Excerpt from Paint Your Wife by Lloyd Jones, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

On our trip to see my father, Dougie and I spent a night in Melbourne and boarded a train the next day. The whole way there my head was turned by what was galloping past the window. I remember feeling some confusion at a landscape that didn't contain edges or rises. I remember thinking that it would be difficult to just disappear into a landscape like this one, with everything so lightly tethered, even the scrub, none of which appeared to be deeply rooted. The odd spooked tree looked like a woman's hair roller. The trouble my father had gone to in order to escape my mother and me lay outside the train window, bending into the windless distance. And yet there were also these postcards hinting at the future. Otherwise, why bother? Why would he keep up the contact?

On the train I thought back to the last day we did anything together as father and son; Frank had taken me and Dougie diving. Later I would realise he had an ulterior motive for the trip out to the coast, that he was measuring his escape route. But at the time there was no way of knowing what he had planned. I did know about the woman from Wages—that was another secret I had recently shared with Dougie, though no one else in the world knew. In the car we sat together and stared at the back of my father's head with all its walled-up life that I wasn't supposed to know about. Near the beach the wheels hit the loose metal. Clouds of white dust were sucked back past our window. Frank chopped down a gear. We had left the road now and we could hear bits of driftwood snapping at the chassis. I was aware of Dougie's extreme discomfort.

He'd never ridden in a car like this one, that did the things that this one did, or that had a hairy-shouldered driver like Frank. Doug's own father worked in sales, and NE Paints had given him a car which he washed and polished every weekend. Mr Monroe would never treat his car the way Frank was thrashing our family car across the gravel and driftwood. At this rate if he didn't stop soon we'd end up in the sea. Doug was holding on to a roof strap. His mouth dropped open, his face bailed up with unasked questions and heaving fright. There was some more snapping of wood, a final growl from the motor and we stopped. A cold-looking sea bulged and crashed ashore and my father said, 'This'll do us.'

Doug and I were in no hurry to climb into our wetsuits, though as I remember, I didn't have a wetsuit. I had surf shorts and a woollen jersey with sawn-off arms. In the chilly air we stood about hugging ourselves.

'I have news for you, boys. You have to actually go out to where the crays are. They don't come to you. Any objections. Harry?'

'Nope.'

'Doug? How about you, son?'

'Nope.'

You sure? You don't look sure.'

'I'm sure.'

'What about you Harry? You too, sunshine? You haven't said much. We all sure about this thing?'

Down on the wet shingle there were last-minute instructions. Crays don't have ears but my father was saying that it helps to think that they do and that you want to pick them up just behind the ears. 'Just pick it up as you would a hairbrush off a dresser table.' We watched him tighten his huge lead belt. 'One last thing. This one is for you, Douglas. What colour is a cray underwater?'

'Orange.'

'Harry?'

'Red?'

'You're both wrong. A cray is kelp-coloured. Think of yourselves looking for an old black sock under your bed. You ought to know about that, Harry.'

The information was confusing: socks, hairbrushes, crustaceans with ears. 'Okay,' he said, wading forward in his flippers. 'Let's go and rob a bank.'

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.