Indelible Ink (62 page)

Marie was dozing again when she put it before her so Blanche left the room. In the kitchen Rhys was removing clingwrap from a tureen. ‘I found this. It looks like something she could eat,
but I don’t know how to work the microwave.’

‘It’s from Susan. Here. I’ll do it.’

‘I met Susan. She seems pretty upset.’

‘Mum was too out of it for a visit last time she came over. This looks good. Of all things, I’ve got a craving for Redskins.’

‘How far gone are you?’

‘Eighteen weeks.’

‘It must be getting better now. You’ll have some good months before it gets difficult.’

‘I do feel good but I’m still scared.’ Blanche put the tureen in the microwave and pressed some buttons. ‘Especially of the birth.’

‘Don’t be. Hormones are the best painkillers.’

‘I’m also scared of becoming a hausfrau.’

‘That’s inevitable for a while.’

Blanche tried to concentrate on Rhys’s face and avoid her hands. One of those naturally slim women, no doubt. Blanche always wondered how they carried pregnancies. She was wearing lipstick
today; she looked quite nice.

Rhys turned to find Blanche examining her. ‘You’ll miss your job, eh.’

‘Actually, I’ve decided to stay.’

‘Really? Are they going to give you maternity leave?’

‘No.’

‘I guess you can afford to stop working.’

Blanche wondered if Rhys was like her brothers, making presumptions about her wealth. She thought of her debts and the reduction of her inheritance. She could afford to stop working but she
could no longer afford the lifestyle she wanted: none of them cared about that, in fact they were probably happy. ‘Yes and no. I was going to resign today but I’ve decided to stay as
long as I can, and get back to work as soon as I can. There’s a top female creative who worked right up until two days before she gave birth and was back at work full-time soon
after.’

‘That’s impressive,’ Rhys said dubiously. ‘She mustn’t have been breastfeeding.’

‘You had your child on your own, didn’t you?’

‘Pretty much. But Travis’s father helped out, as well as my business partner Rob.’

‘So not really on your own. Did you stop working for long?’

‘Almost a year. I let everything go. I went into debt. I built back up slowly.’

‘But you’re really successful now, aren’t you? So you didn’t lose out, at the end of the day.’

‘Well, I was planning an exhibition when I fell pregnant. I had to write it off. But I’m back onto it now.’

‘You’re going to have an exhibition? I didn’t know you were an artist!’

Rhys smiled as though at a private joke. The microwave pinged and she popped the door then removed the tureen with a tea towel. Blanche was aware of a shield being held up against her. She felt
bad about her tone at Rhys’s place a few weeks ago. ‘Where are you showing?’ she persisted.

‘Fussel and Warhaft?’

‘Really?’ Blanche was impressed and a little envious. ‘What sort of work?’

‘Paintings.’

‘So you’ll give away the day job if your show sells out?’ Blanche said eagerly.

‘God, no. Tattooing is still the top of my pyramid. Marie told me you were a great drawer when you were a kid.’

‘Did she?’ Blanche stopped, soup plates in her hands.

‘She said you went to art school.’

‘Yeah, then I sold out.’

‘You could draw when you stop working. I drew when I was pregnant and breastfeeding. Crap mostly, but it felt good. Do you ever get ideas?’

‘I bought a whole lot of charcoal and paper a while back, around the time I fell pregnant. I got obsessed with tunnels and alleys. Freud would have a lot to say about that I’m
sure.’

‘Or the road builders of Sydney.’

Blanche moved cutlery around on the table. She was trying to remember what she had done with the drawings. She couldn’t even remember what she had done with the unused paper and charcoal.
It bothered her. ‘They were in a sort of abstract expressionist style. Kind of obsessive.’

‘That sounds great.’

‘My graphic designer loved them.’

Rhys looked at her with interest. ‘And what else?’

‘Oh god, I don’t know. I ran out of time.’ Blanche placed some soup on a tray for her mother. ‘It must be strange, working on people’s bodies.’

‘It’s kind of an honour. On the good people.’ Rhys smiled. ‘Like your mother.’

‘My mother was never a body-conscious person, you know. She really took us all by surprise.’

‘It’s not just about the body. The body contains everything else.’

