Darkness more visible Read online

  'What do yer need a video player for?' yells Paul, impressed with a VCR in a moving vehicle.

  'We do stop and rest,' Ian replies, impatiently tolerant. He has questions but he doesn't want to ask this guy. He'll take orders from the boss, Hannibal.

  Against his better judgement Ian finds himself chatting with Paul. 'The two-lane black-top is my home,' he explains. 'Cruising. Sleeping in the cabin.'

  'Yeah, well, mate, it is my hunting ground.' Paul flexes his muscles like a boxer. 'But shit, man! Gaming in the truck, soft porn interactive software. Plus your long-barrelled hardware.'

  Ian swells with pride as if the size of his penis has been praised by another man.

  'We have to wait.' Paul changes his mood, his tone has a tinge of menace. He picks up Ian's newspaper and goes over to the step of the side door of the building to read. Truckman is reluctant to join him. The beauty of the new rig is better savoured alone. Ian tries out the IT in the cabin. He is no sooner on-line to his voyeuristic website than the screen runs by itself. Eerily reacting to thought patterns in his head, as if he were grabbing snacks of news from hard print, which he was a little while ago, the words scroll.

  A Sydney man accused of murdering his wife and dumping her body in a bin of acid, he reads, was 'extremely exhausted and distressed' after police questioning. The judge in a different trial was told that Leonard suffered from a severe and extreme personality disorder from his early childhood years, when he spent school holidays with a grandmother who bought him kittens and taught him to torture them by cutting off their ears and tails. This father, worried that he was not creating a world for his four daughters, was acting under a delusion when he cut their throats and then killed himself, the coroner found. He used a meat knife. Sara and Rebecca suffered wounds to their hands, indicating they had struggled. But it appeared neither Georgina nor Anna awoke before being attacked.

  Ian expected pictures, not old news of a murder-suicide in Tasmania. But why is this coming up on his screen? He switches it off, and reboots.

  An icon flashes a military hat. Australia the lucky country is transforming itself into Australia the shrinking country, retreating from the rest of the world, unable to come to terms with its past, frightened by the future and with a political leadership lacking strategy or direction. There's no telling what Asians and Jews can do, they are so cunning. All this Japanese hardware does not work the same. Intelligence agencies in the United States have stepped up their campaign to control the flow of information over the net, counteracting an unholy alliance of civil libertarians and business chiefs who back the introduction of secure encryption technologies to protect personal privacy and commercial data on-line. Must be something to do with that, Ian is unsettled by powers beyond his control. But, at least, the modem works through the truck's telephone connection. Must be satellite, that Echelon business. Ian keeps in touch with conspiracies around the world through his users' group. Wherever he goes while on-line, news items of the murder of women and girls scroll like credits at the end of a video.

  The man accused of one of New Zealand's worst mass murders admitted yesterday killing six people and trying to shoot four more but pleaded not guilty on the grounds of insanity. A youth dragging a wheelie bin believed to have contained the body of a murdered Japanese tourist through peak-hour traffic was seen by scores of motorists on their way home from Cairns last week.

  Truckman sees the tow-truck driver throw his newspaper down in a mess of uneven pages and unaligned folds. Ian detaches his wireless connection and goes over. He ostentatiously picks his Telegraph up and tidies it. He is not going to confide his mystification to the aggro brute named Paul. He goes back to the truck.

  If he does not key in his presence, the sound card reminds him in an electronic voice: Still on-line?

  Most GPs grossly underestimate the numbers of women suffering physical, sexual and emotional abuse by their partners and believe in an average practice they would see 10 a year when a more likely annual figure is 250. And many doctors are missing the one in 25 women who have suffered severe abuse.

  The worm addresses him by his Internet tag. Those Lesbian cyborgs and their secret world government have to be contained with the threat of biological or atomic warfare. He tries to go to his other favourite, the UFO site, but the same thing happens. He is not surprised, it proves all his theories: they're out to get him. They put things in the microchips these days. He climbs out of the cabin. And wanders around until he finds a toilet, relieves himself. When he emerges, the boss is there. Truckman is officially given the Freightliner, FL112.

  The boss's American accent goes with the expensive stuff and reassures Ian on all counts. You gotta admire the rich. Ian takes orders and he takes what he is given. He does a good job. He is conscientious and imagines that that earns him rewards, rather than admitting to himself he is an owned man. He wants to ask what he is carrying, but the money is too good and the FreightLiner too beautiful. He does say he finds it very strange having tanker-trailers at an airstrip.

  'A temporary arrangement, Mr Truckman,' assures Hannibal. 'This depot was cheap and vacant. An expediency, you understand?'

  'So what's the cargo?' Usually he doesn't ask questions. 'I'm just curious.'

  'Nothing that is freighted by air, my boy. Hired the hangar, that's all.'

