Authors: Fiona McGregor
From the auburn hair, a disapproving sigh.
From the Islander a cheerful, ‘I’m not!’
The chatty woman ignored them. ‘You’re quite exotic,’ she said to Marie. ‘Especially with those things on your arms.’
Marie politely agreed, hoped the Islander would notice them.
‘And this must be your son,’ the woman went on. ‘Isn’t he handsome?’
Leon had returned from the cafeteria. He placed himself tactfully between the chatty woman and his mother. ‘I got apple and blackcurrant fizzy drink, or organic orange juice. Take your pick.’ He added in a wry whisper as he sat down, ‘Compulsory Madonna lilies in the corner.’
The Islander was being infused with raspberry-coloured fluid. The pouch on his drip stand was nearly empty. Marie was aware of Leon’s eyes continually on him and she looked steadfastly at her feet. She was terrified the Islander would realise Leon was gay. She didn’t want him to register her curiosity either. She was angry with Leon for thinking he could just stare at a man in public like that, as though it didn’t matter. Especially one of those Islanders, god knows you shouldn’t provoke them. In a flash she imagined the Islander heaving himself up with a roar, ape-like, and crushing Leon between his fists. She collected herself and said to her son, ‘How’s it going in Susan’s garden? What are you doing?’
‘Digging holes and filling them in again.’
‘Ha-ha.’ She stared at Leon, willing him to look at her, not the Islander. ‘What else?’
‘She wants natives. She’s got this awful row of agapanthus that I’m replacing. And I’m going to try some roses.’
‘That’s not like you.’ Marie was barely registering what Leon was saying. Even with her head turned away from him, the presence of the Islander dominated her. When an intern arrived ten minutes later to remove the shunt from his arm, Marie began to relax. She and Leon watched him walk out of the room. Tall, big-boned, with a presumption of space, he would have once had the physique of a rugby player. He moved with the lumbering grace of someone unwilling to relinquish a fine suit that had grown too large for him.
‘Impressive,’ said Leon quietly.
Marie said nothing. She was enraged.
She began to feel sick towards the end of the hour. A flush had spread up her arm and the desire to scratch obsessed her. A spinning sensation moved over her brain every minute or so and she felt incapable of walking. They wheeled her into a ward to recover. She began to vomit. Leon stood by the bed with his hand over his mouth as an intern examined her. ‘It’s just a reaction to the chemotherapy. We’re going to keep you overnight and Dr Wroblewski will see you in the morning.’
At night the hospital reduced to its elements of cheap furniture, white linen and stainless steel. Marie didn’t want to be there. The bed was like a rack for objects, not humans; the others in the room coughing and groaning behind their curtains. She felt miserable in her gown, plastic vomit bowl by her side. She looked back on her fear and anger earlier in the day. You stupid bloody racist, she cursed herself. Stupid bloody homophobe. But there was something else in her anger with Leon that she didn’t quite want to let go: rivalry. Even in this decaying body she desired, to the point that she wanted to fight for it. With lust racing through her blood, it was hard to believe she was sick let alone that she was going to die.
She saw the Islander on the verandah the next day, smoking in a chair down the end. The young woman with the beatific eyes was up the other end, holding the hand of a Chinese woman in a red jacket. It was hot out here and patients shuffled to and fro with their skinny limbs exposed. Marie settled into a chair not far from the Islander and dozed with
New Scientist
in her lap. Smoke from his cigarette rippled through the air elegant as silk.
‘Hope you don’t mind.’ He glanced over. ‘I only have a couple a day now.’
Marie’s nostrils sought the aroma as a reassuring envoy from the outside world. ‘I like the smell.’
‘Most people complain it makes them sick.’
‘I’ll blame the chemo for that.’
‘I’ll blame liver cancer. Brian.’ He held forth his hand. It was warm and dry.
‘Marie.’
They went back to their reading. The air began to tighten like an inflating balloon. Marie could feel Brian’s eyes on her arms. She had already taken in what she could of him. A spiderweb on the left elbow, little marks on the joints of each finger and other things too blurred to read from here.
‘Designer tatts, eh?’ he said with mild deprecation.
‘Somebody designed yours too at some stage,’ Marie shot back.
‘Yeah. The gods.’
‘I don’t believe in God.’
Brian chuckled. ‘Not mine you don’t,’ he affirmed.
Marie’s eyes remained glued on the headline:
The rainfall and inflow crisis.
She couldn’t decipher a single word.
Brian said, ‘It’s good work, eh. Passionflowers. Beautiful. Who did it?’ He pronounced it
ut.
‘Someone called Rhys.’
