Paint Your Wife (6 page)

None of the passengers got their feet wet. A quick glance told me they would have
complained if they did. Thirty-five passengers in all—less than what we had planned
for. A lot less. I looked up at a large porthole and saw a man in pyjamas and reading
glasses sitting up in bed with a book.

I was able to greet each passenger with a flier containing information on the town
they were visiting, some rainfall and sunshine figures.

The older women wore silk scarves and sunglasses. Their skin was soapy, ageless,
like marble. I had the impression they were on to second and third husbands. These
were older men, tanned in short-sleeved shirts, iron-coloured hair swept back, proud
of their ageing virility. Americans. Germans. Canadians. An English couple held things
up while they argued whether to bring jackets ashore. A final word came from the woman:
‘Well if it's cold I'll blame you.'

At last the tug eased away from this gentle plaza of bottle-green water round to
the exposed sea. We were running with the swell. At the first surge cameras swung
out from swollen bellies and hands shot out to the nearest thing to grab hold of;
each other as it turned out. The elements produced in me the usual mix of apology
and pride. I let the spray settle on my face and squinted at approaching landfall,
always impressive at this distance. First, the purple ranges, then the native bush
and the
spilling effect of wilderness. This same scene has found its way into a number
of paintings, one famously by a Dutchman, which NE Paints in a civic-minded moment
once produced as a calendar and is still to be found in fish-and-chip shops. The brooding
ranges, the massed cloud slightly overdone in opal colour. On one level that is all
there is to where we live. The rough outline of existence. You look at that painting
and you think, it's as if we are still to arrive, we are still ship-bound with our
flutes and wild hopes. For a month I actually owned the original painting until I
sold it to the former mayor, Tommy Reece. It was a large canvas with a gilt frame.
Tommy was a little guy with abnormally long arms and huge hands. I remember the way
he carried the canvas from the shop; his arms spread to contain this early landscape
of where we live, his unnaturally large hands gripping the rolling gilt edges, his
shiny-suited mayoral figure crucified against the ranges.

The voices grouped at the rail were suitably awed and as we surged in on the back
of the rolling swell the rooftops came into view. A breathy pot-bellied voice said,
‘I don't see anything. I thought you said there was a town. I've got the bi-nocs
trained on them and I tell you there's nothing.' Then the tug plunged across the
bar and the same voice cried, ‘Goddamn!' Fliers flew out of hands as our visitors
for the day once more took hold of one another.

It was just a brief hiccup, nothing to get excited about. By the time they regained
their composure the tug was gliding across the slick waters of the inner harbour.
A long grassy embankment tilted up against a clear blue sky. Some black geese flew
cinematically across the bow. Several cruise ship people took aim with their camcorders.
As the embankment
conceals the town from the harbour, a first-time visitor can wander
along Broadway and never guess that a harbour with fishing boats sits over the rise
at the end. The same secret applies from the port. There is no sense of what lies
on the landward side of the embankment.

The expectant crowd was supposed to stay down at street level. Everyone had been
briefed, I don't know how many times. Now, with horrible mistiming, they sprang up
along the grassy embankment. My heart sank. Aboard the tug I felt the mood swing
as attention seemed to switch from where we lived to who lived here. The Americans
decently waved. The rest were quiet, some frosty faces among them and one or two
with the faintest of smiles.

There must have been a crowd of about a hundred adults plus another larger group
of schoolchildren in sunhats and caps. In their panting eagerness I saw the age-old
affliction.
Please like us. Please say it is okay for us to live where we do and in
the manner that we do.

‘Isn't that sweet, Cary?' a woman's voice said.

Cary, like several others, was reaching nervously for the sheet of information covering
industry, population and climate.

Now, in ones and twos, they stepped ashore and climbed the path up the embankment
to the start of the walking trail. There, our schoolchildren pressed on them bouquets
of wild-flowers and the test tubes that Dean Eliot had filled with sea water and
sand. I was still silently fuming as I reached the microphone. I offered a few words
of welcome. This was the first time that a cruise ship had visited. We all hoped it
wouldn't be the last. It was a new experience for us as no doubt this trip ashore
into our borough was for them. It was a
shortened version of what I had intended
to say, of what I had so painstakingly written down in the jet-lagged hours of predawn
wakefulness. At the time of composing it I hadn't given any thought to its audience.
The cruise ship was still a faceless constituency.

