Authors: Fiona McGregor
She hadn’t heard back. Looking past the bags of compost to the tree skeletons, she thought again of the rainwater tank that could have gone there. She thought of Jared. His tattoo. His
bulges. But what was the point in thinking so much about sex, a woman of almost sixty? She drove a stake into the ground.
And was her humus better than cement? she wondered, mixing a vodka spritzer in the kitchen after lunch, sweat dripping down her spine. Was there a scientist in the vicinity who
could tell them the pros of clean garden air as weighed against the cons of gluts pouring over garden boundaries like feasts off a Roman table, choking the bush? And hadn’t the man who had
built this house, before the Kings moved in, torn down a house as magnificent as the Hammets’? Pat had let her know that as soon as they’d arrived. Marie still had the photograph.
Burrawong, a stately, mournful Federation, two-and-a-half storeys tall with bay windows; in the middle of the garden, two cabbage tree palms like sentinels. It had been in the same family for three
generations. Marie had been crestfallen, felt implicated in its loss. She had fallen in love with its replacement the minute she had entered — the light-filled open plan, the overgrown
declivity that spilt into bushland. But in Pat Hammet’s living room thirty years ago, looking at Burrawong with its rectitude and tradition, she had felt like her new house: callow,
intrusive, unwarrantable.
When Marie had signed the cheque for Jared, she asked him if there was any rain in the long-term forecast.
‘Nuh.’ He tilted his head back to drink from his bottle of Gatorade, Adam’s apple pumping the fluid into his body.
‘My garden’s really suffering.’
‘You think this is bad. You should see the western suburbs.’
He wiped his mouth, thanked her and left.
She slid the invoice into her receipts drawer, then checked her balance online. Slowly but surely, over the last twelve months, it had lowered. With so much of his money tied up in tax
liabilities, Ross had manoeuvred his way out of paying a decent allowance. All those things she had taken for granted — lunches with Susan, furniture, the nursery — remained on her
credit card like weeping wounds. Then there were the necessities like rates, electricity, visits to the vet, another dehumidification for the rumpus room.
There was no payment due for another week so dealing with the guttering would have to be deferred. Her overdraft would feel that cheque going to the nursery. Through the doorway she could see
the lounge suite, lounging away richly and coldly. With a jolt, she remembered her car, gouged all down the side. My god, did I black out? she thought, stunned she hadn’t remembered till now.
In order to save money, Marie had forsaken insurance this year. She went outside and composted till night fell. Sometimes this place felt like a beast, groaning to be fed and groomed. She resented
it.
Coming into the rumpus room through the garden door at dusk, Marie found the television on low. She had forgotten to turn it off again. The six o’clock news was repeating footage of the
latest bombing, and Marie could now recognise the victims as easily as neighbours. Broken, bloody bodies staggered past the camera. She stood before the carnage, hot with shame.
Her evening drinks tasted sour: she stopped at five; the following night at four. Jared drove in and out of her dreams in a cloud of exhaust. Fatima the new cleaning lady came and Marie observed
her stately grace with envy. Against the window, clusters of bogongs quivered towards the light. She lay awake in the wasteland of bed as the Hendersons’ sprinkler system trickled down the
path like a bloodletting. A cricket was trapped in her bathroom, its metallic cheep echoing past midnight. Mopoke nosed her way under the sheet and Marie clasped the cat gratefully against her
skin.
Clark had said
cunt
in front of his daughter again this morning. The phone had woken him and he had stood blearily over the answering machine, puzzled by the sound of
fluey breathing. When it rang again half an hour later, he picked it up. ‘Hallo,’ said an adenoidal female voice. ‘I’m ringing from Chevron at Bondi Junction, and
we’re offering free hearing tests —’
‘You rang me yesterday.’ Clark hung up.
He went into the kitchen to make coffee and the phone rang again. Maybe it was his mother. He picked it up. The infected breathing moved into his ear and Clark dropped the handset into the
cradle. ‘Fucken cunts,’ he snapped, turning to see Nell in the doorway holding the neighbour’s cat, a fluffy white tom called Kimba with pale blue eyes like the Living Dead.
‘Put it down, darling. Daddy’s allergic.’
Nell put the cat down on the doorstep where it crouched beneath her stroking hands. ‘Pussy, pussy, pussy,’ she crooned.
Janice would be at him. She had rung the day after Nell’s last visit to tell him grimly that Nell had said
cunt
, and to remind him that Nell was only four years old. Clark retorted
that he only got to see his daughter once a fortnight and was therefore unlikely to be the source of the word.
