Indelible Ink (50 page)

Clark took a drag. ‘My sister’s just gone into hospital.’

‘Oh god.’

‘Hopefully not serious. It’s to do with her pregnancy.’

‘And your mother?’

‘Back in on Friday.’

‘Is she in pain?’

‘All the time, I guess.’ Clark inhaled till he was dizzy, the filter soggy between his lips. ‘I can’t have any more.’ He gave the cigarette back to Sylvia. She
shook her head and he dropped it, then pulled her towards him. ‘I wish you could have met my mother, Sylvia. Maybe you still could.’

‘Oh, babe.’

‘I want you. I want you to leave him. I’m serious, Sylvia.’

‘I know you are. And I am too. And I’m working on it.’ She pressed her mouth to his.

The wall was cold against his back. A drip from the air-conditioning duct struck his scalp through his hair. ‘Touch me, please.’ Legs moved across the forecourt then stopped, a butt
landed and was ground by a shoe, Sylvia’s hand on his fly burrowing inside cupping his balls. ‘Oh god, I feel like I could come right now.’ He sank his fingers into her wetness,
muttering insanely into her hair.

‘What?’ she said.

‘You’re mine.’ He pushed into her hand. ‘You’re mine, say you’re mine. You’re mine, you’re
mine
.’

Blanche decided not to tell her brothers about their father’s intentions until she was out of hospital. They had put her on a drip immediately when she arrived, and by
the following evening, with Leon there, she felt rested. Leon had brought some grevillea flowers and arranged them in a jug from the nurses’ kitchen. Blanche was touched.

‘Geez, Louise,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I was having a week off the hos’, now you’ve dragged me back in.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I should hire myself out as a professional visitor. Clark sends his love.’

‘Yeah, he texted me.’

‘And Mum, of course.’

‘You’re all being really sweet.’ Blanche thought how ironic it was that only a day ago, when on the verge of collapse, she had been remembering their fights in vivid detail.
‘Remember that time you tried to cut my head off?’ She smirked.

Leon was about to reply when the nurse came in and replaced the empty bag on the drip stand with a full one. ‘An
other
one?’ said Blanche.

‘Yeah, we keep ’em coming.’

‘What’s in them?’ asked Leon.

‘Bit of a cocktail. Mainly saline. Most of your condition is caused by dehydration, Blanche. We’ll be feeding you these every day till you’re better.’

‘She looks a lot better already,’ said Leon.

Blanche had stopped vomiting and her brief stay in hospital was having a placatory effect on the family, as though they could now imagine any of them, including Marie, moving through these
ominous white tombs as easily as through hotels. Leon was struck by how soft and dreamy his sister looked against the pillows. He had brought her a chocolate bilby for Easter, which she consumed
enthusiastically.
Hyperemesis gravidarum
, said the clipboard at the end of her bed. A condition, Blanche told Leon, that their mother had suffered through her own pregnancies.

He returned to their conversation when the nurse had gone.

‘It seemed perfectly logical at the time. You were like,
Go on.
You threw back your head. Like this.’

‘What a martyr. I should have been a Catholic.’

‘We were so calm, weren’t we? There I was, sawing away at your neck with the breadknife, wondering why nothing was happening. Afterwards you broke your hairbrush on my
head.’

‘God, that was satisfying.’

‘Poor Mum. Hosing us down in the garden.’

‘I always got the blame.’

‘You were older.’

‘But you were a big boofy boy!’ Forgetting the line feed, Blanche moved her hand then winced. ‘I don’t want her visiting me, Leon. She’s got enough on her
plate.’

‘She’s quite good today. Pottering around the garden. She’s thrilled you’re keeping the baby. What convinced you in the end?’

‘Hugh. We can take out another loan.’

Leon looked perplexed. ‘You guys are set for life, aren’t you?’

‘Hugh thinks it’s best if we do. Look, I know Hugh can be a boofhead. He’s much more conservative than me.’ Blanche spoke hastily, as though afraid of being overtaken by
further vomiting, or contradiction. ‘But he’s so supportive. He literally got down on his knees and begged me to have this baby and promised to do everything he could for us. It’s
one of the main reasons I’m keeping it. Because he meant it, and I trust him. Even if he is a crap housekeeper.’

‘I guess you’re not much better.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’m even worse. But you’ve got Fatima.’

