Authors: Fiona McGregor
‘He had a Maori head, with a moko on it. He brought it back to England with him.’
‘God, David.’
‘He didn’t mean any harm!
They
sold it to him. Banks was a man of insatiable curiosity. He taught us
so much.
Isn’t it astonishing when you read about these
things? Can you imagine being in a ship with a cargo full of plants and animals the likes of which you’ve never seen, that may as well have come from Mars? The
Sirius
,
Marie!’
Marie thought of the human head carried to the other side of the world, mounted in a cabinet and stared at like an object.
It. A head.
She thought of the person who had smiled and scowled
and kissed and wept through that tattooed face. The crowds at those colonial exhibitions were immense, with queues for miles; the most popular exhibits living natives, in dioramas. Reading about
this made Marie feel dirty, as though she were in the audience too. She was as pleased by the arrival of the information about Banks’s tattoo from David as she was disturbed. She had been
gorging on Rhys’s books and stories for months, with nobody to share what fascinated her. But David was talking so much it was hard to get a word in.
The cove was almost black now, the harbour to the right still glowing with the last sun. Marie had often imagined the
Sirius
being careened on this side of the harbour to keep the sailors
away from the vice of Sydney Cove, the most bored and reckless sneaking across for women and rum. A hundred years later, doctors and lawyers and merchant bankers settled here to keep their children
from the same. In the Kings’ case it had worked, though Marie now felt far less self-congratulatory. What was vice anyway? Whoring and drinking didn’t look nearly as bad to her now as
they used to. She had been cooped up alone in this house for months getting it ready: relief came in the city, getting tattooed. But crossing the water at night held other prospects and here was a
man she’d slept with on the phone, a possible accomplice. She was desperate to get out and have fun. She really wanted to let her hair down. She wished she hadn’t conjured up those
sailors scrubbing the deck: they made her think about the Aborigines dying of smallpox so prolifically that they couldn’t be buried, their bodies snagging in the rocks below. She tried to
imagine the bush without fungus, or lantana, alive with snakes, to flush this horrible thought from her mind. It didn’t work.
‘The
Sirius
never made it back to England, did she? It was a flagship, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, yes, I know,’ David said with brisk good humour. ‘Poetic licence.’
Marie went back into the house and poured herself a Diet Coke with ice and lemon.
‘Then it became fashionable among the European aristocracy,’ David went on. ‘Prince Edward had himself tattooed before he became king, and sent his sons to the same Japanese
master. Apparently
all
the European aristocracy visited this man, in Yokohama.’
‘Hori Chiyo!’ Marie interjected. David was like a guest who offered to help at a dinner party and ended up taking over the whole menu. Yes, this was
her
territory; she elbowed
him out of the way. ‘I have a book here about all that. He used ivory sticks and coloured inks. He tattooed half the European navy. When they banned tattooing in Japan a rich American set him
up in business in New York.’
They began to talk over the top of each other, David relaying the story of Count Tolstoy, a relative of the writer, pulling his shirt off at dinner parties when he’d had a bit to drink,
and showing all the tattoos he’d acquired in North America and the Pacific.
‘And Lady Randolph Churchill. Churchill’s mother.’
‘Is that so?’
‘She had a snake tattooed around her wrist. She hid it beneath her watch.’
‘And what about you?’ David said cheerily.
The fine lines on Marie’s arms were healing. ‘I’ve been getting mine done too.’
‘
Really?
’
Marie trailed off. She remembered David’s Darling Point townhouse, the studs of halogen lights in the ceiling, the Sepik River carving of a man-creature grasping a phallus that flowed in a
continuous curve from groin to mouth. The plane of David’s chest, his back to her in the dawn.
‘Well, I won’t be looking at Sirius Cove much longer. The auction’s in two weeks.’
‘You’re going to auction? That’s quite an event. How do you feel?’
‘I feel like I’m in a trance. I’m looking forward to it in a way.’
‘You’re being very brave.’
‘As much as I love it here the place has become a burden.’
‘You’re going to need some distractions. Why don’t you let me take you to dinner?’
