‘Maybe the wedding’s tied up with the surrogacy plan. Something like “We pay for your wedding and honeymoon – you then have a baby for us and allow us to buy it from you.” It sounds far-fetched, but why else would Nikhil and Natalie choose witnesses they’ve known such a short time? Let’s face it, if they’d been part of your sister’s social circle for ages, or Chris Gibbs’, you and Simon would have heard their names.’

‘True. But there’s no surrogacy plan that we know of. We made that up, remember?’

‘There might or might not be a surrogacy plan. If there isn’t, there’s something else. I want to find out what it is, tomorrow. Do you?’

Lifeworld online, 19 January 2015

OPEN LETTER TO BILLY DEAD WOMEN

by Sondra Halliday

Dear Billy Dead Women

I’ve decided to use this week’s column to write to you directly. You’ve been writing to me and sending me presents, and I don’t believe you’d have done that if you didn’t want a reply. The trouble is, I don’t know who you are or where you live. I don’t know your email address. If I’m going to communicate with you at all, it has to be in public.

I am proud to say that, although I am no kind of detective, I know more about you than those whose job it is to investigate your crimes. They’re still clinging to the overwhelmingly unlikely possibility that you might be a woman. It’s victim blaming at its most flagrant, masquerading as open-mindedness. All but one of the murder victims are women, so the killer must be a woman too, or else how can it turn out that all female suffering has a female cause that conveniently absolves the lethal bulldozer that is patriarchy, the one we’re not allowed to notice even as it crushes the life out of us?

If you’re wondering what you’ve just read, Billy, let me explain: it’s called a radical feminist rant. Don’t pretend you didn’t know that’s what I am. Every journalist in the country is writing about you, yet I’m the only one you’ve chosen to bombard with books and stories and letters. Why me, Billy? It’s because I’m not keeping my head down like a good girl, isn’t it? I’ve looked up and seen the hostile pattern all around me – a pattern of woman-hating – and I’ve correctly identified how you fit into it.

You target me, Billy, for the same reason I target you: you would annihilate my kind as irreversibly as I would annihilate yours if I had the chance. What I’m trying to say is: I understand why you feel as if you know me. It works both ways.