by Tina Shaw
I kept my eyes on the onion, peeling off another outer layer. I was aware of her studying me to see if there were any visible signs of deterioration, as if she could peer right through the skin and muscle and bone, to see the state of my heart. It was always about my weak heart. No sport, no undue exertion, no violent emotions … Sometimes it felt like I was living inside a plastic bubble. At least I could still get out on my Vespa. But no wonder people thought I was a dork.
Then Mum perked up a bit, a glint in her eye. ‘I’ll have a chat with Doctor Brad next time I get a chance – maybe that’ll help.’ Considering my mother’s ‘chats’ can be more like heated debates, I had to pity Doctor Brad.
I didn’t sleep too well that night: tossing and turning, worrying about what Ryan would say to Roxy. What a bad idea: Ryan as a go-between.
Somewhere around midnight I started berating myself for being so gutless. I should’ve talked to her myself. I mean, what was the worst that could happen? She would scornfully tell me to piss off. Then tell her friends who would tell a whole bunch of other people. Then the whole school would know. What was the big deal about that?
The corridor scene kept replaying itself in slow-mo in my head. Except this time I edited in dialogue:
Hey Roxy, you wanna come to the pictures with me this Saturday?
Ooh, James, I would love that.
Yeah, right.
Rolling onto my side, I pulled the duvet over my head, and groaned with shame. It was bad enough that I’d never had a girlfriend, didn’t go to parties, and couldn’t play sport – now I was making a massive fool of myself as well. And for what?
I rolled onto my back and stared at the dark ceiling, listening to the wind moaning in the power lines outside. I heard Roxy again, crying. Lying on her bed. All right, so I liked her. She was hot, no doubt about that. But there was more to it than that. I’d seen something sad in her, like a stone she was carrying around inside. I’d seen something we had in common. It reminded me of my faulty heart, my own invisible stone. Though actually it was more like a punctured balloon than a stone.
I closed my eyes, not wanting to think any more. I listened to the lonely sound of the wind, and hoped like hell everything would turn out all right.
4
‘Cool wheels,’ said a ginger-haired kid as I pulled off my helmet and shouldered my backpack.
‘Thanks,’ I said, equally cool as my bike.
Kids were streaming past on their way into school, and I had about five minutes to get to the home room. The ginger kid was still talking.
‘How fast can it go?’
‘Hundred k.,’ I muttered, distracted. What if Ryan got really trashed on the bourbon and ended up in an accident? Mum would never forgive me. I started across the asphalt towards Casey building.
‘It’s French, isn’t it?’
The kid was jittering along at my elbow in a way that was extremely annoying. ‘Italian,’ I said.
‘How many ccs has it got?’
I opened my mouth to tell him to get lost, when the bell went. ‘Gotta go,’ I muttered and ducked away.
My dad’s name was Max. He was a mechanic. The Vespa belonged to him. Mum kept it in the garage for years, covered with a flannelette sheet, where it languished until one lazy afternoon when I ‘discovered’ it.
He and Mum met in a supermarket, of all places, in Australia. She’d dropped a jar of jam on the floor. The thing had smashed to smithereens. Mum was totally embarrassed. Dad stopped and they got talking. He had a nice grin. He died whan I was three years old. And that was about all the family history I had. There was a photo in the lounge for a while, but it disappeared a few years back. He was standing in the desert, with Ayers Rock in the distance behind him.
My one and only memory of my father was of him lifting me up onto the Vespa. The sun was shining. He put his hands together like a flapping bird, and made the Vespa noise: Vrmmmm. It struck me as really funny. Just like a wasp, he told me. Much later I learned that the word ‘vespa’ means wasp in Italian. The Vespa was something I could’ve talked to my dad about, if he’d still been around. There were lots of things I could’ve asked my dad. Like whether I should buy alcohol for Ryan, and whether he thought I had a chance with Roxy. But I was on my own with this one – except for Ryan.
So that afternoon it was with deep reservations that I went to the liquor shop. There was a walk-in beer fridge, crates of wine bottles, shelves of other bottles … but where did they keep the bourbon? I cruised around looking for signs, being as casual as hell and trying to look as if I went into liquor shops all the time.
