Indelible Ink (25 page)

She remembered mass in her childhood. Sunday mornings were awaited with dread, a blot on the fresh page of the weekend. She remembered the drone of the priest and her desire to avoid sitting
next to her father, her fear of punishment and wrongdoing. Her mother sitting forward, forehead pinched, a crease forming between closed eyes. Maybe this was when she was recovering from her
hysterectomy. Marie knew nothing of her mother’s problems at the time, only that her family was smaller than nearly every other in the parish, giving her a feeling of social diminishment. She
couldn’t remember when she learnt about her mother’s hysterectomy. You didn’t speak about these things. Sickness, the body, gynaecology especially. Her mother had died of
something unrelated, her requiem the last mass Marie had been to. She loved the swing of censer over coffin, the frankincense and muttered prayers. It seemed a magical arcane rite, like the
anointment with holy water. After years’ absence, the responsorial psalms had risen to Marie’s lips naturally as breath. But the truth was that in her childhood holy water held no
appeal: the insufferable boredom of regular worship robbed it of all meaning, let alone exoticism.
Blessed are those who fear the Lord ...

All the blood shed by Christian swords, the afterlife clogged with the souls of burnt infidels. Muslims, Jews, witches, homosexuals, apostates, heretics, wayward women. How many sins would she
have to confess to Archbishop Pell or his acolytes in the confession box that she passed now on her way to light a candle? Bless me, Father, for I used birth control and I wish that every woman in
the world could do the same. Bless me, Father, for I was unfaithful to my husband and I don’t regret it; I regret only not having fucked more men. Bless me, Father, for on top of the
fornication there was my drinking, but though I regret the pain it caused I don’t regret the fun.

Bless me, Father, for I don’t believe we go to hell for sinning nor to heaven for being good. I don’t believe the meek shall inherit the earth. Bless me, Father, for I don’t
even believe in your bearded God.

But somebody, please, bless me.

Marie lit a candle for each child and a fourth for her grandchild. A fifth for a new owner to take care of Sirius Cove. A sixth for the bush and ocean around it. She hesitated then lit a seventh
candle for Rhys. The eighth was for her new life.

She remembered the Sacred Heart on the waiter’s forearm that fated day months ago like a call to arms. There was another Sacred Heart from a story of Leon’s about George’s
family. During her hours on the toilet, this story returned to her. George’s sister Anna, an artist, had been shunned by their mother for hanging a painting of the Sacred Heart in her toilet.
George, previously, had been beaten up by his father for being gay.

Were the Anglicans any better? Marie wondered as she left the cathedral, hat pulled low on her head. Thinking about religion always put her in a rage. The Anglicans were
worse
, she
decided; they were so pallid, at least the Catholics had style to their hideousness. Better art design, higher drama. The only thing the Anglicans had going for them was the ordination of women,
and the Sydney diocese had banned that. Marie thought sourly of the Pope’s funeral, all the old men bishops in their Byzantine finery sucking on the teat of the patriarchal god.

She crossed the wind tunnel of Whitlam Square and moved into the warren of Surry Hills laneways. She considered stopping at a pub toilet but her insides remained cemented. Self-disgust shadowed
her. She fought it off. Why, she pursued her interrogation, was shit profane? The benign vegetable ooze of babies’ seemed exempt; even Clark had been proud of changing Nell’s nappy.
Then later to the toilet, accompanied, encouraged. Then the ascension to privacy. The subtext of shame. So a child learns.

She wished sometimes she had a god, for protection, wishes and confessions. But what god would bless her on the toilet and listen to this prayer for a purge? After bran, prune juice and pills,
what solution was there but one of the spirit? Every morning Mopoke sat in the bathroom staring at Marie as she strained. Sometimes she squatted in her tray beside her, looking up sympathetically,
tail dragging in the litter. Marie would hold the tail aloft but Mopoke was constipated as well. She remembered the cat in her elegant youth, digging holes, perching over them with faraway
concentration. Then the inspection and neat occlusion.

Marie walked in the sliver of shade next to the fences. She couldn’t wait to get to the studio, to be hit by the adrenalin of tattoo.

