Indelible Ink

by Fiona McGregor

  ‘Okay.’ Blanche hung on to the doorframe. ‘I’m going to Mac up the Revlon.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Kate.

  ‘No, it’s fine.’

  Blanche went back into her office and shut the door. They had to think up a new pitch. She had to go through the media schedules for Narva. There was a meeting with Roche in two days. They had to think up a new Diet Coke pitch, and fast. Blanche had had a dozen sheets of top-quality art paper and three boxes of charcoal delivered, all on the office-supplies account. She had a craving to draw, with charcoal soft as kohl, to feel it working into the grain of her skin while her fingers worked it into the paper. But when would she find the time? She lay on the floor, pulled her Thai silk pillow beneath her head and dropped Refresh into her eyes.

  So her childhood home had been sold and a wall had risen around Sirius Cove. She had been relieved that her mother and Clark hadn’t attended the auction because the loss had felt so personal. Let alone the ignominy of the price. She couldn’t have borne it with them there; somehow the punters hadn’t interfered with that intensely private ritual of letting go and grieving: like an audience they had wrapped a warm anonymous blanket around it. It was strange to think of her mother still there, sleeping, eating, probably even still gardening in this house that now felt like a corpse. It was a death yet here Blanche was, at work as usual. When she should have been marching down the main street in a funeral cortège, the world witness to her grief. She unzipped her skirt to free her legs and one by one brought her knees to her chest. It was cold in the air-conditioning, which made her back ache more. She realised she was crying when Kate knocked. She hoicked down her skirt and scrambled to her feet. ‘Come in!’

  She was standing, hands on knees, as Kate came in.

  ‘Ya righ’?’

  Blanche couldn’t get used to Kate’s vernacular for How are you? It always felt like an interrogation and put her on edge. ‘I stood up too quickly,’ she panted. ‘Headspin.’

  Kate stood politely by the door. When the thrumming in her head had subsided, Blanche went and sat at her desk. ‘My back’s out.’

  ‘D’you have a good osteo? I’ve a fantastic osteo, I’ll give you her number. I’ve also been getting loads of acupuncture lately and it’s totally changed my life.’

  ‘I’ve got a chiro.’

  ‘Don’t you find chiro a bit violent?’

  ‘I need a bit of violence,’ Blanche said with a touch of the ham. ‘I’m tough.’

  Kate smiled. She stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, a bag of cashews in her hand. She had taken to wearing long white socks beneath her cowboy boots, short kilts and sleeveless shirts done up high. A quirky old-fashioned rock’n’roll look. Her legs were disgustingly athletic and smooth, and covered in goose bumps. Look at that amazing black skin. No sunburn, no cancer, so healthy-looking. Blanche wished she had skin like that.

  ‘I just wanted to apologise for before,’ Kate said. ‘It was out of line.’

  ‘It’s okay. Sit down.’

  Kate sat on the edge of the couch with her feet together, her huge liquid eyes on Blanche. ‘I just trashed solitaire. Promise. I’m really sorry, hey. I’m itching to do some work, honestly. I’d really love to do the Revlon. If you’re busy or stressed, whatever I can do to take a load off.’

  Blanche looked at the pillow she had left in the middle of the floor. She felt like she’d exited the toilet with her skirt stuck in her knickers and been haplessly walking around like that ever since. She hated ceding. Delegating work was a form of ceding. Having her vulnerabilities on display like this was ceding. ‘Okay,’ she said, ceding. A shiver ran through her body. ‘It’s cold in here, isn’t it.’

  ‘You alrigh’?’ Kate said again. ‘You look really pale.’

  ‘I’m just stressed.’

  ‘D’you eat lunch? You can’t skip lunch.’

  ‘I ate some yoghurt,’ Blanche lied. ‘And fruit. I had a big breakfast. I just feel so lethargic.’

  ‘I’d offer you a cashew but I’m not sure they’d be good for you.’

  ‘That’s fine, I don’t feel like one anyway.’ Blanche had received more Narva that morning, but didn’t want to get the block out in front of Kate because then she would have to give her a piece, and she wanted to keep it all for herself.

