Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  Suddenly she has to grab his waist as the horse climbs.

  'Why are we going uphill?' she asks idiotically. 'I mean up so steep a hill.'

  The sun is chased by the slim moon in the west. In the mountains after sunset, it is still light. They are going through the scrub, up a steep ridge. There are grass trees and large rocks, tufts of bladey grass. In her dreams all this vegetation was blue, bluish. White and black. They reach the top of the Widow's Peak. Then they descend into dusk. He urges his mount further. The path goes into a stand of thorns. He hangs down over his horse's neck. Virginia is smacked in the face by prickly, flinging canes, scratches upon scratches. Panic is an inch away. She lies back along the horse's rump, going downhill. Prone, looking at everything upside down. She has never been on this part yet it looks familiar and feels familiar. Here Lesbianlands borders National Park, deep into the Great Divide. The sassafras is in full flower. A barbed wire fence. He orders Virginia off to undo the Queensland gate.

  'I hate those things, they spring open and hurt,' she says. But she does what he says.

  He waits, cynically watching, and then nudges his horse through. 'You're the wrong one,' he says again. 'You all look the same to me.'

  'Which one did you want?' She carefully untangles the wires and, placing the stick in the loop at the bottom of the fence post, pushes with all her waning strength to latch the top to the post and restore the appearance of a continuous fence.

  'About half your age. You're an old boiler. Scrawny and tough as a game turkey, I'd reckon. Get back on. You know what we call this place?' Virginia decides to ride side-saddle, hooking her second leg over the rifle pouch.

  'No.'

  'No Man's Land,' he sneers.

  'Yeah, that's right,' Virginia says.

  'No, I mean No Man's Land like in the war, like desert, like where you get shot at, where nothing can grow, where you get out of as soon as you can,' he explained seriously. 'Just sour ground.'

  They come up to a cyclone fence behind which are earth-moving vehicles.

  'Get off,' he commands.

  Virginia complies, landing on a stone nearly spraining an ankle. He dismounts to tie the filthy rag from around his neck into a blindfold around her eyes. The horse crunches on gravel. Virginia is kidnapped.

  40

  …get away with murder…

  Silverberg Planetary Defence Systems answered when we called Nadir Mining Explorations from Libby's office. Lola wasn't there. Taken aback, but quick, Libby asked for Josh Conrad in chummy manner. 'No one by that name.'

  Looking at me and tapping the pages of the contract, Libby Gnash said, 'I really don't like this patent clause.'

  'Come?' I wanted her to explain it to me very clearly. 'What about this Falcon set-up, in Malta?'

  Little Libby grimaced, her eyes fiery with intelligence. 'Well, it suggests there is an umbrella organisation. What's the product, a mineral? drugs? The secrecy clause is a worry'

  'Why did you say "drugs"?' I was curious, because, even as an example, they had not occurred to me.

  'Just something I read recently.' She tossed off the remark, throwing a gesture at the reading matter which surrounded her, without lifting her head. Law books, files, piles of briefs secured with pink tape, newspapers, torn-edged articles, statutes, acts, note-paper pads; something to read on every available surface, including the floor. The copier was buried. The opened drawers of the filing cabinet provided more horizontal space for flat folders. A colourfully busy screen of a computer suggested access to all there was to know via the World Wide Web. An office more in contrast to Rosemary Turner's I could not imagine, although they shared ingress through the same arcade. Posters on the wall were of old campaigns: 'say no no excuses'; and most were crooked. Several frames still leaned near the door, awaiting hanging. The picture I could see depicted a female of the Chinese red army nobly rounding up white leghorns on emerald and lime grass.

  'What?' I demanded, thinking she would say something vague. Instead, she responded with exact names, such as erythropoietin, human growth hormones, perfluorocarbons and blood expanders now being traded along with narcotics, but not attracting police interest, beyond customs officers and sports administrators, and both the hard and the performance-enhancing drugs were big business, with the cover of real corporations, listed on foreign stock exchanges, registered somewhere else and financed with money laundered in the dirty gambling industry.

