Marie didn’t know that, and felt a bit miffed that he had beaten her to the information. She said, ‘Another specimen for his collection?’
‘I knew he wrote about them, but not that he had one done on himself. He said he couldn’t understand how the Tahitians put themselves through such an ordeal. I wonder why he finally succumbed.’
‘Maybe it was something for himself.’ Marie sat in a recliner and stretched out her legs. They needed waxing. God, Marie, stop it will you. She left the light off and listened to David talk about Banks. Metallic orange drained from the body of water before her, the outlines of trees sank into gloom. The beauty of this view still astonished her and she wished for someone to share it with. Every night, the opera of sunset, like bathing in champagne.
‘He had a Maori head, with a moko on it. He brought it back to England with him.’
‘God, David.’
‘He didn’t mean any harm! They sold it to him. Banks was a man of insatiable curiosity. He taught us so much. Isn’t it astonishing when you read about these things? Can you imagine being in a ship with a cargo full of plants and animals the likes of which you’ve never seen, that may as well have come from Mars? The Sirius, Marie!’
Marie thought of the human head carried to the other side of the world, mounted in a cabinet and stared at like an object. It. A head. She thought of the person who had smiled and scowled and kissed and wept through that tattooed face. The crowds at those colonial exhibitions were immense, with queues for miles; the most popular exhibits living natives, in dioramas. Reading about this made Marie feel dirty, as though she were in the audience too. She was as pleased by the arrival of the information about Banks’s tattoo from David as she was disturbed. She had been gorging on Rhys’s books and stories for months, with nobody to share what fascinated her. But David was talking so much it was hard to get a word in.
The cove was almost black now, the harbour to the right still glowing with the last sun. Marie had often imagined the Sirius being careened on this side of the harbour to keep the sailors away from the vice of Sydney Cove, the most bored and reckless sneaking across for women and rum. A hundred years later, doctors and lawyers and merchant bankers settled here to keep their children from the same. In the Kings’ case it had worked, though Marie now felt far less self-congratulatory. What was vice anyway? Whoring and drinking didn’t look nearly as bad to her now as they used to. She had been cooped up alone in this house for months getting it ready: relief came in the city, getting tattooed. But crossing the water at night held other prospects and here was a man she’d slept with on the phone, a possible accomplice. She was desperate to get out and have fun. She really wanted to let her hair down. She wished she hadn’t conjured up those sailors scrubbing the deck: they made her think about the Aborigines dying of smallpox so prolifically that they couldn’t be buried, their bodies snagging in the rocks below. She tried to imagine the bush without fungus, or lantana, alive with snakes, to flush this horrible thought from her mind. It didn’t work.
‘The Sirius never made it back to England, did she? It was a flagship, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, yes, I know,’ David said with brisk good humour. ‘Poetic licence.’
Marie went back into the house and poured herself a Diet Coke with ice and lemon.
‘Then it became fashionable among the European aristocracy,’ David went on. ‘Prince Edward had himself tattooed before he became king, and sent his sons to the same Japanese master. Apparently all the European aristocracy visited this man, in Yokohama.’
‘Hori Chiyo!’ Marie interjected. David was like a guest who offered to help at a dinner party and ended up taking over the whole menu. Yes, this was her territory; she elbowed him out of the way. ‘I have a book here about all that. He used ivory sticks and coloured inks. He tattooed half the European navy. When they banned tattooing in Japan a rich American set him up in business in New York.’
They began to talk over the top of each other, David relaying the story of Count Tolstoy, a relative of the writer, pulling his shirt off at dinner parties when he’d had a bit to drink, and showing all the tattoos he’d acquired in North America and the Pacific.
‘And Lady Randolph Churchill. Churchill’s mother.’
‘Is that so?’
‘She had a snake tattooed around her wrist. She hid it beneath her watch.’
‘And what about you?’ David said cheerily.
The fine lines on Marie’s arms were healing. ‘I’ve been getting mine done too.’
‘Really?’
Marie trailed off. She remembered David’s Darling Point townhouse, the studs of halogen lights in the ceiling, the Sepik River carving of a man-creature grasping a phallus that flowed in a continuous curve from groin to mouth. The plane of David’s chest, his back to her in the dawn.
