by Simon Cleary
‘Here,’ he says, rubbing his right thigh. This thigh is complete, the stump of his leg below his knee. Kira watches his hand caress his skin. ‘This is my good leg,’ he says. ‘I don’t want the doctors to take any more of it. I want a dragon to ward them off.’
She moves around him, resting her hand on his thigh, feeling the ridges of his quadriceps, the contours of him, the texture of his skin, comparing what she is discovering about his leg with what she knows of all the other thighs she’s worked. She touches his hips, both. She moves around him, changing sides. She almost speaks. Where, how, why, but restrains herself. She leaves him and his thigh and returns with another lamp which she sets on a chair dragged close. A yellow light.
An hour later she sets to work, inking to the vibrations of his body, pausing every forty-five seconds, lifting the tattoo machine just in time, coming to know his body in waves.
His skin glows, his thigh giving off its own light where she cuts it. Self-fulfilling. The hours pass. She rotates him, repositioning herself too. As she turns her head to refill her line of caps he reaches into his trouser pocket and pulls out a hip flask. She looks up at the sound of the cap being unscrewed. She imagines a genie escaping. He does not meet her eyes as he lifts the flask to his lips. She says nothing until he offers it to her.
‘No thanks,’ she says, too curtly.
‘It’s a family heirloom.’
She looks at the worn brown leather casing. ‘Alcohol makes blood run,’ she says.
He responds with another slug. ‘Then run, baby, run,’ he mutters to himself as he screws the cap back on before tossing the flask across the room. It hits the wall, and thuds to the ground. Kira sighs.
‘All right then,’ she says, collecting it, and taking a shallow mouthful herself before setting it down on her work table, behind her rows of inks, a tall dark peak shadowing them. Later, she gets them both water. Then dry biscuits from the kitchen.
She tires before he does. The machine grows heavy. The pads on her fingers whiten where the blood has drained from holding it so tight for so long. She straightens her back. It’s as if he’s not even here, and instead has left her a chrysalis to pattern. The low whistle in the west where the falling sun brushes the eucalypt leaves on the ridge, singeing them, wisps of smoke curling into stars.
She lays down her machine and stretches, and thinks, abruptly, where is her son?
‘Let’s stop for now. Let’s finish this later.’
‘Later? What the hell is that? There is no “later”.’
She knows he’s right, that she might lose her place, but she doesn’t care. Hopefully Phelan will have him. She goes to the window and pushes it open as far as it will go, listening in the direction of the Big House, looking. And there he is, through the pines, Penny beside him, shifting a hose from the base of one orange tree to another. Kira bends over the soldier once again. He knows how his dragon is progressing at the front of his thigh, but hasn’t asked to see what she’s done on the back, hasn’t tried to twist his head or seek a mirror. He’s listening to his skin, she thinks.
It is past midnight when she finishes, sore. She asks him what he sees.
‘Hope,’ he answers.
She leaves him on the bed and returns with her Nikon. ‘May I?’
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know. Habit. Pride. To remember. To make it last.’
She takes a photo and shows him. He sees his leg, his skin breathing fire. He sees his courageous leg beneath the skin, all its hunger, all its leaning into life. He tells her it’s beauty he sees.
‘I’ve never used that word before. Beauty.’
She nods.
‘Thanks.’
She sees his pride and suspects it’s been a long time since he felt that.
‘Take some more photos,’ he says to her.
Kira claims a shutter full of images.
Ng hugs her under the stars. ‘Thank you,’ he says.
The Sound Motorbikes Make
In the Big House, three days after Ng, Phelan hears the sound of approaching motorbikes, Harleys.
‘The keys to the gun cabinet, Pen. The keys, quick!’ he yells.
Penny hears, sees, hurries into her bedroom, before emerging, throwing the keys to him where he stands in the corridor.
