Painted Love Letters

by Catherine Bateson

  ‘Dear God,’ he said, ‘they are beautiful. Dave’s sure he wants to go in his?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s what it’s for. That’s what he did it for.’

  ‘To face death,’ Nan said. ‘To be ready for it!’

  Gable dusted an old crate and sat down, pulling up his pant legs first, so they wouldn’t crease. ‘Is it that close?’ he asked.

  Nan pulled up a second crate. I leant against the table tennis table. I knew all this off by heart. My vocabulary had increased. I knew words like secondaries and metastasise. I knew the names of bits of the body which had never figured in our human body lessons at school: the lymph glands and the pancreas. Most of all, I knew about lungs.

  ‘They’ve stopped chemo,’ Nan said, ‘there’s no point. He’s started morphine. He wants to die at home, not in hospital. Marijuana helps, to a degree. It stops the nausea, promotes appetite. Sources tell me other drug therapies may be more effective.’

  Gable looked at me sharply and tipped his head towards me.

  ‘I am allowed to hear anything I want to hear,’ I said, ‘it’s the agreement.’

  ‘Very unorthodox, very Dave,’ he muttered, ‘I take it,’ he said to Nan, ‘if I understand correctly, you’re talking about heroin?’

  Nan nodded, ‘There’s a rumour it’s very effective.’

  ‘Well anything can be obtained,’ Gable said frowning, ‘but it’s costly.’

  ‘Money,’ Nan waved, ‘that’s in hand. I’ve sold my house. Badger and I get along quite well in his flat. And when this is all over, we’re going to India to meet a yoga master.’

  ‘Badger?’

  ‘Badger is her lover,’ I said crossly. Lover was a word I had recently learned. It sounded more dignified than boyfriend and less permanent than husband. I hated all this talk about heroin. We’d heard about it at school. There was a book, the diary of a young girl who became hooked and couldn’t get off. We all took turns reading it. You could get sick from withdrawing. You sweated and itched and your teeth fell out. Then there was the other problem that it was illegal and we could all be put in jail. And you had to inject it, sometimes in your eyeball because you couldn’t find the veins in your arm.

  ‘Ah,’ Gable stood up, ‘of course. Well, you must let me know if there’s anything at all I can do, short of drug dealing.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Nan said, ‘we’ll keep you informed.’

  ‘I um, wouldn’t say anything at school about this,’ Gable said to me.

  ‘I don’t,’ I told him, picking my cuticles, ‘it’s in the agreement.’

  ‘Of course. Of course.’

  There were too many things not to say at school, drugs was only one of them. I didn’t say the cancer word at all, I didn’t say secondaries or mestastsise or pancreas, I didn’t say pain, I didn’t say dying. I didn’t talk about the euthanasia debate that was currently a nightly show at home. I didn’t say that my mother went to work every day because, she told me, it gave her a normal perspective on life and that’s why I should go to school, too. Just to learn that everyone in the world wasn’t dying. Just to learn that everyone in the world was thinking and talking about stuff other than pain management, legal and otherwise, death and when to die, legal or otherwise.

  Dad’s theory, which he ran past Bodhi, now a regular visitor, was that he’d simply overdose himself.

  ‘I’ve never tried smack,’ Bodhi said, ‘too scared, man, but I reckon I would, in your position Dave.’

  ‘I just want to get the show out of the way,’ Dad said, ‘I don’t want anything to happen to stuff it up. Gable’s terms for the show are very generous. If enough sells Rhetta won’t have to work anymore in that stupid job.’

  ‘I don’t have to now,’ Mum said, ‘I want to, Dave. I actually find I quite like it. It’s about giving people value for money. You see,’ she said turning to Bodhi, ‘the Queen Victoria is a top international hotel. The bistro does room service, breakfasts. We get all sorts of visitors, there are glimpses of the world. It was snowing yesterday in Missouri. Can you beat that? It was snowing and this guy, a business man, had just rung his family and the ranch, he actually owns a ranch, was snowed in.’

  ‘Wow,’ Bodhi fanned himself, ‘that’s something isn’t it?’

  ‘I wish we’d been able to travel, Rhetta,’ Dad said, ‘I wanted to take you to Paris.’

