Paint Your Wife

by Lloyd Jones

  He was being so nice to her. She felt bad that he’d come all this way on his bike. She wished she had something nice to say back. She wanted to hide.

  She pulled a strand of hair across her face.

  She said, ‘I don’t know what’s holding up Dean.’

  He didn’t show any sign he had heard her.

  ‘I noticed a bike leaning up against the house. Is that Dean’s?’

  She was so surprised by this she went around the side of the house to look. Black mudguards. The heavy pedals. The faintest ghost that was Dean. Her heart sank. He must have come home and left again while she was down at the beach.

  Now she heard the man say, ‘Violet, maybe you should let me know what is going on. What do you say? I won’t bite your head off.’

  Jackson and Crystal were wriggling in her arms. She pretended they were more of a distraction than they really were. She could have put them down to continue the conversation; instead, through the maze of little pink pawing hands, she asked Alma if she could have until Monday. Monday didn’t promise anything better. It didn’t promise anything at all, but it was the only stalling device she could think of.

  ‘Monday,’ he said. He didn’t look happy to hear it. ‘All right. Monday it is.’

  After Alma left her she counted up her change. She found she had twenty-four dollars and fifty cents left. She needed things—bread, milk, tea—but she couldn’t bear to spend the money because if she did there would be nothing left. So she stole milk from the letter boxes of farmhouses scattered up Utopia Road. The houses were a long way back from the road and the letter boxes. It was pretty much free picking. Though it turned out she was democratic about it. If she took a carton of milk from a letter box, the next night she would push the twins in their pushchair past that house for the next letter box. A carton here, a carton there. In other ways it wasn’t so straightforward. A week ago and she’d have thought this was the kind of thing that happened to other people. But there she was stealing under the cover of night, taking what wasn’t hers to take.

  This was pretty much how Violet came to my official attention. A phone call from one of the houses. A sighting of a silhouetted figure with a pushchair running down the road in the moonlight. Any milk taken? Why yes, was the surprised answer at the other end.

  In a moment of wide-awake hunger she lay in her bed thinking, I’m sick to death of milk. Tomorrow I will catch a fish.

  She had caught spotties and some herring before but nothing that she would eat. This was a much more serious undertaking. She scooped a pen out of the shingle higher up the beach and laid Jackson and Crystal down. With the driftwood near to hand she fashioned a shelter. Seeing the pattern of shadow and sunlight fall over their pink faces she removed her purple blouse and hung it over the driftwood, before heading up the beach to the log where she placed the bucket with its tackle.

  She’d woken up thinking about the fish she was about to catch. Before she got out of bed she’d cooked and eaten it half a dozen times already. Her stomach juices didn’t remember any of it. Were those stomach cramps hunger? A wave drew up the beach seeking her bare feet. She said a prayer. Two prayers. One for Jackson and Crystal—‘Don’t yell out or I’ll hit yis.’ The second prayer was for the ocean. ‘Let there be a bloody great blind eye of a fish headed this way, please?’ She peeled some cat’s-eyes off the rocks, smashed their cover and dug out the yucky green flesh which she threaded on to the hook. She did as she’d seen Dean do. She waded out into the tide up to her waist and threw the hook and sinker beyond the fringe of soft brown kelp; letting out the line as she backed her way to the warm shingle and the toothless complaints of the babies.

  Shush Jackson. Shush Crystal honey or I’ll whack you. Shush. You don’t want the fish to hear. She made the sound of the sea. Two pairs of dark eyes shone up at her. Shush baby. Were waiting for the fish…After a few minutes a nibble travelled up the line. She closed her eyes, held her breath. Concentrate. Concentrate. Please God. Concentrate. Shaddup Jackson. Shush baby. She waited, waited…when she gave the line a rip she felt her hand come up against the fish’s weight. She walked towards the water excitedly pulling the line in hand over hand. Already she could see its aspirin-white belly. The flash of blue, followed by a singular movement, a near thing as far as the fish was concerned. The line went slack in her hand and drooped over the stony part of the beach. Fucking fish. She began hauling in the line and almost immediately it snagged on the kelp. She walked along the beach trying to free it. She didn’t have another hook or sinker. There was nothing else to do but strip off and swim out to the snag and free the line.

  At this point Alma left the sandhills and walked back to his bike. He stood it up and balanced the bag of potatoes on the handlebars and cycled the short way to the Eliots’ place.

  That night she sat out on the porch. It was warm, one of those nights that light up the entire countryside. You could thread a needle in this light. You could play a hand of cards. You could ride a bike.

  The last thought made her lift her head. She stood up. The bike was still where Dean had parked it. The front door was wide open. She turned her head to listen for wide-awake sounds at the end of the hall. She thought she’d better check just to be safe. She tiptoed up the hall and stood in the doorway for five minutes until she was sure they were asleep. She knew she shouldn’t leave them. It was the worst thing you could do. It was irresponsible. Anything could happen. A fire, for example. The thought was so awful that she shook her head to get rid of it. It was almost as dangerous to think like that; to think the worst was to breathe life into the possibility of it happening. She stood the bike up and stared back at the peeling weatherboards. In the deep night she heard a morepork calling and the sleepier sound of the sea turning over. She knew she shouldn’t leave. It was wrong. She should definitely not leave her babies but here she was lifting her leg over the saddle bar.

