The War Artist

by Simon Cleary

  When she doesn’t answer he yells. ‘Well it is, isn’t it?!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s what I want – family.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Family.’ It’s as if his voice and his body are operating from different realms, one splitting from the other.

  ‘Sure.’

  He looks at her. His fidgeting hands. He looks at Phelan again. Then he jerks round to the sheets of flash on the wall behind him, the designs themselves beginning to crowd in.

  ‘Fucking bullshit!’ he suddenly spits, and reaches for a knife at the small of his back, tucked into his belt, concealed by his shirt. Phelan recognises the replica Gerber – twelve centimetre, black-handled, double-edged – the type displayed in the windows of the army disposal stores in George Street.

  Phelan is out of the chair, but the man has already lunged at Kira and grabbed her wrist with his left hand, swinging the knife wildly through the air with his right, snorting.

  ‘Fuck yeah, fuck yeah, fuck. And you,’ he screams at Phelan, ‘don’t move! Just fucking stay there!’ He pushes Kira towards the register. ‘Open it!’

  Phelan remains where he is, watching their eyes. The terror in Kira’s, a blazing emptiness in the man’s.

  ‘Do what he wants,’ Phelan says to Kira, as calmly as he can, feeling the adrenalin coursing in him, too strong to rein in. Twice in a week. Use it, though not yet.

  But Kira is cringing, pulling against the man’s hold as if prepared to sacrifice her hand for her body. The man is thumping the pad of the cash register with the fist that holds the knife.

  ‘Open you dog! Fucking open.’

  But the machine resists.

  ‘You need the key,’ Phelan says evenly. ‘The key!’ he repeats, louder, reaching into his own pocket and pulling out a bundle of house keys, guessing the man won’t know the difference.

  ‘Here,’ Phelan calls, holding them high, moving closer as he does. ‘Here. You’ll need these.’

  The keys hang from a deep blue lapis lazuli pendant, jingling. The man’s eyes come to him. Phelan offers the bunch of keys, holding them up between thumb and forefinger, high, away from his body, as if feeding an animal, drawing its gaze, distracting it while he steps steadily forward.

  The man has the knife in one hand, Kira’s wrist in the other. Phelan holds his keys out further, nearer the man’s reach.

  ‘Here,’ Phelan says again, his voice soft now, almost song. ‘Here, take these. You need them.’

  The junkie releases Kira’s wrist, reaches for Phelan’s keys.

  Freed, Kira pulls desperately away, stumbling backwards. Then, at the precise moment the man’s bony fingers grasp for the keys in Phelan’s outstretched hand, Phelan drops them. Their slow trajectory towards the ground. The junkie’s eyes widen, following the keys as they fall, this development beyond his imagining. The keys clatter on the timber floorboards and the man is temporarily frozen, his dumb head and his open mouth, before slowly bending.

  Phelan’s boot strikes the stunned face before the grasping fingers even reach the floor, knocking him backwards. He kicks the man again as his body collapses to the ground, then slams his heel into the wrist of the knife-hand, the blade spinning on the floorboards, skittering out of reach, disappearing under the tattooist’s chair. Phelan leaps onto him, flipping the man, wrenching his right arm behind his back, jacking it up, pinning him to the ground, the man’s cheek on the floorboards, the manoeuvre surprisingly easy.

  The man screams as Phelan ratchets his arm up his back, and Phelan knows the junkie is no match, that this is over. Feels his power. Pulls the man’s arm back another notch, another screech of pain. Less power than control. Something lost beckoning to be reclaimed. The screaming gives way to a groan, as Phelan’s weight presses oxygen out of the body beneath him.

  ‘Shut the fuck up, now arsehole,’ Phelan whispers, leaning closer, pulling the arm back even further, feeling it reach the end of its range – a little more pressure and it’ll burst from its socket – readying himself over the petty thief’s limp body.

  ‘Hey.’

  It is Kira beside him.

  ‘Hey!’ she yells. ‘What are you doing?’

