Authors: Fiona McGregor
Neil was in a Motorhead t-shirt, writing something into a ledger with a chewed biro. He looked up. ‘My first customer of the day!’
She chose an ankleband of jasmine and signed the same piece of paper she vaguely remembered signing the night before.
‘I like your style, lady,’ Neil said to her in the back room.
Marie was flattered and remotely perturbed. ‘Really?’
‘Yair, it’s like the old days. Punters used to come in ’n’ say
I’ll have that
. I’d get ’em sleeved up in an hour. Now it’s all this
consult, consult. They’ve gotta throw runes or sit in lotus position for three days before they can even decide what they’re gonna get! I’ve gotta get someone to work reception
full-time,’ he whined with his back to her, preparing needles. ‘I can’t handle it! I used to smoke marijuana years ago and I think it still hasn’t worn off! All this
astrology shiatsu bullshit.’
Marie didn’t know what to reply. ‘No,’ she said, placatingly.
She removed her sandal and settled on the couch. It was cool and quiet in the shop. No music played. Sporadic Sunday traffic drifted past. How still these moments where everything changes,
hollow yet pregnant, like the eye of a storm.
Neil began to swab her ankle. ‘You got a garden?’
‘I do, actually. A big one.’
‘With roses?’
‘No. I tried them but they didn’t take.’
‘Nah,’ he assented. ‘Pissy English flowers, aren’t they.’ He wrapped the transfer around her left ankle and peered at it through his bifocals.
‘I have a lot of natives, and a subtropical section along the bottom.’
‘That must be a bit of trouble these days, eh,’ he said rhetorically.
He switched on the iron, took her foot in his hand, and began to tattoo. How drunk had she been the night before? This wasn’t the sensation she had remembered, not this smarting that rang
through her leg to her heart like an alarm. Her breakfast bloody mary wasn’t sufficient lubrication for the ordeal. Her heart rattled her ribcage like a lunatic prisoner. What am I doing? Why
did
I get a rose? Christ, I can’t stand this.
‘Fucken politicians,’ Neil burst out. ‘You know they run their limousines all night while they eat in their swanky restaurants? I saw this thing on TV? All these limos lined up
outside this restaurant with the engines running, polluting the fucken atmosphere for, you know,
hours
just so the cars are warm enough to drive the poor pollies home in.’
She had seen the report he was talking about. She had been drunk, shouting at the television. ‘Yes,’ she gasped, ‘I think it’s wrong.’
‘And we’re supposed to feel guilty about going on joy rides?’ his reedy voice complained. ‘I voted for him the first time around, y’know. Thought he might be the
change we needed.’
He let go of her foot and Marie exhaled. ‘I did too.’
‘They’re all the fucken same. It’s all downhill.’
Neil looked at her in a comradely fashion, turned her foot, then the pain clawed in deeper. She clenched her eyes then forced them open and was soothed by the dexterity and steadiness of his
hand. ‘You’re bleeding a lot. Y’been drinking?’
Marie said nothing.
‘Not a good idea. Turn over?’
Through the ink, more blood welled around Marie’s ankle and a hot charge ran through her, an overwhelming sense of herself as flesh and blood, here and now, living and affirmed. To be able
to stand and speak and walk away half an hour later felt like a victory. She was flooded with energy.
How could she go home now? On such a sunny day, in an unfamiliar neighbourhood with its buildings crowded together, its gutters of colonial sandstone. The smell of jasmine hit her as she turned
the corner. She smiled at an approaching couple, the girl looking back at the ageing woman getting into a pale blue Saab.
The streets came alive as she drove up Palmer past the old church. The terraces with their colourful façades, the businesswoman in her black skirt suit, the bodybuilder straining to bend
his muscle-puffed arm to answer his mobile phone. Marie felt like celebrating. She saw a café, parked and went inside.
Did they know? Could they see? ‘I’ll have a ham and cheese baguette, please,’ she said to the waiter as though nothing had happened. ‘And a glass of the Lehmann’s
Cab Sav.’ She longed to rest her swaddled ankle on the chair opposite. She ate with appetite and ordered another two glasses of wine in quick succession. Opposite, a well-dressed man was
reading the
Herald
. On the front page was the familiar image of a torture victim, naked, bound and blindfolded. The man smiled at her then went back to his reading. So many people out there
getting away with murder, so many bodies, so many crimes. And this, now, in her own smug heart, this pounding lust for taboo and severance, this blood seduction. Like coming home after a tryst in
Quakers Hat Bay, serving dinner to her family, slick with lies and another man’s sperm. This bliss, this murder.
