Authors: Fiona McGregor
The tattoo parlour doubled as a body-piercing studio, with a counter of glass display cabinets. There was a wall of designs and a clump of panting rhapis in a wooden stand below them. The man
behind the counter was about Leon’s age, with a goatee beard into which red fangs were dyed. He was talking to a tiny woman in a pencil skirt and a shirt with the top button done up. Her hair
was pulled back in a ponytail and she stood very straight with her handbag perched on the counter before her. She wore black-framed glasses with little diamantés on the arms.
‘And I’m thinking, Scary? This?’ She placed a fine-boned hand on her chest. ‘Switch on the evening news, Bozo.’
‘Don’t get out much,’ the shop assistant mumbled in assent. His earlobes were stretched open by enormous metal tunnels that wobbled stiffly when he nodded. He turned to Marie.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Just looking, thanks.’
‘D’you want to get Indian for dinner?’ the doll-like woman said to him.
The designs on the wall were slicker versions of those in William Street. None appealed. Marie found some portfolios on the mantlepiece and began to leaf through them. The further in she went,
the more confused and indifferent she became. She had felt some kind of blessing that morning, the image floating, evolving in ether, her body waiting like a dam, but the sense of having been duped
now began to seep through her, perhaps even of being the duper. She stole a glance at the old-fashioned maritime designs clustering the woman’s arms. Not for her either. The woman’s
eyes flicked at her, as though she were an insect.
Marie opened the next portfolio. Pages of photorealist portraits. Her heart sank. Maybe she was in the wrong place. Maybe she was being too choosy and what she wanted — amorphous as it was
— didn’t exist. She opened the last portfolio and three pages in found a tattoo of flames. It rippled off the paper like light. She took the portfolio over to the counter. ‘Is
this person here today? Can I see him for a tattoo?’
The shop assistant angled his head to look at the photo, and frowned. ‘She doesn’t work here anymore.’
The woman looked at Marie with sudden interest. ‘Has Rhys got her own place?’ she said to the shop assistant. ‘Good for her.’
‘Why’s that still in there?’ he said under his breath. His fingers slid into the sleeve and plucked the photo out.
‘Bloody good choice, if I may say so myself,’ the woman said.
‘Can you tell me where she works?’
The shop assistant looked at his girlfriend with accusative eyes. She pursed her lips at him. Marie could feel their game somehow favouring her. The assistant wrote on a piece of paper.
‘Up the road. And you didn’t get the address from anyone in this shop. Okay?’
His girlfriend laughed. ‘As if the whole world won’t be queuing up soon enough.’
Hot winds from the western plains had settled into the streets of Surry Hills like sauce into a griddle. Marie turned down a laneway. Over back fences vegetation spilt. She passed through the
sweet-smelling shadows of jacaranda, their blossoms carpeting the bitumen purple. She turned into a street of plane trees and grand nineteenth-century terraces four storeys tall with flaking
façades. A dracaena angled its spiky head over a wrought-iron fence. The frangipani were putting out their first flowers. Now and then Marie touched her hand to a smooth leaf or cold steel
to give herself the answer of texture. She stopped at a house with a
For Sale
sign but couldn’t see through the window.
She headed vaguely in the direction of the address. She wasn’t in a hurry. It had been weeks of nothing but household tasks; now she was off-duty. She knew the area superficially from when
Leon lived here but wandering the streets on foot was different from driving to a specific point. She became random as a leaf; she could go anywhere, was open to everything. She passed a girl in
checked trousers with straps linking the legs; an elderly couple arm in arm muttering to one another in a foreign language. Between the gentrified houses was an occasional ramshackle terrace,
projecting a smell of damp and cockroaches. Marie went into a bakery and bought a quiche, which she devoured on the bench outside. How long had it been since such pure hunger! She checked the
address and realised it was across the road.
A bell rang in the far reaches and the door clicked open. Canvases of tattooed ladies danced around her with carnival exuberance. In the next room was a table with a large diary on it, a vase of
irises, portfolios and a box of tissues. On the right, a staircase ascended to the floor above. The walls were hung with old photos. There was the tramp of boots then a woman emerged from the back
room. She was tall with dark shaggy hair and an angular face into which were sunk large, dark, bloodshot eyes. Her high forehead and full top lip gave her an inquiring, opinionated air. Thick metal
hoops hung from her lobes, she was of an indeterminate age, and both her hands were completely tattooed. She appraised Marie with one swift glance, and frank disappointment. She opened the diary on
the table and leafed through the pages. She spoke in the tart, ironic drawl of old Sydney. ‘Um ... d’you have an appointment with Rob?’
