The War Artist

by Simon Cleary

  Kira was about to ask him about himself, but freezes. She realises suddenly how the farm has been a shelter from this, too. Arseholes.

  ‘That’s enough,’ she says quietly.

  ‘Just tattooing, hey? Is that all?’

  She stands. ‘Mate,’ she says, her voice firm and clear, ‘that sort of talk is not going to happen. You carry on like that, you’re going to have to leave.’

  In her gut is the memory of the night with the junkie, Phelan to her rescue, and Phelan across the paddock now too, just a yell away. The last thing she’s going to do.

  ‘His tattoo bitch, hey?’

  She shakes her head slowly, as if disappointed for him that he hadn’t listened, but in truth it’s an enormous exercise of self-control. ‘I told you not to carry on like that,’ she says evenly, taking one deliberate step towards him, before suddenly striking him with her open right hand, slapping him fiercely on the cheek.

  ‘What the! What?’ He covers his head with his arms.

  ‘Get the hell out of here, you pig!’

  The sergeant wilts, unnerved. ‘Whoa, whoa,’ he says.

  ‘Out!’

  ‘Just a joke, Sister. It was just a joke. Calm down.’

  ‘What would your brothers think of you? What would Sapper Beckett think? The memory of your dead comrade.’

  They’re just words, not hers, trying anything.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ pleads the sergeant, ‘I’ll behave.’

  ‘Not today,’ she replies. ‘Come back when you’ve got some manners.’

  To the east Kira watches a great cloud illuminated by spasms of lightning. The cloud is distant, too far for thunder, or the breeze working against it. The cloud is self-contained, like an atom that will not be split, bolts of lightning flying from one end to the other. Another streak of horizontal lightning – greater than the rest – threatens to burst the cloud open, all its depths, the entire world of it. But for the war within itself, Kira thinks, the giant cloud might have moved unobtrusively across the sky, its very existence a secret. She sits on the steps and watches the show.

  Is this how Flores’s tattoo gods settled their arguments? she wonders. But here I am, and they cannot touch me. Not tonight. I am leaving them behind.

  Gallery of Limbs and Torsos

  After tattooing them, she takes photos of her work. Early in her career she would photograph every tattooed body and post the image online. Or, if it wasn’t a piece to share, she’d simply store it away, compiling a catalogue of her work. Back in the days when she designed and drew and created, and what she created was unique. When she tattooed daily, when she dreamed daily. That was a long time ago, back when the studio was more than a front for Flores’s dealing. When tattooing mattered to them. Now she looks at her work on these men and once more thinks, this is good.

  She downloads the images from her camera and admires them at night when Blake is asleep. Her roses are as beautiful as any she’s done before. She’s proud she had them in her to give to Surawski. Look at Ng’s dragon and its one missing scale, its vulnerability more compelling than its fierceness. A glistening shield, wet with the sweat of battle. She compares her work with what other artists are doing and it’s not bad, she thinks, not bad at all.

  The soldiers rise from the chair or the bed, their tattoos done, their skin aflame. They pose for her, these men she has marked but will probably never see again, and in this moment they are at the centre of the universe, and she is there with them.

  She prints the images off and surrounds herself with them.

  Penny escorts Blake across the paddock. She’s carrying his school bag for him, the carton of eggs they filled together too. He’s been anxious to get home after opening up the palm of his hand on a star picket. Usually such an easy child, he seems to have resented that he’s had to wait at the Big House this afternoon while Kira finishes work. Little displays of petulance. She wouldn’t normally walk him home like this, but he couldn’t wait for his mother to get him and Penny wants to explain what happened, what she’s put on the gash, give Kira some antibiotics just in case.

  Blake runs ahead. When Penny reaches the top of the stairs the door is wide open. From one of the bedrooms she can hear the sound of the mother comforting her son. She doesn’t want to intrude. To her left, the door to the enclosed verandah where Kira tattoos is ajar. The makeshift studio glows in the afternoon light, the bed, the armchair, Kira’s stool, a table with an array of tattooing paraphernalia. But the walls. Penny steps inside. The walls are covered with sheets of A4 paper, images of the bodies Kira has been tattooing.

