by Lloyd Jones
Lloyd Jones was born in New Zealand in 1955. His best-known works include Mister Pip, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The Book of Fame, winner of numerous literary awards, Hand Me Down World and his acclaimed memoir, A History of Silence.
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Copyright © Lloyd Jones 2004
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First published by Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 2004
This edition published by The Text Publishing Company, 2014
Book design & illustrations by W. H. Chong
Typeset by Midland Typesetting
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Creator: Jones, Lloyd, 1955– author.
Title: Paint your wife / by Lloyd Jones.
ISBN: 9781925095371 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781922182395 (ebook)
Subjects: Painters—Fiction.
Dewey Number: NZ823.2
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
1
I’ve been visiting our son Adrian in London. He is a year or two older than I was the first time I flew there, dropping out of the clouds, glancing down at the storybook burst of Westminster and the serpentine crawl of the Thames. This time around it’s been ten days of lounging about, filling in time reading the newspapers, musing on the crazy things that happen out there in the world. Hungry car thieves in Sao Paulo mistake AIDS-infected blood for raspberry jelly. That sort of thing. I was enjoying myself and London was big and scrambling. I showed up in the shop windows as a smiling amiable fellow, someone I hardly ever am at home. There were the same row houses in their grainy white that captured my interest more than twenty years ago as a newly graduated paint technician. London seemed to be painted in the colours of mist. The contrast with home was striking. Our houses were like bright coloured marbles let loose over the plain, shining down from hillsides, beaming up at the broad sky. More importantly, our paint was guaranteed not to blister or peel, to withstand extreme conditions. Our white was a cat’s-eye white. Opaque, unpleasant to touch. London’s white was creamy; its grime charmed.
This time London had never looked so green. The weather was brilliant. Blue skies, the pavements hard and cheerful. I spent much of my time walking and looking for a park bench on which to sit and open my paper. St James’s Park. Holland Park. Hyde Park. Squirrels running up trunks. Foreign nannies with prams. Boys and girls tongue-kissing over the rolling park grass.
Around six I’d totter off to some pub or bar rendezvous suggested by Adrian. He’d ask me what I got up to that day and I might begin to tell him about ‘Thieves in Sao Paulo…’ But he was only interested to know if I’d visited any of the second-hand shops.
‘If you were over near Portobello Road you could have looked up Mr Musty at least. I was in there the other day and said you might drop by.’
I had to shake my head and look away guiltily. ‘Afraid not. Ran out of time.’
Adrian seemed put out. I knew he’d gone to some trouble to look up these places.
‘Anyway, the man to ask for in Musty’s is Dave somebody. Ginger hair. Missing his little finger.’
I gave a vague nod of intent.
‘You should, you know.’
‘I know I should but I didn’t. I ran out of time.’
Just what did I do? I read the newspaper and ordered another cup of tea or looked for my ref lection in the passing shop windows. Names floated up from the past. Assorted paint arcana.
In paint tech we used to have a teacher we all liked because he played in a rock band at weekends. He was entirely bald, apart from a pair of rimless glasses. When he smiled it was from a position of unrealised advantage. Our paint, he liked to say, could stand up to the most testing of conditions—searing heat, freezing rain, salt winds. London’s paint by comparison would turn to omelette. He said this a lot and whenever he did we would exchange triumphant smiles. It’d all turn to omelette. We loved saying that.
‘John Ryder. That’s it. I knew his name would come to me.’ Adrian looked unimpressed. He doesn’t know about the paint tech side of me. When he was born I’d given up paint for trade in second-hand goods and furnishings. He looked at the dregs in his glass and drained them.
One night he said he wanted to take me clubbing. I scratched around for a reason why this wouldn’t be possible. I asked where he had in mind and he said in his new way of speaking, his eyes and face angling off to new arrivals entering the bar, ‘Doesn’t matter where. Trust me. You’ll love it.’
I ended up paying an exorbitant taxi fare. Twenty years ago it had been enough to walk everywhere, and with holes in my shoes. I didn’t dream of catching a cab, anywhere. Adrian and his mates seemed unfazed. They all work in the film industry—Adrian said what they did but I can’t remember; strange-sounding job descriptions, grippers, line people. They probably catch cabs every day of their lives. On the other hand I paid an amount which in my daily trade in second-hand furnishings was worth a decent sofa and maybe a mattress thrown in. But as I say, Adrian and his mates seemed so remarkably cool about it that I hated to make a fuss. Instead I followed them through the doors manned by Nigerians in black leather jackets. They nodded at Adrian but seemed puzzled by me. I couldn’t hear a thing. I gather Adie was explaining, his thumb hooked back in my direction, while the Nigerian’s face hung low to catch the drift. He nodded at the floor and I passed by his uplifted red eyes. Inside it was a deafening thump thump thump. I had to yell for Adrian to hear.
