You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead

by Hardy, Marieke

  With a faint but distinguishable breath, the air in Melbourne started to ripple again.

  ‘Things were already shitty,’ I said to Gabi on the phone later that night. ‘And then he went and said that with the awful timing after telling her how well she was looking and everything suddenly got really, really super shitty.’ As her friends we had become instantly versed in the dialogue of cancer, only weeks before referring to it carelessly as ‘that Delta Goodrem thing’. Christopher Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair about the disease ‘having a language of its own—a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication’. We talked effortlessly now about internal mammary nodes and learnt how to pronounce the word ‘metastatic’ without stumbling. Gen had been taken—Hitchens again—‘from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady’.

  We were talked through her options. She could throw herself into chemo—‘aggressive, with the hair fallout and the drugs and the what-not,’ according to her obscenely cheery oncologist—or instead try a course of hormone therapy. Gen considered this. To fill the space of our overwhelmed silence, her doctor made some small talk, asking her if she was going to vote Greens in the upcoming state election.

  ‘Will that affect the treatment?’ I asked him.

  He stared at me.

  ‘I mean, if she votes conservative will you get rid of the cancer quicker? Because we’re willing to negotiate. Within reason.’

  He looked at us for a moment. Saw Gen trying not to smile. He forced a laugh.

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘It’s just that . . . well, not a lot of doctors vote Green. As you might imagine.’

  ‘Fine then, I’ll vote Liberal,’ Gen said. ‘Now fix my fucking cancer.’

  She decided to go with hormone treatment, after days of agonising eeny-meeny where we pored over the benefits and hindrances of every option. In the weeks leading up to her first session she decided to celebrate the fact she was keeping her hair by booking into a variety of different hairdressers, all of whom fucked up her mane in a variety of ways.

  ‘I look like a puppy who is clearly just for Christmas,’ she texted me with an accompanying photograph of a hideous bubble perm.

  The treatment itself was merciless, involving an injection to shut down her ovaries and enforce menopause on her blooming thirty-six-year-old body. She had to also suffer an hour-long drip to begin ‘managing’ the bone cancer. Through it all she found the time to torment us with a new and interesting catchphrase.

  ‘Can you get me a cup of tea?’ she would ask from the couch. ‘I’ve suffered enough.’

  The ‘I’ve suffered enough’ line carried her through arguments over what we were going to watch on a DVD night (Russell Brand Live won repeatedly: ‘Please can’t we watch Russell one more time? I’ve suffered enough’), what we were going to eat for dinner (‘Oh come on, let’s just get Thai. I’ve suffered enough’) and what we would listen to on the car stereo (‘What are you talking about? The new Jebediah single is amazing.You have to say you like it, I’ve suffered enough’).

  Our group of mates held its annual ‘Shit Kringle’ dinner, where we attempted to top each other by gifting the worst presents possible. Booky brought a life-sized cardboard cutout of Robert Pattinson. Sam brought a five-dollar Brashs voucher, a record store that went into receivership in 1998. I brought a single ticket to see lowbrow American comedian Rob Schneider live. When it was Gen’s turn to hand over her present, she was already laughing so hard she could barely hold her hand straight. She drew Hotman’s name and he opened it with trepidation. It was an ashtray, shaped like a boob, with an accompanying pamphlet on how to cope living with breast cancer. The milk-curdle laugh struck up again. We were helpless. We banged the table. ‘I’m off my tit!’ she shrieked loudly.

  The texts I got from her when she was in hospital should be preserved and displayed in a museum. ‘They are playing the Dire Straits “Walk Of Life” in the hospital waiting room,’ read one. Another: ‘Musical update! Chemo ward is now piping “Stayin’ Alive” through their radio PA system. Their taste and sophistication is boundless. Got to run, my Albino husband is here and wants to give me an enema.’

  We continued to torment her oncologist, who was mystified by my constant appearance at Gen’s appointments and would make vague, coy references to the fact that we might have been enjoying a secret life as lesbian partners.

