Indelible Ink (22 page)

It was strange seeing her house described as a package for someone she hadn’t met. She was humiliated by Hugh writing out that cheque even if she could persuade herself that in a
roundabout way it was still her money. She shuffled through the advertisements, aware of Hugh looking at her with the same piercing interrogation as when he had first walked in.

‘You’ve done well, Hugh. I like how you’ve presented it.’

‘Such a lovely house. Such lovely light. And so
cool.
’ Hugh took off his jacket. His underarms were wet. ‘Stinking out there!’

‘It’s cold here in winter, actually. South-east facing can be a problem.’

‘But it’s summer we’re selling it in, isn’t it?’ Hugh wandered around, looking at things. ‘I’m sad actually. I want to do the right thing by it ... Are
you sure you don’t want to paint the kitchen? Buyers are conservative, you know.’

‘They can paint it. They’ll paint it anyway.’

‘Listen. We’re thinking of changing tack. We think that the way to get the best possible figure is throw all the buyers together into an auction situation. It’s not worth
anyone’s while to make a mistake so we’re advising a more conservative approach.’

That word again. Marie shifted around the pains in her stomach that had begun to move like snakes to their music. ‘I read that clearance rates are around only forty percent at the
moment.’

‘Not here. The only places in Australia that aren’t feeling the pinch from interest rate rises are the lower north shore and eastern suburbs of Sydney. It’s depressing,
really.’

‘Why don’t we set a figure, and see if we can get it? I want to know who’s coming here after me, I want to be sure they’ll look after it. And if we can’t find
anyone within a month then we’ll go to auction.’

Hugh didn’t look totally convinced, but he ceded.

‘They’ll kill the cabbage tree palm, won’t they.’

‘God, no. They’re not allowed. A client of mine in the eastern suburbs bought a row of houses in Bondi. Backpacker hostels, absolute flea pits. He built apartments and a mature
Norfolk Island pine was interfering with his plans and he had to go through an unbelievable amount of money and red tape to move it. It ended up costing him around fifty thousand dollars. And your
buyers won’t be making money from apartments on this site to compensate.’

‘You mean it’s a liability?’

‘There are ways around it. Look, I know how hard this is for you, Marie. I have to tell you all of this so you know exactly where you stand.’

Marie could see what must have been a patch of piss gleaming on the floor of the living room. She hadn’t seen Mopoke all day. She and Hugh must have stepped right over it. She fetched a
rag and bucket then went to clean it.

Hugh followed and stood over her talking. ‘You’ll still be alright. You’ll still have easily enough to buy yourself a bewt little place.’

‘I know.’

Hugh fell silent. Marie became aware of his mass behind her and realised he could see the tattoo on the back of her neck. When she stood, he turned away, embarrassed. She threw the pissy rag
into the bin.

‘Look, ah, I’ve got to go. I’m picking up Blanche. Call or email if there are any changes you’d like made to the ads. Anything you’re not comfortable with, any
questions.’ He regarded her with the same piercing interrogation as when he had first walked in. ‘Anything at all, Marie. Okay?’

‘Thank you, Hugh.’ Out on the patio, she gave him a pot of germinating banksia.

When he had gone, she went in search of Mopoke and found her asleep under the bed. She hauled her out and cleaned her rheumy eyes. She walked around holding her, cooing, ‘Where have you
been pussy cat? Were you hiding from the real-estate agent? It was only Hugh. You know Hugh.’

Mopoke felt so light. Her teeth could no longer handle biscuits: her breath had a trace of rot. Beneath the thick fur, her muscles were giving way to bone. She began to purr against
Marie’s chin. ‘Come and get some fresh air, Moey.’ She carried her down to the bottom fence and deposited her on the ground. Mopoke stood there with her legs splayed. Marie
wondered if she had dermatitis now, the goo from her eyes seemed to be increasing. ‘Come on, puss,’ she pronounced it
pus
, walking ahead and calling in her gooey cat voice,
‘Pus-pus, here, pus! You can make it!’

Mopoke didn’t move.

Marie picked her up and carried her back. She found it hard to look up at the house these days. It seemed to be reproaching her. And the garden, trees and birds, the very air in the rooms. There
was something colossal in the mood surrounding her; she felt guilty for abandoning her custodianship. There was a breeze coming off the harbour and Rupert’s flag was flying straight and
proud. ‘Well,’ she muttered as she entered the house. ‘I’m leaving.’ She threw a shirt over her shoulders then went up to the Junction for groceries.

