The Bubble Boy

by Stewart Foster

  ‘Maybe we should,’ says Dr Moore, ‘. . . and maybe postpone the television people.’

  ‘Do we have to? Can’t you just change the filters?’

  ‘Just for a day or two, Joe. It’s not just that. We have to work out what’s going on inside of you at the moment.’

  ‘But I feel okay!’

  Dr Moore bites on his lip as he looks at my chart again.

  ‘Joe, it’s the third nosebleed in eight days.’

  I nod. I know that. I don’t need the chart to count – yesterday, then three days ago and four days before that. It’s the third one since they started the new treatment. They’re trying a new drug to keep my white blood cells up. If it works, it won’t cure me, but it will stop my body getting so many infections and I won’t have to have so many blood transfusions. I hate blood transfusions. It’s when they give me new blood. It doesn’t hurt but it makes me feel sick the day after.

  Dr Moore takes a deep breath.

  ‘More blood tests?’

  ‘Yes, I think so, Joe, just to be safe.’

  He tells Dr Hussein to arrange a test for tomorrow morning, then they press some buttons on the monitor and walk back towards the door. They say goodbye and tell me they’ll see me soon. I look down at my bed. Greg sits back down beside me.

  ‘Hey, mate. It’s just for a day.’

  ‘But I love it when the TV people come!’

  ‘I know, mate. Let’s see how it goes.’

  I look back at the monitors. I wish I could change the numbers with my mind. Make the air purity go up, make my temperature go down, keep my heartbeat constant. But I can’t control them. My body does that. Not very well, though.

  ‘Does it mean Beth can’t come either?’ I ask.

  ‘Of course she can.’

  I lie back on my bed, hear my breath and in the distance I can hear the low buzz of the workmen’s drills outside. Greg stays with me for ten minutes until his shift ends and the new day nurse arrives.

  The new nurse started yesterday. He doesn’t talk to me much. All I know is that his name is Amir and that he’s come to England from India. I only know that because it’s what Greg told me, and he only told me that much because that was all Amir had told him.

  Greg gets up and says ‘hello’ when Amir comes in and Amir says ‘hello’ back, but his words are muffled behind his mask. Greg shows him where stuff is, asks him if he has any questions. Amir shakes his head and mumbles that he’s okay. Greg holds his arms out and shrugs behind Amir’s back. I want to laugh but I can’t because Amir is looking right at me. Greg slides out of the door. I wait for Amir to say something but he doesn’t. He just walks around my room, slides the chair back into the corner, ties the string on the blinds, smoothes his hand over the monitor, then presses his finger against the red light and for a moment it glows bright. I want to tell him that he looks like ET, but it’s hard to talk to strangers. It’s easier if they talk to me first. People who come in from the outside have things they can say – they can tell me what they did last night, what time they got up, why they’re unhappy, why they missed the bus. But I can’t tell them what I did yesterday because it was the same as the day before and the day before that. I could tell him that I don’t have anything interesting to say but you’re not supposed to start conversations like that. And it’s even harder to talk to people who wear a mask because I can’t tell what they’re thinking as easily. Some of the new people wear them when they first start. They say it’s to stop me catching things, but when they leave after a few days I think it’s because they are more scared of catching things off of me.

  Finally Amir walks over to the window and stops. He looks across at the grey building opposite, then up at the sky. A plane flies across it and he turns his head and watches it fly over the Lucozade building towards Mercedes-Benz. Then he turns his head to look back to where the plane came from.

  ‘We’re on the flight path,’ I say.

  Amir jumps and looks at me with his eyes bulging above his mask.

  ‘We’re on the flight path for Heathrow.’

  He doesn’t say anything; he just looks at the planes in the sky. It’s only been a day but maybe he’s already wishing he was out there with them instead of being stuck in here with me.

  I look up at the clock. It’s nearly 11 a.m. I flip up the lid of my laptop (I’ve got a Science lesson this morning), look at the screen, then glance over the top. Amir sighs, walks away from the window and then stops by the door.