  ‘Have you two known each other . . . long?’ he would ask, doing everything in his power not to tip a leery wink in our direction.Through the mist of treatment options and CT scans and mindless answers about what side effects would occur when (‘It’s different for everybody . . . we really can’t say’ was a sentence we would rather stab someone in the face than hear again) we kept grasping for the clarity of absurdity. When we were solemnly told a byproduct of Gen’s hormone therapy would be ‘a dry vagina’ it was all we could do not to fall onto the floor of the surgery in schoolgirl hysterics.We felt ten years old again, staring directly ahead at the wall, trying not to catch each other’s eye lest the façade of demure adulthood collapse.

  He said ‘dry vagina’, I could sense us both thinking, in scandalised, adolescent tones. Just the term was enough to set us off. We were tickled by the thought of being seen as lesbian life partners. Our love for each other could not be bound by conventional terms. In the lift, safe from the disapproving eyes of people who daren’t laugh in a cancer clinic, I acted out for Gen’s benefit my role as her brittle lover.

  ‘Well, I’ve not noticed much dryness in the vagina myself,’ I told the imaginary breast care nurse. ‘But Genevieve does keep a pump pack of lubricant by the bed for special occasions and birthdays.’

  This journey we were on was not without its pain. We were aware, all of us, at every moment, of what this meant, the unfunny clang of mortality, the fear of silence.There were times when we’d be sitting and watching Delilah playing and without warning all the energy would be sucked out of the room and I wanted more than anything just to lie down and start weeping and never stop. The injections and the nausea and the mood swings and the back pain, none of it was remotely amusing and there were days when Gen just disappeared off the radar, wouldn’t reply to texts, wouldn’t answer emails.

  ‘I was having a bad day,’ she would explain with shrugs when asked about her lack of communication and we’d leave it at that, respecting the private moments she needed to howl at the moon and shake her fist at the sky and curse her stupid fucking dumb fucking unfunny lot.

  We took her to yoga classes and Chinese herbalists and sat with her on sober nights when everyone would have otherwise murdered a glass of wine to numb the bad feelings. We ached for her when she shut down and we wished sometimes that it had all happened to us instead, the whole damned thing, so that she could just go on playing guitar and making bad puns and being adorably obnoxious on her Saturday night radio show happily free of troubles. But it hadn’t worked out that way. Cancer chose Gen, and as an addendum it had chosen us. We may not have been able to duck out of its revolting clutches but by fuck we were going to tackle it on our own terms.

  Gen continues her treatment even now as I write this. Monthly rounds of hormone therapy, waiting to see how long it keeps the cancer at bay, if she’ll eventually have to submit to the hateful, pedestrian rituals of chemo and lose her vigour and her freedom to indulge in shitty haircuts. More appointments with oncologists, nobody telling us it’s going to be okay, this is just a passing phase, wait ’til I tell the guys at HQ you thought it was cancer. And through it all we will continue to crack wise, and make tasteless jokes about dry vaginas and ‘keeping abreast’ of the situation, and Albino Norwegian death metal cancer husbands singing us to sleep. In the face of this enormous, malevolent cloud, how else would we cope? We don’t know any other way. This is a funny cancer story because Gen is the funniest person I know. And this is how she chooses her story to be told. Forevz.


  Here I am. Immortalised in paperback. My fifteen minutes of fame are here and sadly, it’s because of the Darth Vader of disease: cancer. I would have much rather achieved it through the newspaper headline ‘Russell Brand leaves Katy Perry for mystery Aussie’, but alas destiny, in it’s infinite nincompoopery, has decided to be an utter bitch arse.

  Stop. Cancer time.

  My wonderful father, who is fighting his own cancer battle, told me of a cartoon drawing he remembered seeing of an eagle swooping to capture its prey, and a mouse, knowing that it was about to become brunch, standing there defiantly giving the hungry eagle the finger. This is how I feel about my cancer. I am going to be that mouse and stick my finger up at it at every turn. Of course, there are the frighteningly dark times. I am scared. I am angry. I am shocked. But I am ferociously loved.

  My strong, beloved family and my unbelievably giving, incredible, loving group of friends have acted as a collective net, and any time I have been even close to tumbling from an emotional sky rise, they have all been there manoeuvring the net into position to catch me wherever I may fall on any given day. I think that the laughter between us has made the intolerable mildly tolerable, and there is music in that.

