The War Artist

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by Simon Cleary


  But when she approaches the end, when the surgery is done, and she has been discharged from hospital with a lopsided walk, her elbow tucked in and her forearm across her chest, shielding herself, and when her oncologist has given his latest prognosis, and she has commenced what she is told may be ten years of drug therapy, she doesn’t care how long it’ll take, she’s just glad she’s alive.

  Even then, she is still not ready. She cannot yet bear his judgement, so she swings back into her story. She finds her own research, all the studies, all the peer-reviewed articles she’s collected, all the blogs and on-line forums, a million women sharing their experiences. She tells him breast cancer has a long tail, echoing her oncologist, watching her husband to see that he understands.

  James is dead-still beside her. She talks and she shivers in the deepening shadow. All the while she is aware of him staring at her, open-mouthed. If she continues, might she talk him into eternal silence?

  A crow cries from somewhere behind them, ark, ark, and Penny stops, suddenly exhausted. Ark, ark, the crow says. The day is shifting. She closes her eyes and waits for either crow or James.

  When he responds, it is exactly as she feared it would be every day since she decided to deal with it herself, not to burden him further. His words are exactly as she imagined hearing, the precise intonation even: ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  But it’s not really a question. It’s not even a lament. Why didn’t you tell me?

  Penny had promised herself that if this is what he says, she won’t fight it. She’ll know and accept her fate. It would be a simple test to guide her way through the complexity of her longings. If, after all she’s given over so many years, he still could only think of himself, if he could not recognise the stoicism in her, well okay. She’d turn her back on him and leave without a word, leaving him to mumble his why didn’t you tell me’s into the dusk. Her vow to herself.

  But now that she hears it, it doesn’t flatten her as she’d thought it would. It’s a seal but not the one she’d imagined. Because she can’t help but look at him and see his buggered old face on his oversized head, a tiring body, a lifetime in the breaking. She has been spectator and actor and if perhaps she could have left more of her own marks on him or gouged more out of him than she has, well, so be it: he’d still be buggered. Among the eddies and counter-eddies of emotion and hope and self-doubt and woundedness and falling cold, she shivers once and thinks: this is him. This is us.

  Instead of walking away she slaps him. Hard.

  Pulling Air

  When Phelan finds himself again, they are in the house and he is seated on the back steps. Penny is in the garden, turning a late-afternoon hose on. It seems he’s been watching her for hours: observing her disappear behind a hedge as she kneels, then seeing her rise again, a weed he can’t name pinched between her thumb and forefinger; knocking a loosely clenched fist against the rainwater tank to gauge the water level; scooping leaves from the frog pond.

  Phelan tries to remember what she’d told him. It comes back in snatches. His memory’s been patchy since Beckett, but this is time itself he’s lost. Routine mammogram, he recalls. Stage two. Something about oestrogen receptors and lymph nodes. Then, mastectomy.

  ‘Mastectomy?’ he’d repeated.

  ‘Mastectomy,’ she’d said.

  ‘That’s when they—’

  ‘Yes. They took off my left breast.’

  He hadn’t looked at her, not there, back on the path, in the forest, a crow scrutinising them.

  He watches her moving out among the plants until she is done, and joins him on the steps. The silhouette of the great Norfolk pine at the back fence pulses, the falling sun behind it.

  ‘What about chemo?’ he asks, trawling through the little he knows about treatment. ‘And radiation?’

  ‘Like I said before,’ she replies, ‘I don’t need it.’

  ‘I thought—’

  ‘No, not always. I’m lucky …’ She pauses, as if the line to come is one she’s delivered before, ‘… I get to keep my hair.’

  He nods. ‘And work?’

  ‘I went back part-time after a few weeks’ leave for the surgery and the recovery. Though not this week – they gave me this week off so I could … be with you.’

  He nods again.

  ‘The hospital has been very supportive,’ she adds.

  In a way he hasn’t yet been. Though he knows she doesn’t mean it that way.

