by Simon Cleary
She has turned away from the screen, back towards the bed, when she hears his voice. It grips her by the shoulder and pulls her roughly back around, urgent in her ear, resounding. She stares at the screen, transfixed. She knows him immediately. That same pock-marked face, the jowls, the short thin hair parted on the right. But so much older, somehow darker, crosshatched, the sort of ageing years can neither cause nor measure.
‘I’m not alone,’ he is saying. ‘But people are afraid to speak up. They think it will damage their careers.’
‘They think the army won’t understand?’ the male host, a household name, asks.
‘What I should have said,’ Phelan says, correcting himself, ‘is that it will damage their careers. It’s a certainty. And yes, the army does not understand.’
‘If you had a message to the army,’ the female co-host says, ‘what would it be?’
‘One day we’ll evolve beyond this,’ the soldier she once tattooed says, not with wisdom she thinks, but resignation. But there’s a beauty in his sorrow, as if he might know its depths.
There follows a silence longer than breakfast television usually allows. Kira reads the caption at the foot of the screen: James Phelan, Former Brigadier, Poet. And beneath that, Toowoomba. Each word is disorienting. She’d never cared to know his rank, and as for his name, Phelan – she must have heard it that night, but she hadn’t remembered, hadn’t ever needed to. Not really.
‘You write about one of the men under you who died in Afghanistan …’ the male host says eventually, before falling away, even a conversation-shaper as accomplished as he is not knowing how to finish.
Kira watches former Brigadier James Phelan, poet, slowly unbutton his sleeve, then start to roll it up. The care he takes. This, too, she recalls, his purposefulness. She watches the faces of the enthralled studio hosts at this unscripted act. And for one perfect moment, Kira knows exactly what’s coming. It’s as if he’s rolling back his sleeve for her alone, signalling to her through the screen. This revelation intended for her. The camera pans to a close-up of Phelan’s arm, his old skin, her tattoo, Samuel Robert Beckett.
One day we’ll evolve beyond this, she hears. One day.
Kira has seen her clients on Facebook and Instagram and on television before. She’s seen her work in the Daily Telegraph as an identifying feature of a ‘person of interest’ to the police. On corpses pulled from the harbour or out of Darlinghurst alleys. But not this. Blake is calling her now, Mum, but she ignores her son. James Phelan is talking and revealing himself, and the camera is closing in, but she’s incapable of hearing any longer what he’s saying.
He rolled up his sleeve for her before, years ago, when his skin was bare, before time, before, it seems to her now, the record of her own history had begun.
She swirls back out of Hurstville and this bleak flat, away from Blake, away from Flores. Away from their collapsed relationship, so many promises laid to waste. Everything that’s been crushed out of it, every smothered dream. She pulls away from the woman she’s become, trapped, uncertain. She pulls away from the thousand spites, all the ugliness she’s brought into the world, or convinced herself she has. All the bitter dealing, every daily revenge. How much squalor can fit into a day. She’s reversing the last six years of her life’s evolution, every changeling spirit she’s laid to rest. All those stillborn escapes.
She hears a long-ago soldier’s voice and leaps into the sky, soaring above the years. She remembers. She returns. And once again she’s diving beneath a moon-swept ocean, and the water is clean and her body is strong and desire is good and she is powerful.
‘What the fuck are you crying for?’ Flores demands, shirtless in the doorway, hung-over. He is sour now, the previous night’s anger gone.
‘Nothing.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Lost love,’ she says, throwing it at him, looking him in the eyes, forgetting Blake is in the room.
‘Bitch,’ he spits back, but without conviction.
She laughs, bitterly. It’s possible he’s even more wretched than she is. He sheds his trousers, tossing them onto the bed, not caring where they land, not seeing the lump under the covers.
‘Hey!’ she says, remembering, ‘Watch out! Blake’s under there!’
Flores looks, sees.
