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  'We don't have any money. Why she was hanging around us?' Virginia says, sighingly. And begins cleaning the wall.

  Cybil chats about Tiger Cat. 'Her latest client is from the land, she said. Judith Sloane is interested.'

  'That weasel,' Virginia scoffs. 'Every time I pull a weed I think of her. Well, that makes me feel better about the body-builder.'

  Cybil resumes her attack. 'What's wrong with this Judith anyway? From what I hear, she is a vegan, she sings right-on songs. She is politically correct. You're all about political correctness.'

  'All bullshit,' Virginia decides. 'She makes me so angry it has kept me from topping myself. At times.' Virginia becomes impassioned as she remembers her rages. 'Fucken Sloane Ranger, Poms, what a fucking arrogant race of barbarians! It's the colonial attitude. See something? Just go and own it. Self-serving shopkeepers, Uriah Heeps with their grasping fingers and abject sly classism, why am I cursed with their bloody awful language?'

  Cybil, sitting solidly in her armchair, refuses to be amused. 'Aren't you one to talk?'

  'We are nothing but custodians of the earth we stand on. We can't have anything, except respect and gratitude. The perfidy of Poms,' Virginia tosses the sponge into the sink from the doorway, 'is the idea of ownership. They stole it in the first place.'

  'See! you're prejudiced. You're not perfect yourself. You're prepared to muddy her name.' Cybil's little dog leaps onto her lap. 'What are her crimes?' she asks.

  'Plenty of gripes.' Virginia has difficulty knowing where to start. 'The feral pigeons she's got. Her fucken sheep. The bloody honeysuckle, it's destroying the bush. Oh, you name it. She's got no damn soul.'

  'You should hear yourself,' Cybil calls and hears what's left of the plate clatter into her kitchen tidy. 'Listen to yourself. Judith's just a moody feminist whose day is done. They can't change.'

  Virginia does listen to herself and doesn't like what she hears. 'Don't make me say things I don't want to. I'm feeling unreasonable. Unlike you, I don't like this constant arguing.'

  'Admit it, feminism is a dead horse,' Cybil laughs. She reaches across the arm of the chair for the phone. 'I'm going to order Thai take-away. They'll deliver.'

  Virginia gives in. 'Speaking of dead horses. The Clydesdale. It happened years ago,' she begins.

  Cybil listens.

  'We came across the skeleton of the horse, Trivia and I. It had no teeth in its mouth. He had one tooth left in the back set when he died. This noble beast. He was a magnificent animal. I remember her leading him up the track, young, handsome, gentle.'

  'Who?' Cybil, when hearing women's stories, wants names.

  'Judith. He had the eye of a gentle giant, though he was not trained. She was going to break him in herself. He would drag the logs in from the forest for her log cabin. He would not need grease for his clutch, oil for his differential, nor need a road through the trees. He wouldn't spoil the ferns or elk-horns. All the little girls could line up along his back and get to primary school ten kilometres away. There were plenty of kids on the land then.'

  'Really?' Cybil is surprised. Virginia's speech is sarcastic. 'Sounds like Judith's heart was in the right place.'

  'He was probably cheap because he wasn't broken in,' Virginia continues. 'Little girls never lined up along his back. He never got his feet trimmed or his teeth filed. Judith pronounced that he was a loner, that he liked being wild. Domestic animals have to be fed. They're like us.'

  'Disillusioned, probably,' Cybil comments, glancing at the time and looking about for her purse.

  'On the day we found the skeleton, Trivia stood there feeling her own regret. She said she should have done something. Now it was too late. Far too late. One tooth.'

  'How sad,' Cybil says softly, flattening the note, ready for the doorbell to ring.

  'It was,' Virginia nods. 'Feel the truth, and remember this is what Trivia said.'

  'Go on,' Cybil urges.

  'There were always vegetables in Judith's garden. She was a star, she had groupies. They would come from the city and dig and plant, and feel privileged. The food was left to rot, never even given away to gurls, her neighbours. Nor even to the horse. Like all her bullshit, she probably didn't have a clue. Yet she wouldn't let anyone else have him.' Virginia is still furious. 'Meanness is pathetic. Never feel sorry for a mean person. It is not wise. They shall not have that as well.'

  'Why didn't you just take him?'

  Virginia shrugs. 'A number of times I asked her. I would have trained him well, and fed him hay and oats. Horses are not native to this country. It is cruel to set them free. For the land and for them. Hard-footed animals destroy the bush. Compact the soil. Trivia agreed. But I kept away, then I had good manners, timidity in the face of Judith's power games. The big horse eventually died of starvation and neglect. I hope her dreams are rotting in her chest.'

  The bell rings. Cybil leaves Virginia with her memories and regrets while she goes down the stairs to the security door with the cash and returns with a plastic bag of sealed containers. She makes room on the table and puts out plates and chopsticks.

  Cybil and Virginia converse as they eat, Cybil gently teasing out the details and Virginia talking.

  'I don't mind killing. If I kill the right person,' Virginia replies to Cybil's curious question.

  'The right person is the absolutely innocent or the absolutely guilty, yeah?' Cybil eats energetically.

