The War Artist

by Simon Cleary

  Yet how different this return is, freighted by burden. For both of them. And then his arrival pushed back. Sure, it might have only put off the inevitable by a day, but hard as it’s going to be to tell him, it would have been harder if he’d arrived home last night as he’d originally planned. He would have been exhausted after the long journey, after all the officiating, all the emotion of it. Even so, she couldn’t possibly have hidden it from him. It wouldn’t have been fair. She won’t hide it from him now. She can’t, even if she wished to.

  This morning’s text from Sydney was unremarkable. He’d been about to board, giving her the flight number and its scheduled arrival time. She’d replied immediately that she’d meet him at the airport – as she always did.

  But now she’s overcome by anxiety. She imagines him emerging from the gate searching for her, expecting she’ll be in the middle layer of waiting people, as she usually is. She imagines his face seeking her in the crowd, the need in him palpable, overwhelming his usual equanimity. She fears that. But she also fears he’ll detect something is different. Without realising that everything is different.

  And then what will she say?

  She’s practised it a hundred times but still doesn’t trust herself to tell him without tears. At least not in the airport, not in public. Suddenly she’s sure of that much.

  Phelan stands at the gate, his overnight bag beside him, waiting for his phone to come on, and what he expects will be a message from Penny that says – seeing she’s not here – she’ll be outside waiting. She is always on time, that fine quality of hers. You can build a relationship on that, he’s often thought, because dependability is about respect, and what is respect but a face of love?

  A message comes through. Darling, welcome home … I’m sorry but can you get a taxi? P x

  A cold shudder. Does she know? How can she? Is she guessing? Does she sense something? Something he hasn’t done? An ill-chosen word? Fuck, he thinks, fuck, fuck, fuck. He rereads his text from last night, but can’t see anything in it, gathers himself, strides through the terminal and steps out into the humidity. He finds the taxi queue – he’s on leave, beyond the privilege of a driver, not wanting one today anyway. His mind is churning with torrents of competing thoughts and plans, roiling. The buzzing in his ears seems to grow louder. He’ll grab a taxi and hang on. She knows; she can’t know. It is like an alternating current. Though if she knew, surely it wouldn’t be Darling.

  But what if she has guessed? he thinks suddenly. So damn what? What was it anyway? Though last night’s thread hasn’t yet snapped, the nearer to home he gets the more it stretches.

  Even if she knows, she’ll understand, he says to himself. In time she’ll understand, in time she’ll forgive. The war and its toll. She’ll understand: a man under your command dies in your arms and everything is changed, everything, destiny setting you a new course.

  The taxi passes the factory outlet clothing stores and takes the overpass. He sees the Airtrain curving its way on its raised track out to the airport. Another thought: why does he need to explain himself anyway? As if he’s done something that needs justification. Hell, after the months of stiff emails he’s received from her, the handful of awkward conversations, her reluctance to skype. After making half a dozen excuses to avoid a video-call – her responsibilities as nurse unit manager at the hospital, the unrostered extra shifts to fill in for junior staff suddenly taking sick, even describing her monthly book club as a ‘commitment’ – he assumed she simply didn’t want to see him, preferred the controlled communication of email and those increasingly perfunctory phone calls.

  She’d denied anything was wrong when he asked, said she wasn’t upset with him, but he knows a cooling when he feels it, a withdrawal. So she can hardly be surprised, he says to himself. And now she is taking it a step further, now she can’t even be bothered meeting him at the airport!

  Suddenly he’s angry, and it shits him he’s in a taxi, returning alone from six months in Afghanistan with a soldier’s death on his shoulders, that he’s a brigadier without a driver to meet him, that his wife hasn’t bothered to show, and that the Punjabi cabbie is taking the cross-city tunnel without asking him his preferred route and that it’s him who’ll be paying the $4.50 toll.

  Agitated, Penny paces from room to room. Where will she tell him? The kitchen? Their bedroom? The garden? She is passing through the living room and its great bookcase, when she stops abruptly.

  Occupying an entire wall, metres long, is her floor-to-ceiling library, all the years of her reading life. Book after book organised chronologically by when she finished it, her library charting her reading history. Her childhood fictions at the top left, the start, leading to the handful of books she read between leaving school and meeting James, followed soon enough by the novels she completed on his first tour away, so soon after their marriage. Too soon. Those first novels followed in time by others. Thick bands of books gathered during each of his postings. Her library reminds her of a tree’s growth rings – the bursts of intensive reading while James is away, her reading seasons more frugal when he is at home. All the events of her life are held in place up there on the shelves by what she was reading at the time – changes of house or city, milestone birthdays, extended visits, the deaths of friends and relatives, of princesses and movie stars. The entire decade of yearning for children – the hope, the treatment, the despair, the anguish, the arguments, the love, ultimately the love, all mapped out in shelf after shelf. The order of it gives her comfort. Finishing a book and then placing it – whether memoir or novel or non-fiction – in its proper place at the open end of the shelf. Irrespective of whether she enjoyed or was repulsed by it, whether she’s ever likely to recommend it or read it again,

  She halts before her recent reading, the thirty or so books she’s consumed since James left for Afghanistan, almost no fiction among them, almost all the same topic, devoured with an urgency she’s never known. Her heart races, a fresh anxiety at what these books will give away, too soon. Penny gathers them in her arms and carries them, half a dozen trips, to the laundry where she boxes and hides them away. Just for today, she thinks, just until I tell him.

