The War Artist

by Simon Cleary

  Underneath the cottage, in the torchlight, there’s a cement basin on a small slab of concrete, fibro sheeting on three sides, the fourth open to the elements. Kira turns the tap and the house shudders and she wonders how many years are being released. The water, when it comes, gushes rusty brown. Penny joins her under the house and, taking the torch, locates the electrical box. Penny flicks all the switches there are, and the cottage begins to hum.

  ‘I’ll bring some linen over,’ Penny says.

  ‘We’re okay for linen. A towel would be a big help, though.’

  Kira tries the lights when she returns upstairs, and in the main bedroom climbs onto a wooden chair to swap a working bulb for a blown one. She checks the mattress of the old brass four-poster for mice and, finding none, wraps sheets tightly round it, before, with Blake’s help, dragging the bed into the centre of the room, away from the walls. They crawl into bed, exhausted, the mother’s body curving around the boy’s.

  Blake wakes her in the night, shaking her shoulder. The bedside clock pulses red, and though it is not yet midnight there are giant jaws gnawing at the walls around. They hear a wicked screeching in the dark outside and in the ceiling an army of feet run one way then the other and Blake is scared, and Kira, hushing him with guesses, is too.

  Out of the Mist

  A strange and magical mist billows over the edge of the escarpment, damp on their skin. Already, out here, the night and its terrors have receded. The early light is muted, almost playful. It’s as if the rising sun has stalled and hovers in the enveloping shroud of fog, waiting for them to set it once again on its course.

  A bird calls – Kira can’t tell what – its song clear, the only sound in all the umbral world. She holds Blake’s hand as he leans out over the edge to listen, perhaps to even spy it.

  ‘Careful, Little Man.’

  ‘Muu-uum,’ he complains.

  ‘We don’t know how far it is down there,’ Kira says, her words struggling to find shape in the mist. ‘It might be steep. We wouldn’t want you to fall.’

  Away through the fog behind them an engine kicks into life, followed by headlights. A quad bike, she guesses, Phelan. She grips Blake’s hand more tightly and watches the lights as they leave the house and approach the cottage a hundred metres away. The fog swirls. It lifts and descends, thins and grows dense once again. The bike appears briefly through a hollow in the mist, an old man hunched over, dog between his legs. He sees her too and momentarily releases the throttle – whether in surprise or doubt she can’t tell – before changing direction, and making for her. The headlights, the fog, her son, bird answering bird at her back.

  By the time he pulls up, and the dog has leaped off, they’re staring at each other. He with his hands still on the handlebars, as if he might yet wheel around and return to his sanctuary, she with her fingers gripping her son’s hand. He cuts the engine, swings his leg over the seat, and stands.

  In the flesh he is more broken than he’d appeared on television. Or perhaps he’s collapsed even further since then. He’d spoken with such clarity on screen, but now his shoulders are bent. She looks at his neatly combed hair, and the scars from minor surgeries on his forehead. His skin is a delta of capillaries and his cheeks are swollen, as if time and again the words he’s needed to speak have got stuck there. Whatever else he has done, she thinks, he has achieved vulnerability.

  He recognises her immediately, despite the changes. She is thicker, stronger. Tattoos now cover her like a suit of armour: both arms, her wrists, the backs of her hands, her fingers with rings of ink. Her warrioress is still there, though she seems crowded, stooped, as if she is just another weight for Kira to carry. The hair that had once been long has now been cropped. It is still dark, but looks freshly dyed and he thinks he detects the remnants of purple near her left temple. He’s so tired.

  ‘Kira,’ he says. His tongue is thick with effort. He wants to say, what have you been doing all these years, what have you been up to? He wants to ask her about her life. He wants to say sorry. He wants to say thank you. He wants to swim and to dance.

  Instead, he says, ‘Where have you been?’ As if she’s late. As if he hadn’t told her to stay away.

  ‘I liked your poem,’ she says.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she shrugs. ‘There was something in it I recognised.’

