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  When Truckman arrives at the warehouse at four in the morning, lights are on. He does not move from his seat. Two men come out to direct him. The shutter doors rise, leaving him a foot either side to back the load in. Taking his time, he does it perfectly. He gets down from the cab, stretches, yawns, struts. The boss calls him over to a little glassed-in office. They exchange money and log books.

  Ian Truckman is given a few days off. He decides to drive down the Campbell Delta and stay by the surf on Doon Buggy Drag near Lookout Point. His vehicle takes up most of the cable ferry.

  The lone conspirator is fishing for salmon at the edge of the surf at dawn.

  5

  …fear of the abyss…

  To: "chandra"

  From: "O'Lachlin"

  Subject: Annihilation

  Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2000 17:07:57+1000

  MEMO: Revelation Ch. 20 Verse 7 "And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison."

  >> The Earth, that jewel among planets for cosmonauts and aliens to view with wonder, astronauts say is dirty with smoke. Rainforests burn all over the globe, smogging the atmosphere. The belt of coral reefs around her equatorial waist died in a heated sea. That diversity and interdependence of biospheric colour and organic life in the unique oceans of our solar system, that epitome of phenomenal beauty, turned to pale bone in the space of a few months in 1998. A thousand years of breathing beauty broken by beholders who are blinded. Fire!! The last horseman of the Apocalypse here. Can't you see?

  >> Actuality overwhelms the dismal predictions of seers. But who listens to prophets? They have only words! And language serves liars and slanderers and flatterers equally as well. Probably better. Secrets, dissemblance, even practised at home among your own, puts spies in charge of the bear and the bald eagle.

  >> The Inferno of damnation emerges from mythology onto the surface of the earth in all its images of suffering. Unspeakable atrocities, rape of the innocents, hordes of homeless displaced by neighbouring armies, tribes and militias, dispossessed in snow and cyclone of food and shelter, robbed of work, of purpose, of meaning, shattered by quakes and floods, weakened by disease; their water poisoned, rivers of flame causing fish-kills and die-backs, cyanide spilling everywhere, vegetables irradiated; milk strontium-tainted; beef, contaminated through covetous cannibalism, from cattle on the hoof to the final frozen mince, profane all that was sacred in the once great Cow-mother. The sacrilege of transgression does not stop there, but it is so obvious.

  >> Now Hathor's, lo's, whatever her name, the Celestial Cow's species is burping dangerous quantities of methane into the thin ozonic shield for the greed of carnivorous man. For hamburgers and dairy products: tell the masters by their wolverine teeth. Acid soils, salinated paddocks, toxic algae shrink natural resources as mega-production increases; beasts of mythological grandeur turn powerless as babes; words of apocryphal prophets mock their own kind in the deafening babble of brass drowning the music of the spheres; fine tunes of inborn talent absorbed by necrophilic porn; offensive greed honoured by obscene respectability making continuous capitalism malignant. Materialism is only one symptom: hark doomsday death cults!

  >> Weaponry obsesses the chains of command and government at the cost of all that is priceless; the wild and the free colonised by nonsense, exploitation and criminal ignorance, if not destroyed. Pleasure putrefied by personal excess, perfection polluted by the very idea of itself perpetrated by sanctimonious paragons of hypocrisy, pettiness positions itself in the palaces of power and consigns wisdom to the sewer.

  >> Paradise, that kingdom come, the Elysium fields for fools, opium of the people, dissolving into the white dust peddled on the streets and numbers on the stock exchange, is a chimera in the desert of commerce shimmering god and heaven as reflection, as projection, as justification for the abomination of all that is blameless. For fear of the abyss within, hell.

  >> Supreme selfishness assails the subtle ecosphere of human character, attacking moral fibre, upsetting the delicate balance of soul, heart, body and mind as if a sick pestilence, the stuff of nightmare, escaped the fetters of geological time to wreak havoc in the brains of humankind. Evil at the end of the second millennium of the Christian era is as vigorous as cancerous tumours outgrowing the host-being. Sublime scepticism shrinks all knowledge to the dimensions of individual understanding, naming and numbering, casting the ineffable into banal backgrounds of grotesque shadow easy to ridicule.

  >> In the same Western civilisation that produced the religions which rule our ways of life, the heavenly cow whose udder produced the Milky Way is shat upon. Birth-giving deities who existed when nothing else had being, who were believed to have created that which exists, while honoured through moon-worship in many cultures were never a notion of antenature, merely expressions of respect for that which is sacred, joyous and bigger than us, beyond our capacity to comprehend, are divinities of the same history as now. Kali, Lat, AI-Lat, Audumla, whatever the name of the sacred wetnurse of humanity, is absolutely abused by bovine usage in the present time. Thus is lo angry. While jealous man endeavours to control the extremes of life, the moment of breath suffers for his search.