Diffident with sobriety, Marie tried not to stare at the grids that extended from the woman’s sleeves to the first joint of each finger. ‘No. I don’t have an appointment with
anyone. I wanted to see Rhys.’
The woman shut the diary and looked Marie up and down. Suspicion was joined by confidence, and mild curiosity. She cocked her head. ‘How did you get my address?’
‘From a place on Crown Street.’
‘Ohhh ... Why —’ she began, then cut herself off.
She continued to stare at Marie, who squirmed and looked away. ‘I saw a photograph of your work there. I thought it was beautiful.’
Rhys sent her a brief smile. ‘Just a sec.’ She left the room.
On the wall was a photo of
Alice — Inuit Tattooist
, a smiling nonagenarian in a frumpy cardigan with tattoos lining her cheeks and jawbone. Next to this was a photo of a
prepubescent girl whose sultry Asian eyes pierced the camera with bold self-possession. A tiny cross marked the end of her nose and the middle of her forehead. She was naked from the waist up, hung
with necklaces, her arms tattooed with sleeves of snake scales. Marie could hear the rumble of a male voice, and Rhys’s lighter reply
.
She stepped closer to examine the tattooed girl,
when the artist returned and issued her edicts.
‘I wasn’t supposed to be free right now. Somebody else was due.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I only do customised.’
‘That’s fine.’
‘I got a two-month waiting list.’
Marie was crestfallen. She wanted a tattoo immediately but also felt she had come to the right place and didn’t want to go anywhere else. ‘I’ll wait.’
‘Know what you want?’
‘Yes. Flames.’
Rhys sat at the table and indicated the chair opposite, and her portfolios. ‘Okay, d’you know where? If you want my advice, I think flames go best on the lower torso. The belly is
ideal for older women, especially if you’ve had kids. The texture of stretchmarks, you know.’
‘Oh, I’ve got plenty of them.’
She listened to Rhys’s advice while she turned the pages. A Hokusai wave breaking across a calf muscle. A corset delicate as lace down a woman’s spine, in black ink only. And all
across a large man’s back, Australiana bright as a 1930s advertisement. She began to feel excited.
‘Alright, my belly. I’ve had three children,’ she added shyly.
‘Looks great. I presume you’ve been tattooed before. You’ll have to shave, down to about here, or wax. Think about how big an area you want to cover. You’ll notice a lot
of space in my designs: bare skin is part of my palette so I tattoo fast, which is good for you. I’ll measure you up for the design today.’ She plucked a tissue from the box and honked
into it. ‘Bloody plane trees. I’ll pencil you in for the first available and if you want you can go on my cancellation list. I get a cancellation, I text whoever’s next on the
list. I don’t hear back within the hour, I text the next person.’
‘I’d love to come in as soon as possible.’
‘Yeah, I know.’ Rhys smiled. ‘You want it, like,
now.
’
She took a deposit, and motioned Marie to the stairs.
Afterwards, what Marie remembered most about the tattoo studio was the photo above the stairs of what appeared to be a cadaver.
Marie walked down the path beside Susan, trowel and pots in hand. She was debating with herself whether to apologise for vomiting in the homewares shop. When Susan had arranged
to come and get plants, she hadn’t mentioned it, but plenty of things were never mentioned let alone apologised for. Marie decided to wait. Overnight, fifteen centimetres of rain had dumped
on the east coast and a thin cloud cover kept the air cool and damp. A couple of lorikeets shrieked as they alighted on the angophora blossoms. Marie noticed a track through its shedding bark,
probably made by a possum. The trunk beneath was raw and pink as skin beneath a scab.
Susan kept a hand clamped on her large white hat. ‘Wooh! It really does pong.’
‘It smells happy; it smells like death.’
‘Your garden’s really surviving, isn’t it.’
‘It always perks up after rain. But some things are dying.’
‘My last azalea’s dead, thanks to these bloody water restrictions.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about azaleas, Susan. I’ll give you some broms.’
