Darkness more visible Page 11

  Uniformed officers were coming and going as I stood at the front desk. I didn't have to wait long. Philippoussis took me up to a bare interview room on the second floor. Alone we relaxed a bit. I signed the statement which he read out. It was close enough. When he asked, I did not expand much on the barbecue personnel. Apparently they had given statements. They knew nothing. In his mind, I had no connection with them, nor were any of the gays too drunk or doped. He shrugged when I asked disinterested questions.

  We chatted. He was fixed on the coincidence of the two different deaths on one night, in one small part of the world.

  A theorist, Phil. He said, 'It all seems consistent with an established profile of a manslaughter involving drinking, drugs, kids, the beach, a Friday night, careless sex, mixture of marijuana, alcohol and hopelessness. Car accidents. Violence happens. But in this case, I reckon there was a relationship between the two.'

  'Girl overdoses in toilet block, boyfriend freaks out, takes off, totals his car and himself. Tragic but not unusual. Do you think she was raped?' I asked automatically.

  He looked at me steadily for a moment. 'She was not really a she. She was a he. A lad in drag.'

  'No way!' I was stunned.

  Philippoussis had not been one of the cops who interviewed me on the night, so he was surprised I, with my background, had not examined the body, at least rudimentarily. I had not. Not a cop, just a civvy witness who wouldn't disturb a possible crime scene, I had gone to the toilet and closed the door on a very young corpse slumped into a concrete corner, slack and wasted, skinny legs in black tights spreadeagled out from a mini-skirt, hair black-hennaed, and make-up. Far too much make-up.

  The words 'White virgin?' popped out of my mouth, as I remembered the grimy Nadir company cap I took home.

  'It is hard to tell whether a boy is a virgin or not,' DC Philippoussis said, meditatively and ironically at the same time. 'We'll know more after the full PM. The body will be on ice for a few days. Because he was found where he was, and how he was, there will have to be a coronial investigation into the cause of his death.'

  He was still pondering my question. 'But I don't think he was raped. No anal bruising. Could have had sex though. How would you know? Ejaculation often occurs in the death throes. Bodily reaction to leaving this world. But, as I said, we will have to wait for the pathologist's report.'

  I rather liked the way he took my silly question seriously, without prejudice.

  'Too many dead youths in rural New South Wales,' he continued. 'Wish we could do something about it, but resources, you know. They have to do an autopsy when someone dies in suspicious circumstances, but I want a full one for both boys. Forensic medicine is not a glam job among the medicos these days. Did a paper at uni on it. Stats show huge discrepancies between certified causes of death and post-mortem findings. Doctors are too scared of litigation to find out exactly how their patients die. But,' he said, uncertainly, 'they could try to put them both to bed and throw the investigation away. Save money.'

  Phil, I guessed, would be about ten years my junior. I recognised the bloodhound in him. He wanted to find the answers, the complete picture, regardless of cut-backs. A matter of urgency, he wanted to be sure these deaths were not homicide. His first murder would be an important point in his career. I was friendly to this man, and not only because he was easy to look upon, easy to be with. Rather, my ulterior motive was to have, for future reference in my career as a PI, a trustworthy ally with access to Criminal Intelligence files. Not a bad thing to build up a network of contacts.

  Lisa has been missing all weekend, according to the mother of the teenage girl. Since the fight she rang me about on Saturday. After the cop shop and before meeting Margaret Hall in the industrial area, I set about this paying job.

  Heroin addiction is seen as sexy in the fashion industry. Stockbrokers and dentists and architects, who sit around their low-slung coffee tables on a Sunday afternoon, taking a line of recreational smack with their chardonnay and chilled bottled water, could lobby to stop the senseless, expensive war on drugs, but they don't. All charm collapses when you get among the teenagers trying to be chic. While the professionals' own cheeks are rosy in the mirror, they are entertained by the hard-angled shots of bony girls with black-rimmed eyes in slummy backgrounds, glossy art photography on their walls. Stoned and self-satisfied, they are cushioned by money. Corporate lawyers with mates at the bar of the criminal courts get paid so much for protecting the high financiers who knock out a few small economies with a stroke of the pen or a swear word on the phone, don't need their delicious, naughty pleasures to be cheap especially. No doubt, like clothes, the more expensive the better. If they could buy it like the Bollinger with a credit card at Liquorland I would be happier.