  Ink on skin on ink on paper on wall. Positioned with care, the black and white images clustered together on one wall bleeding into a group of colour photos on another. So many limbs, so many torsos. The marked hands and wrists. A glistening thigh, a dimpled arse cheek. The muscle-taut skin. Scars. Not the men’s, but the war’s. Or perhaps, Penny thinks again, they’re just domestic cuts and scratches and blisterings, wounds of civilian life. She sees neat lines of stitching. Fist-sized hollows where dark beasts of war once fed. The stumps of an amputee.

  Penny moves around the room, taking in the walls of tattooed skin, unaware that as she moves she’s tucked her hands behind her back like she’s a gallery patron, peering close. She murmurs to herself, nods reluctantly, begrudgingly.

  So, they really are quite beautiful, these images of tender skin and their exquisitely fresh wounds. She can tattoo, this woman, she can take photos too. Then suddenly, she thinks, where is James?

  Penny scans the images, seeking out not Beckett or poppies, but her husband’s bared body. When she finds it – the oldest among so many young men – she thinks, yes, that is him, this artist has captured him.

  From the garden of the Big House Phelan sees a camera flash, not knowing what it is, catching only the unexpected flare of light as he pauses against the trunk of a cypress, and looks across at the cottage. Nearby, Blake is swinging his legs over the side of the verandah, banging the heels of the new pair of RMs Phelan has bought him.

  ‘Mum’s nearly finished,’ Blake says, seeing the flash too, seeing Phelan come off the tree and squat to get a better view of the cottage.

  ‘Can she have dinner with us?’

  ‘Of course,’ says Phelan. ‘Of course she can.’

  Phelan, when he stands alone in her studio, feels his own skin tingle, begin to hum. Some song of common wounding, of universal suffering. He stands in her makeshift gallery, overwhelmed by what Beckett has put in motion. Surrounded by these men he is coming to know, he quietly weeps. If Kira touched his shoulder now. If his mother did. If Penny could see this. If only they all could.

  Tribute

  Once again he is alight, madly. Once again Beckett enters him, speaks to him, urges him to act, though this Beckett is different. Not so much a remembrance as an artistic vision. The single tattooed name on his shoulder has now been joined by a platoon of tattoos. This new Kira-born vision. To take Beckett to the country, to take him and his brothers to the world! Who would not want to join him, who could not see its truth?

  It doesn’t take much to interest a journalist contact, and then – a morning of calls and a coffee down in Brisbane later – a publisher. He shows her the images he’s taken on his phone of Kira’s photo wall, magnifying them on her laptop so she can see for herself.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, short blonde hair, deliberate, experienced, encouraging.

  ‘It’s art,’ he says.

  ‘And it’s an idea we can sell,’ she replies.

  Penny watches him at his project.

  ‘You’re mad,’ she says. And in truth she is not sure whether the mania propelling him from the farm and back into the wider world will blow out after a few days, and he’ll collapse onto a pile of empty whiskey bottles.

  But the days turn into weeks and the fever of activity does not break – t
he phone calls, the emails and the trips down the range to the city. The refining of the original idea. The spreadsheets and the timelines. All the consents. The conversation with the Chief, the flights to Canberra and the lengthy negotiations with the army.

  ‘It’s a tribute to Sapper Beckett,’ he says, ‘and a celebration. Not just of Beckett, but all of them.’

  ‘Who is she?’ they want to know.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Charlie,’ he says, waving it away. ‘It’s not about her, but them.’

  ‘But without her, there is no them.’

  ‘She’s “The Tattooist”. That’s enough. Otherwise, she is anonymous.’

  ‘Won’t people want to know?’

  ‘People want to know about heroes. There’ll be one on every page. That’s who people will want to learn about.’

  He coordinates the photo shoots with the men, organising them into the photographer’s studio in Brisbane at the nominated times, watching them turn into models, flexing their bodies. Flashes of ego and delight. The power of solidarity.

