You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead

by Hardy, Marieke

  Gen was the first person I knew to get sick, properly sick, and it hit our group of friends like a train. We were in our early thirties, still dancing around the concept of recklessness, dawdling irresponsibly with commitment like bored, aimless teenagers. There were carbon copy nights of hard drinking where we would inevitably end up back at Blair and Angie’s house in East Brunswick at three o’clock in the morning, talking too loudly and attempting to crump and knocking over furniture. It was a ten-year summer; nobody could be bothered getting pregnant and everybody kept going to gigs and sticking powders up their noses and nothing really changed. There was the lazy expectation that with any luck it would stay like this forever. We were old enough to know better. We just didn’t feel like knowing better.

  People our age didn’t get cancer. Grownups got cancer. Friends of parents, distant aunts, paper thin grandmothers with a plethora of pre-existing ailments. Or that one sad and strange kid from primary school who kept turning up to class, month after month, with considerably less hair and a big brave scared smile, until one day they didn’t turn up anymore and the principal said something adult in assembly about happier places and peace of mind that nobody really understood.

  Cancer was maudlin and sentimental. Cancer was in Beaches. Cancer was a dull reminder that we wouldn’t be spared those difficult, painful feelings of process and grief the rest of the adult world had to experience. That it had happened to Gen—a woman whose brassy, milk-curdling laugh was so robustly impossible to ignore she and I were often asked to leave restaurants so other diners could continue their meals in peace—was simply absurd. She was an independent, forthright, guitar-playing smart alec. A band she had been in years before were briefly the darlings of Triple J and teenagers had lined up around the block to see her play. On stage she was all snarl and sass and 1980s prom dresses. She was known for her quick wit and collection of sequinned windcheaters. In the days of Myspace she had competed with our friend Glenn over accumulating online friends and with concerted effort had locked in over one thousand in a week. She was brash and infuriating and somebody you always wanted to be around.

  She had called me directly from the doctor’s office.

  ‘They found a lump,’ she said in a flat, dull voice. ‘It’s big. I know it’s cancer. I just know.’

  It was three days before her thirty-sixth birthday. She had been freaking out about the milestone, gently, in that self-deprecating, self-conscious way we all had of facing birthdays in our thirties. We had been making jokes about adult nappies and jailbait boyfriends who looked at us blankly when we referenced generational things like Mudhoney and Joan Kirner. We were planning our annual liquor-sodden picnic in the park, where we would toast each other, lushly and repeatedly, and watch from half-lidded sprawlings on the grass while the children of our friends beat a piñata senseless.

  Now all of a sudden the party was on hold and Gen was sitting on my couch sobbing and I was trying to half-heartedly reassure her that everybody had lumpy bosoms and it was only recently that my GP had had a prod around my décolletage and bluntly pronounced it ‘one of the lumpiest damn chests I’ve ever encountered’.

  Even talking about cancer felt hollow and Hallmark, like we were faking sincerity in some overblown daytime soap opera.

  ‘Everything’s going to be okay,’ I heard myself saying to Gen in a high shrill voice. ‘You’re going to be okay. We’ll get through this.’ Given another half hour without a script I feared I would soon slip into excruciating desk calendar quotes and a montage set to the music of Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes’s ‘Up Where We Belong’ involving the two of us running along a beach in slow motion.

  There were tests, of course. There had to be, it was apparently the regulation thing for people with obscenely lumpy bosoms. I met with Gen and her family at the Royal Melbourne to get the results, all of us full of nervous energy and optimism. We did the crossword and made jokes about the trite photocopied posters advertising African drumming workshops for chemo patients. I imagined the oncologist laughing in our faces as he tore up the test findings, promising with chuckles how he would regale his fellow cancer specialists with the tale of this buffoon from Northcote who had wasted his entire morning falsely believing she had breast cancer.

  ‘Wait ’til I tell the guys you thought that lump was cancer!’ I pictured him saying, with matey nudges in the ribs of a giggling breast care nurse.

