Paint Your Wife (31 page)

He made one last effort to buck me—he failed of course and it seemed to take everything
out of him; his hips fell back and the air expired from him. His shoulders went weak.
He closed his eyes and panted for a bit. I thought he could be playing possum you
could never be sure with a sneaky individual like Dean. I moved my legs up his chest
and pinned his arms with my knees. Away across the fields in the classroom windows
I could see rows of tiny faces looking back in our direction—at their mayor; and
strange to say, at that moment Ophelia snuck back in to my thoughts with, ‘What kind
of mayor did you say you were?' It was a valid question. What kind of mayor pinned
down a runaway like Dean in the playing fields of his own youth where for hours, as
it seemed back then, Dougie and I held opponents in fierce headlocks for the duration
of the lunch hour, their sweating faces against our own,
their pounding chests. I
remember the day that news of the death of Felix Sampson, founder of NE Paints, spread
across the school playground; everywhere you looked you saw kids unravel themselves
from headlocks and stand up and brush the grass off themselves, and as one gaze up
at the Sampson villa on the hill. I remember that night, Frank acting all weirdly
serious at home, and my mother shooing me out of the kitchen while Frank sat down
to compose a letter of commiseration to Felix's sons, Brian and Aubrey, both shits
as it turned out, who eventually wasted no time in selling us to the highest bidder.

Over at the classroom block a teacher emerged and moved gingerly in our direction.
A female teacher. She stopped and went back inside. A few minutes later a teacher
with male swagger started over. It was the headmaster, a man I had once shared the
mat with at this very same school. Dean turned his head and saw him too and a misguided
flush of hope entered his face.

I called out to him. ‘Hi Phil.'

‘Harry! I wondered if that was you.' He looked briefly behind him and came forward.
‘The
children,'
he said rather awkwardly.

‘Right,' I said. ‘I understand. But it's okay Phil, despite how it must appear. It's
nothing at all. It's just a little difference to sort out. Dean's not such a bad
bloke, are you, Dean?'

Dean stared up at me tight-lipped with eyes of hate.

‘We're almost done here, aren't we, Dean?'

‘In that case,' Phil said.

I gave him a nod of encouragement.

‘Really, it's nothing.'

He looked absently down at Dean. He said to me, ‘Okay, Harry. Regards to Fran.'

‘Thanks,' I said. ‘Same to Meg.'

Under me Dean stared up with a bewildered face. Phil started on his way and stopped.
He turned around.

‘I almost forgot.' He stood there as if inviting me and Dean to guess. His delighted
face was beaming. ‘Our Olivia is pregnant.'

‘Little Olivia? Holy mackerel, Phil, that makes you a grandparent.'

‘I know,' he said. ‘I feel too young.'

‘Well don't you get old on me too fast.'

‘I won't. See you, Harry.'

After he moved off again I slapped Dean's face. It sounded louder and actually much
worse than it really was. Phil stopped and looked back. Behind his black bifocals
his eyes narrowed.

‘It's all right, Phil. It was nothing.'

Phil nodded, a bit more disapprovingly this time, and went on his way.

Dean twisted his face this way and that. He spluttered up at me, ‘What did you do
that for?'

‘I don't know. It just felt right,' I said. ‘Didn't it feel right for you?'

‘You're not the fucking mayor. A fucking mayor doesn't do that sort of shit.'

‘I am the fucking mayor. You're looking up at the fucking mayor. Get used to it.
Now are you ready to talk like a civilised human being or do I have to slap sense
into you? What's it to be, Dean? Give me an indication. Civilised or barbarian? I
can do both.'

‘The first one,' he said.

‘Good choice.'

There are days when Frances asks me, ‘How was your day?' and I hardly know how to
begin to answer. This was shaping up as one of those. Later that night I told her—‘You
know Phil Anderson from the school, remember his daughter, Olivia? Well she's pregnant.'
Her answer was much the same as mine, ‘No, she can't be,' and just like that in dressing-gown
and socked feet she took herself off to thoughts of the future, old age, shortened
horizons, and I was spared the need to explain the rest. She would have been appalled
to hear that I had spreadeagled myself over Dean Eliot on the local school playing
field. She would have clasped a hand over her chest and thanked God or someone lurking
in the ceiling that she wasn't down-town when I had chased after that poor boy Dean.
Being mayor is a thankless job, and I would be reminded of that the next morning
when I picked up Alma from beside his letter box for him to say offhandedly, ‘I
trust you've organised the baby-sitter…' So much of what a mayor does is off limits.
There isn't a grandstand of home support cheering our every move. I know that and
accept it. But from time to time it grates just a touch when the same beneficiaries
upon seeing you wipe the sweat from your brow fail to ask, ‘Is there anything I can
do?'

