Controls and their parents

I have an applet with a control on it which is used to display a gif. When the user clicks on the control I want it to display another gif based on where the user clicks (basically an image map, but with added complications which I won't go into here). However, I want to encapsulate all of the processing in the control, and I can't seem to get it to load the image. Apparently getImage(URL) is a member of the Applet class and I can't access it from my control. What is the best way of getting the control to load a gif? Is there another function, or is it possible to ask the Applet to send an image to the control?

Thanks in advance

Dave Turner