Zac and Mia (2 page)

‘If you can’t zap it, swap it,’ Dr Aneta had rallied when I relapsed. On a planner she highlighted a fluoro yellow block from November 18 to December 22.
Zac Meier
, she printed.
Bone Marrow Transplant. Room 1
. The first eight or nine days would be to zap me again, she explained, ready for the transplant on ‘Day 0’. The rest of the stay would be for strict isolation, to heal and graft in safety.

‘Five weeks in the same room?’ Shit, even high-security prisoners get more freedom than that.

She clicked the lid back onto the pen. ‘At least you’ll be out in time for Christmas.’

Before leukaemia, I had enough trouble sitting in a room for two hours, let alone a whole day. Everything interesting happened outside: footy, cricket, the beach and the farm. Even at school, I’d always sit by the window so I could see what I was missing out on.

‘Room One’s got the best view,’ Dr Aneta said, as if that could sweeten it. As if I had a choice.

The song ends and I hold my breath. For a moment, I hear only the predictable sounds: the whir of my drip; the hum of my bar fridge.

I wonder if the newbie is counting the squares on
her ceiling for the first time. There are 84, I could tell her. Eighty-four, just like mine. Or maybe she’s already re-counting them the opposite way, just to be sure.

Eighteen freaking times? Methotrexate is nothing—
this
is killing me.

The nurses are still in their weekly meeting so there’s no one to save me from this endless cycle of crap. Who would listen to a song eighteen times? Make it nineteen. Is this girl mental? Is she experimenting with a new form of therapy, trying to make her cancerous cells spontaneously self-destruct? Is there some
Lady Gaga Miracle Cancer Cure
I haven’t heard of?

Old patients never do this kind of thing. They have respect. Admittedly, Bill can turn his radio up too loud for the dog races, but the volume only reaches mildly annoying, not all-consuming. Then there’s Martha, whose high-pitched cackle is grating, but only after too much rooibos tea.

It’s not as if I can get up off this bed, walk out the door and find a quiet broom cupboard to hide myself in. Thanks to
Bone Marrow Transplant Protocol
I’m stuck in this four-by-five-metre room. Twenty days down, fifteen to go—which is too long to be held hostage to the obsessive compulsions of a girl next door. All I can do is put my pillow over my head and hope she’s got Hodgkin’s lymphoma, with a one-day-a-month cycle. I can’t contemplate the possibility of her being an AML
or ALL. If she’s getting a BMT, I’m legging it.

The song begins again, making it twenty—the number I decided would be my breaking point. I have to do something before my ears start to bleed.

A shout won’t penetrate her Gaga-thon. How else can I communicate through a six-centimetre-thick wall?

I get up off the bed and notice my hands are bunched into fists. So I use one.

I knock. Politely at first, as if I’m a visitor to someone’s house. I knock, hoping the message gets through.

No. It doesn’t seem to.

I knock again, in sets of three, insistent as a courier this time.
Knock knock knock
. Wait.
Knock knock knock
.

The song reaches the chorus I’ve come to hate so much. Worse, I now know all the lyrics.

I bang harder, like a brother locked out. My fist thumps every beat in time, banging them so loud she must be hearing them in stereo. The wall on her side has to be bouncing with the impact.

The music stops—success!—and so do I, noticing how easily skin has peeled from my red knuckles. I rub it away and realise I’m grinning.

Perhaps it’s because this is the first contact I’ve had with anyone since I’ve been in this room. Nurses, doctors and my mum don’t count. The new girl is young—someone my age. My heart pounds with the effort. I’m dizzy with it. My room throbs.
Whir. Drip. Hum
.

Then,
tap
, the wall says back to me.
Tap
.

The tap isn’t angry like the music had been or the words she’d shouted earlier. The tap is close. She must be near now, puzzled, a curious ear against the wall, as if listening for alien contact.

I crouch.

Knock
, I reply to the wall, down lower this time.

Tap
.

The wall sounds hollow. Is it?

Knock
.

Tap
.

Knock
.

Tap tap?
In the quiet, the tap is raw. I think it’s a question.

Knock
.

In the gaps in between, there’s nothing but the whirring of my IV machine and the anticipation of the next cue. My quads ache as I wait. My feet feel cold on the lino.

Tap?

Knock
.

It’s clear neither of us knows Morse code, and yet something is being spoken. I wonder what she’s trying to ask me.

Knock
. Silence.
Knock
.

And I wonder what I’m saying.

Then that’s it.

Whir. Hum. Buzz. Drip. Whir
.

On my knees by the wall, I’m ashamed. I shouldn’t have complained about her music on her first day of admission. There are too many things I don’t know.

