Everything Left Unsaid

by Jessica Davidson

  ‘That’s it. I’m making a doctor’s appointment for first thing in the morning.’ Mum’s starting to look decidedly worried now.

  I groan. ‘You can’t. I have to go to school tomorrow, at least for the morning – I have an assignment due. They take ten percent off for each day you’re late.’

  ‘Fine. Tomorrow afternoon, then.’

  While the rest of the family is eating dinner, I go for a shower, hoping the heat of it will help. It does, sort of, and when I’m back in my room, getting dressed, my phone beeps at me.

  Where were you today? It’s Juliet.

  Sick, I text back.

  Faker, comes the reply. Bet you did the thermometer-under-hot-water trick and started your English assignment once your olds went to work.

  I’m grinning as I text her back. Damn. Should’ve thought of that. Serious caffeine consumption here tonight.

  Juliet

  The next day, Tai practically happy-dances out of the school gates for a doctor’s appointment, leaving me to an afternoon of double history without him. ‘You’re not even sick, Tai. Not doctor-sick, anyway. You just want to get out of school for an afternoon.’ Mia’s not usually the paranoid type but I’m convinced she is now. Anyway, it’s the middle of winter – everyone’s sick. She’s probably got that serious Last Year At School vibe that my mum’s got, too. They’re desperate to get us all through it, unscathed and uni offer in hand. Homework diaries are checked, curfews are policed and minor ailments require a GP visit.

  • • •

  At the bus stop on Wednesday morning Tai’s looking smug, although there’s something else I can’t quite pick behind the smile, not at first anyway. Tai tells me that the doctor checked his throat and listened to his chest, and then noticed how Tai was leaning in, head tilted to one side, to listen to some of his questions. Then the doctor checked his ears and asked some more questions. Instead of sending him away with a prescription for painkillers, the doctor gave Tai a referral for a brain scan. We sit on the bus in silence, sharing headphones, music up so loud it takes away any need to think. It takes the entire bus trip for me to process what he’s told me, and it’s only when we’re about to get off that I’ve found something to say about it all. He’ll be fine, I know it. The scan will show up nothing, of course. Rae’s mum gets migraines all the time – heaps of people do. Tai’s probably just stressed, that’s all, worn out and tired. I tell him so, and he nods a little too vigorously.

  ‘Yeah. I’m fine. Just year twelve and everything. Either that, or I’ll die young and leave a beautiful corpse.’

  ‘That’s not funny, Tai.’

  An appointment is made for the scan, next Monday, and for the most part I forget all about it. Our mid-semester exams start in just over a month, and, like every year, I’m cursing myself for not studying more, for not listening more in class, for passing notes to the girls when I should’ve been listening. But this isn’t just any year – it’s the last.

  Mum insists that I have to go to uni, and though I’m not entirely sure if she’s right, I don’t know what I’d do instead, so uni it is. Tai and I have worked it all out. We’re going to apply to the same uni, rent an overpriced apartment together, and live on coffee and two-minute noodles. And in between semesters, we’re going on a road trip. We don’t know where yet, just that we’re going.

  The night before the scan Gen comes over to my place. She has spent the weekend packing. Her dad didn’t get the lounge suite, but Gen decided to live with him, so he doesn’t care about leaving behind expensive Italian leather anymore. Mum is slightly horrified by this news when I tell her at dinner.

  ‘But who’s going to buy her tampons? And iron her school uniform?’

  ‘They have an ironing lady, Mum. And she buys her own tampons.’

  Mum starts muttering darkly about Dad and her own lack of an ironing lady, so I excuse myself, saying I have to study.

  Instead I spend the night staring blankly at my history textbook.

  I know Tai’s fine, really, but I’ll feel a lot better when the scan is over.

  July

  Tai

  I don’t sleep the night before the scan; at least it feels like it. I don’t know why I’m so antsy about it – if it was something bad, I’d know, right? That’s what I keep telling myself, but there’s just enough fear there to take the edge off the certainty and leave something hollow and unsatisfactory in its place.

