by Hannah Bent
Harper
Today is a Tuesday, which means it is ‘popcorn and romantic movie night’, but my dad says I cannot go because I am too sick. To be honest, I’m a little upset about this. I am in a new hospital, and the doctors are very friendly, but I don’t really feel okay about missing tonight. I don’t like skipping things that are written in my diary. But I am practising some deep breathing skills that Wài Pó has taught me. This is helping my mind to relax. Another thing helping me to relax is that I have Louis, the love of my heart, by my side.
He is always so smartly dressed. Today he is wearing a navy suit with a pink shirt. He has a few watches on his arm because he loves telling the time, and when he looks down at them, his syrupy hair falls over his face. Even though he needs a haircut, he is one of the most handsome men I have ever met.
He brought me a gift today: a packet of coloured glass beads which he is helping me make into a necklace. As we do this, we are half listening to Dad and Wài Pó, who are talking in hushed voices to the doctors outside my bed curtain.
‘You have a beautiful neck,’ Louis says, ‘and these beads will make you look like a princess.’
He tries so hard to put the thread into the hole of each bead, but keeps missing.
In – out – miss, in – out – miss. In – almost in – miss.
I wish I could help him but I can’t because I have too many wires and drips and things stuck to me. Louis frowns as he threads, then sighs loudly and dumps his hands onto his lap, shaking his head. He missed another bead. Poor Louis. He is not enjoying this. I will ask Wài Pó to finish the necklace for him.
I can hear the hard sound of Irene’s high heels against the floor as she comes into the room. She’s always late.
‘Hello, I’m Irene. It’s a pleasure to meet you.’ Her accent is always so posh when she is talking to new people. I hear the doctor say hello back. He doesn’t know yet that she’s a stepmonster.
They start talking again for a while at a low mumble, mumble, mumble, then Dad’s voice becomes louder.
‘We’ve already been to another hospital!’
Louis, fingering the beads on his lap, moves his head to the side and listens. He is frowning.
‘Why can’t you help us?’ Dad asks.
Louis looks at me. ‘Why do you have to keep changing hospitals?’ That is a good question and I try to think in my mind for a good answer.
‘Dad said the doctors at the last hospital were useless and something called dis-crim-in-a-tory. That’s why.’
‘What does dis-crim-in-a-tory mean?’
Last night, I had used a dictionary to look this word up. Discrimination: Showing an unfair or prejudicial distinction between different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age or sex. That was a lot of new information in my head that I didn’t understand. I needed more time to figure it out with the help of an internet search engine and my speech therapist, Mrs Green. But I didn’t tell Louis this. I told him it meant anger towards doctors. I knew this because when Dad spoke, I could tell he was growing a fire in his heart. He spat his words out and I knew there would be red in his cheeks. I thought he was being a bit unfair. Doctors always try to do their best. They always have with me, ever since I was small.
Suddenly, Dad’s voice grew even louder. ‘I don’t understand why you won’t put her on the transplant list.’
Transplant. I have not looked up this word in the dictionary yet but they said it in the last hospital too.
I cannot hear what the doctors are saying back to my dad; their voices are too small and quiet.
‘If my daughter didn’t have Down syndrome, I’m sure you would be giving her the chance she needs to survive.’
‘Um, excuse me, it’s called Up syndrome.’ I speak in a loud way but no one pays attention.
‘This is utter discrimination.’
That word again. I can feel Dad’s heat. It is all over the room, making me feel breathless.
‘James, please calm down.’ My stepmonster’s voice is cool, so cool.
Why does she get to speak and be listened to, but I don’t? They are always talking about me, but I am never included.
‘Hello!’ I call from my side of the curtain. ‘Hello!’
Louis joins in. ‘Hello, everyone, Harper is calling you.’
‘Keep your voice down,’ I hear Stepmonster say to my dad. ‘She’ll only get sicker if she’s distressed.’
