Indelible Ink

by Fiona McGregor

  He spoke about his mother’s change. ‘I’m worried about her. She was drinking too much for a long time and really messy after my father left. She’s anxious about the sale of the house. Sometimes I worry she’s completely lost it.’

  ‘My father had an anchor tattooed on his forearm. He was in the navy.’

  ‘We should introduce them.’

  ‘I don’t think he’s quite in your mother’s league, Clark.’

  Clark couldn’t help but be disappointed. ‘What’s he like? Spanish?’

  ‘Was. I loved him. He was Maltese. A short-arse, like a foot shorter than my mother. He was a bit hopeless but a lovely man.’

  Sylvia told him that her parents had been jazz musicians in Brisbane. Her father had died when Sylvia was twenty-seven and her mother had eaten herself into a ball of depression on the Gold Coast. Sylvia had fled to Sydney twenty years ago when Queensland was a police state.

  ‘Do you ever go back there? Visit your mother?’

  ‘I hate it there, but I’m beginning to hate it here as well.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I feel more and more controlled. Pressured by rising prices. Everything feels so corporate. Even universities are corporations these days. I went to see a band the other night and as we went in the girl on the door said, I understand you’re eighteen years of age, very stiffly as though reading from a rule book, and I’m like, Actually I’m more than twice that, I’m forty-one.’

  Clark registered her age with more alarm than he did the draconian door policy. It was at least five years more than he expected. The other side of forty, though less than a year to go for him, seemed an aeon away. It was the country where his mother lived. And the equation of older woman and younger man didn’t sit easily. Clark registered also Sylvia’s anger and eloquence, with admiration and a little fear. He registered her ethnicity. Her surname. Married name? She could be divorced. He realised with a start that he had given away his googling, because she had never told him her surname. But she didn’t appear to have noticed anything untoward; she was still talking.

  ‘I walked into the venue feeling flattered at first. Then I thought, Fuck this, she’s young enough to be my daughter and she’s only said that because she’s done some dumb course or been told by the manager that she is legally obliged to say that stupid line to every punter. It’s insulting! They’re teaching courses like this at our university, and I work in the profession that’s strangling us with this onslaught.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  Sylvia looked out at the passage of a boat across the water, her face blue in the moonlight. ‘I feel guilty about my mother. We’re always hard on our mothers, aren’t we? It’s like a Greek tragedy, we can’t help ourselves, it’s like the natural instinct is to want to kill them. In order to live. It’s different for men though.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You’re sentimental about mothers. You can afford to be.’

  Clark thought about how perfect this paradigm was for Leon and Blanche. Leon took his mother’s love for granted. Blanche was the opposite: she often seemed to hate their mother. He considered how much of Blanche and Marie’s vexed relationship wasn’t due to the mysterious vagaries of female relations that he had always held at arm’s length with something he considered to be respect, but to a banal treachery caused by the narrow confines of their similarities. And in that flash of insight, he didn’t see his mother as the usual victim. He saw only the awful intractability of the whole dynamic. This ushered in an empathy for Blanche, which worked on him like a balm.

  He had been avoiding his mother this year. He hadn’t taken Nell to see her. Something had broken when Marie began getting tattooed. He also harboured an obscure resentment towards her for letting the house go, even though he supported the decision. Often lately, the house surfaced behind Clark’s eyelids clear and animate as a person. He could almost see truculence in its façade at the mention it had received in Jonathan Chancellor’s Title Deeds as adman Ross King’s old residence. The house had really been their mother’s. Ross had been the renovator, tearing into it and re-dressing it like an overzealous parent continually changing his child’s clothes, while Marie maintained the daily care. And where was Ross in all this? Blanche would know. She hadn’t wanted to join her brothers in cutting off Ross after he left: she had always worn her independence on her sleeve and her father’s favour on her heart. Clark supposed it was fitting for Ross to remain silent about the sale because he had wanted it all along: somewhere, somehow he would be celebrating. It was probably better he stay away. Clark’s protective shield around his mother hardened; he regretted their discord. Her life in that house was almost as long as his in entirety. Everything he had first learnt about the world, his primary sensations and obstacle courses were in that house and to lose it was to lose the very foundations of his life.

