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Father Damien project too, although I didn’t bother telling Dad.
    â€˜Who is a hero of yours,’ I asked him later that evening. He was reading on the couch but he propped the book up on his chest to answer me.
    â€˜Let’s see — Leonardo da Vinci, I’d say. Yes, Leonardo.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜He was endlessly curious about the world. And not a bad artist either,’ Dad said. ‘He kept a notebook, a bit like your Nature study book, full of drawings of the way things worked, like the motion of waves, cloud formations, flowers — you name it, he stopped and looked at it, recorded it, wondered about it. He’s my hero. There’s a book of his drawings on my shelf, if you want to have a look.’
    I left a note on Mr Chapman’s table the next day. I wanted to clear up any confusion.
    Dear Mr Chapman, I wrote, I just want you to know that Father Damien is no longer my hero. I think dying on purpose is a waste. If I were a leper, I’d want someone to be finding a cure, like they should find a cure for cancer, not just pray for me. Leonardo da Vinci is really my hero. He would have found a cure, if he’d been born a bit later.
Yours sincerely,
Chrissie Grainger
    Mr Chapman passed me a note in return, at Little Lunch.
    Dear Chrissie,
I think you have made an intelligent choice with Leonardo. Did you know he nearly invented the aeroplane? If you need to talk to me about anything at all, you know you always can.
Yours sincerely,
William Chapman.
    He came up to me in the playground and repeated his offer. I told him, thank you, that things were okay, really. I was swinging from the monkey bars, which I hadn’t been able to do because of the slippery glove, and he watched as I swung across to the other side.
    â€˜Allergy better then?’ he asked.
    â€˜Turned out not to be one,’ I said, ‘just one of those mysterious things that go away after a while.’
    â€˜That’s good,’ he said, ‘inconvenient wearing a glove all the time.’
    Not as inconvenient as having leprosy, I wanted to tell him, but didn’t say that either. I swung up on to the bars again and right across and back and across until the bell rang. My arms ached and my hands smelled metallic and rusty but I knew that by lunch time my arms would have forgotten the weight of my body and the desperate lurch from one bar to the next and I’d want to do it again, just because I could.

Unfinished Business

    Nan said that sometimes people stay alive for ages longer than the doctors predict because there is still something they need to do, some unfinished business. Sometimes, she said, this was seeing someone they needed to say goodbye to, sometimes it was an event, like the birth of a child, or a marriage, which kept them living when, according to medical prognosis, they should have been dead. Nan reckoned that Dad’s exhibition was keeping him going.
    Mr Gable had come around with two of his helpers, minions, he called them and it sounded quite rude. He was Dad’s art dealer, a large moist man who wore flowered braces to hold up his large trousers. No one called him Mr Gable. Even his minions just called him Gable as though that was enough.
    â€˜Gable,’ Dad said, ‘back from the States, eh?’
    â€˜Dave, I heard the news. I came as soon as I could.’
    Gable put his arms around my father, dwarfing him in a bear hug. When he finally released Dad, Gable pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose and wiped his eyes. ‘We’ll put on a show,’ he said, ‘up all the prices so you can make some money out of the bastards.’
    â€˜You’ll make the money.’
    â€˜Not me, no Dave, forget it. Just the framing costs.’
    â€˜Gable!’ Now it was Dad’s turn to fossick around for a hanky.
    Nan and I took Gable out to the shed and showed him the coffins.
    â€˜Dear God,’ he said, ‘they are