Wài Pó slides through the gap in the curtain. She takes my hand and pats it. ‘No need to worry, Míng Huà. The doctors are trying to make you better.’ She looks sideways with her eyes at the gap in the curtain. Everyone’s voices are quiet again.
‘I don’t like this talking behind my back one bit,’ I tell Wài Pó. She takes a hawthorn candy from her pocket and offers it to me.
‘Not hungry.’
She goes to Louis and takes the beads from his lap. ‘So beautiful!’ She sits beside him and starts threading. In and out, Wài Pó’s quick fingers move between each bead. And then she starts singing; it is a Chinese song my mum used to sing for me. In my heart and in my mind I say, ‘Hello, Mum.’ I feel her with me.
We stay like this together – invisible Mum, me, Louis and Wài Pó – until the necklace is finished. Wài Pó holds it up to the light in the ceiling. It shines in the colours yellow, red, orange, green, purple and blue. This is a beautiful thing.
Dad pulls open the curtain so hard it makes a sharp scratching noise against the railings. His face is red, just like I knew it would be. Irene is behind him, searching for something in her bag. Her face isn’t red like Dad’s, but her red lips, red nails and red dress pop against the white walls of the hospital. She pulls out her car keys.
‘I’ll meet you in the car park,’ she tells Dad, then goes clip clop clip clop down the corridor.
Dad faces me. ‘Darling, we need to get another opinion from a different doctor again.’
I don’t understand what this means.
‘We just need to find you a doctor who will help. Don’t worry – I’m sure there is one out there.’
I thought the doctors were helping me. But before I can say this, he is already talking to Wài Pó, telling her to pack up my things.
‘Irene is getting the car. I’m going to settle the bill.’
He’s off in a flash, stamping his feet as he goes.
A nurse enters. She walks over to me and takes off all the coloured wires on my chest. These wires measure my hum in a way that doctors can understand. I ask her why she is removing the wires. She says I am going home. This is confusing, because my chest is still sore, I am still out of breath, I have a terrible cough and my body is cold and puffy.
‘Don’t the doctors need to wait until I am better?’ I ask. That is what usually happens. The doctors don’t send me home until I am better and can walk without feeling like I am losing air.
The nurse looks away and tells me not to worry. Then Wài Pó talks to me in Chinese and tells me not to worry. But instead, I start to feel the panic in my chest.
‘Don’t worry,’ she repeats. ‘We will find a doctor to help you.’ She is speaking in the English language now so Louis can understand and be calm in his heart too. But I think that is what Dad said, too, and it still doesn’t make sense. I study her face for more clues but she won’t look me in the eye.
‘Louis.’ I reach my hand out to have him hold it. ‘I don’t understand.’ Louis hops from side to side, which means he is nervous. I don’t like it when he is nervous. It is not good if both of us feel bad, though, so I take a deep breath and say, ‘Will you put my beautiful necklace on me?’
He stops moving and smiles. ‘Of course, my beauty. Of course I will.’
To be honest, I like it better at home than in the hospital, because even though my Marlowe is not with us in our big white house, I still feel her here.
Every day, when I walk past her room, I say, ‘Hello to you, my Marlowe.’ I wonder if she can hear me from fa
r away. I think in my mind about the letter I wrote her, and all the other ones I have written since she has been gone.
‘Writing a message to someone by hand is a special thing.’ That’s what Dad says and I agree. He also writes letters, though I don’t think he sends them. But that’s okay.
I think to myself that when you open a letter that has been made by hand with a pen and paper, you can feel and touch the mark of another person. You can see their moods in the shape of their words, and sometimes you can find their smell caught between the ink and the paper.
Oh, I do wish my Marlowe would come home soon.
I am back in my bedroom with its happy yellow walls. I am not thinking about missing popcorn and romantic movie night, or that Louis went without me. I know he didn’t mean to make me feel sad, it’s just that he finds it even harder than I do not to stick to the schedules that are written in our diaries. And anyway, I feel okay because I am doing something special. I am sitting with all my things that are in the in-between. I am trying to help them find their way again. But you can’t force them; all you can do is try your best. This is something Marlowe did in her room when we were small. She was good at saving things.
