The War Artist

by Simon Cleary

  ‘You knew these men were trying to get back on their feet again, but as a kid you couldn’t begin to guess what had knocked them down in the first place. And you didn’t want to.’

  It feels, after six years, that she and James are finally on their feet again. Being led by hope, fragile but real. In the first year, James hadn’t remembered his own birthday, let alone their wedding anniversary. Penny brought him cakes in the hospital for both events, candles and sparklers, balloons and streamers. A naïve attempt to spark him back to life, pity on the face of at least one nurse. You’ll be okay, the sparklers said, I’m here, I won’t let you go.

  Well she didn’t let him go, hasn’t. But six years is a long time, and there were days she lost enthusiasm. In truth lost heart. Years when it was easier to let an anniversary slide rather than torture it into place. Risk it overwhelming her, taunting her. When they eventually resumed marking their wedding, it was her husband, rebuilding himself, who did it, bringing her breakfast. Thank you, he said, his voice quavering with both gratitude and terror, thank you.

  Penny knows the terror has not retreated, but still she hopes, this first day, as they begin to feel their way into this space, that they might at least return to the same bed. She dare not hope for desire – the medication and whatever it was designed to cure having killed that off for good, that much she’s resigned to – but perhaps the intimacy of a common bedroom isn’t beyond them.

  She takes his hand and leads him to the master bedroom, with its built-in wardrobes and the bay window, and the shadows on the wallpaper where paintings had once hung.

  ‘So, is this where you were conceived?’ she asks brightly, as they stand together in the centre of the empty room.

  ‘Not on the floor, that’s for sure.’ But she can see him thinking about it, now, for the first time. He was the eldest, and his parents had bought the farm before he was born, soon after they were married. ‘It’s possible,’ he says. ‘Yes, it is possible.’

  ‘We need to choose our room,’ she hears herself say.

  The therapists had insisted on teaching him not just a new language – a vocabulary of emotions, some of which he’s sceptical actually exist, shades of feeling cut so fine as to disappear into meaninglessness – but also a new way of thinking: how to express need. How to listen to others express theirs.

  And as he studiously practised, week after week, so she also was forced to learn, and in turn, to teach.

  But some moments are too big. Theoretically she could say to him that now, after being where they’ve been, after six years of rebuilding, six cycles, each a new eternity, after deciding on a new start here at the farm, that now was the time for them to start sharing a bed once again. She could tell him that she’s adjusted so many expectations, shed so many hopes, but she’s clung on to this one. That she can endure his nightmares and his dream-cursing. That she’s prepared to be woken by his tossing. That she wants once again to wake to the sound of his breathing. That’s all.

  Instead, she simply says they need to select their bedroom.

  He senses it. Not all, but enough.

  ‘This should do, don’t you think?’ he says, and her heart soars.

  Mapping Country

  He maps the boundary of the property, setting out with the dog. They can’t yet afford a motorbike, so he walks along the fence line, marking out the posts that need replacing on a mud map he’s drawn in his notebook. He records the broken strands of barbed wire, where sections have grown slack and need tightening. He estimates how much new wire he’ll need. He lifts branches off the fence where they’ve fallen during storms, inspects the gates, notes where the termites have got in and how all the gateposts could do with a coat of sump oil. He limps around his property on dry knees, three days in all.

  It’s a miracle of sorts, being able to set aside his ruminations like this, his obsessions, his lonely projects. Not to feel compelled to switch on his computer at daylight and disappear into an online world of news websites, of army media releases and obituaries, of internet communities knitted together by grief and anger. Not just Beckett but beyond. All the Afghanistan killed, all its wounded, his quest to find a place for himself in a greater world. A miracle! That he can walk his way past his obsessions, that this land and its imperatives offer him this.

  And how the country comes back to him as he walks, an entire childhood of it, adventure upon adventure. The thing that surprises him most, the thing he’d forgotten – or sees differently now – is how battle-drenched even this land is. How war-flavoured his childhood had been.