‘Rhys!’
‘You know her?’
‘She’s a legend! I know a few blokes had work done by her. Her stuff’s won competitions all over the world. Where’s she working now?’
‘In a studio in Surry Hills, in partnership with a man called Rob.’
‘Oh yeah?’ It was hard to tell how much of his pallor was jaundice; criss-crosses were weathered into his neck. He looked frail in that moment, with his head hung forward and lips parted inquisitively, the gaps where back teeth were missing visible. His eyebrows had fallen out. A look of anger crossed his face, intimidating Marie. ‘She used to work at Skinned Alive, one of the Rickers outfits. That was years ago.’
Marie was still adjusting to his Pacific accent. ‘The who?’
‘The Wreckers?’
‘Aren’t they bikies?’
Brian smiled at her pityingly. ‘Yes, ma’am.’ He fiddled a cigarette out of his pack of Longbeach, then put it back in. ‘Fucken racist cunts they are too. Scuse my French. Glad she’s not working there anymore.’
‘She’s done almost everything I have,’ Marie said proudly.
‘I could never afford someone like Rhys,’ said Brian, not without self-pity.
He chose the chair next to her that night in the television room. Everybody else had gone to bed. He sat down carefully, as though his body were precious cargo. Previously avoiding his gaze, Marie now watched his face constantly, for the battle of disparate elements that took place there — timidity, joy, confusion, anger, and the dazed non-expression of the sick and medicated.
‘I got three others in my room, right? One of ’em coughs all night. Another fights with his missus till visiting hours are over. And the third one looks like he’s gonna cark it any minute.’
‘How depressing.’
‘Yep. Can’t wait to get out of this joint.’
Marie had been moved to a double room, the patient opposite recovering from surgery. She had come into the television room for solitude and a larger screen that she didn’t have to crane her neck to see, but she welcomed Brian’s presence. Each time he appeared she was struck by how frail he was, as though in his absence he inflated to an archetype that was increasingly irrelevant. Marie consulted the program. ‘There’s a James Bond movie on in half an hour. Do you like James Bond?’
‘Yeah. I’ll make a cuppa.’
Marie went to her room for the fruit her children had brought her, and cut up a mango. She could see now how much of Brian’s irritation was with his ailing body. The demeanour he bore to the outside world seemed neutral. He wore a dressing-gown with a design of dull green checks. Part of an exposed thigh bore what looked like a Samoan tattoo that moved in semi-circles all the way down to his calf. She passed him a piece of fruit. ‘If you eat some of this, it will help me eat too. I’ve lost too much weight.’
‘What can you do?’ Brian patted his thighs sadly. ‘I used to be two hundred and ten.’
‘I loved it at first, all the weight loss.’
‘Don’t like skinny women. All those diets and shit.’
‘I’ve got an appetite tonight.’
The movie began with James Bond drinking a cocktail on a boat in the Caribbean. For the next fifteen minutes, he moved through an impossible world of colours, gadgets and superhuman strength. It was exactly the sort of thing Marie was in the mood to watch. When the ad break came on, she asked Brian, ‘Why do you think you got it?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe I was just unlucky.’
‘Do you believe in all those theories about stress and anger?’
‘All I know is that I’ve got it and I’m gonna beat it.’
Marie said something she hadn’t wanted to say to anyone else: ‘I think I might have got mine from drinking.’
Brian raised his eyebrows in polite enquiry. ‘Oh yeah?’
James Bond got on a plane, looked at his watch and frowned.
Brian said, ‘I’m hep C, eh. Got it in gaol.’
‘Oh,’ said Marie, more concerned by the gaol than the virus. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Ah, you couldn’t avoid it. At least I’m out now.’
The plane began to plummet. They watched the film in silence. Marie thought about Brian in gaol. She pictured a long room of stone floors, cells lining the walls, sartorial guards strolling up and down, truncheons swinging from their belts. An ordered, ascetic, masculine environment.
‘I ran the heroin in Long Bay for a while. Too much of the good life,’ Brian said airily. ‘That’s why I got it.’
‘You took drugs in
gaol
?’ Marie was suitably shocked.
‘Anything you want, sister. The best smack in Darwin for years was sold out of the gaol.’ This said to up the ante. ‘I’m just waitin’ for crystal meth to get a hold in the penitentiary system. Imagine the fucken riots then, eh? Ha. They’ll be talking about the good old days of heroin. Don’t worry, I’m more of a Jim Beam man these days.’
‘Oh, really? I was a Chivas girl for a while there.’
