Paint Your Wife

  Later, while my mother was doing the dishes, the uncle came up behind her and pinched her bottom. She leapt from her daydream; a cup and saucer flew up in the air and broke over the floor. George’s adventurous uncle backed away with his hands raised, his remorseful eyes shifting to the end of the house where George was already tucked up in bed.

  In the morning Alice heard George get up and shuffle about. It was very early—still dark. She got up and went to the window in time to see George walk his barrow across the paddock and disappear into a thick mist. She let the curtain go and went back to bed. Another two hours passed before she got up and returned to the window, this time to see the uncle totter out, this time without a kitchen chair. She’d put out some breakfast but he must have passed it up. She had an idea he was on his way to say goodbye to his nephew. At least she hoped that was so; she didn’t want to see him again. She locked herself in the bathroom and sat on the toilet with a cigarette, staring at the peeling blue paint. In another ten minutes she heard the uncle’s car start up.

  Late August. A lightness in the sky. Signs that winter was passing. If you stopped absolutely still and held your breath you could feel the sun crawl and settle over your face, neck, arms. A passing milk truck driver mulling on these things wouldn’t have given it another thought at that hour, a barefoot woman in a raincoat standing in the middle of a paddock, a line of heifers looking on between the woman and where a man was shovelling. The heifers seemed to be waiting for George to turn around and discover his wife. A mob of sheep in the next paddock looked as one along their grubby flanks at the woman. The sun moved serenely behind cloud and a huge shadow spread like a stain over the half-bitten hill; when the sun re-emerged it was brighter and more dazzling than before. There was a dark flash of shadow against the hill as George speared the shovel head. He picked up the handles of his barrow and balanced his way along the planks to the new hill site. He had only to turn his head a little to the left and he would have seen what the heifers and the sheep and the line of birds on the pylon could see. If only he’d put his calculations to one side for a moment.

  From his deck Alma Martin saw George lay down his barrow. He thought, here we go, George boy, your day is about to turn. But no, what does George do? He brings his tobacco out of his back pocket. The heifers, his wife, the sheep, the birds and the rest of the world wait patiently while he rolls a cigarette and then stoops to pick up the handles and run the barrow the rest of the way to the tip face. The large heads of the heifers were the only ones to turn when George came back the other way with his empty barrow—they did so in a neat choreographed line as he ran back and picked up his shovel to resume his battle with the hill.

  The woman in the raincoat turned up at Alma’s door a few minutes later. She was unbuttoning her coat as she came through the door, and as Alma had guessed, she was wearing nothing underneath it.

  It wasn’t the same as it had been. It wasn’t like when George and the others were away at the war, when it felt like they were the only two inhabitants left in the world. Now they were like compatriots who meet in a foreign place to share memories of how things used to be. They talked a lot about earlier times. And then in the way it always did these days, talk would turn back to George.

  By the end of September he had made such inroads that they began to talk about the end of the project, and what would happen then. My mother was resigned that one day it would come to that—she had begun to imagine the moment when George would fling down his shovel, wipe his forehead and turn to her with a look of sweaty accomplishment. And then what? What would she say? ‘Thanks very much, George’?

  My mother would have left George had Alma Martin asked her to. She’d have given up the farm for the fire-watcher’s cottage on the hill. There was plenty of opportunity for Alma to take the bull by the horns and propose something. But inertia is Alma’s failing. His way is to respond rather than to initiate. And for all his sharp observation and dedication he failed to see my mother’s gradual slide away from him.

  In the sketches of her during this period, the heightened eyebrow betrays irritation that Alma should think to sketch at a time such as this. She could well believe he had just sat in his seat as the train left the tracks.

  7

  What is important in life? If you ask a man without the use of his legs he will answer—legs. The same question asked of a legless man with a pencil and paper in his hands will produce a different answer. He wishes only to see more clearly. This was Alma’s idea—his hope for Dean’s salvation from immobility.

  These days when Victoria left Dean drawing he didn’t seem to notice her tip-toe departure. Mind you, Victoria would say Dean didn’t seem overly aware of her presence in the first place. Pencil, eyes focused to an almost mean-spirited extent, he looked prepared to be surprised by what he was drawing—in this instance, a lemon tree—in case it turned out to be not what he thought it was. Victoria, on the other hand, didn’t have time to discover that a lemon tree, as it turns out, is, by the way, a lemon tree. And there it is on paper, more or less how it looks in the garden. It was such an idle and pointless discovery when elsewhere around the house there was work to be done, rat carcasses to dispose of. Still, it was better this way. She didn’t mind leaving him when he was so engrossed in what he was drawing. It was preferable that he stare at that lemon tree than lie back in bed translating damp areas over the ceiling into various countries. She could leave him to draw, mount her bike and move out into the world.