She doesn’t tap and I don’t knock.

I just kneel, imagining she’s doing the same, six centimetres away.

I know that dual-flush buttons are good because they’re environmentally friendly and all that, but sometimes they’re confusing. Do I press the half-flush or the full? Some days I need a button that’s in-between.

I stand thinking about this for too long. Again.

I wash my hands, amused by the reflection in the mirror. My head is bald, lumpy and asymmetrical, but my eyebrows are thicker than before. I appear to be morphing into one of those creepy guys from
Guess Who
.

I leave the ensuite and return to the room, where Mum’s opened the blinds and pulled the pink reclining chair into sitting. In the morning light, her bed-hair resembles a bird’s nest with wiry twigs of grey.

‘Well, how was it?’ she asks.

‘What?’

‘You know …’

How many times can a seventeen-year-old discuss his crap? With his mother? I reached the limit eighteen days ago. At least she doesn’t say,
Have you opened your bowels?
the way the nurses do.

‘How’s
yours
, Mum?’

‘I’m just asking.’

‘You want me to photograph it next time?’ I manoeuvre myself and the IV pole past her. She whacks me gently with a pillow.

‘You want me to keep a log book?’

‘A
bog
book.’ Mum impresses herself with her word play.

Documenting my bowel movements—now
that
is an excellent use for the so-called ‘diary’ that Patrick gave me. He thought I’d benefit from
expressing my emotional journey
, or something like that. Instead, I could use it as a Bog Log, plotting frequency and consistency. I could colour-code each page, drawing big, brown pie charts with annotations.

‘How about:
December ninth. Twelve days post-transplant. Semi-diarrhoea. I chose the half-flush.’

‘I don’t think that’s what the diary’s for.’

‘Not poo and spew?’

‘It’s for your
feelings.’
Having raised two boys and Bec, Mum knows better than to use the ‘f’ word in earnest.

‘December ninth. I
feel
… lighter.’

She smiles. ‘See, that’s better.’

I don’t need to write about crap. Of any kind.

I conquered toilet training at three years of age. I wasn’t a prodigy, sure, but a solid student. From then on, toileting was supposed to remain a private thing behind a locked door, far from a mother’s queries. Mum’s job was to monitor other things, like the kind of food going into my mouth in the first place. And she had. She’d done a good job.

And then this. At my worst, Mum wasn’t only asking about my output, she was witnessing it. I’d tell her to leave the bedpans alone, which she did, but she often stayed in the room when the nurses cleaned me up or washed me down, even if she was pretending to do crosswords. I’d become a baby all over again, but with testosterone and pubic hair and nurses sponging me in shifts. Sometimes I was so out of it I couldn’t get embarrassed.

Before they could give me new marrow on ‘Day 0’, they had to take me close to death. Five days of four chemo drugs, then three days of total body irradiation. I felt as if a truck had run over me. Then reversed, tipped sideways, and landed on top of me. There was nothing to do but be pinned underneath. Breathing was hard work. Controlling my sphincter was beyond me.

I can handle that end of things myself now. Post-transplant, my symptoms are down to occasional vomiting, mouth ulcers and dubious turds. To be honest, spending time in the ensuite has become one of my favourite pastimes. For ten minutes or so, no one’s watching or prying or probing. I can just sit and think about things. It’s not up there with solving world
poverty, but it’s an achievement. It’s progress.

Mum closes her
Woman’s Day
and gapes at me. ‘Have you been squeezing that zit?’

‘I didn’t touch it.’

She’s got a paranoia that I could trigger a massive explosion of pus and blood too powerful to be fixed by my measly platelets, ending with an emergency transfusion, which might not save my life. Death by pimple? Now
that
would be a stupid way to die. I wouldn’t take the risk.

How is it fair that I can have leukaemia
and
zits? If my hair grows back ginger, I’ll be really pissed. My brother Evan’s on the ranga spectrum, but he dyes his hair in secret. He thinks no one can tell.

‘So what do you want to do today?’ Mum asks.

‘Go base jumping?’

‘We could play
CUD.’

Mum makes me laugh out loud, whether she means to or not.
‘COD
,’ I correct her. ‘As in
Call of Duty
. And no, not really.’ All she does is camp around then shriek when killed, using made-up swear words like
Fff … irewood
and
Shh … ipwreck
. Mum’s not cut out for armed combat.

‘So what do you want to do?’

‘Breathe. Eat. Sleep. Repeat.’

She pokes me. ‘Come on, Zac, you don’t want to be
bored.’

My mother: Activities Coordinator, Unofficial Welcoming Committee, Diarrhoea Detective and Happiness Police. She ricochets from one role to the
next, plugging gaps, swapping props, prodding, checking,
doing
.

