by J. C. Burke
I trudged off. Too bad if I got soaked. I wasn’t going back into the ward empty-handed. There had to be another Maccas close by.
Three blocks down the next street, I was stopped again and told to turn back. This policeman was even meaner and actually told me to stop being a ‘drama queen’.
Now it was raining cats, pigs and elephants. My Doc Martens had water pouring out of them and my beautiful coat was starting to smell like soggy wool and stick to my skin.
‘Excuse me,’ I asked a woman taking shelter in a bus stop. ‘Do you know where the closest Maccas is?’
‘By the hospital, I think.’
‘I can’t get to that one! It’s blocked off.’
‘I know there’s one on the other side of the city. But it’s about a twenty-minute walk. They do good burgers over there,’ she told me, pointing to a dingy-looking cafe with an unpronounceable name.
‘No. It has to be a Maccas cheeseburger with extra gherkins.’ My bottom lip was getting the wobbles. ‘It’s for my friend who’s a patient at the hospital. He has AIDS and no one in his family knows.’
‘Oh, sweetheart,’ the lady said, gently putting her hand on my shoulder. ‘That’s terrible. Aren’t you a good friend.’
‘I can’t go back without the cheeseburger.’ Now I was crying. Not blubbering crying. More the sniffing and shaking-jaw variety. ‘He’s waiting for it because he just had the tube pulled out of his chest.’
Her head was cocked, her lips open, but I couldn’t wait for her words.
‘Don’t worry,’ I muttered, stumbling back into the downpour. I felt like I was the only one out there. Everyone else seemed to be crowded under whatever cover they could find because now it was raining sideways.
Where am I going to find a Maccas? I snivelled to myself. Why is everything so hard? Why can’t something just work out for once? I wanted to look up to the heavens and shake my fist like they do in the movies. Yet it was too wet to even do that.
Luckily, I at least glanced up, because ahead, just visible through the thick sheets of rain, was the faintest shimmer of lime green.
I started running. I had to get there before the lights changed and it drove away. I was ankle deep in puddles, my Doc Martens feeling like they were about to float off without me. Yet I didn’t stop. Not till I was at the driver’s door and banging on the window of the lime mobile.
Ralph totally freaked out. He jumped away from the window like he thought I was some crazy with a knife about to carjack and kidnap him. Then he saw that it was me and wound down the window.
‘Gemma?’
‘Can you let me in?’
He unlocked the door, and twenty seconds later I was sitting in the front seat, bawling my eyes out. Somehow I managed to choke out a jumble of words. ‘Cheeseburger,’ ‘Maccas,’ and, ‘Life’s better with extra gherkins.’
Ralph drove while I told him the story of Zane. By the time we reached the drive-through on the other side of the city, I could’ve filled my Docs all over again with my tears.
It wasn’t until we’d turned out of Maccas and I had the goods in my hands that I began to calm down. Then I started to feel really, really embarrassed. I had blubbered and dribbled snot all over myself in front of Ralph. I felt like pulling the Maccas paper bag right over my head and hiding in it.
‘What were you doing in the city?’ I asked, trying to speak calmly and slowly like I was a grown-up in a play.
‘I work at Hot Spot Records.’
‘Oh, yeah. That’s right.’
‘I couldn’t find a park because they’ve blocked off the street where I usually go,’ Ralph said. ‘At least it gives me a good excuse for being late.’
‘How late are you?’
‘About an hour.’ Ralph grinned.
‘Oh. Sorry.’
‘Don’t be. This is a thousand times better than work.’
‘Well, I really appreciate it,’ I started. ‘Especially when—’
Ralph interrupted. ‘Don’t go all formal on me, Gemma.’
‘Huh?’
‘Saying you appreciate it and stuff. And what’s with your voice?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
We had pulled up at the hospital. Ralph had his hands off the wheel and was facing me. ‘Gemma,’ he began, ‘I’m just going to say it because Vanessa says I have to. Not that I don’t want to. I mean, I want to say it. But I know you’ve been dodging me. So I doubt it’s what you want to hear …’
I braced myself because these days I couldn’t tell what was coming at me. All I did know was that AIDS would most likely be in this sentence or at least have something to do with it.