  'That's why, the actual product, if there is one, is worth knowing. So,' she concluded, 'any dodgy company with no real officers, no people by the name of those who sign their contracts, is up to no good. I mentioned erythropoeitin, merely because it occurred to me and you're a triathlete. Globalised monopolisation of the freedom to do what you damn well like. George Orwell got it so wrong. Except for doping the workers with soma.'

  Big Brother notwithstanding, it occurred to me that Libby already had this and other legal matters of Dr Featherstone's business under the wraps of her professional client confidentiality. I brought her back to the material of the legalised, apparent injustice on her desk in front of us. The personal nature of the previous case which saw us on opposite sides was in the past, water under the bridge; she answered my queries straight up. With some. No one trusts lawyers, but this contract, which she had not seen before, unified Libby and me against a common enemy. Bad people. Perhaps Maria's death brought us together a bit, enabled me to tell her about the Neil investigation, and my finding the Nadir cap in the toilet block.

  'Private gyms,' she said, 'are main distribution points of illegal performance-enhancing drugs, some of which are legal in other countries.'

  I explained who Sean was to me, without going into Tiger Cat's activities as I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that Lola Pointless and she were friends. 'He's a poofter and a man I trust.'

  Libby accepted my recommendation of his character without argument. 'The homophobic witch-hunts in the press of rich libertarian paedophiles have grown way out of proportion,' she opined. 'A young man just says he was molested and he can get away with murder, pretty well. All he has to do is cry and act like a girl. Put his violence, his drug habit, his useless life down to what the old homosexual did. It is all believed. They put the guy in jail to taste rough justice and it's okay. The hatred is rampant. If indignation against molestation of girls were as righteous, what a safer society we would have! Instead such people as the New Right sanction violence as they quote the Bible and go around the country calling for a return of the death penalty!' She got off the high horse of her politics to ask, 'Is your trainer a conduit for illegal substances? Maybe he isn't, but his gym might be a place of exchange.'

  Libby Gnash, a dynamo, was a glutton for information. Sean's hands have pummelled me, his society has amused me, psychologically he has been there for me before and after races, my trials of physical and mental endurance. I felt he was neither a paedophile nor a steroid pusher, but the fact that he has been acting strange lately, the presence of Tiger Cat and the opinions I had just heard were making him look fishy.

  'Well, I'll get back to you, and Libby,' I said on parting. 'Thanks.'

  When I entered the gym, it was eerily quiet, for the time of day. Late afternoon. I felt a bit like a mouse who has wandered out of her hole to find the kitchen deserted, folks left on holidays, leaving only the cat. She had changed her hair colour, and was heavily made up but I recognised her in the mirror, as I draped my towel over the equipment.

  'You all right?' I asked Tiger Cat, warming up on the bicycle.

  She didn't answer me. No one else came in. I shortened my routine. Why was Tiger Cat punishing her bruised body? She couldn't be feeling well. She had to be on something. When I went to wash my face, she was there in the doorway of the locker room, slits of yellow eyes gleaming. I ignored her. Whatever she was on, I felt I could handle her.

  The vibe of deliberate violence. I looked up at the sky-light. What is it about ablutions areas? In a public toilet once a group of young
black women felt like teaching me, a white cunt, a lesson. They threw a few punches, got damaged themselves. Tiger Cat moved, leaned her back against the door jamb and lifted a leg across to the other. Trying to buy some time, I buried my head in my towel. She said something about my body. I figured I could be imagining it. Sometimes the threat of injury can be sexual, especially with the likes of Tiger Cat, who I knew was into power that way. Whether she was butch or femme, bisexual or what, sex plainly motivated her. When I looked up she wasn't there.

  'Sean's in the ballet room,' I heard. 'Sorry, aerobics,' she called sarcastically.

  We shared a contempt for aerobics, maybe the only thing we really had in common.

  I yelled, 'Thanks.'

  Sean was polishing the mirrors that take up one entire wall. It looked as though there were lipstick streaks where he hadn't replaced the greasiness with gleam. Then I saw his face. It was black and blue. I stood still.

  'What are you cleaning off, Sweetness and Light? Love letters?' I tried to joke. 'Threats?'

  'Fuck off'

  'Are you going to tell me?' I asked gently. He had never been like this to me before.