‘Dad,’ said Nell, as they crawled down William Street in a thick line of cars. ‘Can I get a cat?’ She lingered on the last letter to emphasise her point.
‘Sure. Ask Mum.’
‘No,’ Nell said patiently. ‘We can’t have a cat at our place cos of Roger.’
Roger was the yappy terrier who belonged to Chris, Janice’s new partner, a barrister. Clark had felt ripped off when the stories of barrister tax evasion finally left the pages of the
Herald
without having mentioned Chris Nickson once.
‘I mean at your place. Then I can play with her when I stay.’
‘Nellie, darling, your dad’s allergic to cats. Remember?’
Nell drummed her feet against the seat. ‘I want a catt. I want a
black
catt.’
‘Your dad’s an infirm old man who gets really sick around cats,’ Clark elucidated.
‘Oh, you are not.’
Clark looked at her, surprised and flattered. He was constantly amazed by her intelligence and how far ahead of her age she was
conceptually
. He didn’t believe in talking down to
children. It seemed to be paying off. The State Library was covered in scaffolding, people picking their way along its edge. Clark felt a rush of admiration for his daughter, whose fleshy neck
furled beneath her chin when she smiled, whose eyes were becoming more like Janice’s — icy, intelligent, chaste and shrewd. He could feel the folds of his stomach sweating against one
another like greasy tyres, and straightened his back. The only sort of cat Clark could bear was a dead one, with historical significance, like Trim, Matthew Flinders’, whose statue was hidden
somewhere in that scaffolding. He launched into a potted history.
Nell asked, ‘What did she look like?’
‘Trim was a he and he was black and white with a goofy face.’
‘Goo-fy?’
‘He was the first cat to go around Australia in a boat, Nell!’
Nell looked out the window, and Clark became so involved in what he was saying that before he knew it, like a little paper boat on the whirlpool of life, he was sucked into the harbour tunnel.
He hunched over the wheel, silent, bilious, trying not to swear.
Half an hour later he was walking through the light-filled house, calling his mother. He wandered down to the rumpus room with Nell, onto the terrace, and found her outside. ‘I’m
applying for a PhD,’ he told her.
‘Oh?’ she looked up in surprise. ‘And what does that involve?’
‘Research and writing for three years.’
‘So you will get to write.’ Marie was trying to unblock the drain outside the laundry. Her hands struggled in its fetid sleeve.
‘
And
get paid for it, if I get a stipend.’
‘What are you going to research? Where do you do that?’
‘The library, the art gallery, archives, lots of places. It’s about interpreting images to construct history. But kind of crimes and misdemeanours, not regular history, more the
stuff that gets brushed under the carpet. It’s local, of course.’ Clark’s head began to swarm with ideas too fast to articulate. ‘Anyway,’ he said, even though this
wasn’t his real motivation, ‘a PhD will help me get a better job.’ His real motivation was to write, indefinitely. ‘
If
I get it, Mum.’
‘I think it’s a great idea, Clark. I’m proud of you. Look’ — Marie held out the bucket to Nell, the mud in it writhing with worms — ‘these are what make
my garden grow.’
Clark grimaced. Clinging to his thigh, Nell looked from her father to her grandmother, then approached the worms and stared, fascinated. ‘Worms,’ she said.
‘You should have seen the traffic today,’ said Clark. ‘
Un
believable.’
‘It’s all the tunnels and roadways. They’re carving our city into little fortified towns,’ Marie said sadly. She packed the mud onto the edge of the herb patch, then led
the way into the house.
So here she was after everything, a normal mother doing normal motherly things. That brilliant, fatal conflagration seemed ancient history, the city in ruins, smothered by jungle. She
didn’t know if she had lost or found herself, here in her kitchen on another sunny day. Some sacrificial urge still burnt inside her. She felt herself revolving on an extreme oval, one moment
remote from the fire, the next so close it scorched her. Everything was going to change, and the tattoos felt like protective circles. She poked through the cupboards looking for something to feed
them all. Nell passed into the living room, carrying Mopoke, a bag of fur punctured by startled eyes.
‘Careful, sweetie.’ Clark followed her. ‘She might scratch you.’
‘She’s barely got claws left,’ said Marie. ‘Put her on her cushion, Nell. She’s a very old lady so you have to be gentle.’
‘Fucken cunts,’ said Nell matter-of-factly, as she staggered over to the cushion to deposit the cat, enormous in her little arms.
‘Pardon?’ said Marie.
