The War Artist

by Simon Cleary

  The woman pulls out a tourist map of the town, and marks the route in red pen, before going on to circle the nearest corner shop and the town centre and the skating rink which is half-price for kids on Sundays. Kira is only half-listening, distracted by the woman’s hair. Not the brightness of the dye – Kira’s done similar herself – but the surprise of it, here, on a wet morning, at a caravan park like this, with a husband like that. It’s comforting, reassuring even, as if all things are possible, even still.

  ‘Thank you,’ Kira says, grateful for every simple act of kindness.

  ‘You’re welcome, Love. Just passing through are we?’

  ‘Visiting friends and relatives,’ Kira answers, still smiling.

  ‘You’re not from here though? Sydney?’

  Kira is startled. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Your plates, Love.’

  Ah. Yes.

  ‘Visiting the boy’s father, are we?’ the woman asks, gesturing her head to Blake who’s standing barefoot in a puddle outside. Her smile is intended to be matronly, but the intrusion stuns Kira and she looks at the woman, agape.

  ‘Well,’ the woman says, registering Kira’s reaction, ‘then you must have left him behind. Look, Love, there’s nothing to be worried about here. We see it all. It’s usually one or the other for the mothers that visit us from interstate. Just let us know if you think there’s going to be trouble, that’s all. Better for us to be able to help out, step in early. You know?’

  Kira arrives half an hour early and parks down from the lookout, beneath the pines. She gives Blake a water bottle and biscuits and puts on another Hayao Miyazaki anime for him.

  ‘I’ll be just up the top there,’ she says to the boy. ‘You stay here, Blakey. Okay?’ But he is already lost in the images on the screen, filling with wonder.

  She stands on the viewing platform jutting out over the valley. She is oblivious to the vista, examining instead each vehicle as it nears, watching their drivers emerge, each a spark of trembling hope. Will he even recognise me? Kira thinks about how much of her has been covered, how many new tattoos she’s collected since her Celtic warrioress, how many reinforcements her talismanic protector has called in over the years. A menagerie of guardian beasts. All those protective spells she’s tattooed on her skin since. Hope and strength and carpe diem. Heavy words that somehow seem to mock her.

  Midday passes. She wanders over to the café and scans the tables inside. She speaks to a waiter, but there’s no booking for a Phelan. She returns to the platform where tourists and lovers come and go, pointing or resting their elbows on the railing or pushing coins into the mounted telescope and bending and pressing their eye against the glass. Twelve-thirty passes, and then one o’clock. She checks on Blake, who’s fallen asleep in his seat, and restarts the disc in case he wakes.

  One-thirty. Perhaps he got here before she arrived, she thinks. Perhaps he’d observed her from some discrete vantage point, seen her with Blake. Fled.

  She stands in the doorway of the caravan park’s office.

  ‘What’s up, Love?’

  ‘I …’ but Kira can’t speak and bursts into tears.

  The woman comes from behind the desk and puts an arm around her.

  ‘There, there,’ she says. ‘What’s happened?’

  Kira composes herself, and tells the woman she’s lost her phone with all of her addresses and phone numbers. That she’s now got no way of contacting her father, who will be worried sick about her.

  ‘You don’t know where he lives, Love?’

  ‘He’s new to town,’ Kira answers, producing a copy of the newspaper article she’d printed out at the studio, showing the woman a photo of Phelan. She wouldn’t happen to know him, would she?

  ‘He doesn’t have a number in the phone book?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kira stammers, not having thought to look him up there, not ready to speak with him by phone anyway.

  The woman puts his name into the online directory, but nothing comes up. ‘Being a brigadier and all, he’ll probably have a silent number. Let me see what I can find out, Love,’ the woman says, retreating into her office to make some calls to her grapevine of friends.

  ‘He’s out on the range at Preston,’ the woman says when she returns ten minutes later, watching Kira carefully. ‘Does that ring a bell?’

  ‘That’s it!’ Kira exclaims, feigning recognition. ‘Thank you, oh thank you!’