  After an interminable wait, we were ushered into a windowless room. A clumsy young man in a too-short tie introduced himself, saying he was a student doctor and was it alright with us if he sat in on the consultation ‘for learning purposes’. ‘Sure,’ shrugged Gen. The room was already crowded. Her sister was leaning against a disposal bin for used needles. Her mother was next to her at the desk. I was sitting on the examining table, swinging my legs.

  There was a palpable silence now. None of us were able to keep up that forced banter, the lighthearted small talk diverting our attention from the looming destiny of diagnosis. Gen’s mother picked nervously at her fingernails. Gen stared directly ahead, brave, stoic, beautiful. Her blue eyes were very clear. The sequins on her jumper winked beneath the fluorescent light.

  In a spectacular case of failing to read the mood of a room, the student doctor thought now might be as good a time as any to break the ice.

  ‘Sooooo,’ he opened with. ‘What’s the deali-o here today? What are we in for?’

  We all looked to Gen. This had to be her call. How much she wanted to tell him, the details.

  ‘I’m waiting to get some results,’ she said finally. ‘I’ve had some . . . tests.’

  ‘Right,’ the student doctor replied, nodding seriously. Adopting the ‘I’m here to listen’ face he had no doubt pictured himself wearing in future years when he was a highly paid GP with a four-year waiting list and a mistress named Conchita.

  ‘We’ve been waiting about two hours out in the foyer,’ Gen’s sister explained, adding in a shaky, impatient voice, ‘It’s been fairly brutal.’

  She was referring of course to that infinite stretch of time we had simmered in unspoken frustration, looking at the mere amount of steps between knowing and not knowing, the difference between carrying on with the rest of our day unencumbered or stepping into a whole new world of catheters and radiation. We had watched at least seven people go in before us, in varying degrees of poor health. We had envied them. At least they knew what they were dealing with. At least they had earth beneath their feet.

  If this was a sign that our party may have been in a slightly fragile emotional state, the student doctor failed to notice it.

  He ploughed onward, sensing a misguided opportunity to bond with a room full of women.

  ‘Oh boy, don’t tell me about waiting!’ he said with comradely eye rolling. ‘The other night my girlfriend and I waited ninety minutes for a table at Mamasita. You know that restaurant in the city? They offered to give us a seat at the bar, but I’m like, “No way, we want a table.” I mean, the food was amazing, don’t get me wrong. But ninety minutes? An absolute joke.’

  More silence. I wondered if his man-of-the-people routine would carry on if the news was bad and Gen was given three months to live.

  ‘You think a death sentence is rough?’ he would say, interrupting the oncologist’s grim diagnosis with a wry chuckle. ‘One time I had an overdue DVD at Blockbuster and was fined eighty-seven dollars. Oh man, was that a shitty day. I had to pay it off in instalments!’

  When the oncologist finally entered the room at a brisk clip, waving his manila folder about like a baton, things were finally and instantly set on an even keel. He cut to the chase, telling Gen she most certainly had breast cancer and that it had spread to her lymph nodes and they would be performing a mastectomy within the following week.

  The news was of course terrible, though I sensed most of us were doing everything we could not to look at the ashen face of Mr ‘You think that’s bad’ over the other side of the room as he realised the moronic
depths of his faux pas.

  I still think about that student doctor from time to time. I very much hope he’s been run over by a bus.

  In a rush, more men in suits and ties entered the room, taking Gen behind a mysterious curtain and poking at her and murmuring reassuringly. As I held her mother’s hand, I heard the booming voice of her surgeon cutting through.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about this at all,’ he said with confidence. ‘We’ll just get in there, take it out, and move on. That’s always been my motto with surgery—Keep It Silly, Stupid!’

  The silence behind the curtain was suddenly deafening. The surgeon cleared his throat.

  ‘I mean—Keep It Simple, Stupid! That’s my motto. Not the other one. That was . . . that was a mistake.’

