Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  Then, when they are facing each other across a table for two in a seafood restaurant, she tries to convince herself that now she is hearing the other side of the story. Judith says what she wants to hear. She bags Virginia.

  'To put it mildly she thinks she is better than everyone else, but look at these bruises. She is just vindictive and as violent as the rest,' explains Judith, slyly glancing to gauge Cybil's reactions. No make-up now, her shiny black eye, facial bruises and abrasions would, if anything could, put her off her garlic prawns.

  Cybil nods, seeming to concur on all points, although she found it hard to make Virginia go berserk, but, she remembers gratification the couple of times she had managed to get close. Judith's superior manner annoys Cybil.

  'Why do you want to tell me all this?' she asks. Is that all you wanted me for? her bedroom eyes say. She feels she is being used, underestimated.

  Judith shrugs mysteriously.

  'Maybe you should just get over your jealousy of Virginia,' advises Cybil, and digs into the plate with her fingers.

  'That's not what it's about. I thought you were a woman who would understand, who knows Virginia,' she whimpers. 'I feel really abused. I'm not going to let her get away with it. Not this time. We live in the wilds up there, no police. If women are allowed to go around bashing other women up because they don't agree with them, it's not safe.'

  Cybil licks her thumb, 'I find Virginia quite moral and responsible.'

  'Oh, I don't. She wants power,' claims Judith. 'She wants us to bend to her will.'

  Cybil has known Judith's type all her life, and her projection doesn't fool her. 'I think she just wants to do her work,' she says, playing out the rope for Judith to hang herself. 'She's an idealist.'

  Judith is very conscious of every movement. She carefully pours herself some water. 'Idealism is dangerous.'

  Cybil coarsely guzzles her wine. 'Don't you mean ideology? Ideologues?' she asks, indifferently. She looks over Judith's shoulder at other customers, more interested in what they order than Judith's studied performance, although she does notice it. 'If you're not going to eat that, I'll have it.' Cybil covets the remaining rice-paper spring roll in the entree dish.

  'No, that's mine.' Judith has been counting.

  Cybil grins, and sighs, 'Tell me what really happened, then.'

  'We were coming back from a party,' Judith has to speak with her mouth full. 'In the dark. No torch. Making our way home. And she just lashed out.'

  Cybil is bored. Her eyes keep wandering to the swinging door to the kitchen. She watches the waitress.

  'Virginia and I have known one another a long time and, you know what I mean, it's there all the time. Wednesday night her hostility broke through the surface.' Judith slowly, sanctimoniously, leaves the cutlery in the correct position for collection. 'Well,' she says, changing tack. 'I will have to retaliate to even the score. As I am not as strong as she, if it's an eye for an eye, she wins.'

  Cybil rests her elbow on the table and her head in her hand, 'You mean idealism wins. Because Virginia wouldn't just hit you out of the blue.'

  'Well, she did. She was drunk. Cybil, you don't need her. I'm warning you. She cracked. She'll come at you next. I'm worried for you.' Judith is seriously trying to seduce her.

  Cybil recalls, as she looks straight at Judith, the appraisal Virginia made of this woman. Greed masquerading as monk, a miser on communal land tears the fabric of the collective. Virginia's biggest bone of contention with Judith was actually about the environment and abstract feminist ethics rather than personal animosity. Your closest neighbour is your worst enemy when deceit replaces respect for difference. Without truth, meaning and sincerity, said Virginia, and there was a fourth, something like relevance, you can only dictate. You can't have anything but struggle for dominance. Virginia is, Cybil concludes as she stares at the woman appealing to her, one of the least hypocritical people she has known. Especially women. Yet Judith is telling the truth, the bruises prove it. Uncomfortable, Cybil doesn't know what to think.

  However, she parries, 'I don't believe you.'

  Judith is shocked.

  Cybil takes her elbows off the table to let the plates be cleared and, checking, appreciates the effect of her swordplay. She continues, 'You can tell me all the lies you like, and I might give you the benefit of the doubt. But I won't accept that Virginia hit you. Full stop. Not possible.'

  Glancing through her swollen eyelids, incredulous, Judith shamelessly makes a pass, 'I could give you a better time, Cybil.'

