The Things We Promise

by J. C. Burke

  In the ad break we decided that Louise and Andrea should both come over soon to discuss what look they wanted for our formal. It didn’t matter that the formal was still months away, Billy said it would help him kill the time.

  ‘So you’re staying here?’ I asked. ‘You’re not going back to New York?’

  ‘I haven’t decided. The lease on our apartment is up. Claude’s packed it up and put our stuff in storage.’

  Each utterance of ‘our’ felt like a little electric shock. I wondered if that’s how it felt for Billy too.

  ‘I know I can’t face New York at the moment,’ he almost whispered. ‘It’ll make me too sad and stress me out. Everyone’s dying or dead. At least, that’s what it feels like,’ he said. ‘I’m too tired to keep hearing about it. Here I’m safe. Or at least safer.’

  Billy went back to his Rubik’s Cube. No wonder he didn’t want to think.

  I pretended to watch Moonlighting. I hadn’t let my expression slide off my face. I’d swallowed my gasps before they left my lips. This was the way it had to be, if I wanted to be included.

  But Billy’s stories, in fact nearly everything that came out of his mouth, had a way of making me scared or sad or just plain pissed off with the planet.

  Imagine waking up one morning and finding out that Andrea, Justin, Louise and Bronnie Perry were all dead? Sonia Darue was on her way out and Ralph and Vanessa weren’t talking to me anymore because they were scared they’d catch the plague too.

  Maybe people were horrible? Is that what I was starting to learn? Louise Lovejoy was hated by half the seniors for a crime she didn’t even commit. But no one asked questions. All of us, including me, were happy to don our latex gloves and point our fingers at her. Louise had spent nearly a whole year alone. Demoted from the gang of Sonia Darue and the prissy girls. Had she purposely waited for the next year to roll around before she dared come and sit with us? If she’d tried six months earlier would we have told her to piss off because we didn’t want to be contaminated by her and join the rank of untouchables?

  It wasn’t Polly Pessimistic thinking this. It was Polly Perceptive. Suddenly it was like I’d taken off my sunnies and could see the world in the harsh light it really turned in.

  But I had promised Billy I’d be Polly Positive. To not freak out over everything.

  So as I tried to fall asleep that night, I turned up the music on my Walkman to drown out the sounds of Billy coughing that were barking up the hallway.

  Louise was now a fully-fledged member of Nigel. We were walking back there after school, discussing Saturday night because we were going out raging. Some guys who’d left school last year had started a band called Albatross. Louise had seen them and said they were pretty good. They were playing up at The Northern, which was renowned for being easy to get into because of the slack bouncers. Even better, Andrea’s parents were away for the weekend, so we could stay at her place and get home as late as we wanted.

  Our plan was sounding excellent. Louise and Andrea were coming to my place in the afternoon. First, we’d have a meeting with Billy about our hair and make-up for the formal. Then Billy said he’d do us up for going out that night.

  ‘Oh my God, what are we going to wear?’ Andrea was already squealing and there was still forty-eight hours to go. ‘Like we don’t want to be too dressed up, do we?’

  ‘Jeans,’ I advised.

  ‘Gemma, can you not wear what you always wear?’ Andrea turned to Louise and said, ‘Levi’s 501s, some black top and Docs. Oh and big gold hoops. That’s Gemma’s uniform.’

  ‘So?’ I muttered.

  ‘So it’s getting boring, Gemma.’

  ‘I’ve got a really nice new jeans jacket,’ Louise told us. ‘So I think I’ll wear that and maybe a black leather skirt.’

  ‘You have cool clothes,’ Andrea said to Louise. ‘What can you bring over to Gemma’s that I could wear?’

  There was a good chance Ralph would be at the pub on Saturday night. The guys from Albatross were his kind of people. Black stovepipe pants, black pointy shoes and a big flop of hair over the eyes: the look that I loved.

  I was avoiding Ralph now. And I think he was avoiding me too. But it was hard to know when we’d barely spoken in the past anyway.

  Twice this week we’d been walking down the same corridor, seconds from colliding into one another, when one of us had miraculously disappeared into a classroom or done a step-ball-change and headed back in the direction we’d come from. That was ‘avoiding’ in my book.

