The War Artist

by Simon Cleary

  Instead, Phelan tries to throw him. ‘How long have you been doing this, Andrew?’ Though Phelan already knows – there aren’t so many of them serving in-country that you can’t discover something about most.

  ‘“This”, Sir?’

  ‘These interviews.’

  ‘I arrived in January.’

  ‘Four hundred and thirteen soldiers have returned since then. So that’s four hundred and thirteen interviews?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘That’s a lot of war you’ve seen.’

  The kid is nervous.

  ‘I haven’t seen any of it myself, of course, Sir.’

  ‘You interview enough warriors about their bad stuff, and their bad stuff becomes your bad stuff.’

  ‘Vicarious trauma, Sir. Yes.’

  ‘Are you okay, Andrew?’

  ‘It’s not all bad stuff, Sir.’

  When he returns to the house Penny greets him as if nothing has happened, as if she knew all along he’d return about now, having got whatever he needed to out of his system. She tells him that both the Chief of the Army and his friend Ben Donaldson have called, her voice straining for lightness but her eyes studying James’s face for his reaction. He is aware of an intensity in her, something more than mere curiosity. Though his expression gives nothing away, the weight of returning the Chief’s call is initially too heavy for him. He tries Donno instead, but the call goes to voicemail and he doesn’t leave a message.

  Beer? Phelan texts instead.

  Where u been? Donaldson replies.

  The Fox in an hr?

  Have to be tomorrow, Bro.

  Ok.

  1400?

  Ack.

  Acknowledged. The thought of seeing Donno fortifies him enough to ring the Chief.

  ‘What did he want, James?’ Penny asks when Phelan returns from his study to the kitchen, the call a lengthy one. He looks across the room. It is too small a space to hold a thousand-yard stare.

  ‘An operational matter,’ he replies flatly.

  ‘What type of operational matter, James?’ When he doesn’t answer, she presses. ‘James?’

  ‘He wants to organise a time for an interview about Sapper Beckett’s death.’

  ‘Are you the interviewer or the interviewee?’

  ‘It’s all part of the process.’

  ‘I’ve heard that the men from Beckett’s base are blaming you …’

  He looks at her. ‘Who?’

  ‘Gossip. Some of the wives and girlfriends.’

  He takes in the information.

  ‘Well,’ he says eventually, grimacing, ‘that’s what I just heard too.’

  Communions

  Phelan steps from a cold shower after another night of fearful thrashing. He is dizzy and short of breath. He forces himself to shave. The night’s anxiety is still on him. When he hears a raised voice in the street he starts, and his heart begins to clatter again. He grasps the edge of the basin with both hands to steady himself. When he looks up he sees Beckett’s name in the mirror’s damp.

  ‘Why don’t you see someone?’

  He freezes. Penny’s voice from the doorway.

  ‘No one else needs to know,’ he blurts.

  ‘Know what?’

  He shakes his head.

  ‘What don’t you want people to know about, James?’

  ‘I’m so tired …’

  She looks at him and nods. ‘Well that’s what I meant. You need to see someone to help you sleep.’

  He is still shaking his head. Slowly Beckett fades from the glass.

  ‘You can’t go on like this, James. You need to sleep.’

  The lunch crowd at The Sly Fox is thinning, though slowly. Even for a Friday there are still too many suits for this side of the river, too many vapid conversations to try and ignore. He’s arrived an hour early, but even after a third whiskey he can’t settle enough to concentrate on the Sudoku in The Australian. He’d flipped through the paper from first to last when he arrived. There were no headlines, nothing about the war on all the pages dedicated to ‘The Nation’, nothing at all until ‘World’ where he reads a single column about the difficulties the Brits are having in Helmand Province. Beckett has been forgotten by the papers, of course, a relief, and thank god there’s been no one else in the weeks since. But by Christ, even a swooping magpie gets coverage before the extraordinary work of our patrols. He pushes the ice cubes round his glass with his finger, not feeling the cold. It’d say something about him if a mere Sudoku clue could distract him from the toll of war.

  ‘Who’s responsible for putting that crap on?’ Donaldson calls out as the chorus of Dexys Midnight Runners’ only hit begins to throb from the wall-mounted speakers.