  I would like it pointed out, however, that although I am quite fond of the Rasta wig, I am not afraid of being bald. I could make a nice living covering Sinead O’Connor’s early works, or as Tony Abbott’s testicles. I hear he is in need of some.

  I am anxious having my story ‘up in lights’ via this book, but it’s really the only way I would want this nightmare to be recorded. Although ‘in song’ would be nice. Are you feeling me, Beyonce?

  Now, ladies, do me a favour and get your baps checked.

  Forevz.

  Maroon and blue

  Being a Victorian you are regularly asked—by taxi drivers, by distant relatives, by umbrella-toting strangers in the street—which football team you support. It is just one of those questions that arises when you live in a certain town, an unspoken commitment to participating in the communal way of life. More often than not awkward silences follow when I am forced to admit that I don’t actually support anybody. In my home state, public admission of not following a football team is tantamount to standing up on a church pew and stripping down to reveal a peek-a-boo baby doll lingerie set and the words SATAN IS SEXY carved into your lower abdomen. Australian Rules Football is so much a part of the Victorian way of life that it creeps into conversations about other, completely unrelated matters, like parking fines or major surgery.

  Memo Australian Labor Party, wrote one newspaper correspondent during a recent state election campaign, please can I be on your secret database? The subtext could read: ‘Says would rather be tied down and forced to watch continuous replays of the Collingwood grand final win than ever vote for us.’

  My lack of football team is not due to some misguided snootery regarding arts funding or rapey ‘any hole’s a goal’ players, but because in 1996 my heart got broke so bad by football that I cried for days and refused to eat. Football has the power to do that sometimes—cut you off at the knees and leave you bereft. Grown men stagger out of the MCG, weeping openly all the way to Richmond station. Wiping runny noses on Driza-Bone sleeves, they comfort each other with comradely sniffs and a rough, jostling understanding. In most cases it’s the men who weep, while the women just get stony and cold. Riding the Swan Street trams, they wear the haggard faces of survivors.

  When my mother and father first started dating, they attended a football game together. Being amateur theatre actors at the time, they needed a break from all the community puppet shows and hemp workshops they usually attended, and were probably congratulating themselves on retaining a link to their gauche suburban past, as arty types often do when paying to watch competitive sport.They were standing in the outer, a part of the ground usually reserved for violent men recently escaped from prison or AA. The outer doesn’t really exist any more, which is a grand pity as watching a game from deep within its confines in the 1980s was an experience akin to running ashore at Gallipoli with Chopper Reed for an all-you-can-smoke meth sale. I once stood in the outer during a Richmond/Fitzroy clash and heard an obese man with a vivid coldsore hurl abuse at a nearby umpire.

  ‘Hey Umpy!’ he shouted commandingly. ‘I been up your mum and she give me AIDS.’

  At the time, this fairly evocative comment caused a brief but reverent silence as nearby onlookers contemplated its brutally impressive nature. Someone in the distance may have applauded. This was the outer—a no-man’s land of racist insults, poor personal hygiene and the occasional jolly stabbing. It was legal to smoke in the outer. People stank of piss and stale beer and dagwood dogs. At Collingwood games whenever a supporter would yell ‘COME ON THE PIES’ some wag in the outer inevitably followed it up with ‘Fark, and I thought it was just tomato sauce!’

  When during those early days of courtship my father escorted his intended through the crowd of leering wharfies in duffle coats trying to surreptitiously look down her dress, he was fretting somewhat. My mother was a nice girl from Glen Waverly who enjoyed musical theatre and the odd game of netball. He feared it would only take one call of ‘PICK THE FUCKING PIGSKIN UP YOU FUCKING FAGGOT’ or ‘SOMEONE TELL THESE CUNTS THERE’S A FUCKING GAME ON’ to make her turn very pink in the cheeks and inform him in a rather tight and small voice that she’d quite like to be taken home now thank you and to please not bother calling again. I think it was about fifteen minutes into the game that a poor umpiring decision was made close to the boundary line, at which point my mother propelled herself to the fence, hoisted herself up to eye level with both little gloved hands, and screamed at full volume ‘UMPIRE YOU FUCKING WHITE MAGGOT WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU CALL THAT THEN’ and my father sighed happily and decided then and there that this was indeed the woman he was going to spend the rest of his life with.

