Tattoos: A Novel

by Denise Mathew

  “Here,” Jax said.

  He handed me a kidney basin that he’d somehow managed to get his hands on. Relief that I’d been saved from making a mess on myself was intertwined with absolute embarrassment. Without fanfare I retched and heaved, mostly amber colored bile since I hadn’t eaten all day, into the basin that he was still holding. As my stomach continued to go through the motions of evacuating its contents, I prayed to anyone who’d listen that nothing would splash onto Jax’s hand. If that happened it would have only made an already horrific scene even worse.

  Tears that involuntarily accompany vomiting, trailed down my cheeks and my nose was a runny mess. Disgusting strings stretched and glistened from my nose to the basin, like drool from a dog’s mouth. After a few minutes that felt like an eternity, my stomach decided it had done its duty and the nausea subsided. I drew in a long inhalation. Before I sat back, Jax already had a box of tissues in front of my face.

  I grabbed a handful without comment. I knew I should have thanked him for saving me but I was too mortified to speak. I wiped the snot and tears from my face then closed my eyes and leaned back against my pillows. I gave myself the luxury of a few minutes to decide how I was going to handle it. What were the right words to say when you upchucked in a basin that a gorgeous guy just happened to be holding?

  When I had the courage to open my eyes again, Jax was at the sink rinsing out the basin. Thankfully washing away all evidence of my sickness. By the way he rinsed and dried out the kidney basin then washed his hands with the pink soap, it wasn’t the first time he’d handled this kind of situation. But that didn’t matter to me because it was the first time he’d ever done it with me. I made it a life long goal never to do it again.

  He strode back to me and gave me a half grin like he’d done the first time I’d met him. The dimple in his cheek winked at me.

  “Just keep it in the bed with you, in case…” He motioned with his hand in what must have been his code for throwing up.

  I nodded. “Thanks,” I said. I tucked the basin against my side. It was at that very moment that a nurse with a teddy bear covered scrub top and white pants, came racing into the room.

  “Marilyn did you ring?” she asked. Obviously she was new, because I’d made it a point to let everyone know that I hated the name Marilyn.

  “Marilee,” I said.

  “What?” the nurse said.

  She didn’t look much older than me with straight black hair, brown eyes, a tiny upturned nose and a stethoscope draped around her neck.

  I opened my mouth to speak.

  “Her name’s Marilee not Marilyn,” Jax said. I felt a smile curve my lips. When he said my name it made my heart do this strange flutter thing.

  The nurse seemed almost affronted by Jax’s statement, as if people that did the kind of work he did, should be seen but not heard. It reminded me so much of the way Mom treated people who she labeled, not our kind. The only problem was that Mom wasn’t any different than any of the folks she looked down her nose at, she’d been born poor and had only come up in social standing because of her marriage to Harold.

  “Oh, okay…Marilee,” she said, gazing at me. “Did you need something?”

  “She just vomited about 200cc, I’m not sure if you’re doing an intake and output on her or…” Jax cut in again. A smirk worked across his face. I had to cover the grin that was quickly spreading across my face. He’d noticed her attitude too, but unlike me he wasn’t going to let her get away with it.

  “Oh okay, thank-you…I’ll mark that down,” she said. Then she appeared stumped for something else to say. She went crimson, turned on her heel and was gone.

  “I’ll probably take some heat for that but she just doesn’t know how it works around here,” he said, locking his eyes on mine. “There’s no hierarchy for helping, you just do what needs to be done, even if it isn’t exactly your job.”

  “Thanks, you really saved me there,” I said, unable to wipe the smile from my face. For some reason Jax seemed to have this aura around him, that made you forget about all the bad things in your life, for a few moments at least.

  He cocked an eyebrow, an action that I was sure would have made most girls swoon like love sick puppies because it was definitely having that very effect on me.

  “I better get back to it,” he said.

  He retrieved a dust broom from the corner of the room and moved to leave. I so wanted him to stay because I knew when he’d left he’d take the light with him. I wasn’t sure if I could cope with that right then.

