by Simon Cleary
‘You go, James,’ she says to him, ‘I’ll stay here and help for a bit.’
Phelan looks at one, then the other. We’ll all be okay, he thinks, standing there in the kitchen of this refuge. Each one of us, in our own way, always.
The little room is glowing. The old lino on the floor and the cracked benchtops and all Blake’s cranes on the windowsill and every cup and every saucer in the drying rack dance in the sunlight and Phelan is overwhelmed.
‘You go,’ she says to him again, and blows him a kiss.
‘Let me …’ Phelan says. His chest is swelling. His wife is beautiful. His wife is good. And Kira is here, extraordinary. He has an overwhelming need to share, to give, to thank.
He takes a cane hand-basket from the top of the fridge without explanation. ‘I’ll be back,’ he says. ‘I won’t be long.’
The two women look at each other. He sets out, fixing his old Akubra – stained and creased and collapsed at the brim – firmly on his head.
As Phelan leaves the cottage he watches Blake throw the kite into the air above him and then run, his string hand behind him, the opposite of fishing in the creek, trying to get something to fly away instead of bringing it in. Even when the string sags, and the kite falls to the ground, Phelan smiles. Blake looks up and waves wildly towards him.
Phelan watches as Blake heads towards the escarpment where there’s always a breeze, and smiles. How much the boy has learned here on the farm. How confidently he stands by the edge, holding the kite’s thin vertical dowel between his fingers, waiting for the breeze to strengthen before launching it up and out, throwing it like a spear. The yellow diamond lifts and then lifts again, working its way towards some unseen current above the boy’s head, the kite straining against him, flapping against the wind. Blake feeds out more line, turning his wrist again and again as he shucks off loops of string.
Blake turns, beaming, and gives Phelan a thumbs-up. Phelan returns it. The kid’ll be okay too, he thinks, the kid’ll be okay.
Phelan follows the fence line where stray buttercups grow in the shade of posts. He cuts them with the blade of his Leatherman, and lays them in his basket. Onward he moves, eyes to the ground, scanning for colour. When he finds a wildflower he kneels and snips it near the base of the stem. He gathers dogwood and boronia and, among an outcrop of boulders to the west, a flannel flower. He recalls once coming across a spotted sun orchid on the other side of the hill behind the cottage, and veers towards the stand of eucalypts rising above the crest.
As he climbs the hill he snaps a head of silver wattle from a stunted bush, and lays it in the bed of flowers. He drops to his hands and knees when he reaches the top and enters the eucalypts, lifting long shreds of bark from the ground, choosing three curlicued strips for the basket, fossicking.
‘I got a tattoo once,’ Penny says.
‘Really? You?’
‘I know!’ Penny says, ‘I know!’ She tells Kira the story, the two women at the table shaking their heads and laughing, Penny taking off her sandshoe when she is done, showing off her ancient welt.
‘I might have something for that,’ Kira says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Come with me.’
Penny follows Kira out of the kitchen and into the front room where she worked, where her gallery of printed soldiers remains. Penny takes in Kira’s tattooing gear, neatly organised on shelves, the bed still set up like a masseuse’s table just in case, Phelan’s book on the coffee table.
But there is another object that catches Penny’s eye, a small azure statuette standing among the ink bottles that she hadn’t seen when she was here before. She reaches for it. She raises the fragile bird to her eyes, turning it. Its legs are impossibly slender, but its breast is bursting as if in song, and its wings are spread as if they would encompass – or smother – the world.
‘Where did you get this?’
Phelan senses the van before he sees it, a splinter of white through the trees. He looks up. The van stands on the eastern side of the turkey’s nest, driven, he assumes, through the stock gate, across the paddock and parked here so it’s invisible from the road. Phelan remains stationary for a full three minutes, counting, watching. All is still.
Then he rises and leaves the basket at the base of the nearest gum. He scans the side of the hill, the field, the horizon, but sees no human form.
