Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  'I don't think so,' Rory mumbles, staring out at the navy-blue sea, inhospitable in the ghostly light of approaching rain. 'The mummy's boys, like Christ, like poofs and drag queens, like high camp opera buffs and fashion designers, like the hippy whippy tree-sitters and all the devotees of Carl Jung and men's movement jocks claiming their female side, have androgynised the warrior woman. She is invisible. Okay, we are invisible, which makes cyberspace the excellent place for our meetings under a full moon of revolutionary intent. A brilliant concept, but I don't think you could kill anyone, Chandra. At least I hope not.'

  'Don't be so sure,' Chandra says ominously. 'Our enemies may have found us. They would have no compunction in killing us. The ultra-Right is convinced, as we are, of the operability of an international female conspiracy, they just have it twisted by their all-encompassing prejudices. Assisted by Jewish banks and Russian mafia, for goodness sake!'

  'A lone sociopathic genius, I reckon,' Rory remarks. 'That's who's playing in your website, rerouting others' stuff through glitches. Challenging your role as web-master, that's all.'

  Chandra, herself, cannot see how it was done. 'We romanced about the ultimate controller, said that she was a wealthy woman coming out of the Bahamas or Norfolk Island. At other times we had her floating around the world on a big yacht, migratory, or with a personal Lear jet. A techno-birdwoman. Even a female cosmonaut in a rogue space station orbiting the earth was suggested. Possibly beings from another planet could take the rap. We had no proof of any of that, but we had to lay down the scent, shock them, scare them, have them chasing a hare of the wrong colour. We have to be so absurd only a female can follow the real path. No Dionysian, smart-arse pretend-woman could sort the imaginative from the real. Because lies are their bread and butter, how could they?'

  'You've obviously gone more into it than I have. Who do you mean when you say we,' Rory asks, 'yourself?'

  Chandra says, 'We fucked up as much as we could, to use Valerie's term. It didn't take heaps of equipment. They have no proof of anything on the Internet. There are no bodily chemicals, no scent.'

  'Margot might be able to smell it out, even in cyberspace,' Rory continues. 'But I like her, Chandra. I wanted her to get a picture of what we are about.'

  'No,' Chandra chides, as she feels the courage seeping out of her purpose. 'There is a sub-site buried in alien web pages for the warrior women who call themselves evil.'

  'Alien web pages?' Quiet lightning sparks out at sea.

  'Yes,' Chandra affirms wearily. 'Like the Elvis fan club. All sorts.' She wants to live, to have fun, to enjoy what she has made of her life. She wants to fuck, eat, drink wine, ride. Go out with Margot, listen to music, picnic on the grass, but she has worked herself into a revolutionary lather, painted herself into a serious corner where she must wear the dark clothes of the assassin and hide in the shadows. She knows in her mind it is guerilla warfare, but her heart wants the joys of love, to frolic in the garden of delights. Rory, Chandra realises, hopes to bring Margot up to their level of understanding, expertise and commitment in the future, but, she reasons, that it's relatively impossible. Logical equations make it most unlikely. Margot is reading the manifesto as a piece of evidence in her trail of detection.

  Chandra pulls herself together, smiles at Rory and says quietly, 'I'm glad you gave her SCUM to read.'

  'What a relief that is,' sighs Rory. She rolls a cigarette.

  'Stay at my place tonight.'

  'Thanks.'

  'What say we pick up some Chinese or a pizza?' Chandra suggests as she gets her station wagon on the road.

  'Great.'

  54

  …what they wanted to know…

  Hot flushes flash on her flesh as if electric circuits short in the brain in her skull. Virginia cannot diagnose the cause, post-traumatic chemical reactions or menopausal symptoms. Her mind shuts down, then comes alive with sparking verve. Her sense of self is an unintelligible static.

