by Tina Shaw
A painful twinge came from the region of my chest about then. Was it my heart? No, it was a knife being twisted ever so slowly.
Actually, I shouldn’t have been out there in the Square in the first place, following people around. I should’ve been at home, in bed. Mum would have a fit if she got back from work to find I wasn’t resting. But there was another reason why I wanted to go home: I couldn’t stand the sight of Roxy and Ryan. I’d got the message, well and truly.
I pushed off from the planter, and started heading in the other direction, back to where I’d parked the Vespa.
Then I changed my mind. Bugger Ryan. He was my kid brother; I wasn’t going to let him get away with everything. I wasn’t going to be a wimp all my life. I veered across the street, making straight for them. The helmet under my arm felt like a bowling ball. I had the vague notion of slamming it into Ryan’s smug face.
Roxy saw me first. Her eyes widened. I couldn’t read the look, but for a nanosecond it was like we were the only people in the universe. But then the look vanished. A thin, secretive smile slid across her lips. That was when Ryan spotted me.
‘Hey, it’s Napoleon Dynamite,’ he shouted.
Roxy seemed to smile at this, but her eyes were cool, watching me the whole time.
All of this took place in the two seconds it took me to stride across the street. I raised my helmet, ready to smash it into my brother’s smirking face. Then whump: a car screeched against my legs. ‘Ouf,’ I went, like a Frenchman. I put a hand on the bonnet to steady myself. Was I hurt? Nope. Sadly. There wasn’t even a physical injury to blame on Ryan.
Laughter was coming from the pavement.
‘You should watch where you’re going, bro,’ called Ryan.
Rap was pumping out from the tinted windows of the car. There were a couple of guys in the front seat. Ryan opened the back door and Roxy slid across the seat. He slid in next to her, his arm slung along the top of the seat, and pulled the door shut behind them.
11
‘James …’
I hauled the pillow groggily over my head. I didn’t want to go to school today. Maybe I would quit school altogether. I could get a job weeding gardens for people – quietly, on my knees. Maybe cleaning swimming pools, like the pool guys in Malibu. Huh, who was I kidding? There was only about one pool in our suburb, and that was a Para.
‘James!’
Oh God, go away. Couldn’t she see I was not getting up? anyway, I was off school until the doc gave me the all-clear. Or until my heart settled down. Either way, I wanted to sleep in.
The covers were yanked off me. I opened my eyes to see Saruman glaring down at me. Oh Lord, why had I been given such a relentless mother? She had the bed manner of the Grim Reaper.
‘I’m asleep,’ I groaned, blinking in the harsh light that was emanating from the windows. She’d even pulled back my curtains.
‘James, you’ve got to get up – now.’
Then I noted the strained tone of her voice. ‘What is it?’ I asked, fully awake.
Maybe Ryan had totalled himself last night, wrapped his car around a power pole, as Mum was always half-expecting him to. Actually, that was just wishful thinking on my part. Though I still wouldn’t have liked Roxy to be in the car at the time.
‘There’s a …’ Mum was having trouble spitting out her news. ‘We’re going down to the hospital. Your number’s been called.’
Suddenly I caught her urgency. ‘The op?’
She nodded grimly. ‘Yes, they had a cancellation at the last minute. You were next on the list. They’re all set to go.’
‘Well, why didn’t you say so?’
I was out of the bed and grabbing clothes off the floor before she’d even made it to the door. I couldn’t believe it. I never imagined it would happen this suddenly. I thought old Doctor Brad would come round and fill us in on the story, then he’d prep me about what I was supposed to do, like not eating anything. Phew, just as well I hadn’t had breakfast yet.
I struggled into my jeans and pulled a tee-shirt over my head. Then I grabbed my overnight bag from the wardrobe, where it had been packed and ready ever since we’d known about the surgery. Open heart surgery, shit. My chest was going to be wrenched open like a plum. I tried not to think about that too much. My heart was beating like the clappers. Slow down, I told it. Wanna make it to the hospital in one piece!
Mum was waiting in the hallway, holding her car keys. With her face so pale and drawn, she looked even more like Saruman. I had a fleeting vision of opening the door to a plain of gathering orcs.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be on day shift this week?’ I asked, as we hurried down the path to the car.
