Big Rough Stones

Ro went through the motions of her life in a stupor. She did not try to see Julia, who was busy anyway, and she answered questions from her friends in monosyllables.

At the end of a fortnight Alby took her off to the pub. They had a game of pool, which Alby won effortlessly.

‘She did. But … she wouldn’t have. She didn’t want to. She’s braver than me.’

‘I don’t know. Everything. It wasn’t going to work. The Julia thing. The interstate thing. The country thing. Me.’

‘You can’t fuck up with Gerry. You shouldn’t. She’s too … I was going to say straight. I mean she’s not straight. Not that sort of straight. You know what I mean.’

‘I guess so. Is that what it is? I’m afraid it’s me. I’m a complete shit.’

Ro had once made the mistake of explaining to her mother, in self-righteous tones, that although she had broken up with a lover, they would be good friends.

‘What do you mean dear?’ Elsa had asked, bewildered. ‘I thought friends was what you were all along.’

Ro was furious, assuming that her mother, like Queen Victoria, failed to believe that passion between women was possible, could only imagine genteel companions, spinsters of this parish, living together because no man would have them.

But she couldn’t enlighten her mother. She was stymied by her own rhetoric. It was the sex that had ended, on that occasion, and sex was not supposed to define friendship. Every woman needed more than fucking in her life. Sisterhood and friendship should be honoured more highly than sex. Sisters first, lovers second. That was the theory. Perhaps her mother, in all innocence, was accepting this credo, this honouring of friendship, at face value.

When it came to breaking up with Gerry, Ro was unable to explain, because at that stage she couldn’t honestly claim that she and Gerry were friends. Gerry was elusive, didn’t answer letters, showed no sign of wanting to meet. So far the magic ex-lover friendship, like Ro’s with Alby, was not working with Gerry. That failure was a pain that nagged at Ro with the persistence of a sore tooth.

She threw herself into plans for the protest at Pine Gap. And that, of course, was when Gerry’s letter arrived. The very morning they were leaving on the bus to Alice Springs.

Hester was dead. Bitten by a snake, Gerry thought. She’d heaved the convulsing dog into the ute, but by the time they reached the vet she was dead. Gerry had buried her on the side of the hill with a view of the small dam.

Ro was appalled. She sat on the edge of her bed, pack at her feet. Hester was part of Gerry. Gerry’s dignity. Noble, Ro thought now. The idea of Hester convulsing and probably vomiting was horrible. And Gerry’s stoicism. And the size of the hole she would have had to dig. Far bigger than burying the shit. Ro felt tears welling up, though whether they were for Hester or for Gerry or for herself, she couldn’t tell.

But there was no time. She would miss the bus. And as usual, the problem of being unable to ring Gerry. But what would she say on the phone anyway? She unearthed a writing pad and an envelope and pushed them into her pack. The bus trip was twenty-four hours. There would be time to write.

But writing on the bus was not easy. It felt disloyal to Gerry to let Julia see the letter. But it was impossible for Julia not to see, when they were jammed up against each other hour after hour.

There were two dozen women on the bus and lots of laughing and singing and talking. Maddie, in front of Julia and Ro, was one of the very few with a seat to herself. Eventually Ro ate her pride.

‘Maddie?’ She craned over the back of the seat. ‘Do you reckon we could swap seats for a while? For an hour or so. I’m writing a letter and I can’t concentrate.’

Then of course she couldn’t think what to write. She sat with the pen in her hand and the writing pad on her knee and stared out the window. They were well past any farmland now. The dry country stretched ahead of them, scrubby mountains on one side and salt pans on the other. The desert. It was as though she had chosen dryness over Gerry, and dryness was what she would now have with a vengeance. She pressed her nose against the glass, grateful for the air conditioning.

Dear Gerry, she wrote, the letters spidery from the vibrations of the bus, I’m so so sorry about Hester.

There she stuck. Gerry didn’t know that Ro was going to Pine Gap, though she might guess. They’d talked about going together when the idea first came up. But when Gerry mentioned it again, Ro had already decided to go with Julia, and was evasive. And then they’d broken up.