  Animal Spirits

  The man and the knife have gone. The police too. He’d given them what they needed, no more, and when they return to take statements tomorrow he’ll have left too. Phelan locks the studio door behind them, and returns upstairs. The air is bruised, heavy still with the stew of fear and violence. He can smell traces of himself. Kira slides to the floor and hugs herself, her back against the wall, arms across her chest, her hands gripping her shoulders.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Phelan asks, standing awkwardly in the centre of the room, looking over at her shaking. Her eyes blinking wildly. The warrioress’ skin glistening with sweat, trembling.

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine, but …’ she says, shaking her head, ‘… fuck me.’

  ‘You did well.’ A stupid thing to say. Hoping, perhaps, that’s what she might say of him.

  She shakes her head again. She’s still coming down.

  The rain begins to fall. First Kira, then Phelan, turns to the window. Kira sniffs the air.

  Phelan watches her nostrils flare, some animal spirit returning. He lowers himself to the floor beside her. He doesn’t recognise the pattern of his own breathing. They sit wordlessly for a long time, the rain steady outside.

  ‘How many drops?’ she murmurs.

  ‘How many?’

  But she is musing, and hadn’t meant to speak.

  ‘Nothing,’ she says.

  A gust of wind blows a spray of rain through the casement window. Kira rises. Phelan watches the muscles beneath her shoulders ripple as she reaches up to lower the window, her black singlet framing her neck, her arms, the power in her back. She has to jiggle the window before it slides down. She leaves it ajar. The room needs to breathe, not just them.

  ‘So,’ she says in time, rubbing her hands together almost clownishly as if needing something exaggerated to get herself going again, ‘where were we? Let’s finish this thing, hey?’

  Phelan smiles. His legs tremble as he levers himself off the floor and climbs back into the chair.

  Kira stands beside him and prepares to resume her work, but when she raises her arm, tattoo machine in her hand, it is shaking uncontrollably. She looks at her juddering hand, surprised.

  Phelan looks too, and then into her face. The doubt in her eyes as much as in her body, not sure she can do this. He reaches out and gently touches her bare forearm, her tattooing arm.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he says softly. ‘Just begin.’

  She presses her foot on the pedal and the machine vibrates. Still she hesitates. She holds her right arm out, the machine in her hand. Phelan watches. She could be a priestess drawing some sacred energy to herself. She steadies. Hand, arm, shoulders. The machine’s vibrations dissolving shock, erasing fear. She returns to the tattoo. To Phelan and to Beckett.

  ‘Have a look in the mirror,’ Kira says, pointing.

  She watches as he stands and bends his head to his shoulder. He walks towards his image till he fills out the glass. Kira looks at this brave soldier again, a quizzical look on his face as he begins to make sense of the reversed text on his shoulder. His skin is sun-worn, nicked and blotched, his thick neck pitched slightly forward, as if from a lifetime of leaning into things headfirst. The hair on his head is thin, but perhaps it has always been like that, the hairline high. How many suns have burned that skin, she thinks. She looks at his arse and his still-firm buttocks. She tries to guess his age. Is he fifty? Is it possible? Is he that old?

  In the mirror his brow is creased with doubt as he inspects his tattoo. He looks from mirror to arm to mirror and pulls his shoulder around, straining to see the tattoo in its fullness. To see what others will see. Kira is satisfie
d – the sense that comes from completing a difficult task, from doing what’s asked of you, from knowing you’ve given everything and what you gave was good. ‘It looks great,’ she says.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  It’s not the soldier who is asking, not the man of action from earlier in the night, but, she suspects, a man who a thousand times has privately dismissed the folly of tattoos, their cheapness, their crassness, and who is now suddenly anxious he has made a terrible mistake.

  ‘Yes, it’s great, and it’s a great tribute to your mate, Samuel.’

  Phelan swings back around to look at her, startled.

  Well, she tried. Sometimes words aren’t capable of reassurance.

  ‘Can I interest you in a drink?’ she aks, surprising herself as much as him. She should be exhausted, should be fading, but instead she’s high on a second wave of adrenalin, more than the usual surge that comes with completing a tattoo and hearing the tattoo deities murmur their pleasure. How much of it is a reaction to Flores not being here – not being the one to tell her she’s fine and to wrap a blanket round her shoulders – she can’t possibly know. Realising, now, she didn’t need him anyway. Whatever strange events have just touched her, whatever good strange things. She doesn’t quite know what they are, but doesn’t want them to end just yet.