  They held hands on top of the dining table. That was what talk did these days — circled around and through hopes and dreams and death. One minute it seemed just as though we were in a television debate, coolly arguing the pros and cons of getting involved in hard drugs for pain relief. Why was the medical profession so cowardly? Why was the government a pack of no-hopers who promoted sleazy drug dealing in back alleys with nameless Mr Bigs laundering their money while in school yards toothless dealers conned kids into having their first hit? I loved the idea of someone washing their money. I thought of taking garbage bags of it to the laundromat, the way we had to when the washing machine broke down. All those dollar bills emerging clean and crisp from the dryer. Then just as I had got over that image, the conversation would shift and we’d be in Dad and Mum’s private space of regret and goodbye and we’d have to work out whether or not to leave the room, go and make another cup of tea or put a record on or just go on talking as though they could do that in public and we were cool about it.

  Nan was cool about it, often. She’d sometimes get up and put her arms around both of them and just stand there. Bodhi claimed he could sometimes see her aura. It was all purply and blue, he said, which indicated she was a higher being.

  ‘Not me,’ Nan said, ‘I have done everything too late. I’ll need a few more lives to get it right.’

  I learnt to try to look at my parents as though they were actors on television. If I pretended I didn’t really know them, that this was a drama I was just watching, I could get through their private moments without crying.

  Mum said I was growing up too fast. She said I should be in Girl Guides or learning ballet or going horse riding instead of always shadowing their talk, instead of always being involved. She said there was something to be said for the normal nuclear family where no one talked about anything and nothing was said. She said I’d regret all this later, expensively, to some shrink.

  Nan said I was growing up at my own rate and that was dictated by all sorts of things, not only external events but internal consciousness. She said the cycles of life and death are muddled over in the West post-industrial capitalist society. She said in an age when babies were plucked from the womb so that an obstetrician could go to golf, what could we expect but a sanitised death?

  Mum said I hadn’t been plucked from her womb. She had me at home with only natural muscle relaxants and that she was equally prepared for Dave to die at home, too, if it came to that. Dad said he wasn’t doing anything for the moment, just putting one foot in front of the other, just getting by one day at a time, thank you.

  I knew he was waiting for the exhibition and I was scared. The exhibition would happen. Gable had printed all the invitations. He had unearthed old prints of Dad’s from his gallery storeroom and our shed. He brought round stuff for Dave to date and sign. He looked at the work Dad had done since his diagnosis — how many months ago? The new stuff was black and white, like x-rays. It was full of shadows, just like Dad said his lungs were. He was mapping the disease’s progress, he said, in his own way. Only the two coffins gleamed, coloured and beautiful, the luminous surfaces begging your fingers to stray, to wander. Gable cried, seeing the work. He muttered words like bare, honest, confronting but what he meant was death. We all knew that.

  Every day brought the exhibition opening closer. And no one else seemed to know that that’s when it would all be over. I dreamed of ways to postpone the opening. I thought of bomb scares, setting off the fire alarms. I thought of getting really sick, maybe being run over. Then they’d put it off while I was in hospital. They’d have to put it off, Dad wouldn’t let th
e exhibition open without me.

  Nan said, ‘It’s not up to you to decide, Chrissie. It may not even be up to your father. These things happen in their own time, the way birth does.’

  I said, ‘I don’t know how to say good-bye.’

  ‘You will, when you have to.’

  I was sick of it all, too. I hated this waiting. We were all waiting. The exhibition bustle disguised it a little. Mum’s work pretended it wasn’t happening. School went on, although they must have known by now and no one pulled me up for dreaming in class or spending the lunch hour in the library. I longed for Dad to die so we could all get on with the rest of our lives. At the same time I didn’t want him to, I couldn’t bear the thought of waking up one day and him not being in the kitchen, taking his first tablet. I couldn’t understand how we could go on without his gaunt smile, his fierce eyes.

  Some nights Mum came and slept in my room. Or she lay there, rather than sleeping. Sometimes we talked or cried quietly and held hands. I’d go to sleep like that, holding her hand or her holding mine, and when I’d wake up I’d be surprised to find my hand under my cheek.