Marie could hear Blanche and Rhys speaking in the kitchen. A hushed, even exchange, broken at one stage by an exclamation, couldn’t tell if it was a bark or a laugh.
Exhaustion had hit early today. She couldn’t tell in what order things happened. The touch of Blanche on her shoulder, living room visible one moment, swathed in darkness the next. The
television glimmering, then lights on low and a candle on the coffee table. A sudden silence making her struggle to sit upright, thinking she was alone in the house. Then she heard them again. Soup
steaming on a tray before her, Blanche saying, ‘Do you want to sit up at the table with us, Mum? Or do you want to eat it there?’ Marie looked at the soup. Her mind devoured it, but her
body felt distant, a shrivelling ball of pain that wanted no interference. Maybe if she rested a bit more. She lay back against the cushions, listening to Blanche and Rhys talking quietly at the
table.
Children
,
work
, she made out a few words. She fell back to sleep.

She had begun to secrete the fentanyl patches and morphine days ago. The idea had come to her when Carla accidentally dropped a vial. It plopped under the bed without her noticing, and when she
left, Marie rescued it. She put the vials and patches in the bottom drawer of her bedside table, beneath a scarf, alongside a syringe Carla had discarded after one use.

They knew the cancer had reached her liver, but nobody knew why she was so distended. As the rest of her shrank, her stomach grew. She was monstrous. Jaundice stained her skin and eyes. Fluid
collected in her feet, Carla massaging them each visit. Marie still managed to brush her teeth every night.

She seemed so often to be surrounded. She felt as though she were at a party and the lights had been dimmed, an expectant hubbub like a speech in the wings. Noise, muted; heat, light, movement.
Susan, Rob, Stew, Nell, her children, her children. So many things to be done, so little time. Did she say it? Or think it? Was that Blanche? Or Judy. In the car with Judy in Tasmania, driving
towards their mother’s birthplace in Liffey. And all along the horizon, the smoky blue line of the Western Tiers.

They were in Avalon, in the backyard filling trumpet flowers with water to squirt through the fence at the goats next door. Win’s market garden. Imagine that, Leon. It was twenty years
before I learnt that trumpet flowers were Honolulu lilies and a noxious weed. Smell of Chinese food, Win’s silent wife. Win beheading the chooks, blood pulsing, passionfruit along the fence,
those flowers seemed to have been designed by God ... Don’t go back there, it’s all changed. It’s all big houses now.
Drug-dealer mansions at Whale Beach
, Ross used to say,
ha-ha.
My mother was quite cold, Blanche, she was a mystery to me. My father was in Changi. We could never complain. He’d say,
Well, it isn
’
t Changi.
My parents
told me so little. It was as if I was born in a cabbage patch in that market garden on the northern beaches.

Tickle of contact. A liquid chink, chair squeaking. Marie opened her eyes. Rhys was seated before her with paints and a brush.

Marie splayed her hand on the cloth that Rhys put down.

‘Any requests? Colours? Plants?’

She tried to think. A jumble of images. ‘Birds of paradise?’ Her mouth felt like cottonwool. ‘The ocean, waves?’

‘Yeah. And I was thinking palms. Something long and slender.’

‘The Gymea lily is shooting, Mum.’ It was Blanche’s voice. She was sitting on the other couch. ‘Leon said it’s because of the drought.’

‘Yes. They flower when traumatised.’ Marie thought: I must go into the garden tomorrow to see that.

‘That’s a good idea,’ said Rhys. ‘Gymea lily.’

‘Can I get you anything?’ Blanche addressed both of them.

‘Maybe another rag? Thanks.’

Marie felt her eyelids drooping. Again the chink of Rhys dipping her brush into the jar of water. The cool lick of sable along her wrist. It travelled her nerve endings and she managed to sit up
to watch the gauntlets forming. This brilliant, wide-awake reality, sweet and tangy as citrus. Rhys worked fast. Wavy dark blues appeared around her wrists; along her tendons burnt orange lines
with little hooks at the end. Green jags for palm fronds. The narrow sable tongue insinuating itself along the corrugations of her hands.

‘Can you hold them still for a few minutes so they dry?’

Marie tried to stop her hands trembling. They looked so beautiful. She felt like a queen. Here on her throne, waiting, waiting.

Blanche had left them alone for most of the work, then returned as Rhys finished. Marie met her eyes, troubled and brimming. They smiled at one another.