  The woman clicks her tongue, then comes around from behind the counter and takes another map from the carousel of tourist pamphlets in the corner of the reception foyer, writes down the address and marks the route.

  ‘While there was no entry in the directory for your father,’ the woman says, handing Kira the map, ‘the number was there under his wife’s name and initials. And the address. He and … your mother … moved out there maybe a year ago.’ The woman pauses. ‘She is your mother, isn’t she?’

  ‘Families are complicated things,’ Kira says, without meeting the woman’s eye.

  Two Women and a Boy

  Kira drives down the long dirt track to the house and pulls up near the shed with the white ute parked inside. It is late afternoon. She’d half-expected to be greeted suspiciously at the gate like in a scene from a rural-gothic movie, an apron and a shotgun, but the house seems still. She waits. She sits in the car until Blake begins to whinge.

  ‘All right Little Man,’ she says, pulling on his purple gumboots.

  She’s about to knock when the door opens. His wife, Kira understands immediately, even though she has no picture of Phelan’s wife in her head. This woman is a similar age to Phelan, if younger then not by too much. Her face is weathered but open, a neatness about her – hair pulled back from her forehead, plucked eyebrows, cheekbones high in the western sun. Though her eyes are tired, as if she may not have slept, there is a solidity about her in the doorway, deciding who will pass.

  ‘Yes?’ the wife says, looking from the woman to the boy and back. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘Hello,’ Kira replies. ‘I … we …’ she says, trying to meet the woman’s eyes, before she herself chokes and bows her head.

  The boy looks up at her, startled, as his mother’s chest begins to heave.

  ‘Mum?’ he says, and when she does not answer, he says it again, scared now, ‘Mum, what’s wrong?’

  Penny glances across to the car but there is no one else with them. Just a wagon packed high with boxes and bags, a jumble of domestic items hard against the inside of the windows, as if pressing to get out.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asks. The woman’s heavily tattooed hand grasps the boy’s. The anger in those tattoos, Penny thinks, the fierceness of that grip. She resists an urge to retreat silently back into the house. Breathe, she tells herself, and she straightens.

  ‘I … I … I …’ the woman stutters through her sobbing. ‘I’m a friend of Jim’s. I mean … I used to be … I mean, the poem …’

  Then it hits Penny. ‘Are you the tattoo artist?’

  The woman nods.

  ‘You’re the one who gave him the tattoo?’ Penny knows she’s now at the edge of a precipice, feels it in her body, but can’t yet imagine what’s at the bottom. ‘From Sydney?’

  ‘Yes,’ the woman says, then adds, ‘we’ve just driven up.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘Over the last few days.’

  And then, after a pause, a quiet in which both women are only vaguely looking at each other, in which both of them are instead reaching back into their own universes for some principle that might stabilise this moment, some memory. After that long pause the woman summons up the courage.

  ‘Is Jim here?’

  ‘What’s your name?’ Penny asks.

  ‘Kira.’

  ‘Kira who?’

  ‘Dyson.’

  Penny nods slowly, not kno
wing how to fit the information into the fragile matrix of her life, what weight to give it. But the longer the two of them stand facing each other, the stronger Penny feels. Perhaps it’s the tattooed woman’s obvious vulnerability and neediness, or the look of bewilderment on the face of the child. Maybe it’s also that this is her home, her threshold as much as James’s. And that she’d been right about something setting him off, that her instincts are good. That she can trust herself.

  ‘James is not here right now,’ she replies. By which she means he’s not standing there with the two of them and the boy. Whether he’s asleep, or still hungover, or cowering in his room, Penny doesn’t yet care. ‘What do you want?’

  They sit on the front verandah with cups of tea, Blake with a lemonade. He nestles against his mother on the day bed, leaning into her even as he sips, listening to the sound of her talking, the cool melamine cup in his little hands, the vibrations of his mother’s voice. Penny holds a plate of chocolate chip biscuits out to him. Blake stretches forward and takes one.

