Paint Your Wife

  In a few days George was well enough to sit up at the kitchen table in his dressing gown. My mother was still angry with him.

  ‘You could have been killed and then what…?’

  George got up and walked over to the sink to pour himself a glass of water. He finished his water and put the glass down.

  ‘The bee thing is over. I don’t want to talk about it, Alice.’

  Silence was George’s solution to most things. Now a new layer of silence fell over their lives, this one more heavy and suffocating than any before. George spent his days in his dressing-gown. Some days he shaved. On those days he forgot to or couldn’t be bothered he looked like a figure of ruin. The dressing-gown. The dark stubble. His idleness. He was content to sit and watch Alice cook and feed the chickens. She put meals in front of him which he picked at. He spent a good deal of his time looking out the window at the clouds. He’d sit until dusk, smoking and gazing at the dark shifting patterns of the starlings rising in the sky. How did they know when to make a turn? How was it communicated? He smoked his cigarette and drifted. He was so quiet at times it was easy for my mother to forget he was there. Once he stuck out his hand and tried to squeeze her. It gave her such a fright she cried out and he let go. George stood up and tightened his dressing-gown cord and moved shamefully into the other bedroom.

  Over this period of convalescence, he dressed only once and that was when Alice’s mother visited.

  She came over for lunch one Sunday. After listening politely to the account of George’s brush with death she turned the conversation to memories of when she and her husband used to live on this same farm. While my mother got on with making the lunch George sat in the sitting room listening to Alice’s mother talk up the qualities of Alice’s father—which is to say his unstinting dedication to her. How he would pick the hair out of her hairbrushes and combs and bring her a cup of tea in bed before disappearing out to the farm for the day with his cold mutton sandwiches. The hill must have caught her eye in the window because she remembered the day Alice’s father had made her climb to the top. ‘You don’t want to die without seeing the view.’

  ‘Oh but it was exhausting!’ she told George and twice, she said, she had fallen; there was no neat and winding track like today, and what’s more, she told him, twice Alice’s father had pulled some loose skin from the balls of his own feet to cover her watery blisters.

  This information had a stunning effect on George. He sat back and stared at this small woman with the non-stop mouth.

  ‘Really though, George, Alice’s father was a saint when it came to the small things. I’ve mentioned my blisters, my hairbrushes. But if I’m honest, truly honest, then I have to say he wasn’t one to move mountains. How often did he promise to get rid of that bloody hill?’

  At that moment they both looked out the window. There it stood. George and Alice’s mother picked up their teacups and stared at it.

  Over the following week George often appeared distracted or lost in thought. He’d sit scratching his chin, brooding, thinking, scheming. The swelling had left his face. It was a good sign. His blood was kicking out the toxins. Now he began to draw up plans. There was no hint of what he was planning until Alice found a list on the back of an envelope.

  Paint the house.

  Turn the bottom paddock into orchard (pears and apple).

  Dig another well.

  Double the size of the chicken run.

  Under ‘5.’ he had written ‘hill—get rid of it’, circled it, and marked the circle with a big tick.

  6

  The morning George made a start on the hill Alice was still in bed. She didn’t hear her husband get up and make himself breakfast and slip out of the house. Alma Martin, however, claims he was on hand to see the first spadeful. He was up on his deck with a cup of tea watching the new day spread across the plain when his eye picked up George down in the paddock still stuck in shadow. He had a shovel and a wheelbarrow at the base of the hill. He must have filled the barrow already because now he picked up the handles and walked the load to the edge of a large depression another hundred yards away. There he tipped up the barrow, shook out the last of the soil and started back to the base of the hill where he went about filling another.

  Alma sipped his tea. It still didn’t seem strange or out of the ordinary. There were any number of explanations. George was after topsoil. Or he had made a start on back-filling that area of swamp which was a good thing to do and finish ahead of winter if he could manage it. More importantly, it looked like old George was back on his feet again and swinging into action. Alma drained his cup and went inside.

  It was much later in the morning that he suddenly remembered George. He stopped everything, put down his brushes and went outside for a look. This time he caught up with George over at the swamp; he was carrying a long scaffolding plank over his shoulder. At the base of the hill Alma could make out a bald spot where George had been shovelling.

  My mother was watching this same scene from the back window of the house. The natural thing would have been for her to wander outside and ask George what he was up to but she was reluctant to break the spell of his industry lest he turn back into that forlorn and hopeless dressing-gowned figure. She also had a horrible idea of what he was up to, however far-fetched and extravagant it might seem. She had an idea George had taken to heart her mother’s comments about that ‘bloody hill’.

