Delacroix, Goya and Turner saved Melissa. She was transfixed by their paintings of working men and women, living in revolutionary times. Their pocked faces full of pain and ecstasy, the excruciating detail of close combat, of slaughter and triumph.

At 12 years of age, her father took her out of school and on a tour of the great art galleries of Europe. Since her mother’s death four months earlier, she’d spent her time lying on her bed watching YouTube clips of airplane crashes, reading Leonard Cohen poetry and not eating. Her father had troubles of his own.

David Tangine was booked to exhibit 12 new paintings in Sydney by the end of the year and he hadn’t put brush to canvas since Justine died. He cancelled the exhibition. When he saw his only daughter with emerald almond eyes like her mothers, was slipping from his reach, he acted.

He never thought, as they wandered through the galleries of Madrid and Paris, that Melissa would find in Delacroix and Goya – painters he thought too romantic – an escape from the darkness. A ladder to the light. A third painter made up the triumvirate. At the Tate Gallery in London, she saw William Turner’s hand reaching down that ladder. She stood in front of ‘Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth’ and cried.

On their return, Melissa rehung her her mother’s paintings and started eating again. The Cohen poetry went in the bin. She bought a second hand Pentax and started taking photographs of the faces of working class people.

An old woman carrying her shopping in Marrickville, stood bent over in the street as Melissa adjusted the focus and the speed.

“Do you want me to smile, love?”

“No, you’re perfect just the way you are,” Melissa said.

Melissa cropped some of the faces so only the eyes showed. With some she used a filter so it looked like they were walking through a shroud from another world.

She came second in the National Photographic Portrait Competition. The Sydney Morning Herald used her photograph of an old man playing the pokies in an Erskineville pub. His eyes had a deep sadness. Readers wanted more of Melissa Tangine’s pictures.

David was stuck with Justine’s art in the lounge. They were splinters buried deep in his heart. Oil paintings of people going to work and lying on beaches. Edward Hopper’s influence showed in her use of light. Would they ever work their way out?

By the time Melissa turned 16, her photographs had been published in The New York Times, Marie Claire and Vogue. ‘The Next Leibovitz,’ The Washington Post wrote. David became her agent. Calls came in from European galleries, keen to exhibit her work. He knocked them back. Melissa had to finish Year 12 first. Maybe next year.

“Why do eyes feature so prominently in your work?” a reporter asked.

“Because as a child, I watched my Mum put her make up on. Her eyes were a deep green. I used to imagine falling in to them. Seeing the world as she saw it”

The school trip to the National Gallery in Canberra was boring, except for the swim in the river near Tidbinbilla. The boys thought she was out of their league; too beautiful, too smart. She wanted to be asked out but not by dickheads. She sat up the back of the bus on the way home and played with her iPhone.

The headache started three days later, then a fever and she was rushed to the North Shore Hospital.

“We’re not sure exactly what it is,” Doctor Khan, the neurologist said. “It looks viral. She’s on a ventilator.”

David stood in front of the doctor, who looked about 35 and wore a gold wedding ring. Did he have any kids? He must see hundreds of frightened parents pacing the ward corridors. Trying to read the signs in the eyes of the passing doctors and nurses.

“We’re both educated men,” David said, trying to keep clam. “If you were going to make a guess – take a fucking wild stab in the dark – what would you say it is?’

“Encephalitis. The symptoms aren’t classic but they’re close enough. I’ll ring you if there are any developments. Go home and try get some sleep.”

He drove over the Harbour Bridge to the Freshwater apartment with Justine’s pictures covering the walls. He opened Melissa’s bedroom door. The screensaver on the computer showed a cartoon dog licking the screen and then rolling on to its side. He sat on her bed and cried so deeply, he could hardly breathe.

xxxxxxx

Doctor Khan called the following morning. David parked the car in a no-standing zone and walked in to his office. The neurologist was holding a file and had ordered a half smile on his face.

