by A. J. Betts
The ward manager asks the mother to leave and I see her take off, her hair drawn back in that tortoiseshell claw, a hand swiping at tears.
But the fight’s not yet over. I hear the new girl get stuck into Nina.
‘Go away.’
‘I need to hook up the new bags,’ Nina’s saying. ‘Yours are empty.’
‘No!’ the girl yells with more energy than I could muster. ‘No more. Leave me alone!’
There’s a flurry of nurses in the corridor and, soon, Patrick’s shoes as he walks to Room 2 and closes the door behind him. I imagine him standing there, hands clasped, asking delicately about her ‘feelings’. She fights him too.
It doesn’t end until later, with Dr Aneta and probably something like valium. ‘Fine, give it to me,’ the new girl says. ‘Give me the lot.’
Now there’s a silence that seeps through our wall. Six centimetres isn’t so solid after all.
There’s so much she doesn’t understand yet: that it gets better; that it’s not the doctors’ fault. Don’t struggle, I want to say. Don’t pull the Emergency Exit lever. Take the pills and, for what it’s worth, enjoy the ride.
I wish I could tell her this.
I wish I could tell her how lucky she is.
Returning to bed after my third piss of the night, I see a star on the floor. It’s as if it found its own way there, skimming under the door and across the smooth lino.
There’s still a bit of glow left in it. I pick it up and let it lead me back to bed.
When I’d told the girl about the star on her ceiling, I hadn’t wanted her to return it. Why does she keep getting my messages wrong?
I hope I haven’t made her sadder.
I hear her toilet flush. Three a.m.
I wonder how it feels to lie in a room this size without anyone to share it with.
I don’t reach for the iPad tonight. I’m not in the mood for updates on the winners and losers. Instead, I keep hold of the star as it fades. I watch until it disappears completely, and even then I feel its shape in my palm.
Head to head, we lie.
At least, I think, she’s not fighting me.
5
ZAC
Around lunchtime, I convince Mum I’m desperate for a spearmint milkshake from the cafe—a guaranteed way to get her out of my room. I need to knock on the wall and tell the girl to take back the star. She wasn’t supposed to return it to me.
I knock, but a man’s voice answers. The girl’s already gone.
Cam and I met in the common room way back in April. He was in for radiation and our cycles overlapped, so we’d play long games of pool, though I think he took it easy on me. Fresh from surgery, the scar on his head was a raised, violent ‘C’. ‘C for Cam. In case you forget.’ It could have been ‘C’ for the other word, the one that can’t be named. Cam’s tumour had been the size of a golf ball and he carried one in his pocket for illustrative purposes. He’d thought his headaches were caused by getting dumped on Trigg reef too many times.
‘I’ve … what do you call it?’ he calls through the wall. ‘Relapsed. Like you did.’
It’s not fair that the two words should be so close: relapse, remission. They should be at opposite ends of the dictionary.
His hair’s grown back curly, he says. ‘But now the bastard’s back and I’ve got to get zapped again.’ He’s an electrician, he reminds me, so he can handle it. He boasts he’s been surfing every day since finishing treatment the first time. Last week he scoffed at a two-metre tiger shark. ‘What could it do to me?’ he laughs through the wall. I can almost hear the sea in his voice.
Nina’s lured into his room more often than mine. There’s not much of an age difference between them, I reckon. I overhear their small talk and the buzz in her voice. When she comes into my room, a grin still plays at her lips, a different shape to the one she usually gives me. Her cheeks are the colour of her ladybird clip. I watch her change my IV fluids and reset the monitor, wondering how she can let herself be sucked in when she knows what I do: that his 25-per-cent chance has slid to ten. Even ten per cent is generous.
Fuck, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to think about numbers but that’s what happens here.
In school, chance was straightforward:
If a dice is rolled, what is the probability of rolling a 3?
1:6
If two die are rolled, what is the probability of rolling two 3s?
1:36
I liked maths. I liked that I knew where I stood. But now?
If a 32-year-old man has a brain tumour removed, then after eight months the cancer comes back, what are the chances for survival?
