by A. J. Betts
There’s a soft tap at the wall that could be accidental.
I switch off the iPad and the room fades to black, but there’s no chance of sleep. Our conversation loops in my head like a song on repeat. It’s not a perfect song, but it’s an improvement on the Lady Gaga kind.
Mia’s funny, in a ha ha kind of way.
I lie in bed thinking of all I typed, and the things I’ll type tomorrow at 3 a.m., the hour when rules are suspended.
8
ZAC
I’m so hot right now.
Over 39.5 degrees. So much for my perfect graph.
The cleaners threw out everything of Mum’s: tubs of ice-cream, reading glasses and crosswords. Even the calendar’s in a hazard bag in an industrial bin somewhere. My room’s been emptied, scrubbed and sterilised.
Mum’s gone too. Dr Aneta ordered her to take her cold of unspecified origin back home with her. Dad phoned to say he was coming up, but I talked him out of it. The room’s too small for him. Bec offered, but I’d hate for her to pick up bugs in her pregnancy. Besides, what would be the point? It’s not like I can entertain anyone.
My platelets have plummeted to 12, neutrophils to 0.4 and haemoglobin to 8. My total white blood count has nosedived to 0.8 and I’m too sick to give a shit. I’m slumped in the pink chair while Veronica makes my bed. My sheets are soaked with last night’s sweats. Again.
It’s just a cold. A stupid freaking cold that I’m too pathetic to fight on my own. The line from my Broviac leads to two bags of antibiotics. I use the urine bottles. Cleaners ferry them away.
I keep the blinds drawn, not knowing day from night. It’s all the same. Psychedelic dreams weave through sleeping and waking, looping around themselves. I only had four days to go. How long ago was that?
I’d forgotten this blanket of fatigue and how it holds you down. I’d forgotten the sweats and shivers and endlessness. Nurses offer to play Call of Duty but I can’t manage it. I’m not interested in TV or the internet.
This is a good thing, Nina insists, keeping a hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s better your white blood cells get a thumping in here than out there.’
Come on, Helga. Show some spine and fight back.
Later, when I can’t be bothered sleeping, I drag the iPad towards me and switch it on. The brightness dazzles me. It’s just past 3 a.m.
My Facebook profile has been stormed by well-wishers. It’s just a cold, I want to inform everyone. Don’t stress. But I don’t have the energy.
Mia: Helga?
I see her name rise into chat. I hadn’t realised she was there.
Zac: Zac
Mia: U ok?
I don’t need to lie to her. It is what it is. She only wants the truth.
Zac: ordinary
Mia: U said ud be home by now.
Zac: Caught a cold. Beat the crap out of me.
Mia::-(
Zac: drugs starting to kick in.
Hows yr 3rd round?
Mia: its my 4th
Shit. How long have I been sick?
Zac: u in Room 2?
Mia: yeah.
Zac: hi
Mia: hi. Happy fucking christmas.
Zac: Today?
Mia: 4 days ago.
Zac: Oh. Happy Christmas
Mia: I feel like shit
Zac: me too
Mia: like I’m sucking poison
Zac: it’s normal.
Mia: yeah?
Zac: it’ll pass. it all does.
I remind us both.
Mia: I don’t want to die
The cursor blinks, waiting for me. Without my mum sleeping beside me, I don’t have to rush this. No typos, no cliches.
Zac: U won’t
Mia: I’m only 17
Zac: U won’t
Mia: a woman died today
Zac: Who?
Mia: dunno. Room 9
Zac: What cancer?
Mia: dunno. She was old
I’ve never known anyone to die here. Death usually takes place in the comfort of a patient’s home after the hospital has handed them over to family or palliative care or God, or whoever else will listen. They’re supposed to sort out their wills and choose the songs for their funerals, say their goodbyes and go out in their own beds surrounded by loved ones. It must have been unexpected.
Mia: Lots of people were in there.
Zac: you saw?
Mia: through her window.
