Zac and Mia

by A. J. Betts

Another blop.

  Mia: Hey!

  R U there? Zac Meier?

  The cursor flashes angrily beneath the question, but I’m a rabbit in her headlights.

  Tap!

  There was definite knuckle-crunching in that one. Her demands are in stereo.

  Shit. I type:

  Zac: I’m her

  But my fingers slip across the iPad’s touch screen and I press ‘Enter’ prematurely. There’s a pause long enough to regret my error. Long enough for confusion to sink in next door.

  Mia: R u a girl?

  Zac: No

  I opt for a short message. Brief is better. This touch screen is a minefield.

  Zac: I’m here

  A male

  I add, for clarification, though I lose a few seconds considering the options of ‘boy’ and ‘man’. Surely she knows I’m male! She’s seen me through my window at least four times. Could it be that my constant proximity to females—my mother, the predominantly female staff, possibly even my bone marrow—has seriously compromised my Y chromosomes? More questions are fired:

  Mia: Who r u?

  Is that u next door?

  Zac: Yes. Rm 1. Yr neighbour. Zac

  Male

  I say again for emphasis.

  Mia: But yr profile pic is a girl …

  Shit. She’s right. I’d forgotten about the German Beerfest girl with long blonde plaits and generous cleavage.

  Zac: not me. thats a joke

  How do I explain in abbreviation about the nickname ‘Helga’ and the unknown German donor?

  Zac: Long story … am part Helga … possibly …

  Mia:?

  Zac:!

  What else can I say?

  The cursor blinks at me in disbelief. I need to prove I’m me so I reach across and knock on the wall. It sounds different to before.

  Mum is watching me. She eyes my fist. I’d forgotten she was here.

  Mia: y did u put yr number in my drawer?

  Zac: Not yours. Cam’s. Misbake

  Why does this have to be so hard? Cam must have left my note behind accidentally. So much for the cleaners.

  Zac: Mistake. Mistake!!!!

  The repetition and exclamation marks look pissed off, as if I emphatically regret friending her, which I do, but only because I’m making a complete dick of myself.

  She types nothing and I think she regrets it too. Why bother being friends with someone you can’t meet? Someone who looks the way I do and types so recklessly.

  I take a deep breath and start again. I need to spell this out.

  Zac: Didnt put note in yr room.

  Am stuck in here.

  Note for someone else—Cam. He’s in

  room 6 now.

  But mistake ok.

  Ok?

  She answers my question with another.

  Mia: y stuck?

  The cursor blinks curiously. How do I type this? My weakness through year 11, thinking it was too much footy. The bruises and fatigue and flu. Then the tests and diagnosis and those six months of chemo, then life—life!—then relapse, followed by the search for a Bone Marrow Transplant donor and the Total Bone Irradiation, then the quarantine for the German marrow to take hold as I rebuild my immune system so my neutrophils will be ready for the world. But until then I’m stuck here, stuck here to graft and build and heal and wait and get excited about the smallest things, like a tap on the wall and someone, finally, my own age to talk to.

  Zac: Just stuck. 7 more days. Not so bad …:-/

  I’m left looking at the blank space for ages. Did I say too much? Did it sound like I was asking for pity?

  I sense her slipping away, her eyes glazing over, wanting to return to her Facebook page of healthy, popular friends from the real world with tans, oversized sunnies and heart-shaped pendants. They could be models in magazines. I want to tell her I’m one of those people too—well, kind of—even if I do currently resemble a Rice Bubble. But all I say is:

  Zac: U can play yr music if you want. I hate gaga but

  Mia: Me too

  Zac:?

  Mia: it was a gift.

  & good mum-repellant

  Zac:?

  Mia: guaranteed

  Zac: didn’t work on mine

  u can play anything u want. Its yr room.

  There’s no response so I go stupidly on.

  Zac: Take it easy. dont be sa

  This iPad should have an override button to stop me stuffing up.

  Zac: d

  I add, but I don’t know why I type this either, as if I’m the Sad Police. I’m not. She can be whatever she wants to be.

