Authors: Fiona McGregor
‘Oh, I was in that.’ Through the layer of plastic, Edwina began to massage Marie’s scalp.
‘Really?’ said Pat, bouncing a wink off the mirror to Marie.
‘Yes, I had no idea! I was completely taken in!’
‘What did you say?’ Marie asked.
‘That I didn’t think a mosque would suit Mosman, of course.’
‘You know they’re all down at Cliffo beach now,’ said Pat.
‘Who?’
‘The Muslims. In hordes. I was down there recently with Phillip and I couldn’t believe my eyes. You see the women in their scarves preparing all the food for the men. Ugh, those big
fat men swimming and so on while the women sit out of the way in their heavy black clothes, sweating and serving them. And I thought to myself, What on earth are you doing, you
dopey
women?’
Edwina peeled the plastic off Marie’s head. ‘I’ll miss you, Marie.’
‘I haven’t gone yet.’
Marie thought Dr Cayley must be wrong but she swallowed her pills obediently along with her Panadol, laxatives, Swisse women’s vitamins, and fish and evening primrose
oil. Prompted by Penny, she had unearthed the pinball machine in the cellar. Bought decades ago as a folly, it was fought over incessantly, the pings and whirls driving Marie and Ross mad. The
children acquired friends who ignored their parents at the door, trooping straight into the house with the glazed-eyed resolve of addicts going to their dealer. The pinball machine was also admired
at advertising parties: its glass top, and seclusion in the rumpus room, a magnet for the cocaine coterie. Then seemingly overnight the machine was abandoned and had sat rusting in the cellar ever
since. What could you do with such a hulk? And how could she have forgotten its existence? As her house emptied, Marie began to feel the impact of its perimeters as though she were a pinball
herself, rattling through the rooms and decades, and all those pills in turn inside her body, seeking targets.
She asked Fatima to come an extra day and help clean out the cupboards. She stood there supervising as the refuse of a rich life spewed forth. Toys, an old tennis racket, broken banana chair,
bug catcher, gumboots, school textbooks, two pairs of children’s ski boots and twenty years of
National Geographic
. ‘Would you like any of these things, Fatima?’
‘No thank you.’ Fatima smiled.
Marie noticed Fatima had molars missing and thought of the reminder notice for her root-canal therapy. She sat with Mopoke in the rumpus room flicking through the old magazines while Fatima
ferried things to the garage.
A man with a scar or a strong, damaged face may often be judged more attractive than one with unmarked features
, wrote an anthropologist in the 1970s. Marie
corralled the
National Geographic
magazines into a pile. ‘You can leave those.’
More than a purge, the cleaning became a forced investigation. Marie was dismayed by how much of her past was signified by things. How and why did they linger? They irritated her, like something
stuck on her shoe. She still hadn’t found her mother’s embroidery, but an obsolete printer was here.
She was happy to find her university textbooks from Psychology 1, and an old
DSM
. Year after year, she had intended to go back and finish her degree, abandoned with her first pregnancy;
year after year she had been too tired and distracted.
The most unbelievable relic was probably the plaster cast from Leon’s broken leg, crumbling, grotesque, the yellow insides like an old man’s skin. She remembered Leon at fourteen,
limping down the path behind Ross, sports bag jerking, face wracked with pain. ‘Leon went down in the scrum,’ Ross announced, with an undertone of embarrassment.
Marie went out to the patio where Leon was slumped on the couch, leg trembling with Parkinsonian fury. She drove him to Dr Cayley’s and, while the leg was being set, rang home from the Red
Phone in the corridor. ‘It’s broken in three places. Why didn’t you take him to the doctor?’
‘He said he was alright.’
‘Of course he did. He’s a teenage boy.’
‘He won’t let me near him.’
‘You were watching him play, weren’t you?’
‘I’m trying to get dinner here for two children, Marie.’
‘I can’t imagine how hard that must be.’
Ross’s sigh billowed through the phone, making her hair stand on end. ‘O’Sullivan rang,’ he minced. ‘Tell Leon he wants to know how he is.’
‘Please, Ross.’
‘I don’t think blokes like that should be allowed to coach football,’ his voice rose. ‘I’m going to ring the school about this.’