  'True,' Virginia nods. 'I could deliver euthanasia.'

  'We're not god, we're not the judge.' Cybil wipes her hands with the paper serviette.

  'If I'm free you're free, we cannot police each other,' Virginia jokes. 'Beware, liar in your lair. Vengeance is mine. I watch and wait.'

  The food is finished, the evening wears on. Cybil switches again. 'You have hatred and racism of your own, VeeDub. And you won't shut up.'

  'It is not racism when you're talking about the English.' Virginia is on her feet, pacing the confined space of Cybil's flat.

  'You've often boasted that you are as free as your twin brother,' Cybil probes with an untruth. Cybil's refusal to understand makes Virginia frustrated.

  'I'm not. That's the point. I don't want to compromise and serve like most women, mother, whore, nun. Not of my own free will.' Virginia remains patient. 'Jeff has, like the English, all the privileges of being intrinsic to the hegemony.'

  'Sounds like the politics of envy to me,' Cybil interrupts. She feels her power is secure when she can get Virginia to throw something. Or shout. Having this power proved again with Virginia punching the wall, she begins to cry. She wants Virginia to cuddle and comfort her.

  The weeping doesn't move Virginia; this time her heart turns to stone.

  'You are the hypocrite,' she says, provoked. 'It is easy for you to claim the pain. My frustration is like a padded cell with no lining. I hurl myself against the walls, and the walls are muscled monsters with no compunction.' Angry tears sprout from her fierce eyes and she becomes passionate. 'The powers that be truly want me not to exist,' she insists. 'They taunt me with their ignorance and the next bit of horrendous behaviour. Mine pales beside the brilliance of their violence, and you don't care!'

  'Yes, I do,' says Cybil, softly. 'I care too much.'

  'What?' Virginia listens to Cybil relent, ratonalising her outburst in terms of the Change. 'I don't control the chemicals in my brain, let alone the bloody hormones. Menopause, what a ride!'

  'Come here,' begs Cybil.

  'Look, I can't stay in this place,' Virginia says, feeling trapped and burdened by the duty of work, by the onus of love. 'Because you're not admitting your part in it.'

  19

  …ghostly rapists…

  Sofia frantically looks up fish recipes. She has Mrs Beeton's All About Cookery and the Heart Foundation's Guide To Healthy Eating. She is attracted to the recipes Mrs Beeton tactfully parenthesised: Jewish Dish; Passover Dish; Jewish Invalid Cookery. Her duty to Maria whips her into action. She will feed her low-fat food. Intending,
at the outset, to get Maria's weight down, she now worries about '2 pennyworth of gingerbread' and the meaning of the word gill. Showing off, obsessed, she begins talking aloud, assuming Maria is within earshot.

  'The Jews have different tastebuds, chosen ones, I suppose. Apart from the gingerbread with fresh salmon, it combines cayenne pepper with golden syrup. We shall eat kosher from now on. Good prana. God will whisk the obesity away. No sacrificial lambs. No cloven-hoofed meats…'

  Maria, seated in an armchair, shuts the irritating chatter out. All she can imagine is a kitchen blasted by Sofia's culinary efforts looking as if a bomb hit it. She would not only have to clean up, she would have to be grateful. She does not want to eat fish and salad, she feels like fried tomatoes and lamb chops and two slices of bread tossed in the hot juices. And she wants to do it herself in a kitchen scrupulously clean and efficient. As Sofia calls out about exotic pairing of flavours, Maria thinks wistfully of bubble and squeak, of mashed potatoes browned in a hot pan, of bacon slowly manufacturing the pig oil that makes everything taste so satisfying. She recalls a moment in a film, possibly The Color Purple, or maybe one set in South Africa, where the black woman who slaves for the whites is allowed to take home bacon fat. A solid white block. The shot of the pure lard portraying contrasting possessions brings tears of sympathy. A victim of bathos, Maria feels the sentimentality as hunger in her stomach.

  Maria must not allow herself to get depressed. Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse is the book on her lap, but she needs science-fiction, fantasy. She imagines she could give up smoking and drinking before escapist reading. But not, she sighs, food. The genre novels on the table are due back at the library today.

  Sofia, having decided on the Jewish recipe for her expensive fish, is manically throwing together the ingredients for gingerbread.

  Oh no, Maria heaves herself up and glances around the surfaces for the car-keys.

  Respecting that Sofia in these moods is highly sensitive, she speaks politely. 'Well, a kosher lunch will be another two hours I suppose. I have to take the books back. All right?'

  Sofia doesn't hear her until the front door slams, when Maria's words echo in her brain a clear repetition. She is panic-stricken. 'Maria, Maria. Where are you going?'

  Like a yacht with heavy ballast and a light wind in its sail, Maria is not about to turn around. 'Library,' she yells.

  Sofia strung like a violin string could spend money in ludicrous amounts. 'We are aristocracy! We have to have the best, even if in genteel poverty like Anastasia Romanov.' Sofia, having spent some of her childhood in a wealthy diplomatic family, has wintered in Moscow. An adventure with Jill and Margaret in Rosemary's car to the Fishermen's Co-operative down the coast at the weekend turned into a spree. In the fridge are crabs, lobsters, cod, and being dealt with now, a large chunk of salmon. Monday morning came and Sofia was down at the deli before Maria was out of bed.

