Free Painted Love Letters by Catherine Bateson Page A

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 the 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.’
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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