by Simon Cleary
‘There’s a history of Australian art in those catalogues,’ her mother used to say. ‘Of names, and movements and fortunes. Of galleries and dealers and patrons.’
For months at a time Kira would take one to bed with her, turning pages compulsively till sleep overcame her. Or she’d sit at the kitchen bench, or on the deck in the afternoons after school, and it would be the exhibited artist’s created scenes, rather than her own view of the ocean before her, that she’d try and set on paper.
‘Come on darling, show Mrs Winsome how you can draw.’ And her mother would pull out the sketch pad, and the collection of pencils, and set Kira up at a fold-out table, and have her copy Ingres’ Grande Odalisque from a catalogue of a 1997 exhibition of Orientalist art at the gallery in the Domain. ‘Isn’t she amazing?’ her mother would say, voice hushed, but not so low Kira couldn’t hear.
In time, the pleasure Kira got from drawing for her mother’s friends waned, and her mother’s project of inserting her into the sweep of art history that those catalogues recorded became the burden it was destined to be. The words of admiration from the doctors’ and judges’ and churchmen’s wives predictable and wearisome. Kira became bored.
And yet, it’s difficult to ignore your abilities when there’s little else you can rely on. The grades, the wins in school competitions or exhibitions sponsored by banks and charities, her watercolours hanging in the foyer of a town hall or the exhibition room of a regional agricultural show, her mother dutifully maintaining a scrapbook of her promising daughter’s achievements. In her last year of school her major project was an interactive multi-media installation that was recognised by a showing in the Art Gallery of New South Wales with other finalists from schools around the state. Participants in her ‘experience maker’ (as she described it, pretentiously she’d later acknowledge) would answer a series of questions – date of birth, favourite colour, ethnicity, religion – resulting in a crude tribal personality profile. They’d then slide their bare arms into a sealed Perspex box where the bristles of small car-wash brushes, arranged along the length of the box and turned by a series of small motors, would paint stripes of colour onto their forearms. War paint, she called her installation, the country in the middle of a Middle Eastern war that, as far as she could tell, no reasoning person had wanted to join.
Surprisingly it was the motors of her installation that fascinated her most: the smooth silver casings and the shafts that rotated as if by magic when power ran through the little machines, the hum of them, the steadiness of it, their reliability. She knew enough to keep that to herself when she was interviewed by The Herald, a profile piece. She was learning how seldom people looked below the surface of things – that people could install her art or hang her paintings or write about her, without caring whether she was true or not. When her mother walked down to the local newsagent that Saturday morning to buy multiple copies of the paper, Kira left the house by the side door with her portfolio bag, the banksias in the street beginning to flower, and offered a series of charcoal self-portraits to a Bronte café owner, who blu-tacked them to his wall and handed her a joint. Proceeds go to charity.
‘You can’t waste it, Sweet,’ her mother said again. Though she must have known everything had soured, surely.
‘I’m sick of it, Barbara-Ann. You made me sick of it. You! You know that, don’t you?’
‘Me? Me? Without me …’ she trailed off. ‘You’ve got to understand the opportunity you’ve got. Look …’ Her mother disappeared into the living room and returned with a handful of recent catalogues from her favourite Paddington gallery, laying them out on the coffee table in front of the divan. ‘Look at this.’
Kira sat up.
Her mother pointed to the price list in one catalogue, then the next, flicking through them, faster and faster, a frenzy. All the non-negotiable tens of thousands of dollars in their precise columns. As if what she was laying out was irrefutable evidence. But in support of what case?
‘But you don’t understand, Mother Dear. Read my lips: I … just … don’t … care.’
‘No, you listen to me girl!’ Her mother’s voice began to tremble. ‘You’re the one who doesn’t understand! You’re as good as any of them. Better! This is what you could earn. This is what you could make. More!’
Though what Kira heard was, ‘This is what we could make.’
‘After all I’ve sacrificed. After everything we invested in you …’
It was that last we that did it. Not just that her mother presumed to speak for her father. But that she’d so misrepresent him, could so misunderstand him.