  When I was a kid, maybe about eleven, and Hendrix was a baby, Dad took me out fishing with him, making a big deal out of me being a big kid now there was a baby around. He let me scale a fish I caught, and I was so busy trying to get it perfect, show him how well I could do it, that I didn’t notice I was cutting into my thumb until there was blood everywhere, all over the fish. I had to go to the doctor’s and when they put the stitches in, I cried – not because it hurt or because of the needle but because I’d messed up scaling the fish, let Dad down.

  If I didn’t realise I’d cut my thumb, it’s possible there is something there, maybe something that’s been there for a while, maybe something bad, that I’ve got no idea about.

  Instead of sleeping, like I should be, I text Juliet. You awake?

  Am now. You ok?

  Yeah, just can’t sleep. Too much caffeine or something.

  You can sleep in tomorrow. Lucky.

  Yeah, I know. Wish the appointment was a bit later, could have a sleep in and a swim.

  Stop it. Some of us have to go to school at the crack of dawn.

  Sorry. Hey – what if something’s wrong?

  You’d know. You’d have to know.

  Yeah?

  Definitely. How could you not?

  I guess.

  Night, Tai.

  Night, girl.

  • • •

  At breakfast, Mum looks at me anxiously. ‘Are you ready, Tai?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I shrug. No big deal.

  ‘Lot of fuss about nothing, hey, Tai?’ Dad grins at me.

  ‘I reckon. At least it gets me out of biology this morning.’

  ‘Hey, Tai?’ River swipes a piece of my toast, and looks at me seriously. ‘What if, what if . . . you don’t have a brain?’ He starts to giggle.

  ‘I’ll have to join a gang of zombies and eat yours.’

  He nearly chokes on the toast while Mum tells me off. Even so, I can’t resist doing a zombie walk towards my room when I go to get dressed.

  • • •

  Alherm Hospital is a maze of mint-green hallways, fluorescent lighting and grey furniture. When we find the radiology department Mum pulls the referral out of her handbag, directing me to one of the hard, grey chairs to wait.

  The scan itself is okay. The nurse gives me one of those tie-up hospital gowns to put on and I lie in this big tube while it whirs and grinds. I wish I had my iPod or my phone or something. Instead I close my eyes and try to pretend I’m somewhere else, but it doesn’t work. I’ve never been any good at stuff like that.

  When it’s over I put my clothes back on and toss the hospital gown in a basket in the corner. We’ve got some time to kill before the doctor’s appointment where I get the results, so Mum and I follow the signs to the cafeteria and look up at the menu.

  ‘What do you feel like, Tai? Lasagne? Fish and salad?’ Mum’s staring at the menu, shiny-eyed, gripping her handbag like it’s about to leap off her shoulder. Oh god, I think Mum is trying not to cry. I’m not sure I can handle that. I pretend to think about her question, but I’m not really hungry. Nerves, probably.

  ‘Um, lasagne.’

  We take our trays to a table and sit down, but Mum ignores her plate of food and fishes her phone out of her bag, stabbing at the buttons like they’ve done something to irritate her.

  I take a bite of lasagne. It’s like cardboard in my mouth. Mum’s still attempting to send a text and I’m not hungry, so I pull out my phone and check it. Juliet’s sent me a text.

  How did it go?

  I drum my fingers on the
table, trying to work out what to tell her when I don’t really know anything yet. Good, I guess. Just waiting for the report.

  There’s still ages to wait after lunch, ages spent sitting in a waiting room flicking through magazine after magazine. Some celebrity getting divorced, another one in rehab, a recipe for tuna pie . . . they’re all the same. Finally the door opens and the doctor calls us in. ‘Tai Hudson?’

  I walk into his office, Mum following behind. It’s too cold in here. I shiver as he points to a chair.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down and we’ll have a chat about the results?’

  I sit down, and watch him. He seems youngish and he smiles at me like he means it. But then he looks at the papers on his desk and hesitates. I’m vaguely grateful for the chill in the room, distracting enough to let his pause, the look of – sadness? – in his eyes slip by almost unnoticed. I wish he’d hurry up so I can get out of here.

  ‘Well, Tai,’ he says. ‘It appears we’ve found something a little . . . abnormal on your scan today.’

  Uh oh.

