Authors: Fiona McGregor
All the memories were equidistant, and she was alone on another planet.
It took three days for her to produce a stool sample. In her recalcitrant belly a layer of hot rock burnt away her appetite and stilled her bowels. Her next appointment with Rhys approached and
still she couldn’t shit. She dutifully marked properties in Wednesday’s paper, but felt too bad to go on inspections with Rob. By now she had become obsessed with her bowels, this
Lutheran curse, the devil’s work, each day she hoped for the blessing of evacuation. Impossible to concentrate on anything else as her belly shrivelled around its mysterious agony. Oh, for
that most private of ecstasies, a big easy shit. To eat, drink, shit and sleep, all those daily pleasures she had taken for granted. Until it finally emerged in a long, painful release. Marie was
elated.
The next day she arrived at the studio smiling. There was a small crowd at the counter being managed by Mel. Marie went straight up the stairs.
‘My cousin had a twisted bowel thing,’ said Rhys.
‘How does that manifest?’
‘She got rushed to hospital. She nearly died. It was scar tissue from a fucked IUD in the ’80s.’
‘My god. I had an IUD.’ Marie thought of her mother. Hysterectomy. Oh no.
‘I didn’t mean to freak you out. I mean it’s really good you’re getting checked out.’
‘My IUD. Wouldn’t that be just typical. To be punished for having contraception.’
‘Bless you, Marie.’
‘I’m sick of these tests. I was supposed to go house hunting with Rob on Wednesday.’
‘That’ll keep.’
‘I’ve left it all so late.’
‘Look. My cousin was fine. She had surgery and it was all sorted.’
Rhys bent over Marie’s arm and the sunlight shone on the dull roots of her hair. Marie was dismayed by grey hair on Rhys, her ageless shaman. ‘I hate getting old,’ she
snapped.
She wondered about the final barrier of dermis against which the ink drilled to a rest, the eternal stain filtering its picture through millions of renewing cells. She considered herself from
the inside: tongues of fire, wings of a moth, the flower-studded vines weaving them together. And all the spaces of bare skin between like chinks of sky. She had read an account of a woman who had
been fully tattooed in a matter of weeks, her husband working as fast as possible to make money from his wife in the sideshow. One hundred years later, Marie was possessed by a similar sense of
urgency for different reasons. She was afraid of what the pain inside could mean. Rhys worked until dark to finish the passionflowers, one just inside her left forearm, on her upper right, the
third on her chest, the vine curling and winding between. The flowers were maroon, purple and orange, with the clarity of botanical drawings. Marie left the studio feeling closer to completion.
The days went by in a barrage of tests.
Sludge of barium, white hospital walls, IV’d tranquilliser. They X-rayed her oesophagus, her stomach in two parts. A gastroscope was inserted down her throat, the tube worming deep into
her gullet. They told her to fast, to strip and put on a gown. They laid her on a table then slid her into a tunnel, nothing at all in that total enclosure but machine sounds and pounding fear.
They opened her veins and took her blood, repeatedly. Ultrasounds, endoscopies, the swift sadistic punch of biopsy needles. They anaesthetised her and cut incisions in her belly through which they
inserted a microscopic camera. Bewildered, Marie surrendered her body to each invasion. It was a battleground and she a mere spectator. Coming to after the laparoscopy with the murmur of
doctors’ voices overhead, men she would have dined with not three years ago as the wife of Ross King. Gingerly they lifted her gown to examine her dressings, their eyes like cockroaches
scuttling over the fresco of tattoos.
Clark threw himself into the ocean and swam along the rip to the sandbank. He dragged his thighs through the water then stopped to watch the waves. It was early morning and the
sky was still pink. Behind him, office workers were huffing across the sand with their personal trainers. Sleek bodies in new sports clothes with heart-rate monitors jogged along Queen Elizabeth
Drive. To his right, surfers perched among the waves like gulls. He always thought of them as birds, bobbing on the water, then the sudden take-off. Soon they would become black crows, when the sea
turned cold and wetsuits were donned and his favourite season in Bondi began.
