Free Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones

took it outside to bury in the patch of weeds. Victoria
was embarrassed about that too. Her late husband had always been the gardener.
    Now they went back inside the house and checked in all the rooms. They sniffed the
air in each before returning to the sitting room. More adventurously, Victoria took
herself over to the wall where the rat had crawled inside to die. She sniffed. She
sniffed again, and smiled with relief.
    She opened her purse to offer a payment. Alma told her it wasn’t necessary.
    ‘But Alma, I couldn’t sleep while that thing was in the house. You smelt it. You
have to take something.’
    ‘Well, there is something,’ he told her.
    Everyone whom Alma was to sketch or paint can thank the rat epidemic for bringing
him into their lives. The sitter’s payment was negotiated for Mrs Swain, Mrs Long,
Meg Wyatt, Meri Thorn, Mrs Black, Jill Christophers, Beryl Knight, the Hasler girls,
Tui Brown, Ginette Fields, Gracie Brewer, her mother Augusta, the Healy sisters Joan
and Kate, Bronwyn Rapson, June Fairly and her daughter Joyce, and Hilary Phillips.
    He didn’t get to Hilary’s until a few days before Christmas. Hilary was vague. She
thought she’d heard telltale noises in her bedroom ceiling. Alma poked around and
couldn’t find anything. He lowered himself down on to the steps she was holding.
    ‘False alarm,’ he told her.
    ‘Are you sure?’ she asked.
    ‘Pretty sure.’
    ‘But I saw one,’ she said, and this news pricked his interest. She hadn’t said so
earlier. She hadn’t said she had actually seen one.
    ‘Yesterday’ she said. ‘Yesterday morning. It ran across the kitchen floor. A huge
brown grey black thing.’
    Alma followed her into the kitchen. He looked behind the stove. There were no droppings
that he could see. He searched through the pantry—nothing there. By now he was shaking
his head. She’d led him on a wild goose chase. To oblige her he checked along the
skirting but he was simply pretending. For whatever reason, Hilary’s place was the
only one in the district to escape the infestation. Alma told her she should feel
lucky. She didn’t look lucky. She looked disappointed to hear that, as if she wanted
rats, wanted them verified so she could be part of things, part of the infestation.
It didn’t make any sense. In the end he told her he’d lay a trail, ‘Just to be on
the safe side. Just to be sure.’
    ‘Yes, definitely,’ she said, her face lighting up. ‘I know I heard something and isn’t
it best to be on the safe side, as you say, Alma?’
    Hilary’s cottage was set at the end of a finger of sand on the town side of the estuary,
separating off the wharf area. She had all the windows open to the glittery view
of the sea. If the rats hadn’t found her cottage by now Alma was sure they wouldn’t
but he laid the poison that Hilary so desperately seemed to want.
    As he began to pack up his gear he was aware of Hilary standing over him. She had
something in her hand and without looking up he knew what it was.
    ‘There’s no cost involved, Hilary,’ he said.
    ‘Well, I still need to pay you, Alma. You can’t come all this way for nothing.’
    He told her she could pay him when he caught something and not before.
    ‘No. I’m going to pay you now.’ She sounded firm. But then as she opened her purse
she seemed to linger as if she had forgotten why she’d opened it. She raised her
eyes and gave him a hopeful look and the penny dropped. Alma smiled.
    ‘There is another way,’ he said.
    Hilary’s was one of two portraits he could never get right. She couldn’t wait to
see what he’d drawn. She couldn’t wait to find out what he had seen. Her brimming
eagerness made him rush. Then he wouldn’t show her. Together they’d arrive at a decision
to start over and for her to sit back in her chair a little more and think of Jimmy
or vanilla ice cream.
    In the case of Victoria she complained that her body lacked figure, that her dress
bulged in all the wrong