  She watched him as he approached the paddock with the cow. George put down his barrow to open the gate. The cow stood up—George waved his hand—and the cow sat down again. Now he lifted the handles of his barrow and went through. There was a patch of paddock where heavy rain tended to collect. It wouldn’t drain. Hoof traffic quickly turned it into quagmire. That’s where George had laid a number of planks. He ran the barrow up, jogged to the end and tipped the load out.

  Throughout the rest of the day my mother and Alma checked on George’s progress from their respective positions. George didn’t stop shovelling until dark. There was nothing especially alarming about that—from Alma Martin’s point view, that is. A man in his singlet pushing a wheelbarrow is hardly an unusual sight; even a man casting the sharp end of a shovel into the side of a hill, no matter how much it might remind the casual observer of a gnat biting a rhinoceros on the bum.

  That night George spoke of back-filling the swamp. He didn’t mention the hill. For the first time in weeks he ate with a healthy appetite. His face, neck and shoulders were red. After clearing his dishes he ran a bath. My mother was in bed when she heard the door next to her room close.

  The next day, however, what had looked perfectly ordinary the day before changed into something else.

  Up on the hill Alma woke to roosters sounding across the valley floor. Bits of cloud shuffled across the top part of his window. He dragged himself from bed and wandered in his underpants out to the porch where he stretched and yawned; away in the distant paddock at the bottom of the hill there was George and his wheelbarrow. He had stopped to light a cigarette which suggested he had been up for some time already. The heifers stood in a line watching him. Never before had the heifers looked so sane.

  Over the following days the same pattern established itself. The early morning rise. The repeated journey between hill and swamp. The mindless
application which George brought to the awesome task of eliminating the hill.

  One afternoon towards the end of that week my mother waited for Alma at the bottom of his drive by the letter box. These times they got to themselves were so rare that she tended to come quickly to the point.

  ‘First the bees, now this mad thing with the hill,’ she said. ‘He says he wants to make me happy.’

  ‘Well that’s not a mystery, is it? George isn’t motivated by engineering. He wants you to admire him. That’s what this is all about.’

  My mother shook her head. In her own mind things couldn’t get worse than this.

  ‘What a situation. I’m married but I don’t have a husband. I have a…’ Here she caught herself. What was Alma Martin to her, exactly? A friend? An intimate?

  Alma gazed off in to neutral territory

  ‘It’s unusual. I’ll grant you that,’ he said.

  ‘No, it’s a mess,’ replied my mother. She tried to find Alma, tried to look around him and make eye contact. She said, ‘I don’t know what to do, Alma.’

  This time Alma raised his head and aimed his attention over her right shoulder. He thought for a moment, then shook his head.

  ‘There’s nothing to do, Alice. Your husband is back. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for us, now, does it?’

  That could have spelt the end of everything between my mother and Alma Martin. It is my mother’s view that he didn’t mean to say it quite like that. The same thought must have occured to Alma. Now, as if to make up for it, he raised his arms and pulled her into him. It was a brazen thing to do under the circumstances. Over Alice’s shoulder Alma would have seen a tiny figure in a white singlet run a wheelbarrow around the base of a hill which he aimed to remove as a token of his love for the woman Alma happened to hold in his arms. And had George laid down his shovel and looked back in this direction he’d have seen the whole story laid out before his eyes.

  More positively, George had a goal to work towards now. He had turned himself into a draught horse. From now on, his love for his wife could be measured in pints of sweat. It would boast geographical proportions. One day he would be able to look my mother in the eye, and say, ‘Alice, look what I’ve done for you. I moved a mountain.’

  There are precedents. Kings building palaces for their mistresses. Ship-owners naming ships after their wives. Poets dedicating their books. Explorers naming channels and landforms after their absent spouses. Youths with penknives carefully, lovingly cutting the name of the girl with the shy eyes into the bark of the tree.

  On a more practical note, once George removed the hill Alice would have only as far as the bottom paddock to walk in order to see all the way to the ocean. From the paddock with the cow, the valley tends to roll downwards to the town—soon to provide the illusory but deeply satisfying neat rule of a shoreline.

  Word of George’s enterprise quickly got around the district. Within a week sightseers began to drive out to take a look for themselves. Cars, small trucks, delivery vehicles, the odd tractor parked in the long grass along the verge. A man sat in a harvester with his hand resting on his knee, squinting across the paddock. Others hung off the fence, smoking. More embarrassing as far as Alice was concerned, a pub sweepstake had started, and the men along the fence spoke authoritatively, some in a boastful, knowing voice.

  At the pub, you put in your money and were invited to pick a number from a hat kept behind the bar. None of the numbers were below one hundred. No one in his right mind thought George would move the hill in less than one hundred days. The highest number was five hundred. Most of the wizened faces who had swung on the end of a shovel reckoned it should take George around three hundred days to shovel and wheelbarrow the hill from where it stood to where he was dumping it in the swamp.

