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  The Larrikin slapped down her large glass after she'd drained the last of its contents. I grabbed her by the swirls on her forearm and tugged suggestively with a slight toss of my head in the direction of the bar. With elaborate courtesy I removed my hand from her tattoos and begged for a few words on the front verandah.

  'What is it? Schooner of New?' offered I, and bought myself an unspiked tomato juice.

  When we had seated ourselves on the hardwood benches and faced each other over a matching rough-hewn table perpendicular to the car park, I asked the Rik what she knew about the Spiders barbecue, who was there and anything interesting? I described the ugly headgear I picked up in the toilet. I managed to glean a few facts. Jill David was wearing a cap, but she couldn't remember what colour or whether any writing was on it. The kid who died had a cap on backwards and so did the big bitch dealing out the pills. Tiger Cat was dealing drugs?

  A Scania 380 interrupted my interrogation. I stared at its heavy herd bars. The windows were dark-tinted. I looked down at the number plate, South Australian. I must have gone pale. The Rik started taking off Thelma, 'That man done gone and raped you down in Texas, Louise? Let's you and I just fire his little ol' rig and steal his hat.'

  'Actually,' I started. I wouldn't confide in Rik, and skirted around my brain for an easy subject. 'Actually,' I repeated, 'it's more like that older movie, Duel, remember that? The guy gets shadowed by a huge, big, evil, anonymous semi on his way home.' I choked on my drink and began to cough and splutter.

  'Shit, what's the matter?' The Rik was aware something had made me gasp.

  I explained. 'I've seen it in West Australia, Northern Territory, Queensland, now here.' My throat was still catching. 'The first time I was on my pushbike. I'm sure, at least once, it deliberately tried to kill me.'

  Rik scoffed with disbelief. 'It's just a milk truck. Or is the tanker on the back full of toxic waste? Get a grip, Margot.'

  'In WA, it had double articulation, full of cattle aching to be out of there, crapping with fear and claustrophobia.' I took a swig of drink to clear my throat, to avoid the eyeless gaze of huge windscreen.

  'Road trains are different from this vehicle. Gotta be more powerful,' stated Rik.

  The rig drove out of the car park and headed west. My Achilles tendon started throbbing. 'No matter how strong we think we are, each one of us has a weak spot. I've known robust women turn to jelly when their thing happens. One cop I knew, it was traffic. Being held up more than three minutes really sent her. We'd have to go the long way round. She was okay, provided we kept moving. Apart from that, she was great. Brave. For the three months we were partners.'

  The Larrikin laughed, derisively, 'I had to save Milt, over there, from her own sleeping bag. Screaming as if she were being bloody murdered. The fucken zip caught.'

  'My weak spot is someone is always following me,' maintained my point, seriously. 'This phobia is not exactly an irrational fear. I know too much, and they want to, silently, one day, give me an accident, good and fatal.'

  'Why?' The Rik was all ears, a sucker for the excitement of undercover work and intrigue.

  'So I don't blow any whistles,' I confided. 'There are too many of them, their contract with each other too clever to be spoken, their conspiracy a matter of a wink. A word and I'm gone. They're everywhere. I know the extent of their subterfuge and how necessary it is.' I exaggerated to Rik, to make a story of it.

  The Rik got up saying, 'Truckers are okay. They gotta code.'

  She removed a brick from a pile of papers on another table, took one, held it up and waved it at me as if it explained everything. She brought it over. It was a flier for the gun lobby. Shooters were gathering to protest the government's anti-gun laws. I glanced at the date and let the offending material float down. Rik picked it up again.

  'Now tell me,' she was tapping the page with her finger, 'You would know one firearm from another. What's this?' She held out the picture, ostentatiously covering the caption.

  'That's a .243 calibre repeating rifle. It's been picked up in suicides and domestics quite a bit,' I answered the quiz question.

  'They love their toys. Need semi-automatics to protect our wives and children. And kill wild boar,' she said. The Rik was smarter than she let on.

  'But actually they are used to shoot wives and children,' I argued. 'Murder-suicides. Easier. With guns,' I expanded, rubbing my heel.

  'Yeah? What about gassing? In cars,' Rik seemed prepared to express the opinion that guns don't kill, people do.

  'Bikies are fairly fond of killing each other,' I said.

  'Me, I reckon,' she puffed with bravado, 'What a way to go. Pow!' She used her forefinger to illustrate. 'One clean shot, and it's all over Rover.'

  'What's the word among the gurls on the barbecue night, the evening the kid died, Rik?' I leant forward confidentially.

  The Rik eyed me with cunning, wanting to talk and not trusting me at all. I told her I was investigating this death.

  She said, 'It's fucken fishy if you ask me. We left before the action.'

  'The new regional commander, he wants a war. On drugs.'

  'Marijuana. Or what? Big stuff like the shit landing on the coast?' The Rik probed as if she thought I had inside information.

  'I don't know, but his track record is stacks of informers. It's the way he works. Surreptitiously, cards close to his chest. He's ex-Vietnam. Wouldn't be beyond him to order a massive helicopter operation out here.' I swung out my arms to include the distant ranges. 'Would he have a cause, do you think?'

