The War Artist

by Simon Cleary

  It was disorienting to be away from the studio. Impossible, some days, to navigate, and brutally lonely. Inevitably, Flores took on another apprentice, paying him nothing till he started paying his own way, which meant he was tattooing months before he was ready. Which meant their dream was done, and they were surviving on turnover and add-ons. Piercings and the necks of drunks.

  Shrinking Behind Ink

  She can’t remember exactly when she realised Flores was dealing, though she’d probably known it subconsciously for a long time. More and more he’d leave mid-afternoon if the booking list was empty, and not return, staying at his brother’s. At first, their finances improved, a miracle of sorts – that while there were fewer clients, there was more cash coming in.

  ‘It’s not how many clients,’ Flores told her, ‘it’s whether they’re the right type of client.’ It had been one of his sayings since she met him, so she didn’t suspect anything, not from the words alone. And she was relieved the pressure was off.

  But then she started coming in and examining the booking diary and it’d be empty for whole weeks, not even any regulars. Then his brother was sent inside again and still Flores stayed away at night. And when she asked, he spat at her feet, as if the question was an impertinence.

  The first time he hit her she heard, above his fury, between the pushes and the slaps and the closed fists, between his bone and hers, the sound of something tapping against the window behind her.

  The places the mind can take you when you need it to. The door to the apartment was locked so there was nowhere to run; she’d tried to fight back but he’d quickly overwhelmed her. So her mind left her body to its fate, led her to turn her head away from Flores, to follow the odd little tapping sound at the window. And there, attracted by the light in the apartment, was a Christmas beetle bunting against the glass. Tap, it went, tap, then wheeled around and flew at the glass again, thumping into the windowpane, its shimmering metallic colour. It’d been years since she’d seen one, since she was a kid, and now this poor little beetle with its glossy rainbow-coloured back was tapping at her from outside, prepared to die to get in.

  At some point she became aware that Flores had stopped, and was beside her on the floor, uttering pleas of contrition and shame, lifting her, cradling her in his lap, petting her hair, sobbing, ‘What have I done? What have I done?’

  In the morning, she conspired with him to be ill for a week. In the morning, he played Lego with Blake before leaving to buy creams and icepacks and wheat bags from the chemist. In the morning, she found the Christmas beetle’s body resting on the ledge outside the window.

  ‘Never again,’ Flores promised. But he’d dragged her across a border to a land she’d never conceived crossing, and part of her could never return to safety. She knew that. ‘Never again,’ he vowed, but it wasn’t Flores the tattoo-poet making the promise, it was a functionary in an opaque distribution network doing runs to the western suburbs when directed to, every now and then icing up.

  ‘It’s all good, Babe,’ he tells her, ‘it’s all good.’

  It doesn’t take long for a body to disappear entirely. Kira is proof. She covers herself. Not her neck, not her face, but she hurries to fill the rest of her body. So many protective tattoos to stand beside her Celtic warrioress. A great Christmas beetle for her right shoulder, for the angel who’d come to her rescue. She asked Flores to tattoo that one, explained to him its significance, believing his vows, hoping that if Flores did it, the ink would be a seal of sorts, a blood oath. But after the second time and then the third, she turned to other tattooists. Dragons and tigers and eagles.

  ‘Who the fuck’s work is that?’ he’d ask.

  She knew better than to tell him.

  ‘You shouldn’t be letting anyone else touch you, Babe. You fucking shouldn’t. Just look at yourself. You’re ruining yourself, Babe.’

  But she wants to become impenetrable. Messages of courage and strength on the backs of her fingers. Skulls. Roses growing from bony eye sockets. She shrinks behind her ink. She builds a wall around herself, aiming to disappear behind it, untouchable.

  Until the return one morning of Brigadier James Phelan. Until the moment she hears his voice, sees her own tattoo, imagines his strength. Without even being aware she’s doing it, she weeps.

  Have the tattoo gods sent him again? she wonders. Is he their emissary? But what message is the soldier carrying: hope or damnation?

