Free Painted Love Letters by Catherine Bateson

in that stupid job.’
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜Wow,’ Bodhi fanned himself, ‘that’s something isn’t it?’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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