Zac and Mia (3 page)

Status: Need new tunes in here. Suggestions??

‘I need new tunes,’ I tell Mum after four rounds of Mario Kart and a torturous half-hour of
Ready, Steady, Cook
. With my tastebuds screwed up from chemo I’ve lost any interest in food, so watching so-called celebrity chefs prance about with artichoke hearts has no appeal. Mum, however, considers it compulsory viewing. ‘I know my iPod playlist by heart.’

‘You want me to go to the music store?’

It’s perfect: sending Mum on a CD-buying mission will give me at least an hour solo.

‘Only if you have time …’

Mum finds her purse and smudges on lip gloss. She washes her hands again and checks her face in the mirror.

‘What should I get?’

‘Ask the store. Tell them it’s for a seventeen-year-old.
Male.’

She shakes her head. ‘No way. Write down some titles.’

Thanks to Facebook, I suddenly have a list of sixty-seven recommended albums. My one status update led to a barrage of suggestions, many of them sugar-coated.

Cancer is a Facebook friend magnet. According to my home page, I’m more popular than ever. In the old days, people would have prayed for each other, now they
Like
and
Comment
as if they’re going for a world record. I’m not knocking it, but how can I choose a couple of albums out of sixty-seven?

‘Surprise me,’ I tell Mum. ‘If they’re crap, you can always swap them tomorrow.’

This is genius. I could have Mum back and forth between here and the music store for the remainder of my admission, giving me valuable hours of freedom and her some much-needed exercise. Finally, my chemo-brain is starting to clear. I hope she never learns about iTunes.

Mum dries her hands with paper towel. ‘We
could
do with more ice-cream …’

And with a wave, she’s gone.

Halle-bloody-freaking-lujah.

Whir. Buzz. Hum. Drip
.

I throw off the sheet and step onto the lino.

It’s the new girl’s fourth day in. From what I hear—and don’t hear—she’s still alone. Her mum visits in the mornings but never stays for long. She doesn’t sleep overnight the way mine does.

This morning I heard the clack of coathangers in the girl’s wardrobe. After four days, she was finally unpacking her clothes. It sounded like surrender.

She’ll have a port in, below her collarbone. It’ll be raised and numb from surgery. The nurses would have needled it already and she wouldn’t have felt a thing. She won’t be nauseous from chemo yet. Depending on which drugs she’s getting, maybe she never will. She’ll only be here for another three days, then home for five, before her next cycle—that’s what Nina told Mum. The girl’s got osteosarcoma.

Shit, if I was her I wouldn’t be sulking. Her stats are awesome. Hasn’t she googled them? Doesn’t she know how lucky she is?

Suck it up
, I want to say.
You’ll be home soon. Play your crappy music and count down the days
.

But the song she’s playing now is more hip-hop than girly-pop. I push my IV pole closer, hoping to make out
the lyrics. With one ear pressed to the wall, I keep check on my round window, not wanting to give anyone the wrong idea. Nurses walk indifferently past, as does a guy with a hat. He’s younger than the typical visitor. He’s carrying a helium balloon with a small white bear.

I hear him enter Room 2. He walks to the window side of her bed, I think. I can’t understand all of his words. They come less often than the girl’s, whose voice sounds lighter than ever, as bubbly as soft drink. I wonder what he says to make this happen.

‘Gross, take it off,’ she laughs, and I guess he’s doing what all dickheads have done before him: using a cardboard bedpan as a hat. It’s so obvious, I can’t believe she falls for it.

He recites tomorrow’s menu options from the blue card, and helps her tick the boxes. I hear him describe a party she missed, and how Shay and Chloe had asked about her.

‘Don’t tell them—’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Good. I’ll be out of here soon.’

‘What’s that?’ His voice is nearer to our wall. I imagine him touching the lump beneath her collarbone.

‘It’s a port.’

‘Freaky. Does it hurt?’

‘No. Yeah.’

‘Will it leave a scar?’

It’s ages before she cries. I hear each gasp and each long interval between.

‘Hey … Hey. You said you’ll be fixed soon, yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So don’t cry.’