  Satisfied with the explanation, Ian walks back to the loading bay where his pride and joy, White Virgin, is parked. He slaps a mosquito on his forearm. Beyond the runway are mangrove mud flats beside the river. Little boardwalk piers at the end of winding dirt tracks serve the oyster leases. He does not like being bitten by mosquitoes because he knows they carry diseases medical science has no cure for.

  The artificial intelligence has him sucked in. Ian has never been so spoilt in his life. He tests the satellite dish for multi-media on-line. On top of the digital images, the unbidden worm keeps wriggling.

  Ian plays with another gadget which gives him his exact longitude and latitude, a global positioning system.

  Australia is the natural home of the road movie. I'm just a living movie. Regardless of that jerk, Paul, he is happy. Tow-truck drivers are bloody cowboys, anyway.

  After cleaning the tanker he heads towards the interstate highway. The trailer is loaded, he feels, but not with milk or oil. The weight is more like water than anything else. He adjusts and becomes familiar with its carriage.

  PCYC constables organise the marquee, the district division of the State Rescue Squad assigns jobs; their wives and good-hearted volunteers handle the various crises of organising the local triathlon; club officials mark the course; fanatics and triathletes prepare themselves psychologically and physically to punish their bodies for the greater wealth of media barons and, possibly, the entertainment of lounge lizards; cameramen check their stock, and power-brokers exchange words and make decisions beyond the imagination of even the most paranoid nobody. Meanwhile, Chandra Williams reprograms her trojan horse virus to insinuate itself past the portals of porn sites.

  A run, a swim, a cycle. Breakfasted, I went next door to discuss the commotion there the Friday night of Neil's death. My barefoot southside neighbour was breast-feeding. I wanted to know whether the boy who had driven off at high speed after an argument with his father had any connection with the lads in the morgue. She was an unsatisfactory woman to talk to generally. Her brains seemed scrambled by too much yani and half-baked New Age ideas. But, breast-feeding, she was relatively coherent.

  'What was the fight with your son about?' I asked, getting down to the topic with little preliminary explanation.

  'He is not my son. He is my partner's by one of his other ladies,' she ducked my query with irrelevant fact.

  'Other ladies?' I repeated, going with the flow. She implied her partner was presently polygamous. I really don't understand these people.

  'Yes, why not?' She was defiant and defensive, as if I was a member of the moral majority intruding on her space and railing against adultery.


  'Anything unusual going on?' I insisted.

  'Hopefully,' she replied, as she adjusted the moth-eaten soft silk shirt and gave the infant the second breast. 'We don't like being bored by banal routines. Son and father, you know, have to work out their aggressions on each other.' She lectured me on the needs of men, how they are at the mercy of their testosterone chemistry.

  I cut into the psychobabble with, 'It's hardly a fair contest, his dad's twice his size. Don't you feel threatened or frightened? When male aggression gets out of hand, it's women and young children who get hurt.' I looked at her babe in arms and saw the pleasure she experienced from the contented sucking, and darkly imagined the man being possessed by jealousy throwing a tantrum. Not an arduous creative exercise.

  'It was only about mullah,' she dismissed and gazed at her baby.

  Those who profess to care little about money tend to get very passionate on the subject, and again I was aware of an inequity in the classic battle. The boy probably had none at all.

  'Weren't you worried when he drove off like that? Another kid was killed going the other way. He wasn't driving safely.' My words fell over each other.

  'Tell me about it. He doesn't even have a licence,' she said, as if there wasn't adult responsibility involved.

  'Why was his father so angry? I interrogated. 'Don't you care?'

  'No,' she said vaguely. 'The cops found him. There was bad karma about that night. Someone had to die.'

  'What?' I nearly shrieked.

  'A Mars-Pluto transit.' Talking about truly spurious stuff she was very definite. 'And,' she added eagerly, 'remember there were strange lights in the sky.'

  'The moon,' I commented crystallising her weird illuminations to solid rock.

  'Moon in Scorpio, yes. At first we thought it was lightning out to sea,' she went on.

  Paranormal phenomena was not the topic I needed. Even if I told her of my involvement in finding the dead youth and investigating his murder, she would probably offer no sympathy. If she did, it would be shallow or sugary with a touch of arsenic. Guessing I was distressed, she reached down into her huge patchwork and denim bag and shuffled about until her free hand emerged with a rainbow purse. She detached the infant from her nipple to examine the contents, a large variety of pills, herbal, pharmaceutical and round black Chinese ones all mixed up together. She chose a yellow Valium and gave it to me.

  There was nothing to do but hold out my palm and say 'thanks'. I may even swallow it later. After the triathlon, perhaps. Relax the muscles.

  I had to go to town. A work-out. Shopping.

  A couple of Koori friends stopped me in the street. Dannii held out a flier about the racist white virgin. Violet, pulling at her dachshund on its lead, said, 'Stupid gubba gin.'

