Sign

by Colin Dray

  Every day after school Sam’s mother brought his sister to visit. Some days Katie would have Twistie crumbs colouring the corner of her mouth, others a stain of chocolate milk on her jumper. For Sam it seemed wholly unjust that his sister was being lavished with treats at the hospital canteen while he was the one suffering all the injections and checkups and daytime television of the children’s ward. Sometimes he could barely bring himself to look at her as she chattered about what her friends at school were doing, or whatever class project she was working on.

  His mother told him later that getting a snack was the only thing that helped calm Katie down before she saw him. The hospital terrified her. The thought of leaving Sam there overnight, even more so. Sam remembered that on the first day following his operation, once he was properly awake but unable to speak, his sister had sat on the edge of his bed, inconsolable, sobbing in a long, echoey howl. She bit strands of her hair into wet brown clumps. The freckles on her nose pinched in a terrified wince. He had only ever heard her make that sound once before—the time he’d had to read aloud to her the letter their father left behind when he moved to Perth.

  That day, after the operation, once Katie had cried herself into a limp sleep and woken up quiet, their mother had given her a white handkerchief edged with blue embroidery. She was to use it whenever she felt sad. It was special, their mother said. It was especially made for tears. It would gather them up and hold them tight, and by the time the material was dry, she was guaranteed to be happy again.

  Katie was sceptical and, still crying, hugged Sam’s stomach extra tightly and altogether too long before she left for the night. From that day on, though, she kept the handkerchief tucked in the sleeve of her shirt, exactly as her mother had done.

  4

  At night, when his mother would head home to tuck Katie into bed, Sam could hear the hospital sigh as visiting hours ended. The hallways emptied, the guest-lounge television quietened, and once the kitchen ladies had finished clearing the remains of dinner from their trays, the sound of rubber wheels passing through the wards stilled to silence. Then Sam was alone with the sound of his own breathing, with the whistle in each suck and push of his lungs and the throb of his swollen jaw. The breathing tube was gone now to help the stoma heal, and in its place was a small plastic vent that he could feel shift in place when he moved. Beneath his bandages the inside of his throat was oddly itchy, and when he swallowed he thought he could feel scabs crinkling against his tongue.

  He had a sick, churning feeling in his belly every day. In the daytime he could almost block it out—flick through the worn books brought to him from the patient lounge, watch the orderlies make their rounds, stare through the small television in the corner of the ward. But at night it was different. A swell of anger bubbled and frothed in his gut as he rehearsed the same bitter questions: Why him? Why just him? He was the only person he knew with cancer. What had he done differently? Was there something he shouldn’t have eaten? Was Dettie right all those times she’d insisted that the microwave was radioactive? That it mutated your blood? Was there some way he could have noticed earlier what was growing inside of him?

  In the nurses’ station three goldfish circled in place, each of them opening its mouth wide, silent under the water. Sam curled tighter into himself, festering in his rage. He imagined himself lying in bed all those nights before his operation. Years and years of nights. His neck was so sore now; had it always been this sore? Had it always hurt just a little? Some tiny telltale ache that he ignored and didn’t think worth mentioning? He wanted to go back. Back before now. Before this. He was suddenly furious that he couldn’t. That this wasn’t even an option. It didn’t seem right that he was stuck in the after, when it was too late. When he’d had to give up so much. He wanted to go back to before, when he might have done something. Noticed something.

  There was a hole inside him. An empty space he had never even known was once filled. He was supposed to sing the school song with everyone else at assemblies. His teacher had made him remember part of ‘The Man from Snowy River’ to recite at the yearly talent show. He’d just taught himself how to do an impression of Kermit the Frog. But all of that was gone now. It all seemed so enormous, and so silly, and so unfair, all at once.

  He moved his lips as if willing the sounds—any sounds—to return. As if somehow, by some miracle, he could call them back into being. In his imagination he opened his mouth and a deeper, richer voice erupted. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ he could almost hear his doctor saying. ‘Never before in medical history have we seen someone’s voice grow back! It’s a miracle!’

