Indelible Ink (30 page)

‘Who?’

‘She’s called Sylvia.’

Nell made a face and hunched her head into her shoulders. ‘Daddy, I’m
hot.
’

‘I know, Nellie. It’s
for-ty-five-de-grees
out there, and we’re going as fast as we can to a big air-conditioned building where you’ll see dinosaurs and
snakes.’

Nell made a whimpering sound.

‘You’re being
such
a good girl. We’re nearly there.’

He found a park in Liverpool Street, locked the car and took his daughter’s hand. They walked around the corner past the old police headquarters, hugging the thin strip of shade, Nell
jerking his arm. He was excited about introducing his lover to his child: a circle was being joined.

In the deep cool mouth of the museum foyer, they stood looking up at a huge suspended skeleton. The arrangement had been to meet Sylvia here or, if she hadn’t arrived, in the reptile
gallery. But in she came, right on time, and walked over to where Clark stood with Nell beneath the vast mobile of bones. Sylvia’s face was livid, her shirt clung to her back and her hair
hung limp. She had told Clark the last time they met that she had been a state swimmer and he now thought of water every time he thought of her body, her long limbs streaming past in a wake. He
shivered with the sensation of his sweat cooling, turning his shirt cold and wet against his back.

‘You believe this weather?’ Sylvia said.

‘Pretty freaky.’

Clark introduced Sylvia to his daughter. Nell looked her up and down, then pointed to the skeleton and announced, ‘I’ve got dinosaurs.’

‘Have you?’

‘Yep. Tyrannosaurus.’

‘This is a whale skeleton,’ said Sylvia, bending over. ‘So you might see one of these alive one day. Can you imagine?’

Nell stared at Sylvia sceptically, in case there was a joke in the air. She looked at the skeleton, then at Sylvia again and twitched her mouth as though resisting a smile. Clark took this as a
good sign.

They moved off through the rooms. The place seemed more vibrant than Clark had remembered. After several years working down the road, he found the Australian Museum had crumpled into a corner of
his mind like a relative in her dotage whose sour, faded clothes belied her rich past. He was an irrevocable humanist and had always preferred the smaller sociological museums to this edifice of
nature. But today it was as though he had caught the old woman by surprise and all her secret cabinets were open, her treasures revealed.

He followed Nell and Sylvia down the ramp. He was surprised by the position of the mole on Sylvia’s clavicle, which only his fingers had previously seen. He had thought it was lower, near
the armpit. Nell had taken Sylvia’s hand and was peppering her with questions, each of which Sylvia answered with perfect lozenges of information.

She glanced back at Clark. ‘I used to want to be a marine biologist, you know.’

‘Really? And why didn’t you?’

‘I was crap at science. It was a romantic idea, really. By the end of high school I realised my desire was more about the ocean and swimming and collecting things on the beach than serious
scientific study.’ She made a little face. ‘David Attenborough was my pin-up boy.’

Nell said, ‘I wanna go and look at the snakes.’

‘That’s exactly where we’re going, darling.’

‘I’m not scared of snakes.’

‘What about you?’ Sylvia asked him.

‘I know you’re not … What?’

‘What did you want to do? Did you always want to be a historian?’

‘I’m not a real historian. More an amateur riding on the coattails of Cultural Studies. First I wanted to be a film-maker, until I was at uni and realised how much film depended on
money. I think in retrospect it was just about looking. Watching. That’s why I’ve chosen this image-based concept for my thesis. I’m from the television generation.’ He
grinned. ‘I’m a natural perv.’

Sylvia touched his nose with the tip of her finger. His heart pounded. ‘You’re sunburnt,’ she said.

Nell laughed and prodded Sylvia. ‘We went to the beach yesterday.’

‘We went boogie-boarding, didn’t we, Nell?’

Nell launched into a garbled description of their day at the beach, and Sylvia listened attentively. This was their first proper daylight meeting, and Clark was trying to look at all of her
without either her or Nell noticing. Sylvia was up till now a series of angles, like a cubist painting. The prism of cheekbone beside him at the seminar, pale blue forehead in the car by
Blackwattle Bay. The shallow yet well-defined cleavage he had burrowed into that night and again a week later, in his car at the end of Victoria Street, the first time they fucked.