1:11
Convert this to a percentage.
9.09%
Maths is inescapable here. Doctors rattle off ratios of white blood cells and neutrophils. Nurses measure my temperature and weight, calculating milligrams of Methotrexate, Prednisone, Cyclophosphamide. They chart my progress, praising my improvement in increments, as if I’m somehow responsible for the upward gradient. More than the oldies’ with dodgy bowels, mine is a graph worthy of excitement and optimism. I am their star student.
Unlike Cam. Fucking Google. On some websites his chances are pegged as 1:10; on others, 1:14. When he bangs on my wall and says, ‘Zac-boy, turn to Channel Four. It’s The Goodies! Goodie goodie, yum yum,’ I wonder if he looks at the same sites I do.
I know to keep these stats to myself, away from Mum and Patrick and Facebook and whoever else would worry. I have to file them away and focus on what’s in front of me: Nina.
‘Cam wants to give you a lesson when you’re out,’ she says, washing her hands.
‘In maths?’
‘In surfing, doofus.’
‘Me?’ The human Rice Bubble? At least I’ll float.
‘Cam says he’ll take you to Trigg after Christmas. He’s got a nine-foot longboard that would be perfect for you. He asked for your mobile number.’
I’ll be shark bait for sure. Still, I tear out a page and write down my number. That man walks around with a giant C on his head and new tumours in his brain, and still he dares the ocean. I can’t say no to him.
Or Facebook me: Zac Meier (second one listed, you might not recognise me!)
Mum delivers my note to Cam then stays in to chat. Without a significant other—his kelpie and flatmate don’t count—Cam finds a surrogate in my mum, who brings teas and giant Anzac biscuits. In the real world they would have nothing in common—Mum’s a farmer from down south; Cam’s a surfing electrician with a Falcon ute—but here on the ward, the usual rules don’t seem to matter as much.
Nina eases a thermometer into my ear. Today’s hairclip is a reindeer.
‘This end of the ward is better, don’t you reckon?’ I’m as casual as I can be with a thermometer sticking out of my head.
‘Yeah?’
‘It’s brighter, or something. Better feng shui. Good for patients of a … younger age. Like Cam. And even … younger than that.’
‘Really?’
‘It would make sense, I reckon,’ pushing on, ‘for the young ones—like Cam, or … whoever—to be put up this end … in the future. You know, whenever the next hypothetical young one has to come back in.’
‘As hypothetically young as Mia, you mean?’ Nina flicks her wrist and records numbers in my file.
Mia. The name suits her. ‘Is she okay?’
Nina snaps the pen onto the clipboard. Whatever the reality, I know she won’t bullshit me.
‘She’ll be fine, Zac. Don’t you worry about her.’
But I know this already. I’ve googled it.
That girl’s got the best odds of all of us.
Two days later, Patrick comes in saying he has good news.
‘I’m cured?’
‘Um … well, no. I mean, you will be, Zac, in five years … officially …’
‘You’ve got me a date with Emma Watson?’
His face cracks with relief. ‘Maybe. I mean, I haven’t read the fine
print. We’re nominating you for a Make-A-Wish Award.’
I’ve heard about these wishes, granted to under-eighteens with life-threatening illnesses. I’ve seen photos of kids in helicopter flights or at Disneyland hugging Mickey and Minnie Mouse. The thing is, they’re pre-pubescent—the kids, that is, not the giant mice—and I’m having trouble picturing myself as the latest Make-A-Wish pin-up guy.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re such a fighter, Zac.’
‘Like Anthony Mundine?’
‘Well, maybe.’ Patrick sits sideways on the end of my bed and rubs at his corduroy trousers. ‘No, not really. It’s because you never complain. You’re always … on top of things.’ I can see what he’s thinking: Unlike that girl …
‘I get it. More like Hulk Hogan, then.’
‘Zac!’ Mum points a liquorice stick at me. She’s lectured me about taking advantage of Patrick’s goodwill. Like the other staff here, he’s used to psychologising about adult issues, such as bankruptcy and infertility and the unfairness of life and blah blah blah.