  'Last time they did that, it cost them twenty-five million dollars and they got twenty-odd arrests. No shit!' The Rik showed her contempt for that particular incompetence (or corruption) at the same time as being impressed by the figure spent. She mentioned the names of the growers caught, the pathetic size of their crops, and was about to spread rumours when I brought her back to my question. 'Dello and Maz said the girl was crying, freaked out. Maz has got a rescuing side to her. They think she was dropped out of a car, near the mangrove swamps, on one of the dirt roads.'

  'You happen to know who owns a red Saab?' I shot the question without waiting for a beat.

  'Nope,' she fibbed. 'Some rich bitch. You'd be surprised who uses and who deals on the coast.'

  I nodded. 'Probably,' I admitted, too cool to ask for names. We went and joined the others, who were talking of explosions heard by the gurls on the land. Rory was having the least to say.

  'I wouldn't put it past the old Judith to have ordered a booby trap through a catalogue to keep marauders off her crop,' the Rik proclaimed. 'Or Virginia.'

  'You don't know Virginia. She is not like that,' said Rory.

  'She frightens me,' Bea put in unconvincingly. It didn't look like much frightened Bea. But the Virginia I saw yesterday could be capable of anything.

  'Nuh, she's like a big black crow all the little birds are shitting on to protect themselves or their tucker. That's how little birds get rid of them, you know. Flying above shitting on them.' Bea was impressed by this fact about little birds.

  Virginia and booby traps! I noted on my pad. Judith?

  'There are recipes for bombs on the Internet,' informed Alison. 'Any one could make one.'

  I got up to leave. This was going round in circles. I said I'd be seeing them. Rory accompanied me. 'I'll meet you at the mailbox, Margot.'

  'You bet,' I jerked my head efficiently. 'Saturday. Two things before you go; what's wrong with Alison? And, you wouldn't have any idea who owns a red Saab, would you?'

  Rory folded her arms and leant her back into my car, and replied, 'Fortunately, she hasn't got any broken ribs. Just sore. And, I can't say for sure, but I think the car Jill's been driving around in, a red Saab, belongs to a woman named Rosemary Turner.'

  'What happened to Alison?' I asked urgently. 'Beaten up? A car accident?'

  'I'm not dobbing anyone in, Margot. She'll be all right.' Rory slapped the roof of the Suzuki and said, 'See you.'

>   I sat in the driver's seat and wrote: Alison bashed, who? T.C. dealing hard drugs? R.T., surely not? An attaché case on the passengers side floor looked invitingly neat, even though I knew nothing much was in it except a few loose threads in the shape of papers relating to four diverse topics. Clicking it open I tossed the spiral notebook inside, virtually entangling the lot into one knot, to be dealt with later.

  In the couple of hours' drive home Virginia White's mind carries on its tirade, only the tip of which she expressed to Maria. Virginia backs up and drives through the creek, over the rocks and up the slippery bank. She takes her reliable vehicle down the side track to have a chat with her neighbour, Rory. Rory is not home.

  Virginia strides through the bush, stopping at her cabin only long enough to drop off her shopping and collect her leather satchel of tools. As she works the wood with her adze, taking out hunks of rot, trying not to interpret the shapes that emerge too soon, Hope gazes silently, wondering whether to make her presence felt.

  Eventually she does. Although Virginia doesn't want to be disturbed, she listens to Hope's monologue of woes. The younger woman, her limbs as smooth as saplings, her tanned legs and arms streaked with mud, the bits of clothing that she wears green and brown, merges with the bush around her. Her being there in fact doesn't interrupt Virginia. She keeps working, forming female musculature as if Hope is posing for her. Rather than having to imagine the Amazon beneath her chisel, whether she is glancing back over her shoulder or staring intensely towards the future, Virginia will pause and look up as Hope moves enough to give the idea, to assist the perception of the secrets contained in the cruddy old wood. Each is in awe of the other. While Hope knows she is witnessing the great artisan at work, Virginia appreciates the mere youth of the girl, the naivety, the innocence, the flexibility, the language of another generation, like a patois from a province she can never visit. Understanding those coming after along the path of linear time is like stepping in the same river-water twice, impossible. She, the older, must bend backwards in the effort to impart the wisdom of the wiser. But the discourse is distressing. Hope's life, just the tale of a white girl struggling for identity, has a degree of suffering; coming to the sanctuary of a women's only place, to find lies told her, all the official documents of who she is in the world stolen. Gurls out to have a piece of her, why?

  Virginia tries to wrap the detail up into packages of generalities which apply to us all. The childhood rape, the poverty, the perversity, the nonsense, the mother's betrayal and brutality, the lesbian sexual experience of being made into a slave, and so on. Horror. They talk as furiously as Virginia applies her sharpened blades.

  'Women betray their knowing frequently. I don't know why mothers such as yours—such as mine, actually—do not protect their daughters with, at least, truth. Telling. Except to analyse their position from a feminist, theoretical position. That, dear Hope, requires that you read for yourself,' she says.

