Zac and Mia (7 page)

PART TWO

‘… and this year it goes to … Zac Meier.’

I stop chewing. Was that my name?

‘Go on,’ says Mum. ‘Shake a leg.’

Evan kicks me under the table. ‘You got an award, dickhead.’

Sure enough, two hundred eyeballs are zeroing in on me. From the makeshift stage, Macka’s calling me up like I’m a prize puppy.

‘That’s it, Zac. Come on.’

What the hell?

I look to Bec.
An award? For what?
But she, Mum, Dad and Evan are clapping along with everyone else. I gulp what remains of my bread roll and sauce.

Players and parents shift their knees as I weave to the front of the hall, scouring my memory for whatever I’ve done to deserve an end-of-season cricket award.
Fielding outer from a camping chair?

I’ve been out of hospital for fourteen weeks, and in that time I’ve only played four matches. Everyone’s seen how shit my bowling’s been. My fielding wasn’t too bad, on the one occasion the ball came within a metre of me. And my batting? I wasn’t even allowed. The reality is I don’t deserve a free Coke, let alone the trophy gripped in Macka’s hairy hand.

Then it hits me: Best and freakin Fairest. It’s a sympathy vote at the best of times, rewarding good humour and ‘effort’, as opposed to any real skill. Everyone above the age of ten knows it’s a consolation prize. For once, I’m glad that my old mates aren’t around to witness this.

Macka grabs me as I reach the top step. From here, I see the sweat beads on his forehead and the moist ellipses spreading out from his armpits. It’s embarrassing how much he relishes this.

Macka turns me to face the crowd, holding me in case I run. Sympathetic faces shine up at me.

‘Many of you wouldn’t know it, but Zac was the kind of athlete who could have gone a number of ways: AFL, basketball, soccer, rugby. It didn’t matter the shape or size of the ball, Zac knew what to do with it. He always had good hands.’

Eyes go searching for my hands so I push them deep into my jeans pockets.

‘Footy was a passion, but after he started feeling … not so flash … last year, I convinced him to spend more time with the “gentleman’s game”. Remember, Zac?’

How can I forget? Footy wore me out so I had to do something else with my afternoons. It was either cricket or swimming. And who’d choose swimming?

‘Good hands, good speed, and a heart as big as Phar Lap’s. Even when Zac got … the bad news … he’d still turn up. When he could.’

Macka’s too clumsy for this.
Get back to the novelty awards
, I want to tell him.
Start on desserts—the mini pavlovas are getting soggy over there
. If he drops the ‘C’ bomb, I’m legging it.

‘But he’s pulled through—again—and demonstrated real character, on and off the field. He even showed up to training on the day of his eighteenth birthday, cake and all. He’s a real team player, our Zac.’

I’d love to stuff the trophy into Macka’s big mouth, but his next words come out choked up anyway.

‘We’re all proud of you, Zac. Even when you were in hospital, you’d be on the Facebook, checking our results and giving
us
encouragement. A real battler. No one deserves this award more than you.’

And there it is—the final, backhanded compliment.

I give two sarcastic thumbs-up, snatch the trophy, then jump off the stage. I take the side door, and keep on going. I jog across the floodlit field, past the pitch, the semi-circular soccer markings and the footy posts, aiming for beyond the field where floodlights can’t find me. Then I peg the trophy as far as I can into the unlit national park where, by day, mountain-bikers bump over rocks and grass-tree stumps. Tomorrow, there’ll be a new obstacle for them to avoid.

I lean over to catch my breath. Each exhalation is a quick cold punch in the dark. I’m clear of leukaemia, I’ve got new marrow, so why does this have to follow me? Best and fucking fairest? I don’t want charity votes or pity prizes. I don’t want a big deal made out of just showing up.

‘If that’s how you throw, I’m surprised they gave you anything.’

Bec. I should’ve known she’d follow.

‘Macka—’

‘Macka’s a knob. You know that.’

‘Yeah. But still …’ I spit and it tastes of tomato sauce. ‘He shouldn’t have said that. I just want to be …’

‘Normal?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You are, apart from when you’re hurling trophies onto the Bibbulmun Track and muttering to yourself.’

‘Besides that.’

‘Want to go back? There’s chocolate mousse.’