  ‘Mother Madonna, you know,’ Sylvia was saying.

  ‘Isn’t that more of a wog thing?’

  He knew he was taking liberties by using this word. He wanted the intimacy it might provide. Sylvia gave a little smile. ‘Yeah, but not only.’ She placed her stubbie in the cavity near the gear stick and wiped her hand on her thigh.

  ‘Look at your hands. They must be as long as mine.’

  Clark held up his right hand and Sylvia placed her palm against his. They looked at one another over their fingertips then his hand was on her face and he was leaning over, kissing her. She moved closer, sighed into his mouth. He had a lurching sensation in the pit of his stomach, as though something were cracking open.

  Sylvia stroked his cheek. ‘Let’s get out and sit on the grass.’

  Clark took a towel from the back seat and spread it across the ground. They lay beneath the sky holding hands, listening to the lap of water. There was a faint track of stars, and dominating the skyline the peaks of the Anzac Bridge, humming in the distance. Then they were kissing again, he was unbuttoning her shirt, her hand moving to his belt, his on her breast. Then a rake of headlights over their bodies. They froze, listening to the ignition cut.

  Clark’s erection died and he was relieved. Sylvia locked her arms around his torso and squeezed him so hard that a bark escaped and echoed around the bay like a shot. He squeezed her back harder and she yelped. They lay there laughing inside the dying echoes. Holding this willowy body, he thought of the mother that had birthed it, bloated with despair on the Gold Coast. And what of his own mother, what now had he come from? How our bodies change. His static life had kickstarted, he had the feeling of being on the verge. He held Sylvia’s hand against the sky, touching the ring on her finger. ‘Your wedding ring, huh?’ he said facetiously.

  People wore rings on any finger these days, Clark told himself. He still wore his because he liked it as a piece of jewellery and it fitted on no other finger but the fourth. The transferral to his right hand had been his indication of divorce but men, it occurred to him now in a panic, sometimes wore their wedding rings on their right hand. Didn’t they?

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘What, are you married?’

  ‘Of course. Aren’t you?’

  ‘No. Not anymore.’

  Of course he knew she was married, he had known all along. Martinez was her husband’s name; he had realised that as soon as he started googling her. But he hadn’t wanted to believe it, he had told himself that, like Janice and Blanche and so many women their age, Sylvia used her maiden name at work. But even that scenario could have meant there was another name, another person ...

  Sylvia turned on her back and settled her head against his chest.

  ‘Oh, it’s such a beautiful night.’

  Blanche loved the TV shoots. The big trucks with their cargo of men and gear, a macho arena through which she prowled with feline toughness in her pointy little boots. Morrison the director was a Swinburne graduate who, straight out of film school, had made a feature about a crim that went on to win two AFIs. Blanche loved his gritty aesthetic and was surpr
ised at their first meeting to find a pale, clerkish boy with an apologetic posture. Morrison wore white shirts every day that looked as clean at six p.m. as they had at eight a.m. He hardly spoke to anyone, whether out of shyness or arrogance Blanche wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to interfere in his work. She went on set once, to ask for more long shots. The rest of the time she sat in the green room with Kate and Lim, watching the shoot on a monitor.

  ‘How much chocolate d’you reckon they’ve eaten by now?’

  ‘The girl’s spitting it out,’ said Kate.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Truly.’

  ‘He should be shooting her in profile,’ said Lim.

  ‘Is there any chocolate up here?’ said Blanche. ‘I’m hanging out.’

  ‘We’ve finished it.’

  Lim looked puffy in the face today, hungover maybe. Blanche realised that she didn’t desire him anymore, and she felt abandoned. Her BlackBerry beeped. How is my precious pooky? A buyer came through Sirius today but still no definite offers. What time are you coming home? x

  Not too much longer hopefully, Blanche texted Hugh. Out the window, the fading claw marks of cirrus stretched across the eastern sky. She could hear the women from the production company gossipping below, Rachel the art department coordinator and one of the set designers, a horse-faced woman with lank white hair. They had gone outside to suck on their cancer sticks. Rachel had a low, sexy voice full of innuendo, with a touch of sibilance: the sort of voice that drag queens emulated.