It wasn’t just the Hendersons, the metastasis of flags was everywhere even though Australia Day was almost two weeks ago. There was a woman outside the pharmacy in an Australian flag shirt
and cap with an Australian flag backpack. There were Australian flag scarves on mannequins in clothes shops. The Lebanese corner shop had planted a large one outside the door. Cars had miniature
flags flying from their windows like limousines. It made the suburb looked like Pennsylvania on Fourth of July, decked out in its red, white and blue. And all the cars were shiny, all the houses
big, and all the shops were crammed with luxury goods for the well-fed blondes of Mosman.

Clark was late to the seminar, the only seat free in the front row next to a woman with chestnut hair. When she turned and smiled at him, he glimpsed a jutting cheekbone and a
fine web of laugh lines. The lecturer droned on and Clark found himself wanting to move closer to the warmth of this woman on a hot afternoon on the third floor of the university. ‘What did
he say?’ He inclined his head to her. The woman shrugged, turning a pen in her long fingers, looking straight ahead. Clark watched the fingers, fascinated as they released the pen then
stretched themselves in the crook of the woman’s arm. Never a good idea sitting in the front row: when his eyes moved back to the rostrum, he found the lecturer staring straight at him. He
looked at the floor and tried to concentrate. He couldn’t understand a single word. Soon, he was looking at the woman’s hands again. Suddenly her ring finger clicked backwards,
startling him, her face impervious as the top joint of her finger snapped like a tiny mechanical toy. She was double-jointed, in the same place as him! It seemed one of the most momentous
discoveries of his life. Eyes on the bore addressing the room, Clark stretched then snapped his own finger back. She snapped hers. He snapped his again.

Then she was walking to the front of the room, her height unravelling like a beautiful secret. My god, she wasn’t a student, she was a member of staff. Clark squirmed. He realised he was
in the wrong seminar. She was talking about law. He stayed, mesmerised.

He approached her afterwards to apologise, and she laughed. They stood there awkwardly as the room emptied around them. ‘Anyway,’ Clark said, ‘you don’t have to worry
about me misbehaving. I won’t be in any of your seminars.’

She was tall and broad across the shoulders and wore no make-up. Her bone structure was almost Aztec — strong lips and cheekbones, fine prominent nose. She shifted her bag up her arm and
looked at Clark shrewdly with eyes that could have been green or brown. ‘I’m sure I could stop you misbehaving if I had to. What are you doing?’

‘A PhD. Cultural Studies. I can’t believe you’ve got a double-jointed finger!’

‘It’s a good party trick, isn’t it.’

‘We should form a circus act and tour the country.’

They walked down the corridor to the lifts, not speaking. Clark was aware of her keeping pace with him; those shoulders seemed to carry her entire body in its passage of tensile, swinging grace.
As they drew up to the lifts, he finally allowed himself to look at her and found she was smiling. He wanted to tell her that he was seeing his daughter this weekend for the first time in six weeks
and he was jumping out of his skin with joy. He wanted to tell her everything. ‘What are you doing now? Want to go for a drink?’

‘I can’t, sorry.’

‘I’m Clark, by the way.’

‘I’m Sylvia.’

He googled her when he got home. Typing in
Sylvia
and
Law
and the university, he found she was an associate professor, had published several articles on law reform, and that her
surname was Martinez. Ah, Spanish. In an instant she was starring in a blockbuster movie as an Aztec princess — no, she wasn’t enough of a bimbo. A shaman then. He did an image google
and found a photograph of her at a book launch, in a group of five academics, and another thumbnail that when enlarged became too pixellated to see her properly. She looked ordinary in these
photos, but now he had her surname as well he googled
Sylvia Martinez
and found four entries on MySpace and seven on facebook. Sylvia Martinez, twenty-three, California. Sylvia Martinez,
thirty-six, physiotherapist, Wyoming. A teenage Goth in Brisbane. None was her. They didn’t even look like her. But as the hours rolled on and Clark wandered further into the Westfield of the
web, he began to wonder what, in fact, she
did
look like. He only had one encounter to remember and he had rubbed it raw. Was her skin pale or tanned? How big were her eyes? And what were
her breasts like? He waded through forty-six entries on Sylvia Martinez, finding an occasional bureaucratic detail that vanished on contact with his memory, like snow. All of this Clark did on the
living room couch in front of a documentary about the war in Sudan, his takeaway cooling beside him. There were so many Sylvia Martinezes in the world that his epiphany began to drown beneath the
banality of all those lives: a little billet-doux buried in junk mail.

