Darkness more visible Page 29

  'If there really were explosions, why no police involvement?' I asked a routine question. 'Surely, it's illegal to use dynamite on someone else's land.'

  Rory shook her head. 'We won't have men on our property. We try to keep a low profile. Anyway, we have no proof. We don't know where they blasted.'

  Rory showed me the Forestry map. Lesbianlands is a whole swathe of mountain range between two river valleys; a huge property. Tributaries to the Campbell, and in numerous little gullies, creeks feed into them with the wonderful symmetry of geography. The Wurrumbingle Highway, weaving along the contours then bisecting them, made least sense to me. I would have to be on the ground to understand the climb. Cartography was a discipline I had never mastered, the abstract pattern of landscape describing altitude in closeness of wiggling circular lines simply did not compute in my brain as hills and peaks. I would have to see it physically. An escarpment, for instance, would give me an idea of what is accessible.

  Neighbours. The Campbells live up the Campbell Road, which is on the other side of the highway, but on the map almost adjacent. Willy, Wilma, Barb, sundry cousins and nephews, parents dead. This family owned the place as a cattle run before they needed money, so sold it to the gurls. Several members still think it is theirs. Willy leases the Crown land bordering Lesbianlands.

  'Why?'

  'Because their spread is on the dark side of the bluff,' Rory explained.

  On another boundary, the National Park side, a South African dentist from Newcastle was an absentee landlord. His name, Vanderveen; owned a helicopter. Two single mothers, very tough girls with a tribe of wild children, rented the cottage up there. 'They shoot their own supper, wallaby, rabbit, brush turkey and wood duck. Vanderveen refers to the eldest sons as 'white boys' in his funny accent as he orders them about.'

  'Meaning?'

  'Meaning they're not black, but they are peasants. Those girls don't like it,' Rory said. She had never met the wealthy dentist, but described the single mothers as fair-ground types who may at any time take up with some new jock, pack up the kids and hit the road. Tenants probably wouldn't stay long and haven't been there very long, I noted.

  'Who knows what kind of prick will insinuate himself into their lives?' Rory asked rhetorically as though shady moral character was a given in any new boyfriend.

  There was an Indigenous claim in concerning the Crown land. The Cavanagh Gorge National Park is just beyond. There, Rory suspected, very large marijuana crops were grown by criminal syndicates. 'Big operation. Very dangerous to know about. On the river flats, the neighbours nearest Lesbianlands gate are honest dairy farmers, Christian folk, who hand out Country Party voting cards every election.' The criminal syndicates, we decided, are not so stupid as to use occupied land rather than the deep, dense rainforest of the National Park. They use local lads to tend their plantations.

  Willy Campbell looked the most suspicious to me, I commented, but Rory said, when I met him I wouldn't be so worried. 'He's a little chap, with all the aggro and filibuster of being short, fundamentally terrified of big strong women. Including his wife and sister. Actually, in his strange way, puffed up with importance through his alliance with the frightening pack of witches with attitude. Gives him kudos.'

  The names of the gurls on the land would mean nothing unless I went out there. Visit, listen, gossip, find out what I could, stay a night at her house.

  It seemed a reasonable job to me, but I could not get over the feeling that Rory was using it as an excuse to get me into her environment. In fact, she said so. But in such an overt and flirtatious way I didn't have to take it on.

  Finally, I got down to the fundamental motive of money or gain. In the past there had been a bit of mining. Gurls had found pretty nice gem stones. If I found a big crop of marijuana well and good, because they did not want commercial growing on the place, just enough for women's own needs.

  'Another reason for no police?' I grinned.

  Rory nodded, saying, 'We can rely on your discretion, Margot.'

  'You can,' I replied. I shut my spiral-bound shorthand book, having enough to go on for the minute. I would to get back to her as to when it would be convenient for me to go out there. I needed to get to the gym, do a work-out, to sweat. Rory intended to attend the triathlon as a spectator. 'Well.' I got up. 'I'll see you tomorrow then.'

  In the desert, Dr Meghan Featherstone stands up. Her American colleague, the metallurgist, kneels, scraping the earth.

  He says, 'It's like the elephant's foot.'

  'You mean Chernobyl? Where the nuclear meltdown baked the sand into radioactive glass in an enormous solid column?' Meghan humours him.

  He looks up sharply. 'Well, what is it?'

  Meghan frowns. She examines what appears to be an unbroken expanse of greenish glass, about five metres in diameter. Under shifting grains of sand and the restless twigs of desert oak is, 'a circle,' she answers.

  MacAnulty removes a small pick from his tool belt and begins chipping. 'I wonder how deep it is,' he ponders.

  Meghan stops him digging. 'You want radiation poisoning?'

  'Where's your geiger counter?' he asks, still scraping. He is not afraid of death or disease, he is looking for buried treasure.

