Paint Your Wife (2 page)

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.'

Doug and I were in no hurry to climb into our wetsuits, though as I remember, I didn't
have a wetsuit. I had surf shorts and a woollen jersey with sawn-off arms. In the
chilly air we stood about hugging ourselves.

‘I have news for you, boys. You have to actually go out to where the crays are. They
don't come to you. Any objections. Harry?'

‘Nope.'

‘Doug? How about you, son?'

‘Nope.'

‘You sure? You don't look sure.'

‘I'm sure.'

‘What about you Harry? You too, sunshine? You haven't said much. We all sure about
this thing?'

Down on the wet shingle there were last-minute instructions. Crays don't have ears
but my father was saying that it helps to think that they do and that you want to
pick them up just behind the ears. ‘Just pick it up as you would a hairbrush
off
a dresser table.' We watched him tighten his huge lead belt. ‘One last thing. This
one is for you, Douglas. What colour is a cray underwater?'

‘Orange.'

‘Harry?'

‘Red?'

‘You're both wrong. A cray is kelp-coloured. Think of yourselves looking for an old
black sock under your bed. You ought to know about that, Harry.'

The information was confusing: socks, hairbrushes, crustaceans with ears. ‘Okay,'
he said, wading forward in his flippers. ‘Let's go and rob a bank.'

He was a strongly built man. He wore an armless steamer suit and I remember watching
the layers of shoulder hair lift in the cold breeze off the sea. We watched him wade
into the shore break and sink amphibiously into the icy water—there was no hesitation—then
we followed him, kicking in a line for the reef about sixty metres out from the beach.
Halfway there I lifted my head out of the water to look for Dougie—sky and water
filled my mask, and there in the distance I saw Dougie climb out of the tide. I remember
wishing I could be there too but knowing this was impossible I kicked on to catch
up to my father. Without him I would not be out this far.

Inside the reef, the sea shifted and moved us around as easily as if we were kelp.
We were in three metres of water and by now I'd started looking for hairbrushes.
My father dived down and near the bottom rolled on to his back to get my attention.
He was pointing to something—a hairbrush—stuck in a crevice. He wanted me to dive
down for it. Between the surface and the depths were shifting pillars of light and
sea dust.
I could also feel currents of trust and blind faith. I was going to have
to dive down because that was what was required. The pressure in my ears increased
until they were really hurting. The change in temperature was dramatic. I remember
wanting to surface, to get back up to the world of light for air, when my father
grabbed hold of my wrist and guided me down deeper to that crevice. Finally he released
his grip and dropped his hand on the cray and lifted it from its hiding place. Together
we bulleted to the surface, my father with the cray in his outstretched hand so
that it was first to burst from the sea into the white light of day. Frank blew the
water out of his snorkel and dropped the cray into a sack. I waited until he dived
again and taking my chance I swam like hell back to the beach.

It's not much of a memory, but then you can't pick the memories you'd like to be
representative of yourself. When I'm dead, I'd like to think that Adrian's memory
of me will be of the time I carried him home wrapped in my raincoat in driving rain
after he sprained his ankle on a tramp, or of the time I took him out to an expensive
London restaurant for veal marsala, rather than a memory of looking up across that
crowded nightclub to see his old man with a lean on list his points with an outstretched
finger to an amused-looking black woman.

My memories are of the crays we ate on the beach around a fire of crackling driftwood,
the drive home, and later the strained silence of the house. And of that night, curled
up in bed, with my father rocking in the door of my bedroom, caught between wanting
to be elsewhere and needing to venture forward, and for the moment unable to do either
but stand there and grin perhaps at his own memory of his boy kicking in the direction
of the beach for all he was worth.

It was a few days later that he left us, his footprints on the grass preserved by
the first frost of the year. All morning different women came over. I sat up in a
tree and watched these crabbed figures examine the footprints that the sun hadn't
yet reached. The tour then moved to my parents' bedroom where my father's clothes
still lay on the floor, just creases and compressed air. His car was found later
in the day. It looked to everyone like he'd driven at full tilt at the sea. At low
tide the car sat in water up to its windows. For a couple of days we waited for his
body to wash up. At its failure to do so, people began quietly to theorise. Then
it came to everyone's notice that the woman from Wages had disappeared as well. My
mother waited a week before we drove out to the coast. At low tide it was possible
to walk around the back end of the Holden. You could see where people had taken potshots.
The windows were shattered and the paintwork was damaged where rocks had missed the
more glamorous target of the windows. The sea shifted puppishly around the chassis.
My mother said, ‘Do you know what is so embarrassing about this, Harry? It's that
anyone would go to this trouble on my behalf.' Soon after this the postcards began
to arrive.

The next time I saw Frank was after Dougie and I left the train and followed the
stationmaster's directions through a superhuman heat. There was a suburban iron fence,
flat, unyielding and unimpressed by the oven-like heat; it was all that kept at
bay the vastness of the desert, and beyond the fence stood mounds of piled soil and
against them the insect-like shadows of huge mechanical diggers, all very still.
Eventually we arrived at the address scribbled down on a scrap of paper I'd held
in my hand as far back as the station. We put down
our packs and stared at a movement
in the window. We'd definitely seen it and since we hadn't seen another human being
since leaving the station both our gazes stuck to the window. A moment later the
door opened on a woman in calf-length slacks. She wore a white top, thin white shoulder
straps, white on white, blonde hair out of a bottle, a face that once might have
been pretty. She held a cigarette in her hand. Some time previously I had heard gossip
that Frank and the woman from Wages had parted. But I hadn't stopped to think that
there might be another woman. Over her shoulder we could see cool shadows. Now the
woman pushed herself off the door jamb. She seemed curious, and then impatient. She
called out to ask if we were coming in or not.

We picked up our packs and as we moved towards the door, the woman moved half into
the blinding light where she stuck up a hand.

‘You can stop there. I'm not running a motel. Just so you know.'

Doug asked me to check the address again. In the few paces forward it hadn't changed
but now he wanted to see for himself.