After a while, Marie said, ‘And how are you, Edwina? How’s business?’
‘Oh, you know, ticking along. Can’t complain.’
‘And your children?’
‘They’re very well. Exhausting me as usual.’
‘That’s children for you.’
Edwina was wearing a peach-coloured v-necked t-shirt. A fine gold chain hung down her tanned chest, with a pendant that disappeared into her cleavage. Marie tried not to dwell on this pendant: she tried to look Edwina in the eye. Edwina raised her eyebrows and smiled with bright, professional solicitude as she poked the dye brush into Marie’s roots. Marie looked back at Vogue, which was quoting from a 1951 edition: Our readers dislike the bikini, which has transformed the coastlines into the backstage of music halls and which does not embellish women … She read on in the sticky silence.
Ten minutes later Edwina said, ‘There we are, Marie. I’ll just leave that to set.’
‘Thank you.’
Edwina clacked across the room to where a blonde woman with freshly washed hair awaited her. The reception desk, a white oblong table on an oblique angle near the door, was dominated by a large vase of lilies whose scent was tangible even here, beneath her skullcap of hair dye. Marie inhaled gratefully. Outside, sunlight seared the paving.
‘It’s going to be forty-three degrees tomorrow,’ said the blonde as Edwina began to cut her hair.
‘Oh, I don’t believe it. They always get it wrong.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised — it’s almost that now.’
‘I wake up every day dreading the heat, you know.’
‘I can’t quite believe it, to be honest with you. I mean things melt when it’s that hot, don’t they?’
‘I was in the desert once, and it was forty-nine. You can’t move. You can’t do anything.’
‘I think it should be a public holiday,’ another customer pitched in.
‘You’re absolutely right!’
‘Edwina, get on the phone to the PM, will you?’
Gales of laughter.
Marie watched them in the mirror, smiling and trying to catch their eyes.
‘Why me?’
‘You’re upspoken!’
‘I’m not going to do your dirty work for you, Jane!’
‘Isn’t it outspoken?’
‘I’m not dirty.’
More laughter.
Marie left the salon and walked down Military Road in the direction of the deli. Everybody was moving slowly, seeking the shade. She passed a blonde in tennis clothes, wheeling a pram. Two Queenwood girls came out of Country Road, each holding a mobile phone to her ear. The uniform had changed since Blanche’s school days. Hats were compulsory again, for health reasons, not propriety. The girls wore theirs jammed beneath their elbows, and Marie could see the border of foundation around their jaws, the clotted eyelashes, the expertly applied tints in their hair.
They waved at a Mosman High boy in a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt and an eyebrow piercing that looked infected. A middle-aged man in Tommy Hilfiger was walking up behind him. ‘Dylan! Hurry up. Your mother’s expecting you at home right now.’
The deli was a cavern of relief, its wooden shelves stacked with beautifully labelled jars. Marie filled her basket with olive oil, mustard, marinated fetta, parmesan, a vat of Nice Cream and a litre of organic apple juice. She took her purchases to the counter and handed over her Visa card. ‘Is there any wholemeal bread?’
‘No, sorry. There’s no wheat flour left in Australia because of the drought. Try spelt. The spelt’s excellent.’
Marie added a spelt loaf to her shopping.
‘Thirty-eight dollars and fifty-five cents, thanks.’ The cashier ran Marie’s card through the machine, plucked out the docket then bit her lip. ‘I’m sorry. It’s been refused.’
‘But I just used it at the hairdresser’s!’
The girl’s head tilted with embarrassment. ‘Sorry. Maybe you just reached the limit now.’
The limit on that card was fifty thousand dollars. Marie was aware of someone behind her. She reached into her wallet for her Amex and passed it over, ears burning. The girl ran the card through. Her mouth pulled to one side. ‘I’m sorry …’
‘That too?’ Marie’s voice sounded harsh in the dim, quiet shop. ‘The card gremlin’s really got me today, hasn’t he? There must be a mistake. Can’t you ring them?’
‘It’s Saturday. There’s nothing I can do. You could ring customer service?’
Marie glanced around and saw that the woman behind her was Gina.
