Paint Your Wife

by Lloyd Jones

  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.

  On Beach Road we carried on as far as Big Bay where only half of the cruise ship people left the bus. The Englishwoman was one of them. Her husband slumped back in his seat, his sports jacket flung back over his head so he could sleep. When I stood outside the bus and looked up at the windows I thought all the other tilted faces were asleep. Most as it turned out were reading.

  I led the party of stragglers down to the beach. The fur seal nursery is about a hundred and fifty metres from the car park. After five minutes the complaints started. The shelf was too steep. Shingle kept getting in their shoes. In grim silence we soldiered on, until the Englishwoman piped up. She said somewhat discouragingly that she had been to the Galapagos Islands where she had seen over five hundred fur seals. Five hundred! I was simply hoping old Bess would be there to save the day, a scarred veteran of the sea with an obliging manner and a vanity for having her photo taken. The rain returned and that sent everyone running for the bus.

  On their way back to the port everybody came alive. One older woman actually began to clap her hands. They were on their way back to the cruise ship, back to civilisation and maybe even lobster. Hereafter, everything smacked of haste. Their swift exit from the bus. The quick handshakes. The words that held no meaning given between the gritted teeth of a smile. Yeah, nice to meetcha. You bet. Hang on in there. They didn’t want to know us. From their great balustrade they hardly noticed us in our cramped lifeboat waving our white handkerchiefs.

  That evening was to be our surprise, our crowning effort, our big hurrah. As the Pacific Star sounded her foghorn, along Beach Road in dozens and dozens of parked cars we tooted our horns. We tooted and tooted until the white sugar lump melted into the pale horizon.

  Along the beach fires were kicked out. People began to move away. Cars started up. To the last there were a few drunken toots, then all was quiet. The night reared up. We heard a wave roll up the beach and the pebbles roll over.

  The next day the fliers with their flora and fauna information floated soggily across the bar. A few days after that the first of Dean Eliot’s test tubes of saltwater and fresh air were washed ashore. We were back to life as we had known it before the visit of the cruise ship. We were back to our gaudy selves and that would have been that, put it all down to experience, had not a strange thing happened.

  The night the cruise ship put out to sea and for several nights after that, along Broadway, they arrived like moths in the night—women my mother’s age, a few younger ones as well, come to find themselves in Alma’s crowd scene painted over the derelict shop windows.

  The portraits were based on sketches Alma had done more than forty years earlier. There was one of my mother sitting on a set of porch steps. She looked so young. Painfully young. She must have been in her twenties. In those days she was married to George. In addition to my mother I counted twenty-five other faces. Now the original sitters of these paintings wrapped themselves up against the night and walked slowly with their faces turned to Alma’s portraits. Some who had already spotted themselves in previous visits went directly to that section of the crowd. It was a big mural; as I’ve said, I’d asked him to produce something that would stretch over three shop windows. During the following days the paintings drew a lot of atte
ntion and comment. I watched from my shop door. It was fun to observe those women who were seeing it for the first time; the way they crawled along the pavement with a deliberate shopper’s eye. Some had to dig around for their glasses. These women would lean closer and try on different faces. It was like someone rifling through a lost property box. Word must have spread far and wide because people who had moved away from the district years ago turned up out of the blue. Celia Merchant was one. She arrived in a late-model car, lined up her younger self with a camera flash and ran back to the car and drove off.

  When I reported this to Alice she said in a critical voice, ‘That’s Celia.’ Then she asked, ‘Who else has been down there?’

  I said, ‘Hilary Phillips,’ and she answered, ‘Poor Hilary.’

  Hilary was the only woman who could put up with the shamelessness of staring at herself in broad daylight and not give a damn. There were people who refused to believe that this large, unhealthy-looking woman with emphysema and tiny screwed-up eyes was the same person as the alert face leaning forward from the crowd of painted women, a fresh face on the end of a delicate neck seeking engagement. Even the older Hilary looked doubtful at times. She could even look like she was cross with that young person. Sometimes you actually heard her talk back to the young woman on the window. Once I saw her rock back on her heels with laughter at a shared joke. Hilary didn’t care that anyone was watching. She didn’t give a toss for what people might think of her. She was past that, and yet when I saw her stand before her younger self she could look puzzled and worried as though that younger face belonged to a scrupulous bank clerk with news that she didn’t have as much money in her bank account as she had thought.