  As a kid the firefights were always guerrilla contacts. It was something about the topography. The country was perfect for ambushes – the long grasses of the western paddock, the deep, viciously eroded gullies, and after rain, the creek and its three pools. Phelan hobbles across the country now on stiff knees. He steps over the same places where, as a child, he’d lie on his stomach in the grass. Lying for hours, propped on his elbows, the red-painted stock of his replica rifle keen against his right shoulder, his left eye closed, his right peering down the curtain-rod barrel, the grasses waving in an afternoon breeze.

  Even as a child he could wait. He could listen too. The whistling grass, a cackle of cockatoos overhead. Rolling onto his back and counting the birds like they’re a squadron of jets before rolling back over and commando-crawling forward, breaking the head of a stalk of grass and tossing it into the air to see which way the seeds float, circling his older cousin perched on a boulder. Learning what downwind means. And that in every tactical advantage lies a weakness, that while his cousin has a three-sixty view around him, he’s also exposed. Phelan the kid tosses a small rock so it lands with a thud in a different quarter. He watches his cousin’s head snap around, the thrill of manipulating the moment. He watches the back of his cousin’s head, and lines him up, eye and barrel and trigger.

  Penny follows the sun. She leaves the bunya pines behind, heading down the slope towards the creek, an old calico bag over her shoulder, in it, gloves and hand shears. When she hears a light plane in the distance she stops and scans the sky but can’t find it, waits instead till there is nothing left of it before resuming.

  She smells the water first, then hears it, sees it. A spring, no more than a soak at the base of a granite outcrop, a single lily among shaded reeds. She presses the moist ground with her fingers, feels it give. The insects grow accustomed to her. She moves slowly down the fragile watercourse, plant by plant, clipping sprigs of herbs and handfuls of grass, breaking off branchlets and their leaves, placing everything carefully into her bag so when she returns to the house she can lay it all out neatly on the kitchen table for identification.

  Though today she barely knows what she is looking for, in time she will know how to use these plants. She will come to learn when the rains fall due, what a good season looks like, which grasses are native and which introduced, how the land responds to drought, what it must do to survive. All is before her. Today she begins.

  The damp ground becomes a creek, which leads to a small rock pool. Penny takes off her boots and tucks her socks inside, before stepping into the shallow water. She chases her own ripples to the other side of the pool, crawls over a natural dam and continues down the creek, rock-hopping. A dragonfly hovers above the water up ahead, as if signalling the way.

  As the banks steepen, lantana grows down to the water’s edge, funnelling the water into deepening shade, crowding out the creek until finally there is a wall of it before her. Light filters through from the other side. Penny bends her head low to continue but an overhead branch rips off her hat and tears at the back of her neck. She winces, before collecting herself. She recovers her hat where it is caught, then drops to her knees to crawl beneath the lantana tangle to the other side. She wrestles her way through, jeans soaked and eyes blinking in the bright light. Penny hears the sound of cascading water nearby. She moves slowly forward, stepping tenta
tively onto a large flat rock at the top of the waterfall to survey the country as it opens out before her. From here the creek drops its way into a valley below before joining a larger creek that disappears out of view to the north. On the other side, gullies and sharp spines of rock rise again. And not a house in sight, not a road, not a single overhead electrical wire.

  She places her boots and her hat and her bag beside the pulpit rock. The sun is warm on her face. She peels off her jeans and lays them beside her to dry. Feels the sun now against her pale thighs. How long since they’ve been exposed to the sun like this? She looks at her soft thighs. There’s not a colour anywhere out there among the scrub and the rocks and sky anything like her pale pink flesh. She is nearly fifty. Has her flesh ever glowed like this before?

  The scratch on her neck starts stinging, and Penny reaches for it, the blood still moist. She slips out of her long-sleeved shirt and inspects the bloody collar, then kneels beside the hurrying creek, first to cup water onto the back of her neck, then to work the blood out of her shirt.

