After Cleo

Needled

A cat’s scratch can be a badge of honour

Watching Lydia pack over the following week, I became increasingly curious. Not in the old way, when I’d been threatened by every aspect of Sri Lanka. I longed for a better understanding of the world she wanted to be part of and began to wonder what it would be like to visit the monastery. Physical hardship, possibly even danger, might be involved.

Closer to home, I had more prosaic challenges to contend with. While Lydia prepared for her departure, I was gearing up for the final phase of breast reconstruction: the nipple tattoo.

Philip claimed that, as the fake nipple’s chief inspector, he was perfectly happy with it, but it looked albino alongside its partner. Having got this far, I figured the job might as well be finished.

But tattoos involve needles. Plus there’s no man in a gown to knock you out during the process.

While I was mulling this over, Jonah insisted on a fishing rod session. Watching him spiral through the air, I wished I could be more like a cat. Even a neurotic one like Jonah didn’t waste time fretting over needles.

When he finally collapsed on the rug, his glossy sides heaving in the sun, Katharine gathered him up.

‘Oh, Jonah!’ she said, burying her nose in his fur. ‘You’re such a good de-stresser!’

Maternal alarm bells jangled.

‘What’s worrying you?’ I asked.

‘My IB presentation on immigration,’ she replied, running a finger down Jonah’s nose. Our cat adored nose rubs.

Katharine was demonstrating a passion for refugees. On weekends she taught English to children from the Sudan. I’d already noticed an accusatory glint in her eye. Just as Lydia implied we didn’t do enough for the disabled, Katharine was disappointed by our lack of commitment to refugees. I’d been made uncomfortably aware that Shirley’s proportions were generous enough to accommodate several Sudanese families.

I was concerned about our younger daughter. Her face had grown pale and thin with shadowy semicircles under her eyes. The plaster on her elbow seemed to get bigger every day, covering either a fungal infection or a rash. Either way it was a manifestation of stress. I asked what time she’d finished her homework the night before. She said 11.30, but I knew it would’ve been much later. She promised to get to bed earlier tonight.

Jonah’s paws were dry, she said, unfolding him on top of his scratching post. He flashed me a look of self pity as I lifted his front paw. The pad was cracked like an old riverbed. While I couldn’t improve Katharine’s opinion of my commitment to refugees, I could do something about Jonah’s paws. He watched intrigued as I lifted his leathery pads one after the other and massaged them with hand cream. Then he promptly licked it off.

When Lydia came downstairs, she offered to drop Katharine at school and take me on to the tattoo parlour. We accepted without hesitation.

The tattoo parlour was a dishevelled old worker’s cottage with a discreet sign on the fence. Lydia waited for me while I disappeared down a brick path lined with plants.

A blonde woman opened the door. With no moles, marks or wrinkles, her face was technically perfect. It was almost as if someone had pencilled her features in on a blank canvas. Devoid of the myriad faults that make a face real, she resembled a daytime soap star.

She asked me to take my top off and lie down on her massage table.

‘It doesn’t hurt, it just buzzes,’ she assured me, placing a blue plastic sheet over my exposed breast.

I tried not to look at her tattoo needle. It resembled a dentist’s drill in a brown plastic jacket.

‘It’s just colouring in,’ she reassured me. ‘You might feel a tweak if the nerve endings have started joining up. I use anaesthetic cream for that.’

Anaesthetic cream? I’d have the sleep of Morpheus any day. To my relief the procedure was painless. It just sent assault waves of vibration through my body as she drilled away. Every few minutes she paused to dab her artwork with little white squares of gauze.

‘It shouldn’t bleed,’ she said. ‘The trick is not to dig the needle in too deep, otherwise you get deep tissue bleeding and the tattoo goes blurry after a few years like my dad’s did. But they didn’t know that back in the war days.’

Too much information. I asked if she had any tats.

‘Oh no,’ she replied. ‘Except for my face.’

‘Your face?’

‘Yes, eyeliner and eyebrows. I had a natural colour done for my lips. Lips can be tricky. If you choose a strong colour it goes out of date.’

Forty minutes later I stood in front of a mirror to admire her work. The coloured in nipple looked darker than its partner. She said it would fade. I’d have to keep it dry and covered in ointment for four days. I could expect a visit from my old friends swelling and discomfort.

‘You’ll be able to sunbathe topless soon,’ she chirped.

While wearing the bikini bottoms Greg had mentioned, no doubt. Were these people insane?

I asked what she’d recommend in the way of facial tattoo. She said I had lovely eyes, so she’d do the eyeliner first. Imagining myself the Cleopatra of the old people’s home, I squinted in the mirror. The bright red veins in my eyeballs hardly needed highlighting.

A bunch of yellow roses from Philip was waiting beside the front door when Lydia and I got home. Sweetheart. I opened the card and read: ‘I hope your feeling better.’ The florist needed a stint at apostrophe school.

To celebrate my coffee-coloured nipple, Lydia and I went to a new cafe down on Chapel Street. With its concrete floor and primitive benches posing as seats, it resembled a nuclear shelter. The clientele was studiously hip. Men wore grey T-shirts. Improbable patches of hair on their chins and cheeks suggested a mange epidemic. Women were bent over laptops or pecking birdlike at their phones. Almost everyone bore that compulsory badge of twenty-first century youth, at least one tattoo.

A ringlet of steam rose from the machine. Rich, nutty aroma hovered over the tables. The coffee-maker shook his dreadlocks and beamed me a telepathic message – ‘Uncool.’ Responding in kind, I sent one back – ‘I could have rinsed your nappies, son.’

‘Great tats,’ I said, admiring the impressive coil of red and blue rats twisting up his arm. ‘That must’ve hurt.’

‘Not as much as the one I had here,’ he said, tapping a spot just above his right breast.

I felt an urge to tell him we were brother and sister in ink.

‘Why did you have it done?’ I asked instead.

‘To prove I could master pain,’ he replied.

‘Oh,’ I said, staring down into my coffee.

I could’ve told him pain takes many forms. The most excruciating manifestation isn’t from a tattoo needle, or probably even knives and guns. It isn’t the wave of panic you experience when a doctor uses the c-word, or the jab of surgical wounds. Real anguish happens when things go wrong for your kids.

But he’d written me off as old and boring. He was looking through me to his next customer.

Back home, watching the usual run of funeral insurance advertisements on afternoon television, I caught a snippet of an American sitcom – one of those modern ones where it’s hip to be gay.

Lydia brought in a mug of tea and glanced at the screen.

‘You want rebellion!???’ roared the television teenager whose parents were furious about his new pornographic tattoo. ‘I’ll show ya rebellion. I’ll run away and be a monk in Thailand!’

As canned laughter filled the room, Lydia and I exchanged glances – and a hint of a smile.