Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  'It lands on the ground like a beach-ball,' explained Hope. 'They're really light. All this material weighs nothing.' She read, '"In their own galaxy they are pure mind, not soul, not spirit, not perfect." Where is it?' She flicked her eyes over the text. '"They have noses and ears like dogs so that they may know through these senses… The double chevron in the position of the third eye operates like a micro-chip for interstellar communication… Helmet-heads adapted for planetary conditions, carefully devised, incredibly clever computers of superflesh hardware… Ears can revolve… Translucent circulating fluid, no elimination process." Um, it's here somewhere. "They don't have substance as we know it. They can imagine. On earth they need mists or water to project their images." Yet, ah, hang on. "Wings, mixture between bat-wing and feather…. They invented all this from an observation station on Venus…. Trunk musculature like that of a snake, all bones interlocking vertebrae." Here is what I want to read to you: "Their skin is like seal's fur. Their eyes are like eagle's, except for the third eye which can appear human. Their tails are like aircraft rudders and necessary in various positions for balance. The only design feature they took from human beings, apart from head size, is opposing thumbs on the end of all four limbs." Somewhere it says, they have to land at high altitudes, something to do with oxygen. Hey?' she exclaimed eagerly. 'What do you make of that?'

  'Notes, for a novel?' I suggested. 'A feminist sci-fi? Trivia was a writer.'

  'But I told you. I've seen them,' Hope was trying to convince me with the strength of her conviction. 'I can show you where they landed.'

  She was so sweet and keen and young, I wanted to indulge her but I am an honest sceptic. 'I bet it's over in that gully beyond Judith's, behind the escarpment near Ilsa's,' I said.

  'How did you know?' She was flabbergasted.

  Shrugging, I grinned. 'Just a wild guess.' Hope had verified the destination of Willy Campbell's bulldozer in my speculations, anyway.

  Disappointed by my lack of faith, Hope insisted. 'But they've taken Virginia.'

  'I beg your pardon?' I expostulated. 'What do you mean?'

  'Her house is like the Marie Celeste. Cup on the table. Food ready to be cut and chopped, pot waiting. Been like that since, um, Wednesday. Like she just walked out to the woodpile and never came back. Disappeared, like in the Bermuda Triangle.' Hope described something my bullshit detector discerned as likely to be true.

  'How do you know she didn't go into town on the spur of the moment, saying, like, bugger it, do it later? Urgent business?' I tested.

  'Virginia does heaps of sudden trips to Port Water, but never does she leave her house like that. I know,' Hope said definitely.

  'How?' I encouraged her confession.

  'Well, I go down there to read when she's not at home. I've never asked her, but I don't reckon she'd mind.' Hope's confidence was pretty well backed up by what I thought of Virginia. She wouldn't mind and Hope would find some interesting reading matter in her library. Not considering for a second that she had been taken by aliens, I wondered where she was.

  I said, getting up, 'I'm going there now.'

  'Yeah,' concurred Hope. 'But Virginia won't be home.'

  Scrambling through the understorey towards the sound of the waterfall, every now and then I saw a wider vista. At one stage I could look down upon Rory's establishment, the telephone tower, various solar panels set on poles at angles and a disc glinting blue in the moonlit dusk.

  Virginia's vehicle is in its spot. Chandra and Rory exchange shrugs. Rory cooees up the track towards the place where she knows she is working the log. No answer. The vegetables on the chopping board look tired and limp. They wait a while then return to Rory's.

  The sun has gone off the solar panels. They see each other as shape and gesture as they sit on the darkening deck. The bush around them is quiet except for the occasional squeak and squawk as birds hustle themselves into nests. Fruit bats begin to become active. The two women are quiet in the dying light, breathing air dense with life force.

  Realising Chandra has issues with power, Rory does not take up their earlier disagreement. Instead, asks how she became so good with computers.

  'Started with bulletin boards in Melbourne,' Chandra says. 'It was exciting. Weren't many women in my Users' Group, but those there were smart. One of them ended up making money hand over fist trouble-shooting software. Wonder if she's a millionaire yet.'

  'Different choices?' Rory suggests. 'Different politics?'

  'No Internet then,' explains Chandra shortly. 'Fixing software was a lot of leg-work.'

  'I see.'

  'Mm, most of the time she was in her car, going to factories, banks, places, I don't know. I couldn't drive then.'

  They go inside, chatting. When Rory begins lighting her candles to augment the weak halogen globe, Margot walks in.

  'We thought you were lost,' lies Chandra cheerily.

  'Yes,' agrees Rory, although neither of them had given her much thought since they had set her down on her way to Hope's.

  'I was for a bit.' Margot displays some scratches, 'But I finally found the creek. I kept the sound of the waterfall close to my left.'

  'What a girl scout!' Chandra moves about with one crutch, hurling herself into the lounge chair by grabbing its arms with her hands and pushing up and twisting in fast motion.