‘Sorry mate,’ he says contritely, patting Blake’s back twice through the doona.
‘What’s become of us, Flores?’ she whispers to herself when he disappears into the bathroom and the shower starts to run and Blake emerges from their broken bed, wide-eyed. What’s become of me?
So, he was a brigadier.
Kira retreats to the back room between clients. Flores is working on an all-afternoon sleeve, a pumped-up bicep. She can hear his voice above the Velvet Underground, holding forth about the glory days of tattooing, bemoaning the celebrity tattooists and the backyarders. In his glory days Flores could tattoo all day without pause, lost in his work. Now the tattooing is a sideline, a front. And when he does tattoo he’s slower, distracted, irritated even. She reckons she has ten minutes before he’ll start wondering where she’s gone.
She looks up Brigadier James Phelan on the web, the sound muted. There are hundreds of entries about him, most of them from the two-thousands, dated. She reads articles with quotes by him in Afghanistan, flicks through a montage of images of him, watches army media interviews on YouTube with his name sewn neatly in black into his uniform. I’ve marked Blake’s clothes like that at the start of the school year, she thinks, only on the inside. She sees the brigadier in the passenger seat of a four-wheel drive, turned towards the camera, smiling with what she guesses is Kabul blurring past through the window behind him. She sees Phelan in webbing on patrol, the shape of him with his body armour and ammunition belt and goggles and helmet make him less human than the village urchins in the foreground. There is another photo of him at attention, arm angled in precise salute, with a flag-draped coffin moving towards the open tail of a giant cargo plane. You could almost believe you’re accompanying someone to war like this, she thinks.
And then there are a handful of recent references, a local newspaper story, the morning’s television piece. She re-watches it. The characters’ mouths move silently, until once again she sees her tribute. She finds an email address on a page linked to a university writing journal, Contact the Writers, and clicks on it. His name populates the To panel of a new message screen, [email protected]. She sits back in her chair, looking at the screen and the name from a distance. Her heart races. She deletes the new message box, and only then feels her blood slow.
She tries thinking back to that night when this brigadier saved her from Flores’s brother’s friend. But there has been no saving herself from Flores’s brother, or from Flores himself.
What’s become of her? What curse was laid by whom that night?
The Love of Brothers
That night. All those years ago. The next day.
It’s mid-morning and she’s a black cat slinking home. She can almost feel herself changing form, padding softly up from Central Station, moving quietly in the shadows. She barely understands it, the way different creatures inhabit her, moving in and out. She arches her neck and looks up from the dirty Saturday street at the first-floor windows of the studio, and on the floor above, the windows of the apartment she and Flores share.
There is nothing to be ashamed of. If Flores is back, he is back. Wherever he was last night, it was the universe’s choosing. The curtain of their bedroom window has blown out and flaps against the building’s brick wall, licking at the daylight. So he’s back, she thinks, and then, practising – because she’ll need to explain herself – she conjures him in her mind and says firmly to him, About time.
She quietly climbs the stairs. She stands in the centre of the empty studio and feels the after-tremors of last night’s violence. The turbulence buffets her still. The
floorboards in their sleeping quarters above her head creak and she makes her way up the second, open flight of stairs.
Flores sits on a Bentwood chair at a small desk against a far wall, facing her, his back to the desk, waiting. Leaning against the wall beside him is his brother, Prince. It is he who speaks, pushing off the wall with the heel of his boot.
‘You shouldn’tve called the cops.’
They look so alike they could almost be twins – the same height, their broad shoulders both pitch forward as if crossing a finish line, their two wiry frames, both of their hair clipped short, the angular faces of both brothers darkly stubbled. But Flores has a stillness his brother doesn’t, a steadiness of eye. Or he used to.
She can’t think quickly enough to work out how Prince knows about the police, so she just asks.
‘They came back with more questions this morning,’ he answers. ‘Just left, didn’t they.’
‘Oh,’ she nods.
