Paint Your Wife (8 page)

She caught a glimpse of herself in the sitting-room mirror; she was touching her
hair and blushing.

‘I'd have to wash my hair first,' she said.

That seemed to amuse him; again the warm smile pegged to that creased line over his
forehead.

About now she thought to look down at her bare feet. She'd been outside collecting
cowshit for the garden.

‘Look at me!' she said.

‘That's what I'm asking to do,' he replied.

The next morning Alma showed up with his tin case of pencils and his sketchbooks.
She showed him through to the sitting room. She had an idea that a sitting was a
formal occasion and in preparation had gone around the room straightening cushions
and pulling off furnishing covers. She had dressed herself up in her Sunday best,
a black skirt and red blouse. She had been toying with putting a flower in her hair
when Alma turned up.

It is hard to know what to do with yourself the first time you sit. You are suddenly
aware of your arms and legs, too aware, and as soon as that awareness slips into
place it's as if those limbs were never really an integral part of you at all, but
clumsy add-ons. My mother had expected some direction from Alma but he just stood
there looking at her, moving a pencil back and forth across his chin. He might have
been taking an
interest in the view outside the window or gazing at a slow-moving
river. A river is unconsciously what it is. It does not know how to be anything else.
A river does not suffer embarrassment. My mother didn't know what to do with her
arms. They had never felt so alien. She tried folding them. Now she unfolded them.
She felt herself grow clumsy before Alma's gaze. ‘Just relax,' he told her now. ‘We're
not in a hurry.' She told him she felt silly. But it was as if he hadn't heard.

He had his tin case open on his knee and was sorting through his pencils. A beast
lowed in the paddock outside the window. She wished she was out there. She said apologetically,
‘This doesn't seem to be working, does it.' Again Alma didn't answer. She said, ‘If
I'm no good just say. I don't want to waste your time.' He said, ‘You're not,' but
he didn't tell her what to do either. He glanced back at the window, and remarked
casually, ‘Looks like rain.'

This mention of the weather switched her thoughts to the drainage canals that still
needed to be dug in the far paddock. She might have asked Alma to help if she hadn't
used up all her favours with the rat business. If she didn't ask, she could at least
make a start. She knew that she would be visible from his cottage up on the hill
and that he'd let her swing on the end of a shovel for no more than half an hour
before he'd race down the hill. She was thinking about that swamp. She was thinking
about that shovelling. She was only dimly aware of Alma. She could hear him breathing—now
she couldn't as she dropped back to a place deep within, back from the flashing
exterior of the world. The erotic experience Hilary reported would come later.

That summer every poisoned rat in the district decided to make life hell for Alma.
The rats chose out-of-the-way places
to die. He had to dig a passage under two houses
and feel around in the cobwebbed dark. There were walls to lever open. Women screamed
at their children to get away from where he was working. A need to quench a terrible
thirst is the last act of a dying rat and usually they will crawl under a water tank
to die.

At Victoria's house he arrived to a terrible stench. It wasn't a hot day but every
window in the house had been thrown open. Vengeful rats like this one of Victoria's
will crawl inside walls where they fester and rot.

Alma tied on his ratter's scarf. Sure enough, he found what he was after down by
the skirting of the wall that contained the open fireplace. In a worst-case scenario
he would have to pull a wall of scrim apart, but on a day when luck and skill are
equally favoured what he preferred was to make a small hole in the wall, just large
enough to poke his hand through. With a deft angler's wrist movement he could flick
a leadline with a hook and reel in a decomposed rat. But Victoria's was one of those
houses where nothing had ever gone easy—not the portraits that came later or the
recovery of this corpse. After five or six failed attempts the stench stuck in his
throat. He told Victoria he would take that glass of water now.

They went out to the garden where they could breathe. He cleared his lungs and after
the break he found he was getting better length and a few minutes was all it needed
before he had his corpse. Alma took it outside to bury in the patch of weeds. Victoria
was embarrassed about that too. Her late husband had always been the gardener.

