Darkness more visible Page 14

  The immediate problem is language. Chandra is quite happy to keep changing the name of the site and her email addresses. For the moment with her web, there is a sigh and a T denoting a junction in her netting.

  Chandra clicks on Kitchen to see what is going on. Any mention of white food is a revolutionary avowal, of character, not of theory, is a fast track to Cellar2chat.

  Is it okay to let Daddy's girls rule?

  No. They are male females. You've read the bible! We need a code. Etruscan?

  Etruscan it is. A virgin alphabet. GMAB

  To get beyond the vanishing point, we need to know the nature of egg-white. Although he might know the nature of egg-white, he does not know what we mean when we say we know the nature of egg-white. Nor flour.

  Well the metaphysics of metacooking in the metakitchen, heh?

  OIC.

  Male chef not the type to think beyond the food. And nerds don't cook enough. Get me?

  Chandra Williams settles down to program a virus as an experiment, using various news services to scramble electronic communications on the superhighway. She is testing the effectiveness of the code as language. She wonders, can we rely on specialisation as a universal male trait? Someone keeps quoting Valerie Solanas.

  Chandra contributes to the chat enough to encourage women to examine the proposition, then rolls into her actual kitchen. For the subterfuge to work, of course, real recipes from real women with real problems must take up a lot of time and space, like a wall of rock disguising the entrance to the cave.

  Although the travel of the morning is promising, Chandra feels a niggling impatience. Inarticulate inspiration is burning her left palm between the mounds of Luna and Venus. After she has checked the marmalade bubbling on the stove, taken the temperature of hot sugar, and reset the timer, she goes back to the page that had been tampered with. The spot in her own design is now an eagle soaring. She tries to catch it with her mouse. She is being led. Her digital skills are brilliant and it is a challenge. When, finally, she does pin it, the entire text of the SCUM Manifesto comes up.

  >> Nothing wrong with calling the bluff.

  It is a response to her joke. A Solanasite?

  Chandra pastes a flag for a new room in the menu of Cellar2chat: Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

  Well, thinks Chandra, I hope my structure holds, for the conspiracy is born. She is amazed.

  Colleen McKewen appears at the door of CID, tossing car keys from hand to hand.

  'You're a hard man to find.'

  Detective Constable Philippoussis says, 'I've been running errands for Crankshaw, interviewing boaties down at the marina, getting the shipping news like the lowliest reporter of all. Finding out the times of recent arrivals and departures. Names and registrations. If I knew why I would feel better. I thought the yachting world was a gossipy lot. The Crank wasn't even happy with the results.'

  'What about the bodies?' Detective Constable McKewen asks.

  'Leave them exactly where they are. Our boss lives up to his nickname.'

  'Sure does. Let's go.'

  Phil leaves his desk in careful disorder and takes his brief-case. When they are in the truck, he gives her his notes of Penny's instructions. 'Can you find that?'

  She reads. 'That's Elias Gilmore's place. They are all Gilmores out along that road, except for a few Wills and Dickies.' In the long-wheelbase Land-Cruiser, police issue gumboots on hand, Colleen driving, Phillip mentions he heard the mother had committed suicide.

  'Yep, Gillian Gilmore, what do you want to know? My mother was a Gilmore, different branch, same root stock. Soldier settlement, World War I.'

  Flat paddocks of pasture run parallel to the river. 'Just talk about them, Colleen. Tell me. Whatever.'

  'One day,' says the policewoman, driving competently and quickly through territory familiar to her, 'she simply gave up, took herself out into the garage and hung herself from the rafter with nylon rope. This son, Hugh, found her before going to school one day. Gillian kept her house neat as a new pin, her clothes, husband's, kids', pressed to a knife edge all the time. When she hanged herself with a length of green rope she hadn't even bothered to take the rollers out of her hair properly and she was dressed in a tatty old T-shirt and shorts.'

  'Did she leave a note?'

  'She wrote, simply, "No More".'

  'Where?'

  'Where what?'

  'Where did she write "No More"?'

  'Why?'

  'Forget it.'

  'No, why?'

  'How did they know it was suicide then?'

  'What bothered my mum,'—WDC McKewen, slightly older than Phil, wears make-up, and chats easily—'when she was telling me, was about how clean she was. Always proper. But Gillian just grabbed the nearest thing. Picked the rope off the floor of the garage. No preparation.'

  Philippoussis nods. 'Go on.'

  'Gillian came to the district as a teacher and ended up marrying a farmer. Hard to imagine that Elias was dashing enough to win the hand of the young good-looking school-teacher.' Colleen glances at her partner as she turns off the main road to see if she should go on in that vein.

  'Was it printed?' Phil asks, suddenly.

  'What?'

  'The note?'