Did they have to make so much noise behind her? She twisted around and saw that Julia and Maddie were laughing at a story their neighbour across the aisle was telling. She turned back to her letter.

I’m trying to guess how you must be feeling. I know what an amazing friend Hester was for you.

Better than me she meant, guilt bitter in her mouth. Gerry deserved so much more than she, Ro, could ever have provided. She stared at the pen and wondered, with new clarity, about the part she played in other people’s lives. She had trampled in on Gerry and it hadn’t worked. And where did that leave Gerry?

That’s fate, that’s how it can be, a defensive voice in her head declared, the voice of commitment-is-marriage-and-marriage-is-patriarchal. She wondered if that was right. Ideal perhaps. But right? Especially with someone as vulnerable as Gerry.

The thing was, she had seen Gerry more clearly than she usually saw anyone, seen Gerry’s pain and been moved by her courage.

I’m on my way to Pine Gap, she wrote, in a burst of honesty. Otherwise I would try and get over to see you.

I am thinking of you. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do. I’ll be back in two weeks.

Two weeks. What kind of an offer was that? Presumably it was right now that Gerry needed comforting. For a wild moment Ro thought about demanding that the bus stop and let her off. She could hitch back to Adelaide and drive over to Victoria. She could tell Gerry that she loved her. She did, she discovered to her surprise. She loved Gerry.

We act tough, she thought, we swagger about in the world, flirting and flaunting ourselves. Then we jump into bed and make ourselves completely vulnerable. We want the other person to look after us. We pretend that we can look after them. We’re not tough at all. We’re walking wounded, desperate for security. That joke gay men made. What does a lesbian bring on the second date? A moving van.

It struck Ro now that Gerry was one person who never acted tough. She was always completely herself, regardless of where she was or who she was with. It had driven Ro up the wall. That Gerry couldn’t adapt, wouldn’t dress up for a dance, wouldn’t adjust herself to fit in.

Now she saw it as admirable. But she also saw that she, Ro, couldn’t live with it. She didn’t want to be raw. Open and defenceless. She didn’t want to show her weaknesses. She cared too much what people thought of her.

I still love you. She held the pen poised above the words, then crossed them out. She’d have to write the whole thing out again.

Julia was asleep with her head on Maddie’s shoulder so Ro stayed where she was, watching the dry land unfold beyond the glass. When evening came she watched her own reflection grow in the window—watched with no sense of self-satisfaction.

The bus delivered them direct to the river bed where their first camp would be. The next few days were full of people and mass collective meetings and endless talk. From the outside Ro must have appeared much as usual. She moved around greeting many friends. Everyone was there, women from every state, Martha and the women from the Land, women from city and country. There was no time alone in camp life, no space for sitting and thinking.

At night Ro slept with Julia and they had swag sex, passionate but relatively quiet, for the sake of the neighbours. Of course many of the neighbours were doing the same, the magic of a big group of women together.

But Ro was uneasy. Once in the night she jerked into total wakefulness, the words in her mind so clear that she wondered if they had been spoken aloud. You shouldn’t be doing this. The phrase carried all the weight of a pronouncement from on high. Church, or school assembly. She lay trembling, staring at the stars. The words came out of her own conscience, she had no doubt of that. But why?

It wasn’t till they were packing to move out to the gates of the base, planning for the main protest, that Ro found the envelope addressed to Gerry. Unposted.

She was a fucker, no question of it. The letter had never been great and was now crumpled and late. For a moment she was tempted to put it on the fire but she stopped herself, restrained by a new humility. It might be inadequate but at least it was a gesture.

She asked around till she found a local woman who was driving back into town and agreed to post it.

November 11. An anniversary with multiple significance for the women at the camp. The end of the Great War. The sacking of Gough Whitlam. The lead-up to the murder of whistleblower Karen Silkwood. Ro listened in silence to the passion, the longing for peace, for justice, for a better world. She followed Julia and Maddie and her affinity group over the perimeter fence, and sat with a dull throb in her head through the collective decision-making about what to do next. She trudged up the road, arm in arm with an unknown woman, filled with a weird sense of fatalism. Every red rock glinted sun back at her and the flies gathered in the corners of her mouth and eyes. She wrapped a scarf around her face to keep off both sun and insects and wondered what on earth she was doing. She had almost forgotten why she was there, it was enough to survive. She might as well have been a French legionnaire crawling toward her gory fate in North Africa. She and her companion were in full view of the alien silver domes when they were finally arrested.

