by Aimee Said
“What for? It’s not as if you dragged me up here against my will. Anyway, Mum said ‘Daniel, we’ll see you soon’, so at least she’s not planning to put me in solitary confinement for the rest of the holidays.”
“Unless what she meant was ‘Daniel, we’ll see you soon when we haul you back here with your father to punish you, too’.”
The thought of Mum and Dr Phil joining forces for a parenting uberlecture makes me shudder. “I’d better get down there. The longer I keep them waiting, the more time they have to stew on it.”
5
We walk down the stairs together but Dan continues to the front door and I go to the kitchen. Mum, Dad and Ziggy are all sitting at the table. Mum and Dad look … not so much angry but as if something’s very, very wrong. Ziggy seems as confused by the situation as I am to see him there. I don’t know why they think he needs to witness my telling off, unless it’s meant to be some sort of moral lesson about the pitfalls of going into girls’ bedrooms.
“Sit down,” says Dad. “We need to talk.”
“We were just listening to music,” I say as I pull out my chair. Then, when no one says anything in response, “Okay, and kissing a bit, but that’s all. It’s perfectly norm–”
Mum holds up her hand to stop me talking. “Not about that – although we will talk about respecting house rules later. There’s something we need to tell you.”
Now I recognise her expression. She’s not angry, she’s sad. “What’s wrong?” I ask. “Has something happened to Gran?”
“No, she’s fine,” says Mum, “but I’ve got some news.”
Next to her, Dad’s fiddling with the mechanical pencil he uses to fill in the cryptic crossword over breakfast, clicking the thin column of lead out and pushing it back in. It’s the sort of thing that drives Mum batty, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She smooths an imaginary wrinkle from the tablecloth and studies her hands for a few moments before continuing.
“I went for some tests last week – nothing special, just the regular check-ups Dr Chandarama insists on for all her patients when they get to my age: blood pressure, blood sugar levels, mammogram, that sort of thing.” Mum’s talking faster than normal, running words together as if she’s worried that if she pauses between them, she might not finish what she’s saying. I’ve just about got my head around the fact that whatever this news is, it’s medical, when she says, “They found something in the mammogram – a mass in my right breast. I went back on Monday and they took a cell biopsy and sent it to be tested.”
Monday. All I remember is that it was the day of my last PE lesson for the year. I don’t recall Mum seeming any different. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“We didn’t want to worry you if it turned out to be nothing. Dr Chandarama said that nine times out of ten a lump is just that: a lump. She thought it was probably a cyst that might need to be drained or could even go away by itself. Until the biopsy results came back, we weren’t sure that there was anything to tell you about.”
“But now there is?”
She nods. “I got the results yesterday. It’s what they call early breast cancer, which means that the doctors don’t think it’s spread beyond my breast … and possibly to the lymph nodes in my right armpit.”
Dad stops clicking his pencil and tilts his head back to look directly at the light above the table. It’s an old trick to stop you from crying. It usually doesn’t work.
“Are you going to have an operation?” I ask.
“To start with, yes. This afternoon we met with the surgeon Dr Chandarama recommended. I’m booked in for surgery at the Women’s Hospital on the twenty-seventh.”
“You mean a mastectomy?” Just saying the word makes my stomach tighten.
“They won’t know for sure until they see what’s happening in there. Dr Bynes is hopeful that I will only need a lumpectomy, but I’ve told her to do whatever she has to.”
“The important thing is that Mum’s getting the best care available,” says Dad, cleaning his glasses with his hanky. “She has a whole team of specialist doctors and nurses looking after her.”
I don’t buy it. “It must be bad if they have to operate straightaway.”
“That’s my choice,” says Mum. “I could’ve waited a few weeks, even a month, but I want to get it over with as soon as possible.”
Ziggy, who’s been silent until now, mutters “cancer” under his breath. Then, “cancercancercancercancer” as if he’s repeating an incantation over a bubbling cauldron.