“Thank you for coming so quickly. I want to discuss a problem,” ee said. “The virus has infected the frontal and rear lobe and it’s destroying tissue. Melissa has gone in to a deep coma. The CAT scans are fairly conclusive”

“Fairly?” David said.

“She’s brain dead. I wish I had better news”

David stared at Dr Khan’s degrees on the wall. To the right was a picture of his family taken at the Wat Arun temple in Bangkok. Two young girls stood in front of the parents and waved at the camera. He had a flash of Melissa laughing in Trafalgar Square.

David stared at the squares of grey carpet. “What happens now?”

“There’s a ward in the basement where the coma cases receive specialist care. She’ll be well looked after. They receive physiotherapy and we play them music. Some research suggests a few can hear music.”

“And then what?”

The neurologist with the smiling family stared at David.

“That’s up to you”

“Can I see her?”

“Of course”

The elevator dropped five floors and Dr Khan swiped his card and the door opened on to a ward the size of tennis court. David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, was playing softly. The bodies lay under white sheets attached to heart, lung and brain wave monitors. At the end of the ward Melissa lay with her eyes half open. A tube ran up one of her nostrils. David held her hand. He wanted to shake her by and say, ‘hey wake up kid, we’ve got things to do.’ The heart monitor gave a gentle beep. There were no windows. Each patient had a white LED light which hung down from the ceiling, over their bed. 40 little lights. He lifted one of her eye lids and stared deep in to her eye, hoping she’d lift off the bed, and say in her mother’s voice, “what the fuck do you think you’re doing, Dad?” He kissed her on the lips and walked out without looking back. Dr Khan stood under a flickering neon tube.

“How long can you keep her alive for?”

“Theoretically, indefinitely”

“Is there some way we could move things a long?”

“That’s not really my department. I know this is very soon but have you thought about medical transplants? She’s young and healthy. There are people who are desperate for kidney’s and livers. Even eyes”

“You can transplant eyes?”

“We can culture and regrow the optic nerve. That was the stumbling block. It has an 85 per cent success rate.”

David felt the corridor walls shift.

xxxxxxx

Two years passed like dragging a lake for a body which wasn’t there. He considered Nembutal and jumping off The Gap. Justine’s death seemed like a prologue to Melissa’s living death. He drank heavily and staggered around the lounge with Shostakovich belting out of the speakers, drowning out the neighbour’s fist’s hammering on the door.

Clea worked in customer service at the Art Gallery of NSW. She was 40, blonde with a pixie face and a pageboy haircut. They met at Watson’s Bay over a birthday lunch for a mutual friend. She sat opposite him and asked questions about Melissa.

Clea’s love making was a salve. She was hungry for him and he returned her interest with tenderness. In the love making he found a tiny ‘fuck you’ to death; a fist-pump for life. A rebellion against the white lights hanging down over his daughter; against the medical monitors that went ‘beep’. One morning, after they’d made love, as the sea mist rolled in, he sat her down on the chaise lounge wrapped and started to paint her. He climbed Turner’s ladder like Melissa had done and looked in to the light and it was good.

xxxxxx

David felt he was sitting a job interview. Professor Regina Bawa, head of optical surgery sat next to Dr Khan. To his right was a young woman with red hair, wearing a grey pants suit, whose name he couldn’t remember. She led the hospital’s ethics unit. David sat across the table with his fists clenched in his lap.

“So let me see if I’ve got this right,” David said. “You want to harvest my daughter’s eyes and put them in the head of a kid who’s got autism because he’s going blind?”

Professor Bawa spoke with her palms open on the table, as if she came in peace.

“The young man, Peter, has mild autism. He’s actually highly functional. He has a condition where the sheath around the optic nerve is deteriorating quickly. He’s now colour blind. Soon he’ll be profoundly blind. Your daughter could save his sight”

“Melissa has been with us for two years,” Dr Khan said. “There has been no change in her status. Melissa’s and Peter’s genetics are a good match”

The ethics woman played with her 2B pencil and tapped the rubber end on the table.

