Paint Your Wife

  One afternoon an entire flock of magpies flew up around him. They were so close he felt the draught of their feathers. They reached a spot in the sky and all at once there seemed to occur a communal thought of, Hell, let’s forget this, and they dropped back to earth and moved about as in an open market, worms dribbling from their beaks.

  Here begins Dean’s magpie period. A storm. A fallen pine tree sprawled across the road. A massive foundation of roots in the shape of a muddy fist wrenched violently from the earth. From his cart Dean leant forward reaching over the top of his knees to touch a greener branch; it was sticky with gum. As he pulled it back his eye fell upon a magpie’s nest sitting deeper in the tree, shaped like a mixing bowl. Twigs, grass, bits of wire. Instead of the eggs he expected to find he came across a red golf tee, a blue plastic ID tag that farmers clipped on to the ears of their dairy herds, the wrinkled skin of a burst red balloon, a small double-happy fire cracker and a postage stamp depicting a tui.

  Magpies, he read, were tireless collectors. They were also excellent mimics. They could imitate fire engines. Meow like cats. Bark like dogs. They could even hold a human melody. Some were able to discern and express a preference for certain composers—a Beethoven sonata, for example, whereas the same magpies appeared to be stone deaf to Bach. ‘Interestingly, they show little interest in Donizetti or Verdi…’

  Soon Victoria was complaining to Alma about the state of Dean’s room. It stank. What’s more, whenever she poked her head in there she had the creepy feeling of having entered an enclosure, something to do with the light. Dean had stopped drawing back his curtains. And there was so much stuff he accumulated, most of it rubbish. Strange and useless things such as silver foil bottle tops, broken reading glasses—she had no idea where he’d stolen those from—a plastic clothes peg, shirt buttons, postcards, strange bits and pieces which on their own made no sense; nor did they add up to a whole. She worried about the rats returning, a new infestation, finding in Dean’s squalor a desired haven.

  Mothers are stuck with the first vision of their child. No matter what they become—prime minister, rapist, drunkard, schoolteacher, mayor, trapeze artist—they can’t fool their mothers to the same extent as they might hoodwink the paying public because in their mother’s eyes they can never shake free of the time they wore napkins and their bare bum was sprinkled with talcum powder. Victoria was the same as any other mother who sees what they want to see and therefore remain blind to what is unfolding before their very eyes. This is their failure. And Victoria could not see the magpie that her son had turned himself into.

  But then what were the chances of her picking such a random and remote thing as a magpie to bloom inside the soul of her son? Clues? There was the disgusting state of his room. His new interest in collecting. The way he pawed at the window to raise himself in order to see out. But those signs don’t necessarily lead you along the trail to magpies. It could just as well be girls, for example.

  Anyway, for the moment other things consumed Victoria. She stared back at herself in the mirror. She picked up a strand of hair and pulled it across her cheek. Her face was pudgier. How did that happen? She grimaced at herself and cleared her thoughts to make room for a far more pressing matter. Dean’s money had come through—a lot of money. They had enough to do something with it. She thought they had enough to buy a dairy. If not a dairy, then a shop of some kind. She could park Dean behind the counter and he would run the till and make himself useful. She had tried to excite him about this idea. She had tried to get him to start thinking along the same lines. Mostly it ended with her talking to herself and Dean concentrating on his bottle top collection.

  Then, as these things tend to happen, out of the blue came an opportunity to buy a second-hand shop, Pre-Loved Furnishings & Other Curios.

  The instant Victoria pushed Dean’s new wheelchair through the door he was won over by the shambolic order. The light was dim. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust, but gradually the different lumps of shadow revealed themselves as cloaks of armour, medieval swords, old stuffed armchairs, stag heads, tiny stuffed animals such as ferrets trapped inside glass domes, Victorian dolls. A number of stuffed birds swooped down from the ceiling on invisible line. There were small models of vintage cars and yachts, black-faced garden gnomes, rakes, lawnmowers, shovels and coal bins, some with bronze lids engraved with hunting scenes. On top of a pile of magazines was a cover of a modern woman with a can of fly spray. There were no walls as far as Dean could see, just clutter, shafts of light, brilliant dust particles. It produced in him a cosseted feeling, something close to a nest you could say, and without any of the boring and drowsiness-inducing logic of smart furniture placement. As Victoria was frowning at the dust mark her fingertip left on top of a chest of drawers, thinking to herself what a shame it was that people let things go, Dean was saying, more emphatically to himself, and now to his mother, ‘Yes, this is it. This is it.’

  8

  In the late spring of that year, the view from my mother’s sitting room slowly enlarged. The sky seemed to reach down further, bending at the shoulder. There was a day in November when for the first time she could see the sunny clay base of the coastal hills curling northwards. The promised sea view from the window was still to reveal itself but in the crystallised light hovering on the edge of the farmland there was a hint of things to come.

  If we are to call this George’s composition then we can think of my mother as the sitter, the bored sitter, and like Cézanne’s model, showing signs of falling from her perch. Signs even of going a little mad.