  This was deeply comforting. The man in charge of Gen’s mastectomy couldn’t even get his surgery motto straight. If things continued in a similar vein she’d be prepped for the operation by Pauly Shore and wheeled in by the cast of Let the Blood Run Free.

  We filed out of the room in a sombre mood, not looking each other in the eye, wondering what to do or say next. Gen announced she was going to the toilet and, for want of anything better to do, her mother and sister went too. I was hovering in the hallway outside, slightly stunned, waiting for them to finish, when music started playing over the PA and everyone in the hospital paused and stood to attention.

  It was the Last Post.

  It was Remembrance Day.

  We were at this very moment supposed to be observing a minute’s silence and reflecting upon the blood that had been spilt during Australia’s wars. Gen had just been told she had breast cancer and was going to lose part of her body. And she was in the toilet. It was so absurd I couldn’t help myself. I started laughing. I laughed in sadness and shock and grief for her breast. Breast we forget. A man who had dragged himself to a respectful standing position from a wheelchair glared at me. It grew worse when I heard Gen’s infectious snort from inside the ladies toilet, followed by the sacrilegious sound of a flush. Her laughter set me off laughing even harder. The invisible thread of hysteria linked us through the concrete walls. We were in a restaurant again, thumping the table, shrieking, helpless, disturbing fellow patrons. Each paroxysm sending the other one off on another wave of collapse.

  The diagnosis had shifted us into free-fall now, a completely unknown realm. The poor taste jokes we had always made about racism and JonBenet Ramsay took on a breathless, fuck-you-world edge.

  It wasn’t my first experience with breast cancer. Years before, my father’s sister had developed the disease and battled on valiantly for what seemed to be a long while. I had experienced her demise with a cool detachment characteristic of self-absorbed teenagers. I knew nothing of the process of disease and acceptance. She had died slowly on the New South Wales coast, a hundred years outside of my orbit physically and emotionally. All I remembered of her now was a bird-like smile peeping out of oversized pillows.To my abject shame thoughts of her death stirred no real feeling outside of vague curiosity and a duty to share a morbid medical fact with new GPs. Is there a history of, yes I suppose so, you see my father’s sister . . .

  She had been a grownup. Cancer was for grownups. Gen was not a grownup. Gen was determinedly frozen in her rock ’n’ roll twenties. She would join me in illicit bloody marys on Wednesday mornings after some sordid evening spent screaming abuse at Big Brother contestants. We went on rollercoasters together. We sat naked in the Japanese bathhouse in Collingwood, dangling our legs in the steaming, clear water and emitting helpless cackles as we compared the prowess or lack thereof of boys we had once loved.

  The night before her operation we all got shitfaced in Gabi’s kitchen, planning a variety of comedy wigs Gen could showcase once she was in the depths of chemo. Her favourite was a Rastafarian beret with accompanying dreadlocks. She was desperate to wear it mostly so she’d have a legitimate chance to tell the number one joke in her terrible joke repertoire. (Q: What did the Rastafarian say when the marijuana ran out? A: ‘Who put this shit music on, mon?’) Gabi’s three-year-old daughter Delilah wouldn’t sleep, insisting on lying on a beanbag on the floor listening to ‘How Deep is Your Love’ on repeat. She called it ‘the quiet Bee Gees song’. As we poured endless wines and the jokes grew darker—one fairly poor taste routine involving how Gen was going to manipulate the Make-A-Wish foundation so Russell Brand would be forced to swing by the hospital and have sex with her—the brothers Gibb kept singing, on and on, in easy-listening tones.

  When I arrived in the hospital foyer the next day Gen was already there, waiting and grinning. ‘Mastecto-ME!’ she shouted at full volume. Passersby within earshot, some dense with illness and wheeling IV units out onto Royal Parade for a covert cigarette, turned with startled expressions. She was standing triumphantly, one hand on her hip, the other in the air. She looked more like somebody about to be presented with a washer-dryer set and holiday to Hamilton Island than a young woman with cancer, hours away from having her right breast removed. I have never loved her more than at that very moment.

