Indelible Ink by Fiona McGregor

Author:Fiona McGregor [McGregor, Fiona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857894137
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

WATER

MARIE CARRIED HER SHOPPING down the path and left it by the front door. Six p.m. Already dusk. In one day, it seemed, the sun had swung further away from the earth. Cockatoos were making a racket down in the reserve. She uncoiled the hose and began to water the bed where Iceland poppies were waiting to sprout. The pointlessness of it mocked her. Why had she planted these seeds when she knew the house was going to be sold? Why had she clung to the idea of the garden outliving her? But now her stupidity might pay off, in a way she had never imagined. Like rounding the corner of an unknown road and suddenly seeing cliffs drop before you. Sometimes you were going too fast to stop. And here she was, watering the garden anyway. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Inside the house, she lit a candle on the coffee table. She picked up the phone to ring Clark but, feeling mute and disinclined to duty, put it back into its cradle. Six months, it was ridiculous. Two more months here, then where? And the oncologist delivering the news like a morning paper. It seemed too shoddy a story to pass on to anyone. Marie sat in the living room listening to the sounds of the house, sensing the bodies and food and conversation that had passed through it. She felt flattened and transparent, a woman of dusty air projected onto the couch.

Her mother had lived for decades after her hysterectomy, eventually dying of a heart attack. Two years later, her father had died in his sleep of a brain aneurysm. Marie wondered now about her mother’s final hour, whether or not she knew she was dying. A moment of terror as she realised the pain in her chest was fatal, then the eternal dark. Unless in fact she had wanted to die. She had her God. Not for her, the eternal dark.

Marie didn’t want to talk to anyone for fear they would blame her. She hadn’t looked after herself, she had drunk too much and eaten badly, she had held sadness and anger in her stomach all these years until they turned against her. She hadn’t gone to the doctor early enough, she had ignored her symptoms. She only had herself to blame.

Nothing had changed, people were still the same. Every sickness was a curse, every dying a punishment. And every death a murder, or suicide.

The garden at night was a cool, deep space filled with the sounds of crickets and one late willy-wagtail. Marie stepped across the lawn, lifted her nightie and squatted beneath the lemon tree. The moon slid from its veil, flooding her to the marrow, and everything around her lit up like a stage. She could see the crinkled furls of hibiscus, and high up in the angophora the lit cigarettes of a possum’s eyes. And so it might happen as she had originally wanted. The garden might outlive her.

Leon didn’t know what to pack because he didn’t know how long he would be gone.

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