‘What about the kid?’
‘No way,’ I said.
‘Not Chrissie,’ Dad said, ‘we don’t even know how tall she’ll get.’
‘What I want,’ I said, ‘are flowers at the funeral.’
‘Flowers are pretty,’ Bodhi said, setting his snakes dancing again.
‘Waste of money,’ Dad said. ‘We can paint flowers on the coffin.’
‘I only want my bunch.’
It felt to me that a funeral wasn’t a funeral without one bunch of flowers, just like a wedding wouldn’t be a wedding. Or maybe I had a picture of myself laying the flowers gently on the coffin. I could see the bunch of flowers, kind of pathetic, kind of brave, which was how I felt most of the time. The flowers and my hand were the only things I could see. I couldn’t imagine how my father would go from discussing the coffin with Bodhi to actually lying in it, not breathing any more.
‘A little bunch wouldn’t hurt,’ Bodhi said. ‘She’s just a kid, Davo, give her a little bunch of flowers, man, they’re not going to change the world. You’ve got to flow with these things, you’ve got to know that while you’re the main dude in all this, it’s the old woman’s and the kid’s gig. You won’t be there for the final party, man.’
‘Okay, okay,’ Dad said. ‘Get the book, Chrissie.’ I fetched the funeral book and I crossed out ‘no flowers’ and put in ‘Chrissie’s flowers only.’
‘Cool,’ Bodhi said examining the notebook, ‘fantastic idea, man. I reckon these should be marketed. Everyone should have a funeral plan. My old woman had a birth plan, you know, for when Tibet came along. But it all went to hell. Sari just couldn’t embrace the pain. Now, when do you want these by?’
‘Soon,’ Dad said grimacing, ‘make it sooner, rather than later.’
‘It’s a deal. I’ll start getting them knocked up right away.’
It didn’t take Bodhi long — he delivered two new coffins to our house within a couple of weeks. They came just before I left for school one morning and Dad went out to take delivery, wearing a new plaid dressing gown. This time a year ago, he’d have just wrapped himself in one of Mum’s sarongs and sauntered out, a cup of tea steaming in one hand, a cigarette burning in the other.
Bodhi and his mate put the coffins in the shed where Mum had let me put up a table tennis table we’d bought cheaply at a farm clearance sale. It sat there, unused. I felt it called a still-unknown friend to me. But the coffins went on the table tennis table. Dad ran a finger along the surface. ‘Great,’ he said, and, ‘like the handles.’
The handles were made from heavy rope and the coffin itself was a pale untreated pine. I had not wanted to see them arrive. I had rather hoped that Bodhi would turn out to be unreliable and the coffins would never arrive. If I thought of coffins, along with my hand, and the bunch of flowers, I saw something dark and lustrous, like a grand piano. That was the kind I expected.
‘Well there you are, Davo, I’m thinking of advertising them, you know. So when you get them painted, give us a tinkle and I’ll come over with the camera, if you don’t mind.’
‘Not at all,’ Dad said, ‘In fact, if they look okay, I’ll put them in the show that’s coming up, if … well if.’
‘Yeah, sure. Great idea, man. Embrace it, Davo, embrace it.’
Dad started painting that morning. I got to school late because I had to help him set up — not that I told anyone that. I was just beginning to find my way around the city school and I didn’t want weird stories about my family spoiling things.
Still, I was curious, so the first thing I did when I got home was check out the coffin. Dad had already painted the sides in an abstract pattern of what could have almost been footprints, footprints in water, though, not sand or earth. It was good. You could look at it and know it was David Grainger’s work, the way you have to with art. They were the same colours he used in his etchings, and with the same kind of shapes that made you think of real things, even though they themselves weren’t what had been painted.
‘What do you think? Do you like it?’ Dad asked that evening.
‘Yeah, yeah I do,’ I said. ‘I reckon it’s coming along well.’
He did the top next, sort of stick figures in a big space of green moving into red, moving into black, so that I thought of how when you live in the country the sky’s always huge and the stars don’t go anywhere near filling all that darkness. The coffin reminded me of how small I’d felt looking up at the country sky and I knew those figures, if they were people, felt the same way about the colours Dad had used. They were so big and deep they overwhelmed the little clay-coloured dots and dashes who might have been walking through them.
