Read Online Painted Love Letters by Catherine Bateson - Free Book Online Page B

beautiful. Dave’s sure he wants to go in his?’
    â€˜Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s what it’s for. That’s what he did it for.’
    â€˜To face death,’ Nan said. ‘To be ready for it!’
    Gable dusted an old crate and sat down, pulling up his pant legs first, so they wouldn’t crease. ‘Is it that close?’ he asked.
    Nan pulled up a second crate. I leant against the table tennis table. I knew all this off by heart. My vocabulary had increased. I knew words like secondaries and metastasise. I knew the names of bits of the body which had never figured in our human body lessons at school: the lymph glands and the pancreas. Most of all, I knew about lungs.
    â€˜They’ve stopped chemo,’ Nan said, ‘there’s no point. He’s started morphine. He wants to die at home, not in hospital. Marijuana helps, to a degree. It stops the nausea, promotes appetite. Sources tell me other drug therapies may be more effective.’
    Gable looked at me sharply and tipped his head towards me.
    â€˜I am allowed to hear anything I want to hear,’ I said, ‘it’s the agreement.’
    â€˜Very unorthodox, very Dave,’ he muttered, ‘I take it,’ he said to Nan, ‘if I understand correctly, you’re talking about heroin?’
    Nan nodded, ‘There’s a rumour it’s very effective.’
    â€˜Well anything can be obtained,’ Gable said frowning, ‘but it’s costly.’
    â€˜Money,’ Nan waved, ‘that’s in hand. I’ve sold my house. Badger and I get along quite well in his flat. And when this is all over, we’re going to India to meet a yoga master.’
    â€˜Badger?’
    â€˜Badger is her lover,’ I said crossly. Lover was a word I had recently learned. It sounded more dignified than boyfriend and less permanent than husband. I hated all this talk about heroin. We’d heard about it at school. There was a book, the diary of a young girl who became hooked and couldn’t get off. We all took turns reading it. You could get sick from withdrawing. You sweated and itched and your teeth fell out. Then there was the other problem that it was illegal and we could all be put in jail. And you had to inject it, sometimes in your eyeball because you couldn’t find the veins in your arm.
    â€˜Ah,’ Gable stood up, ‘of course. Well, you must let me know if there’s anything at all I can do, short of drug dealing.’
    â€˜Thank you,’ Nan said, ‘we’ll keep you informed.’
    â€˜I um, wouldn’t say anything at school about this,’ Gable said to me.
    â€˜I don’t,’ I told him, picking my cuticles, ‘it’s in the agreement.’
    â€˜Of course. Of course.’
    There were too many things not to say at school, drugs was only one of them. I didn’t say the cancer word at all, I didn’t say secondaries or mestastsise or pancreas, I didn’t say pain, I didn’t say dying. I didn’t talk about the euthanasia debate that was currently a nightly show at home. I didn’t say that my mother went to work every day because, she told me, it gave her a normal perspective on life and that’s why I should go to school, too. Just to learn that everyone in the world wasn’t dying. Just to learn that everyone in the world was thinking and talking about stuff other than pain management, legal and otherwise, death and when to die, legal or otherwise.
    Dad’s theory, which he ran past Bodhi, now a regular visitor, was that he’d simply overdose himself.
    â€˜I’ve never tried smack,’ Bodhi said, ‘too scared, man, but I reckon I would, in your position Dave.’
    â€˜I just want to get the show out of the way,’ Dad said, ‘I don’t want anything to happen to stuff it up. Gable’s terms for the show are very generous. If enough sells Rhetta won’t have to work anymore