  There was no welcome from Cybil. No bed for her there. She drives to the long beach away from the suburban sprawl of the tourist-retirement town and intends to sleep in her car. The night is wild with shooting stars and king tides crashing. The moon rides scudding clouds. Sheet lightning floods the busy dark with sudden illumination, devoid of thunder. She feels she is facing some abyss, but her pain is not a void. It is a throbbing, thumping energy, a solid awareness in her guts. She is restless, no drugs, no alcohol, no cigarettes. The sand, when she ventures out, is crisp beneath her feet. She strips to embrace the discomfort of freedom, the bare essential of being, and throws herself into the breakers. The waves lift her high as they peak and roll. The activity of light in the white, roiling foam shoots through her skin like a spa beyond spas, draining the weariness from the marrow of her bones. She needs all her strength, and it is just enough, to not be thrashed, dashed and dumped. She is on a knife-edge between freezing to death and being too hot to handle. As there is no comfort, no warmth, no cool, and she does not seek it. She emerges, salty and wet, simply alive. She is not calm, nor mad. She is disintegrated and of a piece, standing, like a surviving soldier erect among the fallen in the smoking spoils of a battlefield, as she dries herself with her T-shirt, owning nothing but the experience of some kind of journey which involved no travel. Indeed, she could travel if she wished. There is no duty to anything, certainly not to material possession, nor even the weighty art she felt bound to. Or love? Well, if the beloved can hurt you so much, so casually, so carelessly, what is there to be afraid of? No enemy could inflict this agony and physical pain doesn't touch it. Starting from an appreciation of desolation in the thoroughly personal through the sagacity of living, there is, Virginia thinks as she picks up a handful of sand and lets it run through her fingers, change. Whatever.

  It is still night-time when she starts her car. The tuned motor of the diesel engine surrounds her like a doona of sound, easing the chill in her heart with soft gratitude. She drives along the rutted roads, through low-lying coastal bush, slowly, knowing that serendipity follows the drama of a feeble wisdom. Margot Gorman lives near here. Virginia looks for houses amid the paperbarks. Then there are three. A light burns in the middle one. An aqua Suzuki Sierra sits quietly beneath a free-standing carport. Two bikes hang beside it under the roof. After a pause of consideration, wondering what she can give in return for bed and breakfast, Virginia turns into the yard and parks the Rodeo on the lawn. Her fellow triathlete is busy at work in a small room with a desk, computer and angled lamp, frowning over reading matter. VeeDub steps back into the darkness and lets out a dog-maiden cooee, the vocal signal of a gurl's approach. Margot meets her on the verandah at the front door.

  The yell did not startle me, as practically every other human noise would have at that time of night. The call of one's own kind. Virginia White yelped, a poor forked creature seeking shelter from the storm, but arrived like an answer to my prayer for help. I had come to the part in the manifesto which says: 'If SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.' I highlighted it and went to the door. She asked what I was doing and I told her. I took her to my office and she studied the chaotic map on my wall. She was impressed. Complimentary. But most of all, she helped me interpret the hypnotic, enraged, fluent manuscript. Few women, she thought, would take Valerie Solanas's suggestions literally, while every woman would agree with the gist if she were at all honest with herself.

  'When the Solanas site started up,' she explained, 'the Solanasites were trying to revive the strategic side of early 'seventies feminism. Most of which was theory, a way of seeing. The discourse borrowed its methods from all sorts of disciplines. Science, art, all philosophic and political opinions. They took on everyone: Freud, Marx, Darwin, biology, theology, archaeology, philology, everything. Social criticism and grassroots action continued and continues to this day.'

  'Feminist studies at the universities?' I asked, and she shook her head.

  'They turn out to be very small worlds indeed.' Virginia
eyed the carton of wines I had begun tasting. I fetched a couple of glasses. 'When the Internet expanded,' she continued, 'the non-tenured ethical feminist had a means of spreading her word, started net-working with like-minded. Where were they to go? What were they to do? At first Chandra's site was full of hot air, but it existed, which was great. For several years, they just raved to each other in the chat rooms. Mainly whinges. Older feminists losing their academic jobs. Women's Studies graduates starving them out. That sort of stuff.'

