Letters to Leonardo (15 page)

Dear Leonardo

Mum is cruel
.

She’s like a boy I saw in a park once. He lay on the ground with a butterfly perched on his hand. It sat there for a while and then suddenly, for no reason, the boy closed his hand and crushed it. He smiled
.

Holding that butterfly’s life in his hands had just been a game to him
.

Is that all I am to Mum? Is that all any of us are?

Matt

From my desk, I grab her birthday cards and lay them out on the bed. I pick up the first one and hold it between my fingers, ready to rip it into a million pieces. That will teach her. See how she likes being torn into pieces and stomped on.

Dave walks in. “Don’t, mate,” he says quietly. “If you destroy them, you’ll wish some day that you hadn’t.”

“I doubt that.”

I think about the fifteenth birthday card and the ones Mum never sent – the pieces of her from the past and a piece from the present. There will probably be nothing of her from the future, but I don’t care. I take the cards I have read and start ripping. Dave tries to stop me but I push him away.

“Don’t,” I yell. “I’ve got the right to do this.”

Dave backs off and stands watching while I toss card confetti around.

When I finish I sit on the bed and cry. We stay like that for ages. I don’t think Dave knows what to do. In the end he gets up and leaves.

“I’ll give you space,” he says.

I fall asleep on top of the broken bits of my past, and wake up at about 4 am feeling stiff and miserable. I climb into bed and pick up the cards I haven’t read.

Reading Mum’s words makes me feel better somehow. I’m sure she loves me – in her own way. Mothers have to love their kids, right? I wish Troy was here right now. He’d make one of his goofy comments like “What’s not to love?” or “You’ve got a face that only a mother could love”.

When it gets light, Dave arrives at my door with bacon and eggs (not what Rosenbaum would recommend to start the day) and the hand-held vacuum cleaner. He puts breakfast on my desk. He turns on the vacuum cleaner, and is about to suck up all the bits of paper. “Wait,” I yell. “I might be able to put them back together.”

“Come on.” Dave grabs my empty wastepaper basket and sweeps all the pieces into it. “We’ll do this at the dining room table. It will be easier.”

I wolf down my breakfast and get dressed. We spend the next two hours bent over the table, arranging the pieces of card. Finally, we have three separate piles. We put the bits together like a jigsaw and paste them onto a piece of cardboard. There are obvious join lines, but eventually the cards are all in one piece.

Dave’s being really cool about everything – considering all the stuff I said to him – and the fact that I destroyed his beloved Rosenbaum. I guess he’s trying to make things right.

“I know you didn’t sleep much last night. I’ll drive you to school later, if you like,” he says.

“I’ll get the bus.”

“I don’t mind taking you. I’d rather make sure you’re okay before I head off.”

“I’ll be fine.” I try to stop my voice from shaking. “I guess I’ll just go back to being what I was, before I found out I had a mother.”

“It wasn’t all bad, was it?”

“No, Dad. We were okay.”

I feel calmer than I have in ages. I guess we’re starting to sort stuff out.

Dear Leonardo
,

You and I
are
different
.

Our mothers were
not
the same. Your paintings are full of little kids with curious smiles, wearing the confidence of their mother’s “everlasting” love. To paint like that, you had to know what it felt like
.

Matt

At school Troy ambushes me the minute I get off the bus.

“How did it go? What was she like? Did you talk?”

Where do I start? I choose my words carefully, try to keep it impersonal, contained.

“We didn’t talk.”

“You mean she wasn’t there again?”

“She was there.” The memory of her fear makes me sick in the stomach.

“What? Matt, what’s wrong?” Troy stands in front of me like he’s trying to shield me from the other kids – so they can’t see I’m upset.

“She was terrified of me.” The words come out in a whisper.

“How do you mean? You’re her son.”

I tell Troy about Mum’s face at the window.

“You’re kidding. What’s with her?”

“She’s sick. She has this thing called bipolar.”

“Can’t you take something for it?”

I scuff my shoe on the asphalt. “Not if you want to be an artist.”

Luckily for me, the bell goes for the start of class. I’ve had it with talking about Mum, thinking about Mum, wondering why she made the choices she did – why she doesn’t even seem to know how much she has hurt me.

After school I’m doing my homework at the kitchen table when there’s a knock at the door.

“Door’s open, Troy,” I yell.

Slow footsteps creep down the hallway. They don’t sound at all like Troy’s size-nine Blundstones. I get up from the table.

“Mum!” At first, when I see her standing there, I’m shocked. Then I get mad. “What are you doing here?”

“Sorry about the other day, Matt. I really am. You just caught me at a bad time.”

Not much of an apology. She’s making out it’s my fault. “You could have at least answered the door.”

“I couldn’t, Matt. Not the way I was.” She shoves a red and blue striped plastic bag towards me. “Here, I brought you these.”

“What are they?”

Mum smiles. “I know it’s a bit late. But these are all the birthday presents I bought for you over the years.”