‘Nell!’ Clark looked at his mother. ‘This is Paddington child care, and barristers at home. Can you believe it?’
Mopoke remained in the position she had landed, half standing, half crouching, staring straight ahead. A moth flopped on the floor nearby and she lifted her nose.
‘It’s the last of the bogongs. Mopoke used to be a great bogong hunter.’ Marie looked at the cat sentimentally. ‘She used to eat them too. They made a crunching
sound.’
Nell stroked the cat carefully into a recline. Mopoke went down, eyes moving from side to side. Clark hovered over them, thinking he must stop saying that big round word
house
, and get
used to small, simple
flat
.
‘Cunts,’ Nell said.
‘Pretend you didn’t hear her,’ Clark whispered.
Marie opened the fridge and laughed into its cold white interior. She wanted to gather up Nell, put her nose into her neck and take in her sweet milky smell. She began to take food out: bread,
cheese, ham and bottled dressing, iceberg lettuce in a Tupperware container.
Nell marched in looking very pleased with herself. ‘Caniva Coke, Gran?’
‘I don’t have any,’ Marie lied. ‘How about water? That’s what we’re having.’
‘I saw Coke in the fridge.’ Nell’s voice began to rise.
‘It’s like this all weekend,’ said Clark. ‘Honestly, I feel like a child abuser when I offer her water.’
‘And don’t you look smart,’ said Marie, getting out the Diet Coke. ‘In your new jeans and haircut. What’s on the hem?’
‘Daisies.’ Nell extended a foot proudly. Beneath her fringe peeped a red arc from where she had gashed her head under the magnolia tree last year. Marie remembered the incident more
for Clark’s hysteria than Nell’s.
‘They’re a birthday present from her stepfather.’
Marie brought the food into the dining room, then plates and cutlery. ‘Well,’ she said when Clark had sat down, ‘I’ve decided to sell the house.’
He looked at her in shock, then a smile spread over his features. ‘That’s really good. I mean, it’s kind of tragic, but necessary. Isn’t it?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘I got a Game Boy too, Gran.’
‘Did you, darling? You lucky girl.’
‘And we’re going to America for Christmas.’
‘Really?’ Marie avoided Clark’s gaze.
Clark tucked a lettuce leaf into his roll and looked at it glumly. ‘I
have
to get fit.’ He chewed, eyes roaming the room. In spite of his campaign, the idea of losing the
house made him secretly frightened. It would be like cutting off a lifetime’s tress of hair, too difficult to maintain, devastating to relinquish. He looked back at his mother.
‘It’s the end of an era.’
‘It sure is.’ Marie squeezed her roll shut and brought it to her mouth.
They ate in silence, looking out at the view.
Thirty-two degrees, hot October night. Marie couldn’t sleep. Down in the cove a gang of koels began to fight, their outraged caws rising in the darkness. She
couldn’t use the hose till Wednesday. She lay there mentally listing the tasks. Start researching real-estate agents. Book the guttering man. Prune the kangaroo paws, and everywhere manure,
and mulch, mulch, mulch. She was dreading the coming day with its blowtorch sun. But night gave the heat a feeling of luxury.
She went into the bathroom for some water. Mopoke was stretched across the tiles on her stomach, absorbing the cool. Marie drank stroking the cat with her foot. How could you sleep in this heat?
Or consider working when the sun came up? How could you do anything but melt and drift?
The heat brought the tattoos up like Braille. The dips and swirls disappeared then rose again, fresh enough to scale slightly, ancient enough that they seemed to have always been there. This
language of welts was strangely familiar, as though the needles hadn’t so much inserted ink as stripped the veneer from an underlying design.
Her skin spoke in the darkness. Look, this is me. I have arrived. Marie drove slowly along Military Road. She didn’t usually take this route into the city, but she was looking for tattoo
parlours. She knew that tattoos, like mobile phones and myna birds, had been proliferating for years already, but she had only just begun to notice them. Like an artist obsessed with a new vision,
the synchronicities aligned and she saw her superstition almost daily. The lower-back insignia of the girl in the supermarket, faded adornments on the workmen rendering the Hendersons’
swimming pool. She grew discerning, recognising the poor imitations on bad boys in movies. She felt dissatisfied with her timorous, generic markings. A craving had taken root inside her. She
couldn’t see any parlours on this side of the harbour so she drove across the bridge towards the smog-laden skyline then into the cluttered streets of East Sydney. She passed two parlours in
quick succession. Each reached out to place a hook in her eye but she still wasn’t ready to stop. She continued up the hill, and at the next sighting began to look for a park.