The War Artist

by Simon Cleary

  ‘I know that it was my fault.’

  ‘But do you?’ Gruen presses. ‘Do you really? Or is it just that you know his mates hold you responsible, that I hold you responsible, that in time history will too.’

  ‘Of course I know. Of course I do. As if I’d need you to tell me.’

  ‘As if you didn’t need me to tell you!’ Gruen snarls, losing his equanimity. ‘There’s no one better than me to say it. Because he was my soldier to protect. It was my base and my patrol. My watch. And he was my boy. And if you hadn’t come, he wouldn’t have been killed.’

  ‘I know that,’ Phelan says again. ‘And I know that’s what you think. You made all that abundantly clear a long time ago, Tony. And I’ve had a long time to think about it. You are right. I was wrong. If I hadn’t been there, Sapper Samuel Beckett would not have died. And I will never forgive myself.’

  Seven long years of silence.

  ‘It fucked you up, didn’t it?’ Gruen says, even now pushing further forward.

  ‘Being responsible for a young man’s death can fuck you up,’ Phelan replies. ‘Yes, it can.’

  The two men fall back.

  ‘Has it fucked you up too, Tony?’ Phelan asks after a while.

  ‘I can live with my responsibilities without them fucking me up.’

  ‘Well good for you. Good for you.’

  ‘We saw that you got a tattoo of his name.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘The boys. Those of us on patrol that day. Those of us who shared that base together.’

  ‘You saw my tattoo?’

  ‘You showed the world when you did the interview, Old Man.’

  ‘I’m not afraid to talk about Beckett.’

  ‘And to talk honestly about your role in it?’

  Phelan pauses. Clocks tick. Tattoos sting. A wife watches. ‘I’m not afraid of that either.’

  They both weigh Phelan’s answer, what truth there might be in it.

  ‘The boys get together every year,’ Gruen finally says. ‘Those of us who are in Brisbane. Every ANZAC Day we hire out the first floor of The Victory.’

  ‘It’s a trap,’ Penny says.

  But Kira’s needles disagree. You can do it, they hum, you are strong.

  Victory

  Phelan stands in King George Square, close to the parade’s route, lost in the gathering crowd. He hears the hiss of a coffee machine in a cart at his shoulder. A mother brushes dandruff from the shoulders of her son’s dark jacket. The wheels of a baby’s stroller squeak and car horns squabble. People are talking everywhere, though even if he were to pause and lean close he still couldn’t hear what they were saying, as if no matter how much he may wish it, there are conversations to which he can never be admitted. It’s his first parade since he was a kid where he’s not in uniform. All the civilian boots hurrying across the square to join the bulging crowd are out of step. A voice comes over the loudspeaker, momentarily parting the static, a man’s voice, but too high Phelan thinks, too hurried, swallowing his words, as if something as mundane as delivering a message to an ANZAC Day crowd can make a person anxious.

  Overhead are clouds and fighter jets, on the ground fifty thousand upturned heads. Stirred or benumbed? Phelan feels the whiskey flask against his left breast, filling the inside pocket of the jacket Penny bought him for his breakfast television interview. On the outside are his medals, two sides of the same jacket.

  He finds a toilet cubicle and slugs down his Jameson’s, feels it hit. He straightens, sighs and straightens further, slaps his cheeks.

  The bells of the City Hall clock tower chime ten o’clock, demanding to know what he is doing here, why he is spectator not marcher.

  He feels her tattoos on him, his whole body is alive with them, not just his skin. She’s humming for him, whispering to him. You can do this, her tattoos murmur. You can.

  It propels him forward, through the thick streets, vibrating with people. It is afternoon now and the day is glowing. The close crowd carries him for a city block or two. Then, as he nears The Victory, he slows. The couple behind him have to swerve suddenly to get round him. Would they be cursing him if he was in uniform?

  Phelan stops completely when The Victory comes into view. He leans against the wall of the building on the corner of Edward and Charlotte, and looks across the intersection at the pub. A giant Maori in a black-and-white security uniform stands guard on the footpath outside, patrolling the side door leading upstairs to the private room where the boys have been drinking since late morning.

