Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  How far can she trust Margot? How much can her lap and shoulders take? While talking on the phone she was listening for clues of Margot's intelligence, and got nowhere. What she did understand was her kindness, her rigorous sense of justice and fair play. Chandra lets herself admit she is overwhelmed by Margot's guilelessness, her beautiful structure of body, the turn of her ankle, as they say in Victorian novels, the articulation of her muscles, veins, sinews, bones; and the way she uses her strength to accommodate Chandra's disability without arrogance. When they swam together, it was all swirls. The climax in the water was quick, replete, clitoral. Chandra is, at her age, only interested in relating to free and independent women. She doesn't want to fall into co-dependency. Again. She wants honesty and strength. She thinks about this. The addiction of love comes over you and your principles fly away. Everything goes on hold as if an irrational goddess demands loyalty to another realm; all you do for your lover is dressed in sacred raiment with an odour of goodness. To her cost, in the past, Chandra thinks, this was not necessarily blessed with rightness. But who knows? Activity pursued in the arena of love or with the aura of love usually compromises her. So as not to hurt her lover a lesbian will often, simply, change her mind. Go along with behaviour or beliefs otherwise unconscionable. Chandra snaps her fingers and sighs. Wisdom from life and wisdom from logic are both very well, but wisdom from the feelings throws an almighty spanner in the works. She knows she cannot trust Margot Gorman. She would never trust an ex-cop, a spy or someone in the pay of corporations that lay rainforests to waste and exploit the labour of women and children.

  So Chandra concludes, rather ruefully, as she yanks out weeds in the steady rain, that she must exercise self-control, will-power, over the urges that her very passionate body will ache to satisfy in the near future. The expectation torments Chandra. She pulls her callipers into position, stops, watching the clouds break up in the south-east, before she makes the strenuous effort to get erect. The sticks sink in the mud. To get to her feet, she says ironically. Keep your feet on the ground, Chandra, she admonishes herself. Unless she can change her, she must not fall in love with Margot Gorman.

  The sun set, the moon had risen, but at dusk today you wouldn't have known. Half-light, half-dark hung in the cumulonimbus air, forcing a look at the clock to tell the time. I was waiting for a reasonable hour before I opened a bottle of wine. I leant back on my desk chair with my feet on an unopened carton, the Featherstone manila folder on my lap. A couple of deposit receipts puzzled me. They did not relate to her known accounts. I wanted a drink. I wanted to taste different reds. I glimpsed the untidy scribblings of the morning as I swung around, deciding to give in and break open the boxes. As I came back with the corkscrew, and stared at the metre-square butchers' paper, it occurred to me to ask: how much is in the Lesbianlands account? Rory's phone was dead, so I cracked a fruity chambourcin. I looked up Trina's address in St Lucia and dialled directory for the phone number.

  Although the timbre of her voice was identical, it soon became evident that Meghan's high-pitched engaging enthusiasm was, in her sister, obsessional, mad. The matter of money sent her into a spin. 'Where is it? She can't have sunk it all into that dreadful place, what's it called? Lebanese Plains? Cedars of Lebanon mean something biblical. I guess, started by an inbred colony with fundamental Christianity. Whatever, it was creepy. Jill's a parasite. She was so angry, I'm afraid she'll send up a bunch of girls to bash me or throw me out. That's why I haven't got back to you. I've been lying low. It's about time you rang up, by the way. I was giving you a lunar month. Judith Sloane was there, going through things. Jill called me psychotic, a leech, a moron, told me to grow up and I said, look who's talking. When I accused Jill of having gambling debts she was lying about, Jill well and truly lost it. Sheer violence. She accused me of going through all Meghan's papers, of stealing, of sneaking. I came in in the middle of something between her and Judith, and something about Jill discovering Judith there when she came home.'

  I interrupted the flow, 'Trina? Trina, listen! Do you think that Jill is stealing from Meghan? Is that why you employed me?'

  'Meggy is a fucking consultant, isn't she? She should be a bloody millionaire. Anything to do with money and they turn up like vultures, feral bludgers. I've been protecting Meghan for years. How come she doesn't own this flat? Tell me that, tell me that. Then all I'd have to pay is the rates. It would only take one job and she could pay it off, but she doesn't. She said she can't. Where is her money?' She kept talking while I swilled the chambourcin, '97 vintage, across my palate and taste-buds. Then I held the receiver in the crook of my neck and pumped the air out of the bottle and stoppered it.

  Before I delved down for another grape, another wine, I said, 'Maybe she has discovered better things to do with her money than supply her sister.' I didn't expect her to listen to me. Or if she did, to hear what I was saying. I rely on my canine sense. Dogs, because they have no words, can always scent the truth and its absence. What about Trina? It was an old story in Meghan's relationships, I imagined: her sister and her lover hate each other. So they fight, so? The truth was, both wanted money for nothing. And so did that other ex, who never gave me her name.

  Trina suddenly demanded. 'Where are you coming from?'

  'What?' I jerked back into the communication. A paper chase is usually like a game, a logical maze. Right from the beginning this one had led me into the asylum where the insane reign.

