The Brilliant Light of Amber Sunrise

by Matthew Crow

  Mum put down her coffee cup and stepped back to look at him. Amber had her head in her hands and her shoulders were jigging up and down like she was being electrocuted. Every so often she’d be still and take in a deep breath before carrying on with her hysterics. At first Mum just held her hand to her mouth. I thought she was going to cry again, which would have killed the mood, but instead she smiled, and then let out one sly giggle.

  “Sorry,” she said, and then laughed again. “Oh, you stupid sod,” she said, and burst out laughing, laughing like she hardly ever did, laughing like no one was watching. She laughed so hard she had tears in her eyes, and her nose began to run. Even though she could hardly breathe for laughing, she kissed Chris on the head where his hair used to be, then did the same to my head. When she did I could feel her lipstick smear across my skin like a slug’s trail.

  “My lovely lads,” she said, sitting down on the bed next to me as she tried to get her breath back, “what am I going to do with you, eh?”

  That night everyone was quiet. Kelly had been throwing up all day but eventually had settled while her mum and dad were still there. Her dad had left about half an hour after that and her mum went for a nap in the parent’s bed, meaning that while we could, technically, still use the rec room, none of us really wanted to for fear of disturbing her.

  Outside the lights had been turned off and the radio had been silenced, which meant that only one or two nurses were still milling about. I felt the darkness press down on me and found myself growing heavier as I began nodding off.

  “Francis,” Amber said, pressing her hand to my arm.

  “Hmmmm?”

  “Francis, are you awake?” she said, shaking my arm so hard that the answer could only have been yes. “You’re going to have to work this for me,” she said, dropping her voice to a whisper halfway through as Kelly groaned and turned over. Amber handed me Chris’s razor.

  “Have you been stealing?” I asked.

  “I asked him to leave it. Come on.”

  I said I wasn’t sure, that we were supposed to be in bed and a joint toilet trip might incur all sorts of suspicions and reprisals. If they caught us they might have to inform Social Services. I said I thought we’d better do as we were told and wait until morning to carry out any schemes or shenanigans. The rules, I told her, were there for our benefit.

  “Oh, Francis . . .” Amber said, piling pillows under my sheets so that it looked like I was still asleep, “. . . we all need our heroes. I just wish you hadn’t picked John Lithgow in Footloose.”

  I did not rise to her sniping because it would only have encouraged further insults. But she was obviously ill informed when it came to eighties teen movies set against the backdrop of interpretive choreography. Had she actually watched Footloose all the way through, then she would have known that John Lithgow comes good in the end. So the joke was really on her.

  In the bathroom the long bulb flickered on, then buzzed noisily. It was a dirty shade of white, like a towel that had been washed one too many times, and made our skin look even duller than usual.

  “I want you to do me too, so that I’m one step ahead of the game,” said Amber, once our eyes had grown used to the light and we no longer had to squint just to look at each other.

  “But it might not even drop out. It doesn’t all the time. It says so in the leaflet.”

  “Not a risk I’m willing to take,” she said, as footsteps marched lightly past the gap at the bottom of the door.

  “Here.” She handed me the razor and sat down on the floor. “Scalp me.”

  In the end Amber took the lead. She pulled out a pair of tiny nail scissors that she had slid into the elastic of her knickers and started hacking off lengths of her own hair. She used no method or system, just grabbed whole handfuls, pulling them tight from her scalp, and let the ­miniature blade slice through them until they fell free and drifted around her like leaves in autumn. The whole time she did it I just sat behind her and watched. I remember feeling impressed by how little she seemed to care. Most people doing what she was doing would have shown nerves before the first cut at least. Amber went at the task like it was the only natural solution. She didn’t seem to mind one bit. If anything it looked like she was enjoying herself.

  By the time she had finished, there was hardly any hair left on her head at all. There were only wispy remains, like her skull was growing mold.