The price of the drinks was out of this world. It was beers all round for which I paid after stupidly saying ‘Let me,’ which they did. I paid for another round, and another one after that, until at last they slipped off the feeding teat and disappeared into the crowd of bobbing heads. I followed the arrows to something promisingly called ‘the conversation pit’ where indeed I had a conversation with a black woman along the lines of, ‘You’re black,’ to which she smiled patiently
and said, ‘Yes. Thank you. I know.’ It wasn’t so horribly gauche as that, but not all that far behind either. I asked her where she was from. She leant her head closer so as to hear and I could smell all kinds of tropical fruit smells. I said, ‘Are you from Guyana?’ and she shook her head and her big luscious mouth fell open; she said, ‘No, darling, I’m from around here. Born here, Harry Bryant,’ she said. I liked the way she said ‘Harry Bryant’.
After some more fumbling of this kind we did manage a conversation. We asked about each other. We were even going to dance but we didn’t in the end. Eventually I used up all my goodwill and her patience and after saying decently, ‘Well Mister Mayor, it’s been nice meeting you,’ she moved off stylishly, holding her glass with both hands before her, a whiff of tropical breeze cutting through the thick air. Across the room of dancing shadows and shaven heads there was my son grinning back at me.
I don’t remember much more of the night. That nice black Brixton woman was the last decent conversation I had. The rest of the time was filled with noise and beer. And shots of something in tiny glasses that was painless and irresistible at the time. I don’t recall how we made our way back to Adie’s flat; I hope there was a taxi, I hope no one drove, but that’s where I woke feeling just bloody terrible, in a sickly sweat. The conversation with the nice black woman from ‘round here’ played endlessly back in my head with a clarity that was cruel and mocking.
I got dressed and slipped out of the flat and drifted to the nearest underground station. I rose gastrically near St James’s Park to warm sunny skies. Flirted with buying a yoghurt outside a nice-looking deli and thought it best not to tempt fate. Instead I crossed the road and entered the park.
Everything looked so beautiful and I felt so shitty I could barely stay upright. I followed a path and felt my age every step of the way. As the morning grew warmer I found a nice grassy spot to lie on, and there I dozed for a pleasant few hours. At some point I woke to raised, hectic voices. It was a pick-up game of football and the goalposts—two humped jerseys—were only metres away. Twenty years ago I had joined in these sorts of games at Holland Park. I remember one game played under an early evening sky where the light actually seemed to stall and we had played on and on in a state of suspended bliss. Skills I never knew I had revealed themselves; a flashy slap of the ball off one foot then the other turned the goal-keep, a schoolteacher with a long pre-war face, and I banged in the shot past someone’s shoe that was standing in for one upright of the goalposts. A man on a bike who had stopped to watch actually applauded. Funny that this man, so incidental and anonymous in every other respect, should rise in my thoughts all these years later. I seem to recall telling someone who had asked that I was from Sweden. I wanted origins more spectacular than my own to go with that drive past the shoe upright. And afterwards, on this particular night, the night of the goal by the young Swede, I went for a beer in the pub opposite the park gates—I’ve long forgotten its name—and remember falling in with a Nigerian officer on leave from the war in Biafra. He had a nasty gash over his forehead, and two nicks in his cheek. Here was another occasion where I was all too aware that I was speaking to a person of colour, a black man. At the same time I was also determined to give the impression that his colour was neither here nor there. But of course that was untrue. It was colour generally which had made an impression on me during my first trip to London. That new colour white I’d not seen before, and now black.
On my last night I took Adie to see Chicago and afterwards jammed into a forgettable Soho eaterie, then in the morning took the train out to Heathrow. I got the exit seat I asked for, in cattle class of course, and after the lunch cart came through I popped a sleeping pill.
By the time I woke, many, many hours later according to my TV monitor, we were over the Arafura Sea. And there it was, far below, flat, grey, untroubled. The smiling Singaporean cabin crew were handing out hot flannels. Coffee and croissants and something listed as a fricassee arrived over the Northern Territory. Soon we were above central Australia. In the bright morning light the plane cast a birdlike shadow for the eye to chase, and I stared at that ancient coloured floor with thoughts of my father. I imagined he was with a new woman, despite the onset of age. I haven’t seen him for twenty-five years. Whenever I am forced to admit this I always find myself rushing to say it’s nothing, really; the truth is, I don’t feel anything. There is no anger. Whatever anger I felt at the time has well and truly passed. If I think of him at all it’s usually at Christmas because that is when his annual postcard used to arrive. On one side a colour photo of a wombat or a huge fantastic-looking lizard, or a cane toad. Frank had a sense of humour at least. On the other side a few quickly scratched words—‘Hope all is well, Harry. Be good. Your dad.’
