Indelible Ink (17 page)

‘It’s very ... um, beautifully drawn,’ he said.

He leant back against the bedhead and she could feel the heat of his skin, the contraction of lungs and trickle of digestive juice along its ten-metre labyrinth to the bowel. The humble,
diligent workings of his body, which continued in spite of everything, softened her, even filled her with a kind of awe. They also riled her with their imperviousness. What’s in it for me?
she thought, feeling robbed. The rustle outside grew louder. ‘Rain,’ she said.

Then David rolled onto his side and pressed his body to hers, cock twitching against the tender skin of her groin. Desire stabbed her. Viagra, she suddenly thought. Or was it just her? Who
cares? She cupped her hand around his balls then bent to take him in her mouth. David groaned, running his fingers down her flanks, ‘Such soft skin.’

She wiped herself with spitty fingers and slung a leg over his hips and drew him inside. From above, half shadowed, his face looked sad and wanting, and a feeling of compassion for both of them
washed through her. She placed his hands on her breasts, closed her eyes and moved faster. She knew if she leant forward how quickly she could come. The rain was growing louder, an all-enveloping
hiss, drowning them out. Marie reached behind to push him in deeper then felt a rush begin. ‘Slowly.
Slowly.
’

He kept going for a while with her sated and relaxed, still on him. ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t wait ... oh, it’s a bit uncomfortable now, David.’

‘That’s fine, he’s fine!’ David said, as though his dick was a person. ‘He’s had a very nice time.’

Later, falling asleep, Marie became aware of frenetic movement. She realised that David was masturbating. He finished quickly and began to snore. She turned on her side and dozed with her back
to him. Later again, she woke properly and lay there watching dawn percolate the sky. The Chinese calligraphy began to clarify. From outside, the
cheep-cheep
of a bird. Marie grew more alert
with every passing second. It occurred to her that life was nothing but a series of fumbling endeavours, one after another, until you died.

She went for a swim when she got home. Eight a.m., nobody around, birds quiet in the sullen heat. Across the harbour lay the tall buildings of the city, Renzo Piano’s acute angle dominant.
The reserve was a dry yellow, the sky and sea a dirty grey, and all the yachts in the cove were still. The first bite of water around her ankles made Marie cry out. She stopped to adjust to the
temperature, then submerged fully and rose stroking towards the harbour.

Was the studio her opium den? A place of arcane, ambivalent pleasure, the drug administered through modern stainless steel? More prosaically, it had begun to feel like another
home, containing another language and family. She loved the domesticity of the old terrace, the mysterious top storey keeping it aloof, the tattooed ladies on the walls of the front room. Often as
she paid, she could hear kitchen sounds beyond reception, or encountered friendly traffic, like Rob, Rhys’s partner, a short dark man with a black beard of Rabbinical length.

‘I wanna get a photo of the flames before we begin today,’ Rhys said. ‘You okay if Rob takes it? He’s got a cracker camera.’

‘I’d love one.’

Rhys lifted her chin and yelled behind her. ‘Rob!’

Rob appeared, a chain clinking around the hip of his baggy, calf-length shorts. ‘G’day Marie!’

‘Hi Rob.’

‘Gotcha camera, darl? We forgot to photograph the flames — you didn’t see them, did you?’

Rob went and fetched a large Nikon. ‘Can you stand next to that window, Marie?’

Marie lifted her shirt and lowered her trousers. Rob pressed a button on the camera and the snout pushed towards her and opened its eye. ‘
Great
job. Looks fantastic!’

The bell rang and two people walked in. Marie recognised the shop assistant and the doll-like woman she had met in the other tattoo parlour. His red-fanged goatee had been shaved off, the metal
was gone from his earlobes. It was thirty-eight degrees outside, the hottest January on record, but the girl’s shirtsleeves were sharp as blades, her lipstick and hair perfect. ‘Christ,
it’s hot,’ she said.

Rob did the introductions. ‘Stew, Mel, Marie.’

‘What are you getting done today, Stew?’ said Rhys.

‘The Pud.’

‘Last session,’ said Rob. ‘Touch-ups ’n’ stuff.’

‘Well, hallo,’ Mel said to Marie, examining her flat black shoes and plain t-shirt. Marie felt very Mosman and very sweaty, and cringed from Mel’s stare. ‘So you
found
it. Good for you.’

‘Yes. Thanks for the tip.’

‘The boss know you’re sleeping with the enemy?’ Rhys laughed at Stew. ‘Stew’s an animator,’ she explained to Marie.