The nurses stood in the hall.
It must’ve been just after …
She was skinny. ppl were crying.
I let her keep going. It’s the most she’s ever typed. I think I hear her fingers on her keyboard.
Mia: have you ever seen a dead body?
Zac: not a human. You? Before?
Mia: My nan at her funeral.
I laughed cos they used the wrong makeup.
The lipstick was pink gloss and I kept thinking about how long it would stay on.
Longer than her lips?
How long would it take for pearl earrings to drop from her ears?
Zac: you laughed?
Mia: I was 8.
All the relatives I’ve known are still alive: four grandparents, two uncles, an aunt, a great-aunt, four cousins, one brother and a sister. I’ve never even been to a real funeral.
Zac: In kindergarten, a boy drowned in a dam.
The teacher said he’d gone to a better place.
I thought she meant McDonalds.
Mia::-)
I wonder what Mia looks like with a smile. Not a posed one, like in her Facebook photos, but a lazy real one, slumped against a pillow in the middle of the night.
Mia: pick it up quick
Zac: pick wh
The shrill sound punctures the silence, twice, three times, before I can knock the handset from the wall. I’ve never heard the internal phone—everyone else calls me on my mobile. I hold the bulky receiver, forgetting what to do with it.
‘Helga?’
I swallow. ‘Zac.’
‘Are you okay … to talk?’
‘Yeah,’ I tell her, though my throat’s thick and husky. ‘I’m okay.’
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’
How come she asks the kinds of things everyone else avoids? Is it because we’re still, technically, strangers? Or because it’s 3.33 a.m. and the normal rules don’t apply? My breath whistles through the holes.
‘Um … I don’t know.’
‘Yes or no?’
‘No.’
‘Heaven?’
‘No.’
‘God?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘You do?’
When she pauses, I hear her breath whistling too. ‘Can I tell you something?’
‘Yeah. Yes.’
‘When the woman died in Room Nine, there was something else … in the corridor.’
‘What?’
‘Like something I couldn’t see.’
‘A ghost?’
‘I don’t know. It felt like … like that old woman was standing next to me. Like she was watching too. It freaked me out.’
I know all about death. I know that one person dies in Australia every three minutes and forty seconds. I know that tomorrow, 42 Australians will die because of smoking, almost four on roads, and almost six by suicide.
In this coming week, 846 will die from cancer: 156 will be from lungs, 56 from breast, 30 from melanoma, 25 from brain tumours like Cam’s. And 34 of them will have had leukaemia, like me.
Google tells me everything I need to know about death except what comes after.
What can I say about a ghost in the corridor? How can I tell her it was her imagination, and nothing more? When I was little I believed in Jesus and Santa, spontaneous combustion and the Loch Ness monster. Now I believe in science, statistics and antibiotics. But is that what a girl wants to hear at 3.40 a.m.?
‘Helga?’
What I really want to say is how good it is to hear her voi
ce. ‘I’m here.’
‘You think I’m crazy?’
‘Depends. What drugs are you on?’
‘Does it hurt to die?’ she asks.
‘No.’ This I believe.
‘I haven’t even lived yet.’
‘Yeah, you have, and you will. Until you’re eighty-four, at least.’
‘But still,’ she says. ‘If I did, what a stupid way to die.’
I take a lozenge from a packet and put it in my mouth. ‘Actually, there are plenty of stupider ways.’
‘Stupider than a lump on my ankle?’
‘As stupid as watering a Christmas tree with the fairy lights plugged in.’
‘Helga, no one has ever done that.’
‘Thirty-one people have been electrocuted that way. And that’s just in Australia.’ I hear her laughing through the wall and it makes all my sickness disappear. ‘Did you know three Australians die every year testing batteries on their tongues?’
‘No way.’
‘Yep. Then there’s death by vending machine. For future reference, if a chip packet ever gets stuck in one, just walk away …’
‘Are you talking crap?’
‘The crappest way to die is drowning in sewage.’