  My mother went to Fitzroy games while heavily pregnant, a time during which I am told other mothers decorate nurseries and apply lanolin to their bosoms and pat the Dulux sheepdog or other such gaily maternal activities. She would pace up and down the stands, pausing occasionally to kick out at passing children or hot-dog sellers. If Fitzroy were falling behind in the scores she would shout firstly at the game, then directly into my father’s face. His long, thin frame would be swaddled in an enormous sheepskin coat, as though to cushion the brunt of her fury.

  ‘WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY DOING OUT THERE, ALAN?’ my mother would bellow, running her hands over her baby bump in an agitated fashion. ‘THIS IS A FUCKING SHAME, NOT A FUCKING GAME.’

  In utero I soaked up her demon song and emerged from the womb inextricably devoted to the Fitzroy Football Club. It ran through my veins.

  Fitzroy were always the joke, the patsy, the fat kid up the back of the bus who wore dental headgear and a Sugar Ray t-shirt and referred to his parents’ car as ‘the vroom vroom machine’. Tell a group of strangers that you supported Fitzroy and you were openly mocked, often to the point of physical violence. Following Fitzroy was the equivalent of wetting your pants at speech night and then having to perform ‘Hakuna Matata’ from The Lion King in ensuing squelchy torment.They hadn’t won a premiership in so long there were club bumper stickers that implored hopefully ‘Let’s roar like 1944’.

  My family was of course completely obsessed. While the leisure activities of other families revolved around cheery greeting-card bonding-type affairs such as Monopoly or It’s a Knockout, ours centered utterly on the club. We went to what was known as the ‘Ins and Outs Night’ which, despite its vaguely pornographic name, was less about standing around cheering as Barbara Windsor took on all comers and more guessing which players would be picked in the team for the weekend’s game. We went to training, where we’d stand in the freezing cold watching thirty sweating men running around frantically in circles and jumping over orange witches hats. As a child I would dutifully bake a chocolate cake for these sessions, wanting to reach out and nurture in some way. The players would ho
ld a slice in their meaty paws like a delicate little flower, mumbling thankyous and regarding me with no small amount of curiosity.

  Saturdays were game day. Hour-long drives to VFL Park or Whitten Oval were fairly common, the relentless tedium of the traffic only relieved by endless games of ‘Name That Show Tune’. Sundays were sacred. We’d spread out the newspapers and hold Hardy family round-table post-mortems on who had played well and who had let us down, physically and emotionally.

  ‘Richard Osborne was fucking wasted on the back line,’ my mother would lament as she sipped her Earl Grey and we would all nod glum assent into our muesli mix.

  I had a recurring dream where I would play in the forward pocket, like Bernie ‘Superboot’ Quinlan, and every time the opposition tried to return the ball to play I would interfere, manipulating my way into yet another goal, another triumph. I would lead Fitzroy to another victory single-handedly. My dreams allowed for no reasonable efforts on behalf of my opponents. In my subconscious, I was king.

  Before I hit puberty I was allowed in the Fitzroy changing rooms, likely due to the fact that I used to hide my long hair up under the Commonwealth Bank cap I inexplicably wore everywhere and had about as much bosom as a Cruskit. Some geriatric trainer with a whistle around his neck and a tired expression would wave me in, presumably too exhausted/drunk/glaucoma-stricken to notice that I was a girl, and there I’d be, darting about among legs and shorts in the hallowed surrounds.

  They really used to work the trainers hard in those days. They were like wizened little gnomes in tracksuit pants and windbreakers. Ancient ex-athletes, they’d spend half the game feverishly trying to keep up with the players—who either completely ignored them or accidentally elbowed them in the face during a moment of intense play—and the other half standing on the boundary line gasping for air and occasionally vomiting blood. I loved them, mostly because of their aforementioned lax security work and the fact that they occasionally let me carry the used mouthguards around in a little bucket.