Painted Love Letters

by Catherine Bateson

  ‘No, better not,’ she said, ‘it wouldn’t be right, you getting caught up in any flak.’

  When he’d gone. Nan announced that she was moving out of our house and into Badger’s.

  ‘I don’t believe you’re doing this,’ Mum said, ‘I don’t believe a woman of your age would do such a stupid thing.’

  ‘You can’t move,’ I said, ‘Nan, you can’t move.’

  ‘I hate going, Dave,’ she said to my father, ‘I know it just seems like the wrong time but I don’t think it is. I think you and Rhetta need to be together and I know Badger and I do. I won’t be far away. It’s just that I won’t be living here full-time.’

  ‘Why do you have to go?’ Mum demanded. ‘Just why? Tell me one good reason, and I don’t mean that nonsense about Dave and me needing time. We need you. Chrissie needs you. We need you here.’

  Mum slammed into her bedroom. We could hear her banging things on her dressing table. Then she came out waving her hairbrush around.

  ‘What right have you got to be happy,’ she shouted. ‘What right have you got to be making plans!’

  And she threw her hairbrush down. It bounced and landed at Nan’s feet.

  ‘You know I would give you anything,’ Nan said, ‘anything at all. If I could I’d take my own lungs out, but I can’t, I can’t.’ She walked up to my mother and then she took off the long string of amber she always wore and put it around my mother’s neck. I don’t think Mum even noticed because she was crying too hard and her hands were over her eyes.

  We did see Nan all the time. She dropped in nearly every day and we went over to her place too, and it was almost as if she hadn’t left except Mum wore the amber necklace all the time and seemed to soften a little as though it wasn’t only the hairbrush that had cracked that afternoon but also a casing she’d made around herself. Although she still worked at the bistro, because she said it kept her sane, she stopped working back-to-back shifts and weekends and was at home more often. Sometimes when I got home from school she’d be lying with Dad on the couch, not talking or watching television, just lying close and for a minute or two I’d forget everything and just be happy to see them like that.

  Nan bought Mum a new hairbrush, made of boar’s bristle with a wooden handle. It was the kind of hairbrush, Nan said, that would last you a lifetime, if you didn’t lose it somewhere. They were made in England and you could only buy them at David Jones. Mum had her hair cut because of the grease smell and the washing but she used Nan’s brush every night, first on me counting one hundred strokes and then on herself, when she’d take the amber necklace off and hang it around my neck so the brush wouldn’t get caught in it and pull it and maybe break it. I’d stand there counting the honey-coloured beads as my mother counted brushstrokes. I knew the amber was special because my grandfather, not Badger, had given Nan the necklace when they got engaged. He’d brought it back from the War. Amber was for eternity, Nan said, but she also pointed out the little lives that had been trapped in it, insect parts and fly wings, so I was never sure whether eternity was a good thing or not.

  Leprosy, Leonardo and Father Damien

  I knew these facts off by heart: Father Damien arrived in the leper’s colony of Kalaupapa in 1873, later he himself contracted leprosy and he died in 1889. I knew that leprosy often begins as a small dot in the palm of one’s hand. You shouldn’t call it leprosy, Mr Chapman said, it was really Hansen’s Disease and the fact that it was still called leprosy in our textbooks went to show you how behind Queensland was in the education system.

  I had a small red dot on my palm. I couldn’t remember it being there when we lived in Nurralloo. It wasn’t a freckle or a mole, it was a definite dot. It looked a little as though someone had jabbed with a red ballpoint pen or the sharp end of a compass, not hard enough for blood to bead on the surface, just hard enough for it to leak under my skin and form a pin prick red dot.

  At night I would wake screaming from dreams in which my fingers or my nose slowly crumbled. I wouldn’t even know it was happening and then in the dream I’d look down, casually, see myself in a mirror, and I’d realise in horror why the people in the street or the supermarket had backed away from me. Dad would come in when I screamed and hold me and rock me. He always asked what I had dreamt about but I never told him. It wasn’t fair to tell him about the leprosy dreams when his lungs were covered with real hot spots, cancerous cells that might be still multiplying themselves.