Marie was determined to be rational about this. So what if he wanted something from her. Didn’t everybody want something from somebody? In return, she could get something from him,
couldn’t she? A change of scenery from her couch and the television. The sex wasn’t exactly great, but that could have just been first-night awkwardness. David was making an effort:
once he got to know her better, he would understand. She didn’t want to come across as acquiescent, let alone desperate. She said she was too busy this week but next week was a possibility.
David suggested Level 41.
All through dusk the temperature remained steady at thirty-nine. Night brought no relief. Marie made pasta for dinner. Mopoke came into the kitchen and ate her entire meal at Marie’s feet
then rubbed her thank-you against Marie’s calves. Then she moved slowly across the living room out to the deck where she sat like a statue with her back to the house and her face to the
harbour.
The tennis moved into the fourth hour. Livid marks grew beneath Safin’s eyes. There were tantrums on the court, a racket smashed, umpires yelled at. Between sets, the players sat on the
sidelines staring into space with wild-eyed exhaustion, their thighs wobbling between the hands of physiotherapists while the commentator recited a litany of injuries and surgical procedures. Marie
wondered if those big floppy shorts didn’t make playing in a heatwave more difficult. You couldn’t see anything in them. Replays of 1970s matches were pornographic by today’s
standards. She missed them.
That night in bed she heard a mopoke calling across the cove. She lifted her head off the pillow to hear better. The cat trod lightly up the bedclothes and settled into the crook of her belly,
flicking her tail up to rest against Marie’s chin. A second bird on this side of the cove began to answer the first, and Marie went to sleep like that, the softness of the cat’s tail
against her jawline, listening to the vibration of birdsong over water:
mo-poke, mo-poke, mo-poke.
‘He must’ve been doing his research,’ Rhys said to her the next day. ‘You must’ve made quite an impression on him. You and the aristocrats,’
she added facetiously. She was shaving Marie’s chest, extending the vine.
‘I think most of my ancestors were farmers,’ Marie replied with fortitude.
‘Anyway, aristocrats were seen as totally removed. They may as well have been savages for the eccentric realm they occupied.’
‘Such an alien concept, isn’t it? Aristocracy?’
‘We’ve got an upper class in this country, we just can’t admit it. We’re one of the richest nations on earth and still all pretending to be Aussie battlers,’ Rhys
said.
‘We still have a bit of the frontier mentality. Maybe that’s why we love four-wheel drives, because we still think we live in the bush.’
‘Yeah, battling the elements, struggling for our patch or something. And still trying to plant the flag with this real-estate obsession.’ Rhys was speaking in that acerbic tone that
Marie had once feared but now recognised as rough, honest humour. ‘As long as you work hard, anything goes. Like the dude at Macquarie Bank who makes seventy thousand a day but works eighteen
hours, so he like
earns
it.’
‘Seventy thousand a
day
?’
‘Ya ... Anyway, so says me. I’m a workaholic too.’
Marie had noticed the increase of traffic in the studio. A man Clark’s age with a narrow moustache, coming down the stairs when she arrived today. A woman the time before. Mel always at
the counter. ‘Why don’t you cut back? Wasn’t that the idea of Mel?’
‘The demand is too strong.’
‘You’re incredibly popular, aren’t you.’
‘Tattooing per se is getting popular. And I love my work. I mean, I’m a full-time artist earning my keep. How cool is that? I’m living a life of luxury.’ Rhys pushed a
button on the boom box and ambient music filtered forth. ‘Anyway, so much for aristocrats. They stopped getting tattooed as soon as poor people got into it so it’s a working-class art,
really. Appropriated by the middle class.’
‘Well, here I am, Rhys. Conducting a full-scale takeover.’
‘Oh, you conquered long ago, Marie.’
Marie wasn’t sure if this was a good thing. If she hadn’t changed, as Susan attested, then Mosman had taken over tattooing. If she had, then it was the other way around. Maybe, more
realistically, it was a murky place in between.
There was the slap of latex gloves being pulled on. Marie’s ears carried this sound to her brain, which translated it into a message to her body: sweat glands release, heart rate increase,
saliva cease. ‘Lachlan Murdoch has a tattoo.’
‘Yairs, our Lachie, on display at the tennis last night. Lachie hates the elites, mind you.’
‘You watched it? I never would have picked you for a tennis fan.’