Marie hung up and paced the corridor. She hated her husband for his hatred, and her son for his betrayal. She hated herself for having failed so spectacularly. She took Leon to Pizza Hut on the
way home, where he ordered a Supreme with the lot. ‘O’Sullivan rang,’ she said, watching his face. Leon ate his pizza without looking up. On arriving home, he disappeared into his
room for the next four years.
He covered the plaster cast with graffiti of his favourite bands. The names were still legible. Guns N’ Roses. Red Hot Chili Peppers. The Doors, The Cure. Marie put the cast back into the
carton containing Leon’s old magazines, the topmost one showing a Burt Reynolds lookalike with a thick moustache, a strappy leather thing on his bare torso.
‘Help me, Mopoke,’ she groaned to the cat. She carried the carton to the garage, the gay porn glowing like a fresh wound in her mind. Of course it was her who had saved these things,
including that copy of
Colt
. She remembered the hot shame when first coming across it secreted behind Leon’s desk after he moved out. It had altered her fantasy life forever, and these
shaggy-haired, smooth-skinned men of the 1980s rushed back now like old lovers. She took the
Colt
up to her room with the pile of
National Geographic
and the psychology books.
The flames took two four-hour sessions to complete: the first session the outline and darker reds; the second the oranges, yellows and touch-ups. Marie lay back watching Rhys
carve curves into her belly. On the wall was a sign saying
DON’T MOVE KEEP STILL
, next to it metal shelving crammed with books. Sometimes Marie shut her eyes against the pain. There
was the tattoo whirr, the tear of paper towels, occasional voices. Below the window a boom box transmitted community radio, crossing every two hours to another language or genre. Marie lay there
not wanting translation, letting the emotion of the music wash through her as the needles injected dye into her flesh. She came away from these sessions purged and exhilarated. By the second hour
the pain had alchemised and she reclined peacefully, eyes opening every now and then to see Rhys’s intense face below.
‘Fan
tas
tic skin.
Soaking
it up. You were born to be tattooed, Marie.’
Marie grimaced as Rhys wiped the seeping tattoo.
‘Breathe.’ Rhys switched on the iron again.
Halfway through they had a break. Rhys took out her contact lenses and leant back to receive drops in each eye.
‘My middle child has trouble with her contact lenses,’ Marie remarked. ‘Have you tried the new non-allergenic ones?’
‘I’ve tried everything.’ Rhys blinked, hands moving over the benchtop. She pressed a tissue to her eyes then put on glasses. ‘Is she your favourite?’
‘Pardon?’
‘There’s always a favourite. Usually the middle child.’
Marie didn’t want to answer, but there was nothing peremptory in Rhys’s manner and in this room her usual defences seemed unnecessary. ‘My youngest is my favourite, but
he’s gay.’
‘But?’
Marie sighed. ‘I’m a hypocrite ... I don’t like my rose.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The rose tattoo on my shoulder blade. I don’t like it.’
‘What brought that on?’
‘It’s just not me. Do you think I should have it removed?’
‘Laser treatment’s expensive and I don’t really believe in it. But you shouldn’t wear something you’re uncomfortable with.’ Rhys sat on her stool, boots
hooked on rungs, shadows under her eyes. Marie realised how tired she must be. Two other jobs already today. She had mentioned a child. ‘An alternative is doing something over it.
You’ll still see it slightly, like a ghost.’
After her first tattoos Marie had felt like leaping into the air, but these longer sessions made her at once giddy and lucid, as though the leap had been made, the border crossed. Downstairs,
while her payment went through, she looked at the photograph of the girl with snake arms.
‘I’m glad you like the photos,’ said Rhys. ‘We didn’t want just the usual flash.’
‘Who is she?’
‘Isn’t she beautiful? She’s a Kalinga girl from Luzon island in the Philippines. A tattoo like that could take months to complete. A wall of pain.’
‘She doesn’t look much older than twelve.’
‘It was a preparation for womanhood. A woman was considered more desirable if she’d endured that sort of pain. They were headhunters. Rob put her up. He has Filo blood.’
‘When was it taken?’
‘I don’t know. Early twentieth century? Their forests have nearly all gone now. Logged or burnt.’
Rhys indicated the photo over the stairs, which Marie still averted her eyes from. ‘I know. He freaks some people out. But he’s like our Moses.’
