Paint Your Wife Read Free Page B

‘Harry’s looking for his dad.’
    The woman didn’t say anything. She was staring at Dougie’s face, so I was off the
hook for the moment. She looked cross with what she found there.
    ‘How old are yis?’
    ‘Old enough,’ said Dougie.
    ‘What about him?’ She meant me but she was asking Doug.
    ‘The same.’
    By now though I was craning my head back to see if there were any other 11As hidden
further along the block. That’s when the woman wriggled her thin hips. She smiled
at Dougie. She said, ‘I like you. What’s your name?’
    ‘Dougie.’
    ‘Dougie,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that a dog’s name?’
    ‘Must be. I’m here, aren’t I?’
    The woman found that funny. She gave Dougie’s shoulder a friendly push. She said,
‘I like you,’ again. She stepped aside for Dougie to enter. But as I followed she
blocked my way.
    ‘Not you. You can bake in hell.’
    That’s when I told her that I thought my father lived there. I showed her the address
I’d written down on the scrap of paper but she wouldn’t look at it. She said, ‘I
don’t have to look. I don’t care what the damn paper says. It could say Queen Elizabeth
lives here or Elizabeth Taylor. It could say George Washington himself lives here
and I just fucked his bewigged brains out. I don’t have to believe anything just
because it’s written down on a shitty piece of paper. Understood?’
    And that was it, I was thinking I really was going to fry in hell when Dougie rescued
the whole mission with, ‘His dad’s got a tattoo on his bum.’ Doug saw it that time
Frank was changing into his wetsuit. Then he started describing this butterfly. He
had the woman hooked. But he had to ruin it by saying it was a monarch butterfly and
suddenly she was shaking her head.
    ‘I don’t know anything about a monarch butterfly.’
    And just like that Doug was backtracking, ‘Well it may not be exactly a monarch…’
    ‘His name is Frank,’ I said. ‘Frank Bryant.’
    The news took the wind out of her sails. Her earlier hostility was waning and we
could hear her mind ticking. She said, ‘I know lots of men by that name. There’s
thousands of fucking Franks.’
    But as she was saying it, all the conviction of what she was trying to put across
seemed to lift and her face softened as if she too didn’t really believe in what
she was saying any more. And just like that she said we could come in but on condition
that we didn’t use her bathroom. She said she had water and she had beer. ‘If you
want beer you’ll have to pay for it first. Water’s free, though.’
    ‘Water,’ said Dougie, and the quickness of his reply saw the woman roll her eyes.
The important thing was we’d got in out of that terrible heat. For God knows how
many years I’d dreamt and fantasised of meeting up with my dad, but at that moment
I’d have given it all up for a glass of water. The woman set down a jug on the kitchen
table. She placed two glasses beside it. We gulped down three glasses apiece. The
woman refilled the jug and we drank that too. I was gulping down the last glass when
the woman said to me, ‘Your father usually gets in around seven.’ She said, ‘I don’t
think I want to miss this.’ Now she was looking at me in a different light, examining
me, and in a voice that was slightly mesmerised, she said, ‘You’ve got your father’s
eyes. You’re lucky.’ Then she said, ‘I’m Cynthia, by the way. I’ve known your father
for the past three years but I think I’ll leave Frank to explain all that. I don’t
want to say anything more for the time being.’
    She wound up letting us use her bathroom. It was either that or we’d have to piss
in her backyard. And after that we sat around waiting for Frank to turn up. Dougie
joined in the vigil too, checking his watch, staring between the whitewashed walls
and the window where we first saw the shadow of Cynthia.
    For the first hour with Adrian in London I’d felt skittish as we worked ourselves
into our