Paint Your Wife (16 page)

9

Alma Martin was witness to my mother's sly departure. Frank's truck bumped across
Chinaman's Creek. The screen door at the house opened and my mother backed out dragging
a bag after her. At this stage Alma didn't know about Frank, and while he didn't
know what to make of what he'd just seen down at the house he didn't think any more
of it. His mind was on other things. He drained his cup and went inside to resume
work on his painting of Alice standing by the curtains at the back window of the
house.

My mother couldn't face George. She couldn't tell him in person; she would rather
die than see his face crumple and him sit down in the long grass from the force of
this unforeseen blow. In the truck, my mother said, there were two contrasting moods.
She felt she was on her way to a funeral while Frank was off to a wedding. There
was no thought of her immediately moving in with him; she wasn't up for creating
more scandal. There was a spare room at the Browns'. Tui invited her to use that
while she took stock of her life and thought what to do next.

Two days later Tui got Alma over on the pretence of asking his advice on house colour.
It was a waste of time because she knew Stan would never budge from white. But she
thought Alma might have some ideas around the window areas. Some highlighter could
be used to good effect. Alma had told her to think of the house as a face—hair, eyes,
nose and mouth had their corresponding features in roof, window, door and porch.
He told her the door would look good in brick red.

‘Brick red's good,' she agreed. She told him any ideas would be appreciated. ‘You're
the authority. I won't pretend otherwise. But on the subject of faces,' she said,
‘it's all very well being noticed but you don't want people tripping over themselves
on the pavement.'

‘A quieter colour. I've got it.'

Tui snuck a look at her watch. The man who had invented house butterflies was coming
to dinner. Stan was keen on exploring an idea to develop a range of exclusive butterflies
to go with the NE Paint colour range. She needed to get the meal on. And besides,
suddenly there was nothing left to talk about. My mother had ventured out to the
porch. And Alma had stopped listening. Tui Brown excused herself as Alice came down
the steps slowly, one at a time, her arms folded, a wan smile. Alma thought she looked
more beautiful than ever.

My mother said she would have hugged him if Tui Brown wasn't watching from the window.

‘Come on, we'll walk up the street a bit,' Alma said.

For the moment they talked about everything but the burning issue. The monotony of
the houses, this new neat rule used to carve up the farmland. The bone-white colour
that Stan was sold on. The street came to a T-junction. They could
go left or right.
After looking in both directions my mother felt Alma tip her elbow.

‘Come on, let's go back.'

They walked slowly, and this time Alma brought her up to date with George.

He told her he'd seen the truck and had even seen her with the bag backing out the
fly-screen and still not thought anything about it. But in the middle of the night
he had woken with a start. It had nothing to do with any noise; just a powerful
sense that something was wrong. He told my mother he had got up out of bed and walked
outside. The night was dark except down at the bottom of the hill the farmhouse had
every light turned on. One or two lights can be passed over as forgetfulness but
the house blazed with light. He had wondered if he should go down the hill and make
sure that everything was all right. But he didn't; it was too cold and so much easier
to go back to bed.

In the morning he returned outside with his mug of tea. He couldn't tell if the house
lights were on. As usual, his eyes took the well-worn course across the paddock to
the hillside. The wheelbarrow was there, the shovel stuck in the ground. Usually
George would be out by now. It was then that Alma saw what he'd missed—fifty yards
back a lone figure sat on a canvas chair.

The paddock was heavy from the overnight rain. George would have heard the squelching
footsteps of someone approaching. Only the cow looked back over its shoulder. George
stayed slumped. Perhaps he was sleeping? Then, Alma said, as he came up from behind
he saw what George was looking at: the sunrise over the ocean. The view was still
not
quite there. There was still a section of hill to clear in order to widen the
frame. But nonetheless contact had been made, and here was something to celebrate.

Without turning his head George said, ‘She's gone.'

‘Gone where, George?'

‘She's pregnant.'

Thinking that congratulations were in order—and here as Alma was relating this my
mother felt a pinch of guilt at the darkness she sensed Alma was scrambling out of,
the different points he was forced to connect and at the same time stay calm in the
face of revelation—Alma opened his mouth to speak, and again George filled in the
blank spaces.

He said, ‘Not to me. Another bloke.' He held up the letter my mother had left on
the kitchen table under the salt shaker.

As she was hearing Alma retell this she could only imagine the impact of the news
on him, and yet, according to his account, it seems he had switched into a practical
mode. He told George he'd go inside the house and make a cup of tea. He said, ‘You
can follow me in or I can bring it out here.'

For the first time George raised his bloodshot eyes. His mouth was unshaven and
broken-looking.
‘Somebody
by the name of Frank Bryant. If you happen to know him,
Alma, tell
him
I plan to shoot him. But not today. I'm too friggin' tired for it
right
now.
Tomorrow I imagine will be a different story.'

Alma told my mother that he had left him there out in the paddock and walked back
to the house. In each room he had to turn off the light switch. He didn't know what
had possessed George to turn on all the lights. In the sitting room he stopped at
the window and looked out. George, he said, had looked like a man hurtling through
space, his hair every which
way, his eyes focused on a point set at a tremendous
distance inside of himself.

At the Browns' that night, my mother was bad company. She sat opposite the butterfly
man, a small serious-minded fellow, listening to the manufactured varieties of butterflies,
to confident pronouncements about the future. Listening but not really hearing. She
couldn't tear herself away from the picture of George sitting in that canvas chair.
In the end she had to apologise and excuse herself from the table.

Later that night from her borrowed bed she listened to the low male rumbling talk
of
Stan
and the butterfly man, and at a very late hour she heard the two men outside
her
bedroom
window. Both of them were pissing into Tui's bed of roses. The butterfly
man
was doing all the talking and Stan was assenting.