‘Maybe more like a fighter at war,’ Patrick suggests.
‘So this room is like, Afghanistan, and my leukaemia is the Taliban?’
‘If you like …’
‘A metaphor. Thanks. Can I use that in English?’
‘Sure. Right then,’ he says, standing. ‘Put some thought into what you want. Emma Watson, hey? Hermione from Harry Potter, you mean? Why not? We can all dream …’
‘Be nice,’ Mum says, after Patrick’s washed his hands and waved himself out.
‘You be nice or I’ll wish a Jenny Craig membership on you.’
The truth is, I don’t want to go to Disneyland or drive an F1 with Michael Schumacher. When I finally get out of this room, the last thing I want is a fuss being made over me. All I want is to get under that huge blue sky, mucking about on the farm with Dad and Evan, and playing footy with the guys. Even helping Bec with the animals. I just want to be outside again, like I’m supposed to be.
Besides, I don’t deserve an award. I’m not a fighter and I’m probably not very brave. I haven’t done a Ned Kelly and saved a kid from drowning, or sailed around the world like that girl in a pink boat. Playing three hours of Xbox a day doesn’t make me a hero. I’ve lain on my bed for twenty-seven consecutive days and successfully mastered my bowel movements. I’ve succeeded in losing 100 per cent of the hair on my head, which has somehow managed to double in size. And, after seventeen days with new marrow, I’ve finally begun to make some white blood cells of my own, so the tests show. None of this is groundbreaking stuff.
I’ve watched documentaries about prisoners of war who survived for years by chewing charcoal dust and putting maggots onto wounds to eat their infections. Now that deserves a trip to Disneyland. In here I have a bar fridge-freezer, television and Xbox, air-conditioning at a constant 21 degrees, hot meals and three snacks delivered daily, and someone who makes my bed.
I don’t moan about my treatment because what’s the point? The way I figure it, this is just a blip. The average lifespan for an Australian male is currently seventy-nine years, or 948 months. This hospital stay, plus the first rounds of chemo and the follow-up visits, add up to about nine months. That’s only 1.05 per cent of my life spent with needles and chemicals, which, put into perspective, is less than one of the tiles out of the eighty-four on the ceiling.
So in the scheme of things, it’s nothing. And it’s definitely not worthy of a Make-A-Wish Award. If anyone deserves a prize it’s Cam, but at thirty-two, he’s too old.
Nina deserves an award too. She knows the odds and still lets herself fall for him.
‘So, why Emma Watson?’ Mum says later. Even Mum’s braver than me. She chooses to endure this.
I’m the least brave of everyone. I never signed up for this war. Leukaemia conscripted me, the fucker.
6
ZAC
Facebook tells me I have two new friend requests. With 679 friends, I really don’t need any more. Before I got sick, my tally was in the mid-400s, and even that was a stretch: schoolfriends, ex-schoolfriends and guys from the footy and cricket teams. But now, I have ‘friends’ from everywhere: distant relatives, patients and their families from hospital, and members of various teen cancer networks I was coerced to join, who clutter my profile page with jokes, borderline-spiritual quotes, and acronyms I can’t always translate.
‘Online communication is essential,’ Patrick told me, ‘to survive the isolation of your Isolation.’ But I have a feeling my ‘friends’ benefit more than I do.
The most entertaining thing about Facebook has been rejecting Mum’s persistent friend requests.
‘You’re with me every hour of the day, Mum. Why do we need to Facebook each other too?’
‘I just want to see what you’re up to.’
‘You do see what I’m up to. You see everything. In real time.’
‘But I only have fourteen friends,’ she says, as if pity could break me.
‘Then you need to get out more. Go talk to real friends, or visit Aunty Trish. She only lives three suburbs away. Or better still, go home.’
‘I’ll go when you go, in seven days,’ she reminds me, as if I’ve managed to forget. As if.
I reject Mum’s friend request again, then open the second one.
I’d expected it to be from Cam.