  'I'm sure you could,' she says, watching the waitress make her way from the swinging door past the other tables, carrying their main course. 'But Virginia did not beat you up.'

  'But, it's true.' Judith is indignant. 'I really make her angry!'

  'Frankly, Judith, I don't care,' Cybil thrusts. Steaming white rice is put on her plate. Abalone in green sauce she serves herself.

  Something is being left out of the details of the fight which Judith describes, illustrating each blow to her body. Unlike Virginia, she is not giving Cybil her part in the event, her thoughts, her motivations. And that is deliberate. She must have provoked her. Cybil knows she could ask questions and receive answers. Liars are never lost for words. She tries one. 'Did you hit back?'

  'No, I tried to protect myself!'

  Judith, if she wants to seduce Cybil, will have to be more butch than that.

  44

  …the centre of the earth…

  The men in the warehouse cast long shadows. Ian Truckman's questioning is silenced by, 'It's good money mate.' What they did with the trailer when he left it on its stilts at the docks is their business. His was home to see Mum and the sister's kids, play cricket, come away having nicked a piece of jigsaw for a good luck charm to hang off the rear-view mirror. The trailer he drags now is a tight rectangular package wrapped in khaki canvas, with state-of-the-art ratchet straps. Spraying the cabin with pine-forest fresh air, he says to himself, 'Good money, yeah.' He knows where 'good money' comes from.

  Albury through Holbrook he pushes the rig flat chat on the clear Hume. The moon is a blade, swinging around from left to right of the highway. The night could be full of bones. The pressure pack falls out of his hand because of the sweat. The can is rolling under the pedals, so he slows the pace. Lights of a town. 'It's fucking Gundagai. Watch for cops. Don't answer CB. Shut up scabs, this rig can handle 140, no worries.' But the can is rolling round the floor and he needs to crap. 'Pull yourself together, Ian.' He has to stop at an all-night truck-stop, clean up in the shower, sit down for coffee and say gidday, what's your load? 'Yeah, I'd do that, if I knew the answer. Stop next one, Ian, my lad. I just got to lose that slick foreign sports-car. Stop it tailgating, passing, slowing, teasing, whizzing off and turning up again. It's not a car, it's a craft hovering eight inches above the road so as not to cause suspicion. It's only interested in me. What yer carrying, mate? What am I carrying for good money? Oh yeah, likely to admit it, sure. Not hungry anyway. Stopping, no way. Toxic shit. Guns. Don't know. Something illegal, I know that.'

  Truckman is pulling this suspect material when Meghan frightens him travelling north between Albury and the Australian Capital Territory turn-off.

  Meghan Featherstone chooses to take the Alfa Romeo to Canberra for the American. She has the kind of manic metabolism that scorns sleep. In Melbourne, they had arranged a meeting for six a.m. at the Brazilian Embassy assuming she would fly from Essendon with the rest of the team before midnight. However, the Yank, an automobile enthusiast who had bought the Alfa from a bankrupt in South Yarra for a price he could not refuse, needed someone to ferry it interstate. He mentions this casually. Meghan bounces in her seat, saying, 'Me, me. Let me.' Disingenuously. While the others shake their heads, her immediate superior smirks with a roll of his eyes to the ceiling. A practical man who knows how to handle his small bunch of specialists, he is a people manager. As a scientist none of the others approaches her intellect, but socially, Meghan is like a
child. He does not treat her as a child. His intuition, educated by frank conversations with his wife, suspects this idiotic persona is an effective means of deflecting bothersome sexual harassment from her conceited colleagues, who are frequently humiliated when she dismissively demonstrates how slow they are.