To shoot another takes more anger than George could summon. He wasn't the hothead
type who later regret their action from the dock. George was more of a melancholic
and so naturally he veered towards self-pity and drink.

By that Christmas, George was one of the regulars in the Albion, one of the after-hours
patrons who led the other drunks in song. It would be easy to think that this would
forever be his lot—a fast-spreading bum on a bar stool or worse, a rumpled drunk
found asleep on someone else's lawn next to the newspaper delivery.

It would be easy to leave him there alone to deal with his pounding head, except
for this: it was the lawn directly outside the Anglican Church. Any moment now the
first parishioners would turn up. Victoria was rostered on to morning tea which is
why she had turned up so early. Here is another story to file
under ‘accidental encounter'.
She walked over to where George lay asleep. He looked like he might in bed, his right
arm folded up beneath his head, except for the fact that he was in his clothes and
shoes. His tied laces gave the impression of fastidiousness and for a moment Victoria
wondered if she had a heart attack or stroke victim on her hands. She crouched to
feel his pulse. His breath was sour. She called his name quietly then insistently,
and after that, irritably.

‘Come on, George. You can't sleep here.'

Eventually one eye opened to the world in all its brilliant angles.

‘It's me, Victoria,' she said.

She told him he couldn't lie there in full view of the congregation due any moment
to file in the door.
Congregation.
The word induced deeper sleep. She shook him awake
again. ‘George!' She raised his arm and slipped her own underneath it. She was strong
from hauling Dean around the place and George was still whippet-like from months
and months of his labour on the hill. She was able to walk him along the road to
her house. It wasn't so far. She had to help him up the front steps.

George was complaining of his head now. She told him, ‘The door's open, and the bathroom's
the one at the end of the hall.'

Victoria watched George stagger up the hall, a steadying hand against the wall, head
dropped between his shoulders. She was late. She supposed she could leave George
in the bathroom and still get over to the church and take care of the morning tea
before services started. In the end she decided to wait and see. George might not
be able to cope. He might slip
and fall and bang his head against the bathtub. Anything
could happen with him in that state.

When he emerged his face and hair were slicked clean. His skin shone with health.
He looked so transformed, and all it had taken was a basin of cold water. And later,
years later, she would surprise my mother with, ‘He had the most wonderful teeth
and he was smiling.'

The teeth had done it. But water was the transforming element. Not paint.

10

In 1967, a young surveyor turned up at Alma's door with a district plan. He'd come
up the hill for a better view of the surrounding landscape, a boyish-looking fellow
with a mop of blond hair and a struggling moustache that he was perhaps too proud
of, angled sideburns, shorts, walk socks. The world had sprung a surprise. According
to the contour map, the hill down on the Hands' property shouldn't be where it was.

‘Oh, you mean George's hill.'

The surveyor raised his dull face. He obviously didn't know what Alma was referring
to; and Alma found himself annoyed by the young man's moustache on its joint quest
for maleness and officialdom.

‘You don't know about George's hill?'

The surveyor preferred to consult his plans than to hear what Alma had to say. With
Alma's permission he spread them over the deck and knelt down to peer at the alphabet
of squiggly lines and land titles. For the moment, Alma was content to let the surveyor
search for the missing bit of landscape. He wasn't sure if he could be bothered with
explaining. Eventually the
young man stood up and walked to the edge of the deck
and squinted down at the deceiving landscape. The new hill was clothed in grass.
A new generation of sheep which had no reason to think the hill hadn't been there
forever trailed over its grassy bumps.

Alma came and stood behind him.

‘The hill moved, if you must know.'

The young man smirked.

‘Hills don't move,' he said.

Alma told him, ‘I don't know if I can be bothered with this, but you had better believe
me when I say that this one did.'

The surveyor thought he was talking to an old fool. Alma could see that and didn't
like it. He reached up and grabbed his shaving mirror that hung from a rusty nail.
He told the surveyor to take a look at himself. The surveyor looked around.

‘It's all right. It's just us.'

The surveyor held up the mirror and stared at his blushing face. ‘Now what?' he said.

‘Well let's talk about that moustache of yours. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm
going to suggest that five years ago it wasn't there. And that, there, that crease,
that frowning line that just lit across your forehead, that wasn't there when you
were crawling bare-arsed over your parents' sitting-room floor.'

The surveyor dropped the hand that held the mirror.

‘So what's your point?'

‘My point,' sighed Alma. He felt like showing the surveyor the road. ‘My point is
this. The hill you're looking at, for example. Why should it be where a map twenty
years out of date says it is?'

The surveyor scratched the back of his neck. This was proving more difficult than
he had expected.

‘I see. So what should I tell my boss, Mr Martin? He will want to know. Did the hill
just pick itself up in the night and go out for a walk—as hills do, of course—and
got lost and couldn't find its way back to the exact spot?'

‘That sort of tone won't help you. I was going to tell you but I don't think I will
now.'

The visit of the surveyor is the closest occasion to the story of Alma's portraits
getting out before now. I'm aware that various people will have different versions,
but that is the history I more or less caught the tail end of.

I grew up with the neighbour always down at our house drawing my mother. I must have
been very young the first time I ever saw my mother sit with the sort of patience
I would later see on the closed-down faces of people waiting at bus stops.

I can remember coming across a box of old sketches. These ones were done at an earlier
time. My mother is back in the house and pregnant with me. Frank is by now working
at the paint factory like everyone else. George is with Victoria and Dean, newly
established behind the counter of Pre-Loved Furnishings
&
Other Curios. And I
am curled up in my mother's womb waiting to come out to the world I have just described.