‘And I hear they’re going to toughen them even more.’
‘The dams have dropped to forty-five percent.’ Marie arrived at the patch of bromeliads and bent down to dig. ‘Sometimes I think we’re going to run out of water
altogether.’
‘Not with the desalination plant.’
‘I mean in the long term. The whole country.’
Susan stood above her, scanning the garden despondently. ‘I’m very unhappy with my gardener. He charges through the nose.’
On her knees beneath this cascade of mild rebuttals, two feet from Susan’s gold sandals, from her freshly painted russet toenails, Marie was assailed by a sudden sense of incongruity.
What am I doing with this woman?
She had been friends with Susan since their husbands formed King Jones in the 1970s; even after the cataclysmic split of the advertising agency twenty years
later, and worse, they had endured.
We hardly know each other
, she thought as she potted the bromeliads. They walked back up to the house.
‘I saw Louise out the window of my car the other day. She looks like she’s about to drop,’ Marie said.
‘It’s due in the new year.’
‘God, it goes quickly. You’re going to be a grandmother!’
‘We’re getting old, Marie.’
‘We’re all getting old at the same rate. Nature’s democratic by nature.’
Pleased with her platitude, Marie stopped to pick some mint and lemongrass.
‘And how’s Clark?’ Susan asked. ‘Has he found another job?’
‘He’s applied for a PhD.’
‘Oh yes. Robert moved home when he did his PhD. He was only twenty-three. Watch out you don’t have Clark back on your doorstep, wanting three meals a day.’
‘Susan, he’s thirty-nine. He’s a father.’
‘Well, they do say that mature-age students apply themselves better. And Blanche?’
They discussed their children briefly, mechanically, like cuckoos coming out to strike the hour.
‘Anyway,’ Susan reverted, as they walked up the side path, ‘nature doesn’t have much to do with ageing anymore. Honestly, Marie, the lengths people go to these days.
Sometimes when I’m at the hairdresser’s I think I’m the only one in the room who hasn’t had something pulled out or put in.’
‘You don’t need to. You look fabulous and you know it.’
In the shade, Susan’s eyes were visible behind her purple UV lenses. She looked at Marie with devious invitation. ‘Gina has been getting Botox treatment. Did I tell you?’
‘
No.
’ Marie’s face jutted forward eagerly.
‘She swears by it. God help her.’
‘Gina always was very careful with her appearance.’
‘I don’t know. I can understand sometimes why the Muslims hate us. It all seems so self-indulgent.’
‘I read in
Good Weekend
that nose jobs are all the rage in Iran
.
’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
Susan considered this scandalous piece of information. ‘Well, there I was thinking they were such downtrodden goody-two-shoes skulking about in their veils,’ she said in a cheated
tone. ‘I wonder if they use Botox as well ... They inject it, you know. Needles! In the
face
.’
‘I’ve heard that Botox is good for migraines,’ Marie said smugly. ‘Apparently it’s one of the most poisonous substances in the world.’
Susan barked with laughter. ‘You’d better not say that to Gina.’
‘I haven’t seen Gina since the divorce, Susan. I’ve been dropped from her dinner party list.’
‘Well, you’re not getting out of New Year’s at our place, and the Tottis are coming too.’
‘I’d love that.’
Susan’s witty malicious eyes raked Marie’s body approvingly. ‘You’ve lost weight, haven’t you? Shall we go in?’
From behind, Susan looked removed and vulnerable. The skin around her elbows had loosened. Sunday after Sunday on her husband’s yacht had sailed deep furrows across her face. Nobody
escaped these marks of time, the cracked heels and spotty hands. Nature couldn’t be cheated. Rain followed sun as night followed day.
Marie walked into the house affirmed. Common enemies aside, she and Susan had bonded from growth in the same patch, absorbing the same nutrients. As they removed their hats, the air outside
began to brighten with cicadas. The clouds parted and a billion tiny legs in the trees around the house grew frenetic with their worship. Within minutes it felt as though it hadn’t rained at
all; within hours the garden would be completely dry. Was there such a thing as true balance? Nature was also the cane toad plague moving steadily south, the man signing the contract for the pulp
mill in Tasmania, the spreading saltpans.
‘The new lounge suite!’ Susan exclaimed. ‘I want to sit in it. Why is it over there? Why isn’t it facing the view?’