  There was a boy four beds over who had broken his ankles and dislocated his shoulder being thrown from a horse—Dettie had rolled her eyes at the big ‘production’ he put on when he needed to use the bathroom. Each day, he was taken to physiotherapy, where the nurses made him do exercises for his arm, strengthening his muscles, keeping them from wasting away. Eventually, once the casts came off, he would have to do the same for his feet. Sam sat dreaming up similar exercises for himself. Things he’d half understood from the pamphlets on his bedside table, and filled in the rest.

  Think the word: Banana. Split it up. Ba. Na. Na. Mouth the sound. Ba. Move your lips. Breathe out.

  Pah. Pah.

  Mmmpah.

  He wheezed and sputtered. His whole chest seethed. The hospital around him pressed in and his stomach turned. The fish kept circling, their mouths gaping, dead-eyed and mute. Sam collapsed back into his pillow and cried.

  5

  In the next bed there was a young girl who seemed to sleep most of the time. Thin and yellow and still, she lay surrounded by grey equipment and colourless tubes, all of which was circled by a thick plastic curtain. To Sam, the girl’s skin seemed even waxier behind this shiny surface, and on the rare occasions she sat up to watch television or greet her family when they came to visit, he could see the slow way that she moved—her bony arms stiff and heavy. She was always cold, she said, and Sam wondered if it was because she was bald. He could see the bare skin beneath the knitted beanie she wore, and whenever she was awake he wanted to tell her that he knew how it felt, that he remembered the way it had been after each of his treatments, back before the operation: the strange tickling feeling of air across his scalp, the bruises, the vomiting, the dizziness. Sam wanted to tell her all this as they lay in the quiet, but he couldn’t. And it didn’t seem important enough to bother writing down.

  Twice, when their dinner trays were being gathered before lights out, one of the kitchen ladies offered Sam the girl’s untouched jelly. He didn’t eat it though. Jelly felt good, cool and soft, as it slid down his throat, but it always seemed like the girl was watching. And anyway, after the bowl had been behind her curtain it reeked of antiseptic.

  It was the quiet that made the hospital worse. Or rather, the beeps and hisses that filled the quiet. Sam could never sleep. The rough cotton of his pillowcase. The heat on his legs and the chill on his cheeks. The sizzle of fluorescent light from down at the nurses’ station. The way the orderlies plodded along at such a hulking pace. The ward seemed hollow and ominous, the white walls pressing in on him, stark and cold; and whenever he closed his eyes he felt that he too was somehow going stale, stiffened and empty and sterile.

  On the fourth night he was woken by the hiss of his curtain being pulled closed, but as he snapped awake there was no one by his bed. Instead, as he rolled over, he could see past his fabric curtain and through the girl’s thick plastic one to where three figures surrounded her body. Two orderlies and a doctor were checking her monitors and talking in hushed tones. Sam watched them raise her slender arm, hold her wrist a moment, then set it back down. After a few minutes of the doctor thumbing through her chart, flashing a small light in her eyes, the orderlies kicked the brakes loose on her bed and wheeled her out from behind the plastic, over towards the hall. As they passed his bed, Sam propped himself up on his elbows. He could just make out the girl’s face, still moving
, her head rolling back and forth, one hand rising and falling.

  One of the orderlies noticed Sam while he was pushing aside some detached cords with his foot.

  ‘Shhh…It’s okay,’ he whispered, sliding the girl’s thick curtain back against the wall. ‘She’s just getting her own room. That’s all. Go back to sleep, little guy.’

  But Sam watched the bed glide around the corner and out of sight, still trying to listen for the sound of the girl’s breathing, wet and small.

  He lay back down, and for the rest of the night stared into the dark, chewing on the corner of his pillowcase. For the first time, it seemed, he could hear a high-pitched ringing in his ears—faint, but everywhere. A ringing like he’d never heard before. Had it always been there? Had he simply never noticed? Had he never been quiet enough to make it out?

  He closed his eyes. Nestled his face further under the covers.