As he approaches the van his gait slows, staying out of the line of its side mirrors. A new model Mercedes with tinted windows and New South Wales plates. He slows further, inching forward now, till he raises his head and peers through the darkened glass. The van is empty. He tries the doors, but they are locked, the rear door too. He returns to the driver’s side window and presses his forehead against the glass. There is a baseball cap hooked on the rear-view mirror, a cigarette packet on the dashboard, chewing gum wrappers jammed into the ashtray. On the floor at the passenger’s side he sees a collection of loose tools – wire-cutters and pliers, cable ties.
Then, laid out in the middle of the bench seat, he sees the tattoo book, opened to his own image on the flyleaf.
‘Is anyone here?’ Phelan pants as he stands in the empty kitchen. No answer. He begins moving slowly through the cottage, searching.
‘Hello?’ he says, quietly, tentatively. ‘Hello?’
He finds the two of them in the enclosed verandah off the kitchen. Whatever he has disturbed, it doesn’t now matter.
‘Where is Blake?’ he asks urgently. ‘Where is he?’
Kira looks at Phelan and knows. She knocks over a chair, and runs across the room, through the kitchen, leaping barefoot down the stairs, wild, somewhere ahead of her an abyss.
Penny watches her go, and turns to Phelan.
‘What is it now, James?’
Danger.
The yellow kite lies discarded on the ground. Kira turns a circle beside it, scanning the length of the escarpment, the ridge to the south, back to the cottage and the road, then to the row of pines in the north and behind them the Big House. The squawking galahs in the distance are nothing. Think, she tells herself, think.
‘Fuck!’ Phelan curses, only now thinking he should have disabled the van. ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’
He returns to the kitchen and grabs the keys to Kira’s wagon from their hook. On the road he changes gear, spitting gravel. As the wagon accelerates he glimpses Kira standing in the paddock, Blake’s kite in her hands, jerking her head briefly towards the sound of the car before turning back to the eastern horizon. The wagon rushes up the hill, Phelan keeping his head, flying up and over and down, the crunching suspension, the gum trees rushing past. He veers towards the paddock gate on the left as he approaches it, but doesn’t stop, taking it out, the lengths of cross-timbers splitting, fence wire snapping and whipping against the sides of the car.
In the distance he sees the van across the paddock where he’d left it beside the turkey’s nest, empty, a jab of relief. It may not be too late after all. The car ploughs through the long grass as it speeds towards the van, its wheels shuddering against the corrugations in the earth until it hits a submerged log and Phelan is thrown forward, his chest slamming against the steering wheel. The car comes to a halt, its engine revving madly. Phelan groans, turns off the ignition, and stumbles out.
Blake’s head rises above the edge of the cliff a hundred metres away and Kira gasps. She screams his name in wild relief, and he looks up at her, and even as she starts running towards her son she senses confusion in him, a turn of the head, a looking back.
Her bare feet tear across the ground, but she cannot run fast enough to stop the fear. She cannot run fast enough to quieten the squawking galahs or catch the fleeing clouds or escape the pitiless sun or return to Sydney. She cannot run fast enough to turn back time. And she cannot run fast enough to stop Flores appearing behind her son.
Flores seems larger than
before, the product, perhaps, of her frightened imaginings. His glistening shaved head, his sunglasses, the black collared shirt, the straps of a backpack around his shoulders. He steps from the shade of the great fig into the sun beside Blake, huge, confident, and smiles at her.
Somewhere a half-thought reaches for her – why isn’t Blake coming to her? She slows pace, falters, the weight of dread gathering in her. Flores places a hand on Blake’s head, and Kira feels it like a punch to her stomach, gasps. We are one, he’d said to her again and again. We cannot be parted. The tattoo gods – they decree it. Was that before or after Blake? Is he any less manic now? She forces herself on, staggering under the doubt.
What words are there, Kira thinks? There are so many from which to choose. Are there words of hope she has not clung to, tattooed so she can’t forget? A grief she has not confronted in skin, a fear? She has urged wisdom into a thousand needy bodies, a thousand ancient verities to guide a thousand aching souls. Words of love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Her own skin is aflame with meaning. What words?