  ‘Great,’ he says, as the logistics of her life these last six months begin to dawn on him: just how much she kept from him, the spaces she’d carved out of their relationship, how false the alternative existence she’d continued to describe to him while he was in Afghanistan.

  An entire cycle has run its course while he was away. A water pipe shudders down the side of the house as the pump starts to pull air. And he has been entirely unnecessary.

  Small Brushstrokes

  Penny closes the bathroom door behind her, her nightdress in her hands, traces of soil beneath her fingernails.

  Phelan picks up his Meditations from the bedside table where he’d unpacked it and opens it at random. The ancient words his eyes fall on contain no wisdom, nothing of comfort, nothing even to distract him. Their familiarity is, for perhaps the first time in his life, an irritant. He lays the book down and listens instead to Penny changing in the little room next door, hearing each shift of her limbs, tracking her movements in his mind. He hears water splashing in the basin, a handtowel pressed against her face, a drawer opening and closing. It strikes him that the woman in the next room preparing for bed is his wife. Not woman, but wife. The most ordinary of revelations. When did that metamorphosis happen?

  Phelan hears her discarding the day’s clothes, knows the precise moment she is naked, counts the beats of her weightlessness, hears her change into her nightwear then turn off the bathroom lamp. The band of light at the foot of the door disappears, and Phelan waits. But still she lingers.

  ‘Let me see, Pen,’ he says when she emerges from the ensuite.

  She crosses the room as if she hasn’t heard him, and places her old clothes into the wicker basket in the corner, her back to him. Such shoulders as hers, he thinks. It’s the surest way to read a person – not the eyes, but the shoulders – and he sees now, only now, the slightest of pitches to the left, this change in her bearing.

  ‘Penny,’ he says again and she hesitates. ‘Please, Penny. Please.’

  She doesn’t reply, crossing instead to the window where she pulls the curtains tight. When she turns to face him there is an entire room between them. She motions to the reading lamps on either side of the bed. He turns them off, first his, then, leaning across the bed, the frame creaking under his weight, hers. The darkened room. Penny gathers the hem of her nightdress and draws it to her thighs where she pauses momentarily, before lifting it up and over her hips and arms, shoulders and head, then dropping it carefully to the floor beside her.

  She stands facing him, a silhouette in the stray moonlight. The symmetry of her old shape is changed. Her legs and her hipbones are all her, but her arms fall awkwardly beside her now, and one of her collarbones seems to have dropped, pulled down by the weight of absence. She said she’d lost her breast, but how can a man believe such a thing without seeing? The uneven fall of moonlight across her chest hollows it, as if her body holds darkness differently now, the shock not in the maimed flesh, or the scar, or any collapse of beauty. It’s that this is not quite the wife he expected coming home to.

  Behind her the curtains billow on the night breeze. She straightens under his gaze and in her bony shoulders there is defiance.

  He brushes her right nipple with his fingertips, gently, carefully, feeling it rise. Phelan kisses her then, his hand cupping her. He smoothes her skin with his tongue, recovering the shape of her breast. Then, slowly, he moves across her chest. He’s unsure where h
e is going, this journey the pads of his fingers make across her altered body, her new skin. Her breathing shallows.

  The side of his thumb works over her skin in small brushstrokes as he searches out the scar, as if he’s working his way through a grid of uncertain territory, sector by sector till he’s covered the lot and can declare it’s clear. In time he finds it, low, across where her breast once was.

  ‘I love you,’ he says, and Penny sobs in the darkness. Sobs and laughs and lies at peace. Is bliss just a form of acceptance? Its pinnacle?

  She lies awake, overcome. He loves her, she him. Did she ever really doubt it? This certainty the reward for her heroic restraint, for her own sacrifice, for the lonely months of anxiety, of planning her healing without him. She feels for her scar, and it is almost a gift. A kiss, a consummation. Sleep.

  Whatever it might have been that woke him. Did Penny say something? But her breath is even and she is somehow still there, somehow sleeping. A dream then, though nothing of it remains.

