In case you’re thinking it involves good money and working in some groovy little office full of cool, like-minded music freaks, or free tickets to concerts where I meet famous people backstage – then think again. I email Roger my piece every week and I never see anyone. I don’t have contact with older, more experienced journalists who could show me the ropes or how to do things better. And I have to pick up my copy of the paper from the local café, just like everyone else. Nor do I get any feedback, except for the occasional phone call from Roger telling me that I’ve stuffed up in some way. Maybe I’ve gone over my word limit or, more commonly, this week’s ‘rave’ isn’t quite up to last week’s. He’s always telling me to crank things up a bit. I never know what the hell he’s talking about, so I just do what I do and each week when I pick up my copy of the paper there’s my piece under the name of Ms Angst.
I should add that every week I half expect to not find it there, to have been given the heave-ho. It’s not that I’d mind that much. I’m not one of those people who has always wanted to be a writer. The pay is crap (I still have to work as many hours as a waitress as I used to) and churning out those 300 words takes me more time than I care to admit. At the start of every week I think, Well, this is it, I’ve got nothing to write about. But by the time Thursday comes around I’ve usually had a bash at two or three subjects. I pick one and spend most of Friday – my day off from the café – polishing it up and sending it off.
So don’t freak when you see the Don’tcha just hate it . . . line. It’s only me chewing over a possible little diatribe for Roger.
‘Let’s have our coffee down by the water then,’ Mum suggests. Then she adds in a more hesitant, cloying tone that makes me want to heave, ‘That is if you still want to stop?’
‘Yeah okay,’ I say.
So we take the turn-off and travel the few kilometres along the boulevard to the newly reconstructed precinct of shops and coffee houses set along the bay. I pull the van into one of the parking bays that looks out over the water. Between the car park and the water there is a long, quite wide garden area with small trees and a crazy pathway zigzagging down to a wooden pier and restaurant. Seats are dotted along the edge.
‘Last time I was here it was a weekend,’ Mum muses, ‘and there were at least six brides all having their photos taken.’
‘When was that?’ I ask shortly.
‘Must have been a couple of years ago.’ She frowns. ‘Your father and I were on our way down to see Gran at Easter. People get married on any day now.’ Her wistful tone jerks me into fresh wariness. I reach for the door and slide it open.
‘I’ll get the coffee,’ I say and point to the seat right in front of us. ‘Why don’t you go sit out there and I’ll bring it over?’ I’m determined that this trip will not degenerate into any kind of getting-to-know–you-again experience. Ditto for meaningful conversations about wedding days, past or present, and romantic outings with my father.
‘No Rose,’ she says firmly, opening the other door. ‘Let me please. I’d like the walk. Want anything to eat?’
‘Okay then,’ I say with a shrug, happy for her to do it because I’m low on cash, ‘just the coffee will do.’
Mum heads across the road to the nearest café and I wander over to the lawn and look out at the murky brown, oily water. It’s nice with the breeze and the sun shining. I’m wearing jeans with a faded denim jacket over an old pea-green T-shirt. It’s warm enough to take off the jacket but I prefer to stay covered. I dig my hands into the pockets of my jeans and edge back to the seat in front of the car, shut my eyes and turn my face up into the sun.
Last time I was here, Zoe was with me. We missed the bus and had about three hours to kill, so we walked on the pier and ate pizza. Must have been about fifteen months ago. It was cold. I can see her sitting under that big plane tree down near the water, big legs crossed.
‘Am I okay?’ I remember her asking me that day. ‘Do you really think I’m going to make it?’
‘Of course you’re okay, Zoe,’ I replied automatically, slumping down beside her, opening the pizza box and handing her a slice on one of the napkins, ‘and you’ll make it for sure.’
I always answered these questions as though she’d never asked them before, when in fact, especially if we hadn’t seen each other for a few days, she would often begin conversations this way. Zoe just can’t do polite conversation starters like, ‘How are you? Isn’t it a great day?’ or ‘What have you been doing?’