It was a mummified body with the macabre protrusion of skull through parchment flesh, the clavicles and ribs rising like a mountain range in an eroded landscape. In the corner was a closeup of
blurred stripes and crosses. ‘This is the Iceman they found in the Alps, remember? He had about fifty-eight tiny tattoos. They think they were done to treat some sort of back pain, and
probably a stomach disorder. He had whipworm.’
Marie thought of her stomach ulcers. The knife unsheathed inside, the constant shifting around its point. She disliked people who spoke of their ailments. ‘Acupuncture,’ she said
vaguely.
‘Well, acupuncture supposedly didn’t begin until about three thousand years ago in China. Otzi’s Italian and five thousand years old. But most of the tattoos were on meridians
and it
looks
medicinal.’
‘Did he die of his worms?’
‘He had an arrowhead embedded in his chest. He was shot in the back, but I don’t know if that killed him. Anyway, I like to tell myself that tattooing heals. I’m a
believer.’
The sessions began in the afternoon, the room in sunlight enormous around them, diminishing over the hours to a bright cone from the lamp Rhys positioned over the tattooed
area. From ribs to pubis was her canvas, Rhys a quiet worker, gliding on the office chair to decant more ink, returning to Marie’s side before Marie even knew she had gone. Then it began
again, the searing cut, the graze of paper, the cut, the graze, the whine of the iron.
Marie was trying to visualise stomach ulcers. Did they resemble blisters on the epidermis? Spongy pustules filled with mucus? Or did the aqueous interior give them another structure? She
wondered how pliable they were, whether they resided in one spot, suckered to the fleshy lining, or moved through the viscous bile of the abdominal cavity. She lamented her ignorance of the body.
She sensed she must begin preparations for the hunt.
Rhys began to score alizarin at the base of the flames. Stung awake, Marie became aware of every perforation, the stark tent of lamplight, the tree outside deepening to silhouette, the mournful
keening of Bulgarian women on the radio. And in the moments of acute pain when the interior burning surfaced like a fin through the ocean of tattoo, she was stranded again. She needed
distraction.
She read the spines of Rhys’s books.
Parrots of Australia. Edo Japan. Bad Boys and Tough Tattoos
. She mentally listed household tasks. The garden was in shape, the rooms cleaned
out, she had only the guttering to do. The horizon was clearing and she saw a simple yet radical possibility: she could go back to university and finish her psychology degree. A whole new world
could come from that; a smile spread across her features. And it came to her also while lying there that she would engage Hugh to sell the house. All the tortured cogitation associated with this
fell away, and the decision made, she withstood the pain easily.
She questioned Rhys about her tattooing. Gradually Rhys relinquished details. She had dropped out of art school and fallen in love with a young tattoo artist. ‘He practised on me, and I
stayed with him mainly because I loved being tattooed. Then I got critical of his draughtsmanship; I started thinking I could do better. But I was such a good little girlfriend, it took me another
two years to leave him and find my own teacher. I didn’t want to threaten him. My boyfriend, that is.’
‘We’re like that with our men, aren’t we. I was like that with my ex-husband.’
‘I’m not anymore.’
‘Good for you. And what was your first tattoo?’
‘A snake.’
‘Whereabouts?’
Rhys shrugged, not looking up.
Marie closed her eyes and slipped back down to the half-world of endorphins.
Rhys was all there and yet somehow absent, her only visible tattoos the hypnotic gauntlets, and even these were mostly concealed by gloves. Marie dozed through the final flames, the pain all
around her a hot red flood.
Christmas Day was unnervingly quiet. There was nobody here apart from Leon, and he slept in. A sense of impermanence made the house feel to Marie like a holiday rental, the
languorous hot weeks stretching ahead filled with the sounds of the beach; her continuing her motherly tasks of cleaning, organising and providing; the inevitable packing up at the end. The
inevitable end.
She had a swim in the cove then went into the kitchen to begin preparing food, Leon eventually joining her. Clark arrived late, taking the dishes he had made straight to the table. There was a
ham at one end; at the other, the cloth was held down by a breadboard covered in a baguette and a parmigiana. There were green beans with basil, olive oil and garlic; a potato salad with capers and
anchovies; a green salad; and spicy chick peas. Lastly, Marie brought out a dish of tuna steaks and turned on the barbecue. There was barely enough room for all the food.