  “Now it’s your turn,” she said, leaning back against me. “And if you muck it up like you did with Chris, I’ll kick your balls back into your stomach.”

  “All right,” I said, and turned the razor on and then off again, quickly, panicked by how loud it was.

  “What’s the problem?” she asked, turning around to face me.

  “Someone’s going to hear. We’ll get into trouble.”

  “No, we won’t,” she said with certainty. “If anyone comes knocking, you just start crying and remind them you’ve got cancer. No one’s going to press the subject after that.”

  I nodded and she settled down, leaning her head against my stomach once again. I turned the razor back on and, even though I flinched when the buzzing started again, eventually I became used to it and achieved the task at hand.

  Amber’s few remaining hairs came off in a fine dust that seemed to hover in the air before settling on the ground around her. By the time I’d finished, her head looked shiny but pockmarked, like a dirty moon.

  I turned off the razor and put it down amid the strands of hair on the floor.

  “I win,” she said, dragging her fingers across her dented scalp. “Now come and help me clear all this away.”

  “I think we’ve got the thick of it up,” I said after half an hour spent scrabbling about on all fours, trying to reclaim tufts of hair that had stuck to the floor like glued pennies.

  “Yeah, it’ll do. If anything they’ll just think we came in for a pee and started shedding,” she said.

  When I realized she still had her back to me I tucked a small lock of her hair into my pajama pocket.

  “Have you looked at yourself yet?” she asked.

  I shook my head. I was fine with being bald, or at least fine with knowing it had happened. I had already gotten used to the extra draft that wafted around my head every time someone opened a door, or the exaggerated shock that occurred each time a drop of water hit my temple. But the thought of seeing myself made me feel uneasy, so for the entire day I had avoided mirrors like the plague.

  “Come on.” She gripped my hand tightly and turned us both to face the long mirror on the back of the ­bathroom door. Neither of us spoke at first. We just stood, hand in hand, staring at ourselves like we’d been painted by the world’s most morbid cartoonist.

  Had I been on my own I might have cried. I felt my stomach churn when I first caught sight of my reflection. The natural response to seeing a photograph of yourself is to wonder if that is how you always look when you smile, and then vow to remain composed and dignified in public forevermore. This was like that but so much worse. People would know I was bald even with a hat on. It was written all over my face. But then I glanced at Amber’s reflection and realized that she was still pretty, in her own way, and even if she didn’t think so, she didn’t seem to mind one bit. For some reason this made me relax. I was keen never to cry in front of anyone, save perhaps Mum and Chris. Crying’s not the best character trait anyway. It doesn’t help that most men seem to cry with a dignified single tear, whereas I start hyperventilating and then wail even louder when I panic about swallowing my own tongue. So it was a relief when it stopped mattering. When everything stopped mattering other than the fact that Amber was there, with me, in the same position, in the same mirror, with the same problems and blotches and baldness, and that she seemed not to care one bit about how she looked. And, perhaps most importantly, that she didn’t seem to care how I looked either.

 
“Well,” she said eventually, her hand still in mine, “at least there’s no chance of us attracting anyone else.”

  “There’s that,” I said, because it was all I could bring myself to say.

  “Cancer . . . one-way ticket to monogamy. They never put that in the leaflets.”

  “They should,” I said. “It’s always the negatives they seem to dwell on. I think it’s due a bit of good publicity.”

  “Right?” she said. “Haterz. You’re an odd-looking thing,” she told me. “But I still would.”

  I turned and kissed her once on the cheek. It was the first time I had ever kissed Amber. The first time I had ever done anything that she hadn’t initiated. The second I did it I felt terrified, like she was going to grimace or wipe it off or say something to cut through the moment, like she always did. But she didn’t. She just smiled, and gripped my hand a little bit tighter.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get back before we really do get caught. I’d hate people to think I was leading you astray.”

