by Simon Cleary
Birdsong
She has not heard birdsong since she was a child, not properly. Her tattooing life in the Sydney streets was filled with birds, but on the skin. The sounds of the city drowned out the squawks and chirrups of the few living there, the pigeons and mynas and crows. But all the birds she’s tattooed from flash designs passed down from generations of tattooists: how many hundreds of swallows and doves and eagles she’s sketched and traced and inked, squeezing so much meaning into so few species.
Out here, the flash seems emblematic and flat. Here the variety of wings and birdsong is dizzying. She begins to categorise what she sees, what she thinks she hears, separating them into rough groupings. All the black and white birds, the parrots, the small bush birds that refuse to stay still long enough to get a proper sense of them, the hawks that hold aloof over the valley. From the library she borrows a field book with colour plates and sits on the landing at the top of the stairs in the afternoons. When she picks Blake up from the school bus she practises the names of what she has seen: butcher bird, pardalote, wattlebird.
She hails Phelan one morning on his way to his cattle, and he stops, reluctantly. They’ve not spoken since that first day, avoiding each other for a month. Kira produces the field guide and turns to the plate with a pair of whipbirds sketched, male and female.
‘You can hear them,’ she says, ‘but you can’t see them.’
‘Wait here,’ Phelan says to her.
When he returns from inside the Big House, it is with a pair of binoculars. He hands them to her, wordlessly.
She expands her vocabulary from the back door of the cottage. Pale-headed lorikeets flash past, apostlebirds drop to the ground from a stand of gums, squawking and turning over fallen leaves. She finds a long caramel feather on a mid-morning walk and it’s weeks before the heavy rustling she hears in the undergrowth turns out not to be the wallaby she’d guessed, but a pheasant coucal. She hears the long shrill whistle of a kite and looks out. The bird glides westwards, the tips of its wings bowed downwards. If she were close enough she could hear the whisper of the air across its feathers. The third time she sees it she tracks it to its nest of sticks set in the big eucalyptus by the dam.
A whipbird answers its mate, their calling and the buzz of the early sun on the windowpane. She lies in bed listening, imagining what they’re saying to each other. I’m here, says one. Me too, replies the second. Where? asks the first. Over here, the second answers, just over here. Can’t you see me? I’m here. You’re safe.
After a while she hears a man’s footsteps outside, the shifting weight of each step as the soles of his boots roll over the gravel, the small pebbles crunching against each other, their uneven surfaces rubbing together. Strangely, she is not afraid. She rises, bringing his binoculars with her.
She meets Phelan at the foot of the steps and follows him quietly towards the cliff. She lies on the ground where he motions her to, and trains the binoculars on one tree then another, narrowing in until she spots them, plain and mysterious.
Later that day, Phelan stands beside the forty-four-gallon drum they use as an incinerator to burn off their weekly rubbish. He drives the crowbar between the earth and the foot of the drum, using a stone as a fulcrum. He levers the bottom of the drum off the ground, then reaches forward and pushes it over and onto its side so he can shovel the build-up of ash and debris into the cardboard box he’ll walk to the edge of the cliff and tip into the wind.
As he works he pulls out the rubbish that has not burned down. He’ll decide later what to throw back for a future burn, and what to stack – mainly bits of metal that should have been separated. As he thrusts his shovel deep into the drum and scrapes the spoil towards him, he finds a burnt tennis ball. Had he thrown it there himself, he wonders, tossed it from the house verandah months ago, testing his aim? His shot memory. He holds it in his gloved hand and squeezes it. He hears a hiss of air, and lifts it closer to his ear, squeezing again. He smells the little puff of ash. He takes off his gloves. This ball. He rolls it in his palm, feels it on his skin, in his fingers, feels its weight in his cupped hand. This beautiful blackened ball.
