Darkness more visible

by Finola Moorhead

  Judith grimly grits her teeth until her jaws ache. Her calm craft belies the crabbing of her claws as she grasps the fibres. She is hungry. The groin muscle flexes and loosens as her foot on the pedal increases its rhythm She is the picture of the classic witch of history in the wickedness of her industry. 'I flee their fires, lit by a flaming torch, the bearer encouraged by crowds yelling in rapture for another's pain, mobs waiting to witness agony, to watch agony, the self-righteous spectators vicariously torturing each and every one of itself. I smell the flesh burning. I am one of the crowd. Without pain, whispering betrayal, using lies to survive. Howlingly afraid of death, willing to throw the blame at the flames, bleeding with frenzy, drunk and alive, crazy. In my dreams, in my meditation, I am gutting myself, angry and passionate; outside, I am cool, disinterested, mysterious. Smoky voice and silken hair. Silky voice and smoken hair. No one knows my soft long locks are dyed, that my one personal extravagance is exclusive hair products, hugely priced. No one knows I'm going grey. How can success turn so absolutely to such distress? I am restless, unbearably restless. I don't know what to do. My imagination was based on witches, wonderful witches, now I am haunted by visions of witch-burning. Time has warped and I am there. No one is here, but I am surrounded by accusatory fingers pointing as saints hoist me up on the rack. They poke at me. Aliens from other times have invaded my humble hut, caught me at my wheel, as if they have been hunting me down the centuries. Escape.'

  Judith has pure Anglo-Saxon heritage. English is the patois of her native soil, where her, her mother's, her grandmothers' and ancestors' umbilical cords are buried. Words cannot fail her. The language is her birthright. English names what she knows, and is as guiltless as she as it renders irrelevant tongues which speak of things outside the shop-keeping mentality. But Judith Sloane with this grasp of clarity has used her fluency to build castles in the air, to entrance and entrap, and above all, to fool herself.

  She can't remember exactly when she starting deliberately lying. Perhaps it was when she came to Australia and had to disguise her snobbery to get on the peace wagon of politics where the band was playing. Being true to her roots became unconscionable. While others were crudely calling for liberation with narrow vocabularies and clumsy syntax, she fell into habits of manipulation. At first she stooped from superior grammar to be understood but she sounded like a genius and they made her a star. Maybe the land itself, so geologically ancient, so murmuring with ghosts, mocked her sophistication, or, perhaps, the native people still communing with their spirits, with their hunting and their gathering, their culture struggling against the noble European heritage turned her away from speaking the truth.

  With the bullfrogs calling for more rain, Judith leaves her humpy. She is in need of honey and her car is garaged on the other side of the river, only a walk away. After striding across the paddocks then along the road, pursued by a whistling down a long corridor without a hint of echo, Judith pushes her way through the bush on a narrow track she knows well. The eerie sound of other-worldliness is distinctly in her ears. She feels an unholy cathedral about her. Walking very quickly to the gate on air-soled boots with advanced climbing treads, her passage is silent. Her plaid shirt tied round her waist by its arms until she reaches the road, she wears her vest and moleskins.

  Every moment or so, she handles the little pouch of gems and touches her wallet in her hip pocket. She is driven by the need to hide her wealth at the same time as have it. She wants to be done with Lesbianlands now, to be walking away with her treasure, autonomous, anonymous. No one is around. Even the dogs are sleeping. Let them lie. The looming weather, of course, has shooed the gurls to town. Nonetheless, she follows her habit of passing their places noiselessly by her own slightly divergent tracks. Surreptitious skills learnt in a dangerously sarcastic childhood and honed in a clever adulthood, she can be as still as an Hopi shaman. Her footsteps on the ground make no sound. Apart from honey for the moment, she also wants to be transported to the counter of the bank, requesting a box in her name in the vault.

  But the whistling continues in her ears with its aggravating lack of echo, ringing on her drums. She can hear nothing else. Currawongs open their beaks and lift their throats but she cannot hear them. A butcher bird in front of her stands on a low branch, dipping his head and carefully performing his beautiful call. It doesn't penetrate. The distant thunder booms, impending like doom. She hears that, she is not deaf.

