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  'I've just discovered a dead girl in a toilet on the beach,' she hears. Chandra, having spent many years on the end of the rape crisis hotline, knows exactly how to deal with this interruption. She settles down to patient concern, welcoming the opportunity to be simply reacting rather than obsessively proactive.

  A beautiful voice washed over me, like cool water over burnt skin, healing my crisis.

  Chandra spoke with me for at least an hour. It was not only the timbre of the voice; there was skill in her approach to my distress. She calmed me down with intelligence, with belief, asking the right questions, soothing without saying anything false or sugary. I told her everything, or at least I thought it was everything. When I got off the phone to do as she suggested—drink some of the sweetest wine in my collection, as she had ascertained that I had no spirits to hand as a rescue remedy, then get myself some hot milk, again with some sweetening—I realised I had not told her that she had been a tremendous help. She was open and honest and chatty about herself after we had dealt with my discovery and shock. I asked her how she was so good at this and the answer came with a deep laugh. She had been a professional phone counsellor. The laugh was warmly reassuring. She said she was trying to place me. She knew my name from somewhere but I did not help. Curse my little PI socks. It was a sensible conversation as well. Alison would be asked to ring me as soon as she got in.

  Soon after I put down the phone I heard a couple of cars race past my place, going north. No one goes that way at this time at that speed unless they are idiots or avoiding the ferry. The police? It is very much the long way round even if your intended destination is the coastal town north of here. And you wouldn't be speeding if you knew there was a series of hairpin bends two or three kilometres on. These cars were going too fast. The first one I didn't see, but the second was one of those souped-up six- or eight-cylinder numbers, with a heavy bass throb. A surfer's panel-van?

  Alison rang. The ranger arrived, unlocked the toilet. The cops, according to Lenny, said, 'shit!' Among other swear words. They would not let him in. One went to call in details from his car. 'The reality,' said mother Alison, 'is quite different from the video games. He, all bravery and brutality in his head, suddenly needed his mummy and was scared. Glad to have his Mama.' The 'pigs' let her go after she had answered a few questions, a couple of which concerned me. She went back to get Tilly. The cops told Maria and company only that a girl had been found dead, and got their names and stuff. 'By the time we got to his dad's, it had become a story worth telling. His father was staying with his mother, Di Minogue, at Crossroads. Her house is full of extended family and supportive aunties who will listen to Lenny tell it over and over.' Alison raved on, as if the whole thing had been a buzz. I couldn't imagine her going to sleep. She sounded manic, and although she said she was concerned for Lenny and Tilly that was not how she had behaved. She had looked after me.

  'Thanks,' I said, sincerely.

  Natural curiosity wanted to know if anyone did it. Probably the girl committed suicide, but my intuition suggested dirty work in the background. If it turned out to be an overdose, whoever was at the barbecue will be under scrutiny.

  'Who was still there?' I asked. Alison hesitated.

  While her openness automatically took her off the suspect list, Alison confused me.

  She replied, 'A few were staying overnight. Margot, you don't need to know this right now. It was a Spiders thing that turned into a bit of a fizzer. Gurls from the bush had camping stuff, tarpaulins, ground-sheets.'

  Spiders is the name of the gay and lesbian coalition in the Campbell Valley and Paradise Coast. They organise dances, bush-walks, games, dog-shows, events and outings, and each year, prepare a float for the Mardi Gras in Sydney.

  'Will they be there now?' I wanted to know, in case I felt like going down there later.

  'I doubt it.' Alison snorted.

  'There's a caravan park right there.'

  'Fifteen dollars for a shower? No way. Not likely.' She laughed. 'It's not in their nature to pay. Just hoped the ranger wouldn't turn up. But, of course, he has.'

  'Did you,' I began, 'happen to see a semi? In the parking area?' I finished, 'Anywhere?'

  She answered very quickly, 'Nup. Why?' The police vehicles were banking up on the other side as she crossed on the ferry. My suspicions, my emotions, were way out of proportion with what I witnessed.

  'Nothing.' There were actually too many questions, I could hardly expect Alison to have the answers. It occurred to me, as we finished the conversation, that I could have been wrong; the glint of silver was probably just a big vehicle, a fisherman going on holiday.

  To compound the distress of this upsetting night, shouting broke out among the hippies next door and was spilling into the yard. The language was foul. They were trying to get rid of someone. 'The fucking last ferry is going soon.' The violent words were masculine. The man's son from a previous liaison was a well-known trouble-maker. He was drunk. Maybe the father was too. Moonsunshine, Moo, will not remember a thing about it in the morning or she will deny that it was any big deal, just males working off their natural aggro to re-establish their karmic balance. I was about to go over and straighten them out when the boy suddenly left. His car skidded out onto the road and I watched its tail-lights go south.

  All of a sudden, deadly silence. Unaccountably I burst into tears. Tears of fear and dread. And grief for the emptiness in some women, like Moonsunshine, who is simply not there, as if her self, her sense of being a person in her own right, had been annihilated for good. I was crying for the dead girl, too.

