The War Artist

by Simon Cleary

  ‘Get orn,’ Phelan yells, slapping the animals’ rumps, isolating the heifers, one-by-one, and directing them towards the gate. ‘Get orn.’

  Penny controls the gate as each heifer approaches, widening it to allow the animal into the next pen, quickly shutting it on a steer trying to follow the heifer through.

  ‘Get orn,’ Penny yells too, picking up the cry, a dusty chant she joins in with James, almost a duet.

  They’ll have the bull for two months, two of their heifers’ cycles. Increasingly, Penny feels the animals are as much hers as James’s. She wants to be there when the bull arrives, and insists he arrange its delivery for a day she’s off-roster. She wants to see what beast they’ll be setting among their heifers. Proud and strong, she tells him.

  She’s not disappointed. He is a beautiful creature with a clean white head, polled, with tightly curled hair on his crown. Behind his still head are a powerful neck and muscular shoulders. He eyes them in the yards, first him then her. He paws at the soil and his bright pink nostrils flare before he sharply turns his great head away to sniff their cows on the breeze.

  ‘James,’ she says, ‘I’m thinking about a new breast.’

  The verandah is as good as anywhere to raise it, the two of them looking out at the eastern horizon. The birdsong, the buzzing grass, the tin creaking as it expands above their heads. Already she’s discovered that some words vanish out here on the verandah, while others sink roots, that it’s a mystery what survives.

  ‘You don’t have to, you know.’

  ‘But would you like me to?’

  ‘It’s not about me, Pen,’ he says, with surprise.

  She could be wrong, but thinks she hears a note of indignation. She can ignore manufactured hurt, she thinks, but not the implied judgement in these old beliefs of his: that if she wants an implant it’s because of some weakness of hers, some moral or psychological frailty. That the body is only ever something to be overcome.

  But beauty? Joy? Does he still not understand why people dance? Sing? That there are things worth celebrating? Such as battles won. Even generals do that.

  Of all people, she thinks. Haven’t you learned? Where was your stoic philosopher general with his CBT when you needed him?

  Of all people.

  Writing Class

  Phelan studies the lecturer from the outer semicircle of seats. The man’s neat beard, his slicked back shoulder-length hair, his tan dress boots that others might mistake for RMs. He’s supposed to be a serious writer. They say he’s worked cattle out west, won literary awards, grown his hair long, set novels in brothels and on barques and by the banks of creeks.

  Having relented to his psych, here Phelan is, one of two dozen first-year writing students introducing themselves to the group. It’s as strange a situation as any he’s found himself in before – though unlike the others here the course isn’t part of a degree, except that if he likes it the uni will offer him credit down the track. Phelan can’t ever see himself wasting money on enrolment fees. He also can’t believe, as he watches the lecturer sitting cockily on the desk at the front of the class, manipulating biographies out of his students, that he’s subjecting himself to yet another trial by introduction. At least in the Keith Payne Unit they were his people. As his turn approaches he swings between saying nothing and saying everything. Jim. Army. Thirty years. Discharged. Been knocked down. Trying to get back up again.

  ‘And what about you, James?’ the novelist asks him carefully. ‘What brings you here?’

  Phelan is suddenly aware that the lecturer, having been contacted by his psychiatrist, already knows exactly who he is. And either feels sorry for him or is intimidated by him. That this whole introduction thing is a farce, and that he has no manifesto he’s memorised like all the students before him have, that there’s no one here he wants to impress. And that he’ll be fucked if he’s going to tell them his psych thought the course would be better than continuing with cognitive behavioural therapy.

  ‘I really don’t know, to be quite honest,’ Phelan answers. ‘Trying something new.’ He doesn’t mean to, but he sounds petulant rather than genuinely uncertain. Those students who had not already been politely giving him their attention, now turn to look at him with interest.

  ‘And what would that new thing be?’ the lecturer presses, offering him a chance to redeem himself. Phelan is obviously the oldest in the class, has probably lived more and ought – surely – know why he’s here.