‘Every single day Hugh tells me he loves me. And I need that. I’m probably very insecure.’

‘I think we all are. I think it’s a family illness.’

‘Or a national one.’

‘Clark’s a good housekeeper, you know. Not a speck of dust.’

‘That’s Dad. He’s got Dad’s fastidiousness.’

Leon was about to point out that it was their mother who had done everything around the house when Hugh arrived in a blaze of lilies, with Blanche’s laptop and more chocolate. Blanche
grabbed it greedily. ‘Narva!’ she cried. ‘Was it easy to find?’

‘I got it in Paddington.’

‘Jesus, are you serious? That far?’ Blanche tore the packet open. ‘Did you try our local?’

‘I tried just about everywhere.’

‘Bloody hell! It should be
everywhere
.’

‘Don’t stress, pooky. Don’t think about work.’

Leon went to find a vase. When he returned, Blanche and Hugh were holding hands and discussing names for the baby. Leon felt jubilant without knowing why.

‘This little terror,’ said Blanche, ‘has made me aware every second of its existence. It’s been trying to tell me something. So I want something kind of feisty. What do
you think, Leon?’

Names, thought Leon. Signifiers or red herrings? Their names had been plucked out of a hat, Clark and Blanche from the Hollywood hat, his own he didn’t know. He liked it — Leon King
— a big name, masculine. He knew people who had changed their names, one with whom he had studied horticulture going from Sharon to Fern in second year, everybody continuing to call her
Sharon behind her back, pronouncing
Fern
with a mocking American accent. ‘Well, we have Celtic ancestry.’

Blanche looked nonplussed. ‘Clark would know about that.’

‘I do too,’ said Hugh. ‘Welsh.’

‘My name’s kinda Jewish, isn’t it?’ said Leon. ‘Clark said there’s a few missing links in our family tree. He said it could even be Aboriginal.’

‘Aboriginal?’ Hugh pulled a face. ‘I doubt it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, you hardly look it. I mean, you’re
white
.’

‘We could still have a bit. I wouldn’t mind. Anything’d be better than boring bloody Pom.’

‘I’ve got English blood and I’m proud of it.’

‘Look, we’re just white trash,’ Blanche said in a conciliatory tone. ‘So come on, Leon, any suggestions?’

‘How about Kylie?’ Leon minced.

Blanche and Hugh stared at him.

Leon lifted his shoulders up to his ears. ‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘Like what?’ said Blanche. ‘Sorry. I just don’t get it.’

‘Kylie’s an Aboriginal word, isn’t it?’ said Hugh. ‘Is that what you meant?’

Why had he said Kylie, why had he spoken like that? Was he trying to mock the poofter he thought they thought he was? Subliminally channelling a cancer joke? Maybe it was just the family habit
of pissing on anything remotely sentimental for fear of feeling. He didn’t believe Hugh that Kylie was an Aboriginal word, but a quick google when he got back to Sirius Cove proved he was
right — it was a West Australian word for a type of boomerang.

By Blanche and his mother’s hospital beds, the sense of his physical strength had felt heretical to Leon. He
had
been a big boofy boy, stronger than his sister for as long as he
could remember, stronger soon enough even than Clark, much to Clark’s chagrin, yet he had always assumed that as the youngest and the one picked on most by his father, concessions were his
due. His homosexuality reinforced this. He knew there was hurt beneath Blanche’s joking reminiscences but he had been so preoccupied by his own wounds, so convinced of his inferiority, that
it hadn’t occurred to Leon that he might have wounded others. Blanche was right, his mother did favour him. He shut this out in order to breathe. He also needed to keep the idea of privilege
foreign: to admit to it would be to admit that he in turn owed concessions. It was a logic with infinite implications. When applied across the board, the debts were never-ending. An entire people
could owe another, in perpetuity, and that was just preposterous. It was impossible to even contemplate.

He had noticed the cockatoo in the angophora early that morning as he drank coffee on the deck. It was clambering up the trunk with beak and claw, crest half open like a
budding flower. From the depths of the house as he washed and dressed, Leon was aware of shrill cries over the phatic noise of the day, and when he entered the garden he saw a group of mynas
attacking the cockatoo. The large muscly parrot stood its ground, lifting a leg to scratch behind its ear then hopping further along the branch. Standing below the great shirring tree, Leon saw it
was joining its injured mate.