  Sure I’d been the one to jump out of his car without saying goodbye. Then I’d ignored him when he’d trailed me on the way to school. But that didn’t count as me being rude. He’d been the insensitive one. I mean, how did he expect his comment would make me feel? Warm and fuzzy?

  Maybe if he was at the pub, we could talk about it and I could tell him why I jumped out of the car. But the risk in doing that was Ralph telling me that he didn’t even know I’d jumped out of the car; that he’d thought the conversation was over. But I could retaliate with, Then why did you stalk me in your car the other week? Or my latest theory, I bet Vanessa’s told you to be nice to me. But I knew I couldn’t say any of that or I’d totally come across like a freak who overthought everything, which I did. But Ralph didn’t need to know that.

  On Saturday night, I couldn’t wear my ‘uniform’, as Andrea called it. Not because she thought it was boring but because that’s what I was wearing the night we crashed the Fink’s party and danced to Salt-N-Pepa. Ralph was there that night and what if he remembered what I was wearing? Not that he would. He probably wouldn’t even remember I was there. Let alone our dance. But the problem of what I was going to wear was one I could deal with. Why not make Saturday night the night to shine? Why wait all year for the formal?

  By Friday evening, I had a shortlist of three outfits. The one I liked the best was a black-and-white striped T-shirt paired with a tube skirt that Mum said ‘hugged my curves’. To my mother that was a good thing. To me, it was not.

  The second option was my 501s and a white shirt, but Billy told me, ‘You can do better,’ so that was out. The third was a dress, black of course, with gold buttons on the shoulders. I don’t usually wear dresses so I felt weird in it, like I was playing dress-ups. But Mum and Billy both agreed it was the best.

  In the end, it didn’t matter, because at five-thirty on Saturday morning, when I was in my green spotty flannelette pyjamas, an ambulance came to take Billy to hospital.

  He had a fever, he couldn’t breathe and the cough that I’d heard the last few nights echoed down the stairwell as they carried him away on a stretcher.

  Mum and Billy went off in the ambulance. Mr and Mrs C and me followed in their tiny car. No time to change. Mrs C had rollers in her hair and Mr C definitely didn’t have any jocks on under his pyjama pants. The engine of the Fiat strained to keep up with the red flashing light in front of us. Mrs C draped her arm over the seat so I could hold on to her hand and not feel so alone in the back.

  I closed my eyes and remembered my promise. I would be Polly Positive. For all of us.

  14

  BILLY HAD A DRIP IN HIS ARM. HE WAS wearing an oxygen mask that whistled and had a weird plastic bag hanging off it. He didn’t speak. It seemed that all his energy was going into taking the next breath and then the one after that.

  He wasn’t in the main section of King George’s casualty ward, but in a small room tucked away off one of the millions of corridors. By small, I mean Mum and I could fit in there only if the door was kept open and even then half of my body was poking out into the draughty hallway.

  Rushes of cold air kept blowing under my pyjama top as nurses and doctors hurried past, calling out things like, ‘Trauma in five.’ I wanted to ask for a blanket so I could wrap it around my shoulders. But everyone was too busy to stop. They were acting like they couldn’t even see me.

  I wished Mr and Mrs C were still here. Or that Aunty Penny would miraculously reappear fr
om her girls’ tour of Bali. Mum was present in person; she could nod and answer. But I felt like I was probably just a blur of green to her, a mottled shadow that existed only in her peripheral vision.

  Mum wasn’t going to wrap her arm around me or ask one of the scary nurses if there was a spare blanket. And I couldn’t tell Mum how frightened I was because it was obvious she was frightened too.

  ‘I think I’ll go for a wander,’ I said to Mum, because I was starting to freeze. ‘Do you want me to see if I can find a coffee machine or something?’

  ‘Sure,’ Mum replied without turning her head from Billy. ‘Take my purse.’

  It was only then, out of the room, that I noticed our surroundings. Mrs C and I had been so frantic trying to find Billy and Mum in the labyrinth of corridors and underground tunnels that I hadn’t taken in the scene around us.

