Zac and Mia

by A. J. Betts

  I have to remember not to look down. I have to clip the thing on and get dressed quickly, hiding the temporary prosthetic that rubs my wound till it bleeds. It burns like hell but I have to keep it on, keep it hidden, unclipping it only for the bath or bed. In water, at least, the scars don’t hurt so much.

  Such a pretty word: scar.

  The ugliest is stump. I woke to a stump. The surgeons congratulated each other for saving the knee and a part of the shin. They boasted, over and over, that I was lucky.

  Lucky?

  While my friends were dancing at Summadayze, I was kept in observation with intravenous morphine. I pitched in and out of the world, visited by psychs who attempted to talk about change and perspective and body image and luck. Then they hooked me to more chemo. I couldn’t eat, wouldn’t talk, didn’t watch when the wound was unbandaged or the staples taken out. I tried to trick myself beyond my fucked-up body, slipping between vivid dreams until the morphine was taken away and I was left to live like this.

  Against my will, I resurface. My head falls against the side of the tub. At this angle, I see every beam of the ceiling. Sixteen of them. At this angle, I don’t have to see myself. My body can be perfect. It can be anything I imagine it to be.

  So I stay in the bath for hours, hearing the animals and the floorboards that creak beneath Bec’s weight. In this house, wood flexes and yields. Even the walls, somehow, seem to bend for the people within. I’ve never known a house to be soft. Bec, too, is unexpectedly kind. Yesterday, she asked for my opinion on paint swatches. ‘A new coat of paint for a new soul,’ she said, levering open a tub of olive green.

  Bec hums as she paints. Through the day, she brings me sandwiches and sliced pears and expects nothing in return but the safekeeping of her brother.

  She can relax: I didn’t come here to hurt Zac. I don’t want their money, either, anymore. I’ve got enough to get to Adelaide, at least. Enough to get out of here.

  I have to start again or not at all.

  23

  ZAC

  Thump, pat, pause. Thump, pat, pause.

  The sequence comes from inside Bec’s house. It reminds me of Mia on her crutches. But isn’t she still in the bath?

  I go around the back of the house, passing the baby’s room with its windows opened to release the stink of paint. Outside the spare room, I stop and listen.

  Thump, pat, pause. Thump, pat, pause.

  There’s a gap between window and frame, so I draw the curtain to one side. I recognise the end of a brown tail. It thumps the floor, then slides from view.

  ‘Get out of there,’ I whisper, opening the window some more. I lean in, trying to coax the joey to me. ‘Come here.’

  She doesn’t come so I pull myself through the window. Inside, I crouch and click my fingers at the joey, now sniffing the spilled contents of Mia’s backpack: a jumble of clothes, a tube of gel, a phone.

  ‘Come—’

  It’s not the mess of Mia’s life that stops me. It’s not the empty packets of pills.

  It’s the half-leg in the corner of the room. It starts with a flesh-coloured socket, like an over-sized champagne glass. It tapers down to a pole with screws and a harness. Beneath is a stripy sock that ends in a blue shoe, its laces tied in a perfect, white bow.

  It knocks me with unexpected force. Mia. The hollow socket. The chunky clasp. The neat white bow that shouldn’t be.

  A hand at my back shocks me. Bec slides her other arm around her belly, like she’s shielding her baby from all the harm that could ever happen.

  I gasp for breath and Bec tightens her grip around all three of us, drawing us together.

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘I know.’

  We shut the door to the bedroom and release the joey outside. It springs indifferently away. Goats bleat and the sky is too bright, too blue for this.

  ‘I think, perhaps,’ begins Bec. ‘I think she needs her mum.’

  I sit in the cool shed, grateful for solitude. Laid out around me are the wooden slats and plans for the cot. There’s no urgency to finish this: the baby’s another six weeks away at least.

  With a chisel, I dig into the flesh of a post-head. Thin spirals peel away. My incisions become vines that curl around, twisting and tangling the length of it. I carve tiny leaves. In each leaf, I etch veins. I zoom in on every detail, though I’m wasting my time. Nothing I do could ever make her better. Nothing I say would make it right. This chisel, this hammer, these nails—they’re useless. Mia’s not tough enough for this. For that. The ugly leg. All this time I’d suspected, but never known for sure. Tore a ligament at netball, she’d say. It’s so easy to believe her.