  It was still there—that ringing. It was only broken by the sound of his stiff sheets rustling as he moved. Or the occasional distant thud of a door being pushed through down the corridor. The buzz of a small fluorescent light near the nurses’ bay.

  Everything else was that ringing. All around him. Inside him. Through him. Him and this ring. The ring he’d never heard before, but suddenly felt he’d be hearing forever. Ringing and ringing and ringing. He chewed harder. The boy in the bed opposite stretched and gave a small moan in his sleep, rolling his face further into his pillow.

  The ring in Sam’s head settled deeper. Louder. Everywhere. He wanted to shout. To scream. To drown it out. He breathed instead—hearing that whistle, that suck of air, as something at least. Anything to fill the void.

  The next morning two more orderlies came to push the remaining equipment out into another ward, and the cleaners arrived, chatting loudly, to mop the floor.

  6

  Dettie had a present for him in her handbag. It was his last night in hospital and she’d been promising him a special surprise for the past two days. He knew where she was hiding it, whatever it was, because she kept fiddling with her handbag, rubbing the leather and clutching the shoulder strap. Finally, when visiting hours were almost over, and Katie had asked her mother to take her to the toilets, Dettie eased down onto the chair beside Sam’s bed and undid the clasp.

  ‘You are a very lucky boy,’ she said, her fingers picking through the contents of the bag, fixing on something. She held her hand poised there.

  ‘Do you want to guess what it is?’ she said. ‘I bet you can guess.’

  Sam stared at the back of her wrist. It couldn’t just be another stitched square. He shrugged.

  ‘What would you love more than anything else?’ she asked.

  She was smiling larger than Sam could ever remember seeing. It deepened the wrinkles around her eyes and made her cheeks pull, pale and thin. He turned his head slightly, looking past her at the newly made bed sitting empty beside them.

  ‘How about your daddy being here?’ she said.

  He jerked upright. She’d said it, and she was still smiling. Nodding. His eyes, now wide, flashed from the hallway door to the nurses’ station and back. He felt a fluttering in his chest, and couldn’t seem to breathe out. Was that where Katie and his mother were? Were they bringing his father in with them?

  Dettie’s grin remained wide, but she closed her lips. It made her face seem pinched and tight. She petted Sam’s knee, humming, and lowered her gaze to her handbag, holding, waiting long enough for Sam to look back down at it too. Slowly, she drew out two rectangular cards and covered them with her palm.

  ‘Now, you know how much he has wanted to come and see you,’ she said.

  He could already hear it in her voice. Sam’s father wasn’t there. But he still couldn’t stop the tingling sensation circling his body, tickling him beneath his arms. He exhaled.

  ‘And he really tried so hard to be here, Sammy. He was so cross when he couldn’t make it.’

  Fine. Not here.

  The fluttering settled into a sick, heavy feeling in his belly. Sam already knew what was in Dettie’s hand.

  ‘He said to me: You make sure my Sammy knows his daddy is thinking of him. That’s what he said.’ Her eyes were watery. ‘You tell him I’m proud of him.’ Her lips stretched white, like linen pinned across a washing line. She kept on nodding.

  With her fingers still clinging tight to its edge, she held out one of the rectangles for Sam to see. It was a postcard. It had his father’s name on it, his address in Perth, and the message read:

  My darling son, Sam. I miss you and I am thinking of you always. I will see you soon. Love, your father.

  It had been a long time since Sam had heard from his father, or read one of his letters out to Katie. He hadn’t even sent something before the operation. The message sounded peculiar. Distant. Even his handwriting looked different now.

  Sam’s stare drifted off. His eyes followed the folds of bedsheet crumpled across his lap. The blanket Dettie had straightened at his feet as she sat down. He saw her handbag, which lay tipped over on its side. Saw the tightly creased tissues poking from its mouth. The corner of an unwrapped packet of cigarettes. The neat stitching of her cardigan. Finally, he was looking at her other hand, at the second card she was clutching. This was a photograph. It was a man holding a drink, a glass of beer, smiling. Sam could tell that it wasn’t his father, but he had seen him before. The picture was of Dettie’s dead husband, a photograph she’d always kept with her, old and crinkled and bound at the edges with sticky tape. Sam could almost remember him. Something about him and soup. A smell of soup.