He leaves soon after. When he cruises past my door, his brow is crinkled in a way that reminds me of my brother Evan, keen to be elsewhere.

Whir, drip, hum
, my room says.

Room 2 says nothing. Her silence is sadder than ever and it pulls me in.

I crouch down and knock on our wall. How else can I speak to her?

I knock three times. My knuckles say,
Go on—put some music on. Put it on repeat, if you want. I can handle it
.

But I’m left unanswered.

‘What are you doing, Zac?’ Nina’s beside me.

‘I dropped a … Q.’

‘And how does a Q sound?’ The clip in Nina’s hair is a possum. Or perhaps a quokka. It seems to be smirking too.

When I stand, I bang my head on the IV pump.

‘I’ve got your meds.’ She rattles the container. ‘But perhaps you need something … stronger?’

I’m lightheaded when I say, ‘Go tell the newbie to play Lady Gaga.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I don’t know Morse code and my message got lost in translation.’

Nina sizes me up. ‘I never picked you as a Gaga guy.’

‘I know it’s not a standard request,’ I say, flashing
the grin that inexplicably works on her. ‘Just once. For me?’

I spy the diary beside my bed, fling it open and tear out a blank page. I write:

I wonder if capitals are too much. Or the exclamation marks. I consider drawing a smiley face to offset any traces of sarcasm.

‘Why don’t you download Lady Gaga from iTunes?’

‘I
don’t want to hear Gaga,’ I whisper, pointing to the wall. ‘I want
her
to hear Gaga.’

Nina folds the page carefully. ‘As you wish, Zac. Take your pills, huh?’

Nina pockets the note then washes her hands for the compulsory thirty seconds. It feels more like sixty.

‘Where’s your mum?’

‘At the shops buying music.’

‘Lady Gaga?’

I snort. ‘As if.’

‘Of course. You’re okay then? On your own?’

‘Definitely.’ I nod and she leaves, both of us grinning.

Mum’s got a good snore happening, the way she always has at 3 a.m. One of these mornings I should record her
as proof. She reckons she doesn’t snore—that she barely even sleeps—but I know the truth. When she’s at her noisiest, I’m at my most awake.

It’s not Mum’s fault: it’s the 3 a.m. curse. I wake up busting, go for the third slash of the night, then can’t get back to sleep.

Three is the worst hour. It’s too dark, too bright, too late, too early. It’s when the questions come, droning like flies, nudging me one by one until my mind’s full of them.

Am I a miner? Addicted to late-night television shopping? A long-distance skier? A musician? A juggler?

It’s 3.04 and I’m wondering who I am.

The marrow’s German—the doctors were allowed to tell me that much. I’ve had German marrow for fourteen days, and though I’m not yet craving pretzels or beer or lederhosen, it doesn’t mean I’m not changed in other ways. Alex and Matt have nicknamed me ‘Helga’, and it’s caught on. Now the whole footy team thinks it’s hilarious that I could be part pretzel-baking, beer-swilling, plait-swinging-Fräulein from Bavaria with massive
die Brust
.

But is it true? Could I be?

I try to catch myself being someone else.

I know it sounds like a B-grade thriller
—When Marrow Attacks!
—but if my own marrow’s been wiped out of my bones then replaced with a stranger’s, shouldn’t that change who I am? Isn’t marrow where my cells are born, to bump their way through the bloodstream and to every part of me? So if the
birthplace of my cells now stems from another human being, shouldn’t this change everything?

I’m told I’m now 99.9 per cent someone else. I’m told this is a good thing, but how can I know for sure? There’s nothing in this room to test myself with. What if I now kick a footy with the skill of a German beer wench? What if I’ve forgotten how to drive a ute or ride a quad bike? What if my body doesn’t remember how to run? What if these things aren’t stored in my head or muscles, but down deeper, in my marrow? What if … what if all of this is just a waste of time and the leukaemia comes back anyway?

At 3.07 I switch on the iPad, dim the brightness, and track my way through the maze of blogs and forums, safe from the prying eyes of Mum. Snoring in the recliner beside me, she’s oblivious to my dirty secret.

