Everything Left Unsaid (18 page)

The next afternoon Tai struggles to get out of bed, and when he stands up to kiss me he stumbles. I rush to catch him and hit my hip on the sharp corner of his desk. ‘Ouch.’

‘Sorry, girl.’ Tai sits back down on his bed and drops his eyes to the floor.

I sit beside him and rest my head on his shoulder. Underneath the old grey shirt he’s wearing he’s nothing but skin and bone.

‘Juliet? Do you remember what we were like before everything was about painkillers and chemotherapy and hospitals?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I think I’m starting to forget.’

• • •

A week later, Tai is back in hospital. While he’s being poked and prodded, I’m sitting in the waiting room with his parents. Stanley is drinking his seventh coffee of the morning, while Mia stares out the window at the endless grey slabs of concrete buildings across the road. There’s a television bolted to the ceiling in one corner of the room, and though the volume is so low you can barely hear it, I pretend to be interested in it. It’s still better than watching Mia and Stanley – their faces are filled with wrinkles that weren’t there a year ago, and they just look defeated.

Gen arrives at the hospital after lunch, but Tai doesn’t really want any visitors so we go and sit on some steps outside, the quietest place around. There’s only a cleaner smoking nearby. Eventually he pitches the cigarette and heads back inside. Gen reaches out for my hand and holds it tightly.

‘I wish I could go too,’ I say.

‘We can go back inside if you want.’

‘No. Not that.’ I swallow, hard. ‘With Tai. I wish I could die too.’

‘Juliet!’ Gen whispers. Tears start to trickle down her face.

‘Well, I do.’

‘But you can’t, I mean . . .’ She trails off, rubs her face.

‘Sometimes it just gets too hard, Gen. I don’t want to watch him die anymore. Remember in the news, a couple of years ago, that old couple had that suicide pact? Wouldn’t that be easier than this?’ I’m crying now as well.

‘Promise me you won’t ever do anything like that,’ she whispers. ‘You have to promise me, Juliet, you have to – because I can’t lose my best friend, too. Promise.’

I take her other hand, look her in the eyes. Gen’s doing little hiccuppy sobs and her nose is running, face streaked with mascara.

‘I promise.’

‘Just so you know, Texy, I didn’t used to be like this. I actually used to be happy, once.’

I’m finally home from hospital, curled up in bed, doped up on The Next Best Thing To Morphine, Texy purring on my chest. Mum and Dad have taken Hendrix and River to the beach, maybe because they’re so noisy and want to play, which is the opposite of how I feel right now. My last-chance kitten is good company, the only kind of company I can cope with at the moment. He bats at my face gently.

‘Yeah, I look different, huh?’

I can’t wait until the effects of the chemo wear off a bit because then I won’t feel so listless and ill. At least I’ve got some kick-ass painkillers.

Juliet comes to visit me all the time the first week home. Sometimes I wish she wouldn’t but I don’t know how to tell her that without sounding bitter and mean, so I don’t say anything. At the last appointment the doctor said it was normal to feel like this, like I just want to sleep all the time, like I don’t care about anything. I think Juliet kind of gets the message anyway, because she starts to come less often, and doesn’t stay as long. She’s quieter, too, just sits there drumming her fingers on her jeans in time with the music, or patting Texy, or just lying next to me.

One night, she hands me an invitation to Gen’s eighteenth and looks at me hopefully.

‘No, Juliet. I can’t.’

‘Yes you
can
, Tai, I know you can. We’ll leave early, okay? And we’ll just sit down at a table or something – you’ll be fine.’ She looks at me, silently pleading.

‘I don’t want to,’ I say, flatly. ‘Please. Stop asking.’ My voice cracks on the
please
and she looks pained, like I’ve struck her. She leaves not long after that, and when she’s gone, I take a painkiller, head for the shower. My head is throbbing and I want that warmth, that white noise, while I try to wash the pain away. I’m reaching out for the soap when suddenly there’s pain,
so
much pain
, like something in my head’s exploded, and I’m yelling out, ‘Mum! Mum! My head!’
You’re falling, Tai, you’re falling and the pain’s so bad that you can’t breathe, you can’t breathe, maybe this is it, maybe the tumour has finally won and no-one will hear you, maybe no-one can save you this time and oh god the pain oh god please the pain . . 
.