Phelan tosses it lightly, and the ball leaves his hand by an inch and falls back. He tosses it again, rolling his fingers over it, ash coming off on his skin. Again it falls back into place, its weight leaving and returning. He tosses it again and again, higher and higher, until its arc reaches above his head and he must look up and see its shape against the sky. This little darkened sphere rising and falling against the blue. His hands catching and throwing. Ever higher he throws it, and he moves his body into place beneath it, his palms together creating a nest for it, his hands growing darker catch by catch. When he misses and the ball spills from his fingers onto the ground, he bends to pick it up.
‘Hey Boss!’ It’s Beckett, but he is laughing. ‘Yours!’
Sapper Beckett is clapping his hands, and pointing, and the tennis ball the Afghan boy has struck high into the air with his makeshift bat is black against the bright sun. Out of the corner of his eye Phelan sees the boy racing away for a run, but with his head turned and his startling green eyes trained on him, hoping he’ll drop it.
A dozen other village kids are also watching him from their fielding positions in the hard-packed dirt street as he moves back from where he’d been wicket keeping, towards the spot where the ball might land. Boys with shaved scalps who’ve joined the game, others in embroidered skullcaps. Girls in pale blue dresses, their loose scarves falling from their heads.
Phelan is laden with combat gear and backpedals awkwardly, his eye on the ball, almost tripping, this big old cumbersome soldier.
Will he catch it or won’t he?
Sapper Beckett is hooting and hollering, trying to put him off, the kids joining in, a wall of boisterous noise.
Catch it or don’t.
Be here or don’t.
He watches the spinning ball as it drops towards him, his gloved hands cupped, ready.
‘Got it!’ he yells out, before he’s even caught the ball, ahead of the moment, excited, elated. This moment.
Phelan starts again, resumes his tossing. This ash-blackened ball. These inconsequential dropped catches. The perfection of the ball’s weight and its colour and its parabolas and the sky and his hands and the memories of his hands. Beckett’s laughter. All the ash on him, a benediction. And when he begins to weep it is like rain and if there is life to be born here he is ready to open.
Not Alone
He shaves and irons a shirt. He faces himself in the bathroom mirror before dressing, twisting shoulder-ways.
‘Hello there, son,’ he says to Beckett.
He leaves the house, passes through the back gate, turns towards the cottage and marches towards her. The clouds are high and bright and moving swiftly north where they will, he knows, dissolve beyond the horizon. He counts his broken steps in groups of a hundred, breaking the journey, tallying the bundles in his mind. So much counting over so many years: inventories and fighting strength and unspent rounds. He passes the collapsed piggery and the rusting harvester. A blue-tongue turns and disappears into lantana shadow. He is ready.
The cottage stands before him, perched high on its stilts. He pauses at the foot of the steps, his hand on the railing for long seconds, feeling for her movement inside. He hoists himself upwards, but the door opens before he reaches the top step and Kira fills the space.
When Phelan lies down he grimaces. His old body.
‘Does it hurt?’ she asks.
‘Of course,’ he replies, but lightly, thinking, it should.
Shafts of light fall on him through the window and for the briefest of moments his head is still and one side of his face is glowing and all the blemishes on his skin are illuminated, the scars and blotches and nicks, the bark of him glowing sagely in the afternoon.
‘Wait,’ she says, before beginning, and closes he
r eyes, her left palm resting on his bare right shoulder. He watches her, wondering where she is going. Her head is motionless. Her nostrils twitch, once, before her breathing slows and the creases in her forehead begin to disappear.
Is she praying? he wonders. Penny yes, but surely not her. Through the window behind her Phelan sees a hawk dive towards an invisible prey. Eventually he also closes his eyes and feels the warmth of her hand on his shoulder, and then the sun on his face.
When she speaks again it startles him.
‘So,’ she says, examining her work, ‘Samuel Robert Beckett.’
‘I want something else, something new.’
‘Sure. What’ll it be?’ as if mimicking a bartender.
‘Anything,’ he says. ‘You choose. Anything.’ Because what he really wants is to be opened up, to hurt, to feel alive.
‘Let me think,’ she says, and then, when she returns, asks him whether he wants to know what she’s decided.