  ‘You let me know if you want anything,’ he says.

  ‘Okay.’

  He opens the door and in a second he’s gone.

  I wish the people didn’t change so often. It’s like they only stay until I’ve got to know them and then they move somewhere else and new people come in and I have to start all over again.

  I click on my laptop and start my lesson with Sarah. Sarah is my science teacher. She has brown hair, brown eyes and wears a blue cardigan. I don’t know if she has any legs but I do know that when she says my name the J sounds like a D and the O sounds like an E, so she calls me Dew not Joe. Sarah doesn’t talk to me about TV, about football, or the weather. All she talks to me about is science. It’s the only way I can learn without the risk of people bringing me infections. Sometimes she is there for real and we can talk, but today I think that maybe she has gone on holiday because she’s left me a video of her to click on.

  I have to do this lesson for two hours every week. I don’t get holidays the same time as other kids because I miss school when I’m poorly. Today’s lesson is about resonance. I click on Sarah’s picture. The screen changes to a diagram of two boxes side by side with two wires inside. I close my eyes, open them again. It’s only been a few seconds but I already feel like yawning. I look at my browser, think of going on YouTube, maybe Spotify. It’s not like Sarah’s here to check I’ve done it. I fast-forward. A picture comes up of sound waves beating down from a boat to the bottom of the ocean. I go to click on the boat but the Skype icon at the bottom of my screen starts flashing. I click on it.

  Hi Joe

  11:10

  I smile.

  Hi Henry. What are you doing?

  11:10

  The pencil scribbles on the screen.

  Stuck in a bubble . . . You?

  11:11

  Stuck in a bubble.

  11:11

  Ha.

  11:12

  You doing much today?

  11:12

  Learning physics from a cartoon. Waiting for Beth.

  You going out of your room?

  11:13

  No . . . Too hot . . . The cooling system broke yesterday.

  11:14

  Ha.

  11:14

  I fried!

  11:14

  I smile again and feel warm inside.

  Want to go to screen?

  11:15

  Henry feels more like my real friend when I can actually see him.

  Sure.

  11:15

  They’re digging up the road outside.

  11:15

  Show me.

  11:15

  We switch to video. Henry’s smiling face fills the screen and we wave. I take my laptop over to the window and tilt it so the camera is pointing down the road. I show Henry the roadworks, the yellow diggers and the traffic lights, then I pan it across the street, show him the people walking in the rain past the shop fronts, then the buildings up above, the big tall windows, one stacked upon another, then I show him the gutters and the roofs. I stop by the building opposite and tell him that’s where the man in the grey boiler suit comes out and slits the pigeons’ throats.

  ‘Wait until he comes out again,’ he says.

  ‘I can’t see him. Maybe he’s having a cup of tea.’

  ‘Show me tomorrow then.’

  I move the camera on, more rooftops, more shop doorways, more people walking in the rain.

  ‘See, nothing much happens.’

  ‘Wanna s
ee out my window?’

  ‘Sure.’ The screen goes white.

  ‘Henry!’ I say. ‘Don’t point the camera at the sun.’

  ‘Oops, sorry.’ He angles the camera down. I see the big red-brick buildings sticking up into the sky, and a park and a cemetery with white headstones that stretch out for miles. Henry told me it’s called Clark Park – children play football and baseball there.

  The cemetery is called Woodlands. Henry thinks people go there straight from the hospital morgue. The camera starts to shake.

  ‘Henry, are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m good. Just walking to the other window.’ He turns the camera. I see his blond hair and smiley face again. He’s always so happy to show me around. He gets out of the way and I see more red buildings, cars and buses going down straight roads, stopping at the lights and in the distance I see a ferry crossing a river. It’s the Schuylkill River that splits the city in half. Then he sits down on his bed.