“What if I don’t want them?”

“Come on, Matt,” she coaxes. “Aren’t you even a little bit curious?” She pulls out a Lego robot. “I got you this the year you turned six. What do you think?”

She crouches on the floor and walks it towards me. It reminds me of Troy’s Frankenstein walk. The thought makes me grin.

“See, I knew you’d like it,” she teases.

I’m not quite ready to forgive her yet. “Mum, we need to talk.”

“Later. Let’s have some fun first.”

She sits on the floor in the hallway and takes other toys from the bag, an easel, paints, shoes, a clock radio, rollerblades and a spitting dinosaur.

The dinosaur has three horns on top of its head like a triceratops. Mum pulls a plastic cap off one horn and takes the toy to the kitchen sink where she fills it up with water. She puts the dinosaur on the floor in front of me. “Turn it on.” She’s like an excited kid.

I flick the switch. The dinosaur plods down the hall. Mum pushes a button on the side of its head and the dinosaur spits water. A splash hits me in the eye.

Mum laughs. “Can’t believe the batteries still work. I bought this nine years ago.”

She runs down the hall, turns the dinosaur around and walks it back towards the kitchen.

She looks at me sadly. “I guess you’ve grown out of most of them. They’ll only clutter up your room anyway.”

She starts to put the toys back in the bag.

I take them from her. “Thanks, Mum.”

“Friends again?” She smiles brightly.

“Mum. It’s not that simple.”

She stops being the excited child. She looks miserable. “I know it’s not that simple, Matty. But I’m really sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry for all the times I’ve hurt you.”

It’s hard to keep up with these sudden changes in her. Nothing about her is simple.

“Why, Mum? I don’t understand any of it. I don’t understand why you picked your painting over us. Can’t you have both?”

She tries to hug me. “It doesn’t work for people like me.”

I pull away. “But why not, Mum?”

She won’t let me go. “Because of my sickness, Matt.”

“I know you have that bipolar thing, but so do lots of people – and they have families – and they take tablets and stuff so they can be normal. Why can’t you?”

She steps back and looks into my face. Her voice is soft and uncertain. “Matt,” she says. “You can’t just take one course of tablets and make bipolar go away. You have to take the tablets forever.”

So? I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t you take them if it meant you could be well?

I look at her blankly. Mum takes another deep breath. “My sickness isn’t in my stomach or on my skin like the allergies your friend’s sister has.”

“But you can take tablets.”

She’s close to tears. “But I can’t paint when I’m on my meds. I can’t do anything. But without them I can live, be sad and happy. It’s hard for me to control how I feel and sometimes, I even do things that I really wish I hadn’t.”

I almost say, “Like leave your child in a shopping centre.” Instead, I bite my lip to stop the words spilling out.

“But at least I feel things.” A tear drops down her cheek.

“You seem okay now, Mum.”

Mum frowns. “I’m a bit like your friend’s sister in a way,” she says. “She has to think about everything she eats, and I have to think about everything I do. It’s hard for me to know what’s real and what’s not. I have to consciously work out if what I’m doing and feeling is real or just some part of a high or low cycle.”

I’m still confused. When I look at her she seems normal – like any mother trying to help her son understand something. “Are you like that all the time – even now?”

She nods. “Even sitting here talking to you, I’m thinking, is this the right thing to do? I don’t know. I just feel so bad for hurting you again.”

“These cycles, do they last long?”

“It depends. Some people only go off the rails now and then. But I’m what they call a rapid cycler. It means I get them all the time – that’s why it’s hard to work out what’s real and what’s not. It all seems real to me.”

I think of the night sky. I like to pretend the constellations are real. I pretend that Sirius really is a dog and the Seven Sisters belong to him. But afterwards, I always know it’s all in my imagination. I try to understand what it must be like for Mum – not to be able to tell the difference, to be scared of yourself and what you might do.

“I can’t imagine what it would be like just not to do things,” I say. “Sometimes what I do works out and other times it doesn’t. But most of the time it doesn’t really matter either way.”

“It’s not like that for me,” says Mum. “I can do terrible things if I’m not careful.”

I look closely. For the first time, I see how brittle she is. “So why don’t you take the meds?”

“I used to. But then I found it stopped me from being creative. Part of the thing about seeing things in such an intense way, is that it gives more depth to your painting.”

She looks beautiful when she talks about her work. Her cheeks dimple and her eyes shine with a glow that lights her whole face. I wonder if there will ever be anything in my life that makes me that happy.

“Couldn’t you take less medicine?”

Her face clouds over. “If you don’t take the right dose, it doesn’t work. Matt, I really am sorry. I came here today to try and make it up to you.” She reaches into her handbag and takes out a bottle of tablets. “Lithium,” she says. “I’ll go back to taking these, if you’ll give me another go.”

It overwhelms me. I’ve never had anyone prepared to make such a sacrifice for me before. “But what about your painting?”