The waiter placed the bill on her table, and she saw a Sacred Heart tattooed on the inside of his forearm. Thorns encircled the organ, a drop of blood spilt down his wrist, all of it nestled in
a bed of flames. So the bells had rung, the bets been laid, and she made her way back into the ring.
Nosing down the alley behind the parlour, sun in her eyes, she made contact with a Jeep. She slowed but couldn’t disconnect. She shrieked as metal gouged metal, and in the rear-view mirror
saw a man emerge from a building and run shouting towards her. She put her foot to the floor and zoomed around the corner, laughing maniacally. Four blocks away, she found a space where she could
park, the wrecked side of her car flush to a wall. Making sure the coast was clear, she walked down to William Street. She wished she could see the man in his damaged Jeep.
When she arrived at the parlour, the tattooist was busy with a client. Marie could see a section of fat hairy back reclining on the couch, then Neil came out and eyed her with bemused wariness.
She began to take money out of her wallet. ‘I want another one on my right ankle.’
‘Whoa.’
Marie looked at him in surprise. ‘I feel unbalanced.’
‘Don’t we all. It’s gonna be uncomfortable having both ankles done on the same day.’
She stood her ground with the arrogance of the initiate, and a woman who had the money to buy. ‘I’ll be fine.’
Through the door, she could see the owner of the back. He had turned, showing a chest blurred with tattoos, the afternoon’s work a raw patch on his forearm. Ginger hair surged up his torso
to a greying bush around his face. He was grinning at her. Disgusting man.
‘You’ll have to wait,’ Neil said.
‘How long?’
‘Couple of hours.’
‘I’ll wait.’
‘Give you time to sober up, think about the design you want.’ He turned in the doorway on his way back out. ‘It’s for life, y’know.’
Offended, Marie sat down with some portfolios. Was she that noticeably drunk? She plonked her handbag on the seat beside her, ate a Rennie then got out her compact. Hard to see herself in this
way, in pieces, in the glare, held at arm’s length. She didn’t look that bad, surely. The glitter in her eyes more mood than alcohol; the usual flushed cheeks, but that could have been
sun, or menopause. In any case, there must have been millions of people in the world as drunk as her right now, let alone drunker, she thought defiantly, as she went over to the water cooler and
poured herself a cup. So what’s the problem? Show me the straight line, officer. I’ll walk it.
Night fell on the street outside and, as the alcohol receded, Marie’s desire remained white and certain as bone. She chose lilies for her right ankle and settled in for the wait. Minute by
minute, the plateau of sobriety extended around her. She began to submit. There was something exhilarating about this exposure; nothing between you and experience, neither barrier nor
augmentation.
Every morning a counterpoint of drilling was Marie’s breakfast soundtrack. The jackhammer gouging the Hendersons’ garden began just before eight a.m. On the other
side of the cove a house was being renovated, and each time the jackhammer next door paused, power tools responded across the water in soprano notes.
On Sundays the cove was quiet but Marie had still woken early. She felt shackled, both legs swollen up to the calves as though they had been split open at the knee and lava had been poured in,
silting up the ankles. For a while she lay in the throb of her hangover, listening to Mopoke howl at the bottom of the stairs. Eventually she got up and comforted the cat. She showered then dried
herself before the mirror, the anklebands glaring up at her. She tiptoed down to the kitchen, across the broken glass of her life. Chastened, she stayed inside for two days, bathing and anointing
her wounds.
On the third day she ventured out to meet the man from the nursery. As Jared piled bags outside the laundry, the rich scent of rot filled the air. Beneath his Western Union baseball cap, his
weathered face belied the perfect, kinetic sculpture of flesh and cloth that was his body in its faded King Gees. He carried the last bag high against his chest, leaving Marie with nothing but the
bottom half of his body to look at: the curve of haunch, the bulge between his thighs. Jared straightened.
‘Can I get you anything?’
