Indelible Ink (38 page)

‘Anyway, you’d be the expert on crime, wouldn’t you?’ Fate, he thought. Exactly the woman I should have fallen in love with at this time!

‘In some areas but not others. The law is totally specialised.’

Feeling her body this close, knowing it would be sleeping with another tonight, Clark fell silent and miserable. He looked at the church on the corner and remembered graffiti that had been
scrawled beneath its
Jesus is Coming
billboard the first time he had come to Darlinghurst.
Wear a raincoat
. It had been there for years. Or had it? Maybe he just read it somewhere and
superimposed it onto his memory. But he did remember coming here for coffee back then, how grungy it was. Nearly all the cafés run by working-class Italians. In the park diagonally opposite
he had seen a heap of bands at an anti-nuclear concert, including The Go-Betweens and Laughing Clowns. Opposite it again, on the site of the old pie factory, was the white edifice of Republic,
where the loud fag next to him had
fucked some guy
. It was so easy for them. All the whinging and declaiming, but it was so fucking easy.

‘Is your place like that?’ He pointed to Republic.

‘God, no. It’s 1920s. Art Deco.’

It was also easy to imagine the flat that Sylvia shared with her husband, somewhere at the back of Potts Point where a few blocks had been saved from the developers. There would be moulded
ceilings, floorboards, plants on the balcony. White walls, white crockery. Ikea. Clark didn’t want to know the address. He didn’t want to wake up howling beneath her conjugal window. He
followed the passage of a man with a briefcase past the pub to the next block where he unlocked the door of a renovated terrace. Another fag, no doubt.

‘Mr Lawyer or Computer Whatever has just gone home to one of Tilly Devine’s old brothels. If only he knew. I think of her whenever I drink in here, screeching at her girls. All the
sly-grog crims drank in here. You wouldn’t know it now. It’s so nice and clean.’

‘Now there’s an interesting chapter that I could certainly help you with: prostitution as crime, or not. Some of these houses are still brothels.’ Sylvia pointed to a terrace.
‘I worked my way through uni in that one for two years. It was called Sweethearts.’ She gave the name a flirtatious spur. ‘Then I moved to A Touch of Class. We all called it Touch
Your Arse.’ She laughed. ‘And Sweethearts of course, became, Cheaptarts.’

Clark sat shocked and silent beside her. A button had been pressed, a wall gone up; beyond it Sylvia was on her back, spreading her legs for the masses. The image filled him with lust and anger.
A hot gritty wind rushed into the pub as a group entered the Palmer Street door.

Sylvia was rubbing his thigh. ‘Come on, Clark, I thought you’d be fine with it. You talk about your Tillys with such affection.’

‘I am fine! I am!’

‘Can I get us another beer?’

‘That’d be great.’

When Clark spoke of his own past, he wasn’t calm like Sylvia. He flashed over certain periods with an unresolved mixture of shame and accusation. He came away from their trysts intoxicated
by all he’d learnt and all that remained to be disclosed, but suddenly the fact that she’d lived forty years without him filled him with despair. He would remain excluded from her past
forever. He thought with bitterness how hard it was for them to find a time and place to make love, while all those others had just walked in off the street and had her.

Once he had gone to a strip show in the Cross. On a drunken spree with schoolmates after the last HSC exam, he had followed a flashy spruiker off Darlinghurst Road. He remembered the stairs, the
smell of cheap cleaning product, the pink-lit stage and scrawny girls, one of them older than the rest. She was the one he fixated on, her sagging breasts strangely arousing. Desire and disgust
tangoed aggressively along his arteries. Then an elbow in his ribs and the boy next to him was yelling at the stripper, ‘Hey, Mum, Clark hasn’t done his homework.’ Clark joined in
and they were thrown out for heckling. The stripper would have been younger than he was now. Sylvia returned with two beers. Clark drank his deeply, cringing at his snide, superior adolescent
self.

Sylvia took his hand. ‘Talk to me.’

‘I’m worried about my mother.’

‘I thought you said the house sold. Won’t she get her fresh start now?’

‘It’s not that. She’s been having tests. Something’s wrong.’

‘You worry too much, sweetheart.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘Cheaptart.’ She nuzzled him.

They said goodbye in their usual spot by the building site, hugging against the cyclone fence.

