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He was a strongly built man. He wore an armless steamer suit and I remember watching the layers of shoulder hair lift in the cold breeze off the sea. We watched him wade into the shore break and sink amphibiously into the icy water—there was no hesitation—then we followed him, kicking in a line for the reef about sixty metres out from the beach. Halfway there I lifted my head out of the water to look for Dougie—sky and water filled my mask, and there in the distance I saw Dougie climb out of the tide. I remember wishing I could be there too but knowing this was impossible I kicked on to catch up to my father. Without him I would not be out this far.
Inside the reef, the sea shifted and moved us around as easily as if we were kelp. We were in three metres of water and by now I'd started looking for hairbrushes. My father dived down and near the bottom rolled on to his back to get my attention. He was pointing to something—a hairbrush—stuck in a crevice. He wanted me to dive down for it. Between the surface and the depths were shifting pillars of light and sea dust.
I could also feel currents of trust and blind faith. I was going to have to dive down because that was what was required. The pressure in my ears increased until they were really hurting. The change in temperature was dramatic. I remember wanting to surface, to get back up to the world of light for air, when my father grabbed hold of my wrist and guided me down deeper to that crevice. Finally he released his grip and dropped his hand on the cray and lifted it from its hiding place. Together we bulleted to the surface, my father with the cray in his outstretched hand so that it was first to burst from the sea into the white light of day. Frank blew the water out of his snorkel and dropped the cray into a sack. I waited until he dived again and taking my chance I swam like hell back to the beach.
It's not much of a memory, but then you can't pick the memories you'd like to be representative of yourself. When I'm dead, I'd like to think that Adrian's memory of me will be of the time I carried him home wrapped in my raincoat in driving rain after he sprained his ankle on a tramp, or of the time I took him out to an expensive London restaurant for veal marsala, rather than a memory of looking up across that crowded nightclub to see his old man with a lean on list his points with an outstretched finger to an amused-looking black woman.
My memories are of the crays we ate on the beach around a fire of crackling driftwood, the drive home, and later the strained silence of the house. And of that night, curled up in bed, with my father rocking in the door of my bedroom, caught between wanting to be elsewhere and needing to venture forward, 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.
Excerpted from Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones. Copyright © 2016 by Lloyd Jones. Excerpted by permission of Text Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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