‘You shouldn’t hide yourself,’ Flores had said. ‘The universe sees. It knows.’
Kira was on a park bench sketching out a swarm of bees, freehand, nothing before her. The words are similar to her mother’s, but Flores gestures to some greater moral authority.
‘Do you like it?’
‘You’ve got something. Don’t hide it. It’s a talent. You gotta use it. You owe it to the universe.’ Flores and his cosmos of interweaving debts, which she’d only later come to understand. ‘Come and see,’ he said, motioning for her to walk with him to his studio. ‘We’re hung in the streets, not hidden away in parlours.’
She remembers the first time Flores touched her neck, offering to tattoo her.
‘We tattooists and surgeons and undertakers and whores,’ he’d whispered. ‘We body-workers, we lovers of flesh. The body calls and we respond. We are beloveds answering our lovers. A body cries and we answer it. We pull back the woven veils and begin our work. Our various blades, the points of our instruments, our hands pressing the flesh for a knot beneath the surface.’
So she joined him. She drew, and she cleaned, and then eventually, sooner than most apprentices, she learned to do needles. She started with one of his spare machines on grapefruit, then pigskin. Eventually old friends from art school, for free.
She changed shape in this studio. Her long hair went, and what was left she coloured: red, orange, yellow, moving through the spectrum like the colours were seasons. She added metal, experimenting, settling for a single ear hoop. She felt her arms strengthen, her shoulders, a new musculature building in her. She started wearing singlets, black Jackie Howes, showing herself off. Her name morphing as well, Keira to Kira, an early Japanese phase.
‘You won’t be missed?’ Flores had asked, seeing the new creature emerge. ‘Your mother?’
Kira shook her head. Her mother had ventured into the studio once and Kira almost laughed when she saw her enter, anxious, tightly holding a boyfriend’s hand.
‘You wanted to see for yourself what I’m wasting my life on?’
It had been unnecessary of course, as cruelty always is. Rebuffed, her mother would, she knew, go back to her glassed balcony overlooking the sea where she would shuffle her aspidistras and lament her fate.
How much was it tattooing that seduced her, she wonders now, bent over her drawing desk, how much Flores? This question returning again and again on evenings like this one, Flores having disappeared from the studio mid-afternoon with barely a word.
Where do you go? she wonders. Who do you see? What are you doing there, you and your young brother?
If I told you I’d have to kill you, he’d said. But you can only tell a joke so many times before it stales. Before mystery turns rank and morphs into secret.
There is movement on the other side of the doorway and Kira looks up from her stencil. In the mirror she sees the reflection of a solitary man regarding her, his back to the flash on the wall, his head as still as the wall itself.
Skin and Needle
‘How does this look?’ Kira asks, showing him the design.
The man examines it carefully. ‘It looks good. Yes, that’s fine. That will do.’
She leads him from behind the counter to her chair, and tells him to take off his collared shirt, which he fo
lds neatly and places on the table beside him. He rolls up the left sleeve of his white undershirt so it gathers evenly around his shoulder, revealing a pale sweep of white skin above his elbow.
He’s fit and he’s hard, she thinks, inspecting him more closely now. There’s power in his arms and shoulders, whatever his age. The skin on his pocked cheeks has gathered in jowly pucks from years of clenching his jaw. He has short thin hair parted on the right, and on the left side of his forehead is a cluster of splotches, each the size of a small coin, blossoms of imperfection.
She stands above him and touches his shoulder, sure of her business, her hands moving over him, searching for scars or bruises or pockets of fluid.
‘You’ve got pretty good skin for an old bloke.’
‘Not that good,’ he laughs, ‘and not that old.’
Kira shaves his shoulder, the cold blade and his light arm hair falling away. She wipes down his skin with a tissue, then takes a bottle of liquid from her cabinet, applying it to his freshly smoothed skin before holding the stencil against him. She feels his shoulder tense beneath her hand, sees his flickering eyelids, his shallow breathing. Some part of his body wants to run, some essence.