  It’s only taken us ten minutes to do our window tours. He tells me he thinks London looks great today. I tell him his streets look more interesting than mine. He laughs and tells me it’s boring, that I only like America because it looks so exciting in films.

  I hear a door click open. Henry looks up over the top of his screen.

  ‘Hey, Brett’s here.’ He turns his screen. Brett is Henry’s favourite nurse. He’s tall and skinny and he’s got spiky hair like Bart Simpson. He bends down and waves at me.

  ‘Hey, dude,’ he says. ‘How you doing?’

  ‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m good. Sorry, but I’ve got to check on this guy and give him his meds.’

  ‘It’s okay. I’m going to go, Henry. Catch you later.’

  I close down my laptop. I like chatting to Brett, but I hate seeing the needles. Greg says it’s psychological, that I’m hyper-empathetic. It’s just a complicated way of saying that whenever they stick a needle in Henry, it feels like it’s going into me. I don’t know when it started to happen, only that it did.

  Henry is my best friend. He’s American and lives in a hospital in Philadelphia where his doctors think he has the same condition as me. Or maybe I have the same condition as him, because he’s three years older than me so has been trapped in his bubble three years longer than I’ve been trapped in mine. But Henry might be going outside. Not for ever, just for an hour or so. A scientist from NASA has made him a spacesuit with special lightweight oxygen tanks. So far he’s only worn it in his room, but yesterday they let him walk to the end of the corridor. It sounds like they’ve still got some technical problems but I think Henry will be going outside soon. I wish I was too. I wish I could go outside and walk with the people down the street. They might just be going to work but I’d love to walk with them in the sun or in the rain and I’d talk to them without worrying that I might die every time I take a breath. I’d like to go a park and kick a ball and throw a Frisbee for a dog. I’ve never been to a park and the only time I’ve ever seen a dog is on TV. Henry hasn’t seen one either. He saw a cat outside his window once, but I think he must have been dreaming because his window is two hundred feet up in the air.

  When I was nine, I dreamt the doctors were going to fly me over to visit him. I told Henry, and we planned what we would do if we could hang out. He would bring Madden NFL 13 and I would get FIFA 13, then we would watch old films. Henry wanted to watch Terminator – he would bring all four of them, and we’d stay up all night and drink our glucose drinks and play music. But the director of his hospital wouldn’t let us do it in real life. He said it wasn’t practical or safe for either of us to travel ten miles in a car, let alone three thousand on a plane. So we just use Skype instead.

  I close down my laptop and think of him in his room. His doctors are trying something new, too. They’re injecting him with something called Amphotericin B to fight off fungal infections. If it works for him then maybe it’ll work me too. Last year they gave him extra vitamin D because he was sweating lots and his bones were aching. It made him hallucinate and be really thirsty. Two weeks later they tried the same with me. It made me dizzy and sick. It made me think that maybe me and Henry don’t have the same thing after all; we just live in the same kind of place.

  I hear a buzz by my side and pick up my phone. There’s a picture of Beth on the screen and a message. She says she’s sorry but she’s got an assignment to finish and she won’t be able to make it to me until five. I tell her it’s okay, pick up the remote and turn on the TV. The news headlines are on. There’s pictures of big tanks with soldiers marching beside them somewhere in Russia, another picture of a plane and a map of the Indian Ocean, and a photograph of a boy who’s raised a million pounds for cancer just by posting things on Twitter, and then there’s a weather map of Britain saying it’s 34C outside.

  I change to the DVD remote and watch Avengers Assemble. It’s the third time I’ve seen it, even though Beth only bought it for me last week. She’s always buying DVDs for me. Once I asked her how she could afford them all; she just said they weren’t that expensive and sometimes she just borrows them from her friends. But she never takes them back. I really love Beth. She’s the only relative I have left who can visit me since Mum and Dad died.

  Halfway through the film my head begins to ache and my eyelids begin to drop. I turn the sound down and close my eyes, hear people screaming, things crashing and Thor shouting. My head feels light and I can’t feel my legs or my feet.