I sense her antennae twitching, seeking out signs of melancholy. We both know there’s a whole squad of reinforcements on standby: Patrick the psychologist, art therapists, teen mentors, Prozac and, if desperate, clown doctors called over from the children’s hospital.

‘Do we need to use the ‘f’ word?’

‘Fuck no.’

She laughs. ‘Then help me do the puzzle from today’s paper. Ooh look, we need thirty words to get to genius.’

The ‘f’ word troubles me but it’s Mum’s feelings I’m worried about, not my own.

‘Mum, go home.’

‘Zac—’

‘You don’t have to stay. Anymore. I’m getting better.’

It’s true. Days Minus 9 to Minus 1 were hell. Day 0 was an anticlimax. Days 1 to 3 I can’t recall, 4 to 8 were foul, 9 to 11 were uncomfortable, and now, twelve days after transplant, I’m starting to feel human again. I can handle this.

‘I know,’ she says predictably, turning a page of her magazine. ‘But I like it here.’

It’s bullshit and we both know it. Mum’s not a four-wall kind of woman. As long as I can remember, she’s always had a straw hat and a sheen of sweat. She’s hazel eyes and sun spots. She’s greens and browns and oranges. She’s a pair of secateurs in hand. She’s soil
and pumpkins. She’d rather be picking pears or fertilising olive trees than stuck in this room, with its pink reclining chair. More than anything, she’s my dad’s soulmate, though she won’t go home when I ask her—even when I beg her.

My room has two windows. There’s the small round one in the door that looks into the corridor, and there’s the large rectangular one that looks out over the hospital entrance, car park and nearby suburbs. That’s the one she sits beside most days, like a flower tracking the sun.

‘List three things you like about hospital. Apart from the puzzles and gossip.’

‘I did like my son’s company … once.’

‘Just go home.’

After my first diagnosis, the whole family would drive up to Perth for each round of chemo. Mum, Dad, Bec and Evan would stay in a motel room three blocks away, visiting each morning with games and magazines and more conversation than I could follow. Dad was bigger and louder than usual. He’d make jokes with Bec, as if the two of them had suddenly formed a slapstick comedy duo. Mum would shake her head in mock disapproval, while Evan hung back, eyeing the drips and nurses with suspicion. ‘Hospitals make me sick,’ I heard him say once. ‘The smell …’ I didn’t blame him—he didn’t belong here either. At least he was honest about it.

Then each time they left in the evening, I would stand at the rectangular window and watch my small
family trudge back to their motel. Dad would hold Mum’s hand. Seven stories down, each of them looked sadder than they should have, especially Dad. To be honest, their visits made me feel worse, and this time I made Mum promise to keep them all away. Fortunately,
Bone Marrow Transplant Protocol
forbids more than one official visitor at a time, so Mum nominated herself. The only catch is she never leaves.

‘They don’t need me at home. Bec’s got the store under control. The pruning’s been done so the men have it easy.’

‘But Dad—’

‘Can look after himself.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I’m your mother,’ she reminds me, as if she’s taken a vow to love and to cherish, to protect and to irritate, in sickness and in health (but especially in sickness) as long as we both shall live.

And with military focus, she begins the daily word puzzle from the newspaper. Mum approaches it as though something bigger could be at stake, as if our success with it would bring about a success in my treatment. Through the course of the day, as Nina, Patrick, Simone, Suzanne and Linda enter and exit the room for various offerings and takings, obscure words are added until we reach thirty. Mum is over the moon and writes on the calendar under December ninth:
Genius!

And that’s why I agree to do the word puzzle, and Scrabble and
‘CUD’
and every other activity she suggests. I do it to see the confidence in Mum’s
handwriting. Genius. Another success; another day passed.

It’s during the six o’clock news that I realise I’m being watched.

Someone in the corridor is peering through my round window. She’s young, maybe sixteen or seventeen, with big eyes, dark eyeliner and thick brown hair that probably rolls on past her shoulders, further down than I can see.

She’s not a nurse, though. She’s someone like me and I feel her eyes latch fiercely to mine.

I can’t pull free. She’s stunning.

Then I blink and she’s gone.

Strange. She didn’t look like a girly-pop lover. Not that Lady Gaga’s been played again. Since she turned it off two days ago, all I’ve heard from Room 2 has been occasional arguing—the mother, I’m guessing, and the girl—followed by the predictable whoosh of the door. There hasn’t been a trace of music or television or anything else.

Is that my fault? Because I knocked?

Mum and I watch the news but, right now, it’s not the outside world that interests me.