‘I think you’re a really cool girl.’
I kept holding my breath but then I realised that was it. That’s what Ralph had wanted to say and I had not in a million trillion years seen those words coming.
Back in the TV room, Zane gobbled up the two cheeseburgers with extra gherkins. He didn’t speak. He just ate and I watched him. I had already decided not to tell him the story about how I ran into the boy I’d had a serious crush on since Year 7 and randomly jumped in his car and he drove me to Maccas, then told me I was ‘cool’.
It was a good story and Zane liked a good story. But I didn’t want to tell him about Ralph. It was hard to explain. Of course Zane didn’t like me like that. But I still wanted him to think that he was the only one in my heart.
19
THE SEVENTEENTH OF JULY, THE SWEET day I wore my black-and-white checked coat, the day Ralph Harding told me he thought I was cool, became a night that turned sour.
The rain had dried up. There were even stars scattered around the sky. Mr C and I were driving home from the hospital, singing along with the radio. It was The Beatles, ‘Hey Jude’, which was a sad song but nothing could make me feel sad tonight.
At least that’s what I thought, until we turned the corner into our street and saw four women coming out of our block of flats, dresses on coathangers trailing behind them, their hems sweeping the footpath. Mum and Mrs C were almost jogging after them.
Something about this picture was very wrong.
By the time Mr C parked the Fiat, the ladies had driven away.
‘What happened?’ I called. Mum was huddled under Mrs C’s arm.
‘Bloody, bloody bastards!’ Mrs C was shouting. ‘They no good, anyway.’
‘They took their dresses and Catrina’s too,’ Mum whimpered. ‘I hadn’t finished the hems.’
Back upstairs I made some tea while Mum sat at the kitchen table staring into space. I tiptoed around the kitchen, making toast and heating up the teapot, as I attempted to coax just yes or no answers from her, trying to piece together what had happened.
‘Was that Catrina’s mum and the bridesmaids driving away?’
‘Yes.’
‘Catrina wasn’t with them?’
‘No.’
‘But they took her dress?’
‘Yes.’
‘And they didn’t want you to finish them?’
‘No.’
‘They told you why?’
Mum nodded. ‘Catrina’s mum saw Billy at the doctor’s.’
The next thing Mum said I could barely believe.
‘They’re scared about being in the same house as Billy.’
‘What?’
‘They thought I should’ve told them,’ Mum croaked. ‘Because Catrina’s pregnant and she uses the toilet when she comes over for a fitting.’ Mum lay her head on the table. ‘The world’s gone insane.’
The next morning, I called Billy at the hospital and told him Mum was sick. His words, muffled in spit that he couldn’t swallow because it hurt too much, were hard to understand. But we muddled through and I told him I’d see him later in the afternoon.
Of course, I didn’t tell him what’d happened. When he asked how the fittings had gone, I told him the ladies had left with the dresses, so now Mum could concentrate on mine. He liked that answer.
Mum lay
on the couch. Donahue was on the TV and the topic of the day was ‘Why do some children hate their parents so much they won’t even speak to them?’ If that’d been the subject on Donahue even four months ago, I may’ve joined the discussion. Shouted at the audience, Yeah, and some parents hate their children because they’re queer!
Today I didn’t, because Mum looked like a zombie lying on the couch staring at the TV. She didn’t need me to suck her just a bit drier.
The topic of ‘Should your father be told that his son is sick?’ seemed to have disappeared from the agenda. What would it achieve, anyway? It’s not as though Dad would jump on his white horse and come charging down to rescue us. And if he did turn up, it’d be beyond stressful. Billy’s T cells would probably nosedive and crash.