  >> We cannot know what lies after the demise of consciousness, nor who peoples places we cannot reach, ever. But arrogance precurses its own fall. It is true that no amount of medical progress can check the extraterrestrial viruses, try as they might, and they will. In religious logic, therefore, the satanic is as viable as the godly. The spiritual dimension is beyond personal power. Fear of death is the province of the faithless who, in the dreadful irony of their own mortality, kill. Disastrous lack of love for life and living is poverty of the imagination, plain ingratitude, passionless lust, vice, little lies and major dishonesty, all within the free will and fate of being human. Robbing death of its dignity is treating life as a private possession.

  >> Just as science has proved viruses rush through the hole in the ozone layer from outer space like molecules of water down a gully-trap creating mysterious diseases of the body, fantastic vision supposes evil erupts from the nether regions, the engine room of the devil within the material world, leaving circles of glass on the crust of the earth like pimples on the skin. Frightening the hopeless.

  >> Isn't it tragic?

  >> Tragic!

  6

  …white virgin…

  After the dance and sleep disturbed by Maria's phone call, Margot Gorman is treating herself gently, sipping a herb tea, sitting on her front verandah in the sun, when she smells dust. Then she hears the approach of a powerful motor on her road. Travelling slowly, going north, the lorry White Virgin passes her house. It is a prime mover, no trailer. Overall fragile, and brittle, her uterus giving her hell beneath her flat abdominal muscles, Margot is not herself. Red clover or chamomile, she couldn't decide, now the mixture tastes horrible. She tosses it.

  While 'white virgin' may have nothing to do with amazons or Valerie Solanas, it grasps the imagination of a death-crazed world. While being a code-name for a covert operation, the nickname of the figure-head of the extreme Right, the title of a pornographic interactive video-game, a new drug, a conspiracy, the white virgin is, typically, a victim. The words haunt Margot.

  White Virgin. The two words bedevil me because Harry spat them at me because my courage frightened him. Harry said, with hatred, 'As far as I can see yo' nuthin but a poor little white virgin.' Harry claimed a grandmother in the Pitjatjantjara tribe, but you couldn't see it in his face. He fancied the jive-speak of African-American ghettoes. He meant to annihilate me as a daughter of colonists. All at the National Crime Authority knew as much as I but were not going to do anything about it. He probably said it because I wouldn't go to bed with him. When the words 'white virgin' turned up on the bug catcher of a truck, the perspex shield mounted on top of the mighty engine, I couldn't see the driver whose driving was murderous but I knew they had sent him. As he tried to run me on my bike
off the road, Harry's jibe echoed in the darker corridors of my consciousness where vulnerability sits and cowardice lurks. You have no bullet-proof vest, Margot. You're scared. The nuisance phone call, after Maria's, came from them.

  There was a satanic cult up on the plateau, according to my neighbour, Moo. Satanists are always looking for a white virgin to sacrifice. Pagans may cry for respectability as a religion and honour old Gaia, the earth, but is it natural to have women naked and men overly dressed in cloaks? Most forms of erotica and soft porn I've seen say it's okay. Sexual fantasy is all right, but what is being fantasised? Penetration? Death? Sacrifice. Virgin indicates innocence, ignorance, youngness, potential, endless possibility. The cherry to be sucked, the fruit to be plucked. The work prostitutes put into looking as young and virginal as they can is mind-boggling. Happy, good-time-girl personas. What they love is the money and the brief power over men. They don't necessarily hate themselves, they don't know themselves. There's a hole where identity should be. All surface.

  White virgin, that rig!, agent of my fear. I try to think of old, unmarried ladies, suffragettes, who did know themselves, in heavy tweeds with hunting stools as walking sticks, sensible shoes: have weapon, shall walk. Wise white virgins with a seat should they need one.

  White Virgin, South Australian number plate. It could be a coincidence.

  Mourning Tree-Lover's Cult. New Age witches and warlocks go out in the bush to moan and wail and ululate and weep over the destruction of the earth as they dance in their birthday suits, in a circle, playing drums and blowing pipes, getting high on the fruits of the earth. I bet they are as self-righteous as some Christian militia group which, on a neighbouring property, perhaps, gathers to practise shooting scum, aiming their guns at the enemy. It doesn't take too much of a flight of fancy to see the enemy as me.

  Proud to be female. I am not paranoid. I saw White Virgin, driving along my road. I decided to ring Maria.

  Virginia White is a striking presence. Tall, with a well-domed forehead, a Roman nose, high cheekbones and broad front teeth; her mouth is bow-shaped. Her eyebrows hawk-like, hair coarse and abundant, black now streaked with steel grey, her voice, although she speaks little, is deep and gravelly. Her face is expressive. She is big-boned and lean, athletic with stringy muscles and prominent veins. She moves with the grace of ease of action, with an energy that enjoys physical labour, but is otherwise still. She is a powerful thinker, capable of sustained mental effort.

  Her charm is in the intensity of her smile, or frown. Being in love usually makes Virginia happy. Ecstatic, perhaps. Virginia never wanted lifetime companionship. Sexual intimacies are for her journeys of discovery, holidays from the terminal loneliness of the soul. Wholehearted in her commitment until the chemistry runs its course, she is not envious of greener pastures. Happy ever after is a make-believe that, even as a child, she considered a boring ending. A dead end. Stasis. She doesn't need power over the other woman, she wants her to be as free as she with a life to live and a job to do. She is with a woman with whom she has nothing in common.

