The War Artist

by Simon Cleary

  Penny senses the shifts in the life of the farm, the new pre-occupations in her husband. There are the hours at night in his study and the jobs he’s not getting to during the day. And there’s the way he circles back before bed to ask her again what she remembers of the war-taken, scribbling down whatever titbits she might have to give. At first she thought he was collecting material for a poem. But there’s also a fresh vitality in him, a crispness to his footfall on the floorboards in the mornings, a purposefulness to his breakfast routine. There’s more laughter too. And more of the old playful teasing.

  But she’s no fool. Whatever James’s quest, whatever she’s encouraged him to face, she knows it’s stronger than her. She may not see everything, but she knows enough to know that. The daily trips he makes while she is at work, through the pines and across the paddock to the cottage, a track forming in the grass. What potions does the painted woman mix inside? What spells does she cast? Has she stirred something that Penny had thought the years of James’s medication had anaesthetised forever?

  Kira opens Blake’s room. A turned handle, a tongue receding, a cone of torchlight reaching out across the floorboards. Blake lies on the single bed like a sleeping lordling, three or four mattresses layered on top of each other, his face to the wall, beautiful. A pale mosquito net stretches out from a brass frame above his head, tucked firmly under the uppermost mattress. Beneath the net, her son’s chest rises and falls. Beside the bed, set on a silky oak lowboy, is a line of folded cranes of different sizes, looking out at the room.

  She lifts the mosquito net and whispers his name softly, her hand on his warm shoulder. But as she touches him, she feels something leave her too, an echo of the old soldier, and wonders how many spirits of how many tattoos have fled her fingers to nest in her son? Wonders what the cost of a tattooing life has been. This boy, this exquisite boy exposed to so much. Having chosen tattooing, having then chosen Flores, this third life she has now chosen, this one here on this farm with former brigadier James Phelan and his wife, at least for now, this is for her son.

  Caves and Waterfalls

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ she says at the end of a session. ‘A favour?’

  Phelan swings his legs off the bed.

  ‘It’s about Blake …’

  He waits for her to go on.

  ‘It’d be good to get him outside more. He’s great with the chickens, but … could he, after school … maybe he could … accompany you one afternoon?’

  Through the rear-view mirror Phelan can see the boy standing in the tray of the ute, holding on fiercely. Phelan wonders if he is small for his age. Beside the boy are the chainsaw, his gloves, the sharpened axe and a pile of hessian bags. He slows as they approach a creek and Phelan leans his head out of the window and yells to the boy.

  ‘Hold on, big fella. It’s going to get rough.’

  Phelan drops the Hilux into the shallow creek bed and then up the other side where he makes for a stand of trees on the northern aspect of the bluff. When he pulls up he leans forward for a better view, his face close to the glass of the windscreen. He nods to himself, switches off the ignition and climbs out.

  ‘Let’s have a proper look at these, hey?’

  The boy trails him through the trees, Phelan inspecting them for the diameter of their girth, how straight, how tall. He wants to get three posts out of each trunk and stops before a likely gum before looking up at its height. The boy looks up at the man. Eventually Phelan grunts before returning to the truck where he hands the axe to Blake, wide-eyed. He tucks the gloves into his belt, and swings the chainsaw off the tray. The weight of it, the substance of it, its perfect fit.

  ‘You stay here. Beside the truck. Okay?’

  At the base of the tree Phelan pulls the cord and the chainsaw’s engine comes to life. It’s as if some vital, animating force deep inside it has woken. He measures the tree again, its weight, its fall, and sets the chainsaw’s teeth against its trunk. Smell the smoke, hear the two-stroke engine, feel the teeth sink into the tree’s bark. How light the saw becomes, the machine hungrier now than even he is, seeming to have a need apart from his own.