By my window, I have the calamansi plant that forgot how to give fruit. It became sick and black in the roots. There is also the gecko that lost its tail by accident of the French doors closing on it. Last of all is the little duckling. I found her by the Silverstrand Mart in Clearwater Bay. The duckling must have lost her mother, so I put her in my pocket and gave warm love. Then I made a shoebox bed with some dried flowers. The first day this little duckling did not move much because I forgot to feed her and also because I think she may have missed her mum. But now this little duckling has a good, strong hum and is quack quack quacking away.
Today I give the duckling a name. It is Méi Lì. This is the same name my Wài Pó has. I sing to Méi Lì, just like when I was in the hospital and Wài Pó sang for me.
Marlowe
My grandpa was forty something in the photograph, standing on a rock, holding a butterfly net. His gaze rested beyond the frame. He had probably seen a Papilio machaon hovering by a purple coneflower. The photo was clipped from an obituary in the 1994 issue of the Lepidopterists’ Society journal, stuck with blu-tack to the inside cover of my notebook. The caption read: Arthur Marlow Eve, 1969. Norfolk Broads, United Kingdom.
‘I miss you, Grandpa,’ I said to the photo.
The house was quiet. Olly had left, and I was sitting in the living room, reviewing my notes before heading into uni for a meeting with Professor Lipin, rereading the words I knew so well, trying to formulate a compelling way to eventually present this to my thesis panel.
The Conservation and Natural History of the Maculinea arion, Britain’s Previously Extinct Species.
Factors involved in the decline of the Maculinea arion…
Since the 1979 United Kingdom extinction of M. arion.
Thomas. J.A. and Simcox. D.J.’s research on the symbiotic relationship between the M. arion caterpillar and the Myrmica sabuleti brought the species back from the dead and changed conservation practices forever. M. arion’s social parasitisation of M. sabuleti occurs through a complex system of chemical mimicry and olfactory deception. Once the adult M. sabuleti has been deceived into caring for the M. arion grub, it will feed off the ant larvae…
I paused at a photo I had taken of a specimen, pinned. The small, blue butterfly was stunning. The insides of its dusty, metallic wings refracted the light in different shades of blue and silver. I thought of aspects of the arion grub’s cannibalistic and predatory behaviour. How could something so beautiful be born from such a violent process? I looked at the image next to it. With a zoom lens, I had captured a cluster of hardened scales on the insect’s left wing. They looked like a collection of iridescent blue snowflakes.
The sound of the phone ringing startled me. I uncurled myself from our armchair and went to the side table to answer it.
‘Hello?’
‘Darling?’ Dad again. He never called just to chat.
‘How’s –’
‘Not good.’
I felt his words sink to the pit of my stomach.
‘I’m afraid Harper’s condition is worse than we had thought…’ He cleared his throat. ‘I didn’t want to have to tell you over the phone.’ His voice started to tremble. ‘I don’t quite know how to say this…’ Adrenaline snaked through my body. I don’t quite know how to say this… He had used these exact words when Mum –
‘Harper is dying.’
Dying.
That word.
That word that I had heard so many times before.
I hated that word.
His voice sounded fuzzy now, as if he were speaking in slow motion. ‘Her heart and lung functions have deteriorated significantly. We’ve been told that medication and corrective surgery will no longer help. She needs a heart and lung transplant.’
The world both inside and outside my body went silent.
‘Well, get her those transplants then!’ I was shouting. Why was I shouting?
‘It’s not as simple as that. We’ve been to several hospitals. The doctors have told us there are not enough organs available to meet the demand, and because of Harper’s disability they are refusing even to put her on a transplant list.’
It took me a while to make sense of what he was saying, and when I did, I sank to the floor.
‘This can’t be happening. Refusing to put her on a transplant list – isn’t that discrimination? Surely something can be done!’
