Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  Cybil feels just as guilty about the mess in her flat. Now it is beyond the power and sex equation, uncharted territory for Cybil, who fondles her dog, muttering nostalgically, 'I doddled her dot until she came and then I stopped, looked at my watch, put on my clothes, scattered excuses and walked out the door.' Although Virginia did not cry, but looked at her with those intelligent eyes, so full of hurt and withholding dignity, Cybil had her where she wanted her. Cybil picks up a dish and hurls it at her wall, alone and scared, wishing she could turn back the clock to the luscious days with Virginia, the Amazon, indulging her senses.

  But death is depressing. There is a block of chocolate somewhere. It is under some clothes near the computer. As it is at her finger-tips, Cybil decides to surf the net.

  Chandra programs a hide and seek game in the maze of her wimmin site, to sift through the chatters in Cellar2. Using the same handles, the players earn points which at a certain level they can spend to become the mole or not as they choose. By quizzing them on an array of subjects, from the trivial and local to the historical and specific, the outcome is to get the others to reveal themselves. Her detective work here is far more successful than her face-to-face approach. With paper and pen she is matching the relevant pseudonyms with women she knows.

  Philosophising is not allowed; it's about what you know.

  The key-players in their secret cell fall for her ruse as answering riddles is bait and hook. OWL is someone out in the bush. REDSHOES someone local. BLUESKY, BAC and MOP keep beating her, so she tosses in queries about the intrusion into her own website. As the night wears on, she becomes lost in her own fog and she herself is merely one of the players feeling around in the mist, thoroughly addicted to the game. Meanwhile she notes who in the game also chats on-line, trying to keep ahead and maintain control. Those rerouting multiple IP addresses are obviously the most suspect. She embeds a spider in the dubious laptops or on-ground computers to retrieve data from their hard-drives. She, Chandra, is also a sitting duck.

  41

  …the impossible separatist…

  Virginia White is a trembling wreck. Her worst nightmare is being trapped in a lift in a city building. She is confined to a shed inside a cyclone fence deep in the wooded mountains of the Great Dividing Range. She tells herself not to panic. The essence of bravery is knowledge of fear. She has understood that woman's freedom is only with other women, that she can never be complete alone, and that loneliness is an annihilation of selfhood. Others break down the barriers. With all breakage pain is involved. She escaped the scenario of sitting with every conceivable thing money can buy, haunting singles bars, castigating herself for failing, watching television, getting fat, whatever, to find after all, she has a damaged, self-critical self. And she is not responding with courage. Involvement with other women to uncover her own identity, through intense relationship with the earth, pushing her boundaries, to realise her potential has led to this shivering coward. She quarried a hole in sheer rock-face to place a tank, made her own shelter, thought up a code of ethics, believing in her strength, in growth. Freedom. Respect. Her heroism is undermined. Trials met by the fragile ego, to survive without sustenance or comfort, all misunderstood, she is crying, not panicking. Absolutely bereft. The sufferer you never meet has no reality, neither has the goddess earth, as for the life in her veins, scraps of memory, race memory, genetic memory, spiritual memory, flitting alongside ego in the human condition, it is no good. Even comprehension of what she is is hollow. Emptied. How can she be locked up in her beloved bush freaked out? Her ego is not in her body, not at the moment. The concerns of individuals who are moulded by addictions, victims of circumstances, are but little dots in the distance. Caves?

