Indelible Ink

by Fiona McGregor

  She took Aftershave into her old bedroom, which had been added during the second renovation, when Blanche was twelve. It was her magical retreat, with its bay window; the realm in which she had come of age, gossiping over TimTams with her girlfriends; throwing up a cocktail of Mateus Rosé and No-Doz after an INXS concert. She remembered the summer her father had given her a Sony Walkman, the wonder of the rich, stereophonic sound spreading from the headphones like flowers from seed. Dripfed aural romance, she fantasised about John Reid, a Shore boy who lived in a big house on Raglan Street and soon materialised in this room in the flesh. They had clumsy, virginal sex, John crying afterwards while Blanche stroked his hair and felt weirdly empty. And all of these memories were twenty or more years old, she reflected, as Aftershave moved around the room looking for an appropriate angle to take a photograph from, crouching beneath the television on its clunky bracket in the corner. She was embarrassed by this: she used to think it was the height of sophistication but now it reminded her of a hospital room. And the view was the least special in the house, she realised with a jolt, just a pathetic inch of Athol Wharf poking across the middle distance. You could see the Hendersons’ garden, most of it now the just-finished swimming pool, a pale glinting bowl awaiting megalitres. Blanche wondered if the next twenty years of her life would pass as quickly as the previous, and how many more special things would suddenly appear ordinary, even crass, in the company of a stranger. She felt choked by loss.

  ‘Nope,’ said Aftershave, jammed into the corner, the camera hiding his soft blonde face. ‘I can’t get a decent shot in here.’

  ‘I’ll show you the master bedroom,’ Blanche conceded, knowing from his tone that he had already decided something. Most likely it was decided the second her mother had spilt the beans about her husband, his rival.

  Aftershave would not be so easily manipulated after all. He would not be used as a bargaining chip.

  Blanche let him out of the house feeling meek and miserable, then went to join her mother on the deck. ‘You shouldn’t have told him about Hugh.’

  ‘I know.’ Marie stirred her drink with its flamingo and sent Blanche a look of drunken cunning. ‘We’re not very good at this, are we? I made you another one, darling.’

  ‘I didn’t finish the first one.’

  Blanche drank in silence. She couldn’t wait for Christmas in Aspen. Just her and Hugh, skiing every day, not a family member in sight. The three weeks before departure seemed an age; she longed for a cold white drift to smother this heat and loss and obligation. She sipped the Campari, stronger than the first, and her mouth turned at the bitterness. She stared at the water through the trees while her mother sucked up her red drink like a vampire. And yet she believed Marie’s claim of a break from alcohol, leaving no excuse for the revolting tattoos. Just an endemic vulgarity, just like Aftershave. She felt a combination of despair and surrender, on her island in the rising sea. There seemed no middle ground.

  Alcohol, her warm night companion. No need for food, everybody gone. Marie drank some Mylanta to settle her stomach then poured a glass of wine and switched on the television. I want to marry you, declared the English gentleman in his extravagant collar and high polished boots. You know your family will never accept me, the maid said, pressing her face against the ruffles of his manly chest. ‘You know your family will never accept me!’ Marie chimed to Mopoke, flopped along her thighs. She ran her hands through the fur, a purr rising with the upstroke. She watched television with a sardonic eye, yielding in spite of herself, weeping at the end when the ardent lovers were parted by the Cruel Forces of Society and weeping on through the late news. Every Australian family has a reason to celebrate, the Treasurer announced. The economy is booming. How like a pig he looked, with his self-satisfied smile. Like a child who had stolen someone’s lunch and gotten away with it.

  She changed the channel, alighting like a fly on the footage of a face being sliced open. Her stomach twisted. It was Extreme Makeover. She watched with schadenfreude and voyeurism, sluicing her solitude with the last of the wine. The bloody scene dissolved into the face of an ordinary woman, dotted lines marking her features. The camera pulled away to show her body while a list was recited: We’re going to give her a brow lift, an upper and lower eyelid lift, a nose job, a crow’s feet release, dental surgery, a tummy tuck, a Brazilian butt lift and liposuction.