  When he doesn’t immediately respond, she adds with a tone of self-mockery, of playful exaggeration, ‘It’s the least we can do. It’s not every day a girl gets rescued by a soldier!’

  Every habit and every professional judgement he’s ever exercised, every risk he’s ever avoided, tell him to leave. Every obligation, every loyalty. Every Aurelian lesson. But this is where he finds himself. Beckett-led. This night. These random events. This woman. This now. This new him. This post-Beckett him. It is possible that everything is changed, everything, and who can ever say what can be controlled and what ought be left to fate and if a new world is calling him through a fissure in the old? What sort of man would he be to turn away?

  Not Blue, Azure

  He watches her with the bartender, a young bearded man in his twenties, his short hair neatly contoured, tight black T-shirt, dress-rings on the hand that pours the whiskey. A week ago, Phelan was approving operations to bring in men with beards like this, a week ago beards like this were trying to kill him. A week ago, he could not have imagined sliding his phone from his pocket in the bathroom of a pub and texting his wife.

  Darling, I’ve been delayed again. So sorry. I’ll be on the first flight home in the morning. Love you. James

  She places the shots – straight, two each – on the table between them. She hadn’t asked him what he drank. Raises the first of hers now, looking him directly in the eyes, smiling, waiting for him to raise his too.

  ‘Thanks,’ she says.

  ‘My pleasure,’ he replies, whatever ritual she’s leading him into.

  She knocks it back, then shakes her head, as if splashing the whiskey into every corner of her brain. Her mane of hair sways, mesmerising.

  ‘So,’ he asks, ‘how long have you been tattooing?’

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ she wags her index finger, then points to his untouched glass.

  Whenever he drinks there’s a reason, never for mere pleasure, certainly never intoxication. Usually it’s to make others feel comfortable. Sometimes just so it can’t be said of him he’s not to be trusted. You can train yourself to drink. Phelan lifts the glass and tips it back. ‘Satisfied?’ he asks.

  She smiles to herself and settles a little deeper into the cushions on the bench.

  ‘So,’ he leans forward, ‘you and tattooing?’

  Kira sighs, shakes her head in resignation. ‘No woman in history ever slept with a man who asked that question.’

  Phelan turns away, an involuntary glance at the doorway, as if it’s from the street dangers might come. When he looks back his heart is racing. When he looks back to her she’s grinning.

  ‘You’re right. I don’t need to know. But tell me this,’ he says, touching her tattooed forearm with his right index finger, giddy as he moves further into the unknown. He presses his finger gently against Kira’s warrioress, against her protector’s flowing skirt, these women and their flesh. ‘Why is she blue?’

  The bass thumping from a speaker above their heads fades as one song dies and another begins. Kira reaches for Phelan’s glass, sips from it, puts it down, leans into him, her mouth against his ear.

  ‘Azure,’ she whispers, her hand on his chest now. ‘Not blue, soldier, azure.’

  She watches him at the bar ordering another round. Sometimes you can look too hard for reasons. Believe too much in the logic of the universe and in your own capacity to select one thing over another, good over bad. The soldier looks back over his shoulder, as if checking she’s still here. This grand flux, everything aswirl. In walks a soldier, in walks a thief. Who can ever know how a dance ends?

  He follows her out into the night. The street is wet, but the storm has passed and the city sky is clearing. The buckles of her boots gleam in the streetlight. Her hips pivot over the kerb as she hails a taxi, her bare left arm raised high, still as a falconer’s, waiting for the cab to come to her.

  ‘Where you go?’ The driver asks, turning to look at them as they climb inside, Phelan’s thighs following Kira’s as they shuffle across the back seat.

  ‘Do you know Gordons Bay?’ she asks.

  ‘Gordons Bay,’ he repeats. ‘I know. What street?’ His hand hovers over the GPS mounted on the dashboard.

  ‘Just get us to Gordons Bay. I’ll show you from there.’

  The driver shrugs.