‘Well, hallo! How are you?’
‘Hallo, Marie.’ Gina smiled at her and the cashier in turn.
She gave Marie, in a reluctant manner as though fighting a compulsion, the quick once-over that Marie associated with men, desire, younger days. But there was nothing erotic in this scrutiny. Marie’s heart began to accelerate. She opened her wallet for the third time. Inside was a twenty-dollar note. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said to the cashier, ‘I’ll have to go and sort this out with the bank. On a hot day like today! I’ll be back.’
Gina’s slim, tanned form moved aside. Marie stopped on her way out. ‘We must catch up, Gina. I’ll be gone soon.’
‘Oh yes, the sale! Yes, we must.’
Marie crossed the road and made her way towards the car park. Well, she thought, better to be coiffed than fed. She didn’t want to go to the bank in case she couldn’t get cash out as well, nor to the supermarket to spend her fifty dollars. She had enough food for a few days. She wanted to run away and disappear. She thought thirstily of the cove. She had parked her car at the end of the car park beneath a peppercorn, but the sun had swung around and was now sheering through her windscreen. She passed a woman shutting the door of a red Toyota with fragile determination, carrying an old-fashioned basket. Pat Hammet. She fell upon her with relief. ‘Pat!’
Pat looked up from beneath her old sunhat. ‘Hallo, Marie. This is unexpected.’
Marie wasn’t sure what this meant. ‘You won’t believe,’ she said breathlessly, ‘my credit cards just got knocked back. Both of them, in the deli!’
Pat peered at her. Something flickered across her face. Embarrassment, perhaps pity. She put down her basket and opened her wallet. She had an elderly tremble in her hands, noded with arthritis. She drew out a one-hundred-dollar note.
Marie was stricken. ‘No, Pat. Please. It’s just a mistake. In this weather!’
‘It’s alright. I understand.’
‘Thank you, really. It’s just a terrible inconvenience.’
Pat tilted her head to one side. ‘Now what’s this I hear about you and tattoos?’
‘Pardon?’
‘I thought you’d moved out of Mosman. You even mentioned Redfern or something. And then I heard that you were covered in tattoos!’ She checked Marie with the frank appraisal of a schoolmistress checking a pupil’s uniform. It seemed to Marie, as a woman drew up in a silver Mercedes, that Pat was speaking extremely loudly. Booming. Like a deaf woman.
‘The auction is Saturday week but I’m getting a two-month settlement so you’ll still see me,’ Marie said. ‘You should come over before the house goes.’
‘Who are the agents?’
‘Hugh, my son-in-law. Coustas and Stevens.’
‘Right.’ Pat raised her eyebrows. ‘And are you interviewing your buyers?’
‘God, no. I escape when they come. You met all of yours, didn’t you.’
‘Oh yes. Gave them a thorough grilling. Fat lot of good that did me. That Celia was born in Mosman, you know.’ Pat put on a mincing voice: ‘She told me, Oh, it’s a lovely house, we won’t change a thing, we love the bush. I can’t bear to go back there, Marie. I can’t even look at what they’ve done.’
Marie decided not to tell Pat about the swimming pool.
‘But you,’ Pat prompted.
‘I’m fine about it, Pat. I’ve let go.’
‘I couldn’t believe my ears. Tattooed! Then I thought, Well, Mari
e’s an original woman. But she’s not stupid.’ Pat stood back and let this compliment sink in. The Mercedes woman smiled as she walked past with her lime green polyurethane eco shopping bags. Marie felt as though she were falling off a cliff. She could see every detail of the rock face, feel every flicker of wind. The humming of cicadas morphed into a relentless pulse.
‘My car’s going to be a furnace. I have to go.’
Eyes like claws. Marie walked to the end of the car park and unlocked her car. The seat branded her thighs. In the rear-view mirror she saw her hairdo had collapsed in the heat. On arrival home she stripped off her clothes, put on a costume, slung a towel over her shoulder and went down to the cove. It was high tide with jade depths for a good ten metres. Marie breast-stroked out with her head above the water, cheeks burning. She swam over the mysterious low-lying kelp into cooler water. Then she lifted her arms and dove under for the full relief on face and scalp. Her foot spasmed with cramp and she realised the tension that had gripped her for the past two hours was still in her body; but even in this state, raging and alone, her entire being surged with love for this place. She floated for a long time facing the sky, every cell in her body singing to the water and trees.