‘What are you doing to me?’ Sylvia pressed her face into his neck. ‘I want you so much.’

Clark’s eyes stung. ‘I
need
you.’

They called each other sweetheart all the time after that. Or, occasionally, cheaptart. They texted each other every day.
What are you up to sweetheart? x. Sitting in the uni café
quietly dying at the thought of my supervisor ... & yr hands down my pants. xo. Are you digging in those archives sweetheart? Wish you were digging in me. x. Sweetheart, I miss u. xo. Cheaptart
where r u, haven’t heard from u in HRS. R u ok? xox. Terrible news sweetheart. My mother has cancer. Call me. xoxo

MARIE CARRIED HER SHOPPING down the path and left it by the front door. Six p.m. Already dusk. In one day, it seemed, the sun had swung further away
from the earth. Cockatoos were making a racket down in the reserve. She uncoiled the hose and began to water the bed where Iceland poppies were waiting to sprout. The pointlessness of it mocked
her. Why had she planted these seeds when she knew the house was going to be sold? Why had she clung to the idea of the garden outliving her? But now her stupidity might pay off, in a way she had
never imagined. Like rounding the corner of an unknown road and suddenly seeing cliffs drop before you. Sometimes you were going too fast to stop. And here she was, watering the garden anyway.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Inside the house, she lit a candle on the coffee table. She picked up the phone to ring Clark but, feeling mute and disinclined to duty, put it back into its cradle.
Six months
, it was
ridiculous. Two more months here, then where? And the oncologist delivering the news like a morning paper. It seemed too shoddy a story to pass on to anyone. Marie sat in the living room listening
to the sounds of the house, sensing the bodies and food and conversation that had passed through it. She felt flattened and transparent, a woman of dusty air projected onto the couch.

Her mother had lived for decades after her hysterectomy, eventually dying of a heart attack. Two years later, her father had died in his sleep of a brain aneurysm. Marie wondered now about her
mother’s final hour, whether or not she knew she was dying. A moment of terror as she realised the pain in her chest was fatal, then the eternal dark. Unless in fact she had wanted to die.
She had her God. Not for her, the eternal dark.

Marie didn’t want to talk to anyone for fear they would blame her. She hadn’t looked after herself, she had drunk too much and eaten badly, she had held sadness and anger in her
stomach all these years until they turned against her. She hadn’t gone to the doctor early enough, she had ignored her symptoms. She only had herself to blame.

Nothing had changed, people were still the same. Every sickness was a curse, every dying a punishment. And every death a murder, or suicide.

The garden at night was a cool, deep space filled with the sounds of crickets and one late willy-wagtail. Marie stepped across the lawn, lifted her nightie and squatted beneath
the lemon tree. The moon slid from its veil, flooding her to the marrow, and everything around her lit up like a stage. She could see the crinkled furls of hibiscus, and high up in the angophora
the lit cigarettes of a possum’s eyes. And so it might happen as she had originally wanted. The garden might outlive her.

Leon didn’t know what to pack because he didn’t know how long he would be gone. His housemate’s girlfriend agreed to sublet his room for a while, so Leon
pushed his clothes up one end of the wardrobe, ran the vacuum cleaner over the floor, and boxed some items out of the way. He didn’t know where his mother was with everything; she sounded
exactly the same on the phone. They had talked about the garden, him automatically suggesting that he bring some cuttings, her automatically agreeing. He would realise the folly of this by the time
he was collecting them but continued for the sake of palliation. His mother had the same voice, the same advice.
Drive safely, Leon
. He had driven just over the limit all the way down the
Gold Coast then the sky closed in and the fender in front approached as bushfires near Grafton engulfed them. He wound up his window and slowed to a crawl. The acrid smell of burning stole through
every opening in the vehicle. He reached back to touch the damp newspaper around the cuttings and found it rapidly drying. And what would happen when the two-month settlement period was over? Where
would his mother go? The crack across his right boot dug into Leon’s foot as he worked the pedals. And how the fuck would he make money down in Sydney? Well, the house had been sold, and he
would be helping his mother. So she could buy him a new pair of boots. Those Timbalands he’d had his eye on ...