  He stands up and places a sheet of pictures from the scan onto a lit-up white screen behind his desk. Taking a pen from his pocket, he points to one of the pictures.

  ‘This here is your brain. And here, everything looks normal’ – his pen traces an invisible line along until it reaches an imperfect white circle – ‘but this part, here? It’s not supposed to be there.’

  ‘What does that mean, exactly?’ Mum asks. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  A knot settles deep in my stomach. I stare at my shoes.

  ‘We’ll have to do a biopsy to confirm the results, but I’d say it’s likely that we’re looking at a medulloblastoma.’

  A what? I look up at him.

  ‘It’s a kind of brain tumour, Tai.’

  ‘A brain tumour.’ It sounds flat, and I have to force the words. My stomach is in knots, and my head feels heavy. It’s like I can feel the weight of the tumour now it’s been seen, been labelled and defined.

  ‘But what does that mean?’ Mum insists, gripping my hand. What she means is, what are you going to do about it?

  ‘The next step will be a biopsy, where we remove a sample from the tumour to examine. We’ll have the results within a few days. That will help us know exactly what we’re dealing with.’

  ‘And then what?’ Mum’s voice is pinched. Thin.

  ‘We’ll send the results off to your GP, and on to Dr Dellar, the oncologist—’

  ‘Oncologist. You mean cancer.’

  He rushes to fill the silence in the room, using phrases like ‘survival rates’ and ‘new treatments are being used all the time’ and ‘let’s not get ahead of ourselves, shall we?’

  He talks about the different surgeries and chemo, talking and talking until the room swims around me.

  ‘I think I’m going to pass out,’ I say. He offers me a glass of water and tells me it’s a normal reaction. He’d know, I guess. It’s a good thing one of us does, because I have no fucking idea whether seventeen-year-olds with newly diagnosed brain tumours usually pass out or not.

  They pass words back and forth, but I don’t hear them. Somewhere during this conversation I got stuck on the word ‘tumour’ while they kept going and now I can’t keep up. I stare at the pictures from the scan, abstract swirls of black and grey surrounding that white space. They could be pictures of anything, but I’m supposed to believe those pictures are of me, of what’s wrong with me. ‘Abnormal’ is right. I manage to tune back in, and they’re scheduling a biopsy. The doctor looks at me.

  ‘Does that sound okay to you, Tai?’

  I don’t answer.

  In the car on the way home, Mum drives white-knuckled, without talking.

  ‘Mum?’

  ‘Tai?’ She’s staring at the road and won’t look at me.

  ‘Am I going to be okay?’

  I’m waiting for her to say something reassuring, something so that it all makes sense, but she acts like she didn’t even hear the question, the way she does when my little brothers are being annoying. The rest of the way home, I stare into the windows of the cars driving past, trying to guess where they’re going, what the people in the cars are like, what they do – anything to distract myself from crying.

  River and Hendrix have left a pile of plastic army men in different poses outside my door, and in the hurry to get into my room, to close the door and lock it, I stand on one. Swearing, I limp into the room and slam the door behind me. Pretending the tears welling are from the pain of stepping on the army guy only works for so long.

  River knocks on the door, yelling out to me. I don’t answer. Eventually, the sound of his footsteps fade to silence.

  I run my hands through my hair, pausing at the spot where the doctor said the tumour is. It’s been growing for years, he told me. How could I not know? How could I not feel it? I don’t understand that, didn’t even really understand a lot of what the doctor said.

  It feels like a joke, the whole thing.

  I haven’t even been sick, not really. I mean, I had that cough, but it probably had nothing to do with it anyway. And I’ve had headaches every now and then, but doesn’t everyone? And they weren’t even that bad; I didn’t go to the doctor for them or anything. But there it was, the whole time, growing inside me. I think about the biopsy, about a needle going into my brain. I never really screamed getting needles as a kid, was never petrified of them, but I don’t really want one in my brain, you know? But that’s the only way to know how bad this thing really is.

  Mum calls me to dinner but I don’t want to leave my room, even though I’m starving. I don’t want to face them tonight.

  Dad knocks at my door. ‘You’ve got to eat something, Tai,’ he says. His voice is subdued.

