The War Artist Read online

  He goes to speak but he is made of earth.

  ‘Ssh,’ whispers Kira, whispers the sea. Ssh.

  She lifts her arms and he looks up, thinking it’s the stars her fingertips want to brush, but instead Kira is peeling off her singlet and dropping it to the sand, reaching back between her shoulders for a clasp.

  Phelan turns his head away, as he does for his wife. But Kira’s pull is greater than mere habit, sweeps away self-discipline. He wilts before her nakedness, and looks back at her, amazed.

  This sea creature beside him, stepping towards the water. Some form of perfection he’s never before encountered, moving like no woman he’s ever known. Her dark hair, her long limbs, her hips and buttocks, the ancient markings on her skin. She glows, lit not by moonlight, but by something inside her answering the sea. The tattoos on her naked body silhouetted against her are glowing, their designs projected beyond her by that interior light, as if taking shape in the air itself. As if the warrior woman on her arm might come to rest in the palm of his hand should he open it.

  A tiny wave breaks on the sand and sweeps towards Kira, lapping at her feet before withdrawing, leaving anklets of foam. She steps into the sea, and as she does he fears she might disappear forever.

  ‘Wait!’ he calls, frantically unbuttoning his shirt and throwing it to the damp sand, then starting on his singlet.

  ‘No,’ she commands, turning, raising her palm.

  He freezes, the power of her. Each pebble, each grain of sand, every tiny piece of shell-grit is detonating around him.

  When she continues, her voice is quieter. ‘Soldier,’ she says gently, patiently, ‘remember your arm. You can’t.’ Kira points to his left shoulder and the plastic she has taped into place. Suddenly she is no longer siren but woman, no less beautiful, but more real, a professional who has not forgotten herself. ‘You can’t get your tattoo wet,’ she continues, and then, when he opens his mouth to protest, cuts him off. ‘You’d regret it if you did.’

  Ah, Beckett. Though inked into him barely an hour before, Phelan has already forgotten him. It is Kira who hasn’t, this woman who never knew him.

  ‘Wait for me,’ she says, laying a hand on him.

  He nods in resignation, submitting to her authority. Armies cannot function without it.

  Kira wades into the sea. Her thighs and then her hips and her waist. She brushes the water’s surface with the palms of her hands as she wades forward. A moment of shimmering moonlight before she leaves. Then she dives, up and out and forward, the perfect arc of her body.

  Phelan climbs back into his shirt, counting the buttons as he does them up, a little task to distract himself. He gathers her clothes and her shoes and folds them, never losing sight of her. He lays her things carefully on the sand above the high tide line, and watches her slow strokes, the rhythmic bobbing of her head as her breaststroke takes her from the shore.

  Phelan walks along the curve of beach towards its southern tip, as close as he can get to her body out there in the glittering bay. Never has his wife swum naked before him. But is this for him anyway? This woman, this ocean, this night, these forces he doesn’t understand. He squats at the end of the beach. These layers of darkness, and beyond them, imagination.

  Gradually he becomes aware of voices, neither his nor Kira’s, and swivels on his heels in the sand, staying low. The sound gathers, kids calling to each other, jostling, their shoes dancing on the bitumen as they descend the road. They pass under the last streetlight before the foreshore and Phelan sees three fearless teenage boys whooping and wrestling between swigs of beer, their bottles raised to the stars like bugles. When they reach the rocks ringing the bay they tip their heads, almost in unison, drain their stubbies and toss them against the boulders, shattering the night. They leap, rock to rock, as if they can fly.

  Phelan turns on his haunches, back towards the water, but the surface of the bay is still and Kira is gone.

  The boys climb onto the tinnies, balancing on the tips of their bows, arms spread like nautical figureheads, oblivious to Phelan’s presence. They won’t see him, he knows that, because they’re blind to stillness. Instead, their laughter is filled with boisterous astonishment – that they are bigger than they could ever conceive, that there is nothing for them to find here on the beach that they cannot create themselves. Their talk of women, when it starts – their boasts about what they’d do and what they wouldn’t – has no malice in it. Phelan can’t help but smile.