‘I’ve left the parlour!’ Stew thrust his head forward in delight. ‘Got a job at Fox.’

‘Gone over to the dark side, eh?’ said Rob. ‘They make you take your tunnels out?’

‘Murdoch or bikies, much of a muchness.’ Stew shrugged. ‘I can stretch ’em up again.’

‘They’re like little arseholes when they’re shrinking,’ Mel remarked, touching the loose rings of flesh that his empty earlobes had become. ‘Little ear arseholes.
Quite cute really.’

Stew had a tattoo of Felix the Cat on his left forearm and the Roadrunner on his right, delirious with another death. Captain Haddock fumed on a deltoid. Stew himself was like a cartoon
character, or a sideshow puppet whose head was on a long stick inserted into the body cavity, bouncing when he laughed as though someone had depressed it. She wished Mel hadn’t said that
about his earlobes. She kept thinking of things poking through the puckered holes. She tried not to look at them.

‘What are you getting done?’ Mel asked her.

‘A moth, on my back.’

‘Oh.’ Mel was nonplussed.

Marie felt slightly offended. ‘It’s colourful, like a butterfly, it’s this big. It’s called a Splendid Ghost Moth.’

‘
Oh
.’

‘Mel,’ said Rhys, ‘Rob’s gonna show you the ropes cos I’ve gotta pick up Travis from school, so I want to get started on Marie. Okay, Rob?’

‘Sure.’

‘Did you mean the Magic Pudding?’ Marie said to Stew.

Stew lifted his shirt.

‘Oh,’ Marie exclaimed, ‘I love the Pud!’

‘Isn’t it great.’ Mel gave his belly a little stroke. ‘It is
so
good.’

The Pudding’s shading was still fresh, enhancing his livid countenance. He took up a large space, his currant nose Stew’s navel, spindly legs disappearing into the lawn of re-growth
below. He had a fork stuck in his head that tapered off around Stew’s solar plexus. Stew and Rob shot one another a look then, to the surprise of the three women, broke into song:

Eat away, chew away, munch and bolt and guzzle,

Never leave the table till you’re full up to the muzzle!

The Pudding’s furious face twitched as Stew sang.

‘Rightio.’ Rhys laughed. ‘Tatt looks great. I’m going upstairs.’

‘I’m trying to understand,’ said Mel, ‘this fixation with a pudding. I’m a wog,’ she explained to Marie.

‘It’s not common,’ Rob admitted. ‘You don’t have to be Anglo. I’m not.’

‘It’s an acquired taste,’ said Stew. ‘You’re a Pud fan too, Marie?’

‘I love him, I’ve still got my original edition. My eldest son played him in a school play. He insisted on the forked version, just like you.’

‘Did you make the costume?’ Stew said excitedly.

‘I couldn’t get the fork to stay upright. I couldn’t persuade Clark to wear a bowl.’

‘Foam. And you use a plastic one and paint it silver.’

‘I’ll have to remember that. Clark was so cross with me.’

‘Clark,’ said Mel. ‘That’s a nice name.’

‘After Gable. We loved old movies.’

‘Little boys,’ said Rob. ‘They’re so vain. Travis takes like fifteen minutes to fix his Superman cape in the mirror. And that’s without the facial
expressions.’

Marie guessed Travis to be Rhys and Rob’s son.

‘How many children do you have, Marie?’ Stew asked.

‘Three. Clark my eldest is thirty-nine.’

‘Same age as Rhys,’ said Rob.

‘My god, I would have taken her for thirty.’

‘She’s got that beautiful Slavic skin,’ said Mel.

‘And, um, do you have any grandchildren?’ Stew asked.

‘Nell.’ Marie smiled. ‘Clark’s four-year-old.’

‘Gosh, you look good for a grandmother,’ said Mel.

‘You’ll have to introduce Nell to Travis,’ said Rob. ‘Travis would love that.’

They stood there looking at Marie expectantly. Marie felt overwhelmed by their friendliness. ‘I’d better go up.’

Clark had been about nine in the play of
The Magic Pudding
. Marie had dressed him in an old pair of Ross’s shorts. The huge brown shorts, stuffed with foam, waistband gathered
around the boy’s chest, created a very pudding-like effect. She remembered her pride when Clark stormed on and roared the Pudding’s polemic to the audience, the fork immediately
flopping horizontal. The sight of his vulnerable, skinny legs made her ache with tender protection. Ross bellowed with laughter, pinching the bridge of his nose. Marie began to laugh as well,
leaning up against Ross, the vibration of their laughter mingling in her bones. ‘He’s a right little Hitler, isn’t he?’ Ross said, laughing again.

