Paint Your Wife (12 page)

Later when George was to ask her where she was when she saw him she would tell him
she happened to be passing the window—not standing in the window which is a position
too removed, too chillingly neutral. Still, it had taken a moment to register, to
distil this unlikely fact of George covered in a swarm of bees. What it meant exactly.
It had taken a moment to awaken from the slumber of everydayness to this surprising
new thing. Even now she didn't rush. She walked quickly.

There was a hose at the side of the house. My mother turned on the tap and trained
the nozzle on George. Clusters of bees rose until George's pinched face was revealed,
then for reasons known only to himself he lurched back in the direction of the hives.

Here was another job for Alma. He would know what to do. What she should have done
was get out the smoker. On this point Alma was mildly reprimanding. ‘A little bit
of fuel and newspaper or a damp rag and a match. The smoke does
the rest…' He spoke
in a cool brisk way as they hurried down the hill. ‘Bees hate smoke. I'm surprised
that George hasn't told you that…'

Some survival instinct must have stirred in George because as they crossed Chinaman's
Creek they saw him below, half-submerged in the water. He lay on his side, his raised
hip and shoulder exposed. When they pulled him out he was barely conscious. His pulse
was faint. George's face a swollen mess. His eyes were slits.

My mother fumed over him. ‘What a crazy thing to do, George. Crazy. Crazy.' Some
layer of being an inch beneath George's swollen red skin seemed to acknowledge this
point. His eyes shifted wider. His chest rose.

It was another hour before they heard the doctor's Wolseley bump across the creek
bridge. He climbed out of the upholstered car in his tennis gear, a middle-aged
schoolboy with a shining flop of brown hair. His white legs waded in large white shorts
and white canvas sandshoes. He didn't bother with introducing himself. When he got
out of the car he simply looked dimly in the direction of the house. ‘In there, is
he?'

He took George's pulse. He rolled back his eyelids. George's pupils were fishy and
dull. He said George was in toxic shock. Obviously George had a strong ticker. But
the doctor was confused. Why would a man rush into a hoard of bees and dance around
like a drunk at a fairground? It made no sense unless you knew what my mother knew,
that George had been looking for a gesture. Once, years before, when they were going
out and she had showed some interest in another boy George had deliberately crashed
his Indian motorbike to make her look his way again.

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.