Painted Love Letters (7 page)

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.

The women dancers, the show girls with black stockings and flaming hair were beautiful, as were the women coming out of baths, or holding children, but they didn't look like my mother in her waitresses uniform, and the kids didn't look like me, all knobs and angles and shadows.

‘When you start out, go for simplicity. Go bold. Don't worry about details, don't get too little about things, Chrissie. The Japanese have a form of painting where you're allowed only one brush stroke — the minute the brush lifts off the paper, the picture is finished. That's simplicity. That's Zen.'

Bodhi came over one day. He was building Nan and Badger coffins now and we had to store them in our shed because they were going to India, to meet a real yoga teacher.

‘Just not the sort of thing I want the tenants finding,' Badger explained, ‘might freak them out.'

‘What about my friends,' I said, ‘what about freaking them out?'

So Badger got Bodhi to make a coffin sized cupboard in the shed, with two shelves and a sliding door. ‘Oh great,' I said, just terrific. That really solves that problem, doesn't it?'

‘We can use it for storing things later,' Mum said, ‘paint or gardening things, maybe.'

‘I'll have it fixed in time,' Bodhi said, ‘and it will be so useful. You'll be able to put the table tennis stuff in it.'

He was kind of calm, Bodhi, and because of that I told him.

‘I've got two days to do this invitation, Bodhi, and I can't think of anything to draw. Not a thing.'

‘You haven't been looking in the right place, Chrissie,' he said, sipping his tea, ‘you've made too much of it, it's just a drawing. The main thing is that it tells people when the wake's on, when to come and where. You should just draw what's in front of you now — look, what's wrong with that?' He pointed at the back fence which was sort of sagging under the weight of our purple bougainvillea. Or maybe the bougainvillea was keeping the fence up. It was hard to tell.

I thought of my father walking into the exhibition, leaning on my mother's arm, the small steps they had taken, almost as though he was leading her to an altar, about to give her away. Or she was leading him, and giving him away?

‘You're right,' I said, ‘you're absolutely right, Bodhi.'

He looked mildly surprised. ‘Yeah, okay.' he said. ‘Well, good.'

I gouged out the lino so the fence posts were heavier than ours, and more uneven. I didn't worry about all the whorls and knots and lines of wood, just a few to make it clear they were old posts, falling down. I printed that first in black ink, thick and squidgy. Some of the prints smudged, some weren't quite straight but I didn't care, although I was as careful as I could be.

Then I got another block and drew the trailing bougainvillea on it and carefully cut around it. It didn't much look like bougainvillea, in fact it looked a little like a plant from the cover of a science fiction book. It looked as though any minute it might transform into a giant human trap but when I printed it on top of the fence posts, it was okay. It was a plant and it was alive. You could almost feel it growing.

It had to do, anyway, because time was running out. Gable wanted one so he could photocopy it and post them to all the important dealers and collectors and colleagues. Mum wanted some so she could give them out to her friends at the bistro. Nan wanted some for her yoga and Italian classes and I had to send one to Mr Chapman. It didn't matter any more if it was a good print or a bad print, the important thing was that I had done it, and now it was ready.

I didn't expect to enjoy the wake. I walked into the gallery with Mum, Nan and Badger expecting all the prints and Mum's coffin leaning against one wall all by itself, to hurt like I couldn't talk or breathe; instead I felt lightened by them still being there. As though Dad was there too, not, I knew, just around that pillar or behind that bunch of people all holding wine or beer glasses — but there in the pictures he made.

Some of them would become part of other people's lives, some Mum and I would hang — our favourites. And while he would never again walk into a room, or touch us, or say our names, he had left us his presence. There he was watching — my mother bent over me when I was a baby. There was my father loving us. There he was, in the last year, painting us a dance. It didn't matter that it was on a coffin. And it didn't matter that his own beautiful coffin was ashes, it didn't matter that both my father's coffins would become ashes one day. What mattered was that he had painted us love letters. Sick and dying as he was, he had painted, so we would always know his love.

And there, in the middle of everything, was my poor little fence, my brave bougainvillea, each keeping the other up, framed beautifully in pale wood by Gable, who came towards us now, arms outstretched and hugged us both, not briefly but for the longest time, until I could feel his tears trickling down the back of my neck.

And then we were surrounded by everyone, the way you might be at a surprise birthday party. Even Mr Chapman was there. He gave me a big hug and I smelled a fresh soap smell around him, rather than the old fuggy smell of tobacco. I wondered if he'd given up smoking before the Christmas holidays but he introduced me to his wife, who also gave me a hug and I didn't have a chance to ask because people I didn't even know kept swarming around me, holding me briefly and thanking me for the bougainvillea.

Bodhi gave me a glass of champagne and I drank it straight off even though the bubbles went up my nose and I ate some salmon too, on a little pancake thing and it tasted like smokey tears. I looked at my mother and she looked young, for the first time for months and Nan and Badger were on either side of her, as though there to catch her if she should fall. She won't, I wanted to tell them, we won't now. We'll be okay because he is still here, with us. And that was true and also not true. And we were okay but not always. That's how it is, I suppose.

I took my bougainvillea home even though I didn't hang it on any wall. I took it home because Gable wrapped it up for me and forced it into my arms. And because I knew that an artist would take it and I wanted to think I was artist enough to do what my father would have done. That didn't mean I had to hang it, though. I plastered my walls with pictures of pop singers, a white horse splashing through ocean, copies of my favourite songs and poems written out in my neatest handwriting. I didn't have to hang the bougainvillea and the fence, I was part of them and they were a part of me. I knew everything now about love and death, everything I needed to know.