  Now there is caviar, as well as pâté and cheeses, bottled eggplants and artichokes, exotic spices and herbs, but not, Maria noticed with a groan, one slice of cold meat. No one to turn to, not even Margot. She trusts Gorman because she understands confidentiality. She won't talk, and is, possibly, the least damaged woman in her circle. Alison, who intuitively reads her palms, perceives her needs, is dangerous. If Maria confronts Sofia with her extravagance, all this beautiful food, fit for a banquet, will end up all over the house, not a shred would be left to eat. Tonight it will be loud music and seriously sadistic sex, if past experience is anything to go by. Everything has drama, importance. Small things have exaggerated significance when Sofia is the heroine in the art-house movies in foreign languages that she loves. Maria turns the key in the ignition and revs the engine to warm up in the old-fashioned way. Then, using only the rear-vision mirror, she slowly backs the car out of the yard and into the street.

  Sofia is a genius, her mental associations so fast the strings of insights come in rhymes. In riddles. Although life is full of humour and commitment, the relentless entertainment tires Maria. She does not mind doing the work of cleaning up, tidying and keeping the ship steady. Really. She is committed to Sofia's welfare. The dysfunction is a fault of society, other women must rescue and care. No one else will. Maria has been through it many times, helped many women. Sofia cannot take extra stress. But something must have happened to bring it on. The Internet? Sofia has been known to blow light globes when she enters a room. Screens emit electro-magnetic radiation, disturbing the delicate balance of chemicals and neurons in her brain. She lives on the edge, her nerves cannot take strain from the outside world. It was okay, yesterday, for her to go for a drive. Maria spent the day with Alison. Was it the girl who had gone to the toilet and never come back? Maria thinks. But Sofia did not know this girl before. No one knew her. Dello and Maz had picked her up hitch-hiking and, as is Dello's way, invited her to stay and party. Dello runs Maz through the ropes of sexual jealousy as a game of keeping them together, making life interesting. Yes, a death, an accidental death of someone she was just getting to know would prey on Sofia's mind. Sofia loves new people on sight, later she is suspicious and scared, sometimes vicious. On that Friday, she was fine. Maria puts importance on death, as if drawn by a morbid empathy.

  'I have you, Maria. I need you. I know you are always there for me. I am worried about your weight and I'm going to do something about it.' Sofia yabbered on in the car in the moonlit night. She had been clever with the cops, though. Maria waits for a train to pass in front of her at the level crossing. Then without warning she had been callous. Sofia switches mental tracks as a traveller changes means of transport, leaping from one obsession to the next. The obsession itself the destination, the being. Maria read Chessler's Women and Madness when it first came out. It is not Sofia's fault. Male power in families is reinforced by violence or its threat, by religion, by set moral and legal systems; even his absence gives weight to his point of view, ensuring his patrilineal line, his sexual rights. Some girls are denied childhood altogether by becoming sex objects very young while treated like little princesses by mild, smug and rich patriarchs. Maria is convinced Sofia suffered sexual abuse at the hands of the diplomat or a member of his family. Maria takes the direction to the coast, to gaze at the sea and think.

  But before she sits in the car overlooking the ocean, she must get take-away food.

  On the footpath outside the take-away, she meets an old friend, hurrying about her shopping. Maria stops Virginia White, who is always good for a rave if you can ever find her.

  Maria grabs her arm, pleads, 'Sit down in the park with me, VeeDub. Tell me how you are?'

  'You heard about the race? Yesterday?' Virginia fills her in.

  They walk to a table beneath the Norfolk pines, and talk—the tall Virginia, thin and strong, beside the short, round Maria, breathing with difficulty. Virginia can unburden her woes on Maria, who, even if she doesn't actually understand what she is talking about, can absorb it all in the subcutaneous blubber.

  'Then Cybil turned on me. An individual lesbian may suck out the very life force of her partner. It's never happened to me before,' Virginia prefers to take the incidental to an abstract, broader canvas.

  'Unless her partner is prepared to ape the model of heterosexual perfection and be a wife,' responds Maria. She sits down, and, comfortable with generalities which disguise personal gripes, continues, 'provide, succour, listen, edit, admire, be a saviour. Long-suffering, or be a husband in virtue, loyal, faithful, bringing home the bacon, flattering, taking out to dinner.'

  Virginia nods agreement, 'To holidays in winery valleys listening to classical quartets. Cybil would truly love that. But I have neither the time, nor the money.'

  'In the 'seventies we thought we could break the mould. Create a new paradigm. Do it anyway,' Maria advises. 'Cybil's so sexy.'

  Virginia means what she says. 'Where am I going to get the money for that sort of a trip? Borrow it?'

  'Indulge yourself,' sighs Maria. 'Pairs of dykes, both working at shared
projects, like gardens or businesses or in the arts or wherever, they seem happy just with each other. It is too easy to criticise.'