Flores waits for her. Blake’s eyes are wide beneath Flores’s steady hand. Man and boy are like a statue, the clay of them setting before her.
Kira is close enough now, whatever doom may be. Her heavy steps cease, she looks at Flores and she says, panting, ‘He is not your son.’
But he doesn’t hear. He strokes the boy’s hair in reply, as tenderly as he ever has. Perhaps it’s that he doesn’t believe. He smooths Blake’s brow. His expression could even be one of pity for her.
‘Ah,’ he says calmly, ‘I see.’ Just standing there, smiling smugly, patting her son.
‘He is not yours!’ Kira’s voice rises. ‘You can’t take him!’
‘A boy needs his father,’ Flores says, laying it out as if what he’s offering is clemency. ‘Come back home, Kira.’
‘But you’re not his father!’ she screams. ‘You are not, it is not you.’
She can’t bear to look at Blake as she continues to scream. If Flores won’t hear it the universe will.
‘YOU. ARE. NOT. BLAKE’S. FATHER.’
She means it as an accusation. But the rest of what she has to say is confession. The words themselves tell her, force her to lower her voice.
‘The brigadier is, Jim is.’
Now the words are out, every other sound is sucked away, every bush insect and every bird and every breath of wind. A silence the like of which the world can never have known descends on this plateau above this valley beneath this sun, and it is her duty to fill it.
‘You’re not Blake’s father, Flores. I’m sorry,’ she says, sensing the shift. ‘I’m sorry, Flores.’ But no words are big enough to fill this space. They can open it, but they can’t fill it.
She sees a twitch of muscle. Something in his neck or perhaps it’s a tightening of his forearm, maybe just a catching of breath. His body trying to hold back a truth it’s known for a long time. The change in him, when it comes, is swift. Suddenly, he is a man without a son and he collapses, dropping to one knee, his hand falling from Blake’s shoulder to the ground, holding him.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Kira says, stepping forward. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Only now does she turn her gaze to her son. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says again, this time for Blake.
Mouthing it to him now, ‘I’m sorry Little Man, I’m sorry.’ Her reaching, trembling, hands.
Released, Blake moves away from Flores to join Kira, confused, but never again to be his son.
Phelan watches Flores shrug off his backpack, watches him unzip it. Knows what is happening before he sees, runs, keeping his head still, the brief moment breaking into ever smaller parts, shorter frames.
He watches the gunman’s shoulder movements, Flores’s splaying right elbow as he ratchets the backpack open, tooth by tooth. Kira embracing Blake, the one immersed in the other, both oblivious. Phelan closes in on Flores, but knows he will not make it. Flores’s hand enters his pack. Phelan gathers himself. He will not make it. He doesn’t need to wait until he sees the gun; the change in Flores’s face is enough. It is barely perceptible, but he knows it well – the surge people feel at the moment of arming themselves. Sometimes invincibility, always strength.
He knows what he must do. He is decoy, distraction, and, inevitably, target.
‘Hey!’ Phelan yells, ‘Hey!’
Phelan stops running. There are still thirty metres between them, and there is no cover. Every little upwind sound is magnified, the shifting of three bodies to face him, each gasp, each sob, Flores’s safety catch flicking off. Phelan recognises the raised weapon, a standard-issue Browning. He dives and hears the rounds, one-two, but the thud he feels is his shoulder against the ground, and as he comes out of the roll and looks up Flores is walking steadily towards him, arms raised, the handgun pointed at him.
This firefight, here. The two rounds echo and rumble still and he might be lying in long Preston grass or a ditch in the Chora Valley, the same storm breaking overhead, the same sky. How the world contracts. How the world draws into itself. He feels the third round hit his left arm. Burn and burst and useless flesh and bone. Above the pain he hears his name. There is no emptiness out here in the windswept field. Only that which is essential. Sky and pain and Kira calling his name.