‘I’m not really. I just love the spectacle of big sports competitions. I’m agog at what they do to their bodies. I mean, they think we’re hard core — what about
them
?’
‘It’s exciting, isn’t it. The way they push themselves to the limit.’
‘Watching the AFL is pretty much the only time I feel in tune with my fellow countrymen. I’m even learning the rules.’ Rhys grinned.
‘I’m more shallow than that. I barrack for looks or personality. It is gladiatorial, after all.’
Marie noticed her usual position on the couch now put her closer to the sun. The light moving across the floor would soon reach her yet the notion of changing seasons and imminent cold was
completely at odds with this heat. The indigenous people said that Sydney had six seasons but now it felt like neither six nor four, but one: summer. Rhys began to tattoo.
After a while Marie said, ‘Why do you think the men wear such enormous shorts these days? They don’t look very practical.’
‘That’s John Howard’s fault. That’s when it started. Prudery.’
‘But the women’s outfits just get skimpier.’
‘G-strings make good television.’
‘I could never wear g-strings. To my husband’s despair.’
‘No way.
Crack attack
. Chicks do get to wear better clothes in general though. That’s one good thing about being a woman. Can you turn this way a bit?’
Marie obliged, wincing.
‘Hurting?’
‘It’s more my indigestion.’
‘I’ll make you a mint tea when we have a break.’
Marie gazed at the wall as Rhys moved over the painful, bony part of her chest. Rhys tattooed with her head tilted, close to the working hand, her other hand holding the skin around the area
taut. She was wearing glasses today, and a rare sleeveless shirt. Sweat brimmed in the divot of her neck. Behind her, tacked to the wall next to the
KEEP STILL
sign, was a flyer advertising
something called
FAST
. The letters were in slanted script zooming over a naked man on a trapeze. He had a cute little cartoon face and from his genitals cartoon fluids spurted. An array of
names that sounded like circus performers spilt beneath, and
Nonstop Shows!
Marie wondered about these tantalising flyers and the world they contained. How you could be living right next to
something and never see inside it. The cellular structure of society, like a hive, cheek by jowl the wealthy lawyer, the tattoo artist, the housing-commission Aborigine.
‘The thing that gets me about this egalitarian thing,’ said Rhys, ‘is how much it’s about sameness. Like we’re all earning the same wage and living the same life in
the same place in the same skin. Bollocks to that.’
Bollocks
, thought Marie. One of Mel’s words. The constant seepage between hive cells. And how far away — unreachable — some were from others.
The third hour was upon them and Marie was detaching. Through the windows on warm currents of air came the drilling of cicadas. It was Sunday and the whole suburb was quiet, the singing from the
Greek Orthodox mass up the road mingling with Cleveland Street traffic. Travis was with his father. Every time Marie thought of Travis, she thought of Nell. She missed her granddaughter with a
visceral ache. She knew Rhys worked on Sundays for the extra money. Marie, on the other hand, saved money as parking in all the surrounding streets was free. Often she had to factor a parking
ticket into the cost of a tattoo but on Sundays she drifted into a quieter peace. From Rhys’s boom box came washes of sound and strange voices muttering, a slow undulation pulsing beneath.
Watching her blood rise from the lines on her chest, Marie considered the almost identical lifeblood of plants and animals. She’d read that a molecule of chlorophyll contained thirty-six
atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and carbon arrayed around an atom of magnesium; while a molecule of haemoglobin contained exactly the same except that at the centre was an atom of iron.
She considered herself now, the white skin everywhere broken and coloured. Awareness of difference had come to her, and its corollary, awareness of judgement. She took measures in public because
of this, and with the right dress code could maintain her previous position. And that was the thing as well: to recognise what she had taken for granted: a
position
. To recognise its
ebb.
At dusk she emerged from the cocoon of Rhys’s room. Downstairs was alive with voices. Rob came out to reception. ‘Just printing flyers.’
Rhys passed one to Marie. It was for
FAST
. ‘It’s a night that Stew and some poofs run. It’s a boys’ striptease.’
‘Girls this time too,’ said Rob.
‘It’s fun. You should come, Marie.’ Rhys’s eyes twinkled with mischief, equal parts invitation and challenge. ‘They’ve found a warehouse, which is like a
miracle
.’