Dear Vincent

L
ife is really tough for Tara; her older sister has died, her father is ill, and the future seems very bleak. Her only consolations are her love of painting, and Vincent Van Gogh’s art. Will these be enough to give her the strength to get through the dark days?

New Zealand Post Award-wining author Mandy Hanger tackles the difficult topic of suicide fearlessly, with a novel that’s not afraid to go to the dark places but which is, ultimately, positive and uplifting.

M
Y
FATHER
SLOUCHES
IN
his wheelchair, a dough ball of resentment. Only the fierce penetration of his eyes registers life behind his rigid face. If he moves at all it is involuntary. The twitch of a finger. The jerk of a leg. But for all his immobility, his presence still looms over us. The gargoyle in the corner. The silent judge.

There is a gritty meanness in his eyes sometimes. Or worse, bottomless sadness — the kind that rakes your soul. Though more often than not these days, anger flares: embers trapped within an iceberg. He is living the inflexibility he’s practised all my life.

Even as I finish hanging out the washing and tilt my face up to the morning sun, I know he will be waiting
for me to feed him, wash his face, brush his teeth — all before I have the luxury of heading off to school. Luxury? It’s funny how perspective shifts.

Buttered light filters through my eyelids and I hold my breath, waiting, waiting, waiting, with a sense there’s something I should know. It teases at my memory. Tickles at my nose. I crack one eye open and there’s the clue: a butterfly, chalky white, its tiny dome eyes staring straight back into mine.
Of course!
How could I forget?

It’s Van’s birthday. The 11th of June. She would be twenty-two today. So old. It’s hard to picture how she’d look. Beautiful? Without a doubt. Respectable? Not for a second. Not my Van. The odds that she’d have turned into a merchant banker, IT nerd or anything, in fact, where she’d have to toe the line are about two billion to one.

Meanwhile, my own life’s reduced to a different numbers game. Nearly six years since Dad’s first stroke. Just under five since we were woken by that gutting midnight call. Three since Mum was forced to take on night shifts at the hospital to pay the mortgage on this shitty hole. One since I began to work half-time to help. And the amount of time I get to lead a normal life? No whole number’s small enough.

‘Tara?’ Mum’s shout repels the butterfly. It flutters off, a ghost adrift. ‘Don’t forget to take the shopping list. I’ll pick you up outside Countdown at ten to nine.’

Does she remember it’s Van’s birthday? Surely she must. But Mum’s declared everything about my sister a no-go zone — as if by refusing to speak of her the past can somehow be erased. If only it was so easy.

Inside, I shoo Mum off to bed before I start on Dad.
Her shifts play havoc with her sleep patterns — and her moods. She’s turned into one of those wizened peasants Vincent loved to paint: a small grey shadow, sour and disconnected, all joy in life sucked out of her.

While I’m waiting for Dad’s porridge to cook I eat the last of the bread, sandwiching a scummy wedge of budget cheese. Our cupboards will stay bare until I’m paid later today and do the shop. When we were small, the only time Mum used to make a fuss was over birthday breakfasts: an Ulster fry with bacon, eggs and sausages, and golden crisp potato farl. Now the only fuss she makes is the kind I hate — the kind Van called Mad Cow Disease to wind her up.

I mince Dad’s morning medication into dust and smother it with yoghurt. Pop it in his drooping mouth, scraping the teaspoon across his lips to catch the overflow before I stuff the dregs back in. He shudders as he swallows, his eyes saying it’s my fault that it tastes like shit. I help him drink a sip of water, then cool his porridge with milk and coax it in, one spoonful at a time. I know I should be chatting to him, helping pass the time, but, really, what is there to say?
Do you know what day it is? Does the thought of Van thump you in the guts like it does me?
Even if he could answer, he’d only throw it back at me.
Wind yer neck in, girl. You’ve got a face on like a Lurgan spade.

By the time I’ve finished everything with Dad I’ve less than half an hour to get to school. Who’d have thought I’d ever want to spend more time there, but with my rest home shift starting at two it pretty much wipes out the afternoon.

