches for more. Her body heat dries out the clay. Her attention catches on the intent to be motionless, to be unnaturally still like a woman her own age in a beauty salon somewhere with mud-cake on her face. She shares this crazy quietude with any number of women all around the world. She hears water. She must be disoriented, the sound contradicts her sense of direction. The trickle seems deeper in the labyrinth. However, she crawls towards it. The cave branches after she rounds the tree root she had been leaning on. Here she stops, on all fours to sniff and listen, proceed according to the information of those senses. Further down is another fork and a narrowing of the width. She must choose between what she could fit in and that closer to water. They seem man-made. She chooses water, but not in the open air. She, on her tummy flat as a lizard, is lying in a pond. Not clean, she is wet. She has to squeeze herself backwards. A cold shiver of panic turns into a hot flush as she gets stuck. Her rump strikes alarming resistance. Anxiety returns, this time heading for screaming, laughing hysteria. She must not give in, because sustained panic is a stupidity you can never live down because it is the self betraying the self and the consequences are quite long-term and exactly the same as those of any act of stupidity. Stupidity is too much of a self-indulgence. There will be no rescue anyway. She could be working silently in the rainforest on her ark or she could have gone further into the jungle where none of the others ventures. While she considers the impossibility of rescue she is deep-breathing and counting out the air. Colours start to occupy half her brain, the right frontal lobe suffused in violet, then slowly indigo to pale blue and lime green, yellow, one after the other the hues of the spectrum invade her consciousness. She hypnotises herself into sleep, or a hypersentient relaxation. Her spirit travels.

  When she wakes, cold, shivering and swearing. She wriggles back to the pond to drink. Using a crocodile roll, she manages to face in the direction out. No panic this time, just cool, calculated survival and measured writhing. Beyond the tree root, there are several cavities, two of which show a faint glow of daylight. She stays a moment with the tree and surveys where she had gone mentally in the last few hours, coming up with a conclusion so banal she is almost disgusted with herself. Apparently, her relationship excludes friendship and work. Her work, the ship the world will never see depicting women trying to survive and express themselves, was thoroughly and contemptibly put down by her lover as a useless, pointless wank. Yet. The sculptured boat is her survival, even though only very recently a dead tree; bursting with life-size figures the barque her sense of freedom, transmogrifying into the women of her generation. That this needed to be done is indisputable. Not bought. Not sold. Extant. Standing. Driven inside, her lifting of her talents above the commercial gunk of the fashion, the fortune, the fame are hellishly difficult. Art is the shattering of the mirror we look at ourselves through. Friends neglected, torn to pieces for their inadequacies, their sacrifices, the ways they survive. Maria, forgone, for lust of Cybil. Not only neglected, criticised, judged. While she was criticising the women, the dykes, the feminists she knew, she was trying to find something. Her lovers horrid betrayal shows Cybil to be devoid of Virginia's projection upon her of finer motivations. Nevertheless the hook is in her gills, she struggles on the line. Cybil's hatred allowed Virginia to perceive things that by herself she might not have seen. Cybil annihilates her and Judith had to cop it.

  Pushing at the walls, thrusting and dragging to lift herself against gravity, she emerges from the cave through the vertical air-hole of the mine into a tangle of bush, disturbed by recent blasting, fenced with hessian bags on sticks. She crashes her way through the prickly hedge, until she finds the creek. She follows its flow to a little waterfall and lowers her sore body into the rippling water where it is deep enough to wash herself in. Deeper than she needs, she floats on her back in a possible swimming spot with big boulders. An azure kingfisher watches from a branch. She looks up at the sky.

  She takes off her clothes, gives them a rinse and hangs them on the vines and lets the water bubble over her body like a spa. She joins the Wampoo Fruit Dove in cooing. Feels silly, relieved, and terribly alone.

  'Gotta go, gotta job. Got to be down past Footscray at five,' Ian Truckman tells his mother as he latches his mobile into his waistband.

  He takes a piece of the kid's jigsaw for luck, to hang it off the rear-view mirror to ward off the aliens. It's a bit of blue sky with two hooks and two eyes and a speck of green tree.

  At the warehouse, they release the trailer off its stilts and connect up the Freightliner. Michael is not on this trip. Once on the Hume Highway heading north, he mumbles his monologue. 'Strange seeing he kept track of me on the way down. I don't know, it drives heavy, this load. Haven't got a good feeling. Made me mum happy with some money, or at least it should have. She just wants to see my kids, asked whether I sent the ex any of it and what was her address so she could. Never got any answers to her Christmas card. Well what do you expect?'

  He does not know what he is dragging back there. He wishes he did, because it would be safer. When he stops at Glenrowan Ian Truckman goes through his glove box for something to take with his coffee. 'Ned Kelly everywhere. Try some
contact through the CB but nothing to say, not interested. Static interference. Take it easy, Ian. She'll be right, mate.'

  When Virginia reaches up to retrieve her clothes from the overhanging branch, she is face to face with the barrel of a rifle. A man on horseback. He says, 'Wrong one.'

  'Wrong what?' Virginia is not aware that her face, but not her naked body, shows her age.

  'The wrong maiden in distress,' he removes his firearm from her face.

  The stock saddle has a long stockwhip curled on the front pummel and the rifle is placed in a pouch where saddle-bags would be. The horse, standing in the water, extends his neck down to drink.

  'Put those on and get up here,' the neighbour indicates the back of the saddle. Virginia is relieved more than anything. She puts on her wet clothes, uses the vacated stirrup and swings her leg over. She says, 'Thanks, Willy.'

  'When did you discover the mine?' he asks savagely. 'How long have you known?'

  'What do you mean?' Virginia retorts.

  'I mean the gems,' spits Willy Campbell who, although tall on a horse, is a little man with a little brain. 'Did you find anything? What do you know?'

  The witless questioning gives her time. Behind the tack on the warm flesh of the horse, she acts tough. Persephone, Artemis, Virginia.

  The answer is forever. But she replies, 'Should I tell you? Would I tell you? I don't think so.' She feels light emerging from hell. Her knee throbs, her hip aches. She has bruised some bones. Something hard in her shorts digs into her seat. A cheap paper cutter is in one of her pockets with tiny blades and a penlike catch to attach it to the end of a sketchbook. She uses it for fine detail, like eye-sockets and creases beneath a cheek, around a mouth.