  ‘What blood type are you?’ said Kate.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  ‘Cos you know it’s important to eat according to your blood type?’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  ‘It’s all about antigens and how your body absorbs food. Different blood types have different antigen markers, and they react badly with certain foods. And stomach acidity and digestive enzymes vary too, according to types, so we all absorb food differently. Like, you know how sometimes you eat what you think is a really good balanced meal and you end up all bloated for no reason?’

  Blanche didn’t know what antigens were but right now felt as bloated as a puffer fish. The cashews smelt incredibly strong and strangely repulsive. She tried to pay attention to Kate’s rapid-fire speech. ‘Well … yeah, I guess so.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Kate sat forward, her speech accelerating. ‘So if you absorb and digest food more efficiently you’re bound to lose weight and function better. It goes back like tens of thousands of years, to BC, to how our ancestors ate. So blood type O came first, then A.’

  ‘Oh, okay. So you’d be O because you’re black?’

  Kate’s eyes narrowed. ‘We all came from Africa, remember?’

  ‘Right.’ Blanche squirmed. ‘I really didn’t mean …’

  ‘It’s fine. B came last, when we started nomadic societies and started to move around, so B gets to eat most things. I’m AB, the most recent and rarest type. It only emerged about a thousand years ago.’ Kate smiled about herself as though she were the latest, most efficient product; the meanest machine. She ate more cashews. Blanche was overwhelmed by their odour. She had never even known that nuts had a smell until now. Kate said, ‘Are you vego?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be vego if you’re O.’

  ‘Well … I don’t eat that much meat, I don’t think.’

  Blanche reflected on her diet. A double-shot latte when she got up, made at home. A second from Machiavelli’s on her way into work, with a croissant or muffin or Portuguese tart. A third coffee with lunch but never after three. She had stopped smoking when she was twenty-nine and taken ecstasy a few times in her twenties, but not for years, not since Hugh, who hated drugs. She didn’t count her occasional lines of cocaine. ‘I stopped smoking when I was twenty-nine,’ she said.

  Kate nodded. ‘That’s good, that’s really good.’

  For lunch Blanche usually had a Caesar salad or focaccia or roll-up. Not much meat there. Dinner was usually Thai takeaway or sausages, steak or pasta. Her favourite foods were red duck curry, fish cakes and wood-fired pizza with goat’s cheese, rocket and kangaroo. ‘I think I probably eat more poultry and fish than red meat.’

  ‘Everybody thinks that’s better, but in fact if you’re type A you should be practically vego and avoid dairy. D’you eat much dairy?’

  Blanche felt suddenly despondent again, remembering chocolate, corn chips, cheese on toast, a million and one random snacks. What relation did Pringles and Twisties have with the food of BC hunter-gatherers? she wondered. She was hopeless at keeping track of this sort of thing, never wrote down her periods, for instance. She had to admit that she didn’t really know what she ate, when it boiled down to it. She felt completely out of touch with her body, trapped inside it like a snail in a shell.

  ‘How old are you? If you don’t mind my asking.’

  ‘Thirty-seven.’ Blanche pulled a face.

  ‘God, you look great for thirty-seven. You only look about thirty-three. Anyway, all the nicotine would be totally flushed out of your system by now.’ ‘

  Yeah, my lungs feel fine.’

  ‘You should do a blood test, honestly. I’ve
changed my diet and I feel incredible. I’ve lost weight and I’ve got like so much energy. Type AB is quite rare but good cos it allows me to eat a variety. The hardest thing was cutting out chips and hamburgers — I was a closet McDonald’s binger, you know. It’s about exercise too, as in the type suitable for your blood type.’ Kate looked shrewdly at Blanche. ‘You strike me as an O, you know.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. Dunno why I think that. But I bet you are. Most of England is O. Maybe that’s why I can tell.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be eating yoghurt for lunch. High protein, low carbs is what you need. And you should be doing aerobics and running.’

  Blanche groaned. ‘My poor gym membership!’

  ‘There’s loads of research on it, just google and you’ll find a million articles. It’s fascinating.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks, Kate.’

  ‘Should I do the Revlon, then?’ Kate stood up.

  ‘Yeah. That’d be great.’

  ‘I’ll have it done by five.’

  ‘Great!’

