Painted Love Letters (2 page)

Love Letters and Coffins

Dad was obsessed with the cost of funerals. He talked about it all the time. He wrote letters to the newspapers about it. One was published in
The Courier-Mail
and I hoped no-one at school saw it. Dad cut the letter out and stuck it on the notice board in our kitchen, right next to the card notifying him of his next hospital appointment.

Everything he didn't want, he made me write down in a notebook. He didn't want a mahogany coffin, red or white satin lining, brass or silver-plated handles and he particularly didn't want flowers.

‘Tell everyone to donate the money they would have spent on wreaths to cancer research,' he said, and I wrote it down.

He didn't want: a multinational funeral home taking care of his remains, strangers saying anything at his funeral, and he particularly didn't want to be buried.

‘Cremation. Wrap me in a plain shroud and cremate me.' he said.

‘What's a shroud?' I asked, ‘and how do you spell it?'

I wrote it down. I had a list of what he wanted and a list of what he didn't want.

‘I don't want you remembering me as a sick old man,' he said, but I didn't have to write that down.

‘I don't want my death mourned, I want my life celebrated,' he said. I didn't write that down.

‘You can't make us not feel sad,' I said, ‘it doesn't work that way, Dad.' Then I had to leave the room because he also didn't want anyone to cry.

‘It's so unfair,' I said to my mother when she got home from work. ‘It's all right for him to say what he wants and doesn't want. He'll be dead. What about us? What about what we want?'

Mum pulled me into her white shirt. She smelled of kitchens, oil and steam. She was waitressing at the Queen Victoria Hotel. She was a bistro girl, she told our friends, grimacing.

‘The thing is, Chrissie, that when you're very, very sick like Dad is, you don't always have the energy to think about other people. I know it seems unfair, but that's how it is. Do you want me to talk to him?'

I thought about it. After each bout of chemotherapy my father came home looking greyer and as though there was a little less of him.

‘No,' I said, ‘don't bother.'

Dad talked to some friends of his and found a carpenter who agreed to come around and measure him up. The carpenter was a thin, long man with greying dreadlocks who didn't comment on Dad's stash of illegal pain relief, the dope he smoked throughout the day.

‘Cool, man,' Bodhi kept saying as he flicked his carpenter's rule at my father's body. ‘So what do you reckon, recycled timber or you got something else in mind?'

‘I don't care, Bodhi, the cheapest thing you can get. I don't care if it's plywood.'

‘Plywood wouldn't hold you,' Bodhi said, ‘I'll get hunting. Tell you what, let me measure up your old woman and I'll give you a cheaper deal for two.'

‘That's a great idea,' Dad said, pouring Bodhi out some lemon grass tea, and filling the bong, ‘that way I could paint Rhetta's too while I'm still around.'

‘Right,' Bodhi nodded his head so emphatically his dreadlocks bounced around like little snakes, ‘like, it would be there when she needed it.'

‘Dad,' I said, ‘Dad, I don't know if that's such a great idea.'

I could tell that it was too late.

‘What about the kid?'

‘No way,' I said.

‘Not Chrissie,' Dad said, ‘we don't even know how tall she'll get.'

‘What I want,' I said, ‘are flowers at the funeral.'

‘Flowers are pretty,' Bodhi said, setting his snakes dancing again.

‘Waste of money,' Dad said. ‘We can paint flowers on the coffin.'

‘I only want my bunch.'

It felt to me that a funeral wasn't a funeral without one bunch of flowers, just like a wedding wouldn't be a wedding. Or maybe I had a picture of myself laying the flowers gently on the coffin. I could see the bunch of flowers, kind of pathetic, kind of brave, which was how I felt most of the time. The flowers and my hand were the only things I could see. I couldn't imagine how my father would go from discussing the coffin with Bodhi to actually lying in it, not breathing any more.

‘A little bunch wouldn't hurt,' Bodhi said. ‘She's just a kid, Davo, give her a little bunch of flowers, man, they're not going to change the world. You've got to flow with these things, you've got to know that while you're the main dude in all this, it's the old woman's and the kid's gig. You won't be there for the final party, man.'

‘Okay, okay,' Dad said. ‘Get the book, Chrissie.' I fetched the funeral book and I crossed out ‘no flowers' and put in ‘Chrissie's flowers only.'

‘Cool,' Bodhi said examining the notebook, ‘fantastic idea, man. I reckon these should be marketed. Everyone should have a funeral plan. My old woman had a birth plan, you know, for when Tibet came along. But it all went to hell. Sari just couldn't embrace the pain. Now, when do you want these by?'

‘Soon,' Dad said grimacing, ‘make it sooner, rather than later.'

‘It's a deal. I'll start getting them knocked up right away.'

It didn't take Bodhi long — he delivered two new coffins to our house within a couple of weeks. They came just before I left for school one morning and Dad went out to take delivery, wearing a new plaid dressing gown. This time a year ago, he'd have just wrapped himself in one of Mum's sarongs and sauntered out, a cup of tea steaming in one hand, a cigarette burning in the other.

Bodhi and his mate put the coffins in the shed where Mum had let me put up a table tennis table we'd bought cheaply at a farm clearance sale. It sat there, unused. I felt it called a still-unknown friend to me. But the coffins went on the table tennis table. Dad ran a finger along the surface. ‘Great,' he said, and, ‘like the handles.'

The handles were made from heavy rope and the coffin itself was a pale untreated pine. I had not wanted to see them arrive. I had rather hoped that Bodhi would turn out to be unreliable and the coffins would never arrive. If I thought of coffins, along with my hand, and the bunch of flowers, I saw something dark and lustrous, like a grand piano. That was the kind I expected.

