She hadn’t heard back. Looking past the bags of compost to the tree skeletons, she thought again of the rainwater tank that could have gone there. She thought of Jared. His tattoo. His bulges. But what was the point in thinking so much about sex, a woman of almost sixty? She drove a stake into the ground.
And was her humus better than cement? she wondered, mixing a vodka spritzer in the kitchen after lunch, sweat dripping down her spine. Was there a scientist in the vicinity who could tell them the pros of clean garden air as weighed against the cons of gluts pouring over garden boundaries like feasts off a Roman table, choking the bush? And hadn’t the man who had built this house, before the Kings moved in, torn down a house as magnificent as the Hammets’? Pat had let her know that as soon as they’d arrived. Marie still had the photograph. Burrawong, a stately, mournful Federation, two-and-a-half storeys tall with bay windows; in the middle of the garden, two cabbage tree palms like sentinels. It had been in the same family for three generations. Marie had been crestfallen, felt implicated in its loss. She had fallen in love with its replacement the minute she had entered — the light-filled open plan, the overgrown declivity that spilt into bushland. But in Pat Hammet’s living room thirty years ago, looking at Burrawong with its rectitude and tradition, she had felt like her new house: callow, intrusive, unwarrantable.
When Marie had signed the cheque for Jared, she asked him if there was any rain in the long-term forecast.
‘Nuh.’ He tilted his head back to drink from his bottle of Gatorade, Adam’s apple pumping the fluid into his body.
‘My garden’s really suffering.’
‘You think this is bad. You should see the western suburbs.’
He wiped his mouth, thanked her and left.
She slid the invoice into her receipts drawer, then checked her balance online. Slowly but surely, over the last twelve months, it had lowered. With so much of his money tied up in tax liabilities, Ross had manoeuvred his way out of paying a decent allowance. All those things she had taken for granted — lunches with Susan, furniture, the nursery — remained on her credit card like weeping wounds. Then there were the necessities like rates, electricity, visits to the vet, another dehumidification for the rumpus room.
There was no payment due for another week so dealing with the guttering would have to be deferred. Her overdraft would feel that cheque going to the nursery. Through the doorway she could see the lounge suite, lounging away richly and coldly. With a jolt, she remembered her car, gouged all down the side. My god, did I black out? she thought, stunned she hadn’t remembered till now. In order to save money, Marie had forsaken insurance this year. She went outside and composted till night fell. Sometimes this place felt like a beast, groaning to be fed and groomed. She resented it.
Coming into the rumpus room through the garden door at dusk, Marie found the television on low. She had forgotten to turn it off again. The six o’clock news was repeating footage of the latest bombing, and Marie could now recognise the victims as easily as neighbours. Broken, bloody bodies staggered past the camera. She stood before the carnage, hot with shame.
Her evening drinks tasted sour: she stopped at five; the following night at four. Jared drove in and out of her dreams in a cloud of exhaust. Fatima the new cleaning lady came and Marie observed her stately grace with envy. Against the window, clusters of bogongs quivered towards the light. She lay awake in the wasteland of bed as the Hendersons’ sprinkler system trickled down the path like a bloodletting. A cricket was trapped in her bathroom, its metallic cheep echoing past midnight. Mopoke nosed her way under the sheet and Marie clasped the cat gratefully against her skin.
Clark had said cunt in front of his daughter again this morning. The phone had woken him and he had stood blearily over the answering machine, puzzled by the sound of fluey breathing. When it rang again half an hour later, he picked it up. ‘Hallo,’ said an adenoidal female voice. ‘I’m ringing from Chevron at Bondi Junction, and we’re offering free hearing tests —’
‘You rang me yesterday.’ Clark hung up.
He went into the kitchen to make coffee and the phone rang again. Maybe it was his mother. He picked it up. The infected breathing moved into his ear and Clark dropped the handset into the cradle. ‘Fucken cunts,’ he snapped, turning to see Nell in the doorway holding the neighbour’s cat, a fluffy white tom called Kimba with pale blue eyes like the Living Dead. ‘Put it down, darling. Daddy’s allergic.’
Nell put the cat down on the doorstep where it crouched beneath her stroking hands. ‘Pussy, pussy, pussy,’ she crooned.