  ‘Looking for my inner Hemingway,’ Phelan says, attempting a joke.

  ‘Even Hemingway didn’t find that,’ the lecturer remarks, smiling generously before turning to the eighteen-year-old girl next to him.

  Phelan can’t write in the house. He doesn’t want to spoil it and whatever delicate thing he and Penny are creating there. Instead, he sits on the edge of the escarpment at dusk, after hours of trying to repair the bore pump but getting nowhere. It takes the westerly wind to prise some lines out of him.

  ‘Dinner’s ready!’ Penny calls from the verandah, cupping her hands to throw her voice. But when he doesn’t hear, or pretends not to, she has to stomp out to the front gate and across the paddock, and rest her hand on his shoulder and tell him it’s time to come in.

  I have lived flat for six years, she thinks, laying her right palm on her chest where her left breast once was. She looks at herself in the long mirror and breaks into a sudden smile, this parody of a patriot’s gesture: hand on heart, all truth to tell, a life readied for sacrifice to a greater cause. She drops her hand and stands tall. I am more than my body, yes I know that, but my body has held true for six long years now. My old flesh has rearranged itself, become more fluid, more elastic, has learned better not to resist the gravitational pulls of all the suns and moons passing overhead. Knows better how to survive. It has proven itself. I have proved myself. And I no longer wish to live flat.

  With or without him. It’s good he doesn’t mind. Does it matter that he may not care? It’s not about me, he says. Of course it’s not, James. But is it true anyway, that it’s got nothing to do with you? The scars we bring into our bedrooms. The tattoos. The maimings we share with our husbands and our wives and our lovers.

  An hour or two at sunset isn’t enough. He’s not ready to come in for dinner, feels himself resenting it, finds ever more secluded writing sites, lingers into the night. Soon enough he takes to sleeping out.

  ‘It’s not you,’ he says to her. ‘Please understand, Pen. It’s not you,’ he tries to explain but falters. Phelan hefts a swag to his shoulder that first time and strikes out with his dog. The two of them leave in the late afternoon, a clear winter sky, moonless, the falling cold. They sleep in the dead-centre of a paddock, Phelan measuring the distance between fences before rolling out his bedding. The smell of canvas on buffel grass, the warmth of a dog’s belly. There are meteorites in the east. He loses count. He writes in the dark, the darker the better, not caring to see what words he’s reducing to paper. It’s the moment he seeks, prolonging it in the darkness, line after unseen line. He sleeps. A stone appears beneath him in the night, and he shifts his body to accommodate it, curving round it. The ground is not so hard.

  When he wakes it is still dark, and no bird has yet stirred, but the stars have withdrawn and a fog is creeping in. He lies motionless as the mist thickens, some great benevolent spirit rising out of the earth. The light, when it comes, is slow and diffuse, as if there is no east, as if the laws of the universe have shifted. There is dampness on his cheek and the magpies on their branches are a long way away.

  Only in the light does he read what he’s written the night before. Among them are lines for Penny. Just a few, just scraps, some striving. However beautiful or ungainly, whatever they might be they’re a love song. Thank you, they say. Forgive me. Once more.

  In the spreading dawn he hears the Hilux engine starting. His dog rises, and leans close, licking
his face. Phelan follows the sound of the vehicle as Penny pulls out from under the shed and heads slowly up the road and over the ridge and beyond to the hospital for an early shift.

  When he returns to the house he tears her poem from his notebook and sets it on her dresser.

  She returns to an empty house and a poem. She takes it from her bedroom, pours a glass of wine and sits out on the verandah to read it. Is he out there somewhere watching? She reads:

  The seasons, though, had ceased to turn,

  there was nothing left to love or learn.

  Let him see her cry then, let him.

  ‘It’s not you,’ he says to her again, later.

  It doesn’t help that she knows it’s true. Or that there’s no point asking him what it is. Because he won’t know. That he’s hoping his poems might give him an answer.