I don’t pass out though, just lie there on the shower floor, water pounding down around me, holding my head, holding it together. I’m vaguely aware of the door opening, of Mum coming in, shouting at Dad to call an ambulance, turning off the water. She manages to get me mostly dry, get my boardies on, and if things were different I’d be embarrassed that she was dressing me like a little kid, but all I can do is lie there, clutching my skull, whimpering that it hurts. The ambos come and when they lift me onto the stretcher it hurts so much I think I scream. I bite down on my lip until I can taste blood and they look at me, worried. They give me oxygen, and then there’s a drip in my arm, something in it which is taking the edge off the pain clawing at my skull, and there’s Mum holding my hand as the ambulance speeds along, and I think she’s crying.

We’re at Emergency then, and they give me an injection, cover me with a starched white sheet and put an ID band on my wrist. They take me for an ultrasound, won’t let me get off the bed, which is probably a good thing because I’m not even sure that I could. Whatever was in that needle was good, it’s helping, and I can breathe, shakily, and think,
Not tonight. It’s going to happen, but not tonight
. The doctor on duty doesn’t look quite as tired and worried now, even though he admits they need to look into why it happened.

They don’t let me go home.

I can’t bring myself to tell Juliet I’m in hospital again so I ignore her texts, pretend I’m out of credit, because it’s just easier that way. Mum asks me if I want her to let Juliet know what happened but I shake my head no.

It sounds weird, I know, but the thought that I was dying had become background static, something repeated over and over so much that you don’t even hear it anymore, or you hear it but the meaning is lost, has become nonsense from repeating it so many times. At least that’s how it felt until tonight. Now the background noise has quietened, and the truth is screaming at me loud and clear.

The doctors say that the chemotherapy went as well as they’d hoped and if you ask him, Tai says he’s fine, but he’s not the kind of fine that I’ve ever known. It’s like the Tai I know, my Tai, is being replaced by someone who looks and sounds familiar, but acts like a complete stranger. Mia tells me that the doctors have said mood swings and lethargy are pretty normal.

And it’s true that all Tai wants to do lately is sleep, or at least pretend to. His room is always dark, and he barely talks.

Sam goes to visit one day and sends me a text afterwards.
Well that was awkward. How do you do that every day?

How can I not?
I reply.

• • •

While Tai’s hibernating, Gen is doing the opposite, throwing a huge party for her eighteenth.

At the party, there’s this guy. He’s smiling and chatting, openly flirting. And I know I shouldn’t, but I flirt back.

He asks me if I have a boyfriend and I don’t know what to say, eventually managing, ‘It’s complicated.’ It’s not exactly the truth, but it
is
complicated – Tai hasn’t felt like a proper boyfriend in a while. The guy laughs. ‘You’re a little young for complicated, aren’t you?’

If only you knew
, I don’t say. It’s refreshing, talking to someone who doesn’t know about Tai. We have a drink together, and then he kisses me so intensely that I’m left breathless.

He whispers, ‘Want to get out of here?’

I’m so tempted to say yes, to escape, be somewhere else, be
someone
else for a while. I’m about to take his hand and go when Rae appears beside me.

‘Juliet, what are you doing?’

He says, ‘She can do whatever she wants, right?’

Rae ignores him, staring at me. ‘What about Tai?’

Now the guy is staring too. ‘Who’s Tai?’

‘Tai is . . . he’s my boyfriend. He’s dying. Though he might as well not be my boyfriend because we’ve barely spoken in weeks, and if I didn’t go over to his place I’d never see him. He never even texts me anymore. And if he wasn’t dying I would’ve broken up with him for that, but he is, so I can’t, because that wouldn’t be fair to him. It’s not fair to me, either, but that doesn’t seem to matter.’

The guy goes off to find a less complicated girl, while Rae wipes mascara off my cheeks as I sniffle. ‘I just wanted to forget for a little while. And he was so nice to me, and it’s so hard sometimes.’

I’m all cleaned up when Gen comes over, glittery and vodka high, hanging on the arm of the piercer. ‘Hey, you two. Great party, right?’

I smile at her and I know she can tell that everything isn’t okay, but I understand when she doesn’t want to ask, doesn’t want to do that tonight.

• • •

I see Gen again two days later. Uni results have gone up, and I’m too scared to look. I’m scared that I didn’t do well enough to get in, scared I did get in. When Gen rings to tell me she got in to the course she wanted, I confess that I haven’t looked yet.