‘Do you really love me?’ often came next. I know it sounds gruesome. But I didn’t mind because I knew she really had to know. It wasn’t a put on. Most of the time she was such fun but this stuff had to be faced and resolved before we could go on with anything else. I was her best friend, so who else was going to do it?
‘Do I love you?’ I would often joke. ‘What do you reckon, Zoe? That I hang around for your money?’
Zoe lives in Bayswater. Her mother lives on some sickness pension. They often don’t have money for proper food because cigarettes and dope and those two stupid mongrel dogs are more important. Like me, she won a scholarship to that big posh school on the other side of town. But unlike me, she really needed that place to get where she wanted to go. For me, deciding to go there was just a way to piss off my older sisters who’d all attended our excellent local state high school. Zoe’s life had never been easy. Yet we were best friends from the first day in that place.
‘But will any one guy ever fall in love with me?’ she often persisted.
‘Of course.’
Zoe is the ultimate romantic, so this bit, along with getting to the top of her chosen career, was high on her list.
‘How will I meet him?’
‘For fuck’s sake, Zoe. You’re only eighteen!’
Zoe is beautiful in a big, in-your-face, over-the-top kind of way. I think so anyway. Wonderful green eyes that sort of glitter in certain lights if she’s excited or angry. Heavy black lashes and eyebrows, a wide mouth always laughing – or crying – and short curly fair hair which is usually dyed a few shades lighter than her natural color, sometimes with a slash of purple in it too, or orange and silver if she’s in the mood. But she’s heavy. I don’t know how much she weighs but she has big thighs and bum and breasts. I was always telling her that in another age she would have been considered right on the money because she is so curvy. Her middle, waist and belly are proportionally quite slim. But that look is not right for now and it plays on her mind a lot, I guess. She’s always trying to lose the weight, going on and off diets.
Of course, all that might have changed by now. I haven’t seen her in a while. She might have lost it all.
Right through school, Medicine was Zoe’s one goal. And when she knew she had got in to the Med school at Monash at the end of our Year Twelve it was like all her Christmases had come at once. She had leukemia when she was a kid and was in and out of hospital for about six years, from the time she was eight. Apparently it was touch and go whether she’d actually survive or not. I don’t know if her being fat is related to the childhood illness or not. We never talked about it.
It was during her time in hospital that she fell in love with the whole world of doctors and surgery and advanced medical treatments. The doctors were her heroes. When other little kids were mucking around with their mates, playing dolls and computer games, Zoe was fighting for her life, and those medicos were the ones who saved her. Her plan was to eventually become an oncologist, and it probably still is. Unlike me, who has just frittered away my first year out of school by working long hours in a nothing job that pays badly (and will probably repeat the performance again this year because I can’t see myself at university or going overseas), Zoe will have finished her first year at university by now and be gearing up for the second. I’ll bet anything that she’s done really well in her exams. There was never anything else but Medicine for Zoe.
Apart from guys, that is.
I was never into guys in the same way, which is
ironic when you think about what happened later. But Zoe fell in love easily and often, and she was always in some cataclysmic state about someone. She had no qualms at all about ringing guys up and asking them out. Sneaking off to see them. No qualms at all about sleeping with them either. Her heart got broken on a regular basis but she bounced back quickly. That’s how it was when I knew her anyway.
‘One hot latte.’ Mum is back with the coffee, smiling. She hands me mine, sits down beside me and holds out a brown paper bag.
‘Want some?’ I peer in at the delicious-looking pastries she’s chosen, and my mouth immediately begins to water. I was so taken up with travel angst this morning, I’d forgotten to eat anything.
‘Thanks.’ I break off a piece of date slice and pop it in my mouth. The sweetness explodes on my tongue like a sugar bomb and I’m suddenly starving. I pull the rest of it out and gobble it up quickly.
‘Sorry!’ I say, a bit embarrassed, pulling the top off my coffee. ‘I said I didn’t want anything but this is so . . . nice.’
‘Have another one,’ she smiles at me.