In 0.23 seconds, Google tells me there are over 742 million sites on cancer. Almost 8 million are about leukaemia; 6 million on acute myeloid leukaemia. If I google ‘cancer survival rate’ there are over 18 million sites offering me numbers, odds and percentages. I don’t need to read them: I know most of the stats by heart.

On YouTube, the word ‘cancer’ leads to 4.6 million videos. Of these, 20,000 are from bone marrow transplant patients like me, stuck in isolation. Some are online right now. It may be 3.10 a.m. in Perth, but it’s 7.10 a.m. in Auckland, 3.10 p.m. in Washington, and 8.10 p.m. in Dublin. The world is turning and thousands of people are awake, updating their posts on the bookmarked sites that I trawl through. I’ve come to
know these people better than my mates. I can understand their feelings better than my own. Somehow, I feel like I’m intruding. Yet I watch their video uploads with my headphones in. I track their treatment, their side effects and successes. And I keep a tally of the losses.

Then I hear the flush of the toilet next door.

The new girl and I have one thing in common, at least.

Fourteen days post-transplant, and it’s official. I am hideous.

I’d known my face had puffed up—steroids will do that to you—but I hadn’t realised how much. Either Nina has switched my ensuite mirror with one from the House of Mirrors, or my head has been replaced with a giant Rice Bubble.

Why hasn’t anyone told me? Why have they been pussyfooting around the obvious deformity that is my head? Only two days ago Dr Aneta called me a ‘hottie’, and I’d assumed she wasn’t referring to my temperature. Nina was talking me up too, and took my photo with Mum’s phone. Mum sent it to my sister, Bec, who posted it to my Facebook wall, causing a bombardment of two hundred compliments, including private messages from Clare Hill and Sienna Chapman.
Sienna wrote she wants to ‘catch up’ when I’m home, and Sienna wouldn’t use those words lightly. Was she actually impressed, or was she blinded by charity? It happened in
Beauty and the Beast
, didn’t it?

In my opinion, the only accurate comment came from Evan.
Nice pic, scrotum-face. Suits you
. Prick.

According to the ensuite mirror, I have no neck. Is it possible my German donor was, in fact, Augustus Gloop? Or has all the ice-cream I’ve been eating gone straight to my chins?

The doctors say that it’s good to put on fat after a transplant, that it helps the fight, or something like that. Well, it certainly doesn’t help the ego, especially when the new girl keeps peeking through my window.

How is it fair that she gets to wander the ward freely, flaunting her glossy hair, perfect cheekbones and single chin as she stares into other patients’ rooms to judge them and their pasty, bloated heads, while I’m stuck in here being force-fed ice-cream and lies, making a total fat fool of myself?

Which would explain why she hasn’t replied to my handwritten note. Why would someone like her bother communicating with a bald Jabba the Hutt like me? Especially now she’s caught me playing Cluedo with my mother.

I know I shouldn’t care what she thinks—this is temporary, after all—but what if she thinks this is me, the
real
me?

‘Mum!’

‘What?’

I point to my face and raise my eyebrows. At least, I think that’s what I’m doing. ‘What breakfast cereal do I remind you of?’

‘Stop ogling yourself and get back to bed. You have to guess if it was the candlestick or the rope.’

‘No.’

‘It was the candlestick.’ Mum snaps the board shut and stretches. ‘Is it afternoon tea time yet?’

We notice it at the same time: a folded piece of paper on the floor. I look at it, then at the door, which hasn’t been opened in hours.

Mum walks over, picks it up and sniffs it, as if her nose is trained to detect traces of contamination.

‘Is it from Nina? I hope it’s clean.’ She unfolds the paper and shows me the CD inside.

I launch myself to snatch it from her. The rush dizzies me; the surprise panics me. The page is blank. Why didn’t she write something?

I flip the CD to read
Lady Gaga for Rm 1
scrawled in blue marker. The realisation is sickening: the newbie not only pities me as a steroidal puffball, she also believes I like girly pop music. Next she’ll be sending me CDs by Justin Bieber.

Oh fuck, does she think I’m gay? Not that there’s anything wrong with that …

‘Pop it in the laptop.’ Mum levers the lid from the ice-cream. ‘Let’s listen.’