  Between His Thumb and Forefinger

  ‘Kick?’ Flores proposes.

  Blake nods enthusiastically.

  But nothing can be taken at face value.

  ‘I’ll come too,’ Kira says, standing, not wanting to let Blake out of her sight.

  ‘Whatever,’ Flores grunts.

  She looks out the passenger side window of the red Audi A5 Flores has been looking after for Prince these last twelve months, stored in a secure garage around the corner, a low thump of bass from the speakers.

  At the park, Blake runs ahead. Kira sits on a grassy mound watching the soccer field. Nearby, older boys shoot hoops on the cracked bitumen basketball court and two young mothers bend over each other’s second-hand pram and console one another. Flores is still strong, still muscular, an athleticism that used to be benign, beautiful. He kicks the first ball to Blake, but misdirects it, and Blake has to run to retrieve it.

  Even Flores seems anxious about Prince’s release this time. Prison has never broken his brother, nor ever rehabilitated him, only strengthened him. The networks he expands inside, the fresh loyalties he attracts. But what has Flores been up to while his brother has been away? Has he been caretaking Prince’s share of the business, or cutting in, squeezing him out? Who owns what? she wonders. Who owns who? And who, ultimately, owns me?

  After ten minutes, Flores leads Blake away from her on the knoll, towards some empty goalposts and the tattered netting draped over the crossbar. They’re out of earshot now, and she feels a flutter of anxiety. Flores stands in goal and crouches while Blake shoots, Flores casually stopping each shot. Each time he rolls the ball back to the boy, who tries again. And each time Flores reaches out and stops it, rolls it back. It seems cruel.

  She watches as Flores gestures for Blake to come to him, watches as the man bends to the boy to impart something, some fatherly lesson about soccer and life. A sudden wave of panic washes over her. What the hell is he saying? she wants to know. What poisonous advice? What faux verities about blood and loyalty? With what words might he destroy a still innocent child?

  Flores pulls away from the game to take a phone call, then another, a flurry, and they have to leave.

  Back at the apartment the doorbell rings. Kira starts. Every knock on the door these days, every turning of a key, every buzzer, causes her stomach to tighten, her heart to quicken. Flores coming home at some odd agitated hour, or a visit from one of his ‘business associates’ as he calls them, or a friend who’ll collect him for a drink or a long session of weights. If he’s home, it is she who answers, Flores watching on. It is always for him. Kira can’t remember the last time she had a visitor – does anyone even know she’s here? She gets the door and the phone, collects the mail from the wall of boxes in the lobby. It’s become a form of servitude.

  How entirely she has become attuned to him and his moods, always aware of whatever room in the apartment he’s temporarily occupying, whatever thing it is he’s doing there, weighing how long it will take, whether it’s simple or not, whether he’s cursing it. How much time she has before he’ll emerge, seeking her out.

  We evolve like this, with survival mechanisms. She’s part-dog, with her heightened hearing, and part-insect in the way she detects vibrations in the walls and the floor, the shifts in the currents of late-afternoon dust motes falling across a bank of louvres. Her thousand different antennae. It’s got so she anticipates his activity. How she has grown to hate herself.

 
; But today she resists. Some premonition.

  ‘I’ll get it then,’ he mutters, another blade of resentment.

  She hears Flores answer the door, then a pause as he steps out onto the landing, followed by back-slapped greetings and grunts of primal acknowledgement. Flores closes the apartment door on her, Blake in his bedroom. The murmur of voices continues outside, Flores and his visitor. She is, for this moment at least, safe.

  The phone rings. She stands in the kitchen and picks it up. It’s the real estate agent. Already the rent is late.

  ‘No, it can’t wait,’ the agent says forcefully, ‘I need to speak with him, now.’

  Kira walks slowly down the hall. She leans forward towards the glass eye in the door and brings her own eye up to it. Flores’s back is to her, his shoulders broader than usual under the distorting effect of the lens. Whoever he is speaking with is still on the landing, just out of view. But there is something about Flores’s stance, as if it has hardened into contest.