  An ad for expensive scotch came on, all dark wood and seamed stockings, and Marie went to the liquor cabinet for a glass of Chivas. She switched off the television, scooped up Mopoke and went over to the stereo. In twelve hours she would be at the tattoo studio finalising the flames design and this liquor cabinet and its contents would be no more. She put on the Stones’ 12 x 5 and danced across the rug holding the cat.

  ‘Last drinks, Mopoke.’ Marie drained her scotch, Mopoke beginning to squirm. She put down the cat and turned up the music. ‘And out they go!’ She took the Midori into the kitchen, swigged then emptied it into the sink. She went back for the Johnnie Walker. ‘Ouch, Mo, that’s about a hundred dollars down the drain,’ she proudly informed the cat, who was settling stiffly onto her cushion.

  The reek of alcohol filled the kitchen as bottles accumulated by the door. Marie lurched out to the garage with a cartonful, pouring them into the recycling bin with an almighty clatter. What a gorgeous noise, the sound of breaking glass. Wasn’t that a song? I love you, hate you, love you, hate you, Shirley Bassey howled from the house. The Hendersons’ kitchen light flicked on.

  She went down the side path in the dark, tripping on a bucket outside the laundry. ‘Fuck you, Rupert!’ she cackled. The moon slid out from behind clouds, lighting the way into the garden. The heat was everywhere, even in the grass and earth between her toes. She hitched up her nightgown and pissed beneath the lime tree.

  She went back into the house as ‘Sexual Healing’ came on, and turned it up. It was a good song to clean up with, even if a bit close to the bone. She mooched around clearing plates, swelling with virtue when she passed the empty liquor cabinet. Then she remembered the freezer. The bottle of Finlandia. She extracted it, a tray of steaks sliding to the floor. ‘Now,’ she addressed the bottle, ‘I’m gonna have to drink you, oh yes I am.’ She chugged it all the way out to the recycling bin. Was that her phone ringing? She went back into the house, no, just the opening bars of ‘Le Freak, C’est Chic’. Dancing at a party in Whale Beach after she had weaned Leon. New strappy Charles Jourdan shoes — she had danced all night in them.

  She replayed the song and danced with her reflection in the glass doors to the deck. Susan was right, she had lost weight. She did a little striptease, opening the doors to feel the breeze on her skin. She looked trim in her black lingerie, and the sexy anklebands. But she needed those high strappy shoes. She made her way upstairs, a shutter or something banging, then she slumped on the floor before her wardrobe to rummage through the shoes. There, at the back. Oh, so beautiful. Hard to get on, those tiny little holes in tiny little straps. Jesus, hang on to the railing going down the stairs will you, Marie! Her laughter pealed out before her. Finally, through the open plan, she stepped tall and elegant in stilettos and lingerie. Oooohh, freak out! She jiggled her hips and flung an arm to the sky, then strode across the room to repeat the move up the other end. She held her breasts, leaning forward to get more cleavage. Bloody shutter banging again. She did a disco swivel for the thrill of the rose tattoo and saw in the doorway two police officers, one banging his fist on her door.

  Nausea surged into her stomach. Marie fumbled with the remote. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ She held her shirt over her body. It felt like a handkerchief. She looked down at a tickling on her knee and saw blood.

  ‘We’ve had a noise complaint. Mrs King, is it? Can you turn that down, please?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I’m so sorry.’

  They stood there politely until she complied. ‘If the music goes back up, we’ll have to fine you twenty thousand dollars,’ said the older officer.
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br />   ‘It won’t, I promise.’

  Later, before falling asleep, Marie masturbated with a Rexona bottle. She fluffed up the pillows and lay back working it with sorbolene, imagining the policemen at crotch level. She was hot and desperate and ravaged herself so severely that it hurt to piss for the next two days.

  ‘You’re lookin’ a bit green around the gills today,’ Rhys said cheerily. ‘Been out on the razzle?’

  Marie felt like dying. A session like last night’s was normal a year ago, but now it made her feel as if she’d been run over by a truck. She shaded her eyes from a spear of sunlight. ‘Just at home.’ Rhys raised an eyebrow. Marie strung a flimsy smile around the mountain of her hangover. ‘What do they call it? Home disco?’