She turns up at my place half an hour later and makes me log on to the website. I close my eyes.

‘You did good, Juliet!’ she squeals. ‘Second preference. Bachelor of Human Services.’

When I realise that she’s not joking, we dance around the bedroom, laughing and happy. Mum comes to see what all the noise is about, and when she hears, she jumps around the room with us, shrieking too. I can’t remember when I last saw Mum so happy.

After a while, Mum leaves to get us celebratory takeaway, Indian, and while she’s gone Gen produces Sneaky Vodka from her bag.

‘To us,’ I toast, ‘and our brilliant intelligence.’

‘To next year,’ Gen adds, holding up her own glass.

I hesitate a moment before I touch my glass to hers. ‘Absolutely.’ I look at Gen. ‘I wish I could call Tai and tell him.’

She shrugs. ‘Do it.’

I flip my phone around in my hands for a couple of minutes then make the call. As usual, he doesn’t answer.

‘Hey, Tai,’ I say to his voicemail. ‘I just wanted to tell you I got in to uni, my second preference. Um . . . yeah, that’s pretty much it.’ I’m about to hang up but then something surges through me, and things that have been left unsaid for weeks burst out.

‘Actually, you know what? That’s not it. I don’t know what you’re going through, Tai. How can I? But I’m trying to be there for you, I really am. But I need you to be there for me, too – that’s how it works. So maybe you could remember that. You’re not dead yet. And I don’t want to remember us like this.’

I hang up the phone, and try to remember to breathe.

‘Feel better?’ Gen asks.

I don’t know if I do or not. I just hope it has helped.

Our first fight, the first big one as a couple . . . it sucks. Photos go up on Facebook of Gen’s eighteenth and I look through them. I refused to go, but at the same time I kind of resent being left out.

There’s Juliet and Gen getting ready, standing on chairs to hang balloons, posing in the mirror, showing off their dresses. Juliet with the girls, holding up a plastic martini glass and grinning at the camera. A random photo of the backyard . . . and there she is, almost out of frame, sitting with some guy. His arm is around her and she’s smiling at him, not even noticing the camera. The next shot, he’s whispering in her ear, arm still looped around her shoulders, and she’s laughing at whatever he’s saying. They’re not doing anything besides sitting next to each other,
too close
to each other, but he’s got his arm around her and if they were strangers to me I’d think they were a couple. I feel the anger building in me and I grab the phone, dial her number.

‘Hey, Tai.’

‘Nice party photos, Juliet.’

‘What?’ I can hear the smile drain from her voice at my tone and I feel absurdly pleased with myself.

‘Who the fuck was he?’

‘He? Who are you . . . Oh. It’s kind of a long story.’

‘Well, seeing as I kind of don’t have a long time before I, you know,
die
, how about you tell me the short version?’

She sighs heavily. ‘There was a guy there, a friend of a friend of Gen’s I think, and we talked and stuff.’

‘Stuff? Stuff like shared a drink? Or stuff like went and fucked each other?’

‘Tai!’

‘You haven’t answered the question,’ I say.

‘No!’ She sounds exasperated. ‘We didn’t have sex. He kissed me, and it was wrong, okay, and I’m sorry, but that was all that happened.’

‘He kissed you and then you kissed him back, right?’

‘Yeah.’ Her voice is small.

I can’t decide what to say first, so I just let it all out, about how she can’t even wait until I’m dead to get another boyfriend, how she’s not a very good girlfriend, how . . .

‘Hey.’ Her voice is starting to crack and I know I’ve made her cry (
happy, now?
). ‘Tai, I know it was wrong. I’m sorry. But you’re supposed to be my boyfriend, and you . . . you just don’t care. You never even text me back half the time, you never want to hang out, you never want to talk or ask me how I am, you don’t want to listen to music like we used to or anything. You act like you don’t even want to see me. I know it was wrong, and I’m sorry, I swear – I just . . . someone actually wanted to talk to me, to put their arm around me because I was cold. Someone wanted to kiss me . . . and you haven’t been that someone for a long time, not since schoolies.’ She’s crying now, I can hear muffled sobs, then she says, ‘I’ve got to go,’ and hangs up.

I hit redial again and again, but she won’t answer.