Free Painted Love Letters by Catherine Bateson Page B

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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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