  ‘Yairs, well, home everything these days, isn’t it? The interior era. Turn around so you can see that in the light.’

  Marie stood before the mirror holding the flames over her belly. The design gave her form and strength, her body radiating power from the flames at its core. But above this changing body was the same old face, Marie King, of Sirius Cove. ‘Do you think I’m mad?’ she blurted.

  ‘Not for getting tattooed.’ Rhys was at the corner table, soldering. The blinds beside her were drawn, the blue jet flaring in the dimness. It subsided into a bright painful point, then Rhys stood the soldering gun on its end and pushed her glasses up into a headband. ‘I wouldn’t tattoo you if I thought you had a screw loose. If you wanna go away and think about it, that’s fine. No go-ahead until you’re sure about what you’re doing. I’ll give the spot to the next person on the waiting list.’

  ‘I’m a grandmother.’

  ‘Really?’ said Rhys, with remote politeness. In a tone of impatience, her face averted, she added, ‘I’ve tattooed grandmothers. I’m a mother myself, whatever that means.’ She pulled a tissue from a box and trumpeted into it. ‘Where you from?’

  ‘Mosman.’

  ‘... Right.’

  ‘But I’ll be moving out of my house soon.’

  ‘They say that moving house is the second most traumatic thing after death.’

  ‘I’m dreading it.’

  From outside on the landing came the slurp of thongs and male voices. ‘That’s just my partner, Rob.’ Rhys sucked her bottom lip and examined her. ‘Rightio, Marie. What’s it gonna be?’

  ‘I want the tattoo.’

  ‘Tuesday then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rhys fired up her soldering gun.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Marie asked, curious.

  ‘I make my own needles. Some of them anyway. In fact I’ll probably be using these to colour you.’ Rhys smiled facetiously. ‘My instruments of torture.’

  She called out in a sing-song voice as Marie reached the top of the stairs, ‘Go easy on the home disco, eh? We want you bright ’n’ perk-y.’

  Marie walked past the warehouse, which contained an art gallery, gym and furniture store, then into the laneway that dog-legged around to Bourke Street. The purple brickwork was covered in graffiti. All around the corner swarmed black and red bats. There was a Warhol-like portrait of a young Elizabeth Taylor and a homage to the Coppertone girl with a dog pulling her knickers off, showing her tan line. How times had changed, Marie thought. Ross had been so jealous of that advertisement: it had won awards and been a people’s favourite. Now it wouldn’t make it past the censors. At the other end of the wall, slapped on with a big paintbrush, was a fourth-term warning: IF YOU VOTED LIBERAL I WILL HUNT YOU DOWN AND KILL YOU.

  She walked on past the backs of houses; stopped to look through a fence. She was going to sell with a two-month settlement to give herself longer to look for a new place. Could she live here, with a garden this small, without the smells and sounds of the harbour? What would it be like waking in a street like this, in an area where she knew nobody but Rhys, the tattoo artist, who regarded her with a mixture of curiosity, civility and exasperation. Who kept her in Mosman anyway? The Tottis seemed to have disappeared. She had lost touch with Pat Hammet as well, and the Hendersons may as well have been robots. She didn’t doubt it was Rupert who had called the police last night. The Joneses — Susan — that was her last connection.

  She walked down Bourke Street beneath the spreading boughs of plane trees, their pods releasing allergens for half a million of the city’s inhabitants. She realised how little she knew of the world beyond her territory, how confined she had been. And she felt afraid, and lonely. And excited.

  ‘Did you see Mum’s ankles?’

  ‘Why on earth would I be looking at her ankles?’

  ‘She’s got tattoos.’

  ‘Hey?’

  ‘Didn’t you see them when you were over there?’

  ‘We went to Kurnell today, not Mum’s. Hang on a sec.’