My job for the morning was making Billy’s mush. I wore the blue gingham apron I’d made for Mum in Grade 6, which marked the beginning and the end of my sewing career. The hem was uneven and the pocket had unravelled after its first outing. But wearing it now added to the atmosphere. There were saucepans boiling and I was elbow deep in pumpkin and potato peels. I pretended I was working in a soup kitchen for homeless people because inside my head that made it a bit more interesting.
When Aunty Penny arrived at 4.30 p.m. I had six containers of mashed vegies lined up along the counter, the lids all reading Billy Longrigg, 9SW, Bed 22.
‘Nice job, Gem,’ she said.
‘All that mashing is good for the biceps.’
‘How’s Mum?’
‘She’s asleep.’
‘I could kill those women. At least they paid her.’
‘I still can’t believe it,’ I said.
‘Me neither,’ answered Penny. ‘It’s the twentieth century. No wonder people call it a plague.’
When I arrived in Billy’s room I found him sitting up in bed, a tall pile of the latest fashion magazines stacked in front of him.
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Where did they come from?’
‘Visitors,’ he mouthed, then mopped the spit off his lips before he took a spoonful of my pumpkin mash.
‘Jonathon?’ Aunty Penny asked. ‘He called to ask if he could visit.’
‘Who’s Jonathon? Is he the fashion photographer? The really short guy?’
Billy nodded.
‘He’s not that short. He’s cute. But gay.’ Penny laughed. ‘Anyway, hope he cheered you up. The nurses said you didn’t get much sleep.’
Billy pointed to Zane’s empty bed and whispered, ‘He had a bad night.’
‘I heard they’re putting in another drain,’ Penny told us.
‘Is Zane going to be okay?’ I hoped it didn’t have anything to do with the cheeseburgers. ‘Did his lung collapse again?’
‘Most likely,’ Penny answered.
‘I might go and ask how he’s doing,’ I said.
One of the reasons I had to get away was because I couldn’t stomach watching Billy eat. The orange mash bubbled between his lips with the effort of swallowing and I knew that most of it would end up dribbling back out of his mouth. I was going to have to add pumpkin to the list with blackberry jubes.
The nurses station was at the other end of the corridor near the TV room. I wandered down to see if I could find Anna. She was the only nurse I’d spoken to enough to actually know something about. Anna was from Holland and here on a working holiday with her boyfriend.
Since Billy’s first admission, I’d probably travelled up and down the corridor of 9 South West at least fifty times. The worst part was the middle section where the single rooms were. I seemed to have formed a new style of a walk when passing by there: head down, quick steps and most importantly, don’t look in, no matter how curious you are. That was the difficult part, because often there were huddles of people crying and hugging outside the rooms. But it was the sounds from inside that freaked me out the most.
Up ahead, the door to Room 16 was wide open and a patient was being wheeled in on a bed. I glanced sideways, as quick as a flash. Yet not quick enough to miss seeing Zane disappearing and the door closing after him.
I picked up my pace, only just making it to the TV room before I collapsed into one the chairs. This was just a bump in the road, I told myself. Zane would be okay, just like Billy would. There was a cure around the corner, everyone was saying it. It was just a matter of them getting through each bump – whether it be crypto, candida, pneumonia, cat germs in your brain and whatever other strange varieties of infection AIDS had to offer the body.
The glass door of the TV room slid open. So I pasted on Polly Positive’s smile.
‘Hi, Gemma,’ Anna said. ‘I saw you coming down here.’
‘Oh? Yeah.’ For a second, I wondered if I was only allowed to be in here with a patient.
‘You saw Zane, didn’t you?’ she asked. She was crouching next to my seat. Today she was wearing blue mascara. ‘Your aunty said you’d be upset that Zane’s not well.’
‘She said they were putting another tube into his chest.’
‘They did something to Zane called “pleurodedis”. It’s sort of like they have to stick the lung together. It’s quite painful so he’s had a lot of sedation.’
‘Will he be all right?’
Anna shrugged, but she may as well have shot me in the stomach because that’s what her silence felt like. ‘We’ll have to wait and see,’ she finally said.