They snickered as footsteps stopped in the corridor. The door opened, revealing the night supervisor. Brian turned down the TV. ‘We’re just hevving a cup of tea,’ he said politely.
‘We’re watching James Bond,’ said Marie with a touch of insolence.
The nurse regarded them suspiciously. ‘Lights out in half an hour.’
When he was gone, Brian pulled out a joint, announcing, ‘Best medication for cancer.’ From the other pocket he pulled a hipflask.
‘You’re organised.’
‘You on the wagon?’
‘I have the occasional tipple.’
Brian sloshed some bourbon into their tea. ‘Your
health
, madame,’ he said in a posh voice.
The bourbon went down like fire, lighting up her whole body, as car after car exploded on television, and James Bond ran for his life.
Leon drove into the city along the winding back roads. The newsreader was saying an arsonist had been charged with lighting a bushfire in Ku-ring-gai Chase. Leon was dismayed by the obliteration of the land’s natural contours by the new houses: Mosman was no longer a semi-feral foreshore, it was a luxury getaway, landscaped to within an inch of its life. God, he loathed this city, the pretension, the disregard, the wealth — the selfishness of the wealth. As he took the hill onto the bridge, he went into his mother’s fantasy of a bushfire on the foreshore, consuming vegetation and houses alike. Then he was over the harbour, driving towards buildings sequinned with setting sun, and the beauty of it took his breath away. How he had missed it.
He was nervous about seeing George. He had avoided looking him up on previous visits and George eschewed online profiles so Leon couldn’t check up on him. He had worn his memories like old polaroids into near blankness. George’s misted form in the shower cubicle; his neck, his smell, as they kissed in the palm grove of the Botanical Gardens. The thick line of hair from navel to groin, George rolling onto his back and lifting his legs for him. Leon had moved up to Brisbane mainly because it seemed like a place that George would never visit, but he still found himself scouring the papers for an event that would entice him. Some days, walking down the street, every dark-haired man looked like George. Leon had rung him for his birthday in January and surmised from the screeching parrot in the background that George had moved in with Linus, but he didn’t ask. He didn’t want to know.
Leon admired himself in the shop windows, a naturally bulked six-foot silhouette with tawny bushy hair, in a faded wife-beater, low-slung Diesels and Cons. He arrived at the restaurant first and was sitting facing the window, chest puffed out, arms crossed in front, when George arrived. George greeted him with a kiss on the cheek and sat down opposite. He appraised Leon’s body calmly then looked into his eyes. ‘Long time no see. You look really well.’
‘You too.’ Leon felt nervous.
George ordered almost straightaway.
‘So,’ he cut to the chase, ‘your mum. Which oncologist is she seeing?’
‘This guy at the hospital.’ Leon tried to pronounce his name. ‘Do you know him?’
‘Wroblewski? I know
of
him.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘He’s alright. Their new oncology floor’s pretty good. Well equipped, well set out.’ George made it sound like a theme park:
Scare yourselves silly on the new Oncology Ghost Train!
‘That hospital’s also rife with staph.’
‘Great.’
‘Sign of the times, mate. We’re sterilising ourselves to death. So what’s her prognosis?’
‘Stage four.’ Leon handled the jargon like a new weapon, aware he still needed lessons, hoping nonetheless it looked powerful in his hands. ‘Roe whatshisname’s given her six months.’
‘No surgery then?’
‘Nope.’
Their food arrived and George paused while the waitress arranged it. It was a noisy restaurant, full of the hard shiny surfaces so prolific in Sydney now, and they had to raise their voices to be heard. The sides of Leon’s face ached with the strain. They helped themselves to food.
George said, ‘Listen, you don’t need to worry about the staph. The main thing will be palliative care. If she has good palliative care, that’s the best you can do.’
Leon kept his eyes on his Mussaman lamb curry. ‘She reckons she can beat it.’
George said nothing.
‘This food’s amazing,’ said Leon.
‘Yeah, isn’t it?’
George looked thinner, fitter and more serious. He had grown sideburns, the lines around his eyes were more pronounced, and his hair was quite grey, all of which Leon found painfully sexy. He feared and trusted George’s professionalism. George had cut his teeth in Ward 17 at the height of the AIDS epidemic; now he was managing Triage. In Leon’s eyes he had always carried the wounded glamour of the returned soldier. Leon had never known anyone with AIDS let alone anyone who had died, a fact that used to make him feel inadequate in the company of George’s friends. All the older gay men’s stories of the halcyon days of wild dance parties were laced with death, like Mexican festivals. To Leon, death seemed a higher truth, the only place where he would finally understand. But now that the possibility of it loomed, the questions only increased.