Now they went back inside the house and checked in all the rooms. They sniffed the
air in each before returning to the
sitting room. More adventurously, Victoria took
herself over to the wall where the rat had crawled inside to die. She sniffed. She
sniffed again, and smiled with relief.

She opened her purse to offer a payment. Alma told her it wasn't necessary.

‘But Alma, I couldn't sleep while that thing was in the house. You smelt it. You
have to take something.'

‘Well, there is something,' he told her.

Everyone whom Alma was to sketch or paint can thank the rat epidemic for bringing
him into their lives. The sitter's payment was negotiated for Mrs Swain, Mrs Long,
Meg Wyatt, Meri Thorn, Mrs Black, Jill Christophers, Beryl Knight, the Hasler girls,
Tui Brown, Ginette Fields, Gracie Brewer, her mother Augusta, the Healy sisters Joan
and Kate, Bronwyn Rapson, June Fairly and her daughter Joyce, and Hilary Phillips.

He didn't get to Hilary's until a few days before Christmas. Hilary was vague. She
thought she'd heard telltale noises in her bedroom ceiling. Alma poked around and
couldn't find anything. He lowered himself down on to the steps she was holding.

‘False alarm,' he told her.

‘Are you sure?' she asked.

‘Pretty sure.'

‘But I saw one,' she said, and this news pricked his interest. She hadn't said so
earlier. She hadn't said she had actually seen one.

‘Yesterday' she said. ‘Yesterday morning. It ran across the kitchen floor. A huge
brown grey black thing.'

Alma followed her into the kitchen. He looked behind the stove. There were no droppings
that he could see. He searched
through the pantry—nothing there. By now he was shaking
his head. She'd led him on a wild goose chase. To oblige her he checked along the
skirting but he was simply pretending. For whatever reason, Hilary's place was the
only one in the district to escape the infestation. Alma told her she should feel
lucky. She didn't look lucky. She looked disappointed to hear that, as if she wanted
rats, wanted them verified so she could be part of things, part of the infestation.
It didn't make any sense. In the end he told her he'd lay a trail, ‘Just to be on
the safe side. Just to be sure.'

‘Yes, definitely,' she said, her face lighting up. ‘I know I heard something and isn't
it best to be on the safe side, as you say, Alma?'

Hilary's cottage was set at the end of a finger of sand on the town side of the estuary,
separating off the wharf area. She had all the windows open to the glittery view
of the sea. If the rats hadn't found her cottage by now Alma was sure they wouldn't
but he laid the poison that Hilary so desperately seemed to want.

As he began to pack up his gear he was aware of Hilary standing over him. She had
something in her hand and without looking up he knew what it was.

‘There's no cost involved, Hilary,' he said.

‘Well, I still need to pay you, Alma. You can't come all this way for nothing.'

He told her she could pay him when he caught something and not before.

‘No. I'm going to pay you now.' She sounded firm. But then as she opened her purse
she seemed to linger as if she had forgotten why she'd opened it. She raised her
eyes and gave him a hopeful look and the penny dropped. Alma smiled.

‘There is another way,' he said.

Hilary's was one of two portraits he could never get right. She couldn't wait to
see what he'd drawn. She couldn't wait to find out what he had seen. Her brimming
eagerness made him rush. Then he wouldn't show her. Together they'd arrive at a decision
to start over and for her to sit back in her chair a little more and think of Jimmy
or vanilla ice cream.

In the case of Victoria she complained that her body lacked figure, that her dress
bulged in all the wrong places. She said she looked like she was made of mattresses
or armchair stuffing and that bits of twine had been pulled tight in all the wrong
places. Two weeks after Alma finished and presented her with her portrait he was around
there on another rat job when he noticed she had taken down the painting above the
hearth. Its absence was puzzling. They had spent a pleasant hour deciding where to
hang it and Victoria had been excited at the time. Now the blank space on the wall
made him question the accuracy of his memory. They skirted the subject, but after
a while their eyes kept returning to the emptiness above the hearth and finally Victoria
told him, ‘Alma, I had to. You gave me no choice after I saw what poor company I
make…that downturned mouth, those grumpy eyes.'