  The life flowing through him as he crafts words to accompany the photos, lines of poetry, lyrical complements. Laughter not curses. This new cycle of, what? Happiness?

  It is too much. ‘Not just mad, but cruel,’ Penny says to him.

  ‘Cruel?’

  She’d encouraged it, she knows that. But she’d thought that whatever it was he couldn’t face when the tattooist first turned up here, that wound – resistant to therapy and medication and love – whatever it was, the tattooist might help him shift it. Bloody fool she’s been. Because there’s been no release. Worse – Beckett’s hooks are even deeper into him. The tattooist’s as well. The tattooist! How Penny has humiliated herself. She has given her life to this man, but it’s not her he’s celebrating.

  ‘Here I am,’ she says. ‘Here I have always been. You can’t even see me.’

  ‘Pen! Don’t say that!’

  ‘But it’s true, James!’ she says. ‘Beckett … Beckett will destroy you. He’ll destroy whatever is left of us. You’ll let him. You will, won’t you?’

  His distress is like a child’s, uncomprehending.

  ‘Oh Penny! But the book is a good thing. It’ll help people understand the war.’

  ‘It will destroy us. Is that what you want?’

  ‘Of course not. No. No. No. I’m sorry. You’re everything, Pen. Everything. I … I—’ He reaches for her, but she pulls away. She will be no partner in his unsparing zealotry, will give him no encouragement, no succour.

  ‘You’re on your own with this, James.’

  When it is finally done, and the first copies arrive, three weeks before release, Phelan carefully wraps one for Kira. He lays the sticky tape beside the scissors on the table in his office and rises.

  At the back door of the Big House he pauses, gazing out. Penny looks up from the kitchen table.

  ‘The stars are brilliant tonight,’ he says.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  He shrugs. ‘The tattoo book.’

  ‘Aah.’

  Penny lets him go, walks down the hallway and enters his office. She pulls a copy out of the box, sits in his chair and begins to flick through. Thinks, can’t help it, when was the last time you gave me anything?

  ‘What’s it for?’ Kira asks.

  She knows it’s a book, big and heavy in her hands. But neither her nor Blake’s birthday is near, and the anniversary of their arrival – an event Penny had politely marked with a cake – had passed three months ago.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Phelan says, feigning calm, control.

  Partly it’s the weight of it that makes her pause. She’s shed so much, and has no instinct to accumulate.

  ‘Come on!’ Phelan urges. ‘Open it.’

  There is a mighty expectation in him. She feels the weight of that too.

  ‘Mum!’ Blake goes to wrestle it from her, but she keeps hold.

  ‘Let’s open it together, Little Man.’

  ‘This will endure,’ Phelan says, his eyes beginning to flame. ‘Longer than me and my skin. Longer than Ng’s and Surawski’s. Longer than a platoon full of tattoos. A whole army-full.’

  She’s not sure what she’s looking at, this album of her tattooed soldiers. A temporary blindness falls upon her, an opaque film clouding her sight. She turns the pages slowly, with ungainly fingers.

  She sets the book on the table, open, face-down. It is heavy. She feels giddy. It is too late. Everything is changed. Motes of dust float around the glowing bulb. Kira lifts a cupped hand into the throw of light and holds steady. Whatever might fall into place.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Phelan asks after a while. His eyes burning still, yearning to ignite her.

  She shakes her head and drops her arm. Looks at him. His thin hair. His puffy cheeks. A fire beyond her dousing.

  ‘What the hell have you done?’

  She sits on the top step of the cottage just before daybreak and looks out. Directly in front of her is the row of cypress pines and behind it, the Big House. You have to turn your head to avoid it. She does. Gazes at the lightening of the east, all the sky beyond the escarpment, softening. The creatures of this place are stirring – the chooks and the cattle, Phelan’s dog, the carolling magpies. They’ve been good to her. And to Blake who, soon enough, will climb from his bed, looking for her.