  She found herself taking issue with the sun. From where she stood, the sun seemed to be playing favourites. It was clearly on George’s side, the way it would sit on his shoulder as he ran his barrow along the planks. It may seem a stupid thing to resent but not if you thought, as Alice did, that the sun actually liked George. It liked George more than it did her. The way it sat so companionably on George’s shoulder compared to the way it spoke to my mother at the window: ‘See what an idle life you lead, Alice. Look at George!’

  But who looked after the chickens? Who had shifted the heifers? Who looked after the sheep? And who washed George’s bloody clothes and looked after the damn house and cooked the meals?

  George could quietly point to two things as his daily contribution. The gradual elimination of one hill, and the creation of another. As pointless as washing clothes in order to get them dirty again, you could argue. And while the new hill obliterated the swamp, to the naked eye it didn’t look right. Part of the problem lay in knowing how it had come into being. Even the sheep couldn’t be fooled. They wandered around its base, raising their black snouts at it, but that is as far as it went. They weren’t about to be conned into climbing its sides. The cow lay in the paddock patiently waiting for the hill to leave and for things to return to what they used to be. The magpies never landed on it either. Cows for the day, the magpies stood in the paddock trying to stare the hill down. Even the windblown rain refused alternatives and tried to land where it had always fallen, which is to say on the swampy paddock that now lay buried under a mountain of relocated dirt.

  My mother was back to thinking about the future. She had started to contemplate that defining moment of completion when the finished work would slip in like the new day. She imagined the moment—stooping to pick up one of George’s socks from the carpet, there in the window she wou
ld find a glittering blue line with a white sailing boat at the edge of the bottom paddock. More optimistically she saw George hanging up his shovel and resuming his farm duties. They would be outwardly happy, of course, because that would be part of the deal. Officially she would be obliged to show joy because look at what George had done for her. Other women would make admiring noises and complain about their lazy bastards of husbands. That was one option. To share her life with Alma Martin was another. A third and completely unforeseen option availed itself that spring.

  My mother was in town on her way to Franklin’s to pick up some mousetraps. Around the pub she ran into some upgrading work to the footpaths. The area was roped off and she was obliged to detour along boards that were still wet from earlier rain when she slipped and was about to fall as a hand reached out and steadied her.

  ‘Oops, caught you,’ said the man.

  Meeting our life partner often results from such a trifling incident. Tui Brown née Waverley was standing at the end of the wharf when a gust of wind lifted the hat off her head and blew it out to sea. Stan Brown saw the whole thing happen from the beach. Next thing, Tui sees Stan rowing out in a dingy to where the woollen hat floated soggily just beneath the surface, like a purple jellyfish. At a dance Jimmy shouldered his way across a crowded floor until he reached Hilary, and there he remained, silent but smiling hard, waiting to be discovered which he duly was.

  Frank Bryant’s good points are all neatly congregated into that singular moment where he sticks out his hand to prevent my mother’s fall. Frank’s grasp was firm and sure of itself. Once she regained her balance Alice noticed he had nice brown eyes. They regarded her back with surprise. Just that morning Frank Bryant had picked up a coin from the footpath, and now this.

  ‘I was just about to pour a cuppa,’ he said.

  So he was quietly confident around the opposite sex. That appealed to my mother. She followed him to his truck. In the cab he got out a thermos. He had an extra cup which prompted her to say, ‘So you were expecting me?’ And he said jokingly, ‘I always carry an extra cup just in case.’

  So he could play along. Pick up the thread of a line. She liked that, too. He had enough milk only for himself but when he learned that she also took milk he happily forfeited his share. While they drank their tea my mother asked Frank Bryant a few questions about himself.

  She’d already guessed he wasn’t from around here. At least she hadn’t seen him before. ‘The Hokianga,’ he said, and he hooked his thumb in a certain northwards direction. ‘I was sent down to Ardmore to learn to fly, then the war ended, and so here I am. Just in time, it would seem.’

  His smile was a handsome one.

  ‘Well Mr Bryant, I owe you two thanks.’

  ‘Frank,’ he said.

  ‘Frank, frankly…’

  ‘People say that too.’

  So he wasn’t without wit.

  ‘Thank you for saving me from my fall and thank you for the tea.’

  He gave a military salute and my mother replied with a girlish curtsy and off she went. A man who caught her knew how to fly. It was an attractive package. And later as Alice was leaving town, whose truck should quietly rumble up behind but Frank’s. He must have watched in his rear mirror and noted the direction she took; it was a pleasing thought. Now he leant across the gear lever to offer her a lift. Over the noise of the engine she fibbed and said she was expecting someone along any minute. She was sure Frank would have heard about George’s epic undertaking. She didn’t want him to know that the quest to shift the hill was for her benefit, that she was the woman whom people presumably spoke of, when in fact, as she was happy to discover and surprised too she would later say, she was quite pleased for Frank to think of her as unattached for the moment.