  'Where have you been?' asks Margot. 'Did you see Virginia?'

  'No, actually.'

  'She wasn't there.'

  Neither Rory nor Chandra know what to make of Virginia's absence yet, but they do not take Hope's explanation seriously.

  'We'll go up again in the morning. Have a proper look,' Rory states.

  'Good idea,' Margot sits in the armchair opposite Chandra. 'I've been reading Trivia's Golden Notebook.'

  'Trivia. I remember her,' comments Chandra. 'She was a writer. Wasn't she? About five years ago.'

  Margot puts on her tracksuit top, asking, 'Wasn't Maria her lover?'

  'Me too,' Rory's abrupt non-answer silences Margot and Chandra. 'I'm afraid truth got stranger than fiction.' Rory keeps talking, 'Innocent not ignorant. She was streetwise but she could not understand the non-creative mind: why would you pay money if you could make it yourself? Why would you sell your soul to buy something when you could live in poverty and know something? Her imagination got the better of her.'

  Margot smiles in the candle gloom at Chandra, willing Rory to talk on, open up, while she keeps her own thoughts on hold.

  'She built before I did.' Rory speaks from behind the kitchen bench where she is preparing vegetables by the light of a small electric lamp. 'When it burnt down it broke her heart. And her spirit.'

  'So many delicate things are so easily abused,' Chandra remarks clumsily.

  Rory describes Trivia's place. 'A wooden frame and steel chests, poles, excellent roof with tank attached and no walls higher than half a metre, on the plateau. A long hole in the ground, a cemented dugout, rat-proof. The walls were canvas awnings. The fireplace was mud brick rendered with cow manure. Campbell's cows had the run of the place then.'

  Chandra jokes, 'Were you on with her before, after or during Maria and she?'

  'Before. Not for long. Maria was her last lover. Trivia cooked kidneys like Harold Bloom in Ulysses, she said,' Rory reminisces as she puts the washed lettuce from a tea-towel into a large glass bowl. 'Brain food. Mostly she was a vegetarian.'

  'What happened to her?' Chandra asks.

  'Killed herself. Slit wrists.'

  Margot confides, 'I read her diary after Maria died. Sofia gave it to me.'

  Rory continues, unhearing, Trivia allowed everything, even the most way out beliefs. She gave them credence. She indulged women. She had faith in them.' Rory stops her work to look into space. 'She was almost a chain smoker without it affecting her voice or her ability to scamper over these hills.'

  'Did her mother call her Trivia?' inquires Chandra.

  'No, she called herself that.'

  'Writers are preten
tious because they pretend there is another world composed of words and impressions and comment that is important. Escape is their work,' opines Chandra.

  'Like cyberspace?' Margot has a dig.

  Rory sets the table with plates, knives and forks, and puts butter and bread, cheese, tinned salmon and salad in the centre. She puts a match to Tilley lamps and the room brightens moodily.

  'Trivia said making up reality was her profession. Amateurs at it on the grapevine sent her into a rage like a flame-haired raven talking nineteen to the dozen. Maria was smitten. She took her to hospital. The medicos were hopeless. Over-worked, incompetent. I don't know. We went to a motel, her doped on pethidine. Maria distraught. She woke, saw the Gideons and died. She was born six years too early.' Rory gets up to blow out the atmospheric candles as if they irritate her suddenly. 'Hope quotes the Bible, too.'

  'And,' says Margot, 'she believes that Trivia saw aliens, and she does too.'

  Chandra asks, 'Who's Hope?'

  'Hope O'Lachlin?' Margot hears her own slip of the tongue, glances at Rory and runs with it. 'Could that be her surname?'

  'No,' Rory shakes her head. 'At least I don't think so. It's Strange. And she is a very strange girl, I suppose, she does remind me of Trivia, a bit.'

  Margot finds her bottle of wine and a corkscrew. As she reaches into the cupboard for glasses, she insists, 'But what happened to Trivia to make her do it?'

  'She said something about aliens. She was calling her blood rubies. I wasn't much help. I thought she was going mad. Anyway, it was down to Maria.'

  'The chain of instances in another person's life that are another person's life don't seem to be attached to a main trunk unless you make up a psychology for them,' Chandra grins as she reaches for cheese.

  'Well that was as clear as mud.'

  Margot feels there is an importance about Trivia and the mystery of the past of Lesbianlands and wonders what it has to do with now. She encourages Rory's memories.

  'It was late August, there was a frost. Extremely unusual though not unknown here. She had planted lilly-pillies and pawpaws because she felt she could live on those fruits if she had to. They went black.' Rory sips her wine and frowns at a wall, remembering. 'There were neat clusters of dried grains and pasta varieties always at her house, canned food, carefully sealed packets of herbs and spices and dried peas and dried mushrooms. She could always cook you a meal. No, she wasn't mad. The aliens was the only truly weird bit.'