It used to be my favourite, but now it’s considered too risky for my immune system, along with a dozen other things. Custard. Soft cheeses. Soft-serve ice-creams. Cold meats. Swimming pools. Saunas. Dust spores. Alcohol. I wasn’t even allowed one of the barbecued sausages.

‘Raw eggs,’ I remind her. ‘I can’t eat it.’

‘Neither can I.’ She rubs her seven-month baby belly.

With her other hand, she rubs my back while I take in sharp jabs of air, glad of the dark.

It’s dark. Thank god.

There are no street lights. The moon’s behind clouds. Even the car’s interior light is broken.

I’m glad Rhys has brought us back to King’s Park, across from the spot where we first made out. That time, we skipped the movie and drove up here. We admired the twinkling view, but not for long.

Tonight, Rhys parks on the forest-side of the road, facing the trees. I’m glad; it’s even darker here.

His car smelled of new leather that first night. I got a brain-freeze finishing my Slurpee in a hurry, afraid of spilling it. The radio played, and when that Lady Gaga song came on, Rhys grinned and took off his hat. He checked his hair in the mirror before shifting us both into the back. There was a blanket there, ready. His boot kicked the interior light and it cracked, making
him swear, making me laugh. His kiss was rough and cold, Coke and raspberry. His stubble scoured my neck, my breasts, my thighs, leaving a rash that stayed for days.

Tonight, he’s tacos and aftershave. I peel off my top and guide his hand to my new bra. I hold his fingers there, wanting him to feel the beaded bow in the middle. I move his other palm to the flat of my stomach, sliding his fingers down to my jeans, then underneath, to the start of the matching undies. I want him to remember the feel of me. ‘God you’re hot,’ he used to moan.

‘Wait.’ He stops. ‘I don’t think …’

Rhys isn’t supposed to think. He’s supposed to sigh, his back a slick of sweat, grabbing and grunting on the tidy leather seats. ‘Christened it,’ he said after that first time. ‘The car,’ he clarified, grinning and pulling his hat back on.

But now he puts his hands back on the steering wheel. He concentrates on the forest as if he’s a fucking botanist all of a sudden.

‘What?’

‘We broke up,’ he says.

‘We?’ He was the one who let my calls go to voicemail. He was the one who stopped answering texts. No,
we
didn’t break up.
He
backed out.

‘I can’t—’

‘What? Fuck me?’

‘No. Yes.’

I hadn’t intended to go all the way, just far enough to get him interested. ‘You don’t think I’m …’ What’s
the word I need?
Pretty
?
Fuckable
? ‘Anymore?’

‘Don’t do this to me.’

I grab his hand again and push it down my jeans. I want him to want me. My other hand unzips his fly. Even when he nudges me away, I touch him the way he likes. I want him to grow hard and hot in my hand as proof that I’m still sexy, that I can still make him moan.

But he doesn’t. He grips my wrist and stops me, all the while staring into bushland.

‘There’s no point.’

I laugh. He never did get irony.

‘You’re an arsehole.’ I grab my backpack from the floor and grope the back seat for my T-shirt and crutches. I pull the shirt on. ‘And a coward.’ I throw open the car door and swivel into the cool night air. When I stand, my crutches crunch into gravel.

‘Don’t be stupid. Mia. I’ll drive you home.’

‘Home?’

‘Well, where? Erin’s?’

‘No.’ I’m not going back there. Her mum corners me with questions, thinking she already knows the answers.

‘Or your other friend,’ he suggests. ‘That skinny one.’

He doesn’t offer his flat, at the back of his parents’ house, even though he used to smuggle me in there before. Before.

‘Screw you,’ I say, pivoting and slamming the door of his precious car. ‘I’m too good for you, anyway.’ I punch at the door with the solid end of a crutch. A
panel gives way so I do it again. ‘Too hot for
you
, Rhys. Everyone says that.’

My brain corrects me.
Said
, not
says
. Everyone
said
that.

‘I’m still hot, Rhys. I’m still fucking hot.’

He reverses, and I hit the car again. I want to smash his windows, smash him too.

Dirt and gravel detonate as he spins and speeds away, leaving me with two crutches and a backpack in a dark, dark forest.

I’m glad it’s dark. It’s so dark I can’t even see myself.