‘His family situation’ – I didn’t want to dob, but I didn’t want to do nothing either – ‘is complicated.’
‘We know all about it, Gemma. One of our AIDS volunteers will speak to him when he’s well enough.’
‘To see if they can contact the family?’
‘He hasn’t wanted to in the past,’ she explained. ‘But people change their mind.’
‘So you’ve asked him?’
‘Yes. A few times now.’
I felt better knowing that. It was another lesson I was learning. These days the smallest thing could make such an amazing difference to the way I felt.
‘Can I go and see him?’
‘He’s asleep,’ Anna said. ‘But I’ll take you there.’
My fingertips slid along the wall as I followed Anna back up the corridor and into the single room where Zane was.
The only sounds were the oxygen hissing and the beep of the machine that tracked his heartbeat. Zane lay as still as stone, as though he wasn’t actually there at all and in his place was a mannequin. A Zane look-alike that you could practise CPR on. The hospital gown was loose around his shoulders and I could see a tattoo. Just three numbers, etched in green: 937. The number of kilometres to home.
It was coming up to the last weekend of holidays before school went back on Tuesday. It was my turn to give Andrea excuses as to why I couldn’t go out with her. I can’t deal with you at the moment. I can’t deal with you. Or your mother. Or your grandmother, at the moment. Even though it was the truth, I was too chicken to say it. So instead, I offered her the other truth because I wanted to make her feel bad: ‘I can’t go out on Saturday night because Billy’s really sick and back in hospital.’
I hoped that wasn’t going to cast a jinx on Billy because he was actually starting to feel a bit better. He’d even managed to swallow some non-mush food. Plus, he was starting to hassle the doctors and nurses about when he could get out of there.
Zane wasn’t getting better. He had been in the single room for three days. Every time I went in, he was still lying there looking like the Zane mannequin. Once or twice I saw his fingers twitch, but that was it. Anna said they were keeping him sedated. She didn’t explain why and I didn’t ask because I never understood all the medical blah blah that came with the answers to those questions. They were the doctors and nurses, so I figured they knew what they were doing.
But I was impatient for Zane to wake up so the volunteers could talk to him about contacting his family. So his parents could hurry up and get down to the city to see him.
Billy had given us strict instructions that on Saturd
ay we were to have the whole day off and not come into the hospital. Probably the only reason Mum agreed was because he had a heap of old friends visiting him that day anyway.
Mum seemed to be beating herself up for not going in to see Billy on the day after the dress drama. She kept saying how pathetic it was that she couldn’t pull herself together and that people like Catrina and her mother weren’t worth the heartache.
Mum and I were still in our pyjamas in the afternoon. I had just finished my third bowl of cereal while watching the really cheesy midday movie.
The fabric had finally arrived from New York. The pattern was finished, the glossy black velvet spread over the table. I stood there watching as Mum held up the scissors about to make the first cut.
‘You nervous?’ I asked.
‘I am, a bit,’ she giggled. ‘I don’t know if it’s because this fabric is so beautiful.’
‘Or that it’s your daughter’s dress and you don’t want to stuff it up?’
‘Thanks for that,’ Mum answered. ‘I haven’t stuffed up a dress yet.’
Perhaps it’d been too early for a joke like that. Over the past months I had watched my mother alter Catrina’s bridal gown to fit around her ever-growing belly, the whole time telling Catrina that it wasn’t too much trouble, and that she promised her dress would be perfect and that she’d be a beautiful bride. Now Neuta stood in the corner, naked, because my brother had AIDS.
Mum took a deep breath. ‘Here goes.’ She lined up the scissors and cut into the velvet. I watched her steady hand work, cutting a straight line, the other holding the fabric tight. ‘Phew,’ she said when she reached the end. She looked at me and we both started giggling.
‘Were you scared when you made your own wedding dress?’ I asked.
‘I can’t remember.’
‘I wonder why I’m no good at sewing.’