  The war on drugs must be maintained! So many resources are bound up in it; manpower, money, policy. Not to say corruption. The black economy playing a game of chess with the white economy: pawns are dispensable; and there are pawns on both sides. I have been a white pawn, even though I thought I was a knight. We were, in the Authority, disgusted by the futility of our work when we got evidence against the high-flying criminal, often a respected man of money. We would get the case to court, only to be defeated by clever legal shenanigans. While everyone knew they had done it, they would walk away on a technicality, free, laughing. Not a blot on the copy-books of the oh-so-dignified, expensive barristers, their reputations stay pristine. The foot soldiers of the black economy, the cannon fodder, are addicts about the place who, however they got there, are in such pain there is no better thing than its obliteration. Whether, to begin with, it is physical, emotional, social or psychological—possibly feisty anger at political injustice—it becomes the addicts' personal problem. They need escape. They have a hit to get rid of the discomfort, and it's dreamy and cool. I have sat down and listened to their 'cool', and heard excuses, justification, cynicism and a lack of compassion for others which, as I thought of it, mirrored the scorn of the powerful with their total lack of conscience. 'Hey man, you're wrecked.' The victim and the victors are two sides in the one game, a mentality, a moral cancer in our society. In the victim's morning there's no ache worse than his, it's the worst—the starving millions in the world, well, knowing about that just contributes to his pain. 'Like you're travelling, man, in paradise lost, but you know where to find heaven, for a day,' a poet-junkie explained to me in an interview room once. 'You just have to score.'

  Two dead boys. So much for heroin chic, glorified decadence! My high is health. I have seen heroin make heroines of the victims of incest. Fathers and stepfathers breaking the daughters to perpetuate the suffering cycle of worthlessness to make them available for the brotherhood later in life. Lisa, her mother has told me, did not suffer any trauma or abuse in her early childhood; she was more spoilt than anything. However, you never know. I went out to find the girl.

  So far as a country's resources go, the war on drugs is a waste of money. And lining some very interesting pockets. I still consider blowing the whistle on a few individuals I have the facts about, but is it worth my life? I rode my bike to escape, but they chase me, keeping an eye on my every move, even way outback where there would be nothing but me and a road-train. In that cabin, a CB radio, 'breaker, breaker, she's here, she's there. Roger and out.' The juggernaut of corruption with mechanical tentacles electronically connected on all the band-widths lets its shadow fall on me whenever they feel the need to activate my fear. There is no way I can convince them I am no threat, short of working for them. And that, I will not do.

  Lisa is fourteen years old. I had fetched her home before. The old crime, 'in moral danger', a case of the missing consonant, in mortal danger. It could have been she in the toilet block.

  Down the streets of Port Water, into the arcade, up to the seats outside the foyer of the flicks, glancing at stills of Bruce Willis blowing up something in motion picture action, silhouetted in flames, I found kids were hanging around with not enough money to go to the
movies. Among skateboards and drippy hair, I found no Lisa. Port Water, a town dedicated to tourism, has a big marina for ocean-going yachts, bars, cafés and motels, fun parks and little zoos, pleasures on sale everywhere, water-skiing with a parachute and, outside the breakwater, deep-sea fishing. One of the most popular places on the eastern seaboard, it is perfect for the dropping off of mega-millions of dollars worth of dope, cocaine and heroin. A rusty junk of illegal immigrants beached a few months ago.

  The teenagers, wearing baggies so big both hands in pockets were needed to hold them up, bringing their shoulders forward in a hunch, but carefully showing bright boxer silks underneath, were not cynical or unhelpful. Their hair was parted in the middle to hang vertically over the cheeks, speckled with angry pimples from a diet of coke and french fries, which rarely bunch into a smile; it emphasised a kind of worried look, a worry in itself. I asked questions and got monosyllabic responses. Eventually extracting a clue, I went out to the new suburbs where brick veneer, road-works and roofscapes are replacing, at a rapid rate, the banksia, tea-tree, paperbark scrub of the coast. Houses on stilts dip into gullies of remaining rainforest. The natural contours of hills gently rising from the sea were covered by dwellings for humans seeking a view.

  The schoolkids were in the rumpus room under the main part of the new four bed-roomed 'bungalow', beside the two-car garage. Five lads and Lisa lolled, half-standing, leaning, their eyes attached to the light of the screen, indifferent to my entrance. The computer monitor showed garish colour and jerky movement. The action looked pretty horrendous to me. Choosing the boy seated as the most probable line of articulation, I asked were they old enough for this stuff. I found out that this game had not yet received a rating from the Office of Film and Literature Classification. They giggled, proud as smart youngsters. It was only a trial version, freely available on the Internet. While the graphics were amazing, the depiction of competition and violence was horrifying. The boys with their loopy eyes were fascinated. Lisa looked bored. She had accepted that I had come for her, and, although not evidendy keen, was acquiescent. For her I was an easy way home. We left the boys to their virtual aggression.

  'Don't you think the nature of those games has some effect on how depressed you are?' I asked her in the car.

  'I'm not depressed,' she said with dying fall.

  'No?' I was incredulous. 'You look it.'

  She whined, 'I was just having fun.' Her voice sounded morose.

  'Whatever happened to swimming, playing hockey? Sports? I used to surf after school, or when I wagged,' I talked, determined to get something out of her.

  'Like go groan,' she said. 'Computers are cool. Chat pages are real cool. Nerds are really cool. Surfies are dorks.'

  I asked about the sexual material on the World Wide Web I had heard so much about.