Mum puts her hand on his shoulder to stop him. “Zig, I know this is a shock, but everything’s going to be okay. In a few months my treatment should be finished and everything will be back to normal.”
“Bullshit,” says Ziggy, wrenching his body out of her reach and almost knocking over his chair as he stands. “That’s bullshit, and you know it.”
Dad moves to follow as Zig runs from the kitchen, but Mum holds him back. “Leave him, love. He just needs some time to make sense of all this.”
He isn’t the only one, but with Ziggy gone I can ask the question I’ve been holding in since Mum said the C-word. “Do they know … Have they said … what your chances are?”
Mum glances at Dad, but he’s back to staring at the light. “No, and they won’t until they’ve had a better look at the cancer and whether it has spread, and what sort of treatment it needs. The good news is that they’ve found it early and, statistically, women my age with this kind of cancer have a pretty good survival rate.”
I don’t think Mum has any idea how unreassuring the phrase “pretty good” is. It’s about as comforting as when I asked Nicky what the chances were of Mum letting me apprentice as a pastry chef instead of going to uni and she said, “Just make sure there are no sharp objects around when you bring it up.” Dad seems to share my doubts because he gets up from the table and mumbles something about making sure Ziggy’s all right.
“Is there anything you want to ask, or to say?” asks Mum, in the same voice she used to give me the when-a-mummy-and-a-daddy-love-each-other-very-much speech when I was seven. I wish she’d stop being so bloody rational and just scream or cry or swear or something, because then I could, too. But she just keeps smiling patiently.
I shake my head.
We sit in silence for a few minutes before Mum nudges me. “I bet you never thought I’d have something in common with Kylie Minogue, did you?” She laughs, but her eyes don’t join in.
When Dad and Ziggy return the first thing I notice is that Ziggy’s eyes are red and puffy. The second is that his hand is wrapped in Dad’s hanky, which is spotted with speckles of blood. Mum’s gaze sweeps from Ziggy’s hand to Dad, silently demanding an explanation.
“Zig had a little disagreement with a wall,” says Dad. “I think it’s just a few scraped knuckles.”
Before Mum can say anything, Ziggy collapses onto his knees and buries his face in her lap. She leans over him, enveloping his body with her own, and rocks him back and forth, murmuring soothing words in his ear and kissing his head. Dad stands in front of them with his hands clasped tightly together on his chest, as if he’s praying. He looks like he wishes he could trade places with Ziggy.
When Mum suggests we order pizza for dinner I know she’s really sick. The last time we had takeaway pizza was after Ziggy’s junior footy team won the district cup two years ago. Mum took two bites of her super-supreme before declaring that it was full of trans fats and nitrates. After that, she banned salami from the house and started making her own wholemeal pizza dough. It’s not bad compared to, say, her beetloaf, but it’s not the same as the real thing.
Despite the pizza being her idea, Mum only has one slice. While the rest of us eat she makes chatty small talk about having to go all the way to the organic butcher in Kingston to pick up the Christmas turkey, and whether Mr-Sumner-down-the-street will put his life-size nativity scene out on the nature strip again this year. I don’t know what Dad said to Ziggy, but my sullen, grunting brothe
r has been replaced by a boy who politely asks me to pass him another slice of pizza instead of reaching across to grab it, and helps me clear the table even though it’s my week on the roster. It’s unnerving.
After dinner, we play Scrabble. All I really want to do is go to my room and listen to some seriously LOUD music to cancel out all the noise buzzing in my head, but Scrabble is Mum’s favourite game (because she always wins) and Dad obviously wants a night of family bonding.
The game isn’t too painful, aside from Ziggy cracking it when he isn’t allowed to put down “gangsta” and Mum’s allowed “forsooth” on a triple word score, but I can’t fake-smile my way through a second one. When Mum uses her last tile I yawn with exaggerated tiredness and declare that I need an early night.