  He yet could go, he yet could stay.

  As he watches, tossing up what to do, Gruen emerges from the pub, alone. Phelan’s gut tightens. He feels the building hard against his shoulder. Gruen steps onto the footpath and puts his phone to his ear, his thin lips moving. He gestures as he talks, cutting shapes out of the air with his right hand, giving orders to someone. As Phelan has not done for a long time.

  You can do this, Kira’s tattoos whisper to him.

  But do what exactly? Watch Gruen on his phone as he’d watched him on his army radio in the Chora Valley? The angle of Gruen’s head and the rope of muscle running down the side of his neck are entirely unchanged. Brisbane and its babbling streets disappear. Phelan watches Gruen receive intelligence. Watches him process it, move his men around. Watches him bring in air support all over again. Where is Kira here, where Penny? Phelan closes his eyes. He breathes. He tries to count the battle away, one two three, but a shell explodes nearby and his eyes snap open and Gruen is looking directly across the street towards him.

  Phelan jerks his head back sharply. His heart, his skin, heat at the back of his skull. He slides into a doorway, panting. What shadow there is, what shade. He tries to make himself small. These people passing by on the footpath in front of him, these old men, these parents with their children in their hands. This same throb of battle. The smell of piss from somewhere far away, so close. This crowd of boys, this Beckett-filled street. Beneath this molten sun, sheltering in this shallow doorway, this no-space. Phelan’s legs weaken.

  ‘Old Man.’

  Does he feel his legs at all?

  ‘Phelan,’ the voice tries again.

  Ah fuck.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come,’ Phelan hears Gruen say.

  He opens his eyes. Gruen’s hand is on his shoulder now, patting him.

  ‘Come on up, Old Man,’ Gruen says. ‘Join us.’

  It is an ambush, he thinks, Penny is right. But I have no choice.

  All their heads turn when he enters the room. They look at him, amazed. It is as if they themselves have called him forth, as if the intensity of their denunciations over the years has made him real. As if from somewhere in their cauldron of accusations they have found the spell to summon him for sentencing. And now here he is, among them! They look at him goggle-eyed, astonished at their power.

  Gruen signals the barkeeper to cut the music.

  ‘Boys,’ Gruen says, pausing for effect before yelling. ‘Here he is!’

  The men roar. An ambush and a sacrifice, Phelan thinks.

  Gruen raises his arm to quieten the room, his boys before him once again. At moments like this it’s as if he’s still their commanding officer in Afghanistan, as if they’re all still hunkered down in their forward operating base in the Chora Valley, the last remaining representatives of humanity, no one to rely on but each other. He might be about to deliver a briefing, preparing them to step out beyond the wire, urging them to keep their heads down. Sweating to keep them safe. When he speaks again it is clearly, evenly.

  ‘Let us give James Phelan credit where it is due. We invited him here, and he has come. He didn’t need to, but he has. That takes courage.’

  A number of men snort derisively. Phelan thinks he hears the click of a closing door, sealing him in. Gruen raises his hand again. Silence follows.
r />   ‘Phelan has something he wants to say. Let’s hear him out.’

  Phelan looks around the hostile room. They come at him, pressing forward, wedged still in the Chora Valley, working to cut themselves free. They’ll kill him to get out, he knows that. They have to. He desperately needs a drink, but he’ll have to do this without one.

  ‘If …’ he starts. ‘If I hadn’t … been … on that patrol …’

  They listen to him stumbling and gulping, trembling before them, and realise what they have in front of them is not what they imagined they’d get, nor what they wanted. They barely recognise him he’s so broken, so pathetic, incapable of issuing orders, let alone expecting anyone would follow them. Where there had once been a soldier, even a career-arsed brigadier you wouldn’t cross a proverbial dirt track to piss on, now someone else entirely has taken his place, someone it’s hard to be angry at.

  ‘Spit it out,’ someone hisses, but he’s shouted down by others.