‘Well, I won’t be looking at Sirius Cove much longer. The auction’s in two weeks.’
‘You’re going to auction? That’s quite an event. How do you feel?’
‘I feel like I’m in a trance. I’m looking forward to it in a way.’
‘You’re being very brave.’
‘As much as I love it here the place has become a burden.’
‘You’re going to need some distractions. Why don’t you let me take you to dinner?’
Marie was determined to be rational about this. So what if he wanted something from her. Didn’t everybody want something from somebody? In return, she could get something from him, couldn’t she? A change of scenery from her couch and the television. The sex wasn’t exactly great, but that could have just been first-night awkwardness. David was making an effort: once he got to know her better, he would understand. She didn’t want to come across as acquiescent, let alone desperate. She said she was too busy this week but next week was a possibility. David suggested Level 41.
All through dusk the temperature remained steady at thirty-nine. Night brought no relief. Marie made pasta for dinner. Mopoke came into the kitchen and ate her entire meal at Marie’s feet then rubbed her thank-you against Marie’s calves. Then she moved slowly across the living room out to the deck where she sat like a statue with her back to the house and her face to the harbour.
The tennis moved into the fourth hour. Livid marks grew beneath Safin’s eyes. There were tantrums on the court, a racket smashed, umpires yelled at. Between sets, the players sat on the sidelines staring into space with wild-eyed exhaustion, their thighs wobbling between the hands of physiotherapists while the commentator recited a litany of injuries and surgical procedures. Marie wondered if those big floppy shorts didn’t make playing in a heatwave more difficult. You couldn’t see anything in them. Replays of 1970s matches were pornographic by today’s standards. She missed them.
That night in bed she heard a mopoke calling across the cove. She lifted her head off the pillow to hear better. The cat trod lightly up the bedclothes and settled into the crook of her belly, flicking her tail up to rest against Marie’s chin. A second bird on this side of the cove began to answer the first, and Marie went to sleep like that, the softness of the cat’s tail against her jawline, listening to the vibration of birdsong over water: mo-poke, mo-poke, mo-poke.
‘He must’ve been doing his research,’ Rhys said to her the next day. ‘You must’ve made quite an impression on him. You and the aristocrats,’ she added facetiously. She was shaving Marie’s chest, extending the vine.
‘I think most of my ancestors were farmers,’ Marie replied with fortitude.
‘Anyway, aristocrats were seen as totally removed. They may as well have been savages for the eccentric realm they occupied.’
‘Such an alien concept, isn’t it? Aristocracy?’
‘We’ve got an upper class in this country, we just can’t admit it. We’re one of the richest nations on earth and still all pretending to be Aussie battlers,’ Rhys said.
‘We still have a bit of the frontier mentality. Maybe that’s why we love four-wheel drives, because we still think we live
in the bush.’
‘Yeah, battling the elements, struggling for our patch or something. And still trying to plant the flag with this real-estate obsession.’ Rhys was speaking in that acerbic tone that Marie had once feared but now recognised as rough, honest humour. ‘As long as you work hard, anything goes. Like the dude at Macquarie Bank who makes seventy thousand a day but works eighteen hours, so he like earns it.’
‘Seventy thousand a day?’
‘Ya ... Anyway, so says me. I’m a workaholic too.’
Marie had noticed the increase of traffic in the studio. A man Clark’s age with a narrow moustache, coming down the stairs when she arrived today. A woman the time before. Mel always at the counter. ‘Why don’t you cut back? Wasn’t that the idea of Mel?’
‘The demand is too strong.’
‘You’re incredibly popular, aren’t you.’
‘Tattooing per se is getting popular. And I love my work. I mean, I’m a full-time artist earning my keep. How cool is that? I’m living a life of luxury.’ Rhys pushed a button on the boom box and ambient music filtered forth. ‘Anyway, so much for aristocrats. They stopped getting tattooed as soon as poor people got into it so it’s a working-class art, really. Appropriated by the middle class.’