  Night after night he leaves. Penny prepares meals for him, and leaves them out. She imagines him re-entering the house in the morning after she has gone to work and eating quietly, standing at the kitchen bench, scooping casserole or pasta into his body. She sees him washing the dishes and drying them and putting them away before carefully hanging the tea towel back on its rack.

  She thinks, as she returns from a shift to an empty house, that it’s like she’s feeding a wounded animal, coaxing it closer, building trust. Then she thinks, no, not an animal – not a dog or a horse, not even a patient – but a ghost. She’s living with a shade.

  Each night for a month he does this, taking the dog and finding somewhere different on the farm. He sleeps on the banks of the dam and wakes to the bowed heads of creatures drinking, one eye on him. He lies down between the buttress roots of the Moreton Bay Fig, beneath its heaven-concealing canopy. He sleeps on the escarpment, moving further along it each night, positioning rocks between himself and the fall. Writes his nocturnal poems.

  He remembers pitching tents when he was a kid, and tries to remember that kid self. Tries to think back to the boy hammering a peg into the ground with an oversized mallet and striking rock. He remembers trying to straighten that bent peg, using the flat of a nearby stone like an anvil to bang the kink out of it. Trying, getting close, but realising that once bent, you can never get a peg perfectly straight.

  More Than a Body

  From the house at night, alone, there are so many lights. The stars and the moon, and the orbits of the satellites she sometimes follows with James’s telescope. The universe those satellites have created, the worlds they’ve realised.

  There are also the lights of the valley, the headlights on the snaking highway to Brisbane moving in waves like scales. Nearby on the spur there is the cottage, dark inside, but the iron roof glinting with moonlight. And beyond it, over the ridge, invisible from the house, back past the cattle yards, and across Boundary Road where the wall of the escarpment swings east, there are the lights of the large houses erected by the town’s professionals, leaning into the valley.

  They could do it together, she’d thought. They’d sit quietly at the table, side by side, and she’d tip the pieces out, and together they’d turn them over, their hands reaching and deftly flipping. She’d set the lid of the box up, facing them, so they could examine the image of the jig-saw. His hands would move as keenly as hers, till all the pieces were face-up. Then they’d sort the pieces by edge and colour and shade. They’d mark out the border, like a picture frame, and when that was done they’d pause and stand and stretch and look at what they’d achieved already. She’d open a window, and behind her his breathing would be steady at the table. Then they’d start to fill the puzzle in. They’d divide it up. The sky for her and the buildings for him. Or vice versa, it hardly mattered. The hours would pass, and the angle of the sun too, and there would be cups of tea, and the jig-saw filling out, and maybe they would talk and maybe they wouldn’t and either way it wouldn’t matter, and his hand wouldn’t tremble as it hovered over a piece of dark green foliage, and she wouldn’t kneel on the floor to pick up the thousand pieces he’d swept off the table in a fit of fury. No. Together they would start to rebuild a little jig-sawed world, and they would lose themselves in it, and when it was done it would be complete.

  What’s wrong with her that she hasn’t left him? It’s the question her girlfriends ask. What sort of weakness is it, that she’s still here? That she has continued to stumble in his shadows. Is a poem or two all it takes to keep her? His neediness. His gratitude. A marriage. Is hope even necessary? Love and faith may be enough. She has grown stronger herself, but is it only so she might dig a hole into which she will fall? Yet he’s not a bad man. Just wounded, just weak. Not what’s wrong with her, but what’s right with her that she’s stayed.

  Quietly, sadly, Penny makes up another bedroom for her husband to return to when he is finished with his sleeping under the stars.

  But she too, has the sky. And the farm and all its joys and consolations are hers as much as his.

  It is she, when the birthing season nears, who researches how heifers calve, what signs to look for, what to do if things go wrong. She reads. She watches videos. She speaks with vets and with neighbours on Sunday after Mass at the tiny wooden church in the nearest village. She jokes with the midwives at the hospital and prepares a box of equipment that she sets aside in case she needs it: shoulder gloves, lubricant, rope, clean rags. She checks on the heifers twice daily, feeling their girths, examining them for signs of readiness.