‘I’ve called in already.’
Somehow I got myself into the car, then we were pulling out of the driveway, wheels screeching. That car trip was a blur in my mind. All the familiar houses and shops passed by as if in a dream. We went past Ajax’s place, with the three butterflies in flight pinned to the outside wall. I’d always thought they were so tacky, but now the sight brought a lump to my throat. I hoped I’d get to see them again.
‘You’ll call Ajax?’ I asked Mum.
‘You can call him yourself,’ she said brusquely, staring straight ahead, even though we’d stopped at the lights. ‘There’ll be time.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ I muttered. ‘Course.’ I’d sort of thought I’d be rushed straight into theatre, but maybe it wouldn’t pan out quite that way. I could’ve called him there in the car, only my hands were slippery with sweat and shaking a bit as well. Fear was shrivelling my insides. I decided it could wait. He’d be on his way to school, anyway. Yeah, it could wait.
We turned onto the main road and there was school. All the kids were going in at the gates, and I was kind of looking out for Ajax – and if truth be known, for Roxy, too. It was funny seeing the kids going to school, like it was a normal day, and me in the car on the way to the hospital, not knowing how that would play out. Tears were pricking at my eyes. I squeezed off a hard breath.
Mum sent me a glance then. ‘All right?’ she asked.
I nodded. ‘Yup.’
But inside I was like jelly. My whole insides had gone wobbly. I was a skeleton filled with loose jelly. I was trying not to think about what was ahead of me, but still I felt about ten years old, like the time two thugs tried to take my new bike off me on my way home from school. They would’ve too, if Ryan hadn’t come along. After they’d run off, I sat down on the pavement and sobbed like a baby. Ryan cuffed my head. ‘What’re you bawling for?’ he said. ‘You’ve still got your bike.’ Tough, even as a kid. And me, the eternal wimp.
‘Does Ryan know?’ I asked.
Her mouth made a little twist. ‘I haven’t seen Ryan this morning.’
Ah.
It wasn’t long before we were driving along Hagley Ave, past the park, and turning into the hospital parking building. There was the long thin chimney poking into the sky. I’d once asked Mum about that chimney. Did they burn the bodies in the hospital? She’d explained how they used the furnace to get rid of waste products, bandages and stuff, and how it also heated the building during the winter. I hadn’t quite believed her. And now, looking at that ominous pale chimney, I had to wonder whether part of me would end up in that fire. Whether part of me would go up into the sky as smoke. My little leafy heart parts … or more. I shivered. Mum sent me an anxious glance.
‘I’m fine,’ I said, without her having to ask.
She pulled into a carpark. We walked through all the cars to the tunnel which connected the parking building to the hospital. My legs felt so weak, I didn’t know if I was going to make it. The tunnel’s incline seemed so steep, it was like walking up a hill, and in my nervous state I had to stop twice to catch my breath. It was the longest walk of my life.
Mum gave my back a quick rub. ‘You’ll be fine, son,’ she said, making it sound as if I was only going to sit NCEA or something. She’s a terrible faker. At that moment I really, really wa
nted to be Clint Eastwood. Or anybody else, for that matter. Just not me.
Mum was standing over by the window, trying to call Ryan’s cell phone again, when Doctor Brad came in. He sat on the side of the bed, acting the relaxed buddy kind of guy, when really I bet he was nervous as hell. I wanted to ask him how many of these operations he’d done before, but thought I’d better keep quiet. This wasn’t a good moment to piss off my heart surgeon.
Mum got off the phone and sat in the chair beside the bed. We had a private room, with a really nice view over the doctors’ carpark. If I’d bothered to look, I’d see all the shiny tops of the parked cars glittering in the morning sun, like the sun glinting off the helmets of the Rohirrim on the fields of Pelennor. I wondered if Doctor Brad was a LOTR fan. Maybe he preferred action movies where there wasn’t too much blood (he probably saw enough of that at work) like, I dunno, Mission Impossible. I’d have to ask him one day, if I got the chance.
