Susan Hampton

They travel in threes, usually in station waggons or utes, often have dogs, and eat out of cans in country motels, always the one on the edge of town – near the truckstop with good hamburgers – I remember the Isis Motel in Guyra They drive old cars, or horses made of wind, whose manes are streamers of wind. They tend to wear black. I have met them as young as fourteen – Beck’s friend Kristin had written her autobiography already, it was called ‘These Days’ but it was stuck in her computer somewhere, in the shed at her mother’s. Her mother and the girlfriend, they were also storm spirits. They taught swimming and they were kind at first, often charming After watching the birds’ mating rituals on the forest floor at the bottom of the steep train, under the speckled trees, we decide to go north. We borrow Beck’s sister Jade’s car, and Alecto gets her licence first go. We hear the Sibyl is staying at the Isis Motel. This time there’s no bush festival, no whip-plaiter, the pumpkins from the scarecrow bellies have all been eaten in baked dinners cooked for the Lamb and Potato Festival. That will be fifty-three dollars. The others shower and go to bed, I’m as usual awake. At night across the road, five types of frogs set up their orchestra, and the Mother of Ducks lagoon throbs around the gazebo – tree frogs like the ones at home chaka-chaka, chaka-chaka I go out and unroll my sleeping bag on the picnic table suspended over the lagoon, and watch the sun come up over the railway line. In the distance across a golf course, I see smoke and walking I come to a woman in black near a tent. The Cumaean Sibyl, I presume? I say. She laughs in her mantle, invites me in. – So you’ve left the infernal regions too, I say and she laughs again, going out and poking kindling under the damp logs. I notice a laptop on her sleeping-bag. She’s written a book about birds in New England which she shows me. No one reads it, she says, except ornithologists. She’s now writing a manual for editors. When she goes out to the fire I look at her hand-written page ‘Parts of a publication: sections and paras, signposts and transitions, running heads and feet.’ Any news from home? I ask. The singer is failing to get his wife back, she says. The ferry man batted him back with an oar. I prophecy he’ll be torn to pieces, she says, and offers to cook me some kidney. Where are your sisters? she asks. I say they’re at the motel. Well, they won’t be getting kidney, she says. Our New England holiday over, and no other prophecies from the Sibyl, we’re drive south through the Moonbi Hills and down past the Emirates’ horse stud at Murrurrundi through bull-dozed mountains the Sibyl says you once went round, past the cones of a giant power station and the sign: Muswellbrook – City of Power. And on to the Newcastle freeway. Back in Sydney at the hostel, the girl at the front desk leans forward: Have we heard? About Beck? She’s sorry, Beck has been killed in a car accident near Bulahdelah. Automatically I touch my dreads and groan.

I pinch myself hard on the inner arm, inwardly smiling yet frightened too – what if I get caught in this far realm, on the underside of the world, in these pixelated centuries where humans are exactly the same, both kind and radically unkind – So anyway, I say, her husband has his ships ready to go to war, and he’s waiting for the wind. He decides to order the sacrifice of their daughter – the wind comes, and they sail off to defend a trading route at Troy. Jade says, And this trading route is called “Helen”? Very good. OK, skip ten years. When the husband comes back, his wife unrolls a purple carpet and his cousin prepares a banquet. His wife says, Darling, the slave-girls have run you a bath. He bathes. His wife finds out there’s someone at the front door from Troy, a woman called Cassandra, holding twins she bore to the husband. Cassandra would like to come in. Maybe this piece of information was the trigger to the murder – at any rate, as her husband steps from the tub, she wraps a net around him as if it were a bathrobe, a net she’d made herself – Wait, are you hungry? Jade says. Come into the kitchen. Amid the chicken bones and a potato salad she says, All right, go on. You have a very nice mouth, I say. Go on, she says, the net, wraps it round him. OK. So the cousin comes in and takes two swipes with his sword, his two-edged sword, then the wife beheads the husband with her double-headed axe AHA! Jade says. Yes, I say. Then, splashed with his blood and bearing his head, she runs to the banqueting room where his followers are being slaughtered among the mixing-bowls. She has defended herself and her daughter – everything else is gloss at that point. Revenge, though sticky-fingered, is sweet. More chicken? Thanks. Her kids, a son and daughter, were sent away in case they grew up wanting to avenge their father. Which of course they do, Jade says. Yes. The surviving girl sends messages to her brother, who’s in another country: don’t forget: come home when you can, and avenge our father – Years pass. Grown up now, the boy goes to Apollo’s shrine for advice, and the oracle tells him to do just that. In the end, the boy does come back from exile, and kills his mother. A court case develops about the matricide, and this is where we come into it. See, up till now, the punishment for matricide has always been death. Lineage has been through the mother. But this play was written at a particular point in history. Or pre-history, Jade says. Right. So the court is held at the Shrine of Apollo, and Apollo himself is counsel for the defence. Alecto is given the job of public prosecutor – Your sister? Jade says. Yes. So the Magistrate calls up some citizens, and we hear the case. What were the mitigating factors? ‘The son was told to do it.’ His father’s ghost and ‘the oracle of Apollo himself’ told him to kill his mother. They made the rest of their case, mostly spurious, one of Apollo’s arguments being that it’s less bad to kill a woman than a man. We made some good arguments, but the vote for the boy to die was fifty-fifty. At the deadlock, Athena turned up, Athena! her garment having been kissed by many men or what, we don’t know, and she in her deciding vote acquitted him. For us to lose, in effect, a case of matricide meant the balance of power was shifting. I pour another vodka. What I didn’t say to Jade was, it meant we’d be lying low for some time, centuries perhaps. I remember the fires of earlier camps. In the distance, border furies, heat furies, storm furies. The sound of the Barking Owl. And this owl, a real owl, sounds like a woman being murdered – Athena, your bird is telling you something! But Athena, last we heard, was with her cousin Kate Kyriakou on their way back to Greece for the Olympics. At the last minute they got a Virgin flight. It’s an irony of fate, I said, that it was a foremost goddess who helped tilt that power. Or not, Jade said, maybe it was simply a pivot-point in storytelling where men must be shown to be in control, and the best way to do that is to get a woman to do the job. Yes, I said. Let’s present it to Athena this way: she’s being chosen to give an award in a public ceremony and get her picture in the morning paper, her big chance, as a goddess, to be kind and compassionate. To downplay the warlike. Mesmerise her with theology – Jade said, and perhaps flirt with her at the same time. For whatever reason, I said, Athena – without consenting to matricide – did not give it a high level of punishment. Certainly she didn’t exact a death. In that sense you have to admit she is a civilising factor, I said. Flick your dreads as you may, Jade said. We hounded the son, though, I said. One time we said we’d leave him alone for a while if he promised to do penance at the Temple of Artemis.