Oh Lord, deliver me from this evil. Oh God, relieve me.

A fortnight after their first meeting, Clark and Sylvia were drinking beer in his car overlooking Blackwattle Bay, continuing a conversation begun at the pub before closing.
They talked about everything — the university and funding, the law, the water crisis, Palestine, the federal and state governments, a fond reminiscence of Norman Gunston, and how jogging on
cement fucked your joints. Had Sylvia sought him out? Had she been thinking of him too? Looking up from his notes as he walked through the foyer, Clark had found her standing right in front of him.
‘Let’s have that drink now,’ she’d suggested. The hour at the pub had passed in seconds so they bought takeaways and drove down to the light-strewn bay. It was a marvel to
Clark to hear his stories tumble into the ears of a woman he barely knew.

He spoke about his mother’s change. ‘I’m worried about her. She was drinking too much for a long time and really messy after my father left. She’s anxious about the sale
of the house. Sometimes I worry she’s completely lost it.’

‘My father had an anchor tattooed on his forearm. He was in the navy.’

‘We should introduce them.’

‘I don’t think he’s
quite
in your mother’s league, Clark.’

Clark couldn’t help but be disappointed. ‘What’s he like? Spanish?’

‘Was. I loved him. He was Maltese. A short-arse, like a foot shorter than my mother. He was a bit hopeless but a lovely man.’

Sylvia told him that her parents had been jazz musicians in Brisbane. Her father had died when Sylvia was twenty-seven and her mother had eaten herself into a ball of depression on the Gold
Coast. Sylvia had fled to Sydney twenty years ago when Queensland was a police state.

‘Do you ever go back there? Visit your mother?’

‘I hate it there, but I’m beginning to hate it here as well.’

‘Why?’

‘I feel more and more controlled. Pressured by rising prices. Everything feels so corporate. Even universities are corporations these days. I went to see a band the other night and as we
went in the girl on the door said,
I understand you’re eighteen years of age
, very stiffly as though reading from a rule book, and I’m like,
Actually I’m more than twice
that, I’m forty-one.
’

Clark registered her age with more alarm than he did the draconian door policy. It was at least five years more than he expected. The other side of forty, though less than a year to go for him,
seemed an aeon away. It was the country where his mother lived. And the equation of older woman and younger man didn’t sit easily. Clark registered also Sylvia’s anger and eloquence,
with admiration and a little fear. He registered her ethnicity. Her surname. Married name? She could be divorced. He realised with a start that he had given away his googling, because she had never
told him her surname. But she didn’t appear to have noticed anything untoward; she was still talking.

‘I walked into the venue feeling flattered at first. Then I thought, Fuck this, she’s young enough to be my daughter and she’s only said that because she’s done some dumb
course or been told by the manager that she is legally obliged to say that stupid line to every punter. It’s insulting! They’re teaching courses like this at our university, and I work
in the profession that’s strangling us with this onslaught.’

‘I know what you mean.’

Sylvia looked out at the passage of a boat across the water, her face blue in the moonlight. ‘I feel guilty about my mother. We’re always hard on our mothers, aren’t we?
It’s like a Greek tragedy, we can’t help ourselves, it’s like the natural instinct is to want to kill them. In order to live. It’s different for men though.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You’re sentimental about mothers. You can afford to be.’

Clark thought about how perfect this paradigm was for Leon and Blanche. Leon took his mother’s love for granted. Blanche was the opposite: she often seemed to hate their mother. He
considered how much of Blanche and Marie’s vexed relationship wasn’t due to the mysterious vagaries of female relations that he had always held at arm’s length with something he
considered to be respect, but to a banal treachery caused by the narrow confines of their similarities. And in that flash of insight, he didn’t see his mother as the usual victim. He saw only
the awful intractability of the whole dynamic. This ushered in an empathy for Blanche, which worked on him like a balm.