She peels the stencil away, leaving the purple outline of what will be his tattoo.
The sleeve of ink running the length of her left arm comes closer. From her wrist, up and over her shoulder, her tattoos interweave in a swirl of blue and green on the skin below her collarbones. There are so many tattoos – laced so neatly, beside and above, overlapping and interlacing, one forming part of the next, the Celtic warrioress the largest – that it’s not easy for him to make out any one image.
‘Good,’ she says, inspecting the stencil, before retreating to the drawing room while it takes.
Phelan’s eyes begin to dart. In the distance he sees her rummaging among papers. Outside the street is clamouring, a thousand sounds he can’t tease apart; a storm of fire impossible to navigate a way through. When she returns he is sweating.
‘Have you been back long?’ she asks, wiping down his skin with ointment.
His head swivels to look at her. ‘Back?’
‘You’re a soldier, aren’t you?’ Her voice is sure, and it’s her turf.
‘It’s that obvious?’
‘It’s that obvious.’ Though in fact, it’s a guess.
‘I got back today.’
A siren starts up outside, close, insistent while whatever vehicle it belongs to – police or ambulance, he can never tell the difference – struggles to get clear of traffic. The siren is followed, first by one car horn, then another, and then a third, as if a pack of wild dogs has cornered its quarry out there in the sweltering city. The siren’s call changes to a short, jagged, staccato burst of electronica, before resuming its steady wail. The horns tire. The evening tires. The wailing siren moves away.
‘So this is your first tattoo?’ she asks him.
‘Yes.’
‘Usually I tell my virgins there’s nothing to be frightened of, but … well … as a soldier there’s no need to say that to you, is there?’ She laughs, then falls silent.
Nothing to be frightened of. Phelan watches her clean hands, takes in the cheap rings and notes where the ink from her sleeve ends at her left wrist. He watches her pull a pair of thin black latex gloves on, hears them snap against the skin on the back of her hands.
Kira gets a new needle from its sealed plastic, popping the eye through the back of the packet and drawing the needle out, the point directed away from her. She then cracks open a new tube and rests it in the palm of her left hand before sliding the needle into the end of the tube, allowing the shaft to fall through till its point comes out the tube’s tip.
She takes her favourite Micky Sharpz tattoo machine from its drawer, loosening the tube clamp enough so she can back the tube up through the hole in the machine’s frame, eye and shaft and tube, till the eye is adjacent to the pin at the end of the armature bar. She flips the grommet off the pin, and settles the grommet into the eye of the needle itself, before working the eye and grommet over the armature bar pin till the tube and needle are in place and firm. She retightens the clamp. They’re all so deft, these movements of her hand and wrist and fingers in perfect choreography. She stretches a thick red rubber band around the frame and the needle shaft. That give, that softness.
Kira savours the weight of the machine in her right hand; the custom-made metal frame, the two copper coils in their black plastic wrap, the plates and springs, the tube and grip and the needle she’s just fitted. Damn Micky, she thinks, you’re a goddamn thing of beauty.
‘All right,’ she says, gently pressing the floor pedal with her right foot. The surging electricity brings the instrument to life, and it becomes a new presence in the room, this buzzing object in her hand. The vibrations enter her, calling her body into her task. She lifts her foot, bends to adjust the voltage on the power pack, before letting the electricity flow again. That buzz, still a little ragged. She watches the vibrations of the armature bar, the current breaking and reconnecting, and tightens the screw, closing her eyes, working in feel and in sound until she’s found its sweet spot and the machine is purring. When she opens her eyes she sees the wave in the armature bar, gentle and slow-moving, passing back and forth along the bar. The magic of it, how the first rapid violence of its movement metamorphoses into song.
‘All right,’ she says again, dipping the needle into a cap of black ink then pressing it against his skin.
