Indelible Ink (56 page)

For weeks now he had hardly done any work. Initially Sylvia was the source of distraction but, since the night she had stayed at his house, contact had ebbed. Clark had stated
his position at the university: now it was a waiting game. Nell had chastised him on the weekend for his vagueness, and Clark realised that, as much as he tried to shrug it off, the impending loss
of his mother’s estate had rattled him to the core. At night in bed, his mind returned to the anxieties of finance and career; without the extra money he also imagined himself to be less
attractive to Sylvia. The other thing to worry about was Leon. He seemed paralysed, paranoid, so Clark had taken it upon himself to organise a barrister. Then there was illness. There would be
death. Reading had become impossible; only the strongest images had the capacity to keep Clark’s attention. So when he was granted three days’ access to photographic archives, he got
there early. He sank into the chair with relief, as though he had arrived at the cinema after rushing around all day.

He clicked on the light and pushed his face inside the safety of history. The pictures weren’t arranged in any particular order and, as much as he hoped for the north shore, most of them
again were of the inner city. He lingered over crime scenes, nostalgic for a squalor he had never known. The dead seemed so exalted, as though this moment were their apogee. He felt like the camera
— disrespectful, intrusive — but had no desire to stop. He didn’t even have a toilet break. He wasn’t the first to see these pictures, yet so few had gone before him that
their tracks were visible across the sand. He was Captain Cook in a new land. These were
his
dead.

At two o’clock when he could hold on no longer, Clark went to the toilet. He bought a sandwich and bottle of juice and ate lunch in the gardens. It was a warm day; lorikeets squealed in
the trees around him. He had asked Leon if he was able to concentrate on work and Leon had replied that his work was respite: in fact he craved getting into a garden, dealing with solid matter and
helping things grow. Blanche on the other hand admitted she was having trouble but she had her pregnancy and was leaving anyway. Clark was so glad she was quitting advertising: it made her more
human in his eyes. It was almost four o’clock and the sandwich dissolved immediately in the acid of his stomach. He rang his mother and left a message on her voicemail. He didn’t text
Sylvia till five nor had she texted him. She had responded with alacrity to his inquiry about a barrister, both of them almost grateful for the distraction of somebody else’s problems. Clark
read James Ellroy when he got home. He spoke to no one, and by the next morning his dreams of a brilliant thesis began to grow again.

He set to work on the remaining archives as soon as he arrived. He wondered what it was that made someone resemble their era. Some of the people in these photographs looked so contemporary;
others were typecast to perfection. Sylvia would have suited that dress, he thought, gazing at a Depression-era prostitute. He pressed onwards, rueing his slide back into Sylvia-land. And then he
found the picture he didn’t know he was looking for: a murder-suicide in Mosman Bay. In a street not fifteen minutes from his childhood house, a psychiatrist had come home from work and shot
his wife, two children, then himself. Clark’s pulse increased. He moved the photos around, returning to the overhead shot. The corpse of the wife was framed by the foreshortened legs of a
tripod, increasing his claustrophobic sense of voyeurism as though the final wretchedness of this woman were literally caught between his legs. Clark reeled: he had suddenly changed places and
instead of being the camera had become the woman herself.

He packed up his things and walked out to catch a bus to the hospital. He had reached middle age with violence and disease at a safe distance, but today when he emerged into the bright sunlight
he felt pixellated by death and loss, the mark of every twisted neck, every pool of blood and violated room still upon him. He couldn’t be Cook: he couldn’t write the stories as though
they belonged to him. They could only be written as though he belonged to them. It wasn’t an act of control so much as one of submission. Nothing, in fact, was within his control. He stared
out the bus window, miserable in the fug of his terrible BO.

Looking through the doorway at his sleeping mother, Clark fumed over his father’s behaviour. The financial ramifications were just the surface evidence of a deeper injury he was inflicting
on all of them. Instead of watching his siblings from afar, satisfied with his cool, Clark felt pulled right into the centre. His armpits smelt like nothing less than fear and anxiety. He envied
Blanche and Leon their freer emotional expression. He couldn’t fault Blanche’s idea of Marie moving to Neutral Bay. He vowed to take Nell to Sirius on the weekend, stay the night, go
for a bushwalk or something. He wanted to
connect.