‘I trust you,’ he says. But everything is stiff. His old man’s back, the side of his face planted on the bed, his turned neck, his shoulders, the hardness of his cheekbone. He is stiff and dry. When he blinks it feels as if his eyelids are scraping against his eyeballs. Better to keep them closed. Better just to give his other shoulder to her needle, hand himself over to her pain. When he stirs it is because of the cry of a cockatoo, heralding a shift in the weather.
He opens his eyes and sees her gloved hand pass beside his face to the ink table. There are bright red marks on the tips of her fingers.
‘Is that ink or blood?’ he asks, coming out of his stupor.
‘You don’t know the difference?’
She means, he thinks, you of all people. But her surprise doesn’t tip into incredulity, doesn’t try to shame him, even in jest. The little laugh that follows is, he thinks, aimed at herself. She hurries on.
‘There are so many reds.’ She runs through them, like reading from an industry catalogue. Some have mercury in them, others cadmium or iron. Or metal oxides. The naptha chemicals. To say nothing of blood, and the way it changes colour.
When she is done she leads him to the bathroom mirror.
Kira has cut a lone red poppy into him, delicate, double-skirted, dark-eyed, sitting high on its stem, utterly singular.
‘What do you think?’ she asks.
He examines himself again back in the Big House, elated, the breeze building too, moving into the leaves and branches outside.
There is poppy and there is skin. There is a glistening shoulder and a ruffle-red flower come into being by a tattooist’s hand, the blossom’s dark outline etched into flesh. The poppy may rest, but the flesh, the body, the blood?
You are not alone, the flower whispers to him, a lullaby across a thousand fields, a thousand lands. You are not the first, it sings, its red-cupped face, its voice coming to him on an ancient wind blowing over the eastern escarpment, and sweeping over the Hindu Kush, and skitting across the English Channel. It is the breeze that has breathed spirit into a thousand poems. A thousand vows of remembrance.
At Work in the Fields
He tapes the stencil of the poppy to the wall above the computer in his office. He gathers the information about the war dead that he’s haphazardly collected over the years. All the articles, all the obituaries and memorial pages, all the snippets of information that have nearly drowned him since his breakdown. He navigates the internet now with a clarity of purpose, gathering updates, flashes of feeling he collects from Facebook. He creates folders on his computer for each soldier.
He reaches out beyond the killed in action. He sends off emails, reconnecting with people he hasn’t spoken to since he left the army. He hooks into support networks, roiling grief-posts. He rings old colleagues. ‘What do you know? What have you heard?’ The names of those who died in-country are easy, their lives of valour and sacrifice. It is those who have died back home who are harder to find, their stories darker and more complex. He is offered private numbers. He rings mothers and spouses and brothers, histories of grief and denial and reconciliation. Wells of pain too deep for a dropped stone to ever measure. Still, he gathers them, treading as carefully as he can – their names and their stories, as true as he can find.
He returns to her after a week and hands her his list of names.
‘I need more poppies,’ he says, fire in his clear eyes.
‘So many?’ she asks, part surprise, part sorrow.
‘A field.’
Each day, after Penny leaves for work, he comes.
A poppy a day, Kira suggests, and he agrees.
‘So, tell me about him,’ she says with the first press of needle to skin. It becomes part of their daily ritual, working down the list. ‘Tell me about this man.’
And he does. He recounts what he’s learned about the soldier, his eyes closed, the hum of her machine drawing what he knows out of him, the buzz becoming a melody and his ragged words, lyrics.
He tells her about each of the men, details of their lives, of their deaths, of their families, where they were born, under what sign. Who they loved. Who loved them. Sometimes he has a lot to tell. Some days there is little beyond the soldier’s bare biographical dates. Even then he lays them out for her like stars on an astronomer’s map.
But always, always, he tells her where they died, and he tells her how. He doesn’t spare her. Or himself. He tells her who died alone, and who in the arms of comrades. What their final words were, if he knows, whispered or typed or scrawled in blood. There are clean wounds and there are bodies blown.
