Paint Your Wife

by Lloyd Jones

  At the end of the day with nowhere else to go but home, Dean passed under the bronze rifles and donkey of the Anzacs instead and entered the Garden of Memories where he sat on a bench by the rose garden. For a long time he was the only one in the gardens. So it felt like an intrusion when he looked up and saw a woman circling near the fountain. He wondered how long she had been there, and if she’d seen him bend to tie up his laces and come up with a profanity for the world.

  She had taken some care with her appearance. Dean was not to know that this was a hallmark of Diane who is Dougie Munroe’s wife. Diane wouldn’t be seen dead in a dressing gown. Anyway, let’s continue with the scene from Dean’s perspective. The woman looked over his way and started towards him. She was pointing at her wrist and asking for the time. So he told her, ‘Five forty-five.’

  The woman looked down at her own wristwatch and she made a complaining noise. ‘That’s what I’ve got too.’ She looked up and shook her brown bob of hair, shook loose some pleasing fragrance. She stared at the gates Dean had just come through. Now she turned and looked for the other entrance at the far end of the gardens. Then she wanted to know something else.

  ‘Your watch is absolutely correct and not fast?’

  ‘It’s good,’ he told her, and she said, ‘Well, that’s that, so why should I be surprised?’ She looked fed up, and after thanking him she marched off under the gate entrance with the Anzacs.

  The man she was supposed to meet turned up fifteen minutes later on the grass beneath a maple. Dean guessed he was the person the woman had been waiting for—the closeness in age, a matching preparedness, the man’s shiny black shoes. He cupped his hands to light a cigarette but abandoned it when he saw Dean. He started over.

  ‘You missed her,’ Dean said.

  ‘Woman with brown hair? Probably in a red top?’

  ‘This one was wearing blue.’

  ‘A blue top.’ The man looked surprised.

  Dean said, ‘You were supposed to be here at five thirty.’

  ‘No. I said six o’clock. I definitely said six o’clock…wait. She told you five thirty…?’

  ‘She said you were supposed to be here.’

  ‘Well that’s bullshit for starters. Five thirty.’ He threw away his unlit cigarette in disgust. Dean considered going after it but the man was sculpting a figure in the air. ‘Brown hair… and kind of…you know…’

  ‘Yeah. That’s her,’ said Dean. ‘She said her watches always run fast.’

  ‘Ah ha ha ha. Yes. We are talking about the same person. No doubt about that. That was Diane you just met. That’s her without a doubt. Did she say if she was coming back?’

  ‘She didn’t say…’

  ‘What else did she say?’

  Dean thought for a moment.

  ‘Nothing. That’s about it.’

  The man closed his eyes and gently shook his head. ‘Oh Diane, Diane…’ He took a deep breath and opened his eyes and pointed to the space beside Dean on the bench.

  ‘May I?’

  The man sat down and crossed his legs.

  ‘So she didn’t leave a message?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Thank you, Diane. Why am I not surprised? After all, why would you do something so reasonable as leave a message?’

  Dean stared at the ground. It seemed like this would be a better conversation if he wasn’t there and the woman Diane was sitting here instead.

  ‘A blue top. I find that interesting. Very interesting.’ He sat up and crossed his arms and nodded back at the rose bed. Now he uncrossed his legs. ‘So what else? Did she look happy or sad? For example, did she look disappointed at having missed me?’

  None of the questions and their guesses quite hit the mark. ‘Annoyed’ might be the word but the man hadn’t put that one forward.

  ‘She was angry with her watch,’ Dean said.

  ‘Interesting. Interesting. That in itself tells a story. People always look to lay blame when they’ve lost something. Diane is my wife. Possibly former wife. I had better get used to that idea.’

  He stopped himself and took a good look at Dean.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve seen your face. I’m Doug, by the way.’

  ‘Dean,’ said Dean.

  He felt the man look him up and down.

  ‘So Dean, what are you like with a paint brush?’

  It was his next job. Not a big one. A few days’ work at the Albion Hotel. Doug showed Dean upstairs and led him past suites named the Quagga Suite, the Giant Sloth Suite, the Jamaican Tree Suite. ‘All this shit has to be painted over.’ He pushed on one door which opened on to walls covered in forest and savanna. It wasn’t one landscape or another. Patches of tropical jungle fought with Arctic waste for wall space. Snakes writhed around tree trunks, mammoths stood ornamentally in the background. A Tasmanian tiger peered back between branches. Birds with pink feathers turned on a sharp wing over ice floes. One large awkward bird caught his attention. Dean knew what it was. He pointed at it, waiting for the name to come to him. ‘That’s a dodo isn’t it?’ And he began to recite some of the stuff Guy Stuart had told him until Doug interrupted him.

  ‘Anyway’ he said. ‘I’ll be downstairs if you need anything.’