It was only when I stood up to the microphone and looked back at their dangling wrist
chains and the blank tanned faces that I sensed their boredom. A man in a navy jacket
looked around as if he had lost someone. Someone else fidgeted with a cufflink. A woman
in sunglasses and head scarf searched in her leather bag for tissues. I wound up
my welcome and led my own applause as I stepped away from the mike.

A councillor escorted the passengers on to the bus. Heath, who works at the garage,
had been asked to fill in as driver for the day. How ridiculous he looked in his peaked
cap! I stood in the crowd waving up at the bewildered faces that lined the windows
of the bus. Then at the last moment I skipped aboard, the doors thankfully closing
as the band started up with ‘Georgia on My Mind'. Out at sea the sleek white cruise
ship lay at anchor; along Broadway grumbled the wheezing old paint factory bus with
its belches of black smoke. After two hundred metres the bus stopped outside Angie's
Koffee Kafe. Angie stood beaming at the bottom of the step like the former flight
attendant she professes to be. That's when for the first time I actually began to
feel a little sorry for the cruise ship people.

Under the leaking roof of the abandoned paint factory they congregated around the
edges of a large puddle and listened politely while I recited the story of NE Paints
and its long and fruitful association with the town. ‘
Any
paints, we used to say.'
The Canadian woman chuckled and I concentrated in her direction for the next minute.
A can of paint with the NE logo carried a premium. Our paint knew local conditions.
It would not blister or fade. We were famously known as ‘the paint capital'. I led
them through the management area and we crowded into Felix Sampson's office with its
second floor view over the rooftops of New Egypt. I deliberately stood beneath a large
black-and-white portrait of Felix with his white goatee and customary long white
shirtsleeves. With casual modesty I let it be known the boy in the photo with Felix
was me. I am still in the sack from the NE Paints picnic sack race. My face flushed
with the exhilaration of having won it.

‘So what happened to the paint factory?' It was Cary.

We were screwed. Bought up and spat out. That's the truth of it. More politely, though,
I explained how NE Paints was bought by a big international concern which promptly
closed down the plant and shifted its operations to an Asian country. And Cary nodded
like he knew that story.

Frances and I had just married when things turned to dust. I remember how the town
scrambled around to make things right again. A group of people seized on tourism.
Tommy Reece, who'd enjoyed the entire span of the NE Paints era of prosperity, naturally
looked for a paint solution. Both were right and in an unexpected way they converged
when Tommy came up with the idea to colour-code the town and rename the streets,
strip them of their explorer names and slap on the names of colours from the old
company paint chart. But it was a lost hope and poor Tommy was lurching around with
a death rattle in his throat. People did what people always do in those situations—they
moved out. Kids I competed with in the
NE Paints picnic sack race took themselves
off to Queensland and Sydney. Whole streets emptied out. The frosty white oxalis
sprung up in abandoned gardens. My friend Douglas Monroe and his wife, Diane, went
into a venture painting desert scenes on to the sides of old paint cans to sell as
plant holders. They painted camels, date trees, seascapes, rocky shores. None of
them sold (well, Diane's mum took as many she could deal with) and in a black mood
Doug gave up the camels and painted the words ‘paint can' and to his surprise, and
it was depressing too in a way, these cans began to sell. Doug would later buy the
Albion. A terrible mistake. Even at its fire sale price. Everyone said so. It was
like seeing an accident happen before your eyes.

With my own redundancy Frances and I bought Pre-Loved Furnishings
&
Other Curios
from Alice's first husband, George, and his second wife, Victoria. As the town emptied
out we picked up some great bargains. Things that cannot fit into the boot of a car
or an aeroplane—sofas, bed frames, mattresses, TV sets. Money wasn't an issue, either.
I'd been worried about having to barter and drive hard bargains with old friends.
But everyone was so eager to leave they didn't care. They might have brooded on the
decision for months, then in a single night they made up their minds and cleared
out. Several days would go by, and this happened a lot, then a neighbour would hear
a dog wailing. Once someone opened a front door and a whole menagerie of budgies
flew out. One item was common to all: don't ask me why, but people left their lawnmowers.
They stood in their back sheds, oiled and cared for up to the last moment, the handles
next to the rake handle and the catcher with its oil spots and grey mould. In the
backyard would be a
cheap plastic slide, an old tractor tyre filled with sand, a half-buried
doll, its pink plastic arm flung up like that of a drowning person. You found yourself
closing the eyes on the doll or picking a cricket bat up out of the long grass. These
small and simple acts helped us along. You stood a cricket bat against the side of
a house and you felt like you were restoring possibility. You were also removing
the traces of abandonment, and this was vital, because in those years and ever since
really the challenge has been for the rest of us who stayed to find a way to live
in a place so riddled with rejection.