  'In the jeep.' Meghan lifts her hand to her forehead to make a brim. The jeep seems a long way away, spiky with short-wave aerials in the sketchy shade of a single tree. The heat shimmer makes it look like an insect on water. 'Loren, we have something here. It's pretty extraordinary. I can't be sure, but I don't think it was here last year when I did this area. There was a lot of rain in the wet season. I don't have a good feeling about this.'

  'Oh, sure, we pay you for your female intuition, Dr Featherstone,' MacAnulty replies sarcastically.

  'You men are so bloody careless.' Meghan scratches her temple. 'Well anyway, we have to check. I don't want you disturbing any more dust, you gung-ho Yankee.'

  'Hey, what more damage can I do? I'll go over to there, okay?' He points. 'I'll see if I can get a handle on its depth. Whatever,' he laughs. 'I wouldn't be surprised at anything we found out here.'

  'I'm not your nurse or your mother, you can poison yourself if you want to. Please yourself.' Meghan turns on her heel, still frowning, and strolls back across the red earth to their vehicle. The Elephant's Foot was an inspired guess: the circle of hard glass could have been made by a nuclear fuel meltdown. Five metres in diameter, not a crack in the surface, Meghan calculates mentally. It's either cylindrical or semi-spherical beneath the surface. Too geometric. But then again, Stonehenge is geometric. Dr Featherstone's stroll becomes a stride.

  The car-phone rings as she comes within earshot. She runs to pick it up.

  'Megs?' Judith Sloane's voice.

  'Hi,' she responds, taking in the ridiculously blue sky. 'What is it?'

  'Megs, there was a fight here last night,' Judith says with the sly confidence of a tale-teller.

  'Anyone hurt?' Meghan wonders why she has rung her at work and how she got the number. 'Where are you, Judith?'

  'In Stuart. Your place. Between your sister, Trina, and Jill.' Judith relishes the gossip. 'I wanted you to know it from me, not Jill. Or Trina. You know, third-person witness.'

  'Trina is in Stuart?' Meghan sits in the open passenger's door watching the activity of Loren MacAnulty of Kentucky shimmering like a Drysdale figure loosened by the watery filter of heat. She considers Jill David's trustworthiness or its lack, her propensity for practical jokes and her capacity to ape Judith Sloane's accent. This conversation is a surreal. The chimera causes Loren MacAnulty to disappear altogether. She likes being Judith's friend. She sees her as the wild, uncompromising aesthete living on Lesbianlands, standing against the tide of time, spinning or weaving or shearing with hand-clippers, her twin soul, the ideal being who hides inside Meghan's breast. Her own ambitions of the future—to live on brown rice and bush herbs, away from the civilised world's rat-race, at peace, with one sole piece of technology, her highly magnified binoculars—
are on hold until certain work is finished.

  'I feel totally unsafe here,' Judith whines. But it could be Jill taking the mickey.

  'Any reason?' Meghan asks.

  'She was furious.'

  'Who?'

  'Jill.'

  'Jill?' Meghan smells a rat. Loren materialises not very far away, walking towards her. Meghan speaks into the mouthpiece. 'Look Judith, I have to get back to work.'

  'I liked Trina.' The English voice sounds patronising. 'She is so like you to look at, she even speaks like you.'

  Loren sees her holding the phone and nodding. He smiles, 'Whatever it is, Meghan, we have got something. And it's big.'

  'Big' being the salient word in every American heart. Meghan says goodbye and finishes the call.

  Jill can't lose her temper, that is why Meghan has hit her on occasion: to get some passionate reaction. Heroine on the stage, she is phlegmatic in real life. Meghan fell in love with the actress, and she still loves her to distraction. Trina is a thorn in her side. Admiration for Judith, adoration of Jill, Meghan feels responsible for all three women. Jill has mimicked for her, acted for her, amused her. Her own falcon, helmet on, chained to a perch, it stands to reason that the creature pecks, painfully at times. Trina, always jealous of her lovers, hates Jill more than most. But why, Meghan quizzes herself, is Judith involved? She puts the questions out of her mind and starts attending to what Loren MacAnulty is saying.

  'Big Money still overrides domestic laws, NAFTA and CER. None of your concern, my girl. You are in our employ. And I'm thinking this find might very well be one we keep under wraps.'

  Meghan snaps open the instrument case, absently shaking her head. She runs the geiger counter casually over her own person. Its constipated click confuses her. 'Come here,' she orders. She stands him straight, and, starting at his feet with her ear close to the amp, she swipes the sensor over the air about an inch from his body. Again, the half tick. A cough.

  'What is this, Loren? I don't understand,' Doctor Featherstone says meaning to worry him.

  She puts the instrument down and reaches into the back of the jeep for a bag. Dressed in an overall the colour of the desert sand, she hauls the pack over her shoulder. Offering no explanation, she makes her way back to the site. When there, she crawls all over the surface of the disc, rapidly reassessing her first impressions. Disc, column or semi-sphere? The geiger counter reports exactly the same stifled burps, indicating, at least, there is not a dangerous level of radiation here. She removes other testers from her pack, and begins tapping and knocking and scraping, putting dust and chips in plastic forensic bags. She chisels out a specimen.