‘You sure?’ I choose the fresh blueberry muffin next, and its warm, light texture gives me a sudden longing for all that home cooking that I don’t have any more. At home my sisters are always making something delicious to eat. I miss it. Barry, the twenty-five year old tight-arse I live with now, literally doesn’t know how to boil an egg. I know because I’ve seen him try. The other one – I call him Stuttering Stan because he can hardly speak a full sentence – not only doesn’t cook, he resents anyone who does. He’s one of these skinny, pale, sick-looking vegans who thinks everyone should live on nuts and fruit the way he does.
‘Is it hot enough?’ Mum asks, watching anxiously as I take the first sip of coffee.
‘It’s perfect.’ I smile at her, touched. I haven’t lived at home for nearly a year but she remembers how I like my coffee. ‘Thanks Mum.’
We both look out over the water. At the groups of people wandering along, at the sailing boats tied up against the wharf. The crap that is usually lurking like a hungry dog around the edges of my mind has backed off momentarily, and a fizzy lightness invades my head. I like being away from the café. On the road, in the van. Doing something different. Thanks Gran, I think to myself, then I feel mean and try to backtrack. Gran is probably about to die. She doesn’t need me being glad about it.
‘Before, when I asked if you’ve spoken to Zoe, there was a reason,’ Mum says quietly, not looking at me. My self-protective antenna immediately begins its high-pitched warning hum. More like a warning screech really. Don’t go there, Mum, please. Things are fine now. Please just don’t go there.
‘Oh yeah?’ I say, as nonchalantly as I’m able, thinking, Hold on tight Rose, hold tight. I do not want anyone, especially my mother, to know exactly how much all this stuff still affects me. I bought one of those self-help books in a second-hand bookshop that’s near the house I share with those two morons out in Hurstbridge, and as far as I’m concerned I’m doing okay. I’ve got myself through the first couple of stages – denial, anger – all on my own. Now I figure it’s time to move on, to forget it all. That’s the one I’m working on now. Forgetting. I don’t want to go backwards.
‘Do you know she’s in hospital?’ my mother asks. There is a two-second pause as I feel the words crash their way into my skull. Hospital?
‘What?’ I whisper.
‘Hospital,’ my mother murmurs back.
My heart begins to race. It lurches forward in my chest like an old car. Chug, chug. It’s going to give out any second and leave me stranded by the wayside, no way forward. Wrecked completely.
‘So you didn’t know?’
‘No.’
‘Rose, I know you . . . don’t like talking about this,’ Mum says in a monotone, ‘about Zoe, I mean. But I thought I should tell you. I thought you’d be angry if we all knew and you were left in the dark.’
‘Right,’ I mumble, goose bumps rising along my forearms under the jacket, ‘thanks.’
A chill seems to be coming from deep down inside me. I pull the denim jacket tighter around me, suddenly feeling weak with shock. I know. I know what is coming next and, more than anything, I don’t want to hear it.
‘The cancer is back.’ Mum says.
‘Cancer?’ I speak the word but it is hard to get my head around it. Cancer. The cancer is back. Okay, we always knew there was a chance of that happening, but . . . I didn’t seriously consider it. She has been through so much already. So much of her childhood obliterated, lying in bed with drips in her, all the drugs and nausea and not knowing if she was going to live or die. The doctors told her that if she stayed clear for ten years, then the chances of it recurring were minimal. When I first met her at fifteen, at the beginning of Year Nine, she’d just come out of years of treatment. I want to beat my fists against something hard, a brick wall maybe, or the roof of my van. Enough is enough. She’s twenty now. How much should one person have to endure? I know it’s only been five years but . . . Someone is laughing at us. Five years is not ten years, is it? Five years is worth nothing.
I turn to my mother who is staring out at the water.
‘It’s in her blood?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mum says. ‘All I know is that she’s been in hospital for a few weeks of treatment.’
A few weeks!
‘So has it worked?’ I ask quickly. ‘Is she going to get better?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mum says, ‘I don’t know any details.’