It always takes someone else to truly tell us how wretched we look, and the cruise
ship people didn't disappoint in that regard. The visit to the paint factory was
as good as it got. Afterwards they filed on to the bus to visit the historic cemetery.
But they weren't interested. They drifted around the blackened headstones. One woman
tried to call someone in Toronto on her mobile phone. They weren't generally as fascinated
as we had hoped they would be. When it started to spit they all rushed back to the
bus. Heath wondered if it was the creepy feeling of the spongy grass; when he said
that we both fell silent at the sound of the nearby creek water running beneath the
graves.

They were more excited at the sight of a chicken walking along a footpath. A cry
went up, ‘A chicken! Look!' and the cruise ship people rushed to that side of the
bus. At the commotion Heath looked up in his mirror. A woman yelled at her husband
to roll on more film. Heath wrestled with the gear stick to change down but I waved
him on.

After the chicken highlight I sat back and let the town drift by my elevated window.
I thought back to that black woman
at the nightclub Adrian had taken me to. I remember
telling her I was the mayor. I have an awful feeling I might have also said it in
a boastful manner. It was after she said her name was Ophelia. But is anyone really
called that? Ophelia from ‘around here' had half-mockingly said, ‘Well Mister Mayor,
are you going to buy me a drink?' I do wish I hadn't told her she was black, though;
for all that I don't think she minded much. She seemed to be the forgiving type.
I amused her. When I told her I was the Mayor her eyes lifted and I think it genuinely
surprised her. I didn't tell her about Pre-Loved Furnishings
&
Other Curios.
I didn't think she needed to know about the tip, either. I let her hang on to her
vision of mayoral chains.

A mayor tends to know his town in an unique way. A visitor, Ophelia say, will see
trees, a handsome welcome from Rotary, arrows pointing to the beach. A more bleak
vista greets the mayor, a more troublesome one in terms of expenditure covering
sewage, landfills, potholes. You see it in terms of what remains to be done rather
than what has been accomplished. It is forever a work in progress. From the bus window,
however, we had looked even more desperate than the records show. It was embarrassing
and heartbreaking too, in a way, to see everyone stand so stiffly by their pie warmers
and vege stalls after the cruise ship people left Angie's. How politely we averted
our eyes as they pecked away among our arts and crafts. We are not London or Rome
where for every customer put out by yet another half-arse meal and mediocre service
another customer crowds the doorway. Our chance to impress is our only chance.

I had some other stops scheduled but I decided to pass them up. The cruise ship people
were already tired of getting on and
off the bus. When I looked up in Heath's mirror
I could see them stifling yawns, glancing at wristwatches. Now they began to speak
of other places they had visited, of other voyages, other cruise ships. Travel tips
passed up and down the aisle. As Heath slowed down for one of our natural wonders,
a rock formation which from a certain angle looks like a giant lion's head, the cruise
ship people leant in to the aisle to hear the Englishwoman describe the wonderful
colours of the fishing boats in Zanzibar. The bus dropped down another gear. Heath
leant his head back for instructions. I waved him on. ‘We won't worry about Lion's
Head, Heath.' And that was that. I settled back to listen to the cruise ship people
talk of restaurants with fish tanks and iced water. Opinions on last night's meal
out at sea were exchanged and with a surprising depth of feeling that had been notably
absent from all the other conversations I'd listened in to. Their voices seemed to
rise another octave. A rumour swept the bus that they would be served lobster tonight—and
one elderly man who had hardly moved a facial muscle from the time he arrived on
the tug boat suddenly shot out of his seat, his eyes blinking wildly, as he sought
out the source of the rumour.