The next twenty-four hours in the Alice Springs cells were surreal. Ro could see that the women around her were intensely engaged. One hundred and eleven white women, all calling themselves Karen Silkwood, many in gaol for the first time, crammed into cells that usually held Aboriginal men. Some women were scared, some were angry. Some were conducting shouted negotiations from cell to cell. Should they admit to their real names, allow themselves to be fingerprinted so that they could get out on bail? Should they continue to resist? The toilets were blocked and the smell was terrible. The walls were covered in graffiti. The misery and degradation of the previous occupants hung in the air, a miasma, shockingly brutal. The protest about the US base lost its urgency. Here was racism, fundamental, elemental, an Australian truth that most of them had never seen before. Not close up. This they should protest about.

The debate surged backwards and forwards and through it all Ro crouched mute on the corner of a hard bunk, her allotted space. Once she would have leapt into a debate such as this, vociferous and opinionated, loving the rolling clash of words. Now she couldn’t rouse herself. What did it matter? She and the others had privilege that no Aboriginal prisoner ever had. They could give up their resistance and walk away any time. And eventually they did.

Ro appeared briefly before a tired and harassed magistrate and went back to the camp where she slept for twelve hours.

On the second last day she begged a lift into town for a shower. The driver was the same woman who had taken the letter to post. Ro slid into the passenger seat and was horrified to see, among a pile of other papers on the dashboard, the self-same letter. The driver saw her pick it up.

‘Oh shit,’ she said. ‘That’s right. I was supposed to post that for you. I’m sorry. Want to stop at the post office now?’

Was there any point apologising to Gerry? What could she possibly say? She wanted to explain that it wasn’t her fault. But, she realised, that was what she always wanted to do. She was forever explaining to someone that it wasn’t her fault. The fact was, she was too busy with other stuff to pay proper attention to anyone. Probably Gerry never expected any better from Ro.

Sorry about the delay, she scribbled on the back of the envelope and slid it into the box with a sense of doom.

One of the surprises of the fortnight was the emergence of Maddie. She seemed to be everywhere Ro looked. She was funny and reliable and sensible. People depended on her.

‘Where’s Maddie?’ they said. ‘You know, Maddie, from Adelaide. Could we ask Maddie to do it?’

She was a great facilitator at the endless meetings and she was calm and fearless when it came to dealing with the local and federal cops.

Ro was jealous, but also a little uneasy. More and more often when she saw Maddie she saw Julia as well. Surely Julia wasn’t attracted to Maddie?

Ro had always thought of Maddie as fluffy. Pleasant enough, but not a person to take seriously. The idea that Julia, passionately involved with Ro, might be lusting after Maddie, was too much for Ro.

She shook herself mentally. It was a friendship thing, no doubt. And of course she didn’t own Julia in any way. The first and cardinal rule of sisterhood. No ownership.

Sometimes she wondered if sex was enough, a subversive thought. She and Julia had plenty of sex, but did it make them any closer to each other?

Her suspicions reached a peak on the bus trip home. She had the window seat. Julia sat next to her but spent most of her time chatting to Maddie across the aisle.

They arrived in Adelaide to a rousing welcome from the Feminist Anti-Nuclear Group and finally dispersed in search of showers and comfortable beds.

It was hard to settle back into the normal routine. Ro’s household cooked her a celebratory dinner and listened to her stories, but after that they drifted back to their own concerns. And by the time she was rostered to work, everyone there had already heard Maddie’s stories, and weren’t much interested in a repeat from Ro.

On Friday Ro was in the office most of the morning and saw Maddie for the first time when she came in from the kid’s shed for lunch. Ro was curious about Maddie now. And at least they could reminisce about the camp together without risk of boring anyone else.