  When Meghan Featherstone returns to the vehicle, the beaming MacAnulty is eating a sandwich.

  'So give,' he pleads through a mouth full of food. 'Rutile, ilmenite, maybe zircon?' He would believe anything, this scientist. 'A bit of a comet or something?'

  'I can't say with absolute certainty, but my guess at this stage is pretty bloody weird,' Meghan says seriously. 'You'll laugh at me. I have to get back to a lab to make sure. Hydrogen fluoride is the only known substance to eat glass.'

  'Extraordinarily toxic,' Loren grins evilly. Destructive substances give him a rush like no other. For all his faults, Loren MacAnulty is unfailingly cheerful.

  'So tell me the intuitive news first.' He hunkers down on the sand in the shade of the Jeep. Meghan removes her gear and arranges the samples carefully in a case for the purpose.

  'What impressed the physicists about the Chernobyl disaster was the effect of huge heat on the sand and rock,' Meghan says as she packs up their camp. He laconically rises to help her.

  Loren lifts the tent poles onto the roofracks. 'Go on,' he yells.

  'Well we know the earth is a shell over molten lava, and is skin. Geologists have only ever drilled, what?, eight kilometres down?' She, too, shouts, as they move about.

  'You know what? What we have here is one beautiful object that our lords and masters will be very happy with. Are, I can say. I described it over the phone. Couldn't help myself,' Loren MacAnulty, the lovable redneck academic, says deprecatingly. His lords and masters are probably CIA.

  Meghan doesn't care. 'I don't know what burnt this soil. It happened quickly like a nuclear event, but fusion not fission.' Loren slams the back doors of the truck.

  'But it is not particularly radioactive. It could be a fuel we don't know of,' he says as they get in the jeep. He drives.

  'It could be natural, a kind of pinprick in the earth's crust, a pimple of the inner inferno, an emission on reaching what it would see as a cold atmosphere flattening out,' says the humourless Meghan. 'Or it could be evidence of a small alien craft, rocket-like, taking off vertically.'

  He grins, the odder the better.

  'I imagine that when I get to the lab and analyse this stuff it will be ordinary sand glass, with the geological constituents we have around here. The oldest continent out of water,' Meghan shrugs off zany conjecture.

  'We could be looking at something that is scientifically spot on, an elucidating, genuine discovery.' Loren MacAnulty slaps his thigh.

  'Which will make you and your company famous, Mac.'

  'Yee ha.' A genuine cowboy. 'We might be getting closer to the answers: why we are here, and where we have come from and so on, the meaning of life.'

  'The life of rocks, the life of the earth,' Meghan says earnestly. 'What about the locals? You don't care about the Australian government. What about the community here? We could be on a sacred site, but when one is working for the white man one hasn't got freedom of conscience,' she finishes primly. 'For the moment.'

  'Point taken,' Loren floors the accelerator. 'Anyone tell you, you're a genius!'

  Meghan Featherstone suddenly laughs at the absurdity of it all. Or the bumpy ride.

  The sheds of the outback station, owned by a multinational pastoral company, come into view. After a polite tea with pumpkin scones with the manager and his wife, they take a fixed-wing aircraft back to Darwin.

  Raptors and reptiles entertain Meghan's mind during the flight. With glass one would expect some refraction, some luminosity. All she can see is a dull greenish shape in the pindan, not even the clear circumference they had determined at close range. Her brain files this inconsistency along with the others. Organiser of data, paid for her excellent work on detail, she looks at her big hands. Alison once said that meant she should be a jeweller. She has funny hands, long, but chubby at the base of each finger, a life-line split in two. They pass over a settlement, shapes of new corrugated iron blazing the sun back up at them. Of course the locals will know we were here. The Aborigines probably know the green glass is there also, or some of them will. They will have the best explanation of all. Something mystical, mythical, religious. But it is not in her charter to ask them. Let's hope the company thinks to compensate them, but what does money do? Buy souls?

  Raptors and reptiles, she is an enthusiast, has loved them since a child. She sees several whistling kites outside her window for a moment, and down below a flock of brown buzzards lurk around a camping ground. When they reach controlled airspace, Meghan is asleep.

  My body was zinging after a work-out with my trainer. He stretched my tendons, pummelled my muscles, and merrily gossiped about one of the top female triathletes having an eating problem which he, in his wisdom, considered was actually a character problem. The girl was so self-obsessed she was a joke.

  'How is it,' he questioned rhetorically, 'your sport is so full of weirdos, fanatics and der-brains?' He answered himself, 'Money and television, multinationals and advertising. And Mickey Mouse games. The real challenges are on the track, in the field and the pool.'