  ‘Isn’t that good, Sammy?’ Dettie was saying. ‘To know how much your daddy loves you?’ She turned over the postcard and started reading the words to herself.

  On the front of the card, which Sam could now see for the first time, the image seemed odd: a kitten in a basket of flowers. It was fluffy and big-eyed, with long silver whiskers. He stared at it, tilting his head to get a better look, but it remained peculiar. There was nothing funny about it. No joke. It wasn’t pulling a face or doing a dance. Whenever his father had sent a postcard before it was usually a cartoon. A sheep wearing sunglasses or a crocodile with knives and forks saying, Wish you were here! This one was pink, with wide, watery eyes, embossed and glistening.

  Perhaps his father had been really worried about him when he picked out the card. Maybe he was too scared Sam was in danger to try to be funny. Maybe he’d just lost his sense of humour altogether. It had been over a year now. Being in Perth might have changed him. Like the way Sam didn’t think about soccer all the time anymore.

  When his mother and Katie returned, the postcard was propped against the wall behind the lamp. Dettie didn’t point it out, leaving it a surprise. But when his mother finally did notice, straightening his table as they prepared to leave for the night, she stared at it strangely, mouthing the words of the message to herself. As she finished, miming the words, Your father, she glared.

  Obviously, no one had told her about it, and probably Sam’s father had decided not to send the card to her in case she got upset. She never said anything out loud about it, though. She just smiled tightly, leaned over Sam’s pillow and kissed him goodnight. On their way out into the hallway Sam could see her giving Dettie a long, curious look, but it didn’t seem to be angry.

  Only later, months later, would it occur to Sam that the card wasn’t stamped. That it wasn’t his father’s handwriting at all.

  7

  The first afternoon Sam was home from hospital he secluded himself in his room and read comic books. His throat was still bandaged and the tape that secured the dressings to his skin itched horribly. Whenever he moved his head he could feel the stitches pulling, and he spent hours staring in the mirror trying to talk, as if he could somehow will his voice back. The inside of his throat felt tender, like a fresh bruise, and it hurt to swallow or breathe too deeply.

  Katie had kept sticking her head into his room to smile and then run away. It bother
ed him to feel watched like that, so he shut the door and wedged his shoes beneath it. When his mother came to bring him lunch she had to knock with her foot and wait for him to open up. As she edged her way in, Sam turned and crept back under the covers.

  She set the bowl on his bedside table and laid a spoon and a napkin on his knees. Steam drifted up from the soup and filled the room with the aroma of tomato. Sam grimaced and tried to roll away from the smell.

  ‘What’s wrong, honey? Don’t you want something to eat? I can hear your stomach growling.’

  Sam shrugged and pulled the blankets up over his shoulder.

  ‘Come on, you love tomato soup.’ She petted his hair. ‘I made it especially. Honey?’

  He curled up his legs and squinted until he could barely see. He wasn’t going to cry until she left.

  ‘That’s fine, sweetie, you get some rest. Try to eat something. And if you need anything…’ She trailed off. The silver bell she’d bought him was missing from his bedside table. Sam had thrown it across the room, and when she found it under a pile of his clothes, she nodded and left with it tucked inside her hand.

  ‘We’re here for you,’ she whispered, and pulled the door to, but not shut.

  With the lights off, Sam began to learn the creaks and clicks of the house. Soon he could make out the activity going on in the other rooms as he lay in bed. He heard the floorboards give in the lounge room as his mother moved about; the thump of Katie’s door when the draft pulled it shut; the stomping whenever she ran down the hall. In the quiet, it was as though the house was breathing, and he wondered for a moment why this was something he had never noticed before.

  Outside, he heard Dettie clatter through the back door and into the kitchen, jangling her keys and calling out a hello. The flyscreen swung closed and Sam could tell a bag of groceries was being spilled across the countertop. A few minutes later the kettle boiled, and for an hour or so the room went quiet while his mother and Dettie sat and talked.