She walked back to her house uncovered. In the Hendersons’ kitchen window, Rupert’s glowering face appeared. She stripped and showered. It was a new person in the mirrors of her ensuite. Someone vibrant, expressive and particular. Someone radiating humour and life. She walked around her bedroom naked, exulting in her shouting, shrinking, wrinkling body. Fuck you, she thought. Fuck. You.
Ten kilometres inland, fifteen minutes’ drive from Bondi, the mercury rose. Clark could feel his arms burning as he drove and he took his right hand off the wheel away from the sun. The sunspots he’d had burnt off his forehead last year were itching again. It wasn’t a day to be out in, especially not in a car with dodgy air-conditioning. The streets shimmered and were eerily empty as though a bomb had been dropped. It was inhuman. But he had arranged to meet Sylvia and, having Nell all weekend, this was the only time he would get to see his lover. And Nell had been miserable in the heat this morning: an air-conditioned building would be better than the beach where they would only roast more. Yesterday the sand had actually burnt his feet.
‘Is Gran coming?’
‘No, she can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘She’s sick.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘Nothing serious. She’s just got a cold. We can ring her when we get home if you like.’ He added, ‘We’re going to meet a friend of mine instead.’
‘Who?’
‘She’s called Sylvia.’
Nell made a face and hunched her head into her shoulders. ‘Daddy, I’m hot.’
‘I know, Nellie. It’s for-ty-five-de-grees out there, and we’re going as fast as we can to a big air-conditioned building where you’ll see dinosaurs and snakes.’
Nell made a whimpering sound.
‘You’re being such a good girl. We’re nearly there.’
He found a park in Liverpool Street, locked the car and took his daughter’s hand. They walked around the corner past the old police headquarters, hugging the thin strip of shade, Nell jerking his arm. He was excited about introducing his lover to his child: a circle was being joined.
In the deep cool mouth of the museum foyer, they stood looking up at a huge suspended skeleton. The arrangement had been to meet Sylvia here or, if she hadn’t arrived, in the reptile gallery. But in she came, right on time, and walked over to where Clark stood with Nell beneath the vast mobile of bones. Sylvia’s face was livid, her shirt clung to her back and her hair hung limp. She had told Clark the last time they met that she had been a state swimmer and he now thought of water every time he thought of her body, her long limbs streaming past in a wake. He shivered with the sensation of his sweat cooling, turning his shirt cold and wet against his back.
‘You believe this weather?’ Sylvia said.
‘Pretty freaky.’
Clark introduced Sylvia to his daughter. Nell looked her up and down, then pointed to the skeleton and announced, ‘I’ve got dinosaurs.’
‘Have you?’
‘Yep. Tyrannosaurus.’
‘This is a whale skeleton,’ said Sylvia, bending over. ‘So you might see one of these alive one day. Can you imagine?’
Nell stared at Sylvia sceptically, in case there was a joke in the air. She looked at the skeleton, then at Sylvia again and twitched her mouth as though resisting a smile. Clark took this as a good sign.
They moved off through the rooms. The place seemed more vibrant than Clark had remembered. After several years working down the road, he found the Australian Museum had crumpled into a corner of his mind like a relative in her dotage whose sour, faded clothes belied her rich past. He was an irrevocable humanist and had always preferred the smaller sociological museums to this edifice of nature. But today it was as though he had caught the old woman by surprise and all her secret cabinets were open, her treasures revealed.
He followed Nell and Sylvia down the ramp. He was surprised by the position of the mole on Sylvia’s clavicle, which only his fingers had previously seen. He had thought it was lower, near the armpit. Nell had taken Sylvia’s hand and was peppering her with questions, each of which Sylvia answered with perfect lozenges of information.
She glanced back at Clark. ‘I used to want to be a marine biologist, you know.’
‘Really? And why didn’t you?’