Is my pasty face capable of blushing with humiliation? Would my red blood count be high enough to enable such a luxury?

I consider banging on our wall to set the girl straight:
I’m a 100-per-cent hetero, quad-biking, half-forward flank!

But that would take a whole lot of knocking and I don’t want her to risk confusing it with:
Thanks! Thanks heaps! I love Gaga more than life itself! Snaps for Gaga!

Could she really believe she’s indulging my audio and emotional needs? Or is there the slightest chance she’s taking the piss out of me?

Mum’s delight at seeing me pick up my diary is quickly destroyed by my violent tearing out of a page. She tries to appease me with a spoonful of pink ice-cream.

‘Go on. It’s your favourite.’

It’s not, really.

I scribble:

But when I read this back, it’s not sarcastic at all. It’s childish. And a bit crazed. So I scrunch this page and try another.

No. Too religious.

By this stage, Mum is making good work of a bowl of Neapolitan ice-cream while watching
Ready, Steady, Cook
.

I tap a fresh piece of paper with my pen. I can’t remember the last time I wrote an actual letter to someone, especially a stranger. How do I get my point across without sounding like a Nazi or a nutter?

I stare at the blank page and exhale. What am I trying to say?

There’s a whole lot of white space staring back at me. What do I say to a newbie who isn’t coping?

I replace the lid on the ballpoint pen and press the buzzer for Nina who, after entering and washing, makes a beeline for my still-flowing drip. She frowns at me suspiciously, making her butterfly hairclip flutter. I pass her my folded note with
‘For
Room 2’
written across it before Mum notices.

‘Really? So that’s all I am to you now?’

‘What wouldn’t you do for the hottest guy on the ward?’ I say, hoping to catch her out. She doesn’t rebut so I point to my fat cheeks. ‘I mean, am I? Even with these?’

‘Yes, Zac, you’re still the fairest one of all. Anything else?’

‘If I was a breakfast cereal, which one would I be?’

‘In personality or appearance?’ She doesn’t miss a beat.

‘Either.’

‘Lately? Verging on a Froot Loop.’

She’s not far wrong. I’ve been stuck in this room for twenty-four days and I’m getting pretty desperate for company. I don’t mean my mum or the nurse or the psych or the physios or anyone else who’s paid to be here—I need interaction with people my own age, in real time. It’s not enough to have online friends who sign in with bursts of exclamation marks, thumbs-up symbols and smiley faces. I need something to remind me of the real world, uncensored and reckless.

I need a friend.

‘Breakfast cereal?’ Mum says hours later, after making up her pink bed, turning off the lights and sliding under her blanket. ‘You’re a strange one, Zac.’

She’s right. Eleven days to go.

I’ve heard how cool children’s oncology wards are, with huge lounges, rainbow-coloured rooms, ukulele-playing clowns, and games rooms with drum kits and jukeboxes. Best of all, they’re bombarded with West Coast Eagles players and visiting soap stars bearing autographed gifts.

But because I was diagnosed at seventeen, I missed the cut-off and found myself in an adult hospital with white walls and a small cube for a television. On my
first night in, I lay in bed and watched a documentary about the construction of NASA’s new robot vehicle, the Curiosity rover. It was hard to stay focused amid the strange sounds and smells of the ward, and my nagging fear.

By the time I’d relapsed, the launch of Curiosity was across the headlines. The night before my transplant, Mum and I watched the footage of Atlas V shooting through the atmosphere, carrying its huge, robotic cargo. Even after we turned the TV off, I kept thinking about that robot hurtling through space. Inside it, scientific instruments were set to probe and dig the surface of Mars, searching for the building blocks of life. If scientists can propel a robot 560 million kilometres away, I thought at the time, surely they can fix something as small as rogue blood cells in a body.

It’s easy to go off on tangents here—there’s nothing else to do. I’ve become so bored that even the nurses’ idiosyncrasies are interesting. Veronica, for instance, has huge hands, which are surprisingly nimble as she changes the sheets on my bed. Sitting in the pink chair, I admire her no-nonsense choreography. Her hospital corners are second to none.

‘So, how’s your morning been?’ I ask her.