  ‘I haven’t seen much of Bec lately.’

  It’s Mum by the entrance. When did it get so dark outside?

  ‘Have you?’ she asks.

  ‘She reckons her legs have puffed up. Cankles, or something.’

  ‘Should I help you clear the poo then?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s Friday, Zac.’

  I release the chisel and it rolls along the bench. ‘No. I’ll ask Bec.’

  Her front door’s locked, as expected, but I don’t knock. I don’t want to break the spell of this house anymore. I wait a few seconds, then turn away to leave.

  Then, ‘No!’ shouts a voice from inside.

  I stop. No? Was it Bec? Was she calling me?

  ‘Don’t!’

  It is Bec. I’ve never known my sister to be afraid of anything.

  I push an ear to the door, hearing the ‘Farrrck!’ that manages to rattle the entire house. ‘Faaarrrking hell!’

  Fuck! Bec? Mia! I should have known—something had to give eventually.

  I sprint around the house and yank open bathroom louvres, but they’re too small to crawl through. Inside, Bec’s voice is rising in anger. ‘Don’t you dare!’

  I target Bec’s bedroom and force up her window. Panic escalates as I roll in, pick myself up and dash to the kitchen, the epicentre of noise—‘Fuck! Shit! Fuck! Shit!’—where screams amplify at the sight of me sliding in with golf clubs. I grab hold of the sink to slow my skidding. Then I hold on longer so I can take it all in.

  I’d expected to see women engaged in combat, not this: Bec lying belly-up on the kitchen table like a beached whale beneath a bath towel. Mia bent over, her face buried in her hands.

  ‘Zac!’ Bec pants, clearly hysterical. ‘Oh my god, Zac!’

  What the hell? ‘Is the baby coming?’

  ‘God, I wish.’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Just do it. Quick!’

  ‘What?’ I yell.

  Mia whips her hands from her face, reaches for Bec’s knee, then rips a strip violently free. Bec bucks as if she’s taken 3000 volts from an electric fence and howls every swear word she’s ever taught me and more.

  The two golf clubs clatter to the floor.

  ‘What the …’

  Bec’s a writhing, flailing buffalo with a four-letter-word vocabulary. Tears stream down her face, which is twisted with pain. And … laughter?

  ‘She said it wouldn’t hurt!’

  ‘It?’

  She groans in a primaeval way, then lets her head flop sideways to face me. ‘I’m trying to impress Anton. We haven’t even started on the bikini line.’

  Beside her, Mia inhales into cupped hands—gulping, laughing—and it’s the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen.

  ‘Who does this? Please tell me labour is less painful.’

  ‘Toughen up,’ I say, though I’ve never been more grateful to my sister.

  ‘Oh, she’s cruel. There’s a whole tub of wax just sitting there.’ Bec shakes her head at me. ‘Oh, Zac. Oh shit, this is bad.’

  ‘Have you inhaled too many paint fumes?’

  ‘Oh, Zac, you have no idea. We’re really in the shit now.’

  I laugh. ‘We? I’m not the one covered in hot wax.’

  ‘So what’s the joke?’ Mum demands from the doorway. ‘Besides m
e?’

  ‘You can’t keep her—’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘She’s not an animal—’

  ‘Mum, you sound like Bec.’

  ‘Well? Why didn’t someone tell me?’

  Bec and I exchange a look.

  ‘What about her check-ups and blood tests? Is she up-to-date?’

  ‘She’s not an animal,’ reminds Bec. ‘She did my eyes. Lashes and brows. Good, huh? I’d bypass the leg wax though.’

  Mum sighs. ‘Don’t be flippant. Someone’s got to tell her mother.’

  24

  Mia

  I seek out the dark. It was always going to end like this: Who’s going to take care of her? Who’s going to be sensible?

  Pins and needles stab my foot, though it’s no longer there. Phantom pain—the cruellest fucking joke. They say cancer makes you stronger. It doesn’t. It messes with your head. It gives you an itch you can’t scratch and a heart that won’t stop aching.