  Imprisoned. Castigating herself as misanthropic isolationist, the impos-sible separatist, caught by the short and curlies, feels her care for others evaporate. The abuse of the ozone layer, the effect on the climate does not bother her. Her lack does; it borders on despair. Theories that no woman is allowed to be free are no more real than being tied up. This bloody installation on Lesbianlands could not have happened without inside help. 'Nope. It was not that anyone started out evil. We simply did not know how to do it. Instead of letting questions reign, answers were hammered down with a gavel. Sentences. Statements. Prohibitions. And I, I too, wanted my way. We allowed space and protected our own. Space. If I have space, like a tree I can grow, and the vibe of grow is to know. But there were days to fill and not a moment to be wasted, learning, having about me books of facts, frogs, birds, reptiles, trees, sedges, orchids, an odd moment of contemplation, names were yet another safe haven from knowledge. If you could describe, identify, codify, make lists, you thought you knew, but did I? I found the carcass of an almighty tree. Was it madness? Was it inspiration, a shaft of light in the dark forest? The log had something to teach me. I had merely to educate myself by educing its secrets. I had left sculpture behind in the straight world. This sculpting was a process, not a product. It would never be seen, displayed, shown, praised or prized. I thought arrogantly as sweat made the handle slippery. Still there was more I needed to know. Then love, sex, undid me. Part of the full cornucopia of being, I could just reach out and take it, or I could leave it. How could it destroy my strength?'

  Walls of green hardwood, padlock on a thick chain through a hole in the door, claustrophobia is not the only anchor Virginia feels weighed down by. She has no doubt who the traitor is, but there is nothing she can do. She does not have the freedom, besides which she is a snivelling, frightened wreck, screaming for release.

  'I screamed. It is such simple torture. He tied me up. He did it with pliers, with wire. The panic rolled over me like a slow-moving breaker and dumped me in the wash of hopelessness. Who would care? Cybil would be glad to see me so small. Would Cybil care? Then I met despair. I let it roam like an eagle on the air above me. Who is worrying about me? Not Cybil. Is Cybil missing me? Faithless lover. I entered her realm: food and sex, champagne and bubble baths; passionate fights and passionate love-making; gratification. I could not give such pleasure without loving. Amazon wishful thinking. I will survive this, this restriction. The locked room alone would freak me, but I have no use of my arms. I cannot even bend one up to my waistcoat pocket to get the pen. There are two things hooked, that is right. I have a cheap paper-cutter there. One of those that have tiny break-off blades. This is going to take patience.'

  Virginia uses her muscles to twist around and get the weapon in her hand, the plastic knife with its fragile blades, a pathetic sword. Her words flow on, hours pass, night and day. The telephone rings in Cybil's flat. It is Judith Sloane, she has to meet. All oozy flattery.

  'What's the problem with telling me on the phone?' Cybil is reluctant to dance to Judith's tune. If Virginia's back-to-nature ways are repellent to Cybil, and partly she had determined that was because she was a working-class girl at heart, Judith's downwardly mobile arrogance is obnoxious.

  'I couldn't possibly do that,' whispers Judith. 'Not on this line.' Slime-ball, thinks Cybil.

  'Afraid of ASIO?' Cybil laughs.

  'Well I am using Meghan's line and you know she works for the government.'

  Curiosity playing a gut-line with her astuteness, Cybil agrees to a rendezvous. After she replaces the receiver, Cybil experiences a sudden surge of loyalty and recalls the time Virginia lost it with her about Judith. Some results of that tempest are still in the mess of her sitting-room. Cybil looks at her antique clock, automatically contemplating its value, sees time and, energised by unfinished business, dives into the job of cleaning her nest. It must be said that when Cybil Crabbe works, she does it well. 'Flowers,' she writes on her list.

  As far as Judith is concerned, Cybil will learn for herself whether Virginia is right. She is inquisitive. 'Maybe it will be fun.' In a few hours her home is neat and tidy, just in case, and fresh sheets are on the bed.

  42

  …several loose ends…

  After my swim in the creamy s
ea and a gentle jog along the pristine sand, I managed to get hold of Rory. She told me the bridge had been fixed, which, while she found it just as mystifying as its destruction, seemed to point the finger more decisively in the direction of the Campbells. They stamped their character on the style of the work. The job itself neat, the bush around destroyed, disregarded. She gave me Barb Campbell's address in Stuart. Then we arranged the details about Saturday. I'll be with Chandra. Good, great.