Sometimes she shudders at the detail, and pulls away. To look at a different horizon through the window, to breathe a fresher air, to gather herself.
‘Are you familiar with The Iliad?’ he asks.
She shakes her head.
‘It’s the story of the Trojan War. A long war, like this one, ten years of it … well, not quite as long as this. Anyway, what Homer does is capture every single soldier’s death. He describes every detail – that Diomedes’ spear struck Astynous above his nipple and his sword hacked off General Hyperion’s shoulder; that Patroclus was struck not once but twice, the first time between the shoulders and the second in the lower belly, the spear going right through him; that Achilles stabbed Deucalion, not just in his arm, but in the place where the tendons join the elbow; that blood soaked one warrior’s hair but not another’s.’
She waits for him.
‘How our deaths are as unique as our lives.’
‘You remember the girl I was working on before you that day?’ She watches him looking at her, fixing on her, as if trying to draw the memory from her.
‘The large girl?’ he asks. ‘The one with the skulls on the inside of her wrists?’
‘And under those skulls?’
He shakes his head.
‘Scars,’ Kira says. ‘From where she’d cut herself.’
The girl couldn’t have been much younger than his soldiers, than Beckett.
‘And those skulls,’ he asks, ‘were they her idea or yours?’
‘Sometimes,’ Kira says, taking courage, hoping it won’t sound absurd, ‘it feels as if we’re in the business of accommodating death.’
But then she falters. Phelan waits. However long it might take.
‘Sometimes,’ she continues, ‘sometimes I can smell it on a person. You break the skin, and the scent of death hits you. When that happens, you wish you were doing something else.’
He wants to ask her about himself. Instead, he says, ‘So you’re not a tattooist at all. You’re an exorcist?
Kira feels her own blood flowing. She explores the top of his back – the ridged and hollowed canvas of it – feeling its contours, navigating it with her fingers, working out where to plant each poppy. She wants, when she is finished, for them to move with the shifts in his musculature, like they might sway fo
r a zephyr passing across a field, the red blooms bowing and lifting their heads as he moves.
She had almost forgotten what tattooing can do, how you can lose yourself entirely. Blake’s playground scuffles fade to nothing when she presses her foot on the pedal and the electricity starts to flow. She stretches skin between thumb and forefinger and her dwindling savings are of no consequence. She wipes away blood and ink and it is the most urgent thing ever required of her. Flores is nothing, nowhere.
She finishes a poppy and she is immeasurably stronger than when she’d begun it. Taller somehow, more confident, formidable. Perhaps Flores can feel my strength, she thinks. And knowing how strong I am, he dares not come after her. She thinks, buzzing in the beauty of the skin she has just transformed, Flores knows and he has given up. He accepts this, she thinks, we are safe.
The list he’d shown her just days ago is already incomplete. It grows with the war. Phelan’s task is to keep it current, to ensure he misses no one. He hands her an updated tally.
They tattoo in the morning for an hour or two on the single bed they’ve dragged from the second bedroom into the front room. She tattoos, opens him up and allows him to talk. When they are done Phelan covers his back with his long-sleeved work shirt, and goes out into the paddocks and the sheds and the yards.
Sometimes she watches him throw hay from the back of his four-wheeler, or disappear into the toolshed. Other days she goes down to the Big House where, as she’s arranged with Penny, she cleans, helping pay her way. Then, each weekday without fail, she leaves the plateau mid-afternoon to collect her son from the school bus.
They circle around on the plateau making room, each for the other. Sometimes he looks up from his work in the afternoons to see her car returning, other times he can only hear it, counting the minutes until it reaches the cottage. Phelan is coming to know things about the kid too, the way he slams the car door and bounds up the cottage stairs before Kira’s door has even opened. He’s seen the kid trip mid-stair and recover, as if nothing happened. He’s watched them disappear into the cottage, boy and school bag, mother and boy.