Janice would be at him. She had rung the day after Nell’s last visit to tell him grimly that Nell had said cunt, and to remind him that Nell was only four years old. Clark retorted that he only got to see his daughter once a fortnight and was therefore unlikely to be the source of the word.
‘Dad,’ said Nell, as they crawled down William Street in a thick line of cars. ‘Can I get a cat?’ She lingered on the last letter to emphasise her point.
‘Sure. Ask Mum.’
‘No,’ Nell said patiently. ‘We can’t have a cat at our place cos of Roger.’
Roger was the yappy terrier who belonged to Chris, Janice’s new partner, a barrister. Clark had felt ripped off when the stories of barrister tax evasion finally left the pages of the Herald without having mentioned Chris Nickson once.
‘I mean at your place. Then I can play with her when I stay.’
‘Nellie, darling, your dad’s allergic to cats. Remember?’
Nell drummed her feet against the seat. ‘I want a catt. I want a black catt.’
‘Your dad’s an infirm old man who gets really sick around cats,’ Clark elucidated.
‘Oh, you are not.’
Clark looked at her, surprised and flattered. He was constantly amazed by her intelligence and how far ahead of her age she was conceptually. He didn’t believe in talking down to children. It seemed to be paying off. The State Library was covered in scaffolding, people picking their way along its edge. Clark felt a rush of admiration for his daughter, whose fleshy neck furled beneath her chin when she smiled, whose eyes were becoming more like Janice’s — icy, intelligent, chaste and shrewd. He could feel the folds of his stomach sweating against one another like greasy tyres, and straightened his back. The only sort of cat Clark could bear was a dead one, with historical significance, like Trim, Matthew Flinders’, whose statue was hidden somewhere in that scaffolding. He launched into a potted history.
Nell asked, ‘What did she look like?’
‘Trim was a he and he was black and white with a goofy face.’
‘Goo-fy?’
‘He was the first cat to go around Australia in a boat, Nell!’
Nell looked out the window, and Clark became so involved in what he was saying that before he knew it, like a little paper boat on the whirlpool of life, he was sucked into the harbour tunnel. He hunched over the wheel, silent, bilious, trying not to swear.
Half an hour later he was walking through the light-filled house, calling his mother. He wandered down to the rumpus room with Nell, onto the terrace, and found her outside. ‘I’m applying for a PhD,’ he told her.
‘Oh?’ she looked up in surprise. ‘And what does that involve?’
‘Research and writing for three years.’
‘So you will get to write.’ Marie was trying to unblock the drain outside the laundry. Her hands struggled in its fetid sleeve.
‘And get paid for it, if I get a stipend.’
‘What are you going to research? Where do you do that?’
‘The library, the art gallery, archives, lots of places. It’s about interpreting images to construct history. But kind of crimes and misdemeanours, not regular history, more the stuff that gets brushed under the carpet. It’s local, of course.’ Clark’s head began to swarm with ideas too fast to articulate. ‘Anyway,’ he said, even though this wasn’t his real motivation, ‘a PhD will help me get a better job.’ His real motivation wa
s to write, indefinitely. ‘If I get it, Mum.’
‘I think it’s a great idea, Clark. I’m proud of you. Look’ — Marie held out the bucket to Nell, the mud in it writhing with worms — ‘these are what make my garden grow.’
Clark grimaced. Clinging to his thigh, Nell looked from her father to her grandmother, then approached the worms and stared, fascinated. ‘Worms,’ she said.
‘You should have seen the traffic today,’ said Clark. ‘Unbelievable.’
‘It’s all the tunnels and roadways. They’re carving our city into little fortified towns,’ Marie said sadly. She packed the mud onto the edge of the herb patch, then led the way into the house.
So here she was after everything, a normal mother doing normal motherly things. That brilliant, fatal conflagration seemed ancient history, the city in ruins, smothered by jungle. She didn’t know if she had lost or found herself, here in her kitchen on another sunny day. Some sacrificial urge still burnt inside her. She felt herself revolving on an extreme oval, one moment remote from the fire, the next so close it scorched her. Everything was going to change, and the tattoos felt like protective circles. She poked through the cupboards looking for something to feed them all. Nell passed into the living room, carrying Mopoke, a bag of fur punctured by startled eyes.
‘Careful, sweetie.’ Clark followed her. ‘She might scratch you.’