  He looks out at the bay again. He imagines Kira treading water and looking back at the commotion on the beach. Can she see him, too, squatting, all of it under control?

  One of them spies Kira’s clothes on the sand and hurries to investigate.

  ‘Hey, check this out!’ he calls.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Over here!’

  ‘What?’

  The kid lifts Kira’s bra. ‘What the—’

  But Phelan has moved quickly and is almost upon them.

  ‘Thanks lads.’

  The three boys turn. Phelan’s shoulders and head and bull neck, his outstretched hand.

  ‘I’ll take those.’

  It’s as if the boys have unwittingly conjured him out of their imaginings, and having created him, must heed him. The one with the bra hands it to Phelan.

  ‘The rest.’

  The boy bends and collects the remainder of Kira’s gear, gives it to him.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Phelan says it slowly, deliberately, allowing no other option, and now it is sealed.

  ‘Do you boys need help with anything else?’

  The one closest mumbles something and shakes his head.

  As they retreat, their courage returns. By the time they step off the beach and begin making their way up the road zigzagging its way to the clifftop, they slow and yell face-saving taunts back at him. But Phelan too has disappeared and the boys will have to imagine him anew.

  Home, Into the Stars

  She swims out so far that when she finally looks back to land she can see the buildings rimming the cliff. Treading water, she locates her mother’s house. It is unlit, which means it is empty, because even after her mother goes to bed she leaves a light on, a signal – to whom Kira could never fathom – that the lady of the house was in residence. Kira guesses she’s either away on one of her overseas vacations – usually Nice, sometimes Biarritz, never alone – or else she’s temporarily moved into one of her boyfriends’ apartments.

  Kira puts her head down and swims back towards the beach. She closes her eyes as she strokes, opening them only to lift her head and check her bearings. The water is deep and dark and she swims hard. When she reaches the shore she is out of breath. She takes Phelan’s hand when he offers it, allowing him to draw her body to his, feeling his shirt against her breast.

  She laughs and pulls away. Phelan offers his shirt as a towel. Though she knows his torso already, she watches his singleted chest with different eyes as he unbuttons and peels off his shirt.

  ‘Come on up to the house,’ she says, nodding towards the clifftop.

  The house is Federation red-brick, two gables and a tiled roof. An empty carport with carved timber bracing and matching tiles stands to the right of the block. There is a chest-high mock orange hedge on the footpath boundary, and an ornate wrought-iron gate that swings smoothly when she opens it.

  ‘Won’t we disturb your mother?’ The ‘we’ with which he dooms fidelity.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘The house is all ours.’

  Normally he’d want to understand how she knows but there’s another impulse operating on him now. He follows her through the gate and closes it quietly behind them. A carriage lamp on the front porch switches automatically on. Phelan’s heart quickens, but Kira ignores the light and leads him down a side path before kneeling beside a large terracotta pot and its tiny Port Jackso
n fig. The base of the pot crunches against the brick pavers as Kira tilts it in the dark and feels beneath it for a key.

  ‘Hey, soldier,’ Kira calls to him from her mother’s bedroom, ‘help me with this.’

  Together they drag the mattress out onto the balcony, into the intoxicating stars. Of all the camps and all the bivouacs, of all the swags rolled out in the trays of utes, and beside ASLAVs, and on the flat roofs of mudbrick hovels beneath star-bled skies, of them all this is the strangest. But he trusts this balcony, these stars, this night, this woman. He is beyond doubt, in the hands of fate. And, he suddenly thinks as he watches her move about the balcony, a passing benediction, that it is Beckett who has led him here, Beckett’s spirit, and his own honouring of it.

  But Beckett wants things of him too, makes demands he cannot refuse.

  ‘Charlie, my cock, my nuts. Are they still there?’

  Phelan’s not sure he’s heard right, though the words were clear and strong. All the thunder, all the light. All hell aswirl.

  ‘It’s all right, son,’ Phelan yells into the boy’s ear, ‘you’ll be okay.’

  ‘I want you to check, Charlie.’

