Paint Your Wife (14 page)

‘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.

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.'