  There is the moment he is feeling for, when the tree begins to go. On one side of the moment it is still tree, on the other, timber. Feel for that moment. Reach for it. Know it. That’s the thing, that’s where the rush is. How many triggers he’s pulled over the years. But there’s distance in time and space between pulling the trigger on a weapon, and the puff of dust or the dark mark on a firing range target. Here he’s still connected, still one through body and shoulder and arm and engine and biting teeth. Bayoneting a man in a trench may have been like this, he thinks. Or killing a beast with a knife or a hen with an axe. The life-force transferred, the strength gained. But only that which is necessary is sacred. Whose words were they? Aurelius’s? His father’s?

  The tree succumbs, and he turns the engine off so he can hear the sinews snap, and the rush of air as the canopy crumples, the crash to the ground, the vibrations that reach him through the earth.

  ‘Here, come,’ he calls out to the boy.

  Blake approaches, though tentatively.

  Phelan walks the length of the trunk, stepping out the three posts he’s after, before cutting them from the fallen tree. When he looks up, the boy has his hands to his ears. After the three sections are cut and rolled away, Phelan takes the chainsaw once more and draws a long line down the length of each section, bark deep.

  ‘Pass me the axe,’ he says to Blake, turning off the saw and resting it on the ground beside him. ‘Now we need to take the bark off.’

  Phelan raises the axe high above his head before bringing it down, not blade-ways but in reverse, striking the wood instead with the rear of the axe-head. A dull thump. Again and again he hits the wood, moving up and then down, softening the bark with each stroke, loosening it from the timber beneath.

  ‘Watch now.’ He kneels and grips the bark with his fingers where he’d cut it length-ways with the saw, and pulls it towards him. It peels away easily. Blake leans over the section of trunk and does the same, grasping the bark and pulling it and, small as he is, away it comes.

  Blake looks at Phelan, his eyes sparkling, and grins.

  Penny watches her husband collect Blake from the cottage, watches the boy clamber up and into the tray of the ute where the dog is waiting excitedly, hears the engine noise fade away over the ridge. She changes out of her uniform. She takes a bottle from the fridge, pulls on her boots and makes her way across the paddock.

  When the door opens she holds up the bottle. ‘Can I tempt you?’

  She can’t work out if she’s interrupted the tattooist. The woman’s face is inscrutable, at least to her.

  ‘Sure,’ Kira says. ‘I’d like that very much.’

  Too bad if she doesn’t really, thinks Penny.

  There are no wine glasses in the kitchen cupboard, so Kira finds two tumblers, holding them out while Penny pours. Penny places the bottle between them on the kitchen table, bare but for a camera.

  ‘How’s the cottage?’

  ‘Good … Great … Perfect,’ Kira says finally. ‘Thanks.’

  Penny nods. The kitchen is neat, she notes, it is clean. They both drink quickly. ‘Blake’s a great kid, isn’t he?’

  ‘He loves it here, absolutely loves it,’ the answer just enough to cancel out the question.

  Again the conversation flounders.

  ‘You’re a photographer?’ Penny prompts, nodding to the camera.

  ‘I used to do a lot. I enrolled in art college after school. Yeah, I enjoyed taking photos. I thought …’ But the tattooist trails away.

  Penny perseveres. ‘Have you found anything around here to photograph?’

  ‘Actually, yeah.’ A spark of life, a little less caution. ‘The birdlife … some of the birds are pretty amazing. The colouring on some of the parrot
s is incredible.’ Kira picks up the camera and scrolls through some shots she’d taken that morning, a dozen wild budgerigars feeding on grain she’d tossed onto the grass. She hands Penny the camera.

  ‘Beautiful,’ the older woman says, looking at the first image. ‘Are there others?’

  ‘Just scroll through yourself.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  Kira waves the question away. ‘No, no, no. There are no secrets in there.’

  In the morning Phelan goes to Kira. In the late afternoon he takes Blake with him as he catches up on chores. They finish felling the trees they need, wrap chains around the slippery, debarked logs, and haul them to the yards where they set up makeshift drying racks. While they wait for them to dry Phelan leads Blake around the property, circumnavigating it over the course of a month, painting sump oil on the good posts, straining the barbed wire in stretches and running new lengths of wire in others. When the new fence posts are ready, they drop them, one by one beside the rotten posts they’ll replace, then return to the first of the old posts and start digging it out. Once a post seems loose Phelan ties a chain to it and, with both of them in the cab of the ute, Blake peering through the back window, Phelan nudges the truck forward, pulling the stump out in a cloud of dirt. It’s painstaking work – if they extract one in an afternoon it’s a good day.