  Kira is not sure what, exactly, she is surveying; what alchemy of time and circumstance. The trail of soldiers to her door has fallen to a trickle, though now Phelan has bound them to her she can’t easily turn them away, coffee-table book or not. She has saved enough cash, but enough for what? A new identity? A new home? That would no doubt please Phelan’s wife who seems to oscillate between suspicion and tolerance.

  She hears her son’s feet hit the floor. When he doesn’t find her in bed, he calls out for her, ‘Mum! Mum!’ and she thinks, there are chooks to be fed and breakfast to be had and a school bus to be caught, and whatever the hell I’m going to do, it’ll be for him.

  What to Forgive

  So this is where Phelan has escaped to, Gruen thinks, turning onto the gravel road and following it along the plateau. He stops his LandCruiser at the top of the rise but doesn’t get out, surveying the country, knowing it already from the satellite images, but there’s still the thrill of entering the map, owning the coordinates and feeling the images come to life around you.

  He sees the old homestead, the cottage, the escarpment to the east and the north, sees the land gullying away to the west. A nice view, Gruen thinks, but there’s only one way in and one way out. These trade-offs. That lesson from his first season in Chora when they’d set up their outposts on high ridges overlooking insurgent valleys. Thinking they’d control the valleys, but really it was the valleys that controlled them.

  Gruen sees two figures, man and boy, climb over a ridge to the west. He checks his watch. Phelan will have seen him. Gruen moves his vehicle forward to reach the house before Phelan does.

  ‘Hello, Old Man,’ he calls when they are in earshot, the boy carrying an empty yabby trap in his arms.

  Phelan points the boy towards the Big House and the kid leaves them, looking over his shoulder.

  ‘If you’ve come for a tattoo it’s too late.’

  ‘For your book, it’s too late.’ Gruen smiles at the retreating boy. ‘Whose is he?’ he asks. But Phelan does not reply.

  ‘You’re the only one not in there, you know,’ Phelan says. ‘Every other member of the platoon. All your boys. Every one got a tattoo, every one is there in the book.’

  ‘Beware groupthink.’

  ‘Hah! But of the two of us, I’m the one who has left the army.’

  Gruen holds his gaze. ‘And even then you haven’t been able to let go,’ he says quietly.

  Phelan can’t meet Gruen’s eyes. He sighs, and as he d
oes his shoulders drop. His eyes fall to the ground, and then, embarrassed, he lifts his face to the sky, as if distracted by something up there.

  ‘Look Old Man. The book is fine. It’s beautiful. The men love their tattoos, and they love the souvenir. All the media coverage. They’re proud to be part of it. You’ve given them that. It’s a fine thing you’ve done. A fine thing. But that’s not why I’m here.’

  ‘Well then?’

  Gruen pulls out a ziplock plastic bag with a USB stick inside, and holds it out to Phelan.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You know.’

  Phelan’s mind is writhing. He can’t find anywhere for it to settle. His eyes shift from the bag and whatever riddle Gruen is laying out, whatever danger lurks inside, and stares hard at him. ‘I’ve got absolutely no idea what this is about.’

  ‘But you will,’ Gruen says. ‘It’s about Becks.’

  Phelan takes the plastic bag.

  ‘And it’s about you, Old Man,’ Gruen adds.

  ‘What the hell?’

  ‘I owe you an apology.’

  Phelan shakes his head. ‘And this?’

  ‘It’s the footage from the helmet cam.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The helmet cam Becks was wearing when he died.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because this way you’ll have everything. This way you’ll know what to forgive yourself for,’ Gruen says.

  The helmet cam. His room and a laptop, and on his desk a transparent ziplock bag with a red memory stick inside. The clean plastic and the neat lines and the fresh metal and its smallness, cool and anaesthetised in its little plastic bag. You and Beckett Gruen had said. You and Beckett and a helmet cam. Phelan could destroy this little red splinter of history. He could toss it over the escarpment for it to crack open on the rocks below or wedge in the roots of a strangler fig for the weather to do its work. Or he could slide it into a drawer and try and forget about it, hoping it will somehow disappear in the dark.