  ‘If I hadn’t been on the patrol,’ Phelan continues, ‘then there probably wouldn’t have been an attack, and … and Sapper Samuel Beckett would probably still be alive. And …’ There is no way out for him now. ‘And I didn’t need to be on that patrol. There was no sound operational reason for me to be there. So I must carry the responsibility for his death.’ Phelan looks around the room. He tries to meet their eyes, even if just one or two men, but he can’t and looks down. ‘He was a mate of yours, and I’m sorry.’

  They look at him and his pitiable apology, some embarrassed for him and wanting it over now, for someone to put Phelan out of his misery; others furious. They turn to each other and battle over him, as if he is no longer there, whether he be hanged or not.

  He watches from the centre of their competing, safe for as long as the fight continues. He has lost all authority. He understands that. Once he could have made or broken men’s careers, fancied he could have even broken the men themselves, that he had that power. Now he is a scrap some of the men want to save, and others long to see burn. The judgements themselves are no harsher than those he’s reached himself. They ring with a purity in the spoken air, crisper, cleaner – he’s weak, unreliable, vain. He closes his eyes. It’s more than a relief. There’s gratification in it. Though it’s not the damnation that hurts – it’s the counter-arguments. The voices who refuse to judge, the compassion. The so-whats, and who-gives-a-shits, and the first stones, and glass houses. It sounds weak, even to Phelan’s ear. These men who are not trained in mercy seem to him, at that moment, reduced by it.

  The longer the debate over him goes on, the more they are all tainted by it. Indecision is always fatal, a once-upon-a-time mantra of his. The trick is knowing what has died. He is Barabbas. Get it right this time, he thinks. There is no one else, no choice.

  But Gruen says, ‘Let him atone. Let him try. Watch him try and make amends.’ Gruen is almost whispering. The room is leaning in to him, tongues lapping, as if his words are the last remaining droplets of sense. Just watch.

  ‘You’re not buying his fucking PTS fucking D line are you, Boss?’

  ‘Look at him,’ Gruen says quietly, ‘look at him.’

  All their turning heads. All their withering gazes. These marksmen, Phelan thinks. Finish this, finish it.

  Too much silence.

  ‘We get that you feel guilty, Sir,’ one of the men says, breaking it. ‘But that’s only half of it. We saw the interview you done, Sir. About how war can fuck you up. About how the army can do more to help. About “destigmatisation” and all that. And good on you. But then you bring Becks into it. What the fuck? I mean why the fuck would you do that? And that’s the problem see? You say you feel responsible for Beckett’s death, but then you take responsibility for his memory, see? They’re separate things. The war fucks people over, spits them out, no one there to catch them. All right. Fix that up. Good on you. But leave Becks out of it. You can’t do that, see? You can’t give a man’s life away, and then take his memory.’

  Echo and silence. Long and deliberate and reaching back with precision. Phelan is there. Gruen is there. Beckett is. Each man in the room.

  ‘Fair enough,’ Phelan says, ‘but he shouldn’t be forgotten either. No matter how the war takes them, they shouldn’t be forgotten.’

  Phelan takes a step backwards from the bar table. The tight fist of men around him opens slightly, clearing him a space. They watch as he unbuttons his shirt. Those not yet at the table gather from the far ends of the room. They see Phelan’s chest hair, his pale skin, his softened gut as he pulls his shirt out from his trousers. All talk, all drink, all music, all shifting weight from foot to foot ceases. Phelan peels off his right sleeve, and they see Beckett. They know it already from Phelan’s interview. Even so, seeing Beckett’s name there on Phelan’s pink skin, reading his name there among them, is a shock.

  Then Phelan peels off the second sleeve. His shirt drops to the floor and the men see his back, his field of poppies, each bearing its initials.

  They understand, they know. They don’t need to count, they know. They lean forward and find their mates and see themselves and the price of war and they know.

  Then one of them, Joseph Ng, wounded after Beckett, rolls forward in his wheelchair, rapping the men in front of him with the back of his hand to make them shift.

  ‘Let me see,’ he says to Phelan. ‘Kneel down, will you,’ and Phelan does.

  Ng reaches out. He jerks his head suddenly, an involuntary tic, and his reaching hand shudders before resuming its course. They watch his trembling finger, see it land on the back of Phelan’s left shoulder. Tap Phelan’s flesh, gently brush the tips of his fingers against a poppy’s petals. Watch him lean in closer still to examine him, making as if to pluck the poppy, to lift it off his skin and smell it.