‘I’ve been trying to call you all morning,’ Flores says. Kira feels the interrogation begin. Even just a few months earlier, this wouldn’t have been possible. But neither was what she did last night, nor Flores’s doubt now.
‘My battery died,’ she replies, dropping her handbag on the floor. She may have to apologise for something, but not for that.
‘So where have you been?’ It is Prince, the brothers doing some sort of tag-team she hasn’t seen before.
When she answers, it’s to Flores. ‘You weren’t here when it happened. I was scared. I took a taxi to my mother’s place.’ She looks him in the eye. She has not lied. Whatever Prince is muttering, she ignores it and doesn’t take her eyes from Flores. When he nods, she knows he believes her. ‘Did the police tell you what happened?’ she asks.
‘A robbery,’ Flores replies.
‘An attempted robbery,’ she corrects.
‘You still shouldn’tve called the cops,’ Prince repeats.
‘You weren’t there Prince,’ she snaps, and aggressively kicks off her shoes, watching them slide along the polished floorboards, clattering against the wall.
‘Is that some sort of accusation?’ Prince retorts.
She laughs derisively.
‘And another thing,’ he continues, drumming his fingers against the wall, ‘who was the dude the police said you were with?’
‘Get out of here, Prince,’ she says, more exhausted than exasperated.
‘Well who was he?’
‘No one … a walk-in … a soldier.’
Prince grunts dismissively. ‘A hero fucking soldier.’
‘He saved my life,’ Kira flares, not that Prince warrants it.
‘That’s a bit melodramatic isn’t it?’
‘He had a knife. Your mate was off his head.’
‘Hey!’ Prince bites. ‘I never met him before in my life.’
She looks piercingly at him. ‘I haven’t even told you who it was. I haven’t even described him to you.’
She looks at Flores. See, she wants him to understand. See how dangerous your brother is.
‘Don’t go blaming me,’ Prince says. ‘Got it? Don’t, right.’
‘Get him out of here,’ she says to Flores.
Kira leaves them for the bathroom and closes the door. She hears the brothers talking, their voices low at first, Flores, and then a burst of Prince, but not loud enough to make out the words. Kira splashes water from the washbasin into her eyes, then presses a hand-towel against her face.
There was a time, being an only child, when the ferocity of Flores’s loyalty to his petty criminal younger brother was attractive to her. Principled Flores. But that was before she’d met him. The second born of the Rodriguez boys, they called him ‘Prince’. More likely after Machiavelli, she began to think. Neither of whom were smart enough to stay out of prison. Certainly not this Prince, with his street dealing and his low-level gangster contacts. He’d draw Flores in if he could. If he hasn’t already.
When she returns to the room Prince is gone. She lowers herself onto the futon, where Flores joins her and starts rubbing her back through her singlet. She resists, her body still cold, still tight.
‘He’s a prick,’ she says.
‘Yeah.’
‘So, what are you going to do about it?’
‘Nothing today. Today I’m looking after you.’
‘Yes, today,’ she says. ‘Now. I need to know. He’s poison and I need to know what you’re going to do about it. Last night happened because of him. He’ll bring all his crappy karma with him and we’ll get swamped by it. I almost did. Look at me, Babe. I could have been killed last night. You know that, don’t you?’
‘I know.’
‘You believe me, don’t you?’
‘I believe you, of course I do.’ He pauses. ‘But he’s my brother. You don’t abandon your brother.’
Why not? That’s just clichéd, lazy thinking. She thought him above that.
‘He needs my support right now, Babe.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means love. It means faith. It means hope. They’re the things you’ve got to give.’
She’s only ever read the words on him before, never heard him say them. They both look at the inside of his left forearm at the same time, 1 Corinthians 13:13, and then at each other, awkwardly now. There’s a long silence between them, as long as it might take a relationship to end.
‘I could have been killed last night.’