All I really want to do is paint — hide out in the art
room and let the colours wash through me in a heady rush. Vincent says to attack a painting the way a lion devours meat, to call on the grain of madness that is the best of art. Imagine trying to explain all this to Mum and Dad. They view creative madness as a sin on par with striking a priest.

I park Dad in front of the TV and head off on my bike. Our street is full of tacky mansions, but ours is the doozy that drags the others’ values down. Good old leaky home syndrome. The day Mum finally admitted we had no money to fix it or to chase the builders through the courts I cried — I’d had a gutsful of our neighbours’ snide remarks.

‘You think your life is difficult?’ she’d said. ‘Try walking to school in Belfast when the Proddies are on the march.’ She talks about the Troubles the way the old boys in the rest home remember El Alamein.

Since then I’ve built a force field that shouts ‘fuck off’. You have to in a school like mine, where the fact I used to go to the best private Catholic school is all the ammunition the gangs need. In my first week they bullied me out of my iPod and mobile phone and stripped the Nike jacket off my wimpy back. Admittedly I’m safer now. Three years on and we’re dirt poor — I don’t even have an internet connection at home, let alone a replacement phone. There’s nothing left to nick.

AT WORK, IZZY, QUEEN
of the Twilight House kitchen and aunty to one of my classmates, sneaks me a
sandwich as I button up my uniform — it’s Tyrian purple, a grandiose colour for such a shapeless sack. The Phoenicians made this same dye from the mucus gland of carnivorous sea snails, and used it to tint their royal robes. Kind of ironic. By the time I’ve done my shift here I’m smeared in mucus too. And worse.

My old school friends would freak to know I spend my afternoons wiping strangers’ bottoms — let alone that I do the same for Dad. That’s even worse. No daughter should have wash her father’s private parts. Van refused to help him, even when he was first rushed to hospital and looked as if he’d die.

‘You must be fucking kidding me. I’m not the nurse.’ She’d clapped her hand over her mouth and gagged as she stormed for the door.

‘Vanessa McClusky, you get your bealin’ arse back here.’ Mum’s never twigged that when she hisses her voice travels twice as far. ‘If your father was well he’d—’

‘What, Ma? Beat me up?’ The old men in Dad’s ward pursed their lips in disapproval as she extended her middle finger and flipped the bird. ‘Divine intervention. A man reaps what he sows.’ Van draped her arm around my neck and whispered, ‘Don’t worry, Miss T, one day I’ll ride in on my golden charger and whisk you off.’ Her breath was hot and smelt of cigarettes.

It’s post-lunch nap time, the quiet before the dinner frenzy then the final push to bed. I make my way down the corridor, averting my eyes from the insipid rubbish masquerading as art. Old Nadine’s at her wandering, a gaunt greyhound who can’t sit still. She edges past me, a loaded nappy weighing down her pants.

‘Hey Nadie-nay.’ I steer her back towards the toilet
in her room. ‘Let’s get you comfortable.’ She turns her face, her mouth forming a pout before she registers it’s me. Her grin is worth the smell.

I peel off her trackpants as she gently burrows her fingers into my hair. I get more love from these doolally darlings than I do at home. The skin around her private parts is chaffed and red. I wash her down, then rub some soothing cream onto the site of her latest neglect.

This, and the many other daily indignities suffered by the residents here, is why Mum still refuses to give up on the care of Dad. Never mind that she’s killing herself, working all night as well as running after him all day. No thought at all for the fact I’m trapped at home to cover for the times when she’s not there. It’s our
duty
and we’ll do it till he dies. Unless, of course, either one of us decides to join Van first.

I’m still haunted by the memory of that night. The phone ringing on the downside of midnight. Mum’s unearthly wail. Running to her open door and there she was, slumped by the bed, head jerking backwards and forwards — until she sensed that I was there.

‘Go back to your room.’