  Dean had just stumbled on to one of my outstanding failures as mayor. After the wind-down of NE Paints the enterprise committee had come up with an idea to turn ourselves into a theme park called Gondwanaland. We worked ourselves into a fever over it. It seemed such a fine idea, so original. Our theme park would bring the extinct species of the world back to life. I managed to get a special local body business grant. We used the money to draw up plans. We called a public meeting and filled the old NE Paints community hall where I bounced up on stage and introduced the idea. A steering committee had prepared a number of charts. A large illustrated flap chart invited my willing audience inside to a reception centre, shops and cafeterias, and an auditorium. The artwork showed a lot of smiling faces, and in the uniformed park employees they saw their future selves on the Gondwanaland payroll, as car park attendants, guides, projectionists, restaurant hands, vendors, manufacturers of Gondwanaland maps and stuffed toys—the stuffed quagga, woolly mammoths made with the finest New Zealand wool, Eskimo curlews—and this was the moment when Frances had nudged my side with her idea for jigsaws. The park would need financing. We spurned big-moneyed partners; not after what NE Paints had done to us. In our small-town wisdom we decided on a private subscription. Five hundred dollars bought a unit share. That was quite a large amount and there had been some nervous shuffling in the hall. But could we afford not to be involved?

  On the coast there are moments when a storm signals its end. The clouds part; the sky has never before looked so blue. The world appears radiant again. Gondwanaland was that shaft of sunlight. What a change it made to see people with some purpose in their stride! Suddenly everyone was an expert on theme parks. Discussion on the giant elk or Eskimo curlew flushed out the pedant. ‘Your giant elk, Harry. It takes its name from the old Norse elgr and Old High German elaho.’

  For all that, the buoyant mood made for a nice change. It was like we’d discovered oil.
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br />   There was much discussion on where to site the park and this led to some speculative buying of property. Merchandising ideas steamed ahead. Cupcakes in the shape of dodos, T-shirts with G logos, a map showing our town’s approximate location back when these islands were part of a supercontinent. There was Frances’s Gondwanaland jigsaw. The Gondwanaland burger which Heath pestered me to death over. We saw it would be crazy to hang on to the street names of the past—Green Way could become Moa Lane. Pacific Blue would turn into Curlew Square. We liked those new names. For one thing they finally shook off the yoke of NE Paints. They said something more about our place in the world.

  It was a good idea, if a little wacky. This made it even more appealing. It made people smile. Everyone’s enthusiasm was up. We bubbled along, encouraged one another. So when Doug took me aside to ask me if I thought it was a good idea, a sound idea, whether he should go ahead and launch himself at refurbishing the hotel and pick up the Gondwanaland themes embraced by the rest of the town, I said, ‘Hell, Dougie, you’d be mad not to.’

  We spent a lot of the money raised by public subscription on nailing down trademarks. Now we could see that we’d struggle to finance it on subscription alone. We would need institutional support, maybe government support, a benign loan, perhaps from one of the commercial banks. Our figures stacked up. We had growth charts. All in all, we had an impressive story to go to the bank with.

  Yet it was rejection after rejection. It was hard to understand why, harder still to explain to the hopeful constituency. Face to face we’d get respectful and enthusiastic hearings, then the letter with its bad news would arrive some weeks later. I’d call up, sure there was a mistake, but I never got through to the person the steering committee had met with. I began to feel more and more desperate. The business kept me awake at night. I didn’t know which bank or funding agency to turn to next. I put all my hopes and those of the town in one last pitch to a rural bank.

  I remember it was a fortnight later, getting the news and looking up from the letter with the bank’s regrets and seeing a woman on a stepladder clipping a hedge; and I had this mad desire to rush out and stick my head between the blades of her hedge-clippers. The theme park was so stupid, so obviously stupid now that we’d been turned down. Worse, I’d led the flock down a blind alley and straight over the edge of a fucking cliff.

  Tommy Reece hadn’t done this bad. The Tommy of the sombre portrait—the last one by the way commissioned by council. Gondwanaland was the kind of disaster that should end a political career. But when the election came around eighteen months later no one could bear the embarrassment of remembering. I was voted in unopposed.

  Long before then, however, the constituency found other ways to square things up. They filed in one after another with their worthless possessions and demanded ridiculous prices and I couldn’t refuse any of them. Overnight Pre-Loved filled up with ships in bottles, plain wooden boxes talked up for their ‘antique value’, miniature cars that were really cigarette lighters, stuffed animals, stuffed toy animals, so many koalas I had to burn them, an embarrassing number of stag heads, wooden tennis rackets of a vintage more likely to turn up as an accessory in a clothing catalogue than on the tennis court. The slightest bit of hesitation on my part and they reached for their last card, but what a card. ‘To be honest Harry, I did a bit of money on that Gondwanaland thing…’

  A few days after Dean had finished up at the hotel they were on their way back from the supermarket when the Datsun blew up halfway along Beach Road. They had to abandon it. They had groceries plus the twins to carry, and a surfboard Dean had tried to sell me. I should probably have bought it but some mean-spirited bile kept rising up my throat. I took my time looking over Dean’s surfboard, drew out the agony, pursed my lips and drifted into long silences while he twisted and burned before me.