  ‘Beckett?’

  ‘Something else.’

  A black cockatoo bursts from out of the mist, screeching. Blake flinches, then, seeing it above them, points excitedly, wide-eyed. A second appears, following the first, all wing-beat and eddying fog, so close to them in the distorting light, so close you can see a flash of red tail feather. So close you could touch them.

  ‘Wow!’ Blake exclaims when the birds have vanished, and the dog has disappeared after them, chasing air.

  ‘We don’t see many black cockatoos here,’ Phelan says to the boy. ‘You’re lucky.’

  The sun glows through the mist, strengthening.

  ‘Your wife …’ Kira starts, then falls away, not knowing what she had intended to say. The fog quickly fills the gap. She starts again. ‘Your wife is very kind.’

  ‘Yes,’ Phelan says, ‘I love her.’

  Creatures in the Landscape

  Penny brings over a broom, a mop and a bucket filled with cleaning products – creams for the fridge and the bathroom, powders for the oven, sugar soap for the walls. Rags for the two of them. They move from room to room, knocking mud nests off architraves, sweeping away spider frames, dusting picture rails and sills, wiping stains off the walls themselves.

  She prompts conversation, tries to get to know a little more about the tattooist, but the woman is walled off. Penny gives the boy a hammer, and asks him to bang in the nails in the skirting boards where they’ve pulled away from the walls.

  ‘He’s a good kid,’ she says.

  ‘Thanks,’ the tattooist replies.

  The second day Kira works alone in the front room, once an open verandah but now enclosed by louvres. She painstakingly cleans the glass with the vinegar and newspaper left for her on the stairs, while Blake draws faces on the back of a used envelope he found behind the old couch. The room lightens. The lino on the floor is faded and cut, wounded by the years. She mops it but it remains cut and wounded. She beats the dust from the armchair and Blake helps her carry it back inside and into the front room.

  ‘Well done, Little Man.’

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Yes, Manny?’

  ‘I miss Dad.’

  Kira watches Phelan limp from the house with a crowbar over his shoulder. He is like an ancient warrior-monk with a staff, setting out to protect a footbridge from bandits. She loses sight of him on the other side of the house.

  There is work she wants to do, so she leads Blake down the track that runs along the spur to the house Phelan has just left. There is no sign of him in the yard, but how much does she have to say to him anyway? She has taken risks enough just to get here. She takes a rake from the garden shed and gathers the leaves and twigs on the lawn into piles. Blake sits on the verandah folding paper. She can’t think what to do with the piles, so moves to the verandah and the front entrance, sweeping them down. It’s not such a bad thing about the piles of leaves, because the wife will see what she’s done. Then she feels the pang of conscience. You donate in secret, her father used to say, you don’t shout about your good deeds from the rooftop.

  But this is a transaction she’s proposing, or at least an acknowledgement of a debt she wants to show she’ll find a way to repay. Because the cottage is perfect – it’s private, it’s a refuge for a while, and it’s as isolated as she could hope. And it’s protected. Yes, by a broken warrior, but still protected.

  The first day at school Kira walks Blake to his classroom. She’s fully covered, gloves and upturned collar, hiding her ink. The teacher is a
recent graduate – narrow-hipped, tight-skirted, stockinged. She points to a desk with Blake’s laminated name card already taped to it. Kira scans the room but when she bends to kiss him, he is already moving away from her, his attention caught by some activity in the corner.

  ‘Look how quickly he’s making himself at home!’ the young teacher chirps, sensing Kira’s unease.

  Kira nods vaguely before dragging her gaze away from Blake and the little group of kids he’s joined, and directing it at the teacher, trying to take her in, her wide eyes and lipstick.

  ‘He’ll be safe here, won’t he?’ Kira asks, unable to keep the need out of her voice, that vein of desperation.

  She goes to Blake in the corner and kisses him on the head before she leaves.