“I understand your predicament,” she said. “You love Melissa and you want what’s best for her but she can’t give her consent. Only you can do that. I would consider that an act of love.”

“There’s no predicament,” David said with heat. “I can walk out of here any god damn time I please and I’ll decide what an act of love is. If you touch one hair on her head without my permission, I will have you so fucking quickly in court, your heads will spin”

Professor Bawa patted the table and then ran her fingers through her thick black hair.

“We will do nothing without your consent, David, you have my word. But I was wondering if you’ve given any long term thought to Melissa’s welfare. You intimated to Doctor Khan whether the hospital practiced euthanasia. Officially, we don’t. But in the case of an organ transplant, such as the eyes, we make exceptions”

“And if you were willing to consider donating her kidneys …” the ethics woman said, but Regina hushed her down.

David pushed his chair back, stared at the red-headed woman, raised the middle finger of his left hand and walked out of the room.

That night he awoke in a dream with a scalpel in his right hand. He runs the scalpel around Melissa’s left eye and retracts the eye ball. He lifts it three millimetres and cuts the optic nerve with a laser. He passes the eye to the surgeon to insert it in to the eye cavity of a boy. He is about to cut out the right eye, when the eye ball moves and stares up at him. Through dry, cracked lips she whispers, ‘why?’ The scrub nurse drops the instrument tray and David wakes screaming in the darkness.

He slowly makes out shapes in the room. The TV on the wall, an old painting he did of the Manly Ferry, cutting its way to Circular Quay. A light shone from the kitchen. He walks naked down the corridor and for the briefest of moments, hears Melissa and Justine laughing like they used to over breakfast. He closes the fridge door and the kitchen falls in to darkness. One hour until sunrise.

It was Melissa who had taken those extraordinary pictures, not her eyes. Triggered by Goya, Delacroix and Turner and the sum of her life lived until then. Justine’s death had created a cavernous hole which Melissa filled with art. Nietzsche said we cover the walls of our prison with art. Wrong. Melissa used art to smash despair and create a new reality. It wasn’t a prison. It was liberation.

By giving the autistic kid her eyes, he was burying Melissa and Justine. The boy would become a walking memorial to two women. The thought circled around him and then clicked. It was the right thing to do. He splashed his face with water. He’d call Professor Bawa.

xxxxxxx

They took the bandages off on Peter Kisskind’s 17^th birthday. His mother and father stood nervously at the foot of the bed. The operation went smoothly. Professor Bawa slowly unwound the bandages.

“How are you feeling, Peter?” Professor Bawa said.

“Bit nervous. Hungry too.”

“Keep your eyes closed until I tell you to open them”

She put the bandages on a steel tray, washed away the gunk away and shone a small pen light on his eye lids.

“Can you see that?”

“Yes”

“Okay. Now very slowly open your eyes,” she said. His Mum clutched the bed base, her bottom lip trembling.

“It’s blurry but I can see Mum and Dad. I can see light in the room. See better than before”

“Can you see colours, Peter?” Professor Bawa said.

“No. All black and white”

“Don’t worry too much Mr and Mrs Kisskind,” Professor Bawa said trying to hide her disappointment. “Sometimes it takes a while for the colour rods to fire up”

She went back to her office and made notes on her computer.

Case#74, Patient: Peter Kisskind, male, 17 years of age. Partial return of sight but lacking colour dimension. Typical of rejection. Will check again in 24 hours and if negative, will notify parents. Subject unsuitable for further transplants. Expect total blindness in four weeks.

It was 2.00am and Peter was staring at the ceiling. The tiny light in the fire alarm blinked on and off. He counted the time between blinks. 60 seconds. Little red light. He turned on his bedside light and pulled the tray around to his lap and got his colouring-in book. He opened the new packet of colour pencils his Mum got him. He liked how they looked, all lined up with the white and yellow pencils on the left, then the reds, the blues, greens and grey and blacks on the right. He flicked the book open to an outline of an old ship coming in to a harbour. He pulled out a deep green pencil for the sea and started colouring in.