Phelan unlocks the cabinet. The magazine is full. He slides it into the .303, his heart thumping. Click, snap. That precision contains his swelling emotions, their sharpness, their certainty. There is not yet any order to his thoughts, only peril and instinct. The old grooves. He slings the gun over his shoulder, feeling the rifle strap at his collarbone, the stock against the small of his back, feeling even the safety catch in position against him.
Out the back door, through the gate and onto the dirt road, and his first view. Already the bikes have arrived, their stands kicked into place, two riders swinging their legs over and off. Their synchronicity. The two men move slowly, as if bossing Phelan with their nonchalance, one throwing his jacket over his seat, the other stretching his arms, reaching for the sky. Their heads face each other momentarily, a word or two, no more, before turning towards the cottage.
Phelan’s quick stride turns into a trot as the first of the men takes the bottom step. He tries to control his breathing, tries to think. Kira hasn’t appeared at the top of the stairs. Surely she won’t. Surely she’s latched the door and retreated. But there is no back door from which to escape, and the windows are too high for jumping. At least Blake is at school, safe. The calculations begun.
At the top of the cottage stairs, one of the men raps. The knocks reverberate through the air like small detonations. The other man turns to look out, away from the house. Something about his pose, the set of his neck, his sweeping eyes, seeking movement before object. The man sees Phelan at a jog, hears Phelan calling out now, his weapon in his hands – ‘Get away!’ – the two men at the top of the stairs, exposed, these heartbeats. One throws a leg over the handrail and slides, the other drops to his haunches, shrinking on the step.
‘No!’ they yell out. ‘Don’t!’
Still Phelan runs, faster now, raising his rifle as he approaches. The target is splitting, one of the men is at the bottom of the handrail, nearly on the ground, and if Phelan allows that to happen he’ll lose his advantage. His blood is beginning to surge in him, the language of blood, now! now! now! But the man who’s remained on the stairs is yelling and holding out his hands, his two palms out, and is calling Brigadier! Brigadier! and it’s confusing. Phelan blinks the uncertainty away from all that is familiar to him – the cottage, the drill, the gun in his hands, the blue sky, his childhood home. Yet still there is something, a word tossed into the air, and Phelan’s walk slows and the man rises from his position at the top of the stairs, his head and shoulders framed by the door now, Kira’s red door, and the man calls out Brigadier Phelan! and the voice is like one he’s heard before, and behind the man with the outstretched white palms the door opens and it is Kira herself.
‘You should have let me know.’
‘Yeah, we shoulda.’
‘This is my property,’ Phelan continues.
The land maybe, not Kira.
‘Yeah,’ Surawski says. ‘Sorry.’
Under the shade of the fig Phelan knows them, corporals Surawski and Gislason. He knows them from the patrol briefing, these two somewhere in the line with him, having their gear checked like him, stepping out through the gate like him, each man patting the head of the base goat. These are the brothers he’d meant when he’d spoken at the ramp ceremony, the men he was addressing, Surawski and Ng and Gruen and Swift and Hillman and Gislason and the others from the platoon. Knows them from what he’s learned afterwards. He remembers them from The Victory, these two drinking quietly together in a corner, like lovers, Surawski’s fingers coming forward to touch his back after he lifted his shirt, following Ng.
Another one needing to touch to believe.
‘She may not have been in,’ Phelan hurries on, the adrenalin still in him, jagging him this way and that. ‘It could have been a waste of time.’
The three men watch as Kira moves towards them, a jug of lemon cordial in one hand, a tower of four glasses in the other.
‘Text me next time, call me,’ Phelan murmurs before Kira reaches them in the depths of the shade. ‘I’ll organise it. Let everyone know.’
‘Sure,’ they grunt, ‘sure.’
Greater Than They Think
In time they come. Some word of mouth. Some soldiers’ grapevine. They wind their way up the mountain, in carloads or alone, each of them coming for her. It is as if they know her already, are aware of everything she has done, believe in what she can do.