  I looked at a label, pulled the vacuum cork, sniffed the bouquet, offered her a smell and poured. She nodded and went on. 'While there were more jobs for women than ever before, there weren't enough. You're talking a lot of female intellectuals here, hungry for their own culture, digging up the past, re-writing history, un-covering, dis-covering, re-covering. Again far fewer were being published than had things to say, stories to tell, insights to share. Each had in common the feeling that Valerie Solanas had said something personal to her when she first read her, and to a lesser extent Ti-Grace Atkinson. But the fervour, instead of burgeoning as it had in their hearts, shrivelled out there. People, both men and women, calling themselves feminist were undermining feminism. Radical thought became decidedly uncool, old hat. Lipstick and shaved legs were back. Post-modernism, sado-masochism, alliance with, among lesbians, gay men and transsexuals, women claiming pornography for themselves. Like, we needed whole institutions, universities, galleries, political parties, to cover the breadth of ground we had to to catch up, culturally. Solanas had put it all, in a way, in her little tract. So the Solanasite network snaked out through the Internet. All sorts of women, from academics to refugees, all identifying, as you have here, the fundamental forces of oppression; money and poverty; male violence and fear; actual war; madness; nonsense; drugs; pornography; feminised men.' She paused. 'Nice wine.'

  Swirling it over my taste-buds, I agreed. I had chosen one that would go well without food.

  Virginia talked on, 'All wanting to do more than put a Band-aid on damage. The Solanasites always take a female point of view. They needed each other. They got each other through the web. It felt good, sharing. But they had to work out what to do. Last time I logged on they were still at it, though the codes had deepened, and it seemed to me, older women had been joined by considerably younger ones, cyborg street-fighters. New generation.'

  'Okay,' I sighed, gesturing to my butcher's paper on the wall. 'How does that affect me?'

  'Well,' she got up and pointed. 'The Meghan investigation, for instance. If she's a Solanasite, this money that's missing could bankroll a project, or be there for female intellectuals who no longer have a job and can't pay their rent, or be channelled to women in need wherever. Or, Meghan could be working…'

  'She is a Solanasite, Jill told me,' I interrupted.

  'Well, if she's working for a transnational and she is a Solanasite, then she will be "unworking".' Virginia picked up the skinny volume and began trying to find the place. 'Solanasites either "unwork" or,' she read, '"withdraw from the labour force", but that's not the bit I want. Listen to this. "Love can't flourish in a society based upon money and meaningless work: it requires complete economic as well as personal freedom"… Ah, here it is, "SCUM will unwork at a job until fired, then get a new job to unwork at."'

  The penny dropped. But I asked, 'You don't think this is all madness? Lunacy?'

  'Of course not. Solanas was brilliant. Madder men have ruled the world on stupider ideas for yonks, with,' she added, 'disastrous results.'

  'But how would she do it? She's a forensic geologist, a consultant. I mean, wouldn't it be dangerous?' I said, as I picked up a pen and found my notes.

  'The more powerful your position, possibly, the easier it would be. I don't know. I took the other option.' Her voice became reflective, a little sad.

  Scribbling, I conjectured, 'She would have to be clever. But we know she is that. She could just throw into her report a piece of information that sabotages the whole deal.'

  'Or,' Virginia augmented, 'she could lay a scent in a mischievous direction and have their hounds hunting a phantom hare. If she were clever, as you said, she could leave them standing with egg on their faces, say, having a lot of research which proves that aliens landed at points with latitude and longitude carefully recorded.' She laughed, 'Meghan could have fun, unworking, in the scientific arena, a lot of which is nonsense already.'

  'I reckon you've hit the nail on the head. Thanks.' I smiled, looking up from my note-taking and saw Virginia was really tired. 'I'll find you a mattress.'

  When I went out to trundle the sofa into a spare bed, she did not follow me. After I had made it up and moved a light to within reach of the pillow I returned to ask if she would like a cup of something. She was looking at the chaotic diagram of my cases, spun out and pale as if shocked.

  'What's the matter?' I asked.

  'Did Cybil kill the transvestite boy?' She said the question as if it were entirely possible; as if she, Cybil's intimate, considered her capable of murder.

  'She may have caused his death, but,' I began.