  I hated the chapter on Father Damien but I couldn’t stop reading it, over and over again. Leprosy starts with a tingling and then a numbness in the extremities, often the digits. Your fingers begin to rot. The book said that when Father Damien took confession, sometimes he had to hold his nose for the stench of rotting flesh. At first he slept out in the open, rather than share a hut with a leper, and he ate his food from a flat rock. I couldn’t understand how he could bear to eat. Fingers and toes fall off, noses crumble back into the face of the victim, and eventually, before you die, your whole body becomes numb to pain.

  There had been cases of leprosy in Australia, up north. There had been a leper’s colony in Queensland. There were still leper colonies in India. One of the problems with leprosy is that you feel no pain in your hardened skin, so you can burn yourself hideously and not know. I stuck pins in the thickened skin around my red dot, stuck them in harder and harder until I bled, just to make sure I could feel the sharp point going in. Some days I seemed to have to jab harder than other days. Some days I could hardly feel a thing.

  My mother’s hands were rough from washing the glasses at the bistro. You washed them with a little methylated spirits in the water so the glasses shone. She seemed to often burn herself, pulling things out from our oven. I asked her if a particularly ugly burn hurt and she said, ‘No, I hardly felt it when it happened and it still doesn’t hurt. Looks horrible though,’ and we both stared at the welt near her thumb.

  It was hard to tell if my original spot had grown larger, or whether the pin pricks made it seem larger. Sometimes I got a tingly feeling in my fingers, a little like pins and needles. It happened most often in the morning, when I woke up and it was usually in the left hand, the hand I tucked under my head when I went to sleep. I wondered if I should write my symptoms down, the way Dad was keeping a pain journal.

  I was really scared when my left hand ring finger went numb after the Friday sports afternoon. I went home and peered at my palm through the old magnifying glass I used to start small fires sometimes. The whirly lines on my skin looked huge and the dot was definitely not a freckle. It was not a little pimple, like the kind my mother called sweat pimples. It was not a mole. It wasn’t a scar. I could think of only one thing it could be …

  It takes ages to die of leprosy. That is one of the horrible things about it, gradually all of you thickens, and goes numb, the way my finger was. I was sad about that finger.

  Mum sometimes wore turquoise and lapis lazuli rings from India and I had tried one on and worn it for a whole weekend.

  It wasn’t possible that the rings, even though they came from India, could carry leprosy germs. And I hadn’t worn it on my ring finger anyway, but on my thumb.

  I found one of my mother’s old cotton gloves that she’d worn back when she’d tried to look after her hands. The idea was that you smeared moisturiser over your hands and then slept with the gloves on and when you woke up your hands were softer than a baby’s bottom. It was too hot, though to sleep with your hands in gloves, Mum said and anyway, what with the washing up at the bistro, hardly worth it.

  I didn’t think it was too hot. I put the left hand glove on and then I couldn’t see the hardening skin and the give-away red dot and no one else could, either.

  ‘Allergies,’ I told Mr Chapman at school and he didn’t question me any further.

  ‘Allergies,’ I told everyone in class, ‘I have this cream, see, and the glove helps it soak in. I have to wear it even in bed.’

  ‘Growing your fingernails’ Dad asked
at breakfast, ‘or is this a new fashion?’

  Mum was on morning shift at the bistro. While we were eating our Weet Bix she had been working already for three hours, serving bacon and eggs easy side over to the American business men who tipped so well .

  ‘Oh, you know,’ I said, tucking my gloved hand under the table, ‘just a school thing.’

  We had to write an essay called ‘Your Hero’ for Mr Chapman. I chose Father Damien. I said he was my hero because he had worked with the lepers even though he knew he would eventually get leprosy and die. I said he was my hero because he had died young and had kept working right up until his death. I wrote the essay with my gloved hand in my lap. I traced the picture of Father Damien from our history book and put it up in the top left hand corner of the paper. It was a picture from before he had leprosy. He wasn’t particularly handsome, his mouth was too big and he wore daggy glasses and clutched a crucifix in his hands.