  “Are you in a band?” I blurted out. I knew it was the most stereotypical assumption I’d ever made, but I was grasping for anything that would keep him there a little longer.

  “Kind of, if you want to call it that…” he said with a low chuckle. I almost laughed with him; I was shocked that I’d actually hit the mark.

  I straightened up in the bed, surprised at how lucid I was since I’d thrown up. “Where do you play?” I asked.

  “Wherever they let us play,” he said with a shrug.

  “Is it a metal band?” I asked. Once again judging a book by its cover.

  “Nope, just top forty pop, we’re a cover band really…”

  He leaned against the broom. I knew he was a cleaner and that there was nothing wrong with his job, but it just didn’t seem to fit him.

  “I really have to get back to it,” he said with an apologetic smile. He positioned the broom in front of him, pushing it toward the door.

  Every fiber in my body wanted to keep talking to him but I didn’t. The last thing I wanted was for him to get into any more trouble than he was already in.

  “Thanks again,” I said with a wave. When I thought about what I was doing, waving like a model in a parade, I dropped my hand to my duvet and shrugged. As expected, as soon as he was gone all the reality of my world pushed back into the room, and I was alone with my cancer.

  6. Jax

  As usual the bar was too hot. Cigarette smoke swirled in the air like toxic dragons, but I didn’t care. Nothing could get to me when I was in the zone, belting out a tune we never usually played. After quite a bit of shameless begging, Zeke and Max had agreed to play Radiohead’s Karma Police. Singing, even if it was other people’s material was the one thing that managed to completely disentangle me from the real world. When I held the mic in my hand and the music started, it was as if everything around me was swept away and it was just me and the tunes. No matter how wiped out I was, I hated when we took a break between sets because as soon as the band stopped playing, I was shuttled back to the dive we were in.

  Most of the people that still crowded the bar were wasted and trolling for someone to take home with them for the night. Girls giggled too loudly, beer glasses clanked, and piped in music filled the air. I couldn’t wait to get back on stage. Not that it was much of a stage since it was barely bigger than a table top. Our drummer, Zeke had to put his gear on the floor at the side since it wouldn’t fit on the stage with Max, our guitarist and me. We were a three man band but still managed to make it work. Max had a bass and guitar that he interchanged according to the track we were playing. Zeke played the drums and also sang backup for a few songs.

  The three of us had been friends since grade school. We’d started our first band when we were fifteen, not that it was much of anything more than a name The Vitals, since we didn’t have any instruments to play until a few years later. Despite the fact that we didn’t have instruments we had our voices. Zeke used to make percussion sounds with his mouth and beat on empty ice cream containers and boards, pretty much anything that would serve as mock drums.

  “This place is brutal,” Max said, sweeping his sweat soaked dark bangs back off his face. His black eyeliner had smudged around his eyes. Combined with his sharp cheek bones he was more sinister looking than even he knew. A head shorter than me, Max was skinny to the point of skeletal and the fact that he always dressed in unrelieved black only added to his scrawny appearance. Max like
d piercings as much as I liked tattoos, and had studs in his eyebrows, nose, a lip ring and at least ten earrings in each ear.

  Max tipped the last dregs of his beer up to his lips and grinned. “At least we get free beer though,” he said.

  I nodded, not that I’d enjoyed any of it. I’d found out the hard way after way too many hangovers after our gigs, booze and performing didn’t go together. Especially not when I was expected to work during the day and was perpetually sleep deprived. Max and Zeke didn’t have day jobs, relying on what we made from the gigs and of course a few scams here and there to make ends meet. For the most part they were good guys at heart, who were doing the best they could with what life had dealt them.