  Other people died, J R R Tolkein, who wrote Lord of the Rings died. W H Auden, a poet in England died. Eighteen people died in the Snowy Mountains. They were all old. They were on a pensioners’ bus tour of the region. Nan and Badger were pensioners but they kept on living while Dad grew greyer as though the cancer had entered his blood and settled there like ash.

  The exhibition was hung. Mum took a week off work so she could drive Dad in and out and help him supervise. Suddenly he seemed more energetic. He talked about the work. Seeing it all in one place made him see it again, he said, and it wasn’t bad, not bad.

  ‘If I had more time,’ he said but he got out his sketch book anyway and his charcoal and one day he said he felt well enough to show me how to make a lino print. I looked up the word remission in the dictionary and wondered.

  I thought of miracles and the power of prayer and those little candles that flickered underneath the statue of Mary in Dee’s church. I hadn’t lit a candle but maybe someone had, maybe even Dee had, because Dee knew now, everyone did. Maybe Dee’s mum lit one, maybe she had asked God on my behalf.

  ‘People,’ Mum said carefully the night before the exhibition opened when we were holding hands in our beds, ‘people sometimes get a surge of energy before they die. Like a second wind when you’re running, or like when you’re really tired but you stay up to watch the end of the movie on television and suddenly you’re not so tired? As though your body has found a reserve it didn’t know it had.’

  I didn’t want to hear though, and I let my hand drop from hers as though I had just suddenly fallen asleep.

  Dad walked into the exhibition opening and everyone there clapped and cheered. If it hadn’t been for the coffins, maybe, or the strange x-ray prints, you might not have thought he was sick. You might have thought he was just older than he really was, maybe, or very tired. Nan, Badger and I stayed only a little while. Just long enough to see that everyone did love him so much and to show off my special exhibition dress. Then they took me to dinner with their Italian class to Mama Lucia’s and I learnt how to say ‘a little more, please’ in Italian and I swirled the spaghetti around my fork the way Nan and Badger did. We ate tartuffo icecreams for dessert and the hot splurt of liquid from the centre cherry surprised me so much I got the hiccups and had to drink water backwards.

  I stayed the night on a folding up bed at Badger’s — well it was really Badger and Nan’s but the only bit of Nan you could see were some photos she’d put around the little lounge room and the fresh flowers. The flat was down by the river at West End and the neighbours played some strange hectic music which Badger told me was bazouki music from Greece. Huge cockroaches flew in from the outside trees and Nan wouldn’t let anyone step on them. She just swept them outside, and when they’d recovered, they flew right back in.

  I was scared one would land on me while I slept so I pulled the sheet up over my head even though Nan said they only came in after the light. I slept well. I knew my father would live. I knew he was in remission. It was a good word, remission. It meant that the cancer had halted, cells were no longer multiplying in his body. The hot spots had retreated and he would have time now to go on with his work. He would look old for a while. I knew that. It would take time for him to recover properly but he would. We had all seen him drinking and laughing last night, forget that he leaned a little on my mother, forget that he couldn’t call across the room to a friend, forget the coffins resting together. Remember only that he walked in himself, that a couple of days before he had helped me do a lino print of one of my drawings. Remember that he had eaten breakfast every day for a week.

  My father died two days later and I couldn’t forgive him.

  The Bougainvillea

  The lino print we made together hung on my bedroom wall and when I looked at it, I could hear my father’s voice.

  ‘Don’t forget it costs just as much time and money to make a bad print as it does to make a good one; start small, Chrissie.’

  We used my frog drawing from my Nature Journal and Dad showed me how to place the drawing on the light box, how to make it simpler, reducing the details to a few bold lines which shouted frog! at you, even though bits of it were missing.

  I inked up the lino with the sticky printer’s ink. I laid the thick damp paper over the block and starting from the top left-hand corner, I finally rubbed the paper all over with the back of a clean wooden spoon and then lifted the paper carefully off the block.

  The frog looked as though he was about to leap out of the picture and sometimes that made me cry. My father had shuffled slowly into his death. In the end, the only bit of him which had remained recognisable as Dave, were his eyes, still fiercely blue in the bones of his face.