He didn’t want to wake Marie so he went down to the hospital pharmacy with the script the nurse gave him. He had been here before. The long, low-ceilinged corridors with their tracks of
exposed wiring, the masonite walls. It was oppressive. He walked the slope past an intern wearing a surgical bonnet then into a new section, pristine white with fluoro lighting. Through a large
window to the right he glimpsed a walkway, a nurse hurrying across it to the building adjacent.

He turned and found himself back in an old section, all worn lino and raw brickwork. Nobody was around. He turned another corner. He was lost. Can somebody help me? The hospital seemed the
perennial nightmare of this city of shifting sands, always being destroyed and rebuilt. Every corridor sloped downwards, drawing him deeper into the bowels of the building.

Down he went, into the second circle, past a sepia remnant of men cutting sandstone for the building’s foundations, then the Victorian days of starched matrons and coppers boiling
infection from tubercular sheets. Plague hospital, lunatic asylum; did they haunt the sick of today, those returned soldiers peering gauntly from their beds? The dead rose up around him. The
air-conditioning hummed in his ears, huge silver ducts snaking overhead. What did they keep down here? Maybe around the next corner he would find someone stirring a cauldron. He passed two nurses
wheeling a gurney, the patient sprouting tubes. He saw a sign to the pharmacy and followed it to the end of the corridor. At last. He handed the script over and the pharmacist returned with two
bags of medication.

Clark passed the nurses and their patient again on his way back to the ninth floor. A small screen with red and green wavy lines was propped on the end of the gurney. The nurses joked as they
hefted it towards the lift. ‘We’re taking you on a magical mystery tour.’ The patient was motionless, face covered by an oxygen mask. Clark saw the name on the gurney.
Brian
Va’a.

It was his mother’s Brian. My god, did she know the state he was in? She had made light of coming back to hospital, saying how much she enjoyed his company, and Clark had fantasised a
romance between them, which of course was ridiculous. Was Brian alright? Had Marie seen him? The gurney caught up with Clark at the lifts, and he stared at Brian who was oblivious to the singing
nurses. Clark wanted to rip out the tubes and shake him awake. The female nurse pulled her ponytail from beneath her surgical gown and pressed the lift button, humming under her breath.

Blanche went back to Sirius Cove the next Sunday. The house seemed empty. She could smell stale cat food from the kitchen and in the laundry found the plate shifting with ants.
She hadn’t had any time with Mopoke on her last visit and felt bad about that. She had almost considered bringing the cat to stay with her. She threw the old food out, cleaned the meal mat,
then followed the sound of the television down to the rumpus room. Clark, Nell and Leon were there, eating pizza. ‘Hi,’ said Blanche from the doorway.

‘Hi,’ they replied, eyes on the screen.

‘Does anyone know where Mopoke is?’

‘No. Haven’t seen her.’

‘Me and Nell fed her yesterday but I don’t think she ate it,’ said Clark.

‘Yeah, we fed her.’

‘The food was full of ants. Did you give her her medicine?’

‘Of course,’ said Leon.

‘What medicine?’ said Clark.

They shifted irritably in their seats. Clark turned down the television, saying with a helpful tone, ‘We’ve made a start on things, we’ve got a list here.’

‘Okay, great. I just want to find Mopoke to say hallo.’

She began in the laundry, checking the cupboard then behind the washing machine. What about the dirty clothes basket? But Mopoke hadn’t been able to jump into the basket for over a year
now. Blanche searched in the study then crouched in the living room and looked beneath the couches. ‘Mopoke, Mopoke!’ She went upstairs, thinking Mopoke could no longer climb them
easily so if she was up here she hadn’t eaten for a while, and if she wasn’t she must be in the garden or even, ironically, somewhere in the rumpus room. She walked along the landing
calling her and went into Leon’s bedroom, which smelt of dirty trainers and unwashed hair. What a pig. Mopoke wouldn’t be in here; she had never liked Leon much more than he had liked
her. Up in Clark’s attic room? But no — more stairs. Blanche stopped in the bathroom to look at herself in the mirror. She looked terrible: fierce and drawn. She sat on the toilet and
peed, head in hands. Her cunt smelt different and she took solace in her body’s animal changes, fate turning its wheel without her having to do anything. She remembered Mopoke’s arrival
when she was a teenager. She was a water cat, tightrope-walking the bath’s edge while Blanche lay beneath a doona of bubbles. Oh, how she loved that cat. ‘Mo-ey, where-are-you?’
Blanche went into her mother’s room.