  ‘Have a couple,’ she says, and then to Kira, ‘I’m afraid we don’t have much here for kids to play with.’

  Penny watches the tattooist lift the small china teacup to her lips. Her awkwardness with it – she’s not a regular tea drinker. Her dark lipstick, her dark fingernail polish. Penny reads the lettering on Kira’s fingers, L-O-V-E and H-O-P-E, and sees other markings – inked rings, a lightning bolt, clef notes, a yin on the back of one hand, a yang on the other. She realises too that what she’d earlier thought was shadow at the neckline of the woman’s T-shirt, is ink. She looks away and out across the paddocks.

  ‘He could climb on top of the harvester,’ Penny says to Kira suddenly, pointing at the old Sunshine rusting near the side fence, ‘and have a good muck around on it.’

  ‘Is it safe?’

  ‘As safe as anything else around here.’

  The tattooist nods. ‘There you go Little Man,’ she says to her son, ‘go and have a play. It looks a bit like a spaceship doesn’t it? See the seat? See if you can climb on top of that. I’ll be right here watching.’

  When he’s gone she tells her story to Penny, the violence and the threats of it, how she had no choice but to leave. That she’d seen James on television. How he’d saved her once before and that perhaps, just perhaps, he could put her up for a bit now while she caught her breath and thought things through and made a plan and found her feet and …

  Penny feels herself harden as Kira falters then hurries on, trying to repair her misstep. She tells Penny she’s got cash, isn’t a sponge, but that whatever happens she can’t let Flores find her.

  ‘We’re desperate,’ Kira pleads, looking at her, not yet sure if she’s a foe. ‘I hoped Jim might be able to help.’

  Penny tries to weigh all of this, to pick the lies from the self-deception from the mere bullshit. The seconds build, long and ominous, until the silence looms over this visitor, increasingly insurmountable.

  ‘There wasn’t anyone else I could think of!’ Kira blurts, and Penny accepts the desperation is real. Can see it in her eyes.

  Even so, Penny waves the pleading away. ‘Flores is your husband?’

  ‘He thinks he owns me,’ Kira answers miserably.

  ‘And he doesn’t know where you are?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where does he think you are?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Come on!’ Penny snaps at her. ‘Think. What’s going through his head now? Where does he think you’ve gone? Friends, relatives? Where?’

  ‘None of my old friends – and that’s what they are, ’cause I haven’t seen them for years – know anything about Jim. Never heard of him. Even if Flores tried to torture it out of them,’ she smiles blackly, ‘they wouldn’t know to tell him.’

  ‘Can he track you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  Kira looks away, thinking.

  ‘The car? Whose name is it registered in?’ Penny presses.

  ‘Mine …’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Don’t you believe me?’ Kira asks eventually.

  Penny gazes at the boy, sitting proudly on the harvester’s iron seat, his hands out in front of him as he grips an imaginary steering wheel, turning this way, then that.

  ‘That doesn’t matter right now.’

  Cottage by Torchlight

  There is something monstrous about this creature on her verandah. Her body swarming with skulls, flexing faces and otherworldly spirits, the woman’s once-tender flesh now strangled by devil skin. And the boy in her thrall – how long can his innocence survive? If still it does.

  Studying her, Penny feels the touch of something on her own left ankle and looks down. There is no crawling insect or breeze-blown butterfly there. Instead, the mark she has not noticed for years, not even after Samuel Beckett, has begun to prickle, and she is forced to remember.

  How many years? Forty-odd, something like that. She is twelve, and beside her is a boy her age. They are crouched together on the concrete floor of the abandoned dairy, sheets of corrugated iron torn away from its roof and walls by years of summer tempests. More light than shade falls on the exposed slab. It is Easter break, and it is late afternoon, and the pack of Marlboros he has brought with him lies carelessly tossed, a rectangle of red and white on the grey concrete.

  ‘You first,’ she says, by which she means she will do him.

