The War Artist

by Simon Cleary

  Charlie

  Phelan leans forward and looks through the car window, across the road to the lowset pale brick house, one of thirty in an ocean-front street of what appears to be an uncomplicated coastal holiday town. Beckett’s parents can’t see the ocean from here, even though it is just the other side of the dunes, and constant. The wind and the salt have, he observes, got at the front door of the house, which peels in the long morning sun, and what was once a front lawn is now sand, the beach reclaiming its own.

  When he turns the engine off, the ocean is loud and insistent. What are you doing here? it berates him; you know better. Or, what took you so long?

  Heat gathers quickly in the car, and when he opens the door the sticky air rushes in and around him like liquid. He pushes through it, swings his legs out of the car and stands. His knees creak; fifty years and a four-hour car trip. He is tired and he is old. He can smell Melaleuca in the air, sweeter than perfume. Phelan walks across the bitumen and up the pebblecrete driveway, past the white letterbox on its single white post, standing like an egret. He’d decided against his uniform – he didn’t want to meet them on those terms, not this time.

  At the top of the steps Phelan turns briefly. They deserve a sea view, he thinks, something for their grief. He turns back and rings the bell and hears its electronic chime echo inside the house. Sweat gathers under his arms, on his back.

  The door opens. He recognises Beckett’s father, strong, muscular, fit. Probably still playing local football. He is younger than Phelan remembered from the Holsworthy tarmac almost a month ago, this dead boy’s father who, in his early forties, is himself still young. Beckett’s mother stands behind him, looking over his shoulder, but not hiding. A halo of fluorescent light glows above her dark hair. She is as old as mourning itself.

  ‘Who are you?’ the father demands.

  So they don’t recognise him. He is as insignificant as he fears.

  ‘We met before. In Sydney. I was in uniform. My name is Brigadier James Phelan. I accompanied your son home.’

  As Phelan fumbles through what to say and what not to, more people emerge from rooms inside the house, filling the hallway behind Beckett’s parents, curious about the alien voice. What is this, Phelan wonders, a month-long wake?

  ‘Come in, hey. Come in, James Phelan,’ the father says eventually. ‘There are things we want to ask you.’

  Phelan follows them into the silent house, passing framed photos in the corridor, one of a blond mop-haired Beckett, sixteen or seventeen, salt-encrusted, grinning, the nose of a surfboard in view, a clean swell in the background. Phelan glances through the open door of a bedroom where posters of cricketers are tacked to the walls. No one speaks until they are seated in the lounge room, water jug and glasses placed on the sitting room table, four of them seated here: Phelan, Beckett’s mother and his father, and an older man, a grandfather, Phelan guesses. An outer ring of family members lean against the walls, or fill out the lounge seats, kids perched on the arms of chairs, or crawling in and out of laps.

  Beckett’s father clears his throat. ‘Colonel?’

  ‘Brigadier,’ Phelan replies, before adding hurriedly, apologetically, ‘but it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Would it have mattered to our boy?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I don’t understand.’

  From the ring of aunties and cousins, one interrupts. ‘He deserved a fuckin’ general. You hear? A five-fucking-star general!’

  Beckett’s father waves his hand at her.

  ‘Eeeeee,’ she whistles and stops.

  Beckett’s mother hasn’t raised her face from her lap. The grandfather’s eyes are dark and still, waiting.

  ‘Brigadier, tell us this. What happened to our boy after he died? After the battlefield. Where did he go? What did you do with him? Where did he lie? For how long? Where was he when your chaplain knocked on our door? When that notification team of yours parked their car exactly where you have yours out there now, and woke us and told us he was gone? Where was our boy then, where was he at that moment?’

  Phelan is hopelessly exhausted once again. He can’t possibly give them what they need. Doesn’t even know what they’re asking. When he answers, he speaks more slowly than he’s ever spoken before. Answering multiple questions. Maybe there’ll be an answer somewhere in what he says.