‘Not so bad. You?’

‘Standard. Have you been in Room Two yet?’ Mum’s currently using the visitors’ showers down the corridor, so I have to take advantage of her absence.

Veronica nods.

‘Did the girl say anything?’

Veronica snaps a sheet into place and shakes her head. She’s accustomed to dealing with patients her own age or older, most of whom prattle on for hours about the temperature and/or quality of the hospital meals, not the status of girls-next-door. It’s unusual to have two teenagers in an adult oncology ward, especially in adjoining rooms.

‘Did she give you a message?’

‘What do you mean by “message”?’

Mum’s face appears at my window. She’ll be beginning her hand-wash routine, which leaves me with thirty seconds exactly. ‘Did she give you a note? About music … or
Seinfeld
or chicken schnitzel?’

Veronica makes a point of showing me her large, empty palms. ‘The only words that girl says are ones I won’t be repeating. You opened your bowels?’

I close my eyes. ‘Yes. And urinated. Three times in the night, once this morning.’

Veronica’s pen scores sharp ticks on my chart. Can a man have no secrets? She checks my temperature. ‘Girls like that remind me why I had only boys,’ Veronica says, as if this was a clever choice on her part. ‘She is so …
moody
. Won’t eat breakfast. Won’t eat anything. Won’t fill out the blue card. Won’t open the curtains. And how she speaks to her mother …’

My own mother pushes through the door, carrying her towel and toiletries bag. ‘Morning, Veronica. He’s pooed.’

‘Thanks, Mum. She knows.’ Everyone knows.

‘See, boys, they have manners,’ Veronica continues.
‘Boys treat mothers with respect.’

I peel myself from the chair and coerce my IV pole towards the bed, where I attempt to lever myself between impossibly taut sheets.

So starts Day 25: twenty-five in this room, fifteen post-transplant.

‘Want to play COD, Mum?’

‘Only if you want to die!’ She catches herself too late.

I grin and shake my head. No chance.

Amid the gunfire and Mum’s respawning for the fiftieth time, I hear something else. Something that doesn’t belong to a
Call of Duty
Team Deathmatch.

It’s the shouting of a real person. Two of them.

I turn down the volume.

‘Who’s snooping now?’ says Mum.

‘Shh.’

I hear the mother. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

It’s the
me
that jars most. Significant others are supposed to say things like, ‘You’ll be okay’ or ‘When you finish this round of chemo, we’ll go to Dreamworld’ or ‘We’ll pray hard and God will get us through’. They don’t turn it into a melodrama about themselves.

‘You should have listened more. Stayed on track—’

‘So
I’ve
caused this? By going part-time?’

‘You didn’t need to. You’re smarter than that … that certificate in beauty—’

‘You don’t know anything. It’s a diploma—’

‘It’s a joke.’

‘Stay out of my life.’

‘And that boy—’

‘Fuck off.’ She says it so loud the whole ward must hear it. ‘You’re jealous.’

I don’t know how the girl can fight back, but she does, again and again.

The ward manager asks the mother to leave and I see her take off, her hair drawn back in that tortoiseshell claw, a hand swiping at tears.

But the fight’s not yet over. I hear the new girl get stuck into Nina.

‘Go away.’

‘I need to hook up the new bags,’ Nina’s saying. ‘Yours are empty.’

‘No!’ the girl yells with more energy than I could muster. ‘No
more
. Leave me a
lone
!’

There’s a flurry of nurses in the corridor and, soon, Patrick’s shoes as he walks to Room 2 and closes the door behind him. I imagine him standing there, hands clasped, asking delicately about her ‘feelings’. She fights him too.

It doesn’t end until later, with Dr Aneta and probably something like valium. ‘Fine, give it to me,’ the new girl says. ‘Give me the lot.’

Now there’s a silence that seeps through our wall. Six centimetres isn’t so solid after all.

There’s so much she doesn’t understand yet: that it gets better; that it’s not the doctors’ fault.
Don’t
struggle
, I want to say.
Don’t pull the Emergency Exit lever. Take the pills and, for what it’s worth, enjoy the ride
.

I wish I could tell her this.