No one mentions my award on the drive home, and by the time we’re in front of the TV, ice-cream bowls in our laps, it’s ancient history. During
Better Homes and Gardens
, Mum, Dad and Evan talk about olives. I’m grateful for the way they act like tonight never happened, like everything is normal.

On cue, Bec calls my name through the door. It’s Friday night and the shit needs clearing, after all. She has a driver hooked over her left shoulder and a three-iron over her right. I pull on gumboots and grab torches, then we follow the beams past the houses, the store, and up along the paved path to the pens, where sheep and goats form woolly clumps, settling into sleep. Bec shines her torch over the ewes, checking if any are close to birthing.

She swings her light to the alpaca pen too, where
five are sleeping, their front feet folded beneath them. The other three sneer and move away. Even the original alpaca, Daisy, scowls.

We hook the torches to fence-posts to light up the path. Then Bec lines her club against some pellets and shuffles into position.

Roo poos are perfect missiles, dry and compact enough to get good air, even when fresh. Sheep and goats, on the other hand, leave stodgy, moist mounds that explode on impact. Sheep-shit golf never ends well, so we leave them in the pens along with their owners.

It’s the wild roo shit that annoys Mum because it gets everywhere—in the pens, the shop’s entrance, the customer toilets, the new pavers, under the seats and along the main walkway, from one end of the petting farm to the other. Roos can jump any fence to help themselves to feed, leaving enough ammunition to keep us busy each Friday, clearing the way for weekend visitors.

Pregnancy may have altered Bec’s stance, but her swing remains smooth and fast, sending each pellet over pens and most of the olive trees below. I reckon she harbours dreams of becoming a pro golfer. The media would love her, asking for recounts of her training regime: a thousand pellets every week.

‘Evan’s going to get his heart broken,’ she says.

‘Again? Where’s this one from?’

‘France. Have you seen her? Twenty-one and super-cute.’

‘So Dad’s hiring French girls to pick instead of me?

You know what that does for my ego?’

‘There are six backpackers, Zac. She’s not just for you.’

‘Shit, it’s not like I’ll chop off a limb.’

‘Doctor’s orders.’

The comprehensive
S
O
Y
OU
’
VE
H
AD A
B
ONE
M
ARROW
T
RANSPLANT
: W
HAT
N
OW
?
booklet has been memorised by everyone in my family, including Evan, whose reading is usually limited to
Zoo Weekly
. Thanks to this booklet I’m banned from contact sports, running, quad biking, physical labour and operating mechanical equipment for twelve months. Homework, unfortunately, is deemed safe.

‘It’s picking olives, Bec, not motocross.’

‘Anyway, I’ll need your help with feeds. Dad’ll be busy with pickers, and there’s a busload of tourists coming. First day of school holidays …’ she adds, as if it’s slipped my mind. As if.

‘How am I supposed to meet a hot backpacker if I’m up here with toddlers?’

‘I’ll send out spies,’ she says. ‘Actually, there
is
a German picker.’

‘Nuh. Given my marrow, that’d feel … incestuous.’

‘There might be an Italian. Or a cute Kiwi. I’ll investigate.’ Across the torch beam, my sister’s scheming. ‘You could do with a fling.’

Bec’s got no idea of the surplus of girls in my life already. At school I’m a novelty—an older guy come back to repeat a year. In study periods, they beckon me over to their desks, asking for help with topics I should
already know. But there’s more to it than study: girls can sniff out vulnerability. I see the way they look at my scars. They’re careful with me, as if I’m covered in warning labels.
Achtung. Fragile
.

But it’s not gentleness I’m after. Or sympathy.

I mis-swing and a pellet shoots off at an angle, rattling the roof of the coop and setting chooks into a flap.

‘Just a fling,’ Bec says, trying to read my thoughts. ‘It’s not on your banned list …’

‘A set-up from my sister? Awesome.’

‘You’d want to work on your personality, though, considering your sporting ability’s gone to pot.’

I smack a crap so hard it whistles into the dark like an unexploded firework. It feels amazing.

‘Lucky,’ Bec says.

Then she leans on a gate and lets me whack the rest of them, every satisfying one.

I tap my pen at one of the new postcards advertising
The Good Olive! Olive Oil and Petting Farm
. I wish I could tell Cam that life’s brilliant, but I can’t.