Clark never lost his enthusiasm for the Magic Pudding. Fifteen years later, in his Honours thesis, he wrote about the character as avatar of colonial greed, prescient of end-stage capitalism.
Marie was impressed by the fifteen-thousand-word document. To see her son’s twenty-four-year-old mind work with ideas was to watch a bird in flight whose wings till now had been clipped. He
didn’t express himself like this in the family home — passionate, eccentric, overexcited, mildly pretentious — he assumed instead a surly world-weariness, originally as protection
against a father who would have ridiculed such a thesis, but then it became a habitual attitude. With all of them, possibly the whole world, Clark had become bitter and defensive. Marie worried
about her role in this, she worried she didn’t like him, she struggled to give him her approval. She found him so hard to talk to now. Hopefully the PhD would make him happier. And as she
left the room containing three people the same age as her children, she remembered Christmas Day and how much she wanted Clark’s approval as well. Paradoxically, the longer Clark lived a
non-career-driven life, the more curmudgeonly he became, as though he were anticipating the judgement of the world and pre-empting it by bringing it on himself, on everybody. Marie felt overwhelmed
by how easy it was to talk to Stew, Rob and Mel. She felt that if she didn’t leave the room immediately she would want to stay there for the rest of her life.

She thought about age as she made her way up the stairs, how it manifested first and foremost on the skin. Then grey hair, arthritis, old injuries waking from the opiate of youth. Desire
lessened with age but didn’t vanish. Inside your fifty- or sixty-something-year-old body, you continued lusting, your mind oblivious to the flesh crumbling around it.

It was hard to believe Clark was the same age as Rhys. But why was she surprised by Rhys’s age when Rhys’s poise and wisdom had always held authority with her? Something about
Clark’s adage that tattoos were for the young. Clark, Blanche and Hugh were so much more earnest than the people here. They had entered a No-Fun zone with adulthood. As their mother, Marie
was supposed to be even deeper in this zone. Right up the back, just in front of the remedial chairs, with the retired professors and bingo players.

But age changed throughout the ages, first-time mothers these days old enough to be grandmothers. Men had seniority, regardless of age. Marie’s father had been twelve years older than her
mother, and that was normal. A mother twelve years older than a father would have been wrong. And back when Clark was playing the Magic Pudding, Marie and Ross were younger than the tattoo folk and
her children were now, yet they already had two mortgages, three children and a twelve-year marriage. Somewhere, somebody was not acting their age.

Age changed in other places. In Africa, women her age were still dancing in their hot village streets, like the folk in
Buena Vista Social Club
, shimmying and shaking to their sexy love
songs. While in Sydney town, dancing remained the province of the young.

You could take Viagra like David, or have Botox like Gina, get a new liver like Dennis Hopper. You could get new breasts like Nicole Kidman, who looked the same age now as she did ten years ago
and probably would ten years hence.
But we cannot buy immortality
, said a doctor in a documentary on cryogenesis that Marie had watched recently.
Our bodies simply aren
’
t
designed to last that long.

She didn’t think the tattoos would reverse the ageing process, nor even make it stand still. In some ways they would have the opposite effect. Like tidemarks, they would indicate forever
what was happening now.

Marie entered Rhys’s room with the frazzled air of a woman who had lugged her baggage all the way up the stairs only to find she didn’t need it here. She shut the door on her yapping
thoughts and began to undress.

‘My faithful tattooed lady.’

‘I’m greedy, aren’t I.’

‘Yep. You’re on a mission.’

Rhys lay the transfer across Marie’s back, and beneath its gentle adumbration Marie surrendered.

There wasn’t much to do in a garden during a January that blazed near forty almost every day. All Marie needed now was to keep it looking good for the buyers. She watered
twice a week and on washing days uncoiled the bailing hose from the laundry. She cut grevilleas for the living room. She tried not to go outside in the middle of the day and wore a thicker shirt to
protect her healing back.

The guttering man arrived just before lunch. Marie went out to greet him. ‘It’s going to be boiling up there,’ she said.

‘I’ve gotta go to Pymble next. This is the easy job. Harbour breezes, you know.’

She watched him climb onto the roof from the patio. He wore sock guards and his legs were burnt brick red. He touched the gutter and swore, hands flicking away. He moved along in this fashion,
clearing the gutter and burning himself in the process. He held up a nest with two eggs in it and called, ‘Want me to save these?’