  Judith Sloane becomes hot, unbearably hot. She perspires. It is muggy. No wind in the pre-storm air, not a breath. She takes a sidetrack, aiming for the river to cool off. The clouds build up, black and brutal. Thunder rumbles. Not a zephyr. No rain. The mountains of the Great Dividing Range close in. She is so hot. Her throat is dry. The path climbs. It shouldn't. She wants to go down. In her hurry to leave the house, she forgot her water bottle. More thunder. Overhead. She takes the next track down. When she finds the river, the bank is sheer. She is parched. Salty sweat is irritating her skin. She struggles along the water's course until she can slide in. She holds the pouch of rubies in her fist and skids as the skies crack.

  Hard sudden rain pelts down. Mud beneath her feet. She has no footing, she slips over the bank, into the creek. It is deep. Thunder is deafening. Lightning is close. She looks at it with horror, marking time, out of her depth.

  A shaft of electricity, a jagged snake of sharp sparks, strikes the conducting water. Judith cramps in shock. Her body shudders. Seconds later she is dead.

  The precipitation is as dense as five thousand years of women's tears. Hail strips gurls' vegetables and fruit trees. The springs that feed the Campbell River all open their faucets on full, fill the streams and get them flowing fast. It doesn't let up for hours. Rory's house on its stilts is marooned, the creeks roar and rise. Her swing bridge is swept away. Logs dislodge. Trees on the banks are torn out by their roots. Top soil shifts beneath lantana thickets. Land slides.

  The rain was a mighty waterfall surrounding all and sundry. My yard was so soggy there was no other way to the loo than along the concrete path, and that was slippery.

  After she and I had returned the boat and trailer to the yard of Lois and Thrust, picked up a litre of milk at the shop, some fresh rolls and the newspaper, Virginia had coffee and muesli and was on her way. What a big, strong woman, with a practical bent and a lust for life, a brilliant mind and a sense of compassion and humour! 'Safe journey, friend,' I slapped her back in a sisterly hug, and grinned. We all waved her off through the curtain of drips from the guttering of my front verandah.

  When I begin a love relationship, I cease to need to write. Communication is all showing, not saying; displaying and being, not describing and reflecting; and anyway, who has the time to sit alone and put it down? A gear changes. Time is needed for the precious little things in the company of the beloved. Life goes into overdrive and you cruise along; everything is in the present tense. You're travelling. The landscape's changing and you are at your destination. Each moment is delicious and unique, full of history and mystery. Each passing fancy is magnified to magic, as if a zoom lens is attached to your eye bringing the close-up closer and blurring the background into a magnificent impressionism of colour. Oh dear.

  I just loved everybody. Well, all those who stayed in my home anyway. If I could sing I would sing. Rory and Meghan fought over sections of the fresh paper for the few moments it was a folded thing, Rory, eventually, getting the news and Meghan, the business pages and sport. I gave Chandra breakfast in bed. When I went back to the kitchen for refills from the teapot, each had her elbows on the open broadsheet, page two in Rory's case. They were in earnest discussion about the nature of money. If I hadn't had Chandra to go to, I would have enjoyed joining in and, no doubt, I would have learnt something. Such an embarrassment of riches!

  Alison phoned and we all talked to Penny. Four stories she got. A squared-off picture of the events of last night was more than I could give by myself. I was chuffed. She wouldn't get better than that. Then I
remembered the cheque in my pants and recovered my payment from the laundry basket. The rain was steady and hard. When we had all showered, there was one urgent matter on the agenda, according to Meghan. The rest of us didn't mind.

  Hope Strange stands beneath the tin roof that Trivia erected, walled by sheets of water. She hears the big waterfall roaring as well as the sound of new ones and the crashing of trees. The pelting is deafening overhead. The sun goes dark. The black cloud pauses theatrically and passes. Thunder and lightning pursue their path before the ferocious wind. The storm moves on its way, leaving steady rain.