  The sapper rolls his hips so Phelan can get at him. He still has his dark ballistic glasses on. The rounds are flying overhead, but Beckett reaches up with his right hand and pulls them off. Phelan lifts his too.

  ‘Tell me, Charlie. Tell me,’ Beckett says again with complete seriousness.

  Phelan looks into his eyes. The sound of the firefight around them and the blood-mud ditch is somehow fading away, replaced by this urgency.

  ‘Of course you’re all there, son. You’re right as rain.’

  ‘Have a look Charlie. I need you to look.’

  Phelan takes off his gloves and lays them aside. His heart is pounding. He unbuckles Beckett at his waist, and reaches into his trousers. He can feel something of Beckett through his jocks. It’s probably enough. Probably. But Phelan owes him this, wants to know himself now, so he slides his hand beneath Beckett’s jocks, and finds his penis there, his balls. He’s moist, but it’s not blood, not yet, and as Phelan holds him in his hand he feels the warmth begin to leave the boy, and he shivers.

  ‘You’re all there, son,’ Phelan says, their helmets touching, fire above, what might be a sacred moment. ‘There’s nothing to worry about, got it? Nothing to worry about. You just hang on, son. The medivac will be here any minute. Any minute.’

  ‘Thanks Charlie,’ Beckett says. Or Phelan thinks he says, thinks he remembers.

  But now what? Should Phelan keep him awake or help him sleep?

  Phelan looks at Kira’s tattooed body but doesn’t know how to touch it. He fears it is beyond him. That it is too knowing. That it seeks more experienced men than he, truer men too. Whoever tattooed her, whatever intimacies, whatever the hands that have worked her flesh, whatever bodies have inspired her, whatever life she’s taken into hers, he’s inadequate. There is nothing her body does not want to know, nothing it does not yearn to record.

  But who is he?

  ‘You …’ he says, his voice trembling. ‘I …’ But he falters. It is too much for him.

  She just laughs, gently, as she might laugh at a silly child, and reaches for him, her teeth at his neck. This moment, this yes and this no, each folding into the other. Whatever his hesitation, it doesn’t matter. She takes him.

  Mementos

  Something in his dreaming, some sudden movement, wakes her. Kira examines him in the glinting starlight and the late moon. Lying on his side, his right arm curves over his head as if protecting himself, even in sleep. His fist clenches involuntarily and he pulls his head down, balling, groaning. She reaches for him, takes his hand and gently strokes it, caressing the night and the scars and the gashes, wondering to herself, where has this hand been? Muses, as she returns to sleep, about what it might do to her own dreaming.

  When he wakes it is to a throw of morning light and a slip of breeze. He rolls to gaze at her. The tattoos on her arm are like foliage, a blanket of leaves laid tenderly over her shoulders as she lies on her side, the dawn rising easily around her.

  He returns to her with a coffee he’s made from the espresso machine he found in the kitchen, another new experience. He places it carefully on the tiles beside her head and watches her face respond to the coffee’s aroma: the widening of her nostrils, her fluttering eyelids. The sky is not yet blue above her when she wakes.

  ‘What happened?’ she asks, pointing to a long scar on his left forearm. ‘Here? And here?’

  But he holds back. A gentleman never tells, or some such. He traces the warrioress on her arm, the hem of her blue dress, her hip, the sword’s long curved blade.

  ‘That azure,’ he says. ‘It’s a fine colour.’

  ‘Is it your favourite now?’

  He continues to caress her skin. ‘I don’t have a favourite, but … blue … it’s … it’s the most,’ he struggles for words ‘inspiring colour.’

  ‘Inspiring?’

  ‘It’s the colour of the sky and the colour of the sea. You reach for the heights and explore your own depths. You don’t accept what you think are your limits. You push yourself. Push the boundaries of what’s possible. That’s inspiring.’

  ‘Do you give that little speech to all your men?’ she replies, looking at her work, Samuel Robert Beckett, beneath its plastic wrap.

  ‘Made me sound like a dickhead, did it?’

  ‘Well,’ she persists. ‘Do you give that speech to your men?’

  ‘We all need people to inspire us.’

  ‘Do we? Really?’