  Apparently what she wants to be is alone. Her green chat symbol disappears and I’m left feeling like I’ve said all the wrong things, spelled all the wrong ways.

  Don’t be sad? Why isn’t there a significant other—like her mum, or the guy in the hat who’d visited that day—to spew out dumb stuff instead of me? She needs someone beside her to tell her that everything is going to be all right, that it’s not for long; that at seventeen, she has sixty-seven years of life ahead of her, according to current statistics, and this is just a blip, a time-out from her real life, less than one square on her ceiling.

  I hear her body rising from the bed next door and, soon, the toilet flush. If she’s throwing up, I hope it’s because of the Cisplatin and not because of me.

  I linger on her Facebook page long enough to learn she’ll be going into year 12 next year; that she’s been training for a Diploma of Beauty Therapy one day a week. That she loves Tim Burton films, Ryan Reynolds, Flume and peanut M&Ms. That she hates bananas. And she’s in a relationship, it says, with Rhys Granger.

  I switch the iPad off. We might be ‘friends’ but we’re not friends and, apart from the obvious, we have little in common. It would feel weird to stalk her wall any longer.

  ‘A six-letter word meaning ostracise?’ Mum asks.

  But words fail me.

  7

  ZAC

  Status: 5 days to go. Dying of boredom. Suggestions?

  Mum’s assigned herself a project: teaching herself to knit from a Knitting for Dummies book. At forty-nine, and a soon-to-be-grandmother, she decided it was time. Her first attempt is a scarf for Bec’s yet-to-be-born baby. She clicks and clacks using wool from a packet that was hygienically sealed to prevent germs from entering our cocoon. Cast 32, knit-stitch eight, purl 24. It sounds like aerobics. Mum could do with some aerobics.

  I need a project too. Something to make my last week trip along like her stitching, quickening with increasing confidence. Instead, time feels like a lump of plasticine in my useless, puffy hands. Five big fat days to go.

  It’s not that Mum hasn’t offered to teach me—she bought spare knitting needles in the hope we would purl in sync—but I threatened to use one to stab myself in the eye. I’d rather watch repeats of Glee than take up knitting. Besides, I need to pay more attention to my image.

  ‘I need a hat,’ I tell her.

  ‘I’ll have to finish the scarf first.’ Since when do babies wear scarves anyway?

  ‘Not knitted. Bought. A cap, or something, like Ryan Reynolds would wear. Can you get me a hat?’

  ‘Why would you need a hat inside?’

  ‘It’s not for sun protection. It’s more for … ego protection. My head is too pale.’

  Mum glances up mid-row. ‘Who’s Ryan Reynolds? And what’s wrong with your head?’

  ‘I’m a human lightbulb. I want a hat. A cool hat. A manly hat. A hat hat.’

  ‘All right, Dr Seuss.’

  ‘But not from the hospital store. Somewhere … cooler. Could you do that?’

  ‘What, right now? After thirty days, you’ve decided you need a hat right now?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  Mum exaggerates a sigh as she finishes the row, then she places the needles and wool in her lap. ‘You’re a funny one. Is this about the scarf? Because I’m doing one for the baby first?’

  ‘Can’t a man h
ave a hat?’

  ‘Do you need to talk to Patrick?’

  ‘I need …’ I repeat, exasperated, ‘a hat. And a mother who doesn’t ask so many questions.’

  ‘Tetchy,’ she mutters, tossing her handbag over a shoulder. ‘I’ll get some ice-cream while I’m out then. So, draw me a picture of this manly hat.’

  I tear a page from the neglected diary and draw something similar—but not too similar—to the hat Mia’s boyfriend was wearing when he came in a week ago.

  He’s wearing it again today as he passes my round window, crossing paths with Mum in the corridor. I wonder if she takes any notice of this guy, with his fixed expression and fistful of carnations.

  The conversation next door is too quiet to hear. Mia’s speaking, at least, which is more than she’s done for the past two days. I’ve wanted to tell her that it gets better; that this will pass. I hope Rhys is saying these things to her now. I hope he’s being the significant other that her mother couldn’t be.