  Zeke’s mother was a cokehead who was in an out of rehab since he’d been around six, his father wasn’t much better, and had been busted for dealing and pimping Zeke’s mother. It was a miracle that he’d turned out as good as he had. Max had been marginally luckier, if you could call it luck. He’d grown up in foster homes and though he’d had mostly shitty excuses for parents, he’d managed to get adopted when he was twelve. The couple that had adopted him weren’t druggies, they just liked to run computer scams. They’d been caught and arrested when Max was seventeen, but up until that time he’d enjoyed three square meals, a roof over his head and a little pocket money. After they were hauled away to jail, Zeke and Max got a one bedroom apartment together. It was so small that it made my place seem like a palace. But they didn’t care because it was theirs.

  “Drink up,” Zeke said. He laid a pitcher of draft beer and two spotted glasses on the table next to us. I knew that if the owner got wind that we weren’t all twenty-one like we’d told him we were, the beer would have stopped and so would our gigs.Thankfully Max had a friend who was a pro at making fake ID’s otherwise we’d be out of luck everywhere.

  Max practically pounced on the refills. Even though Zeke and Max were best friends they couldn’t have looked any more different than they did. Zeke was short and pudgy with a thick mass of blonde curls that could have rivaled Jimmy Hendrix’s afro. He was supposed to wear glasses all the time but since he hated them they were always in his pocket, causing him to perpetually squint. Generally he dressed like me, in jeans and graphic t-shirts.

  Zeke poured himself a drink and sipped at his beer as if it were bad tasting medicine. Seeing him do that always made me wonder why he drank at all.

  “Did you see Emma?” Zeke asked with an evil grin. He was more than aware that the last person I wanted to run into was Emma. I’d dumped her a few months back and she hadn’t taken it well. The problem was that Emma was a little bonkers and if you looked psycho-bitch up in the dictionary, Emma’s picture would be right next to it.

  “Are you screwing with me?” I said, shaking my head.

  “Nah, I saw her too, I can’t believe that you didn’t. She was all over this guy in the back,” Max said.

  I blew out a relieved breath. By the sounds of it, Emma had moved on. At that exact moment I felt a tap on my shoulder. Max and Zeke snickered in unison. Even before I’d had a chance to turn, I knew who was behind me.

  “Emma,” I said.

  The name felt like poison in my mouth. If there was anyone in the world that I could absolutely live without seeing ever again, it was her.

  Her brown hair fell in soft waves, framing a face that most people might find pretty or creepy, depending on their opinion on dolls. Her eyes were artfully made up to look much larger than they were and were as green as emeralds and fake as a two dollar bill. Her lips were a severe red and painted into a too-small mouth that was cartoonish against the geisha girl white makeup that she wore. She had a sleeveless fitted one piece hot pink dress that came to her mid-thigh, showcasing her ghostly white slender legs. Matching ballerina slippers finished her scary ensemble.

  The thing was, Emma liked to look like a doll, which in itself should have steered me clear of her. But since I’d met her when she hadn’t been wearing her doll guise, I’d fallen into her trap. It wasn’t until after we’d dated for a couple of weeks that the skeletons, or in her case the dolls, came out of the closet. By that time I’d already liked her enough to accept her weird obsession.

  “You look so yummy up there, I just wanted to bite you,” Emma purred.

  “Go away freak,” Max said under his breath.

  My shoulders instantly bunched. Emma wasn’t the type to mess around with, she didn’t just get mad she got even. I cut an icy glare at Max. He made a zipping his lip motion. I turned back to Emma. Based on the dreamy smile she sent my way, she hadn’t heard Max’s quip. Her smile sent shivers through me. It also made me remember how she’d gotten even with me after we’d broken up.

  It had been more than a dicey situation when she had left a scorpion in my jacket pocket. The only reason I hadn’t got stung was because when I’d reached into my pocket for my house keys, I’d been wearing a pair of gloves. Until that day I didn’t realize how truly sage Gran’s advice about dressing for the weather had been. Suddenly and without warning, the image of the Tower flashed in my mind and I wondered if this was the girl that was going to bring my world tumbling down. If there was anyone who could do it, it was Emma.

  In that moment I was kind of happy that Gran had done my cards. Even though I knew it was completely stupid, I was on alert for danger. Being prepared, meant I might be able to avert disaster.

  “Break’s over,” the bartender yelled over at us. I practically collapsed into a puddle of relief.