  All the suits and the skirts turn their heads towards the tall man making for Phelan, his shaved skull and his green eyes and his black polished shoes glistening. He too is dressed in collar and tie and impeccably creased trousers, but without a jacket. He’s been out ten years, and Phelan knows the years have been good to him.

  ‘Crap name for a band, crap song,’ Donaldson adds, breaking into a wide smile.

  ‘Talk to the barman,’ Phelan says, taking Donaldson’s large hand, before suddenly clasping him close, chest to chest, holding him tight, surprising him. When Phelan releases him, Donaldson looks at him carefully.

  ‘Sorry mate,’ Phelan murmurs quietly. ‘I’m just so fucking tired.’

  Donaldson doesn’t respond immediately to the unexpected concession to weakness. ‘They used to have a jukebox here,’ he says instead, looking around. ‘You remember?’

  Phelan nods dully, deflated. He fears he is on the verge of tears.

  ‘It must give you the shits, JP. You go away to fight for your country, and what happens?’ He makes Phelan meet his eye. ‘They take your bloody jukebox away.’

  Phelan smiles, but it is tired, resigned.

  ‘Right-o. A drink then.’ Donaldson glances at Phelan’s glass, then clears a space between the suits at the bar. As Phelan watches his back he feels a pang of anxiety, an irrational fear that his friend is leaving already. He reaches for his glass to steady himself, drains the melted ice.

  The two twenty-something couples who’ve been playing doubles end their game. The girls in their tight black skirts toss their cues onto the felt, not bothering to rack them, maybe not knowing, and wander away from the table. Their male companions know no better, and follow, the hand of one comically chasing his girlfriend’s arse, just out of reach. Phelan shakes his head to himself and rises from his stool. He puts two gold coins into the coin slot, and rams the coin arm in. The balls release, drop, rumble and roll.

  ‘How are you doing, JP?’ Donaldson finally asks as Phelan sets the balls into position in the triangle, Donaldson’s question coming in from an angle so Phelan can dodge it if he wants.

  Phelan doesn’t yet look up, intent on nestling the black into place. ‘You heard what happened?’ Phelan asks eventually, his hands resting on the triangle, the balls still corralled.

  ‘I heard, I read, I saw,’ Donaldson says.

  Phelan nods.

  ‘Mate,’ Donaldson continues, ‘from what I’ve seen, you’ve done bloody well.’

  When he speaks, Phelan’s voice is soft, barely audible above the music. ‘What did you see, mate?’

  ‘Bringing him home like you did. Greeting his parents. Addressing your men. Explaining what happened to the country. That must have been fucking hard, but you did what had to be done. You’ve got broad shoulders mate.’

  Phelan is silent for a long, long time. He and Donaldson are school friends who went through Duntroon together. While Phelan climbed, taking every offered opportunity, promotion after promotion, Donaldson stayed closer to the ground, serving in East Timor and Iraq before getting out in his late-thirties and parleying ba
ttlefield experience into Dean of an all-male residential college at the university.

  ‘Nothing’s changed,’ he quips whenever he gets the chance, ‘I’m still trying to keep young men alive.’ Without competition between them, they’ve grown closer these last ten years. ‘You did what had to be done,’ he repeats. ‘Didn’t you?’

  Phelan lifts the triangle, slides it into its home in the table, and tosses. Donaldson calls true and breaks. They don’t talk while they play.

  We line up our shots differently from other men, Phelan thinks, his head over the cue. It’s an article of faith that makes him feel strong. They follow their balls around the table, all sweet cracks and backspin, all the years of practice. Their control of speed, their ability to read a table’s felt, know an unreliable cushion, judge the angles. How their balls fall perfectly into their pockets, all these small, temporary oblivions. As long as he plays, his life is in control.

  ‘Can you remember voices, Donno?’ Phelan asks between games.

  ‘What do you mean, JP?’

  ‘Some people say they can hear the sound of someone inside their brain, can actually hear the sound of their voice.’

  ‘The missus you mean?’

  ‘Hah, fucking, hah.’

  ‘What happened, JP?’ Donaldson finally asks. ‘What happened over there?’