  That night he and Violet discussed what to do. They needed transport of some kind. They needed to get to the shops and what if the twins fell sick? Dean got up and walked away from the conversation. She followed out to the porch where he let her know he had seen a second-hand bike at the Pre-Loved place. ‘If I can get him to come down on the price the bike will do for now.’

  I made him work for the price he wanted. The hassle over the Stuarts’ bed was still fresh in my mind, the way Dean stonewalled and sought to exploit the situation. I didn’t want to be cruel about it. I let him have it in the end but not without a slow, sweated-out negotiation. I’ll give credit where it’s due, though. Cunningly he clinched it with, ‘It’s not really for me. It’s for Violet.’

  A steady spell of fine weather towards the end of January saw Dean disappear for days at a time on his bike. Often he was gone by the time Violet woke to find the two babies wedged up against her where Dean had put them in the night.

  She assumed he was out looking for work so she was surprised when he told her he’d bought a small house truck which he planned to do up and sell. She didn’t ask what he’d used for money or where he’d found it. She had a feeling Dean had cycled into some other life away from the one they shared, and she was afraid to ask. A bit of paint on his fingers and hands, a green fleck on his eyebrows—that was as much of his world Dean brought back to the cottage on Beach Road.

  And since he was never there she asked him for the rent money just in case he wasn’t back in time. Dean who was tying up his laces said he would be back.

  ‘When?’ she asked.

  He went on tying his shoelaces. ‘I’ll know when I know.’

  Later in the day when I turned up with Alma she insisted Dean was on his way home. Alma was more willing to be led along a merry trail than I was.

  ‘Was that your car we saw up the road?’

  There was no point denying it and its bad end. All the same, she turned the question over and considered it from every angle.

  ‘So Dean is driving what exactly, honey bunch?’

  ‘He’s not driving anything. He’s on a bike.’

  ‘Your bike?’

  This seemed to confuse her. What did I mean by ‘her bike’?

  Alma was impatient. He didn’t care about the damn bike. He wanted to get to the end of the outstanding rent. He was tired of all the running around. He wished he’d never rented the place out in the first place.

  ‘This is how many times I’ve run out here?’ he asked.

  ‘I know and I’m really sorry,’ said the girl.

  Now there were more promises made. She’d speak to Dean. She’d make sure he left the rent money with her if he couldn’t be there himself.

  We bumped our way back along Beach Road. Neither of us felt like speaking.

  Well, Dean didn’t come home that night or the next. There was no phone. If there was a phone he might have rung, and as far as Violet was concerned any excuse would have been welcome.

  In the morning she left Dean a note and took the twins down to the beach. She walked for longer than she normally did because she was fed up with the waiting. She wanted Dean to find her gone. She wanted him to feel that stab of panic for a change.

  But it was hot, and the twins were irritable. Today she didn’t have the energy for it. Crystal kept dropping her rattle and she had to keep bending down to pick it up. The last time the little girl dropped the rattle Violet yelled a
t the pink face dribbling near her ear. They started pulling her hair until she shouted at the air behind to cut it out. A seagull hopped on to a log and looked at her. And suddenly she was sick of the beach. Tired of the idea to give Dean a dose of his own medicine. She would go back and if Dean was there she would say she had just gone out for a walk. If he wasn’t there she would put the twins down and sit outside on the porch steps and wait for him.

  Near the flax bushes by the cottage she heard someone moving about. She thought it must be Dean and rushed forward to find Mr Martin on the lawn. In that split second she knew he’d looked around and worked out Dean’s absence. She could see his annoyance, and something else—hope was it, something preventing full-blown disappointment hogging his face. Some hope that Dean might have left the rent with her. She waited for the inevitable question. But instead she heard him ask, ‘Was that Dean I saw out at the Riverside Community?’

  She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know the place. Dean hadn’t said anything. Where did he say again?

  ‘You know, Violet, where the house truckers park?’

  She had no idea what he was on about. He gave her some directions but she didn’t know of it. She shook her head and felt her eyes drop. She heard the landlord step closer. He must have reached out with his hand. She heard one of the babies coo.

  ‘They’re lovely babies, Violet. They’re adorable. You get to my age and you just don’t see babies any more.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘You know, I cycled out here. I hate asking Harry to come all this way on my behalf. He’s a busy man. And it’s such a lovely day I thought…what the hell…I’ll cycle out there.’