  I didn’t know what to do with myself now it was over. I couldn’t go to school and sit through the long day there. I couldn’t bear the kids watching me. I couldn’t bear knowing their fathers were all alive, that their fathers would walk into their homes at six o’clock or half past, shout out, ‘where’s my girl?’ and spin their daughters round in a flurry of love.

  I was too angry to go to school. I slouched around, following my mother as she cleaned up the house, crazily washing everything.

  ‘He didn’t have the plague, you know,’ I shouted at her when I caught her mopping down the studio with disinfectant.

  I didn’t go to the funeral.

  ‘I don’t want to see the coffin,’ I said, ‘it’s just going to be burnt. All that work. He shouldn’t have bothered painting it. He shouldn’t have wasted his time. He should never have smoked.’

  ‘You need to go,’ Mum said, ‘otherwise you won’t remember he is dead. And what about your flowers?’

  ‘He didn’t want flowers. Donate the money to cancer research — look it’s in the notebook.’ Mum ignored the notebook I held out, ‘You need to see the completion of things. You have to accept it, Chrissie.’

  ‘You can’t make me go. You’ll have to drag me every step of the way.’

  ‘I don’t think she should go,’ Nan said, taking the notebook away, ‘I think she’s seen enough, Rhetta, to remember that he’s dead.’

  Badger took me to a video arcade instead. While they were burning my father’s coffin, I was racing my Space Speedster through enemy territory — dodging alien assassins and asteroids. Every time I shot another one to smithereens, I’d feel a second of relief, as though I had killed part of my own sadness. Beside me Badger flew a Boeing and landed in O’Hare airport in America under difficult weather conditions. He said the Boeing was the hardest to land. When I had written up my name in the top scores, we swapped and I crashed a Cesna in heavy fog.

  Gable said we needed to have a memorial service; there were too many people who had known and loved Dad to deny them the right to mourn. Mum said she thought that was a marketing decision on Gable’s part. Nan said marketing decision or not
she agreed with Gable and why didn’t he host it in the gallery?

  I didn’t want it to be at the gallery because then we’d have to see Mum’s coffin all by itself but I knew that’s where the service had to be, because that was where Dad was now, mostly, if you didn’t count the ashes that were still sitting in a little lacquer box on the mantlepiece because we didn’t quite know what to with them.

  ‘Dad wanted a wake,’ I told them, ‘but he said he didn’t want to be mourned. He wanted me to write it in the book, but I didn’t. He and Bodhi talked about it, they called it a celebration.’

  ‘That’s stretching the point,’ Mum said.

  ‘Get this Gable fellow to pay for it,’ Badger said, pouring tea, ‘he can afford it.’

  ‘Good idea, Badger and Chrissie can do the invitations,’ Nan said, ‘not much point her going back to school with the year nearly over.’

  ‘Great idea,’ Gable beamed when he heard, ‘Dave said to watch young Chrissie,’ and he rested his hand, with all its winking rings, on my forearm for the briefest moment.

  I knew I would do a lino print for the invitation. I loved the bold thick lines the gouging made, those deep troughs the ink missed entirely. I loved the danger in thinking in reverse — what you left untouched was the surface the ink clung to, what you cut away, were the white bits. It was exciting.

  Or would be if I could think of what to draw.

  ‘You have to start with something you know,’ I could hear my Dad’s voice as if he were standing next to me, leaning over my sketch book. ‘… and I mean know, Chrissie. You have to show me this frog, the one you’ve seen, jumping out from your paper.’

  What did I know? Nothing.

  ‘You have to absorb what you are drawing. Feel as heavy as that fat little milk jug. Hold yourself as straight as the thin blue vase.’

  Mum and Nan left me alone, as though I were a real artist. They bought me sweet corn fritters and glasses of lemonade and sarsparilla cordial. They didn’t ask to see the blank pages in my sketch book. Mum piled Dad’s art books on the bookcase in my room and I took them down one at a time and looked at them. There was Paris, the pictures my mother had shown me, that now seemed like years ago, when we lived in the country and we were all happy. Paris had nothing to do with me, the people dancing belonged to a different time, they were happy, whirling around with each other. Picasso’s dove and his little boy and his circus people had nothing to do with me either, although some of them looked thin with sadness, the way I felt.