  Before Phelan can answer two men in construction boots, who’ve been sitting on stools against the wall watching them, stand. Donaldson is beginning to reset.

  ‘Doubles?’ The wirier of the two asks Phelan. He has a thick beard and long hair pulled tight into a ponytail. His forehead glistens.

  ‘Sure,’ Phelan replies, his head turned away from the man to knock back his whiskey. ‘Two shots on a foul.’

  The man steps closer, steps into Phelan’s face before he can react, the man’s tiny burning pupils just inches from Phelan, sweat dripping from his forehead, stale Guinness on his breath. Whatever building site he’s come in from, whatever else he’s taken, whatever is amping him, however long he’s been itching to orchestrate something, there’s no doubt what he’s after.

  ‘Mate,’ the man says, arrowing in, ‘only pussies and soft-cocks play two-shot rule. Which one are you?’

  Phelan can’t answer. He is no longer in the pub, is no longer holding a pool cue, no longer caught in a room full of smoke on a lazy Friday afternoon, the fall of a gooseneck lamp on the wall. No longer capable of drawing on all the times he’s had to defuse situations just like this, some bar-room warrior after a pub trophy. Instead, he’s back in the Chora Valley and there’s a burst of fire overhead and his finger is on his trigger, and either he pulls it or he doesn’t, and his nostrils are flaring, and blood is pumping inside him, rivers of it coursing through his veins, and there aren’t even seconds in it, time both smaller and more immense.

  Before he can act, Donaldson slides between him and the man he’s about to destroy. ‘Let it go, JP. Let it go.’

  Ah, thinks Phelan out in the street, sinking to his haunches on the footpath, a train rumbling overhead, is this what the army has been protecting him from? Is this what the scaffolding of hierarchy and regulations and orders and obedience has given him?

  ‘You glad you got out, Donno?’ he asks, looking up, knowing the answer but wanting to hear it again, now.

  ‘Unreservedly. You could too, JP. There’s a whole wide world out there.’

  But he’s moved a warrior’s dead body. He’s taken the last of Beckett’s water. Is he any less culpable than the hordes that combed the battlefields of Flanders souveniring wristwatches or levering gold-fillings from jaws? What more is he that even he cannot know?

  ‘Just say if you want me to ask around.’

  ‘What happened to that lapis lazuli carving you said you’d bought in Kabul?’ Penny asks.

  It hardly matters to her, there are plenty of things more pressing. Still, if he’d brought it back, if he’d remembered to despite Beckett, and it was still tucked into a corner of a bag, then she’d add it to the collection of souvenirs he’s gathered for her over the years, a little gesture of normalisation.

  But he goes cold, waves the question away.

  He wants to know, he doesn’t want to know. He wants to know, he doesn’t. It’s like a game of ‘he loves me, he loves me not’, pulling petals off a flower. Whether to turn on the television news for reports of the war, whether to log on, whether to pick up the phone. Yes, thank God no one else has died since Beckett. But it doesn’t take much for his brain to flip that around – no one has died because I’m not there, no more casualties because I’m not in command.

  So it’s me, is it?

  When Phelan does trip into a sleep hole, blinded by alcohol, he wakes screaming. Or with his nightshirt drenched after lying in an irrigation ditch for hours. And some nights, at the edge of doom, he wakes with his hands around Penny’s throat. He flees to the bathroom. He trembles, even as water streams from the shower rose all around him, his hands over his ears to block out Penny’s sobbing in the bedroom.

  While the water runs in the shower she is safe. Whether true or not, it’s what she tells herself. Something to sequester a little space, time.

  She’s plenty of things. Loyal, good-natured, diligent. But not naïve. Not after A&E, the years in the general wards, what she’s read, socialising with James’s soldier mates, especially in the younger years. She’s seen suffering, bodies ravaged by disease, beaten, burned, left to rot. She’s seen what horror can do, felt its breath, its touch. There’s little she can’t imagine. She can conceive of villages wiped out by plague, cities destroyed by cataclysm, prisoners tortured for secrets, genocides, holocausts. But she could never have conceived of her husband’s hands around her throat, strangling her.