  Now I could sum up the situation and it wouldn’t take a brain surgeon to work out that my brother had been tucked away. Tucked far away where the other patients and their families couldn’t see the big sign that read Infection Hazard.

  Outside my brother’s room was a trolley filled with gloves and masks. Plus a massive bin lined in yellow plastic that also shouted Infection Hazard in case you’d missed it the first time.

  ‘Can I help you, dear?’ A woman at the reception desk smiled at me. She seemed pretty nice so I wondered if maybe I could ask her for a blanket. ‘Are you looking for someone?’

  ‘No, it’s okay. I’m here with my brother, who’s …’ I gestured down the corridor. Her gaze followed my finger, her smile folded back inside her lips and she went back to whatever she was doing.

  ‘Is there a coffee machine around here?’ No words back. Just a finger pointing at something behind me. ‘Oh?’ I murmured. ‘Thanks.’

  The powdered milk plopped in the cups and the bitter-smelling coffee reminded me of Friday evenings at the swimming dome, watching Billy race. Some nights Dad came too. I’d sit between my parents, bugging them to let me have a sip of their coffee. Mum always said no but Dad would let me.

  How simple those days had been. Maybe not for my parents or for Billy. But for me they were. AIDS, queer-haters and boys that attack girls were not the kind of surprises I’d thought might jump out from behind the couch.

  At the other end of the corridor I could see a small gathering of people in white coats outside Billy’s room. I walked faster, not caring about the hot coffee splashing onto my fingers.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. No one moved. ‘Excuse me,’ I said again, louder.

  ‘That’s my daughter,’ I heard Mum say. The white coats parted, letting me squeeze inside and share the doorway with them.

  Billy looked more with it now. He’d even taken the oxygen mask off so he could speak.

  ‘How long will I be in here?’ he was asking a doctor in a paper mask and gown, who was perched on the end of the bed. ‘Can you tell me that?’

  ‘AIDS-related pneumonia can be unpredictable. But we’ve got this one early …’

  I didn’t take in the rest of what he said. ‘AIDS-related pneumonia’, or rather just the ‘AIDS’ part, had jumped out from behind the couch and hit me over the head like a sledgehammer.

  Billy’s white cell count had nosedived. His lungs had almost collapsed with pneumonia. There was a thrush infection in his mouth that was threatening to creep down his throat. In simple terms, this meant that Billy had crossed the threshold into the dark space that was called AIDS.

  Now I looked at his HIV diagnosis longingly, wishing we could go back to those simple days.

  The doctor also explained that there wasn’t a bed available in the AIDS ward. She didn’t actually say that nowhere else would take him. What she did say was, ‘With your condition there aren’t any other beds available to you except on 9 South West.’ This meant that Billy would have to start treatment for his pneumonia in this room, that someone had let slip was actually a storeroom.

  ‘When will a bed in 9 South West become available?’ Mum asked the doctor.

  ‘Later today,’ she’d answered. ‘Or maybe even sooner.’

  I looked down at my feet and ordered Polly Pessimistic not to think about what that could mean. There were two options: the first was that the patient had gone home; the second was what I told myself not to think about.

  The white coats squeezed their way out of the room. Outside they ripped off their aprons and masks, stuffing them into the big plastic bin. Then they strolled off, deep in discussion on whether or not they had time to grab a coffee.

  ‘What’s the time difference in Bali?’ Mum said, looking at her watch as though it would tell her the answer. ‘I have the number of Penny’s hotel.’

  ‘Mum, don’t call Penny,’ Billy uttered through panted breaths. ‘Let her enjoy her holiday. I’m in hospital now, it’s going to be fine.’

  Mum made the humph sound that usually meant she wasn’t going to take any notice of what was being said. I didn’t know whose side to take, but if I had to choose, I would have gone for Penny coming home from her holiday. She was good at handling Mum.

  ‘Gem, sorry about tonight,’ Billy mouthed.

  ‘We can do the practice make-up another day,’ I told him. ‘It’s no big deal.’

  ‘There’s plenty of time to discuss all that formal stuff,’ Mum said. But then a minute later, she added, ‘I’ll start cutting out a pattern for your dress. It’ll keep me busy while I’m sitting here in the hospital.’