  'Chapter 16, verse 18, And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake and so great,' Hope shouts, almost laughing, ever-remembering the Bible-bashing since birth. 'Whatever, whatever, whatever,' she continues. 'The cities of great nations fell. Da da. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication. Ah ha, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, MOTHER OF…um, and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration.' Hope strides like an actor in the role of a preacher performing to the weather as if her open cabin were a proscenium arch. 'And the angel said unto me, Wherefore didst I marvel? I will tell thee of the mystery of the woman, and of the beast that carrieth her, which hath seven heads and ten horns. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah,' Hope is quite suddenly infinitely bored. So she knows the Apocalypse off by heart, so what?

  Later on in the day, when the rain eases a bit, she dresses in an oilskin. Keeping to high ground, circling the gullies, she enters the rainforest and approaches the sculpture from above. It is not there. She wonders if she is lost. The bush has reconfigured itself. The creek is unrecognisably wide and raging like a torrent. It is dangerous to descend any lower. She goes to the top of the waterfall, which in itself is a moment of splendour in magnificent wilderness. She can't get to Virginia's house, or Rory's, so Hope squishes her way across the high ridges to Judith's. No one is home but spiders, pigeons cooing their loft and sheep huddled together under a couple of trees in a bundle looking like boulders.

  She lights the fire and hunts about for something to read. There in the book-case in a box like a book is a stack of passports. English, South African, German, Australian and one from New Zealand, her own. Hope O'Lachlin. With her date of birth altered. How bizarre! She finds an Agatha Christie paperback, snuggles up in the sheepskins and reads out the rain, when hungry eating tinned fish.

  Rory, Chandra, Meghan and Margot are all in the one car, the Subaru station wagon. Tess and Nikki are in the back. It's crowded.

  'Well there's no way I'm going to get in for a few days,' Rory comments from the passenger side of the front seat.

  'Nope,' agrees Meghan.

  'That's okay. You can bunk down in my barn as long as you like,' Chandra offers. Margot gazes over the speckling cloth of water that was a grazing paddock. Wading birds high step and spear food while the dairy cows crowd on an island of raised earth. She must get back to photography soon, she muses.

  The women are going for lunch at a macrobiotic café up on Hippi Sitti plateau where there's an art exhibition. But first they are checking on Meghan Featherstone's goats.

  After she turns off the highway and as they begin the hairpin bends of the steep climb, Chandra remarks on the crazy driving of the trucker in front of them. All four are fascinated.

  'Well we won't be passing him, that's for sure, not on this road,' Chandra says firmly.

  'Look at that!' A motor-bike leaning into the corner coming down narrowly misses the big white semi-trailer. All the lights on the cabin begin flashing like Christmas decorations.

  'This bloke's crazy!' Rory reckons.

  'Maybe he's scared,' mutters Margot, quite frightened herself.

  'Amber caution lamps, blinkers, headlights and tail-lights, stop-lights and backing lights, how can they all go on together?' wonders Rory.

  'Oops, okay, he's turned them off now,' Chandra enters the mood.

  Margot is, uncharacteristically, a bundle of nerves. The others can hear terror in her voice. 'Don't you think it would be a good idea to stop and let him get away?'

  'Yeah, but where?' accedes Chandra

  'There's a look-out up here a bit, not far.' Meghan points.

  'Meanwhile, let him get ahead,' croaks Margot.

  'Okay,' Chandra says. 'Don't get your knickers in a knot.'

  The path of the Freightliner is chaotic. It is fortunate Ian Truckman is having to drive slowly in low gear; he has no hope of keeping to his side of the road. Cars coming in the downhill direction pull out onto the shoulder to let him pass.

  'Here it is. On your right.' Meghan tells Chandra.

  Chandra turns into a scenic parking bay which would give a great view of the Campbell River valley and the escarpments of the Great Dividing Range. Margot gets out and tosses a raincoat over her head and shoulders. In front of her, the wooded cliff is precipitous, showing the tops of pencil palms, palmettos and ancient gums of wide girth.

  'Wow!' Chandra winds down her window filling her senses, 'I'm glad we had to stop here. It's wonderful.'

  'Is that the river,' exclaims Rory. 'I have never seen it so wide!'

  'It used to be like that before they cleared and irrigated,' says the now keen ecologist, Meghan. 'But in this weather, you couldn't tell the sheep from the goats.'

  'Listen,' yells Margot. The horn of the semi makes a racket like an intermittent siren. They look towards the piece of road they can see further up. The truck comes into view weaving erratically. 'He's not going to make it.' Margot jumps back in the car.