  Clark put his phone on loudspeaker then dropped it into his lap. Sunday night and he couldn’t find a park near his building. He turned the corner and drove slowly along a street of hooded figs, their great gnarled trunks glowing in the headlights. He hated parking here because of the acidic carpet of figs and fig shit dropped by bats at night and lorikeets during the day. It stuck to the car and ate through the duco. The moon had risen while he was in transit and hung above him, warped, pitted, luminescent. The fig trees carved shadows black as pitch. As Clark reversed into a space, his sister’s voice piped through. He turned off the engine and picked up the phone. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I said I was there last week meeting a real-estate agent and she showed me these tattoos on her ankles. She said you’d been there. I rang you days ago, you know.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry. I’ve been really busy.’

  ‘But you haven’t been working.’ Blanche was incredulous. ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Applying for a PhD.’

  This wasn’t entirely true. The application had been sent weeks ago and Clark had since been applying for jobs half-heartedly. Boredom had set in. And guilt for not working. His house had never been so clean: his CDs were even in alphabetical order. He had done his tax and begun swimming every morning. He missed his daughter constantly, like a yawn craving oxygen; he missed her more than he had six months ago when working full-time and seeing her less. He even missed the sleepless nights and insensate days of the first years of child rearing when fatigue stretched out like a long throbbing pain that you eventually became immune to. He spent most of the day surfing the net aimlessly. How could he explain any of this to his Svengali little sister? People without children just didn’t understand the permanent demand of parenthood, any more than people with secure employment understood the vulnerability of the unemployed.

  ‘Surely you mean those henna things,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t think of that actually ... But she said she went to a place on William Street. I’m sure they’re real.’

  His sister in any case could make a drama out of nothing. He closed involuntarily against her emotions like a sea anemone. Getting out of the car, he found Nell’s jacket on the floor and walked up to the flat with it held against his face like a poultice.

  ‘Look,’ he mitigated, ‘William Street is getting so gentrified now it’s hard to imagine anything very nefarious going on there. How did it go with the real-estate agent?’

  ‘Hopeless. He didn’t stay very long. Mum wasn’t very friendly.’

  Clark laughed. ‘Was she pissed?’

  ‘Not initially ... we had a Campari.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  Clark unlocked the door, walked through to his study, switched on his computer, walked back into the living room, switched on the television and muted it. He became bored when speaking on the phone without doing something else at the same time, which irritated anyone he spoke to, especially Blanche, who applied the same fierce concentration to telephone calls that she did to any interaction. This attention to detail was partly a pre-existing character trait and partly a habit from work where so much could hinge on a few words down the wire — the tacit refusal inside affab
le reassurance, the shadow of a knife about to land in your back. Clark, focusing on the latter, objected to what he considered an overly mercenary attitude to conversation. This was what the corporate world did to you, turned you into a permanent hunter. Except that you didn’t actually need the quarry you were bagging, it was all merely for display. The world was literally overrun with these types: everywhere marched the sleekly trained and sharply equipped, in service to greed.

  On the other hand, in Blanche’s view, Clark’s hyperactivity signalled an unwillingness to surrender — to scrutiny, pleasure, relaxation. Anything. And neither of them ever wanted to waste time.

  ‘Why don’t you want to talk about this?’

  ‘Listen, I’m totally wiped out and going straight to bed. Can we talk about this tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m going tomorrow.’

  ‘In the morning?’

  ‘We leave at eight o’clock.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘There’s nothing else to say,’ Blanche said glumly.

  ‘Well, um, have a great Christmas?’

  ‘I have these pains,’ Marie said to the doctor. ‘Here, mainly.’ She placed a hand beneath her navel.

  She was lying on the bed, looking out the window at tentacles of wisteria. Dr Cayley’s surgery was in a rambling house at the back of Neutral Bay. Marie was shocked by his appearance, stooped and slow, with a thick white beard and eyebrows that burst over the fence of his glasses, up the cliff of forehead. She couldn’t remember the last time she had visited. Her memory was of an upright posture, grey hair and trim beard. Dr Cayley had plucked a glass bead from three-year-old Clark’s ear, removed Blanche’s appendix, and set Leon’s broken leg. He had prescribed antibiotics to all the family at one time or another, and put Ross on three diets. With its worn floorboards, ancient camellia bushes and faded wallpaper, his surgery had seemed a place of comfort. But now Marie felt unsure, and an endemic mistrust of doctors reasserted itself.