  Her tan skin was pale, bringing out the steely streaks in her dark hair like a gossamer cobweb. Her eyes reached new depth as she stared at me in horror, saying, 'You get what you wish for, Margot, and it is the opposite of what you really want.' She went on to explain. 'Penthesilea's revenge, in banal, grubby reality. The young Achilles, like a black widow spider's mate, dead after sex. I wished for her to realise some truth about herself, to face the moral laxity in her sensuality, her use of sex, her despair. And now she must, and now I'll have this knowledge, always, a hollow shadow across my sense of joy, where a healthy ego should be, a friend, an ex-lover. A changing, growing person.' She sighed, and moved away towards the lounge-room. 'I almost prefer that he had been deliberately killed, by a Solanasite, who knew what she was doing. Oh my goddess,' she said, as she lay on the prepared bed, 'I hope Judith's all right.'

  The regrets were not enough to keep her awake. I turned off the light and went into my office, switched on the computer and edited the Featherstone report. I felt I earned my sleep.

  In the morning, Meghan reassesses the state of her heart and wonders how Margot Gorman is getting on. She is glad now that Trina pretended to be her to get the detective to look into her finances to rile Jill. For once, Trina has done her a good turn. Having an instant coffee outside in the goatless paddock, amid the verdant grey stillness of the day, everything is changed. In the autumnal equipoise of temperature, there are no shadows. The sodden, south-facing block anchors her, sucks her in, challenges Meghan, a protean person. Complements her.

  She takes a walk. The water-table is high. Beneath the tangled carpet of kikuyu, her footfalls squelch. Violet skies hang over the west mountain range. Frogs agreeably croak. Meghan's mental and physical energies compete with the twang of her heart-strings, urging her to her new fad, her next thing. She feels free of the burden of Jill, her depressions, her demanding frustrated talents. Fuck artists, get a real job. She listens to the amphibians, slaps mosquitoes and remarks on the squawk of the young butcher birds. They hop around the top of the unfinished pigeon coop keeping an eye out for frogs to catch, to belt to death on a branch and hang in the naive, savage pride of nature. Meghan, an admirer of raptors and snakes, conceives the next target of her enthusiasm. Ecology. She will make a wild-life sanctuary, a non-people-friendly regeneration of her place. She'll plant koala trees, rip out the exotics, revive the indigenous seed source, study the subject, know it all, do it perfectly. Released from the squalid compromise of Jill's addiction and the financial drain, she goes back inside, refreshed, ready to clear up a few things.

  Fifty thousand looks like a lot of money to Trina, who like all the Featherstones is rigorously honest; Meghan has made it overnight. The tidiness of her papers in the drawer intimidates her, while she knows she must look through them and check what is really missing. First get rid of the mortgages: pay off St Lucia, for Trina; close the
joint account and fix up the rest of the loan on Lebanese Plains. On-line to the banks, it is all so quick, freeing up stock, selling some shares, transferring money, day-trading off the Nadir bonus, out of mines into sustainable energy companies and other sunrise industrials.

  Meghan finds the personal difficult. Jill is cheating with Rosemary Turner. She can't believe it. 'Trina might be mad but she is not dumb,' she says aloud. 'And, although she has a problem with me, she is loyal. She would not go off her tree unless there was something.' Meghan, now savagely motivated, makes a working clutter of the sterile tidiness. Her bodgie space-craft snaps, from a previous job, are gone. That is odd.

  Whatever the report and bill from Margot Gorman, Meghan writes a generous cheque, sticks a Post-it note on it with the word, 'thanks' and seals it in an envelope, which she addresses. She emails Libby Gnash to instigate invalidation of her contract and make it known to her employers that she will no longer be available for further consultancy. She also instructs her to get onto partner-before-Jill, ask her price and pay her with the proviso that she have no more harassment, no contact at all. 'Bargain with her,' she types, 'she'll be cheap.'

  There remains now for Meghan to clear it all up with Chandra Williams. Her creeks are too swift for her low-slung car. She sets out in her bush-walking gear, full kit.

  'Caroline, my first lover and sister-in-law, calls us the Spartan twins,' Virginia White was talking about her family, over coffee and heated-up frozen croissants. When we woke, it was late morning in a grey day and we were both hungry. 'She's a classics scholar.'