  'I never saw the note,' Constable McKewen answers tartly.

  'Tell me about the lad.'

  'Hugh is the third of seven children. Marji is Hugh's elder sister and Daniel older brother, then boy, girl, boy, boy…' She hesitates, affirms herself and continues. 'Hugh was never the same after finding his mother. He was fourteen. Her suicide happened about a year ago. He went off the rails, stood up to his father's discipline, basically violence. Only a matter of time before he would kill himself on the road or through drugs.'

  She takes another turn, and the police LandCruiser bumps along an even narrower road.

  'Before she died, Hugh had heroes, Wayne Gardner and Michael Doohan, and wanted to emulate them. He was a good dirt-bike rider. Hugh liked the speed, been rounding up cows on a bike since younger than ten. But Elias puts local football as the only sport worth doing. He's a "hard-working" man, meaning his hard work includes having a drink on a Friday night and the game on Saturday and working the rest of the time—while the wife and children, as much as able, work all the time without the relaxation, except to watch. His drunken behaviour, like his mates', is dreadful but excusable because it is not every night. With Hugh, it was classic father jealousy of the son, too like his mother, too big for his boots.'

  'If I were a school-teacher, I'd write a long suicide note,' opines Philippoussis.

  'Gillian tried so hard. Always looked perfect,' Colleen remarks approvingly.

  'What about the rest of the family?' he inquires, noticing new houses built within view of old as the road dipped and curved with the contours of the country along the valley of a creek tributary of the Campbell River.

  'The older boy is the dead spit of his dad in taste and looks. He likes to be called Dan the Man. Marji, the older girl, also, her father's daughter, a farm girl, good in the dairy, left school early. The younger girl is ten now, bright and clever, small, fine-featured like Hugh, good at school and in command of her little brothers, changes completely in the company of her father or her oldest brother, according to my mother. Tons of cousins. Here we are.'

  Colleen bounces the four-wheel-drive over an uncomfortably high cattle grid. While the dirt road is rocky, the sloping yards up to the cemented bails are grassless mud. The black and white cows mill about in slush, lifting their tails to shit down their legs. Line-dance music blares out so loudly that the police have to bend towards each other with their plans.

  'Where's the house?' he asks.

 
; Colleen gestures back and then draws a path with her forefinger over the hill. Abandoned calves bellow for their mothers nearby.

  Philippoussis is a city boy, born and bred; sloshing around in gumboots is not his style. He indicates that he does not like the smell.

  'Okay,' Colleen grins, 'I'll take the milker. Looks like it's Elias himself.'

  As Phillip drives away he realises why the yard is so wet. A high-pressure hose to keep the concrete floor of the dairy clean is on full bore.

  The home-yard is different from its surrounds. Over the gateway arches a bright puce bougainvillea. White painted chains stand on end like charmed snakes frozen at the moment of holding a shallow bird bath horizontal. Blue rocks fixed together in the shape of a basket handle over a circular garden bed of petunias and daisies. Decrepit wheelbarrows with their rust painted over put to use as standard plant pots for weedy grass and geranium. Flowers, exotic trees and rose bushes all rocked into neat corrals. Native shrubs flourish along the fenceline. Several gnomes confer at the side of the path. A pink stork stands on one leg next to a lonely palm tree. The lawn was mowed recently.

  He mounts the verandah and knocks. Mammary glands to rival the Friesians', thinks Philippoussis as he is met with an instinctive hostility. Three younger children are mesmerised by a video screen in the room behind her.

  'Marji Gilmore? I'm Detective Constable Philippoussis—'

  'What?' she interrupts, truculently. A little girl beside her says his name perfectly. Polite and pert. A regular Lisa Simpson, thinks Phil.

  'Shut up, Peggy. Right then. What do you want? My Dad's down the dairy milking, and Dan's down there too, I think. He should be.'

  'Peggy, I want to speak with Marji alone,' Phillip says and watches the little thing in her socks and school uniform go back into the company of her brothers.

  'Show me where your mother died, will you, Marji?'

  Marji nods, steps out through the flywire door and selects a pair of Blundstones from the assembled boots and shoes on the verandah. She drags them over her ankles, and, as the elasticity of the sides have long gone, slops off.

  'Follow me.'

  Around the back of the house, where a vegetable garden green with produce has a fence to itself, are a couple of sheds: a big open one made of tin, another of earlier vintage erected with poles, and a lean-to. The third free-standing one is a typical garage with a door and pitched roof, strong and straight hardwood beams. Marji points upwards.

  'Mum liked to look after her car, didn't want it to go off. Make it into a veteran one day, she'd reckon. It's mine when I get my licence.' Marji Gilmore pats the immaculate duco of a twenty-year-old four-cylinder Datsun. 'I put some polish on her now and then. That's Hugh's, she points to a bright lime motor bike decorated with an eight-ball number. He used to race. Won't let anyone touch it even though we never see him.'