Doctor Brad meanwhile folded his very clean-looking hands over his knee and gave us his serious look. He was really a nice guy; I just reckoned he was not too good at talking to people. It seemed to make him nervous the way I got nervous if I had to speak in assembly, or do anything else in assembly, for that matter.
‘I’m sorry we’re running a little behind,’ he started. Mum craned forward in her chair, even though she was practically sitting in his lap already. ‘We had a young man brought in this morning who was in a car crash – a serious crash. We operated, but we weren’t able to save him.’
Should he be telling us this stuff, I wondered? Maybe he was opening up to us because my mum was a nurse. But it sure didn’t make me feel any better.
‘Anyway,’ the good doctor continued, ‘a theatre’s only just become available.’
He paused, swallowing. Mum and I exchanged a glance. We were both thinking about Ryan. But surely it couldn’t be him? That would be just too macabre.
Doctor Brad had cleared his throat and was carrying on. ‘So, James, are you ready for your op?’
I sort of squeaked, ‘Yeah, I guess.’
But really I was thinking about Ryan. I had an image of Ryan, all beat up, lying in a hospital bed and hooked up to these big thrumming machines that were trying to keep him alive. Mum, when I glanced at her again, had blanched. Even her lips had gone pale. I saw her fingers twitch around the cell phone. I knew she was dying to call Ryan again, but was fighting the impulse cause she wanted to hear what else Doctor Brad had to say.
Doctor Brad gave a nod. ‘Good boy,’ he said, getting off the bed. Then he said to my mother, ‘The nurse’ll be along soon to prep him.’
She nodded (one health professional to another), also standing up, and I waited for her to ask the question that was preying on both our minds. But maybe she was too freaked out, because she didn’t say a thing. Did I have to do all the dirty work round here?
‘Um, Doctor Brad?’ I said, in that high-pitched mouse squeak I didn’t seem to have any control over right then.
‘Yes, James?’
‘I just wanted to know – how old was the guy from the accident?’
That gave old Doctor Brad pause. He frowned, like he didn’t want to tell us. But then he said, ‘I think he was nineteen.’ He and my mother exchanged glances: so young, I could read their look, a bloody waste. Though Mum wasn’t looking too sad about the tragedy of it. In fact, she looked positively cheerful. It wasn’t Ryan – that was what she’d be thinking (and well, me too).
‘Why do you ask?’
Mum answered for me. ‘Oh, no reason, Brad,’ she said in a relaxed voice. ‘Thanks for everything.’
Brad? Hm, first name basis, and when did that happen? Maybe there was some doctor-nurse thing starting up here. Kind of cheesey, I know, like Shortland Street.
The guy gave a shy kind of look, mumbling something about how he hadn’t done anything – yet – and headed out of the room.
Mum slumped down into the chair, and glared at her cell phone. ‘Bloody Ryan,’ she muttered over the phone, looking thunderous. ‘Wait till I get my hands on him …’
I was thinking about that ‘yet’ – hadn’t done anything ‘yet’. My tummy was growling, from hunger, yes, but also from sheer terror. This must be like waiting your turn to do a bungy jump. Now, some people probably enjoyed bungy jumping, but it was nearly the worst thing I could think of doing. However, I had just discovered something far scarier, and it was going to happen to me very soon, this morning. Maybe, once all this was over, I’d give bungy jumping a go. I might like it.
Mum, meanwhile, had put her phone away. ‘He’s a very good doctor, you know,’ she murmured, crossing her legs. ‘Everybody in the hospital says so. Got a very good, solid reputation.’
‘I should hope so,’ I said. ‘I don’t want any old junior doctor operating on me. He’d probably get things mixed up, and whack in a chimp’s valve or something.’
‘They don’t have chimp valves lying around, James.’ She was examining her nails, probably thinking about having an anxious chew on them.
‘How do you know? The heart guys could have all sorts of weird stuff back there and you wouldn’t know about it.’
She gave a crooked smile. ‘I have a fair idea of what goes on in this hospital.’
‘What about when they leave their tools behind, inside somebody?’ I’d seen that on TV – X-rays of scissors and scalpels, left inside bodies. ‘You come in for a simple ingrown toenail and you end up walking round with a whole bunch of metal tools stuck inside you.’