  In the kitchen, when she’s done, she’s panting from the effort. The face of the wall clock is suddenly enormous, its hands moving inexorably.

  She is waiting for him on the front porch when the taxi pulls up. What seeing her triggers, what it sweeps away. She is standing there quietly, as if she’s been waiting for days, and seeing her like that, his agitation subsides. She’s wearing a dress as she always does, this one light blue and patterned with sunflowers, though not sleeveless, as she prefers. Her arms, usually gym-toned, are covered.

  Phelan is overcome by the accumulated joy of all their previous reunions, the uncorralled excitement of those first moments of pure welcome. He wants to embrace her now. He calls out from the street, waves, and if she remains on the porch a moment longer than necessary, hugging herself tight before stepping carefully down onto the path, it signals nothing to him.

  Penny’s face is shaded by a wide-brimmed garden hat as she comes down the path. She removes her sunglasses when they are nearly upon each other, but he sees nothing unusual – the sun lighting her short brown hair, her high forehead, her face free of make-up, her strong jawline.

  ‘Welcome home, Darling,’ she says. ‘Welcome home.’

  Phelan hugs her, but she only gives him half her body. It’s as if she’s already twisting away in the moment of their first touch, extracting herself from his grasp, leaving him the instant he arrives.

  Penny leads him up the front path, nervous words spilling from her now, evasive words about gardens and plants and seasons and rain. About how she’s glad he’s home. About how she’s missed him.

  But then, at the doorstep, just as he’s about to ask if there’s something he ought to know, she’s crying, sobbing, telling him again and again how much she’
s missed him. It’s uncharacteristic of her, not the strength of the emotion, but the tears. Yet when he reaches to embrace her she pulls away again, turns, and enters the house without him.

  Phelan follows her into the kitchen, disconcerted, determined to find out what’s wrong. But the aroma of freshly ground coffee beans stops him. The room suddenly becomes foreign, his head suddenly dizzy. He is back in this morning’s house at Gordons Bay, overlooking the tattooist’s body and the sea, and once again he is kneeling beside Kira, a mug beside her face, stirring her awake.

  ‘Where did you end up staying last night?’ Penny says, wiping the tears from her cheeks, sniffling, smiling.

  Revelation

  Phelan feels a cold blade in his shoulders and freezes. He’s vaguely aware of his wife continuing to move around the kitchen, making for the hot water jug, her back to him. He swallows. The rush of time, throatfuls of it, would choke him if he tried to speak.

  Eventually she turns and repeats the question sweetly, as if perhaps he hadn’t heard her. ‘So, where did you stay last night?’ She’s looking at him innocently, her open face, the water jug suspended beneath the tap, waiting for him to respond before turning on the tap.

  ‘With a mate,’ he says in a voice he barely recognises, all authority drained out of it.

  ‘Who?’ she asks, still nonchalantly, filling the jug one-handed, not looking up, no need to. He has a network of soldier mates and she’s entertained most of them over the years.

  ‘No one you’d know,’ he says, so quickly the words run together.His temples begin to throb, something trying to burst free.

  She turns the tap off and looks up at him, meeting his eyes for the first time, a kitchen bench between them. She is confused. There’s not a friend of his she can’t fit into place. She waits for him, expectantly.

  ‘Fuck me!’ he suddenly spits. ‘Christ!’ His face is violent red. ‘What sort of interrogation is this? Get home from a fucking war – take my own fucking taxi home – and here I am getting drilled. For Christ’s sake,’ Phelan snorts. He heaves his bag up from the floor, turns his back and strides angrily towards the bedroom.

  ‘Sorry,’ she calls out, following him into the bedroom just as he throws his bag on the bed. He’s got his back to her and is aggressively stripping off his shirt and tossing it at the wicker clothes basket that has stood in the corner of the bedroom the life of their marriage. When she catches it.

  ‘James,’ she says softly when she sees his taped shoulder, thinking it’s a wound dressing of some sort. ‘Oh, James.’ She moves around to get a better view, but he turns away, sheltering it still. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? What happened? You said you’d only had a slight concussion, that was all. You said you hadn’t been hit. Show me. James, show me …’

  She goes to him confidently – all the certainty of wounds and their tending, all the old habits – and takes his wrist to still him while she bends her head near. He looks down at his shoulder too, as if remembering it afresh.

  Penny pulls away, aghast.

  ‘A tattoo,’ she says her eyes wide in shock. ‘You’ve got a tattoo!’

  It’s not as if she hasn’t been around them, she’s an army wife for God’s sake, and over the years she’s admired as many as have horrified her. But not James. She can hear him at a barbecue twenty years ago, one of his mates pressing him, calmly knowing he was setting himself apart but not wanting to offend, seeking a tactful route: ‘They’re not for me.’ And then, when that answer wasn’t enough, when they kept pushing, he looked them in the eye, forcing them to wait on him, and told them he believed the body was sacred and who was he to mark it like that. He wasn’t entirely serious, but knew that talk of sacredness frightened people off. No, it wasn’t really about reverence for the body. It was about self-possession, and the projection of it. That he’d be beholden to no man.