  ‘He was never alone. We ensure there is always someone with him. The army has protocols. We have … ways of looking after our … warriors’ … bodies …’

  There is murmuring behind him, not the wild woman this time, but a chorus of low voices.

  Phelan tells them what he can about their protocols, the minutest detail. It is a map of sorts he tries to lay out. He wants them to see there was more than just respect in it, that there is sacredness as well, that the army is capable of that. That he is too.

  ‘And then, when it was time to bring him back home, I …’ all their eyes are on him ‘… I accompanied him in the plane. And then, after the flight home, when we landed …’ What does he say now? That he handed Beckett back to his parents? That they’d entrusted their son to him and all he’d returned to them was his body? He nearly does. Nearly slumps and says it, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa, nearly beats his chest and nearly asks forgiveness.

  Beckett’s father grunts. ‘And before that?’ he asks. ‘When he died. What then? What did you see? What did he say?’

  The last words test. So much hangs on it, too much. The need those of us who are left have for wisdom, for reassurance of uniqueness, hope. But who among us could bear our entire life being distilled into one final utterance? This is not an examination Phelan needs to pass for himself. It’s for Beckett he mustn’t fail. He searches the room for clues on how to respond, a crucifix or a laughing Buddha or a totemic painting, but there is nothing to help him and he regrets breaking the man’s stare.

  ‘How did he die?’ Mr Beckett asks.

  Phelan wavers before the enormity of the question. Beckett’s parents already know what happened. The army has briefed them. He looks up at the ceiling to think. Because there is falsity and there is duty, and before him is a young soldier’s family, and Phelan’s weakness is not their burden.‘I saw …’ he says, looking into the father’s face again, ‘… I saw your son quietly close his eyes. The pain had passed. He was calm. I don’t know where he went then … you’ll know that better than me. But in that moment I saw a warrior who was loved by his fellow soldiers. I saw a warrior who was a better man than me … me who should have been his leader.’

  There, he’s said it. And it’s true.

  ‘Is that all?’

  Phelan wants to groan, can’t think of anything more, but understands what he’s given so far isn’t enough. What else? He gropes around for some harmless detail, no matter how small.

  ‘He called me Charlie.’

  Beckett’s mother lifts her head.

  ‘That’s not my name, but that’s what he said, “Goodbye Charlie”. I had a sense … I had a sense it wasn’t me he was farewelling, but maybe all of us. Maybe in that moment, we were “Charlie”.’

  ‘Eeeee,’ the aunt in the back keens, as the room begins to murmur and click and whistle, a collective acknowledgement of some truth beyond Phelan.

  The mother starts to softly weep. The father places his gentle hand on her arm, and the room quietens again for Mrs Beckett and her weeping. Phelan averts his eyes. After a long time, the father turns back to Phelan.

  ‘My wife’s name is Charlotte. Our son called her Charlie.’

  On the way back to Brisbane Phelan pulls over on the highway, the traffic streaming past, and staggers into the bush. A burst of startled galahs takes to the air and Phelan drops to his knees, retching.

  Made, Not Born

  The next day Phelan turns on the cricket, a different sedative. He watches it, vaguely, for Beckett, looking for the play
ers whose images he’d glimpsed adorning Beckett’s bedroom walls. Some possibility of fellowship. On the screen batsmen bat, bowlers bowl, cricketers’ cricket. Little human figures shrouded in white positioning and repositioning themselves against a green background, running in, then running out again.

  If there’s a narrative unfolding out there on the field, it’s lost to him. This game he’d once understood so well has now moved beyond his grasp. It’s hard to keep hold of anything – Beckett, what happened at Chora, the shape of his wife. He’s got the interview to do, when? Next week in Sydney? He can’t put it off again. But what has he got to say? What can he remember?

  Between overs the same television advertisement repeats, an armed forces recruitment drive. Again and again and again the army asks him whether leaders are born or made. Phelan squirms. He could lie down. He could sleep. But the advertisement is insistent, drilling into him. Born or made?