‘Before we go down that road, there’s one more hospital we can try. We have a meeting with the doctors from the Queen Victoria Heart Hospital on Saturday afternoon. I would like you to be there.’
‘But Wài Pó said not to worry.’ Words started flowing from my mouth as if of their own accord. ‘Wài Pó said to focus on my PhD. I have my thesis defence in a month…’ Why was I telling him this? Dad had never approved of my decision to leave Hong Kong to study overseas. My thesis defence meant nothing to him.
I paused for breath, suddenly realising what I was saying. Harper’s life was at stake – of course my thesis defence didn’t matter now.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ashamed.
‘Harper’s most recent test results came in last night. It’s much worse than we had anticipated. You know Wài Pó… she couldn’t bear to be the one to tell you.’ He sighed into the phone. ‘I think you should come home, Marlowe. This time is different. Harper needs you now.’
I felt like I was going to be sick. This couldn’t be happening. I wouldn’t allow it. I would fix things, just like I always did.
‘I’ll book my flight home today.’
I hung up the phone. Although it was warm in the house, I was shivering. I swallowed a deep sound that wanted to escape from my throat. I knew if I let myself cry, I wouldn’t be able to stop. So, I counted: One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three… focusing on the numbers, their shape, their sound, until I hit my tenth Mississippi and felt my body go numb.
I was late. I stood up and reached for my shoulder bag by the front door; it smelled like the fresh thyme that grew abundantly in our lab. I thought of my research, of all the hard work I had done. And then I thought of Olly. It was like being hit by a tonne of lead. How was I supposed to say goodbye to Olly?
Don’t think, just walk.
I opened the front door. Cold air pricked the skin at my neck and I readjusted my scarf so that no skin was exposed. My boots squelched against the wet pavement as I raced to the bus stop.
There was a queue for the 19. I joined the end of the line, trying to steady my breathing by watching a discarded Tesco sandwich being consumed by a ravenous black cat. I boarded the bus and fought my way through the press of damp, cold bodies to the upper deck.
There was an empty seat beside a foggy window. I sat down and exhaled deeply. In front of me, a middle-aged couple conversed in Hindi. The woman didn’t pause for breath, her voic
e growing louder by the second. To her left, a teenage girl with Down syndrome sang.
Dad’s words played over and over in my mind.
Harper needs you now. He had said those words so many times before. Damn it, he hadn’t even asked me how I was. Breathe, I reminded myself. From my bag, I took a book on the conservation practices of the butterflies I had come to love and flicked through the pages.
Harper.
My gaze lingered over the close-up image of the arion’s wing, and I was mesmerised by the beauty of each hardened chitinous scale.
Harper.
What was I doing reading this book? I shut it and put it back in my bag. I thought instead of how to tell Professor Lipin that I would be leaving, and slowly the significance of what I was about to do sank in.
Don’t think about it, I told myself. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three…
The teenage girl was singing louder now. Passengers turned their heads, giving her steely looks. I suppressed the urge to tell her to be quiet and focused instead on the view outside the window. The bare limbs of trees reached towards the sky. People marched along the streets below, wrapped in black coats.
‘Shut up, ya retard,’ a bearded man shouted from the front of the bus. I turned towards the man, my body filled with heat. The teenager had her headphones in. She didn’t seem aware of him approaching until he was towering over her. She looked up at him and removed the headphones from her ears.
‘I said shut up, retard.’
Suddenly I was on my feet, fists clenched, ready to come to the girl’s defence. But she had it covered.
‘My name is Poppy, like the flower. Not Retard.’ The bus stopped at Green Park station. ‘I’m sorry. My mum also says I am too loud sometimes. I will be quiet now.’ Poppy resumed singing, softly this time.
The man did not move. He just stood there, staring at Poppy, until the influx of new passengers forced him back to his seat. I unclenched my fists and exhaled. Sounds of chatter on the bus resumed, more animated than before, and I was alone with my uncomfortable thoughts once more.