  All day she waits in the car across the road from the school gate. Even when she grows hungry, she stays rather than abandon her post to get something from the corner store at the end of the street. She watches people come and go, filtering them for danger. The second day she does it again and then the third, until the principal comes out and leans into her window and tells her there’s no need for her to stay, that it’s better if she doesn’t, says that she must have other things she needs to do.

  But there is nothing I have to do more important than this, she thinks.

  To disappear – the great trick, the great feat. To brush the scent from your tracks with a branch snapped from a nearby tree, like in the boys’ adventure books Kira read as a child, the books originally her father’s. You sweep your footsteps clear so all that remains is the swirl of leaves drawn across the dirt. Because only the rarest of eyes is capable of reading the way the tips of leaves have been dragged across the earth. These Boy’s Own truths. In time the rain and the stampeding footfalls of the day will obliterate even the evidence of the ruse and there will be nothing of you left. Except, perhaps, the little mound of ash left over from where you burned your sweeping branch at the side of the river. White ash trodden into the ground by the feet of nocturnal creatures, or blown across the landscape in the first rising wind, a scattering no eye could possibly interpret. I left no trace, she tells herself, and while Flores’s eye was rare when they first met, he’s destroyed it since.

  But Kira starts to doubt herself. The loneliness of it. She and Blake, and the pleasantries at the school gate. Or the conversations she’s started at supermarket checkouts, taking her cue from the covers of the women’s magazines. One day she returns to the caravan park on the pretext she might have left something behind, and listens to the blue-haired woman’s chatter. The woman is as good as a stranger, but her talk is, at least, one familiar thing.

  Sometimes after school she takes Blake to the library where he’ll lift origami manuals from the shelves and fold paper at the low children’s desk. She finds a picture book for kids who have to flee ‘angry houses’, and snuggles beside him into a beanbag.

  She buys paint from a hardware store in town and, after checking with Penny, paints the door of the cottage red, bringing colour to it, good luck.

  At night, after Blake goes to bed, she opens her silver case. She takes out her tattoo machine and feels the weight of it in her hand, playing with the screws, turning it on, creating music. She counts the needles on her needle bars, rolls rubber bands between her fingers, shakes her ink bottles. She sighs.

  Where is this going? she wonders.

  She cleans their house each Monday morning, thoroughly, trying to pay her way. If Phelan is still there when she arrives he either quietly leaves the house through the other door, or locks himself in his study. He can be so still. Does he think she doesn’t know he’s in there?

  When Penny buys half a dozen leghorns from one of the farms on Boundary Road she thinks the boy might enjoy collecting the eggs, and pulls in at the cottage on her way back to the Big House. The tattooist comes down to the ute with Blake when Penny asks if they want to have a look. They watch as Penny lifts one of the cardboard boxes from the tray to the ground, then kneels and folds back the top flap.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ she asks Blake as he peers in.

  There is a burst of wing-flap, and the boy pulls back, alarmed. Penny laughs.

  ‘Here, look,’ she says lifting the white hen from the box, pressing its wings against its body. She cradles it against her breast so it can’t get loose, then reaches for the boy’s hand. ‘Let me show you.’ She guides the boy’s fingers towards the bird. ‘Feel the feathers. They’re soft, aren’t they?’ Look at him, she thinks, the purity of his amazement.

  ‘They’re going to live in that coop over there. See? By the pines. And you know what? I’m going to need someone to look out for their eggs …’ Penny looks up at the tattooist, who doesn’t object. ‘Do you want to come down and help?’

  Blake visits twice a day, with food scraps in the morning then to collect the eggs in the afternoon after school. The first few times his mother goes with him to inspect the coop and accompany him as he walks the eggs to Penny’s back door, Penny always giving the boy some to take back to the cottage. Soon enough, these become Blake’s responsibilities alone.