  There are already twenty-four comments on my latest post asking for a project. There are predictable suggestions from people I barely know—make a scrap-book of your journey; write a letter to yourself in one year’s time; monogram a Christmas stocking—to ideas from mates: build an Eiffel Tower out of used needles (Alex); sell your old marrow on eBay (Matt); convince the nurses to star in a porn movie (Evan). The least-offensive suggestion comes from Rick, another Emma Watson fan: back-to-back Harry Potter movies. Easy.

  Mia hasn’t commented, not that I’d expected her to. I refresh her page again and again, waiting for her to add something about hospital, her dumbass ankle, or even the creepy Helga-boy from next door. But her page remains unnaturally cheerful and my eyes ache from watching it. Her status update, posted last night, says:

  Still chilling down south. Anyone got tix to Future Music Fest?

  I read her friends’ banter about the line-up. None of them ask about her ankle.

  Don’t they realise how wrong they are about her life? How sick and sad Mia is? I’ll bet the only one who knows is in with her now, and he doesn’t stay long. I hear the door open and close, then I see Rhys in the corridor, empty-handed. A minute later I spot him through my rectangular window as he emerges from the main entrance, seven stories down. He lets himself into a car in the five-minute parking bay. Then he zooms off, leaving behind the hospital and its sickness and the seventeen-year-old girl who’s crying softly in the next room.

  It’s more painful than any pop song.

  If I could get up and go in there, I would. At least, I think I would.

  I’d go in there and sit on her bed. I’d rub her back. I’d put my arm around her, I think, if that’s what she wanted, the way Mum used to do with me.

  But I’m stuck in this room, burdened with the sad sounds that no one else can hear.

  When Mum returns from the shops, she presents me with a tea cosy with earflaps.

  ‘What the hell?’

  ‘The man at the store said it’s on trend. He said Burt Reynolds would wear it.’

  ‘Who?’

  She rolls her eyes. ‘The actor. You know, Smoky and the Bandit.’

  Is she for real?

  ‘It was your idea,’ she says.

  I’m tempted to throw up in it but Mum pushes it over my head. She steps back and looks at me like I’m a work of graffiti she’s trying to decipher.

  ‘Didn’t a gay cowboy wear one in that mountain movie?’

  ‘Not exactly the look I was after, Mum.’

  ‘Well, you need to work on your drawing skills.’ She crumples my hat sketch and chucks it into the bin. ‘Why don’t you? I could get some fruit in here … make a still life out of it. Get you a Drawing for Dummies book.’

  Mum’s testing my patience more than ever. It wasn’t so bad with chemo: we could handle five days together, knowing that back at home we’d have five days of our own space. But a month together is cabin-fever territory. Hysteria is just a sideways glance away.

  ‘You know that newbie?’ I say, hoping to kill two birds with one stone.

  ‘I don’t think she’s that new anymore.’ Mum gets me on a technicality.

  ‘The girl formerly known as newbie. Mia.’

  ‘Mia?’

  ‘She’s next door. Can you go say hi? Take Scrabble with you.’

  Mum sniffs at the idea.

  ‘At least the word puzzle,’ I say.

  ‘She doesn’t seem the … word puzzle type.’

  Friendly, she means. The tea-loving, scone-eating, happy-go-lucky sort, like most of the patients and their significant others. The girl’s grumpy, she means, adolescent and angry, the way Bec used to be as a teenager.

  ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ Mum says. ‘You know, I think that hat suits you.’

  ‘Pass me a knitting needle.’

  Instead, Mum hands me a bowl of hokey-pokey ice-cream. I eat it, even though it tastes sweeter than it should. It’s something to do, at least.

  I listen to my new albums with my earphones in, choosing which songs I’d burn for Mia if I had the guts to.

  Five days to go.

  I leave the toilet unflushed and tiptoe back to bed.

  I switch on the iPad and scroll through blogs of patients from around the world. It always amazes me how people confess their fears to a global, unseen audience. How they upload hairless photos of themselves or painful poems in rhyming couplets. Or make promises to gods of one religion or another. Are they brave or just bored? I even read their prayers. It makes me feel less alone, at 3 a.m., to know I’m not the only one shut in.