  'I doubt it,' he spat. And looked straight at me.

  'What happened to your face?' I demanded with abrupt concern. I glanced about the room. Greenroom baskets over-flowed along the wall. There was a make-up case with its contents spilled.

  'Someone mess up in here?' I maintained a jocular tone. 'I didn't know this room was used for anything but aerobics and kick boxing.'

  'You don't know everything,' Sean Dark interrupted, showing none of the sweetness and light I knew to be there. 'Rehearsals are held here, regularly,' Although he is a marvellous cleaner I could make out a word on the glass. It must have been written heavily. Murderer.

  'Who came in here, Sean? Who bashed you and trashed the place?' I was insistent. 'You're not a killer.' I went over to give him comfort.

  'Don't come near me!' he screeched, brushing my fingers off his arm.

  When queens get angry they really do scream. The pitch alone would send you back. I stepped forward. His bruised face was full of hatred.

  'Two-faced bitch. Judas cunt,' he accused.

  'Wait a minute.' I was aghast.

  'You've been ratting on me. Once a cop always a cop, hey? Hey? You had to go and dob me in. While you go and play lady sleuth, I live in the real world. This, this, is the real world.' He gestured about a room chiefly dedicated to make-believe: body image, or theatre. 'You're working with the cops, I saw you!'

  Nothing I could say. Instead I picked up some clothes and started putting them in costume baskets. Fancy-dress stuff. I recognised the tights worn by the youths at the Orlando dance. I folded, shook out, and got into tidying up. Silently helping.

  Sean furiously rubbed the stains on the mirror. 'I don't deserve this. I never meant any harm by it.' He began to cry. 'I don't deserve this. All because of you. What have you been doing all this time Saint Margot, spying? Get out. Just get out. Leave that!'

  Thus ordered, I dropped the large lacy bra on the polished floor. I could see why he was upset but that's all I could see. What part I played in it was a mystery to me. He seemed pretty sure of his information, though, and that means that someone has told him in confidence lies about me: I dobbed him in; I'm playing detective games; and I don't live in the real world. I had a fair idea who the slanderer was.

  Charming, my reality simply obliterated by malicious gossip. I denied the accusations but I didn't argue. He was really afraid. It was him in the cop shop. Someone had bashed him up. Apart from theories, the only solid connection between any of it was lipstick. Lipstick on Neil and lipstick words on the aerobics hall mirrors, neither place lipstick should rightly be. I exited the room, verbal abuse following me down the stairs. No way was Sean Dark a murderer, but why would someone say he was? In such an intimidating way?

  Tiger Cat was taking off in her car, a Hyundai Sonata that she won on her stint on The Gladiators. I shut the outside door of the gym. Then I saw the sign. 'CLOSED for cleaning. Normal hours resume tomorrow 7 a.m.' As I examined the handwriting, I noticed another sticky-tape mark on the glass of the door. Tiger Cat must have seen me arrive, removed and then replaced the note. Would she have been inside or outside? If inside, there is something going on between her and Sean with me as enemy. But, Sean wanted me to heed the note, because he had just thrown me out, definitely did not want me to see this disturbance. Tiger Cat, on the other hand, wanted me to go in. Therefore she wanted me to catch the physically abused Sean crying, clearing and cleaning. Pure mischief. So she was not inside before I arrived. If he didn't want anyone in there, and he wouldn't, he would have locked the door. There is a latch on the inside which does the same work as a key. I stood on the step and looked around. There was no evidence Sean knew Tiger Cat was there at all.

  The RSL Club made a right angle with the gym, behind which were an indoor swimming pool and squash courts. A large car park bordered by a line of trees was in front of another larger car park serving the shopping complex. The gym, though a private enterprise, shared bricks and mortar with the RSL's facilities. There must be another entrance, I thought. I traced the wall around to my left and found a door that looked like a permanently locked fire exit. It was not locked. I opened it and followed a narrow dark passage behind the toilets and showers and was very quickly at the front door of the gym. Tiger Cat must have, or rather could have, seen my car, raced around here, ripped off the sign and ducked upstairs. She could have come to work out, seen the note, was obeying it and returning to her car, possibly, when she saw me arrive and seized an opportunity. The question is why? With such alacrity? Must be something. Or was she lying in wait? I let myself out of the gym for the second time, clicking the latch.