We sit quietly for a while, maybe two feet apart. I sip my coffee and stare at the brown water. I hate it now. The water. The bay. I hate the gaudy bright day around me, the breeze and the boats. Even the half-eaten muffin in my hand. Everything. This news has broken into my life like a burglar, sawing my heart open, exposing all the secret chambers. I can’t seem to find a way to stem the flood of memory and . . . pain. I close off one seeping pipe and another one opens up somewhere else. I never thought this would happen. And I know she never thought it would happen either. Zoe considered herself cured. We both did. I forget about Mum beside me. It doesn’t matter what she says now. I’m tumbling backwards, away from the present at a crazy pace.
‘You know it’s been over a year now,’ Mum says quietly.
‘Yes,’ I mumble.
‘Maybe it’s time for . . .’ She peters out. ‘Some kind of . . .’
‘What?’ I come up to the surface and crank out one of my nasty, tight sneers. ‘For us to be best buddies again?’
‘No . . . no.’ She stumbles on awkwardly. ‘I just feel it’s time you stopped punishing yourself. It’s what everyone thinks.’ She is looking at me and I hate it. I hate it so much I want to stand up and grab her by both shoulders and shake her, but I stay sitting because I don’t want her to know what this is doing to me. ‘All your sisters . . . and me. There has to be some way to . . . stop all this.’ She waves one hand helplessly in the air, ‘Even if it’s just to help Zoe!’
Tears well in my throat and I gulp them down. Help Zoe? What about me? I need help. Why aren’t they thinking about me? Am I some kind of monster that is beyond help?
‘Mum,’ I say, standing up. ‘No one knows . . . what happened.’
‘We have a fair idea, Rose,’ she says.
‘No you don’t!’ I try to smile but my mouth isn’t working. ‘That’s where you’re wrong.’ I can feel a tremor around the edges of my lips and I can’t control it. But at least I’m not shouting and I don’t think I sound too angry or desperate. There are only a few people who know about . . . the full particulars of what went on last summer, and Mum isn’t one of them. Ditto for my sisters and the rest of my family. I don’t want them to know. It’s none of their business.
‘You all think you know everything,’ I say, completely exasperated, ‘but you don’t.’
‘Okay,’ Mum bites her lip, ‘I won’t mention it again, Rose.’
‘Thanks.’ I pull the jacket around me tightl
y. ‘I’ll just have a bit of a walk, okay? Only be a few minutes.’
‘Take as much time as you need,’ she says, still looking away, biting her thumb. ‘No hurry.’
I walk to the end of the pier and stand staring out onto the water. It’s blue now. Clear blue, and lovely. How strange that the water changes colour depending on what the clouds are doing overhead. Does that mean that it’s not really blue at all? Or brown, or . . .? What exactly is colour? Why didn’t I pay more attention in science class?
Memories come rushing in. But it’s okay. Out on the pier in the sun and the breeze I can manage them. It’s when I’m in bed at three a.m., in that horrible house with those two strangers that . . . I sometimes freak. There are a lot of trees around that house, and small twigs and branches are always falling onto the tin roof. When the wind blows, a branch scrapes across my window and I wake, thinking that someone is trying to get in. There are often scurrying sounds, too, of small animals up there in the ceiling. Barry reckons they’re mice. He got up there once with a ladder and chucked a bit of poison about. It didn’t make any difference, but I suppose I should give him credit for trying.
The three of us are like ghosts passing each other in the hallway. A polite murmur of hello on the way to the bathroom in the mornings. Short sharp nods in the kitchen as we make coffee and disappear with it into our rooms. I hate the buzz of Stan’s television, that blue light under his door. He’s in there half the night watching . . . what? There is only a wall between us. Barry sniffs constantly. Blow your nose! I want to yell. Have a cough! Get some medicine! But I don’t say anything. It’s weird to think that the only people I spend time with these days are strangers.
I know I’m fucking up my life but I don’t know how to turn things around. Late at night is when it all gets too much.
But right now I’m seeing it from a distance, trying to pick a starting moment.
Rose by Any Other Name Page 3