The painting made me cry in the night. It made me wish we were the kind of family who went to church. I wanted to say a prayer to a god somewhere, but I didn’t know how, and I didn’t feel I could ask either Mum or Dad what you did about that.
Instead I asked Dee Browning at school. Dee wasn’t my friend or anything, she was just this girl I hung around with even though I wasn’t sure I liked her. She was bigger and older than me and she’d been kept down, not once, but twice. The teachers said Dee was slow, although she looked fast and sharp in her leather-look mini and her nearly high-heeled sandals. Dee went to church, I knew, because she wore a little silver medal of the Virgin Mary cradling a bundle which was the baby Jesus.
‘Dee, can anyone go to your church?’ I asked at snack time. We were standing on the edge of the oval and Dee was watching the boys pass a football back and forth. ‘You know, suppose you weren’t really sure what you were, could you just kind of front up and they’d let you in?’
Dee looked down at me. She had a way of doing that. It made me feel small and drab. She blinked and her eyelashes fluttered blue.
‘Well, of course, Chrissie, the church is open to all Jesus’s little children.’
‘Yeah, but what about me?’
‘You? I don’t know about you. Have you been christened?’
I shook my head. I wasn’t really sure, but it seemed unlikely.
‘Well, I’d have to ask my mother, but I don’t think they’d kick you out.’
Dad started on Mum’s coffin. It was really different, though the same things were there, ‘motifs’, Dad said. The footsteps didn’t walk though, they skipped through a yellow-pinkness as though they were dancing and the colour reminded me of the roses from one of the gardens we’d had. When I told Dad he nodded in a pleased way.
‘Taylor Street,’ he said, ‘your mum loved that garden.’
Dee said that I could go to church with her that Sunday if I wanted but I’d have to be up early, and then afterwards I could go home with her for Sunday lunch. Her mum made roast lamb, she said, and her sisters came with their babies. It was not something I would normally feel comfortable doing but it seemed to be part of the same deal, so I asked Mum, leaving out the church business and she said yes, of course. I felt bad because she was pleased I’d made a friend and Dee wasn’t quite that.
For the top of Mum’s coffin, Dad used gold paint and the little dots and dashes from his coffin had become swirling letters, except you couldn’t read what they said, they just swirled and looped as though you should be able to. It was so beautiful it made my whole chest ache and, although I didn’t really want to look at it, a part of me couldn’t stop — like overhearing a conversation you shouldn’t listen to, but your feet won’t move you away and down the hall. It was a love letter my father had written to my mother, and only she’d be able to read it properly.
I didn’t tell Mum that when I found her crying in the kitchen, holding a tea towel over her mouth. I didn’t tell her because she said she was crying because she’d burnt her hand at work, and when I looked, the burn was there, a large welt across her wrist. I found the first aid kit and put burn cream on it for her and we didn’t talk about the coffins in the shed.
I went to church with Dee, her mother and her little brother. I got up when they got up, I knelt down when they knelt down, I shared Dee�
��s Bible and her hymn book and I watched her whole family go to the front of the church for Communion. I said sorry to God for what I had said when we first came to Brisbane, that first night. And then I tried to pray, not just for Dad but the fourteen men sealed under the Box Flat coal mine, and their kids if they had any. It didn’t make me feel better. Maybe you had to practise to get it right.
I managed to answer all Mrs Browning’s questions over lunch without once saying about Dad’s cancer. I talked about his exhibition and made it sound like we’d moved from the country to the city so he could work on it. I made everything sound pink and yellow. I saw myself in a mirror that hung on their dining room wall, and I looked smoothed out and rosy, as though I were a completely different person.
Later, Dee walked me home. She wanted to see my bedroom but I knew it wouldn’t interest her when she saw it. I didn’t have posters of pop groups stuck on the walls. I didn’t have an autographed photo of anyone from any televison programme, and my wardrobe couldn’t rival her collection of mini skirts and little bubble tops. So I took her into the backyard where at least there was the mango tree to climb. She wouldn’t though, because she didn’t want to scratch her legs, so I thought of the only other thing I could offer.