A drunk cadet had hit them on a bad bend near the river, two broken necks. On the notice-board there’s an A4 page with a blurred digital photo of Beck laughing, leaning into her friends in a nightclub and below that, writing: We Love You Beck – from Kristin, Colette and Mandy. I sit like an automaton in the big lounge room my back teeth snapping against each other, rocks in my gut. That night we watch on an iMac a video of Beck, an eight minute film Colette had taken on her phone. Two of the men are crying. Kristin and Mandy are numb. I move to the noticeboard, reading anything: ‘Live-in nanny required Balmain 5 min from city’ ‘Experience life on an outback station help mustering mobs of 2000 animals on horseback or quadbike’. Near me two women are whispering. Talking about their first-ever girlfriend. One says, Other people are always either versions or not-versions of her. Fourteen, it’s an age to break your heart. You know nothing. On the edge of knowing too much. I lean forward, my head on the foyer koala. Voices travel to me from distant realms: I hear again the singer’s plea for his wife. Blurred from too much experience I prowl around the leaflet racks, groaning. Late that night on the vinyl lounges the people remaining are Kristin and me, alone. My eyes are swollen, my ears still buzzing from the headphones at work. We talk over Beck till no more can be said. Now Kristin begins to tell her own story how her uncle had his boat down the back of their block, and one day he said he wanted to show her something, took her down the lantana path to the boat, something she might like, he said – Kristin was raped at times twice a day or sometimes not for a week and sometimes after it he gave her pocket money once a twenty dollar bill which down the gully later she tore into thin red strips and buried. Back at the house her mother bashed her for lying about the uncle, who was her brother, and who had loaned them the deposit on the house where Kristin and Odette her sister were fortunate enough to live. When Kristin grew up, her mother apologised to her. The uncle was still alive. He had sent her a Christmas card this year. She sat on the lounge, looking down at her runners, her mouth closed. Behind her the stereogram and Elvis, a silent witness. The uncle had said she was a rude girl, she should keep quiet about their secret otherwise he’d give her little sister a taste of the same. Kristin was quiet from then on. The reason she was telling me now, her hand on my arm was that last week she’d had a call from Odette who was living in London. The uncle during those primary school years had done the same to her, tricked her the same way, used the same words. I feel the weight of my empty useless arms. But later I hold her – hug her goodnight. She touches my shoulder. I was convinced, she says, I was saving my sister. My head clatters: Virgin, May I help you? Back in the Furies’ bunk-room it’s beauty night, they’re whisking egg whites for a face mask … After they’ve done each other they sit me on the bed and paint my face with their fingers the egg white sets quickly and they tell me not to smile. I dream of Alecto’s iron tower and bloody clothes – then I’m on TV being interviewed: So, the oldest Fury – and who is your god? I am asked – I once served Artemis, I say. And before that? – Athena, I say – Anath, Isis. I do not mention Dionysis or the Thracian women.