Painted Love Letters by Catherine Bateson Page A

enough stars, I’m going to count them, instead of the places I’ve lived. They’ve got nicer names, although they’re harder to say.
    These were the things you could rely on in Nurralloo, where we lived: fresh eggs every day from Mum’s chooks, Stinge McPhee’s early Saturday visit before he drove to Toowoomba for the races and Dad’s morning ritual. He would get up, cough his guts up, make some Nescafe, sit on the front door step and light his first cigarette. My father smoked Camel cigarettes, or roll your owns when we ran out of money.
    I didn’t want to go to Paris, even though it is the most beautiful city in the world and the city of love, or lerv as Mum says, rolling her eyes. I didn’t want to go anywhere. Nurralloo suited me fine. So when I heard Mum say, ‘Well that’s it, Dave, if Dr. Gregg says to get a second opinion, we’ll go to the city,’ my heart slid right out of my chest and made it down to the toes of my boots. I sprang out of my room quicker than Bongo bounds after a rabbit.
    They were standing on opposite sides of the kitchen table. Mum’s face was floury. She’d been making bread. The flour made dusty patches on her face and when she pushed her hair away, the flour clung there, too, making her look grey.
    â€˜It’s probably nothing,’ Dad said, ‘he just wants me to have a couple of tests. He said it’s probably just a really persistent bug but that I should have an X-ray, just in case. He wants to make sure my lungs are clear. There’s no drama, Rhetta. There’s no need to pack up and drive all the way to the city, we can do this in Toowoomba. Please don’t turn into your mother over this.’
    He sounded tired when he said that, and, for a minute when I looked at him he didn’t seem like my father anymore, just a man who looked sick and grey and I was shocked and wanted to be back reading on my bed with Bongo sleeping on the end but it was too late. I was stuck in the kitchen, watching them and listening.
    We drove back from Brisbane city the day after the seventeen men were killed in Ipswich in an explosion at the Box Flat coal mine. Fourteen men were sealed in the mine. Mum said they were already dead but it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter one little bit to me because my father had lung cancer. He had X-rays to prove it and a cough that wouldn’t go away ever now. Mum drove all the way home, wiping the tears off her face and no-one said anything much because what was there to say? When we drove through Ipswich my mother said, ‘Those poor men, those poor families left behind, wondering.’ And then she sniffed extra loudly and we drove on in silence.
    Dad reached for his cigarettes every so often and then stopped and his hands returned to rest in his lap. Sometimes I snuck my hand in with his and then he’d stroke my knuckles or we’d hold each other’s hands until they got too hot and sweaty. The ute rattled on to Toowoomba but we didn’t want to eat, so Mum drove on out of town and made us eat hamburgers and chips at the truck stop, even though we’d been vegetarians for years.
    Normally I would have loved it, the salty hot fat chips, the grey meat, the surprising wickedness of it. Just as I had loved watching the television in the hotel room in Brisbane and Mum not even saying to turn it off but sitting there with me, watching anything, everything. Even “Number 96” which she hated. But that was before we knew, that was before the tests came through and now everything, even hot chips, would taste the same; dust or clouds, which, like medicine, you had to take.
    Mum and I kept looking at Dad who fiddled with his paper napkin and didn’t eat much. He’d clear his throat as if to say something and end up coughing and then Mum would look scared. I was angry. Dad always coughed. There was nothing new except that now he was dying even though Mum said