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

That night we rolled out our sleeping bags in the sitting room. Dougie fell asleep quickly. For a while I lay there in the humming dark listening to the distant murmur of voices from the bedroom. It wasn't the hale and hearty voice we'd been treated to all evening; it was low, serious, slightly menacing. Once I thought I heard my mother's name spoken. As I strained to hear more the voices fell silent as if they had just worked out that they could be heard. I must have dozed off after that. When I woke it was still dark. I heard a door open, the flyscreen door smack back, a moment later the car engine start. And in its low idling departure I fell back to sleep.

We woke late. In the kitchen there was a note from Cynthia. We were to help ourselves to whatever we could find in the fridge.

Dougie was frying eggs when I came out of the shower. He asked me if I wanted bacon.

Nope,' I said. 'We're going.'

'Now?'

'Now. Pack up. We're going. There's a train at eleven. I rang up while you were asleep.'

'What about your dad?' asked Dougie, the fish slice in his hand, eggs sizzling away.

'What about him?' I remember enjoying that tone of voice. It sounded hard, unforgiving; I liked the effect it had.

Later, as we hurried like fugitives for the station and even as we boarded the train, and later too, with the desert flashing in the windows, all I felt was relief. None of this was planned. I wasn't after revenge. It was more self-serving than that; I'd got what I was after. I would leave London the same way in a few years' time. It was necessary to go there for all kinds of reasons to do with origins and curiosity. But none of that had to stick. None of it had to last. With Frank I felt like I'd removed a thorn from my side. I quite liked Cynthia, though once I was back home I was careful not to mention her to my mother. It would be easier on her, I thought, to tell her that Frank was living alone and had turned bitter.


I had a short wait in Sydney for the connection to Wellington. In the lounge I fell in with a young couple (he was a roofing contractor, she was a librarian) waiting for a series of flights to Murmansk where they would take delivery of two orphaned babies. What a swift change of fortune for all concerned! The roofing contractor sat in his jeans drumming his fingers over his thighs. I could see baby stuff sticking out of his wife's carry-on luggage. Those Russian babies would grow up between goalposts surrounded by hills and ocean, and in twenty years' time or so I imagined there would be a journey up to the Arctic Circle where they would arrive as foreigners but with some inside knowledge of fruit recognising its husk.

In London this time I'd come away with a sense that to be from somewhere, anywhere, was suddenly old hat. It didn't really matter any more. The faces in the street. The Italian, French and Slavic names I read in the newspapers turning out for English football clubs. The crappy food I ate in any number of so-called ethnic restaurants. London has a way of putting everything through a common strainer.

But when we flew across the Tasman in the dead of night I did feel I was from somewhere. I felt it keenly when the plane dipped its wing and seemed to take aim at a tiny cluster of lights huddling together in the immensity of the night. It was after midnight, no cars on the road, not another soul, just me and the taxi driver in his woollen v-neck, a plastic deodoriser in the form of a Hindu deity on the dash.

The thing about going away and coming back again is how much your own life has changed. It is an illusion of course, but this is what you leave the terminal with, and how little the world you left behind two weeks ago has altered. Things are out of whack. Your smile is sunnier than others'. Even the way you walk looks slightly expansive, which is to say, put on. The signs are all there. You have been out in the world.

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.