  We followed a complex path to yet another waiting room where we were told to make ourselves comfortable on the plastic seats—another unceasing drag, made briefly lively when a young Albino man wearing a leather jacket and moodily fingering a crucifix decided to sit with us and fix us all with penetrating stares. He looked like an extra from Children of the Corn with a side career in Norwegian Satanism.

  Somehow, he became an important comic figure in the surgery process. We imagined with whispers that he would be sitting next to Gen every time she woke up from a major anaesthetic, or went in for treatment, or arrived home after a long day being dissected by oncologists. We even created a voice for him, pitched somewhere between Vlad the Impaler and the chef from The Muppet Show.

  As we killed time inventing further elaborate scenarios (Gen’s sister had him tucking her into bed at night and singing Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’ as she slept), a commercial for medical reality show RPA came on the waiting room television. ‘Denise is battling cancer and fighting for her life,’ the voice-over artist said in chocolatey, concerned tones. ‘Tune in on Thursday night to see if she pulls through.’

  There was a long pause as everyone in the waiting room fell silent. A lady nearby in a headscarf started crying into her handkerchief.

  ‘Well, that was tasteful,’ said Gen drily. ‘Hope I’m still alive on Thursday so I don’t miss it.’

  The operation was a success and our friend Fluffy visited and took a photo of a weary-looking Gen on her iPhone for all of us waiting anxiously at home. In the picture she had tubes up her nose. She was also smiling like a prom queen and throwing the V sign.When she called people to tell them about the daily sponge baths she was receiving she seemed unable to stop herself also yelling ‘SPRING BREAK’ down the phone and making loud and sexy comments about the nurses.

  Gen’s brush with cancer took us all to dark places in our heads and we struggled to understand how it fit in the chaos of our lives. A few of our friends pitched in for a week or so to paint and repair her rundown warehouse apartment. (‘You could have thought of a less dramatic way to get your apartment fixed,’ I said to her, watching the working bee in action.) Other friends drank and smoked harder, as though panicked and picking up the slack. I was being pushed to meet a deadline and I snapped at my editor. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I heard myself saying. ‘One of my best friends just had a mastectomy and I’m not in the right headspace.’ It felt as though I was making up an excuse impossible to argue with, using Gen’s illness as another in a long line of ‘I don’t want to meet my deadline’ justifications. Even speaking aloud of what she’d been through for my own purposes made me guilty and confused.

  ‘You know what I would hate most about having breast cancer?’ our friend Dan said one day suddenly, with no small amount of viciousness. ‘All that fucking pink.’

  There was a week or so after the mastectomy where the air in Melbourne seemed to
go blessedly still again. Gen returned home, did her stretchy arm exercises as required and tried to gross us all out by oversharing details about fluid drainage. We chipped in and bought her an iPad, engraving one of her favourite words on the back. When she turned it over and saw that it said ‘forevz’ she shrieked so loud the tap-dancing school next door to her apartment fell temporarily silent.

  ‘I have decided I am going to just walk around with a t-shirt that says “thank you” on it to save me having to say it EVERY FIVE MINUTES,’ she wrote enthusiastically in a group email, ‘as I am having my mind blown by the generosity and love that is being showered upon me.’

  We were in a positive state of mind when we returned to the hospital for the mastectomy results. I tore off a number for the African drumming workshop and handed it to Gen and solemnly informed her that her Albino heavy metal husband was looking forward very much to sharing a djembe with her.

  ‘And my vagina,’ she said. ‘He can beat out a funky little drum and bass rhythm on my vagina.’

  We were waved through immediately, no waiting around, like celebrities at a premiere, and assumed our regular positions in the room. Our favourite oncologist—a man with lurid purple socks and a ready smile—entered with pleasantries about how nice it was to see Gen looking so well. ‘I feel well,’ she said, and meant it. About five minutes after that he told her the cancer had moved to four spots in her bones ‘which of course we’re unfortunately unable to treat’.