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  Unlike Virginia White, Rory passionately believes in written language. She avidly studies the IT sections of her newspaper. The female connotations of the World Wide Web, the words used, are spinsterish. She thinks this must have some meaning, as do those for the nuclear arsenal which are penile and phallic: missile erector and deep penetration of certain weapons. It is etymological.

  In the supermarket a mother and teenage son were having a long conversation about bread. An exchange of rare interest to them both, as they didn't want to stop. They went from the merits of budget white to those of soy and linseed without argument. It was a discussion, a closeness. I felt as if I had dreamed this moment.

  'What about genetically altered produce?' he said. Like mother, like son.

  In a shed behind a fibro house near the industrial area, I bought a secondhand computer from a Mr Hacker with an electronic voice. Strange but true. He must have suffered throat cancer and had his vocal cords replaced with an amplifier. For a man who spoke through a tube, he was incredibly impatient. It cost the same as a dozen bottles of Leeuwin Estate Art Series, which offer from my wine club I had to decline. The printer is a new one, a laser. Very nice copy for my reports.

  Margaret Hall came with me and we had coffee together afterwards. Penthouse, Playboy and various soft porn glossies, full of explicit photos, were the magazine reading for the customers of this place while they waited for their fast food. 'What if guys wanted to read something else? What if they were religious, family men?'

  Margaret shrugged, 'They probably bring a cut lunch, prepared by the better half who will make sure that he has eaten it. Somehow. The brothel's just over there, busiest time when the wife and kids are at the movies. Weekends. Otherwise, the working week, lunchtime.' I watched her spoon sugar into the foam of her cappuccino.

  She said then, with a laugh, 'It's basically useless, Margot.'

  'Why?' I asked, indignant. 'Why did you let me buy it?'

  'Because it is too old to get on-line, or collect email. That's where the action is. And you said you only want to have a filing system that doesn't take up too much room, for book-keeping and databases,' she explained. Margaret turned out to be the type of cyberchick who knows so much, she withholds all information until she feels safe. 'The World Wide Web is like a mine,' she continued. 'There's a lot of rubble to wade through but you can find some jewels.' A sudden, though slight, change came over her face when she glanced at me. Obviously she took me for an electronic age moron and dropped the subject. Or she really did not want me to have the latest equipment for my profession and my work.

  But I let my suspicions ride, and shrugged. 'It'll do for financial records of my renovations, my hobbies and my personal life. Spreadsheets. Typing out reports, won't it? Don't want to download viruses from the net.'

  'Sure,' she didn't care. 'This community is full of drama-addicts,' she opined, fishing for exactly the same gossip she criticised. Although she wanted to know my weakness, for some reason, at that time and place, being pre-menstrual, I raved on, carefully omitting gossip about Maria and Sofia, the dead boy and Meghan Featherstone, concentrating on myself. Our mutual friend was my ex-lover.

  'Broom can't even afford the time to telephone me,' I concluded.

  'Actions speak louder than words, they say,' she said. 'It is a matter of honour among lesbians to remain friends after a break-up. You've got to work at it.'

  Margaret shook more sugar from its little paper package onto her palm.

  'Well,' I allowed myself to express the anger of hurt, 'She couldn't give a flying fuck. What a hypocrite, what a coward! Witch!'

  'So, it's over, Margot. You're dumped. And you're feeling all the abandonment you ever had,' said she, indifferently, as she licked her hand. I couldn't imagine anyone getting close to Margaret. She seemed to have a glass wall around her. Friends were species to be examined.

  'Broom's just a lovable spoilt brat. Some women are sex objects very young, treated like little princesses by mild, smug patriarchs who do not have to resort to violent behaviour. They use a reward system, flattery, education, money, contacts, you name it. Broom hates her mother, right? I find, especially with spoilt brats of the middle class, the mother is cast as some bitch, either faceless and frigid or righteous and hidebound with conservative values. There are spoilt brats in the proletariat and some middle-class girls aren't spoilt brats. Viragos, misers, madwomen, nymphomaniacs, just women trying to keep their end up, trying to take power over their own lives, difficult when he has everything and she has to beg. I think Broom's parents were in the Hitler Youth.'

  'I made a bit of an effort, but—' I hesitated, wondering what danger am I? 'Seems she can't be bothered ringing me.'

  Margaret looked around as she spoke. 'I think she's into some ecofeminist trip, saving the trees up north.'

  Jealousy stirred like a beast in my breast. After so much time.

  Margaret picked up some loose packets of white sugar from a neighbouring table. Her face was pale, dark rings under her eyes.

  'When you're the injured party,' I tried to explain, though it was stale news, 'everyone avoids you, you're a pain in the neck, no one wants to hear you bellyache.' I let myself open up to Margaret, to whom I was no more than a curiosity. 'Words get taken out of context onto the grapevine and one becomes a character in someone else's story.' I felt like bitching.

  When we had said goodbye, I went off wondering why Margaret Hall had offered to help me buy a computer when the one I acquired was less than perfect. She wanted to make sure of that? She wanted to assess me for herself.