Phelan greets them first at the Big House, as arranged. Sometimes they will drink tea or coffee, all their loaded teaspoons of sugar on his verandah. They will smoke or talk shit or share their plans with him, Phelan nodding like a sage.
He only leads them across the paddock to her if Blake is safe at school, the one condition Kira has set, that Blake remains invisible. Their boots and their thongs and their sandshoes crunch in the dry grass, the air around them glowing and humming, the blue sky deepening with each step, the high-floating clouds. Phelan delivers them to her as if he is Charon and they are immortal warriors and this paddock is the Styx, and these men will return. He’d taken their coins from them in the Chora, before he’d become a ferryman, when all was aflame anyway and the only direction was out. Now he pays them back.
Day after day they come to her, and she receives them, one by one, refusing none. She has this duty. To tattooing as much as to these men who need her.
She gets to know each of them before she inks them. To learn what they want, why they’re here. She then needs time to draw their designs. Sometimes they bring her photos, or pages from Skin & Ink or Tattoos Downunder, or images they’ve printed off the net. Sportsmen’s tattoos. Other soldiers’ ink, often marines. She looks at their images, nods and asks them to talk. She might lay the image aside, out of their line of sight, and ask them to describe it.
‘Why that?’ she might say to prompt a conversation.
A couple hand her pieces of folded paper on which they’ve sketched their own ideas. One of the drawings includes notes at the bottom of the page with the symbolism of each element of the design explained.
‘You can strangle a tattoo with too much meaning,’ she says to him.
‘I don’t understand,’ the soldier replies.
‘It’s like a relationship,’ she says.
‘I’m single’, he answers.
‘You’ve got to allow each other space to change, grow,’ she says.
He grins. ‘So are you married?’
The wisdom doesn’t feel like hers, if wisdom it even is. Something a preacher read out at a wedding she went to once, oaks and cypresses and not growing in each other’s shadows. What does she know of relationships? Don’t fuck around, don’t take gear that’ll kill you, don’t fucking lay a hand on me ever again.
But she knows this – that her best work requires her to understand her clients, whether their bodies are soft or hardened, why they are there, what they want. Kira knows too that she needs the money. These men travel great distances for her tattoos and they pay her what she asks for, more than street rates, without blinking. They pay in cash. She keeps a tally in her notebook and hides the growing wad of notes in the ceiling. So she saves. It’s an opportunity to make money that she cannot let pass. Because she must look beyond this time, beyond this refuge. Because she cannot afford to sell herself short.
She will not tattoo images of real people. She will not tattoo weapons, or slogans of war. She will not tattoo angels’ wings.
‘Why not?’ one of the men challenges her. ‘That’s what I want. Like Johnathan Thurston.’
‘You need to discover what it is you really want,’ she replies. ‘Come back then.’
‘I know,’ he insists. ‘For years I’ve wanted wings, big ones, on my back.’
‘But you are not Johnathan Thurston. You are better than that – you are yourself.’ She says things like this to them, and they like it.
But she says to herself, shaking her head sometimes when they leave – Who the hell do I think I am? I am not William Blake. I was never Flores, back when he was a tattooist. No wings he ever tattooed have helped me fly. Or allowed me to flee. If anyone has settled for less than they should have it is me! But not anymore. My son needed me to leave a long time ago. My son didn’t need me to stay with Flores. I’ll make my own wings, dollar by dollar, feather by feather. For Blake. For both of us.
She tells the men they are greater than they think. She tells them they know everything they need to know. She speaks to them in a foreign language, even to her. She uses the words ‘love’ and ‘skin’ and ‘healing’ and ‘faith’. The men look at her as if they are spells falling from her lips. At the end of a session, their bodies afire, her every word is wisdom. She says, ‘You may bleed.’ She says, ‘There may be pain.’ She tells them not to scratch or pick scabs. She tells them to stay out of pools and to change bandages and to apply lotion. She tells the future and they listen, needy, rapt, and submit to her.