  His hands? Did something get into them, poison them, take them over, some malevolent spell at work? The hands that could, just days ago, cautiously, lightly, shyly even, seek her out. What could possibly have happened to them since then? Or was it in Afghanistan they became possessed, some dormant evil waiting to be triggered when he arrived back home, perhaps even by something she’d said? If so, might those ugly hands be severed from him, leaving her with the rest of him?

  The water stops. She tightens. The ensuite door opens. Who is it coming out of the bathroom now? The sudden thought that it may be worse, that he may have armed himself, some knife or razor, aiming now to finish her. She lurches towards the bedside lamp and fumbles for the switch, finds it, flicks it on.

  It is only James. Slump-shouldered, old singlet and boxer shorts, broken, pathetic, contorted by doubt. Seeing her sitting on the side of the bed, he starts to sob. He comes to her, kneels on the floor before her, lays his head in her lap. Gasping his apologies, his fear. Penny swallows. She slowly lifts her hand from her side, undecided. He is heaving with weakness and shame. She lays her hand tentatively on his back. Touches his contrition, his fragility, his terror.

  But after tonight, how is it possible for her ever to sleep again?

  He lies awake, still. He knows the body beside him is Penny’s, but as he begins to drift, as the devils in his head rearrange his thoughts and memories, whatever soft and malleable stuff fills one’s skull, it morphs into Beckett. The hours they shared their irrigation canal bed, the intermingling of their bodily fluids, a communion that cannot be unbroken.

  ‘Sleep,’ Penny says, rejoining him in the bedroom, an act of courage after the previous night. However she might find him. She’d left the room at first light for her morning routine, her meditation on the back deck, but it couldn’t free her from his hands at her neck, at having to kick out against him for breath.

  ‘Sleep,’ she says to him again as he lies contorted on his side, red-eyed, hollowed. ‘You must get something better to help you sleep.’

  With James beside her in the kitchen she rings her GP, almost a friend now, so well has she got to know her. Pen
ny describes his condition with perfect brevity, nurse to doctor. She explains what she wants for her husband, sleeping pills, maybe something more. The doctor will understand what she means. While Penny could get them herself from the hospital, slipping drugs quietly from the dispensary, she wants someone to see him too, someone other than the army medicos.

  ‘Thank you,’ Penny says into the phone, meeting her husband’s eyes, nodding with relief, handing him the receiver.

  ‘Come on down,’ the doctor says to him. ‘I can fit you in now.’

  But Penny can see James is already retreating, manoeuvring himself to flee. Or formulating another plan, in his mind more pressing.

  ‘Thanks, Doc,’ he replies, ‘but today is no good. How about tomorrow?’

  Penny groans, turns away in exasperation.

  ‘Well …’ the doctor says slowly, deliberately. ‘That’s fine too. However, in my experience it is important to respond promptly to these things. You don’t want them to get away from you—’

  ‘I’m good, Doc,’ Penny hears her husband say, cutting the doctor off. ‘I’m good.’

  If there’s one thing he needs, one thing his desperate exhaustion has fixed onto, it’s to find a way of crawling out of the shallow canal he is stuck in with Beckett. To somehow prise himself from Beckett’s embrace.

  Forced together, Phelan realises how little he knows about Beckett. Phelan wears his name, but understands nothing about the kid – the man – not really. And what he thought he knew is draining away. He reaches for them – the few biographical facts anyone could discover, the stories he’d overheard Beckett’s mates telling in the days afterwards, what Phelan thinks are his own memories – but they shrivel.

  What Phelan has gathered about his life aren’t even points on a children’s join-the-dots puzzle, let alone stars in a constellation, Orion or Aries or The Shield of Achilles. Not even a handful of binary coding markers from Call of Duty, not nearly enough to bring him to life.

  His parents received him at Holsworthy, then took him straight home to the north coast, to Yamba, for a private burial. With what rites, Phelan wonders, was he laid to rest? He guesses there’ll be a grave, though it’s Beckett’s parents he really wants to see, Beckett’s family. To accept from them whatever they might be prepared to give him. He can but ask. If there’s a curse, then release. Otherwise, absolution.