  Or maybe she is just naive. He leads the Australian arm of an international project which is top secret, involving several fields of science and study in locations all over the globe. While their clandestine activities are funded by various governments, most of their working capital comes from transnational companies convinced of the worth of their cutting-edge research. For continued confidentiality and avoidance of scrutiny from gubernatorial authorities such as taxation departments, money, channelled through a rack of holding companies, arrives in the workers' accounts from manifold sources. Above-board, no cash, the man runs a stable of talented, highly strung thoroughbreds. He has the job because he listens and watches, assessing the personalities equally as well as the material they present and analyse. That is why he is worth as much as they pay him. While ideology carried him through his science degree, his thesis a combination of zeal and plagiarism, his own expertise lies in human resources, fund-raising and diplomacy. To name the yet unnamed, to put God in His context, is his passion. To make the discovery, provide the explanation, which would eventually make him famous, is his destiny. While the scientists who collect data, experiment, conjecture and rationalise the findings are employees or consultants doing jobs from which they can be sacked at any time, or work in obscurity all their lives, he chooses. He is with the project right through. He has a hands-on, charming approach. He can talk money out of anyone, big money, for the biggest cause of all: the nature of man and the universe.

  Meghan changes personality on the road. Meghan, the child prodigy, laughed to hysteria when the fair came to town. The ferris wheel was far too slow for her. The octopus, flying chairs, big dippers, the whizzer, the dodgem cars made her dizzy with excitement. When just a tiny tot she loved to be spun until she fell over. Her father, a mathematician, her mother a musician, both distant and abstracted adults seemed to find parenthood vaguely disgusting. Her sister, eighteen months younger, was and is driven by different demons. Where Meghan was fearless, Trina was controlled by anxieties. Trina would have tantrums brought on by terror in anticipation of what was about to happen, whereas Meghan would erupt into violence when emotionally disturbed and no excitement was scary enough. The father resorted to regimented discipline and the mother shrugged in domestic despair, turned to her piano and let the housework deteriorate until she got live-in help. The maid was a young German au pair with a taste for hair-raising games. Meghan fell in love, learnt German and French, and Trina's life became hell. Because Meghan pulled no punches when upset, everyone avoided upsetting her, which strategy was soon justified by her academic brilliance. Her parents recognised her prodigy and gave it encouragement and as much education as she wanted. The only relief Meghan had from the constant calculations in her brain, the mentality of learning one thing then having to know more, was the vertiginous daredevil escapades.

  So her boss nods and the American tosses her the keys. He whispers sotto voce to his Australian counterpart, 'Can I trust her?'

  'Should have been a racing driver, our Dr Feathers tone,' smiles the man.

  'I'll be in Canberra before six a.m.' Meghan promises.

  The road gives her those precious moments of mental space she had achieved at the fairground in her young days. The car is beautiful, like riding a glorious hunter to hounds. She feels as aristocratic and glamorous as a countess in a James Bond movie. At Benalla she catches a semi-trailer whose South Australian number plate she recognises from a photo in her X-files. Targets for her mischief, UFO freaks, porn-surfers, rapists, cross-checked with registrations and driving licences identifying road-users who are vulnerable travelling, she decides to play. Her game is thorough. Her work requires her to have an extremely powerful torch. She has fibre-optic cable in her pack. She stops at a roadhouse, buys hot chips and sweets. Her tricks together on the passenger seat, she sets out to catch the lorry.

  When the highway is shared just between the two of them, she tailgates him, flashing her long beam at hypnotic intervals. She knows she has a right bastard when he doesn't pull over to let her past. So she passes him suddenly on a left-bending curve and speeds away. Stopping ahead, she wobbles her piercing torchlight about through the back window until he is too close, then she darkens everything, to quietly bring up his rear later. She knows it's working when she times his speed from behind, flashing by him as he accelerates to 120. She reaches 180 kilometres per hour in the Alfa Romeo, all lights full on and screaming with the ecstasy of a roller-coaster rider on the down drop. She has fun all the way to the Federal Highway.

  At the meeting she is refreshed and giggly, but loses her temper when someone presumes to order her to go to India next week.

  'Get fucked. I'm not going offshore.' She is as temperamental as a chess champion. 'Not this month, boys.'

  Her boss quietly says, 'Meghan, go get some rest. I'll be at your motel at eleven-thirty.'

  In German, she utters something to effect of: 'I would not want to stay in this room full of sexist nincompoops if you paid me in rubies.'

  The German responded in the same language, 'We pay you enough.'

  Still in German, 'Oh? do you? Exactly how much? I want paper records. Of the Swiss account.'

  'I beg your pardon?' Their amiable controller inquires.

  'Nothing, just kidding.'