  Even when he tires, Blake doesn’t abandon the work. Phelan looks for things he can do, little tasks. He tells him stories as they work, recalling his own childhood, the farm becoming an adventure-land of waterfalls and caves and hidden treasures.

  ‘Do you regret any of them?’

  It’s the third time Kira has accepted a drink from Phelan’s wife, but she is determined to hold her past close. Phelan’s wife lifts the glass of moselle to her lips as if the question is as inconsequential as the weather, but how the woman burns to know.

  Kira looks down at her arms, the knit of ink. The beautiful and the desperate. Then looks up at the other woman, still her landlord. ‘I’m not sure we know each other well enough yet.’

  Do I regret any? she asks herself. Every part of my body wants to scream yes. The pair of feathers Flores tattooed on her in the beginning. The cheap wallflowers she’d inked to shorten her worst days, or the useless skulls she had done after her intuition started going awry. Flores’s name, that proof of loyalty he’d demanded from her. Some days she wished she could rip off her epidermis, tear up her thirty-year-old skin and start again.

  But you can’t. She knows that. You can’t pick and choose. A tattoo captures a moment. And then it is gone. Whatever particular yearning or fear that births a tattoo and propels it into the world cannot last. Every ensuing need, every fresh desire, differs from the tattooed moments that have already passed into history. All a tattoo can do is speak of one time, one place. Who we were, not who we are.

  She hears that wise voice sometimes, but in the task of surviving each day there is no time for meditation, no time for philosophising.

  Phelan comes to her in need, and she can disappear. He offers her that opportunity. Those moments of sweet relief, maybe strength, maybe rediscovery. Maybe something to endure.

  One Saturday morning when Penny is rostered off, James brings her a glass of squeezed juice, oranges from one of their trees. He holds the refrigerator-cold glass out to her. She sits up in her bed, propped by pillows, and drinks it as he stands there.

  She smiles and wipes her lips with the back of her hand. ‘Delicious!’

  James beams. Then, after the briefest of pauses, he begins to speak, telling her everything, shedding his shirt, showing her his back. But this is no reprise of the revelation of his Beckett tattoo. This time he is excited, and his enthusiasm is free of doubt.

  Penny kneels on the bed and examines him. Ah, she thinks, so, the tattooist. Penny counts the poppies, counts the days he’s been at his project. He and the tattooist. But is that all? Tattoos? Then, looking at him, open, dismisses the notion. James is too like a child, is beyond deceit. At least for now.

  On her bedside table is the pen she uses for her nightly crossword. ‘Don’t move,’ she says, reaching for it.

  She turns her husband around so he is facing her. ‘Kneel,’ she says, and he does. Then she presses the nib of her pen onto the skin at the left of his chest, drawing a little blue heart there and piercing it with an arrow. Her initials, then his. Whatever you and the tattooist are doing, don’t forget you are mine.

  Needlesong

  Phelan brings Kira yet another new name.

  ‘Corporal Milan Djokovic, thirty-four years of age. Two children, two girls. And an ex-wife. Standard, that. An infantryman. On his first tour he’d been part of a unit providing cover on small hearts-and-minds projects in Tarin Kot. They’d slept the night on a classroom floor after erecting monkey bars in the playground. The next morning they were escorting some engineers down an alley on the way to a nearby mosque to install new speakers, a simple metro patrol. They walked out of the alley onto the street moments before a car bomb went off. The blast threw Djokovic back into the alley. He herniated a disc in his back, but that’s not what did him in. It was attending to the civilians killed and wounded in the explosion. That’s what did it. That’s what he couldn’t forget. Schoolgirls among them. And that he himself had two girls.’

  ‘And then?’ she asks.