  I wondered if it was really heroic to die when you didn’t have to. Was my father not heroic, because he didn’t have a choice about dying? Would he be more heroic if, instead of making art, he’d taken us all to live in Africa, where people starved every day? Would I be considered a hero, dying so young and terribly of the leprosy which must be slowly, very slowly, spreading from my left palm to the tips of my fingers?

  The more I thought about Father Damien, the more I began to dislike him. What made him think the lepers wanted to hear about God, anyway? If your fingertips had crumbled away and your nose had caved in, would you be that interested in praying? Would Dee still go to church if her father was dying? Why did you have to want to die before you were a hero?

  I didn’t take off my glove at all, even to wash my hand. It didn’t get dirty, so what was the point? Anyway, I didn’t want water on it, that might speed up the rotting process. I didn’t prod it anymore, either. I knew what was going on under the white, ladylike glove and it was terrible.

  I handed my essay on Father Damien in to Mr Chapman. I had included detailed descriptions of how at first he had slept in the open air to avoid the smell of decaying flesh but then he’d overcome his revulsion and even eaten with the lepers, eaten out of the same bowl with his bare fingers. And how he had washed the lepers’ sores, heedless of his own health.

  Most of the other kids did sporting heroes or movie stars. One kid even did their grand-dad, he’d been a soldier. Mr Chapman said my essay showed originality but he hoped next time I would choose a less morbid subject. He said, ‘Are you sure that’s just an allergy you have? You’ve been wearing that glove for an awfully long time, Chrissie’.

  ‘Washing up liquid,’ I said, ‘and even soap, really.’

  When I got home from school, Dad was sitting at the kitchen table.

  ‘Put the kettle on, Chrissie,’ he said, ‘and come and have a biscuit.’

  He’d put out some Iced Vo Vo’s and I scraped the pink off with my front teeth.

  ‘So how was school?’ Dad asked, sitting down next to me.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  I couldn’t think of anything we’d done that would interest him. ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘You must have done something,’ he said.

  ‘You know, stuff.’ He was sitting on my left hand side and every so often he seemed to look at my gloved hand. I hugged it between my knees and ate another biscuit quickly.

  ‘Chrissie,’ Dad said, ‘you would tell me if there was anything wrong, wouldn’t you?’

  I stared at him, ‘Wrong? What do you mean?’ Hadn’t he forgotten something even asking me that?

  ‘I meant at school,’ he said. ‘You’d tell me if there was something wrong at school.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong at school,’ I said, ‘nothing at all.’

  We sat quietly for a minute. The kitchen door was open and a breeze riffled through. Dad shivered but I turned my hot face towards it with relief.

  ‘I want to see your hand,’ Dad said suddenly, ‘come on Chrissie, take the glove off.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The glove, Chrissie, the glove comes off.’

  ‘No,’ I hugged my knees tighter together, ‘No, I can’t.’

  Dad grabbed my wrist and pulled. I grabbed the bottom of the kitchen chair with my hand and clung on but the glove slipped on the metal and vinyl and I could see, from Dad’s face, that the effort was hurting him so I let him yank my poor dead hand. He peeled the glove off and we both looked down at my hand as though it was a small, sick animal.

  It was just a hand. A pale hand with longer fingernails than its mate but no less perfect. The unblemished skin went right up the fingers and swept down the palm side in the whirls and patterns that made my fingerprints unique in the world. The compass prick marks had gone and so had the little red dot. I pinched the skin where my palm left off and my wrist began.

  ‘Ouch,’

  ‘What did you do that for,’ Dad asked.

  ‘Just checking’

  ‘Nice fingernails,’ Dad said, taking my hand and examining it, ‘they certainly have grown under that glove.’

  He turned my hand over, palm side up and before I could stop him, he kissed me right where the spot had been.

  ‘Dad!’ I said, snatching my hand away.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You might still get it you know,’

  ‘Get what Chrissie? Girl germs?’