Nell stopped before one of the cabinets. Clark pressed a button and the light hit Nell’s and Sylvia’s faces. Inside the cabinet were stick insects, indistinguishable from the sticks
on which they were posed. Sylvia pointed them out to Nell, sent Clark a look, and he saw it again, the fragile moue, an entreaty of some sort, or a gift. A tender, flushed expression, like the
inside of a shell. He saw also that her eyes were green, and scarred with amber flecks like shrapnel.

They followed Nell, turning on the cabinet lights as they went, talking quietly.

‘Franco’s flight gets in about nine.’

‘Well, we’re going to have an early pizza back in Bondi. Why don’t you come?’

‘No, no. She’s going home tonight, isn’t she?’

‘Swim this heat off. A dusk swim. Beautiful.’

‘You guys need to have your last evening together.’

‘Look at her,’ Clark whispered. ‘She
loves
you.
Come.
Please.’

Sylvia regarded him solemnly, saying nothing.

They were passing through the children’s activity room. Clark was hoping his daughter would find something to hold her attention for a while so he could sit down with Sylvia and just be.
But Nell was in a typically purposeful, garrulous mood, aware of her role as leader of the day’s expedition. She fell onto a framed butterfly and clutched at the glass. ‘Oh, darling,
darling,
darling.
’ It was a magnificent, bright purple specimen, large as Nell’s hand, and Clark found himself thinking how well it lent itself to design, how decorative and
two-dimensional a creature it was, perfect for a tattoo for example, unlike, say, a tiger or a horse. He thought all of this naturally, without panic or the smallest note of resentment towards his
mother, just a matter-of-fact aesthetic appraisal that washed calmly through him. He followed Nell out of the room.

Sylvia was right behind him. Her hand brushed his arse. ‘Okay. I will.’ Then, as though released from a bond, she wandered around the next room on her own.

In the snake gallery, the exhibits looked old and neglected. The dowager retreating into her frowsy shawl. An Asian man in brown clothes peered into the taipan cabinet. His wife sat on one of
the benches reading a sheaf of information through glasses with pale pink frames.

‘DNA,’ Clark whispered to Sylvia.

‘What?’

‘I look at these old stuffed snakes, and wonder, if they go extinct, how on earth they could bring one back to life by taking DNA from those mouldy old scales. That’s what
they’re claiming they’ll try and do with the thylacine.’

‘Apparently our ancestry going back millennia can be read in our DNA. And the length of one person’s DNA goes to the moon and back something like eight times.’

‘What, the DNA they find in a drop of saliva?’

‘I don’t know actually …’

‘My brother told me that Australia has the fastest rate of species extinction in the world.’

‘Gold medals to us.’

‘Which snake can kill you, Dad?’ Nell asked.

‘One taipan contains enough poison to kill a thousand men. That’s what it says here.’

Clark felt as though he were in an ancient tomb, dazzling, decrepit, sombre as time. All this death but it didn’t touch him. Outside, the sun was killing half the city’s plants; the
rivers were drying up; the whole world was dying. His beloved childhood house was about to be sold, but Clark was unfazed. The taipan could have burst from its cabinet and sunk its fangs into the
Asian tourist, and Clark would have remained calm, all-powerful.

Sylvia went to find the toilet and Nell marched out of the gallery through a different door. They found themselves at Kids’ Island, a fenced-in playground jammed with luridly coloured
apparatus, toys and dress-ups. Every single parent and child that had come to the museum had ended up in here. The noise was deafening, an unbroken communal screech, like feeding lorikeets. Clark
unlatched the gate and entered with Nell. He stood against the wall near a woman in a dark green dress with fatty shoulders. She was saying enthusiastically, ‘Yes, yes, it’s a very safe
environment, it’s very cut off,’ to somebody that Clark couldn’t see. And he watched Nell playing on the slippery dip, happy in the cacophony like a man in a cloud of
confetti.

Nell shot out of the slippery dip’s mouth and tramped over. ‘Where’s Sylvia?’

‘I don’t know. Do you want me to go and find her?’

‘Yeh.’

He turned to the dark green dress. ‘Would you mind watching my daughter for a minute? My partner seems to have gone missing.’

She looked at him suspiciously. ‘I’ll only be here another ten minutes.’

‘That’s fine. Thanks.’

Nell dived into the tunnel below the slippery dip. A boy was waving a seagull glove around. ‘I’m gonna peck you!’ he declared.