  The stress drink I found was a beautifully rounded white port from the Rutherglen district in Victoria, wonderfully sweet without the slightest stickiness. I reached out for the bottle and noticed that I had already drunk a good third. I replaced the cork without pouring. Now to ease my nerves, as I warmed milk, I tried to believe it was possible she died of natural causes, not murder. Probably had too hot a shot. Jumping to conclusions offended my sense of logic. Without the fair play of evidence, proof, all one had was fabrication with no basis in fact or knowledge. I have to watch my imagination doesn't rush off into conjecture, which plays a role, sure, but not yet. I turned off the light as soon as I finished my Milo. I was nearly asleep when through the darkness my telephone belled like an alarm.

  'Yes?' I answered the summons weakly.

  'It's Meghan.' Her voice sounded very close. Meghan Featherstone was a client of mine. She had engaged me over the phone, from the recommendation of one of Broom's friends. We had not met yet. She sent her paperwork through the mail.

  'Yes?' I repeated and looked down at the manila envelope which told me I needed a hair-cut. According to that she suspected someone was embezzling her money. But she did not mention it on the phone and I was too tired to ask.

  'It's late, Meghan,' I addressed her thickly, formally.

  'Margot. Would you like to meet my goats?' She sounded crazy, silly. 'Come over Tuesday. For tea.'

  'What do you mean? What do you want?' I couldn't tell her what kind of a night I was having. 'Where are you?' I asked.

  'Just off the Eyre Highway, in the Nullarbor Regional Reserve actually. The sky is so huge. The moon's magnificent but I can see the Seven Sisters.'

  In the desert the moon would be bright. It would not be quite as late over there, but you'd think it would dominate the stars.

  'Why? Why do you want me to see the goats?' Goats, I wrote under haircut. 'What are you talking about?'

  'Just come and see my block. I'd like someone to meet you.' At least I think she said 'someone'. She may have meant herself, but that was an odd way of putting it.

  To get to sleep again I picked up the closest thing to read, a magazine. 'Until recently, the Radiation Health Standing Committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council was responsible for setting Australia's standards and codes of practice in radiation safety.' Above that sentence was a map of the Maralinga Lands with small spots at Wewak and
Taranaki where the clean-up of contaminated soils was taking place. Right near there was the Nullarbor Regional Reserve. Maybe Meghan was involved in that. I had not been told what this woman did. There were government payment slips and some from international companies. She may be a bloody nuclear physicist, an expert in the removal of plutonium from politically sensitive places to dump it in the outback where, according to the Europeans or Americans she probably works for, there is nothing. Did she work for the CIA? Eavesdropping? Spying, bugging communications bouncing off satellites, electro-magnetic waves flowing through the chemical gases… what do I know? She could be out there carbon-dating old bones.

  Half-slept for about two hours then I couldn't go back to sleep, so I got up and began wandering around in the moonlit night, worrying about everything, why Broom left me, money problems, Sunday's triathlon, Chandra's voice, white face, sandy floor, streaky wall. Eventually, I went to bed.

  The lone conspirator drives a lorry named White Virgin. It does not belong to him. Truckman surrounds himself with toys, gadgets. His cabin is spotless. Alongside the exhaust chimney, aerials of different shapes and intent point to the sky above the roof of the semi.

  Ian Truckman is perpetually scared. He is afraid his boss will pull the truck one day and he will have no job and no pride. He has a computer terminal and a lap-sitting cyberman digital games controller shaped like women's breasts. He spent an entire year figuring out how to do it, but now he can do it. He can access the superhighway from the bitumen road. He has equipment to detect strange radio waves which may or may not (he keeps an open mind) indicate the presence of UFOs in the area he is traversing. Sometimes it is difficult to discern the static as he keeps his Citizens Band on at all times. In case. As well as monitoring extraterrestrial activity, he visits pornography sites because he does not want to be a man who is out of touch. He has opinions. For instance, when up to a million Internet users worldwide who downloaded pornography from a website lost thousands in telephone charges, he knew it was a feminist scam.

  Ian is driving at exactly one hundred and five kilometres an hour. Dreaming. As soon as his head starts doing that he needs a coffee. He stops when he sees a line of semi-trailers parked in the verge. There he knows the walls will be decorated with mighty vehicles and blokes will be sitting inside. Before he leaves the semi-trailer he circles his load, checking everything.

  The girl is there to serve him within seconds of his sitting down.

  'Just coffee, love. Thick black, plenty of sugar.' Other truckers are discussing the bush. And pollution.

  'Got a mate with cattle out in the scrub. Might turn up in the burning season. Give him a hand,' Truckman says, getting into the conversation with his bit.

  The blokes keep talking. 'Up North they call it "shark shit",' explains the knowledgeable one. 'Putrid black muck.'

  'No kidding?'

  'That,' says the know-all who likes to chat, 'is the rugged farm term for the tonnes of the stuff which covers 600,000 hectares of prime agricultural land along the NSW coast.'