  She hadn’t ridden a bike for years. The front wheel wobbled to start with, and the handlebars shook loose in her hands as she rode over potholes. Along Utopia the way was smooth. She was able to stand on the pedals and cycle as fast as her legs would allow. Once as she passed under the deep shadow of a giant pine all the bad things that could happen suddenly returned and she stood higher and pushed harder to get away from the picture in her head.

  She reached the T where she had to stop and think back to the landlord’s directions. Only now did it occur to her that he had been telling her where to find Dean. He’d just been letting her know. How the hell had she been so slow? She turned the wheel left and was about to set off but paused to wait for a car from the direction of town to whoosh past. The night fell silent again. She pushed off. Soon the road began to climb. Her legs grew weary and the front wheel slowed. It became so difficult she thought about turning back. But she was past the midway point; she might as well keep going. She counted to twenty; she counted to fifty, to one hundred. There in the near distance was the wooden sign the landlord, Mr Martin, had spoken of. She turned down River Road. The air changed to a gorsy smell, and now there was the sound of a shallow river; there was a screen of thin trees but she could hear a narrow reach gurgle along a bank quite near her. Soon she saw lights, little pinpricks of yellow headlights. She cycled on. Now she could hear music. Someone was strumming a guitar. She heard a woman’s laughter. Different shadows boxed up around her
. House trucks. Caravans. Old buses. She got off her bike and wheeled it in off the road. She could see a circle of faces lit up by a small fire. That’s where the guitar was. One person looked up, now another, and another. The person playing the guitar stopped.

  She called out, ‘Hi!’ She hoped she sounded friendly; she wanted to. But no one answered. No one moved from the fire. It was a bit intimidating, really. She said she was looking for Dean. She’d come for Dean. Anyone here know of Dean Eliot? No one responded. She thought she might describe Dean, maybe that was the way to go about it, when a woman stood up from the circle around the fire and came towards her. She was barefoot. She wore a woollen shawl over the shoulder straps of a white cotton dress. One side of her face was fire-lit. Now that she was closer Violet could see her lip piercing.

  ‘Who’s asking?’ she asked.

  Violet began to say who she was but the woman looked away before she had finished. She seemed to know.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Dean isn’t here.’

  ‘What about the house truck?’

  ‘It’s here.’

  That was something at least. Dean wouldn’t leave without the house truck.

  ‘Dean’s gone?’ It didn’t sound right when she said it, it didn’t sound remotely possible.

  The woman pointed to a cutting on the edge of the dark. ‘He left that way and followed the railway tracks down the coast.’

  ‘To go where? Where was he going? Did he say?’

  The woman shook her head. ‘Nope, he didn’t say.’ She pulled the shawl around her shoulders. Her expression had hardened.

  Now Violet tried to look past her. Maybe Dean was sitting with those people around the fire; sitting there and watching this, the joke on his face.

  ‘Well,’ said the woman. ‘I think I told you what you need to hear.’

  Then she thought to ask after the house truck. ‘Dean wanted to show me,’ she lied. ‘That’s why I’m here.’ She could see the woman weighing up what she had said; she could see another lie was in order so she said, ‘Dean wanted my opinion on a paint colour.’

  The woman gave her a long and testing look. She just wished she’d go away. She wished she hadn’t got up from the fire in the first place. She looked over at the fire. Her friends were getting up and walking away to different house trucks. She turned back and said, ‘Five minutes. That’s all you get because I didn’t hear Dean say anything about you. What did you say your name was again?’

  ‘Violet,’ said Violet.

  ‘All right, wait here and I’ll get the torch. He doesn’t have electricity in there yet.’

  She started over to one of the house trucks and stopped and looked back.

  ‘Well, come on,’ she said.

  Violet wheeled her bike after the woman. The light kept changing. One moment it was pitch black, then a square or rectangle of lead-lighted window, a candle flickering, now it was shadowed, and in the shadows she would see the outline of people sitting on the steps of the trucks talking and smoking. Underfoot the ground was bumpy. She hoped she didn’t step in cow shit. She waited while the woman picked up a torch from the step of one of the trucks and they carried on to the dark oblong at the very end of the house truck community.

  ‘Here,’ said the woman. ‘Mind your step.’

  Violet took the torch. She found the door handle and pushed. The smell of paint hit her. She pushed the torch ahead, and the discovery took her breath away. Here were the places Dean had spoken of, places he’d described in detail back in the days when they both worked in the paint warehouse, when in the cafeteria he had first told of the travelling life he was saving up for. Here were the lakes, and forested hills, majestic mountains and long beaches with the curling waves he so admired, and she saw Dean had injected some poetic licence; he’d found space for a Turkish minaret, two unicorns and a vast bridge, a wonderful engineering accomplishment linking the forested mountain with the virgin beach.