She registered the painted boxes from Austria in which her mother kept her jewellery, all of which would naturally be hers; the antique card table would also go on her list. She opened the
cupboards, releasing scents and memories, finding no cat. She looked under the bed and there was Mopoke sleeping in her mother’s blue silk shirt. ‘Moey!
Here
you are.’
Blanche felt a strange hardness through the fur and quickly pulled the cat out. ‘Oh no, Mopoke.’ Her eyes were half open, her teeth bared, her entire body stiff. She was dead. Blanche
picked her up and began to cry. The smell was terrible. She tried to close Mopoke’s eyes and mouth but they sprang back open in a leer. She stroked the fur, receiving a strange crackling
sensation from the flesh beneath. ‘When did you die, darling puss? Did it hurt?’ She noticed a small turd at the base of Mopoke’s tail. Fluid came from her mouth as well. Blanche
went into the ensuite for toilet paper and cleaned her orifices, weeping copiously. She wrapped Mopoke in the blue silk shirt, and took her onto the balcony.

The harbour at dusk. Everything was luminous. Purple storm clouds swelled on the horizon. The water was smoky lilac and the foliage in the garden polished lime. An eerie absence opened in the
house behind her, and the loneliness of losing this place and her mother was never clearer. Blanche sat there crying with Mopoke on her lap while night seeped into the garden.

Leon was at the sink when she went down to the kitchen. She placed the silk bundle on the counter, her swollen eyes looming. ‘Want a cup of tea?’ he offered.

‘No, thanks.’

Leon placed a cup on the counter. ‘What’s that smell?’

‘It’s Mopoke. She’s dead. I found her under Mum’s bed curled up in this shirt.’

‘Jesus Christ, take it off the counter!’ He withdrew his cup. ‘We eat from there!’

‘She’s wrapped up and I cleaned her. Where are the bin liners?’ Blanche calmly began to open and shut drawers. ‘Have you changed things around?’

‘I haven’t touched a thing. What are you doing? How long’s it been dead?’

‘How would I know? You’re the ones who’ve been here. I’m going to bury her.’

‘
Bury
her? How d’you think the new owners will feel when they dig up a rotten cat in two months.’

‘Stuff the new owners! This is still Moey’s house!’

‘It’s pitch black out there.’

‘Look, Leon, I know you hated Mopoke, but Mum loved her, alright? I’m going to bury her in the morning.’ Grimly Blanche continued down the row of drawers. ‘Why
can’t I find anything in the house I grew up in?’

‘I didn’t
hate
her.’

‘I remember you hitting her.’

‘I did not!’

‘You did. For killing a bird or something.’

‘Oh god, Blanche, I was like ten or something.’

‘Crap, Leon. We didn’t get her till you were thirteen and it was years after that and you hit her really hard. You were foul.’

‘Have you kept tabs have you?’

‘What’s going on?’ Clark appeared in the doorway.

‘The cat’s dead.’

‘When? Where? What happened?’

‘There.’ Leon pointed, adding accusingly, ‘That’s a good shirt of Mum’s, isn’t it, Blanche?’

Blanche had found the bin liners. Clark began to babble. ‘How long’s it been dead? Whose shirt is it? It’s Mum’s, isn’t it? Christ, Blanche, what are you
doing?’

‘I’m putting her in a bag so I can put her in the freezer and bury her in the morning.’

‘Oh no, not in the freezer!’

‘What are you doing with Mum’s shirt? Blanche!’

‘I’m burying her in the garden in Mum’s shirt and I’m putting her in the freezer now because you guys are so thick you didn’t notice she was dead and you’re
so cruel you don’t care. Here’ — Blanche yanked at the packet — ‘I’ll double bag her.’

Nell was standing in the doorway, just behind her father.

‘You are not putting
that
into the freezer.’ Clark marched over.

‘Why not? You put dead cow in there all the time.’

‘It’ll smell the whole thing out. It’ll contaminate everything.’

‘Try your bedroom for smell, Leon.’

‘We’ll take it to the cat morgue.’ Clark began to panic.

‘In fact, she probably
died
from your smell.’

Leon laughed. Eyes on the bundle, Nell’s mouth crumpled. Her father still hadn’t seen her. ‘There’s some kind of pet morgue, isn’t there? They’ve got ways of
disposing of animals, don’t they? Doesn’t Mum have a vet? Where’s that bill? Where’s her address book?’ He strode around the kitchen, rapping out demands. ‘She
can’t be told about this, okay? We’ll take it to the morgue now.’