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.
First published 2002 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
Reprinted 2003
www.uqp.com.au
© Catherine Bateson
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any foram or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Typeset by University of Queensland Press
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Cataloguing in Publication Data
National Library of Australia
Bateson, Catherine.
Painted love letters.
I. Title.
A823.4
ISBN 978 0 7022 3289 0 (pbk)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5814 5 (pdf)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5815 2 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5816 9 (kindle)
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Painted Love Letters Page 7