At the schoolground I was conscious of the need to provide a morality play for those
small faces gaping out their classroom windows. They had seen the mayor astride the
youth—a confusing and troubling spectacle. Now they would see him gallantly offer
the same youth a hand up to his feet. They would be treated to a quieter view of
world peace as the two figures left the schoolgrounds by the gate, and perhaps they
noted the way the mayor stepped aside for the other to go through ahead of him.

On our way along Broadway I stopped at Angie's Koffee Kafe and bought Dean a soft
drink. I was feeling remorseful. I shouldn't have slapped him. There was no need
for it. I didn't know I was going to until I had done it, enormously satisfying though
it was. But Dean hadn't actually done anything wrong. He hadn't actually done anything
to me—stolen, flung abuse. His only crime had been to run from me.
Flight.
And that
is what had enraged me.

At Angie's while he slurped on a straw I explained my vision for the town. Before
they shovelled me into the ground in a plot next to Tommy Reece I hoped we could
look in the mirror and not run from ourselves for the next boat or plane, or take
to the road. I gave the word
run
a bit more play than it warranted but I wanted Dean
to think maybe he was actually to blame for some wrongdoing just in case he was thinking
of getting litigious over being slapped. So on I went. People run when they've got
no reason to run. It becomes a lifelong habit, and then when they reach the end what
is there to look back on? A life of running over the surface of the globe and a colossal
failure to dig down deeper. Always the next thing and never the ground under your
feet. Dean slurped his drink, his eyes tilted up at me, watchful, suspicious.

‘Anyway, Dean, I need to ask a favour of you…' As soon as I said that he straightened
up on his side of the table and suddenly he smelt of the feral opportunism I'd experienced
out at the cemetery that day I turned up hoping to exchange the beds. By the time
I got to the end of the proposal his face had grown in confidence.

‘You
want
me to babysit,' he said.

‘Correct,' I said. ‘For Violet so she can earn some money.
Yes, that's the idea.'

‘Want me?' he said again, getting weird about it now, looking around as if this was
an amusing idea.

‘And when you say
want
you're talking about something free, right?'

‘Correct.'

Now he was very amused. I hadn't seen him look this amused before. He shook his head
down at the table like I just didn't get it, did I.

He said, ‘You want me but you don't want to pay me. Is that the wonderful proposal?'

His moral blindness really was staggering. Did Dean really think he should be paid
to take care of his own children. By now I couldn't even bear to look at him. That's
when he said, ‘They're not my kids.' Just like that. The element of surprise had
swapped places at the table.

Later, after we had parted with a promise that he would turn up the next day, I felt
differently about Dean. I heard about the paint warehouse, and everything that he'd
done for Violet, and what he had hoped to achieve by buying the house truck before
running out of funds and as a result feeling washed-out and derelict and of no hope
or use to Violet whatsoever. He had taken himself off so he wouldn't be a burden
on her. He'd planned to come back as soon as he found a job. Now he had one.

There was something else. Something he seemed itching to ask.

‘You are the mayor, right?'

‘That again,' I said. This time what I thought I'd do was take him back to Pre-Loved
and show him my mayoral authority
stamp. I keep it at the shop rather than down at
Chambers. It's easier that way since I do my own correspondence.

In the end I aborted that show-and-tell because the man with the polar bear, moustache,
glasses, was there. I could see Guy was talking, explaining with his hands. The other
man was shaking his head down at the floor. Between them was the head of the polar
bear with its silent roar and raised paws. I was getting used to the idea of Guy
being there. I was discovering that I quite liked it.

‘Another time, Dean,' I said. Dean nodded like he thought so.

About now I remembered poor Violet and her babies. I'd left them in the van back
at the car park outside the gardens.