  By mid-February, some progress was evident. Alice could see a new hill rise in the sitting-room window, while in another place the old hill was being lowered. The view across to the ranges was slowly erased and this gave the house an odd sinking feeling. When George came in at night his eyes were half-closed with fatigue. Every bit of muscular effort had been drained from him. But Alice heard no complaint. She was hoping that once he realised the immensity of the undertaking he would give it up of his own accord. For now, though, there was still no sign of that happening as he plonked himself down in his evening bath. Once after a particularly gruelling day, George fell asleep in the bath and my mother had to reach down and find the plug between his ankles and drain the water around George’s sleeping torso in case he drowned in his dreams.

  He was never too tired to eat. He wolfed down whatever she put in front of him. Afterwards he would sit back in a glow of satisfaction and watch Alice clear away the dishes. As she set a cup of tea before him he might say, ‘A hundred and forty-eight barrow loads today, Alice.’

  My mother would have to try and remember the previous day’s figure.

  ‘That’s thirty more than yesterday.’

  She’d realise her mistake as George smiled modestly down at his tobacco pouch.

  ‘Actually, it’s forty more.’

  The time to have spoken out and insist he drop this insane project was at the beginning. My mother had taken him too lightly at his word. Only once in passing did she manage to say, ‘Honestly George, I don’t mind the hill the way it is…’ but he hadn’t responded. Perhaps he didn’t hear in that way megalomania is said to be indifferent to dissenting voices.

  Already it was March, and too late to stop him. Too many yards of soil had already been shifted on Alice’s account. Between this calendar month and George shrugging off his invalid’s dressing-gown, people had died, others had been born. A man raking his hair with a steel comb had been struck by lightning. Throughout it all George chewed away at the hill. And it has to be said, as George’s defenders claimed, at times it felt like there was just too much seriousness in the air.

  There is something to the idea that idleness has its season. Standing in long wet roadside grass is not conducive to watching a man wheelbarrow a hill away. In June and July, as the days shortened and rain fell with grey urgency, the crowd along the fence line dropped away.

  A great-uncle of George turned up for a brief stay. He was a heavy man who hobbled around on bad hips and wore an office shirt tucked into farm trousers. The uncle had made a strong impression on George as a small boy. The older man had taught him how to fish and, on family visits, would slip George a small glass of beer. The same loud boisterous figure kept him up long after his mother said it was time to go to bed. Now it was the turn of the favourite uncle to persuade George to lay down his shovel and leave the damn hill alone.

  Others had tried, well-wishers, friends of the extended family. They just ended up walking beside George and his barrow between the old hill and the new one. George couldn’t just stop for any old chit-chat. With new hope my mother stood at the sitting-room window and watched George’s uncle pad across the paddock with a chair he’d taken from the kitchen. No one had done that before. There was an innovative air about George’s uncle that was promising. He didn’t look the kind to give up easily. Alice watched him park his chair and arrange his tobacco and tea flask. Obviously he was there for the long haul.

  The uncle had told my mother that what he h
ad to say to George was perhaps best kept to themselves. He did indicate, however, that he wasn’t one to stride into lecturing mode. Rather, his style was to let the words fall about George and soften him up like persistent rain. ‘Trust me, Alice,’ he told her. ‘Nagging doesn’t work. It just turns a man’s head, if you see what I mean.’

  Across the paddock Alice saw George hesitate with his implements—there had been no advance notice of the uncle’s visit—there was a handshake, some words, the uncle good-naturedly waving him on. George seemed to give a grateful nod before hurling himself at the hillside. The uncle turned round and gave a nod in the direction of the house.

  Throughout the day, whenever Alice checked at the window, the scene was the same. Persistent rain, she reminded herself, and to be patient. George was shovelling and running, with new vigour if anything, back and forth between the old hill and the new one. Every now and then the uncle uncrossed his legs to reach down for his tea flask or tobacco. It was getting on for dusk when she thought she’d check once more. This time there was George with his barrow moving at a spry trot towards the open gate, the fat uncle trailing behind, his hand raised as if to make another point. Alice fell back from the window, discouraged.

  The uncle drank a lot that night. He’d brought his own whisky. At dinner he told stories and risqué jokes. The talk seemed to provoke his appetite, and gloss over his failure. After he’d cleaned off the roasting dish he started on Alice’s leftovers. George didn’t say a lot. He kept his uncle going with a word here and there. Otherwise he sat up like a polite child who knows that if he keeps his head down he will pass unnoticed. At a certain point he looked over at the window covered with night and condensation. He moved a hand to his mouth as he yawned and excused himself from the table. He had a big day starting in the morning. He smiled at his favourite uncle and winked at Alice and took himself off to bed.