Sydney author Fiona McGregor’s novel Indelible Ink is a complex and multi-layered work that focuses on several different themes. One of these is the city of Sydney itself – most of the story is set in the affluent north shore, where mansions with harbour views and established gardens sell for millions of dollars, but the narrative also takes us to bawdy music and dance clubs, the night-time gay subculture of the city’s parks, and the slightly menacing and criminal element of motorbike gangs and tattoo parlours. For this is really the heart of the story – tattoos: what they mean, why people get them, how they reflect the tatooed person’s motivations and self-expression. Marie is 59, newly divorced, and mother to three grown children. After a few drinks over lunch, she wanders into a seedier part of town and decides on a whim to get a rose tattoed on her shoulder. In the following weeks and months, she becomes obsessed with the tattoo industry, meeting artist Rhys, and requesting more and more tattoos to cover parts of her body. She relinquishes the rose (has it inked over) in favour of a score of designs that really mean something to her. The two women strike up an unlikely friendship, and Rhys introduces Marie to a side of the city – and of the lives in it – that she didn’t realise existed, or to which she has certainly never been exposed. Her body becomes a canvas; her tattoos become important and necessary reflections of herself, liberating her mind as well as her body from her previous shackles. Her children are predictably unimpressed by their mother’s behaviour and the situation is not helped by her decision to sell the family home to cover her mounting debts. The three children are all well-drawn, with their own issues and circumstances explored in sensitive depictions: Clarke (single father, PhD student), Blanche (advertising executive) and Leon (single and gay). Their own interests – Leon’s horticulture skill, Blanche’s meditations on motherhood, Clarke’s sense of himself as father, and lately, of lover – create a complicated web of plots and sub-plots, heightened by the chosen absence of Ross (their father) from their lives, by Marie’s friends and even her cat, Mopoke. All add to the subtleties of this story, with their workplace politics, the vagaries of the real estate and share markets, the sensitivities of the unspoken class structure behind the classless Australian veneer (domestic cleaners, tattoo artists, gardeners). But when Marie becomes ill, and she faces not only the loss of her home and her beloved garden, but possibly her life, her priorities and allegiances shift, and this family’s world as microcosm of the larger society becomes apparent. The character of Brian, who befriends Marie in the hospital, is another example of life introducing us to people or places or situations that might be completely out of our experience, but can be embraced as we allow our prejudices and expectations to drop away. This novel raises the question of how well we really know our parents, and the issue of the glorious indifference and realigning of priorities as we age or become unwell or incapacitated – the disinhibition of mortality. This is a frank exploration of family dynamics, of expectations, sacrifices, loyalties and desires. The literal ink on skin becomes a metaphor for going after what we want, ignoring social mores and conventions, and – in the end – choosing to live our lives in a way that is meaningful.
Indelible Ink – Fiona McGregor