  Penny sits. She pulls her legs to her chest and rests her chin on her knees. A yellow butterfly flits down to drink from a puddle she created when she splashed water over herself. So delicate, so beautiful. Penny smiles as it flies away. ‘Come back tomorrow,’ she says aloud, ‘and bring your friends.’

  She stretches out her legs and examines herself. These fine legs of hers, these thin ankles, the dark skin around her knees, her puckered thighs, the folds at her belly. You’ve hung in there, she says to her body. Then, a sudden impulse, and she looks around again, a rush of daring. Should she? But she doesn’t even answer her question, not consciously, and strips away what’s left of her clothes. You’ve done better than hang in, you’re a bloody marvel! She laughs again and crawls into the creek and sits in the cold water, her buttocks on the stony bed, feeling it rush around her. Then she lies back, allowing it to course over her shoulders, over her collarbones, finding its way around her right breast, pouring into the space where her left breast once was, torrenting over her scar, sweeping down her belly and her waist and her legs, all of her.

  The grass is high and the turkey’s nest is half full of water. Phelan can’t wait until he’s repaired all the fences before starting to stock the farm. He figures two paddocks in good order are enough to rotate twenty head of Hereford, and while they’re fattening he’ll make his way around the rest of the property. So he sorts and cleans out the shed, making space for all the tools and materials he envisages collecting in this exciting new life of his. He gets tips from a neighbour about where to buy supplies, and makes the twenty kilometre run into town every other day to stock up on wire and timber, a strainer, tools he’s never used before but which will become as familiar as a rifle. He buys an axe and a chainsaw second-hand, and the old labourer who sells him the gear offers him jars of nails and screws and rusting hand tools just to get rid of them. He debates with himself whether to get a motorbike or a quad, and settles on the four-wheeler, telling Penny he’ll be careful on the slopes.

  Penny is with him when the first beasts clatter down the ramp of the truck, the driver poking their rumps with a length of poly piping, ten steers and ten heifers. Phelan leans into the cab to write out a cheque on the hot vinyl seat.

  ‘There you go, Charlie,’ he says, handing it to the truck driver, this habit he’s developed since one of his hospital stints – no longer calling men whose name he’s forgotten ‘mate’ but ‘Charlie’. Another splinter of Beckett, one he’s unaware is lodged in him.

  And then, when the truck has pulled away, he turns to Penny, a fearful ecstasy upon him. ‘Look at them,’ he says, his hands on her shoulders, shaking her and beaming. ‘This is going to be great.’

  ‘It already is,’ she replies.

  Two days later, at dusk, Penny hears a distressed bellowing from the direction of the turkey’s nest and gathers her husband from where he’s soaping the day’s labour from his hands under the laundry tap. They cut the ute’s engine near the base of the dam’s earthen walls where their little herd of cattle mills around, agitated. Her count comes up one short. Penny climbs the wall, following a muffled moan. From the top she sees the animal in the muddy water, stuck fast, the water line above its belly. James joins her on the dam wall.

  ‘We’ll have to get to it quickly,’ he says, ‘before exhaustion sets in.’

  ‘How?’

  But her husband is already leaping down the slope to the ute where he searches behind the bench seat for rope. There’s just a single length, not long enough.

  ‘Stay here,’ he calls up to her, ‘I’ll have to go back to the shed for more.’

  Penny shuffles down to the water’s edge. ‘There, there, old girl,’ she soothes. The cow’s twisting neck. Its big eye. Its fear. The fading light. ‘There, there.’

  When James returns it is with a large torch and three long pieces of rope, each a different size, twenty metres in all.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Quietened a bit,’ Penny replies, ‘though whether that’s good or bad …’

  James hands her the torch. He squats before her beam of light and ties lengths of rope together, fashioning a lasso of sorts before standing on the bank and throwing the lasso towards the cow’s head. But it falls short, striking the animal’s russet hide in the torchlight. He pulls it in and throws again, this time hitting the cow’s nose. Time and again he throws and misses, begins to curse, feels his inadequacy.