  The industrial estate outside Stuart borders on a banana plantation and State Forest. The rain eased a bit and I took a run around its utilitarian streets. Broom made me love myself. She was this wonderful mirror who laughed at my jokes and excited my senses. I missed that.

  Having the extremes in this area, you would think you'd have tolerance, but you don't. You have random acts of hatred, the odd brutal massacre and mutilation of wildlife, yet you have koala hospitals and FAWNA for the rescue of native animals and birds. Organised xenophobia in new neo-Nazi political parties as well as peace-love festivals of reconciliation attended by the wannabee Aborigines dressed in Red Indian clobber, exclusive gatherings, everywhere; multiculturalism within the monoculture of capitalism. Freedom! Primary staples of rural Australia were here: fish, fruit, beef, milk, timber, and mining. Service businesses. Diehard right-wingers share the grocers, pubs, clubs and video stores with way-out alternative types. Perhaps, I thought as I jogged along a fire trail, the diverse values can be expressed in attitudes to dirt. From neurotic cleanliness, attacking germs, and those people have gardens ruled off like school projects, with pretty flowers all in a row, coloured-in, to such blind passion for nature that to wash your hair or wear leather is criminal, so they go about barefooted and grubby in a uniform of ratbaggery, great for camping in front of bulldozers in pristine forests and endangered wetlands.

  Serious rain. I drove through the new suburbs, windscreen-wipers thrashing, and decided to stop for a work-out and shower. When I got to the gym Sean was not there. Instead, Tiger Cat was hail-fellow, well-met, loud, friendly, too open, and too cunning. She was hanging about on the weights, watching the door. Expecting me? Checking on me? As soon as I entered, she was ready to leave what she was doing to come up to me. She brought my attention to the absence of my trainer and friend, claiming an intimacy with him that must have been exaggerated. I asked her if she was staying on the Paradise Coast. She smirked. I asked her whether she was working or holidaying, to which she responded, 'Always on the job, you know me, having a great time, wish you were here.' It was supposed to be funny.

  Silently, I worked my stomach muscles, shoulders, neck; I did sit-ups and back stretches. Tiger Cat asked me if there was anything wrong. I didn't answer.

  And, when I was leaving, she called across the room, 'Remember me to the mob.'

  'I will,' I replied, and intended to.

  No gym-ju
nkie myself, I can work anger and loneliness out of the system in training and competition. Tiger Cat had less body fat than I; probably never bleeds.

  Instead of taking the vehicular ferry, I came home the long way past the place where the boy was killed in the car crash. The river road has many bends and a covering of road metal. Loose stones lessen the corrugations you get on sandy dirt roads, but are hazardous. I saw the skid marks, the broken fence, a marvellous old twisted tree torn at the trunk and some shattered glass on the verge. I wondered who the lad was—one of the brave young men I heard hooning that evening?

  Alison rang, telling me she really had to get away from Chandra's place, but she was not feeling safe in her own house. She rattled on about the corpse in the toilet block at the beach in such a way I found it inappropriate to tell her what I had discovered today.

  'By the way, heard of a bod called Tiger Cat?' I probed, lightly.

  Her voice changed. It dropped a complete octave as she said, 'There are undercover cops sniffing about.'

  'So you know what she's doing here?' I made so as to ask.

  'We are certain that someone creepy is creeping around. We don't know that it's not you, do we?' Alison sounded crazy.

  'No, you don't,' I said sharply. 'What the hell are you talking about? And, who's we, exactly?' I asked. Are you at angry at me? Or pigs in general?'

  'I can't tell you,' she answered.

  Controlling my tone, I signed off with, 'See you then.'

  Having eaten a bland vegetable pasta with a glass of quaffing chianti, mentally trying to realign my life from the self-interest of training for athletic events to the work of detective, I set up at my new second-hand computer.

  The phone rang. 'Ready for Sunday?' he said, referring to the local halftriathlon.

  'Yes, Sean, I know. End of season, and after one down the coast, then we'll see if I'm going overseas, won't we?' I fumed. 'Where were you today?'

  'Sorry,' Sean said, then reminded me that my contract with Nike depended on my next two performances.

  The rain resolved to a steady drumbeat, surrounding my house like a doona of wet down. I attacked the new keyboard. Figuring out the software, I contemplated the labyrinthine ways of cyberspace, but found it hard to share the manic enthusiasm of Margaret. I am a down-to-earth person. I need to feel things, taste them, see them to be convinced of their actual reality. Virtual reality is a puzzle to me because there is no smell. My intuition—my confidence—needed to be grounded. Apparently, computers are as addictive as playing the pokies.

  Meghan Featherstone's financial papers were neatly clipped together at the top and unevenly stacked at the bottom. There were two signatures one above the other. In the sideways glimpse I gave the documents as I was taking them out of the file, I could see they were actually nothing alike. These autographs had been written by different hands. I sat back again and quickly rifled through, looking for other examples. As I focused it became harder to see the disparity between days, pens, moods and hands. So I had to track down the forgery. I placed the pile carefully in my Fair Dinkum Bargain basket. I picked it up again, shuffling through, frowning, rechecking her bank statements. Some months simply weren't here. A strange memo about world weather conditions.