  Even as she bends and peers, Flores reaches abruptly for the handle, sensing her presence. She leaps back from the opening door.

  Prince is harder, bigger than ever – his chest, his arms, his neck, his abdomen, the product of his twelve-month sentence to a prison gym. He attempts a smile, but it is twisted beyond recognition and quickly settles into a more comfortable sneer.

  ‘You won’t even allow your man to welcome his brother into his own home,’ he says to her, but the greater accusation is aimed at Flores, belittling him. There was a time when Kira used to meet Prince’s eyes, could wave him and his antics away. No longer.

  Flores turns, wanting to take his humiliation out on her. ‘Who was that on the phone?’

  ‘The real estate,’ she answers. ‘They say it’s urgent.’

  Flores reaches towards her, Prince watching the slow trajectory of his brother’s right hand as it nears her chest, and then, with calm deliberation, pinches her left nipple through her T-shirt.

  ‘Tell him I’ll call him back,’ he says, twisting her nipple between his thumb and forefinger, before releasing her.

  Second Contact

  Kira has chosen this life, twice. First, she chose a life of tattooing with Flores. Then, after Blake was born, she chose life with Flores. She can only forgive herself the first decision. If not forgivable, perhaps the second can be reversed.

  But she must be careful. Anyone might open her email, her end or his, and at his, maybe a wife, perhaps a secretary. Yet this may be her only chance. She composes and recomposes the message in her mind for days.

  Dear James, I hope it is not presumptuous to think you might remember me from when I tattooed you!

  I will never forget that night. I have thought about it often – partly because no one has saved my life again since! Is that too dramatic? I don’t think so. Perhaps I should have tattooed your name on me in gratitude! I still have the stencil of your friend Samuel Beckett’s tattoo, and I wondered, after seeing your interview, whether you might want it.

  Best wishes, Kira

  It’s a monument to restraint. She hopes she’s been able to hide her desperation. Conceal also the falsities the note holds. She wants him to recognise her, but how much of her is there left to recognise?

  Phelan walks laps of his office, circling the glowing computer screen, unable to break away, unable also to stop for fear he will impale himself upon the shards of memory. Kira!

  It’s not so much memory as feeling that has him swirling out and around and back again. Maybe not even feeling, but remembrance of feeling, returned to him through a thousand distorting filters.

  I am still here, the words that flash like lightning, are you?

  He could delete it and trash it and walk away, and perhaps forget. But he knows he has not forgotten yet, so there’s no true prospect of that. If it’s not about forgetting then, perhaps it’s the same as staying sober. The daily recommitments and the baby steps.

  Ask yourself, James: Is this good for you or bad? Ask: Do you want to go back there, having come so far?

  She’s still in Sydney, he learns from the web, and still tattooing. Though her studio is at a different street address, it has retained the name, the same manifesto, the same website layout. As if gathering electronic dust.

  Banging harder on the keyboard doesn’t help, but he doesn’t know that yet. Doesn’t know either that you can’t type at the speed of a racing heart. He writes:

  Dear Kira, What a surprise. And thank you – for the offer of the stencil, but also just for making contact. The answer is yes. Perhaps I can visit next time I’m in Sydney? I still have to thank you properly.

  Yours, Jim

  And before he can reconsider the message and all its lawless echoes, it’s gone. He rests his head in his hands. What is there to thank her for? There is an erratic pendulum in his heart. What exactly? Material for a poem or two. His exile. A fist of lapis lazuli that went astray six years ago and which, when the memory of it comes upon him, refills the pool of his guilt.

  Leaving, Coming

  There is a single frenzied hour of packing the Subaru station wagon with clothes and bedding and toys and the half dozen things she says to herself she can never abandon, the lapis crane she’s stored among her trinkets, her Nikon, her metal briefcase with her Micky Sharpz and as much tattooing gear as she can fit. She stops at the bank first and empties their account, before picking up Blake.