‘Thank you,’ said Blanche to Rhys in the kitchen afterwards. She covered her eyes. ‘I was always trying to make her love me more. I’m just like Dad. More, more,
more.’

Marie left the balcony door open and night filled the house. There was the rustle of an animal in the foliage outside her window, then the scatter of kentia palm nuts on
flagging. Somewhere on the harbour someone was having a party and rap music pumped across the water, its urgent macho voice crystal clear.

She switched on the light and went to the bathroom to clean herself with a washer. Poured a glass of water and took it back to bed. She sat propped against the pillows with the fentanyl patches
on the covers beside her, opened her nightgown and laboriously unpeeled a patch from its protective backing then placed it on her thigh. She unwrapped the next. She hadn’t counted on it being
such an effort, the stubborn adhesive taking all her energy. She dropped it and it stuck to the bedcovers and she cursed. Paused to catch her breath. She worked her way through the box, calmly,
efficiently, as though in a dream. The patches were irritating, the glue sharp against her skin. She fought the urge to scratch them off.

She hadn’t eaten for almost three days now; she hoped it would help the chemicals absorb quicker. She unscrewed the bottle of morphine and drank it down. Too ambitious. She lurched forward
gagging, pressed her lips together and swallowed. She followed it with water, willing the mixture down. She finished them in alternation. Sweet thick morphia, cool water, cool water. She burped so
loudly she worried she would wake Leon. She began to feel dizzy.

Last of all, she filled the syringe with as many ampoules of morphine as would fit. She lay on her side, introduced it into her rectum and depressed the plunger with shaking hands. She slipped,
cursed, and persisted. She did this a second time, proud of her strength and will, and when she had finished, lay there catching her breath. She hoped it was enough.

She pushed away the debris of wrappings and bottles, wishing vaguely she could clean them up to save someone the trouble. She was hot. Itchy. She fumbled to remove her socks then stretched on
her back, listening to the night. She remembered Nell watching television the last time she was here, her rapt face in the screen’s blue light. She stepped into the memory and held her
against her hip, played with her hair. And all across the night the
chink-chink
of crickets, tiny, random, like city lights.

Leon overslept and dressed without showering so as not to be late. Not wanting to wake his mother, he rushed out the door and drove to Neutral Bay.

He always loved the descent to the harbour, how the opposite shore pressed flat and close. The address was several blocks above the foreshore and the building had no view, but you could see the
water from the corner. Clark was walking down the street as Leon parked; Blanche was already in the flat.

The tenants had moved out only the day before, and the place still felt warm with habitation. Leon followed his siblings from room to room, admiring the floorboards and layout. The light was
good, except in the smaller bedroom where he would be. He needed to have a discussion with Clark and Blanche about how long they expected him to live with his mother. What if she lasted another six
months? It would be like home nursing in a way. Then again, he wouldn’t be paying rent. He had an urge, as he lingered in this room, to begin looking for a place to buy. With the First Home
Owner Grant and his inheritance, he could get a little flat in Maroubra or somewhere. He would even have enough left over to have a holiday. He smiled at the thought. His future seemed full of ease
and possibility.

The main bedroom was big and light. Over the mantlepiece was the clear white imprint of a robe on the wall, the sleeves flared like a person in flight or a child’s impression of an angel.
‘Wow, how freaky,’ said Leon. ‘What’s
that
?’

Blanche touched the wall then looked at her fingertips. ‘They’ve had a candle here, that’s all. It’s the shape of a kimono. They must have hung a kimono on the wall.
We’ll have to dock their bond.’

There were hooks on the picture rails, a washer in the corner. The outline of dust describing a wardrobe, another narrower one that could have been a bookshelf. There was a used bus ticket on
the bathroom shelf and a packet of castor sugar in the otherwise empty kitchen cupboards.

They walked into the backyard and Blanche turned to her brothers, eyes shining with pride. ‘It’s good isn’t it? It’s perfect.’

‘Yeah.’ Clark nodded. ‘It’s exactly what she needs. So what’s the plan?’

‘Fatima’s going to Sirius today to clean. Tomorrow morning the removalists pack.’

‘I’ll be helping with that, then come here with the removalists to unload the furniture,’ said Leon. ‘I’ll arrange the living room straightaway.’

‘I’ll come at lunch and help you out,’ said Blanche.

‘I’ll stay with Mum,’ said Clark.