  'PI Gorman,' Trina continued. 'Here's a fact for you. Judith was telling porkies.'

  'What do you mean?' I obliged by inquiring.

  'Pork pies, lies. She told Jill she wasn't snooping and she was. She was planting evidence and she was taking stuff. But who listens to me, I'm just the crazy heterosexual sister. I can tell you're not listening to me. Why did you ring? You haven't heard a thing!' she accused.

  'I am afraid you're wrong, Trina. You have disabused me of many fanciful notions by what you've been saying. I think you're right. Both Judith and Jill took some of Meghan's cash, as you yourself have. You've explained to me the complete mess of these documents, the petty pilfering, the odd parts of the country. The wild goose chase.' There was no way, I thought, of knowing whether this woman was suffering a clinical mental illness or merely neurotic, but Megs would keep providing her with a safe house. All I could figure was her hysteria had gone now I had put her on the spot, and I waited for our telephonic connection to be broken because I had a lot of work to do and a lot of wine to taste before the night was out.

  'Well, I'm not paying you,' she said peevishly.

  If I went through the seven deadly sins, searching for a motive, I reckon avarice would loom large, but with Meghan Featherstone, I felt I had to seek its opposite. 'Fine,' I replied. 'Goodnight, Trina.'

  52

  …organised paedophile ring…

  Virginia, weakened, exhausted, finds her own bed. When she struggles out in the morning, she discovers her car is gone. Her home is dripping, in the midst of the thick cloud, which at a lower altitude would be rain. From moon-shadow through the tangled streams of dreams to day-fog, she shifts in a netherland of no clarity. She is emotionally emptied, physically fasted to an ethereal plane where disfocused meditation is reality. She is lost in her own environs. Apart from water, she ingests nothing. Hunger has no grip, no grab. The fruit and vegetables on her bench, disturbed by possums, are limp, if not completely eaten. The jar of chilli powder and the tomato sauce bottle are on the floor with scratches on their lids. The remains of milk coffee in the cup on the table is scummy with mould. She shrugs and goes back to bed.

  After about five hours' sleep, during which the hemispheres of my brain continued thumping ground strokes at one another, I woke feeling seedy and on the ball. My work-space pulled me like a magnet a pin. The fan in my computer whirred loudly and lap-wings made a racket running around the lawn. I turned on the printer, called up my files, read, reassessed and restlessly made a cup of tea. Needing to wash the positive ions off m
y electrified skin with a burst of surf, I pulled my wetsuit off the rack and paced down to the beach. I gingerly broke the breakers. My toes turned blue but soon I was fish-kicking under the rollers which were biding their time then coming in high. I let the oceanic energy toss me about in the spit of its spending on the shore. Then I waited for the next and used the white water like a spa. I eventually swam out beyond the bar to the flatter sea and floated on the hills and dales of waves, and thought.

  Of Rory's matter. The telephone call I made to the Campbells, trying to find out whether a mining lease had been acquired, was worse than pointless. I aroused suspicion. They kept handing the receiver to each other, told me nothing and used their voices continuously to ask me who I was, not associating me with the one who saw Barb. But like her, they said, it was none of my business as I didn't live there. They had made a neighbourly arrangement with the gurls. Which one? They wouldn't say. The gurls were interchangeable as far the Campbells were concerned. They feigned ignorance of surnames, implying that my using such identification only proved that I was a complete outsider and had no right to interfere. I asked did they know that Virginia White had disappeared?

  'What car does she drive, dear?' Wilma Campbell had asked in motherly tones. My want of description on this score elicited cocksure dismissal like an iron fist in the glove of apologetic sympathy. The Lesbianlands' maelstrom in a tin mug was a storm of personal drama, invisible to the greater world. With interwoven roots, it was hard to see the wood for the trees, or the trees for the wood, to single out the individual who traded with the Campbells, or the weed in the native balance of the bush.

  Rory, in contrast to Wilma, sounded flummoxed by her friend's absence. It was amazing they were of the same species on the same planet, let alone living within a couple of miles of each other and fairly similar to look at. Their essential difference made those sci-fi movies of aliens taking human form seem believable.

  The sea rocked me in its cradle, vigorously. King tides were predicted. I recalled Chandra saying she wanted me to be like her mother. As I never knew the woman, how could I possibly ape her, or even try? I summoned up an image of this horsewoman, understated, in her hunting hat with a bit of scarf rhythmic in the wind of her mount's gait. Her spine was straight, her eyes ahead; invisible geometry dotted lines from her eyes to the horse's ears, pricked and erect, the spines of the two creatures maintained a living right angle together; the tip of the toe, the point of the knee, exact alignment. While nothing was static, all contained tremendous strength and discipline. There was no padding in the shoulders of her jacket, yet squared perfection in the movement and rhythm was easy, like music. I changed from back-stroke to freestyle. The flowing tail, black and shiny, of the horse was the only loose thing apart from the scrap of scarf in the whole outfit, echoing the motion, expressing the compressed power of the high-kneed forward pace and suggesting the relaxed impression of the carefree seat of the rider in the saddle when, in fact, all muscles were engaged. The long hands in their gloves were soft on the reins, yet the fingers laboured. The gait changed from a collected canter to a simple elongation of the whole order. Swimming with cupped paws, hurling what water I grabbed backwards, feeling my shoulders revolve and my hips roll, it bothered me that I forgot the name for the colour of a horse when its body is reddish brown and mane and tail black. I must be in love because I wanted to go through Chandra's childhood photos. I swam and it came to me: bay. I knew there was a connection between the horse and the sea. I wondered where the name came from as I imagined in another aeon riding a porpoise from place to place. The dressage of this long-dead mother gave me the clue to Chandra, her holding back, her lust for power, for justice, for freedom of movement, yet keeping it contained and, although she could be playing me for a fool, teasing, she wanted command of a lover, or love itself, as much as she wanted me. I appreciated her speculations on Judith Sloane's miserly motives.