  ‘Made,’ he answers finally. ‘Made!’ Yelling it at the television. Lurching back to his old faith, his army family’s creed. How good he suddenly feels. The recommitment is invigorating. Empowering. We make ourselves, he says to himself, regaining strength. It’s how we respond to circumstance that counts, an eternal truth. The surge of power he feels just by acknowledging this truth, resubmitting to it, renewing his commitment. So simple a thing!

  He looks at himself in the hallway mirror. He clenches his jaw and grits his teeth until the muscles in his neck tighten and the veins in his temples pulsate. His red face. All his vitality. He lets out his breath, drops to the floor, and commences his push-ups, driving away from the floorboards again and again. I have made this fifty-push-ups-a-day body, he thinks. I must ready myself to return. A medical examination to pass, an interview about Beckett’s death to get through, then a flight back to Kabul and a command to resume. The confidence in him is feverish. Today I will shrug off the shallow breathing and the racing heart. I will ignore Beckett’s insistent voice. I make myself. I lead. I am stronger than I have ever been.

  The doorbell rings but Phelan refuses to be interrupted. Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight. He pushes his body, fierce as a zealot. I have not yet finished making myself, he thinks, whoever it is can wait. Phelan is rising to his feet when it rings again. He sucks in six breaths, each deeper than the last, steadying himself. At the third ring he calls out down the corridor, ‘Coming!’

  When he opens the door it is to a tall man he does not know. Though dressed in polo shirt and trousers, Phelan recognises him for what he is behind the dark sunglasses and the thick beard: an ex-soldier. He has grown his hair long, but his shoes gleam and his body is tight. He smells of fresh battle, the hunger for it. Recently discharged, probably now a private security contractor.

  The man salutes, slackly, contemptuously – that old gesture from the vast wordless language of insubordination.

  Phelan’s resolve of just moments earlier, his mad certainty, flounders. Instinctively, unthinkingly, he braces up – the conventional response of the officer in civvies to a soldier’s salute – his arms straightening by his side. Phelan looks past the man as he does so, trying to assess whether the man is alone. Behind him, stretching to the horizons north and east and south, the city goes about its business.

  ‘Who are you?’ Phelan demands.

  ‘A messenger.’ The man almost adds, ‘Sir’, but swallows it.

  Phelan sees the struggle the man wages with the word, the little battle with himself, then the victory. Sees the stranger in front of him grow more powerful.

  ‘Lieutenant Gruen wants you to have this,’ the man says, and only now does Phelan see the envelope in his hand.

  Phelan’s gut tightens.

  ‘But Lieutenant Gruen is in Tarin Kot.’ He can’t hide his surprise, feels himself slipping.

  The messenger smiles. Or sneers. ‘Yes. Where he should be. Keeping his men out of harm’s way as best he can. Protecting them from hypocritical jokes like you.’

  Phelan’s heart pounds. He stands mute for long moments, at a loss.

  ‘Lieutenant Gruen asked you to give me this?’ he croaks eventually, his voice broken.

  ‘Let’s just say he wants you to have it. So you know what sort of train is coming down the track at you.’ The man holds the envelope out but Phelan does not yet take it.

  ‘What is it?’

  The man laughs scornfully. ‘What are you afraid of, Brigadier?’

  ‘Who are you?’ Phelan asks again. ‘How do you know Gruen?’

  The man just shakes his head. ‘I’ll let you in on a little secret,’ he says, leaning closer, conspiratorially, as if about to raise his sunglasses to reveal his eyes, as if whatever he says next will be delivered in a whisper. But when it comes, it’s a snarl. ‘You’re fucked,’ he says. ‘Accept it.’

  ‘Get off my property!’ Phelan finally shouts, his voice shaking. ‘Get off. Now!’

  When the man laughs again, Phelan knows it is at his desperation, his helplessness, knows he has nothing, is nothing. Knows there is nothing he can do to try and keep this out, his destiny.

  The man tosses the envelope at Phelan’s feet. ‘Fucking pervert,’ he spits.