  Phelan’s head throbs. He looks up at the plaster ceiling above the bed and in the ambient light makes out the rosettes in relief, thin-leafed vines twisting around each other in each corner of the room. The bay windows are open and palm fronds rustle in the night breeze. Penny’s breathing catches, then quickly settles into a rhythm once more. This bed, this wife, this room, this house, this city, this night. How long it takes to come home. He drifts back into sleep.

  But then there comes a great heat, his head and arms and feet pulsing with it. His throat becomes dry and swollen. There’s dust on his tongue, kicked up by the men in front of him, now out of sight. Beads of perspiration are pouring off him, and his shirt is damp and sticky. He can smell hours of acrid sweat and grime on his body and almost chokes. The thumping and spitting of shells and rounds above his head, and the pulsing thud-thud-thud-thud of Apaches is almost deafening. He is alone and surrounded by noise, and he’s trudging down a footpad by the side of an ancient stone wall stretching as far as he can see, to eternity and beyond. His gear is heavy. His limbs are like rock. He struggles to put one dead foot in front of the other.

  In the wall ahead he sees a wire protruding from the mud, bright red. He is mesmerised by it, yet knows he mustn’t touch it, knows what it is. But how interesting it is, so alluring in such a dun-coloured world. He should leave it for the sappers, but his hand is reaching for it anyway. He tries to pull his arm back, but he can’t. It’s an IED, it can’t be an IED. It’s an IED. It can’t be. It’s a beautiful little red wire, that’s all. But he knows perfectly well it’s an IED in the wall and he tries to twist his shoulder away, his whole body, but he can’t, and his arm is still reaching, and his hand is going to pull the wire and he can’t stop himself, and he’s sweating and he’s screaming and turning his head for the explosion and Penny is shouting now too, It’s just a dream, James, it’s just a dream. And he’s sitting up gasping for breath and his heart is banging against his chest so it hurts, and when finally the terror retreats he fears what has followed him home.

  ‘What is it, James? Talk to me. Tell me.’

  In time his gulping breath subsides under Penny’s calming fingers. The ragged world slows.

  ‘I think I pissed myself, Pen,’ he whispers into the death-silent night. ‘I might have pissed myself.’

  The indignities that accompany guilt. Knowing that men have lost control of themselves in combat since the first Stone Age axe hovered above the first Stone Age neck doesn’t help. That at least he hadn’t shat himself doesn’t matter either. He doesn’t know if he pissed himself before or after Beckett died, but he remembers he’s trapped and there’s fire all round and some of the fear is momentarily giving way to resignation, and Beckett is lying there still, and Phelan’s waiting for something to come, for providence or fate, bullet-small or Apache-large, and he’s starting to smell himself, and to feel the acrid wetness on his thighs. And he doesn’t want to get rescued like this. It’s a thought he has, one he can never disown, and the only water that’s left is Beckett’s and he takes it and he leans back and he pours it over his trousers, over his groin, sluicing himself in this thicket of sound.

  What War Can Do

  The night outside their window fills with landing flying foxes, branches breaking under their weight, fleshy fruit thudding to the ground, hard-spat seeds, a demented carnival of whistling and screeching. On nights like this they are a chorus of demons on the wing.

  Penny hugs him close.

  There’s not a bodily function she hasn’t seen go bad, so it doesn’t shock her. She’s tended to years of broken men, wiped up oceans of piss and shit and semen, their pus and their blood. But still: James, her James.

  She couldn’t imagine a man less afraid than he. This man now shaking in shame in her arms. How he chased action in his early years, only for it to elude him, because there were too few wars in the eighties when he was young and ready. The administrative postings when they came were not his fault, he didn’t seek easy paths, he did what was asked of him. So when he said to her, before Afghanistan, this time he might see action, she understood it wasn’t just his career he was thinking about and the promotions that might come. It was deeper than that, truer than that, and she loved him for it.

  ‘You can never ask anyone to do anything you wouldn’t do yourself,’ he’d said to her again and again. It had been his family’s motto, he told her, and implicitly, theirs too. He had to test himself.