‘She’s barely got claws left,’ said Marie. ‘Put her on her cushion, Nell. She’s a very old lady so you have to be gentle.’
‘Fucken cunts,’ said Nell matter-of-factly, as she staggered over to the cushion to deposit the cat, enormous in her little arms.
‘Pardon?’ said Marie.
‘Nell!’ Clark looked at his mother. ‘This is Paddington child care, and barristers at home. Can you believe it?’
Mopoke remained in the position she had landed, half standing, half crouching, staring straight ahead. A moth flopped on the floor nearby and she lifted her nose.
‘It’s the last of the bogongs. Mopoke used to be a great bogong hunter.’ Marie looked at the cat sentimentally. ‘She used to eat them too. They made a crunching sound.’
Nell stroked the cat carefully into a recline. Mopoke went down, eyes moving from side to side. Clark hovered over them, thinking he must stop saying that big round word house, and get used to small, simple flat.
‘Cunts,’ Nell said.
‘Pretend you didn’t hear her,’ Clark whispered.
Marie opened the fridge and laughed into its cold white interior. She wanted to gather up Nell, put her nose into her neck and take in her sweet milky smell. She began to take food out: bread, cheese, ham and bottled dressing, iceberg lettuce in a Tupperware container.
Nell marched in looking very pleased with herself. ‘Caniva Coke, Gran?’
‘I don’t have any,’ Marie lied. ‘How about water? That’s what we’re having.’
‘I saw Coke in the fridge.’ Nell’s voice began to rise.
‘It’s like this all weekend,’ said Clark. ‘Honestly, I feel like a child abuser when I offer her water.’
‘And don’t you look smart,’ said Marie, getting out the Diet Coke. ‘In your new jeans and haircut. What’s on the hem?’
‘Daisies.’ Nell extended a foot proudly. Beneath her fringe peeped a red arc from where she had gashed her head under the magnolia tree last year. Marie remembered the incident more for Clark’s hysteria than Nell’s.
‘They’re a birthday present from her stepfather.’
Marie brought the food into the dining room, then plates and cutlery. ‘Well,’ she said when Clark had sat down, ‘I’ve decided to sell the house.’
He looked at her in shock, then a smile spread over his features. ‘That’s really good. I mean, it’s kind of tragic, but necessary. Isn’t it?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘I got a Game Boy too, Gran.’
‘Did you, darling? You lucky girl.’
‘And we’re going to America for Christmas.’
‘Really?’ Marie avoided Clark’s gaze.
Clark tucked a lettuce leaf into his roll and looked at it glumly. ‘I have to get fit.’ He chewed, eyes roaming the room. In spite of his campaign, the idea of losing the house made him secretly frightened. It would be like cutting off a lifetime’s tress of hair, too difficult to maintain, devastating to relinquish. He looked back at his mother. ‘It’s the end of an era.’
‘It sure is.’ Marie squeezed her roll shut and brought it to her mouth.
They ate in silence, looking out at the view.
Thirty-two degrees, hot October night. Marie couldn’t sleep. Down in the cove a gang of koels began to fight, their outraged caws rising in the darkness. She couldn’t use the hose till Wednesday. She lay there mentally listing the tasks. Start researching real-estate agents. Book the guttering man. Prune the kangaroo paws, and everywhere manure, and mulch, mulch, mulch. She was dreading the coming day with its blowtorch sun. But night gave the heat a feeling of luxury.
She went into the bathroom for some water. Mopoke was stretched across the tiles on her stomach, absorbing the cool. Marie drank stroking the cat with her foot. How could you sleep in this heat? Or consider working when the sun came up? How could you do anything but melt and drift?
The heat brought the tattoos up like Braille. The dips and swirls disappeared then rose again, fresh enough to scale slightly, ancient enough that they seemed to have always been there. This language of welts was strangely familiar, as though the needles hadn’t so much inserted ink as stripped the veneer from an underlying design.