‘I’m right, thanks.’
She spoke to Jared over next door’s jackhammer, and Jared said to nobody in particular, ‘Ah, the leafy harbourside suburbs.’ He had a tattoo of the Southern Cross on his left
arm.
Marie couldn’t wait to get into the bags of blood and bone to feed her hungry garden. First she had to greet the men from the homewares shop, who delivered the furniture later that
afternoon. The lounge suite seemed so big and cold, like icebergs cruising into position. She stood on the edge of the living room, directing them. The lamp that she had smashed and Susan then
bought had survived well: they had bent the bottom light back almost to its original shape. Marie kept her old couch facing the view. Looking at the new one, she felt nothing. The drug had left her
body.
At the end of the week she began composting and mulching. She was singing to herself outside the laundry when she realised Rupert Henderson’s face was at the first-floor window opposite.
With its receding chin, narrow jaw and eyes so hooded the lids drooped over the lashes with reptilian lassitude, this face always seemed to be falling, giving Rupert an air of disappointment or
disapproval. He was sixty-four and sat on three boards including the biggest insurance company in the country. He had sold his plastic drink-bottle manufacturing business two years ago for an
enormous profit, played golf, owned a house in the south of France, and was an American Civil War buff. All of this Marie knew from an article in the
Herald.
From a pole on the top balcony
flew an Australian flag. She and Rupert didn’t cross paths often, the Henderson house exuding an officious unoccupied air most of the time. Marie waved at the face, which ducked out of sight.
Then the window opened.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ Rupert said down to her. Amidst the portrait of gravity, his mouth was small and clearly defined, like a bottle opener. ‘There’s a very strong
smell coming from your place. I think something might have died.’
‘It’s just compost and mulch, for the garden. See?’
‘It’s
very
strong. The smell’s gone through our whole house.’
The jackhammer had stopped and a conveyer belt on the far side of the Hendersons’ garden was carting disgorged earth and honeycomb sandstone to a skip on the street. Marie could hear this,
not see it, since Rupert had built a tall fence immediately on moving in. Four months later, its sharp pine smell was beginning to fade. There was a wife, Celia, but she was out most of the time,
busy with charity work. Marie used this as the excuse for her habit of attributing all features of the Henderson house to Rupert.
Across the cove, power tools were starting up again.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Marie said over the insect whine.
‘I just thought I should let you know. It’s even infiltrated the air-conditioning.’
‘It’ll be gone from here in the next day or two.’
‘And you have nests in your guttering. We can see them from our balcony.’
‘Thanks for letting me know.’
Marie smiled up at her neighbour, whose face from below foreshortened to triumph, but inside she felt furious. Getting this amount of compost and mulch onto the garden in two days would kill
her. Bloody Rupert with his swimming pool and flag and mocking little mouth. She missed Pat Hammet and the old house and garden, the sharing of cuttings, the neighbourly updates on the beach and
bush. Rupert in his fortress had no idea what was out there, which was the whole point, she bitterly supposed. The environment wasn’t a place of participation and exchange for these new
neighbours with their fleets of cars and air-conditioned cellars and home theatres; it was a picture safely framed, a display resolutely locked in its box
.
The jackhammer began again, its
vibrations coming through the earth into her ankles, reminding her of the weekend’s drunken escapade.
Clouds had come over, grey and close; the harbour lay like syrup below. Marie took an old tomato stake and a jar of water crystals into the top garden. She moved in rows, punching holes into the
earth, dropping crystals into them. Rupert thought she was just a stupid housewife, didn’t he? Well, ha, little did he know. When she reached the edge of the garden bed she could see down the
side path to the bush, filigreed by dead angophoras.
The
Encyclopedia
claimed they were less susceptible to phytophthora: this deadly fungus, which fed off stormwater outlets and the extra nutrients from north shore gardens, was supposed to
be slowed by dry weather. But it seemed to Marie that more trees were dying in front of her house than ever before.
I haven
’
t seen any scientific studies but as far I know
, Leon
had said in a recent email,
there is no way they can stop the fungus spreading.
Leon attached a link to a petition against internet censorship. Marie signed it and emailed him back:
Don
’
t you think my belt of rhapis would trap those nutrients? That
’
s what it
’
s there for.