  ‘... the most indulgent display of spending. I’ve got about forty-seven thousand dollars in petty cash up there you know.’

  ‘The budget’s the same as Bondi Boys.’

  ‘Oh, more. Because you have to take into account ...’

  ‘... nuh. Going straight to video.’

  I’ll let you know when we’re finished. Blanche put her phone back into her bag.

  ‘I worked on an American ad for sleeping pills in November,’ said Rachel. ‘We went all the way to Perth to film one shot of moths flying in a window. Can you believe it?’

  Blanche sometimes wished she smoked. She wanted to go outside now, to get away from the monitor. She knew that ad. It was for Pfizer. Slated to play North America, Australia, the UK and Germany: cinema, internet, print, television. Not exactly small fry. They just didn’t get it. Blanche wanted to land like a cat among the pigeons and be taken into Rachel’s husky, knowing confidence, but if you didn’t smoke you looked suss hanging around outside, all lurkish intent and dangling hands. You looked like you were running away from a problem or desperate for friendship or something.

  Morrison was doing another take of the man putting chocolate into the woman’s mouth. She was peeling her lips back, her whole face contorting. Make-up came in and dabbed her face. The man rose to stretch then stood there nodding at Morrison’s directions. He had thick eyelashes and a short dark beard, and Blanche couldn’t take her eyes off him. Oh yes, the ritual of smoking with its imperative and relief was immensely appealing at times like this.

  ‘God, this country’s fucked. No money for film. I’m so over it.’

  Blanche shut the window and left the room. She walked down the corridor to the toilet, where she sat for a long time leaning forward, chest on thighs, contemplating how scuffed her boots had become from the scungy set. She should get some cowboy boots: Kate’s looked good scuffed, they looked good any way. Blanche reapplied her lipstick, left the toilets and dropped coins into the chip machine for Twisties. She was reading the fat, flavourings and colourings she was about to consume when Rachel appeared. ‘Hi Blanche!’

  ‘Hi Rachel!’

  ‘He-ey, it’s gonna be great.’

  ‘Yeah, they’re a great team.’

  ‘No, really.’ Rachel nodded. ‘Good on you. It’s so classy.’

  ‘Thanks. You too. Want a Twistie?’

  ‘Okay! Oh no, actually, I totally pigged out at lunch.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Rachel continued on her way to the toilet, turning at the door. ‘Hey, great job, yeah?’

  ‘Thanks, you too.’

  Blanche went down to the set eating her Twisties. Amazing how fantastic these little twisted yellow things full of crap tasted. She’d been eating them since she had teeth. Who was it who discovered that if you put the empty packets into the oven, they shrank to perfect miniatures? It provided endless fun after school. Did packets these days react to heat in the same way? Her wheels began to spin. Why hadn’t anyone made a good Twisties ad? Little idiosyncratic battler of a cheesy snack thing that kept on keeping on. More to the point, why didn’t she have the Twisties contract? Maybe they thought they didn’t need to spend money on advertising ... Never say never. She should get Twisties for her circus lust. She could kill it. There was activity around the catering van and the crew looked as though they were packing up. Blanche remembered the organic carrot cake they’d been served for afternoon tea, and went and saved the last piece from the bin. She gobbled some down then sidled up to Morrison and suggested the woman be sitting upright instead of lying in the man’s lap. Could they slot it into Monday’s shoot? Morrison blinked thoughtfully. Blanche offered him a Twistie. He seemed about to say something when his mobile went off.