‘Well there you are, Davo, I'm thinking of advertising them, you know. So when you get them painted, give us a tinkle and I'll come over with the camera, if you don't mind.'

‘Not at all,' Dad said, ‘In fact, if they look okay, I'll put them in the show that's coming up, if … well if.'

‘Yeah, sure. Great idea, man. Embrace it, Davo, embrace it.'

Dad started painting that morning. I got to school late because I had to help him set up — not that I told anyone that. I was just beginning to find my way around the city school and I didn't want weird stories about my family spoiling things.

Still, I was curious, so the first thing I did when I got home was check out the coffin. Dad had already painted the sides in an abstract pattern of what could have almost been footprints, footprints in water, though, not sand or earth. It was good. You could look at it and know it was David Grainger's work, the way you have to with art. They were the same colours he used in his etchings, and with the same kind of shapes that made you think of real things, even though they themselves weren't what had been painted.

‘What do you think? Do you like it?' Dad asked that evening.

‘Yeah, yeah I do,' I said. ‘I reckon it's coming along well.'

He did the top next, sort of stick figures in a big space of green moving into red, moving into black, so that I thought of how when you live in the country the sky's always huge and the stars don't go anywhere near filling all that darkness. The coffin reminded me of how small I'd felt looking up at the country sky and I knew those figures, if they were people, felt the same way about the colours Dad had used. They were so big and deep they overwhelmed the little clay-coloured dots and dashes who might have been walking through them.

The painting made me cry in the night. It made me wish we were the kind of family who went to church. I wanted to say a prayer to a god somewhere, but I didn't know how, and I didn't feel I could ask either Mum or Dad what you did about that.

Instead I asked Dee Browning at school. Dee wasn't my friend or anything, she was just this girl I hung around with even though I wasn't sure I liked her. She was bigger and older than me and she'd been kept down, not once, but twice. The teachers said Dee was slow, although she looked fast and sharp in her leather-look mini and her nearly high-heeled sandals. Dee went to church, I knew, because she wore a little silver medal of the Virgin Mary cradling a bundle which was the baby Jesus.

‘Dee, can anyone go to your church?' I asked at snack time. We were standing on the edge of the oval and Dee was watching the boys pass a football back and forth. ‘You know, suppose you weren't really sure what you were, could you just kind of front up and they'd let you in?'

Dee looked down at me. She had a way of doing that. It made me feel small and drab. She blinked and her eyelashes fluttered blue.

‘Well, of course, Chrissie, the church is open to all Jesus's little children.'

‘Yeah, but what about me?'

‘You? I don't know about you. Have you been christened?'

I shook my head. I wasn't really sure, but it seemed unlikely.

‘Well, I'd have to ask my mother, but I don't think they'd kick you out.'

Dad started on Mum's coffin. It was really different, though the same things were there, ‘motifs', Dad said. The footsteps didn't walk though, they skipped through a yellow-pinkness as though they were dancing and the colour reminded me of the roses from one of the gardens we'd had. When I told Dad he nodded in a pleased way.

‘Taylor Street,' he said, ‘your mum loved that garden.'

Dee said that I could go to church with her that Sunday if I wanted but I'd have to be up early, and then afterwards I could go home with her for Sunday lunch. Her mum made roast lamb, she said, and her sisters came with their babies. It was not something I would normally feel comfortable doing but it seemed to be part of the same deal, so I asked Mum, leaving out the church business and she said yes, of course. I felt bad because she was pleased I'd made a friend and Dee wasn't quite that.

For the top of Mum's coffin, Dad used gold paint and the little dots and dashes from his coffin had become swirling letters, except you couldn't read what they said, they just swirled and looped as though you should be able to. It was so beautiful it made my whole chest ache and, although I didn't really want to look at it, a part of me couldn't stop — like overhearing a conversation you shouldn't listen to, but your feet won't move you away and down the hall. It was a love letter my father had written to my mother, and only she'd be able to read it properly.

I didn't tell Mum that when I found her crying in the kitchen, holding a tea towel over her mouth. I didn't tell her because she said she was crying because she'd burnt her hand at work, and when I looked, the burn was there, a large welt across her wrist. I found the first aid kit and put burn cream on it for her and we didn't talk about the coffins in the shed.

I went to church with Dee, her mother and her little brother. I got up when they got up, I knelt down when they knelt down, I shared Dee's Bible and her hymn book and I watched her whole family go to the front of the church for Communion. I said sorry to God for what I had said when we first came to Brisbane, that first night. And then I tried to pray, not just for Dad but the fourteen men sealed under the Box Flat coal mine, and their kids if they had any. It didn't make me feel better. Maybe you had to practise to get it right.

I managed to answer all Mrs Browning's questions over lunch without once saying about Dad's cancer. I talked about his exhibition and made it sound like we'd moved from the country to the city so he could work on it. I made everything sound pink and yellow. I saw myself in a mirror that hung on their dining room wall, and I looked smoothed out and rosy, as though I were a completely different person.

Later, Dee walked me home. She wanted to see my bedroom but I knew it wouldn't interest her when she saw it. I didn't have posters of pop groups stuck on the walls. I didn't have an autographed photo of anyone from any televison programme, and my wardrobe couldn't rival her collection of mini skirts and little bubble tops. So I took her into the backyard where at least there was the mango tree to climb. She wouldn't though, because she didn't want to scratch her legs, so I thought of the only other thing I could offer.

‘Table tennis?'

‘Oh yeah. That'd be neat. I haven't played table tennis since we went on holidays. I was really good at it,' Dee replied.

I opened the shed door and remembered. The coffins were both finished, side by side on the table in full sight.