‘I was crap at science. It was a romantic idea, really. By the end of high school I realised my desire was more about the ocean and swimming and collecting things on the beach than serious scientific study.’ She made a little face. ‘David Attenborough was my pin-up boy.’
Nell said, ‘I wanna go and look at the snakes.’
‘That’s exactly where we’re going, darling.’
‘I’m not scared of snakes.’
‘What about you?’ Sylvia asked him.
‘I know you’re not … What?’
‘What did you want to do? Did you always want to be a historian?’
‘I’m not a real historian. More an amateur riding on the coattails of Cultural Studies. First I wanted to be a film-maker, until I was at uni and realised how much film depended on money. I think in retrospect it was just about looking. Watching. That’s why I’ve chosen this image-based concept for my thesis. I’m from the television generation.’ He grinned. ‘I’m a natural perv.’
Sylvia touched his nose with the tip of her finger. His heart pounded. ‘You’re sunburnt,’ she said.
Nell laughed and prodded Sylvia. ‘We went to the beach yesterday.’
‘We went boogie-boarding, didn’t we, Nell?’
Nell launched into a garbled description of their day at the beach, and Sylvia listened attentively. This was their first proper daylight meeting, and Clark was trying to look at all of her without either her or Nell noticing. Sylvia was up till now a series of angles, like a cubist painting. The prism of cheekbone beside him at the seminar, pale blue forehead in the car by Blackwattle Bay. The shallow yet well-defined cleavage he had burrowed into that night and again a week later, in his car at the end of Victoria Street, the first time they fucked.
Nell stopped before one of the cabinets. Clark pressed a button and the light hit Nell’s and Sylvia’s faces. Inside the cabinet were stick insects, indistinguishable from the sticks on which they were posed. Sylvia pointed them out to Nell, sent Clark a look, and he saw it again, the fragile moue, an entreaty of some sort, or a gift. A tender, flushed expression, like the inside of a shell. He saw also that her eyes were green, and scarred with amber flecks like shrapnel.
They followed Nell, turning on the cabinet lights as they went, talking quietly.
‘Franco’s flight gets in about nine.’
‘Well, we’re going to have an early pizza back in Bondi. Why don’t you come?’
‘No, no. She’s going home tonight, i
sn’t she?’
‘Swim this heat off. A dusk swim. Beautiful.’
‘You guys need to have your last evening together.’
‘Look at her,’ Clark whispered. ‘She loves you. Come. Please.’
Sylvia regarded him solemnly, saying nothing.
They were passing through the children’s activity room. Clark was hoping his daughter would find something to hold her attention for a while so he could sit down with Sylvia and just be. But Nell was in a typically purposeful, garrulous mood, aware of her role as leader of the day’s expedition. She fell onto a framed butterfly and clutched at the glass. ‘Oh, darling, darling, darling.’ It was a magnificent, bright purple specimen, large as Nell’s hand, and Clark found himself thinking how well it lent itself to design, how decorative and two-dimensional a creature it was, perfect for a tattoo for example, unlike, say, a tiger or a horse. He thought all of this naturally, without panic or the smallest note of resentment towards his mother, just a matter-of-fact aesthetic appraisal that washed calmly through him. He followed Nell out of the room.
Sylvia was right behind him. Her hand brushed his arse. ‘Okay. I will.’ Then, as though released from a bond, she wandered around the next room on her own.
In the snake gallery, the exhibits looked old and neglected. The dowager retreating into her frowsy shawl. An Asian man in brown clothes peered into the taipan cabinet. His wife sat on one of the benches reading a sheaf of information through glasses with pale pink frames.
‘DNA,’ Clark whispered to Sylvia.
‘What?’
‘I look at these old stuffed snakes, and wonder, if they go extinct, how on earth they could bring one back to life by taking DNA from those mouldy old scales. That’s what they’re claiming they’ll try and do with the thylacine.’
‘Apparently our ancestry going back millennia can be read in our DNA. And the length of one person’s DNA goes to the moon and back something like eight times.’
‘What, the DNA they find in a drop of saliva?’
‘I don’t know actually …’
‘My brother told me that Australia has the fastest rate of species extinction in the world.’
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