  ‘In my experience, yes. Yes, we do.’

  Kira looks away. He senses he’s losing her. But he’s not ready to give her up, to leave her. Not yet ready to return.

  ‘Wait,’ he says, rising. He goes to his shirt, neatly folded over the back of a recliner in the living room, and unbuttons a breast pocket. He returns with something held clumsily in his big hands and feels suddenly awkward. ‘It’s for you,’ he whispers, his voice strangely hoarse.

  The look on her face hovers between delight and disquiet.

  Phelan lifts his top hand. The gift is covered in tissue paper. Kira reaches for it, unwrapping the trinket, fold by fold. A delicate blue crane, long-legged, its wings spread like a great feathered cape. He’d bought it for Penny in Kabul, but fate knows better.

  The thought takes hold, fervently, as if a revelation, that this hand-carved bird had, in fact, always been destined for someone else. That when he’d read the line from The Travels of Marco Polo he was being led to this woman, there are mountains there in which are found veins of the stone yielding the finest azure the world has ever known. That when the Kabul merchant enticed Phelan into his shop, his figurines laid out on a table covered by a large velvet cloth – rows of elephants and lions and birds – and selected this crane from among the carvings, it was always destined for this blue woman.

  ‘It is lapis lazuli.’ He pronounces the words slowly, proud of this new language, sensing only now the beauty in the words. ‘It’s their national stone. Like our opal.’

  But mere words have lost their weight and she has tired of using them. Already she is alighting, awaiting the first of the day’s breezes. She is strong, and she is ready to fly.

  ‘A memento,’ he says, holding it out to her.

  The places those hands have been, the things they’ve done, what they will resume doing now this is over. She looks into his face. He is sad, she thinks. And old and foolish. And while she was not mistaken, the sun is now burning the night away, and she fears its scars.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, her mark on his shoulder.

  Part Two

  Homecoming, Delayed

  Brisbane, November 2010

  Penny sits on the front verandah, looking out over the lawn that slopes down to the lilly pilly h
edge bordering the street. Beyond the hedge, the red-tinned suburban roofs of Wilston cascade down the hillside. Further away, the city spreads eastwards to the bay and the sand islands on the horizon. Two sulphur-crested cockatoos screech at the rising sun, and Penny instinctively scans the sky until she finds them. Already the day is beginning to blur, and soon the islands will disappear in the early summer heat. Shortly after dawn on a clear day, with the aid of James’s telescope, you can see the car ferries on the water between Dunwich village and the mainland terminal. Though it’s not the traffic on the bay she’s tracking this morning, but the planes in the sky as they slowly loop and descend to the runways in the north-east. One of them, soon, will be arriving with her husband. And soon enough she’ll have to leave for the airport to meet it.

  They’ve been texting each other for days, mundane messages filled with the dull detail of travel logistics, worth nothing to anyone if they were intercepted. That he’d touched down in Darwin and loves her. That they’re leaving for Richmond in five – the army base in Sydney with its long runway. That Sapper Beckett’s parents will be there when the plane lands to greet their son’s body and he still doesn’t know what he’ll say to them. Later, that the ceremony was like nothing he’d ever experienced. That he had an afternoon of duties and a brief medical check ahead of him, but that he’d see her in the evening, will let her know which civilian flight he’s on. Then the final text late – that he’d been unavoidably delayed overnight and would be home in the morning. How she’d sighed, conditioned as she was over the years to changes like that – he’s reliable, it’s the army that can’t be trusted.

  But it’s a blessing he was delayed, she tells herself now. The first time she’s ever felt like this. At the end of every other posting or return from leave her longing had been almost unbearable. Not that she’s one to pine – not since their early years anyway. Nor has she learned to merely fill in time as some wives do, or resent each day’s absence. If they’d had kids it might have been different, but they couldn’t and she’s dealt with that, as much as one ever can, the new commitment they made to each other. She got on with things, as the saying goes, has a career of her own that has offered consolations and, more recently, satisfactions. Still, there’s nothing like a return date. No matter how full her life, a posting end-date – circled on the kitchen wall calendar – issues a solemn promise, daily: I will return.