  ‘Not hungry,’ I lie.

  There’s a silence, then I hear him walking away.

  My phone beeps, but I ignore it. Probably Juliet again. Or Sam.

  I know I should text Juliet, know she’ll be worried, but I can’t bring myself to do it. What am I supposed to say to her? Lie and tell her that it’s okay, that everything was fine? Or tell her the truth, say that it’s not fine, and I don’t know if it will be? Neither of those options is even slightly appealing.

  I could probably tell Sam, I reckon, because he’s a guy, because I haven’t known him as long and don’t know him quite as well – because he’s not Juliet. As cool as she is, she’s not a guy, and it’s different somehow, it just is. I pick up my phone and open the text. It’s from Sam.

  How’d you go, mate?

  Not good, mate. Got a tumour. I can’t bring myself to send it though; it sounds too dramatic and too real all at the same time. Got myself a trumour – that’s how River said it, trumour, like something whispered that turns out to be horrifyingly true.

  Juliet

  The day after Tai’s scan he doesn’t show up at the bus stop. I spend the day going from class to class and it keeps me occupied enough to push Tai to the back of my mind for a while, into that holding place of Things To Think About Later. Gen, Lina and Rae have just booked their schoolies accommodation at a high-rise down the coast, and the conversation keeps me distracted. Tai and I have a brilliant plan to book one of the last-minute mystery hotel deals to save ourselves some cash, and I’m crossing my fingers that wherever we get is within walking distance of the girls. Gen spends half of lunchtime explaining her theory that they try to cram as many schoolies into the smallest number of high-rises as possible, so we’ll probably be able to wave at each other from our balconies.

  That night Tai still hasn’t texted me, and he doesn’t answer his phone when I ring. I don’t know what it means, but it makes me feel sick and afraid and angry all at once. Finally I call his house.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hendrix? Hey, it’s Juliet. Is Tai there?’

  ‘Oh, hi Juliet. Yeah, he’s here, but he’s in his room and Mum said I’m not allowed to annoy him. Dad said he’s got a . . . um . . . tumour in h
is brain and the reason Tai looks funny is because he’s been crying.’

  My heart seems to stop beating. ‘Are you sure, Hendrix? About – about the tumour?’ The word sounds clumsy in my mouth.

  ‘Yeah, and now Tai’s allowed to eat dessert instead of dinner and turn his music up loud. And Mum doesn’t even care that it has swears in it.’

  ‘I see.’ But I don’t, not really.

  ‘And I didn’t have to go to my swimming lesson, because Mum was still at the doctor with Tai, so Grandma Eve picked us up from school and took us to Maccas. I have to go now, Juliet – River’s touching my stuff. Bye.’

  There’s a click in my ear and then the disconnection tone. I wish Tai would call me. I don’t know what to think. I text him, again and again, but he doesn’t reply. I’m scared for him, and I don’t know what to do about it.

  • • •

  Tai doesn’t turn up at school the next day, and only sends a single, solitary text in response to my frantic messages.

  Sorry, girl. I’ll talk to you soon.

  The hurt that has been lurking underneath the fear is closer to the surface now; I don’t know why he can’t talk to me, why he won’t talk to me.

  ‘Have you and Tai had a fight?’ Mum asks gently that afternoon, and after a moment I nod. It’s not true, but I almost wish it was because the silence between us seems worse.

  Gen asks me the same question on the phone that night. ‘What’s up with you, Juliet? Are you and Tai fighting or something?’

  ‘No, it’s not like that. He’s not talking to me, but that’s not the problem.’

  ‘Wait. He’s not talking to you, and that’s not a problem?’

  ‘No, that’s not the problem. Not the biggest one, anyway.’

  ‘I’m completely lost right now.’

  ‘Tai . . . he’s sick.’

  ‘The cough? I thought that was gone.’

  ‘No, not that. He’s got a brain tumour, Gen.’

  ‘Oh my god! Is it . . . bad?’

  ‘I don’t know. He won’t talk to me. Hendrix told me when I called his house.’ I try to swallow the sob rising in my throat. ‘Why won’t he talk to me, Gen?’