  For a silly moment on the beach I forgot my injury and started to run. I felt the pain stab like an arrow, tripping my step. Yet I pranced in the sand, on my toes, keeping heels out of it.

  After the exercise I felt sick. My brilliant liver demanded pure beetroot juice. Naturally, I did not have any raw beetroot in the house. Thrust had a luscious-looking garden. I was so desperate I used the phone. Lois answered. I didn't get a chance to say why I rang. Lois had a pressing piece about cousins staying in the house, and how they were going to make trouble. I could hear aggressive language in the background.

  'Who you talking to, sister-woman?' The politics of the have-nots, justified hatred?

  'Shut up, it is none of your business anyway. Better not come round here, Margot, this is a radical mob. They can smell cop, and you're not hard to pick.' Lois dropped her voice. 'It is not their Murri mum that makes them a worry, Margot. They got a bugger of a Yugoslav father.' She was trying to tell me something about serious violence. I overheard a male voice demand again who I was.

  'It's just one of my clients, why can't you shut up and let me conduct my business?' she yelled, then, into the mouthpiece, she said, 'they bloody don't have to come here and stir up us mob. I got customers and stuff.'

  'Crikey,' I said with absolute sincerity and added, having no thought as to what I could do, 'you know where I am if you need me.'

  As I put down the phone, I remembered that the rally was on today. Militant Aborigines I did not expect. Shooters Party and biking clubs, yes. Ignorant racists gathering around their mascot, the televisual plastic celebrity, nicknamed the white virgin, were ready for scuffles. We really didn't need the land rights lobby playing into their hands by providing them with the publicity of conflict. When I read newspapers I prayed the degree of political, religious, ethnic clashes in other parts of the world would not come here. Not the bovver boys of soccer hooliganism in England. Nor guns in every household, like the United States. This was easy-going, she'll-be-right Australia, but I'm afraid, like all pleas for divine intercession in human affairs, it was wishful thinking. I had offered my help on automatic impulse. Before nine when she has important business to do, Rory goes through her correspondence, re-reading a sensitive, almost shy, letter from her mother, and checking her bills. The ISP account, though not that much money and crammed with all sorts of offers of services, details the hours she spent online. She frowns. She finds her diary and justifies the dates in columns. Someone on the land used her computer with her password when she was not here. Her rocky perch of a house is impossible to lock. She invites communal access to her facilities, asking only that women log their phone calls in an exercise book with a pencil on a string near the door. There is a tin with change for cash, or records of what's owing. Suspicion of her sisters does not come naturally to Rory. Virginia always pays up when the bill arrives. Hope, so facile with the technology she could take computers for granted, might not even know that she was required to note expenses she incurred. But, actually, it could have been any one of the gurls.

  Rory, for all her independence of mind and spirit, is dependent on Social Security for income. By nine-fifteen, she is on the telephone quietly going mad with annoyance. No matter what she does, sitting there, impatience builds up like molten lava under the crust. She tries to think up something to do, a yoga exercise holding the handpiece? Even philosophising doesn't work: how can nonsense be tamed? How can the hysteria of frustration be used? Telephonic efficiency is sending everybody crazy, including the people who work in the call centres. The power of witchery to force things to happen in your favour is smothered by the boring procedure of bureaucracy. She has to get through. Music is interrupted by a recorded message that informs her that if she doesn't hold on she will lose her place in the queue.

  The stone that Hope gave her gleams with its own light, an interior white glow. It fits into a fist: she could smash someone's face in, with an enhanced punch, but Rory has to be very angry to be at all violent. Although she weeps for the plight of street kids and wants to change the world, she knows that revolt leads to b
loodthirsty excess. In short, she could never be Madame Defarge with a front row seat at the show of the guillotine's falling blade, filling baskets with heads. Her copy of Solanas' treatise is within reach. She trawls its pages for the comforting intellectual passion, and wonders what sort of urban terrorist Valerie might have been had she a cadre of dedicated followers, or indeed use of satellite communication systems and underground networks of women who agree. Rory puts SCUM on the pile of things she must take to town, all the official papers she has of the Lesbianland Collective. Judith has the bank books and access to the vault where the deeds are held. Finally Social Security talks to her in person and she notes the time of the appointment.