His mother was having another biopsy this morning. She had looked so good the day of the auction, who would have thought. He remembered the flames, how the skin rose stridently with colour, and
how the compact nature of her body had surprised him. Clark had never desired a woman over forty until Sylvia, but Sylvia looked younger and was in the same generation as him, so she didn’t
count. The fact that Clark was at university with adults young enough to be his children was impossible to ignore. There were millions of people this age all over the world now. It seemed like only
yesterday that he had noticed his first white pubic hair: this morning he had discovered a whole clump. Over forty was old — he would soon be old; his lover was already — all that
awaited him was more white pubes, more younger people, more possibility of his own terminal illness. His mother’s age, on the other hand, used to be reassuring: he had always taken comfort
from the fact that her body moved in another orbit, purged by maternity of any endemic sensuality. Yet that day he had seen a woman in her, defiant and strong. The older he got, the closer in age
to him she seemed.
A wave approached and Clark began to swim but missed the peak and churned along unsatisfyingly for a few metres. By the time he regained the sandbank, the sun was another millimetre higher,
shearing straight across the Pacific into his eyes. A wave came and he pushed off hard, charging to shore in a mane of foam.
In Icebergs sauna he soaked up the gossip. Somebody had died in the surf on the weekend. A South African woman mistakenly swimming at the south end had received a head injury from a board and
was dead by the time they pulled her to shore. Clark didn’t believe them at first, but the quiet precision of the discussion convinced him. He didn’t know who the men talking were, only
that they were in the sauna every time he came here. His age, brown and fit, they sprawled across the wooden benches with the comfort of natives. They would be here in forty years’ time,
replenishing the ranks of the old lizards who swam and sunbaked at the pool all year round. Clark increasingly emulated them. After living in Bondi for a year, he wanted the same committed future,
to settle and grow this place in his bones. A pale slouched man entered as he left, greeting everybody eagerly. Something about him unnerved Clark. Blasting himself in the showers, it came to Clark
that the man was his döppelganger and a longstanding fear of not being cool enough to hang with the big boys surfaced. God, he was a child today. He walked home haunted by the dead woman and
the fact that her story had not been publicised. How stupid to assume information of any calamity was available with the flick of a switch or for a few coins at the newsagent’s.
So many deaths you didn’t read about. So many murders. Clark wasn’t looking forward to today’s research. He had ransacked every early colonial painting he could find, but his
mind remained closed. Each day it became clearer that he didn’t feel confident with the material till photography, as though he needed the imagery to be as close to real life as possible.
His thesis was at its best in the early mornings, in that liminal space between sleeping and waking when it filled his head as a glorious tome. But when Clark came to the library he drifted.
Words rose up like battalions and filled the horizon, bearing down upon him. He ended up back at his table by the window with the old comforts of Max Dupain or inner-city crime-scene photos.
Nineteen-fifties Avalon, reminding him of his mother. The brothel on Palmer Street. The Tradesman’s Arms — now East Village where he was going to meet Sylvia at six o’clock
— back in the days when crims and hookers drank there. The photo of Sylvia in his phone. And once he began to think about Sylvia, he couldn’t stop. He ended up thinking about her all
day long.
He got to East Village early, ordered a schooner and sat at the window looking onto Palmer Street. He knew there was something wrong by the tone of Sylvia’s text messages
this week. He also knew that she loved him, which made him feel invulnerable. If they loved each other, anything was possible. He hoped that something was wrong in her marriage. He pictured her
troubled face, kissing her tears, his little flat her succour, and a feeling of contentment flooded his body.
‘Hallo, stranger.’ Sylvia sat down beside him, schooner in hand. She pulled her stool closer so their thighs touched. He could smell her hair.
‘I didn’t see you come in.’
‘I snuck up on you.’
‘How are you?’
‘Wiped out. This always happens to me at the beginning of first semester. I can’t believe the workload, though it hasn’t changed. What about you? How was the
library?’
‘Great! I spent the whole day thinking about you.’
Their hands coiled around one another like mating snakes as they drank their beer, smirking stupidly, watching Darlinghurst roll from day to night.
‘Franco’s beginning to suspect something.’
‘Really? How do you know?’
‘Text messages at midnight.’
‘Don’t you have your phone on silent?’