Ro went home, ate cheese on toast in a deserted kitchen and did a huge load of dishes, not hers, in a spirit of generosity and goodwill to all housemates.

She sat up late smoking and turning over ideas about Pine Gap. The more she thought about it, the more dissatisfied she felt. The media collective had presented the action to the press as though they were all respectable women, nothing too raw or rough around the edges. She began a report for Lesbian News. The more she wrote the more engaged she felt, angry even, the anger she hadn’t been able to find during the action.

There is no point for me in saving the earth if we, as lesbians, have to give up the struggle for our sexuality. And being tolerated within the women’s peace movement is not enough if we are tactfully ignored when it comes to presenting a public image.

My lesbianism is directly relevant to my involvement in the movement. Both are expressions of my opposition to male power. I was not at Pine Gap because of the threat to my non-existent children, nor because of my special bond with the earth. I was there because it is the same patriarchal system that fears and hates women, that oppresses me as a lesbian, and that threatens to destroy my world. And I oppose that system, and all the various manifestations of its power.

I wish I had said (in more than a mutter): ‘I’m not a grandmother, or anything respectable. I’m a LESBIAN, and that’s why I’m here.’

She slept fitfully and dreamed disjointed sequences in which she was shouting, though she was never quite sure why. When she woke, the morning was warm and still. She lay watching the leaves on the old chestnut outside her window. The dreams were because of Gerry.

The fact of the matter was, considered calmly, that she and Gerry didn’t suit and had broken up. Ro had chosen Julia. Perhaps it hadn’t been the ideal way to start a relationship, but there it was. She glossed over the idea of serial monogamy, a shameful practice. She had hoped for a more admirable and revolutionary life.

But perhaps she simply wasn’t fitted for non-monogamy, of any sort. Inside she was tired of it all, the relationship merry-go-round. She was with Julia now and Julia was sexy and interesting and fun to be with. Could she stick with that, not have an eye elsewhere all the time?

She was thirty-three. That was a good age to settle down. Move in together. Have a mature relationship, dinner parties on Saturday nights. A cat curled in an armchair. Julia’s flat wasn’t bad, though a bit spartan. And she owned it, thanks to an inheritance. That was unprecedented security in Ro’s world. So it would be worth working on the flat, making it more homely. She pictured the living room in creams and browns. The cat would match, Siamese. A bit like Julia herself.

Ro was pleased about this new resolve to make a go of it with Julia, but she didn’t want to crowd her, so she waited till ten to ring.

Now that she came to think about it, Julia had said that she would ring Ro, not vice versa.

She moved into the bathroom and scrubbed the bath with unaccustomed vigour. The phone was silent so she attacked the toilet. Brush and bi-carb and vinegar were not enough. She fetched an old spoon from the shed and scraped away by hand at the encrusted deposits inside the bowl. It was grungy but satisfying work, a blow struck against the hard water of Adelaide.

It was when she had one arm down the toilet that the phone rang. She grabbed the bathmat to wipe her hands and ran.

Ro found herself unable to admit, to the beautiful Julia, that she was chipping away at the toilet bowl. ‘Just cleaning,’ she said weakly.

Ro was on her back. She closed her eyes till the light was a red blur against her eyelids. So that was why Maddie hadn’t been able to have tea with her after work. She could have said so.

Ro squeezed her eyes to block out the red blur. She wanted to sit up but her body was filled with a trembling weakness, a buzzing sensation.

This can’t be true, Ro thought. Maddie? Her ideas about Maddie, already shaken up by Pine Gap, whirled about in her mind. So she’d been right about Maddie and Julia at the camp. You could always tell. Two people attracted to each other gave off a smell or vibration or something.

The weakness was gone, replaced by such strength that she had to move. She leapt up, ran into the water and swam furiously to the jetty. She paused there in the shadow, but it was not enough. She swam through to the other side. She would swim to Semaphore. To Port Adelaide. She would climb aboard the first ship she found there and seek asylum, sail off to Panama or Cape Town.