  Monday. We drove past the Datsun with its shattered windows. It had been stripped of its wheels as well. It was a desolate sight, and it was impossible to dodge the thought that the Eliots were in quicksand up to their necks.

  Violet was sitting out on the step as we pulled up on the lawn. The quiet dignity we’d seen on the first day was still evident. She rose from the step, her face shifting with different impulses—gratitude, sincerity, a tiredness as well, I thought.

  She said to Alma, ‘I would have rung and thanked you for the potatoes—I guessed it was you. There’s no phone though.’

  Alma patted her shoulder. He looked at the house.

  ‘So, I take it Dean’s not here?’

  Dean. Already. So quickly on to that subject. She shook her head and stared at her bare toes poking out the bottom of that faded purple dress she favoured.

  Alma raised an eyebrow. I think he’d finally realised that he had reached the point where he could politely ask what was going on. Of course Violet didn’t know what was going on. The truth is she didn’t know much more than we did. She didn’t know where Dean was, and she didn’t know what to say. She’d run out of excuses.

  ‘I hope this doesn’t sound out of line, Violet, but I’m going to ask you anyway. Are you and Dean okay?’

  She’d been expecting a question to do with the rent. When she looked up from her toes her expression was defiant.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  Alma said he was just wondering. He hoped it didn’t sound like he was prying.

  I thought he should just get to the point and throw her out of there. At this rate there would trips galore between the tip and the beach cottage, all of it time-wasting.

  ‘Nah. We’re okay,’ she said.

  ‘Because if you’re in any kind of trouble I need to know if I’m to help in any way.’

  You could see how tempting that sounded. Alma gave her a moment to think about it.

  ‘And if I wasn’t okay?’

  ‘Well, in a way, it would be to my advantage. I need to pay someone to model for me and I thought if that was to interest you, well we could come to an arrangement.’

  Modelling. She hadn’t been expecting that. Boy, was she not expecting that.

  It was a surprise to me as well. On the way over there Alma hadn’t mentioned it. Maybe he hadn’t thought of it, except of course such an idea had a history.

  Now he was warming to the notion.

  ‘We could take it off the rent. It would be in lieu of…but that’s only if you want to.’

  She didn’t say thank you. That was the thing about the Eliots; it was like they couldn’t see or recognise a kindness shown to them. I didn’t sense a trace of gratitude; it was simply a change of circumstance, something new to react to. In a blink she’d leapt Dean-style into that feral position of finding advantage; and now she was out to hammer it home as best she could.

  ‘What kind of modelling?’ she asked. And fair enough, modelling could mean a lot of things.

  ‘Drawing, sketching,’ Alma told her.

  She was starting to nod now; starting to get the idea. Trying to picture it. She folded her arms to think:

 
‘One thing though. I won’t take my clothes off.’

  ‘Good. That settles that. I won’t ask you to then. I won’t ask you to do anything that you’re uncomfortable with.’

  ‘And how much would you pay me?’

  Alma thought for a moment. The speed and the direction the offer was moving in had caught him unprepared.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Three or four sessions a week to start with and that can cover your rent.’

  There was the same deliberate slowness I’d had to put up with in Dean while negotiating the exchange of mattresses. Words weighed, pondered.

  ‘So, would I get more if I took my clothes off?’

  ‘After what you just said?’

  ‘But if I did, let’s say…’

  ‘I hadn’t thought about offering a different rate—but that’s not to say I shouldn’t.’

  ‘And just modelling, right?’

  ‘For purposes of sketching. Maybe even a painting. Portraits, that kind of thing. I’m sure you know what I mean. But you take your time and think about it.’

  She looked up at the sky, then back at Alma—all of two seconds.

  ‘I’ve thought about it,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it.’

  15

  Late on Sunday night we were hit by a cold front. The rain was extremely heavy. I lay in bed listening to it flow over the guttering. The ground outside our bedroom window made that pudge sound. The rain didn’t want to end. My thoughts ran to various disasters. Blocked drains, slippages, property damage. I waited for the phone to ring. And that’s how I eventually dozed off, while waiting for news of the worst.

  Most of the rain was let go of in the night. In the morning it was murky out. When I walked down to the store the air was still wet, soaked through like the washing. Alice rang to make sure I would run Alma out to the Eliots’. She didn’t want him cycling in that weather. ‘And you know he won’t ask…’ As she spoke I could see patches of sunshine hanging in a fine mist over Broadway. He could have biked. And anyway, the tip was closed (it would be a quagmire) and whenever that happens business gets down to a trickle. So I didn’t mind, though just as I was about to lock up a very tall man bent over with hay fever came and bought the hydrography set that has sat around the shop hoping to catch someone’s eye for nearly eight years. Then Guy turned up drenched in his raincoat. He didn’t want anything in particular. He was just out and about and thought he’d drop by. Since the job with the beautification scheme ended I had no idea what he and Kath did for money. When Guy walked in I was about to slip the ‘Back in an hour’ notice on the door. Now it occurred to me that he could watch over the shop. I made it clear that he would be doing me the favour, and of course I would pay him.