I tried, oh god I tried, to drag the news from her, but she insisted I return to bed. Did she think I’d sleep? Not hear her sobs flood every corner of the house? I knew it had to be something to do with Van — every disruption over the past five years had involved her. I lay rigid on tangled sheets, conjuring up every sin my twelve-year-old brain could imagine: stealing, swearing, fighting, drinking, taking drugs, something deeply shameful that she’d done with boys … Perhaps she’d been locked up, or ditched the Irish relatives she’d been shipped off to
after Dad’s second stroke? If only I’d been right.

‘There you go, m’darling.’ I straighten Nadine’s clothes, then work my way along the corridor, checking on my other oldies, toileting and cuddling, cajoling and humouring, until I reach my final rostered room. I check my list for this new client’s name.
Professor Max Stockhamer, short term, double amputee.
I pin on my welcome smile, tap lightly on the door and ease it open. He’s not inside.

What hits me is the burst of colour radiating off the walls. Monet’s
Impression, Sunrise
, with its pulsing orange disc of sun. Seurat’s
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
, its pinpricks of colour bringing that bourgeois Paris afternoon to life. Degas’ ballerinas, arms gracefully arched, their youthful beauty frozen in time. And there is Vincent’s luminous masterpiece,
Starry Night
— the jabbing brushstrokes, the swirling, heaving heavens that burst from the frame with vibrating intensity. I’m drawn to it like a sunflower to the sun, the movement and colours seeping through my skin to fizz my blood.

‘Ah, I see you are an art lover.’

I spin around to meet the amused gaze of an old man in a wheelchair, a bud-green mohair rug draped across his lap. His face is long and thin, and a neat white goatee extends down to a perfectly knotted carmine silk cravat.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.’ I offer him my hand. His grip is strong. ‘I’m Tara McClusky, one of the nurse aides.’

‘A pleasure, my dear. It’s nice to meet a kindred spirit.’ The soft, musical lilt of his voice reminds me of Captain von Trapp, familiar from so many family Christmases when endless re-runs of
The Sound
of Music
were sweet
reprieve. Mum loved them too. It was the only part of Christmas day when she’d relax and let us snuggle in to watch, one each side.

I open the door wider as he propels himself into the tiny room, already crammed with books and ornaments. A hand-stitched quilt covers the bed, its borders embroidered with small white star-like flowers, their pale yellow centres knotted into tiny balls of lemon fuzz.

‘Beautiful,’ I say, stroking my finger across their surface. ‘What kind of flowers are they?’

‘Edelweiss,’ he answers.

‘You’re from Austria?’

‘Once,’ he says. ‘A lifetime ago. We left there to escape the War.’

‘My parents came here from Belfast to escape the Troubles. Mum says she doesn’t miss it but whenever she hears Irish music she turns it off or leaves the room.’

He stares out through the window, slowly nodding. ‘Birth ties run deep,’ is all he says.

I should be moving on, starting to organise afternoon tea, but there’s something holding me. ‘Are you a painter?’ I can picture him with a black beret tipped at a natty angle, brush and palette in his hands.

‘I used to lecture in philosophy,’ he says. ‘I once dabbled in life drawing but have no natural flair.’ He looks up at me, his eyes an almost perfect cerulean blue. ‘And you?’

I shrug. If he’s a deep-thinking academic then the last thing he’ll be interested in is schoolgirl art. ‘I’m studying Vincent Van Gogh and Edith Collier, the New Zealand artist, for my Scholarship exams.’

‘Why Vincent?’ he asks. ‘Some people these days
think his work a bit passé.’

‘It’s hard to explain,’ I say, hot fingers of embarrassment creeping up my neck. ‘When I look at his paintings it’s like I’m seeing pure emotion, like everything he thinks and feels comes alive under his brush.’

He swings his wheelchair around and strokes his little beard, clear eyes assessing me, then nods. ‘Tara McClusky, you’re quite a find. Maybe this place isn’t quite purgatory after all.’

‘What about you?’ I ask, pointing to
Starry Night
. ‘Surely you don’t think he’s passé either?’

‘No, indeed. In fact, I’ve felt a lifelong connection to him. He said that though he was often in the depths of misery, there was still a place of calmness, pure harmony and music inside him.’ He chuckles. ‘Though, when I look at his paintings, I hear a Wagner opera in my head.’