Paint Your Wife Read Free Page A

and for the moment unable to do either
but stand there and grin perhaps at his own memory of his boy kicking in the direction
of the beach for all he was worth.
    It was a few days later that he left us, his footprints on the grass preserved by
the first frost of the year. All morning different women came over. I sat up in a
tree and watched these crabbed figures examine the footprints that the sun hadn’t
yet reached. The tour then moved to my parents’ bedroom where my father’s clothes
still lay on the floor, just creases and compressed air. His car was found later
in the day. It looked to everyone like he’d driven at full tilt at the sea. At low
tide the car sat in water up to its windows. For a couple of days we waited for his
body to wash up. At its failure to do so, people began quietly to theorise. Then
it came to everyone’s notice that the woman from Wages had disappeared as well. My
mother waited a week before we drove out to the coast. At low tide it was possible
to walk around the back end of the Holden. You could see where people had taken potshots.
The windows were shattered and the paintwork was damaged where rocks had missed the
more glamorous target of the windows. The sea shifted puppishly around the chassis.
My mother said, ‘Do you know what is so embarrassing about this, Harry? It’s that
anyone would go to this trouble on my behalf.’ Soon after this the postcards began
to arrive.
    The next time I saw Frank was after Dougie and I left the train and followed the
stationmaster’s directions through a superhuman heat. There was a suburban iron fence,
flat, unyielding and unimpressed by the oven-like heat; it was all that kept at
bay the vastness of the desert, and beyond the fence stood mounds of piled soil and
against them the insect-like shadows of huge mechanical diggers, all very still.
Eventually we arrived at the address scribbled down on a scrap of paper I’d held
in my hand as far back as the station. We put down our packs and stared at a movement
in the window. We’d definitely seen it and since we hadn’t seen another human being
since leaving the station both our gazes stuck to the window. A moment later the
door opened on a woman in calf-length slacks. She wore a white top, thin white shoulder
straps, white on white, blonde hair out of a bottle, a face that once might have
been pretty. She held a cigarette in her hand. Some time previously I had heard gossip
that Frank and the woman from Wages had parted. But I hadn’t stopped to think that
there might be another woman. Over her shoulder we could see cool shadows. Now the
woman pushed herself off the door jamb. She seemed curious, and then impatient. She
called out to ask if we were coming in or not.
    We picked up our packs and as we moved towards the door, the woman moved half into
the blinding light where she stuck up a hand.
    ‘You can stop there. I’m not running a motel. Just so you know.’
    Doug asked me to check the address again. In the few paces forward it hadn’t changed
but now he wanted to see for himself.
    The woman said, ‘All right I’ve had enough of this. You can fry out here or pay at
the door and I’ll tell you right now so that you know—I’m not interested in bullshit
excuses or anything like that. Just so you know. I’m not interested in discussions.
Just so we understand ourselves.’
    Clearly there was a misunderstanding of major proportions. Either I had the wrong
address or she had the wrong impression of what we were there for. But to check
a final time I managed to ask her, ‘Is this 11A?’ before she snapped back with, ‘No
bartering, I thought I said, or stalling. Or negotiation or whatever you want to
call it. And I’m not interested in standing out here and frying my arse for much
longer.’ She took a big steadying breath and after eyeballing us separately she said,
‘Sort out who’s first while I count to ten. After that the meter’s running.’
    That’s when Doug told her,