  Virginia is old enough to have had a significant past and young enough to want to create the future. She is at the change of life. Her twin brother's children's children she loves in a way no grandmother could as she has avoided the demands and resentments of motherhood. She is a great-aunt.

  'Have you had an abortion?' queries Cybil, who wants to know Virginia's life story. The facts.

  'I was married to a black man from New Guinea for two years.'

  Cybil probes Virginia so much about this she even finds out his sexual technique, putting a soft cock into her vagina and letting it engorge inside. Did Virginia like it? 'It was okay. I was young. Doing the "right" thing.'

  Cybil finds out that Virginia was in America when she explored the strawberry fields of sensual perception. Hallucinogens broadened her mind and on the whole strengthened her. She exhibited her sculpture in SoHo, Manhattan, and lived among the artists and intellectuals of the East Village. Having learnt Aikido in New York, she could sling aside a rugby front-rower if she had to, she says.

  'I came back to Australia a celebrity! My work was in demand and money showered down,' she says, as Cybil takes croissants from the microwave. 'It nearly gave me a nervous breakdown. Through all this I was reading the publications of feminist theorists and absorbing that which gave me a sense of myself. Didn't bother to argue with what I did not agree with. Who needs it?' Virginia shrugs luxuriantly.

  'What about your relationship with Jeff?' Cybil is an only child whose interest in siblings' lives is nearly prurient. Puddles, the poodle, leaps up on the bed. Cybil pushes the hired costume onto the floor to make way for the breakfast tray. Virginia and her twin were brought up by the sea in a poor family when violence as a means of managing children was the norm.

  'My brother and I were athletes at school, he a pole-vaulter, a junior champion. And I won races running, swimming. It was a country state school, not a lot of competition. Kids did their own thing. There was no car. We rode our bikes to the events, caught a bus, or hitch-hiked, and had, at least, the encouragement of each other. There was always an excuse why the parents could not be at the presentation of our awards. Usually drink,' she tells Cybil as she pours coffee from the plunger. 'This sharpened the hunger of our ambition rather than quashed it.'

  Cybil asks about sex and having a twin brother. Virginia thinks she cannot get enough of her.

  'He taught me to piss standing up, but we fell out with our first sexual experiences. The same girl,' Virginia grins. 'Caroline.' At the age, for Virginia, of sixteen and, for Jeff, eighteen. 'They later married.' The twins' jealousy was mutual betrayal of a closeness that had seen them through a difficult childhood. By their mid-thirties, all three had healed the rift. Virginia had feminism and a vital lesbian life-style by then. She and her girlfriend came to Lesbianlands in the mid-1980s and built themselves shelters. Her lover, having built, moved on and, yes, they are friends. Even though she is open and truthful with her responses to Cybil's relentless curiosity, Virginia feels oddly distant from the facts as she relates them.

  'What about now?' She interrupts herself. 'What about us, Cybil?'

  But Cybil frowns. 'Why have you buried yourself out in the bush? With no money?' she asks angrily. 'Like turned your back on responsibility?'

  Virginia loves a lipstick lesbian! 'To tell wearers of power suits, like you, to get stuffed.'

  Cybil is not amused.

  'Because it's about women.' Virginia relents. 'Woman's culture. The earth.' Virginia describes her vision and what she is doing with wood. Knowing Cybil's need for narrative contexts, she says, 'Perhaps I saw it once when I was nine. Jeff and I were on the rocks looking out to sea. The raft we had built out of planks and 44-gallon drums was floating away by itself. We didn't know why it was moving so fast. We only knew we had to get off. Sitting there wet and amazed, we made up adventure stories. The raft returned in my dreams. And daydreams. Never just a few boards on rusty drums. It was a ship. A galleon of pirates. A vessel full of Argonauts. A heroic thing. Sometimes it was a chariot pulled by six white horses. Jeff can't remember it very well. I guess the dreams stopped about the time Caroline entered our lives.'

  Cybil's interrogation excites Virginia's sight; she stops speaking about it aloud. The urgency of her art dogs her every moment. She wonders why she is here with Cybil. She is bored with her own—and, if the truth be known—others' stories of childhood. All is fair in love and war, thinks Virginia White. She is as emotionally equipped as any woman for either. Mature. It is Sunday morning and they're having breakfast in bed, listening to Laurie Anderson and Marianne Faithful on Cybil's marvellous sound system. 'We told each other ghost stories in bed. That was good.'

  Virginia feels that at the midpoint of her life she can truly love. Love with commitment. She is fascinated by this ardour as it is unaccompanied by the thrills of daydream and romance. It is in her breast like a knot, mysterious and heavy, taking the passion-roo
m her work requires. She is in love, but she is not happy; she is divided. She trembles like a brumby in the yard, both fearing and wanting to be tamed. She is torn in two, aroused and desperate to be on her own. Unbelievably, Cybil wants to know her body and her story, not her being. She has never been close to anyone quite like Cybil before: can she really be as cruel and selfish as she acts sometimes? Or is there something Virginia does not understand?