‘Going to a party, Griffen?’
The sneering voice was right behind me.
I must’ve jumped, because there was sniggering next. Ah, my brother’s new friends: Tharg and Vomit, to me. They’d left school ages ago and were working at the same building site as Ryan. Tharg was a Neanderthal who knew nothing except rugby, while Vomit had a tendency to drink a lot of alcohol then recycle it in spectacular ways. One night, before he got kicked out of school, he ended up in the flower bed outside the principal’s office and projectile vomited all over the windows.
Needless to say, I didn’t have much in common with the guys.
‘Yeah,’ said Vomit, ‘you gonna get drunk and have a good time, Gritto?’ ‘Gritto’ was actually an improvement on the kinds of thing they normally called me.
‘I might just do that,’ I replied dryly.
Even if I was allowed to drink, the taste’s enough to put me off.
Tharg, who was holding a six-pack in each ham-sized fist, lifted them up and down like weights. He wasn’t showing off. He probably wasn’t even aware of what he was doing; it was just a natural reflex. Or maybe he was getting the liquor shop mixed up with the gym. Vomit nudged him to get his attention.
‘Maybe Gritto here is going to take his girlfriend Roxy to a party …’
The shop crashed into silence. That was how it seemed to me. The music shut down. I couldn’t hear Tharg and Vomit. Their fish mouths were opening and shutting, but I couldn’t hear a thing. My heart was pounding, though: I could sure hear that, resounding in my ears like the drums of Mordor. It was like a bomb, ticking away in my chest. Breathe, I told myself. And I sucked in air as if I’d been underwater for five minutes.
Vomit was laughing his hard little ratty laugh. ‘Yeah, an’ I bet Gritto here’ll show her a real good time, eh?’
Tharg was turning away now. He had an even shorter attention span than my brother. My brother …
‘Yeah, he’ll get drunk and give it to her,’ snickered Vomit.
‘Come on,’ grunted Tharg, over at the counter. ‘We’ve got a party to go to.’
‘Yeah and maybe Roxy’ll be there,’ added Vomit over his shoulder. ‘An’ we’ll tell her that Gritto says hello – won’t we, Mike?’
I turned back to the shelves and stared numbly at the rows of bottles.
Various pictures were racing through my head – high cliffs with jagged rocks below, a rope slung over a strong beam, a fast car out on the highway – anything that would immediately wipe me off the face of the earth. Because it was obvious I was doomed on this planet. All of the fears that had tormented me the night before had crystallised and come true, all at once.
I’d have to leave town. Go somewhere nobody knew me. I’d go home now, pack a bag and catch the first northbound bus. It was either that or find a gun (figure out how to use it!) and put myself down like some kind of sick animal. At that moment, the second option seemed really attractive.
‘Can I help you, son?’
I looked around blindly. Blinked. Swallowed. Felt a hot blush creep up my neck. Then remembered the photo ID in my wallet which proved I was allowed to be in a liquor shop. Not only that, but I was allowed to buy said liquor. Holy Toledo, I said in my best cowboy accent, gimme some hard liquor!
What I actually said was: ‘Where would I find the bourbon, sir?’
Hearts aside, my brother had always
been the strong one. Younger, but tougher, though the state of his mind was debatable. I couldn’t help getting sick and having a damaged heart, but sometimes it seemed more like a personality weakness. If I’d just been tougher in the first place, maybe I wouldn’t have succumbed to the rheumatic fever, and my heart wouldn’t have gone bad.
I’d been told there’s not strong evidence of heart disease running in families, but it seemed like too much of a coincidence to me that my dad died of a heart attack. Doctor Brad seemed a bit suspicious as well. He was always talking about genetics, and how I could have inherited a more susceptible heart from my dad’s side of the family. We couldn’t say for sure, of course, because my dad wasn’t around any more. But it didn’t take a genius to make a connection.