Her skin spoke in the darkness. Look, this is me. I have arrived. Marie drove slowly along Military Road. She didn’t usually take this route into the city, but she was looking for tattoo parlours. She knew that tattoos, like mobile phones and myna birds, had been proliferating for years already, but she had only just begun to notice them. Like an artist obsessed with a new vision, the synchronicities aligned and she saw her superstition almost daily. The lower-back insignia of the girl in the supermarket, faded adornments on the workmen rendering the Hendersons’ swimming pool. She grew discerning, recognising the poor imitations on bad boys in movies. She felt dissatisfied with her timorous, generic markings. A craving had taken root inside her. She couldn’t see any parlours on this side of the harbour so she drove across the bridge towards the smog-laden skyline then into the cluttered streets of East Sydney. She passed two parlours in quick succession. Each reached out to place a hook in her eye but she still wasn’t ready to stop. She continued up the hill, and at the next sighting began to look for a park.
The tattoo parlour doubled as a body-piercing studio, with a counter of glass display cabinets. There was a wall of designs and a clump of panting rhapis in a wooden stand below them. The man behind the counter was about Leon’s age, with a goatee beard into which red fangs were dyed. He was talking to a tiny woman in a pencil skirt and a shirt with the top button done up. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she stood very straight with her handbag perched on the counter before her. She wore black-framed glasses with little diamantés on the arms.
‘And I’m thinking, Scary? This?’ She placed a fine-boned hand on her chest. ‘Switch on the evening news, Bozo.’
‘Don’t get out much,’ the shop assistant mumbled in assent. His earlobes were stretched open by enormous metal tunnels that wobbled stiffly when he nodded. He turned to Marie. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Just looking, thanks.’
‘D’you want to get Indian for dinner?’ the doll-like woman said to him.
The designs on the wall were slicker versions of those in William Street. None appealed. Marie found some portfolios on the mantlepiece and began to leaf through them. The further in she went, the more confused and indifferent she became. She had felt some kind of blessing that morning, the image floating, evolving in ether, her body waiting like a dam, but the sense of having been duped now began to seep through her, perhaps even of being the duper.
She stole a glance at the old-fashioned maritime designs clustering the woman’s arms. Not for her either. The woman’s eyes flicked at her, as though she were an insect.
Marie opened the next portfolio. Pages of photorealist portraits. Her heart sank. Maybe she was in the wrong place. Maybe she was being too choosy and what she wanted — amorphous as it was — didn’t exist. She opened the last portfolio and three pages in found a tattoo of flames. It rippled off the paper like light. She took the portfolio over to the counter. ‘Is this person here today? Can I see him for a tattoo?’
The shop assistant angled his head to look at the photo, and frowned. ‘She doesn’t work here anymore.’
The woman looked at Marie with sudden interest. ‘Has Rhys got her own place?’ she said to the shop assistant. ‘Good for her.’
‘Why’s that still in there?’ he said under his breath. His fingers slid into the sleeve and plucked the photo out.
‘Bloody good choice, if I may say so myself,’ the woman said.
‘Can you tell me where she works?’
The shop assistant looked at his girlfriend with accusative eyes. She pursed her lips at him. Marie could feel their game somehow favouring her. The assistant wrote on a piece of paper. ‘Up the road. And you didn’t get the address from anyone in this shop. Okay?’
His girlfriend laughed. ‘As if the whole world won’t be queuing up soon enough.’
Hot winds from the western plains had settled into the streets of Surry Hills like sauce into a griddle. Marie turned down a laneway. Over back fences vegetation spilt. She passed through the sweet-smelling shadows of jacaranda, their blossoms carpeting the bitumen purple. She turned into a street of plane trees and grand nineteenth-century terraces four storeys tall with flaking façades. A dracaena angled its spiky head over a wrought-iron fence. The frangipani were putting out their first flowers. Now and then Marie touched her hand to a smooth leaf or cold steel to give herself the answer of texture. She stopped at a house with a For Sale sign but couldn’t see through the window.
She headed vaguely in the direction of the address. She wasn’t in a hurry. It had been weeks of nothing but household tasks; now she was off-duty. She knew the area superficially from when Leon lived here but wandering the streets on foot was different from driving to a specific point. She became random as a leaf; she could go anywhere, was open to everything. She passed a girl in checked trousers with straps linking the legs; an elderly couple arm in arm muttering to one another in a foreign language. Between the gentrified houses was an occasional ramshackle terrace, projecting a smell of damp and cockroaches. Marie went into a bakery and bought a quiche, which she devoured on the bench outside. How long had it been since such pure hunger! She checked the address and realised it was across the road.
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