  'It sucks. I belong to Let's Wait. It started in America. You don't do it till you're married,' she explained, becoming serious. 'You know, it's about health too. You don't catch anything that way.'

  Her mother figured it was cheaper hiring me than ending up with a daughter with a drug habit, health problems or criminal tendencies. Lisa's lift home cost her mother a hundred bucks. By the time we got into the shopping centre, Lisa had convinced me she would be all right, no matter what. Her mother worked in a travel agency, and walked with the brisk clippedy-clop confidence of a business lady. Her money was well spent. Lisa sloped off along side her.

  Lisa, who stayed out nights without saying where she was, belonged to some on-line right-wing youth movement which restricted sex before marriage. How bizarre!

  Chandra communicates with a woman from Thailand, initiating a signature campaign on behalf of a Burmese group. Then she emails RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, who have requested notes of solidarity to their office in Islamabad. Home and the world have become different places since the advent and expansion of the World Wide Web. Chandra hopes for no interruptions as she has so much to do. When she returns to one of her own webpages, someone has altered the background: how?

  Virginia has an efficient vehicle, a white Holden Rodeo, four-wheel-drive, 2.8-litre turbo diesel dual-cab ute, which she services herself in the garage of a friend, sometimes leaving it there while she rides around Stuart on her bike. Recently she replaced the gearing on her old Malvern Star, and showed Cybil, which must have given her the idea about this triathlon thing.

  A station wagon is hanging off the bridge. She drives through the creek, carefully avoiding large boulders. Because of the intensity of her thinking, she detours to Rory's place. They have a cup of tea together. Rory tells her about the bridge and the proposed meeting. Virginia nods. She, then, talks. They talk.

  For thirty years, the SCUM Manifesto has been Rory's bible. Every time she rolls a cigarette, she imagines Valerie doing the same. It is a prayer ritual for her.

  Rory shows Virginia a picture of Andy Warhol in the weekend newspaper's colour supplement, the 'weird, wigged-out creature who glamorised the banal'. She shakes her head, but she reads on, '"a void needs filling and one of Andy Warhol's objectives in life seemed to be to make himself exactly that: a void, a cipher, an empty mirror on which people could project anything and everything", a hollow man, a vacuum.' She nods. 'He was a working-class boy enamoured of the products and values of capitalist popular culture that the middle class take for granted, infatuated with the stardom of Hollywood's icons, less understandable as an evil genius than a compelling, slippery historical accident, a celebrity freak. This is the bloke Valerie Solanas chose to shoot, to practise what she preached. No wonder he did not die, there was no heart to hit.'

  Virginia laughs, 'No blood in his veins but lies and hypocrisy, rip off and greed. The woman was a genius. You're not wrong. I met Warhol once.'

  Rory enthuses, 'This little lonely avatar predicted the backlash world before the second wave of feminism. Before! She is a kind of John the Baptist to our new faith.'

  Virginia, not the first to notice that ex-Catholics never lose the connection between behaviour and belief, says, 'Yeah, he was a scared man, but I was a post-modernist then.'

  Rory continues, 'And Ti-Grace Atkinson is Peter, or Paul, the strategist?'

  'Geez, Rory, it's years since I read those works. But I'll have another look. Could be interesting.'

  'Before she could gather about her a tribe of apostles, before I could meet her, affirm her and hug her. Valerie's main friend was a drag queen! We have come so far,' she impresses her point with a fist on the table. 'We have land, we have community, we have visibility, we have strength, brains and some level of solidarity with her vision. But what have we done with her legacy?'

  'The revolutionary movement has gone further underground, on the net. Discovered it on Cybil's computer,' Virginia reassures Rory.

  'That's it,' states Rory. 'I have to get one.' They talk about solar power, battery hours, the nuts and bolts of alternative energy until Rory's decision has gelled into a number of pragmatic steps.

  As she is about to leave, Virginia mentions Cybil's request, with a grin. 'Swimming, cycling, running.'

  Rory says, 'She's trying to make a fool of you, VeeDub. They train for those things. She has you by the short and curlies.'

  'That's going too far, Rory. It's chemistry, right? What goes on between two women? Who can explain it?' Virginia asks, dramatically.

  'No, fair dinkum,' Rory is serious. 'She wants to publicly humiliate you. But don't worry. I'll organise the gurls and we'll be there. You'll have a fan club.'

  Virginia laughs. 'Okay, I'll win.'

  'Will you? Rory laughs. 'You'll never beat Margot, she's a professional.'

  'Should be fun, anyway,' Virginia concedes.

  Standing together, outside amidst the dripping trees, Rory asks, 'The Internet is a maze, a labyrinth, a safe underground for a Solanasite Conspiracy?'

  'Why not?' encourages Virginia. 'Or you could call it Penthesilea's Revenge.'

  'Yes, I'm working on gett
ing on-line, already.' Rory rubs her palms together.

  'Good, I'd better be off.' Virginia, finally, goes.