‘Shut up, James,’ she said, but she was smiling now.
There was something bugging me that I wanted to talk to her about, but I wasn’t quite sure how to put it into words. ‘Um …’ I said, that dazzling conversation opener.
Mum looked at me expectantly. I could tell she was still a bit nervous though, because her eyes kept darting over to the door. Unless she was hoping good, solid ‘Brad’ would make another appearance. ‘What is it, James?’
‘I was just thinking,’ I mumbled, fiddling with the covers. They’d got me to put on one of their green gowns that tie at the back, and I was feeling a bit naked.
‘Yes?’
‘Well, what if something goes wrong in there?’
Her lips tightened, the way they used to just before she was about to whack me (which, for the record, hadn’t happened for a very long time). Then she grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze.
‘Aw, Mum,’ I whined, trying to pull my hand out of her clutches, but she’d latched on tight. I really hoped she wasn’t going to cry.
‘Oh James, it’ll be fine. I know it’s a big operation, but they do them all the time these days.’ The way she was nodding and blinking and hanging onto my hand, I could tell she was trying to reassure herself more than me.
‘Yeah, sure,’ I said, trying to sound like I believed it. ‘But just say, um, something did go wrong, what happens then? I mean, say they get my old chest cracked open and then my heart stops?’
‘Oh,’ she said, making a big ‘O’ with her mouth. Then she got a grip on herself and flicked into her nurse role. ‘Well in that case they would defibrillate the heart.’ Her eyes were darting from side to side. She’d obviously not thought of that one. ‘But that is not going to happen,’ she added grimly.
‘Yes but,’ I continued relentlessly, unable to help myself, ‘what if they really can’t get it going again?’
‘Oh, James!’
That was when my mum’s eyes welled up and great big tears splashed down her cheeks. Oh, darn. You’d think I’d done it on purpose. When I really just wanted to get everything straight in my own head. She scrambled away from the bed, trying to find her bag. There was a box of tissues on the bedside table (thoughtfully left there for emergencies of this very nature), so I grabbed those and pushed them in her direction. She pulled out a handful and disappeared out into the corridor. She didn’t go far. I could hear her snuffling and blowing her nose.
I sighed. I really didn’t mea
n to upset her, but hell, I wanted to know the worst case scenario. Well, not all the gory details. But I wanted to know roughly what might happen to me and my old heart. And sure, Doctor Brad had filled me in on the ‘procedure’, as he called it. ‘The operation’s got a high success rate,’ he’d said. But that was what had been preying on my mind. Because where you’ve got a success rate, you’ve also got a failure rate. And failure in this case meant not coming back out of the operating theatre – didn’t it? What if I didn’t make it? What if this was the end of James Griffen? Full stop. Finito. Zero.
To be frank, I was scared shitless. And I was also really pissed off. I mean, it wasn’t exactly fair. Why couldn’t I have just had the flu? Then none of this would be happening. And there was so much more to do. I was still a virgin, I didn’t have a car, I hadn’t been overseas, unless you counted Australia. I hadn’t been bloody bungy jumping – and by this stage, sitting propped up in the starched hospital bed, I really did want to go bungy jumping, even if it killed me. Most of all, I was pissed off that I’d been so gutless when it came to Roxy. If I hadn’t got Ryan to talk to her, maybe the whole thing would’ve ended up differently. Who knows, maybe it would’ve been Roxy sitting here by my bed holding my hand, instead of my mother.
How leaden.
Noises were coming from outside my door. Voices, and something clanking. A nurse burst in then, pushing a metal trolley. She was closely followed by my mother, who had a bright, funny look on her face. ‘So can I give you a hand?’ she asked.
‘No need,’ said the nurse, with a bright look on her face, ‘you just relax, Emily. James and I will get on just fine.’
‘All right,’ mumbled my mother, ‘then I might just, um, wait outside.’ I’d never seen her so docile.
‘That’s a good idea,’ chirped the young nurse. She looked like she was on drugs. Which, considering where she worked, must’ve been pretty easy to score.