  But then Alma had to get Dean on to portraiture. And now along with being Dean’s legs, Victoria had become his sitter and this captivity was the worst she had known. Eventually Alma was to see the problem. He told Dean it was time for a history lesson.

  The woman in Cézanne’s life was a comely woman with piled brunette hair. The artist stared at her more than he did at the sky or the family or the moon or the sailboat on the blue horizon. She was his constant subject—forty-four portraits in all. That’s a lot of staring. But give credit where it’s due. That’s also a lot of patient sitting. In the portraits hers is a face worn by silence. She sits as one would sit in the dark. Her face is closed down. She begins to look fed up. She looks like she would rather be out dancing. She looks like the nineteen-year-old she was when she and Cézanne first met, someone who knows it is time for something else but who is unable to rise from the chair.

  Here too is Victoria’s predicament. She is stuck in her chair. She sits and sits. Then at a rogue thought her shoulders might find occasion to drop as she sighs, and Dean will look up with annoyance when he sees that she has shifted her expression. He tells her that it’s like trying to nail a fast-moving cloud to the one spot in the sky. ‘Hopeless if the sky is moving about too.’

  For hours on end she sits for her invalid son to draw her, a hostage to Dean’s needs—she already washes his clothes, washes him, holds him up over the bowl so he can piss. It is excruciating for them both. A grown man with legs of jelly writhing inside her strong arms. The stern sound of Dean’s piss against the porcelain bowl. ‘Are we there yet, Dean?’

  There are certain things that Alma could congratulate Dean for achieving in his sketches but perhaps they have been achieved too well. His mother’s misery is not something he wants to draw attention to. It’s time for a change of plan.

  ‘Dean,’ Alma said, easing forward on his chair. ‘I think it’s time we gave lan
dscape a go.’

  They were sitting outside and Victoria had cleared Dean’s drawing materials from the card table to make room for the teapot and cake.

  ‘Landscape,’ said Dean, his lip curling up at the thought. The freckles on his pale face made him look for the moment more simple and ordinary than he really was.

  That’s when Alma noticed the long grass part in the direction of the house. Now another line broke for the house. And another. Victoria looked hard at her plate. She stabbed at a piece of leftover lettuce. Dean also tried to find somewhere to park his eyes. Separately and together their glances intercepted Alma’s.

  He knew what he had to do, and funnily enough he had come prepared for this moment. He dabbed his mouth with a serviette and stood up to reach in his vest pocket for one of Franklin’s mousetraps. He handed it across to Victoria who had the good grace to look doubtful. To his own surprise, as he would later tell my mother, he found himself talking up its virtues.

  ‘The great benefit of these things, Victoria, is that you get to choose where the rat dies. It will only slow down a big one but most of them will sit tamely through to the moment of death. Then what you do is simple enough. You take a paper bag, drop in the corpse and bang it in the rubbish bin.’

  Alma sat down; mother and son were quiet, contemplative, each of them picturing the procedure whereby Dean would cling to his mother’s back in the manner of a marsupial and poor Victoria, her eyes shut against the grim prospect, would have to bend at the waist for Dean to reach over and pick up the rat by its tail and drop it in the paper bag. Around the table, all three opened their eyes as if they’d just completed a prayer.

  ‘Well only if you think they’re worth a try,’ said Victoria.

  Over the next week Alma built a cart out of planks. In Victoria’s back shed he found a length of steel rod which he sawed in two for axles. He discovered Dean’s childhood pram in the long grass out by the incinerator, stripped the wheels off and fitted them to the axles. With some fencing staples he attached the wooden chassis then looped a rope through a screw hook an inch or two from Dean’s sprawled feet and tied it to his bike carrier.

  It was a fine spring morning, chilly though. A vapour of white breath trailed Dean’s mouth. His pale cheeks turned pink. His bare knuckles froze and it wasn’t all that comfortable; clearly Alma wasn’t much of a builder, but Dean wasn’t about to complain. He was back out in the world.

  They stopped once for Dean to take a piss. Alma had to hold him up against the fence-line while Dean aimed into the long grass. In an attempt at easy conversation Dean asked Alma if they were near the Hands’ property.

  ‘Another fifteen minutes or so.’

  ‘This’ll be worth seeing,’ Dean said.

  ‘Oh so you’ve heard. From who?’

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘And what did Victoria say?’

  ‘What everyone says. That George is carting off a hill to please his wife.’

  ‘I see. So everyone says that, do they?’

  ‘Mum said…’

  ‘Mum’s the expert, is she?’

  Dean shut up after that and concentrated on buttoning up his fly. Alma didn’t try to explain. He was sick and tired of people theorising about George. He was weary of the talk and he’d heard all the jokes. These days he found himself feeling protective of Alice’s husband.