  Kira pulls away from Phelan and leans out the open backseat window, resting her head on her arm like a wistful girl might. The soothing vibrations of the car, the night and all its movement big and loud beyond her, her black hair caught in its swirling, wisps of it near her temples playing in the currents. Strands of hair inviting him, Phelan thinks, to tuck them back behind her ears. But would his fingers even remember how?

  Phelan detects a shift in the angle of the driver’s head, and looks at him as he glances surreptitiously at Kira in the rear-view mirror. Phelan thinks he recognises something in him.

  ‘Are you from Afghanistan?’

  The driver’s head jerks round, and Phelan knows he’s guessed right, that he’s Hazara. He repeats the question, this time in crude Dari.

  ‘Dari Gup Mayzani!’ the driver exclaims. ‘You speak Dari!’

  ‘Cumzara,’ Phelan says, holding his thumb and finger together to show just how little, before asking the driver how long he’s been here.

  ‘Zeeyad wakht shouda ke da Australia astee? Australia – zeeyaad saal?’

  ‘Aft saal,’ the driver replies, seven years.

  ‘Khush amadee,’ Phelan says with a little nod of his head, a welcome.

  ‘Kooja Dari yaad gereftee?’

  But Phelan misses it.

  ‘Mebakhshen. I’m sorry I don’t speak Dari well. Ma dorost dari yaad nadaaram.’

  Kira closes the window to listen. As she shifts, her left knee presses Phelan’s right leg.

  ‘You a soldier?’ the driver asks.

  Phelan sighs. ‘Yes,’ he says. Because truth is still important. Each press of skin, each of responsibility’s demands.

  ‘Thank you sir,’ the driver says. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Here,’ Kira says, pointing out the window. ‘This will do.’

  The taxi stops and Kira steps into the throw of a streetlight, her tattooed sleeve glowing like a butterfly’s wing.

  ‘Come,’ she says as he steps from the taxi, her hand outstretched. The night sky is now clear above them, the air a salty whisper. Come.

  She is like a street urchin, leading him along narrow footpaths between red-brick houses, down rough porphyry steps, thick banksias on either side, the sound
of the sea growing ever stronger. They find a staircase, the steps themselves hewn from the rock, the handrails rusting beneath the palms of their hands, big flakes of it.

  The sky opens ahead, and they break out onto the ledge of a cliff. Before them is night sky and ocean, and a small horseshoe bay facing east, a bare sandstone escarpment cascading to a sandy cove below. The houses ringing the clifftop appear as just another layer of landscape, laid down in some more recent geological era, their lights glinting like quartzite.

  Kira pulls off her boots, rolls the cuffs of her jeans, and, as if it is the convention in this place, hangs her legs over the cliff’s edge. The moon is at her shoulder. She leans back and closes her eyes, propped on her arms. Her nostrils flare, like an animal’s, her face to the stars, her skin drinking the ancient light.

  ‘This is where I grew up,’ she says after a while, turning to him.

  Her eyes darken in the moonlight. Azure, he thinks, surprising himself. What might be a new universe is opening before him. If he were not with her, being led into the hidden pores of the landscape, he’d have cut the bay up already. His hours on patrol in the Chora Valley are burned into him, the practice of battle still raw, demanding he interpret landscapes as he was once trained to, the world alive with danger. Without her beside him he’d have tried to measure the bay, thought about sniper holes, where to find cover in the bushes and walls and larger rocks. He’d have marked the houses where the smoke rises into the night. He’d have mapped out what his next move would be and the one after that, and the options that would begin unfolding beyond even that. He’d have known how exposed he was. But here, tonight, she is overwhelming.

  ‘Up there …’ Kira motions vaguely behind them, ‘… is my parents’ house.’

  He looks around, peering at the buildings clutching the rock. His heart quickens with a sudden desire to better know this place.

  ‘Still?’

  ‘My mother’s, anyway,’ and she laughs as if it is nothing. Mere words. A mistake.

  She leads him further along the ledge until it narrows and they clamber, boulder by boulder, down to the beach. The houses disappear as they descend. Moonlight glances off the pulsing sea and the shell-flecked sand and her cheeks and the sides of tin fishing dinghies embroidering the beach above the high-waterline.