  * * *

  Dawn breaks at Goulburn for Ian Truckman, who pulls in behind the Big Merino, so proudly a ram. He reaches for the jigsaw piece, detaches it from his central mirror, kisses it superstitiously and puts it around his neck. The electronic message from his boss reassures him. Entering details into his logbook, he doubts whether the crates contain only what is written down. Dragging a tanker of water half-way down the east coast of Australia, delivering a million-dollar cargo, has taught him how smart they are, how cluey he is. He gets down, goes around the load yanking the self-clicking straps, tight and true. He locks up, has a shower and a shave. Orders breakfast. Rests. Waits. He has to ferry another bloke. He'll have the details. Truckman knew it; they wouldn't leave him by himself for too long. Mustn't show he's onto their game, say nothing, hear nothing, see nothing. They give him plenty of time to cogitate. Almost too long because Ian works out they're playing him for a fool. What do they think, he doesn't know a real UFO from some idiot in an Alfa Romeo buzzing around his rig like a blowfly? Hannibal must have money to burn to go to all that trouble to exploit his weakness. He touches the missing bit of the kids' jigsaw at his throat, just cardboard and paper, a speck of individuality, right, they're having a go at his mind. Feeling sick on his stomach, having finished the bain marie selection on his plate, he hopes he has not caught a case of food poisoning.

  'Clever dicks are fundamentally dull,' Meghan Featherstone murmurs as she flashes on her expensive slim-line notebook. She perches on the king-sized bed with its foot-deep mattress and half a dozen pillows and organises the results of her analysis in readiness for the visit from her hungry, ambitious Solieri. Along with the hard scientific facts and the solid slivers of glass, she buries the mystery and places the nonsense in the mass of mind-boggling data in a stream of figures and formulas. She is ready to release her wild goose. The time is right. She hasn't slept. The printer spits out pages at the rate of thirty a minute.

  Her boss comes. A rap on the door. As soon as she opens up, she is the very picture of driven genius, black rings under her eyes. The man resembles a television scientist straight from make-up. Ingratiatingly courteous, he takes a seat at the table. She overdoes her act of intellectual distress. She raves, appropriately distracted by the mental strain of higher calculus as she dumps reams of paper in front of him.

  'Because of the maths of gravitation,' she says as she taps the column of numbers, 'it is assumed the ear
th is dense. It is too heavy to be hollow, right?'

  'Physics proves this. Iron, lead, solid matter,' he recognises a couple of equations. Fe, relative atomic mass 55.847. Density 7.86 at 20 degrees Centigrade. For each known substance she has run the calculation almost to infinity. He shuffles the pages. 'What's this? Stone? Bronze?'

  Meghan paces. 'But what do you make of it, Sol?'

  He doesn't want it to be this difficult, but he does want to be able to articulate the abstract scholarship in media-friendly English. He packs the sheets into a squared pile, turns them over and lays his beautifully manicured hands on the blank whiteness. 'I can see you've done a lot of work, heating up matter to impossible temperatures, in the theoretical, why? What's the hypothesis?'

  'No, what I've done here,' she reaches for the print-out. He won't let her consult them. He needs extrapolation, not detail, not jargon. 'But but,' stutters Meghan.

  'From the top Dr Featherstone, and rustle up some coffee,' he orders.

  She takes the kettle to the tap. He sighs, shakes his head and gets up to go to the bedside phone. From room service he demands freshly ground high-quality beans, an Italian glass plunger and demitasses.

  'No, I do not want you to make it,' he barks into the receiver with crisp impatience. 'But we will have bottled water if we may.'

  'At first,' Meghan complies with his request for the full story, 'I thought we had a strange, softish meteor, you know, something that would splat, as it were, on impact. That is not within the realms of sane thinking,' Meghan interrupts herself with a giggle. 'No no no, what I mean is, I was looking at the future. It could have been a space-craft landing, sort of hovering, blasting the ground with retrojets as kind-of brakes, turning the sand to glass. That wasn't it. But it wasn't far wrong. It wasn't that far wrong, the silicone has been baked. All except for the mysterious element.'

  'That's what this is about?' He points at the mathematical material on the table.