  As the vandalised hill came into view there was a stifled ‘Jesus!’ from Dean and Alma told him, ‘You can speak freely, Dean. I’m not going to chew your ear off.’ They cycled across Chinaman’s Creek and as they came around the side of the house Dean discovered the new hill. He saw it for what it was: raw, unpleasant to look at, and wrong; it screamed out for cover, for grass or some such softening effect that nature is good at providing. The only word you could attach to it was ‘endeavour’.

  The ground was heavy. Alma had to dismount and push his bike across the paddock. Dean’s cart bounced over the cow pats and bumped towards the singleted figure swinging on the end of the shovel. Alma called out ahead, ‘I’ve brought you a visitor, George.’ George turned his unshaven face from his work; he looked annoyed to be interrupted but seeing it was Dean he brightened up and javelined the shovel into the loose bank of soil and came forward wiping his hands on his trousers.

  ‘I see you’ve got wheels now, Dean.’

  ‘They don’t help me piss though. Ask Alma.’

  George laughed; and Alma thought he looked happy about that and that he might well have looked happier still had Dean told him he pissed over his shoes. Still, he put the thought to one side. He said, ‘Dean’s got the drawing bug. He wants to tackle some landscape.’

  George set his hands on his hips and squinted across the paddock. He said, ‘We’ve got the new hill going up over there. We’ve got this one coming down here. Take your pick.’

  Dean couldn’t decide. In the end Alma made the comment, ‘There’s some nice shadow effect happening on the new hill, Dean.’ To George he said, ‘We’ll try not to get in your way.’

  He had to pull Dean along on his cart as far as the fence-line. As soon as they were out of earshot, Dean made the obvious remark, ‘Earthmoving machinery would make quicker work of it.’ He had missed the point, but Alma didn’t feel like explaining that this was George’s thing—the physical effort was his art. That was the point. It could be measured, evaluated, tallied. Here finally was the answer to that dodgy question: how great is my love? I will not say, but I will demonstrate with my barrow and shovel.

  Alma didn’t voice any of this. Instead he allowed, ‘Possibly.’

  He set up Dean and wandered back to within range of George. What Alice had said about George’s flesh falling off him was true. His clothes looked loose. His eyes seemed too large. The bone of his eye socket leapt from his face. His forearms were muscled, sinewy. None of this was all that surprising. But up this close, with the smell of dirt and endeavour so prominent, Alma felt a grudging admiration. There was George’s balance and his rhythm with the shovel. His huge heart. The outsized vision. As far as gestures went, it didn’t seem so mad any more. It wasn’t as mad as, say, inviting a swarm of bees to settle over your skin.

  George looked up just once and it was to say, ‘Sorry I can’t stop to chat, Alma.’

  Every Saturday that spring Alma cycled and towed Dean out to my mother’s place for landscape drawing. In the end it wasn’t landscape that captured Dean. Perhaps it was just too large and free-ranging. Too much itself—sky, hill. His eye and hand stalled in the search for smaller details. In the end he found it in the magpies.

  No one is able to say with any certainty when the magpies arrived from Australia. One day there was the soft lump of George’s hill and pasture rolling away to the farmhouse. The next day, or so it seems to my mother in recollection, black-and-white baubles covered the same area.

  Think of Churchill dressed as Noel Coward and there you have the magpie. The generous undercarriage, broad in the beam; joined by a short neck to a cantankerous head. And those eyes! Cross with everything! Opposed to everything in general—even their own young.

  Older farmers recall the arrival of the myna birds—‘small sketchy things’ that liked to hop about on the backs of cows.
First there had been the mynas, and then they were gone, by which time there were the magpies. It was simply the measure of things coming and going. Mynas, and now magpies. This was the sequence of events. Bush to pasture, tree line to bare hilltop, bush song to wind, mynas to the squawking and delinquent magpies.

  It must have been Dean’s absolute stillness, his legless immobility, that encouraged the magpies to come closer. It is just like a magpie to spot an advantage. The magpies held their heads at a proud angle reminiscent of the busts of famous people. The first time he noticed them Dean lay down his pencil and submitted himself to their presence. What were they doing? They didn’t appear to be doing anything. The sheep were at least eating. Back in the other direction George Hands was swinging his shovel, and a short distance further away was Alma Martin with his sketchpad on his knee. Even the clouds were moving in careful lines across the sky. The magpies, by contrast, lacked a purpose. They were, Dean happily concluded, a bit like himself. Feathered cripples outside of the natural bird order. The other birds were in the trees. But here were the magpies pretending to be sheep, rolling their shoulders, their beaks lowered as if grazing. When the sheep looked up they seemed put out, hurt, as if they too were aware that the piss was being taken at their expense. Now the magpies did the same, blinking innocence. Then in the next moment they were back to being birds. As far as Dean could see there was no intervening moment—none of that shifting experimentation of, say, a seagull, which will flap its wings while staying put on a sea wall.