  'If she was practising for survival, don't you find it ironic?' Chandra puts it.

  But Margot is intrigued. 'Why did she call her blood rubies? Anything to do with the geology up here?'

  'Not only Ilsa,' assures Rory. 'Meghan also reckons we're sitting on riches beyond measure.'

  'Doesn't mean you have to plunder the earth,' argues Chandra.

  'We won't.'

  'You're not sad? For your loss I mean?' Margot's eyes search for Rory's through the shadowy light. 'I think you should check your books, though. Judith didn't show me them all.'

  'On with the story, Rory, the trauma?' Chandra heaves herself up, finds her sticks and flops her legs into position before she takes her weight on her forearms.

  'The frosts burnt the leaves. There were about three in a row. They burnt her berries and the big flat leaves of the pawpaws and the tomatoes that grew in her compost pile. Then the westerlies came and battered her place on the plateau. Then the fire. Trivia tried to be spiritual. She dredged up archaic symbols from the arcane, subtly changed them and placed them round about carved them on trees made rock cairns and dry stone walls. Everything was triangles, hence the name.'

  The wine-bottle being empty, Rory pours some port from a cask into little glasses. Chandra goes outside and comes back in.

  'The fire leapt from the crown of one tree to the crown of another and Trivia's place was burnt, including the frost-dried fruit trees. No one could find her. The front of that fire was ten kilometres swirling in circular winds burning and re-burning. Trivia talked about the putrid taste of her own saliva as waves of fear and panic and pure heat swept through her. She was alone with it for more than forty-eight hours. When we could we rushed up and surveyed the damage. Her face was black, her lips were red raw.'

  'She had survived but she was traumatised?' diagnoses Margot.

  'Maria just couldn't handle it. Trivia had to be all strong and giving. Suddenly she wasn't. She was just as in need of care as Sofia. We came in with provisions and we fought the remaining fires which smouldered away in the middle of logs. Beautiful trees fell in two and lay pitiful on the cracked black earth. There were animal skeletons here and there. The bush had become an open space in a black and white movie shot in a northern winter. Trivia was at first high with her survival and the new knowledge of terror. She went to the creek looking for rubies, or hell she said. She was never the same.'

  'Did you still love her?' asks Margot gently.

  'I will never get over my grief. I don't often speak about it,' Rory says toughly. 'But my real pain started earlier. When she ditched me. For Maria.'

  Margot, Chandra and Rory talk until they are too tired for more, and go to bed.

  * * *

  Chandra and Rory were having a pretty stiff argument when I woke up at a late hour for me.

  'You shall be judged by what you do, not by what you think others should do.' Rory sounded exasperated.

  'Do I detect a bit of the old Catholicism, Rory?' asked Chandra with a touch of sarcasm.

  'All right. "By his friends shall you know him." Like that one, do you?' Rory was as menacing as someone backed into a corner. I lay still, listening, trying to determine the cause of their discord. Chandra must have released the pressure because their voices dropped. I heard the words, 'scum', 'sanction murder', 'responsibility' and 'the capitalist system', so I assumed the whole thing was political not personal. I got up and stretched, rolled up the sleeping bag, lifted the mattress and rested it against the wall, giving them time to get the idea that I had returned to the land of the living.

  'Trevia was the Roman name of the Greek goddess, Hecate of the three ways.' At breakfast, freshly toasted muesli, biodynamic yoghurt, tinned juice and Oolong tea, Rory and Chandra went about my further education in a jolly fashion, showing off. Weather, company and foreboding atmosphere, the day had a quality of verve where you need to be ready for surprises. Or shocks. The intense payload of this triform friendship would, I sensed, require nerve, be valuable, and worth it. Whatever.

  While it seemed to have helped Rory talking about what happened to the real person, the writer of the 'she you and I' diary, I learnt that the goddess's three-faced images received offerings of cake, fruit and money for protection in journeys, for healthy childbirth and bountiful harvests. She ruled springs and mountains. The corruption of Trivia to the modern meaning of trivial was, according to my elders, the patriarchy's attempt to belittle matriarchal cults by rendering unimportant established rituals and customs. They talked about Kali and Mut and the Morrigan. I listened and took in the delights of the leafy fresh air. It was as late as ten before we cleaned up and got on with the day. They had computer work to finish while the sun was on the solar panels feeding them direct electricity, so I walked up to Virginia White's house unaccompanied.

  Its emptiness did not exactly have the Bermuda Triangle piquancy I expected from Hope's description. Her presence was too strong. The bed was made. I guessed it was a hurried but intended exit. Gestures like the screen put in front of the fireplace, the pushing of the vegetables under the colander with a rock weighting it down, though disturbed and knocked awry by possums, showed she meant to go for a while. The cabin felt similar to the last time I was there when Virginia turned up midway through my inspection of her home. And sat down for a chat.