Doctor Bradley was itching to find out about Dad’s side of the family. He’d tried asking Mum about it, but each time he tried she nearly snapped his head off. They lived in Australia, she told him, making it sound like they lived in the outermost reaches of Siberia. I could’ve told him that my mum was sensitive about that part of her life. She doesn’t talk about it much, because she was really gutted when Dad died fourteen years ago. That was why she came back to New Zealand, crazily enough bringing the Vespa with her. She couldn’t stand being in a place where they’d been so happy together. He’d fallen over at work and died, just like that. By the time Mum got there, it was too late.
After Dad died, Mum lost touch with that side of our family. In her own stubborn way, I suppose, she wanted to put all that behind her and get on with life. For a while I was curious about my Aussie grandparents and my cousins. But Mum just clammed up like a … well, a clam. Eventually we gave up, figuring it wasn’t worth it. Presumably Doctor Brad would soon see the wisdom of that approach as well, and stop banging on about genetics.
In the meantime, we were waiting for an operation. I’d had the chest X-ray and the echocardiogram – that was a cool word for a computer mouse covered in cold goo that was pushed around over my chest as it filmed my beating heart.
Soon after we found out about the old valve situation, Mum and I sitting on the sofa had this conversation:
‘I was reading on the Net about how this thing can lead to something called congestive heart failure,’ I said, trying to sound casual.
‘Yes, James?’
The tip of her nose had gone white. That was a sure sign I was on dodgy ground. For a nurse, she can be pretty squeamish about certain things. Like the so-called facts of life. She got our next-door neighbour, Pete Jenkins, to tell us about that. I haven’t been able to look him in the face since. And if she’d only waited another year, we got it all at school anyway. Maybe she’d send me next door to Pete and he could talk to me about hearts.
‘Well, what if I don’t make it? I mean, what if the operation comes too late?’
‘Too many what-ifs, James,’ she sniffed. ‘Anyway, it’ll be any day now. I’m sure of it.’
‘But there are risks – right?’
‘Oh, James,’ she huffed, going teary. ‘All surgery carries a risk.’
Both of us were probably thinking the same thing: especially heart surgery.
Mum blinked, then slipped her arm round my shoulders and pulled me towards her. We were both trying to be brave about this thing. I let my head fall on her shoulder. I could hear her heart beating away, really loud, vibrating up through the bone and tissue, thumpity-thump, and I felt a tad jealous. Everyone seemed to have a good heart, except me. They never had to think about their hearts, and could do whatever they felt like. Go snowboarding or paragliding, or abseiling into canyons.
‘But what if they don’t do the op in time?’
I felt Mum give a big sigh. ‘They will, James.’ Her heart went thumpity-thump, only a little faster this time. ‘They’ve got to.’
We sat on silently for a few minutes. Finally I said, ‘It just doesn’t seem very fair.’ It was a dumb thing to say, but I really needed to break the doom-laden silence that had filled the room.
‘None of it’s fair, James,’ my mother said sadly.
Later the evening of the liquor shop I was lying on my bed, waiting for my brother to turn up, idly flicking through the channels with the sound turned down. Not exactly watching TV. More like daydreaming. I was waiting for my brother to turn up. Mum was at work so we’d have the house to ourselves.
Ryan thought he was pretty safe as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t physically exert myself, because of my heart, so I was hardly going to slam my fist into his face. Though I was sorely tempted. And he could argue, anyway, that it was my fault for getting him to do my dirty work for me. If I hadn’t been such a coward in the first place, then I wouldn’t be in this predicament. But you could also argue that there should be some loyalty between brothers, blood thicker than water, that kind of crap. Only that didn’t seem to count with Ryan. Maybe I would thump him, after all. That’d give him a fright. Only, he’d probably thump me back. Man, I was sick and tired of being the weakling.
The front door opened, then slammed shut. I got up and stood in the doorway. Ryan was just dumping his rugby gear on the hall floor.
‘You’re a bastard, Ryan Griffen.’
He looked surprised, then grinned. He sauntered past, towards the kitchen.
‘Did you hear me, you bastard?’ My voice was kind of high.
‘Hey, what’s your problem?’ he said, putting on his look of mock outrage. ‘I haven’t done anything.’