  Buildings rise up out of the dark and they’re on fire. The streets are filled with cars that have crashed into one another and people are running and yelling and I’m running with them. Webs or jets? Webs or jets? Jets are quicker but web-slinging is cool. But I’m a superhero. I’m here to save people, not to have fun. I press a button on my chest and flames shoot from my feet. A car flies through the air towards me. I stop it with my hand and put it gently back down on the road. Another car, a falling lamppost, three children are standing underneath it. I flick my wrists and press two fingers into my palm, then my webs wrap around them and pull them out of the way. I hear a rumble and look up. A building is tumbling down above me. The people are running and screaming between flying pieces of metal and concrete. I try to run with them but the tarmac is cracking and the earth’s core is burning below. More metal, more concrete. I run through it all, protecting myself with Mjolnir’s force field. Mjolnir is the name of Thor’s hammer, but now I have it. I can protect anyone and anything. I’m Spider-Man, Thor, and Ironman. I’m all the superheroes rolled into one. Gotta go! There’s a man on a ledge whose clothes are on fire. I engage my jets and fly up into the sky . . .

  The TV screen is blank when I wake up. There’s a glass of water and a silver packet of food beside me on the table. The clock says 7:50. I turn my head. Beth is sat in the chair beside me. She pulls her earphones out of her ears.

  ‘Must be tiring saving the planet.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  She nods at my sheet all crumpled up at the end of my bed. ‘Well, it was either that or you were having a great game of football.’ Beth puts her hand on my arm.

  ‘You okay?’

  I nod. ‘Yeah, it’s just too quiet today.’

  She rubs my arm. ‘And you’re still tired?’

  I smile even though I don’t feel like it. I take a deep breath.

  ‘Another blood test tomorrow,’ I say.

  ‘I know, Dr Moore called me. Don’t worry.’

  ‘The TV people might not come.’

  She rubs my arm again.

  ‘Let’s just wait and see. Hey, I’ve got something for you.’ She reaches down by her side and hands me a plastic bag. I pull out a new Arsenal shirt and a t-shirt with a picture of Spider-Man hanging upside down, and a pair of new pyjamas.

  ‘Thanks!’ I say. ‘Sorry I keep getting blood on them.’

  ‘It’s okay, it’s not like you can help it.’

  I take off my t-shirt and pull the Spider-Man one over
my head. Beth reaches out and fluffs up my hair.

  ‘It looks good,’ she says. I brush my hand over my t-shirt. The cotton presses against my skin. Spidey has already been washed and sterilized before I get to wear him. That’s what happens to all my clothes. Me and Beth usually pick them out together online or she’ll send me pictures of things when she’s out shopping. I like to pick my own clothes, especially my trainers.

  Beth takes a deep breath. ‘So, what’s the new nurse like?’

  I shrug. ‘I don’t know. He doesn’t say much. He just moves things around and then watches the planes.’

  Beth laughs. ‘Maybe he wishes he was on holiday.’

  ‘Maybe he’s wishing he could escape the bubble.’

  Beth sort of smiles then rests her head on her hand and her hair falls down the side of her face and covers the little red scar on her cheek. My laptop makes a da-lute sound beside me. I look at the clock. It’s 8 o’clock at night in London. It’s 3 o’clock in the afternoon in Philadelphia. Henry is waiting to talk to me again already.

  Another beep.

  Beth tells me I can talk to him if I want. I tell her I’d rather talk to her. She smiles.

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Tell me what else you’ve done today . . . apart from saving the planet and watching the nurse watch the planes.’

  I shrug. ‘I learnt what resonance means.’

  ‘Really, what is it?’

  ‘I think you know.’

  ‘I don’t, tell me.’

  I tell her about the two boxes with the wires in them, that if you touch one it makes a noise and then the one in the other box does the same even though it hasn’t been touched. She nods like she understands.