And as was their habit in those days the conversation stopped there. Then they both
heard it—a scratchy sound behind the skirting. Alma told her, ‘Victoria, let this
one be on me.'

As far as the rest of the women in the district were concerned, to be looked at
or observed was as rare as sugar or chocolate. They could have looked in the mirror,
of course.
But there is nothing like another's eyes to set us alight, to make our
nerves stand on end, to tell us, in effect, who we are.

A long period of fine weather put further distance between their lives and the war
in Europe. When you walked outside you saw dragonflies. You saw waxeyes in their upside-down
efforts to get the nectar of the flax flowers. You saw the great unhurried parade of
clouds. You breathed in and forgot the war until you picked up that day's newspaper
off the lawn, or a letter arrived, and then the local imagination crept into areas
of the map previously unknown. When a name such as
Tobruk
arrived in a letter a face
would go slack, like sailcloth.

With the men away some things continued as they had before. The sound of tennis balls
smacking against the wooden volley-board, balls kissing the net, only it was women
playing women. Like at the dance at New Year's Eve, the hall decorated as it had
always been with streamers, flowers, trestles sagging under sponges, music, the same
old dances, but no men.

In 1942 the last of the married men were called up and with these men gone the altered
world was more or less complete. Every second or third day Alice found something
to ask Alma's help with. The beehives. Thistle to dig out of the paddock. Those drainage
canals that had been bugging her. For a farmer's daughter she didn't have much of
a stomach for blood so Alma did the butchering, and when he grabbed a chook and smacked
it down on the saw horse, its neck stretched, she made sure her head was turned or
better that she was inside so she wouldn't hear the light splatter of chicken blood.
Once when a neighbour's bull tore a boundary fence down Alma helped fix that. There
were also the rats, of course.

By now she was so used to his being around they dropped
certain formalities. When
he turned up at the door she no longer headed for the sitting room to perch on the
edge of the stuffed armchairs. While the hot weather lasted the door was open day
and night, and to the extent that Alma was part of the outside world there was no
attempt to hold him at bay.

In those days there stood a hill about a hundred metres from the farmhouse. When
Alice's parents had lived there her mother complained endlessly about the hill blocking
the sea view. Various sheep tracks wound to the top. Every morning Alice would walk
up the hill until she could see the rooftops of town and the blue ocean. When she
was very small, before she could talk or walk, her father used to pop her in his
fishing net and drop her over the gunwale then drag her back and forth through the
top layer of warm ocean, curled up like a trout in her father's net, her gummy mouth
wide with laughter, or so it is told in family lore.

From her father she inherited this love of the sea. And on those days she decided
a swim was in order she'd run down the hill tracks, cornering like a vehicle, her
hips moving like swing doors. But on days when it was too rough or windy she would
raise her elbows and let the breeze fan her; and maybe she'd turn and look the other
way, follow the ridge up to Alma's cottage on the hill. Maybe then she'd see a movement
beneath the guttering of the rat catcher's cottage, and she would smile at the thought
that Alma had been watching.

4

After that first sitting my mother was naturally curious to discover what Alma had
found in her that she could not see for herself in the mirror. At first he was evasive
and put her off. He made up excuses why now wasn't the right time. He glanced at
his watch. He tried to change the subject. My mother wouldn't give up.

‘It's just a drawing Alma, no one will go to jail.'

Eventually he relented, unhappily it has to be said, and she saw what he had been
trying to hold back from her, what she now saw for herself, some strange inclination
on her part to present herself to the world as an eager-to-please shop assistant.
It wasn't her—so how did that look get there. Where did that person, that stiff-looking
shop assistant come from? It wasn't how she thought of herself. But Alma must have
seen something to come up with that. And maybe he wasn't entirely wrong. But it wasn't
all of her either—not the whole story. Not the representative self she wished to
be seen out in the world.