I’d planned to go upstairs, take the phone into my room and call Dan, but when I reach for the handset on the little table on the landing I hesitate. What would I say? “Hi, my mum has cancer” isn’t exactly a conversation starter. Anyway, I don’t know if I’m ready to talk about Mum yet, and I don’t think Dan would know what to say, either. I leave the phone where it is and go through the motions of getting ready for bed.
I brush my teeth, wash my face and pull on the T-shirt Dan lent me when we got caught in a sudden downpour on the way to his house. It hardly smells of him any more, but it’s super soft against my skin. I peel back the quilt and nudge Boris to one side of the pillow to make room for my head.
The branches of the tree outside my window make shadows across my face in the moonlight. When I was little I thought they were the long, bony fingers of a witch, coming to snatch me from my bed. I couldn’t go to sleep without the curtains tightly drawn or with the window open even a crack, and Mum had to double-check the window latch every night when she tucked me in, just to be sure. I can’t remember when I stopped being scared, but I hardly even register the shadows these days.
Tonight though, I lie in the dark, staring at the spidery lines. Mum has cancer, I think, trying on the words to see how they fit.
Our mum has cancer.
My mum has cancer.
I say it over and over in my head, as if that might make it feel more real. But it doesn’t. I’ve seen enough quit smoking ads and children’s hospital telethons and marches for the cure to know that the thing about cancer is that people die from it. Not everyone, but lots and lots of people, including Dad’s father.
Pop was the first person close to me to die. I was ten when he got sick. I remember him complaining about a stomach-ache when he came over for dinner one night, and then the next time I saw him was in the hospice two weeks later. It turned out he had cancer of the stomach and bowel, but by the time he told anyone about the pain in his belly, it was too advanced to treat.
It was around that time that I began to notice how much older my parents were than everybody else’s. Before that it had been something I’d only registered when I saw them standing next to my friends’ parents. I’d often thought of their greying hair and outdated clothes as an embarrassment, but it hadn’t occurred to me until then that if they were born earlier than other people’s parents, they would probably die earlier, too. I started having macabre daydreams about what would happen if they both died while I was still at school, about having to bring up Ziggy on my own or, worse, being sent to an orphanage where they would feed us nothing but gruel and make us work in a factory all day. (My class saw a production of Oliver! that year, so I considered myself a bit of an authority on orphanages.) Of course, once high school started I had much bigger things to worry about than death – like exams and blackheads and the fear of getting my period during a swimming lesson.
6
The morning sky is pure, cloudless blue. My first thought is that it’s a perfect day for a bike ride with Dan, followed by gelato and snogging, not necessarily in that order. My second thought is that Mum has cancer.
I don’t know what time I eventually got to sleep but it was long after the rest of my family came to bed. I lay awake for hours trying to untangle the jumble of thoughts in my head: whether we’ll cancel Christmas this year, and how long Mum will be in hospital, and if she’ll be better by the time school goes back. I tried not to think about my plans for these school holidays being ruined, because it’s wrong to be upset about missed bike rides with your boyfriend or not getting to hang out with your friends when your mum has a life-threatening illness. I block out those thoughts again as I drag myself out of bed and to the kitchen.
“Good morning,” says Mum, who’s already showered and dressed. “Sleep well?”
I nod automatically. I wonder if I should ask how she’s feeling or something. I mean, we can’t just pretend everything’s fine, can we? I look to Dad for a cue, but he’s busy spreading a thick layer of marmalade over a crumpet and most of the plate it’s on while he studies the crossword. Judging by the way my parents are acting, pretending normality is exactly what we’re going to do.
After breakfast, Mum consults the cleaning roster on the fridge and doles out the chores for the week. I scrub the kitchen counters, vacuum the stairs and tidy my room (i.e. kick everything that’s on the floor under the bed) before tackling my most dreaded task: Boris’s kitty litter.