  And it is she who rises first to walk across the paddocks to discover if any of them have dropped overnight. It is she who kneels and watches their first heifer lick its baby as it lies on the earth, moments-born, splashes of red and yellow birthing on its rust-brown and white body. She watches as it dries the calf’s wet coat, warming it with its rough tongue, the calf with one foreleg folded under its new body, the other splayed forward, its filmy eyes. The calf rises to its legs, it falls, it rises again. So much uncertainty, so much wonder.

  She goes to get her husband to share this with him, amazed.

  ‘James, I’ve booked the procedure.’

  ‘The reconstruction?’

  ‘Yes.’ She waits.

  ‘Great,’ he says, realising it is he who must speak next. ‘When?’

  ‘Next week, Tuesday.’

  ‘Up here?’

  ‘No, Brisbane.’

  He doesn’t ask why she hadn’t told him she’d decided to do it before making these arrangements, doesn’t ask about the consultations with the surgeon she must already have had, all the preparations.

  ‘That’s great, Pen. It’ll be great. Tuesday. Okay then.’ He smiles. ‘This’ll be my chance to visit you in hospital!’

  ‘You don’t have to … it’s only a couple of days and … Bec has said she can be there.’

  ‘Pah!’ James says, waving her away. ‘After all you’ve done for me, I’m glad I can look after you for a bit.’

  When they return to the farm Penny locks the bathroom door. She lifts her nightshirt over her head and turns to the mirror and still doesn’t quite recognise herself. She pulls the points of her shoulders back. It’s a funny word, she thinks, reconstruction, what we do to vanquished countries after war. Yet so much promise too! She examines herself again, side to side, comparing. She has grown past any ideal of perfection, or even symmetry. As she looks at her new flesh now, so full, so rounded, so well sculpted, she wonders if it will fall, wonders how it will age. She presses her fingers against the skin beneath her right nipple, then cups her breast, feeling its weight. She looks at her new breast, perhaps a little high on her chest.

  Of course she is more than her body. But this is her body, all of it, and it is good.

  The Survival of Poetry

  Towards the end of the semester he reads aloud to the class, a fragment of something longer.

  ‘You’ve got something to say,’ one of his fellow students says, an undergrad doing the course as relief
from a politics major. ‘About the war, I mean. Like, you can read media reports for a year and you won’t really learn anything. Not really. But that poem … like, that’s really what the war might have been like.’

  ‘Might have been?’ Phelan bristles.

  ‘Yeah,’ the student replies blithely.

  ‘So you didn’t believe it?’ Phelan accuses.

  ‘Sorry?’ The student grows uncomfortable. He’d only meant to praise.

  ‘Might have been, or was?’ Phelan spits, combusting. He points his finger at the kid across the reading circle, this sudden ferocity.

  The room plummets into silence.

  ‘Because unless it’s was, unless it’s was, then …’ Phelan falters. He doesn’t even know himself what threat he’s making, what’s on the other side of it.

  ‘Was then, all right?’ The politics major raises his palms in the air in mock surrender. ‘Your poem captures what a soldier under fire in Afghanistan would have felt, did feel. Okay? And yeah, I believe you.’ And then, when he sees Phelan is shrinking, says, ‘Satisfied?’

  How he wishes the years of therapy and drugs were behind him. He’d love to shed it all, like a skin that’s served its purpose. That kept him together when he needed it, kept him safe, as safe as you could expect. But then sent him off when he was ready, steadier. Art can’t record the sequence of it, no poem can say this, then this, then this. No song either. Birds and cigarettes and portraits of a queen he’d grown to love in there.

  At the end of her shift she goes to the gym, sometimes with a new friend from the hospital, sometimes by herself. She jokes with the instructors who rotate through the front desk, changes into her exercise gear – loose first and then, as the months pass, tighter, skins – and then hits the equipment. The room is filled with discovery. She looks at herself in the mirror, again and again, marvelling.