  Kira thinks about Flores daily, though the edge has come off. No longer does she wake at birdsong as she did those first mornings, startle-eyed, heart pounding, fear-filled, having forgotten to take some nameless precaution. The strangeness of dawn here has its own power, its own pull, equal to the pull of her fears. At first she hears a wall of undifferentiated bird noise, so loud it drowns the sound of Blake’s breathing in his bed across the room, Kira lifting her head to check he’s still there. When she lies back again she forces herself to remain still while her heart subsides. She closes her eyes again and tries to isolate what she hears. She attaches words to what she experiences – squawk and tweet and whistle and trill and coo. She counts eleven distinct sounds, though cannot yet picture the bird making the call. There is a scratching on the roof overhead, and she thinks crow, and listens till the bird alights in a burst of claw-on-tin. Then, whatever bird it was now airborne, she asks herself: Why crow? Why not pigeon or kookaburra or magpie? What memory has she drawn from, she wonders, or what process of deduction has she used that she is unaware of?

  She rises. She doesn’t touch Blake’s cheek as she leaves the room. It might wake him. In the kitchen, making coffee, that routine she’s brought with her, Flores returns. She can’t shake him. He is there as she prepares breakfast for Blake and as she readies him for school. Some days Flores joins them momentarily at the kitchen table, and sits silently, arms folded, pinning her with accusations, weakening her. What she’s destroyed, what she’s taken from him. She slumps. Perhaps he’s right. But here is Blake, and here she is, and beyond her doubt and her turmoil there is calm, and here, on the other side of the wrenching, she feels safe, and if her coffee scalds the back of her hand it is because she has clumsily knocked it over, not because it’s been thrown at her, the entire universe boiling.

  Phelan is aware of her as a new presence in the landscape. A counterweight to the house he shares with Penny. She is there through the curtain of pines and across the paddock to the cottage, her arrival giving the days a new patterning, a palimpsest yet to cohere.

  ‘Why don’t we invite them down for a meal?’ Penny asks.

  ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘She’s lonely, James.’

  He ignores her. ‘Can you give me a hand with the feeder this afternoon?’ he asks.

  But Penny won’t be distracted that easily. ‘You need it too, James.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You need to face it.’

  He looks at her, startled. ‘Face what?’

  ‘I don’t know, James. Whatever it is.’

  He lays his book down but misses the bedside table, and the volume thuds against the carpet. He can barely bring himself to care whether it’s woken Penny in the room next door. He’s been forced to face things for years. It’s fucking exhau
sting. He lies with the torchlight resting against his cheek, directed to the ceiling. He begins counting the drifts of spiderweb, but comes back to Beckett. And when he fades into sleep, Beckett accompanies him.

  He can hear them down the dry creek bed, following his boot prints in the sand, the surest of trails. But what if he can’t outrun them? Ahead there’s a log fallen across the bed. He veers off to the right, laying tracks towards the right-hand bank as he goes. At the log he leaps up and onto it, but rather than follow it further up the bank – the quickest route out of the creek bed – he turns acutely left, running back along the log across the full width of the creek to the left side where the tree’s root-system lies exposed where it toppled, taking some of the earth with it.

  He scrambles and pulls himself up and over the roots and the lip of the bank before rolling away on the flat land, staying low till he judges he’s out of sight of his pursuers below. He’s up and running through eucalypt forest now, weaving between trunks and shafts of sunlight, the ground a carpet of leaves. His trail is still not hard to follow, but he knows it’ll take longer than if he was still in the soft sand of the creek bed. Eventually, when he’s got nothing left, or thinks he doesn’t, he drops to the ground beneath an old gum, panting, sheltering behind its trunk. He wills himself to silence.

  There’s nothing yet from behind him and he hopes they’re in the country beyond the other bank, fossicking for his trail. As he places the palm of his hand on the ground to rise, he turns his head, nothing deliberate in the movement, and freezes. At eye level, eighteen inches away on a fallen branch, are three frogmouths, grey and weathered as the sun-bleached branch on which they’re perching, still as dead timber, their eyes closed into tight slits.

  He watches their hard beaks as he levers himself carefully off the ground, but when he begins to rise, one of them lurches towards him, snapping its beak and hissing, Beckett, Beckett, Beckett.