The same tree with its bronze leaves was in the side window. The same wedge of sky
in the windscreen in front. The world seemed stuck. They seemed stuck. The Eliot
babies began to squirm and agitate on their mother's lap. They began to agitate for
something different. She offered them a breast each but they weren't interested and
she knew what they wanted was what she could use too, some change of air, so she
laid them on the driver's seat while she got the pushchair out. The man from Pre-Loved
had been gone for much longer than he'd told her to expect. Either Dean was there
or he wasn't. If he wasn't he should be back by now.

She was so sure she would see them and so surprised when she pushed the babies under
the arch that nothing more than rose heads nodded in the gentle breeze from the direction
of the port. The air smelt of fish meal. Even the rose plants seemed to know this.
That is how alone in the moment she felt. She
smiled, pleased. It would have been
an observation to share with Dean but he was nowhere to be seen. She pushed on. There
was a bench not far away with a pocket of lawn. The twins could crawl around there.

Soon a woman by herself wandered beneath the arch. The points of her shoes crossed
when she walked and she held her hands behind her back which made her hips appear
wider in a womanly sort of way. She looked to be lost in thought. But when she glanced
up and saw she had company she smiled and started over.

She didn't sit down though. She stood with her arms folded and she smiled down at
Jackson and Crystal rolling on their backs over the grass. As the woman shifted her
interest she swung her hands down at her side.

‘Let me guess,' she said. ‘High school sweethearts?'

Violet guessed she meant the twins were thereby the product of this. Any other explanation
was too long-winded, so as a matter of convenience she nodded.

The woman looked delighted. She said, ‘Oh, they are the best, the absolute best.
Fierce and uncontrollable.' She shuddered when she said that and shook her shoulders,
and Violet laughed. She was pleased to have the approval; well it was more than that.

‘You can sit down if you like,' Violet said.

‘May I? Thank you.'

She made it sound like it was Violet's bench, hers alone. That it was her own personal
space and that she had just opened the door to welcome the woman inside. On second
thoughts she approved of that idea. And she was glad for the company.

Emboldened, she asked the woman if she was married and
if she had kids of her own,
and then if she herself had married her high school sweetheart. With a great display
of arms and teeth, like a giant bird hovering, she laughed. ‘Oh no. No. No. Guy came
later. I found Guy lost in the toiletries section of the supermarket. That should
have told me everything I needed to know right there and then.'

The woman's mood changed. The tide went out in her face. She swung her foot under
the bench while she gazed off into the distance. Still, Violet wondered if there
was someone who'd come earlier.

‘High school. Let's see,' she said. She became thoughtful, as if looking back inside
herself. ‘There was someone. But he didn't look at me. I wasn't much to look at it.
A skinny kid with crooked teeth. I used to follow him around at a distance. He was
so popular. All the girls adored him. Douglas. Dougie. I would watch him at parties.
And years later too I would close my eyes and dream, and then, guess what?' Violet
sensed the woman's itch to tell and at the same time felt her examining eyes upon
her.

The woman sat up. She folded her arms, and leant forward. ‘Okay. This is strictly
between ourselves. Girls' stuff. Top secret, understood?'

Violet nodded eagerly.

‘About four days ago, we met. It was at a funeral for a man who lost his legs in
the war. Poor Dean. He was such a nice man. At lunchtime at school we used to go
into his shop and he'd show us his knives from Borneo and bits of World War Two shrapnel.
It's funny a bomb couldn't get him but something like leukemia could which at his
age, sixty-something, apparently is more unusual.' She stopped and Violet felt the
woman's
eyes on her. ‘Sixty is no longer old. It used to be, but believe me, from
where I stand sixty is no longer old. You find yourself taking stock around my age.
What have I done? What have I failed to do? The failings sadly leave everything else
in their shadow. Anyway, Miss Maudlin me, I was telling you about Dougie. So, anyway,
as expected I run into Dougie at the funeral. We're old friends of course and after
the others have filed into the church we find that we're the last ones left outside
under the trees, just talking. Anyway, we have a cigarette. Over the way is the hearse
and from where we stood you could see the hydraulics of the hearse. Ghastly. Yuck.
Anyway, just then music comes pumping out the church doors. Not just any old music.
Not anything you might expect, say a church organ, but Edith Piaf. Can you believe?
The pallbearers grin back at the church. One of them stamps out his cigarette and
goes in. The others follow. Then it's just me and Douglas Monroe who I adored at
high school out there, beneath the trees. We're the last ones left.