Zac and Mia (6 page)

‘How are you feeling?’ Nina asks. It’s my 44th day in, so I’m told. ‘Are you coping without your mum?’

‘I’m a big boy.’

Nina smiles and hands me four pills, two throat lozenges, three vitamins, and pawpaw gel for my lips. She takes a thermometer from her pocket and puts it in my ear. Distracted, she keeps it in too long, looking at a mid-point between the bed and the wall. She seems tired. In her hair, a small koala holds tight to its branch.

‘Thirty-eight?’ I guess.

‘Thirty-seven and a half,’ she says. ‘Not bad. Do you feel all right?’

‘Do you?’

‘Me?’

‘You look like shit, Nina.’

‘Charmer. You must be better.’ She writes down
my temperature and gives me an unconvincing smile. ‘Looking forward to the new year?’

‘It’s got to be better than this one.’

‘True. Keep your chin up, Zac.’

‘I am,’ I say, though it’s
her
chin that needs lifting.

She moves her hands slowly as she washes them, then leaves.

Without Mum around, I have no idea what’s happening in the rest of the ward. Even Mia’s gone quiet. I remain logged in, but she stays offline.

On her Facebook page, posts invite her to New Year’s Eve parties. They’ve still got no clue she’s next door, hooked up to chemo and hydration. Mia must believe she can keep the two worlds separate. That if she keeps her cancer to herself, it doesn’t exist.

At midnight, fireworks flare at my window, their golds and pinks zipping and whistling. I hear the blaring of distant horns. Down the ward, explosions of party poppers are accompanied by shrieks.

I write to Mia.

But she doesn’t respond. The new year rolls quietly, darkly in.

Status: Cold 0, Zac 1. FYI: platelets 48 and neutrophils 1000. That’s a good thing. Happy NY! Outta here maybe Saturday.

I even ask Nina to take a photo of me, and I pose with two thumbs up. My face has deflated. I look new:
rebuilt from the marrow out.

I make this photo my new profile pic, replacing Helga, and the compliments start flooding in.

I commit myself to the Harry Potter endurance test. Eight films back-to-back is the kind of challenge I can handle.

I become obsessed with two things: the devolution of Daniel Radcliffe’s acting abilities, and the evolution of Emma Watson’s awesomeness. After she hits puberty, around about
The Prisoner of Azkaban
, there’s an exponential increase in hotness. By the end of
The Deathly Hallows
, she’s smokin’.

It must work some kind of magic because, after two days, I’m itching for freedom. Doctors praise my progress, plotted on my chart in a staircase of ticks. I feel like new, thanks to Helga, and part-thanks to Emma Watson. If I walked out of this room right now and strode down the street with this hat on, people wouldn’t stare. I’d be just another guy with a hat. Admittedly, an out-of-breath guy with skin like a vampire’s. But girls like that, apparently.

‘What’s got into you?’ Kate laughs when the physio session ends and I ask for more weights.

I like the burn in my muscles. I like my lungs sucking in oxygen. I like the air rushing up from the exercise bike, blowing at my face.

And I like standing on my feet by the window to look down on the outside world with its taxis and ambulances and smoking surgeons and visitors carrying helium balloons. Soon I’ll be in that germ-filled air
and I can’t wait. This room is too small for me.

A postcard from Cam says he’s doing great, working three days a week. He says he’s got his longboard ready for me.

Bec sends me one of the new
The Good Olive! Olive Oil and Petting Farm
postcards. She tells me there’ve been four new kids and one alpaca born, and that, according to her latest ultrasound, her own baby’s the size of a mango.

My blood test results make the doctors beam. I am on top of this. Nina is beside herself.

But Mia says nothing. Her Facebook profile remains slick and lipsticked, as always. Her friends upload photos of Rotto and New Year’s parties, already discussing plans for their year 12 formal, Valentine’s Day theme, in six weeks’ time. They’re still treating Mia like she’s one of them.

Only I know better. I hear her in the night. Sometimes she throws up. Sometimes she cries. Sometimes she does both, one after the other.

She hasn’t been online in three days, but I write her a message anyway.

I’m surprised it lasted so long. I look again at her profile pic: the oversized sunnies, the pose, the singlet top, the thick brown hair. I think of my own hair: two millimetres of soft down.

It’s a punch in the gut I don’t need. My fingers flinch from the keyboard.

I hadn’t meant to. Most people lose their hair. She should’ve expected that.