‘No way.’
‘Last year a New York man fell into a sewer vat.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah, vat deaths are pretty common. Six Indian workers died in a vat of tomato sauce.’
‘Six?’
‘One fell in; the other five jumped in to rescue her.’
‘You are so making this up.’
‘Cross my heart. There have been deaths in vats of oil, paper pulp, beer—’
‘I wouldn’t mind falling into a vat of chocolate.’
‘That’s been done. New Jersey, 2009. A twenty-nine-year-old man—’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I’ve had a lot of time on my hands.’
I hear her breathing while I wait for what’s coming.
‘Helga, if you had the choice—’
‘A vat of Emma Watsons.’
‘You’ve thought about it?’
‘Of course. You?’
‘Since chocolate’s taken … a vat of Jelly Bellies? You do realise there’s only one Emma Watson.’
‘Then she’ll do.’
Mia laughs. ‘Good luck with that.’
The IV monitor whirs beside me. I’d forgotten it was there. For the last five minutes there have been no machines or meds or leukaemia. There’s only been two people with a phone line between them. I’d wanted to make Mia feel better—I hadn’t expected it would rub off on me.
‘Mia, one in two people get cancer,’ I say. ‘We’re just getting ours out of the way early.’
‘I would’ve preferred to wait till I’m old.’
‘Mia?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Use the mouthwash. It’s foul but it beats ulcers.’
‘That’s what the nurses said.’
‘And sucking on ice cubes helps too.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Trust me.’
I’d meant it as a throwaway comment but she falls quiet as if chewing it over.
‘Okay.’
9
ZAC
‘How are you feeling?’ Nina asks. It’s my 44th day in, so I’m told. ‘Are you coping without your mum?’
‘I’m a big boy.’
Nina smiles and hands me four pills, two throat lozenges, three vitamins, and pawpaw gel for my lips. She takes a thermometer from her pocket and puts it in my ear. Distracted, she keeps it in too long, looking at a mid-point between the bed and the wall. She seems tired. In her hair, a small koala holds tight to its branch.
‘Thirty-eight?’ I guess.
‘Thirty-seven and a half,’ she says. ‘Not bad. Do you feel all right?’
‘Do you?’
‘Me?’
‘You look like shit, Nina.’
‘Charmer. You must be better.’ She writes down my temperature and gives me an unconvincing smile. ‘Looking forward to the new year?’
‘It’s got to be better than this one.’
‘True. Keep your chin up, Zac.’
‘I am,’ I say, though it’s her chin that needs lifting.
She moves her hands slowly as she washes them, then leaves.
Without Mum around, I have no idea what’s happening in the rest of the ward. Even Mia’s gone quiet. I remain logged in, but she stays offline.
On her Facebook page, posts invite her to New Year’s Eve parties. They’ve still got no clue she’s next door, hooked up to chemo and hydration. Mia must believe she can keep the two worlds separate. That if she keeps her cancer to herself, it doesn’t exist.
At midnight, fireworks flare at my window, their golds and pinks zipping and whistling. I hear the blaring of distant horns. Down the ward, explosions of party poppers are accompanied by shrieks.
I write to Mia.
Happy New Year!
But she doesn’t respond. The new year rolls quietly, darkly in.
Status: Cold 0, Zac 1. FYI: platelets 48 and neutrophils 1000. That’s a good thing. Happy NY! Outta here maybe Saturday.
I even ask Nina to take a photo of me, and I pose with two thumbs up. My face has deflated. I look new: rebuilt from the marrow out.
I make this photo my new profile pic, replacing Helga, and the compliments start flooding in.
I commit myself to the Harry Potter endurance test. Eight films back-to-back is the kind of challenge I can handle.
I become obsessed with two things: the devolution of Daniel Radcliffe’s acting abilities, and the evolution of Emma Watson’s awesomeness. After she hits puberty, around about The Prisoner of Azkaban, there’s an exponential increase in hotness. By the end of The Deathly Hallows, she’s smokin’.