  “That’s my cue,” I said with a wary grin. Emma seemed perturbed by the rebuff but didn’t say anything. She tilted her head to the side. In a move I hadn’t expected, she wrapped her arms around my waist and took my mouth in hers. Her mouth was sloppy wet. She tasted of cigarettes and beer. A cloud of cheap perfume surrounded me. Her tongue flicked between my teeth then she pressed her full body against me. The action made me wonder why I’d ever been attracted to her in the first place. Before I had a chance to pull away, she broke the kiss. With a smirk she strode away, her mane of dark hair bouncing as she moved.

  “I think I just threw up in my mouth,” Zeke said.

  “Me too,” Max said, elbowing Zeke in the ribs lightly. “That girl is just plain nasty, and look she left you a reminder of her.”

  “What?” I said, giving him a blank stare.

  “You’ve got that skanks lipstick and white crap all over your face,” Zeke said.

  He handed me a bunch of napkins from the dispenser on the table. I took them, scrubbing the offending marks off my face. I shook my head.

  Obviously Emma wasn’t quite finished with me yet, which more than gave me the creeps. I didn’t want anything to do with her, but having her as an enemy would be hell on wheels. I grabbed the mic. When the music keyed up I started to sing. This time instead of getting lost in it, I couldn’t pull my gaze off Emma, staring at me with a determination that had me wanting to run for cover.

  7. Marilee

  My first cycle of chemotherapy began quite uneventfully. They had hooked me up to the pump and after an hour or so I was done. Unfortunately it had been just the beginning. There was so much more “fun” to follow.

  I’d heard that you didn’t usually feel too bad after the first few treatments, and that only after the chemo built up in your system you’d start to feel it. That was exactly how it had happened for me. The drugs they had given me to combat nausea worked pretty good. It meant that even though my appetite was down, I could force myself to eat. I knew that if I didn’t eat I’d only regret it. That didn’t mean it was easy. Food tasted strange, and although I didn’t exactly feel sick, my stomach felt jittery.

  The hospital tried to give me things I usually liked to eat but nothing was even remotely appealing. Harold had even brought me in some hummus and veggies, usually one of my favorite things to eat. I’d only managed to get down a few bites before the taste of metal in my mouth made me gag. Eating only got worse when a week and a half later, red raw sores fo
rmed inside my mouth. That’s when I started to give up on the whole idea of eating, since everything I put in my mouth only served to irritate my already tender mucosa.

  I picked at the cheeseburger and fries that Harold had brought in. He had come in for a visit over his lunch break. Since he’d made an effort to visit me, with tremendous difficulty I ate three fries and one bite of the burger. I nodded my approval doing my best to appear grateful.

  “My hair is starting to fall out,” I said.

  A few days before, I’d noticed quite a bit of hair on my pillow. I’d been warned that I was more than likely going to lose my hair, but it was still devastating to have it actually happen. I knew that for anyone, losing their hair was a huge deal, but I assumed that for men it was a little easier since a bald guy wasn’t as shocking as a bald girl.

  Harold’s expression was grim. He shook his head a few times. The silence lengthened between us. I knew telling him about my hair loss would make an already awkward visit worse. Neither of us mentioned it but the fact remained that Mom hadn’t darkened the door of the hospital in over a week. She hadn’t even bothered to be there for my first chemotherapy treatment.

  The first few times I’d asked Harold where she was, he’d always given me the same generic statement, that she was busy and that she’d make it over soon. Harold knew as well as I did that it was all bull. Mom didn’t come because she didn’t want to. My sickness didn’t fall in the parameters of being the perfect daughter she had expected me to be. That didn’t mean she didn’t go around acting like an emotional wreck for all her friends, eating up their empathy like it was the finest chocolate.

  “Well, your oncologist did mention that it would probably happen,” he said, running a small hand over his bald patch. I felt bad for ever having made fun of his hair challenged head. He had no more control over losing his hair than I did. Mine would eventually grow back, his wouldn’t.