Her typing is quick—quicker than mine. Quick like jabs. Of course it’s not funny, but what else can you do? If you can’t laugh at yourself, there’s no point to any of this.

What the hell?

I go offline, my green dot dissolving to safety.

There’s a thump at our wall and I don’t know if she’s swearing or apologising. I don’t answer—I’m not her punching bag.
Bang
, it goes again and it jars right through me.

Neither can I. I switch off the iPad and tunnel under my blanket.

I hear her spew in her toilet and I don’t care. I don’t have the strength for the both of us.

At my rectangular window, I watch the patterns that people make below. Some stream in towards the entrance, carrying armfuls of flowers. Others scurry empty-handed back out to the street, feeding coins into the parking machine before scattering to the corners of the car park and driving to places far away.

Mia’s mother moves in circuits, pausing at the concrete-edged garden to inhale cigarettes. She looks too young to be the mother of a teenager. She seems too anxious, as if she could take flight at any moment.

To be honest, I miss mine. She knows how to be grounded when she needs to be, to make me do word puzzles even when I don’t feel like it.

Mia’s mother takes a last drag and darts for the entrance below. A minute later she’s flitting past my door.

A swarm of doctors follows her—at least five of them—and it’s not even the Monday ward round. I tug out my earphones and lean against the wall.

I hear the door of Room 2 pushed open. I hear shoes arranging themselves inside. Soon, the solid clicking of Dr Aneta’s heels cuts through them.

The last time there were that many doctors in my room they were celebrating the success of my first treatment with cupcakes and handshakes, before ushering
me back to the real world. Perhaps Mia’s chemo finished early and she won’t need the fifth cycle. Perhaps she’s luckier than I imagined.

After lashing out at me two days ago, she hasn’t bothered to make contact, so neither have I. What’s the point?

‘How are things, Zac?’ I hadn’t realised Nina had come in.

‘Just stretching my hammies,’ I say, pushing against the wall.

Beneath my trackpants, my legs are pale and thin, but they remember what it’s like to run.

‘Well, I’m in the mood for playing COD.’ Nina turns on the Xbox.

I make my way to bed. ‘After weeks of humiliation, you think you can beat me now?’

‘It’s my last chance.’

But I shake my head. ‘Tomorrow,’ I say. I want to listen to the speech that will start at any moment. I doubt there’ll be cupcakes for Mia. I reckon the whole staff will be glad to see her go.

Nina switches on my TV.
‘Happy Feet
is on. I love
Happy Feet
, don’t you?’

A penguin dances across the screen but its tapping isn’t quick enough or loud enough to block out what happens next door. It’s not a farewell speech. There are no hip-hip-hoorays.

‘Mia, listen.’ Her mother’s voice.

‘Listen
, Mia.’ Dr Aneta.

‘No.’

‘What’s going on?’ I ask Nina, who’s trying to turn up the volume with my remote.

Nina says, ‘It’s not working,’ and I don’t know if she means the remote or Mia’s treatment.

‘No,’ says Mia, again and again. And it breaks my heart. ‘No.’

‘We told you this was likely. You
knew
this,’ Dr Aneta is saying. ‘A limb salvage is standard procedure—the
only
procedure now.’

‘Try more.’

‘You’ve had four cycles already. More won’t shrink it. Listen, Mia—’

‘Mia, listen—’

For a tumour like hers, surgery is a good option: a clean option. When the tumour’s removed and a new bone is grafted, her odds skyrocket. But the leg will take ages to heal, longer than the six weeks left to her formal. There’ll be months of rehab and a scar.

‘Ten or fifteen centimetres,’ Dr Aneta says. ‘Twenty at most.’

I wouldn’t mind a twenty-centimetre scar up my leg if it meant scooping out all of my cancer. But then, I’m not Mia.

‘There’ll be no weight-bearing for some time. You’ll have a wheelchair—’

‘Like a cripple?’

‘Like a person who’s had surgery.’

‘I’m not going to my formal in a fucking wheelchair. It can wait till after.’

If this was taking place in a children’s hospital there
would be a team of empathetic staff on standby to say things like,
We know the formal is important to you and we don’t want you to go in a wheelchair, but in the long run you’ll feel so much better. And the scar won’t be so bad. We’ll get a plastic surgeon. In a year, no one will even notice
.

But we’re not in a children’s ward and these doctors aren’t interested in vanity. That’s why Dr Aneta laughs—not in cruelty, but in disbelief.