  ‘Darling,’ Penny says gently, ‘one of us is going to have to wade out.’

  ‘But we don’t want to get stuck,’ he mutters.

  She persuades him she should do it. Because she’s lighter and less likely to sink, and because he’s stronger and if they tie a length around her waist, he can pull her out if she gets in trouble.

  Penny takes off her boots and her jeans, and places them neatly on the rim of the dam wall. When she steps in she finds the water surprisingly warm, so much of the day’s retained heat lapping at her calves, swallowing her thighs. It is the mud and the silt that is cool between her toes, cool as it envelops her feet and sucks at her ankles. In her hand is the second length of rope. Though she sinks into the mud, she is still able to pull her feet out, first one then the other, and wade slowly towards the heifer, the line around her waist tight, calling to James to let it out, to give her space.

  When she reaches the animal her shoulder bumps its girth and it takes fright and begins to thrash, but its legs are trapped and it soon gives up its struggle. She talks to the animal, a lullaby’s melody, telling it what she is going to do. She reaches beneath the water to feed the rope under its belly, but can’t get far enough, so she presses forward further, her cheek against the beast’s flank, its blood pulsing by her ear.

  ‘I’m just going to slide this under you …’ She stretches her arm out beneath the water again but still can’t get the rope far enough under its belly to pull the end up from the other side. On her third attempt she takes a deep breath and sinks her head into the dark water.

  This time Penny is able to reach through the water and the mud and push the end of the rope under the heifer’s body. That much done, she releases the rope and lifts her head out of the water.

  ‘Well done, girl, well done,’ she pants.

  She manoeuvres her way around the front of the cow to its other flank, beyond the throw of James’s torchlight, whispering to it, stroking its neck as she goes. She finds the end of the rope and pulls it through, enough of it so she can throw it up and over the cow’s back. She returns to the other side, and ties the rope into a loop, guessing at the knot, testing it.

  ‘All right girl,’ she says, ‘let’s get you out of here.’

  Penny calls to her husband on the bank, and turns. She begins wading towards him, dragging her mud-heavy legs.

  He leans out to her with his hand, unties the line from her waist and then ties it to
the end of the length she has positioned around the heifer’s girth. He gives her the torch while he climbs back over the earthen bank to the ute where he will fix the rope to the vehicle and will climb into the driver’s seat and will call out to her before starting the engine, checking with her that it’s okay to reverse and take up the slack and begin to pull the beast from the dam to safety.

  But for now she sits on the dam wall, dripping, strong, elated.

  Duet

  They drive to Brisbane after a month, for her to visit her parents and catch up with friends, for him to see his psychiatrist.

  ‘In the States they run writing courses solely for vets,’ his psych says to him in her rooms at the clinic, trying to gauge his interest before gazing away beyond his shoulder into a pastoral scene on the wall. She sighs. ‘The Americans lead us into these wars, hey? And now they’re trying to lead us out.’

  Whatever the hell point she is trying to make.

  ‘Well,’ she continues, turning back to him, ‘there’s nothing like that here, but most universities have a creative writing course. It’s a way of meeting people. You might get something out of it.’

  ‘Writing therapy?’ he says.

  ‘Something like that,’ she replies. ‘Why don’t you give it some thought?’

  If he responds, it would be to call it out as bullshit. He reaches for his cigarettes instead.

  ‘Not inside,’ she says, dropping her voice to a sterner register, ‘you know that Jim.’ But her eyes continue sparkling.

  ‘See you in a month, Doc,’ he replies brightly, thinking how much he’d miss these consultations.

  They work together in the stockyards, separating the heifers from the steers in preparation for the arrival of a bull. Penny is at the gate, Phelan in the pen behind the cattle, the dog – which would only get in the way – is chained on the back of the ute.