I hold the heavy-duty plastic bag containing the contents of the litter tray out in front of me, as far from my nose as possible. Before I even open the door that leads to the garage where our wheelie bin is kept, I can tell by the oomph-thwack noises that Ziggy’s practising his punches. The oomph comes from Ziggy; the thwack is the sound of his gloved left fist making contact with the bag. The knuckles of his right hand are wrapped in a gauze bandage, fastened with an old nappy pin. He holds his injured hand close to his chest and throws all his strength behind the other one.
“Hi,” I say after I’ve disposed of my fetid cargo.
Ziggy glances in my direction but doesn’t reply, landing another punch directly in the middle of the heavy bag as if it’s his worst enemy.
“Pretty crazy news about Mum, eh?”
Oomph-thwack.
“Want to talk about it?”
Oomph-thwack.
“Zig, can you stop that for a minute and talk to me?”
Oomph-thwack.
I step behind the bag and grab it in both hands to hold it still. Ziggy raises his fist as if he’s going to hit it – or me – anyway, and then lowers it again.
“What is there to talk about?” he asks, lifting his T-shirt to wipe the sweat from his eyes. “Mum’s got cancer. She’s having an operation. End of story.”
This is going to be harder than I thought, but after all my forced conversations with Mum, I’ve picked up a few tips on how to make people talk about stuff they don’t want to.
“Well, how do you feel about it? You seemed pretty upset last night. I mean …” I nod towards his bandaged hand. “It’s better to talk about it than keep your feelings to yourself.”
Ziggy rolls his eyes. “I’ll tell you how I feel, Fray: I feel like it’s shit luck for Mum, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Now let go of the bag and get out of the way.”
I do as he says, partly because I suspect he’d get on with his training whether I let go or not. I don’t know what else I’d expected from Ziggy; it’s not as if the two of us make a habit of heart-to-heart chats. But we’re in this together, Zig and me, and right now he’s the only person who might know exactly how I feel.
When he calls my name as I reach for the doorhandle, I think he must have realised the same thing, but all he says is, “Close the door on your way out.”
Then the oomph-thwacking resumes, and it might be my imagination but it sounds more ferocious than ever.
“Daniel phoned,” calls Mum from the living room as I pass by the open door. “Which reminds me, we haven’t talked about what happened yesterday.” She pats the cushion next to her on the couch. I’m definitely in for a lecture if she thinks I’ll be there long enough to need a seat.
“We weren’t doing anything wrong,” I
say before she can start. “It’s not as if we were torturing puppies or making pipe bombs or something evil.”
Mum smirks for a millisecond before remembering why she’s called me in here, putting on her stern face. “You still broke the rules of our house, Freia. Dad and I like Daniel very much, but there are certain things that we don’t feel comfortable with, and the two of you being in a bedroom behind a closed door is one of them. If you want to be treated more like an adult, you need to prove that we can trust you to keep your word.
“You know the consequence we set for breaking that rule is not being allowed to see Daniel for a week. Under the circumstances, I’m not going to enforce it this time, but if it happens again …”
I nod, relieved and slightly disbelieving at getting off so lightly. Perhaps there’s a part of Mum that still remembers what it’s like to be young and in something-like-love?
“I’m in the middle of something,” says Dan when I call and ask if he feels like going for a ride. (Which is Dan-speak for “I’m playing a video game”.) “But judging by the stench of aftershave wafting from the bathroom, Dr Phil’s getting ready for a date with his new girlfriend. Why don’t you come over?” (Which is Dan-speak for “we’ll have the house to ourselves”.)
I’d been looking forward to a ride, not least because it would buy me more time to think about how to tell Dan about Mum, but I figure I don’t have to say anything about it straightaway. Anyway, if kissing is as good for the nervous system as Vicky claims, a little Dr Phil-free time with Dan might actually help me to talk about it.
Dan’s house is something out of an interior decorating magazine. It’s enormous by Parkville standards – twice the size of our terrace – with all-modern furniture in neutral tones that match the walls, and brushed stainless steel fittings. Dan reckons it’s a house for looking at, not living in, but I’ve never heard him complain about the plasma TV that takes up most of the wall in the living room.