Julia pulled a tee-shirt over her face and lay on the sand absorbing the sun. Her body was in that languid state that comes after a night of satisfying sex and a day of pleasurable activity. It would be good to eat. Fish and chips. But not till Ro reappeared, which presumably she would.

Julia was not worried. It might have been better to tell Ro in advance, but that wasn’t always possible. Events had moved more quickly than she’d planned.

She saw no problem with having two lovers. Ro and Maddie worked together, which she supposed might be awkward for them. But it might be an advantage too. They already had a connection, so they could sort things out between them if necessary.

The two women were very different and that, for Julia, was the attraction. They were both funny, but where Ro was sharp and pointy, Maddie was droll. It was the difference between rock climbing and snuggling in a soft sofa. Maddie was sensuous and languorous and sexy in a way that was new to Julia. The memory of last night produced faint aftershocks in her belly. She hoped Ro wasn’t going to be difficult about it.

Julia was a pragmatist. She saw that Ro was in no position to be self-righteous, having got off with Julia while involved with Gerry. But that wasn’t the point. Julia didn’t waste time on moral dilemmas or past history. All that mattered was how to organise things now. Maddie, she was sure, would be fine. She had said that she wasn’t looking for a full-time relationship and Julia believed her.

Ro was another matter. She was always passionate about how things were done or not done or what people said or should have said. But her passion was unpredictable. Or so it seemed to Julia’s calm logic. From one week to the next she might reverse her ideas, and argue as fiercely for her new position as she had for her old. It was exhilarating, if you didn’t take it too seriously. She was fire where Maddie was water.

Ro tired long before Semaphore. She floated in to the shallow water and lay with the wavelets lapping at her thighs.

What could she say to Julia? Her own rules, the rules of her feminism, disallowed both monogamy and jealousy. But what if monogamy was the only cure for jealousy?

She stood up and waited while the horizon settled back into place, then trudged back along the beach and lay down on her towel.

‘I really want to shit on you for not having told me first,’ Ro said. ‘But actually, I’m not sure it would make the slightest difference. In fact, maybe it would have been worse.’

She remembered the cream and brown living room and the Siamese cat. ‘It’s … well, it sounds stupid now, but I thought we could live together … you know …’

‘You make it sound as though it’s a disease,’ Ro snuffled. ‘Lots of people WANT to settle down. They think it’s a good thing to do.’

‘Yes. I’m sick of this jumping from one lover to another. I want something else. Tea for two and all that.’

The tears welled up again. But she could see Julia’s face. A little sympathy, but scepticism too.

‘Well, sometimes that’s what I want,’ Ro said, native honesty winning out. ‘I don’t know how to do it.’

She had a brief memory of Sascha—oh hell—saying the same things Ro herself was now saying. The sadness of that, the inevitability, was enough to set her off again, but Julia intervened.

‘I think we should get food,’ she said. ‘We haven’t eaten all afternoon. Probably things will look better if we eat.’

It was true, Ro found. Fish and chips and the fact that Julia wasn’t rejecting her out of hand made a big difference.

Julia considered. ‘Finish engineering and do architecture,’ she said. ‘Build houses that suit people.’

‘Why not switch to architecture anyway? Wouldn’t you get credit for a whole lot of subjects?’

‘Probably. But I want to finish engineering. I’m not sure why. I think it might be useful in the future. Architecture feels too narrow. What about you?’

Ro’s ideas, she realised, were soft and woolly by comparison. Two things stood out about Julia’s plans. One was hard work and the other was an absence of people, other than to live in her houses. It was ruthless, a cool determination, the quality that had attracted Ro in the first place. Gerry’s capacity for hard work but without Gerry’s diffidence.

‘Nothing as worthy as that,’ Ro said. ‘All that study. I’d like … I’d like to write.’

‘When I grow up,’ she added ironically. All very well for Julia to talk about her ambitions. She was only twenty-something. Ro was in her thirties, too late for any bold new directions.

Ro opened her mouth to defend herself but what could she say? There was no reason not to do it.

‘Well why don’t you? If you did English, or whatever, wouldn’t that give you time to write?’

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