Painted Love Letters by Catherine Bateson Page B

that wasn’t true, he wasn’t necessarily dying, there were things they could do. But then why did we all have to act as though he was and why did we have to move because that’s what we were going to do? We were going back to Nurralloo to move to Brisbane because that way Dad would have a fighting chance, Mum said.
    â€˜So much for country living,’ she said, days later, throwing clothes in a suitcase, ‘so much for the healthy air, home produce and all the rest of the crap. I just wish, I just wish …’
    She didn’t finish the sentence and I could think of only one thing she would wish for, the one thing that silenced us, so I didn’t even ask, but went on piling the books in the cartons.
    People kept coming round. More people came round than I thought we really knew. They brought empty boxes, casseroles full of chops, a plate of roast lamb, a lemon meringue pie. They brought their own stories of cancer and told them in the kitchen while they made pots of tea and my mother kept packing.
    â€˜Remember Lizzie, or Dawn, or Pam,’ they’d say and then there’d be a story about a breast that had to come off or another bit of someone that was removed. Most of the stories would end with the person getting better and going on to win money at the races, or First Prize for fruit cake at the Toowoomba Show. And they’d pat Mum on the back and pour another cuppa.
    At school it was different. The kids had stories too. Someone’s uncle had been sliced open and there it was, right through him. All they could do was sew him up again and send him home to lie in bed until he died.
    â€˜He was riddled with it,’ Jacko said, smacking his lips, ‘positively riddled with it.’
    I had seen highway signs riddled with bullet holes and I wondered if my father’s lungs looked like that, shot with lots of little holes. No wonder he couldn’t breathe properly, the oxygen would go straight through those holes.
    I left Nurralloo before third term properly finished. I unclipped my paintings from the lines and packed away my unfinished space project. My best friend, Lynnette Graham, hugged me, promised she’d write and even began to cry before her mother gently untangled us and led her away.
    Mum promised me the new house was great — I would have a terrific bedroom, she said. I would be able to decorate it any way I liked. The back yard was huge, she said, big enough for any games I played. It wasn’t, though, it wasn’t acres with Mr Evan’s cows. And my bedroom wasn’t off a veranda: I could either have the middle room, which had no window at all, only a door leading to the sleep-out, or I could sleep in the sleep-out which wasn’t a proper bedroom at all and the bathroom was just off it so I could hear the toilet flushing in the night.
    â€˜It was the best house available,’ Mum said, sharply, ‘close to everything; shops, the school, the hospital, so just shut up and unpack your stuff wherever you’re going to sleep.’
    â€˜Rhetta,’ Dad said, coming in, ‘please, please.’
    Please what? I wondered, but I didn’t ask any more questions. I had heard what mattered. We were close to the hospital.
    â€˜Look, Chrissie,’ Dad said later that night, when we drove to Kentucky Fried Chicken to get the family special — which we never would have eaten before. Mum wouldn’t have let us. She didn’t believe the stories about them using rats but she hated battery hens. ‘The river’s just down there. We’ll be able to take Bongo down there for walks. And there are different things to do in the city, you’ll see.’
    After dinner I went into the sleep-out and stared around it. Yes, it was my same bed with the shelf for books on the bedhead. Yes, they were the same sheets, the pale blue ones with clouds and birds flying through them and a matching pillow case. Yes, my books were on the