  Hope lets go of her depressing tale, or rather, stops the sad past influencing her mood. She is actually happy with the present moment. Privileged. She, as Virginia forms her bold likeness out of jutting root, asks questions pertaining to the quest both are on, seeking answers.

  'Mothers don't have the freedom the fathers have to give you a cultural place. They have their own worries, they're no better off, emotionally, than their daughters. Their selves are stolen, and, depending on the woman herself, she behaves in compensation of that. Whether violently, like mine. Whitewashing, cleaning, scrubbing, protecting the man, like yours.'

  'Annihilation?' Hope smiles. 'Motherhood.' She climbs easily up into the sculpture of a boat and sits on the beam, two arms by her side supporting her balance.

  'Spiritual annihilation, I mean annihilation of the female spirit,' Virginia lectures. 'Like, it not only includes massacre, murder, outside attacks. It's a job women do on themselves inside, because, for the most part, it is too hard not to. To survive. It's better to pretend.'

  'You don't pretend,' Hope comments, simply.

  'Yeah, but look at me.' Virginia implies she's a failure.

  'What do you mean? I think you look great. And this,' Hope pats the timber, 'is brilliant.'

  'Precisely.' Virginia picks out a chisel and digs out the curve of a cheekbone and the hollow of an eye, and then stands up to stretch. 'Where am I doing it? Who will see it? I have come to a place I had to come, both physically, and, um, politically. Nowhere. Off the map. No money. No influence. No standing, even among the alternative world. You see, a sculptor influences culture in a really subtle way. Like you need a whole civilisation around you, for your expression—of self, of knowledge—to be understood. You're not a trail-blazer. Theorists and on-the-ground activists are that.'

  'How do you stop the annihilation?' Hope leans back and takes an upside-down look at the bush.

  Virginia changes to a broader chisel, and says, 'Just don't be annihilated. Don't allow it. You don't have to. But, it requires constant thinking and absolute honesty. You kind of attack each trial as you come to it, then try and practise what you know. Express your real self.'

  Hope seems to have lost concentration as Virginia wants to go on thrashing it out. She says, 'I saw the aliens land last night. It was really clear. A bunch of lights. Right in front of me. Then, in seconds the craft was beyond the hills. I see tree spirits, too. Bunyips, dark shapes, sneaking about.'

  Virginia's mood plummets. 'I don't see them,' she says grumpily.

  Hope swings her body upright, hops along the log, slipping and keeping her footing in one fluid movement. 'Time to go,' she calls from the creek end.

  'Hope,' Virginia murmurs to herself, 'has led me on. Nonsense, madness.' She goes to an untouched part of the fallen tree where all she need do is hack. She picks up her labrys and swings forwards and backwards, getting down to the red wood underneath the crap.

  Virginia tires. She drops the axe and wants to cry, but boiling blood burns the tears into steam. Like sweat. Angry energy overtakes her like a sudden wave breaking, but she will not damage her work. With a discipline borne of faith, she leaves the site.

  The rainforest, in places, is being choked by lantana, an introduced species gone rampant. She slides down the mossy slope to a hedge of lantana. At the weed's scratching edge she digs its roots with her fingers; with the power of her arms, planting her feet, she pulls and yanks and hangs on with all four limbs, a monkey of fury. The large dynamic weed begins to loosen. Blood makes her grasp slippery, but she wants to rip this thing out of the crumbing soil of the hillside. She crawls belly-wise, following every lateral root fighting its hold on rock and ground. She hurls herself at the new sprout. Her weight alone dislodges the huge bush from the precipice. She is glad of the danger. More of the same species smugly creating erosion feel her weight. With fists, elbows and knees hooked around the stinking, abrasive spines, suddenly, she falls. Together they fall into the next lantana bush. She crawls through its spines to its roots and begins again with bleeding bare hands. Falls again with the weed, dangerously, eventually making the hillside bare. Stupid. Heroic. Alone.

  Ecstatic. She talks to the goddess, laughing. 'My rooting ability rivals the wild swine. I am a feral pig and I am digging, tearing, pulling until the last tug brings the thing from the earth and, gravity and I bring it down together. And another. And another. I am exhausted, trusting mother earth as I tumble cushioned by tangled growth right down to the creek.' The bruises and grazes she hardly feels, splashing water into her armpits. She finds herself in a beautiful part of the creek with high walls either side and huge rocks. Flat rocks, native ferns and orchids, the spot has the immense charm of humanlessness. Across the creek is a eucalypt with a low enough hanging branch to suspend the uprooted weeds to die and behind that a big fig. Now she is methodical with a mixture of righteousness and intimacy with the earth, is-ness. Then, spent, in torn clothes she lies in the stream, contemplating her work, full of wonder. The way she came is just about sheer and almost perceptively breath
ing with relief. She makes her way home via the creek. The bliss of menopause is that its fury supersedes the egotism of needing flattery, self-congratulation.