‘I forgot. I switched it on when we came out of the movies and two came through straightaway.’
‘Sorry,’ said Clark, not feeling it in the slightest. What he really wanted was to shout his love for her at the top of his voice and send a thousand text messages at once.
Ping
ping ping ping!
‘We have to put the brakes on.’
Clark nodded soberly. ‘My head understands, my heart howls, but’ — he stared at her — ‘my dick didn’t hear that at all.’
‘That just went straight to my cunt,’ she said matter-of-factly, staring back at him.
‘What?’ he said, just to hear her say it again.
‘You saying “my dick”.’
His excitement grew at the feeling of all the people in the room behind them, the idea of themselves as spectacle, their hidden engorged genitals. ‘Maybe we should lock them in the toilets
together and let them sort it out. We can wait for them here. Give ’em a lift home.’
‘Bugger that. They can walk.’
‘Home together.’
‘You know that’s not possible, Clark.’
‘It is at my place.’
‘Okay then. I get to sleep earlier without my cunt anyway.’
‘I don’t.’
Sylvia laughed into her beer then put it down. ‘
Clark
. I’m serious. We have to put the brakes on. I can hardly work. I’m really stressed.’
Clark looked at his lap, prickling with insecurity. ‘I hate having to talk about this in public.’
‘I don’t trust myself when I’m in private with you.’
‘Are you dumping me?’
‘I’m in love with you. But I’m also married.’
The pub was filling with suits. The music was getting louder. Two men came and sat beside Clark.
‘Right,’ Sylvia said determinedly. ‘Let’s talk about work. Tell me about your thesis. The photos.’
‘Not just photos. It’s visual representation. Images.’ Clark felt irritated: he had told her this more than once. ‘But it might have to change.’ The scent of male
cologne was invading his nostrils. It was the man next to him, spreading his elbows, laughing loudly. Clark longed to smell Sylvia’s hair again.
‘You mean you might have to imagine without visual prompts?’
‘My imagination’s working overtime at the moment, believe me.’
‘Cla-ark.’
‘Okay, okay. The problem is that my relationship with the early paintings is changing. I’m feeling mistrustful towards them. You know that I’m eschewing the notion of
authenticity, cos it’s all about conjecture, myth making, the politics of representation. But I keep favouring photography and the twentieth century. It’s like a drug, drawing me
back.’
‘Why do you think that is?’
‘Crime-scene photography isn’t trying to tell a story. The ego of the image maker let alone cultural presumptions are absent so I can have a more unmediated relationship with the
image. I don’t have to interrogate the motivations of an artist. The photos are like prose, George Orwell’s pane of glass.’
Sylvia nodded, watching him, and he remembered their first drink together, how avidly she had listened to him and how consciously he had used his brain to seduce her. Janice had hated
intellectual conversation. Sylvia loved it. Her husband was some kind of businessman. Probably never picked up a book in his life. An intellectually starved relationship. Clark decided that second
that he wouldn’t let her go. He would use anything and everything in his power to keep her. He heard the man next to him say: ...
fucked a guy in one of those apartments
...
Sylvia said, ‘But there’s always a motivation behind an image, even if it’s prosaic. And there’s no such thing as no cultural presumptions.’
‘Yee-aahh, maybe.’
‘And wouldn’t it be more interesting for you to write about things that are slippery rather than straightforward? Isn’t a thesis supposed to change as it goes along, like a
discovery?’
‘It’s not just that. I’ve probably seen more crime-scene photos of this street alone than all of the north shore put together. The available material just doesn’t
correlate to what I wanted to write about.’
The man next to Clark was guffawing loudly. Clark wanted to punch him. He remembered the painting of Governor Phillip speared in Manly Cove and felt excited. The heavens opened. Today’s
decision that pre-photographic images were impenetrable was a cop-out.
‘What
did
you want to write about?’
‘Crime and misdemeanour on the north shore, as far back as possible.’ Payback, he thought.
‘What constitutes crime?’
Clark’s mouth opened and shut. He took a swig of beer then turned to marvel at Sylvia. ‘I actually don’t know.’
Sylvia put her arm around him. ‘I think it’s a fantastic idea. The more ambiguity the better.’