‘This could change things,’ Patrick had said on my last day in hospital. ‘You’ve been stuck in a room for forty-seven days—’

‘Thirty-three with my
mum.’

‘Yes. What was I saying?’

‘Change.’

‘Yes. You might.’

‘Look at this … do you think my hair’s growing back orange?’

‘Emotional changes,’ Patrick said. ‘Not just physical, Zac.’

‘I
am
emotional about it.’ I’d laughed, skimming a hand across my head. ‘Leukaemia twice, German marrow, and now a born-again ginger. That’s bloody unfair.’

Then Mum arrived, and I grabbed my bag and bolted. The elevator dropped us to the ground floor, where we followed the green arrows to the exit. Outside, the width of the world dizzied me. No walls! Instead there was freedom. Cars. Ticket machines and bollards. Traffic lights. Traffic. The blue of the ocean. Eighty kilometres an hour. Mum and I kept the windows down all the way home and I couldn’t suck in enough air.

And when the car finally pulled into home, with its new and improved
The Good Olive! Olive Oil and Petting Farm
sign, I could smell chicken shit from fifty metres and it was sweeter than anything. I knew better than to admit this, of course—my sanity was under scrutiny as it was. Then my Jack Russell barked and tried to slobber me, but Evan held him back while the others hugged me in turn, and I felt like the luckiest German beer wench to have ever lived. To ever be allowed to live again.

I went back to school, though I’d sleep through periods five and six. I was even grateful for homework because drawing demographic data and analysing economic plans meant I was normal, like every other year 12 student with deadlines and exams, with my life moving forward in a solid black line from A to B to C.

Which is why I don’t want these April holidays to happen. Without the structure of school, time doesn’t function like a solid black line at all. Time plays tricks. It can mess with you. When you least expect it, time can loop back on itself, like a giant rubber band. Time can tap you on the shoulder. If it wants to, it can pick you right up and fling you right back into Room 1, with its needles and bleach and nausea and Mia. Mia. Shit. Where is she? Is she okay?

That tap on the wall. Her angry, desperate tap and uncensored questions.

Has her hair grown back? Did she go to her formal in a wheelchair? Has she moved on, the way she’s supposed to, laughing and flirting in the mall
on weekends? Is she showing off her scar with pride yet? Has she forgotten about me, the way she’s meant to? The way I was supposed to forget about her?

But I don’t know because she’s not on Facebook. By the time I’d arrived home and had the
Welcome Back Zac
dinner, then found a quiet hour to log on—
Was I dreaming or did you join me in the night? Are you a sleepwalker, or did you mean to? How did it go today?
—her Facebook profile had been pulled. At first I thought she’d unfriended me, but when I searched her name, I realised she wasn’t anywhere. She’d erased herself.

How can you share someone’s secrets, sent back and forth in the quiet of early mornings, but not know basic stuff like the suburb they live in or their phone number? How can someone vanish from your life so easily?

I turn the blank postcard over in my hands. What would I write, if I knew her address? Would it sound casual like Cam’s:
Thought I’d drop you a line …?
Or would I tell her more? That normal isn’t normal anymore, and that I don’t know if it ever will be. That I’m still in semi-quarantine. That I’m afraid of school holidays, and spending two whole weeks on my own.

Mum opens my door. Since hospital, she no longer bothers to knock. ‘Do you want to have a party?’

‘Now?’

‘Next week. Get the rellies over, and your friends.’ She stirs the contents of her bowl in slow motion, already planning it. ‘Matthew and Alex would come. And Rick …’

‘They’re away,’ I remind her, taken off to Perth or over east, for work or study. ‘Didn’t you have ice-cream already?’

‘Your new friends at school. They’ll come, won’t they?’

‘Depends on the booze.’

Mum points her spoon at the
Bone Marrow Transplant
booklet pinned to the corkboard above my desk. Alcohol: banned substance number two.

‘For them,’ I say.

‘Maybe just the rellies then. A barbie. It’d be nice to celebrate your hundred-day benchmark, don’t you think?’

A party is the last thing I want. If one hundred days of ‘normal’ is to be celebrated, isn’t that kind of missing the point?

I say yes, mostly for Mum’s sake, but partly for my own. A party might give me something else to think about.

Something other than her.