  When she arrives at school his teacher looks into her eyes in the corridor outside his classroom and knows, gathering a term’s worth of lessons into a satchel and kissing Blake on the top of his head and brushing his fringe from his eyes then taking Kira’s own shaking hands and saying to them both, ‘Go well.’

  Phelan wants to thank her properly. She grasps it, believes it. She arcs around the city on the M4, Blake’s face turned to the window. Remember to pay the tolls when you stop tonight, she tells herself, or the infringement notices they’ll send to the flat will reveal your route to him. Don’t speed either, and beware red-light cameras. This discipline she forces on herself, the effort it takes to quell her instinct to get as far away as she can, as quickly as she can. To flee, flee, flee.

  She knows he’s north, Toowoomba, but has no other clues.

  ‘Mum,’ Blake says eventually, ‘where are we going?’

  She adjusts the rear-view mirror and looks at her son in the booster seat he’s almost outgrown. She looks at him and all the years the two of them made believe he was a king and the seat was his throne and he would issue giggling edicts to his subjects, her. But now she sees his white singlet beneath his blue-chequered school shirt and the seat belt cutting diagonally across his little chest restraining him is no royal sash. All the old dispensations are gone, she thinks, going, going, gone.

  He’s looking at her, waiting.

  ‘We’re going on a holiday,’ she says, sick in her stomach as she says it, but sensing too she’s just the last in a fellowship of women who’ve used those precise words to tell that same fairytale. To help make him believe it, she says, ‘We’re going on an adventure.’ Why not? ‘We’ll see things that’ll make your classmates jealous.’

  ‘Is Dad coming?’

  ‘No Blakey,’ Kira says. ‘He’s got to stay home and work.’

  There isn’t a house she’s visited across their years together – either with him or alone – that he won’t ransack to find her. She’d abandoned her mother years before, and though her mother had no part in this life of hers, no responsibility for it either, he’ll visit her now, and Kira wonders if what her mother learns will horrify her. He’ll locate her childhood friends and her art-school mates and have his business associates watch them till he’s sure she’s not there. He’ll call in favours, he’ll recruit anyone who owes him, no matter how small, no matter how reluctant. Sydney’s not such a big town.

  The motel where they stop, exh
austed, halfway up the highway, has free WiFi. She’s not bold, she’s desperate. She wants to scream help but doesn’t want to lose him. She checks the time, just after eight, and Blake asleep. She writes:

  Dear Jim, I’d love to see you again. As luck would have it, I’m going to be passing through Toowoomba the day after tomorrow on my way to Brisbane. Perhaps we can meet somewhere?

  Warmly,

  Kira

  They’ll get there earlier than that, tomorrow she hopes, but it’ll probably be late, and she can’t afford to scare him. Hopes feverishly she already hasn’t. Before Kira crawls into bed beside Blake she puts out their clothes for the next day and repacks the wagon so all they need to do in the morning is check her email, dress and leave.

  Phelan wakes at two, as he often does in the house. Sometimes he returns to sleep. Not tonight. Even if he hadn’t dreamed of her, he is alive with her, the night is breathless and his heart will not still. When he turns on the computer in his study, Kira’s name is there too, glowing in the dark. He closes and locks the door before sitting down to her message.

  He understands just one thing from what he reads: he’s going to see her again. The rest is flash and fire and he knows the sky above the tin roof is blazing with stars, and somewhere up there her silhouette is giving the night its shape, her body astride him, her hips, her tongue. This great uncompleted need, dormant for so long.

  He’s stirred in a way he thought he never would be again. He’d resigned himself to a new self – that the man he’s been rebuilding for so long was without desire. The changes wrought by years of medication, creeping age, all the shifts in his relationship with Penny he doesn’t entirely understand. That she has given so much to him that perhaps his body knows not to ask for more. Whatever it is, his desire shocks him, threatens to burst through.