  With more interest in working with unfamiliar software than in Meghan Featherstone I set up a file. I listed descriptions of the documents I had been sent. The covering letter, typed on an old-fashioned typewriter, was hasty. It claimed she was being ripped off, that she was so vague and other-worldly she didn't keep tabs on things like she should and would I investigate for her. Strange way to speak about yourself. I went through the scraps of paper, mostly junk, incomplete, haphazard, thrown into a manila envelope and sent. As a matter of course I placed her signature against the one on a homespun contract. Touch and go. A weird document, a kind of prerelationship break-up agreement made in the heat of love, this contract stated that the uneven income ratio obliged Meghan to look after her lover for five years after they had finished for all the housework, handiwork and gardening undertaken by the one without paid work. Worthless, really, as it wasn't dated or witnessed properly. There was here no evidence of theft, just a mess.

  More than anything I was annoyed because I did not understand the job I had to do and the documentation did not help. For instance, a Post-it note with the words 'take the "f" out of life and you have lie'; so? The March and September bank statements were missing, although large debits were circled in other months. Only a couple of cheque butts accorded with receipts. I did not have Visa card statements, only a scribble on an invoice saying, paid by Visa. This was ridiculous. I imagined credit cards to be the easiest means for a stranger to steal one's money. Not having a lot of detective work at the moment, I took it on as a bona fide job. Paper chases were not my speciality. One telephone call, my handwriting on my notepad: Meghan Featherstone suspects she is being ripped off. Will send over paperwork. A phone number. A PO Box address. First, it seemed I would have to find out for myself if she was in fact being ripped off.

  Half-way through this work, I decided my leg was being pulled. In one of the letters, a personal one with an illegible signature, the point was made about the new Family Law Act, which includes gay couples in the same category as de facto heterosexual partners if they have lived together more than nine months. I gave up and wrote in my diary from letterheads the names of her solicitor and accountant. Leg-work and face to face contact would sort out whether a joke was being played on me or not. Fishy business. Have to be on the spot to sniff out the red herring.

  Before I wasted my time chasing her advisors, I would meet the lady herself. No one who earned that much money could be so stupid as to send me (or anyone) all this stuff.

  The rain is pelting down. Quickly the creeks fill up in the majestic landscape of the Ranges; the escarpment of the Cavanagh Gorge National Park instantly turns into series of waterfalls; the flowing streams join the Campbell River with eagerness; the variety of wildlife, orchids, goannas drink to satiety; the dwellings of the gurls become hidden by over-hanging branches and low visibility.

  As the moon rides wild horses made of cloud, Margot Gorman bleeds.

  Book Two

  motherhood

  Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday

  Tuesday's child is full of grace

  9

  …his mother's only joy…

  Some time in the night, I bled. The gratifying stink of menses greeted me from my own bed-sheets. I woke up a different woman. No longer cranky but a bit ragged, I felt full of potential. Energy just around the corner from the ache, good timing so far as the triath goes. On the clock-radio, I heard a man's voice recite, 'he was his mother's only joy'. Because the rain was so heavy on the roof I switched it off. But that sentence stuck in my head. What a tragic life for the woman! The son could not give her sexual joy without breaking a really serious taboo, therefore the mother could have no adult relationship, not one with joy in it, or, anyway, she can't be a healthy woman because she's obsessed by her son. Yet, I suspected the line of poetry was considered perfectly beautiful and simple. It might be okay if 'only' weren't in it, but without that word, it would be too obvious to say at all.

  The phone rang again after I had gone to sleep last night. No one was there. Just silence. Still tired, I began to read a detective novel about several pairs of English ladies staying in a chateau in France for a fortnight of self-improvement. One of each pair is taken in by bounder/cad/man. They have spinsterly tiffs. Meanwhile someone gets thrown over the cliff. They don't know this person, nor does the reader. In fact, it's not a person, it's the body. Fiction is supposed to be tidy, logical. Cosy, especially it's when rainy and dark outside. In this case, too cosy for me. Their good chaps are butch-dykes, if you think about it, bearing superficial resemblance to men. Harbouring a secret wish to write, I wondered how do these old dears get published. They wouldn't know detection from a hole in the road. Is it only Pommy ladies or do all female novelists have such n
arrow lives? I got up and did the washing.

  The answer machine was still in its box. I unpacked it, read the instructions and taped myself, telling callers I would be happy to get back to them if they would leave their name and number. Minimal technology suited me. I should have a mobile phone and a more advanced computer, but there was a miserly side to me which refused to buy anything I didn't need. I fell in love with this place because of nature, the down-market coastal beauty. I cleaned the lenses of my camera. Everything neat, I went out to train after my warm-up. I did the routine a little too enthusiastically and felt a grab in my Achilles tendon.