The last time I saw Frank was the year after I finished high school. With my best friend, Douglas Monroe, I flew across the Tasman and took a train up to the mining town where he was working at the time. Over the years I had shared my father’s postcard correspondence with Dougie, the pictures of the goanna and the Opera House and of Ayers Rock. I used to spread them over my bed and that’s where Dougie had seen them. With Dougie, at least, I could talk freely about my father. For when Frank left us the effect on my mother was awful. She went through a bout of depression that all but disabled her, although I don’t recall anyone using the word ‘depression’ to describe what was happening to her. Sometimes she appeared to freeze, and it was like she’d hit quicksand while passing from one room to another, and then she’d forgot what had brought her in there in the first place. Purpose flew out the window. She would have sunk into the ground if I hadn’t been around to move up behind her at such times and give her a gentle shove to get her going again. Sometimes I’d sit her down and she’d ask for a cup of tea, ‘If you don’t mind, Harry.’ But I didn’t always know what to do. Sometimes I would hurry up the hill to bang on the door of our neighbour, Alma Martin—it seemed he was never too busy to put aside whatever he happened to be doing, to pick up his drawing gear and come down the hill with me and sketch her. It worked like a spell. My mother would fall into a dreamy state; she became serene, accepting. She became like a woman in a painting. But that was only while Alma was there. He’d pull the curtains back and encourage her to come over to the window and look out at the world. ‘See how it changes? Look, Alice, the trees are budding.’ Slowly, patiently, he would manage to will a smile on to my mother’s face—a brittle smile, but a smile nonetheless. At some point, though, he would have to leave and the silences would return. The house became more shadowed. Now my mother took the solution into her own hands. She immersed herself in long baths. She’d lie in them with the lights out until the water turned cold. And I’d stand outside the closed door listening for sounds, anything that would reassure me that I could safely leave the house and cycle over to Douglas Monroe’s house with my father’s latest postcard shoved up my jersey.
Compared to ours, the Monroe house was a hub of noise and high spirits, of lives going forward. Briefly it was possible to forget about my mother soaking in brackish water and Frank off somewhere unknown. But then it would be time to cycle back home. Crossing Chinaman’s Creek I’d force myself to look up at the dark windows and the gloom that awaited me. Alice hadn’t thought to switch on the house lights. Over a short period, one by one, the light bulbs failed. I had to remind her to buy new ones. It was a small thing. But it was alarming to think that she hadn’t noticed. More likely, she had and didn�
��t care.
On our trip to see my father, Dougie and I spent a night in Melbourne and boarded a train the next day. The whole way there my head was turned by what was galloping past the window. I remember feeling some confusion at a landscape that didn’t contain edges or rises. I remember thinking that it would be difficult to just disappear into a landscape like this one, with everything so lightly tethered, even the scrub, none of which appeared to be deeply rooted. The odd spooked tree looked like a woman’s hair roller. The trouble my father had gone to in order to escape my mother and me lay outside the train window, bending into the windless distance. And yet there were also these postcards hinting at the future. Otherwise, why bother? Why would he keep up the contact?
On the train I thought back to the last day we did anything together as father and son; Frank had taken me and Dougie diving. Later I would realise he had an ulterior motive for the trip out to the coast, that he was measuring his escape route. But at the time there was no way of knowing what he had planned. I did know about the woman from Wages—that was another secret I had recently shared with Dougie, though no one else in the world knew. In the car we sat together and stared at the back of my father’s head with all its walled-up life that I wasn’t supposed to know about. Near the beach the wheels hit the loose metal. Clouds of white dust were sucked back past our window. Frank chopped down a gear. We had left the road now and we could hear bits of driftwood snapping at the chassis. I was aware of Dougie’s extreme discomfort. He’d never ridden in a car like this one, that did the things that this one did, or that had a hairy-shouldered driver like Frank. Doug’s own father worked in sales, and NE Paints had given him a car which he washed and polished every weekend. Mr Monroe would never treat his car the way Frank was thrashing our family car across the gravel and driftwood. At this rate if he didn’t stop soon we’d end up in the sea. Doug was holding on to a roof strap. His mouth dropped open, his face bailed up with unasked questions and heaving fright. There was some more snapping of wood, a final growl from the motor and we stopped. A cold-looking sea bulged and crashed ashore and my father said, ‘This’ll do us.’