  For the rest of the afternoon, Blanche slowly made her way through a block of Narva with almond slivers as she googled blood types and diet. The nausea did not abate, nor, weirdly, the smell of cashews. Chocolate was the only thing she could hold down. She was surprised to find how much information there was that backed up Kate’s theories, sceptics notwithstanding. She googled female executives and creative directors and found five depressing articles that all alluded directly or indirectly to sexism in the advertising industry and the glass ceiling. Then she realised she had read two of the articles already. She checked her email and side-surfed onto YouTube and got envious, inspired, angered and bored by a variety of ads, then ended up on the MySpace page of a fabulously rich and successful American executive, thirty-six years old, a big deal at Apple, with enormous lips, tits and muscles, sunbed suntanned, a tiger tattoo on her upper arm, kissing her boyfriend, a chumpy guy in a baseball cap. So LA. Then she went onto the facebook login page and was considering joining, for about the tenth time, when Kate was back in her office with the Revlon print. Blanche looked over with glazed eyes. It was flawless. ‘That’s great, Kate! But maybe ... yeah, um, maybe you could move the print down a little?’

  ‘Okay. Where to?’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘There?’

  ‘Yeah. And maybe, try a different font? Not so kind of schoolbookish, y’know?’

  Kate flipped the print around and examined it. ‘Yeah, yeah, I see what you mean.’

  ‘Thanks, Kate. You’re a godsend.’

  Less than a week after the auction, Marie drove to Rhys’s studio although it wasn’t the studio she was going to tonight but Rhys’s house. She had fretted over her wardrobe for nearly two hours, finally settling on a sleeveless black dress with a shawl. She rang the bell and heels tapped over the floorboards then the door was opened by a woman with long black hair and big arrogant lips, painted dark red. ‘Hi, I’m Natasha.’

  Marie followed Natasha’s short leather boots and fishnet stockings up the stairs past the tattooing rooms to the top floor. Natasha was big, majestic, with a swinging gait and large sultry eyes that slid back watchfully to Marie behind her. On the landing they passed a room, Marie seeing through the crack of the door toys, small shoes and clothes in disarray, then they went into the front room. The walls were crowded with bookshelves and pictures. There was a television, a computer and an old-fashioned stereo with a turntable. Frankincense drifted from a cone in a dish. The wide balcony was fenced by wrought iron and covered at one end to create a sort of sunroom.

  Rhys called out from her bedroom, ‘Babe, can you get Marie a drink?’

  ‘G’n’T?’

  ‘Lovely, thanks.’

  There was a kitchenette at one end of the balcony. Natasha went to the bar fridge and mixed a drink for Marie. It was eight o’clock and daylight had faded. Marie sat on the edge of the couch, shawl draped around her shoulders. Natasha brought the drink out. She was tightly laced into a corset, birds in silhouette flying across her broad milky chest. Lines of diamantés forked from her eyes across her cheekbone. She looked like a character in a movie, something between concubine and cyborg. She lit a cigarette then walked away to smoke it by the window. She intimidated Marie with her size, diffidence and imperious beauty. She leant on the windowsill, exhaling harshly as though in a hurry. In the street light, Marie saw her face was completely unlined and she realised how young Natasha was, how much of the haughtiness was bluff and naïveté, a shield for nerves.

  ‘So,’ said Natasha, ‘I’ve seen photos of your tatts, Marie. It feels quite an honour to finally see them in the flesh. So to speak.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Especially the moth. What’s your next piece going to be?’

  ‘We have a bit more to finish on the vines. Then I’m thinking of an angophora.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘The most beautiful tree in Sydney.’

  By the time Rhys limped in with one boot half laced, Marie and Natasha were huddled beneath the light pulling back their clothing to show one another Rhys’s artwork. Rhys put on a record and sat on the couch watching them while she thumbed a text message into her mobile. A beep returned immediately. ‘Poor little Trav. He so wanted to come. He cried when Paul took him. I felt so bad.’

  ‘Why not bring him?’ Natasha blew a plume of smoke up to the ceiling. ‘I’d help you look after him, you know that.’

  ‘Because he’s five?’

  ‘Five now?’ said Marie.

  ‘He’s just started school,’ Rhys said proudly.

  ‘Us Russians would have everyone there,’ said Natasha, pouting. ‘The kids’d crash at the back of the room when they’d had enough and the party would go all night.’