He had been avoiding his mother this year. He hadn’t taken Nell to see her. Something had broken when Marie began getting tattooed. He also harboured an obscure resentment towards her for
letting the house go, even though he supported the decision. Often lately, the house surfaced behind Clark’s eyelids clear and animate as a person. He could almost see truculence in its
façade at the mention it had received in Jonathan Chancellor’s
Title Deeds
as adman Ross King’s old residence. The house had really been their mother’s. Ross had
been the renovator, tearing into it and re-dressing it like an overzealous parent continually changing his child’s clothes, while Marie maintained the daily care. And where was Ross in all
this? Blanche would know. She hadn’t wanted to join her brothers in cutting off Ross after he left: she had always worn her independence on her sleeve and her father’s favour on her
heart. Clark supposed it was fitting for Ross to remain silent about the sale because he had wanted it all along: somewhere, somehow he would be celebrating. It was probably better he stay away.
Clark’s protective shield around his mother hardened; he regretted their discord. Her life in that house was almost as long as his in entirety. Everything he had first learnt about the world,
his primary sensations and obstacle courses were in that house and to lose it was to lose the very foundations of his life.

‘Mother Madonna, you know,’ Sylvia was saying.

‘Isn’t that more of a wog thing?’

He knew he was taking liberties by using this word. He wanted the intimacy it might provide. Sylvia gave a little smile. ‘Yeah, but not only.’ She placed her stubbie in the cavity
near the gear stick and wiped her hand on her thigh.

‘Look at your hands. They must be as long as mine.’

Clark held up his right hand and Sylvia placed her palm against his. They looked at one another over their fingertips then his hand was on her face and he was leaning over, kissing her. She
moved closer, sighed into his mouth. He had a lurching sensation in the pit of his stomach, as though something were cracking open.

Sylvia stroked his cheek. ‘Let’s get out and sit on the grass.’

Clark took a towel from the back seat and spread it across the ground. They lay beneath the sky holding hands, listening to the lap of water. There was a faint track of stars, and dominating the
skyline the peaks of the Anzac Bridge, humming in the distance. Then they were kissing again, he was unbuttoning her shirt, her hand moving to his belt, his on her breast. Then a rake of headlights
over their bodies. They froze, listening to the ignition cut.

Clark’s erection died and he was relieved. Sylvia locked her arms around his torso and squeezed him so hard that a bark escaped and echoed around the bay like a shot. He squeezed her back
harder and she yelped. They lay there laughing inside the dying echoes. Holding this willowy body, he thought of the mother that had birthed it, bloated with despair on the Gold Coast. And what of
his own mother, what now had he come from? How our bodies change. His static life had kickstarted, he had the feeling of being on the verge. He held Sylvia’s hand against the sky, touching
the ring on her finger. ‘Your wedding ring, huh?’ he said facetiously.

People wore rings on any finger these days, Clark told himself. He still wore his because he liked it as a piece of jewellery and it fitted on no other finger but the fourth. The transferral to
his right hand had been his indication of divorce but men, it occurred to him now in a panic, sometimes wore their wedding rings on their right hand. Didn’t they?

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘What, are you married?’

‘Of course. Aren’t you?’

‘No. Not anymore.’

Of course he knew she was married, he had known all along. Martinez was her husband’s name; he had realised that as soon as he started googling her. But he hadn’t wanted to believe
it, he had told himself that, like Janice and Blanche and so many women their age, Sylvia used her maiden name at work. But even that scenario could have meant there was another name, another
person ...

Sylvia turned on her back and settled her head against his chest.

‘Oh, it’s such a beautiful night.’

Blanche loved the TV shoots. The big trucks with their cargo of men and gear, a macho arena through which she prowled with feline toughness in her pointy little boots. Morrison
the director was a Swinburne graduate who, straight out of film school, had made a feature about a crim that went on to win two AFIs. Blanche loved his gritty aesthetic and was surprised at their
first meeting to find a pale, clerkish boy with an apologetic posture. Morrison wore white shirts every day that looked as clean at six p.m. as they had at eight a.m. He hardly spoke to anyone,
whether out of shyness or arrogance Blanche wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to interfere in his work. She went on set once, to ask for more long shots. The rest of the time she sat in the
green room with Kate and Lim, watching the shoot on a monitor.

‘How much chocolate d’you reckon they’ve eaten by now?’