  Taking the Neil Waughan file, I set out in search of Alison Hungerford. She was not at work. Penny's house on the canal was closed like a prison. Although those places have furniture for outdoor entertaining, they all looked inhospitable. Expensively secured. I walked along the concrete path past the miniature jetties. All that was left of the mangrove edges was mud. Seven black cockatoos, speaking to each other, flew over my head from a stand of radiata pines to the remaining cluster of river oaks beyond the development. Rain. The barometric pressure, indeed, did seem to fall. It occurred to me that I knew the fathers of her first two children, but who was Tilly's dad? Was he anywhere in the picture?

  The Waughan file was a dead end until I found Alison to explain what the pages of print-outs I had taken from Neil's room meant. Dr Neville would not be back until next week. Fortunately, I had written notes from the Rory conversation in the yellow Spirax that was sitting on the seat.

  The street for Barb Campbell was in quite a respectable looking row of identically designed houses with small porches and little sash windows in pastel expanses of fibro sheeting, uncluttered front yards with oleander and azalea shrubs marooned on mown lawns for the most part. Weeping bottle-brush and the odd tall gum which survived clearing from a former time provided a pleasant enough aspect. The back fences, I discovered, were almost non-existent as behind was an abandoned mill site with the black and orange residue of sawdust piles inhibiting growth of anything much except one rampant flow of nasturtiums and crops of Crofton, deadly nightshade, and the weed called 'farmer's friend'. A dominant blackbutt or ironbark shaded the wrecks of cars, some probably in working condition as bonnets were up and tyres pumped.

  Whoever drafted these homes for the Housing Department had domestic fortresses in mind as ingress is achieved only through two narrow doorways, both easily barricaded. Receiving no response to my knock at the front, I boldly stormed the barrier of washing machine, washing baskets and auto-parts at the back. Inside walls a solid shade of light blue had not been painted for a generation or two. Neither pale enough to fade into the background nor dark enough to hide scuff marks, they boasted oily fingerprints and crayon drawings. The place was putrid with the housework of kids; that is, unmitigated mess. Games in progress and those forsaken had used whatever was to hand to create theatres of conflict, space stations peopled with Indians, cowboys, tanks, monsters or miniature kitchens and nurseries with Barbie characters and accessories relating to grossly out of proportion baby-dolls. A turf war over the main-room floor space erupted in violent screaming skirmishes too often for adult powers to attempt peace-keeping negotiations or bother with disciplinary measures beyond entering the foray themselves. Mostly, it seemed, they left the warring parties to it. And might won out. Survival of the fittest. Social Darwinism in a dwarfed world meant, in this case, at their stage of evolution, the overweight girl in garish pink ruled. The fittest was, apparently, the nastiest, the most stubborn and the biggest. Her girlfriends were the army that destroyed and laid to waste the homeland of her siblings' activities and colonised it with a tyranny Idi Amin would be proud of. The television was riotous with the robotic graphics and mechanical voiced phrases of a Play-Station contest. The bloke, his hands black from tinkering with an engine, made no appreciable difference to the atmosphere by his presence. He sat doing nothing, mesmerised by the flicker and crashes on the TV screen, possibly summoning up the energy, or waiting for it to occur to him, to go and wash his hands to enable him to do something. This, apparently, included speech.

  Barbara Campbell, when she came in, had no time for me, whoever I was: one of the kids' mothers, a social worker, a truant officer, a do-gooder of some sort. She didn't appear to care about any other two-legged creature in the house either. With one arm she shoved aside the ineffable clutter on the kitchen table and opened the other, letting a tangle of leather strapping fall into the gap, and sat down. She hunted through the chaos and found needle, thimble and sturdy, string-like thread. From a chain around her neck, hanging between her breasts under her embroidered denim shirt, she retrieved a pair of half-moon glasses, balanced them on her nose and began threading a large needle. A cat daintily stepped over the remains of baked beans on a plate, whining for a pat, which she obliged with a facial nudge as both hands were occupied.