Feeling like he had eaten too much greasy food, Clark took his laptop back into his study and plugged it in. It sounded like a plane trying to take off. It would be just his luck for his
computer to die on him now. He shut it down and went back into the living room and ate his congealed pad thai. An hour later he realised the television program had changed. He switched it off and
went into his study to try to do some work. He opened a book and stared at the paintings by convict artists. These had always been his favourite works from the early colonial period. Now, looking
at the naïve portrayal of blacks around campfires, the stiff English redcoats, he wondered why. He wondered if it was a part of him that craved mollification that loved these bright colours
and childish lines. How naïve could you claim to be, after years of incarceration and journeying across the world? And he wished he hadn’t restricted himself to the north shore: he
wanted to talk about the Aboriginal carvings behind Ben Buckler of a man being attacked by a shark, surely the ur-image. He realised he was saying all of this out loud, to Sylvia. He went to bed
and lay awake thinking of her, the ocean humming in the distance, or was it the wind in the she-oaks outside his window, an endless breathing eventually lulling him to sleep.

On Saturday morning, with Nell here, he was in the kitchen early making breakfast, thinking about Sylvia Martinez. When he went into his study with a glass of juice, he found
Nell still in bed, the neighbour’s white cat crouched on her chest. Nell’s eyes were closed and she was running her hands down Kimba’s flanks, smiling. He was purring sonorously,
his claws working the covers near Nell’s neck. Clark knelt next to the little fold-out bed and the cat jumped off. Nell whined and Clark placated her. ‘Have some orange juice,
Nellie.’

The cat returned when they sat down to breakfast and Clark let Nell take it on her lap. It sat in that same Sphinx pose, bum poking towards him. He peeled Nell’s egg and mashed it on the
toast. Nell watched him, kicking her chair softly, stroking the white cat. Clark placed her breakfast before her. ‘Look how much your hair’s grown.’

‘Yep. I’m gonna grow it long.’

‘How long?’

‘Down to my knees. Down to my
feet.
’

‘How was America?’

‘Good.’

‘What was your favourite thing?’

‘We ate hotdogs.’ Nell chewed with a dreamy look. She ferried a little piece of toast and egg down to the cat’s mouth.

‘Don’t feed him, darling.’

‘He’s hungry.’

‘His owner will feed him.’

Nell pursed her lips and tilted from side to side, then lowered her body over the cat and made purring noises.

‘Was it cold? In America?’

‘Yep. Nope.’

He reached over and tucked her hair behind her ear. It was so thick and lustrous. Her mouth was a crystallised strawberry, her skin a peach. She looked so gorgeous he wanted to pick her up and
squeeze every atom of air out of her body, and suck her chubby little arms. He almost had to grit his teeth against this ravenous love but, when Nell got up and went to the toilet, he saw how much
more weight she had put on and repugnance shivered through him, followed by guilt. He wanted to love her unconditionally: to be the opposite to his cold, critical father. Nell toddled back in and
climbed onto her chair.

‘You know Auntie Blanche was in America too?’

‘Yeah, but they went skiing, but we went to California where it was hot and we stayed with Chris’s friends at the beach and then we went to the desert and and and I rode a
donkey!’

‘Wow, a donkey! Did you swim?’

‘Yep.’

‘Want to go for a swim today?’

‘Yep.’

‘We can snorkel. Bondi’s completely flat and we can look at the fishies and seahorses next to the rocks. Did Mum pack your new snorkel?’

Nell shrugged. Clark went into his study and looked through her bags but found only a change of clothes. He pulled a pair of swimmers off her shelf, gathered up towels, sunblock, hats, water.
Nell was watching him from the door. ‘Daddy, can we take Kimba?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘Because his owner won’t like it.’

‘But he’s hot. He wants to go to the beach.’

‘Nellie, cats hate beaches.’