  Marji chats while she watches the handsome cop measure the depth of dust on the noggins with his finger, kick a tangled collection of old rope, examine rusty tools and note the air of neglect with the exception of the two unused vehicles.

  'It's, er,' Phil interrupts, 'not your mum I'm here about. It's your brother, Hugh. Do you know where he is?'

  'Nope. I do not. He's gone wild. Dad can't straighten him out any more. Dad wouldn't let him come home anyway, chucked him out after he tried to sell the dirt bike. Reckoned he stole it, it belonged to the farm, for the cattle. Hugh said it was his. He raced Motor Cross and kept it real good. Mum bought it out of her own money. But Dad reckons all the equipment around the farm is like, owned by the farm, it wasn't Hugh's to sell. So they had a row.'

  The Detective Constable has no reason to stall the inevitable. 'There was a car accident at the weekend. We think Hugh died in it. The car was stolen. We have to ask you or your father or your brother or all of you to come and identify him.'

  Marji asks, 'What kind of a car did he steal?'

  'A yellow Charger,' Philippoussis responds generously. 'A hotted up Valiant Charger.'

  'That'd be Hugh. Except I didn't think he was into stealing cars.' Poor Marji holds back tears. 'Except, if it was an old one, a classic, like a Charger, I suppose.'

  'Interesting,' replies Phil. 'Did Hugh find your mother's suicide note?'

  Marji does not want to answer, so she doesn't. 'I'll go with Dad,' she says instead. 'Dan can finish the milking. We can take our own car. I've got to get the kids something to eat, first. They can have frozen pizza.'

  The paddocks are emerald green. The distant hills are pure violet. The garish colours of the flowers in the garden stand out against a heavy sky. White clouds hang motionless in the front of darker ones. Cows straggle out across the near pasture, with eased udders. Marji slogs slowly towards the house. The policeman drives down to the dairy, and waits in the van. Marji Gilmore, more like his own peasant stock than the stiff-lipped Penny Waughan, was understandable. Stubborn, proud in a way. He can see the family resemblance in his off-sider. Colleen McKewen appears in whiffy gumboots.

  'Colleen,' he asks, 'Is this a typical family, would you say?'

  'Hardly ever leave the property, this lot,' Colleen confides.

  'Marji keeps her mother's car in pristine condition,' he says in the same tone of voice he used when he remarked on the note.

  Colleen removes the boots with the passenger door open and puts on her lace-ups. 'Marji would think,' she explains, 'life is not easy for me and it's not easy for Dad either, and it looks easy for those useless dole bludgers, dope-heads and blacks, and that's what Hugh became, a dope-head, dole bludger, nigger-lover, and, as Elias would say, poofter. But I don't know about that.'

  Philippoussis studies the cattle egrets, like little snowy angels, as they follow the grazing cows, digging worms out of their footprints. He sees wading birds take off in a flock and make a design in the sky.

  'Marji is bovine,' he says, knowing that Colleen McKewen, unlike Margot Gorman, will not to take him up on his sexism.

  'Well, she's dumb,' agrees Colleen. 'Peggy's not. For Marji her father is god and god is her father and she will marry someone like Daniel, probably one of his friends. She won't get pregnant before marriage because that it is stupid and Elias would be furious. Anyway it wouldn't happen because he'd make the bloke marry her with his shotgun to his head. She only sleeps with Daniel's friends, though she's never got to actually sleep, usually it is done after football in the ute. She'll probably let herself get pregnant when the husband she wants comes along. She had nothing in common with her mother.'

  'We'll see,' Phil notes cryptically, thinking his colleague could talk the leg off an ironpot. 'I hope she'll change her clothes.'

  Colleen goes on, 'Don't worry. She'll be spic and span at the hospital. I liked Gillian, even though she was different. Old Mrs Gilmore, Elias's mother, hated her. Vicious old bitch she is. Thinks her daughter-in-law killed herself because she was mentally sick, neurotic. Probably why Elias slapped her around a bit. Marji has been too placid for him to find an excuse to hit her much. She has tried to save her little sister from it a few times, trying to tell her not to give him any lip. And her little brothers. Marji's all right. It's just that she knows she's a workhorse. Gillian's self-control made life uncomfortable for her because it brought out the aggro in her father, and probably Dan as he got older. It might be that, or it might be that Gillian came from the city. Marji and her father, probably most of the family, put mentally ill on a par with Aborigines and dole-bludgers. No sympathy. Too fragile. Things are tough. Shit happens. Life wasn't mean to be easy. Don't fix what ain't broke.'