‘No, exactly,’ I said. ‘You never do.’
‘Look, faggot, you asked me to do something for you, because you were too gutless to do it yourself, and I’ve done it. All right?’
That didn’t explain Tharg and Vomit knowing about Roxy, but it did change things somewhat. ‘You talked to her?’
‘Sure I did,’ he said smoothly, and continued towards the kitchen. ‘And I believe you owe me one bottle of bourbon.’
‘Like hell I do.’
He was peering in the fridge again. It was a bit bare in there today: Mum hadn’t done the shopping. ‘Oh?’ he said over his shoulder. I took the opportunity of giving him a shove. He slammed shut the fridge door and frowned. ‘What now, eh?’
‘How come Tharg and Vomit know about it?’
A grin slid across his face. ‘Ah, well, they happened to be with me when I talked to her.’
‘What?!’ My face went hot. It was unbelievable. ‘What part of confidential don’t you understand?’
I had the urge to put my hands around his neck and squeeze really hard.
‘Look, you asked me to do you a favour. I did it. I didn’t say how I would perform that favour. You’re lucky I even bothered in the first place. I’ve got my own reputation to consider, too, you know.’
‘Of course,’ I laughed bitterly. ‘Your reputation.’
‘You can scoff, but I know what I’m doing when it comes to chicks – trust me.’ He opened the fridge again. ‘Anyway, you’ll want to know about Roxy …’
And that was true. I very much wanted to know about Roxy.
‘So you talked to her about me?’
‘I sure did, bro,’ said Ryan, finding some leftover cake. He lifted off the plastic wrap, picked up the whole piece, and took a bite. ‘Told her all about you,’ he said through the mouthful. The light from the fridge gave him a yellow glow. ‘In fact,’ he continued, ‘she already knew about you.’
I had the feeling he was playing games with me, but I couldn’t read his look. His eyes were on the plate, and he kept stuffing cake into his mouth. If only I’d had the guts to talk to her myself. I could’ve just said what I meant to, made a fool of myself, and nobody would’ve been any the wiser. Now it was all round the school, thanks to my stupid brother. I nudged him out of the way and shut the fridge door. It was too late to go back.
‘Come on,’ I said, resigned now to being seen as a complete dickhead, ‘out with it.’
Ryan gave me his amused, slit-eye look. He put the dirty plate in the sink and ran some water
over it. ‘She wants to see you.’
‘She does?’
Wow. My heart gave a tiny leap then, just like in books. My heart actually did quite a lot of leaping in the course of things – as well as thumping, crashing, banging and fluttering – but this time it was a good leap. A leap of happiness.
‘Yeah,’ said Ryan. He pulled a folded envelope out of his pocket. ‘Here’s her number. Give her a call, bro, and set it up.’ His smirk, as he left the room, was unreadable. He poked his head back into the room. ‘Oh, and my bourbon?’
That was Wednesday. Roxy and I had a brief phone conversation. We made a date for Saturday. Or at least, she told me a time and a place. But hey, the main thing was, the J-Man had a hot date! The next three days were the longest of my life. Could they have dragged by any more slowly? I don’t think so. At school, I watched out for Roxy all the time, but only saw her at a distance. Though I was collecting some odd looks from her mates. Still, I was walking on air, buzzing like a bee.
Friday afternoon, home-time, and I was getting my stuff from my locker, when I looked around to find one of Roxy’s gang, down the other end of the locker banks, staring at me.
I tried cracking a smile – after all, I knew chicks talked to each other and she must’ve known about our date. But she pursed her lips, like sucking on a lemon, and slammed shut her locker. With hindsight, that should’ve told me something.
5
Most people my age go out partying on Saturday nights. Parties, chicks, cars. Call me a loser, but my Saturday nights were a bit more sedate. Sometimes I’d hang out with Ajax or another mate. Watch a DVD. If I was feeling okay, I’d go and see Marlene at the DVD shop. I’d sit on a stool behind the counter and watch Marlene bring her own inimitable style to what was normally a boring job. Would you like fries with that, sir? Do you realise there is a lot of sex in that movie, madam?