  I spoke, introducing myself as a private detective.

  She looked up, intrigued no doubt by a character who walked out of television drama. 'So what are you doing here?' she asked, then went back to sewing the bridle.

  Flipping open the spiral notebook, I checked the details of her relationship to the Campbells with a lease neighbouring Lesbianlands.

  'Willy's my brother,' she nodded.

  'Basically,' I began, 'I'm investigating unexplained happenings on the women's-only property.'

  She interrupted, 'The gurls are always seeing crazy things, like space-craft and the like.' The bit from the bridle clattered to the floor as she felt about for something. She left it there.

  'Do you know them well?' I asked, easily. 'Can you tell me any particular names?'

  'What do you mean? Like, who I know?' Now she bent for the bit.

  'That would be helpful,' I encouraged.

  'You sound like a social worker.' She glanced up over the top of her glasses.

  'You got anything to prove you are who you say you are, because I am not giving any of the gurls' secrets away. So there. Even if you had a licence, I don't know what to look for. You're not a cop, are you?'

  'Not any more,' I confessed.

  'See,' Barb Campbell nodded as if she had won an argument.

  'Look,' I laughed, 'I'm working for the gurls.'

  Either my laugh or what I said made her more suspicious. Whatever softness she had firmed. Her hard face was cunning before it creased into a false smile. 'Why is that?'

  Lowering my centre of gravity, feeling my trim strength, I said, 'You tell me.'

  'Tell you what?' She finished her repair work and dropped it on the table with the rest of the junk.

  The chubby girl in pink came into the room, was about to provoke her mother, but changed her mind and looked me up and down.

  'If they put in any complaints about us lighting fires, we know exactly where to go with our information about them. They wouldn't like the drug squad out there, would they?' She said in the bossy tone I had heard her eight-year-old use a while before. The kid folded her arms, tough little cookie. 'You don't suppose those, you can't call them houses, have council approval, do you?'

  Barb leaned her elbows on the messy board in front of her and stared me out. Body language and locus were telling me a lot: for some people the equation is so simple. I turned up the official tone. 'Perhaps you could tell me who fixed their bridge on Tuesday. I'm sure they are very grateful.'

  'We did, of course. The whole family. And some neighbours. Did them a favour, so they don't make too much of a hullabaloo about fences, like that bloke Vanderveen. We're country folk. We can't afford to fix fences all the time. They've got thousands of acres, they can let a few cattle roam around. It's about the cattle, isn't it? Bloody greenies. Try everything, they will.' She got up and carefully picked the dirty plates from the assemblage of debris. 'Council could go in and bulldoze the lot. Don't know how many regulations they've broken, but it's got to be a few. Like, what's it called, you're not allowed to have more than one—shit, what is it?'

  'Multiple occupancy.' I sighed as if it were all too much for me, and asked, 'You wouldn't know how the bridge got broken, by any chance?'

  Barb shu
ddered like a horse and ran water into the sink. 'Nuh, Wilma and I were riding through one day, and we saw it. We said to each other, I said to Wilma, she said to me, Poor gurls, how are they going to get their cars across? So Willy and a few blokes, out of the goodness of their hearts, and they are good blokes, said, why not? Wilma talked with the Chinese one about it.'

  Frowning, believing every word, I cried, 'But why would they do all that work for nothing?'

  Barb Campbell turned around, amused, 'Well, Miss Private Eye, you don't know much, do you?' She laughed, a big ho-ho without mirth. 'They might earn a few drinks, around here, having been for a whole day in Lesbianlands. Most of the fellas are spooked, you know? They reckon they're witches. Deadmansland, they call it.'

  The little cookie in pink piped up, 'They can. All they do is think it, and boom a tree falls down on your head.'