  Too late, I thought as she turned off the light and led me by the hand, through the dark, back to the unit.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  At school we once read a story about a man who buried a body and thought he could hear the corpse’s heart beating beneath the floorboards. The sound drove him mad, as well it might, until he eventually confessed everything and ended up getting arrested for the murder.

  I had experienced something similar since what we later referred to as the Great Hair Cull. I’d kept the lock of Amber’s hair and tied it into a bow with a piece of ribbon from some posh chocolates Mum had brought when she came from work one afternoon. The idea was that I would carry the hair with me everywhere, so that we would always be together in one way or another. Also it would work well as proof if anyone didn’t believe I actually had a girlfriend. The stumbling block was that I never went anywhere, and even when I did make the long trek to the bathroom or the rec room with Amber, I was in my hospital gown, which didn’t have pockets. And so my memento of love was kept safe inside the folded page of a book beside my bed. The thought of anyone finding it—most of all Amber—made my stomach cramp with nerves. Every time someone so much as looked at my bedside table I would tremble and get flustered. Once Chris picked up the very book that contained my romantic memento and I almost collapsed. Fortunately he mistook my panic for a “turn,” and dropped it quickly to come to my rescue.

  It seemed our love was to be complex and tortured. To research the subject I had asked Mum to bring in a book about the Romantic poets, to see if they’d had as rough a time of it as I was having. The answer, it seemed, was yes. They also became confused about the use of apostrophes, which was another trait we shared.

  “Is ‘Bright Star’ about sex?” I asked Mum once I’d scanned a few of Keats’s poems to catch the gist.

  “You’d better not be getting any ideas,” she said.

  “I just want to understand them properly. So . . . is it?”

  “Oh, Francis, I wouldn’t know,” Mum said. “‘University of Life, mate,’” she added in a Cockney accent.

  I told her that after reading some of the poems I had decided that was where I might go too, so that I could sit by a brook and compose sonnets and stuff. Mum told me I’d do as I was bloody well told and that was the end of it.

  “Is that the other woman then?” Fiona asked glumly one day when she and Chris came to visit. The curtain around the bed next to mine had been drawn. Olivia sat by the window reading a comic while behind the curtain Colette rubbed healing oils into Amber’s skin and opened her chakras. Every so often I could hear Amber mutter something and her mum shush her, explaining that she had to reach total tranquility for the method to be truly effective.

  Some people (Kelly) thought Amber was a real cow. Others (Mum) thought she was a loudmouth smart ass who needed taking down a notch or two. You had to get to know her properly to see that this wasn’t true. Or at least that it was true, but that there were other aspects to her as well. Like the way she learned everyone’s name as soon as she met them, even if it was only to make the insults she doled out like flyers all the more cutting. Or how she would sometimes give people presents from the posters and keepsakes that she kept stuck to the wall above her bed.

  Mostly, though, you could see the real Amber by noticing the way she was with Colette. Every time Amber’s mum walked onto the unit Kelly and Paul would look at each other with a not-too-subtle snigger. Amber wasn’t embarrassed, though, the way most people would have been. She let her mum be exactly the way she was, no matter how much flack she got for it, and always sat quietly by when her mum went off on some mad tangent—opening her chakras or aligning her energies—and left her to it, even when, if it had been anyone else, Amber would have cut them down to size in seconds.

  She’d also become friends with me straightaway, which I sometimes think is my favorite quality in people. I’m not saying this to be smug. I just know I’m not the easiest person to make fast friends with. Chris says I’m an acquired taste. Mum once said my gravestone would read Worth the Effort, back when she used to joke about that sort of thing. Amber didn’t mind, though. She took me as I was, and the rest is history.

  I started to think of her as being like a Magic Eye ­picture—a jumbled mess that sometimes hurt and often irritated—but if you gave yourself long enough and really wanted to, you could see brilliant things in her. Things that would make you love her, and never be able to stop.