‘Mia, this isn’t a game. If it’s left much longer, you’ll lose the leg. Worse.’

‘I don’t
care.’

‘Mia, you have to—’ says her mum.

But Dr Aneta cuts her off. ‘I’ve booked the surgery for tomorrow morning. The sooner it’s done, the more chance there is to save the leg. After that, you’ll need more chemo—’

‘More?’

‘Four more rounds as a safeguard. I can time it so you have leave for the formal, but a wheelchair will be better than crutches. Surgery’s at nine, so you have to start fasting now, all right? Will you want sleeping tablets for tonight?’

‘I want another
opinion.’

‘I’ll leave some here then, just in case. If you need something stronger, call a nurse.’

And with that, the doctors exit the room and file past my door. Music I don’t recognise comes belting through the wall and the song is so loud and hard it forces Mia’s mum from the room as well. A minute
later, I watch her dart from the entrance seven stories down, straight-lining for the car park.

‘I didn’t realise how thin these walls were,’ Nina says, reluctantly switching off the TV. ‘You want me to ask her to turn the music down?’

‘You feel that brave?’

‘Not really.’

‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘Let her be.’

The breath is faint on my neck when I register it. A hand is on my shoulder. Too soft to be real.

Am I dreaming? Has a spirit come for me, after all?

Behind me, a chest rises and falls. I draw out my own breaths to match. I’m not afraid. If it’s a spirit, it’s a kind one. A spirit with small hands.

But do spirits wear socks?

Fabric is pressed against my heels. Knees nestle into the backs of mine. I open my eyes in the darkness.

‘Mum?’ Perhaps my anxious mother’s come a day early. But I doubt she’d crawl into bed beside me.

The hand is smaller than my mum’s. The breath reminds me of a vanilla milkshake.

I feel a pulse in my foot. Why does the body do that? Why, sometimes, does a body part remind you
that blood’s beating under the skin in places other than the heart?

Then I realise it’s hers. Her pulse beats through the sock and tells me she’s alive too.

The blankets cover us both. There are two blankets. How long has she been here?

‘Mia?’

But she’s sleeping deeply, too distant to reach. I’m aware of all the parts of her that rest against me.

I lengthen my breaths, making them slow and full.

And that’s all I know.

I stretch by the window and check out the cloudless sky that I’ll soon be under. I scan the horizon with the knowledge that Mum is on her way and in five hours I’ll be heading to that southerly point in the distance, leaving all this brick behind. Soon there’ll be no more bed that reclines in three ways, no call button, and no blue blankets.

Blankets. There are two of them. And long hair on my pillow.

A current forks through me.

It
happened
. It was her. With her milky breath and fingers curled around my shoulder. It was real.

I grip my door handle for the first time in forty-seven days and turn it clockwise. I pull it towards me then poke my head into the corridor. The length of it makes me giddy. I lean further out with a shoulder, then my chest.

Nina spots me. ‘Zac! Go back in. You need your final obs.’

‘Oh, come on, I’m going home soon.’

‘Then you can wait.’ She’s trying to hide the card they’ve been signing for me.

I send a bare foot onto the lino and shift my weight onto it. The corridor is wider and shinier than I remember. I smell fruit toast. There are trolleys along the walls and framed paintings I’d never noticed.

‘Zac.’

But I’m scampering along the wall, past the curtained windows, to the door with a ‘2’ on it.

Knock
.

‘Zac!’

‘I just want to say goodbye.’ The door whooshes open when I push it.

Room 2 might be a mirror image of mine but it’s cold and empty. Even the bed’s gone. There’s nothing but an iPod dock on the bedhead and the word
Fasting
on the whiteboard above.

Nina’s voice is behind me. ‘She’s gone, Zac.’

‘Gone?’

‘We wheeled her to 6A. Now get back to your prison cell for the final countdown.’ She tries manoeuvring me around but I hold tight to the doorframe.

‘What’s that?’ I ask.

Nina’s eyes sweep the room before settling on the object. She walks across, picks it up and turns it over. A plastic ladybird has come free of its hairclip. In Nina’s palm it’s just a cheap, silly beetle with six indented black
spots. I see she’s too tired, too kind, too young for this.

‘I didn’t hear her go,’ I say.

Nina lets the ladybird drop into the lined bin, then hooks her arm through mine.

‘Come on, Zac. Let’s get you home.’