  I have to go, but where? Not to friends with sly looks, or a mother who betrayed me. Not to doctors with powersaws and lies. What else would they want to cut off?

  Shit, it wasn’t Plan D that brought me here. Plan D had played out weeks ago.

  Coming here was Plan Z. Zac was the last chance.

  Even though we’d never met, he’d been more real than anyone in the hospital. That strange, pale boy with the knock became the only one with the right things to say.

  ‘You know how chickens sort out their pecking order?’ Zac wraps his arms over the fence beside me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s what Mum and Bec are doing in there.’

  ‘Sorry. I’ll go tomorrow.’

  ‘Home?’

  I shake my head. Mum allowed this to happen. A goat nuzzles me so I dip my hand in a tub of food and offer it my palm. Its tongue is dry and rough.

  ‘Where?’

  I shrug. It doesn’t matter. ‘I keep thinking that if I get on a bus and go far enough, I’ll eventually fall off the edge of the world.’

  ‘I hate to tell you this but …’ Zac mimes a sphere with his hands.

  ‘Spoiler. I just want to disappear.’

  ‘You didn’t go through chemo to disappear.’

  ‘Remember how angry I was about losing my hair? I thought that was a tragedy. At least hair grows back …’

  ‘You fought though.’ He says it like it’s something to be proud of.

  ‘I just wanted to be normal.’

  ‘You were …’ he says. ‘You are …’

  Poor Zac, still tripping over tenses. He knows about my leg. He should realise the word ‘normal’ belongs to the past.

  ‘If I’m so normal, why is everyone handing me brochures on wheelchair fucking basketball? I never liked basketball before, but now that I’m a cripple—’

  ‘You’re not.’

  I chuck the rest of the feed. ‘I’m a freak show.’

  ‘Mia, you don’t know—’

  ‘You don’t know, Zac—’

  ‘No, you don’t know how beautiful you are.’

  The word topples me a little. Beautiful? I close my eyes. The earth feels like it’s pitching beneath me.

  ‘You are, Mia. You were and you are, and you always will be.’

  ‘Don’t.’ I use the fence to steady myself. He’s warping the night with lies.

  ‘If you were at my school, I wouldn’t talk to you. Couldn’t. Look at you, you’re gorgeous. Even with that blonde wig, you’re still hotter than any girls I know. You’re a nine out of ten.’

  ‘I’m a number now?’

  ‘On the universal hierarchy of hotness, you’d easily be a nine. And I’d be like a six-point-five.’

  ‘You’re a knob,’ I tell him, opening my eyes to catch his grin.

  ‘Okay, so I’m probably more like a six. And sixes don’t talk to nines, that’s the rules.’

  ‘You’re not a six, Zac. And I’m definitely not a nine.’

  ‘You know, there was only one thing stopping me from giving you a ten.’

  ‘Gee, I wonder …’

  ‘And it’s because you’re a moody cow.’

  I punch him. He mouths an ow, rubbing his shoulder.

  ‘That’ll bruise.’

  ‘If your stupid hierarchy exists, Zac—and it doesn’t—the truth is you’d be way higher up than me. You’re the normal one now.’

  ‘You want to make a bet?’

  ‘Sure.’ It’s a competition I can’t lose. With a crutch, I tap both of his gumboots. One, two.

  ‘Yeah, but what about everything else? I’m stuck here, repeating year twelve, while my mates have gotten on with their lives. I’m taking eleven pills a day, getting platelets counted each week. I can’t do anything halfinteresting. I’m even banned from picking olives, for god’s sake. This isn’t real life, it’s limbo.’

  ‘At least you look normal. People don’t stare—’

  ‘I’m only a fifty-five.’

  Fifty-five? What scale is he using now?

  That’s when I notice how tightly he’s clenching the wire. Tendons lock over knuckles. Muscles flex in his forearms.

  ‘Zac, I don’t get it. What’s a fifty-five?’

  But he hooks a foot on a rung and hoists himself onto the fence, above me. A chill creeps through my body and I wonder if it reaches him too. He shivers.

  ‘Zac?’