  'How many acres is that?'

  'Dunno, about a million.'

  'Yeah, a million I reckon.'

  'Heard about that stuff,' puts in Ian. 'It is basically pure battery acid which bleeds from cane field drains and farm canals. It causes periodic large scale fish-kills.'

  'Farmers don't piss me off, developers do,' opines the big talker. 'They scrape the soil off too deep when they're grading. They have some kind of laser thing.'

  'That's because they can't build properly any more. Everything's on a cement slab nowadays,' his mate adds irrelevantly.

  'What I hate is these Yankee names.'

  'Canisteo Bayou?' asks Ian Truckman, who recently passed that name.

  'They call it canal development,' the know-all explains.

  'Lovely, it is,' says his mate. 'You just step outside your back door along your own wharf straight into your fishing boat. The mother-in-law is rattling about in a bloody mansion.'

  'Like fishing, do you?' Ian contributes, ready to talk angling his entire coffee break.

  'Never get time, mate. Never have a holiday. The wife's old man died not six months after they built the bloody thing. And she's a pain in the neck, to put it mildly.'

  Ian drains his coffee and he nods goodbye. It is eerily navy-blue outside. He has to make a call. Busy. Can't make this call from his own phone, has to be anonymous. Second try, the other end picks up. He puts down the receiver without speaking. Those were his orders. He visits the rest room and walks across the road to White Virgin gleaming ghostly pale in the still queue of darker vehicles.

  Ian Truckman checks his Conspiracy Theory bulletin board before he presses the clutch and gets into gear. 'Flying saucers chase me down the road, hovering like a hover-craft a couple of metres about the tarmac,' he told a bloke once. The arsehole laughed. So now he shares his fears with likeminded folk on the World Wide Web.

  He pours himself a glass from his iced water container and downs his nosleep pills. The engine purrs, warming up. He reads about listening to John Wesley Harding backwards. He isn't sure about that, but he puts on Highway 61 Revisited. Bob Dylan sings 'Ballad of a Thin Man'. Ian considers the fact that John Lennon was murdered by a cabal comprising the CIA, MI5 and the aliens who escaped after the Roswell incident, and logs out. He looks in his rear-vision mirrors before easing the rig out onto the road.

  The boss likes him because he is neat, on time and strict about the road rules.

  2

  …the shape of breasts…

  In the catchment of the Campbell River water springs from the earth in trickles, finds ways to the creeks, which fall to the tributaries eagerly. Lesser rivers join the flow through flatter farmland then to break up into the delta of the estuary near the sea. Deep in the rainforest, high in the Great Dividing Range, where the rocks drip, Virginia White forces out of wood the shape of breasts. The uprooted tree lies on a steep slope to the creek. The upper branches overhang the stream. Twigs and leaves have long gone. All that is left is the trunk, once hollowed out in a bushfire, thick limbs and rearing lateral roots black with age and red with clay. The only path to this log is the one made by Virginia herself.

  When she discovered the magic, mossy root system soaring from the ground like a chapel wall in a slightly different dimension, she returned to it time and again to gaze and enjoy a moment of magnetism. Until she climbed up onto the mighty trunk she could not understand the allure and why her gazing was not like meditation. Not peaceful at all. An impatience overwhelmed her. The timber had fallen out of the snigging jaws of the loggers' equipment in the days when the old-growth trees were huge. A lumberjack had died when this giant slid down the sheer descent into Deadman's Creek. There was enough wood in it to make a house, or a fortune in fine furniture.

  The root-wall is a gateway, for Virginia, into a world, forbidden to the physical body, the breathing now of vertical time.

  The day she carried her adze to this spot was shot through with inspiration. The red cedar was begging to be brought back to life as art. Chopping away, she cleaned, scraped, cut to find the hidden form. Lightning entered her veins. This work she must do: uncover the sculpture beneath the extraneous growth, decay and mud to find the permanent beneath the temporal. The seasons, the weather, fires and the industry of ants change the surface.

  There is no going back from her blind journey of discovery. When she embarks the bush around her is a sea; the part-hewn log, an island, or a ship. Surrender to the super-normal knowledge buried within has her in thrall.

  Virginia White is driven by some kind of karmic pressure, an understanding that she must do the inexplicable. She is a long way away from the galleries and sculpture parks. The rainforest is her studio. She has no commission. No one will pay her. No one wants her to do this work. Yet she feels an exigency. Patrons with all the power and none of the talent are on her back, hounding her with deadlines and demands. Logically, intellectually, it makes no sense to be so obse
ssed. Except in the metaphor that the practice of art is an expedition to the continent of the mind where truth is beauty and beauty truth. The joy of creation is not the emotion she feels. Travail, rather. Consciousness of toil is what she is aware of as she carefully uncovers with axe, chisel and sharp knife what the old buttressed trunk contains. Female forms. One with the head of a horse. Where the truncated branches are, near the abrupt rockface of the creek, figures arch like archers.