  ‘He started unravelling after he got home from his second tour. He did a third to try and get ahead of it, but it was no good. His marriage began to deteriorate. He went into treatment, but it didn’t pull him back. He’d been accepted onto a crew of veterans sailing the Sydney to Hobart yacht race – it gives them a sense of teamwork again, mateship and competition – but he didn’t get to the starting line. Corporal Djokovic jumped off South Head. He wrote in his suicide note that he didn’t want to take the place of someone who was more likely to benefit from the trip.’

  Kira tattoos MD in black on the flower’s stem, planting it for him.

  One Sunday, Penny watches Kira and Blake leave the cottage and cross the paddock to the Big House, the boy carefully carrying a box in his arms.

  ‘This is for you,’ Blake says at the back door, holding the box out.

  ‘What is it, Love?’ Penny asks.

  ‘Something I’ve made,’ Blake replies, ‘a present.’

  In the kitchen, over tea, Penny unwraps the brown paper covering the shoebox. She folds the paper and lays it aside to re-use, then carefully lifts the lid from the box.

  ‘Oooh,’ she murmurs, ‘it’s exquisite!’ She lifts the first of two origami cranes from the box, their yellow wings bright in the kitchen light.

  Blake smiles, proudly.

  ‘Did you make these all by yourself?’

  ‘I can show you!’ Blake blurts, and produces a sheet of paper he’d tucked into the belt at his back.

  Penny watches as the boy folds the paper on the table, turning it over and pressing it with adept hands.

  ‘If you make a thousand cranes you get a wish,’ Blake says as he folds.

  She thinks about the novenas of her childhood, and her own father leaving the house early on the first Friday of the month to go to Mass before starting his day’s work. If you can commit yourself to it, he’d explain, if you can accomplish nine first Fridays, then Jesus promises he will forgive your sins immediately before you die.

  She wasn’t a child to pick fights with her parents, but all the same she’d asked, So all you have to do to get to heaven is go to Mass nine times?

  It’s harder than it sounds, her father told her, life gets in the way, all sorts of things – you get sick, your children get sick, holidays, work.

  ‘Is that so?’ Penny says. ‘Where did you hear that Blake?’

  The boy pauses, and looks down at the folded paper in his hands. ‘I don’t know. Somewhere,’ he says quietly, his confidence faltering. ‘I think it’s because
no one could ever do it. You’d get bored. It’d take too long and you’d get bored and stop. A thousand is a lot of cranes.’

  That evening Phelan takes a call.

  ‘What do you think you are doing?’ the voice asks, an old voice, unforgotten.

  ‘Gruen?’ Phelan responds. They’ve not spoken since he left Tarin Kot with Beckett’s body, but Gruen has shadowed him ever since.

  Penny looks up from her book, startled, colour draining from her face.

  ‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it Brigadier Phelan?’ The mockery of what Phelan had once possessed, of who he once was. ‘We never thought we’d have to see you again.’

  The Gruen who greeted Phelan at his forward operating base, had doubted him even then. Gruen the seer. Phelan has nothing to hold on to now, no air to breathe, nothing to stop his mouth from drying or blood pounding in his ears.

  ‘What do you want?’ Guessing the answer, fearing it.

  ‘We all saw you on television, Old Man,’ Gruen continues evenly. ‘It was like you’d come back from the dead.’

  Phelan has nothing to say.

  ‘You’ve been making contact with people again, haven’t you? You wouldn’t be thinking of doing anything like that interview again, would you?’ Gruen continues, Phelan understanding now that Gruen is calling to finish him off.

  ‘It was because of you Beckett died.’ Gruen puts it to him like a prosecutor to a trapped and broken accused, all its remorseless logic, the accumulated weight of years. ‘You don’t get to be his advocate, Old Man. Not then. Not now. Not ever.’

  Phelan tries to respond, but can’t form the words. There is sound, plaintive, a whimpering before a raised axe.

  ‘What did you say?’ Gruen asks through the phone, wanting to hear Phelan attempt a defence, ready to pounce, to kill.

  ‘I know,’ Phelan blurts it out. ‘I know!’

  Gruen is taken aback, though only temporarily. ‘What do you know, Old Man? Say it!’