  ‘Fifty-five per cent. My chance of living five years without relapse.’

  I’ve never been good with numbers, never needed to be. But I understand this one. Fifty-five falls cleanly into my head the way a coin chinks into a money box. Numbers are what they are. They can’t be argued with.

  Everything else melts away except for a cold number and a boy who’s looking to the stars as if he knows them.

  ‘Zac, you can’t know that.’

  ‘Google it.’

  I’d assumed that, after leaving the hospital, he’d stopped obsessing over statistics. I didn’t think numbers had followed him all the way down here. Maybe numbers torment him the way my leg torments me. Maybe we’re both only living as fractions.

  Fifty-five is a pass, I think. A fifty-five per cent in Maths or English would be good enough for me. Should I tell him it’s good enough?

  ‘Mia, you’ll be a ninety-eight by now.’

  Well, I’d rather be a fifty-five with two legs than a ninety-eight with one, I decide, as if this could trump him, but the wind steals the words from my lips and tosses them away. I’m glad they’re gone.

  And still he looks up, where thousands of stars fill the arc of the sky. Of all that’s random and uncertain in the universe, how can a boy be so sure of a single number?

  ‘You’ve got the rest of your life to be angry, Mia. Me … I don’t know what I’ve got.’

  ‘Did you see that?’ I point, desperate to bring him back. ‘A shooting star.’

  ‘A burning meteorite.’

  ‘So I can’t make a wish?’

  He shrugs. ‘If you want to make a wish on a burning meteorite, then make a wish.’

  I punch his thigh. ‘Spoiler. Help me up.’

  Zac braces me as I put my good foot on a wire and, pulling at him, swing the other leg up and over. I straddle the fence, facing him, not trusting myself to balance the way he does. Beneath my jeans, blood rushes my scar, making the wound throb. My head’s dizzy but it’s worth it to be level with him. I notice the grey in his eyes. The squareness of his jaw.

  ‘Hey, you were supposed to be cheering me up, remember?’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘It’s in your job description. We can’t both be miserable, it doesn’t work like that.’ I snap my fingers. ‘So stay focused.’

  ‘I’ll try. Where was I?’

  ‘You were about to say bon voyage for my bus trip. And I was going to promise to send you a postcard—’ I nudge him playfully. Then I slap his chest for real. ‘Come with me!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why not? You and me and a Gre
yhound.’ The idea soars. The freedom of it.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Don’t wreck it with details, just come.’

  ‘You’re serious?’

  I nod, but he laughs and looks away.

  ‘Shit, Mia, I can’t take off—’

  ‘You can.’

  ‘I’ve got year twelve, and Mum. And the others. After all they’ve been through—’

  ‘They’d understand.’

  ‘They need me here, on the farm. They need me … well.’

  I need you too, I think, but I keep my lips closed, just in case.

  Zac slides a hand over mine, linking his fingers through. I hadn’t imagined how warm his skin would be, or how much I’d been waiting for his touch. His hand calms me. It stops the throb of my leg. It fixes the stars.

  When he speaks, he picks his words carefully. ‘I know you don’t believe me, Mia, but you are lucky. I’d swap places with you if I could.’

  I flinch. It’s not possible. ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘If I could promise my parents a ninety-eight, I would.’

  ‘I’d swap too,’ I counter, but he squeezes my hand until it hurts.

  Zac’s mum calls our names, calling us in, but neither of us moves. Balanced on the fence, with our fingers locked around each other’s, it’s all we can do to hold ourselves in place.

  Later, after the cold of night has reached our bones, we untangle. This time, I follow Zac to his house. I’m quiet on my crutches beside him. An alpaca grunts as we pass.

  Zac helps me through the window, then he pulls the curtains behind us, shutting out the universe.

  When I crawl into Zac’s bed, I don’t unclip the prosthetic. I keep my jeans on, and so does he. We both stink of feed and dirt, and soon the sheets do too. I curl and he curls behind me, denim against denim.

  Tonight, I want to forget myself. I want to be in someone’s arms, safe from nightmares: not dreaming, sleeping. I want to be more than a fraction.

  In the darkness, our arms and legs coil to make a whole.

  25