  I looked at Chris, who widened his hands as if to say sorry. I did not accept his unspoken apology, and scowled to suggest as much.

  “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “Well . . .” Fiona said, unwrapping a toffee from the bag Grandma had left. “I can’t promise there won’t be a scene.”

  She popped the toffee in her mouth and chewed down hard.

  “You going to leave some for the patient?” Chris asked, as she swallowed and went to unwrap another.

  “Comfort eating. For the heartbreak,” she said. “Besides, I did bring the sports drink, which was one pound ­twenty-nine, so it seems only fair.”

  After a while Colette left to catch the bus home. Amber’s chakras were as open as they could be that day, and she had to get back for a vigil at the church for an ­asylum seeker who did the dinners at Olivia’s school.

  Chris had brought in a pack of cards, so we started a game of Crazy Eights on the bedspread. Fiona only had three cards left when Amber pulled back the curtain.

  She said hello and Fiona introduced herself, pretending to be standoffish at first but then smiling and moving aside so that Amber could sit in her place on my bed.

  “Thanks for the loan,” she said, handing the razor back to Chris. “What do you think of my new weave?”

  “Love it,” he said, trying to sneak a look at my cards. I am all for fun, but rules are rules, so I pressed them to my chest and gave Chris a kick to remind him that I was committed to my role as umpire.

  “Oi!” Kelly yelled across from her side of the ward, at no one in particular. “Here . . . do you know they’re, like, seeing each other?”

  “Are you talking to me?” Chris said.

  “Both of you.”

  “Hiya!” Fiona said, and gave a smile that I knew was false. Fiona’s good at false smiles. I’ve seen her make a bartender whimper on more than one occasion.

  “Yeah,” Kelly said, “they’re getting it on. How sick is that?” Amber went to say something but Fiona didn’t give her the chance.

  “Why’s that then?” she asked.

  “Because she’s bald. It’d be like seeing a bloke. I think it’s gross.”

  “Do you?” Fiona asked. “Is that what you think? Is that your really . . . interesting . . . thought?” she said, giving Kelly a look that made her shrivel back into her bed like a spider being prodded with a twig.

  “Do
you want to play?” Fiona asked Amber, closing my curtain to rid us of further interruptions from Kelly, then squashing herself back onto the bed, making the sheets tighten around me like I was being mummified. “You can finish off my cards. I’ve done most of the hard work for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And don’t mind her,” Fiona said to Amber. “I’ve seen her type. Before you’ve finished your final exams she’ll be eight months pregnant and shacked up with a Bad Uncle. Her opinion’s not worth the paper it’s printed on.”

  Amber shrugged and took the cards.

  “Besides, I shaved my head one summer and ended up spending most of September at the STD clinic. Believe me when I say it’s the neck down that holds most interest.”

  “Not the mind?” Amber asked.

  “Depends on the girl,” Fiona said, downing half the bottle of sports drink she’d brought in for me. “Obviously being the world’s thickest graduate, I have to rely on the power of my physical allure—”

  “. . . ’cuz it really is the only bullet she’s got left,” Chris interrupted, trying to sneak another look at my cards.

  “But from what I’ve heard, you’ve got nothing to worry about. Francis reckons you’re a genius.”

  “Comparatively speaking, perhaps,” Amber said, with a sideways glance at me.

  “And you’ve sure as hell got balls,” Fiona told her. “Girls like you have nothing to worry about.”

  Amber ended up winning in three swift moves.

  “Booya!” she said.

  Chris said she got lucky that time and challenged her to a rematch. Amber declined, citing exhaustion, but really I knew it was because she wanted to maintain first place.

  When I woke up Fiona and Chris had gone and it was dark outside. Jackie brought me some toast but I just nibbled the corner and left the rest for Marc to wolf down when he came to collect the trays. He wasn’t supposed to do this but I knew he did, and had written down some rough dates and times in my Diary of Observations in case I ever needed to blackmail him.