Friend request: Mia Phillips
0 mutual friends
It’s a name I don’t recognise, with a face I think I’ve seen. I stare into the photo to be sure. She has a low-cut singlet and a necklace with half a silver heart. Her arms are draped around the shoulders of other girls. Is it her?
I look up at my round window. She’s not there, of course. There’s just the white wall and two-thirds of the hygiene sign, now framed with festive red and green tinsel. But it’s the newbie’s face on the screen; it has to be. The girl with the tap to my knock.
She’s asking me to be her friend and it’s caught me mid-breath, mid-whinge, mid-everything.
My finger hovers over ‘Confirm’, but I’m confused. How does she know who I am?
‘Mum? Has Cam gone home?’
‘No. They shifted him to Room Six.’
‘When?’
‘While you were sleeping.’
I lower my volume and my voice falls an octave. ‘Then who’s in Room Two?’
Mum shrugs as if it’s none of her business all of a sudden, then offers me a marshmallow. She knows exactly who’s in Room 2.
The screen gives me two options:
Confirm Not Now
‘She wasn’t due back till Tuesday. Isn’t that what Nina said?’ I thought she was on a cycle of five days on and five days off.
‘I can’t remember. What’s a seven-letter word for “moccasin”?’
I don’t need another Facebook friend, especially one who burns me dodgy CDs and peels off glow-in-the-dark stars for no reason. A girl who gets my messages all wrong. Who’s so full of fight.
But she’s alone, after all …
My finger overrides my brain and presses the screen.
Confirm
I brace myself but there are no seismic shifts or deafening alarms. This hasn’t changed anything. She’s just become one more fake friend on my profile page.
Then tap.
Was it the cleaner next door? Or a girl’s knuckle?
Tap.
I catch Mum glaring at the wall.
‘Was that you?’ she asks, and I shake my head.
‘Maybe there’s a mouse.’
Tap, the wall insists. Tap tap.
Holy crap! In the space of two hours, the new girl’s moved in next door, Facebook-friended me and tapped me? This is happening at warp speed.
I scramble to her page to see her life exposed in comments and photos and emoticons.
Rotto this w’end Mia. You in?
Why werent you at Georgies? Best. Night. EVER!
I see her latest update, posted three weeks
ago:
So over this dumbass ankle
The comments that follow are way off target:
Too much dancing!!!?
Didn’t you get antibiotics or something?
Mamma mia u unco spaz;)
I skim down the page looking for more.
I see older updates about shoes and dresses for the year 11 dinner dance a month ago. There’s a photo of splayed hands with ten different shades of nail polish, followed by trails of inane comments by some of her 1152 friends. Seriously? Who knows that many people?
But there’s no ‘C’ word. There’s not even a ‘chemo’.
Rotto? It doesn’t make sense. Has she really fooled them into believing it’s just a sore leg? The new girl might have good odds, but it’s still cancer, and it sucks. It’ll suck for ages.
Tap.
Her friends have been posting crap about summer holidays and pre-Christmas sales, not realising Mia’s been in and out of hospital, feeling like death. Why hasn’t she told them?
I scroll further and see her life in reverse, back through a couple of whinges about a sore ankle, then back to before, to the usual complaints about school, to invitations to the beach, to Karrinyup, to her photos tagged at the Big Day Out and Summadayze. I see her Facebook life exposed in a beautiful, colourful rush, but I still see none of her.
Then my iPad makes an unexpected blop sound and in the bottom right corner of the screen, the chat box tells me ‘Mia is typing …’
Blop.
Mia: Is that YOU?
Shit! Can she sense I’m on her page? Does she think I’m spying? But she invited me!
Five minutes ago I was watching day two of the test against Sri Lanka, and now I’m being belted with stressful taps and questions from the girl next door. Mia. I need to slow her down, or speed myself up. And why is YOU in capitals?
Tap.
‘Zac?’ Mum’s voice is testy. ‘Was that you?’
What the hell? Which do I answer first? The wall or the Facebook question? Or my mum? And what do I say anyway?