That first nibble, a teasing at his shoulder. Phelan turns his head. Her hand pulls back an inch, the machine hovering above him. He watches the needle descend again and press against his skin once more, and is aware of a lag between what he sees and what he feels, a long second before the needle bites and he feels its sting. You see the lightning before you hear it. But by then it’s become a different thing, a new word, a new name, thunder. If the thing one sees is different from the thing one feels, what is the thing itself? Does it even need a name?
He watches her lift the needle once more. A trinklet of blood remains on his skin. You could fall into the gap between seeing and feeling. You could disappear. But he doesn’t, can’t, not yet. He is not sure what he feels. He knows the needle is piercing his skin, entering him. He watches as she draws it away, wiping the blood off with the tissue she holds in her left hand. He feels the point of the needle on his skin. He closes his eyes and gives over to the buzz of the machine. How many machines his body has vibrated to: the Bushmasters and the ASLAVs, the M113s from the old days, sometimes a Hercules, even the simple burr of a camp generator shepherding him from exhaustion to sleep.
‘Is it good to be home?’ she asks, pulling him back.
Home. It’s been a temptress all posting long, visiting him when he weakened. Home. And now she’s whispering it. He sighs, then laughs, a hint of bitterness, but does not open his eyes. Home is too big a word for her, he thinks. She knows not what she is saying.
‘What is your name?’ he asks, finally.
She tells him.
‘Like the Wanted poster on the wall?’
‘One of my illustrious forebears.’
‘So it’s in your blood?’
‘Literally.’
He waits for her to ask him his name in return, but she doesn’t. Instead, the needle probes his shoulder, opening him, the light sting of it. He introduces himself anyway, as if it’s the needle he’s responding to, then returns to her question. ‘It’s good to be back, yes. It’s good to be home. But …’ His voice catches.
Kira continues, needle, wipe, needle, wipe. ‘But?’ she prompts.
Phelan nods to himself, then turns his head away, lost.
‘But … Samuel Robert Beckett?’ she finishes.
He looks up, startled.
‘It doesn’t take a genius,’ she says.
A minute passes, maybe mo
re.
‘Do you want to tell me about him?’
He considers her question carefully, then looks away again. ‘I don’t think I can.’ The old soldier grows suddenly ancient.
‘Sure,’ she says.
He closes his eyes again. The needle is at work on his shoulder, the soft pressure of her hand, the buzzing machine, the high song of his stinging skin. Outside the throb of traffic after the fallen day grows less threatening. There’s a symphony here, he thinks, like the low hum of air through a chopper’s blades, notes you can train yourself to detect above the engine. You really could lose yourself in this.
A Furious Beauty
Chora Valley, Afghanistan, November 2010
Phelan leans over and looks at the ground rushing past below. There are days he feels he could love this country. The furious beauty of it. These rose-coloured dawns, these unassuming villages, these rivers and streams that swell and narrow with the seasons, these kids who stop their play and look up at you with wonder in their faces. Phelan waves to them as the Chinook tips to the left and passes over a village. The chopper follows a bend in the river up-valley, its nose hard on some scent. The machine’s roar is muted by the foam plugs in his ears, but its vibrations are pure and wonderful. Phelan gets out of his office whenever he can, looks for opportunities to take to the air, a certain magic in it for the infantryman he once was. He loves the throb, loves his chest vibrating with it, how you can shed the weight of a war’s bureaucracy inside a chopper. That sweet shuddering, warm like a bath. It could lull an old warrior to sleep. Even one who’s become a taskforce commander.
Ahead, the sheer walls of a mountain pass rush towards them, sharp with daybreak. As he peers at the southern rock face he sees the mouth of a cave, and thinks he detects a reflection of light on metal. He squints behind his dark glasses, looking for the stirrings of some many-headed Taliban Scylla inside the cave. But it is nothing, just the play of early morning light on prehistory, and soon they are speeding through the pass itself and the cave is behind them and a band of shadow falls and in a heartbeat they have emerged and are into the next valley, new villages beaded to a new river.