  'Don't take any notice of it. It's unmitigated rubbish!' A bit of guilt always seeped its way into my system when I spoke with Indigenous Australians. The way I speak English is different. Perhaps the experiences of being a law enforcement officer branded me for life.

  With hands swinging free, her red dog at heel, Rory joined us. 'Just the woman I'm looking for,' she said to me.

  The canines took some interest in each other as Violet told us that the black community was organising a demonstration when the racist caravan rolled into town.

  Rory laughed, 'Okay. Cowards creating myths and paranoia to get power. They're empty, ignorant.'

  'Well they don't know what they're in for.' Violet looked fearsome for a moment, then grinned. The frown, however, didn't leave Dannii's face.

  Rory continued, trying to express some kind of solidarity with Dannii's justified anger. 'It's not simple. Their slovenly intellect is simplistic, and they want revenge for mistaken injustices.'

  'Well, they going to get a fight when they come here,' Dannii promised.

  'They don't think. They wouldn't know injustice if it bit them on the bum,' Violet's laugh was mean with menace.

  Locals busy, visitors strolling, violent forces were undercurrents in the pleasant sea and river-mouth environs of civic pride dedicated to tourism and Saturday-morning consumerism. The sun was shining. Sparrows hopped about the tables. Seagulls mobbed those eating take-away on the grass. But I thought of the east Kimberley. The sight of the blacks from the outback communities wandering around drunk, impoverished; expensive cartons of beer sold by whites and discounted only in numbers of forty-eight cans or more; council signs not allowing them to enter playing fields or parks with alcohol, thus forcing them onto rubbish dumps and vacant housing blocks under spindly trees, to drink out in the open, getting punchy and argumentative by night-time, empty cans everywhere. How quickly culture goes when you lose self-respect! Self-respect, I thought self-critically, is probably a white term for a white set of values. Aboriginals have respect for the spirits of the land, the Dreamtime, each other, the children, the elders, family, kinships. The litter I automatically found offensive made sense when a generation or two before one ate off bark. It's actually white society that doesn't deal with its own garbage. The pub at Fitzroy Crossing had cyclone fences inside separating the bars from each other, making it look like a pound.

  Rory kept talking about the rally while I silently felt shame. Sitting in the dirt by the river, fishing, drinking, lighting little fires in circles of rocks to cook the fish or to ignite a bong or a cigarette, hanging together like any mob of drunks, or assiduously admiring their dances and paintings, whatever we do, we can't really know what it is like to be Indigenous.

  When I tried to get to Cape Leveque, I was turned back, something about their law. I went onto Community land without permission. When I was confronted with my whiteness, I realised, my being, my courage, my honour, are all wrapt up in autonomy. My singular independence. I feared dissolution in the ratbaggery of community. Rory was asking about a local land rights issue.

  So many places on this island continent I have been without invitation. I don't even know the names of original nations. In Sydney and Wollongong the Darug, Gadigal and Gandagarra.

  Daanii and Violet were talking about a land claim not far from my house. I was not invited to buy it. I didn't know what massacres it cost to pass into white hands. We stood together on the pavement. Tourists in pairs in matching clean shorts and walking shoes stepped around us. Even though Dannii's sentences were spattered with swear-words, I listened earnestly. Deep down I felt confusion about my place in the world. As an ordinary Australian with little idea of her ethnic mix, I was as uncomfortable with her hate-filled threats as I was with their cause. Such discomfort, exaggerated to a kind of inability to live with such unease, might be why ill-informed extremists latch onto the notion that Indigenous people are different, not within their definition of 'human', hence deserving of scorn. If I never opened my mouth, or let my eyes rest on their faces with an attempt at understanding, if they did not know me personally, these two Koori women could see me as the same as any ignorant, gubba gin. I, after all, am not giving up any of the advantages of being white in this society, nor am I likely to. The neo-fascists may as well be our storm-troopers, if you go only on skin colour or background. I am European Australian, therefore I am racist. Nor did I fully understand what Violet and Daanii said. It seemed repetitive and scattered. But I was not sincerely in the conversation. Our interaction was superficial unless, I realised, it was about an exchange of favours or some kind of trading. The silences beneath and between the words contained implied knowledge that was not shared.

  'Margot, have you got a moment?' Rory pointed to tables outside the fish co-op. I nodded, okay.

  'If you need my help, at all,' I offered heartily as we parted, 'call me.'

  Rory and I crossed the street.

  Rory had a job for me. Unaccountably, a bridge on Lesbianlands had been destroyed. There were bulldozer tracks. None of the residents had a dozer nor had ordered the use of one so far as she knew. Rory wanted me to interview neighbours and women and discover what had happened. She smiled as if the whole thing were a joke, so I took i
t seriously, not wanting to believe her merry eyes were conveying what I think they were.

  My notebook out, I asked the names of all neighbouring people, their interests, their attitudes and her possible explanations as to why these people would do it. It seemed, as she talked on, a rich canvas of motives and malice, a touch of the wild frontier.