‘I know.’ He reaches for her singlet, but she brushes his hand away.
‘I don’t want him around anymore, Flores. Okay? I’m not telling you to choose, Flores. Okay? I’m not. Give him whatever support he needs. All I’m saying is, I don’t want him around here anymore. That’s fair isn’t it?’
‘All right,’ he says, and only then does she allow him to kiss her.
On his back, disappearing into the bathroom, is his great Ancient of Days, Blake’s masterpiece, the great bearded god measuring the order of his universe from his sunstruck cloudbank. But we are full of disorder, she thinks, and though sometimes it is sweet, not today. Not today.
‘Flores,’ she says later, ‘are you awake?’
He groans.
‘Flores?’
‘Yeah Babe?’
‘Where were you last night?’
He props himself on his elbow, looks at her, but does not answer.
‘The tattoo gods looked after you last night, Babe,’ he whispers, touching her hipbone with his forefinger. ‘They give and they take away with the same hand. If they give, it’s because you earned it. They looked after you last night.’
The Tattoo Gods
What had she done to lose the favour of the gods? A question she’s asked herself time and again these last years. Was it really such a grave offence she’d committed, or was she merely their plaything, moved into position as part of a cosmic rivalry she’ll never fathom? All she’d done was sleep with a lonely old soldier, fresh home from a war. A single night with a sad old bugger she’d never see again. Desire? Sure, but so what? As much a gesture of thanks, an act of kindness even. Nothing Flores needed to know.
She could point to worse by Flores, a hundred grievous betrayals, both before and after Phelan – of her, others, his own tattooing deities. A cascade of small unkindnesses that in time begot savagery, more than a person should be asked to bear. Where are their judgements of him? Why do the gods remain silent? Damn them! Their tithe has been crippling, and still they demand more. Not just of her, but Blake too.
It was Flores who named him. She had to allow him that. ‘An angel,’ he’d said, nuzzling the baby in the dark, still wired from a late session, a pair of wings he’d tattooed using ink they’d made themselves from scratch, still pursuing their grand tattooing dream, reaching higher than ever for tattooing virtue. ‘And no on
e does angels’ wings like Blake.’
If she was proprietorial about raising him, it was partly because Flores was becoming so distracted. Because the tattoo gods refused to commune with the gods of economics. Crafting their own ink – collecting the material, grinding, making the pigment, then mixing it – took time. They priced their tattoos as art, as entire cycles of creative being – birth to death and beyond to eternity, but they were prophets to a paying too few.
And it was not just their own dues, but the money they needed to make to pay off Prince’s suppliers, the uncertainty of whether his brother would turn up despite being warned off, and if not him then worse. Then the police and the law, and if Prince being jailed gave her some relief it was only ever temporary and didn’t extend to a moratorium on his debts.
She nursed Blake in the studio, weaned him there. She took small jobs, roses as often as possible, a hibernation of her ambition, yes, but for a time her flowers became better, somehow purer. Kira fitted her clients in around Blake’s feeds, a bassinet on the floor. Sometimes she worked the pedal with her left foot and the bassinet with her right, her body a conduit for the vibrations from the machine to her baby. An immersion, she thought, a baptism for the boy.
She tied a piece of material around her chest, so the child could rest against her in this pouch, so she could walk, and sit, and eat and he could feel her heart and she – if she closed her eyes – his. Sometimes she drew while she fed, pulsing with creative currents that other days faltered. Once, exhausted, she rested her head in her palm, closed her eyes, and woke to find her pencil in the child’s fist. She brought her pad into her lap so the child could mark paper instead of air. Sheets of notepad she’d fold away for whatever future might await him.
They moved to a cheaper studio, and then cheaper again, working hard to take their regulars with them, trying to maintain the name, Written on the Body, which continued to mean everything to her, even as she spent fewer and fewer hours at the studio when Blake started yanking himself to his feet and pulling at power cords and knocking over ink caps.