  Again the haughty tone, a sort of pitching of herself against Rhys, who stiffened to meet the impact. All the while the two gazed at each other with a frank, dark lust.

  ‘He’s going to a birthday tomorrow. Can’t have my kid turning up to his friends’ parties trashed. Eight, I reckon. In the holidays.’ Rhys pulled out a compact and began to apply make-up between sips of her drink.

  Something had been completed by penetrating the top of the house. Every bit of furniture in the tattooing room one floor down, every crack in the wall and every book spine, was known to Marie. Downstairs had also become familiar, but always this floor above, with its TV chatter and footsteps or long silences, had remained impenetrable and so had grown in Marie’s mind to something large and exclusive. The whole house, due to these hidden realms, had become a castle. Now it was just a collection of rooms in which people lived and worked: an ordinary house.

  ‘Does Rob live here too?’

  ‘Sort of. He has a room in the middle floor at the end, next to his studio. Rob doesn’t live anywhere, really. He lives out of a bag. And his beaten-up Mitsubishi.’

  ‘I admire that. Being unattached like that.’

  ‘Oh, Rob’s not unattached.’ Natasha laughed. ‘More like polygamous.’

  ‘You should go house hunting with Rob, Marie. Rob loves looking at real estate.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘He’s totally obsessed,’ said Natasha. ‘He’s on Domain like every day.’

  ‘Pot calling the kettle black.’ Rhys smiled into her compact.

  ‘I’m just a real-estate pornographer,’ Natasha replied cryptically. ‘It’s just a fantasy.’

  ‘Rob owns this building,’ Rhys explained to Marie. ‘He owns like eight houses.’

  ‘My god. Who would have thought?’

  Marie was cravenly disappointed. Once again real estate enclosed her like a prison. More likely it had never gone away, but she had idealised the tattooists as free of this national obsession with land ownership. Now it seemed like everybody was locked inside, pacing around, measuring space, keys clutched tightly in hand.

  Rhys went on, with both resentment and admiration: ‘Rob’s like the lo
cal eccentric. He’s the goon in the corner of every party but he’s a raging capitalist at the same time and nobody knows it. He’s incredibly good at it. He’s got shares as well. His studio is full of all the best equipment and pigments, he eats nothing but organic, he’s up to his eyeballs in real estate but he only owns one pair of shoes and rides a bicycle everywhere he can.’

  ‘Doesn’t pay any tax,’ Natasha chipped in. ‘It’s all negative geared.’

  ‘You know,’ said Rhys, ‘I’ve got a bit of a problem with one person owning that much, but Rob is so good to me and Travis, I wouldn’t be in business without him. I couldn’t live here either. Mainly, I couldn’t tattoo independently, and that’s phenomenal.’

  ‘These guys,’ Natasha said proudly to Marie, ‘are the last ones standing. They’re the only non-bikie tattoo establishment in the whole of the inner city.’

  ‘But we don’t talk about that.’ Rhys snapped shut her compact and stood up. She was wearing a corset as well, and made up, in high heels, she looked like a queen.

  ‘Look at you two,’ said Marie. ‘I feel so underdressed.’

  ‘You look gorgeous,’ said Rhys.

  ‘You look fabulous.’

  ‘I haven’t worn a corset for forty years. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever worn one.’

  ‘They’re comfortable if they’re well made.’

  ‘You’ve got an hourglass figure — you’re perfect for corsetry,’ added Natasha.

  ‘Yeah, she is, isn’t she.’

  ‘There is the red one, babe. You never wear that anymore.’

  Rhys disappeared then returned with a red satin corset. She loosened the laces and held it up to Marie.

  ‘Not with this dress.’

  ‘Totally with that dress. Come on.’

  Marie stood.

  ‘Turn around,’ Rhys instructed.

  She fitted the corset and Marie did up the front clasps. Hand on hip, Natasha swept the two of them with an approving gaze. Rhys began to tighten the laces while Natasha stood in front, holding Marie’s hands. ‘Lean into it.’ Marie leant and gripped Natasha’s hands as the corset embraced her tighter, pushing her breasts up. There was a point at which it felt comforting like a poultice, then it touched a pain. ‘No, looser.’