  ‘It’s nothing, Pen,’ he says. ‘Don’t let it ruin your—’

  ‘Day ruined,’ she fires at him. Then waits, staring. ‘Well,’ her challenge is fierce, ‘what is it?’

  But before he can answer she reaches across and finds the end of one of the strips of tape with her nails. Her husband submits. She rips the tape off, then pulls the plastic wrap away in one swift downwards unveiling.

  For a moment she’s not sure what she’s looking at, and sees only a blur of black lines, raised on inflamed red ridges of skin. There’s an anger in them, like fiercely wept tears. She tilts her head and reads the inked lettering – the name, and the date, and her husband’s scarred flesh.

  James hadn’t mentioned Beckett’s name in his first short email.

  Dear Pen, There’s been an incident. I’m fine but we lost a soldier. I’ll call soon. Love, James.

  She’d replied immediately, her fingers shaking, trying to get her first feelings down before they started to fragment.

  Oh, no! That’s terrible terrible terrible. I’m thinking of you always, James. Stay safe. Love you. Px

  Then the second email, twelve hours later, odd, as if he’d entirely forgotten he’d sent one earlier.

  Dear Pen, If you haven’t yet heard, you will soon enough. We lost another soldier yesterday. Sapper Samuel Beckett. Everyone’s gutted. He was such a good kid, and such a good soldier, and now he’s gone. I can’t help feeling responsible. Please say a prayer for him, and for his family. Love, James.

  It was stiff, but she thought little of it: the army has its protocols about how much can be said. She knew that better than most army wives. And knew that James was often preoccupied with his responsibilities, these little gaps that would temporarily open between them. Though some of the holes that have grown between them on this posting, she knows, are because of her. But it was a surprise, asking her to say a prayer for the sapper. Not the notion of praying, but that her husband would ask her to. He who asked no one for anything, ever, let alone a god he’d never believed in.

  Call me as soon as you can Darling.

  The phone started ringing even before her computer had shut down, his voice quivering as he said her name.

  ‘Are you okay? What happened, James?’

  He told her, his voice flattening out as if he was reading from a report – giving her the same facts he’d given Canberra earlier that day, even referring to himself in the third person, Brigadier Phelan, before correcting himself, his voice only losing its way after he’d finished, after he’d paused and said, eventually, ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Penny exclaimed. ‘You were there? With the patrol? You were actually there?’

  ‘On the patrol, yes. The patrol was engaged. We came under fire. Sapper Beckett was hit and I … I … I was with him when he died, Pen. And …’ He seemed to choke. There was the silence of a long marriage between them. ‘… And I couldn’t do anything about it.’

  She thought he might even weep. Penny had visited the hospital chapel that afternoon and lit a thin taper candle and pressed it into the bowl of sand beside the darkened altar, knelt and said her rosaries. The first for Sapper Samuel Beckett, the second for her husband, the third for herself.

  ‘You must be grateful it wasn’t James,’ one of her colleagues said, stopping her in the hospital car park and squeezing her arm. Penny thanked her for her concern, responding to her nurse-mate’s tone rather than the clumsy words. Even so, Penny found herself overwhelmed by irrational thoughts. Surely, she wished in desperate reply to her fears, James will be safe for the moment. Surely, while Sapper Samuel Beckett’s death and life are in everyone’s thoughts, nothing else will happen. Surely the universe will do the right thing.

  She emailed again.

  Don’t think you’re responsible, now, Darling. It’s only natural – that’s how leaders always feel. But you’re not responsible. I saw you on the news this evening. Are you sure you’re ok? Love, Penny.

  James’s response: He was just so young.

>   It wasn’t from her husband she came to know about Beckett, but from the profile pieces in the media, and from the other wives. That he was twenty, and the youngest soldier in the platoon. That he walked with a strut without being arrogant. That he loved a laugh. That he had a harelip no one regarded as an imperfection, not in a kid like this. That he was a natural athlete from the north coast of New South Wales who turned his back on a promising cricketing career to join the army on a whim. The story goes he’d nicked the first ball he faced at a national selection carnival, the very first ball of the innings, and before he’d even taken his pads off he was laughing, unable to take any of it too seriously. He applied the following Monday, left behind a prestigious cricketing scholarship, his hometown and a sprawling family.

  Penny also read somewhere he was engaged. She’d heard that benign little phrase – ‘childhood sweetheart’ – often enough to know it was seldom true. But when she rang around she discovered there was a girl, Laura, and a wedding date. When Penny Facebooked her to offer support the girl was gracious, or scared, and told her how she and Beckett were planning to have kids and Penny wept because Laura was only nineteen – the same age she’d been when she and James were married.

  She looks at his shoulder and the tattoo in memoriam of a young man she hadn’t known existed until he was dead. She’s staring, barely thinking, still adrift.