  I track the progress of the hopeful and hopeless, the winners and losers. And each time I read about someone’s death to leukaemia, there’s a grim sense of relief. I could never admit this to anyone—and I feel like an absolute bastard—but their loss helps me believe, in some cosmic way, that my chances of survival are boosted. Someone else has chalked a hit on the scoreboard. It means I’m safer, doesn’t it?

  I don’t know these people and I don’t want them to die, but they make my odds look better. I have to believe in the maths. Mum is snoring beside me for the 32nd night in a row and, even though she can irritate the hell out of me, I can’t let her down. She needs me to beat this.

  I read the blogs of parents with children too young to type for themselves. I read panicked letters on forums from people who found out too late and don’t even get the chance of chemo or a transplant. Again I feel lucky. Then I feel guilty.

  Then I see her at the bottom of my screen. She’s nothing but a small green dot peering up at me: a glow-in-the-dark planet. As if she’s been watching.

  I’m not the only one not sleeping.

  The green dot means go. Should I go?

  But she writes first.

  Mia: Helga?

  Zac: it’s zac

  Mia: U awake?

  Zac: What do you reckon?

  Mia: True.

  I cant sleep.

  Zac: Its the 3 am curse.

  Mia: curse? What drugs u on?

  Zac: just isolation. Enough to make you crazy

  Mia: Helga I feel like shit.

  Zac: Ur supposed to. Chemo does that.

  It’s Zac … by the way

  It gets better

  I add. And then:

  Zac: You’ll get better.

  I hope it doesn’t look like an empty promise.

  Mia: sure

  Zac: for sure

  Mia: Will u?

  Like a dart, her question finds me. She has good aim.

  Zac: I’m nearly better. Brand new Helga marrow.

  Mia: u looked really sick

  My head sinks heavier into my pillow. She’s right. At least she’s honest enough to say so.

  Zac: Chemo. steroids. Lack of sun.

  Mia: So u wont die?

  The ‘d’ word jumps off the screen. Everyone else here avoids it.

  Zac: No

  Mia: Good.

  What do I type in response? Thanks?

>   Zac: New marrow’s grafted now.

  We’re all getting better.

  Mia: What happens to someones facebook when they die?

  Zac: I don’t know …

  Mia: Where do the profiles of dead people go?

  Zac: U’ll have to ask Zuckerberg.

  Mia: Who?

  Zac: The god of facebook.

  Mia: Where do their other things go?

  Like mobile phones and all the music on ipods?

  I imagine mountains of phones. Songs forgotten in clouds.

  Zac: Why?

  Mia: FUCKING BORED. How can u STAND this place?

  Zac: don’t have a choice. Sleep helps. Seinfeld.

  Modern Family.

  Mia: They put a tube down my nose and it killed.

  Zac: ur not eating?

  Mia: everything tastes smoky.

  chocolate tastes like wax:(

  Zac: Try toasted cheese sandwiches with tomato sauce. A chemo classic.

  Let the cheese cool first though

  Mia: aren’t u bored?

  Zac: out of my brain. 32 days in the same room.

  Mia:?!!!

  Zac: Been stuck in this room since November 18.

  Nearly done though. U too. 2 cycles down.

  Mia: 3 to go:-(

  Zac: only 5?? Ur lucky.

  Mia: Lucky????

  Zac: So lucky. Dont u know?

  She must know, mustn’t she? That females her age with osteosarcoma have an eighty per cent survival rate, but hers is above ninety because of the location. If all the cancer gets zapped and the tumour’s cut out, it’ll be over ninety-five. Doesn’t she realise how good ninety-five per cent is?

  Instead, I type:

  Zac: Ur the luckiest on the ward

  Mia: Lucky = winning the lotto

  Zac: U should buy a lotto ticket then

  Mia: Ur a funny guy

  Zac: so everyone keeps saying

  Mia: Not funny ha ha, but funny hmmm …:-*

  Ok sleepy. Thanks.

  Zac: Anytime.

  Mia: See ya Helga.

  Zac: Zac!