Inside the shed, he rummaged through the tools on the wall till he found a tomahawk. Lifting it revealed a child’s handprint on the brickwork and below that a crude drawing of a warship.
All along the wall a line of black warships steamed towards the door with autistic precision. This was his artwork. He couldn’t remember a childhood fascination with war. Maybe it was just a
desire to get away. Leon hesitated in the gloom, running his thumb along the axe blade, trying to remember. His mind retrieved nothing. It kept returning to sex.

He had seen the American warship come across the harbour at dawn, so big it nearly closed the gap between Curraghbeena and Sirius points, a sliding wall of gunmetal grey hefting its mass around
to weigh anchor in Woolloomooloo Bay. Its arrival had dominated the news for days: the dock would be swarming with cameras by now. And the Prime Minister would be waiting with his television
rictus, and all across the indentured suburbs girls would be primping themselves for the US Navy, Potts Point poofters hoping for some run-off. Oh yes, it would be a good time to hit the beats.
Maybe later, when he had finished work. The sound of the bird war, even here in the shed, was all-pervasive and shook Leon out of his reverie.

He picked up the tools and left the shed cursing the mynas. In just a few years, the little bastards seemed to have taken over the entire city. The cockatoos were waiting it out, two white dabs
high in the tree. Monogamous animals, parrots. Leon found that unaccountably romantic. As the temperature rose, Leon packed his ute then drove to work at the Joneses’.

The good thing about being a gardener was that you didn’t have to check in with your employer like an office worker arriving to start the day. The best jobs even gave you mastery of the
domain; you could walk right in and start without seeing anyone. Unless your employer lived behind high walls, with cameras and intercom. If you were buzzed in with nobody appearing, as Leon was
today, you knew it was one of the hired help, and the owner wasn’t home. Leon felt lighter for that: he drove in and parked behind a blue Mazda then took himself down to the garden. Susan,
unfortunately, was there. ‘What are we going to do today?’ she said brightly.

The Joneses’ garden was neat as a toy farm. Even the section of broken marble at the end of the path seemed just a manufacturing fillip, like a bleed of plastic from the seam of the mould.
Leon had probably reinforced the perfection with his arrangement of rose bushes, but he’d hardly had a choice. There wasn’t much to do now except find a spot for the wattle once it had
sprouted, and germinating those seeds was Susan’s little home-science project so he would have to wait. He scanned the garden. ‘Bananas could do with thinning. I’ll chop that one
down and wrap the bunch so it can ripen.’

‘Terrific.’

The banana palms did look terrible and Leon was pleased to have found a necessary task, rather than just trimming the plastic bleed. While he fetched tools from his ute, Susan went to the
kitchen for watermelon. Leon knew that part of his job was to talk to her, and he walked back up to meet her on the terrace.

She lifted the brim of her hat. ‘So Marie has gone back into hospital.’

‘Two days ago. She’s doing another course of chemo.’

‘And how’s it going?’

‘They haven’t started it yet. She’s doing tests first or something.’

The harbour shimmered all around them, here in the toy farm, raised and perfect on the bluff. Middle Harbour was a mystery to Leon. He associated it with sharks therefore wildness, and at the
same time a more secluded sort of luxury. Also, of course, his father, whose house was further in, beyond Spit Bridge. He associated it with childhood in general, as he did the Joneses. The lines
on Susan’s face still had the capacity to surprise him, like the picture of Dorian Gray.

‘Your mother was talking about religion the other day,’ she said.

‘Really?’ Leon took the largest slice of watermelon and chomped into it.

‘They say a lot of people go back to it.’

‘She hasn’t mentioned it. She doesn’t believe in God.’

‘Do you?’

Leon put down his rind in surprise. ‘No.’

‘I keep looking at properties for her on
Domain
,’ said Susan, changing tack. ‘There’s a semi in Avenue Road for just under three million, there’s a gorgeous
three-bedroom flat in Mosman Bay for even less.’

Leon felt guilty that he hadn’t looked at the listings that Blanche had sent him. He had never lived with such a definite prediction, nor at the same time so in the moment.
‘We’re just looking at stuff for her to rent for the time being, Susan, because we don’t know how this thing will play out.’

‘She said to me that she had less than six months.’

Leon said nothing.

‘And here I am looking for houses for her to buy. There’s no point, is there? I don’t know what we’re going to do without her.’