  ‘Excellent fucking work,’ Ng says.

  A Good Leg

  He brings Ng to her, carrying him across the paddock in the afternoon light. She goes out to meet them at the foot of the stairs. A word of greeting, perhaps Come, Welcome, not yet understanding who he is and why he’s here, but she is touched. Phelan lifts the soldier up the stairs, the young man’s face raised in uncertainty, his right arm around Phelan’s shoulders. Upstairs, Kira sits Ng on the bed set out on the enclosed verandah, while Phelan returns to his ute for the wheelchair.

  When he gets back Phelan pulls her aside in the kitchen and asks, his voice low, ‘Can you do this?’

  ‘What, exactly?’

  ‘A tattoo. Whatever he needs.’

  ‘He’ll pay for it?’

  ‘Or I will.’

  Kira looks at him. Phelan is animated by something she hasn’t seen in him before. She doesn’t immediately answer.

  ‘He’s scared,’ Phelan presses. ‘He’s lost one leg, and half the other. He’s just arrived home after two months in the military hospital in Germany. He’s got it all ahead of him still – more surgery, new legs, therapy. But he wants to keep what he’s got left. He wants … well, he’ll tell you what he wants better than I can.’

  Kira shakes her head. ‘Well, I’m scared, too, Jim. I mean, who is this bloke? He could be anyone.’

  Only then does Phelan see Kira’s anxiety, she who came seeking refuge. Whatever fear bringing an unknown soldier to her sanctuary might seed in her. Whatever risks she imagines it might bring, however it might expose Blake.

  He nods. ‘You don’t have to do it.’

  She sighs, shrugs her shoulders. ‘He’s here now.’

  ‘Hey,’ she says as she approaches him from across the room.

  ‘Hey,’ he returns, swivelling his chair towards her. His cap is resting in his lap. His short dark hair, his wide-darting eyes. He’s mid-twenties at most, she thinks, but his trousers are pinned up, the left above the knee, the right below it.

  ‘Where are you from, mate?’

  ‘Sydney, Darra, Vietnam,’ he replies
. ‘Take your pick.’

  It’s only now, standing beside him, close, that his neck and head jag suddenly away from her, before slowly settling back into place.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asks.

  ‘Sapper Joseph Ng. The brigadier said you’re the tattooist.’

  She gestures to the bottles of ink in neat rows on the top of the table.

  ‘You were the one who did his back?’

  She nods, then takes a chair in the corner of the room, facing him at his level, so she might see him better. As she lowers herself, he watches her, his head whipping violently to the left again, before returning smoothly to neutral, as if a hydraulic timer is at work within him.

  ‘You’re an artist,’ he says looking across at her, hauling the words out of himself. The immense effort it takes.

  ‘At your service, Sapper Ng,’ she says, bowing her head as she speaks. The gesture risks parody, but it is sincere. Then the whiplash of his tic. She waits for him to settle, then smiles.

  ‘You and Phelan,’ she says, pointing her head towards the Big House as she mentions him, ‘obviously know each other.’

  ‘Not really.’

  He jerks again, and Kira measures the time between tics. The soldier’s unique rhythm.

  ‘Have you been tattooed before?’

  He nods, showing her the work on his biceps.

  She names the tattooist, and he nods, impressed. She waits for his tic, and then, when the spasm has passed, asks if he knows what he’s after.

  He reaches into his breast pocket for a page from a glossy magazine, unfolds it and holds it out to her. A great dragon, nostrils flared, scales glistening, its eyes looking out at the world and all its threats.

  ‘Where do you want it?’

  He wheels across to the single bed. ‘Can you help me up?’

  She gets underneath his armpits and lifts as he twists and slides from his chair to the bed. She steps back as he shuffles out of his pinned trousers. Usually she’d turn away, but she worries it might offend him if she did. The soldier sits tall, his T-shirt falling to his black Y-fronts, ‘Bonds’ stitched around the elastic. His two withered thighs shine in the half-morning.