‘Table tennis?’
‘Oh yeah. That’d be neat. I haven’t played table tennis since we went on holidays. I was really good at it,’ Dee replied.
I opened the shed door and remembered. The coffins were both finished, side by side on the table in full sight.
Dee took a step forward and then stopped, her eyes widening.
‘Maybe it isn’t such a great idea,’ I said desperately, ‘we could do something else.’
It was too late.
Dee shrieked a cockatoo shriek and then she turned on me, ‘Are you the Addams family or something! That’s disgusting! You must be vampires. Who’s in them, Chrissie, who’s in them? Can I have a closer look?’
‘No.’ I said, pushing at her to get her out of the shed, ‘No. My father doesn’t like people looking at them. He’s an artist, I told you. It’s just a new line of work.’
‘That’s so spooky. I bet you dream of them at night. I bet you dream of vampires coming to get you. I couldn’t sleep if I were you. Not with vampires and coffins in the shed. God, it’s so gruesome. Can I have a proper look?’
‘No,’ I managed to shove her right out and then I shut the door. ‘I think you’d better go home now Dee, there’s nothing to do round here, anyway.’
‘I’m going all right. I don’t want to hang round with a freaky vampire. You might bite my neck,’ and she tilted her head as though to offer me a better look at her long, tanned neck.
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘watch out!’ and I lunged at her, baring my teeth.
She told the whole class. I knew she would. I’d have told if I’d been her. All I could do was lift my head a little higher and try not to look like the kind of girl who would have coffins in her shed, even though I was from the country and my father was an artist. I said in the clear confident voice Dad had taught me to use for bluffing at poker, that Dee was saying that just because she’d lost at table tennis and wasn’t that typical. She was such a poor loser and spiteful. And I looked at them with my best bluffer’s face.
‘Who’d keep coffins in a shed?’ I said, and shook my head, ‘Gosh, Dee, what have you been smoking?’
I told Dee in front of everyone that lying was a sin, and she should know she’d go to Hell and burn forever. I said if you wanted gruesome, you should see the picture Dee had in her kitchen of Jesus with his chest open and blood seeping down.
We fought it out on the tan bark, scratching, kicking and pulling each other’s hair with the rest of the kids cheering us on, until Mr Chapman came and broke it up. My face looked as though I’d put it too close to a feral cat but Dee’s top lip was already swelling. As we were hauled off to the headmaster’s office I looked down at my still clenched right hand and I wanted to shout a big victory whoop, high and wild enough to crack the windows. It was so good to feel my reliable heart pumping and my clean lungs grabbing all that good air.
Oysters
I couldn’t do art at my new school the summer my father lay on the couch, slowly dying. I went to class and I dabbed away at sponge paintings, had a go at monoprints and I drew the cylinder shapes Ms Raskill put on the bench in the art room, but I couldn’t do anything right. It wasn’t like that at Nurralloo with Miss Hopkins. She thought Dad was a weird old hippy who couldn’t draw to save his life. She liked landscapes with gum trees in them that looked like real gum trees.
Pine Hills was different. Ms Raskill knew David Grainger’s work. She attended gallery openings.
‘Christine Grainger,’ she said. ‘Well, well. We will be expecting great things of you.’ She said that at the first art class and I knew I would never be able to paint in her art room, ever.
I would stand at my easel while she played the class music to create the right creative ambience and I would pick up my leaden paintbrush. Nothing worked. It was as though the Country Chrissie from Nurralloo whose paintings used to sing with colour was dead. In her place was City Chrissie, sorry – Christine – who killed a painting even before it got from her head to the paper in front of her.
‘Oh well, Christine, we can’t all inherit the right genes, can we? Conception is a DNA lottery. I’m sure you take after your mother. She must be creative in her own right. What does she do, Christine?’
I wasn’t going to tell Ms Raskill that my mother was waitressing at the Queen Victoria Hotel Bistro so I shrugged.