She tattoos roses growing from Surawski’s skull as he squirms in the chair, anxious about what he’ll say to his mother. Lantana berries for Starc, whatever childhood memories he’s trying to recover. Earnest young Thyme asks her to tattoo the Shield of Achilles on his left breast and tells her he wants to be a father one day. She tattoos Best They Could Do neatly beneath the horizontal scar scored across the side of Howe’s neck where a round took the edge of him and no more. And Swift, the secret orchid keeper with his secret tattoo, whatever she is now complicit in, that too-tender part of him.
And still they come. I need to be careful with them, she thinks.
One of them wants a large back piece done in one sitting.
‘Let’s do it over three days.’
‘Why?’
‘It adds up. I’ll be breaking a lot of skin for you. I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘You don’t understand then,’ he replies.
She nods. ‘All right.’ She wounds to heal.
Phelan couriers them across the paddock to the cottage before retreating to the house where he watches, or becomes agitated not watching. But the surveillance is of a quiet timber cottage, a soldier’s car stilled outside his house for hours. There is nothing to see. Men enter and disappear, the house itself gliding lazily through cloud-shadow. When they emerge, hours later, they are like men exiting a confessional, or a lover’s apartment.
Is it envy Phelan feels? That he is reduced to this? That he goes from necessary to superfluous in an afternoon?
Penny watches all these soldiers returning to their lives. Before the fire, before the breakdown, she and James had often entertained. In the later years of his career they hosted gatherings of officers with their wives and girlfriends or, increasingly, their husbands. And in the very early days there’d be barbecues and poker nights, all the amusing rubbish the soldiers would speak, pumping themselves up, bringing each other down. This is different – their house has become a waiting room for the patients the tattooist is seeing across the paddock – but all the same it’s good to have people in the house again.
Usually they’ll have gone by the time she returns from the hospital, though even then the traces they leave behind add something to the house – boot prints in the dirt, cigarette butts flicked off the verandah, the echo of their excitement on her husband. Better still when she gets home after a shift and they’re still here, putting off the drive down the range. She changes out of her uniform and joins them on the verandah, admiring their tattoos, enjoying their banter. And if James is away with Blake she’ll laugh and tease the boys, sometim
es even flirting lightly, confident in her body.
His journeys of exploration with Blake push further afield. In the winter hours after school they set off for the ends of the property, some task to be attended to. To check on the cattle. To ensure the troughs are full. To check the turkey’s nest, or a fence. To paint the sump oil he’s collected onto the gateposts to ward off termites. To smoke out a rabbit hole before filling it in. Stones have begun to emerge from the back paddock, rising out of the earth. They collect them, one by one, and walk them to the base of an old eucalypt, clearing the field, building a cairn in the shade of the tree.
Blake discovers tadpoles in the top pool. He scoops his hands futilely into the water and almost topples in. While the boy is at school the next day Phelan bends an old metal coathanger into a circle and stretches mosquito netting over it, stitching the cotton gauze into place with needle and thread as he did fifty years earlier. He smiles when he is done – the joy of boyhood, of creating, of gift-making.
‘Come with me, Big Fella, I’ve got something to show you.’ Phelan presents the net to Blake who sees and understands, and sprints out of the shed. Phelan finds a bucket and follows the boy to the pool, where he is squatting on the bank, net lowered. The boy lifts it out and half a dozen tadpoles squirm and bounce and flick droplets of water at him.
‘Look at this one. Wicked!’ And Blake reaches in to catch the largest in his fingers.
‘So, you live here?’
There is something about the way the soldier examines her tattooing room, as if trying to see through the walls to what’s beyond. Something in the fact he’s come alone. And in his agitation, a small-eyed meanness. Half the men are on things, but this one, this former sergeant, is close to the edge.
‘What’s the brigadier got you up here for then?’ the sergeant sneers as he drops into the armchair.