It must work some kind of magic because, after two days, I’m itching for freedom. Doctors praise my progress, plotted on my chart in a staircase of ticks. I feel like new, thanks to Helga, and part-thanks to Emma Watson. If I walked out of this room right now and strode down the street with this hat on, people wouldn’t stare. I’d be just another guy with a hat. Admittedly, an out-of-breath guy with skin like a vampire’s. But girls like that, apparently.
‘What’s got into you?’ Kate laughs when the physio session ends and I ask for more weights.
I like the burn in my muscles. I like my lungs sucking in oxygen. I like the air rushing up from the exercise bike, blowing at my face.
And I like standing on my feet by the window to look down on the outside world with its taxis and ambulances and smoking surgeons and visitors carrying helium balloons. Soon I’ll be in that germ-filled air and I can’t wait. This room is too small for me.
A postcard from Cam says he’s doing great, working three days a week. He says he’s got his longboard ready for me.
Bec sends me one of the new The Good Olive! Olive Oil and Petting Farm postcards. She tells me there’ve been four new kids and one alpaca born, and that, according to her latest ultrasound, her own baby’s the size of a mango.
My blood test results make the doctors beam. I am on top of this. Nina is beside herself.
But Mia says nothing. Her Facebook profile remains slick and lipsticked, as always. Her friends upload photos of Rotto and New Year’s parties, already discussing plans for their year 12 formal, Valentine’s Day theme, in six weeks’ time. They’re still treating Mia like she’s one of them.
Only I know better. I hear her in the night. Sometimes she throws up. Sometimes she cries. Sometimes she does both, one after the other.
She hasn’t been online in three days, but I write her a message anyway.
Hey neighbour,
Did you try a toasted cheese sandwich? I have many more cooking tips where that came from …
I read that a Spanish guy died yesterday in a vat of glue. Pretty tacky, huh? Thought you’d want to know;-)
I’ll be leaving on Saturday so don’t
go knocking on the wall, unless you want to make friends with an oldie.
Good luck with year 12. At least you’ll only have to do it once!
Your neighbour
Zac.
Mia’s green dot explodes into chat.
Mia: Helga!
Zac: long time no
Mia: theres hair everywhere. Heaps. Over the pillow
Zac: it’s normal
Mia: no, its NOT normal! Fucking everywhere
I’m surprised it lasted so long. I look again at her profile pic: the oversized sunnies, the pose, the singlet top, the thick brown hair. I think of my own hair: two millimetres of soft down.
Zac: It’ll grow back.
Mia: my formal’s in 6 weeks!!
Zac: on the plus side there’s one less thing to worry about.
Mia:?!
Zac: Just sayin.
Mia: U think it’s funny my hair’s falling out?!
Zac: hmmm, no … but there are some cute wigs;-)
Mia: FUCK U
It’s a punch in the gut I don’t need. My fingers flinch from the keyboard.
Mia: R u teasing me?
I hadn’t meant to. Most people lose their hair. She should’ve expected that.
Mia: U think this is FUNNY?!
Her typing is quick—quicker than mine. Quick like jabs. Of course it’s not funny, but what else can you do? If you can’t laugh at yourself, there’s no point to any of this.
Mia: U THINK I WANT TO LOOK LIKE THIS?
Zac: I think u don’t have a choice
Mia: U THINK I WANT TO GO BALD AND UGLY?
LIKE U?
What the hell?
Mia: DONT LAUGH AT ME!
Zac: Im not
Mia: DONT FU
I go offline, my green dot dissolving to safety.
There’s a thump at our wall and I don’t know if she’s swearing or apologising. I don’t answer—I’m not her punching bag. Bang, it goes again and it jars right through me.
A message appears in my email, uninvited.
Ive already lost my holidays, xmas and new year to fucking cancer. It can’t tke the only good thing left
I’m NOT wearing a fucking WIG to my FORMAL!!! Helga!