‘No need to be sulky, Christine,’ she said sharply, ‘I mark on attitude, you know. One has to. Can’t expect a class of budding Picassos at Pine Hills.’
I didn’t feel like painting at home, either. I couldn’t walk in from school and go to my room and take out the box of paint tubes Dad had given me for my birthday while he lay on the couch watching the telly, too weak to walk the length of the house to the little sun room Mum had set up as a temporary studio.
I had my Nature Journal. We did Environmental Studies with Mr Chapman. Like my Dad, Mr Chapman was a smoker, so we did a lot of nature walks down to the creek. He would light up, inhale deeply and point to the native grasses that had been planted, the tadpoles just hatched and the mozzie wrigglers they ate. We had to keep a Nature Journal to record our observations and yes, he said when I asked, of course you can draw in it, Chrissie. This is your book, your observations.
I wanted to tell him about smoking, but I didn’t want to tell him about Dad, so I shut up and just moved downwind of his smoke.
I worked so hard on my Nature Journal, Dee said I was meeting boys at the creek.
‘Better watch yourself, Chrissie Grainger, you’ll go to Hell if you do things at the creek.’
‘What things?’ I asked.
I still hung around with Dee, not because I wanted to, but because she was there. We were stuck with each other because there was no one else.
‘Get off the grass. You know what I mean — kissing. Well, kissing isn’t so bad. Letting boys see your knickers, letting them touch you. That’s bad!’
‘I’m working on my Nature Journal,’ I said, ‘I’m not down there with a boy. I don’t want to be there with a boy.’
‘Then you must be down there smoking.’
‘I don’t smoke,’ I said, shoving my fist in my pocket.
‘Show us the journal then.’
She examined the smudged pages carefully, slowly reading my comments aloud.
‘Frog spawn! Gross! That’s so disgusting!’
‘If you smoke,’ I said, ‘your lungs turn to pulpy sponges and when they squeeze them, black stuff oozes out.’
‘You’re so weird, Chrissie. I was talking about frogspawn, not smoking. Hey, this one’s grouse. I really like this.’
She pointed to a page on which I’d drawn a little Willy Wagtail balancing on a thin twig.
‘It’s cute.’
‘You can have it if you want?’ I said.
‘Really? Do you really mean it? I’ll get Dad to frame it if you let me have it.’
I tore out the page for her and after she had carefully put it between the pages of her maths book, she linked her arm through mine.
‘Tell you what, Chrissie, why don’t you come to my place this arvo? Mum’s taken Matthew to the dentist. Dad’ll be home, but he doesn’t care what I do.’
‘I don’t know. I said I’d be straight home.’
‘So, you can ring from my place.’
Dee’s house was big and although she didn’t have a dog or a vegie garden of her own, she had a trampoline in the backyard and a basketball hoop was attached to one side of the double garage.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘so long as I can have a go on the trampoline.’
‘Oh, that’s so boring,’ Dee said, ‘I want to show you my bedroom.’
‘I’ve seen your bedroom, Dee.’
‘Only once. We can play some music. I’ve got a new cassette player.’
‘After I have a go on the trampoline.’
It took Dad fifteen rings to answer the phone.
‘Hey,’ I said, in my bright public voice, ‘how are things going?’
‘Watching a Rock Hudson movie. Where are you?’
‘I’m at Dee’s, okay? I’ll be home in a little while.’
‘Whatever,’ Dad said. He sounded tired. ‘Walk straight home, okay, baby? And don’t talk to strangers.’
Dee was sprawled next to her father, watching a game show.
‘Is it cool?’ she asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘Hey Puss,’ her dad said as she slid off, ‘get us another can before you disappear, right?’
‘Don’t you reckon my dad’s good looking?’ she said when we were in her pink and white bedroom, ‘he’s a bit of a hunk, eh?’
‘I suppose. If you like moustaches.’
‘I love moustaches,’ Dee said opening the top drawer of her white pine dressing table. ‘Look, I’ll paint your fingernails, for you. I’ve got this new colour, Miss Pearl’
Painted Love Letters Page 2