  Frank drove off and she walked on with a smile. Soon she reached the farm. Across the paddock there was the stick figure in a black singlet running a barrow-load of soil along a network of boards. The hill was in two sections now. George had bored right through the middle to create two smaller termite-like crags. He was on the homeward leg to completion. My mother says she can remember stopping at the bottom of Alma Martin’s drive and thinking she could go up there and maybe he could draw her; maybe he might even run away with her. And without consciously deciding one thing or another she found she’d moved on. By the time she crossed Chinaman’s Creek her thoughts were filled with Frank Bryant, his handsome brown face, his simple eyes. He was obviously not too set in his ways either. After all, he could lay concrete and fly. The other thing about this man who had caught her when she slipped was that he actually looked at her with desire. That was the thing about Alma. Too often Alice was left with the empty feeling that he was seeking only information. She might as well be the night sky with Alma’s eye fixed to the end of a telescope. Or else she was a bowl of fruit, interesting to look at in all its shape and configuration. Whereas Alma would draw it, she had a feeling Frank Bryant would want to reach for the fruit and take a bite.

  She stopped at the back door and looked dejectedly across the wet grass. There was the washing she still needed to bring in—George’s digging singlets and socks, and the white blouses Alma liked her to wear when she sat for him. She found herself thinking of the time Stan Brown dropped his cigarette and ground it out in the sand before picking up someone else’s dinghy and carrying it like a beetle on his back to the water’s edge. Where was her hat? Where was that helpful gust of wind that would give shape to the future? This impatience of my mother’s is responsible for giving direction to everything that happened thereafter.

  The day after she met Frank Bryant she thought to bring him a bottle of milk for his tea and other eventualities. Now the story had two strands that they would enjoy telling to each other. The time the young flying ace had flung out a hand to catch her, and the time she brought him a pint of milk just a minute after he realised he’d run out. The spirit of reciprocity was cementing itself, and before long Frank was holding my mother’s hand on secretly taken walks around Big Bay to that end of the shingle beach where famously the fur seals clamber ashore for summer.

  Once in a tipsy moment my mother told me Frank wasn’t much as a lover. In her opinion he was too practical. He was the kind of man for whom elaborate directions for putting up a tent bring a certain joyless satisfaction. She didn’t like his dirty fingernails either. The other thing about Frank was, frankly, his limitations.

  They were sitting on the shingle beach at Big Bay laughing as they told one another yet again the story of how she had tripped and he had caught her by the hand. Of course it wasn’t as if their own chance encounter lacked for precedents, and one immediately sprang to mind—Bonnard and Marthe, the point at which they are still strangers nudging towards each other in the crowd waiting to cross the busy Boulevard Haussmann.

  ‘Haussmann,’ said Frank. He picked up a pebble and flung it past the toe of his workman’s boot.

  This was the first time she properly noted the bristling of his eyebrows.

  ‘Paris, Frank. This happened in Paris, France.’

  With a glimmer of exasperation Frank’s face closed down in the understanding that this wasn’t something he had to know after all. At the same time my mother sighed as one who recognises she has just entered a cul-de-sac, and perhaps a life with Frank re
quired some reconsideration.

  ‘Bonnard was the artist,’ she explained, but Frank had been distracted by something he’d just noticed floating in the tide. His face came alive. He rose to his feet with a handful of stones, and for the next few minutes he took pot-shots at the bobbing log. The stones pocked the sea around the dark log until at last there was a wooden sound—Frank let out a whoop and raised his arms in triumph.

  A slip on the pavement planks had brought them together. Now a story about a famous artist and his wife was about to draw them apart.

  As soon as he sat down from throwing stones into the sea Frank seemed to realise that something was deeply wrong, that something was vitally changed.

  ‘I should be getting back,’ said my mother.

  On the drive into town Frank didn’t know what to do about my mother’s silence.

  ‘I feel like I’ve said something,’ he ventured.

  My mother didn’t see any point in explaining. Why feign interest after such a demonstration of indifference? It wasn’t right. It was a mistake. When she got down out of the truck she thought she was saying goodbye for the last time.

  She walked slowly home, taking the alley by the hardware shop that leads across the playing fields—just in case Frank was of a mind to follow. She claims she felt relieved. She was sorry for Frank, though. It hadn’t turned out so well for him. She was the firefly that had caught his eye and now he was left clutching thin air. Well, too bad, she thought. It’s always best to find out these things early in the piece.

  Within days she was back to gazing across the paddock to the flying elbows of George; the still back of the cow, the slavish wheelbarrow which just that morning in the stillness of dawn had woken her with its creaking wheels. She took out a compact mirror and searched her face for anything that Frank might have left on her. She noticed a few grey hairs and that another wrinkle had joined the others crowding the corner of her eye. She was a changing vista. She was landscape in the making. Alma Martin couldn’t remember his wife. This was how all this business had started in the first place. Now she wondered if George had a mental picture of her as he toiled away, and if he did which one it was. If she was to die tomorrow, which version would pop in to his thoughts and make him smile in the shower?