That Flores is bearing steadily down on him hardly seems to matter. Because there is not just the one voice now, but two. He hears not just Kira, but Penny too, and they are both calling for him, those two voices, one following the other, over and over, intertwined. It is almost song.
A second bullet enters him, ripping out his breath. The sound of his blood gets louder. Still he hears Penny crying his name, closer, Kira also, these two women. The shadow above him now is Flores, he knows that, but it is woman that fills the air.
The next shot he hears is memory. Some vague recollection of a different weapon, his own. But it has no bite, not this round. It is sound without moment. Even so, Phelan’s eyes want to close now. He thinks he sees a Penny-like shape in a receding field, a beautiful composition of the woman he loves, her feet set, his rifle against her shoulder, her eye at its sight. He hears another shot, and Flores collapses out of the sun’s way.
There is suddenly too much light and Phelan must shut his eyes. Still there is his name, still Kira and still Penny. And now Blake.
Epilogue
‘Can you do this?’ Penny whispers.
‘Yes,’ Kira answers. ‘I think I can.’
Kira cups the older woman’s breast in her hand. All their nervous talk ceases. There is only breathing now. And skin and breast. Kira is gentle. She is respectful. She’d thought she’d be uncertain, clumsy even, but it’s not like that. She explores the other woman’s skin with her fingers, her thumbs, learning where the flesh has been removed, where the skin has been tightened, where she’s sensitive. She circles the horizontal scar, but on finally reaching it, runs her forefinger evenly along its length, its little ridgeline of experience.
‘Can you feel it here?’ Kira asks.
‘Only a little.’
‘And here? And here?’
Kira reaches for her gloves out of habit, but pauses. No, she thinks, discarding everything that is unnecessary. As she presses the design onto Penny’s skin, she looks up at the older woman’s face. Penny’s eyes are closed and she is breathing evenly. When Kira peels the stencil paper away a minute later, the purple outline of a hibiscus flower envelopes Penny’s breast.
She adapts to the changing skin and all its shifting textures. She stretches it where the fatty layer is intact near the armpit, but where it is thin and taut over the implant Kira turns the machine down and finesses it, as a lover might brush an eyelash from a beloved’s cheek, softly, softly. At the scar she pauses before crossing it, feels it again with her finger, the little knot. She takes care the needle doesn’t catch, before moving up and along the ou
tline of another petal, embracing the curve of the implant.
They break for water and to stretch.
‘I don’t want to look,’ Penny says. ‘Not till it’s done.’
Kira hangs a sheet over the wall mirror, even though she finds it unsettling, as if this makeshift shroud has temporarily banished some part of her from the room. They talk about lorikeets and galahs and the colours of feathers.
‘Well,’ Kira says finally, ‘I think we’re there.’ She removes the cloth.
Penny climbs off the bed and sets herself before the mirror, naked from her waist, her hair still falling down around her shoulders. She stands and looks and begins to weep.
Kira lets her go, leaves the tissues she normally uses to wipe off ink and blood where they are on the trolley. There’s a dignity in the woman’s tears she won’t attempt to erase. She sits still on her stool, her back straight, concentrating on her breathing, not wanting to do anything, no matter how small, to disturb this moment. All the colour of weeping.
After what seems to Kira a very long time, Penny speaks, though her eyes remain on her reflection. ‘It’s, it’s a shock. It’s—’
Kira’s stomach tightens. Please, she thinks, please let her like it.
‘I don’t know why I’m crying,’ Penny says, turning now to look at Kira.
‘No?’
‘It’s not like … I guess, you steel yourself. Well, you have to, don’t you?’
The women look at each other.
‘Well, I did anyway.’
Penny touches her skin as if it is new. As if some miracle has appeared from some hidden universe, the first hibiscus, and all the world is made new again. Her breast, her body, each glorious tear. The good in it all once more.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she says, and Kira gets up now, the two women weeping, embracing each other, enfolding one another, the two of them. Now.
Acknowledgements