‘Well, here I am, Rhys. Conducting a full-scale takeover.’
‘Oh, you conquered long ago, Marie.’
Marie wasn’t sure if this was a good thing. If she hadn’t changed, as Susan attested, then Mosman had taken over tattooing. If she had, then it was the other way around. Maybe, more realistically, it was a murky place in between.
There was the slap of latex gloves being pulled on. Marie’s ears carried this sound to her brain, which translated it into a message to her body: sweat glands release, heart rate increase, saliva cease. ‘Lachlan Murdoch has a tattoo.’
‘Yairs, our Lachie, on display at the tennis last night. Lachie hates the elites, mind you.’
‘You watched it? I never would have picked you for a tennis fan.’
‘I’m not really. I just love the spectacle of big sports competitions. I’m agog at what they do to their bodies. I mean, they think we’re hard core — what about them?’
‘It’s exciting, isn’t it. The way they push themselves to the limit.’
‘Watching the AFL is pretty much the only time I feel in tune with my fellow countrymen. I’m even learning the rules.’ Rhys grinned.
‘I’m more shallow than that. I barrack for looks or personality. It is gladiatorial, after all.’
Marie noticed her usual position on the couch now put her closer to the sun. The light moving across the floor would soon reach her yet the notion of changing seasons and imminent cold was completely at odds with this heat. The indigenous people said that Sydney had six seasons but now it felt like neither six nor four, but one: summer. Rhys began to tattoo.
After a while Marie said, ‘Why do you think the men wear such enormous shorts these days? They don’t look very practical.’
‘That’s John Howard’s fault. That’s when it started. Prudery.’
‘But the women’s outfits just get skimpier.’
‘G-strings make good television.’
‘I could never wear g-strings. To my husband’s despair.’
‘No way. Crack attack. Chicks do get to wear better clothes in general though. That’s one good thing about being a woman. Can you turn this way a bit?’
Marie obliged, wincing.
‘Hurting?’
‘It’s more my indigestion.’
‘I’ll make you a mint tea when we have a break.’
Marie gazed at the wall as Rhys moved over the painful, bony part of her chest. Rhys tattooed with her head tilted, close to the working hand, her other hand holding the skin around the area taut. She was wearing glasses today, and a rare sleeveless shirt. Sweat brimmed in the divot of her neck. Behind her, tacked to the wall next to the KEEP STILL sign, was a flyer advertising something called FAST. The letters were in slanted script zooming over a naked man on a trapeze. He had a cute little cartoon face and from his genitals cartoon fluids spurted. An array of names that sounded like circus performers spilt beneath, and Nonstop Shows! Marie wondered about these tantalising flyers and the world they contained. How you could be living right next to something and never see inside it. The cellular structure of society, like a hive, cheek by jowl the wealthy lawyer, the tattoo artist, the housing-commission Aborigine.
‘The thing that gets me about this egalitarian thing,’ said Rhys, ‘is how much it’s about sameness. Like we’re all earning the same wage and living the same life in the same place in the same skin. Bollocks to that.’
Bollocks, thought Marie. One of Mel’s words. The constant seepage between hive cells. And how far away — unreachable — some were from others.
The third hour was upon them and Marie was detaching. Through the windows on warm currents of air came the drilling of cicadas. It was Sunday and the whole suburb was quiet, the singing from the Greek Orthodox mass up the road mingling with Cleveland Street traffic. Travis was with his father. Every time Marie thought of Travis, she thought of Nell. She missed her granddaughter with a visceral ache. She knew Rhys worked on Sundays for the extra money. Marie, on the other hand, saved money as parking in all the surrounding streets was free. Often she had to factor a parking ticket into the cost of a tattoo but on Sundays she drifted into a quieter peace. From Rhys’s boom box came washes of sound and strange voices muttering, a slow undulation pulsing beneath. Watching her blood rise from the lines on her chest, Marie considered the almost identical lifeblood of plants and animals. She’d read that a molecule of chlorophyll contained thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon arrayed around an atom of magnesium; while a molecule of haemoglobin contained exactly the same except that at the centre was an atom of iron.