  Beyond the verge of the road there is a sheer drop. A stubby fence of corrugated white tin is all that separates the horizontal camber from the vertical decline. The truck hurtles through it. White Virgin is airborne before it plummets into the bush many metres below. The rig bursts into flame and the petrol tanks ignite. Several explosions occur one after another. The acrid smoke makes the rain smell dirty. Chandra shuts her window.

  Ian Truckman is incinerated.

  'Thank the goddess for this downpour,' says hard-hearted Meghan. 'Means he won't start a bushfire.' The conflagration is snuffed. The detonations cease. The wreck turns into a smoking blackened mess of twisted metal. Meghan, Margot, Chandra and Rory leave other road-users to do their civilian duty, but, in discussion, agree that nothing can be done anyway.

  The juggernaut ended up is pretty well inaccessible. Witnessing the death by fire and the love in her heart burns an abiding phobia out of Margot Gorman's system.

  They decide to eat before they search for the farm where Curly Cue and her sisters are staying. Lentil burgers, zucchini quiche, baked brown rice, stuffed mushrooms, cottage cheese, alfalfa sprouts, green tomato fritters, paw paw smoothies, mineral water, garden salad. They have the place to themselves. Pottery and craft of varying levels of talent crowd shelves along the wall and are for sale. Watercolour landscapes share the walls with horrid oil-crayon abstracts. They are waited on by a large man with a white beard and long pony-tail who talks about climate changes.

  When he returns to his cooking, Meghan rudely asks Margot and Chandra, 'How was it?'

  It is Rory who blushes, Margot notices. Chandra is lusty and cheerful in reply.

  Unaware that two things, amazingly, floated during the storm, they enjoy their afternoon. Meghan's goats are happily housed in a tractor shed, munching lucerne hay.

  The wool on the backs of Judith's sheep gets wetter and wetter.

  The boat floats. As the creek rushes down to river, in the gloom of continuing rain, the Amazon ship catches tangles of vicious vine and drags out lumps of lantana. The adzed log spins in the whirls and curls, destroying gangs of weeds, dislodging pockets of darkness, embracing she-oaks and wattles, opening up new possibilities for enjoyment of landscape and sky. Eventually it lodges between two bould
ers in a curve of the creek, the prow high over a swimming hole of the future, the aft in an incidental waterfall quite close to where Virginia escaped from the cave. The exploratory mines fill up.

  The body of Judith Sloane surfs the cataracts downstream. Jagged branches and exposed roots tear the clothing off her limbs until the corpse is naked. The little leather sachet of rubies sinks to the floor of the tributary and, avoiding the currents, settles among the pebbles. The corpse gets dragged down by snags, and stays caught beneath the surface of the deep pool in the dark bend of the river which Chandra told Margot was the waters of Lethe.

  Coming to the end of her journey when the moon is rising just before dusk, Virginia is at her nephew's home by the kids' bed-time. They are three and four and a half.

  'Read us a story without a book, Auntie Gin.'

  'Okay.' Virginia leans in the doorway, and begins, 'When you go to sleep, you'll find a dream and in that dream there is a stream and in the stream there is a fish and in the fish there is a wish…'

  eBook Info

  Title:Darkness More Visible

  Creator:Finola Moorhead

  Subject:Literature, Fiction, Crime fiction, Lesbian fiction

  Description:When Margot Gorman finds a body in the women's toilets a tangle of mysteries opens up. Margot Gorman, ex-cop, is now a free agent, a triathlete and has the equivalent of perfect pitch in the sense of smell and, naturally, is a connoisseur of good wine. From murder and kidnap, drug dealing and gay bashing, to illegal mining and an underground network of cyberfeminists - the Solanacites - there are many skeins to be unravelled. A complex and intriguing novel that deals with the selfhood of women, it ranges from musings on the Amazons to a self-sufficient community in Australia's womenslands. There is mystery and philosophical enquiry in money, madness, motherhood and much more. Finola Moorhead is the author of the award winning novel, Still Murder, the classic feminist novel, Remember the Tarantella and of a collection of essays and stories, Quilt.