  The man in the ad was on Blanche’s mind. That eagle tattooed across his chest, which she saw as he stood in the corner changing, aware of the eyes of every woman in the room on him. Pecs like half rockmelons, a ring in one nipple. She caught his eye and he glanced away coldly, and it suddenly occurred to her that he was gay. It was a tragedy that she would never get to have sex with the man with the chest tattoo. She walked up to the green room for her bag, throwing the Twisties and cake into the bin. She had nothing to complain about; she had a loving husband, was steering another successful campaign, but she felt unaccountably troubled and dissatisfied.

  She drove home with a knot in her stomach. It swelled into a painful psychic node beneath Hugh’s attentive hands as they made exhausted perfunctory love that night for the first time in months. Blanche shut her eyes and imagined the trapeze artist’s chest pressing against her breasts, as she tilted her hips to receive him, Hugh, him. She dozed fitfully till dawn and woke to the smell of coffee: Hugh padding into the bedroom with a tray and the papers.

  The traffic into town was slow and the galleries had opened by the time they arrived in Danks Street. The first one was showing Tait Green, an art school colleague of Blanche’s.

  Hugh, as usual, was discussing Sirius Cove. ‘I got the photos I took of the garden printed, which Marie loved. Even though they didn’t get used for the ad, they’ll be a good record. She just wants people to appreciate it, you know.’ He turned to Blanche meaningfully.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘Two buyers now. I’m putting my money on the lawyer couple. They’re second-generation Mosman: her grandparents live in Kardinia Road. They’ve got two kids, eight and ten years old, who play in the bush. They love the house. I don’t think they’ll pull it down, just a bit of reno. But the price isn’t ideal.’

  ‘Will you go to auction?’

  ‘I think so.’ Hugh moved along to the next artwork, a pair of trainers made from Blu-Tack, mounted on a plinth, enclosed in a glass cabinet. ‘I paid Fatima for her.’

  ‘Hey?’

  ‘Her cheque bounced, and I was there. Don’t worry, pooky, we’ll just put it against the sale.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not worried. Just don’t tell Clark. Okay?’

  ‘Course not. She must be getting them done quickly. She’s got one on her back. It goes right up her neck into her hair.’

  ‘I don’t want to know, Hugh.’ Blanche spoke in a low voice.

  Behind the white desk in the white corner, the white gallery assistant was doing something on her mobile phone.

  Hugh stared at the Blu-Tack trainers. ‘Amazing. Adidas. They’re perfect.’

  ‘Seven and a half grand. Jesus. What’s the point?’

  ‘He’s ha
ving a joke, isn’t he? Putting them in a glass cabinet like that? Isn’t he saying that it’s us who put our trainers and brand names on a pedestal?’

  ‘Half the time I think that irony’s just a veneer.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s a veneer for nothing.’

  They moved to the end of the room where paintings covered the wall. Hugh continued talking quietly. ‘You know Pasadena? Just up the road from Marie? Not as well situated, but it’s got a home theatre, Gaggenau, five bathrooms, pool, six-car garage with wash bay. Air-conditioned wine cellar. I mean she’s got pretty stiff competition is the thing. Stav’s handling that property, and he reckons it’ll go for seven to eight.’

  ‘So the market is going down.’

  Hugh crimped his mouth.

  ‘Come on, Hughie.’

  ‘Well, yeah, compared to the beginning of summer. But not compared to three years ago.’

  Blanche nodded sadly. ‘The market’s going down.’

  Hugh said in a loud whisper, mildly outraged, ‘You know Stav gets racist remarks sometimes? He’s like second-generation Australian. I think it’s outrageous. I mean, we’re all supposed to be equal in this country. It makes me feel really ashamed.’

  ‘We are egalitarian. You should see Kate and Lim, they’re positively revered. There are stupid people everywhere, that’s all. It’s just ignorance.’ Blanche moved alongside the air-brushed canvases of gridiron players, close enough to take in every detail. ‘I hate this stuff. It’s all surface, surface, surface.’

  ‘It depends what you want. Technically, he’s amazing.’

  ‘So are computers.’

  ‘Come on, pooky.’

  ‘Tait used to paint blue circles at college. That’s all he painted for three years solid. Blue circles. I’m not kidding.’