  He nods. That is the extraordinary thing, more exhilarating than their bodies touching, or the headiness of cigarette smoke pulled into her lungs. That he trusts her to do this thing neither of them has experienced before. That he would simply nod and lift his right leg into her lap.

  ‘All right,’ he says. ‘Do it.’

  She looks him in the eyes. All their other glances before this have been furtive, their kissing a way of avoiding having to look at each other.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure?’

  ‘If you are.’

  And so she picks up the nail they’d levered out of one of the fallen rafters. She wipes it on her shirtsleeve, rubbing the rust off. She doesn’t look at him again. She presses the nail against him above his ankle, and draws it across his skin.

  ‘Harder,’ he says.

  She tries again, but still can’t break the skin.

  ‘Here.’

  He takes the nail and pulls out his pocketknife from his shorts. He swings his leg away from her and positions the nail so its point is against the concrete floor. He cuts at it with the knife, as if the nail is a twig and he is whittling its end into a little spearhead. His scraping blunts the blade of his knife rather than sharpening the nail. But he does manage to scrape off a couple of lumps of rust, and when he is done he bends his leg into his own lap and leans over it, digging the nail into his flesh and ripping it open, scraping, bit by bit, her initials into him, wiping away the blood with the palm of his left hand, wiping it onto his shorts.

  ‘All right, now you.’

  She gives him her foot in the end and closes her eyes, she feels him scraping at her and cries out, but his hands are hard around her ankle and she does not want to pull away, will not pull away. Eventually he is done, and there he is, his two initials, S and F, etched into the flesh beside her ankle. Throbbing now, forty years later, in the safety of her own house.

  Phelan’s head throbs. He’d been lying in bed, falling in and out of a queasy sleep all day, when he heard the car arrive. When Penny answered the front door he carefully opened his bedroom door. He didn’t recognise the voice at first, but it was a woman’s and it could only be her. Kira! Here! Now on his verandah, having somehow tracked him down. From his bedroom he hears little of the conversation. Instead, trapped in his room, he tracks what is happening through the shifting of weight on the floorboards. He’d assumed Penny would turn her away, or that Kira herself
would leave if she thought he wasn’t home. But now here they are, the two of them, talking. He returns to his bed and lies on his side. It is growing dark outside, dark as an irrigation ditch, and he is trapped. If he emerges unscathed, it will not be him who decides. He can’t come out now, not after so long, not after choosing this way. He’ll just have to stay in his room until one or other of the women has determined what they want to do with him.

  There are things Kira could say that could raze everything. Could destroy Penny. Ruin a marriage. Is that why she’s here?

  Penny was right about something having disturbed her husband and sent him careening backwards again. Now she knows – it is Beckett once more, Beckett in the form of the tattooist who’d sealed the name on his skin. Beckett who cannot be escaped, who must be faced. If the tattooist can help, Penny thinks, then what is there to lose?

  ‘How old is your boy?’ Penny asks.

  ‘Eight,’ the tattooist says, before adding, ‘he’s never been on a farm before.’

  It doesn’t matter whether or not she’s lying. What she knows is true is that it’s been a long time since a child has visited their home, Penny thinks. ‘His name is Blake?’

  The tattooist treats the question as part of the interrogation and rolls up her sleeve to show the name in ink, proof.

  ‘All right,’ Penny says, ‘you can stay. Just until you get on your feet.’

  Kira follows Penny across the paddock to the cottage by torchlight. Penny helps Kira prise open the cottage windows while Blake nuzzles the dog on the steps. When they’re done, Penny hands her the torch so she can explore the building by herself.

  Kira goes from room to dusty room, her shoes crunching on the lino floor as she steps on desiccated rat droppings and collapsed insect carcasses and the fallen nests of wasps and starlings. The sound echoes as she passes from living room to kitchen to two bedrooms, exploring the enclosed narrow verandah and the bathroom. From a back window, Kira sees an outhouse with a tin ventilation chute protruding from its corrugated-iron roof.