  ‘Mum,’ Billy began. There was a whine in his voice that I hadn’t heard for a long time. ‘I’m a big boy.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’

  ‘When I get a bed up on the ward you don’t have to hang around,’ Billy told her, pausing between words to catch his breath. ‘You’re busy, Mum. You’ve got Catrina’s dress to finish, plus the bridesmaids’ dresses and her mother’s.’

  Their bickering was interrupted by a man outside Billy’s room, putting on a gown, mask and latex gloves. ‘I’m here to take you for a chest X-ray,’ he announced, before squeezing his way in.

  As he wheeled Billy out the door, my brother wiggled his fingers and winked at me. Latex gloves. Just like the bus driver in New York.

  I’d seen a pay phone by the coffee machine in the reception area, so I wandered off to make the dreaded calls to Andrea and Louise.

  The mean lady behind the desk had gone and her replacement was a man with the longest permed mullet I’d ever seen. He reminded me of Elizabeth Taylor’s boyfriend, Larry. Andrea had shoved so many photos of him in my face, saying things like, ‘Can you believe Liz is going out with a builder?’ and, ‘She deserves so much better!’ Andrea didn’t seem to get that I really didn’t care. Yet here I was, on a Saturday morning waiting with my brother for a bed in the AIDS ward, thinking about Larry, Elizabeth’s Taylor’s boyfriend.

  Perhaps everyone waiting around in hospital could do with a Rubik’s Cube? The seats in the waiting area were filled, plus there were people standing, and I wondered what random thoughts they were all having. Maybe that’s what you did when you hung around hospitals. Thought of the strangest things. Anything to stop you from thinking about what was really going on.

  A pregnant woman, who looked as though she could give birth at any second, was using the phone. I stood there, but not too close, because I didn’t want to seem like I was hassling her. I was sure her phone call was more urgent than mine.

  Finally, when the phone was free, I dropped the twenty cents into the coin slot, took a deep breath and began to dial Andrea’s phone number. But suddenly I changed my mind and hit 2127 instead, the last four digits of Louise’s.

  Maybe I’d been having random thoughts about Elizabeth Taylor’s boyfriend, but obviously my brain hadn’t wandered that far. It knew what I couldn’t handle today: Andrea’s mother, Deidre, answering the phone.

  ‘Hello? Louise speaking.’

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Is that you, Gemma?’

  ‘Yep.’

  �
�What’s all that noise in the background?’

  ‘I’m at the hospital with … Mum and Billy.’ I gulped because I nearly hadn’t made it to the end of that sentence. ‘Billy’s sick. Pneumonia.’

  ‘No,’ Louise uttered. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ I nodded, even though Louise couldn’t see me. ‘But obviously this afternoon is—’

  ‘Don’t worry about that!’ Louise answered. ‘Don’t be silly. Is Billy all right?’

  I wasn’t ready to say the ‘AIDS’ word. ‘He’s going to have to stay in hospital for a few days. But he’s so much better than he was this morning and the doctor said they caught it early. The pneumonia, I mean.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Louise sighed. ‘So you’re not coming out tonight?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did Andrea say—’

  ‘I couldn’t get through,’ I lied. ‘Can you call her for me?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And Louise – don’t make it sound like Billy’s really …’

  ‘It’s okay, Gemma,’ Louise said. ‘I think I’m getting a handle on Andrea. Leave it to me.’

  ‘Thanks.’ One word and it was stuffed full and overflowing.

  Finally at about 6 p.m. Billy was transferred up to the AIDS ward on Level 9. It sounded shallow, especially under the circumstances, but my biggest concern when we walked into 9 South West was what I was wearing.

  Mr and Mrs C had come back with some clothes for me. Who knows where Mrs C found it, but she’d brought in a crocheted apricot jumper with a white lace collar that I hadn’t worn since Year 8. Even then I’d hated it. I almost would’ve preferred to still be in my pyjamas. At least I knew there was no chance of running into Ralph here.

  I was occupied with feeling self-conscious when I followed Mum into the four-bed room that was to be my brother’s home for the next while, and I wasn’t prepared.

  The man in the bed next to Billy had shrunk so much it was hard to spot him among the pillows piled up around him.