Nell found a snake and rammed it on her hand. She poked it in the boy’s face. ‘Well, I’m gonna shoot you with venom! In the
eye
.’

Clark left the playground, latching the gate behind him.
My partner
. He contemplated the possibility that he wouldn’t see Sylvia again and began to panic. He hadn’t seen her
for about fifteen minutes. How could she have got lost? The toilets were right here. But maybe she went into different ones. And maybe she had gone, freaked out. He was more and more conscious of
how illicit her time with him was. He wandered around in circles in front of the toilets then the door opened and Sylvia was standing before him, smiling. They stood in the alcove talking
quietly.

‘Where’s Nell?’

‘Playing. Where were you?’

‘Here.’

‘I got really worried. Nell was asking after you.’

‘How sweet.’

Clark glanced around, stepped forward and put his arms around her. ‘She sent me to find you,’ he whispered into Sylvia’s hair, inhaling her smell. Her eyelashes flicked against
his forehead like little insects. She took his head in her hands and began to kiss him. He was like a teenager with her, instantly hard. ‘Is there anyone in there?’ He nodded to the
toilet door.

‘No.’

Sylvia led him in. Clark recalled a gay party he had gone to years earlier with Leon. The first time he had taken ecstasy and the only time he had gone out with his brother. He had never
experienced anything like it. The toilets were a hive of activity, a whole world unto themselves. Prowling predatory men outside the men’s, stink of piss, treacherously wet floors, out-of-it
people. How afraid he had been, and fascinated. He had fled the men’s then followed a couple of guys with a reassuringly non-sexual air into the women’s. Every cubicle had two or more
people in it; another party was going on in here, as unremittingly salacious as the men’s, yet light-hearted. He waited for ages then was finally in a cubicle, surrounded by sounds of
snorting, giggling, groaning, shuffling. The toilet was blocked but he didn’t care because adjacent he could hear two women having sex. He lifted the seat and unzipped but was so distracted
by the sound of them that he couldn’t piss.

Sylvia took him up the end to the disabled cubicle and the moment they had latched the door, somebody entered.

‘Phew!’ Clark whispered.

Sylvia grabbed his belt and pulled him over to the wall, whispering insinuatingly, ‘What about your daughter?’

‘She’s fine.’

‘Are you
sure
?’

He pressed up against her. Serenely he watched a clip of the dark green dress taking his daughter by the hand and leading her outside to where a male accomplice awaited.
Take her.
The
next clip showed Sylvia kissing a woman, their breasts pressed together. There was the sound of a toilet flushing, running water. He sucked the laughter out of Sylvia’s tongue. He imagined
her DNA coursing down his digestive tract and a million little Sylvias hatching in his gullet. He undid their zippers and pushed between her thighs and she slid her hands down the back of his
jeans, clutching his arse, kissing him deeply.

Forty-six degrees. Each day hotter than the one before, the heat moving stealthily into every corner of the house. Going into the pantry, days after the cool change, and
finding pockets of hot air trapped like bad memories on the top shelf. No refuge, no respite. Marie lived in the rumpus room with the television. She watched the evening news.
I love God
,
said the newly elected Christian independent,
and I love my family.
The dams had dropped to thirty percent. Skeletons of livestock littered dry watercourses. In her muggy upstairs room,
Marie stretched out naked, her body melting against every surface it touched.

Half her herb garden died in the heatwave. On the hottest day, the lavender bushes were scorched. She hadn’t gone outside till six-thirty and was covered knees to head, still her calves
burnt. Even standing on the deck in the shade the very hair on her arms had seemed to singe. What visitation was this, so close to the auction? None of the buyers showed much interest in the garden
but this blitzed expanse would surely shear thousands off the price. Like a storm, the event approached her with its own momentum.

She spent the late hours of the day pruning, then washed off the dust with a swim. The lawns of the reserve crunched beneath her feet like toast. The news said the heatwave death toll was three,
all elderly people in the outer suburbs. But the death toll of plants must have been in the millions.

David was wearing a navy jacket and the same mild, spicy cologne. He had a tan and his hair was clippered so short that his bald patch was imperceptible. He looked younger and
more masculine. ‘What a lovely balmy Sydney night,’ he said as they walked into the building. ‘And you look ravishing.’