  I had not had a good hard sweat and puff. Tossed my towel and water bottle in the back of the car as I sat in the driver's seat. A moment later, as if on a stake-out, DC Philippoussis pulled up in the unmarked police car. He told me to get in. We drove to the Police Citizens Youth Club in the spanking new sedan. He said it wouldn't hurt him to pump some iron either.

  The PCYC gymnasium was abuzz with activity and chatter. The vinyl was torn, the equipment crowded and many of the weights old and marked in pounds and ounces. There was one other woman there, a teenage girl, boxing. Handwritten instructions were pasted on available surfaces. As soon as someone thought of something interesting to say or instruct, he had got out a felt pen, found any old bit of paper and put it up straight away. Diagrams of the human form with particular muscle groups emphasised in colour—amateur artwork on the faces and feet—had not been taken down for decades, as evidenced by the curling, yellowing edges. Youths in torn singlets admired themselves and each other as they dead-lifted, pulled, pushed and pumped with gadfly concentration, resting frequently to chitchat, performing and posing in front of inadequate mirrors. Rugby players pressed enormous weights with their legs or from their chests lying on their backs. Sean Dark's business, in contrast, was like an antiseptic kitchen, crisp and colour-coordinated, where health was an optional extra in a wealthy lifestyle. Sinister undertones of perversion completed the disparity with the good-natured politeness of unabashed male narcissism here.

  Since becoming a triathlete I had not had to think too much about the cost of these things because Nike paid for both Sean and membership to his club as they did for my tracksuit and shoes. Suddenly it felt as if I was back home in class terms. The kids were friendly and the raw conceit competitive. I ran through my routines with no self-consciousness whatsoever and found all manner of gear that was so old-fashioned it was cute. Phil caught me smiling.

  'Glad someone's happy,' he said, absolutely misunderstanding my mood.

  With our feet hooked under a worn wooden bar on movable clinches to an angle with our heads lower, we worked our abdominal muscles in parallel unison.

  'If you only knew,' I panted, starting to feel terrific. 'Had a problem with the Achilles tendon a week or so
ago. Not too bad now. But I won't be competing for a while.'

  Dissemblance was okay for now. Spies all about this place, but I wouldn't like Chandra or Libby Gnash to know I was here, in cahoots with the cops. 'You look worried yourself.' I sat up to change activities.

  'Yeah. You know. Work,' he said nonchalantly.

  'Did you get seconded to the coroner?' I asked as I walked over to the bench press.

  'Not yet.' He let out a long breath. 'Working on it.'

  Getting high on my own endorphins, I considered letting him know how much progress I had made on the Waughan case but did not feel free to talk. I left the equipment and lay a mat on the floor and began finishing with warming down stretches.

  'Showers?' I asked him when I felt ready to leave. He directed me to the ladies'. Sharp needles of water ran over me, invigorating and refreshing. When I emerged, Phil Philippoussis was waiting for me. In the car he asked if I'd like a drink. The old cop culture.

  'Sure,' I grinned. Like a crocodile.

  We got a light ale each and sat in the beer garden of a pub in the back streets.

  'So what's the story?' I asked, picking up the thought that the man wanted to unburden himself. Ever the detective. Always a woman.

  'What's yours?' he responded, sharply.

  'You mean?' I was a bit taken aback. Had he been on surveillance in the car park?

  'Why you suddenly had to find another gym, of course. Apart from the desperate need to feel the state of your musculature?' You don't expect a sensitive New Age guy hidden in such a macho body.

  'Okay,' I expressed giving in. 'Do you happen to know Sean Dark? My erstwhile trainer is accusing me of dobbing him into the cops, threw me out of his gym. But the most interesting part was the condition of his face when he said it. Not a pretty sight.'

  'You think someone down the shop worked him over.' No question mark in his sentence.

  'Well, I don't know. No, not New South Wales' finest?' Our eyes thrusting and parrying like a couple of fencers, I asked, 'What would I dob him in for? His place was trashed.'