  On the wall of his study was the framed handwritten letter his great-grandmother received when his great-grandfather – the first of the Phelan warriors – had died after a long life. She could almost quote it back to him, having stopped to read it each time she dusted the room.

  9 August 1973

  Dear Mrs Phelan & Family,

  With regret I read of the death of your husband. As an old soldier who served and fought under him I thought it was my duty to write and convey my deepest and most sincere Sympathy to you and your family in your sad loss.

  He was a brave officer and was loved by all his men who fought under him. He never asked his men to do anything that he would not do himself. He survived the Massacre at Bullecourt where a large proportion of the Battalion was lost. I myself was wounded twice in that battle. I pray that God will comfort you and your family in your time of sad Bereavement.

  Yours sincerely,

  Herbert Sullivan

  She comforts James. Nurses don’t need war to complete themselves, she thinks. Not like soldiers do.

  Yet isn’t it also true that all the great nurses were wartime nurses? Florence Nightingale in Crimea. The hundreds of heroes who returned from the Western Front with wounded soldier-husbands. Vivian Bullwinkel in Singapore. Ondaatje’s Hana, a favourite of her book club.

  She’s lucky. He is a good man. She comforts him and wonders whether she might yet, in her own home, become a wartime nurse.

  Whether her own wounding helps or hinders. Softens her or hardens. She stands before the bathroom mirror. Already this glass has revealed too much, has a power she fears cannot be harnessed, at least by her. I am no Amazon, she thinks – breast removed to better draw an arrow – and never will be. I am merely Penelope Phelan nee Richardson, standing erect as I can before my reflection. I am now one-nippled Penelope, mutilated Penny. Now have an unwanted pocket of fat beneath my arm, lose my balance, shrink. Some days I can laugh at the irony of my surgical souvenir, that it is me who is wounded, me who experiences phantom breast pains. Some days. I have been maimed by forces beyond my control. James may still want me, but do I want myself?

  Look at what the war has done to us, she imagines whispering to him. She doesn’t, though she might yet.

  All her girlfriends have said it to her, her mother, her sister too, the whole phalanx of women who’ve pulled her along. Even though her surgeon resisted the idea as she’d expected he would, she still thought she detected in him a moment�
��s hesitation that allowed for its possibility. Stress. The conclusion they urged on her. It’s caused by stress. Penny understands well the inevitable human need to find a cause for cancer. To seek answers to unanswerable questions. She has never believed it herself, has never given her patients more than a sympathetic ‘maybe’. Because her nurse’s oath – her Nightingale Pledge – didn’t include giving false hope or misleading advice. But it’s hard not to wonder about the ‘maybes’ when they’re yours.

  Maybe it’s the war that’s responsible, she might say to James, as much to test him as anything else.

  Do you really think so? she imagines her good husband gently responding, though he’d probably be entitled to a different reply, one she’d voiced to herself: If you thought staying home was stressful …

  But she knows he would never say such a thing, because James doesn’t believe in stress. Pressure, he’s said a hundred times over the years, is real, but stress is a controllable response. Oh, those beliefs of his. How many years of polishing, how far they’ve carried him, and thus her too, his polisher-in-chief. He’s a stoic in a post-modern world. What better place than the army for a man like him, who gets to quote his beloved Marcus Aurelius to kids starting out just as he had thirty-plus years ago, young officers, hard and ambitious. As if part of their initiation is to receive the Roman General’s meditations, a lost wisdom, which, if they’re ready for it, will guide them through a world most people find chaotic. The greatness of reason; the fragility of emotion. The triviality of the body. The majesty of the mind. All the aphorisms she’s read, but which her husband has tried to live. Let any external thing happen to those parts of me which can be affected by its happening – and they, if they wish, can complain. I myself am not yet harmed, unless I judge this occurrence something bad: and I can refuse to do so.

  For Phelan and Aurelius, stress is a moral failing. And yet here he is, sobbing in her arms, his mind having failed him on the battlefield.

 

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