Blanche was sick too. ‘Vomiting a lot,’ she’d said on the phone. ‘I don’t know if it’s a bug or some twisted psychosomatic empathy thing.’ When Leon
asked her how work was going, she told him she had lost a big account, her voice uncharacteristically strained with tears, enabling Leon to become even cooler, as though his feelings were drained
into the dam of his sister’s grief. He let her run the conversation, dabbing it with the occasional murmur, like a lion absently patting a cub.

What he felt deep down was a mulish resistance, everything charged by high alert. He was dreading the thought of his mother incapacitated. A cold alone could provoke impatience in Leon; the
reverence and inertia of serious illness would be intolerable. He felt immensely irritated at having to leave Brisbane just when the business had got to its feet and the work season begun.

And yet he chose this. More than anything he felt relief at being taken from the humdrum of normal life into a drama where he would play a main part. His mother had told him not to rush down and
Leon had interpreted this as a plea for company. After her phone call, he paced around the house lifting things and replacing them, forgetting his movements like a goldfish after one lap. He smelt
burning food for half an hour before realising it was his own dinner. He could have stayed in Brisbane a few more weeks, finished the job he was doing and waited for the bushfires to burn out, but
instead he had left five days after the news. For an hour around Kempsey he was trapped behind a semi-trailer, the parched forest coughing dust against his windscreen, a bloody sunset seeping into
the land. He drove into the night, wide awake with excitement.

Yet here she was as though nothing had happened, in the garden in her old sunhat and gardening shirt when Leon arrived early the next morning. He walked down the side path and found her mixing
up Seasol by the tap. He was astonished by how wiry and energetic she seemed. Her body felt so firm when she embraced him.

‘The garden looks fabulous.’

‘It was at its worst on auction day, actually. It’s recovering now.’ She held Leon at arm’s length and examined him. ‘Look at this beard. You smell of
bushfire.’

‘I need to have a shower.’ He reached for the bucket. ‘Can I do that for you?’

‘No, no. I know where I’m up to.’ She looked at him again. ‘I
like
that beard.’

Leon wandered around while she worked. ‘You don’t really need to be doing this, do you?’

‘Not officially. But my babies are hungry, so as long as I’m here, I may as well feed them.’ She pointed out changes. ‘I put a lilly pilly in place of the banksia. What
do you think?’

‘It seems happy.’

Looking up at the house, pain bore down upon him, and Leon rued not having been here for the sale. It had taken his mother’s illness to wake him up. He had sworn after his two trips to
Sydney at the end of last year that he wouldn’t come back except in the case of emergency; he hadn’t regarded the loss of the house as an emergency, and he couldn’t believe that
now. It made him glad to be here. The house stood above facing the morning sun, oblivious to the churn of his emotions. Marie saw his expression. ‘Yes, it’s so sad.’

‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here now.’

‘You didn’t need to be. Clark and I weren’t.’

‘I mean here in general. In Sydney. I might not have seen any of this again.’

Marie stopped by the door just before they went inside, and looked down at the harbour. ‘It’s so beautiful, isn’t it. You must miss it. I’m sure going to.’

When she removed her hat and long sleeves, Leon noticed deep grooves in her forehead and alongside her mouth, the glitter of fatigue in her eyes. He was astounded by the brilliance of the vines
coursing down her arms, and how comfortably she wore them. He couldn’t help staring.

‘Oh, look. You haven’t seen the moth.’ She reached over her shoulder and pulled back the cloth of her t-shirt. The moth hung before him, hypnotic, disturbing, cousin to his
gift that was now displayed over the door to the kitchen. Even partly obscured by clothes, it seemed big as a kite, the wing shimmering silkily. He wanted to touch the luxurious green, every line
careful as a Rousseau brushstroke, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. His initial joy at seeing his mother so light-hearted and capable was giving way to disconcertment.

‘I’m reverting, Leon. I’ve decided my mother was right: if you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all.’

‘They’re, um, the colours are amazing.’

‘I thought you’d appreciate the moth for obvious reasons.’

‘Yeah.’ Clearly he had been privileged by this viewing. It sat heavily in his lap like an over-extravagant present, mocking the sympathy he’d been accumulating since news of
her illness. She didn’t seem to need him except as an audience. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’m a bit overwhelmed, that’s all. I brought you a bottle of wine. Do you want a
drink?’