  ‘Leprosy,’ I said, sitting on both my hands. ‘Leprosy,’ Dad said and then he leant back in his chair and laughed and laughed until he started to cough.

  ‘Oh Chrissie,’ he said, after I had made him sip a glass of water slowly, ‘my darling girl.’

  ‘Father Damien got it and there were cases in Queensland at the turn of the century. They still have it in India. People die of it, I don’t think that’s funny.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dad said, ‘but what made you think you had leprosy?’

  ‘There was this spot,’ I said, ‘honest, and that’s how it starts. And then my fingers went numb. And I had these nightmares that my nose had disappeared. It just made sense, okay?’

  Dad picked up the glove and threw it in the bin.

  ‘I don’t think we need that anymore,’ he said.

  I threw out my Father Damien project too, although I didn’t bother telling Dad.

  ‘Who is a hero of yours,’ I asked him later that evening. He was reading on the couch but he propped the book up on his chest to answer me.

  ‘Let’s see — Leonardo da Vinci, I’d say. Yes, Leonardo.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He was endlessly curious about the world. And not a bad artist either,’ Dad said. ‘He kept a notebook, a bit like your Nature study book, full of drawings of the way things worked, like the motion of waves, cloud formations, flowers — you name it, he stopped and looked at it, recorded it, wondered about it. He’s my hero. There’s a book of his drawings on my shelf, if you want to have a look.’

  I left a note on Mr Chapman’s table the next day. I wanted to clear up any confusion.

  Dear Mr Chapman, I wrote, I just want you to know that Father Damien is no longer my hero. I think dying on purpose is a waste. If I were a leper, I’d want someone to be finding a cure, like they should find a cure for cancer, not just pray for me. Leonardo da Vinci is really my hero. He would have found a cure, if he’d been born a bit later.

  Yours sincerely,

  Chrissie Grainger

  Mr Chapman passed me a note in return, at Little Lunch.

  Dear Chrissie,

  I think you have made an intelligent choice with Leonardo. Did you know he nearly invented the aeroplane? If you need to talk to me about anything at all, you know you always can.

  Yours sincerely,

  William Chapman.

  He came up to me in the playground and repeated his offer. I told him, thank you, that things were okay, really. I was swinging from the monkey bars, which I hadn’t been able to do because of the slippery glove, and he watched as I
swung across to the other side.

  ‘Allergy better then?’ he asked.

  ‘Turned out not to be one,’ I said, ‘just one of those mysterious things that go away after a while.’

  ‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘inconvenient wearing a glove all the time.’

  Not as inconvenient as having leprosy, I wanted to tell him, but didn’t say that either. I swung up on to the bars again and right across and back and across until the bell rang. My arms ached and my hands smelled metallic and rusty but I knew that by lunch time my arms would have forgotten the weight of my body and the desperate lurch from one bar to the next and I’d want to do it again, just because I could.

  Unfinished Business

  Nan said that sometimes people stay alive for ages longer than the doctors predict because there is still something they need to do, some unfinished business. Sometimes, she said, this was seeing someone they needed to say goodbye to, sometimes it was an event, like the birth of a child, or a marriage, which kept them living when, according to medical prognosis, they should have been dead. Nan reckoned that Dad’s exhibition was keeping him going.

  Mr Gable had come around with two of his helpers, minions, he called them and it sounded quite rude. He was Dad’s art dealer, a large moist man who wore flowered braces to hold up his large trousers. No one called him Mr Gable. Even his minions just called him Gable as though that was enough.

  ‘Gable,’ Dad said, ‘back from the States, eh?’

  ‘Dave, I heard the news. I came as soon as I could.’

  Gable put his arms around my father, dwarfing him in a bear hug. When he finally released Dad, Gable pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose and wiped his eyes. ‘We’ll put on a show,’ he said, ‘up all the prices so you can make some money out of the bastards.’

  ‘You’ll make the money.’

  ‘Not me, no Dave, forget it. Just the framing costs.’

  ‘Gable!’ Now it was Dad’s turn to fossick around for a hanky.

  Nan and I took Gable out to the shed and showed him the coffins.