  Freedom

  When Penny arrives, her husband’s yell echoing in her head, she sees the envelope on the floorboards, the open doorway and Phelan shaking on the threshold. She pushes past him, and when she finds no one on the landing, she leaps the stairs and runs down the path to the gate. But there is nothing. She goes out onto the street, and darts to the top of the local Jacob’s Ladder, the long public staircase that falls down the western side of the hill to Newmarket train station. If there is someone at the end of the stairs, far away, they are a shadow now. She returns to the house, panting as she catches her breath. Phelan hasn’t moved, frozen like Lot’s Wife before some terrible prophecy.

  She picks up the envelope, slips a finger under the flap and tears it open. The three images inside are freshly printed, carrying the smell of ink, and the paper is photographic quality, not merely A4. But what they’re of she can’t at first make out. She rotates the images in her hands, trying to orientate herself, leafing from one to the next and back again. They’re from the same series, she can tell that, and it’s dark wherever they are, though not yet night, not black. There are no faces, just bodies, shot close, as if in error. She selects one image and looks hard, trying to decipher it. She sees a belt, fatigues, a forearm with its hand disappearing into the dark folds of battle dress, nothing clear. Yes, she thinks, a camera has gone off prematurely and this is its digital detritus. But then, what does it have to do with James?

  Penny looks at the second image. Her eyes are becoming accustomed to the darkness on the paper, the shifts in the positioning of the limbs. The creases in the fatigues show her it’s a thigh she sees, submerged in dark water, a soldier’s hips, the belt unbuckled, splayed, a muddy arm and hand suspended, masking tape around the wedding finger so the band won’t catch, but the angle an oddity, as if belonging to a different body from the waist and groin and legs in the shallow irrigation canal.

  Suddenly she understands where she is, whose arm, whose hand, whose taped ring, what part of it is her husband and what part Beckett, suspecting his shame runs deeper than merely pissing himself in battle. Trembling, she turns to the third image: her husband with a water bottle to his lips, looking directly at the camera, directly at her, the furtiveness in his eye wholly unfamiliar to her.

  It’s taken whiskey to loosen him, but what shape he’s collapsing into Penny doesn’t know. She gently tries to pry facts out of him, but he is mute, smiling blindly back at her where she’s moved him out on the back deck.

  ‘How long were you there with him? What did Sapper Beckett say to you? What did you talk about? What’s happening here, in this image. When did he die? How do you know? Is that your water or his? Why can’t you remember?’ But she knows the last question is unfair.

>   The bottle of scotch between them catches the afternoon’s rays. He pours another glass, and holds the bottle up to Penny, offering to pour her one.

  ‘Jesus, James,’ she says, shaking her head in exasperation.

  ‘It’s true, Pen. I’m fucked.’

  His first words.

  At least she is trying to work it out, even if he can’t. The three photos are frames from Beckett’s helmet cam, she guesses that much. So everything has been captured, everything Beckett saw, even after he died: the river crossing, the hit, James joining him, all their time together in the trench, the camera continuing to film her husband as he lies with Beckett’s body.

  It won’t be as it appears. It can’t be. Whatever James is doing, there’ll be an explanation. ‘Talk to me, James,’ she says again, but he is dumb.

  He’ll be assessing Beckett’s wounds. Or making him more comfortable. Or tending him. There’ll be a reason.

  What is the protocol around patrol footage? she asks him. Who would have seen it? How many people? Where is it stored? For how long? But Phelan shakes his head, giggling foolishly, unable to remember, if ever he knew.

  ‘Charlie,’ Phelan murmurs softly, ‘my cock, my nuts. Are they still there?’

  Penny looks up from her phone, about to dial Bec. ‘What was that, James?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s all right, mate, you’ll be okay,’ he whispers to himself.

  ‘Yes,’ Penny says. ‘It’ll be all right, James. It’ll be all right.’

  ‘I want you to check, Charlie,’ Phelan says.

  ‘It’s me, Love. It’s Penny.’