She considered herself now, the white skin everywhere broken and coloured. Awareness of difference had come to her, and its corollary, awareness of judgement. She took measures in public because of this, and with the right dress code could maintain her previous position. And that was the thing as well: to recognise what she had taken for granted: a position. To recognise its ebb.
At dusk she emerged from the cocoon of Rhys’s room. Downstairs was alive with voices. Rob came out to reception. ‘Just printing flyers.’
Rhys passed one to Marie. It was for FAST. ‘It’s a night that Stew and some poofs run. It’s a boys’ striptease.’
‘Girls this time too,’ said Rob.
‘It’s fun. You should come, Marie.’ Rhys’s eyes twinkled with mischief, equal parts invitation and challenge. ‘They’ve found a warehouse, which is like a miracle.’
Poofs. The word sounded suddenly cute and fluffy. It had a spring in its step. Marie said uncertainly, ‘It sounds like fun.’
‘What’d you get, Marie?’ Rob asked.
‘We extended the vine across my chest and put some passionflowers on it.’
‘Oohh, bewdiful.’
Stew came and stood on the other side of Rhys. ‘You’re gonna need somewhere to show those off.’
Marie tucked the flyer into her bag and left the studio with images of bronzed musclemen striding around a stage in hard hats, waggling their bulging g-strings over her face at a chintzy table in a chintzy bar. A not-altogether-unpleasant fantasy except she didn’t want to be like one of those screeching desperadoes on hens’ nights. Let alone a post-menopausal tragic. Then again, she couldn’t imagine Rhys inside such a chintzy bar either, though Rhys was clearly going to FAST.
On the streets of Surry Hills, Marie could never predict who she might see. Tradesmen outside the electrical supplier. The smart lady who tended the vintage shop on Crown Street. Youths in jeans outside the acting school. She didn’t cover herself up here and it was a second liberation, after tattooing sessions, to walk these streets with the air on her bare skin. Nobody looked twice. You’re gonna need somewhere to show those off … it was the first time anyo
ne apart from the tattooists had responded to her work in celebratory terms.
She had to walk all the way to Marlborough Street today. She passed two skinny men in eccentric clothing, wheeling around a warehouse on their bicycles. ‘Hallo!’ They waved to her. ‘Hallo!’ She waved back. Further down the alley an old man was retching into the gutter. There was a couple on the corner, the man chopping the air, saying, ‘She has absolutely no idea.’
She crossed the road. Walking ahead was a woman in a singlet with silver-grey hair. Closer, Marie saw flowers beneath the white cotton. She hastened her steps, saw a waratah on one shoulder, crimson rich. Beautiful, prolific tattoos floated down the woman’s right arm. She was in good shape, and middle-aged by the look of that silver-grey hair. Marie was excited, gaining on her fast.
She came abreast and looked over eagerly and when the woman turned to her, Marie saw a tear tattooed on her cheek. She saw a worn, damaged face, the eyes like closed shutters, wary and hostile. They ran down Marie’s arms, then lit up. Marie hurried onwards.
The woman called out in a cigarette voice, ‘Nice tatts!’
Marie turned and said politely, ‘You too.’
Nice tatts.
‘Oh,’ said Edwina, as she tucked the cape into Marie’s collar.
It wasn’t a surprised vowel, more affirmative, as though she was just checking up on something. At the sink adjacent, Colette and her client turned to look. Marie leant her head back into the crevice of the basin and shut her eyes as Edwina’s fingers rummaged across her scalp.
Edwina seated Marie in front of the long gilt mirror then went to greet a customer. Marie picked up a copy of Vogue and opened it at an article on the history of the bikini. Colette wheeled her customer over and installed her next to Marie. When Marie raised her eyes she found Colette again staring at her nape. She caught her eye and smiled. Colette quickly looked away. Her customer, a dark-haired woman that Marie didn’t know, leant towards the mirror to inspect her face from a variety of angles while Colette waited, comb in hand. Marie lowered her eyes again and read the same paragraph over and over. Edwina returned and swiftly and silently cut Marie’s hair. Then she mixed up Marie’s hair dye.
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